The School of Night

by Louis Bayard

  “Henry, since you’re willfully and wildly choosing to ignore my drift, let me qualify my original statement. There is no record in the Harriot papers of anybody named Margaret.”

  At which point Clarissa’s words came spooling back to me.

  There’s no record of his birthday, either. But he was born.

  Very deliberately, Alonzo emptied three packets of Sweet ’n Low into his coffee. “Aren’t you the in-house skeptic, Henry?”

  “Isn’t it you who thinks Clarissa’s visions—wait, how did you put it?—they come from someplace that’s not her. I just figured you’d want the latest dispatches. From said place.”

  “As it happens, we have better things to do than chase after Margarets. Or Bettys. This very afternoon, I’m driving down to Ocracoke to meet an expert in Algonquin history. An old friend of—Christ, where the hell is Amory?”

  But the house’s nominal owner was nowhere to be seen. Taking my leave ten minutes later, I found him loitering in the gravel driveway. A new costume: seersucker pants and a tuxedo shirt. A new face, too. Every muscle in it was surrendering.

  “I can’t get him to listen,” he said.

  “Alonzo?”

  “I keep telling him. Everything’s shifted, hasn’t it?”

  “Everything’s—”

  “That’s what barrier islands do. They shift, they reconfigure.”

  For thousands and thousands of years, he wanted me to know, the Outer Banks had been in motion: sand washing in from offshore bars or washing away on the next tide. In the 420-plus years since Harriot’s party had come to Roanoke Island, the northern shore had fallen back a quarter mile, all but one of the island’s inlets were gone, and most of the islands to the southwest had vanished.

  “I keep telling Alonzo, but he won’t listen. Wherever Harriot thought he was leaving his treasure, it’s not there anymore.”

  I found myself in the strange position of wanting to comfort Amory Swale.

  “Harriot might have left it inland,” I suggested.

  Amory inspected the whorls of dead sand on his undersoles.

  “I do sometimes wonder,” he murmured, “if we should be doing this at all. Digging up things. Perhaps it would be a greater kindness not to.”

  And then, abruptly, he cast off his gloom. Showed me his teeth in all their valor.

  “Have a lovely day,” he said.

  * * *

  That afternoon, Clarissa and I took a different tack. Instead of feeding names into the decryption engines, we fed them number upon number. Harriot’s birth year: 1560. His death year: 1621. The year he came to London: 1580. The year he sailed for Roanoke: 1585. The date of Elizabeth’s birth and death, the dates of James’s coronation. Hell, we threw in the Battle of Hastings and the signing of the Magna Carta and every commemorative occasion we could think of.

  Next we spent a couple of hours combining key names and numbers. And then we tried equations. We tried Latin and Greek characters and Roman numerals and Gaelic and Sanskrit.…

  On and on, an essay in futility, and once again the day slipped away from us. I had just enough strength to collect meatball subs from Quizno’s and a liter bottle of Svedka, which Clarissa, after some hesitation, declined to drink from.

  We ate quickly. I downed a couple of shots, and then we cleared our throats, and Clarissa was just reaching for her laptop when I said:

  “Let’s go for a walk.”

  I didn’t have any destination in mind, so we made for the beach. And as we paused at the top of the dune and kicked off our shoes and felt the uprush of wind, the scent was instantly tonic: salt and decayed kelp and a lingering summer char.

  The moon had laid a track straight across the water. A tethered kite was flapping; in the distance, the remains of a campfire smoldered. We had the place to ourselves.

  Clarissa grabbed a stick and carved a horseshoe shape in the sand.

  “Are there other Cavendishes in the world?” she asked.

  “I’ve got a brother, five years younger. He’s a doctor.”

  “Like you.”

  “The kind that helps people. My parents are highly competent old people, very happily retired. My mother is Mary Queen of Scottsdale.”

  “You came up with that.”

  “Which is why she hates it.”

  “What about kids?”

  “Me? God, no. I mean, for the kids’ sake, thank God.”

