A Traitor's Hand

Chapter One: The Smell of Burnt Paper

The smell reached her before the sound did.

Not the clean scent of a hearth fire or a candle guttering to its end, but the thick, oily stench of paper and leather and glue and binding thread all burning at once—the smell of words dying. Beatrice Aldersey knew that smell the way a butcher's daughter knew blood. She had grown up surrounded by ink and vellum and the clank of the press, and she knew what paper smelled like when it was happy and what it smelled like when it was destroyed.

This was destruction.

She was in the back room when the shouting started, her hand steady over a proof sheet, correcting a misaligned letter with a brush no thicker than a cat's whisker. The room was small and low-ceilinged, the walls stained the color of old tea from years of ink mist hanging in the air. Her father's print shop occupied the ground floor of a narrow timber-frame house on Paternoster Row, wedged between a bookseller and a chandler, in the shadow of St. Paul's Cathedral. The street took its name from the rosary-makers who had once lined it, but now it belonged to the printers and the stationers and the men who believed that the right words, set in the right type, could remake the world.

Edwin Aldersey was one of those men.

He was also, on this July morning in the year 1553, a man who had made a terrible miscalculation about how much time he had left.

"Bea." Her father's voice came from the front of the shop, stripped of everything except urgency. Not loud. Edwin never raised his voice. He said that a printer who shouted was a printer who had lost control of his shop, and a man who had lost control of his shop had lost control of his future. But the quietness of his voice now was worse than shouting. It was the quietness of a man who could see the future arriving and knew it was too late to stop it.

"Bea, come here. Now."

She set down her brush and wiped her fingers on the rag she kept tucked into her apron. The ink on her hands was the good kind—lamp-black mixed with linseed oil, the recipe her father swore was superior to anything the Continent could produce. She crossed the narrow corridor between the back room and the shop front, ducking under the low beam that had given her a goose egg the size of a walnut when she was twelve and that she had learned to avoid by the time she was thirteen.

Her father stood at the window. He was a tall man, thin in the way that men who forget to eat become thin, with ink perpetually lodged under his fingernails and in the creases of his knuckles. His hair, once dark, had gone the color of iron filings in the years since her mother's death. He wore it long enough to tuck behind his ears, and it was tucked now, both sides, which meant he was thinking hard.

"Look," he said.

Beatrice looked.

Paternoster Row was never empty—it was one of the busiest streets in London, thick with apprentices and scholars and clergymen and the occasional nobleman's servant sent to purchase a devotional book or a Latin grammar. But the crowd that was forming now was not the usual traffic. Men in leather jerkins were moving down the street in pairs, stopping at each shop front, checking something—a list, Beatrice realized. They had a list.

Royal pursuivants.

The Queen's men. Or rather, the soon-to-be Queen's men. Mary Tudor had not yet been crowned, but she had won the succession struggle against Lady Jane Grey, and London had declared for her three days ago. The bells of every church in the city had rung until the ringers' hands bled. Bonfires had burned in every square. The people loved Mary. The people wanted Mary. The people wanted the old faith restored and the heretics silenced and everything to go back to the way it had been before Henry broke with Rome.

Edwin Aldersey had spent the last six years printing the words of those heretics.

"How long?" Beatrice asked.

"Minutes. Perhaps less."

She turned to look at him. His face was composed, but his hands were not still. They were moving at his sides, fingers working against thumbs, the way they did when he was setting type in his mind—arranging and rearranging, searching for the right order.

"The pamphlets," she said.

"I burned what I could last night. But the Cranmer tract—the one with the license page—I could not find it."

The Cranmer tract. Beatrice felt her stomach drop. It was a sixteen-page pamphlet arguing against the doctrine of transubstantiation, written by Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was himself now in very serious trouble. Her father had printed two hundred copies in the spring. Most had been distributed through a network of booksellers and sympathetic clergymen. But the pamphlet bore a forged license page—a page that claimed it had been approved by the Privy Council for public sale.

Beatrice had written that license page.

Not the words. The hand. She had copied the signature of a council clerk named Pettifer, reproducing not just the shape of his letters but the pressure of his pen, the way he bore down hard on the downstrokes and lifted too early on the crossbars, the slight tremor in his capital P that came from an old injury to his right hand. She had copied the clerk's seal, too, pressing it into warm wax with a counterfeit stamp her father had commissioned from a silversmith in Southwark.

The forgery was perfect. She knew it was perfect because she had compared it to three genuine license pages and could not tell her own work from the originals.

That was her gift. That was her curse.

Beatrice Aldersey could copy any hand.

Not merely the shapes of letters, but the soul of them—the way a writer leaned into certain words, the way fatigue changed the angle of a line, the way anger made strokes heavier and sorrow made them lighter. She could read a person's character in their handwriting the way a physician read a patient's health in the color of their urine, and then she could reproduce that character on a blank page so faithfully that the original writer would swear the words were his own.

