Traitor Angels

by Anne Blankman

  After consuming the apple, Adam and Eve begin fighting—vicious sniping at each other that used to thicken my throat when I wrote down Father’s lines. In Book Nine, an angel comes to Eden to expel them. Adam refuses to admit they’ve eaten from the Forbidden Tree, but Eve readily confesses and entreats Adam to reconcile with her, saying, Between us two let there be peace, both joyning / As joyn’d in injuries . . .

  The world seemed to stop rotating on its axis. I sat up so fast my head swam.

  I had been entirely wrong about my father’s version of Eve. While Adam can’t face their sins and tries to lie to an angel, Eve is the one who is strong enough to accept their misdeeds. She stops Adam from fighting; she’s the voice of reason and peace.

  At last I understood what my father was truly saying about Eve—and, by extension, me. We weren’t empty-headed decorations, content to bow to men’s supposedly superior intellect. No, my father had presented us as the only people willing to accept our fallen behavior and capable of bringing about a reconciliation.

  In the end, my father had made me the most powerful character of all.

  Something golden and warm unfolded inside my chest. I was strong. And I would prove it to Robert. If Antonio somehow managed to hear of what happened to me in this prison, he would know, too. They wouldn’t break me. Nothing would. And when I died—for die I would, from starvation or beatings—I would do so with my head held high and defiant curses on my lips.

  For the first time, I fully understood why my father had been willing to keep silent and die. There were some things that mattered more than any of us—liberty, faith, natural philosophy, and, above all, truth. I would die for them, too. Leaving my sisters and stepmother alone, with no one to care for them. A sob rose in my chest, but I swallowed it down. They’d find a way, somehow.

  I forgive you, Father, I thought, wishing he could somehow hear my thoughts. I know why you did this. Some things are worth dying for. I’m proud of you, Father, and I love you. I only pray you know it. And maybe soon we’ll be together again behind the closed door of death.

  The rattle of metal made me freeze in place on the floor. Someone had come.

  Twenty-Nine

  THE CELL DOOR GROANED AS IT OPENED.

  “Elizabeth.”

  The single word was enough. It was Robert. I recognized his crisp upper-class accent, the deep timbre of his voice.

  Don’t react to him, I ordered myself. I lay unmoving, a crumpled heap of scarlet skirts.

  Robert sighed. His footsteps crossed the floor, stopping somewhere close to me.

  His hands rested on the back of my head. “Oh, Elizabeth,” he said again, sounding sad. “Why couldn’t you have made this easier on both of us?”

  He picked at the blindfold’s knot, the half-moon of his fingernails scraping my skull in his haste. After a moment’s struggle, the black cloth fluttered away, leaving me to blink, dazed, in the sliver of moonlight struggling through the window.

  The room was cloaked in the darkness of night: stone walls and a floor, a straw pallet, the privy bucket, all blurred shadows. And Robert’s face, inches from mine. For the space of several heartbeats, we stared at each other. Tears glittered in his eyes, catching glimmers of light from the candle in his hand so his eyes looked as though they had been speckled with dots of gold.

  “I didn’t want to have you brought here,” he said. “I’m afraid, however, that you left me with no choice when you ran away. What was it that made you suspect, I wonder?”

  His tone was conversational as he got to his feet. His free hand rested on the sword hanging from his waist, his touch light, as if he didn’t anticipate having to use the weapon. He stood with his head cocked, waiting for my response. Tears continued to spill from his eyes, but his face might have been chiseled from stone. “Come, Elizabeth, tell me.”

  I licked my cracked lips. “It was your comments about Galileo. In the Bodleian you pretended you didn’t know who he was, but later, in the Physic Garden, you knew he had been blind.”

  “Ah.” He nodded, his expression impassive. “Very clever. I realized my mistake as soon as I had spoken. At the time, I was relieved when neither you nor the Florentine seemed to notice.”

  Despite myself, I had to know: “What have you done to him?”

  “Still pining for the foreigner even now, when surely you must hate him?” Robert sighed. “You disappoint me. I thought you were stronger than that.”

  He glanced at a man who was sidling through the cell door behind him—a middle-aged man I didn’t recognize, dressed plainly in brown and carrying a tray. “Set that on the floor and leave us.”

