Traitor Angels (9 page)

At once I understood what he had done: he’d given me a piece of himself, the part he hid from everyone else, because I had shown him my private pain about the nobility.

“You’ve given me a gift,” I said. “Thank you.”

He made a restless gesture with his hand. “I think it’s time we left for the garden, don’t you?” He strode to the door, then turned to look back at me, the white of his teeth flashing in an unexpected grin. “Why are you still sitting? Come! Where’s your sense of adventure?”

Perhaps this was how he could push away fear and sadness so easily. He treated life as an adventure. This wasn’t foolishness, then, as I would have thought only a few days ago. This was bravery.

I unbuttoned my cuffs and raised my arms, letting the fabric fall from my wrists to reveal my strapped knives. “I’m ready.”

He laughed again. And I couldn’t help wondering why he had sounded so bitter when he’d mentioned religion—and wishing I had the courage to ask him.

THE PHYSIC GARDEN HAD BEEN BUILT ON TOP OF
the old Jewish cemetery, Crofts told us as we slipped, as quiet as wraiths, through Oxford’s dusk-painted streets. The sun was setting behind the stone houses, burnishing their roofs orange-red. Lanterns hanging beside front doors swung in the breeze, throwing alternating lines of black and gold across the cobblestones. Except for the creaking of lantern chains or the occasional rattle of carriage wheels, a blanket of silence seemed to have laid itself across the city in preparation for the coming night.

“Didn’t the Jews object to the desecration of their burial ground?” Antonio asked Crofts. I kept my hand at my side, my fingers curled tight around the wooden handle of a spade. Antonio carried another. We had borrowed the tools from the innkeeper, who had hastily proffered them when Crofts asked if he had any shovels he could spare.

“There weren’t any Jews to protest,” Crofts told Antonio. “They were expelled from England hundreds of years ago. Only in the last few years have they begun trickling back in.”

He didn’t say why, but I knew: Mr. Cromwell had offered Jews the right to practice trade, provided they bothered no one. Crofts’s father, the king, however, had done even more for the Jews: he had promised them religious tolerance. Maybe, I thought with an uncomfortable twinge, even the king carried some kindness in his heart.

At dusk the Physic Garden’s imposing stone archway looked bluish white. As one, the three of us hurried beneath it. Orderly rows of plants, much shriveled by the drought, stretched out before us. Some rows had blank spaces where plants should have been, reminding me of a mouth with missing teeth. The scent of herbs I couldn’t identify carried on the breeze. Except for a university don walking with a couple of students, all of them easily identifiable by their long black robes, the gardens were deserted.

“Rosemary is good for treating nausea,” the tutor was saying in a broad Yorkshire accent. “And rue can be added to wine to ease a headache.”

We slipped past them. In the gathering dimness, the gardens feathered out as far as I could see in all directions.

“Where do we go?” Crofts asked. “The Physic Garden covers several acres, so our search must be methodical.”

“I was thinking on the walk here—does the garden contain any apple trees?” Antonio asked.

I gasped.
Apple trees—of course!

“I know where they’re planted,” Crofts said. “My family and
I have toured the garden many times. Come!”

We dashed down the long paths between the plant beds. Crofts took several turns, stopping finally at a long line of medium-sized trees. There had to be at least twenty of them, spindly black silhouettes, their branches laden with dry-looking leaves.

But what now? My father couldn’t have concealed something
within
a tree. He must have buried an object at its base. The question was, How could we guess which one?

In silence we walked the lines of trees. Judging by their middling height, they were about twenty years old. Perhaps they had been planted at around the time my father had revised the sonnet. Frustrated, I gritted my teeth. How could he have brought us this far and then deserted us without more answers?

“There must be additional clues in the sonnet,” I said. Frowning, I ran my father’s poem through my head again. An expert shepherdess tends a non-native plant while an Englishman watches her. . . . I spun around and stared at the trees. A non-native plant. At least one of these trees must have been grown from foreign seeds.

“I know,” I breathed. “We seek an apple tree that isn’t indigenous.”

Crofts nodded. “That must be it! But . . . the university uses this garden as a teaching tool for its botany students, and they probably gather seedlings from all over the world. We have no way of knowing which— I have an idea,” he interrupted himself.

He sprinted in the direction from which we had come, blending into the shadows until I could no longer see him. Each beat of my heart felt like the tick of a clock, counting away precious time
we might not have. Antonio and I looked at each other grimly.

Just then Crofts returned, his face creased in a grin. “I spoke to the university tutor we saw when we came in. He said the third and twelfth trees in this row came from seedlings transported from the New World.”

A gear seemed to move within my mind. “The number three is significant in
Paradise Lost
. The divine trinity of God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit is juxtaposed with the wicked threesome of Satan, Sin, and Death. Galileo is mentioned three times. And the sonnet that led us here was the third one in my father’s book.”

“It must be the third tree.” Antonio and I rushed forward and dropped to our knees on either side of the tree’s base. I pushed my spade into the ground, expecting it to give easily. But it had been baked solid by the drought: the dirt was hard and unyielding. To be so close to my father’s secret and unable to reach it! I let out a growl of frustration and hacked at the earth, sending clumps of dirt flying through the air. I was dimly aware of Crofts standing behind us, waiting.

The ringing of metal on metal stilled my hands. I jerked my head up to look at Antonio. He was staring at the ground in front of him, his face tight with concentration.

“I’ve hit something!” he whispered.

A chill crawled up my spine. A small hole, no more than two feet deep, yawned in the ground at Antonio’s feet. Inside it sat a small box. Metal gleamed through the layer of dirt covering it. With shaking hands, Crofts picked it up and brushed it clean. Then he held it out to me.

“The honor should be yours,” he said. “You’re his daughter, after all.”

“Thank you, Your Grace.”

The box felt cool, its surface gritty with dried dirt. I pried open the lid, its hinges protesting with a metallic shriek. The inside was lined with green velvet, so worn in places that it had been rubbed smooth. Nestled in the velvet were a rolled-up strip of vellum and a silver tube. The latter felt cold and was capped at one end. When I shook it, I heard liquid sloshing inside. I ran my fingers over the cap, wondering if I ought to pull it off. I hesitated. Father was a cautious man; he would have left instructions for handling such a peculiar object.

Crofts laid out the vellum on his lap, then shook his head. “There’s writing here, but it’s too dark to read it.”

My heart was slamming so hard against my breastbone that it was difficult to breathe. “We must find light.”

“Wait.” Antonio scooped the mound of dirt back into the hole, then patted the ground with the flat of his spade, trying to conceal the evidence that anyone had been here. I watched him with mounting impatience.

Once Antonio was done, we raced out of the garden, making for the university building, where a couple of ground-floor windows glowed gold with candlelight. Their soft illumination was all I needed to see the letters scrawled across the piece of vellum. The vellum itself was a piece of animal hide, probably calf’s hide, and was soft and butter yellow. I recognized the small, careful handwriting as my father’s. This must have been penned before he lost his sight and had to rely on others as his scribes. He had written in Latin—the universal language, known by all learned men. He must have wanted anyone to be able to read this page, then, not only Englishmen.

The vellum was dated
Junius
MDCXLII
—June 1642 in Latin. My throat tightened. I knew why that period of time was significant. “My father must have written and buried this when he came to Oxfordshire to meet and marry my mother,” I said. By then he had already traveled to Florence and met Galileo and was working as a tutor and writing poetry while all around him England slowly descended into civil war.

“Tell us what it says,” Crofts urged.

I looked at him in surprise. Surely a king’s son, even one born on the wrong side of the blanket, was versed in Latin.

“My upbringing in exile hardly provided an atmosphere conducive to education.” He sounded embarrassed.

