The School of Night (8 page)

For Christ's sake.

“Well, that's interesting,” Clarissa had said. “For Christ's sake what? Oh, never mind, it says right here.
Clean me
.”

We stopped at Splash Car Wash on South Capitol Street, and then we got breakfast sandwiches from the adjoining McDonald's, and from there it was straight down 95 South. The radio didn't work, but the car persisted in a humming rattle, and my brain kept up a steady hum of its own: the image of Lily, rolling out of that vault, alternating with Halldor's tourist T-shirt and Alonzo's bloodstained raincoat.

And twining through all this: Clarissa. Her disciplined frame and her tiny wrists and that mighty collarbone, hinting at hidden powers. And the scent of sweat from where her thighs met the vinyl seats.

“I would trust you to drive,” I said at last.

“Good,” she said. “You drive like my dead granny.”

We pulled into a rest stop off Route 64. Disarmingly new and clean, with fan windows and TVs that were set to CNN and a strapping, intergalactic Pepsi machine, from which Clarissa obtained two cans of diet soda. The first she drained on the spot, tipping her head back and pouring it in an even stream down her gullet.

The other can she placed in the car's cup rest. This was the first in an almost comical series of preparatory steps. Side mirror? Check. Rearview mirror? Check. Seat positioned at the exact 12.5-degree angle? Check. All we needed was clearance from Houston.

“Been thinking it over,” she said. “We probably don't need to trust each other. I mean,
you
don't trust that Styles guy, and you're still working for him.”

“Working.” I slapped down the passenger-side visor. “Unless there's some 401(k) plan I haven't been apprised of, I'm not his employee. I'm merely providing a deliverable.”

“Like a consultant.”

“If you will.”

“You still don't trust him.”

I stared at the oaks and crape myrtles along the roadside, parched with late-summer heat.

“I don't know,” I said. “People just get very fragile whenever he's around. Actuarial tables stop working.”

“You think he might have had something to do with Lily.”

“Yeah. Well, yeah. And not just Lily.”

She looked at me.

“Alonzo?”

“You said yourself, remember? Alonzo was the last guy in the world who'd kill himself. Think about the message he left us. It wasn't
So long
, it was
Hey, know what? The School of Night is back
. He was ready to move. He was all-systems-go.”

Unless, I thought, he'd gone so far there was no coming back.

“That message he left us,” Clarissa said. “It must have been about the Ralegh letter.”

“I suppose so.”

“Which means he thought it was genuine.”

“I'm sure he did. And I'm sure Bernard Styles does, too. Why else would he go to such trouble to get it back?”

She stopped a minute to consider.

“So you think he wanted it bad enough to kill Alonzo.”

“I don't know,” I shrugged. “You have to admit it's conceivable.”

“But Styles is a
book
guy, right? I mean, book guys—they drink tea, they wear
cardigans
.”

I told her then about Cornelius Snowden, a fully representative book guy, killed in the heart of London for a single volume. And the more I described the circumstances, the more I found myself gravitating toward Alonzo's construction of them. And hadn't I tasted something of Bernard Styles myself? Did I really think he would stop short of slaughter once he had fastened his mind around something?

We were silent a good while. Even the car's rattling seemed to subside beneath the weight of our thoughts.

“Here's what I want to know,” Clarissa said.

“What?”

“Do
you
think the letter's real?”

I tipped my head against the window. And in that instant, the glass seemed to me no more than a profoundly unstable membrane between the heat outside and the car's arctic front. My head was resting not on substance but on an idea.

“You know what?” I said. “I'm not in that game anymore. I'm the last guy in the world to ask about a Walter Ralegh document. Believe it.”

My eyes were still closed, but I could feel her, all right. The heat of her gaze.

“But you were a college professor, right? You must have been on a tenure track somewhere.”

“I was.”

A particularly heavy pause.

“Okay,” she said. “I totally get if you don't want to talk about it. Just tell me to shut up.”

