Traitor Angels

  “I will never tell you anything,” I said.

  “You’ll change your mind.” His hand smoothed the blindfold more securely over my eyes. At my temple, his fingers paused, as if he were considering whether or not to untie the black strip of fabric.

  I held my breath. Please, I begged silently, take it off.

  He let go of my face. “We’ll return in the morning.” His boots creaked as he stood up. “Perhaps after a night of absolute darkness, Miss Milton’s memory will have improved.”

  “I don’t know where the cave is!” I shouted. The men murmured among themselves; their boots rang on the floor and a door opened and closed. A key scraped in the lock. They were gone.

  Awkwardly I rolled onto my side. My hands tingled at the sudden relief from their imprisonment between my back and the floor. I staggered to my feet. Although I picked at the ropes around my wrists, they remained taut, their rough edges digging into my skin.

  Giving up, I left my hands fastened behind my back and took a cautious step forward, then another.

  Nothing. The men didn’t charge into the room, shouting at me to lie down. Nearby, I heard water lapping the shore and the distant roar of an animal. It sounded like a lion. It reminded me of the other times I had heard lions growling in their cages here in London and—

  All at once, I realized what those sounds signified.

  No.

  Moving backward, I skimmed the emptiness with my hands, searching for a clue to tell me more about this room. My fingers brushed the cool stones of the wall, their surface damp with condensation. Inching sideways, I followed the curved walls with my hands until there was no longer any doubt in my mind.

  I knew where I was.

  Although my mind screamed I must be mistaken, I knew, deep down, that I was not. This room could be in no other place. Its shape, the stone walls and floor, the nearby shushing of the Thames, the boat ride across a moat, and the wild cries of the animals in the Royal Menagerie told me the truth.

  I had been locked in the Tower of London.

  Part

  Four

  THE JOINING

  Between us two let there be peace, both joyning,

  As joyn’d in injuries, one enmitie

  Against a Foe by doom express assign’d us,

  That cruel Serpent . . .

  —John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IX

  Twenty-Eight

  MY LEGS BUCKLED. I LET MYSELF SINK TO THE floor, where the chill of the stones pushed through my dress. But I barely noticed the cold; my mind already felt disconnected from my body, as if I had stepped out of it.

  Somehow Robert had arranged to have me housed here in secret. One of the jailers must number among his many friends. Otherwise I couldn’t fathom how he had managed to have me kept here, for this place was reserved for our city’s wealthiest or most notorious prisoners. The king and Buckingham wouldn’t dream of seeking me in the Tower. Robert and his men could do whatever they wished with me, and no one else would be the wiser.

  I wouldn’t be treated like other prisoners. I would have no trial, no public execution. In five days, I wouldn’t be crammed into a cart with the other condemned—possibly with my father. I had failed him. If only I could magically send my thoughts into his mind, so wherever he was in London, he could hear me and know how bitterly sorry I was.

  Fresh tears pressed against my blindfold, but I blinked them away. They wouldn’t help me at all. Father and I were as good as dead.

  Five days. That was all the time he had left before they strung him from the executioner’s tree on Tyburn Hill. Five days until the rough fibers of the rope scratched his neck. Until the rope tightened and tightened, turning his mind dark.

  And I had merely days, maybe hours, of torture before I cracked. They had plenty of ways to break a person; Father had told me of them, after he was released from prison six years ago. They might slit your nose, Elizabeth, he had said to me as I knelt at his feet, so grateful to have him with us again that I gladly listened to his horrific tales although they would give me nightmares for weeks afterward. If the jailers are angry with you, they may crop your ears down to bloody stumps. Or brand your face with letters. There was a man in the cell next to mine who was marked SL. He hadn’t told me what the letters stood for, and I hadn’t needed to ask—they must have meant “seditious libeler,” one of the many terms that had been thrown at my father, too.

