The School of Night (17 page)

She nods. She tells herself it is time to go. And then, to her own great shock, she hears herself speak again.

—And how could one even measure such a thing?

—Well, yes, that strikes at a most interesting question. Through experimentation, I have ascertained a rather persuasive correlation between the, the angle of
incidence
—that is, the angle at which the light converges with the other object—and the angle of
refraction
—that is, the emerging ray. Divide the sine of the first angle by the sine of the second, why, then, the quotient is the refractive index. At least so far as I have been able to calculate.

Her fingers lightly stroke the paper.

—So all these figures, sir. They are the refractive indices?

—For different media, yes. You can surely translate the Latin. There is glass and crystal and marble. Rubies. Copper ore. Even brimstone! The devil, it seems, has a devilishly dark time of it down there.

He chuckles. Then, fearing he has overstepped, falls silent. She, too, is quiet for a long while before gathering up her nerve.

—Please, sir. Why do you care to know all this?

The question catches him squarely in his middle and pumps out a gasp of air.

—Why do I … well, now, I would not confess this to just anybody, but I subscribe to the, the school of
Democritus
, which holds matter to be composed of entities called
atoms
. These entities are believed to be both, erm, indivisible and indestructible. And, by their very nature, far too minute to be observed by the naked eye. That is where light proves itself such an unsurpassable gift to the human mind, for it can disclose to us the structure that lies beneath the surface of all things. The more light we shine into these manifold substances, the more they reveal their innermost natures and the closer we come to the nature of …

His own words jar him to a stop. He laces his hands together and, in a low judicial tone, concludes.

—Well, the nature of life itself. If that coheres into any sort of sense …

—Yes, sir, it does. I consider it to be most grand and noble.

At once she regrets the words.
Grand … noble
 … how paltry do they sound alongside the world he has just revealed to her. Light. Atoms.
Life.

—My object, Margaret—and I do delude myself into believing I have one—is to devise a mathematical relationship between the three variables. By which I mean density and molecular structure and refractive index. And in so doing to—oh, dear, I fear I've grown confoundedly tedious. I must apologize, I was so enjoying our little interview.

—No, sir, the pleasure has been mine. The
honor.
Truly.

—Oh.

He draws away. Scratches a patch along his jaw.

—I don't know about honor.

She understands then. Flattery is a kind of grief to him.

—Margaret.

—Yes, sir?

—Would you care to
observe
some of the work in question? At closer quarters?

—Observe, sir?

—It so falls that tomorrow afternoon I shall be taking the measure of
amber.
If you should choose to be a fly on the wall, I should not at all be put out. Oh, God's wounds, such a look. Am I breaking another rule?

—I fear so, sir.

His lips coil into a knot. And then,
ex nihilo
, a thought flies up.

—Perhaps I might speak to Mrs. Golliver about it! I cannot see how she could protest overmuch. A ten-minute respite from your diurnal rounds, no great harm, is there?

Margaret scarcely knows what to say. Mrs. Golliver
will
protest. She will protest very loudly. And yet it is the master proposing it. Who can gainsay him?

—Sir, I should be … whatsoever you see fit to …

—Then let us propose three in the afternoon. In my laboratory.

And now that there are coordinates attached to it—a time, a place—his plan grows the more fearsome in her eyes. And she the more powerless before it. The words spill from her like a sentence of doom.

—As you wish, sir.

 

OUTER BANKS
,
NORTH CAROLINA SEPTEMBER 2009

21

A
ND WHAT OF
that earlier school? The one Alonzo Wax and I had formed in college all those years ago?

We never did declare a formal halt to it, but as the spring of our freshman year wore down, we saw less and less of each other. We both put a brave face on things, but we knew the real truant was me, and I was no less puzzled than Alonzo. Did I have any place better to be? A more generous or loyal friend? A better curriculum than reading poetry, arguing philosophy, and getting high?

