by Louis Bayard
By fall, I’d managed to acquire a girlfriend, a poli-sci major from Austin with a gorgeous sulk, and Alonzo had discovered Kenneth Martineau, heir to a cardboard-box fortune. Their relationship began as platonic and, even at its most passionate, would never have qualified as torrid, but Kenneth had a weakness for shock effects and, on the anniversary of his mother’s death, announced he was dedicating his life to Alonzo. The rest of Kenneth’s family issued threats and recriminations, and when all the debris was cleared off, Kenneth had cleared off, too. To La Jolla, where he became muse and patron to a found-object constructivist.
As for Alonzo, he quit before the semester was done. But he made a point of keeping in touch, and out of guilt and, yes, residual affection, I answered in kind. Our school may have ceased, but it never really shut its doors.
And now we were once more matriculants, gathering each morning in Amory Swale’s shack. (Amory himself was sent on errands.) That first morning, I brought a plastic thermos of coffee and a pint of orange juice and some harvest muffins and a dozen and a half bagels, which Alonzo dove into like a refugee. “I’ve been—sorry—I’ve been thinking over how the work should be divided. For now…” He licked the last residue of crumbs from his lip. “I’m thinking Amory and I will handle the fieldwork. Combing through old sources, consulting authorities, doing site inspections … whatever it takes to reconstruct Harriot’s tracks. You and Clarissa—”
“Yes?”
And then he showed me the wheel.
I’d missed it in my first perusal. A ring of letters, minuscule in size, circling the map like a globe. Alonzo, working with a magnifier, had come up with a clockwise sequence.
PsjAYStrooxeidDVegaLOkuxTmLikcyCUsSxGAzyrnrmuOrrLBAkchrltRdgarnoom
ONOssfrtvQhiHeRbdallZolgeanitzPeFpfhlogionLlLqaBwnbAdauncsleckQooTiat
GlgKIkiWfleatHEstRqiabaOtzKCdMCpnfeffkuv
“This is the map’s legend,” said Alonzo. “I’m convinced of it. If we crack the wheel, we crack the map.”
By now my coffee was cold enough to stir with my finger.
“Just so you know,” I said. “I’m not a cryptologist.”
“Never fear, Clarissa’s a whiz with computers. What I want you to do is provide the frame of reference. Look for phrases, names, words. Anything you can tie to the man or the period, jump on it like a loose penny.”
He gave his belly a Falstaffian pat and, with just the driest particle of mischief in his voice, said:
“By the way, Henry, I enjoyed your eulogy.”
I put down my muffin. I looked right into his irises.
“Oh, God.”
For what, after all, was my most indelible memory of Alonzo’s memorial service? Lily Pentzler muttering into her sleeve like a madwoman.
“My God, you had Lily wired,” I said. “She was livecasting your fucking funeral.”
“And it was all very touching, Henry. You weren’t sentimental, which you know I abhor. Oh, but tell me what you think of Clarissa.”
“Um…” I made a gesture to the ceiling. “She’s game.”
Alonzo roared. “Why don’t you just go ahead and say she’s yar?”
“Well, I don’t know. Do you believe Thomas Harriot comes to visit her every night?”
“I believe that’s what she’s seeing, yes. I believe these visions are coming from someplace that’s not her.”
“Because she coughed up some Latin.”
“Because she doesn’t want them to come. Because she wishes like hell they’d go away.”
“Schizophrenics wish the same thing.”
And even as I said that, I was recalling how I’d left Clarissa that morning. In the hotel’s common room, sitting on a cane-bottom chair, bowed over a single croissant, her eyes almost glaucomic when she lifted them to mine.
“And another thing,” I said. “Why is she here in the first place? An attractive young woman like that, she must have surer bets elsewhere.”
“People go where they need to be,” said Alonzo, draining the last drop of orange juice straight from the carton. “Don’t you think, Henry?”
* * *
A good question. Was I where I needed to be?
I was the last person in the world who expected us to find gold. But the fact remained that twice in the last twenty-four hours I’d had the chance to leave, and it wasn’t Thomas Harriot who’d kept me here. And knowing this, the pink masonry of the Pelican Arms filled me with a certain alarm as I approached. Clarissa was on the oceanside veranda, her eyes closed, her hair breeze-fraught, wearing her canary-yellow sundress, which looked preposterous against the sad gray cushions. Her toenails had been painted—beefsteak red—and I admit I was briefly seized by the prospect of chewing on them.
“We’ve got a job,” I said.
And so she seated herself in the room’s lone armchair, fired up her Mac Notebook and set to work with a vengeance. Oh she took an occasional bathroom break, an occasional stretch, a swig of iced tea, but no diversion lasted longer than a minute, and then she went straight back to her decryption programs.
Me, I took out a legal pad on my lap and scribbled down every name I could associate with Harriot. Ralegh and Percy and Marlowe and Chapman and all the reputed members of the School. Richard Hakluyt, Harriot’s geography instructor. Thomas Allen, Harriot’s mathematics instructor. Kepler, Harriot’s correspondent. Galileo, Harriot’s rival. And Bruno and Brahe and Roger Bacon. And John Dee and George Ripley and Avicenna.
All of Harriot’s friends and all his equally numerous foes. The Earl of Essex, Percy’s brother-in-law. Robert Cecil, chief adviser to both Queen Elizabeth and King James. Anthony à Wood, who accused Harriot of having “strange thoughts of the Scriptures” and casting off the Old Testament. Father Robert Parsons, the Jesuit priest who said Harriot taught young gentlemen to jeer at Moses and Jesus. Nicholas Jefferys, who said Harriot had denied “the resurrection of the body.” Chief Justice Popham, who, in sentencing Ralegh to death, urged him to wrest himself free of “that devil Harriot.”
Then I started compiling place-names. Clifton, where Harriot’s father may once have worked as a blacksmith. Oxford and St. Mary Hall, where Harriot matriculated at the age of seventeen. Sherborne Castle, where the School of Night would probably have met. Durham House, Ralegh’s London estate. Molanna Abbey, Ralegh’s Irish estate. Various stations on the way to America: Plymouth and Puerto Rico and Hispaniola and Wococon.
Name after name, each one canceling the one before, none more promising than any other. It was, in fact, a perverse comfort that Clarissa was making no better progress than I was. By now, she’d established that the letter string wasn’t a substitution cipher or an algorithm. But no matter what terms she fed into her decryption engines, the result was only more abstraction.
We worked through lunch and the rest of the afternoon, and at seven-thirty, we ordered a Three Meat Treat pizza from the local Little Caesar’s, which we supplemented with a six-pack of Sierra Nevada. Clarissa sat cross-legged on the damp white shag carpet, shoveling in one slice after another, glancing from time to time at her napkin as if she were trying to place its name.
“So,” she said. “Tell me something. Do you hate him?”
“Who?”
“Walter Ralegh.”
I took a swallow of beer, squinted back at her.
“Why should I?”
“He killed your career.”
“Ralegh had nothing to do with it. I’ve never—I mean, if you must know—more than ever, I just want to do right by him.”
“But who’s doing wrong by him?”
“Well…” I kneaded the back of my neck. “History, in a way. It masks him. Before anything else, he was a poet. Who, in his spare time, you know, was storming Cádiz and fighting the Armada and sailing down the Arapahoe River and—”
“Throwing his cloak over that puddle! For Queen Elizabeth.”
“Which may never have happened. You look at all the stuff he actually did, all the people he was—courtier
and soldier—explorer, patron—everything was just an extension of his true calling. And that was poetry. It’s the only way his life makes sense, as this kind of epic verse, never resolving.”
Which was more than I’d spoken on the subject in ages.
“Well, now,” said Clarissa, framing me over the rim of her bottle. “What kind of poem is your life, Henry Cavendish?”
“Prose. All prose.”
A slow, seraphic smile. She pushed herself off the bed. Gave her eyes a rub and, in a flat voice, said:
“Remind me whose room this is.”
“Mine.”
