Traitor Angels

by Anne Blankman

  “Everyone,” Robert repeated. “Elizabeth and Antonio will disguise themselves as sick beggars. As soon as the rites are over, they can steal away from the Banqueting House and into the palace.” He jumped to his feet, his grin quick and fierce. “Elizabeth, I’d say it’s finally time you returned to your birthplace, wouldn’t you?”

  Whitehall was hardly a sumptuous palace that befitted the city many called the greatest in the world. Instead it was an undistinguished heap of houses, interconnected by cramped courtyards and crumbling passageways. As Antonio and I joined the throngs lining up outside the Banqueting House on the following morning, I glanced at the jumble of stone buildings, searching for a flicker of a memory, anything that would tell me this was where I had spent the first few years of my life when my father served as the Latin Secretary.

  There was nothing. I didn’t know if I should be grateful for the void or angry on my family’s behalf that we had lost so much and didn’t even have recollections of my father’s former greatness to comfort us. Only a week until his execution. I swallowed hard. It might not be enough time.

  Don’t think, I ordered myself. The thought of Father would make me come apart, and then I would be no good to him or anyone else.

  The line trudged forward, a dismal collection of people dressed in threadbare clothes. Some were covered in oozing sores, others breathed with the air rattling in their chests. A few were little more than skeletons and so weak they had to clutch the walls for support. The air reeked with the stench of unwashed bodies. I held my sleeve over my nose to block out the stink.

  At my side, Antonio remained silent. Today he looked like a stranger—like me, he had smudged his face with charcoal to dirty his skin and disguise his features, and he had donned a hooded cloak.

  “It feels wrong to deceive Robert when he’s been so kind to us,” I whispered to Antonio. We planned to retrieve the paper and follow its clues until we learned the truth about Galileo’s secret, which we would share with the king in exchange for my father’s release.

  He brought his lips close to my ear, murmuring, “I don’t like it, either. But what choice do we have if we want to save your father?”

  I nodded reluctantly. Part of me hoped he would whisper something else, just for the chance to remain near to him, but he straightened and looked around, obviously studying the surroundings.

  As we waited, I tilted my head back to get a proper look at the Banqueting House. The building, a massive structure of pale stone, was separate from the main palace. Its ground-floor windows were walled up. Robert had said the bottom story was divided into compartments for storage, but I wondered if he was only repeating what he had been told. Was it possible my father was hidden behind those shuttered windows? Alone except for crates as companions?

  No, surely not. The Banqueting House also contained the Great Hall, which included a large theater that catered to London’s elite. My father’s jailers would hardly risk the possibility of their captive’s shouting for help to entertainment seekers. So where was he?

  The long queue shuffled forward. Inside the Banqueting House, sunlight struggled to shine through dusty windows. Some hundred people crowded the vast hall. The walls were made of white marble, the ceiling painted with vivid murals. I remembered my father telling me that Charles the First had been executed directly outside this building. The blood-splattered scaffold may have been dismantled years ago, but our current king still had to live in its imagined shadow. I wondered if the constant reminder of his father’s execution was a sort of long torture for him, or if he had managed to banish the matter from his mind.

  Antonio nudged my shoulder. “He’s here,” he murmured.

  My head snapped around. At the hall’s far end, the king sat on a throne. I had forgotten how big he was, a giant at over six feet. He wore ceremonial red robes trimmed in ermine and a long, curly black wig.

  Something inside me started to shake. This was the man who controlled my father’s fate. I flexed my arms, feeling my knife straps dig into my muscles. As long as I had my knives, I wouldn’t let myself descend into fear.

  A man in the first row was led forward by the king’s physicians. They helped him into a kneeling position on the floor before the king. The king leaned forward, stroking the man’s face with his hands while a chaplain standing next to him announced, “He put his hands upon them and he healed them.”

  My heart dropped. I had thought we would remain in an anonymous crowd while the king blessed us all. Apparently we would be presented individually to him so he could draw the evil scourge of illness from our bodies with the power of his touch.

