The School of Night (14 page)

“Now if you all would oblige me by looking
here
,” he said. “Where somebody—Harriot, we presume—has drawn charming little curlicue waves. On what we may presume to be the easternmost edge of the map, since we lack a compass heading to tell us otherwise. We also find a drawing of a whale. Now wheeeere would Thomas Harriot have seen such a creature?”

With a wry smile, Clarissa raised her hand. “The Atlantic.”

“An interesting idea. Now let's travel westward—
land
ward—to see if it can be borne out. We find these bizarre coordinates. Places like…” His finger waltzed from point to point. “Manteo's Lodge … Bridgett's Stone … Kewasowok's Bier … These names simply didn't exist in England or anywhere else in Europe. Believe me, I've checked. Harriot can only have been talking about one particular corner of the world.” He looked up and smiled. “The place he called Virginia.”

“For all we know,” I said, “the body of water could be the Irish Sea. Harriot did spend three years in Ireland, you know. The bier, the lodge—they could be anything, they could be nothing at all. It could all be some semielaborate joke.”

“Your nearly metronomic predictability, Henry, is something I have missed. As you can
see,”
he added, flipping the newsprint over, “I've taken the liberty of reprinting Harriot's own jottings. This is what he wrote just beneath the map.”

CIIOWVTKSIYFHIYYKPQGXQNOHPSNOFCO

PCRBPFOJYKSNHPHLLHPQBOOXO

ANOHQPQKNOPKTAKFYGHQRBFOPPCIVKNQBO

QBONOQKEOOTNOOYOTNKGSCNACHPOHNQBO

“What is it?” asked Clarissa. “Some kind of code?”

“I admit I was expecting something rather more sophisticated. What we have on our hands is a basic substitution cipher. Of a nearly
embarrassing
simplicity.”

“Okay,” she said. “Could you please embarrass me by explaining it?”

“Very well.” He pulled out a sketch pad and a steel-tipped pen. “It boils down to this. Working from our regular alphabet, we create a substitution alphabet—simply by inserting a special key word. By way of example, let's choose
Henry
. Observe.”

“As you can see,
A
becomes
H
,
B
becomes
E
, and so on. The rest of the alphabet changes accordingly.”

“How come you've doubled up I and J?” asked Clarissa.

“Because in the Elizabethan alphabet they were the same letter. Same with
U
and
V
. Very well, now, we've done our job, each letter in the original message now has a
substitute
letter, and the code flows very easily from there. Wherever you would normally write
A
, you write
H
. Wherever you'd write
F
, you write
A
. And so on. The task for the
decoder
is to figure out what that initial key word is.

“Now, the simplest thing to do is to use your own name. The trouble with Harriot's name—at least the way we spell it—is that it has a pair of repeated letters. Two
r'
s won't work as well because you have to assign each
r
a different letter, which sows confusion. So I started looking at the
other
ways Harriot's name was spelled. And after some trial and error, I came up with this.

“From there, I just had to switch out the rest of the letters—making allowances, of course, for the fact that the Elizabethan alphabet had two fewer letters. By the way, Henry, you're welcome to try it, if you—”

“Go on.”

“Well, once I'd done all
that
, the code was cracked. I had only to divide the letters into syntactical units and voilà!”

He turned the page over and pushed the pad toward us.

In New Found Land dost my treasure lie

Sich splendour as appalls the eye

Great stores of gold, matchlesse in worthe,

There to bee freede from Virginia's Earthe.

“New Found Land
,” said Alonzo. “That's straight from the title of Harriot's book.
Virginia's Earth.
We know where we are now, don't we? But what's
in
this blessed earth?
My treasure. Great stores of gold, matchlesse in worthe.
”

“Metaphor,” I suggested.

“Don't be absurd. What was Harriot's whole purpose in coming here? To find natural wealth, minerals, tangible
things
that would give England a reason to take over the neighborhood, yes? So I ask you: What's more tangible than gold? I grant you, if you look at the map or the cross or the old tales individually, they're thin gruel. But throw them all in the same pot and then toss in the
caramelizing
ingredient of Harriot's own words—well, I call that a meal. For kings.”

I reached for my beer mug. Only to realize I'd drunk the whole thing.

“So Harriot the incorruptible,” I said, “the guy Ralegh trusted with all his money. Stumbles on some massive trove of treasure and decides to keep it all for himself?”

“Let's just say he was laying in a store. For the future.”

“Well, that's all very well,” said Clarissa, taking a sip of her Heineken. “But it doesn't explain why he leaves the gold behind. What good would it do him buried
here
?”

“None at all,” answered Alonzo. “Unless he intends to come back.”

“And why would he?”

“Why would he
not
? Think about it. No one was a more valuable asset to the Crown than Harriot. He knew the local language, he knew the lay of the land, he'd charmed every chieftain in the region. They'd have been mad not to send him back.”