Alonzo never demanded all my time or cordoned me off from my other friends. His interest in men was widely assumed, but he never did anything so crass as make a pass at me. And still I could feel the itch of something unconsummated in our time together. I began to invent reasons for not showing up, and sometimes I didn't bother with reasons. And Alonzo, whose vision of himself had once seemed so impregnable, grew more and more fretful and querulous, like a teacher whose class has slipped out behind his back.

By fall, I'd managed to acquire a girlfriend, a poli-sci major from Austin with a gorgeous sulk, and Alonzo had discovered Kenneth Martineau, heir to a cardboard-box fortune. Their relationship began as platonic and, even at its most passionate, would never have qualified as torrid, but Kenneth had a weakness for shock effects and, on the anniversary of his mother's death, announced he was dedicating his life to Alonzo. The rest of Kenneth's family issued threats and recriminations, and when all the debris was cleared off, Kenneth had cleared off, too. To La Jolla, where he became muse and patron to a found-object constructivist.

As for Alonzo, he quit before the semester was done. But he made a point of keeping in touch, and out of guilt and, yes, residual affection, I answered in kind. Our school may have ceased, but it never really shut its doors.

And now we were once more matriculants, gathering each morning in Amory Swale's shack. (Amory himself was sent on errands.) That first morning, I brought a plastic thermos of coffee and a pint of orange juice and some harvest muffins and a dozen and a half bagels, which Alonzo dove into like a refugee. “I've been—sorry—I've been thinking over how the work should be divided. For now…” He licked the last residue of crumbs from his lip. “I'm thinking Amory and I will handle the fieldwork. Combing through old sources, consulting authorities, doing site inspections … whatever it takes to reconstruct Harriot's tracks. You and Clarissa—”

“Yes?”

And then he showed me the wheel.

I'd missed it in my first perusal. A ring of letters, minuscule in size, circling the map like a globe. Alonzo, working with a magnifier, had come up with a clockwise sequence.

PsjAYStrooxeidDVegaLOkuxTmLikcyCUsSxGAzyrnrmuOrrLBAkchrltRdgarnoom

ONOssfrtvQhiHeRbdallZolgeanitzPeFpfhlogionLlLqaBwnbAdauncsleckQooTiat

GlgKIkiWfleatHEstRqiabaOtzKCdMCpnfeffkuv

“This is the map's legend,” said Alonzo. “I'm convinced of it. If we crack the wheel, we crack the map.”

By now my coffee was cold enough to stir with my finger.

“Just so you know,” I said. “I'm not a cryptologist.”

“Never fear, Clarissa's a whiz with computers. What I want
you
to do is provide the frame of reference. Look for phrases, names, words. Anything you can tie to the man or the period, jump on it like a loose penny.”

He gave his belly a Falstaffian pat and, with just the driest particle of mischief in his voice, said:

“By the way, Henry, I enjoyed your eulogy.”

I put down my muffin. I looked right into his irises.

“Oh, God.”

For what, after all, was my most indelible memory of Alonzo's memorial service? Lily Pentzler muttering into her sleeve like a madwoman.

“My God, you had Lily wired,” I said. “She was
livecasting
your fucking funeral.”

“And it was all very touching, Henry. You weren't sentimental, which you know I abhor. Oh, but tell me what you think of Clarissa.”

“Um…” I made a gesture to the ceiling. “She's game.”

Alonzo roared. “Why don't you just go ahead and say she's
yar
?”

“Well, I don't know. Do
you
believe Thomas Harriot comes to visit her every night?”

“I believe that's what she's seeing, yes. I believe these visions are coming from someplace that's not her.”

“Because she coughed up some Latin.”

“Because she doesn't
want
them to come. Because she wishes like hell they'd go away.”

“Schizophrenics wish the same thing.”

And even as I said that, I was recalling how I'd left Clarissa that morning. In the hotel's common room, sitting on a cane-bottom chair, bowed over a single croissant, her eyes almost glaucomic when she lifted them to mine.

“And another thing,” I said. “Why is she here in the first place? An attractive young woman like that, she must have surer bets elsewhere.”

“People go where they need to be,” said Alonzo, draining the last drop of orange juice straight from the carton. “Don't you think, Henry?”

