by Louis Bayard
—They would take these magical talismans in their rough hands and, one after another, they would ask, Are these the works of gods or men?
—Of men, I said. But I hastened to add that these men were in turn created and inspired by a great and all-knowing God. I made a point of showing them our Bible. They could not read it, of course, so they did what was to them second nature. They rubbed it on their chests, and they pressed it against their heads, and they kissed it, again and again, so infatuated were they.
—Good Christian that I was, I strove to correct their idolatry. I informed them that God’s healing force derives not from the book materially and of itself but rather from the contents therein. Which was, need I say, the true doctrine of salvation through Christ.
—This distinction meant nothing to them. The Bible was miraculous, certainly—it had words written in it, after all, and they had never seen such things—but it was no more miraculous than the spring clock. The Gospel was—how shall I put it?—one more weapon in our English arsenal. It occupied the same rank as a musket or buckler.
—And so, by degrees, I brought these savage priests to the side of Christ. Did I accomplish this through the power of divine revelation? No. I dazzled them with tricks. (Moses the juggler, do you recall, Kit?) I played on their credulity. I pretended our inventions were divinely sent. I led them to believe that, without our God, their villages and crops would be destroyed. And even as they lay dying, I persuaded them it was God’s will. Machiavelli could have asked no better of me.
—Oh, you may look with scorn upon these savages, so like unto sheep. But now I ask you, my friends. Were you and I any different in how we came to God? Were we not, as children, seduced by tricks—by music and incense and signs and omens? Were we not dazzled by power? Our parents, our priests, our kings and queens, all claiming a divine sanction for their sovereignty over us? Were we any less credulous than the natives of Virginia? Any less quick to obey?
—From the very moment of our birth, we were played upon. And we were conquered, gentlemen, just as surely as the Algonkins. Why? Because without our consent, without the consent of all men, a society—a church—a monarchy—cannot hope to endure. It follows, then, that said consent must be secured by the quickest and surest means to hand. Which is to say … God.
—Tonight, then, I ask you. Has God ever spoken to you? His mouth to your ear? Or was God just the birch rod that brought you to your knees?
* * *
They were silent a good while. Not, as he well knew, from outrage—the little Academe had tiptoed to the end of many a branch before this—but from the desire to find the pithiest reply.
It was Marlowe at last who seized a candle, a pen, and paper and began to write.
—We will follow this out, he said. —To its end, natural or unnatural. And we will do it together.
And so that night they wrote a poem.
It was composed in rhymed iambic pentameter. Marlowe, the show-off, had petitioned for a Petrarchan sonnet sequence, but the others ignored him and tossed line after line into the mix—even Marlowe’s acolyte offered a phrase or two—and the poem grew beyond the bounds set for it. And as each new page was blackened over with blottings, Marlowe simply took out another sheet and kept writing.
It was half an hour past dawn when he scribbled out the final line. Eyes febrile, hands trembling, he rose and held the sheets out to them.
—Behold! Our dark treasure!
And then, in a firm and measured voice, he began to read. It was only then that they grasped how far they had trespassed.
Then some sage man, above the vulgar wise,
Knowing that laws could not in quiet dwell,
Unless they were observed, did first devise
The names of God, religion, Heaven, and Hell
Whereas indeed they were mere fictions.
Far from chastened, Marlowe sounded giddier and giddier as he went along, and his voice surged still higher as he recited the two lines that were his particular invention.
Only bug-bears to keep the world in fear
And make them quietly the yoke to bear.
The day’s first light was just creeping around the curtains, and the candles had contracted into tiny stubs when Marlowe came at last to the final stanza.
In death’s void kingdom reigns eternal night,
Secure of evil, secure of foes,
Where nothing doth the wicked man affright
No more than him who dies in doing right.
Then since in death nothing shall to us fall,
Here while I live I will have a snatch at all.
They had done just as Marlowe had suggested. They had followed things out—and found no end at all.
It was Ralegh who, after a long silence, said:
—Perhaps the best tribute to our labor might be to burn it.
With an almost shy smile, he added:
—Lest we ourselves end in fire.
And here was the final surprise. It was Marlowe’s acolyte, so silent through much of the night, who was the first to act, snatching the paper from the table and flinging it into the fire.
A single tear coursed down Christopher Marlowe’s cheek as he watched the work of an evening vanish.
* * *
They might have been excused for thinking that was the last of it. But three years later, an anonymous tragedy began making the rounds of London. An appalling piece of dramaturgy titled The First Part of the Tragicall Raigne of Selimus. It concerned a tyrannical Turk who, as rationale for murdering his father, offers the very poem the Academe’s members had written that long-ago night at Sherborne.
How had the dark treasure survived its own incineration? And who had shepherded it to publication? Marlowe by now was dead. Neither Ralegh nor Northumberland would have dared drag it to the light, any more than Harriot. The only possible suspect was that mild young man whom Marlowe had brought to Sherborne.