“They didn't,” I interjected.

“Oh, that's true,” said Amory Swale, smiling fearfully. “But for reasons beyond anyone's control. England went to war with Spain, and the queen needed Ralegh, and Ralegh needed Harriot. The window of opportunity slammed shut.”

“But where would Harriot have found gold in the first place?” Clarissa asked. “Carolina's very nice and all, but it ain't California.”

“The gold didn't come by land,” Alonzo explained. “It came by sea.”

“Refills?” sang our waitress, hoving into view.

Alonzo turned his whole being toward her.

“How thoughtful of you. I
would
like a refill. And yet ranged against my own thirst is a touchingly archaic need for privacy. What an impasse! Here's what I suggest. Come back in exactly twelve minutes. And stamp very loudly when you come. I'm sure you can manage that, you strike me as highly adaptable. Bye-bye now.”

He waved her away, then rolled up the newsprint and returned it to its home beneath the table.

“So tell me, kids,” he said. “Other than
les frères Wright,
what are the Outer Banks best known for?”

“Wind,” I said.

“Keep going.”

“Storms.”

“And
…”

“Shipwrecks,” answered Clarissa.

“Exactly. The Graveyard of the Atlantic. And if there's one thing the Atlantic had in those days, it was ships. Waiting to be buried.”

It was the age of sail. Oceans swelled with square-masted cogs and carracks from Spain and France and Portugal, from Denmark and Sweden and the Dutch Republic, from Naples and Venice and Genoa, from Turkey and the Barbary Coast. A new boat on every tide, packed with settlers and traders and warriors and pirates and all the plundered wealth of the New World: spices, tobacco, gems, silver …

And gold.

“So your theory is what?” I asked. “Some Spanish galleon comes out of nowhere and hits a reef or a rock or a sandbar? Washes up at Harriot's feet? Isn't that a little improbable?”

“Not in the least,” sniffed Alonzo. “Plenty of ships had already sunk here. Hundreds have done it since. Remember, they had no lighthouses, no accurate maps. This place was death to boats.”

Clarissa leaned across the table. “But if some massive kind of shipwreck happened right off the Carolina coast, how come nobody but Harriot saw it?”

“Who was there to
see
? The whole colony had maybe a hundred men in it, and most of them were inland, defending their silly fort. Harriot was the only one with the freedom, the
job
description to roam. Miles and miles. Norfolk, Elizabeth City … he was there before any other white man. And for long stretches of time, we can assume he was functionally alone. Maybe he even preferred it that way.”

“But we'd
know
,” said Clarissa. “A ship going down with all that treasure—there'd be some kind of record, right?”

Alonzo laid his hand over hers. “I'm going to excuse you on the grounds that you must be high. What kind of records do you think they kept in those days?”

“I don't know.”

“And neither did they. In Bermuda, six hundred and some miles away, they're still peeling old wrecks off the reefs. None of them came with missing-ship reports. Whatever witnesses there were, Lord help them, went down with their ships. If Thomas Harriot had come across one of those wrecks, he'd have known it was finders keepers.

“To summarize,” he said. “We have
geography
—a part of the world well-known for taking down grand ships. We have
opportunity
—a young Englishman roaming that same part of the world unescorted. And we have
testimony
—native accounts, a map, an encoded message in Harriot's own handwriting.
Great stores of gold,
matchlesse in worthe.
”

He folded his hands together, leaned his elbows on the table.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I won't call it a slam dunk, but if you'll pardon me for torturing a metaphor, it's an easy layup.”

This was the part where we were supposed to applaud, but my hands stayed right where they were.

“Oh, come on, Henry,” he said. “Is there anyone in the world today who knows more about Harriot than you do? Is there anyone who can better unscramble his logic? You're the chosen one.”

“Chosen for what?” I asked. And now I was looking at him straight on. “What exactly do you want from us, Alonzo?”

“What do I want? I want you all to help me find Harriot's treasure. And I want us to start now.”

18

“A
ND WHAT IF
there's no treasure to be found?” I said.

“Then we won't find it.”

“And what if we
do
?” Clarissa asked.

“You mean how do we split it up? Well, given that the venture is my brainchild, I might reasonably claim a slightly disproportionate share of the proceeds. Overcome as I am, however, by the spirit of the occasion, I am willing to waive my proprietary rights.”

“Which means what?”

“We split it four ways.”

“And when all this is over,” said Clarissa, frowning, “you promise to shave that awful beard?”

“First thing. And head straight back to civilization. With the most persuasive amnesia story you've ever heard.”

“And Bernard Styles gets his document back?”

“With my blessings.”

Alonzo stopped and waited. Then, in a low and carefully uninflected voice, he asked: