The School of Night (2 page)

And so, by the time the service was over, I believed I had his full dispensation to proceed. But as I stood up, another woman's voice rang after me.

“Henry!”

Lily Pentzler. Short-waisted and long-abiding. Braced like a professional wrestler, tufts of gray hair straggling over carob eyes, a stack of cocktail napkins in each hand. An air of harassed charity, not specific to this occasion.

“Do you need help?” I asked.

“Do I need help?”

Lily was Alonzo's amanuensis. I use that word because that's how it was printed on her business cards. “It means picking up the master's scraps,” she once explained. Exactly what she was doing now.

“The security kept us waiting for nearly an hour,” she told me. “The florist screwed up and sent lilies. Alonzo hated lilies. The caterer just got here. Just. Got. Here.
People
, before they go and, you know, harm themselves in some definitive way, should be required—and I'm talking beyond congressional mandate, Henry, a level of
divine
mandate that says, ‘Know what? Before you do it, organize your own memorial service, 'kay? Buy the wreath, set up the open bar.
Hire
the fucking caterers and
then
kill yourself.'”

“I can see your point.”

“This”—the piles of napkins began to teeter—“this will have the effect of ending suicide as we know it.”

“Do you need any help?” I asked again.

She looked at me.

“We've missed you, Henry. You haven't been by to see us lately.”

“Oh, yeah. Kinda busy. Teaching gig. The freelance thing. This, that…”

“The next thing,” she said, eyeing me closely.

“Yep.”

“Well, come by later, anyway. There's a wake at five. We're taking over the top floor of the Pour House, and Bridget is going to sing something mawkish and out of period. ‘Last Rose of Summer,' I think. On second thought, save yourself.”

She smiled then, just a little bit, and, pivoting slowly, labored toward the banquet table, which was nearly as tall as she was.

By now, no more than a minute had passed, but it was enough. The woman in scarlet was nowhere to be found. Through the great hall I wandered, half inspecting the crossbow bolts and the digitalized First Folio with the touch screen that made the pages turn like magic, and I was aware only of my own defeat, growing around me.

Until at my eastern periphery, like dawn, a long pale arm materialized, pushing against the oaken entrance door.

She was leaving. As quietly as she had come.

And here again fate intervened. Not Lily Pentzler this time but Alonzo's grandfather, ninety-eight, who believed I was his great-nephew and couldn't be told otherwise. Loosening his ancient-mariner grip required the intervention of the actual great-nephew, a pet insurance salesman from Centerville, Virginia. I took three long strides into the entry hall, I shoved open the door, stood there in the blinding heat.…

She was gone.

No one but me standing on those marble steps in the early-September blast. Sweat tickled through my collar, and around me rose a smell like burning tires. Magnolias were growing, crape myrtles, and not much else.

Hard to explain the dejection that swept over me. I was a man in my mid-forties, wasn't I? Disappointment was my daily gruel. Back on the wheel, Henry.

And then I heard someone call after me:

“Well, there you are!”

So much familiarity in the tone that I braced myself for another of Alonzo's relations. (The Waxes were a mighty tribe in their day.) This was someone else, a man in early winter: silver-haired, handsome and rawboned, and erect. Hale with a vengeance: his skin looked like someone had gone at it with pumice. He took my hand and held it for perhaps a second too long, but his smile was benign and vaguely dithering. In a BBC sitcom, he'd have been the vicar. He'd have ridden in on a bike with big panniers.

“Mr. Cavendish,” he said (and indeed the accent was British), “I wonder if I might have a word with you.”

“What about?”

This is where my little track of linearity breaks down. Because when he next spoke, it was as if he'd already spoken. And it was as if Alonzo was speaking, too, from his watery grave. And maybe some part of me was chiming in. All of us in the same helpless chord, not quite in tune but impossible to disaggregate.

“The School of Night.”

2

“H
AVE I SAID
anything wrong?” asked the old man. His gaze was no longer quite so dithery.

“No.”

“I only ask because you seem to have taken a fright.”