  I whipped around to look at the doors. They were closed. Guards stood on either side of them, their hands clasped on their sword hilts. There was no way we could slip out unnoticed.

  Antonio glanced at me. Even with his face half hidden by his hood, the wariness in his eyes was unmistakable.

  The king doesn’t know what we look like, I tried to reassure myself. Maybe if we didn’t attract anyone’s notice we could make it through the king’s rites.

  My pulse pounded in my temples as Antonio and I moved with the long line snaking toward the king. Over and over the chaplain intoned, “He put his hands upon them and he healed them,” and the sick knelt and received the laying-on of hands before shuffling to the rear of the hall, where they waited for the next part of the ceremony to begin.

  “And he healed them,” the chaplain recited as the elderly woman in front of me struggled to get to her feet. It was my turn. I stood motionless, ordering myself to move. My feet felt nailed to the floor. The chaplain beckoned to me.

  The sounds of the room receded until all I was aware of was the king’s face, his brows raised as if he wondered why I hesitated. Go, you simpleton, I scolded myself. My legs awakened, and I trudged forward a few steps before sinking to my knees at the king’s feet.

  Nineteen

  THE KING PRESSED HIS HANDS TO MY CHEEKS. HIS palms were warm and soft. The corners of his eyes crinkled when he smiled at me, as if he sensed my unease and wished to reassure me. Kindness from him. It seemed like a mangled daydream.

  With the pads of his fingers, he touched my forehead, then my cheeks again, ending at my chin. Beside us the chaplain recited, “He put his hands upon them. . . .” I got to my feet, fighting a wave of dizziness. The king was already looking past me at the next sick penitent. Antonio. Don’t speak, I silently begged him. As soon as any words left his mouth, even if they were only a murmured “Thank you,” the king would hear his foreign accent.

  Hunching my shoulders beneath my cloak, I made my way to the back of the hall. With my heart in my throat, I watched as the king ran his hands over Antonio’s face. Only when the chaplain had spoken and Antonio had begun walking toward me did I take a full breath.

  The rest of the ceremony sped past in a blur. When everyone had been touched, we all filed in the same order to the throne, where a second chaplain passed white ribbons knotted around gold coins to the king. One by one, the king placed the ribbons around our necks while the first chaplain said, “That is the true light who came into the world.”

  Once everyone had received a ribbon, the chaplain read an epistle. I turned the coin over in my hand. It had been engraved with the figure of angel.

  Two sumptuously attired men brought the king a basin, ewer, and towel. When he had finished washing and drying his hands, he rose. As one, the crowd bowed to him. Somehow I forced my back to bend. By the time I had straightened, the king and his attendants were gone.

  The crowd shuffled outside. Antonio and I let ourselves be swept along by its slow-moving tide. A handful of guards, armed with halberds, watched the crowd. As Antonio and I had planned, as soon as we stepped into the weak sunshine I pretended to have a coughing fit—which was hardly unusual, given the pitiful state of the people surrounding us. I sagged against Antonio. He laid his arm across my shoulders, leading me around the edge of the Banqueting House toward the court gate. From the dir
ection of the Banqueting House I heard a halberd ringing on pavers—at least one guard was coming after us.

  Antonio and I glanced at each other. We would have to move fast. Across the courtyard a handful of beautifully dressed courtiers strolled out of the jumble of buildings. My stomach twisted in distress. Although they were several yards distant, we couldn’t chance their looking in our direction when we shed our cloaks—but the guard was coming; I could hear the clink of his halberd getting louder.

  The courtiers formed a circle, laughing and chattering with one another. Quickly we threw off our hooded cloaks, revealing the fine clothes we had worn under them. With the cloaks, we wiped the charcoal from our faces as fast as we could. I unwound my hair, letting it fall loose. In his sky-blue breeches and matching doublet, Antonio looked every inch an aristocrat who belonged on these grounds—provided he didn’t speak. If anyone stopped us, I would have to talk. I prayed my wits would be quick enough to keep us safe.

