Traitor Angels (11 page)

For a moment, we sat quietly, listening to the wind rustle through the fields. My thoughts turned to the men who had overtaken us outside Oxford. “The man who attacked me said something very strange—he asked God to curse my father and his ‘traitor angels.’” I hesitated. “It reminds me of the way my father described Satan and his followers in
Paradise Lost
as an army of rebel angels. Do you think he was saying that my father is like the devil?”

Antonio shook his head. “Maybe . . . But how could he know about
Paradise Lost
in the first place? You told me that your father has kept his poem secret from everyone except for you and a few trusted friends.”

That was true, and I knew those friends well—none of them would have told anyone about Father’s poem except in vague terms. So what had the man meant? That my father and his allies were fallen men who were somehow betraying God? I shook my head in frustration. There was so much we didn’t understand. “Who do you think are the other angels he mentioned?”

“Maybe Signor Galilei and my master—after all, it does seem
as though the three of them entered into some sort of arrangement thirty years ago. But why would they be called ‘traitor angels’?” He frowned, looking frustrated. “And who were those men after us anyway?”

“The king’s men,” I guessed. “They could have forced our location out of Francis Sutton, like Crofts did.” My stomach twisted at the thought. “I hope they didn’t hurt him.”

Antonio sighed. “I hope so, too. We should sleep.” He got up and took a step away, then spun back to me, his expression fierce. “When I saw that man riding toward you with his sword outstretched, I thought—” He broke off, the muscles working in his throat as he swallowed. “I’m glad you’re safe.”

Without another word, he strode to where the horses stood and began rubbing them down, speaking to them in a low, comforting voice and leaving me alone to stare after him, wondering what he had meant to say and listening to my heart beat madly in my chest.

BY THE TIME WE HAD WOKEN AND EATEN A HASTY
meal of bread and dried fruit, the sun was crawling to its noonday zenith. Crofts’s fever had broken; his skin was no longer streaked pink, and though he kept a careful hand on his ribs, he spoke without his breath catching in his throat. While we saddled the horses, he insisted that there should be no ceremony between us and that we call him by his Christian name. Addressing a king’s son so intimately was such a shocking breach of etiquette I could barely push “Robert” out of my mouth. When I said it, though, he smiled and looked pleased.

We raced across the countryside, pushing the horses until their mouths frothed and their flanks grew slick with sweat. The sun pounded mercilessly on our heads. Every time I closed my eyes against its glare, its yellow spark burned against my lids. A few times, we glimpsed travelers on the road—farmers riding a
cart piled high with vegetables, nobles rolling along in a carriage. No trio of men on horseback. My heart sank in disappointment. We’d lost them—and maybe the race to my family’s home as well.

When the sun began dropping in the sky, we stopped on the outskirts of a forest. The horses were stumbling from exhaustion, and we didn’t dare continue for fear of roaming highwaymen. We led the horses between the trees, plunging deeper into the welcoming cloak of the woods. At last we found a stream to wash in. Antonio grinned at me as he stripped off his ripped doublet, and I wondered if he was remembering how I had stared at him yesterday when we cleaned ourselves in another stream. Flushing, I looked away.

“This drought has been unbearable,” Robert muttered. He had rolled up his shirtsleeves and was scrubbing dirt and blood from his forearms.

“Except for the weather, your country seems like a good land.” Antonio grinned. “Well, that and the food.”

A reluctant smile tugged on Robert’s cracked lips. “The food
is
poor, I’ll grant you that. My brother James and I lived in France when we were children, and we feasted on delicacies unlike anything I’ve tasted here.”

Antonio strung feed bags over the horses’ mouths, saying, “Yes, I doubt most Englishmen have even heard of macaroni.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

They both laughed. “My point exactly,” Antonio said.

We sat in a circle, leaning our aching backs against tree trunks. The trees crowded so close to us that I felt as though we had been enclosed in a pocket made of shifting green and black
shadows. As we ate, the boys told me of wondrous foods: frogs’ legs; fried zucchini flowers; roasted pigeons wrapped in bacon and figs stuffed with black grapes; and macaroni, a substance Antonio struggled to explain, likening its consistency to tender, pliant string, then laughing uproariously at my revolted expression.

“What do you think the liquid in the vial is?” Robert asked abruptly.

It was as though a lever had been thrown. My laughter died on my lips. All day I had been trying not to think about the box’s contents, for fear my questions and my inability to answer them would drive me mad.

“It must be the result of one of Signor Galilei’s experiments,” Antonio said. “He worked in many areas—astronomy, mathematics, physics, the motion of the tides. It could be anything.” He paused. “Whatever it is, though, it must be dangerous, or Mr. Milton wouldn’t have warned us not to open it. I’ve been wondering . . . Mr. Milton suffered a terrible headache after viewing Signor Galilei’s liquid. Is it possible that looking at the liquid could have affected both men’s vision? Signor Galilei might have been working on it for years, and that could have resulted in his going blind before he met Mr. Milton.”

