The School of Night

by Louis Bayard

  * * *

  The cock is already crowing when she drops onto her pallet. She is spent, yes, but she is more awake than anyone else in Syon Park.

  Numbers. Figures. Angles. These are the last lovers she expected to follow her to bed. When she closes her eyes, they grow only more importunate. A ravishment of rises and runs. They follow her into her dreams, they sing to her, caress her neck, they lift her from her bed, they enter her, every last willing part of her.

  Waking the next morning, she is startled to feel the dampness between her legs. Her phantom lovers, come and gone.

  * * *

  Later, coming down the steps, she sees Harriot staggering through the door, his hand pressed to his eyes.

  —Master?

  —I am not injured.

  —But you are!

  It is several minutes before he confesses how he has been celebrating last night’s achievement.

  —Measuring the sun, sir?

  —Well, naturally, I waited until it had passed beyond a thin cloud, so that its diameter remained distinct. After some minutes of observation, I noticed the cloud darkening. I turned around to face Syon House … and the whole world was dark.

  By now, he’s sitting in a chair, and she’s fussing over him like an old nursemaid, fetching him beer, wrapping linen around his eyes.

  —You must take greater care, sir.

  —Oh, I doubt not but that the damage is fleeting. I am most curious, I confess, to observe those spots on the sun’s surface of which John of Worcester has written. I should like also to calculate the axial rotation. A measurement which I believe may be—may best be effected by—

  He pries the bandage off his right eye, peers into the room’s shadows.

  —Crows.

  —Sir?

  —I see a company of crows. Flying all together. At a great distance.

  Margaret glances toward the windows. The curtains are drawn.

  —Never mind, sir.

  The crows stay with him for two days. He lies in bed, a cool towel draped across his face. With his blessing, Margaret uses the time to go through his trunks—an Augean stable of bent, shuffled, creased, waxed, stained paper, at the heart of which lies a curiously orderly bundle of documents: deeds, bills of sale, inventories, invoices, all arranged by chronology and dotted with mysterious initials.

  Must take up wt W.R.… W.R. approve?… Cf W.R. exptrs ’01 …

  —Pardon me, sir.

  He glances up from his bed. The bandage is off, the crows are growing fainter.

  —I wondered if you might tell me, who is W.R.?

  —Why, that is Sir Walter.

  How simply he speaks the name.

  —Ralegh, do you mean?

  —Yes, yes. He has asked me to oversee certain estate matters. Pertaining to Sherborne and Durham House.

  She stands there for some time. At last, to cover her embarrassment, she says:

  —Sir Walter writes poetry, does he not?

  —Lives for it. Erato over Clio, that’s always been his watchword.

  He pries his eyelids apart.

  —Do you care for verse, Margaret?

  She is slow to answer, for the question has the flavor of a trap. But then, to her astonishment, he begins to recite.

  Not at the first sight, nor with a dribbed shot,

  Loue gaue the wound, which, while I breathe, will bleede;

  But knowne worth did in tract of time proceed,

  Till by degrees, it had full conquest got.

  And in that instant, her past comes rushing toward her.

  —Have I spoken amiss, Margaret?

  —No, sir. It is only the poem, Astrophel and Stella. That was—

  She swallows.

  —It was always a great favorite of mine.

  —Then you must be amused to ponder the close quarters we share with Stella’s sister.

  —Sir?

  —Has nobody apprised you of this? Well, then …

  Sidney’s sonnet sequence, he explains, was inspired by one of the age’s great beauties: a gilded maid named Penelope Devereux. Her brother was the second Earl of Essex, but even in battle, they say, the earl never slew as many men as did Penelope’s dark eyes. She went on to marry Robert Rich—against her will, rumor had it—and Sidney … well, he wed old Walsingham’s daughter. The image of Penelope stayed bright within him, though, and her name was ever on his lips in the month it took him to die.

  —That would have been in the aftermath of the Battle of Zutphen, where he was pierced in the thigh and where, to his great honor, he gave water to a subordinate, saying, Your necessity is greater than mine.

