The School of Night (36 page)

Ralegh looks down toward the river. Even now, ships with square sails come driving through the rain. From Holland, from Sweden. From Genoa, Venice, France. Places he will never see again.

—You came here by water, Tom?

—It was the only way. The city has shut down.

Ralegh nods. —They say the plague is even making its way up the Tower. Three yeomen warders have been carried off in as many days. Perhaps I will be saved the dance of empty air after all.
And
the butcher's block.

—I beseech you, my friend. Do not speak in this way. Recall
—please—
your family, your friends, holding you fast in their prayers.…

—And to whom are they all praying, Tom?

Sir Walter's eyes are no longer sleepy but cold and bright. Speaking very deliberately, Harriot answers.

—To that God Who created the universe. Who even now steers our ship's course by virtue of His loving and eternal wisdom.

—Naturally.

Sir Walter's voice is dry as kindling.

—All the same, Tom, you have recalled me to something I have been meaning to ask you.

—Yes?

—What has happened to our dark treasure?

*   *   *

It is the same question the Earl of Northumberland posed all those weeks ago. And here is the natural result. As the waterman ferries him upriver to Syon House, Harriot's mind washes back to that summer night at Sherborne.

Only the five of them in attendance: Harriot, Ralegh, Northumberland, Marlowe … and a stranger to their midst. Marlowe's latest acolyte, granted (at Kit's request) a rare berth in the Academe's sanctum.

Being green and easily cowed, the young man sat off to the side for most of the night, refraining from comment. It was Harriot who, out of character, took the lead. For he wished to speak of Virginia.

—Sir Walter here may tell you what my charge was. To take stock of such natural and human riches as might be useful for commercial exploitation. Do I misspeak, Sir Walter?

—No.

—Toward that end, I traveled at great length, and with great delight, amongst the Algonkins. From village to village I passed, taking great care to develop a special familiarity with the priests. Who were in the whole most welcoming to me and most fascinated by all I had to show them. Guns and mathematical instruments. Compasses and spyglasses, astrolabes. The simplest things would occasion the greatest awe. The spring clock! Mark how it goes of itself, with no hand to set it in motion. Hail the spring clock!

—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

A
UGUST 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 threnody 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.