The School of Night (15 page)

“Are we all in?”

And as the seconds ticked away, I realized that everyone's eyes were fixed squarely on mine.

“So you're telling us you're going to find gold,” I said. “Where no one else has ever found it.”

“I mean to try. I mean to make history. How about you?”

I could hear the thump of pool balls against baize … the calliope sound of a pinball machine … Kid Rock singing … and, coursing beneath it all, the
basso continuo
of Alonzo Wax.

“Henry,” he said. “For once in your life, avoid mediocrity.”

It took me a second to absorb the blow. With great care, I slid out of the booth.

“Suck my dick.”

*   *   *

I assumed I'd have the night to myself, but sharing the curb outside was a young redhead, taking angry hits off an unfiltered cigarette. Small but well-knit, with a wraparound jeans skirt I could very clearly imagine unpeeling. We stood there in silence, ten feet apart, rocking slightly in the wind.

“They stink, don't they?” she said.

“Sometimes,” I allowed.

I would have said more, but my phone went off. I toyed with not answering, but then I saw the old familiar
UNKNOWN
, and the thought that Alonzo couldn't get off his fat ass and follow me was so deeply enraging that I didn't bother with a greeting.

“What?”

“You're a naughty puss,” said Bernard Styles.

“I'm sorry?”

“Leaving town without telling us.”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry. Family emergency…”

“And I've been so very curious to know how you're getting on.”

“Significant progress is being made.”

“I'll assume
you're
the person making the progress.”

“Yes.”

“One never knows with these passive-voice constructions. Well, then, it's beddy-bye for me. Halldor and I are off to see the Wright brothers' plane tomorrow.”

“Their
plane
?” My brain lurched to a halt. “Where is the plane, exactly?”

“Why, the National Air and Space Museum, of course. On the National Mall.” A long pause. “Where did you think I meant, Mr. Cavendish?”

“I got confused.”

“But you're better now. And that's all that matters.”

*   *   *

The redhead had gone inside, but I was still standing on the curb when the next call came. A Washington, D.C., exchange, unfamiliar to me, and a grainy, grudging voice, only slightly more familiar.

“This is Detective Acree, returning your call.”

A call I'd placed six hours earlier. Before I knew that the guy everyone thought was dead was alive. And that people could be murdered for a book. And that a scientist born four hundred years ago could inspire people to plunder the wastes of North Carolina for a treasure chest that may never have existed.

“Mr. Cavendish?”

“Yeah, I just wanted you to know I'm in the Outer Banks on business. In case you thought I skipped town or something.”

“So you haven't skipped town?”

“Well, no.”

“Then I appreciate you telling me. Is there anything else?”

The cell phone was pulling away from my ear, inch by inch.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Sorry, I didn't catch that.”

“Nothing.”

*   *   *

Alonzo was draining the last dregs of his vodka, and Amory Swale was twirling an onion ring around his finger like a tiny hula hoop, and Clarissa was rubbing the kinks out of her eyebrow muscles.

“I'm in,” I said.

“Very well,” said Alonzo. And then he glanced at his watch. “Ten twenty-three. The School of Night has begun.”

 

ISLEWORTH
,
ENGLAND 1603

19

O
N FEBRUARY 20
, Margaret Crookenshanks, twenty-two, a scullery maid at Syon House, is summoned to the steward's quarters.

—You wished to see me, sir?

The steward is nobody too important in social terms—a poor and distant relation of the Earl of Northumberland—but he has a proud bearing and the snowy ruff of an officer of horse and a monarch's habit of speaking in first person plural.

—On the morrow, we desire that you apply yourself to a new position.

—Sir?

—Master Harriot requires an assistant housekeeper.

—Master Harriot, sir?

—Yes.

—At what time am I expected, sir?

—Cock's crow. Do not be late or unkempt.

—Yes, sir.

—You are to lodge there as well. Kindly bring your clothes and possessions. Any further questions may be addressed to Mr. Golliver, Master Harriot's butler, or to Mrs. Golliver, the housekeeper.

