Traitor Angels (23 page)

All the fight went out of me. He was right. Antonio had shown his true self in the hall tonight, when he talked to Lady Katherine about using Galileo’s discovery for his own purposes.

In the end, he had manipulated me as skillfully as Robert had.

I let out a low cry. Even to my ears, I sounded like a wounded animal. I lay still, listening to the carriage wheels rumble over the road, carrying me closer to whichever place Robert had decreed I should be taken.

No one spoke. We rolled through the streets, finally stopping when I heard water lapping on a shore. I was hauled to my feet and half carried, half led out of the carriage. The men held me tightly by the elbows. I heard them breathing around me, as though they had hemmed me in on all sides.

Beneath my feet, the ground felt marshy. The stink of dirty water assailed my nose. Except for the whisper of wind skimming over water, the night was quiet.

The men holding me dragged me forward. I sagged in their grip, letting them lead me across the soft ground. My legs bumped into something hard. Then I was lifted by several arms and set on my feet on a gently swaying surface. More hands grabbed me, yanking me down onto a seat. We began to move, rocking slightly. The lonely sound of water hitting the sides of a boat reached my ears. I was being rowed somewhere.

Ahead of us sounded the creaking groan of waterlogged wood and iron. A portcullis gate, I guessed, but I couldn’t bring myself to care; all of my thoughts seemed sluggish, as though they had to travel a long distance before unfurling in my mind. As the
boat skimmed onward, water droplets hit my face—dripping off the portcullis spikes as they rose above us, perhaps.

The boat glided to a stop. For a moment, I remained in place, rocking, while I heard shuffling around me. Then arms were lifting me onto solid ground. From far off, a low, throaty cry rent the night air. I stiffened. It had sounded like a wild animal. Where in Heaven’s name had I been taken?

The men seized my arms again and marched me forward, our silence broken only by their panting as they broke into an almost-run. I had to run, too, or risk falling.

They rushed me across paved ground, then through a door and up some steps. The stairwell was so narrow my shoulders brushed its sides, and my captors released me so we could climb single file. I had to lift each foot carefully, seeking the flat smoothness of a step.

Abruptly the man in front of me stopped climbing, and I bumped into him. He grunted. A key rattled in a lock. The man behind me prodded my back, urging me upward. I climbed another few steps before hands gripped my shoulders and threw me to the floor. The side of my body hit stone, the impact knocking the breath from me. I rolled onto my back.

The door whined shut. I lay motionless, listening. Were they gone?

No, I heard them breathing. Short, quick inhalations through their noses, as though they were angry or exhausted. Probably they were both. So they hadn’t closed the door in their leave-taking, but had shut it in order to prevent the sounds of our struggles from being overheard.

Someone moved, the heel of his boot rasping on the floor.
“Shall I remove Miss Milton’s blindfold?”

“Not yet,” said Sir Gauden. “I need her to suffer a little longer.”

The iciness of the floor seeped through my sleeves and I couldn’t prevent a shiver. I was lying on top of my hands, my clenched fists grinding into the small of my waist. Through my satin sleeves I could sense the shapes of the stones in the floor; they were evenly cut. A finely constructed floor; we were in no hovel, then, or back room of a disreputable inn. Wherever Robert had ordered me taken, the accommodations were impressive. If the floors were stone, then most likely the walls were, too. A clever place to hide me. The stones would muffle my screams.

I had to bite my lip so I wouldn’t cry out.

“A few hours of darkness,” Sir Gauden said softly, “and you’ll be ready to do anything we want in return for restoring your sight.” The warm leather of his gloved hand touched my cheek, as gentle as a caress. “Reflect upon your father’s poem. I’m certain you have all the information you need. You only need to put the various pieces together.”

“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.

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

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.