Traitor Angels (6 page)

Or maybe it had been another hidden message.

Stupid
, I decided, resting my arms on the windowsill and filling my eyes with the sight of the stars. Father’s final words had been about a familiar young shepherdess, and I should follow his instructions and find the poem containing this character. Not concentrate on
Paradise Lost
.

Nodding hard, I left the shutters open and readied myself for bed: rubbing rosemary blossoms over my teeth to clean them, washing my face, tying my nightcap strings under my chin. Studying the sky had scrubbed the inside of my mind, leaving it resolute and determined.

I had always understood how Father had maintained his reason when darkness encroached on his sight; why he had dared to remain in England when his old colleagues were beheaded or had managed to flee to Europe or the colonies in the New World. It was for love of something greater than himself. Writing sustained him, feeding his thoughts and cheering his heart. He could live through any tragedy, for tragedy only deepened his understanding of the human soul and turned him into a better writer.

But I couldn’t understand his decision to stay silent today.

By refusing to tell his secret to Buckingham, he had chosen death. He would disapprove of my plan to save him by bargaining with the king, I knew, but I didn’t care. As long as I managed to keep him alive, it didn’t matter if I flouted his wishes.

And if he died . . . I bit back a sob. His death would rip out all the stars in the sky, leaving me in darkness. There would be no more poetry, no more shared laughter in the early morning. Just endless black.

What would happen to us if he died? Mary, Deborah, and I could read and write—hardly useful talents for girls who hadn’t been trained for a trade and had no dowries. We might be able to find work as scullery maids—but what about Anne? I thought of her twisted legs and childish grin, and my heart squeezed painfully in my chest. It’d be the almshouse for her, where she’d be forced to live off others’ charity. She would hate feeling like a burden.

Or . . . there was one more possibility. One other option for females without dowries or useful skills: we’d end up walking the streets.

No.
I pressed my hand to my mouth so Viviani wouldn’t hear me moan. I wouldn’t let that happen. No matter what, I’d keep my sisters safe from such an awful fate. I had to save Father, not only for his sake but for all of ours.

Viviani and I departed the next morning. Night still covered the land when we emerged from the cottage and saddled the horses. Even darkness couldn’t lessen the heat pulsing from the ground in waves, drawing a line of sweat along my spine.

Our provisions were simple: full water skins, dried fruit,
bread, and cheese; spare clothes (we had found Viviani’s stuffed inside Mary and Deborah’s mattress); and sacks of oats for the horses. I opened my sumpters, the bags behind the saddles, checking to make sure I had packed everything I needed. Inside them there was food and water, and also a stack of clean pages, a bottle of ink, and two fresh quills. Father’s poem might have been burned, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be rewritten. Every time I had a chance, I would copy out as much of
Paradise Lost
as I could remember. With luck, I might save his masterpiece.

While I buckled the straps, I let the first lines rush into my mind:
Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit / Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast / Brought Death into the World
. . . Tears blurred my sight. I could almost hear Father’s gentle voice reciting the words and imagine he was with me again—not tied to a horse, galloping through the countryside toward his death.

Viviani swung onto his saddle. “Are you ready?”

I looked at the cottage, an irregular black hump in the predawn darkness. Its interior was still crowded with rented furniture, its bookcase still holding remnants of Father’s cherished collection. But there was nothing in there for me anymore. Not with my family ripped apart.

“I’m ready,” I said.

I climbed onto my saddle, my movements unencumbered by my usual skirts. Today I had donned black breeches, a shirt of white linen, a doublet of black wool, and riding boots. The clothes had belonged to one of Father’s students, from the time when he was a tutor and boarded pupils in his home, before my sisters and I were born. With my braid coiled beneath a broad-brimmed felt hat and the flowing lines of the shirt concealing
the swell of my bosom, I made a passable impression of a boy. I hoped.

This was the first time I would test my disguise by daylight. For years I had crept at night from our row house in London, praying no one would see me as I darted across the road into Bunhill Fields to meet with Mr. Hade, one of Father’s former students and my fencing instructor. As far as I knew, no one ever had.

During the year we had lived in Chalfont, I had continued my weapons training, slipping into the thicket of trees along the village outskirts where I strung sacks of straw from the branches and then attacked them. A pitiful substitute for combat with a flesh-and-blood person, but it couldn’t be helped; there was no one in Chalfont whom I trusted to fight me and maintain his silence, and Father insisted on absolute secrecy.

