The School of Night (10 page)

The paper rests in his hands: weak, perishable. He should tear it up. He should burn it. No telling, in these times, where an intelligencer might be sequestered. King James, Robert Cecil, Northumberland himself—each sits at the center of a near-infinite web, drawing in secrets and allies and enemies.

Harriot raises the letter toward the candle. He watches the upper left corner shrink into flame.

He pulls the letter back.

To his right, a small commotion. Jerking his head, he finds a young woman in a gown of gray russet, bending over his working table, studying one of his papers, her face a mask of engrossment as her lips shape each syllable.

She looks up, catches his glance. The fright in her eyes is as great as his and yet of such a different order that, in the next instant, his brain is reconfiguring the scene.

And already she is leaving—her leather shoes scraping against the wood—and with an urgency every bit as great, he hears himself calling after her.

—
Can you read?

 

OUTER BANKS
,
NORTH CAROLINA SEPTEMBER 2009

12

T
RUE TO CLARISSA
'
S
prediction, it was a few minutes past noon when we drove across the Route 158 bridge into the Outer Banks. Had it been a summer weekend, the bridge alone might have sucked an hour from our lives, but this was the second Thursday in September, and the kids were back in school, the parents had followed, and a vacancy lay now across the strip malls and RV parks of South Croatan Highway.

In Nags Head, we found an oceanside motel called the Pelican Arms, a thin-walled entropic place with broken icemakers and empty vending machines and a film of twigs and candy wrappers on the outdoor swimming pool (now closed). The only other occupants we could detect were dogs—all of them, by motel statute, under fifty pounds—Pekingeses and toy poodles and long-haired dachshunds and, strangest of all, a miniature schnauzer who came strolling out of an elevator, entirely unaccompanied, stiff with entitlement.

I booked adjoining singles while Clarissa sat in the lobby, scanning her e-mail. No messages yet from Amory Swale, our elusive book dealer, and so, hungry beyond all measure, we walked to the local Five Guys franchise. The sight of meat and cheese this time was cheering in a strange way, and I dove right in. So did Clarissa. And then we sat back, faintly embarrassed, and wiped the grease from our hands.

“Tell me about this Harriot guy,” she said.

So I just started talking, and one by one the things I'd once known about him—things I'd forgotten I ever knew—came percolating to the surface. And were still coming up fifteen minutes later, when Clarissa put out a hand to stop me.

“Okay, wait,” she said. “Let me see if I've got this straight. Thomas Harriot is one of the great scientists of his age. He corresponds with Kepler, he influences Descartes, he sees Halley's comet seventy-five years before Halley does. He discovers some law of refraction—what is it again, Smell's Law?”

“
Snell's
Law.”

“Discovers it before Snell did. Sees Jupiter's satellites before anyone else. Notices
sunspots
before anyone else. Becomes a pioneer in—I can't even keep track—ballistics and ciphers—spherical geometry—”

“And algebra,” I said. “Harriot's the one who gave us these…”

I drew the two symbols across the last clean napkin.

< >

“Crocodile swallows the bigger number,” she whispered. “That's how Mrs. Clabault used to explain it in second grade.”

She slowly traced the symbols, then looked back up at me.

“So what ties Harriot to the School of Night?”

“Well,” I said, “he was on Ralegh's payroll for starters.”

“Doing what?”

“Hanging out, mostly. No, that's not fair. He taught Ralegh navigation, he managed Ralegh's business affairs. Surveyed his estates. Stayed loyal to the end, even after Northumberland came calling.”

“And Northumberland was—?”

“Henry Percy, the Wizard Earl. Another friend of Ralegh's, another reputed School member. Richer than sin. Percy gave Harriot a hundred pounds a year just to live on his estate at Syon Park.”

“Live and what else?”

“Think.”

“Mm,” she said. “No tenure track, no dissertation defense. Nice gig.”

Tipping her chair back, she began to rock herself with her toes.

“That line from the letter,” she said. “Something about
tutelary genius.
”

“Outsunning every star, yeah. If there
was
a School of Night, Harriot would have been its master.”

“Then why don't we know about him? I mean, he was the first English scientist to explore America, right? He was here before the Lost Colony was here.”

“Blame Harriot,” I said. “He published next to nothing while he was alive. His notebooks were lost for, like, a century and a half. We're still figuring out what he knew and when he knew it.”

In just the last year, I told her, scholars had uncovered a dated document, proving that Harriot was the first man ever to make a telescopic drawing of the moon. Six months
before
Galileo. Mare Crisium, Mare Tranquillitatis, Mare Fecunditatis … they're all there. The lunar maps Harriot would go on to make over the next four or five years would remain unsurpassed for decades.

“Staring at the moon.” Clarissa cupped her chin with her palm. “All those years. He must have been a dreamer.”

With her draggy eyelids, she looked like something of a dreamer herself.

“Are you ever afraid, Henry?”

“Sure.”

“I mean for no reason.”

“Well, I don't know.” I scratched my cheek. “There's probably always a reason. You just have to figure out what it is.”

She looked at me.

“What if that's what you're afraid of?” she asked.

*   *   *

Outside the restaurant, the weather fronts were already at cross-purposes. A wall of smoky-wet air … the sun shooting looks from behind a cloud … and there, moving doggedly through, was Clarissa, studying each of her sandaled feet as it met the pavement.

“So what did he look like?” she asked.

“Harriot, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“Why do you want to know?”

She said nothing. Just watched her feet.

“You've seen him,” I suggested. “Is that it?”

An irritable twitch. An answering crackle from the tangle of her hair.

“Look,” I said, “I know I wasn't very receptive before. About your—whatever you—I mean, they're
visions
, right?
”

“Alonzo called them
crossings,
” she said quietly.

“Well, see? You told
him
about it, you might as well tell me.”