A knot that had been tied tight in my chest seemed to loosen. “Then you don’t believe their blindness was caused by sin.”

“Of course not.” Antonio looked surprised. “All the time we are discovering new truths about the nature of the universe—why shouldn’t we also be learning more about the God who made it? Perhaps he’s nothing like previous generations have thought, and the more we uncover about the ways our world is made the better we’ll come to know him.”

“Men have been burned to death for speaking as you do,” Robert warned. “You’re walking on treacherous ground, Antonio, and so was Mr. Milton—if the contents of the vial can snatch crowns away from kings, as he claimed. But how can this substance possibly have such far-reaching political consequences?”

“It seems impossible,” I said. “But if this liquid
can
somehow destroy a monarch’s power, it makes sense that our king wants to suppress it.” I stared at the ground turning black in the dusk; I was unable to face either boy. “If the king wants the vial in exchange for my father’s life, I must give it to him. And whatever we find in the sand barrel, I’ll give that to him, too.”

“Is that truly what you think your father wants you to do?” Antonio’s voice was low. “He said his life didn’t matter—that we needed to survive and protect his poem at all costs.”

“I know what he said,” I snapped. “But I can’t accept his instructions! I have to save him—not only for his sake, but for my sisters and stepmother, too. They can’t support themselves, and without him, I don’t know what will become of them.”

At last I looked up. Antonio was watching me with a mixture of pity and sorrow. Robert’s face was contorted in an angry scowl.

“Then you’ll be giving my father what he wants!” Robert jumped up and paced, his boots kicking up eddies of dust from the parched ground. “Don’t you understand that whatever reason my father has for hunting down the vial can’t be honest? Not if he’s hunting for the vial in such secrecy! Maybe he wants it not only to protect his throne but also to push other kings from theirs! He could become a tyrant if we let him. My love for my people won’t let me stand idly by while you give in to his demands.”

“Then we stand on opposing sides,” I shot back.

His eyes, dark and furious, locked onto mine. I couldn’t look at him for one more instant. I had to get away. I raced between the trees, the skinny black trunks blurring on either side of me. When I reached the edge of a clearing, I stopped, my heartbeat thudding in my ears.

Dimly I heard someone walking behind me, but I didn’t bother turning around. Robert could yell at me until he grew hoarse, for all I cared. I’d never change my mind. No matter what sacrifices I had to make, I would save my father. Once the king released him, I would take him and my family to another country, where we could live in safe anonymity, far from our monarch’s grasp. And if the prospect of bidding farewell to Antonio tugged on the strings of my heart, I ignored it.

“My master often told me how the Inquisitors broke Signor Galilei,” Antonio said quietly from behind me. “He had been friendly with the pope and some of the cardinals on his examining team, but they abandoned him. He had to make a terrible choice—insist his discoveries were correct and endure torture and imprisonment, or renounce his findings and publicly confess he was a heretic.” Antonio touched my shoulder, the weight of his hand comforting. “He chose life. Like you. I’ll stand by your decision, Elizabeth. Let Robert think that we’ve discussed the matter and we agree with him.”

I whirled around. My eyes traced Antonio’s silhouette, dark against the filigree of the trees. He had removed his doublet when we washed in the stream, and his white shirt was the only part of him easily discernible, a faded gray in the dimness cast by the thickly clustered elms.

“You think we should lie to him?” My voice was a hoarse whisper. “That . . . that’s a sin.”

“Who says a lie is a sin when it’s told for the right reason?”

“Then we’d be helping the king—letting him become a tyrant.”

Antonio sighed. “I know. But you have to decide—your father’s life or the king’s crown.”

Tears burned my eyes. It was a terrible choice, like Galileo’s had been. And then I thought of my father sitting in his chair by the window, smiling gently and turning in my direction when he heard my footsteps.

It wasn’t a choice at all.

Slowly I took the hand Antonio offered me. “Then we must smile in the aristocrat’s face and plot behind his back.”

“We should pretend to work alongside him for as long as possible.” Antonio’s expression was solemn. “As the king’s son, he can probably help us in all sorts of ways. And at some point . . .”

Our eyes met, saying what we could not bring ourselves to speak aloud. At some point we would trick Robert and bring my father’s secrets to the king.

“Let the game of deception begin,” I said grimly.

By the time we returned to the campsite, Robert had fallen asleep, no doubt exhausted by his injuries. I glanced at the bags on the ground next to our bedrolls. Antonio’s telescope was in one of them, and I might not have this chance again after we reached London.

“I love astronomy,” I said to Antonio, my tone stiff, daring him to laugh. “For as long as I can remember, I’ve yearned to
unlock the secrets of the stars. If you’ll teach me everything you know about them, I’ll be grateful forever.”