  I would hold out for as long as I could, but at some point I would come apart and confess I would never be able to figure out the additional clues my father may have concealed in Paradise Lost. My final moments should be quick, at least, for once it was clear I was useless to my captors, I imagined, they would wish to get rid of me at once. A dagger through my heart or a snap of my neck, and that would be the end of it. I would be buried in a pauper’s grave or dumped in the river.

  The jest, however, would be at Robert and his friends’ expense. You can’t kill someone who is already dead, and Antonio had broken my heart tonight.

  Dawn had lightened the inside of my blindfold from black to gray before I heard footsteps again. A whisper of leather on stone, so faint I feared I had imagined the noise and my mind was already playing games with me. For a moment, I lay on the pallet that I had stumbled into during my blind wanderings about the room last night. If I moved, the straw in the mattress would rustle, muting the person’s footfalls.

  They were a light shuffle. Not my captors, then, who had walked with a heavy tread. Maybe they had dispatched someone else to deal with me. Someone stronger and carrying the instruments of torture Father had warned me of—thumbscrews to break my fingers, a butcher’s knife to slice off my ears or nose.

  Shuddering, I muffled my mouth against my shoulder, forcing the whimpers back inside where they couldn’t shame me. I jerked my hands in their bindings, but the ropes only dug deeper into the bloody grooves I had already worn into my flesh. Biting my lip against the red-hot ache, I didn’t make a sound. I wouldn’t give my new assailant the satisfaction of my pain.

  The footsteps passed my door. They faded into the distance, and I heard another door open and close. Slowly I let out the breath I had kept inside. Father would be so ashamed of me—my nerves were stretched so taut the slightest sound might snap them.

  All night I had staggered around this room, seeking a way out. The walls were solid stone, broken only by a slit of a window, too narrow for me to fit more than my hand through. The door was locked. No matter how many times I had thrown my body against it, it hadn’t budged in its frame.

  At last I had turned my attention to the floor. With my arms bound behind me, inspecting it had been a difficult task, and I was forced to sit cross-legged and stretch my arms back as far as they would reach, my fingers running over the chunks of stone. No loose pieces, not even a missing line of mortar. This room was a securely locked box. The only way I was leaving this place was with Robert’s permission—or as a corpse.

  Rolling onto my side, I closed my eyes, begging for the sleep that would not come. Every time my body started to relax, Antonio’s image loomed against my lids and I jerked to wakefulness. His face was like a knife in my ribs, and every time I saw him, the knife twisted more until it took all of my strength not to cry out. How could have I been so stupid? Of course he wouldn’t want me—the Puritan girl who tried to inhabit men’s spheres of sword fighting and knowledge. If only we’d never met! Then I wouldn’t have imagined a future alongside him, full of useful work and shared companionship. Thanks to him, my world had expanded, and now it had to contract again to its former size, leaving me alone, shaking, in the middle of it.

  Sometime later—I wasn’t sure of the time, for it seemed to pass with agonizing slowness, and I couldn’t say whether minutes or hours had gone by—footsteps sounded again in the distance. Closer. Closer still. Motionless I waited, every muscle in my body tensed. Had Robert’s friends returned at last?

  The creak of the prison door was like a shard of ice impaling my
heart. I bolted upright on the mattress. “Who’s there?” I called.

  Boots clicked on the floor, coming nearer. Beneath the blindfold, my eyes squeezed shut. Escape into your memories, I ordered myself. Anne. I would fill my mind with her. Again I saw her, perched on a kitchen stool, flashing me a wide grin. I could see her lips moving, I could almost hear the high treble of her voice: E-E-Eliz—so strong—

  Hands gripped my shoulders and flung me to the floor. With my hands bound behind me, I was powerless to break my fall and I slammed onto my stomach. Gasping, I lay still, trying to force Anne’s image into my head. Her face evaporated like mist.

  A hand caressed my hair. “You’re a pretty maiden.” It was Sir Gauden. “A pity. I would have preferred an ugly girl, for then I shouldn’t have minded making a ruin of your face.”