“Oh, no, it's just—” I ran a hand down my scalp. “It's been a long—the whole day has been … for a second there, it was like Alonzo's ghost was passing by.”

“And who says it wasn't?”

Humming to himself, the old man reached inside his suit jacket and brought out an umbrella, black and utilitarian, that exploded open at a touch of the thumb.

“The sun disagrees with me,” he said.

“Excuse me, I don't think I caught your name.”

“Bernard Styles,” he said.

There lay, beneath his expensive accent, the faintest traces of Celtic, like tobacco fumes clinging to a reformed smoker's clothes.

“Very nice to meet you,” I said.

“You've heard of me, perhaps?”

“I don't get out much.”

“Well, then,” he said easily, “I should tell you I'm in the same collecting line as poor Alonzo. Only in a different sphere of influence.”

“As in England?”

“Buckinghamshire. Not so very far from Waddesdon Manor.”

“Well, in that case, it's very kind of you to come all this way.”

“Oh,” said Bernard Styles. “I wouldn't have missed it.”

No obvious change in his tone or demeanor. The change was all in my skin—a barometric tickle.

“Can you believe it?” he said, giving his umbrella a slow twirl. “This is my very first time in your nation's capital. Everything looks quite fantastical to me.”

I thought he was overdoing it with the “fantastical,” but then I turned to my left and saw the Washington Monument emerging like a thought cloud from the Capitol's brain.

“Oh,” I said. “I see what you mean. Sorry about the heat.”

“Yes, it's quite wretched. One can't altogether breathe. Perhaps we might go inside, after all.”

The way was blocked, though, by a tall man with a brow like a fender.

“This is Halldor,” said Bernard Styles.

A Scandinavian name but no clear race. His once-tawny skin had peeled away into islets of beige, and his neck looked almost ivory against the black of his vicuña coat. The coat hung loosely off a T-shirt that read, in large cherry lettering: I ♥ DC. It was frightening to think T-shirts came in that size.

“Halldor, I fear, is the only one who thrives in this sort of miasma. Myself, I prefer your highly efficient American air-conditioning. Shall we, Mr. Cavendish?”

Some of the heat came in with us, and for a second or two the air seemed to be ionizing around us. Halfway down the hall, I could see Lily Pentzler going head-to-head with the caterer. Pausing to reload, she flicked her eyes toward me—and then toward Styles. A crease bisected her forehead, and then she began muttering into her sleeve, like a madwoman.

“Perhaps we might talk in the theater,” the old man said. “The upper gallery, I think. More private.” His step was sure and even as he climbed the carpeted steps, talking as he went.

“Such a nice little pastiche. Of course, a true Elizabethan theater wouldn't have a roof, would it? Or such comfortable chairs. All the same, quite charming. I wonder what play they're putting on now.”

“Oh, it's …
Love's Labour's Lost.”

“Well, isn't that apropos?”

“Is it?”

“I wonder if it's modern-dress. No, I don't wonder at all. On that particular question, I have been quite driven from the field. Everywhere one goes now it's Uzis at Agincourt, Imogen in jeans, the Thane of Cawdor in a three-button suit. Next thing you know, Romeo and Juliet will simply
text
each other. Damn the balcony. OMG, Romeo. LOL. ILY 24–7. Oh,
chacun à son goût,
that's what I hear you saying, but does it rise even to the level of
goût
? I consider it, on the contrary, mere squeamishness. I have seen far more fearful things in my life than a doublet and hose. The sooner we inoculate our children against these terrors, the stronger we will make them.”

Seating himself in the gallery's front row, he raised his eyes to the ceiling, where a blue Elizabethan sky had been meticulously painted—far lovelier than the sky outside. A dusky silence fell over him. He laced his hands over the balcony rail.

“You've known Alonzo quite a long time,” he said at last.

“
Knew
him, yes.”

“I believe you also have the honor of being his executor.”

I looked at him.

“Apparently so,” I said.

“In that case, I think you might be of great use in resolving a little problem I have.”