  We dropped the cloaks at the base of a tree outside the court gate, kicking at the carpet of drought-deadened leaves to cover them. Just as we finished, a guard rounded the wall. He peered around the courtyard, his eyes lighting on us for an instant before moving on. I let out a breath of relief.

  We had to keep moving. Together we rounded the Banqueting House again. Before us rose the Tiltyard and the Porter’s Lodge. To their side stood a gateway, which led to the Tiltyard Gallery with its two flanking towers. According to Robert’s directions, behind the gallery lay the old battlemented tennis court, which both his and his brother’s lodgings overlooked. When we had retired last night, he had left for Whitehall, saying he would tell his father he had returned from his hunting excursion in Yorkshire. Staying at court would permit him to keep a close eye on his father, he had explained when I protested he might put himself in greater danger by returning.

  Heads down, Antonio and I hurried through a series of small courtyards. With every few paces we took, we passed more people: finely dressed courtiers, servants in livery, a group of ladies in riding costumes whose like I hadn’t seen before, with doublets splitting into wide skirts, like men’s. The air filled with a cacophony of sounds and scents: the bright laughter of the queen’s attendants, the yeasty smell of baking bread from the kitchens, the clatter of horse hooves across cobblestones in a nearby courtyard. And laced with the mix of flowery perfume, horse dung, and pastries, discernible no matter where you walked, was the dark, rank scent of the Thames.

  Finally we found the exterior staircase Robert had told us of and climbed it, emerging into a musty-smelling corridor. We rushed down a series of passageways, occasionally coming across a group of courtiers whom we acknowledged with a brief nod.

  In one corridor, two guards, carrying halberds, stalked toward us, their expressions grim. My heart thudded in my chest. Someone must have realized we didn’t belong here and alerted them about the palace intruders. My pace slowed. I scanned the passageway—it was lined with closed doors. What if we darted inside the nearest one?

  “Keep walking,” Antonio whispered.

  I shot him a disbelieving look. He held his head high, moving without a hitch in his stride. I hurried to stay beside him. We have to get away, I silently told him, wishing he could magically hear my words in his mind. He didn’t look at me.

  The king’s guards were growing closer. Ten paces distant. Now five. Their eyes swept us up and down. I stiffened. Any instant now they would rush at us, their weapons drawn, and we would be forced to fight and eventually be overpowered when more guards flooded in from other areas of the palace—

  The two guards stepped aside, pressing their backs against the wall. They bowed.

  I exhaled hard. They thought we were courtiers.

  Antonio strode past the guards without sparing them a glance. I followed his example. Our shoes rustled on the rushes-strewn floor, our footsteps muffled. Anyone could be coming up behind us and I would barely hear him. What if the guards had merely pretended to be taken in by our disguises and were even now sneaking up on us? I glanced over my shoulder.

  No one. The guards were walking away, talking to each other in low voices, laughing over a shared joke.

  “How did you know how to act?” My voice came out in a whisper.

  Now Antonio did look at me. “My master and I spend much of our time among aristocrats, presenting our experiments to them. They always ignore those whose social stations are lower than their own. I figured if we paid no attention to the guards, they would assume we were aristocrats and belonged here.”

  “Thank you.”

  We were passing a window, and I looked out at the garden below us. Dozens of birds swooped across browned grass as several spaniels chased them and yipped. This must be the king’s aviary. We had to be close to his personal apartments now.

  An empty corridor stretched before us. We counted doors until we reached the one Robert had said led to his father’s laboratory. I glanced over my shoulder. No one in sight.

  “Go,” I said, and Antonio pushed the door open. We stepped inside, letting the door fall closed behind us.

  The laboratory was a large, airy room. Notebooks, bottles of ink, and a pot of quills covered a wooden table; diagrams of the constellations and the human form had been tacked to the wainscoted walls; and glass-fronted cabinets housed bottles filled with various-colored liquids or tiny preserved animals. On a table running alongside a wall stood a white ball, which I now recognized thanks to Antonio’s teachings as a pasteboard model of a lunar globe. According to its inscription, it had been presented to the king as a gift from Mr. Christopher Wren.