*   *   *

A good question. Was
I
where I needed to be?

I was the last person in the world who expected us to find gold. But the fact remained that twice in the last twenty-four hours I'd had the chance to leave, and it wasn't Thomas Harriot who'd kept me here. And knowing this, the pink masonry of the Pelican Arms filled me with a certain alarm as I approached. Clarissa was on the oceanside veranda, her eyes closed, her hair breeze-fraught, wearing her canary-yellow sundress, which looked preposterous against the sad gray cushions. Her toenails had been painted—beefsteak red—and I admit I was briefly seized by the prospect of chewing on them.

“We've got a job,” I said.

And so she seated herself in the room's lone armchair, fired up her Mac Notebook and set to work with a vengeance. Oh she took an occasional bathroom break, an occasional stretch, a swig of iced tea, but no diversion lasted longer than a minute, and then she went straight back to her decryption programs.

Me, I took out a legal pad on my lap and scribbled down every name I could associate with Harriot. Ralegh and Percy and Marlowe and Chapman and all the reputed members of the School. Richard Hakluyt, Harriot's geography instructor. Thomas Allen, Harriot's mathematics instructor. Kepler, Harriot's correspondent. Galileo, Harriot's rival. And Bruno and Brahe and Roger Bacon. And John Dee and George Ripley and Avicenna.

All of Harriot's friends and all his equally numerous foes. The Earl of Essex, Percy's brother-in-law. Robert Cecil, chief adviser to both Queen Elizabeth and King James. Anthony à Wood, who accused Harriot of having “strange thoughts of the Scriptures” and casting off the Old Testament. Father Robert Parsons, the Jesuit priest who said Harriot taught young gentlemen to jeer at Moses and Jesus. Nicholas Jefferys, who said Harriot had denied “the resurrection of the body.” Chief Justice Popham, who, in sentencing Ralegh to death, urged him to wrest himself free of “that devil Harriot.”

Then I started compiling place-names. Clifton, where Harriot's father may once have worked as a blacksmith. Oxford and St. Mary Hall, where Harriot matriculated at the age of seventeen. Sherborne Castle, where the School of Night would probably have met. Durham House, Ralegh's London estate. Molanna Abbey, Ralegh's Irish estate. Various stations on the way to America: Plymouth and Puerto Rico and Hispaniola and Wococon.

Name after name, each one canceling the one before, none more promising than any other. It was, in fact, a perverse comfort that Clarissa was making no better progress than I was. By now, she'd established that the letter string wasn't a substitution cipher or an algorithm. But no matter what terms she fed into her decryption engines, the result was only more abstraction.

We worked through lunch and the rest of the afternoon, and at seven-thirty, we ordered a Three Meat Treat pizza from the local Little Caesar's, which we supplemented with a six-pack of Sierra Nevada. Clarissa sat cross-legged on the damp white shag carpet, shoveling in one slice after another, glancing from time to time at her napkin as if she were trying to place its name.

“
So
,” she said. “Tell me something. Do you hate him?”

“Who?”

“Walter Ralegh.”

I took a swallow of beer, squinted back at her.

“Why should I?”

“He killed your career.”

“Ralegh had nothing to do with it. I've never—I mean, if you must know—more than ever, I just want to do right by him.”

“But who's doing
wrong
by him?”

“Well…” I kneaded the back of my neck. “
History,
in a way. It masks him. Before anything else, he was a
poet
. Who, in his spare time, you know, was storming Cádiz and fighting the Armada and sailing down the Arapahoe River and—”

“Throwing his cloak over that puddle! For Queen Elizabeth.”

“Which may never have happened. You look at all the stuff he actually
did
, all the people he
was
—courtier and soldier—explorer, patron—everything was just an extension of his true calling. And that was poetry. It's the only way his life makes sense, as this kind of epic verse, never resolving.”

Which was more than I'd spoken on the subject in ages.

“Well, now,” said Clarissa, framing me over the rim of her bottle. “What kind of poem is
your
life, Henry Cavendish?”

“Prose. All prose.”