  Margaret has never heard Harriot talk at such length or with such sentiment.

  —But if Penelope was Stella … who was Stella’s sister, sir?

  —Dorothy Devereux. Not so beautiful as Penelope but markedly more intelligent. A match for any man in wit. After running rather quickly through one husband, she then consented, after arduous negotiations, to marry Henry Percy. And brought him Syon House in the bargain. Where she now reigns as mistress.

  In her time here, Margaret has seen Lady Percy perhaps half a dozen times. Always from a distance, no more connected to a servant than a Moorish prince. And yet connected all the same, through this skein of circumstance.

  To think how many other wonders are to be unearthed and concatenated. Some afternoons she walks through the house in a bright daze, as though she were following Ptolemy’s lantern.

  It is the Gollivers who bring her back to earth. All it takes is the cricketlike chirring of the old man as he labors up the stair. Or—more personally—the hiss Mrs. Golliver makes whenever they cross paths.

  —Ssssow.

  —Sssslattern.

  —Sssslut.

  One afternoon, more vexed than usual, Mrs. Golliver makes the mistake of leading with a hard consonant.

  —Bitch.

  Margaret spins around.

  —I should not wish to convey that to the master!

  It is a bluff, no more. But when she sees the spasm of fear cross Mrs. Golliver’s face, she grasps for the first time her new power. No, the power she has had all along without knowing it.

  —Bless us, Margaret … you heard me wrong … I should never …

  From here on, the old woman speaks not a word in her presence. She has been driven underground.

  * * *

  —Ha!

  Their pens are scratching, nearly in unison, across two parallel sheets of paper. A ripe river air is pouring through the open windows, and the quiet is so thickly banked that the master’s outburst affects her like a box on the ears.

  —Sir?

  —The School of Night.

  He does not look at her when he says it. Nor does he explain his meaning. But there is no mistaking the change in his eyes, from a glow of reverie to a hard deep chill.

  —Margaret, would you kindly fetch my cloak?

  31

  THE LATE QUEEN’S annual progresses were the ruin of many a noble. With her retinue of courtiers and attendants and riders and messengers and musicians, all clamoring to be housed and fed and provisioned and entertained, Elizabeth had but to descend on an estate to drive its owner into insolvency.

  King James, in keeping with his own character and the straitened times, travels light and sober. He declares in advance he will not stay at Syon House for more than a night. He cares not if the clocks are stopped in his honor. He abjures the pageants, the fireworks, the cannons, the tumbling and juggling and tilts and plays and masques. His restraint extends even to leaving his queen at home (though this is no great hardship for him). He is paying a call, no more.

  But when a king comes to call, there is work to be done. A table to prepare, a menu to draw up, musicians to engage. New livery must be ordered, the Venetian glasses must be cleaned, every surface in every room scrubbed to a rare shine. Tapestries, carpets, linen, china must be made ready, and an entire quadrant of Syon House must be set aside for the
royal party’s pleasure.

  And that doesn’t account for the event itself, which will demand all the servants the earl can spare. Even Margaret is enlisted—for one night alone and with Master Harriot’s consent—in her old capacity in the scullery. How fantastical the place seems to her now. Surely, she thinks, as she fires up the old stoves and scours the floor and worktables and cleans the dishes and silverware and swills the floors and carries out the rubbish, surely it wasn’t me who once toiled here. Surely it was some other girl.

  But her limbs take to the tasks as if she has never been away, and, knowing that her term is only a few hours, she can even take pleasure in this labor; she can lose herself in it until the blast of trumpets, coming at six minutes before eight, recalls her to tonight’s occasion.

  And then she hears the clatter of pots and the roars of cooks and the bellows of the footmen and housemaids. She will not see the king’s procession. She will not see Lady Percy’s elongated curtsy, she will not hear the ceremonial poem of welcome, nor will she feel the crackle of tension as the king and the earl walk side by side, with fixed smiles, into the great hall.

