The School of Night

by Louis Bayard

  “Ain’t I the cleverest thing?” she crowed.

  “They’re saving that for the toast, aren’t they?”

  “Our need is greater.”

  Her hand had stolen into mine, and the touch of her skin was strangely healing. I was close enough now to see the fineness of her bones, to smell the talc beneath her Elizabethan wig, and to imagine her driving me to a pied-à-terre in Notting Hill with a plumply cushioned daybed.…

  And then, puncturing that image: a stab of scruple. For standing outside this tent, not fifty yards away, was Clarissa Dale. And the distance between me and her struck me now as an affliction. Even as my new companion wove lines of chatter around me, touched my hand, my arm, my waist, all I could think was: Where is Clarissa? How can I get her here?

  Ironically, it was Millicent who came to my rescue. After we’d taken a rather awkward turn across the dance floor to “Now Is the Month of Maying,” she drained another glass of champagne and then slid two crisp fifty-pound notes into my hand.

  “Be a dear and ask the bouncer for some coke.”

  I stared at the bills.

  “Come now,” she said. “You’ve done this before.”

  “Only with men who won’t kill me.”

  “Ohh.” She caressed my jaw. “He’s in that line, you know. We’ve done business before.”

  And still I hesitated, at which point she planted her hands on me as preemptively as Clarissa and Alonzo had done.

  “Go.”

  From the back, the bouncer looked even larger. Some massive block of granite that the oceans had been washing over for centuries and had succeeded only in finishing to an onyx gleam.

  “The lady,” I blurted.

  The muscles around his jaw began to gather.

  “She wants to know,” I said, “if she might have something more stimulating than tobacco.”

  For at least five seconds, he seemed to be picturing what my face would look like once it had been driven through my skull. Then he took a half step back and jerked his head to the right.

  I followed, waving my hands behind me. The gesture felt futile, but when I turned around, I was pleased to see my co-conspirators passing like a breeze through the now-open doorway. I followed a minute later, with my pockets of dime bags.

  “Clever boy,” said Millicent in her throaty alto.

  She had no intention of sharing. She clutched her booty to her corset and made straight for the handpainted sign that read PRIVEE.

  “Never stand between a woman and her blow,” said Alonzo.

  With those disproportionately small feet of his, he had once again managed to sneak up behind me.

  “Where’s Seamus?” I asked.

  “Napping.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “We found a quiet place between the virginals and the clavicytherium. Now listen. I’m talking to you as if we’ve just met. One minute, no more, and then we part. Please remember this principle. You don’t know me any better than the other guests. And you are not to react in any way when I give you this.”

  Something sleek and cool slid into the sheath alongside my right hip.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “A rapier, of course. No Elizabethan gentleman would have been without one.”

  “Doesn’t seem long enough.”

  “Well, excuse me, a carving knife was the nearest thing to hand. I stole it from one of the caterers.”

  “And I need this because…”

  “Because one never knows, do one?”

  “Okay, just tell me where Clarissa is.”

  “Somewhere, that’s where. Waiting to stumble into you. Kindly avoid any libidinal eruptions.”

  Territorial urges, though, were another matter. When I found her ten minutes later, she was locked in conversation with an amorous goatherd, who was doing everything but wrap his crook around her neck. I had the pleasure of seeing her mask of boredom crack open at sight of me.

  “Oh, hey,” she said, tapping the goatherd on the shoulder. “Could you refill my flagon of mead?”

  He obliged, a bit sulkily. I swerved right into his abandoned space.

  “We have one minute to speak,” I said. “According to Alonzo.”

  “In that case … I love you.”

  To which my first response, I’m ashamed to say, was a guffaw. Loud enough to send at least three heads rippling our way. Then I looked more closely into her eyes, which had not a spark of humor in them.

  “You don’t believe me?” she asked.

  “I don’t believe or disbelieve. I don’t … I’m just—”

  I loved you from the moment you walked into Alonzo’s funeral.