  I clenched my jaw, preparing to hold in my screams. The beating would start soon. It must. Why did he wait? If only he would begin, then this horrible anticipation would be over—

  He yanked me into a sitting position, then grabbed my hair, snapping my head back and bringing his lips to my ear. My mind snatched hold of details that couldn’t possibly help me: the silk of his sleeve brushing my face; the scent of cold game pie and oysters on his breath; the chill of his rings when he splayed his fingers over my cheek, keeping me immobile so I had no choice but to listen to him.

  “Unfortunately for me, His Grace prefers to use other methods,” he said. “He wants you to write out the final three books in Paradise Lost.”

  Why had we returned to Father’s poem? There must be something we had all missed—but what?

  “He has already read the first seven books,” Gauden continued. “Come now, Miss Milton, don’t act surprised!” He sounded annoyed when I started. “Did you truly imagine His Grace wouldn’t take the first opportunity to read the pages you were copying? He told me he looked through them at night while the Florentine and you slept during your journey from Oxford to London.”

  But I . . . I had thought he’d been weak and feverish from his injuries. He had played me as masterfully as a musician plays upon an instrument.

  I made a sound low in my throat but couldn’t say a word.

  Sir Gauden toyed with the knot at the back of my blindfold. “All it will take for me to remove this is your promise to write out your father’s last three books.”

  “No!”

  For a moment, he was silent. “You’ll change your mind,” he murmured. Then he let go of me. I heard his boots ringing on the stone floor as he walked away. The door opened and shut. A key turned in the lock. I was alone.

  So they wouldn’t hurt me, at least not yet. Robert had something else planned for me—something he must think would work better than whips or knives. I shuddered. Don’t think, I told myself. All I could do was live through the next moment.

  I scooted backward on the floor until the tips of my fingers found the hard surface of the wall. Bracing my back against the stones, I took a fortifying breath. What if Robert was correct and the cave’s location was hidden in the final books of Paradise Lost?

  Quickly, I considered the last three books. The Serpent in the Garden. Eve’s temptation and fall from grace. Adam’s decision to taste the apple, too, so he would never be parted from Eve. Their reckoning before God. And, at the last, their expulsion from Paradise.

  Nothing. The only “real” places I could think of in Paradise Lost were Rome, symbolized by the lethally beautiful Hell, and various biblical locations my father alluded to, like Mount Sion. No Padua, no mention of Tuscany except for the Tuscan Artist. Robert had to be wrong.

  And . . . tucking clues into the ending didn’t sound like something Father would do. He was a great believer in the power of the first line, and he had often advised me that the beginning of a poem was its most important part. What if the clues were concealed in the opening lines instead? So seamlessly woven into the first stanzas that I had skipped over them countless times? That would be far more like Father.

  I stared into the blindfold, imagining it as a blank canvas for Father’s words. The first lines unfurled across it, red letters of fire on black: Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit / Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast / Brought Death into the World . . .

  Something about the words gave me pause. I repeated them in my head, turning them over and over until they were old ribbons, rubbed smooth by my mind. In the first lines, my father is telling readers what the subject of his epic will be—namely, man’s “first disobedience,” his decision to thwart God’s wishes and eat an apple from the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. Therefore, if the entire poem is about “disobedience,” the word itself must possess special significance.

  It had to be a clue! Father was exacting with his diction, and if he wanted to draw attention to the word “disobedience,” he must have had a reason. My pulse pounded in my temples. I closed my eyes, waiting for the wave of dizziness to pass.

  Think. I knew of my father’s habit for playing with words’ multiple meanings. He had often told me the Hebrew name for Eve was related to the verb “to live.” Therefore Eve, who had brought death into the world by eating the forbidden apple, was conversely considered the mother of all living things. Life couldn’t exist without death—two opposites joined together to form a whole. It was exactly the sort of literary trick that Father loved.

