by Louis Bayard
Clarissa pressed her lips together.
“So Alonzo’s got, what, a gangster Rolodex?”
“Nothing that subpoenable. More like a phone chain.”
“Extending all the way to London?”
“It got him here, didn’t it? How many dead guys do you know of who can come up with a passport in forty-eight hours?”
We were back in the Pitt the Elder room now, and I was sitting in the cane-bottom chair, and Clarissa was sitting right in my lap, and I was engaged in the deeply satisfying work of untangling her hair when she said:
“Henry.”
“Yeah?”
“When I first told you I’d seen the School of Night, I know you thought I was starkers. No, you did, and I don’t blame you. I mean, I’ve watched those psychic shows.”
“So how is it different for you?”
“I’m not a psychic. I’ve never been able to predict a blessed thing. And no one’s talking in my ear, no one’s there at all, it’s—it’s spasms. Flashes.”
“And that tower was one of the flashes.”
She blew out a cheekful of air.
“I have no idea if there’s any treasure up there. I only know he was there. And she was there.”
With an air of some regret, she hoisted herself from my lap (only that still-tender tumescence to show she had been there).
“Okay,” I said. “So where does this Margaret Crookenshanks fit in with Harriot’s treasure?”
“I don’t know.”
“And how exactly is she dying?”
“I don’t know. She’s in a room and—God, I can feel the life going from her.” She paused a good long while. “There’s someone in the room with her.”
“Is it Harriot?”
“If he is Harriot, then yes. How’s that for an answer?”
“So what’s he doing?”
“I think he’s killing her.…”
* * *
We’d previously thought it the wisest course to remain in our room, far from the murdering crowd. Now, though, the thought of staying here, walled about by ghosts, was more than we could bear. So we put aside any lingering fears of Agents Mooney and Milberg and strolled over to Kew Bridge.
Strolled implies more daring than I really felt at that moment. For the first few blocks, the world seemed to glow with my paranoia, and in fact, the manner in which every pedestrian ignored me struck me as the sincerest token of his enmity. It was Clarissa who—well, I was going to say she made me braver, but all she gave me, really, was an infusion of life force. Simply by brushing her shoulder against mine she had the effect of recalling me to my body and making me realize that I was, to my surprise, hungry. In an extremely domestic way. And was this not, under the circumstances, as good a reason as any to keep walking?
And so, by the time we reached the bridge, I’d completely forgotten about who might or might not be following us, and I was able to look down with no small pleasure on the Thames. That seethe of chop and tide, bearing leaves and twigs in a fury of purpose, and yet serene enough to grant passage to a single canoe, oared by two men in parka vests. Neither of whom gave us so much as a passing glance.
How different this picture would have been in Harriot’s time. A fleet of barges with square sails carrying produce from upriver. Wherries and tilt boats and dung boats and, from the landings, passengers calling “Oars! Oars!” to the sunburnt watermen. It was a wilder beast in those days, the Thames. It flooded its banks without a moment’s notice, and it was so choked with mud—and rubbish and shit and dead dogs and hog intestines—that even the haddock couldn’t see to swim.
I wrapped my coat around Clarissa and pulled her toward me.
“Let’s say there was a Margaret,” I said, “and let’s say we’re right about when this map was written.”
“Sixteen ought three.”
“In that case, it’s worth remembering that sixteen ought three, in addition to being the year of James’s succession, was a plague year.”
“No,” she said. “The London plague was sixteen sixty-five, right? A year before the big fire.”
“That was the Great Plague,” I explained. “Hygiene being what it was in those days, fleas and rats being what they were, plagues came along pretty much once a generation. And the one that came in sixteen ought three”—I clicked my tongue against my teeth—“that was one of the worst.”
* * *
The scourge struck in Southwark first, then worked its way north and west into the city. By the end of July, it was claiming nearly fourteen hundred lives a week; in September, more than three thousand. At any moment, one in every six Londoners was either sick or dying. The town was so deserted that grass grew in Cheapside.