  The words were queued up on my tongue, and maybe I would have said them, or maybe I would have been too stunned by the suddenness with which we had just vaulted past months and months of boundary-setting and indirection and misdirection. A part of me, a large part of me, couldn’t believe in this moment. For the simple reason that nothing could ever be as simple as saying I love you and meaning it and having someone else say it right back and mean it.

  And so I ceased even to sputter, and I stared at her helplessly and watched the light behind her eyes fade, and I would have said something, anything, to bring it back, but then I felt a tap on my shoulder. Not the goatherd, as I first thought, but a heavy-faced, baggy-eyed man in his early sixties, wearing a Thomas More costume like Marley’s chains.

  “Would you tell my wife?” he said in a once-robust North Country accent.

  “Your wife?”

  He nodded toward the far end, where Millicent, shiny and transported, was wrapping one of her legs around the tent pole. Her wig had tipped to one side, her bodice was stained, and her shoes had gone missing.

  “Tell her I’m fagged out,” her husband was saying. “She can find me in the car.”

  He stood alongside me for another minute, watching his wife shake her slender haunches and douse her wrists with champagne.

  “She does love to dance,” he allowed.

  * * *

  The party took its sweet time winding down, but the effects of humidity and wool and salted food, aggravated by the natural hysteria that wedding receptions keep only partly at bay, began to exact a toll. Feeling a little dehydrated myself, I went in search of Clarissa, who was slumped on a milking stool next to the ice station. Not the same tiredness that the other guests were experiencing, closer to the pall that had taken her in Stanton Park. She looked as if the lights were being turned off inside, cell by cell.

  “Jesus,” I said. “You all right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You sure?”

  “Mm.”

  I turned half away, stared across the floor. And then I heard her say:

  “Henry.”

  She tried briefly to stand, then sat back down at once.

  “Sorry,” she said. “What I said earlier.”

  “Oh. Whatever.”

  “The mead, I guess. It does something to a girl.”

  “No, it’s fine.”

  And because once again I was powerless to say anything more, I just stood there, waiting for some color to come back to her cheeks.

  And then I felt a throbbing against my hip. Not my rapier but my cell phone, chafing with alarm.

  “Hello?”

  “You fucking owe me,” said Sabina.

  “Wait,” I said. “I can’t hear you.”

  I turned away and, after some searching, found a rack of ermine robes that partially muffled the noise. I plugged a finger in one ear and said:

  “Go ahead.”

  “Well, to begin with, the bills of mortality only tell you how many people died in any given parish. They don’t give you any names.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So, because I’m a fucking saint, I combed through all the parish death records for 1603. Parish by parish, you so owe me.”

  “And what did you find?”

  “Nothing exactly like Crookenshanks. The clos
est was—um, Crokenshents. In St. Helen’s Bishopsgate. Mother and daughter. Deceased within a couple of weeks of each other.”

  “Do the records say how they died?”

  “Nope. But given the time frame, you’d have to think plague.”

  “Christian names?”

  “Okay, the mother’s was Audrey.”

  “And the daughter’s was Margaret.”

  “Uh, no, Miss Marple. That’s why I held off calling you. But since it was such a rare sort of name—I mean for that day—I figured you’d want to hear it anyway.”

  But I couldn’t hear it, not the first time she said it, so I asked her to repeat it.

  “Henry, are you there?”

  “Yeah,” I said, feeling the strain in my eye sockets. “Sorry.”

  “It’s noisy where you are.”

  “I’m at a party.”

  “I suppose your colleague is there, too?”

  My colleague.

  I spun around, parted the ermine robes … and found Clarissa exactly where I’d left her. On the stool by the ice station. Still and spent.

  And whatever relief I felt was dispersed in the next moment. For, in the fifty feet of space that separated us, a new figure had interposed itself. And this same figure was walking toward Clarissa in a slow and meaningful cadence.