  I stared out to sea. The moon’s track was fading from gold to a clotted cream.

  “What about you?” I asked. “Any family in the mix?”

  “All gone.”

  “Boyfriends, naturally.”

  “Oh, I guess. They used up a lot of time. You remind me of one of them.”

  “That can’t be good.”

  “Have you ever—” She stopped, gave herself a preemptive pat on the head. “Never mind.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t want you to be mad.”

  “For Christ’s sake.”

  “I was only going to say … you seem to … drink a lot.” She made a close study of the sand. “I think I know why you do it, and I just wish you wouldn’t. Because all those bad things you think about yourself, they’re not true. And that’s all I’m going to say, I promise.”

  To my own surprise, I began to laugh.

  “What?” she said.

  “I don’t know. I never expected to have—interventions. I never expected to be this.”

  “What did you expect to be?”

  “I don’t know, something. I mean, I know this sounds completely stupid, but back in the day, I was…”

  “Go on.”

  “Okay, at the risk of sounding like a totally egomaniacal asshole, I was the kind of guy—of whom things were…”

  “Expected.”

  “Well, yeah. I mean, maybe, yeah. I was summa cum laude. I had my Ph.D. by twenty-six. Oriel freakin’ College invited me to read a paper. An American! Talking about Ralegh! I know it sounds ridiculous, this English-lit prof thinking he’s—well, not God—all I can say is, at the beginning it felt like the world was sort of bending my way, and then suddenly the world was bending me. And before I knew it, I was…”

  “Bent.”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  “Henry, I don’t know if it’s any comfort, but life bends everyone, doesn’t it? A little bit?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “You were just unlucky. All things considered, you’re doing okay.”

  “That’s kind of you. That’s a very generous standard of—of okayness.”

  We were walking again, more slowly now, our clothes billowing behind us. We came at last to a shock of pampas grass, which had curled over the sand to form a tiny arbor.

  “Anybody home?” Clarissa called, poking her head inside.

  But the arbor was as empty as the rest of the beach. The kind of place, frankly, I would have brought a crush to in middle school. Only there was no starter-bra awkwardness in Clarissa. Lips parted, eyes shining, she leaned toward me and, just as I was aligning myself for a response, she said.

  “That poem.”

  “Which one?”

  “The one that got you in trouble. The Ralegh poem.”

  Frowning, I took a step back.

  “It wasn’t Ralegh.”

  “Just tell me the title.”

  “You’re killing me.”

  “Please.”

  “You’re fucking killing me.”

  “I’m not, I really want to know.”

  “‘One Name.’ Happy?”

  “That’s an odd title. ‘One Name.’”

  “Well, there you are.”

  Without warning, she dropped into the sand. Pulled my jacket more tightly around her. “Could you recite some of it?” she asked.

  “Jesus.”

  “Please. I’ll be your best friend. I’ll make you brownies.”

  I laughed.

  “Just two lines,” she cooed.

  I canvassed my mind for f
urther objections.

  “It’ll have to be four,” I said. “It was written in quatrains.”

  “Okay, four,” she answered, patting the square of sand next to her.

  I was already reciting as I sat down. Hoping to get through it as fast as I could, honestly, but the wind was drowning out my voice, so I had to lift it into a new register. I thought of Demosthenes, roaring over the waves.

  One name hath been my joy and curse

  My borning cry, my sable hearse

  My life’s redoubt, my soul’s sweet death

  Two fates—one name—Elizabeth.

  I expected it to resound with its own hollowness. But tonight it had an angle of defiance.

  “I can see why you liked it,” said Clarissa.

  “I liked it because it was Ralegh.”

  “No, it’s pretty. It doesn’t become lesser because someone else wrote it.”

  “Um, yes. Yes, it does.” I whisked the sand from my calves. “I’m not sure it was worth a career.”

  “What would he say?”

  I stared at her.

  “Ralegh, I mean. Oh, wait!” She clapped her hand on top of her head. “I just realized Ralegh rhymes with folly! Oh my God, did you ever notice that?”