And suddenly this nearly silent figure bloomed with unguessed possibilities. Had he, in fact, been committing their lines to memory the whole time? Or had he engaged in some last-minute sleight of hand, sliding the dark treasure under his cloak as he tossed some other sheet onto the flames? Was he even now borrowing Marlowe’s preferred form—the tragedy—to flaunt his power over the School’s remaining members?
The only saving grace was that the text made no mention of the Academe or its members. But behind the scenes, a connection had already been forged. Marlowe, before his murder, had been charged with heresy and blasphemy. And within weeks of the publication of Selimus, Ralegh and Harriot were called before an ecclesiastical commission to answer charges of atheism and apostasy. The evidence was scant and the charges were dismissed, but the taint lingered.
And now, with Sir Walter Ralegh soon to stand trial for treason, those lines of old verse might just bear him to his grave.
Small wonder, then, that standing with Harriot atop the Bloody Tower, he should think to ask:
—What has happened to our dark treasure?
With a sorrowing heart Harriot answers:
—Quite as lost to us now as it was then.
—By that, you mean it is still in one gentleman’s possession?
—As best I can determine.
Ralegh watches a pair of gulls wheeling and diving among the idled ships’ masts. Then, to Harriot’s surprise, he begins to roar with laughter.
—Kit should have taken greater care with his lovers, would you not say?
44
AUGUST 1603: LONDON is dying.
Dying by the thousands. Soul by soul, hour by hour. Dying in taverns, in shuttered-up homes. In brakes and ditches and alleys. On the doorsteps of churches.
Sometimes the plague gives a day’s warning, sometimes only a few minutes. The streets that were thronged weeks earlier for King James’s coronation have now a spectral stillness. Those who must travel on errands hew to the center of the road, the better to avoid contagion, but there is no escaping the sounds. A thren
ody of groans, and every so often a brief cry of astonishment, as though death were a kind of pinch.
King James is far away, and the richest Londoners have long since abandoned the city. The poor, lacking any better choice, straggle into the countryside with nothing to guide them. Not a house or village will admit them, and many perish by the road, in fields, in barns. One man, dragging a barrow after him, makes it as far as Syon Reach, a seven-mile distance, before the plague catches him. He dies in the muck of the riverbank, at 8:31 in the evening, to the sound of larks.
At nearby Syon House, the Earl of Northumberland has announced his intention to move his household to Tynemouth Castle. Every member of the earl’s retinue, high and low, is set to work. Even the three wise men who live on the earl’s patronage, even they must set aside their customary duties. Robert Hues oversees the packaging of plate and crystal, William Warner is given charge of key artworks, and Thomas Harriot is made master of the books.
After all, such a library as the earl’s cannot be entrusted to a common knave. Imagine what might happen on the road. The drayman nods off, the wheel rolls into a ditch … the massed sum of Western wisdom swims in mud and sheep shit.
—It must be you, Tom, says the earl. —Nobody else would feel the wound so.
And so Harriot culls a representative sampling of two hundred volumes, sets them in a cushion of straw, watches over them as they’re loaded, covers them with three tarpaulins … and then travels with them all the way to Northumbria.
A three days’ journey on either side. And, during that time, an unquiet silence settles over Harriot’s house. By day, the rooms belong to the Gollivers, who alternate between packing and sniping. By night, Margaret treads the laboratory boards, setting her blazes ever higher.
She never sees the Gollivers, and they make a point of avoiding her. She is all the more astonished, then, to find Mrs. Golliver waiting for her with a silver tray, on which lies a single sheet of rag paper, folded in quarters and sealed with a stamp of red wax.
—For you, I suppose.
A note from Harriot, surely. Last-minute instructions for the arrangement of his instruments. Or else a little burst of feeling, transcribed somewhere on the Old London Road.
But it is not Harriot. It is the last correspondent in the world she would have expected. Her mother.
My dearest Margret,
I am most dredfully ill. I long for you by my side. Might you come? If not, then pray for mee, my girl.
A foreign hand. For, of course, Mrs. Crookenshanks can only make her mark and must have enlisted a neighbor or clergyman.
Still more foreign: the language. My girl—I long for you—dearest Margret. So plaintive and awkward. So unlike her mother, who has shunned the giving and receiving of endearments for as long as Margaret has known her.
And what better sign of her mother’s extremity, that in her final hours she should become what she was meant to be all along? Before life worked its hardness on her?
Again and again, Margaret reads the note. Conscious all the while of the absence on the other side of the curtain. Although she can well imagine what Harriot would say if he were here.
The letter is as much as a week old, Margaret. Your mother, God rest her soul, is very likely dead. Perhaps even buried. Beyond the power of you or anyone else to comfort her.
This, too, Harriot would say: The moment you enter your mother’s house, the door will be barred against you. A deputy of the city government will be placed outside to ensure you never leave. Your only hope of egress, Margaret—your only hope—will be to die yourself. As you almost certainly will.
And should this argument fail to move her, Harriot would recall her to the urgency of her experiments.