“Lead the way,” Viviani said, taking his horse’s reins. “You said Oxford was a distance of fourteen leagues?”

“Yes, a day’s hard riding at least, but since we’ll have to travel across the open countryside, the trip will probably take two days.” I had never been to Oxford, although my mother’s family hailed from the area. Indeed, I wouldn’t have ventured there of my own volition. During the civil war, Oxford had been a royalist stronghold, and my father’s name was one that its residents had cursed.

“Come,” I said to him, pulling on the reins so my horse turned west. As our animals galloped across the fields, we left the rising sun behind us and raced toward a sky still black with night. I didn’t look back.

THE TYRANNY OF HEAVEN

Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.

—John Milton,
Paradise Lost,
Book I

OUR ROUTE WAS ROUGH AND MONOTONOUS, TAKING
us across fields enclosed by hedges or avenues of trees. Of other travelers, we saw few: a handful of men on horseback, a couple of farmers driving a cart packed with chickens, and a stage-wagon crammed with poor riders who couldn’t afford their own carriages.

When the noon sun beat mercilessly on our heads, we stopped in the shade of a tree to eat. Viviani fed the horses. Sitting cross-legged, I watched him through eyes slitted against the sun’s glare, puzzling over this stranger whom I had tied myself to.

“Tell me about yourself.” The words whipped out like a command, and I blushed at how hard I sounded. How the devil was I supposed to talk to a boy? Mary would have known how, but I couldn’t stomach the thought of copying the way she laughed behind her hand or looked through her eyelashes.

Viviani sat down beside me. “And what would you like to know, my lady?”

“I’m not a lady.” Surely he was mocking me. I looked up, expecting to see a teasing smirk on his lips. But his face was calm as he picked up a linen-wrapped package of bread and cheese. “Tell me about your life in Florence.”

“It’s a city that inflames your mind and bombards your senses as soon as you enter it.” Half-smiling, he rested his back against the tree. “Noise everywhere: street vendors shouting their wares of fruit and fish, carriage wheels rattling over paving stones, bells ringing from the dozens of churches. Wherever you look, there is bright color—red-tile roofs, olive-green shutters, the sumptuous clothing of fine ladies and gentlemen strolling past. I like to walk the Corso dei Tintori—the avenue of the cloth dyers,” he clarified, evidently forgetting I was well versed in his tongue. “They hang lengths of wool and silk from their windows, and when you walk beneath them, you can see them snapping in the breeze above your head, such an array of colors that your eyes are dazzled. And the smells! A combination of rich scents you can find nowhere else: cinnamon and clove, ginger and pepper, goat, pork, poultry and fish, the beeswax of candles.”

Despite myself, I inched closer to him, eager to learn more about the city my father had said was the most learned he had ever seen. “But isn’t it such a large and magnificent city that you find yourself overwhelmed?”

He laughed. “Of course! That’s the best part of Florence. Regardless of how long I live there, I’ll never feel as though I’ve unlocked all of her secrets. But it’s impossible to get overwhelmed to the point that you become lost,” he added. “Florence has three
tall landmarks that act as guideposts—the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, Giotto’s bell tower, and the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, which can be seen from any point in the city. When I was a small boy and came to Florence, my master often sent me on errands throughout the city, and I was always able to trace my route home by looking for the Palazzo Vecchio tower. I was seven when I joined my master, more than half of my life ago, as I’m now eighteen, and I still feel as though I’m getting to know Florence.”

“A city of wonders,” I murmured to myself, recalling London’s twisting alleys and narrow wooden houses, its aristocrats in bold colors and its religious freethinkers in black. His Florence sounded like an oil painting, pulsing with reds and golds, while my London was a charcoal sketch, plain and dark.

At my traitorous thoughts, warmth flooded my cheeks. Like all good Puritans, I had been raised to distrust color and pageantry . . . and yet a part of me yearned to see this city that Viviani spoke of with such love.

His voice broke into my thoughts. “My master’s a good man.” In between words, he munched, and I had to smother a smile: He had already eaten all of his bread and cheese and started on another packet. Mary often accused me of having an unladylike appetite, but this boy could eat as much as two of me could. “Vincenzo’s both brilliant and kind,” he continued. “He lets me assist him in many of his experiments—but those wouldn’t interest you,” he interrupted himself.