“His mind was a little less closed than yours.”

“Okay. At this very moment, I am making a heroic—frankly a
manful
and courageous effort—to crack my mind open, okay? A millimeter.”

She regarded me with coin-slot eyes.

“Go on,” I gasped. “I can't keep holding it.”

And so, right there, on the sidewalk of the Virginia Dare Trail, three blocks from the Pelican Arms and not two blocks from the local Hooters, Clarissa Dale told me about the man who, on any given night, might come calling.

It was night where he was, too. Late evening in September, though how she knew it was September she couldn't say. He more a black woolen cloak and a stiff square black hat, with rounded ridges like a biretta. Head to toe in black, which had the effect of calling out his face, was pale as a fish, grim and masklike.

“A priest?” I asked.

“I don't think so,” she said. “No crosses, no crucifixes. No genuflecting.”

“Then what's he doing, exactly? In this dream of yours?”

“He's got a handful of stones. Lapis stones, they look like. He's tossing them into a copper pan. And beneath the pan, there's a fire. And the whole time he's speaking. The same four words, again and again.”

“What words?”

“
Ex nihilo nihil fit
.”

She paused then—struck, maybe, by how the words sounded in her own voice.

“It was Alonzo who figured out what he was saying.”

“
From nothing comes nothing.
”

“That's right.”

“And that's all the man says?”

“No. No, when he's done, he throws back his head and—
hollers
, really hollers. In English this time. At least I think it's English.”

“Hollers what?”

“Long live the School of Night!”

To my great relief, she didn't scream it herself. But there was something unspeakable in the way she mimicked the motion—the way her neck snapped back as though someone had slipped a garrote around it.

“And you'd never heard that name before?” I asked.

“Never. And now it's all I hear.”

We were walking again, without quite being aware of it. Walking close enough to brush elbows.

“So when you say you've
seen
the School of Night,” I said, “this is what you mean.”

She nodded.

“You haven't seen anyone else?”

“I wish I would,” she answered, with an upturn of her mouth.

“Okay, one more question. Would you recognize his face? If you saw it again?”

“Henry. A man comes into your bedroom every week for upward of a year? You're going to remember what he looks like.”

*   *   *

Clarissa's laptop was newer and faster than mine, so we set it on the tartan quilt of the motel-room bed, I dropped a few words into the Google grinder—and up came a picture.

“Was
this
the guy?” I asked, angling the screen toward her.

The man pictured there was small, simian, wary-looking, with a disproportionately large head. He wore the usual white ruff, and he had a pen in his hand and a Latin inscription ringing him around.
Si malum, meum peccatum; si bonum, Dei donum.

At the sight of him, Clarissa burst out laughing. “Are you for real?”

“Yep.”

“He looks like someone's pet.”

“Just tell me if it's your guy.”

“Absolutely not.”

She looked at me.

“So I guess that's Thomas Harriot,” she said.

“Nope,” I said, turning the screen back toward me. “Although they
thought
it was for the longest time. Never mind. How 'bout this fella?”

A more presentable candidate this time: cerebral brow on angular face; pointed beard, thin lips, large all-seeing eyes; a deep but modest gravity.

“Huh. Wow.”

She circled the image with her finger. Lowered her face closer and closer to the screen. Tilted her head from side to side.

“Well, the beard,” she said, “that's kind of the same. The
forehead
, though, it's kinda slopy. I don't think it's…”

She drew back, squinted the image into focus one last time.

“No,” she said. “Not him.”

Her eyes met mine then. She took a long breath, and a welt of pink bled from her cheekbones.

“Good,” I said at last. “ 'Cause that's probably not Harriot either. Turns out we don't really have a definitive portrait of him. No one knows what he looked like.”

With a soft grunt, she heaved herself off the bed and stood for a long while, looking out the window. Unaware, probably, of the way her hair burned darker against the sun. The bloom of light on her arms.

“So tell me,” she said. “Did I pass?”

“The
second
test, yeah.”

“What was the first?”

I flipped the screen down and slid the laptop away.

“The
School of Night
test,” I said. “Thomas Harriot would never have used those words. They were Shakespeare's coinage, not his.”

“Harriot couldn't have taken the name for himself?”

“Why would he? By the time Shakespeare wrote his play, the School—if it ever existed—was almost certainly finished. They wouldn't have called themselves anything.”

She turned around. Stared at me.

“So you've been indulging me, Henry.”

“No. I've been contextualizing you.”

She leaned back against the window frame. “Fuck your context,” she said.

It was the first time I'd heard her swear. But what struck me most was her tiredness. Her body was shutting down, just as it had yesterday in Stanton Park.

“If you'll excuse me,” she said. “I'd like to take a nap.”

I might have pointed out that she was in
my
room. Instead, I strolled down to what the motel called, with a certain wistfulness, its ocean veranda. The air was choked with salt, and just to the north of me, in an Adirondack chair, sat a blanketed Maltese dog, gazing out to sea like the doyenne of a sanatorium. We sat there, the two of us, for a good hour, I'd guess, watching the sea oats. And every time my attention flagged, there was Lily Pentzler to snap me back. Lily, with her Alice-blue face.

When I got back, Clarissa was still awake, looking up at the ceiling fan.

“
Washington Post
,” I said, tossing the paper onto the square of bed by her head. “It's got Lily's obit.”

“What does it say?”

“I don't know, I haven't read it.”

Clarissa snatched up the paper and riffled to the back of the Metro section.

“Hey, wait a minute,” she said. “You said she didn't have any family.”

“She didn't, as far as I know.”

“Well, according to this, there's a cousin. Joanna Frobisher. Of Hyattsville, Maryland.”

Hyattsville was a twenty-minute drive from Lily's apartment. But it wasn't the proximity that was butting up against my brain.