The School of Night (18 page)

A slow, seraphic smile. She pushed herself off the bed. Gave her eyes a rub and, in a flat voice, said:

“Remind me whose room this is.”

“Mine.”

“Okay, good night.”

“It's still early, isn't it?”

“Not for me. I'll see you in the morning.”

I watched her go. Wondering the whole time what would happen if I had asked her to stay.

The beer by now was gone, so I drove to a local Brew Thru for a one-liter bottle of Purple Moon Shiraz, which I managed to spill on my bathroom floor not ten minutes later.

I had enough left over for a prodigious buzz. I turned on Turner Classic Movies and, through the husks of my eyes, watched Jeanette MacDonald fight for Clark Gable's soul. She was still at it when I dropped off to sleep.

I awoke hours later to the pounding of my own head. Which quickly relocated itself to the door, ten feet away.

It was Clarissa, in a T-shirt of her own, gymnasium gray. She took a step into the room. Her eyes were hot and white.

“It
is
Harriot,” she said.

“Okay.”

“It
is
.”

“All right.”

“And someone's
with
him. Her name is Margaret.”

 

ISLEWORTH
,
ENGLAND 1603

22

H
ERE IS THE
first surprise: The laboratory in which Master Thomas Harriot seeks enlightenment is … almost entirely dark.

Someone, it seems, has thrown horse blankets over the windows. Pausing at the room's entrance, Margaret peers into the murk, spies a shifting shape, hears a voice burred with impatience.

—Come in. Come in.

She takes two strides into the room and waits for her eyes to adapt.

—You may be seated.

At last objects merge. A worktable, roughly two yards long, covered in butcher's paper. On the table, a burnished triangle of amber. And directly above, a single lamp, hanging from a chain.

There is no preamble or explanation from the master. Only a flurry of last-minute calculations as he measures off each distance and angle.

At last he sets down his compass and ruler. He pauses. Then he slides a length of slotted black wood into the lamp's base.

The effect is instant. The cloud of lamplight is winnowed into a single lancing beam, which strikes the amber triangle along its exposed flank. At once, a sister ray surges off on its own tangent, carving the amber in two and yet leaving it magically whole.

No time to admire the effect. The master grabs his protractor and sets to work, murmuring the name of each angle (
ABH … GBI … FBM…
) and then scribbling down each figure. The work is slow, for he insists on taking each measure twice, and over the next ten minutes she recedes so far from his thoughts that she must repeat herself before he hears her.

—Pardon, sir. My duties …

—Ohh. Yes.

At a loss for protocol, she takes a step back, curtsies, and makes a straight line for the doorway.
Quick and smart
, she tells herself.
Heels off the ground …

And just as he did in their first meeting, he calls after her.

—Come back tomorrow, then.

*   *   *

She goes back tomorrow. The day after and the day after. Always pausing just outside the door until she hears the three chimes. Then presenting herself with a bowed head.

—I have come, sir. As you asked.

And why has he asked? What does he want of her? As best she can tell, he requires nothing more of her than an audience. And yet he has none of the actor's vanity. He fidgets, he grumbles, he scratches, loses his place, remonstrates with his quill … behaves like a man enslaved to himself. All the more surprising that, one afternoon, the fog around him should part long enough for him to say:

—Margaret, might I trouble you to take down the figures?

She balks at first. She has had precious little practice penning numbers, and her only recourse at first is to ape his hand: the jagged underloops of his 3s and 5s, the squint of his 2s, the dangling edges of his 4s. So thoroughly does she absorb it all that the style becomes her own, and soon the quill is sliding across the paper with a sweet ease. Degree by degree, minute by minute, the master's columns fill up, and playing even this small part in the production gives her an uncommon excitement. Or is it just the relief that comes of doing?

Without her knowing it, her intervals in the laboratory stretch from ten minutes to fifteen to twenty. And when at last she excuses herself, he gives her the same mask of puzzlement each time, as if she were a variable he has yet to sew into an equation.

One afternoon, he sets a large crystal sphere on the table.
A seer's sphere
, she thinks. And there is something of the necromancer in the ponderousness of his motions, in the theatricality of his pauses. The way his hand actually trembles when he slides the black board into the lamp.

Once again, the ray of light comes surging forth, but with this difference. It doesn't so much strike the sphere as detonate it.

The crystal explodes into a diadem of color. Indigo and violet and red and orange. Searing yellow. A green she can almost smell. Every sense is inflamed, and yet no single sense, no combination of senses, can contain it all.

Dazed, she rises from her stool, dimly aware of some violence to her right. The inkhorn … tipped on its side … a river of gall ink crawling toward the sheet of figures.

The master reacts before she does, snatching the paper clear. But in his haste he strikes the lamp with his shoulder, and down it comes in a gale of glass. A second later, the table is ablaze.

Gasping, Margaret grabs the quill and the horn, feeling the lick of flame against her fingers. She watches as the master seizes the blanket from the window and hurls it across the table. But the flames come right back, redoubled in force, swallowing the wool like air.

From without comes the sound of running feet. Margaret turns to see Mrs. Golliver lurching into the room with a bucket of water. The sight is enough to make her laugh, but already the water is cascading over the table. There comes a great hiss … a dying sigh … the fire is transformed into a cordon of smoke.

Panting, triumphant, Mrs. Golliver sets the bucket down. Her voice is as grave as a sibyl.

—Master Harriot, you cannot say you went unwarned.

—It was my fault entirely.

—Permitting a mere girl to serve in such a capacity goes against Nature and common sense. It perverts the natural order of things.

Watching Mrs. Golliver bear down, Margaret suddenly realizes: This is the moment she's been waiting for.

—You must be made to see, Master. The girl was engaged to
work
for us. Not
make work
for us.

—Is that so?