And I could have, I suppose. But in this moment, for reasons I can't define, disclosing the truth seemed easier than concealing it.

So I told her about a young assistant professor at an eastern Pennsylvania university who, one day, received a rare gift. A previously unknown poem by Walter Ralegh.

Not just any poem but a love poem written to Ralegh's young wife, Elizabeth Throckmorton. She had been a handmaiden to the queen, but when her secret marriage to Ralegh was exposed (by the birth of their first son), the queen, in a rage, tossed Ralegh into the Tower. He was able to buy his release, but he never regained his place in the queen's heart or in her court.

In this freshly discovered poem, Ralegh contemplated the cost of loving the woman who had been his undoing—the woman whose first name happened to be the same as the queen's. The effect, on first reading, was charming and complex: Ralegh vibrating between the two poles of Elizabeth.

Two appraisers verified the document as genuine, but the seller—a Peruvian bibliophile-adventurer domiciled in the Caymans—demanded a steep price. Some of the money came from research accounts, some from the dean, some from a competitive grant. And the rest? Borrowed from Alonzo Wax.

The document was unveiled at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Studies Association. Not the usual eight-page twenty-minute spiel in a subdivided hotel banquet room but the full ballroom: hundreds of academics … journalists and photographers … a major article set to appear the following week in the field's preeminent journal … a book contract in the works with a major university press … an air of suspended enchantment.

Ten minutes into the Q and A, an elderly Berkeley professor with a polka-dotted Frank Sinatra bow tie stood up and, in a mild voice that managed to carry from the very back of the ballroom, said.

“I'm afraid you've been led astray, Professor.”

He'd been offered the same poem by the same Peruvian adventurer. Only he'd been told it was by Marlowe.

*   *   *

“Eventually,” I said, “we found out who the real author was: William Henry Ireland.”

“Never heard of him.”

“A renowned scoundrel of the late eighteenth century. He once forged an entire Shakespeare play. Plus a letter from Shakespeare to his wife, complete with a lock of the Bard's hair. To hide his tracks, he wrote on the blank leaves of Elizabethan-era books. That's how he was able to fool a lot of appraisers.

“Well,” I continued, “the end was swift. My article was junked. The book contract was scuttled. Not a journal in the world would print anything I wrote. The dean's wife looked sad for me at a faculty reception. I was done.”

“So that was your crime,” Clarissa said. “Getting hoodwinked.”

“Maybe, with a little more fortitude, I could've gone all postmodern with it. You know, ‘Here's my deconstructive reading of the duality between the authentic and the fraudulent. I mean, dude, what's authenticity, anyway?'” Wincing, I shook my head. “I couldn't carry it off, not with any conviction. And I couldn't stand being the departmental fuckup.”

“You wouldn't have been the first.”

“In the world of Henry, I was the first. You know how people talk to you when there's
one
thing they're not supposed to talk about? Something very
compressed
happens to their voices. It's not a loud thing, but it feels loud.”

“So you went where it was quiet.”

“I went where I had friends. And by then I had only one: Alonzo. So that's how I ended up in Washington.” I forced my eyes open. “Alonzo knew people, and I needed work. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Seven years ago. And, by the way, you should be very grateful. I've spared you many dark months of the soul.”

Worse, I thought: gray years of the mind. An adjunct-professor gig at a local community college, teaching freshman composition for $2,000 a semester. Foundation proposals for 501(c)(3)s. Restaurant reviews for an alternative weekly. Proofreading, résumé editing, paralegal gigs. A stretch of advocacy writing, in which, depending on the client, I might be petitioning for fossil-fuel taxes or warning against climate-change hysteria. Brochures for a Jewish summer camp. Teaching night classes at community arts centers. Seasonal employment with Eddie Bauer.

Yes, I was sparing Clarissa quite a lot. Myself even more.

“So now you know,” I said.