“Okay, good night.”
“It’s still early, isn’t it?”
“Not for me. I’ll see you in the morning.”
I watched her go. Wondering the whole time what would happen if I had asked her to stay.
The beer by now was gone, so I drove to a local Brew Thru for a one-liter bottle of Purple Moon Shiraz, which I managed to spill on my bathroom floor not ten minutes later.
I had enough left over for a prodigious buzz. I turned on Turner Classic Movies and, through the husks of my eyes, watched Jeanette MacDonald fight for Clark Gable’s soul. She was still at it when I dropped off to sleep.
I awoke hours later to the pounding of my own head. Which quickly relocated itself to the door, ten feet away.
It was Clarissa, in a T-shirt of her own, gymnasium gray. She took a step into the room. Her eyes were hot and white.
“It is Harriot,” she said.
“Okay.”
“It is.”
“All right.”
“And someone’s with him. Her name is Margaret.”
ISLEWORTH, ENGLAND 1603
22
HERE IS THE first surprise: The laboratory in which Master Thomas Harriot seeks enlightenment is … almost entirely dark.
Someone, it seems, has thrown horse blankets over the windows. Pausing at the room’s entrance, Margaret peers into the murk, spies a shifting shape, hears a voice burred with impatience.
—Come in. Come in.
She takes two strides into the room and waits for her eyes to adapt.
—You may be seated.
At last objects merge. A worktable, roughly two yards long, covered in butcher’s paper. On the table, a burnished triangle of amber. And directly above, a single lamp, hanging from a chain.
There is no preamble or explanation from the master. Only a flurry of last-minute calculations as he measures off each distance and angle.
At last he sets down his compass and ruler. He pauses. Then he slides a length of slotted black wood into the lamp’s base.
The effect is instant. The cloud of lamplight is winnowed into a single lancing beam, which strikes the amber triangle along its exposed flank. At once, a sister ray surges off on its own tangent, carving the amber in two and yet leaving it magically whole.
No time to admire the effect. The master grabs his protractor and sets to work, murmuring the name of each angle (ABH … GBI … FBM…) and then scribbling down each figure. The work is slow, for he insists on taking each measure twice, and over the next ten minutes she recedes so far from his thoughts that she must repeat herself before he hears her.
—Pardon, sir. My duties …
—Ohh. Yes.
At a loss for protocol, she takes a step back, curtsies, and makes a straight line for the doorway. Quick and smart, she tells herself. Heels off the ground …
And just as he did in their first meeting, he calls after her.
—Come back tomorrow, then.
* * *
She goes back tomorrow. The day after and the day after. Always pausing just outside the door until she hears the three chimes. Then presenting herself with a bowed head.
—I have come, sir. As you asked.
And why has he asked? What does he want of her? As best she can tell, he requires nothing more of her than an audience. And yet he has none of the actor’s vanity. He fidgets, he grumbles, he scratches, loses his place, remonstrates with his quill … behaves like a man enslaved to himself. All the more surprising that, one afternoon, the fog around him should part long enough for him to say:
—Margaret, might I trouble you to take down the figures?
She balks at first. She has had precious little practice penning numbers, and her only recourse at first is to ape his hand: the jagged underloops of his 3s and 5s, the squint of his 2s, the dangling edges of his 4s. So thoroughly does she absorb it all that the style becomes her own, and soon the quill is sliding across the paper with a sweet ease. Degree by degree, minute by minute, the master’s columns fill up, and playing even this small part in the production gives her an uncommon excitement. Or is it just the relief that comes of doing?
Without her knowing it, her intervals in the laboratory stretch from ten minutes to fifteen to twenty. And when at last she excuses herself, he gives her the same mask of puzzlement each time, as if she were a variable he has yet to sew into an equation.
One afternoon, he sets a large crystal sphere on the table. A seer’s sphere, she thinks. And there is something of the necromancer in the ponderousness of his motions, in the theatricality of his pauses. The way his hand actually trembles when he slides the black board into the lamp.
