by Wiltz, Jenni
No. There was one true God and one True Faith.
If the people of England could not accept it, they would burn in hell. It was that simple.
But oh, how they hated him for being a Catholic.
Oh, how they hated him for marrying a Catholic.
And oh, how they hated him for baptizing his son, the Prince of Wales, as a Catholic. They hated it so much that they believed the lies his daughters spread about him—that his darling boy was a changeling, a substitute for a stillborn. They would believe anything to justify the crimes they wished to commit. They had taken his capital and given it to his daughter Mary and her husband, that Dutch Abortion, William of Orange. As if the people could choose their monarch. As if God did not decide who was born to be a king.
But Mary had let them do it.
His Mary, the gentle girl named for her great-great-grandmother, Mary Stuart. She had betrayed him, all so that her heartless husband would smile upon her. She craved his affection more than was healthy.
The army had gone over to the Dutch Abortion without hesitation. So had Anne, the daughter he sheltered and cherished after her sister went to Holland. She had fled under cover of night without so much as a farewell. His treasonous daughters, heretics though they were, were still bound by the commandment to honor thy father and mother, were they not?
“Revile and betray, more like,” he muttered.
There was no one left he could trust.
God had rescinded His favor.
It was the only explanation.
But what had he done to deserve it?
He had violated the sacrament of marriage, but so had his brother and grandfather and the people loved them for it. He had violated his conscience in allowing both of his girls, Mary and Anne, to be raised in the Anglican faith. Was that his greatest sin? But he had done it to please the people, at his brother’s request—at his king’s request. Ought he to have refused?
“Paper and ink, Your Majesty,” the traitorous seaman said, holding out the proffered items.
He snatched them from the man’s grip. He would write a letter to each of them, those cursed daughters who would burn in hell for their disloyalty. He balanced the inkwell on his leg and scrawled out two missives. My son, your brother, lives…and you cast us both aside because we adhere to the one True Faith. You are harlots, sinners, and you shall be cast aside on the Day of Judgment. If only my enemies had cursed me, I could have borne it.
A shout went up outside.
He paused, his quill dripping ink like blood.
Was that William of Orange, come to bring him to London in chains, to try him and execute him as his father had been tried and executed by Cromwell? “By God, you will not,” he hissed. “‘For I repent that I gave my daughter unto him, for he sought to slay me.’”
He looked over his shoulder.
They hadn’t found the coronation ring and handful of diamonds in his breeches. Perhaps he could bribe that one-eyed trull to close his functioning orb for just a moment. Neither had they found the small brown Bible tucked in the pocket of his cloak. He’d kept it near him ever since he found it on his brother’s bedside table, the night of Charles’s death. He had recognized his mother’s handwriting inside it, and added his brother’s name to the cursed list of Stuart dead.
Who, he wondered, would add his name? His faithless daughters?
He pulled the Bible from his cloak and left it on the table. “Give this to my bitch of a daughter,” he said. “Mary will know what to do with it.”
Chapter Thirteen
March 2014
San Francisco, California
Natalie knew the man five seats down from her wasn’t a student. He was trying hard to look like one, but his backpack didn’t have any books in it and his sweatshirt was too small. Why would someone dress up like a student to attend a lecture on the Sinners’ Bible? Who is this guy? she asked, waiting for Belial to chime in. But the angel had pulled his wings over his head and sank into the recesses of her occipital lobe, still angry at her for refusing to talk about the Stuart curse.
Fine, she thought. I’ll figure it out myself.
She slouched in her seat and held up a hank of hair, as if she were looking for split ends. Through the shafts of hair, she stared at him. He had a deep tan and shaggy blond hair, uncut for years, just like hers. It flattened in a circle just above his ears.
The tense planes of his face reminded her of some of the kids she’d seen in shrinks’ offices as a child. They never held their mothers’ hands because they knew it wouldn’t help. Not with what was waiting for them on the other side of the door—the needle pricks, the strobe lights, the ice baths, the interrogations. Some things made you grow up fast.
She shifted her gaze to the big man beside him. He looked a few years older, in his late twenties. Square-jawed with a shaved head and broad shoulders, he looked like a linebacker for one of the teams that played bowl games on New Year’s Day. He flexed his fingers periodically and seemed uncomfortable, shifting in his seat. He had on a thick winter coat, unbuttoned to reveal a shirt and sweater beneath it. Neither looked like the type to be interested in religious conflict in 17th century England. Unlike the other students in the room, they didn’t have their notebooks and pens ready.
Belial, she thought. Why are they here?
But the angel still didn’t answer her.
Finally, Crawford strode to the front of the room. He looked at the clock with a dramatic sigh and drummed his fingers on the lectern. “Ten seconds,” he said, looking straight at her.
She stared back at him, determined to give him nothing. In her lap, where he couldn’t see it, she dug her fingernails into her palm. Son of a bitch, she thought. Beth, stop throwing up and get in here.