“That would depend on the problem.”

Wrinkles fanned out from his eyes and mouth as he began to polish the balcony rail.

“A document,” he said, “recently left my possession.”

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

“It's a document I'm rather keen on recovering.”

“All right.”

Silence grew around us until at last, in my politest tone, I asked:

“And you're coming to me because…?”

“Oh! Because Alonzo was the one who borrowed it, you see.”

I stared at him. “Borrowed it?”

“Well, generally speaking, I prefer to take charitable constructions of men's acts. I'm sure that poor Alonzo, had he lived, would have returned the document to me in due time. Now, of course, he's shuffled off this mortal coil.” He waved softly at the ceiling. “Such a loss.”

“Was the document valuable?” I asked.

“Only to an old sentimentalist like me. Although it does have a certain historical piquancy. As you might appreciate better than most, Mr. Cavendish.” He leaned over and, in a conspiratorial tone, added, “You were a redoubtable Elizabethan scholar in your day, were you not?”

The air grew significantly cooler in that moment, or maybe my face was just getting warmer.

“I'm flattered you think so,” I said. “I'm flattered you even remember my name.”

“Confound the man's modesty! How could I fail to recall the paper you read at Oriel College back in 'ninety-two? ‘Empire and the Silver Poet.'”

“You were there?”

“Oh, yes, I found it quite a welcome blow against the idea of Ralegh as dabbler. And chauvinist that I am, I was surprised that an American such as yourself could grasp the true Englishness of Ralegh's character. Only Shakespeare, I think, was more English.” He clucked his tongue. “All in all, a charming—a comprehensive lecture. I'm sure I wasn't alone in expecting great things of you.”

“Then I'm sorry to have disappointed you.”

“Oh, but you haven't,” he answered. “Not
yet
, anyway. But given your background and your
long
friendship with Alonzo—well, I can't think of a fellow better suited to help me find my little document.”

Still he kept polishing that rail. Back and forth, back and forth.

“But what is it?” I asked. “A deed? A tradesman's bill?”

“A letter, that's all.”

“Who received it?”

“Unclear. Only the second page survives.”

“Okay, who
wrote
it?”

He said nothing at first. Only a slight trembling in his hands showed he had even heard the question. He turned to me at last with a smile broad as a river.

“Oh, God,” I murmured. “Ralegh.”

“The very man!” he said, clapping his hands in delight. “And imagine. The letter turned up just nine months ago. A solicitor's office in Gray's Inn Road was clearing out its archives—several centuries' worth; you know how far back these things can go. Having heard something of my reputation, they called me in to appraise its contents and to see if I might be willing to offer them anything for it. Of course, they had no inkling of what they had, so I was able to acquire the letter for quite a reasonable sum.”

No mistaking the satisfaction in his voice. Some collectors spend money like oxygen—Alonzo was one. Others hoard every last atom.

“Mr. Styles,” I said. “You'll forgive me, but I've learned to distrust any document with Ralegh's name on it. Having been burned before…”

“I should be wary, too, if I were you. In this case, I can assure you it's authentic.”

“And you can assure me Alonzo took it?”

“Oh, yes.” A slow bobbing of his silver head. “He hid his tracks beautifully, I'll give him that. For several weeks, we didn't even know the thing was missing. And then, when we spotted the substitution, we had to dig very deeply into our security archives before we found the—the exculpatory evidence.” He smiled. “Even on grainy security video, there's no mistaking such a distinct figure as Alonzo's.”

“But there are other Ralegh letters already in circulation. Why would Alonzo go to such trouble to steal this one?”

“I would guess he was intrigued by this particular letter's content.”

Styles let that settle in for a while and then, in a fit of mock astonishment, smacked his brow.

“Oh, but I quite forgot! I've a copy to show you.”

The barest flutter of his fingers, and Halldor was standing over us, paper in one hand, flashlight in the other.

“When I first acquired the document, I took the precaution of having it digitized. I assume, Mr. Cavendish, you have no objection to reading it yourself?”