  I ran “disobedience” through my mind, then chopped it apart as Father had taught me, dividing it into separate sections. The prefix “dis” was Latin, and it meant “apart” or “asunder.” Thanks to Father’s lessons, I also knew it referred to the Roman underworld, known as Dis. The ancient Romans hadn’t believed in Heaven; they had thought all departed souls resided in the underworld, a dark, hellish place. The god who ruled over it was known in Latin as Dis Pater, but he had other names, too—

  Suddenly everything flew together, like fireflies in the night converging simultaneously in a single spot, creating a blinding ball of light.

  Another name for the god of Hell was Hades.

  And the name of my weapons instructor, the same man who had been one of Father’s students many years ago after he had returned from the Italian city-states, was Mr. Hade.

  I let out an inarticulate cry. This must be the answer! Father had hidden something valuable—something crucial about Galileo’s discovery—in Mr. Hade’s home. In his letter to Vincenzo Viviani, he had written that only educated people who also knew the intimate details of his life would be able to decipher his clues.

  I stood, my legs threatening to buckle from exhaustion. But my mind was finally, blessedly clear.

  How simple and yet fiendishly clever of Father! Robert would never think of this, and I would die before I told him. Let him think the clues were in the last three books: I would even agree to copy them out, earning my family more time to realize I was never coming home and to escape from London. My father’s secret would stay safe, for Robert knew nothing of my old instructor.

  But . . . that was wrong.

  I sank to my knees. Oh, dear God! Robert did know about Mr. Hade. I had told him myself when we rode across London Bridge. Side by side with him, the two of us on our steeds, I had nudged him and pointed to where Mr. Hade’s house stood on the bridge, explaining it was the home of the man who had trained me. And I had said Mr. Hade’s name. I had said it.

  So there was a chance Robert could assemble Father’s clues after all.

  I staggered to my feet. The hours without food and drink must have been taking their toll; the stones in the floor heaved under my feet. No matter. Gritting my teeth, I walked gingerly, my feet searching for something I could use to untie my bonds. Maybe I had missed an object or means of escape when I searched this room last night. Somehow I had to get out of this prison and journey to Mr. Hade’s house. And I might not have much time.

  But the day passed, and then the night, and I could find no way out. There was nothing in the room to help me escape: a straw pallet, a bucket to serve as
a privy, and the window. I had pressed my face to the latter, breathing in the hot air and wondering which of the prison’s many buildings I was standing in.

  From the courtyard below, I had heard men talking, probably the countless fellows who worked in the Royal Mint or in the Ordinance and Records offices. They had been too far off for me to separate their murmurs into distinct words. None of them would help me if I screamed, I had known; they must be accustomed to the convicts’ pitiful wails.

  During the night, lions growled in their cages and the Thames washed the shore, a ceaseless shushing of water. In the morning, I lay weakly on my pallet, thinking. Today was the first of September. Three more days until Father’s execution. And only God knew how many days remained until my death. Already I had been without food or water for a day and a half.

  Specters rushed through my head, wispy things made of darkness and veils, nightmares of the dying or the mad. My throat was aflame. One drink. One sip of cool water was all I needed to banish the ghosts in my thoughts. If only I could break through this terrible fog and think.

  Sometime later, after I used the bucket, my legs shook so badly on my walk to my pallet that I was forced to sit. I rested my forehead on the floor. My breaths felt like broken glass, cutting the inside of my throat as they went down.

  So this was how Robert planned on breaking me: through neglect. No water or food, no visits, nothing but the sweat-dampened blindfold and my feverish thoughts for company. A clever plan; he was letting me break myself.

  I must build up the walls in my mind, if I hoped to prevent Robert from climbing inside. The final three books of Paradise Lost—I would go through those again, so I could figure out how to weave a new story within their lines when Robert ordered me to write them out and hopelessly confuse him.