  “Very good, Your Grace.” The man deposited the tray and departed, closing the door behind him. A pewter tankard and a plate of bread and cheese sat on the tray. My stomach contracted. Please, Lord, let the food be for me! I would do almost anything for it.

  “Yes,” Robert said, watching me closely, “you’re hungry and thirsty, aren’t you? I bet you can almost taste the water. Think of how cool and refreshing it will feel, sliding down your throat.”

  “Curse you,” I whispered.

  Robert managed a small smile. “I already have been cursed, for all of my life. That will soon change.” His face hardened. “Take a sip, Elizabeth.”

  As he set the candle in its holder on the floor and picked up the tankard, I tried to make sense of what he had said a moment ago. Surely you must hate him. How had he known I was angry at Antonio? I hadn’t confided in him, and he hadn’t been in the hall when Antonio talked about pardoning Galileo.

  “Easy, now.” Robert put the tankard to my lips. I gulped greedily. The water coursed down my throat, putting out the fires burning in the soft tissue.

  When the tankard was empty, Robert set it down, its metallic clank filling the quiet in the cell. Still crouching on the floor, he wrapped his arms around me, his scent of rose water wafting into my nostrils. What was he doing—embracing me? The ropes jerked against my wrists. Robert sat back on his haunches, holding up a knife and the severed pieces of rope.

  He smiled at me. “Do you see how much I trust you? We can be friends, just as we were meant to be. Both of us the children of great men, rejected by our fathers for reasons that weren’t of our own making. You because of your gender, me because of my birth. They thought we would never belong. But you and I will prove them wrong, won’t we?”

  He cupped my chin in his hands. The handle of his knife pressed into my jaw, its jewels sharp and cold. I fought a shiver. His hands slipped from my face. “You’re weak; I can feel you shaking. Here, eat.” He dragged the tray across the floor toward me, the pewter rasping on the stone.

  I let out a cry that sounded like an animal’s and shoveled bread and cheese into my mouth. The bites of bread stuck in my still-dry throat, and I had to swallow hard to get them down. When every crumb was gone, I sat back, shuddering. Robert knelt beside me, resting a gentle hand on my shoulder.

  “Do you know why I usually wear yellow?” He didn’t wait for my response. “It’s to honor my mother. She often told me about her childhood in Wales and how she loved to walk its fields of wild yellow gorse. I wear it to remind my father that my mother lived, and that he wrongs her memory and my brother, James, and me by forgetting her.”

  Tears continued trailing down his face. “Let’s work together. Once I’m on the throne, I can have you made a member of the Royal Society. You’ll take your rightful place among the greatest minds in London. Your father will be released from captivity.” He brought his lips to my cheek, so close I could feel them move as he whispered, “We can start a new world.”

  “No,” I choked out. How could I convince him to abandon his plans? Perhaps if I appealed to his concern for his own neck, he would listen to me. “Think of what you’re doing! If you drink the elixir and manage to cheat death, the life you live might come at too high a cost. You might become blind, like my father and Galileo. Or suffer ill health for the rest of your life, as Galileo did.�
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  Our cheeks were pressed so tightly together I felt his tears, icy cold, on my skin. “Don’t pretend you care about me,” he muttered. “No one does.”

  “I do care!” I tried to pull back in his embrace, but his arms were iron hard, holding me in place. “I care,” I repeated, quietly this time. “Please, don’t go through with your plan. You aren’t beyond redemption yet. But if you drink the elixir in order to rise again, you won’t only destroy your soul—you’ll throw all Christian nations into chaos.”

  His breath shuddered, quick and uneven, in my ear. “Their citizens will see me as the new light of the world. Their savior.”

  “But you’ll destroy the Christian faith!” I cried. “Don’t you understand? Yes, the elixir calls Jesus’s resurrection into question, but exploiting the substance for your own purposes will slowly ruin our religion. The story behind your rebirth will get out; no secret of this magnitude can remain hidden for long, and some of your men won’t be able to keep their boasts to themselves. Eventually, people will learn the truth. They’ll turn on you, Robert. And they’ll begin to doubt their Christian faith. You know how inextricably linked so many European rulers are with the Church. Poison our religious beliefs, and governments will fall. One by one, nations will descend into anarchy.”

