The School of Night (38 page)

Her face—for I was watching very closely—was utterly bare of expression. It was Alonzo's that broke into lines of sorrow.

“Oh, my apologies, it's not Dale at all, is it?
Gordon.
Clarissa Gordon. Security consultant to Mr. Bernard Styles.

“And what a splendid job you did covering your tracks. Not a single item on Google to link you with your employer, and believe me, I looked. But you couldn't quite escape being photographed last spring at the Grolier Club banquet. An event I could hardly attend, being already dead, but one I've been able to catch up on in my spare time. I only wish I'd seen the picture earlier, as it might have spared my good friend Henry some collateral damage.”

In the next second, his hand had buried itself in the wilted white ruff that, to my great fascination, still encircled my neck. It took him no more than ten seconds to emerge with a square inch of hinged metal, glacier blue in the artificial light.

“GPS, by the looks of it,” he said, cradling it in his palm. “I believe they use the same device to track children.”

Tell him
. Every last one of my neurons was sending Clarissa the same message.
Tell him he's wrong.

But her eyes were too dead even to avoid my gaze. With no one to contravene him, Alonzo carried on.

“She probably planted it on you this very afternoon, Henry. How else could she and Styles have traced you, after all? They didn't want to give you the chance to back out. And really, Henry, you should consider it a
compliment
that they had such faith in your abilities.”

He was trying to be kind, possibly. But if you'd given me a choice of whom to strangle in that room, I might have chosen him.

“Oh, now, don't look like that, Henry, I'd have told you earlier but I didn't have any hard evidence. It wasn't until we got to England that I was able to make more
pointed
inquiries. And to see the value of playing out this particular game as far as it could go.

“But you're quite right, Henry, to feel betrayed. I'd feel the same in your shoes. Nevertheless, you must see the upside in all this. Clarissa is no longer yours to protect. She never was. And therefore, these savages have no hold over you now. We are
our own theme,
Henry. We may do as we will.”

Styles cleared his throat.

“There is the small matter of the law, Alonzo. Please consider that you are a fraud and a thief.”

“And you, Bernard, are a burglar and a terrorist who has just blown a hole through one of England's great homes. For politeness' sake, I've omitted that you are also a murderer.”

“He didn't kill anyone,” said Clarissa, her eyes tucking downward.

“Ohhh!” Smiling, Alonzo turned on her. “Is that the illusion you've been clutching to your little bosom? That your employer is a good and honorable man? Lily and Amory might take issue on that point.”

“Dear
me.”
Styles clapped his hands around his jaw. “You can't truly think me capable of such cold-bloodedness, can you, Alonzo? You certainly can't
prove
it. To anybody's satisfaction but yours.”

“I don't need to,” Alonzo answered levelly. “The only thing I'm obliged to do is savor the look in your eyes when Henry and I take what is ours.”

A slight edge had appeared in Bernard Styles's croon.

“Take what is
yours
? The document belongs to me, it always has.”

“And all the intellectual property pertaining thereto? If I may say so, that is to laugh. Until I came along, you had no clue what you held in your hands.”

Styles smiled thinly. “And you have no clue what you hold in yours.”

“Enough!”

The two collectors turned on me with frankly astonished expressions.

“I wish you could see how ridiculous you both look,” I said. “Arguing over your precious loot. May I suggest, before you say another word, you
inspect
your spoils?”

*   *   *

Interestingly, neither of them was in a hurry. Styles may simply have sniffed a trick. Alonzo's case was more complex. I think he had been picturing this moment so long it had become for him immutable, and reality was the only thing now that could disturb its perfection. And so, at the very brink of fruition, he flinched. And, like his rival, stood mute and frozen on the abbey floor.

It was left to Clarissa to snatch the flashlight from Halldor and snap:

“God's
sake.”

She trained the light on the box, lowered her face to it. Peered inside. Then rose and slowly turned around.

And now, one by one, they came forward: Alonzo, Styles, even Halldor. The same sequence: bending, rising, groping for language.

“I don't…”

“It's…”

And for the first and last time in my life, I heard Halldor speak.

“No.”

I couldn't blame him. He was looking down not at gold but at the remains of a human being. The skull pried open in mocking laughter, the right arm half raised in a salute, which was marred only by the absence of a hand. The hand that had, ten minutes earlier, been caressing my cheek.

“Say hello to Harriot's treasure,” I declared.

46

“S
IT DOWN
,”
I
said. “Let me tell you a story.”

Only there was nowhere for the others to sit, really. So they stood, and the only one who sat was me. On the cold hard floor, propped up on that old groaning splintered box.

“Thomas Harriot never married,” I said. “But he did
love.
A woman named Margaret Crookenshanks.”

Clarissa turned her head toward mine.

“Records indicate she died in September of 1603,” I said. “In St. Helen's Bishopsgate. Two weeks after her mother. Given the time and locale, we can probably conclude she died from the plague. Somehow, Harriot was able to spirit her body back here. He buried her in a part of Syon House where no one else would find her. A place that had special significance for him—and her, too, possibly. The northwest tower.”

No storyteller could have asked for a more gratifying silence from his audience.

“Well, time passed. Harriot's grief did not. My guess is that, more than anything else, he found comfort in one idea. That the woman he loved might one day be
known.
Not to his contemporaries, they wouldn't have understood. No, he was pinning his hopes on the future.

“Of course, he could have just declared his grief straight out. But it pleased him to do what he did best, and maybe he even thought she would have preferred it that way. To be encoded,
refracted
through numbers and letters. So that some like-minded souls would know something of what he felt.
All
he felt.”

A scowl carved itself across Alonzo Wax's face.