  There can be no denying the two men’s differences. His Majesty steeps himself in theology and poetry; the Earl, natural science and philosophy. The king is Scottish; the earl’s family has been hunting Scots for generations. Worse still, the earl once contemplated marriage to Lady Arbella Stuart, an alliance that might have cost James the English Crown.

  And yet was it not the earl who made the legitimizing gesture of meeting the new king at Enfield Chase? Was it not the earl who rode into London at the king’s right hand? Let us consign the past to the past. For the present—on this balmy moth-speckled night—the earl and the king, with the help of Spanish Bastard wine and fat meat and jumbles and gingerbread, manage to elide their old differences and part something close to friends.

  And in so doing, they make a kind of inner glow within the outer spectacle. A spectacle that Margaret wakens to only when her work is done. By then it is two in the morning, and there is enough light on every side of her to illuminate all of England. Every chamber in the house ablaze … two parallel rows of torches scorching out a path to the river … and out on the water, the royal barge and, encircling it, an armada of tilt boats, wherries and hoys, all at anchor, all singing with light. And each light finding its mirror image in the water and an answering light in the stars.

  A great dazzlement and, behind it, a single word.

  Refraction.

  Light strikes an object, and this encounter forever changes the light and forever reveals the object. The structure that lies beneath the surface of all things. That’s how the master put it, and even then it affected her like a promise. To have that promise so rewarded, as it is in this moment, to feel herself pressed against the world’s skin, gazing through its pores … where are there words for such a thing?

  A minute ago, she could barely stand, and now she is running as fast as her bruised feet will take her. She wants him to know. He must know that nothing she has done in his company has been idle.

  The master’s house, in contrast to its surroundings, is virtually dark, and it takes her some minutes to locate him, for he is not in the laboratory but in the study. Slouched in one of those hard oak chairs he favors. His book—the collection of Montaigne essays he no doubt intended to read all night—remains unopened in his lap.

  He sees her. He stammers, he half rises, the book tumbles from his lap, he stoops for it, then jerks upright. All these actions betray him, but more than anything else, it is his eyes, the way they receive her image and bend it and absorb it and send it back.

  So this is how love looks, she thinks. Not at all what I would have guessed.

  LONDON SEPTEMBER 2009

  32

  I SUPPOSE IT doesn’t speak too well for America’s national security that, on the evening of September 23, 2009, a dead man was able to catch a flight to London.

  Let me say this much in TSA’s defense. By the time Alonzo Wax made it to Dulles International Airport, he was Solomon Spiegel. Very much in the land of the living, with a Social Security number and passport to prove it.

  Consider this, too. Alonzo looked even less like his living self now than he had in the Outer Banks. True, the moonshiner’s beard was gone, but his hair now rose from his head in a pompadour cliff, dyed butterscotch, and he was wrapped in a Big and Tall glen plaid suit, with a stripy-warp Van Heusen tie. You’d have pegged him for agribusiness.

  All this artifice had now been crammed into an aisle seat in the fifty-eighth row of a Virgin Atlantic Airbus A340 bound for Heathrow. Alonzo hated flying economy, but Clarissa was footing the bill for the tickets, and even he didn’t have the crust to demand business class. Particularly since it had been Clarissa who’d called the Dare County, North Carolina, police from an airport pay phone to tell them about a dead man buried in the sand.

  Maybe that took more out of her than I guessed, because as soon as she got on the plane she swallowed two Ambiens, popped on her earphones, and watched a Sandra Bullock movie until her eyes went from tolerant to closed.

  I draped a blanket over her and I was thinking about inserting one of the micropillows behind her head when, from the other side of me, Alonzo snarled:

  “Do not.”

  “What?”

  “If you are even thinking at this moment that she’s purty when she sleeps, I will strike you.”

  I inched the top of my seat back by two inches.

  “No one sleeps as purty as you, Alonzo.”

  “Solomon,” he hissed. “And how would you know?”

  He had a point there. I had never, to the best of my recall, seen him asleep. I had dozed off on him, though, hadn’t I? Most recently in that Nags Head motel room, but something similar had happened at the tail end of one of our collegiate bull sessions. I woke at noon to find him frowning at me as if I were a misdelivered package.