  There was a long pause. Through our clothes, I felt the pressure of Robert’s heartbeat against my collarbone—a wild, irregular thudding.

  “No,” he said at last. “I’ve worked too hard to stop now.”

  Something in the calmness of his tone made me pull away from him. His grip was loose now, his hands slipping from my shoulders. He had such a beautiful face, heart shaped and rosy skinned. And horribly blank, as though all emotion had been sucked away, leaving him hollow inside. Handsome, though, the sort of face you expected to see in paintings or read about in love poems. In appearance, he and his brother, James, must have taken after their mother—all they seemed to have inherited from their father was his height.

  His father’s height . . . The words bumped around in my head like berries in a bucket. And then I knew.

  I scrabbled backward, crablike. “You are my father’s Satan,” I breathed, unable to tear my gaze away from his still-damp eyes. “Not the king! My father must have used the gossip about you for inspiration, never dreaming how right he was to choose you as the model for his devil. You must have suspected what he did—that’s why you convinced Antonio and me that the devil in Paradise Lost represented your father!”

  Robert’s eyebrows rose. “Your days without food or drink must have deprived you of your wits. Didn’t we already discuss the similarities between your father’s devil and my father? Of course my father represents Satan—his name even falls into your father’s stupid alliterative naming scheme!”

  “So does yours!” I shot back. “Didn’t you know Satan has many names? The Devil, Beelzebub, the Serpent, the Devourer. And Lucifer—the angel in the Bible who is cast out of Heaven. ‘How art thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer, Son of the Morning!’” I quoted from the Book of Isaiah. “My father presents his version of Satan as this Lucifer, Heaven’s greatest angel, the star who burns the brightest. Haven’t you heard of Lucifer before, Duke of Lockton?”

  For a breathless moment, he stared at me, his eyes as hard as stones. Then he jumped to his feet, grabbed the candle off the floor, and threw it directly at my face.

  Instinctively I ducked. The candle landed behind me, its flame reflecting on the stones, sending golden glimmers dancing across their pale surfaces. I bent down and blew it out. The cell plunged into a darkness so heavy the only things I could discern were the whites of Robert’s eyes—eyes wide and focused on me.

  “Very well.” His voice was eerily calm. “I gave you a chance. If you insist on our being enemies, then enemies is what we’ll be. I don’t need your help anyway.”

  “Wait! What do you mean?”

  His smile was quick, his teeth a slash in the darkness. “Come with me. There is someone who I think you’d like to see again.”

  My father. Somehow Robert must have found him and broken him out of the king’s custody.

  I glared at Robert. He would never tell me where he had taken my father; I could see his resolve in the blank calmness in his eyes.

  There was no choice at all: I must go with him wherever he led.

  “If you harm a hair on his head,” I ground out, “then nothing can save you. I’ll hunt you to the ends of the earth.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Such theatrics from a Puritan! You surprise me, Elizabeth.” He opened the door, his face hardening. “Come.”

  All I managed was a curt nod. Robert ushered me out the door into a yawning blackness. Without any torches to light our way, we were forced to move by feel, trailing our hands on the walls as we descended the narrow stairs. From behind me I heard a clink as Robert placed his ringed hand on the hilt of his sword. He was ready for me.

  Somehow I had to prepare myself for him, too. Because I couldn’t let him win—even if stopping him meant my life.

  Thirty

  ROBERT LED ME ACROSS THE TOWER COURTYARD, holding me lightly by the wrist. All around us rose the prison’s massive outer walls, blocking out the sounds of the city. Night had swathed the network of buildings so they resembled hulking shadows. Somewhere, lions roared, their throaty rumbles cutting through the quiet.

  The sound of lapping water twined with the lions’ cries. Robert yanked on my wrist, forcing me to halt. At our feet gleamed the murky water of the moat, lines of moonlight rippling across the surface. A boat bobbed below us, its side bumping against the landing with a wooden thunk. Sitting within it, watching us, were four men: indistinct outlines of long, curling hair and broad-brimmed hats. All but one wore a sword at his waist. Was the unarmed man Father? Please let it be him! I squinted, but the night was too dark; I could make out the dejected slump of the man’s shoulders and the plume on his hat, nothing more.