“Oh, for the love of—Harriot didn't leave us a Book of the
Dead,
Henry, he left us a map. He couldn't have been more explicit.
Great stores of gold, matchlesse in worthe, / There to bee freede from Virginia's Earthe.”

“Yeah, funny thing. A good friend of mine just went through the parish registers for 1603. Margaret Crookenshanks is listed, all right. Only her Christian name wasn't Margaret. The name she was given at baptism was something far less common, something a young girl might have been embarrassed to own up to, given its connotations.”

Clarissa's lips parted, and the name passed out of her like breath.

“Virginia.”

“What better way,” I asked, “for patriotic parents to honor Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, than by calling their baby daughter Virginia?”

I stood now. Gazed at each pair of eyes in turn.

“Thomas Harriot didn't bury gold in Syon House. He buried his
heart's
treasure. And
here…”
I nodded down to that half-shattered container. “
Here
his treasure lies.”

In slow, aching steps, Clarissa advanced. Peered into the box's cavity and studied those old bones one last time.

And then something sparked in her eye. She reached in and drew out a long cylinder, encased in ancient leather, oxidized to a hunter green.

“Let me see that!” cried Alonzo.

But she wrapped her arms around it as if it had come straight from her womb.

“Don't worry,” I said. “It's not treasure. At least not the kind you're looking for. It's a perspective trunk. That's how Harriot was able to see the stars. And the moon.”

“And
Venus,”
murmured Clarissa, to no one in particular. “The phases of Venus.”

A deep silence fell over us now. Broken at last by Alonzo's great, sorrowing bark of laughter.

“The old bastard!”

He sank, by inches, to the floor, and another laugh tore from him as he buried his face in his hands.

“So that's our reward,” he said. “After all this. A goddamned spyglass and a bag of bones.”

He clapped his hands together like gongs.

“Well
now,” he said. “There's no cause to lose faith. We just took a wrong turn, that's all. We misread the damned thing.”

“Alonzo…”

“Personally, I always thought it was a mistake coming here. Amory and I were making serious headway with the Indian lore. Really, if we hadn't been diverted, we'd have—no, believe me, it would have just been a matter of
time
before—”

“Alonzo!”

I positioned myself about an inch from his nose and waited for him to blink me into view.

“It's over,” he said.

“Well, yes,” declared Bernard Styles. “And then again, no.”

He inscribed a tiny ellipse around us with his flashlight before settling the beam on Alonzo.

“Your little
King Solomon's Mines
nonsense,” he said.
“That's
quite finished. And a good thing, too, I've always felt there's nothing more vulgar than a treasure hunt. However, there remains the small matter of my letter.”

He put out his hand like a tray.

“I suggest you return it now, Alonzo, while I'm still in a clement frame of mind. After all, it won't do you a bit of good now.”

Alonzo said nothing. And, in reply, Bernard Styles's voice grew only milder.

“Now see here,
mon vieux.
I'm quite prepared to overlook everything that's happened. I know we've had our differences in the past, but there's no reason we can't patch things up once more. You need only give me what is mine.”

“I don't have it,” said Alonzo.

“Of course you do.”

“I don't.”

“Alonzo,” said Styles, with a long-suffering air. “You've made many questionable errors in judgment, but not even
you
could be so criminally stupid as to lose the thing. My patience is vast and deep, as you know; it is also finite. Perhaps I should count to ten?”

“You can count to ten million.”

There they stood, the two of them, one in light, one in shadow. And if, in the future, a pair of men hate each other as much as
they
did in that instant, I hope I'm not alive to see it.

“I can't tell you how unfortunate this is,” said Bernard Styles.

He made a barely perceptible nod, and everything changed. Like a panther sprung from a briar thicket, Halldor threw himself at Alonzo. Wrapped his long arm around Alonzo's thick neck and, with the other arm, pulled out a long and cold and pristine blade.

A bare bodkin,
I thought, but my gulp of laughter died the moment I saw the pearl of blood well up from Alonzo's neck.

“Bernard,” said Clarissa in a tight voice. “Please.”

“I believe it was Alonzo who said I had no hold over him. I am merely endeavoring to correct his assumption. His
presumption,
really.”

The knife went deeper on the second jab, drawing out a rill of blood that dribbled all the way to Alonzo's clavicle.

“Extraordinary thing, the neck,” said Bernard Styles. “Powerful and fragile in somewhat equal measure. I fully believe, if we let evolution take its course, the carotid artery and trachea will very sensibly retreat an inch or two. So as not to be so fearfully exposed.”

As if to demonstrate, Halldor drew a circle around the exposed area. And by now the blood was no longer a dribble.

“Just tell the bastard where it is!” I cried.

Alonzo's chest heaved and swelled. A gurgle rose from his larynx. A single tear rolled down his white cheek. But the expression in his eyes, that didn't change.

And I was helpless to save him. One move from me, and Halldor's knife would strike home.

“I know where it is!” I shouted.

Styles's head glided in my direction.

“Is that so, Mr. Cavendish? Where?”

“In his room.”

“Which
room?”

“At our hotel. The Dragon's Tongue. It's the—fuck, it's—the
Disraeli
room.”

Styles gave me a sad smile.

“How kind of you to jog Alonzo's memory. I hope you'll understand, though, that in a case of this urgency I will need to hear it from the
horse's
mouth.”

One more rake of the knife, straight down. And now the blood was washing like finger paint across Alonzo's neck.

“Technically speaking,” mused Bernard Styles, “I'm not certain that killing a legally dead man even qualifies as murder.”

What happened next still strikes me as something beyond the reach of physics. One moment Halldor was standing there, his arm coiled around Alonzo. The next moment he was on his knees—then on all fours—and his knife was skittering into the darkness. And there, where he had once been, stood Clarissa, swinging Thomas Harriot's age-hardened perspective trunk like a truncheon.