But her sister didn’t appear, and Crawford cleared his throat. “Good evening. We’re here tonight for the first public viewing of our latest acquisition. The Sinners’ Bible is an extremely rare book, and we’re privileged to have a copy in our collection. To kick things off, our Acting Associate Librarian, Avi Druckman, will explain how this Bible’s famous typographical errors came to be. Avi, will you stand up for a moment?”
Avi stood and waved, a sheepish grin on his face. “Hi, I’m Avi. Follow us on Facebook.”
Crawford glowered at him. “You may be seated.”
Avi sat.
“You’ll also hear about the turbulent history of Stuart England. Professor Elizabeth Brandon will explain why the battle between Catholics and Protestants was still a problem long after the deaths of the decidedly Catholic Mary Tudor and the decidedly Protestant Elizabeth I.” Crawford glanced from side to side. “Professor Brandon, will you stand up for a moment?”
Beth, she pleaded. Get your ass in here.
In the silence, a toilet flushed nearby. The pipes rattled in the wall, and a pair of heels clacked into the hallway outside. Beth flung open the door, her red lipstick feathered around the edges.
“Professor Brandon, so good of you to join us.” Crawford pulled off his glasses. “Let’s hope our audience doesn’t take your tardiness as an indication of your disdain, either for them or our subject matter.”
She watched Beth gulp and pull the door shut behind her. Her sister had faced Russian spetsnaz fighters with less internal pyrotechnics, but Crawford’s disapproval reduced her to a blushing, stammering undergrad. He knew it, and he used it against her.
She fixed him in her sights. “If she’s nervous, it’s because she wants to do a good job, which is an indication of vulnerability and humanity. If you don’t know what that means, I’m sure Avi has a dictionary in here somewhere.”
An Asian girl in front of her gasped.
Crawford tilted his head to glare at her over the rim of his glasses. Only assholes and supervillains glare at people over the rims of their glasses, she thought.
Suddenly,
the right side of her head began to tingle.
She turned her head slowly.
The blond man in the blue sweatshirt was smiling at her.
“What are you looking at?” she snapped, crossing her arms over her chest and turning her attention to the presentation.
§
"As A RESULT,” Avi said, “there are rumors that the typographical errors in the Sinners’ Bible were the product of sabotage. If the type had been laid out and left unguarded, anyone could have broken into the shop and altered the verse in question. It was unlikely the type would have been checked again before printing.”
The Asian girl raised her hand. “Wouldn’t it have been easier to burn down their shop?”
“It would have,” he said, “if the saboteur wanted to put Barker and Lucas out of business.”
“That isn’t what they wanted,” she said, as she glared at the back of Crawford’s skull. “Why put them out of business when public humiliation is so much more effective?”
Two rows ahead of her, Beth’s head sank to her chest.
Avi glanced at the clock and breathed a sigh of relief. “It looks like my time’s up. Who’s ready to see one of the rarest Bibles in the world?”
No one moved or spoke.
“I’m gonna need you to contain that enthusiasm for one more minute.” He pulled a set of keys from his pocket and unlocked a door behind the lectern. A moment later, he wheeled out a metal cart with a clear plastic lid. Beneath the lid lay the open copy of the Sinners’ Bible. Judging by the number of unturned pages, she guessed it was open to the typo in Exodus.
Belial shuddered and raised his head.
Don’t you start, she thought. Not until Beth’s talk is over. That was the deal.
You need me, the angel said.
No one needs you, she thought, sliding her fingers under her sleeve and digging her nails into her scar.
Your sister needs me.
I said—
That boy needs me, too.
She stopped.
In her peripheral vision, she saw the blond man stand up and pull a gun from his waistband. It had a silencer attached to the muzzle. “Everyone stay where you are,” he said. “If you move, you die.”
Chapter Fourteen
December 27, 1694
Kensington House, London
“Send her away,” Mary Stuart groaned. “She’s eavesdropping on me.”
Beside her sickbed, Thomas Tenison, the Archbishop of Canterbury, leaned closer. “Ma’am, whom do you wish to be sent away?”
“That Popish nurse. Behind the screen, at the head of the bed. Don’t you see her?”
Tenison shook his head. “There is no one there, Your Majesty.”
“She is,” Mary whispered. “Why can’t you see her?”
The nurse was listening, as she had been seventeen years earlier, while her sister Anne was abed with smallpox. Their father, James, had paid the woman to spy on them. He wanted a sign that one or both of his daughters might show favor to the Popish religion.
“Never,” she whispered.
She glanced at the foot of her bed. All around her stood men and women of the court—ministers, servants, doctors, clergymen, and ladies-in-waiting. The ones who had never had smallpox had been given leave to go. She did not want their deaths on her conscience. That was burdened enough already.
“I did not want it,” she said, turning her head away. “That was never what I wanted. Do you hear me?”
“Your Majesty, I beg of you, save your strength.”
For what? she wondered. Confession is all that is left to me.