“They closed all the theaters,” I said. “They canceled feasts and assemblies, they stopped calling juries. King James was supposed to take a triumphant passage through the city, but he had to hightail it to Hampton Court. He ended up in Salisbury. You couldn’t even get into the royal palace unless you had a certificate saying you were from an uninfected district.”
Clarissa stared at a flotilla of swans coming downriver.
“So you’re saying Margaret could have been killed by the plague?”
“I’m saying if she was a resident of the greater London population, there’s at least a decent chance.”
“But how would we know for sure?”
“The bills of mortality. Once a week, the city leaders compiled a list of plague deaths. That’s how they tracked the epidemic. They couldn’t catch every single death, but those parish clerks were damn thorough. I think it’s worth a search.”
“The British Library?”
I shook my head. “Too much time. I’ve got a friend who teaches Tudor history at Columbia. I’ll call her.”
“A friend,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “Old or new?”
“Old.”
* * *
That wasn’t quite correct. Sabina and I were new at being friends, but we were old hands at being divorced. Altogether, we’d been divorced three times as long as we’d been married and with somewhat more success.
Which is to explain why, when I called her, she sounded friendlier than she had on our wedding night. Then again, she hadn’t just caught me flirting with the Filipina barmaid at the St. Regis. We had never really sorted through the detritus of our marriage, but the mere fact that so many of our mutual friends were happy—or at least settled—had forced us by default into a tiny support group. Which, of course, could only be sustained so long as we each remained single and unhappy.
And so it was with a tremor of disloyalty that I glanced over now at Clarissa, standing at the northern end of Kew Bridge. Resplendently cold in her woolen car coat. Her red lips even redder in the wind.
“Sabina,” I said into the phone, “I’m in kind of a hurry. I’m in London, or near there, and a colleague of mine has a question.”
“A colleague.” She exhaled long and hard. “Tell me what you need, Henry.”
* * *
Clarissa’s stomach was rattling as loudly as mine when we got back to the Dragon’s Tongue. We considered heading straight for the gastro-pub, but Clarissa wanted to put on a sweater first, so we climbed the stairs to our room, and I pulled the heavy wooden key chain from my pocket—and just then Alonzo came bursting from his room. Clutching two shopping bags, grinning like a televangelist.
“I know your size, Henry, but I had to guess Clarissa’s.”
He shoved a bag in each of our arms and waited with ill-disguised impatience.
“Try them on, for Christ’s sake.”
“Try what?”
And then I saw Clarissa drawing out a corset and a pair of stockings and a farthingale and a kirtle skirt and a petticoat. And then I looked in my bag and found a feathered hat and a short cloak and a small snowy ruff, limp from old sweat.
“Tell me you didn’t pay good money for this,” I said.
“Don’t worry your pretty little head. Oh, and dinner’s
on me, too. But you have to promise to go right to bed afterward. No rutting, please, we need all our energy for tomorrow.”
“Where are we going, a costume party?”
How he beamed at us then! With the fury of a thousand suns.
“We’re going to a wedding, kids.”
39
MEET THE HAPPY couple.
She: vice president for investment banking at the London office of Morgan Stanley Smith Barney. He: senior copywriter in the brand development division of Ralph Lauren. Together, they were clearing well over five hundred thousand pounds a year, and when the time came to merge their assets, they merged as well on a key detail. Having met at an Elizabethan costume ball, they wanted, more than anything, a Tudor wedding. And what better location than Syon House—which, on Saturdays, is closed to the public but open to private rites, the more private the better?
And so, on this Saturday evening in September, several hundred of London’s wealthiest citizens were squeezing themselves into garters and petticoats and mockado stomachers and buckram waistcoats—for the purpose of attending an event that, from a certain distance, resembled a high-end Renaissance Faire.