Already, for the sake of transmutation, you have let everything else fall away: your health, your peace of mind—our love—
No, he would be too decorous to bring up that last part. But his point would be taken. By leaving now, she would be abandoning not just her work but her newly smithed identity. To succor the woman who fought so hard to suppress it.
For hours, Margaret sits staring at her mother’s words until they cease to be readable.
Nothing is any clearer when she goes to bed, though one memory does seep through: the afternoon she found her mother staring at her writing. Unable to make sense of the markings, Mrs. Crookenshanks’s eyes leaked with shame. And with rage, too, was that it? For the chances that had been denied her.
A fugitive weakness, quickly suppressed, but cracking open a whole history of loss. And this is the moment to which Margaret cannot help but return. For it is the moment in which, strangely enough, she and her mother were most united.
* * *
Harriot returns the next evening: aching in every corner of his body, cross with boredom. Crosser still to find no one but the Gollivers waiting for him and his papers still not packed away. And the earl’s entire household due to leave tomorrow!
—Where in God’s name is Margaret?
They make no reply. They just hand him the paper.
Tom—
My mother has asked me to come to her. She is not well.
I did not stay for your return because you would have bid me stay. And I might have listened.
My debt to you is greater than I can say. Pray do not consider your faith in me squandered.
I have not acted rashly.
Words are nothing. Know my heart.
Margaret
So slowly does he drop that he is not even aware of what’s happening until the floor catches him and the wall comes at him from behind. In every other respect, his mind is lucid.
She has gone to London.
With rare tact, the Gollivers quit the parlor. He scarcely notices. He is utterly still, and all the same he is tumbling through space and time, and nothing is as he left it.
—Margaret …
He covers his face. Ten minutes pass. Twenty. At last he draws his hands away, and his eyes, freed from darkness, fasten on something in the near distance. A small white object in the back of the hearth.
Slowly he rises and walks toward the remains of yesterday’s fire. There lies a fragment of paper, spared from destruction by the wood’s dampness.
His first thought is that it is another note from her. A revision of the first. She has changed her mind. Even now, she is winging back to him, begging forgiveness for her foolishness.
But this is not Margaret’s hand. This letter comes from someone he has never met.
To Miss Crookenshanks,
Your sister wished to apprise you that your mother went to her Maker this Wednesday past. Her suffering was considerable but brief in duration. She was reconciled to her God.
You have my profou
The Rever
The lower corner has been burnt away, but the rest of the document is shocking in its clarity.
Pressing the sheet between his hands, he walks down the hall to the kitchen, where the Gollivers are bowed over cups of muddy ale. He sets the paper in front of them. He watches their eyes widen. And in a tremulous voice, he says:
—You have been clumsy, it appears.
How stupid they grow in this moment of revealing: their heads ducking to one side, their gazes shifting away. Like cornered dogs, he thinks.
—Unless I mistake, this was the letter that Margaret should have received.
Still they won’t look at him.
—You gave her another letter, did you not? A forged letter. You led her to believe her mother was still alive. And was expecting her.
He can’t bear to look at their faces now, so he circles around behind and stares down at their blockish heads.
—I’m sure you know what you have done. You have murdered her, the both of you. As surely as if you had taken a dagger and plunged it into her heart.
It is characteristic of them that, at the first sign of pressure, they should break ranks.
—He’s the one that wrote it.
—’Twasn’t my notio
n, ’twas hers.
—Ooh, he was quick to go along, wasn’t he?
—Never thought the girl’d rise to it.
—You let her walk out that door, didn’t you?
—Same as you, woman.
Harriot’s hand slams down on the section of table between them.
—You are vile. The both of you.
He turns away and gazes out the kitchen window and waits until he is master of himself again.
—Did you hate Margaret so very much?
He has no expectation of an answer. He certainly does not expect this: the surge of bile rising straight up from Mrs. Golliver’s throat.
—I might have been of use, too! Once! It isn’t fair!
ISLEWORTH, ENGLAND SEPTEMBER 2009
45
CLARISSA’S FLESH WAS pressed against mine. Her legs were twined around my hips, her breath was warm on my neck, her hand was cupping my cheek, she was stroking me back to life … she was …
Cold as death.
I woke. To find someone else’s hand pressed against my cheek. A dead hand.
With a roar, I jerked myself free, watched the bone fingers sail into the darkness. I sat there, half expecting them to crawl back, but the only thing moving now was me. My lungs, my heart, my skull … every last part vibrating from cold and pain and shock.
Where am I?
As best I could tell, I had tumbled not so much down as back. Through something like six centuries. For this cold, dank, recoiling space could only have belonged to the abbey from whose ruins Syon House rose.
And it was with a gulp of sorrowing laughter that I recognized how fitting a place I’d found within which to be buried for all time.
By now I’d forgotten all about Seamus, still waiting atop the tower. I’d forgotten about Alonzo, last heard trying to extricate himself from Syon Park security. I’d even forgotten about Clarissa and what would happen if I didn’t give Bernard Styles what he wanted by three o’clock in the morning.