Her father called it a craft. He said she had inherited it from her mother, who had been a scrivener's daughter and who could write in six hands before she was twenty. He said it was a gift from God, meant to serve the cause of true religion.

Beatrice was not so sure about the God part.

She was quite sure it was a weapon.

"The pamphlet is in the back room," she said. "Under the compositing stone. I saw it yesterday."

"Then get it. And get out."

"Father—"

"Beatrice." He turned to face her, and she saw something in his eyes she had never seen before. Not fear—Edwin Aldersey was afraid of very little—but a kind of terrible clarity, the look of a man who had done his calculations and arrived at an answer he did not like but could not argue with. "They will take me. They will take the press. They will take the type and the ink and the paper and anything else they can carry. But they will not take you. Do you understand?"

"I won't leave you."

"You will leave me because I am asking you to, and because you are my daughter, and because if they find that pamphlet with its license page, they will know someone in this shop can forge a council seal, and they will not stop asking questions until they find out who."

The sounds from the street were growing louder. A door banged open somewhere to the left—the bookseller, probably. A woman screamed, short and sharp, and then was silent.

"Go," Edwin said. "Through the tanner's yard. You know the way."

She knew the way. The tanner's yard backed onto Paternoster Row through a narrow alley that smelled of dog and lime and worse things. She and the tanner's son had used it as a shortcut to the river when they were children, before the tanner's son had died of the sweating sickness and the alley had become just another forgotten passage in a city full of them.

"Where do I go?"

"To your aunt in Cheapside. Tell her nothing. Wait for word from me."

Beatrice wanted to argue. She wanted to plant her feet on the ink-stained floor of the only home she had ever known and refuse to move. But her father's eyes held that terrible clarity, and she knew—with the same instinct that let her read character in handwriting—that arguing would cost them both something they could not afford.

She went to the back room. She lifted the compositing stone—a heavy slab of marble, smooth and cool, on which her father arranged his type—and found the pamphlet beneath it, folded once. She opened it to the license page and looked at her own work: the forged signature, the counterfeit seal, the careful aging she had applied with a wash of weak tea and a dusting of fine sand.

Perfect.

Damning.

She folded the pamphlet again and tucked it into the hem of her skirt, where the seam was loose enough to hold it. Then she took her mother's sewing kit from the shelf—a small leather case containing needles, thread, a thimble, and a pair of scissors—and stitched the hem shut with quick, tight stitches, sealing the pamphlet inside.

The front door of the shop burst open.

Beatrice did not look back. She went through the back door, across the small yard where her father kept his paper stores, and into the alley. The smell hit her like a wall—tanning chemicals, rotting hides, the sharp ammonia of urine used to soften leather. She pressed her sleeve against her nose and ran.

Behind her, she heard her father's voice, calm and measured, greeting the men who had come to destroy his life's work.

"Good morning, gentlemen. How may I help you?"

She ran until she could not hear him anymore.

---

The aunt in Cheapside was a fiction.

Edwin had told her to go there because he knew the pursuivants might overhear, and a false destination was better than a true one. Beatrice's only living relative in London was a second cousin named Goody Pell, who sold candles from a stall near Bishopsgate and who wanted nothing to do with the Aldersey family or their dangerous opinions about the proper way to worship God.

Beatrice went instead to the only other place she knew: the shop of a bookbinder named Harbury, on the south side of the river, who had bound many of her father's publications and who shared his sympathies, if not his courage.

Harbury was a small, nervous man with a permanent squint from years of close work. He took one look at Beatrice standing in his doorway, breathless and pale, and pulled her inside without a word.

"Your father?" he asked.

"Taken."

Harbury closed his eyes. "God preserve him."

"Where will they take him?"

"The Fleet, most likely. Or Newgate, if they want to make an example." He opened his eyes and looked at her with something that was not quite pity and not quite fear but contained generous portions of both. "You cannot stay here, girl. If they took your father, they will come for his associates. I must pack what I can and be gone by nightfall."

"Where?"

"I don't know. Somewhere they are not burning books." He pressed a coin into her hand—a groat, worth fourpence. "It is all I can spare. God go with you."

Beatrice stood in the street outside Harbury's shop and looked at the groat in her palm. Four pennies. Enough for two nights' lodging in a flea-ridden inn, or four days' bread, or passage on a wherry to Greenwich, where no one would know her and no one would care.

She was sixteen years old. She had no family, no money, no home, and no plan.

She had a pamphlet sewn into her hem that could get her killed.

And she had hands that could copy any writing in Christendom.

She spent the first night in a doorway near the Southwark end of London Bridge, huddled against the stone with her knees drawn up and her skirts pulled tight around her. The July night was warm enough, but the sounds of the city kept her awake—the distant shouts of revelers celebrating Mary's victory, the splash of wherries on the river, the occasional scream that might have been a fox or might have been something worse.

In the morning, she found work.