  His size was outlandish, but there was something genteel about Halldor, too, now that he had cast aside the tourist T-shirts of America for the cloak and ruff and feathered hat of an officer of horse. He was moving like a hyperelongated dancer, straight in the spine, liquid in the shoulders, and his torso, as it swiveled, provided passing glimpses of Clarissa’s face.

  Sabina’s voice was jagged in my ear.

  “Henry. Henry, what’s wrong?”

  But I was too busy running to answer.

  Or at least I was trying to run, but the entire wedding party had joined league against me. A court jester in a papier-mâché crown blocked me on one side; Justice Shallow and Othello on the other. I turned my shoulder like a tailback and broke though their ranks but ran headlong into a group of Shoreditch whores, locked in gossip, and just when I had freed myself from them, a ring of Morris dancers circled me, kicking up their sturdy white thighs. I hurled myself at them, shouting, but no one could hear me over the ocarinas and the hang drums, no one even saw me stumbling toward the ice station, where the chair formerly occupied by Clarissa Dale now sat vacant.

  She was gone.

  40

  IF A CHASM had opened up beneath her and sucked her into the earth’s mantle, she could have not disappeared more effectually. I canvassed the surrounding area. I fanned out in concentric circles. I sussed out niches and recesses and corners, traced and retraced all possible escape routes, I did everything but whip the wedding guests into a dragnet. It was no use. Clarissa was gone.

  Until then, I had imagined I knew what helplessness was, only because I’d watched most of my life pass without doing much in the way of stopping it. But I had never known anything like this agony of waiting.

  And so the call, when it came ten minutes later, was nothing less than mercy. Even the courtly croon of Bernard Styles sounded very nearly sweet.

  “Mr. Cavendish,” he said.

  “Where is she?”

  “Resting, dear boy. She’s quite done in.”

  My hand had begun to squeeze my phone.

  “You fucking bastard.”

  “Now if anybody should be cross, Mr. Cavendish … You know full well if you had been forthcoming with me from the beginning, matters would never have reached this juncture.”

  “I don’t think either of us has been perfectly forthcoming, do you?”

  My voice was calm, but my eyes were scanning every last inch of that tent, looking for just one head with just one cell phone pressed to its ear.

  “If you’re looking for me,” said Bernard Styles, “I’m afraid you won’t have much luck. I’m not even in Syon Park. Never mind, Mr. Cavendish, I take your point. Candor on both sides is warranted. Shall I begin? We each have something the other wants. All that’s required now is a simple trade.”

  “You mean the letter,” I said.

  “Of course.”

  “Well, then, you’ve got the wrong man. I don’t have it. Alonzo has it.”

  “Ah, yes, the late Alonzo. Well, that’s very unfortunate, Mr. Cavendish. I had expected more entrepreneurial initiative from you. Given the stakes.”

  But the stakes, I knew, were different for Alonzo than they were for me. Given the choice between saving Clarissa and finding Harriot’s treasure, Alonzo would err on the latter side. Of that, I had no doubt. I would have to find something else to feed Bernard Styles.

  “Let’s make the stakes higher,” I heard myself say.

  And if I thought I was being too oblique, the laughter that greeted me was perfectly knowing.

  “Mr. Cavendish, you don’t honestly think I credit all that rot about Harriot’s treasure, do you?”

  “Then why have you been stringing us along?”

  “An old man needs amusement.”

  “It’s real,” I said. “The treasure’s real.”

  This time, at least, he didn’t laugh. I fastened onto his silence as if it were a vine.

  “I was a doubter, too, Mr. Styles. Believe me, I doubted. But I can’t overlook the evidence anymore. The treasure is there.”

  “And why should you wish to persuade me?”

  “Because if you give me a few hours, it can be yours.”

  “How gracious,” he said dryly. “And what would you demand in return? For these charitable labors?”

  I pressed my thumb against my eye. Pressed hard.