It had been almost six years since Parliament read out the people’s grievances with her father, James II, and asked her and her husband, William, to redress them. “It hath been found by experience,” they said, “to be inconsistent with the safety and welfare of this Protestant kingdom to be governed by a Popish prince.” So she had accepted the crown while standing in the pouring rain outside the Banqueting House at Whitehall—the same place they had raised a scaffold to cut off her grandfather’s head.
Her father had written to her afterward. If you are crowned while I and the Prince of Wales are living, the curses of an angry father will fall on you, as well as those of a God who commands obedience to parents.
“But the people offered us the crown,” she whispered. “Beneath the great canopy of state.”
“Your Majesty?” Tenison glanced at the canopy above her bed.
“I never wanted it!”
“You must stay calm, Your Majesty.” The Archbishop took her hand and she had not the strength to remove it from his grasp. “The people pray for your recovery.”
Her people…so barbarous in manner and so good in heart. She felt ashamed that they were not the reason she had betrayed her father. No, she had broken a Biblical commandment and betrayed her own blood for quite a different reason.
“His eyes,” she breathed. “Never have they shone as they did in that moment.”
“Your Majesty, shall I call the doctor?”
“He needed me, Tenison. In that moment, he needed me.”
She was a Stuart, the daughter of the king and the rightful heir to the throne. If she had not accepted Parliament’s offer, William could have taken the throne—but he would have had to fight for it. In that moment, she was the only person in the world who could give William what he wanted. And she’d done it, damning her father and half-brother in the process. “It was supposed to make us happy,” she said. “Why didn’t it make us happy?”
Before the days of fighting and revolution, she and William had lived in peace at Honselaersdijck, riding and gardening and drinking tea in her yellow and violet study. She wished it had been her destiny to live quietly there for all her days, but God saw fit to deny her that dream. Then He had taken the only other consolation she might have had—a child, dead within her womb. There had never been another.
“I am adrift,” she whispered. “God wills me to be detached from this life.”
He had cursed her as surely as He had cursed her father and grandfather. Or had she cursed herself when she disobeyed His commandment to honor her father? Perhaps it had been destined from the moment her father named her after that other Mary Stuart, her great-great-grandmother, who had gone to her death a foolish, lustful Popish queen.
“But a queen with a son,” she said, fingers grasping the bedsheets tightly. The lack hurt deep in her chest, pulsing with life like a living thing. It was all she had given birth to, in the end. Without a child, her sister Anne would reign upon William’s death.
Her sister, who hated her.
Who could not even be roused to speak to her on her deathbed.
She remembered the days of their youth, when they had played with dolls at Richmond together. What had happened to turn Anne’s devoted heart black with envy? “We are a cursed family,” she moaned. “In all this, I see the hand of God.”
“Please, Your Majesty,” Tenison said. He waved to a serving woman, who mopped her forehead with a wet rag.
“Write my name,” she said, grabbing the Archbishop’s hand. “In the book that catalogs my family’s misery.”
Tenison narrowed his eyes. “What book, Your Majesty?”
“My family’s Bible.” She closed her eyes. “Write my name beneath the others. See that my sister receives it after I am gone. Her name will end there, too.”
A wave of heat crested over her. This disease made it hard to think, hard to see.
Very well, she thought. I will close my eyes and dream of Holland.
Chapter Fifteen
March 2014
San Francisco, California
Natalie looked at the man with the gun and a jolt of fear shot through her veins. The door was closed, and he had a silencer. He could shoot them all, if he wanted. Belial
, she mouthed. Wake up.
The gunman aimed the pistol at Avi. “What else is behind that door?”
Avi held up his hands. “It’s a s—storage room. Shelves and manuscripts.”
“Get in.”
Avi nodded and stepped backward.
“Wait,” the gunman said. “Your phone. Put it on the lectern.”
She tilted her head. Whoever this guy was, he wasn’t someone she’d have pegged to use the word lectern. Her eyes flickered toward Beth, but her sister was facing forward, stock-still.
The gunman moved to the front of the room. “You,” he said, aiming at an Asian girl who was holding up her hands and hyperventilating with fear. “Into the storage room.” He proceeded through the first two rows of folding chairs, directing everyone to drop their phones on the lectern and proceed into the storage room.
Belial, she thought. He’s coming to Beth. What do I do?
I thought you wanted me to go away, the angel said.
The gunman held the pistol with an easy grip, his index finger laced over the trigger. “You,” he said, stopping in front of Beth’s chair. He held the muzzle inches from her forehead, then flashed a gap-toothed smile. “Stay awhile.”
She let out a shaky breath.
What did it mean that he’d singled Beth out? They all knew she was supposed to present next. Maybe he wanted to ask her something about the Sinners’ Bible before he stole it? But Avi had already presented on the Bible itself, and the gunman had ordered him into the closet. So what did he want with Beth?
Think.
She gulped and looked at the floor. The legs of the gunman’s jeans puddled above the tongues of his canvas skate shoes, as if he normally wore boots. But the jeans were the wrong cut and color for a skater—too dark an indigo, stonewashed, too close-fitting. If he wasn’t a student and he wasn’t a skater, who was he?