Once again, the ray of light comes surging forth, but with this difference. It doesn’t so much strike the sphere as detonate it.
The crystal explodes into a diadem of color. Indigo and violet and red and orange. Searing yellow. A green she can almost smell. Every sense is inflamed, and yet no single sense, no combination of senses, can contain it all.
Dazed, she rises from her stool, dimly aware of some violence to her right. The inkhorn … tipped on its side … a river of gall ink crawling toward the sheet of figures.
The master reacts before she does, snatching the paper clear. But in his haste he strikes the lamp with his shoulder, and down it comes in a gale of glass. A second later, the table is ablaze.
Gasping, Margaret grabs the quill and the horn, feeling the lick of flame against her fingers. She watches as the master seizes the blanket from the window and hurls it across the table. But the flames come right back, redoubled in force, swallowing the wool like air.
From without comes the sound of running feet. Margaret turns to see Mrs. Golliver lurching into the room with a bucket of water. The sight is enough to make her laugh, but already the water is cascading over the table. There comes a great hiss … a dying sigh … the fire is transformed into a cordon of smoke.
Panting, triumphant, Mrs. Golliver sets the bucket down. Her voice is as grave as a sibyl.
—Master Harriot, you cannot say you went unwarned.
—It was my fault entirely.
—Permitting a mere girl to serve in such a capacity goes against Nature and common sense. It perverts the natural order of things.
Watching Mrs. Golliver bear down, Margaret suddenly realizes: This is the moment she’s been waiting for.
—You must be made to see, Master. The girl was engaged to work for us. Not make work for us.
—Is that so?
He means, possibly, to challenge the idea. But there is no challenge in his voice, only an agitation that slowly communicates itself to other parts: eyebrows, fingers, feet.
How he wavers in the face of true fixity! Margaret could almost despise him if she did not feel instead a pang of fellowship. Master Thomas Harriot has no more say in the running of his life than she does in hers.
—Enough of this, says Mrs. Golliver. —Come, Margaret.
She cuffs her under the chin. A light cuff only. It is the words that sting. Enough of this. As if the old housekeeper had somehow joined league with her mother.
No need for these any longer.
* * *
That night, Margaret lies in her cold bed, the tips of her fingers still stinging, the memory of the fire scalding in every pore. She cannot imagine she will ever sleep, but in fact she has just slipped free of consciousness w
hen she hears a light tapping. A voice follows hard on.
—Margaret? Are you about?
Rising quickly, she wraps her coverlet around her shift and unlatches the door.
He stands there. Bareheaded in his black gown. Holding a candle. His voice straining toward cheer.
—So! Your natural habitation …
More than once, in her fancy, a man has come to her bedchamber. He looked nothing like the master.
—I wonder, Margaret, if you would oblige me.
—Sir?
—There is something I should like to show you.
He pauses.
—Out-of-doors, if that is not disagreeable.
He waits on the step while she climbs back into her petticoat and skirt and waistcoat. Then he signals her to follow him down. Pausing on the bottommost stair, he taps a finger to his ear: Listen.
From the darkness of the inner rooms comes a sound like converging oceans. The Gollivers’ snoring.
—Mister G has the quavering treble, says Master Harriot. —The basso continuo would be his fair paramour.
It is ten minutes till midnight, everyone in Syon House is abed, and the earth itself is snoring into the gray poplars and the silver birches.
She looks down. In the master’s hands rests a cylinder, one foot and a half in length, encased in mildewed leather.
—My perspective trunk, Margaret. Of some ancient vintage. I brought it to Virginia ages ago. The local Algonkin were most taken with it. Please …
With some awkwardness, she grasps it. Puts the glass to her eye, tilts her head toward the sky …
And falls back before the onslaught. Stars where there was only night.
It must be a trick, she thinks, but then the moon itself swarms into view. So massive she cannot bring herself to believe in it. Or take her eyes from it.
—It magnifies only to the third power, and the field of view is rather narrow, as you may see. I cannot help but posit that one day, with the, the right configuration of convex and concave lenses, one might—well, it’s difficult to foretell …