This was the welter of mortified privilege into which Alonzo Wax proposed to plunge us. And if he had a plan for getting us out, he was doing a good job of hiding it. Every question we popped at him, he stirred away, like sugar in weak tea.
“Why would we go to a wedding reception?”
“Because it gets us on the grounds.”
“Why a night reception?”
“Because we’re the by-God School of Night.”
“How are we going to get by the security guards?”
“They follow tightly appointed rounds. Believe me, I’ve cased the joint. A sentence, by the way, I never thought I’d use.”
“How are we going to keep from setting off the house alarms?”
“Oh, yes,” said Alonzo, already sounding fatigued. “That’s what Seamus is for.”
He said nothing more on the subject until Seamus himself arrived two hours before the event, dressed as a Cistercian monk. A year or two short of thirty. Small, wire-taut, Groucho-browed, grim as coal. He carried a rucksack and sat perfectly still, spoke only when spoken to, expended just enough energy to survive.
“Don’t let his demeanor fool you,” Alonzo instructed us. “Seamus here is a climbing dynamo. He’s summited Mount Rainier and Makalu, hasn’t he? Not to mention Annapurna and K2. A perfect paragon with technical alpine rock and high-altitude glaciated volcanoes. Honestly, we couldn’t find anyone better suited.”
“Better suited for what?” I asked.
“Henry. The distance from the ground to the top of that tower at Syon House is what?”
“Fifty feet.”
“How high is K2?”
“Higher.”
“So which would be easier to climb?”
“Syon House.”
“Exactly.”
I looked at him. “You’re proposing to scale the northwest turret?”
“Compared to Annapurna, it’s a tiptoe up the tulips. We could be up and over in ten minutes, isn’t that right, Seamus?”
“Hold on,” I said. “We?”
A fleck of red flashed from Alonzo’s cornea.
“Well, come on, Henry, you’re in decent enough shape, aren’t you?”
“I haven’t climbed Annapurna! And just where are you planning to be all this time?”
“On the ground, of course, with Miss Dale. We’ll be keeping lookout.”
“And catching you,” added Clarissa, with a wink.
I gulped down the last dregs of my coffee and closed my eyes and pictured myself crashing through her outstretched arms.
“Okay,” I said, “one more question. How exactly are we getting into this event? It sounds kind of exclusive.”
“Can it be, Henry, that you have no experience crashing weddings?”
“Only my own.”
“Then listen to me. It can be done. I’ve crashed inaugurations, coronations. Circumcisions. It takes a dash of ruthlessness, that’s all.”
Of ruthlessness, Alonzo had more than a dash, but even he was surprised, I think, by the level of security surrounding Syon Park that evening. You couldn’t even go as far as the parking lot without having your Bentley or Jaguar or Lexus hybrid stopped by a ginger-bearded pirate, who used his one patch-free eye to inspect your driver’s license down to its finest grain. So we took the bus and, rather than stroll right in, we traced out a route by the river that brought us over a ha-ha and left us, by some strange miracle, twenty feet from the reception tent. Such an easy passage that once again I felt as if natural laws were being bent back in the face of Alonzo’s will.
Standing before the entrance, however, was something that would not bend: a Myrmidon in an executioner’s suit. Arms fused to his chest, earphones sprouting from his square head. Animosity in every pore. Four hundred years earlier, he’d have been Topcliffe’s chief assistant, driving screws under the fingers of Catholic recusants.
Rather than front him, we reconstituted ourselves around a Mercedes G-Class, pretending it was ours, and watched the legitimate guests, in their costume-shop regalia, process onto the conservatory grounds, feeling for the watches and cell phones and PDAs that could, in a pinch, take them back to modernity.
“They look scared,” I said.
“Who can blame ’em?” Clarissa asked. “I’d sooner leave a Tudor wedding than attend one.”