  I never had. Never once.

  All that time I’d spent in carrels and library stacks and seminar rooms, filling out grant applications, sweet-talking archive gatekeepers, burying my nose in boxes full of dust and insect shit—and all time the notes of my doom were sounding in my ear. Ralegh … folly.

  “There was no one to warn me,” I said now, with a strangled laugh. “You weren’t around.”

  And because the full import of those words was slow to reach me, I had to say them again.

  “You weren’t around.”

  She pulled her legs closer to her chest as if to protect herself and then, in a gesture of contrary purpose, let her head topple onto my shoulder. I slipped my fingers under her chin. I raised her mouth to mine.

  “Mm,” she whispered. “Salt.”

  Her finger ran the length of my lower lip, then drew away. And then, with redoubled force, she brought our mouths together.

  * * *

  Oh, there were the usual encumbrances: the friction of sand against skin, the inability to find a single resting point, the trancelike fear of being discovered, which had lost whatever frisson it had in my youth.

  I suppose the only difference with Clarissa was that the awkwardness of the setting didn’t carry into the act. We fell into each other, with a shock of recognition.

  And afterward, she curled up against my bare chest and closed her eyes and … slept. A covenant of trust. Obscurely but powerfully stirring, for in all my life—and the rolls of my partners are not superhumanly long—I had never once fallen asleep after the woman.

  I didn’t pause to consider what this said about me, I was too entranced with this feeling, this sensation of being free from scrutiny. My own, worst of all.

  I watched her sleep, that’s all. And marveled at how congruent she was with her surroundings. In the ocean light, her tangle of hair was like a bed of kelp, and her skin was the color of conch shells, and her eyes were dark as sea urchins. She was to this particular manor born, but it wasn’t Hamlet I was thinking of, it was baby Perdita, stranded on the Bohemian coast, growing up in Nature’s bosom.

  And with that, a snatch of Winter’s Tale sang in my ears.

  When you do dance, I wish you

  A wave o’ the sea, that you might ever do

  Nothing but that.

  Well, you see, when I quote Shakespeare to myself, that’s usually a sign of—let me just say this: I was glad enough to be Clarissa’s sentry.

  Not that I had much to guard against. An old man in clam diggers, swinging a metal detector like Merlin’s wand. Another pair of lovers, younger, still vertical, with a widening nimbus of pot around their heads.

  And at last, just before midnight, when the arm supporting Clarissa’s weight had lost its last trace of feeling, a bichon frise wandered by.

  “Shoo,” I hissed. “Scram.”

  And in that same instant, I heard Clarissa whispering:

  “Go away.”

  It made me smile, that little echo of hers. Until I realized she was still sleeping.

  And then her eyelids broke open and her torso surged straight toward the sky. And for a minute, I heard nothing but the sound of her lungs, reclaiming the air they had lost.

  “It’s Margaret,” she whispered. “Something’s wrong.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “No. It’s not. We’re all dead.”

  26

  WE SPOKE NOT a word the whole way back to the motel. A curious reticence: not embarrassment, not shyness. We just wanted to be alone with our thoughts. Our bodies, too, for we didn’t bother with a good-night kiss, although Clarissa did give my cheek a light stroke with her index finger just before she closed her door.

  It was ten minutes shy of midnight when I opened the door to my room. My brain must have been half slumbering already because I didn’t notice the lamp blazing by the window, and I’d never even have known I had a visitor if I hadn’t heard him speak from the corner.

  “About bloody time!”

  Alonzo. In a rattan throne. Wearing a massive silk kimono, robin’s-egg blue, and waving a half-empty bottle of Grey Goose like a Salvation Army bell.

  “You might have left a clean cup,” he growled.

  “You might have cleaned one. We have running water, you know.”

  “Running from where?”

  I watched him pour a thimbleful of vodka into the bottle’s cap and swallow it down.

  “What are you doing here, Alonzo?”

  He poured another capful. But his aim was off this time, and a tiny cataract of vodka fell to the floor.