—Yes, sir.

Margaret is sketching out the beginning of a curtsy when a thought stops her.

—If I might, sir. Who is Master Harriot?

—We are happy to say he is a gentleman of excellence and quality. He undertakes experiments and is ever learning.

And at once, she knows who it is.

*   *   *

On her second day at Syon House—a December afternoon—she was carrying a tub of lather and grit down to the river when she looked up to see a gentleman of no certain years in a black cloak. Standing on the roof of his cottage, just above the eave, and holding what looked to be two musket balls, of differing sizes.

At some inaudible signal, his fingers sprang apart, and the balls dropped in unison. And here was the most remarkable thing: Someone was waiting for them below. A boy (one of the trebles from the chapel choir, she later learned) was lying on his side, his left eye flush to the ground, watching each pair of balls land.

—The same time, sir!

—Are you quite sure?

—Yes, sir.

They repeated the exercise at least three times, with identical results.

—The same, sir!

It was a source of great wonder to see labor like this. So divorced from the workings of a manor. So close to pastime. So near to joy.

The steward is rumored to be omniscient, and he does seem to divine the tenor of Margaret's thoughts.

—To speak in the vernacular, Master Harriot is a queer badger. But no danger to a young girl, you may depend on that. Even if our own daughter were to work there, we should sleep well at night.

The steward has no children, but his tone carries conviction.

—My duties, sir?

—You shall be duly advised. You are obliged, however, by entreaty of Her Ladyship, to heed one stricture above any other. Master Harriot requires silence. He will put up with a great many things, but he must have his quiet, mustn't he?

*   *   *

This is so impressed into Margaret's brain that, before knocking on the back door of Harriot's house, she removes her leather shoes. Only to be reproved for it by Mrs. Golliver.

—What sort of girl walks about in her stocking feet? Why, Mr. Golliver, they've sent us a blue jay.

—Bit of a sloven, too.

—Small wonder! Coming from the scullery …

Like many long-married couples, the Gollivers have formed a joint edifice against the world, which threatens at any moment to fissure under private stresses. The husband is bald and ginger-bearded, with a bent, obdurate bulk, like something coaxed away from pasture. Mrs. Golliver is sweaty and blanched, with a bargelike shelf of stomach and an underbite and the appraising air of a hog butcher.

—You're pretty enough, I suppose. Not that
he
shall notice.

The Gollivers take great care to tell her all the things she may not do. These include speaking unless spoken to, retiring before anyone else, awakening after anyone else. Entertaining visitors, male or female. Missing chapel. Whining, protesting, answering back. Asking questions.

—And mark me well, my girl. (Mrs. Golliver's goiterish eyes become strangely radiant.) You are
not
to go near the master.

If he enters a room in which she is working, she is to leave at once. If he requests something within her hearing, she is to convey the request at once to Mr. or Mrs. Golliver. At no time is she to meet the master's eye or engage him in talk or touch a single of his belongings. Failure to obey any of these strictures will be cause for instant dismissal.

Mrs. Golliver reveals the places where her teeth used to be.

—You don't want to end up like Jane, do you?

Only later will Margaret learn who Jane was: the
previous
assistant housekeeper. Who, having concealed her condition for seven months, was obliged in January to confess she was with child.

The father was swiftly located: a stool maker from Richmond who had met the young woman once, at a bonfire. A marriage bond was drafted, the obligatory banns were reduced from three to one, and a week later, staggering with child, Jane Jasper became Jane Fitzwilliam.

—She started going astray in a small way, says Mrs. Golliver. —A missed stitch here. A dropped pail there. A voice raised beyond what was pleasing. Before we could stop it, she was spreading her legs for the first man what asked.
Don't you be like Jane.

*   *   *

Each morning, Margaret is up at five, with the milkmaids. The cold wraps her around from the moment she rises and follows her through the house, lapping at her petticoat as she scoops out last night's ashes and lights the coal fires and then cleans and blacks the master's boots and fetches water.