It was altogether half an hour before we spotted a potential ally. A lithe, rawboned woman, somewhere between forty and sixty, with a terrace of false orange curls and a pannier skirt that was no more Tudor than Robin Hood but had the advantage of sweeping everything from its path.
“Could we fit under that dress?” Alonzo wondered.
“Room enough for Henry,” said Clarissa.
Physically speaking, Seamus the hardbody was a better candidate for the seducer’s job, but he had already retreated into the purdah of his iPod, from which the urgent chords of Panic! at the Disco now came pouring forth, and Clarissa insisted that my Earl of Essex drag showed my legs to good advantage, and Alonzo didn’t disagree, so, without any preamble, Alonzo and Clarissa gave me a shove, and out I went.
The woman was fumbling through her clutch purse when I approached. Her fine marsupial features were pinched with aggrievement as she swore to herself.
“Is this what you’re looking for?” I asked, proffering a cigarette lighter.
She was too surprised to protest, but as soon as her Camel No. 9 was lit, she took her sweet time looking me over.
“Bloody nerve,” she said at last.
Meaning me, I figured, but in the next breath, she added, “If it’s to be a smoke-free wedding, tell us in advance. Spell it out in the wretched invitation. Don’t leave us at the mercy of some little … air-quality Gestapo.”
She took a long, defiant drag. Studied me awhile longer.
“American, are you? How do you fit in?”
“I’m Aurelia’s cousin. From New York.”
Her perfectly manicured left eyebrow rose half a centimeter.
“She’s never mentioned Yankee relations.”
“Why should she? We’re an embarrassment. I was told on no uncertain terms to keep to myself and speak to nobody.”
“You have failed at your charge.”
“Under the circumstances, I can’t regret it.”
I smiled, and after some consideration she did, too.
“Tell me, Mister…”
“Daniell.”
“Where are you staying?”
“Kew.”
“They do want to hide you away.”
“I can’t complain, it’s Aurelia’s day.”
She passed her hand over her mouth.
“Well then, I shall have to keep you to myself, Mr. Daniell.”
“I’m happy to be kept. But what am I to call you?”
“Millicent.”
“Is th
at your real name?”
“For now.”
I took out a cigarette of my own, and we puffed together in silence. Then she hooked her hand lightly around my arm.
“Back to the horror,” she announced.
At the sight of me, the executioner’s face tightened appreciably. His shoulders squared, his hand went to his earpiece … and then Millicent drawled:
“Mr. Daniell is with me.”
Five words in a languid public-school accent, and the proletarian giant backed away.
No time to savor my triumph, for the moment we entered the tent, the sunlight fell away and we were swaddled in a crepuscular pall, relieved at intervals by tiki torches, which blazed away in defiance of any fire code, broiling the air into incense. Sweat sprang from me as I peered through the helices of smoke and listened to the jangled accents of harps and pennywhistles and hammered dulcimers.
“Can you believe the shit they serve?” Millicent said. “Smoked turkey legs. Ale. Who wouldn’t I screw for some champagne right now?”
Gradually, as my retinas let in more light, the jumble of limbs around me began to cohere into guests … who were no less discordant for being fully formed. Queen Elizabeth chatted on happy terms with Mary Queen of Scots. Henry the Eighth necked with the pope. A young bishop gavotted with an ancient milkmaid. And a madrigal choir of stout matrons sang:
Up and down he wandered
whilst she was missing;
When he found her,
O then they fell a-kissing.
Millicent’s fingers were dancing on my wrist. She had been talking to me for at least two minutes.
“… Well, never mind, what right have I to complain? My wedding was an agony of tulle. It pains me to think of it.”
I stared at her ring finger.
“Is your husband here?” I asked.
“Possibly.”
And now a hive of fire jugglers had surrounded us. The heat was flying off them in punishing waves—I was too scorched even to perspire—and when I closed my eyes, the tent ceiling came rushing toward me.
I gasped … blinked myself awake. Millicent, in my brain’s absence, had somehow procured two goblets of champagne.