“I’d like to hear about your experiments.” Even to my own ears, I sounded breathless.

So as we sat in the slanting shade, he told me about the experiments he and his master carried out. Their geometrical
equations to demonstrate that an earlier natural philosopher had been correct when he hypothesized that the motion of light occurs in time, not instantaneously. At that, I set the bread in my lap again, my food forgotten. I listened to Viviani talk about his master’s tests on the newest theory of water motion, which postulated that flowing water presses downward on a riverbed, not outward against its banks, and I could barely breathe. He and Signor Vincenzo Viviani had studied the tiny discs on the side of Jupiter, too, watching as they changed position relative to one another during the course of an evening—proof they weren’t stars but moons, as the same natural philosopher had discovered fifty years ago.

Viviani’s existence sounded like a hearth tale. A life colored silver by stars and black with ink: beautiful and useful. Listening to it had frozen me in place, as though his words had cast a spell on me. I found I didn’t want to move, didn’t want to take a deep breath, as if the slightest movement would break this magical feeling.

He grinned at me. “You woke with shadows under your eyes, but they’re gone now. It’s good to see you smile, Miss Milton. Joy sits easily on your face, and you ought to wear it more often. Now I think we’ve given the horses a long-enough rest, don’t you?”

He had brushed the crumbs from his breeches and swung himself onto his saddle before I had time to form a proper response. Even if he had waited, I doubted I could have strung a sentence together; his fine words had pushed all my wits out of my head, leaving me with only a warm flicker beneath my breastbone.

Foolishness
, I decided, climbing onto my horse. Joy as an
ornament for my face, indeed! But I couldn’t banish the smile that insisted on remaining on my lips.

At dusk we made camp beneath a string of trees. Viviani was incredulous. “
This
is where you propose spending the night?”

I unbuckled the sumpters. Though I chafed at the prospect of halting our journey, we had to conceal ourselves for the night or risk being found by wandering highwaymen, and we would exhaust the horses if we didn’t let them rest. As for myself, my legs ached from riding and pain stabbed behind my eyes, thanks to squinting in harsh sunlight for hours.

“Did you see any inns today?” I snapped. “Or perhaps any homes whose owners would be willing to take in a foreigner and a peculiar-looking boy?” I threw two bedrolls onto the ground. “This is the best we can manage.”

Viviani, looking thoughtful, rubbed his horse’s sweaty flanks. “A strange country, your England. No highways, no inns set up at regular intervals along the road, and no color. Everything here is brown and gray.” He brushed down the horse, his movements unhurried and methodical. With his back to me, he added, “You shouldn’t call yourself peculiar.”

“Indeed? And what would you call a girl dressed as a boy?” I snorted. “Handsome?”

Viviani glanced over his shoulder at me. “Brave, to conceal her identity so she can help her father. Handsome, no—you’re too pretty to be described as such.”

Surprise stole my voice.
Pretty
. No one had called me that before.

“This sort of talk is nonsense,” I muttered. I handed him the
water skin, taking care our fingers did not touch.

His now-familiar laugh rolled out, but he said nothing more. As darkness closed in, we ate our simple supper in silence. When we had put away the remaining food, Viviani picked up one of his bags and ambled into the passage formed by the two rows of poplar trees. At our campsite I took out paper and ink and set to work copying the opening of
Paradise Lost
’s Book One from memory. Father had revised the beginning so many times that the words felt as though they had been embroidered on my brain, but eventually I would venture into less-traveled territory, and I knew I’d make mistakes and unwittingly substitute my own phrases for Father’s. Still, it was better than leaving his masterpiece in ashes. At the story’s start, Satan and his band of rebel angels have already staged a revolt against God in the Kingdom of Heaven and have been cast down to Hell, where Satan lies chained on a lake of fire.

For a short time, the only sounds were the whickers of our horses and the scratch of my quill on paper. Then I heard footsteps shuffling in dirt. Viviani dropped down next to me.

“What is it you do with such deep concentration?” he asked.

“I’m copying
Paradise Lost
.”

He stretched out his legs, crossing them at the ankle. “Perhaps,” he said, “since this poem figures in our mission, I ought to know more about its contents.”

I hesitated. He was right, of course. But . . . these were my father’s words, labored over for years, meant to be the culmination of his career. Sharing them with someone I barely knew felt wrong.

Still, I could hear Father’s voice in my head, begging me not
to let his poem vanish forever. He had intended it to be read by the people, and Viviani certainly numbered among them.