  Robert elbowed me. “Get in.”

  Hands reached up, grasping my arms and pulling me into the boat. I sank onto a seat and twisted around to look at the weaponless man sitting behind me. As he lifted his head, the boat was pushed away from the landing. Two of the men dipped oars into the water, propelling us forward. The unarmed man’s eyes met mine.

  All the air vanished from my chest. This wasn’t Father—Father’s eyes never would have been able to find another’s. This man was sighted, and his eyes were wide and frightened. Had Robert lied to me? Had he lured me out of my cell with an elaborate ruse?

  I spun on my seat, seeking Robert. He sat in the stern, expressionless, as the boat glided across the water. Ahead of us loomed the portcullis gate, its interlocking black bars dividing the night beyond it into small pieces, like panes of glass. It groaned as it was pulled up. When we passed beneath it, water dripped off its spikes, hitting my face and shoulders.

  “You said you were taking me to my father!” I shouted at Robert.

  He shrugged. “If you made an illogical leap in your thinking, I’m hardly to be blamed for it.”

  What did he mean? Who was this man?

  Behind us, the portcullis gate rattled as it was lowered. Fog crawled across the water’s surface, obscuring the Tower complex until it had vanished behind a curtain of mist. The men stopped rowing. We drifted across the water, like a rudderless ship at sea. My hands curled into fists in my lap. What was Robert planning now?

  “We’re ready,” said one of the rowers. I recognized his voice; he was one of Robert’s friends from the ball at Buckingham’s mansion.

  A scuffle broke out behind me. As I turned around, I saw that one of the men had wrapped his arm around the unarmed man’s neck. The second man so confined gasped for breath, his hands scrabbling in vain at the other’s arm.

  “Mr. Pepys,” Robert said, “you’ll answer my questions or my friend will squeeze the life out of you.”

  Pepys! The funny little gentleman from the Royal Society meeting—I remembered him b
owing to Robert, burbling about his service in the Royal Navy. What the devil was he doing here?

  “Please,” Mr. Pepys wheezed, “I know nothing!”

  “Why must everyone lie to me?” Robert snapped. “Only a man immovably loyal to my father would have remained in London during the plague outbreak, and only a man who suspected there was something suspicious about Sir Vaughan and his assistants’ absence from the Royal Society meeting would have jumped and nearly fallen over a chair when their names were mentioned. Yes, I saw your reaction when I brought them up,” he said when Mr. Pepys winced. “Clearly my father has taken you into his confidence. Did you run to him after the Royal Society meeting and tattle on me, I wonder?”

  “I told him you had attended the meeting, that’s all,” Mr. Pepys whispered. “We knew there could be a reasonable explanation for your actions. Maybe you had become interested in natural philosophy—”

  “Stop your rambling,” Robert interrupted. “Now tell me where my father has hidden Mr. Milton or die.”

  “No! Don’t tell him anything!” I shouted.

  Something poked me in my side. I looked down and saw it was the tip of a dagger, its point disappearing into the heavy folds of my scarlet gown. The man holding it gave me a thin smile. My mouth went dry.

  No one said a word; the only sounds were Mr. Pepys rasping for air and water slapping the sides of the boat. My eyes roved across the men’s faces, searching for an instant of inattention in which I could seize one of their weapons. But Robert and Sir Gauden sat with their hands resting on their weapons. The two rowers rested their paddles on the gunwales, leaving one hand free to clasp their swords at their waists. What could I possibly do?

  Mr. Pepys’s eyes bulged, his head jerking like that of a puppet on a string. Robert snapped his fingers and the man released Mr. Pepys, who sagged forward, coughing hard.

  “Mr. Thomas Farriner’s bakeshop,” Mr. Pepys gasped. “It was my idea to keep him there. The king wanted him housed at the Duke of Buckingham’s home, but I thought it was too obvious a choice. I know Mr. Farriner well—he supplies the Royal Navy with biscuits.” He raised streaming eyes to Robert. “The king loves you! I beg Your Grace, don’t go through with whatever it is you’re planning and break his heart!”