Traitor Angels Read Online Free PDF

has need of your strong arms to stoke the kitchen fire.”
    The dismissal was so clear I couldn’t pretend to mistake his meaning. Yet I remained kneeling at his feet and unable to move. This was horribly wrong. Not once had he shut me out. Until now. When he’d returned from prison, thin and exhausted, I’d sat with him in the evenings long after the supper dishes had been washed and while the candles burned low in their holders. I’d traced the shapes of the Hebrew letters his faltering fingers had written, and I’d parroted the Italian phrases he had taught me. I had been his special companion. No one else. And now he spoke to me as though I were no more than a serving girl.
    Behind me, someone cleared his throat. From my crouched position, I whirled, nearly falling backward in my haste. Vivianistood by the window. There was something in his face I couldn’t make out; it might have been pity.
    Shame burned my cheeks. “Very well, Father. I’ll leave you to your discussion.”
    I rushed from the room, ignoring Viviani’s bow. Father’s voice floated through the open door after me.
    “When I was a bachelor, I visited the Italian city-states myself,” he said in his impeccable Italian. He would share those stories with a stranger, when I ought to have been the one listening to his tales? “They are full of many wonders. Of all the cities I saw, I admired Florence the most for its elegance, not only the elegance of its language, but of its inhabitants’ wit.”
    “It’s a most learned city,” Viviani agreed, but I barely heard him. A lever seemed to snap in my mind. Florence. Where this Antonio Viviani and his master resided and my father had stayed during the autumn of 1638—eight and twenty years ago. He’d said that a shared responsibility had bound him and Vincenzo Viviani for nearly thirty years. Did the origins of the supposed “portentous secret” date from this long-ago trip to Florence? And how, when my father seemed determined to keep his own counsel for now, could I convince him to tell me?

Four
    AT THE END OF THE CORRIDOR, A LADDER stretched up to two loft bedchambers. Clutching Viviani’s bags, I climbed it one-handed. Well, there was one bright piece to the fact that my father and Viviani were closeted in his study, discussing whatever had been deemed too important for my ears: if Viviani had been following me, I would have given him quite an educational view up my skirts. Small favors, I supposed.
    On the landing, both doors were closed. I slipped into my room, on the right. Even in the faded sunlight, it was obvious the room was a shabby box: the walls bare of decoration; the bed the old-fashioned sort with a wooden frame and a poor man’s mattress of straw, instead of wool or feathers.
    I loved every inch of it.
    This was the first place where I’d slept alone. Where I could fling open my shutters and stare at the stars pinning back the vastcanopy of the heavens and wonder what secrets they concealed. Why did each constellation move around its center, but the stars within the grouping never rearranged themselves in a new order? And why couldn’t I see the golden chain from which our earthly home dangled, like a pendant on a necklace? The world was clothed in mysteries.
    And I, as a mere girl, had no right to yearn to decipher them. Celestial matters belonged squarely in the realm delegated to men. Father had told me so, when I’d been a child and he’d regaled me with tales about his month in Florence and the time he’d met the infamous man called Galileo, who’d been under house arrest for thinking differently about the motions of the heavenly bodies than the Inquisitors in Rome permitted. If I’d been a boy, perhaps I could have become a natural philosopher, someone who studies the workings of the world and designs experiments. As things were, I had to content myself with gazing at the stars.
    But I knew, deep down, it would never be enough.
    “Enough of this maudlin