“Very well,” I said at last. “It’s a ten-book poem in blank verse, detailing the story of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from Eden, but from a different perspective—in many of the scenes, Satan’s the central character. The story begins after he has already fought God and lost. While he’s in the depths of Hell, he consults with his army of angels about how to recapture Heaven and overthrow the Lord once and for all. He decides to journey to Earth and poison it with evil by tempting its two humans to disobey God’s commands.”

Viviani held out his hand. “May I see it?”

“Be careful. The pages are still wet.” I gave him the stack, and he began to read.

Overhead, the heavens were painted blue and purple, permitting just enough illumination to write by, but it wouldn’t be long before the sky surrendered to night and I would have to put away my work. I increased my pace, working now on Book Two. I was remembering the words wrongly: even in my head, I could hear how awkward the lines sounded. But the plot, at least, was the same; that I recalled with absolute clarity.

At this point, Satan gathers his followers for “the great consult” and they debate whether or not they should fight another battle to gain control of Heaven. Finally Satan suggests they should go to Earth. When none of the angels volunteer for the task, Satan decides to make the journey on his own. It was odd, I thought as I scribbled the lines as best as I could remember them, but my father’s Satan was almost always alone. Perhaps Father was saying something significant about evil—that it divides us
from our souls, keeping us eternally distant from ourselves and one another. As though Hell was solitude itself.

“Your father’s poetry is beautiful,” Viviani said at last. “I’ve never read anything like it. His version of Satan . . .” He trailed off, giving me a wary look.

I took pity on him and decided to say what he clearly was reluctant to, out of respect for my feelings. “My father’s Satan appears blasphemous,” I said, wiping my ink-stained quill on a spare scrap of linen. “He’s brave and charismatic; he rails against what he sees as God’s tyrannical rule in Heaven. He’s a leader,” I added, “exhorting his followers to rebellion. A revolutionary, you could even say.”

I looked up from my task to find Viviani watching me carefully. “It’s a trick,” I explained. “My father presents Satan in such a manner so readers will fall with him—they know he’s the villain and yet he appears so heroic that they can’t help rooting for him, at least in the beginning.”

“Then your father’s epic is meant to manipulate its readers.” He sounded impressed. “It’s a game played on our minds.”

“Precisely.” Mysterious or not, at least this boy was clever—he had latched onto my father’s intentions immediately. “From the start, we know the story’s outcome, and yet we still succumb to temptation and find Satan the most admirable character. Everything he says has multiple meanings, but we don’t understand what he’s truly saying until the story’s end, when he tempts Eve.”

For a moment, Viviani was silent. “It sounds like a literary marvel,” he finally said. “But nothing you’ve told me explains why your father summoned me to England.”

He jumped to his feet, then picked up an object from the ground on the other side of him. Gold flashed on its surface and my thoughts about Father’s secrets scattered like leaves in a windstorm. The object was the mysterious instrument I had seen in Viviani’s chamber at the inn.

“What is that?” I asked.

“A telescope. I was using it earlier.” He opened his hands to let me see it more clearly: it was a cylindrical device, its leather covering stamped with a design in gold filigree. My heart beat faster. I had heard the term “telescope” before but until yesterday I had never seen one. I had imagined them to be massive, bulky contraptions made out of wood and brass, not like this slender instrument fashioned out of leather.

“These are used to study the stars, aren’t they?” My hand itched to grab it, but I forced myself to speak calmly. I couldn’t let anyone guess how fascinated I was by astronomy or I’d be branded as an aberration. “May I try it?”

He looked surprised. “Yes, of course.”

We walked into the clearing. He stood behind me, reaching around my body to place his hands over mine on the telescope and direct its lenses at the full moon hanging low in the sky.

“There will be some discoloration around the edges of the moon,” he said, sounding calm, as though he held girls’ hands every day. Maybe he did. “I suspect this telescope’s concave lenses gather and diffuse light improperly. Longer telescopes lessen the distortion. Someday I hope to build a telescope that permits us to see the heavens plainly.”

I glanced over my shoulder at him. His face was inches from mine, so close I could smell his scent of spiced wine and
sandalwood. In the silvery darkness, I saw a vein pulsing in his throat, where he had undone his cravat. Hastily, I looked into the telescope, fumbling for something to say. “I thought you were a mathematician, not an astronomer.”