He means, possibly, to challenge the idea. But there is no challenge in his voice, only an agitation that slowly communicates itself to other parts: eyebrows, fingers, feet.

How he wavers in the face of true fixity! Margaret could almost despise him if she did not feel instead a pang of fellowship. Master Thomas Harriot has no more say in the running of his life than she does in hers.

—Enough of
this,
says Mrs. Golliver. —Come, Margaret.

She cuffs her under the chin. A light cuff only. It is the words that sting.
Enough of this.
As if the old housekeeper had somehow joined league with her mother.

No need for these any longer.

*   *   *

That night, Margaret lies in her cold bed, the tips of her fingers still stinging, the memory of the fire scalding in every pore. She cannot imagine she will ever sleep, but in fact she has just slipped free of consciousness when she hears a light tapping. A voice follows hard on.

—Margaret? Are you about?

Rising quickly, she wraps her coverlet around her shift and unlatches the door.

He stands there. Bareheaded in his black gown. Holding a candle. His voice straining toward cheer.

—So! Your natural habitation …

More than once, in her fancy, a man has come to her bedchamber. He looked nothing like the master.

—I wonder, Margaret, if you would oblige me.

—Sir?

—There is something I should like to show you.

He pauses.

—Out-of-doors, if that is not disagreeable.

He waits on the step while she climbs back into her petticoat and skirt and waistcoat. Then he signals her to follow him down. Pausing on the bottommost stair, he taps a finger to his ear:
Listen.

From the darkness of the inner rooms comes a sound like converging oceans. The Gollivers' snoring.

—Mister G has the quavering treble, says Master Harriot. —The
basso continuo
would be his fair paramour.

It is ten minutes till midnight, everyone in Syon House is abed, and the earth itself is snoring into the gray poplars and the silver birches.

She looks down. In the master's hands rests a cylinder, one foot and a half in length, encased in mildewed leather.

—My perspective trunk, Margaret. Of some ancient vintage. I brought it to Virginia ages ago. The local Algonkin were most taken with it. Please …

With some awkwardness, she grasps it. Puts the glass to her eye, tilts her head toward the sky …

And falls back before the onslaught. Stars where there was only night.

It must be a trick, she thinks, but then the moon itself swarms into view. So massive she cannot bring herself to believe in it. Or take her eyes from it.

—It magnifies only to the third power, and the field of view is rather narrow, as you may see. I cannot help but posit that one day, with the, the right configuration of convex and concave lenses, one might—well, it's difficult to foretell …

—One might see the moon for true, she says, lowering the glass to her side.

—Why, yes, the moon. In all its—all its particularity. We may prove with some degree of confidence that it is not composed of green cheese.

Or tired stars
, she thinks. That's what her father used to tell her when she was a girl. Every night, the sleepiest stars would swim down to the moon and lie there a short while—until they felt ready to climb back up.

—Sir.

—Yes?

—May I look one last time?

—Of course.

Once again the moon shivers into view: not quite full, or real, but giddy with itself. Why is it she can never find a word equal to the experience?

And why should she bother? The world is conversing quite enough. Frogs, whippoorwills, barn owls, nightjars, bobwhites … churring and jangling and now and then rhyming in some perverse way. Off to the south, the midnight bells, dividing the sound into pulses. And the moon somehow riding atop it all.

She hears the master's voice, low and firm.

—Yes. I should say so.

She looks up at him.

—Sir?

—I should say the nighttime would do rather well.

She gives her head a shake.

—Pardon, he says. —I was merely considering the, the maximal conditions for inquiries of an optical nature. It seems to me that the nighttime, with its more intense contrasts of light and dark, might permit us more detailed measurements. Of refraction and, and the like.

The
us
is not lost on her. Or him. He slaps the heels of his boots together.

—As we have already determined, the Gollivers are quite insensible this time of evening. We should be left to ourselves, I should think. Barring any more bonfires.

He is seeking her consent, she understands this now. She understands, too, that sleep is the one luxury left to her. For what seems to her an eternity, she stands there, in the very pitch of night.

—As you wish, sir.

23

T
HE NEXT EVENING
, just past the stroke of nine, she is there.

At first blush, there is nothing so different in meeting at this hour. The work is largely the same: laborious measurements, recorded row after row. The room is no darker than before, except that the shadows run deeper and the light carves harder.

And there is this difference, too: The act of transcription, which had a certain enchantment by daylight, becomes at night a form of penance. Her hand drags along the paper, the figures swim in and out of focus. Even the master's voice subsides, for seconds altogether, into an undifferentiated buzzing.

Does he notice her inattention? Does he even know she's in the room? It's true there are times when he will cease muttering to himself and address her directly. Now and then, he will even make an effort to explain something to her—the computation of sines and cosines, say—but even this carries a professorial tone. And though her Latin is good, she has had only the rudiments of geometry. She knows what a right angle is but not a hypotenuse. Trigonometry is as explicable to her as Aramaic.

—Of course, what makes the sine and cosine functions so especially telling, Margaret, is that they are not dependent upon the
size
of the triangle. They are merely expressions of the relations between angles.…

—Yes, sir.

The words cascade over her, and she seems to evaporate beneath them. And then he calls out another measurement, and her hand scrawls it down, and the work goes on.

Angulus refractus … hdb per calculum … in aqua incidentia …

And when the work is done for the night, he takes his rest with a common man's relish. Pulls out his pipe, fills it with tobacco, lights it by the nearest candle, and drinks it in. The smoke billows across the room in shivering spirals: a new layer of sting to Margaret's already smarting eyes.

At some point, she finds voice enough to excuse herself. His head angles toward her.

—Good night, then. My thanks.

Leaving, she always steals a look back, but he is always exactly as she left him. Still seated. No sign of retiring himself.