  “Case of nerves,” I suggested.

  “Everyone gets them.”

  “Certainly.”

  “No disgrace. I mean, it’d be one thing if Amory were home.”

  “Where is he?”

  “How should I know? He’s a night crawler. Naps by day, putters through the evening. Impossible to find. Unless, of course, you don’t need him, at which point he sticks to you like nettles.”

  Alonzo stared at the bottle for a while, then set it gingerly on the floor.

  “What can I say, Henry? I was lying in that purgatorial shack of his, I was—I was trying to sleep, and I couldn’t. Even with help. Also, there were noises.…”

  He paused, as if expecting me to hear them, too.

  “Nothing out of the way,” he hurried on. “I just thought I might benefit from a little human propinquity. And you were the best I could find.”

  “I’m honored,” I said. “You won’t mind if I go to sleep.”

  “Do as you like,” he said airily.

  I didn’t bother to undress, just fell headlong into the first double bed I saw.

  “Feel free to take the other one,” I mumbled.

  “Oh, yes.”

  But when I awoke the next morning, a little before eight, he was still in that chair, groggy but awake. I couldn’t tell you if he’d even closed his eyes. The only detectable change was the amount of air inside that bottle.

  “Morning,” I mumbled.

  Alonzo said nothing. I heaved myself up and went in the bathroom and threw on a pair of shorts I had worn two days earlier and, without another word to my roommate, went down to the veranda.

  The day was heating up already, and the beach was just as empty as it had been last night. Except for a barefoot figure passing south in slow procession. Tall and built. He wore a fishing hat and a white T-shirt with SURF’S UP! in hot-pink letters and knee-length shorts that, on anyone else, would have qualified as trousers. His tread was rhythmic, pacific. He never once looked my way.

  Ten seconds later, I was back in my room. Alonzo’s eyes widened at the sight of me.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Trouble.”
>
  And even as I spoke, I was remembering what Clarissa had said on the beach, just a few hours earlier.

  We’re all dead.

  * * *

  Amory Swale’s shack looked even more porous than usual. The front door was unlocked. When we called upstairs, we heard no answer, and when we inspected Amory’s room, we found a fully made bed.

  “I don’t like this,” said Clarissa.

  Scowling, Alonzo led us back down to the living room, then executed a slow 360-degree scan.

  “Tell me something, Henry. When you saw Halldor this morning, did he see you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter, does it? If Halldor’s here, your buddy Bernard Styles knows where we are.”

  Alonzo lowered himself onto the chintz couch. Tied another knot in his kimono sash.

  “It doesn’t matter so much if Styles knows where you are, Henry. You can always make a plausible case that you’re here on his business. As for me … well, to the best of his knowledge, I’m still part of the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Why would he think otherwise? You two wouldn’t tell him. Amory wouldn’t—”

  And then something snagged in Alonzo’s brain.

  “Where. The. Hell. Is. Amory.”

  “Aren’t those his?” asked Clarissa.

  She was pointing to an area just to the left of the couch, where a pair of eyeglasses lay strewn like an old magazine. Oversized aviator frames, thickly ground, speckled with dust and pollen. One of the temples had been half wrenched from its frame.

  “He must have stepped on them,” said Alonzo. “Clumsy soul.”

  “Can he see without them?” asked Clarissa.

  “Not a lick.”

  I picked up the frames. Weighed them in my hand. It was as easy to imagine Amory without skin as without glasses.

  “Alonzo,” I said. “When did you last see him?”

  “I don’t know, seven P.M.-ish? We had cocktails, we ate French-bread pizza … I had some reading to do. Amory just—left. Said he had errands.”

  “He didn’t say where?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe he left a note,” Clarissa suggested.

  But a quick canvass of the house’s first floor found only take-out Korean menus and Food Lion coupons and a raft of credit card solicitations, doodled almost beyond recognition, and an old book jacket for Shakespearean Negotiations (minus the book), and, the one surprise, a brochure for Anguilla: two beach umbrellas on empty white sand.