  “Think strategically,” I told him now. “We could give Clarissa slinky clothes and have her seduce You Know Who.”

  Alonzo slipped the Virgin Atlantic eyeshades over his face. “If you are referring to Mr. Bernard Styles, I believe he prefers the tall assassin type.”

  “What the hell is it with you and Styles?”

  “Other than his stealing all my books. And the small matter of his wanting me dead.”

  “I just mean it’s my impression that collectors get along a little better than you two. Generally.”

  “You persist in calling him a collector. This is maddening of you. Let me tell you how I first became aware of You Know Whom. I’d gone to London for one of Bloomsbury’s auctions. As you know, I always make a habit of reviewing the merchandise the day before if possible. Only this time I wasn’t alone. Trailing me across the floor was this young man—no, ratfink would be the mot juste. Wiry and smiley. Springy feet. Possibly he had been a satellite TV salesman but not a good one. Even worse at espionage. Everywhere I went, he followed, scribbling away in his wide-ruled theme book.

  “I thought nothing of him, and then the next day at auction, I noticed that every item I placed a bid on—mirabile dictu—had another bidder. The same bidder. Pockets as deep as his effrontery. Before the day had passed, the mole’s employer, Mister Bernard Styles, had snapped up every single volume in my crosshairs. This, I don’t need to tell you, was beyond the pale.”

  Alonzo waited until the next Bloomsbury auction. Sure enough, the same springy man showed up, and Alonzo led him on a merry chase, pausing before the most worthless items in the catalog. The next day, he had the satisfaction of watching Bernard Styles throw thousands of pounds at rubbish.

  “Well, the day after that, I received a summons from His Nibs. Most anxious to make amends. Poured my tea for me, did everything but rub my corns. Was I swayed? I was not. ‘The next time you want my opinions,’ I said, ‘you can pay for them like everybody else.’ He said, ‘Very well, how much?’ ‘To you,’ I said, ‘I am not for sale.’”

&nbs
p; “Don’t you ever wonder what would’ve happened if, you know…”

  “What?”

  “You’d made a little nicer with him, that’s all.”

  “That is not the recommended approach with reptiles. You keep them in full view and keep a sharp edge handy.”

  Within another minute, the lights around us began to go out, one by one. I leaned back toward Alonzo.

  “So if you and Styles had such bad blood from the get-go, why did he let you into his collections? Why were you even in touch with him?”

  “You should know this by now, Henry. Collectors never burn bridges. It is never in our interest to do so. Upon further reflection, I decided to throw Styles a few bones. He responded with a few more bones. An entirely specious cordiality ensued. And if it meant enduring his rather vulgar civility, then…” He stifled a yawn. “Well, in the end, it has all proved worth it.”

  Worth it, I thought. Lily suffocated in a vault. Amory buried in the Carolina sand. Alonzo a felon and an international refugee. Me, very possibly, a suspected murderer. Worth it.

  “Here’s what I still can’t figure out,” he said. “If Harriot didn’t find his gold in Virginia, where did he find it? He never left England again; he virtually never left his house.”

  “Maybe Ralegh gave it to him. Or Northumberland. I mean, both those guys were in trouble at some point. The Crown was confiscating their assets. Maybe they wanted to keep something around for posterity.”

  “But on the map, Harriot calls it ‘my treasure.’ You’re not suggesting he kept the money for himself?”

  If he had, I thought, he would have earned himself some fierce enemies. And the record showed none of that. Ralegh, in his will, referred to Harriot as a “trustye & faithfull frinde” and, in a strangely sweet gesture, bequeathed him “all such blacke suites of apparell as I haue in the same house.” As for Northumberland, one of his first acts on leaving the Tower was to purchase a monument to Harriot’s memory. If they ever felt betrayed by their old teacher, they did a good job of hiding it.

  “I suppose there’s one other possibility,” Alonzo drawled.

  “Which is?”