He blinked in surprise, but he didn’t laugh or smile. He merely fetched his telescope from his bag and handed it to me. “It would be my honor.”

Was he teasing me? I sent him a searching look, but his face was calm, not twisted in mirth. He meant what he said. Something inside me softened, and I smiled at him as my fingers closed around the telescope, its worn brown leather covering still warm from his hands. Through its thick glass lenses, a string of stars looked like silver nails that had been hammered through the sky to keep it from collapsing onto the earth.

“It’s called the Milky Way,” Antonio said. “Before Signor Galilei studied it, people believed it was one mass, like a large mist. When he published
Sidereus nuncius
, he revealed how the Milky Way is actually made up of hundreds of stars invisible to the naked eye. It was an astounding discovery.”

“Could his work in astronomy have to do with the vial?” I asked. “After all, it was his theory on the motions of the planets that brought him to trial in Rome.”

“Maybe. But then your father would have buried calculations, drawings of the constellations, things of that sort—not a tube of liquid. Those Inquisitors,” he spat. “They hounded Signor Galilei because they couldn’t understand it’s possible to disprove the workings of the natural world as the Bible presents them
and
still hold God in your heart.”

I pulled back from the telescope to peer at Antonio. “Then Galileo wasn’t a heretic?”

“No. That’s what everyone thinks, but Signor Galilei loved
his Christian faith, even though the Inquisitors took everything from him—his work, his reputation, even his freedom, because he had to spend the rest of his life under house arrest.”

I rolled the telescope between my palms, thinking. In 1633, Galileo had been sentenced by the Inquisitors. Five years later, my father visited him, and Galileo confided something to him. Shortly afterward, England descended into civil war and my father began hiding clues about Galileo’s secret. Did the links in this deadly chain stretch even further back than we had thought—perhaps all the way to the beginning of this century, when Galileo had undertaken the experiments that would eventually incur the Church’s wrath? Or was I merely seeing connections that weren’t truly there?

Antonio cut into my thoughts. “For Signor Galilei’s sake, I’ll always despise the machinery of religion.”

I nearly dropped the telescope. “You despise God?”

He let out a pent-up breath. “I hate when people twist religion to suit their own purposes or force others to believe what they do. I believe in the eternity of the soul and the beauty of Jesus’s teachings. But I won’t believe in the tyrannical Heaven that the Church wants us to worship. Why would God curse babies with ill health for their parents’ deeds? Or send a child to Hell if he dies before he’s baptized?”

I stared at him, unable to tear my gaze from his agonized expression. These were the same questions I had asked myself countless times because of my family. Why God had warped Anne’s legs and mangled her speech as punishment for our parents’ supposed sins. Why Father’s sight had faded to black as payment for his revolutionary ideas.

“Have I horrified you?” Antonio whispered.

I stepped closer to him so I could hear the gentle inhalation of his breath and see the silvery sheen of moonlight on his face. He didn’t smile, as I had half expected, but kept his eyes intent on mine.

“No,” I said. “I’ve struggled with the same ideas. Perhaps your master and Galileo were correct—the universe is a giant puzzle and the discoveries we make about its workings don’t need to erode our faith.” I hesitated. “Maybe God is the greatest natural philosopher of us all.”

At dawn’s first light we prepared to set out again. While I washed in the stream, Antonio told Robert we had come around to his way of thinking and had decided to assemble everything my father had concealed and to protect those things from the king. I didn’t even feel a guilty twinge when I returned to the campsite and Robert clasped my hand, thanking me for seeing the situation his way. Father’s life was worth endless lies.

It was the Lord’s Day, so by all rights we should have spent the day at services, but we couldn’t spare the time even to kneel at our campsite. There were only ten days left until the next Hanging Day. Ten days before my father died, unless I saved him.

Don’t think about it
, I told myself fiercely. Thinking would bring pain and fear, and I could afford neither now.

We spoke little and stopped only for a hurried midday meal from the supplies we had packed. When night turned the sky black, we set up camp beneath a fringe of trees. Antonio tended the horses while I laid out our simple supper. By my calculations, we ought to arrive in London sometime tomorrow. I prayed we
would be fast enough to get there before our assailants.

“Any idea who those men were who attacked us?” I asked Robert. “Did you recognize them from your father’s court?”

He was whittling a piece of wood, his knife flashing in his hands. “No. But it was too dark to see them clearly. I only hope, if they’re on their way to London, too, they’ve taken a different route. I suspect they must have, for I’ve seen no sign that anyone’s on our trail.” He hesitated. “I’ve been thinking about where we should stay when we reach London. I have my own lodgings at Whitehall—in a building separate from the palace, but it’s so close I fear my father and his men would be bound to notice if I had any unexpected guests.”