The School of Night (33 page)

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 strips.

“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?”

Well, let's see, Detective, I'm about to scale a tower. For the purpose of finding buried treasure. Before the night is done, the woman I love might be dead, and I might be, too. And an officially dead man might be dead once more.

Or else we might all be billionaires.

We'll certainly be criminals.

“I have just a moment,” I said.

“Did I get you in bed?”

“No.”

“You sound quiet.”

“It must be the connection. If you must know, I'm overseas.”

“I wasn't aware of that, Mr. Cavendish.”

“I didn't tell you.”

If he was surprised by my insolence, he didn't let on.

“I thought you might want to know,” he said. “We've been investigating Miss Pentzler's death, and there's something I'd like to show you.”

“Yes?”

“But you being abroad…”

“Maybe you could tell me what it is.”

There was a very long pause.

“I can promise you,” I said. “I'm not a flight risk.”

The habit of holding me under suspicion must have been a hard one to break, so I can't really explain why he decided ultimately to take me in his confidence. Or why, having heard what he had to tell me, my brain should have resisted the implications for as long as it did.

“Mr. Cavendish?”

“I'll be in touch as soon as I'm back in D.C. Is that all right?”

“When will that be?”

“I only have … there's a few more hours of business here, so … Monday or Tuesday? That all right?”

“I guess it'll have to be, Mr. Cavendish.”

I drew the phone away from my ear, then put it straight back.

“Detective? Are you still there?”

A moment of weakness, I confess. And it took just one look from Alonzo to dispel it. For that look said what I already knew. The time to speak had been on that beach in the Outer Banks, when I first saw Amory Swale's arm protruding from the sand. We had come too far to go back.

Detective Acree's voice was buzzing in my ear. “Mr. Cavendish?”

“Sorry, I just wanted to say thanks. For the call.”

“Doing my job, Mr. Cavendish.”

“Sure.”

“Good luck with your business.”

“Thanks.”

I held the phone in my hand. Then I put it back in my pocket.

The rain had stopped. A scythe of moon poked through the cloud.

“It's time,” said Alonzo.

41

H
ISTORY DOES NOT
record why Syon House's original owner, the Duke of Somerset, decided to build those fifty-foot towers at each corner of the quadrangle. Did he just want a nicer view of the river? His enemies preferred to see the towers as fortifications, aggressive in intent, and Somerset was eventually executed for his sedition.

Somehow or other, the towers remained standing. And it's safe to say that even the Duke couldn't have envisioned an assailant quite like Seamus, who came at the northwest tower not with arquebuses and longbows and siege engines but with a sack of gadgets:
étriers
and gear slings and angles and bat hooks, each item engineered to pack the greatest tensile strength into the smallest form.

Seamus himself was engineered along the same lines. According to Alonzo, he had a resting pulse of thirty-six beats a minute (“Like bears in winter, Henry”), and there was something nearly ursine in the way he pawed at his gear and something wild, too, in the sheer tautness of his small frame—he had long since stripped down to a quarter-zip microfleece and zoner shorts—the way his muscles corded and bristled beneath his skin. He was half a foot smaller than me, but I wouldn't have dreamed of intruding on him. Even Alonzo preferred to absent himself.

“I'll just be in the way,” he said.

“But where are you going?” I asked.

Alonzo tipped his head toward the neighboring woods.

“Don't worry,” he added. “I'm on the qui vive. No one will get by without my seeing them. Now listen, Henry, the moment you're up there, you
call
me, is that understood? I want to know the layout. Every crevice, every crack, do you understand? Between us, we are going to find this. Oh, and Henry…”

“Yeah?”

“Be great.”

I couldn't help it; I smiled. “Just keep 'em out of our way,” I said.

Thank God there was no question of us hugging. Still, some crackle of feeling must have been exchanged, because when he turned and walked toward the woods, the sight of his bargelike frame (and those discombobulatingly small feet) caught me smack in the chest. Was I seriously proposing to hand over Alonzo's treasure?

And then, superimposing itself over our shared history: the image of Clarissa, as I'd last seen her, framed on either side of Halldor's swiveling body.

I closed my eyes, but that last image wouldn't be blotted away, so I looked instead at Seamus, laying out his gear in small clean formations.

“Seamus,” I said. “Could I ask you something?”

“Mm.”

“Why are you doing this?”

The faintest of grunts as he drove the first grappling hook into the mortar.

“Gonna fund me next climb.”

“Who is?” I asked. “Alonzo?”

His shoulders rose an inch. “It's the big 'un,” he said. “Nanga Parbat. The Man Eater. Forty-six-hundred-meter drop.”

He gave me a nod for emphasis, but I admit I was less in awe of Nanga Parbat than of Alonzo's bold-facedness. Whatever happened tonight, the chance of Seamus getting a shilling for his labor was even less than our finding treasure, and I felt something near tenderness watching him strap the Black Diamond Icon headlamp onto his skull and slip his Five Ten Moccasym rock shoes into the web ladder.

“When I'm up,” he said, “I'll flash me light at you. Twice and off, no more. You tie the rope to your harness, give me two tugs. I start pullin'.”

“You're pulling me up?”

“I've lifted bigger cows than you.”

Which was both insulting and reassuring.

“Won't I need the lamp to climb?” I asked.

“A pair of feet is all.”

Seamus made one last survey of his handiwork, fastened me into my harness, and then quickly genuflected before hoisting himself onto the first hook.

“Cheers, mate.”

And up he went.

Except that plain sentence does nothing to convey the purity, the parsimony, the tongue-and-groove rhythm of it. He gouged into the mortar, he planted his boot, he hauled himself to the next level—all in a single unbroken rhythm. It was like watching a life form evolve before your eyes. Or, to be more accurate,
two
organisms evolving together: the tower and Seamus, twining their DNA pools into a golden strand.