Not real work—not the kind that came with a roof and a wage and a master who would vouch for you. She found a scrivener's stall near the Tabard Inn where a one-eyed man named Dibbs sold his services to travelers who needed letters written. Dibbs was drunk by noon most days and could barely hold a pen by evening. Beatrice offered to work the afternoon shift in exchange for a share of the takings.

Dibbs looked at her hands. Looked at her face. Looked at her hands again.

"Show me," he said.

She took his pen—a badly cut goose quill that deserved better—and wrote a line of secretary hand on a scrap of paper. Then she wrote the same line in italic. Then in the heavy blackletter that printers used for title pages. Then, because Dibbs was still staring, she wrote a line in his own hand, copying the sample she had seen on the board behind his stall.

Dibbs read the line in his own handwriting. He turned the paper over. He held it up to the light.

"Christ's bones," he said.

She worked for Dibbs for five days. She wrote letters for merchants and love notes for apprentices and a will for a dying sailor who could not hold a pen. She ate bread and cheese and drank small beer and slept in the back of Dibbs's stall, on a pile of old sacking that smelled of horse.

On the sixth day, Nicholas Thrale found her.

---

He did not look like a man who traded in other people's ruin.

He was young—perhaps twenty-five—with a narrow, clever face and hair the color of wet straw. He dressed well but not extravagantly: a dark doublet, good boots, a cap set at an angle that suggested he had opinions about fashion but not enough money to fully indulge them. He carried a leather satchel over one shoulder and walked with the quick, purposeful stride of a man who had somewhere important to be and was enjoying the journey.

He came to Dibbs's stall on a Tuesday afternoon and asked for a letter to be written.

"To whom, sir?" Beatrice asked, pen ready.

"To no one. I want to see you write."

She looked up. His eyes were gray-green, the color of the Thames on a cloudy day, and they were watching her with an intensity that made her skin prickle.

"I charge by the page, sir, not by the demonstration."

"Then write me a page." He put a shilling on the counter—far more than a page was worth. "Write me anything you like."

Beatrice hesitated. Something about this man's stillness, the way he watched her hands instead of her face, made her uneasy. But a shilling was a shilling, and she had not eaten since yesterday's bread.

She wrote him a page from memory: the opening of the Gospel of John, in secretary hand, because it was the first thing that came to mind and because the familiar words steadied her.

Thrale read it. Then he reached into his satchel and produced a folded pamphlet.

Beatrice recognized it before he opened it. The paper. The typeface. The fold.

It was the Cranmer tract. Not the copy sewn into her hem—that was still there, she could feel its stiff rectangle against her thigh—but another copy, one of the two hundred her father had printed.

Thrale opened it to the license page.

"This signature," he said, tapping the forged clerk's name. "Pettifer. I know Pettifer. I have worked with him for three years. His hand has a tremor in the capital P—an old injury from a fall. Most forgers would miss it. Whoever wrote this did not."

Beatrice said nothing.

"The seal is excellent, too. The pressure is slightly uneven—Pettifer always presses harder on the left side because he holds the seal at an angle. A detail so small that Pettifer himself probably does not know he does it."

Beatrice said nothing.

"I have been looking for the person who wrote this page," Thrale said. "I started at the print shop on Paternoster Row, but the printer is in the Fleet and his apprentices have scattered. Then I heard about a girl working a scrivener's stall in Southwark who can write in any hand. A girl with ink-stained fingers and dark hair and the look of someone who has not slept properly in a week."

He folded the pamphlet and put it back in his satchel.

"My name is Nicholas Thrale. I am a clerk in the household of Bishop Stephen Gardiner, the Lord Chancellor of England. And I have a proposition for you, Mistress Aldersey."

The name hit her like cold water. She had not told Dibbs her real name. She had not told anyone.

"I don't know what you're talking about," she said.

"Of course you don't." Thrale smiled. It was a pleasant smile, warm and conspiratorial, the smile of a man sharing a joke with a friend. It did not reach his eyes. "Your father is in the Fleet Prison. He has been charged with seditious printing. The penalty, if he is convicted, is death. If he is not convicted, it is imprisonment at the Queen's pleasure, which in practice means the same thing, only slower."

Beatrice's hand tightened on the pen. She could feel the quill flexing, close to breaking.

"I can keep him alive," Thrale said. "I can ensure he is fed, that he has a blanket, that the gaolers do not beat him more than is customary. I can do this because Bishop Gardiner's word carries weight in every prison in London, and because I carry Bishop Gardiner's word."

"What do you want?"

"Your hand, Mistress Aldersey." He leaned forward, and his voice dropped to something almost intimate. "Your extraordinary, dangerous, magnificent hand."

"For what?"

"For the service of the Crown. For the protection of the true faith. For the preservation of order in a kingdom that has been disordered for twenty years." He paused. "And for the continued breathing of your father."

Beatrice looked at the shilling on the counter. She looked at the pamphlet-shaped bulge in Thrale's satchel. She looked at her own hands, ink-stained and steady and capable of things that no one in this city—perhaps no one in this country—could match.

She picked up the shilling.

"Tell me more," she said.