  “I believe you mentioned an exchange,” I said. “That would be all I’m interested in.”

  “Oh, Mr. Cavendish, you are quite the gallant.” You could almost hear his eyes twinkling.

  “Never mind, just give me until three A.M. That’s all I’m asking for.”

  Another pause, of longer duration.

  “If you know where this golden hoard is,” said Styles, “why don’t you simply tell me? Save yourself all the bother.”

  “That I can’t do. You have to believe me, I’m the only one who can retrieve it.”

  “And why should I trust you after all that has passed?”

  “Because. Because when it comes to Clarissa, you can—” I had to wait several seconds to master myself. “You can trust me.”

  I closed my eyes and counted. One … two …

  And then I heard Bernard Styles say:

  “Very well.”

  He disappeared into a cloud of static before abruptly returning.

  “I shall expect a call from you at the very stroke of three. If I do not hear from you, I shall consider our arrangement null and void. Is that clear?”

  I thought then of those other figures from Bernard Styles’s past. Cornelius Snowden, murdered in Postman’s Park. Maisie Hartzbrinck, tossed under a bus. That Southampton professor thrown from a roof. Amory Swale. All of them rendered null and void.

  “I understand,” I said.

  * * *

  Alonzo found me just a few minutes later, wandering beneath a canopy of white silicone doves.

  “Jesus,” he said. “You look like someone sealed you in a crypt.”

  “I think I had some of Millicent’s snow.”

  “You think?”

  “It’s blurry.”

  “I can’t tell you how much this pleases me, Henry. Every hunting party requires a cokehead, don’t you find? I hope Clarissa, at least, has kept it together.”

  “Clarissa left.”

  How thinly it sounded. What a tinny afterecho.

  “She left,” said Alonzo.

  “She took ill. Scrammed back to the hotel. Between you and me, I think she was scared shitless. And honestly, who needs that kind of energy dragging us down? We have to stay linear.”

  He was staring at me now, as though my skin were falling away in long stri
ps.

  “Perhaps you’re right,” he said at last. “Perhaps Clarissa has served her function.”

  Just the slightest lash imparted to that last word. It was left to me to puzzle out whether an insult was intended and whether I was the intended mark.

  “Let’s see,” he said. “Ceremonial dances are done. Toasts are done. Groom’s mother is plastered beyond repair. Yes, I’d say things will be winding down very soon.”

  “What should I be doing?”

  “Staying linear, of course.”

  * * *

  By eleven-thirty the groom and bride had fled, and by midnight the guests were being, more or less forcefully, expelled from the grounds. Except for three guests who weren’t rushing anywhere.

  It was nearly as easy as Alonzo had promised. We slipped around the rear of the Great Conservatory. We crept into the Syon Park gardens. We found the rucksack Seamus had buried under a pile of leaves. All we had to do now was wait.

  And even the rain, when it came, was more sound than anything else: a shirring against the scarlet oaks and chestnuts. The stars had slipped behind orange-gray clouds, and from somewhere in the distance, Millicent’s alto spilled toward us like a ghostly river.

  “Mr. Daniell?… Mr. Daniell, where a-a-are you?”

  For a moment or two I was persuaded she would find us. But then her calls tapered away, and in my mind’s eye I pictured her finding her way to the magnetic north of her car, where her slumbering, abiding husband was even now waiting for her.

  All we could hear after a while were the musicians calling good night to one another and the catering vans loading up and the crackle of the security crew’s walkie-talkies. And then nothing but nightingales.

  Until my phone went off.

  “Don’t answer,” Alonzo hissed.

  But instinct overrode caution. I was already pressing the receiver to my ear.

  “Mr. Cavendish?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Detective Acree with the MPD.”

  It was a sign of how far along I was that this name at first meant nothing to me. I had to come at it in sections. Metropolitan Police Department. Washington, D.C. My city of residence …

  “Hello,” I said faintly.

  “Do you have a moment, Mr. Cavendish?”