After breakfast, she makes the beds and cleans the chamber pots and sweeps the floor and beats the rugs and stuffs the pallets with new hay. She works through the afternoon and the early evening, baking bread, churning butter, washing and pressing clothes, scrubbing floors, scouring plates and silver and Mrs. Golliver's cooking pots with hartshorn paste.

She takes her dinner alone in the attic: barley bread, with a piece of bacon or pork; ox cheeks every Sunday. She sleeps up there, too, on a truckle bed, her bones smoldering from weariness. There is but one window, so the darkness is utter (except for a single candle stub in a sconce). She doesn't mind. It frees her from having to look at her hands, which were once lovely.

*   *   *

Her glimpses of the master are few: a flash of black on the stairs, a low voice in the next room. She comes to know him only at second hand. His unmade bed, for instance, with its man-prints, its man-smell. His boots, waiting for her by the hearth every morning. His clothes, nearly shocking in their sameness. Black cloaks, black shirts, black doublets, black hose … and white ruffs, which are always limp because he dislikes the scratch of starch against his neck.

Once a week, in warmer weather, she hangs the clothes on a line and beats them with a badler, and out come the scents of pomander and cloves, of anise seed and sulfur … and something beyond her power to name, bitter and smoky and mellow.

She smells it again while she's changing the bed linens and, after some searching, traces it to a trail of brown leaves, drying on a windowsill. They look like the shavings you'd find inside a doll. She takes up one of the leaves, rests it on her tongue, and is astonished to feel the tingle pass all the way to the back of her head.

The very next evening, lying abed, still too sore for sleep, she smells it again, spilling like a dream through her half-open window. Rising, she wraps her coverlet around her and looks out.

He is in the courtyard directly below her, sitting on an overturned cheese bucket with a clay pipe hanging off his lip. From this pipe a watery column of smoke pushes toward the night sky. She reaches out her hand and feels it wreathing around her, curing her skin.

The next thing she knows, the pipe is on the ground, and the master's head has toppled into his hands, and his whole frame is shaking and smoking, in the premonitory way of a volcano. No eruption, though. Just a slowly gathering stillness.

The next morning she can still smell the tobacco on her arm.

*   *   *

The steward comes twice a week, at unscheduled times, to inspect her work. He speaks in deep and sorrowing cadences.

—There is a large quantity of ash in the parlor hearth. Crumbs as well on the pantry floor. The napkins are dingy, the ewer spotted. We regret to say we saw a distinct bootprint on the hall floor.…

The Gollivers take up wherever he leaves off. In Margaret, they have found the common cause that allows them to forget, for minutes altogether, their grievances against each other.

—She calls that a seam, does she?

—Clumsy! You'd think she had two left hands.

—I wonder when she'll fill the master's water pitcher. Michaelmas, do you think?

And when they can't find anything particular to catch her out on, they fall back on prophesy.

—She'll turn out just like Jane, I expect.

How wide the gibe misses its mark, for Margaret has long ceased to think of Jane as an example to avoid. Jane has jumped the wall. She has a husband, a child … a future. A young woman could do worse than Jane.

*   *   *

One Thursday in April, Mrs. Golliver takes ill with one of her stomach pains. She writhes on her bed, biting her pillow to stifle the cries. Having applied a henbane poultice to no effect, Mr. Golliver despairs of her and, with a wild straggling eye, calls out to Margaret.

—Here! Go and dust the laboratorium. Quick about it! And come straight back!

Laboratorium.
Such a rich strange word and such a small mean room. Two joint stools. Three chests for papers. One plain, rough working table. No rug or cushion or wall hanging. And no clear place to begin cleaning.

Vaguely she waves her duster among the pewter vessels and pots, the rods and bronze disks and magnifying lenses, the used-up goose quills, the dried inkwells. A sea of objects, islanded with paper.

And here is the question she will never be able to answer: Why does she pause over
this
particular paper?