Traitor Angels (24 page)

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.

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.

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.”

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.