by Louis Bayard
This much I know. Being with her is a rare and good thing, and the rareness and goodness would be impossible without the shortness. We have vaulted past all the normal stages—exploration, evolution, devolution—and landed right in the home stretch. Our golden year, Clarissa calls it.
And so, like any old couple, we spend a lot of time on benches. Quiet as snow. Our history speaks for us, I guess. A history we just happen to share with two people who lived and died centuries before you were born. Among the four of us, I’d wager, we’ve lived a good long life.
* * *
The money? For now, we’re skimming interest off Alonzo’s principal. Clarissa has drawn up a list of charities she wants to have remembered in her will. And I have my own ideas on the subject, which I’ll keep to myself for now.
Ralegh’s letter? I had to ponder that for a while, but once I’d decided, it was the easiest thing in the world to drop those two pieces of aged rag paper in a padded manila envelope and mail them, anonymously, to the Folger Shakespeare Library. Let the experts sort out the truth. Grant them the glory, too, if they want it. To my great surprise, my career is here. On park benches.
* * *
Once I asked her, “Why did you dress like that?”
“Like what?”
“The day of Alonzo’s funeral. The day I first saw you. You didn’t wear mourning. You wore a summer dress. Scarlet.”
“Oh.”
She closed her eyes, and for a moment I thought she’d nodded off. (She does that a lot.) But she was just parsing her words.
“I suppose it’s because I don’t believe in death,” she said. “The capital D part.”
Which, to my mind, is the best kind of apostasy. In my strongest moments, or maybe my weakest ones, I choose not to believe, either. And if that doesn’t earn me a diploma from the School of Night, nothing will.
ISLEWORTH, ENGLAND OCTOBER 1603
54
SYON PARK IS silent. The cuckoos, the swallows, the blackbirds, the thrushes have all moved on, leaving behind the season’s last roses and scarlet oaks and pools of elm and beech leaves … and now and then a heron calling across the river. Just to see if anyone’s listening. It’s a fine time to die.
But death, it seems, has washed its hands of him. Why else did it keep him from following Margaret into the grave? Why, in the intervening weeks, has his health taken not a single turn for the worse? Is he merely being dared to take events into his own hands?
The Earl of Northumberland’s steward, returning in early November, is astonished to find Harriot still in his cottage—and sporting, for the first time in memory, a beard. Nothing like the earl’s fashionable profusion but weedy and gray and straggling, a perfect misery of a beard, repelling the questions it raises.
Barges are at last coming downriver in full sail. London is safe—though not for Ralegh. A widely bruited set of atheistic lines, attributed to him, has appalled even his most devoted supporters and tipped the balance of opinion against him. On his way to trial, London’s citizens line the streets for the sole purpose of pelting him with curses—and tobacco pipes.
But in the course of defending his life, Ralegh carries himself so nobly that, despite his death sentence, he is a hero by the time he emerges. It is said that men who would have gone a hundred miles to see him hanged would now travel a thousand to save him. Rather than weather this sea change of opinion, King James chooses to commute Ralegh’s death sentence—and then send him back to the Tower for perpetuity.
Harriot, never one to shirk duty, pays regular visits to his old friend and patron, bearing scientific instruments. But the words of cheer Harriot would normally bear alongside, these are missing. It is left to Ralegh to steer their conversations. One afternoon, as they are strolling past the pigeons on the high walk that overlooks the Thames, the great man offers his own words of cheer.
—The School of Night. It lives on, does it not?
* * *
Back at Syon House, Harriot sleeps half the day, shuns all work, walks from room to room. The beard goes away (he hates the scratch of it) but the hunger for her, which is deeper than grief or perhaps grief’s other face, this remains.
He lives, somehow, without living. The woman who schooled him in that art is no longer here, and how hard it is for the student to step away from the teacher. Perhaps the only thing that saves him is this. On a bright smoky April morning, the Earl of Northumberland pokes his head through Harriot’s open window.
—Trout, Tom?
* * *
Midsummer’s Eve is hardest, for he cannot help but recall that night with Margaret on the tower. Venus’s phases … the swell of her lips … the stories she told of ghosts running abroad.
That night, he climbs the steps of the northwest tower. The sky is clouded but mistless. He peers into the rain and waits.
—Are you there, Margaret?
* * *
He wishes, often, that he had penned a love lyric to her. Then again, how could he have vied with Astrophel and Stella?
So when he takes up the sheet of paper on which she scrawled her last message, he begins to inscribe … not verses, not even words, exactly, but codes, puzzles, indirections: the currency of their lives together. It pleases him, in fact, to imagine her standing over him as he composes, using a magnifying glass to write in the smallest possible grain.
Yes, I see, Tom. Well played.
* * *
It is not plague that comes for him after all but an angry red spot on his upper left nostril. He pays it no heed, and the spot, for its part, is in no large hurry to colonize the rest of his nose. Another thirteen years pass before it bothers to spread to his lip. And here at last it betrays a degree of impatience, spreading with economy to his palate, his tongue, his jaw.
By the end, speech comes with great difficulty. Breath itself is a vexation. He spends his last days in Threadneedle Street, the guest of a mercer who sailed with him to Virginia all those years ago. Physicians are brought in—one goes so far as to blame Harriot’s troubles on tobacco—but his most constant nurse is visible only to him.
I know your pain, she says. But soon you will get to the other side of it, and you will wonder what all the stir was about.
Ralegh by now has gone to his reward. Northumberland is in the Tower. Three others are standing at Harriot’s bedside when he passes, and each believes he is the one being addressed.
—Oh, you were right. Yes, I see. You were quite right.
Acknowledgments
It’s not quite a cast of thousands, but many kind people were tasked with making me less dumb. Among them: Jessica Berman, Steve Cymrot, Daniel De Simone, Teresa Grafton, Barry Meegan, Katherine Neville, George Pelecanos, John Riley, Jonathan Simon, Francis Slakey, and Dan Traister. I particularly want to thank the patient souls at the Folger Shakespeare Library, especially Georgianna Ziegler, Richard Kuhta, Betsy Walsh, Heather Wolfe, and Karen Lyon.
My Library of Congress research angel, Abby Yochelson, fielded every bizarre question I could throw at her. Gary Krist provided, with his book Extravagance, a useful structural template. James Reese offered invaluable feedback and encouragement. Leslie Feore and the staff of Syon House were so kind in responding to queries that I felt quite churlish devising a fictional burglary of their property. I hope they will pardon me for my make-believe crimes and for any real-world offenses against fact.
Thanks, finally, to Marjorie Braman and Christopher Schelling, who’ve been riding this train from day one. And to Montuori, who is absolved, of course, from reading a word of this.
About the Author
LOUIS BAYARD is the author of the critically acclaimed The Black Tower, the national bestseller The Pale Blue Eye, and Mr. Timothy, a New York Times Notable Book. A former staff writer for Salon.com, Bayard has written articles and reviews for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Nerve.com, and Preservation, among others. He lives in Washington, D.C.
Also by Louis Bayard
The Black Tower
The
Pale Blue Eye
Mr. Timothy
Endangered Species
Fool’s Errand
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bayard, Louis.
The school of night: a novel / Louis Bayard.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-9069-7
ISBN-10: 0-8050-9069-X
1. Collectors and collecting—Washington (D.C.)—Fiction. 2. Historians—Washington (D.C.)—Fiction. 3. Secret societies—England—History—16th century—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3552.A85864S35 2011
813'.54—dc22
2010024961
First Edition 2010
Map and other art by Laura Hartman Maestro
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
eISBN 978-1-4299-6555-2
First Henry Holt eBook Edition: March 2011