  Wren! He was the member of the St. Paul’s commission who’d given the king the paper found under the baptismal font. Perhaps these men had been acquaintances for some time. It would certainly explain why Mr. Wren had been so eager to hand over my father’s paper to him.

  I scanned the notebooks on the closest table for my father’s name or Galileo’s. At another table, Antonio did the same. The only sounds were our uneven breathing and the pages crinkling in our hands.

  The notebooks were filled with the king’s musings on matters pertaining to natural philosophy. I could scarcely believe the king was so fascinated by the subject. Was it merely a hobby for him—or something else?

  With a lurch of my stomach, I thought of Father’s Italian natural philosopher colleagues, Galileo Galilei and Vincenzo Viviani. What if I was wrong and politics weren’t at the heart of the secret? Maybe it was natural philosophy instead.

  Stop guessing, I ordered myself. There would be time enough to think over the matter after we got out of this place. I turned back to the notebooks, skimming over diagrams of the human skeleton; lists of questions, such as whether flakes of snow were bigger or smaller in Tenerife than in England and why it was hotter in summer than in winter (the king had no answers, but wrote he had heard a number of theories); and an account of the time his friend Buckingham had brought what he promised was a unicorn’s horn to the Royal Society for inspection.

  An organization of which I am proud to be patron and founder, the king had written in flowing script.

  Legend has it that a circle drawn with a unicorn’s horn will keep a spider within it until it dies. The Society men tried the experiment, drawing a circle with powder from the horn and placing a spider inside it. At once, however, it ran out. Although they attempted the experiment several more times, it did not succeed, and so I wonder if the tales about the powers of unicorns’ horns are false.

  “Antonio, listen to this,” I hissed. “The king and the Duke of Buckingham are both members of the Royal Society. It’s a group of natural philosophers that meets weekly in London,” I explained in response to his blank expression. If he wondered why I had heard of the organization, he didn’t ask, and I didn’t tell him that in my more foolish moments I had daydreamed about attending their meetings and becoming a member myself—an impossibility, of course, because of my gender. “Buckingham even brought a unicorn’s horn
to show to the Society.”

  Antonio frowned. “Anyone who believes in unicorns’ horns either is a fool or wants to find magical cures—unicorn horns are said to heal all illnesses.” He returned to his book, and I skimmed through the next entry in mine, about a recent experiment the Royal Society had conducted on the effects of viper bites on dogs and cats.

  “Look at this,” Antonio said abruptly, crossing the room to place a leather-bound volume in my hands. A piece of paper, yellowed with age, had been tucked between the pages. The handwriting was small and cramped, the words slanting stiffly down the page. The passage had been written in Italian. In the top corner someone had sketched a figure of a man bending over a pool of water.

  “This is in Signor Galilei’s hand!” Antonio said. “He must have written it toward the end of his life, before he was blinded but when he was in constant pain—you see how the words are written at an angle, as if the writer is lying down while he works.”

  Rapidly I translated in my head:

  I, Galileo Galilei, do proclaim the following is a true account, and I give it for safekeeping of my own free will to John Milton, poet, an Englishman by birth but a kindred truth-seeker by mind. In the summer of my life, when I was a young man teaching at the University of Padua, I made a discovery that has plagued and uplifted my life ever since. While visiting friends outside the city, my two companions and I decided to escape the midday heat by taking a riposo in an underground room—

  “An underground room?” I asked, looking up from the book. “Does he refer to a cellar? And what is ‘riposo’? I don’t know this word.”

  “‘Riposo’ is the Italian word for a midday nap,” Antonio explained. He stood so close I could smell the charcoal on his neck, where he hadn’t scrubbed hard enough. “These underground rooms are similar to cellars, and are common in country villas. People often take riposi in them as a means of getting away from the heat. These rooms serve to—what is the word?—ventilate homes. They can be dangerous, though, for they can deliver noxious fumes.”