“No, wait. There's a sequel. Years go by. In walks a man named Bernard Styles. He says,
Excuse me, I've got a Walter Ralegh letter.
And there you are thinking—”

“Kill me now.”
She laughed. “You could have turned him down.”

“Yeah, see, he put this little check in my hands. I'm very respectful of liquidity.”

She gave that some thought. Then, in a voice jarringly bright, she said:

“Want to know what bugs me? We don't have the first part of Ralegh's letter. I'd love to know who it's written
to
. Who's this ‘tutelary genius'?”

“Yeah. Him.”

“Oh, my God.”

“What?”

“You know who it is, Henry. You do, you
know
.”

But I didn't. Not until that exact moment, when everything that had been building up inside—the events of the past week, the fragments of that letter—merged with old conversations and half-forgotten images and the prospect of those white wind-stropped North Carolina beaches, and everything cohered into one being. And this being had a name.

“Harriot,” I said. “The letter was written to Thomas Harriot.”

Part Two

All you possessed with indepressed spirits,

Indu'd with nimble and aspiring wits,

Come consecrate with me, to sacred Night

Your whole endeauors, and detest the light.…

No pen can any thing eternal write,

That is not steept in humour of the night.

—G
EORGE
C
HAPMAN
,

    “The Shadow of Night”

 

ISLEWORTH
,
ENGLAND 1603

10

H
E STILL DREAMS
of Virginia.

It's always high summer there. The air is piled in damp drifts, and everywhere there's a smoke of rotting persimmons. The clouds are sun-dizzy.

He was a young man when he went. Twenty-five: stuffed with books, cringing from the light. In no way prepared—how could he have been?—for the plenitude that met him. Tapestries of silken grass. Cedars and firs and maples and oaks. Gourds and pumpkins. Oysters, mussels. Thick-shelled walnuts and strawberries of supernal sweetness. A river as wide in places as the Thames. It was all more than he could bear in some moments, and yet, after a time, the thought of leaving it was harder to bear.

Now and then his throat would catch in wonder. Somewhere in this salt-stung wilderness lay (by his own estimate) twenty-eight types of beast never seen by Western man. And who was the man charged with finding them, knowing them, naming them? Tom Harriot of Oxfordshire. Charter of a new world.

For whole weeks he wandered. Every day a new day: mapping the flight of a marlin hawk, gauging the length of the native herring, comparing the different ways of cooking the
okindgier
bean (flatter than the English bean and altogether as good in taste as English peaze), studying the dyeing properties of the
Tangomóckonomindge
bark. By now the Algonquins left him largely to himself, so he passed hours and days unmolested, never so much as glimpsing another human being. In his quietest intervals, he could imagine himself the lord of his own vast green unpopulated island.

Here I will be
, he remembers thinking
. Always.

But outside his peaceable kingdom, things were falling apart. From the start, the colonists had been at odds with the Indians. Skirmishes had broken out, villages were raided and burned, a chieftain assassinated. When Sir Francis Drake came unexpectedly calling, the colony's leaders leaped at his generosity. To go back to England! To be free of these savages! It never occurred to them that one of their party might wish to stay.

They left in the middle of a hurricane. The sky was black, the breakers high as mastheads, and the pinnace carrying Harriot to sea kept grounding on sandbars. Desperate to be gone, the sailors began jettisoning everything on board. In silence, Harriot watched his chests and books, his writings and instruments—his astrolabe and cross-staff and lodestone—sinking in the teeming water. By the time the sailors were done, the only possessions left him were the clothes on his back and the pages he had tucked into his boots and a handful of roots in his pockets.

From the stern of Drake's bark, he watched the shoreline blur into mist and hail.

*   *   *

Wilderness is a distant memory now, for he lives in the shadow of one of England's grandest homes. Nature here has been plucked out, pushed back, domesticated. Which makes it a special pleasure for Harriot to watch the Thames oxbow, three or four times a year, overflow its banks, rising up from its gorge and rolling in a fat brown pool toward Syon House's gallery.