Not wishing to cause him further shame, I hurriedly translated as I read aloud:
“In the month of June in the year of our Lord 1642, I, John Milton, poet, vow that the following story is true and witnessed by my own eyes. Four years ago, while journeying through the Italian city-states, I was introduced to the son of the natural philosopher Galileo. He arranged for me to meet his father at his villa outside Florence in Arcetri, where he lived under house arrest for thinking differently upon the motions of the heavenly bodies than the tyrants in the Church in Rome did. There I found an elderly man, much pained in his body but still brilliant in his mind. As the skies turned black and glittered with stars, we walked in the olive orchards outside his home toward the hill from which one can see Fiesole on one side and the plains stretching toward Pistoia on the other
—

“Fiesole!” I interrupted myself. In
Paradise Lost
, the Tuscan Artist who sees Satan through his telescope is mentioned as living near Fiesole. If I needed further evidence that my father had
intended this literary figure to represent Galileo, then surely this was it. With a guilty twinge, I realized I had misspelled the place name in Father’s poem.

Crofts made an impatient gesture, and I picked up the thread of what I had been reading:
“When the night had grown cold and the stars had hardened to balls of ice, Galileo said we had kindred minds, and therefore he knew he could trust me. We walked to his laboratory, where he showed me a small quantity of a silver liquid he kept hidden in a bottle covered with black paint. The substance was so bright it dazzled my eyes and left a stabbing ache in my head for hours afterward. It lies in the tube which you have found, and which I beg you not to open yet. You may disregard my warning, of course, but if you do I swear you will endure nothing but endless torment. If you wish to know how to keep yourselves safe, there is much you must learn about this liquid first—why it has the power to topple kings from thrones and why Galileo and I could not destroy it, although we longed to with every beat of our hearts. You will only have proved your right to know these truths by assembling every piece of the puzzle that Galileo and I have created for you
.
”

There the missive ended. For a long moment, the only sounds were our ragged breathing and the far-off chiming of church bells, marking the hour of ten o’clock. Slowly, like a sleeper trapped in a dream, I lifted my gaze from the vellum. Antonio’s dark eyes burned into mine.

“There isn’t anything else?” he asked hoarsely.

I shook my head. “I don’t understand. How can this liquid destroy kings? Is this substance what the king is so desperate to conceal?”

Antonio reached for the vial.

“
Don’t
,” Crofts said sharply. “Mr. Milton complained of a headache after viewing its contents, and we mustn’t forget both he and Galileo went blind. Perhaps that is the ‘endless torment’ Mr. Milton meant. And— What’s that?” he interrupted himself. He pointed to a line of squiggles running along the bottom of the strip of vellum. “They look like drawings of some sort.”

I peered at the tiny, twisted shapes:
. The hairs on the back of my neck rose. I recognized those markings. “They’re words, not drawings—my father is fluent in biblical Hebrew, and he taught me. You would pronounce it as
bekhol bethi
. It means ‘in the sand of my house.’”

“‘In the sand of my house?’” Crofts repeated. “What the devil does that mean?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea. It sounds like a line from the Bible, but I don’t recognize it.” I stared at the vellum, the letters stark and black against the yellowed animal hide. “My father seems to have put together a treasure hunt,” I said slowly, thinking. “And designed it in such a manner that only those he deems worthy can solve it.”

Antonio touched my hand. “In the letter your father sent to my master,” he said urgently, “he wrote that the only people who could put together the clues would be those who were well educated
and
knew the details of his life—because he hoped that men who knew about him would agree with his political beliefs. Your father might be referring to
his
house, Elizabeth. Where was he living in 1642?”

I couldn’t snatch hold of my whirling thoughts. “He—he was living in London, but he moved frequently. And I can’t imagine he would have left the next clue at one of his previous lodgings,
out of fear that the next occupants might happen across it. He would have taken it with him—
he would have taken it with him
,” I repeated as my words’ full significance hit me. “This clue must be hidden in my family’s home!”

“But which one?” Crofts demanded. “Your lodgings in London or Chalfont?”

I didn’t even need to reason that through. “London. My father has never considered any other place his home—he’s a London man through and through. But the sand—I don’t understand it . . .”

In my mind’s eye I saw myself descending the cellar steps, as I had done most mornings, and dipping a cup into a barrel to get sand, which I would use to blot the pages I would cover with my father’s dictation. I gasped. “The next clue is in the sand barrels in the cellar of our London house!”