The School of Night (23 page)

“Syon House,” he breathed.

“If Harriot's gold exists,
that's
where he left it. In his own backyard. The estate where he spent the last quarter century of his life.
Golden Sion.
”

“But Harriot specifically mentioned Virginia,” said Clarissa.

“His idea of a good joke, maybe. If you don't believe me, let's take another look at that map.”

With due understanding of his holy office, Alonzo laid it across the Pelican Arms's mothbally bedspread.

“It turns out our Harriot was a funny guy,” I said. “Who knew? These place-names—
Bridgett's Stone
,
Ahab's Beastiary
,
Manteo's Lodge.
Such an exotic sound to them. Your mind conjures up pirate coves, hidden inlets, Indian haunts. Poor Amory went to his grave thinking of the New World. In fact, we're very much in the
Old
World. Specifically, the part of it that Thomas Harriot inhabited.”

“Nonsense,” replied Alonzo. “Manteo is an Indian name. Travel a few miles south from this very spot, you'll find a town with the same name.”

“You'll also find that Manteo was a historical figure. He may never have made it to Syon House, but I can guarantee he wasn't too far away. When did the very first English party land in Roanoke?”

“Fifteen eighty-four.”

“Exactly. A year before Harriot got there. That same party came away with a human prize. A very helpful Croatan who served as their guide and translator.
And
—whether he liked it or not—their ambassador to the local natives. Which didn't make the guy too popular with his fellow Indians. But the English? They valued him so highly they brought him back to London and, in short order, baptized him—although, unlike Pocahontas, he got to keep his name.

“Manteo,” murmured Alonzo.

“The very guy. He and his comrade Wanchese were Harriot's tutors in Algonquin. They're the reason he was fluent before he even reached the New World. And where did they stay during their year in England? At Walter Ralegh's estate, Durham House. Which, as the arrow indicates, is roughly east of Syon Park.”

One of Alonzo's hands began to fan the air.

“Go on,” he said.

And so I did. Name by name …

Bridgett's Stone.

Before it becomes a rich man's pleasure dome, Syon House is a holy sanctuary.

King Henry V, haunted by his father's complicity in the murder of Richard II, decides to expiate that original sin by creating one of England's richest monasteries. And to which saint is it dedicated? In whose name are stone after righteous stone piled?

Saint Bridget.

“Keep going,” growled Alonzo.

Ahab's Beastiary.

Soon after King Henry VIII declares himself head of England's church, his chief minister produces a report “certefyinge the Incontynensye of the Nunnes of Syon with the Priores.” The monastery is confiscated for the Crown, and the Order of Saint Bridget is cast to the winds. Furious over this desecration, a Franciscan friar warns Henry that God's judgments will fall on his head and that one day “the dogs would lick his blood as they had done Ahab's.”

On February 15, 1547, King Henry, now a corpse, is set down for the night at Syon House. Sometime after dark his coffin bursts open. The next morning, horrified servants awake to find a dog licking up their late king's remains.

Ahab has met his beast. In the great hall of Syon House.

“Go a little further,” said Alonzo.

Kewasowok's Bier

March 1603. Queen Elizabeth is dying. Most of her subjects cannot recall any other monarch; some have half suspected her of being immortal. Now her ministers and councilors must scramble to determine her successor.

The likeliest candidate seems to be Scotland's King James VI, son of Elizabeth's old antagonist Mary Queen of Scots. From Syon House, the Earl of Northumberland samples the prevailing winds and writes James, telling him that his time is at hand. The king writes back to assure the earl of “what high account you are with your most loving friend, JAMES R.”

On the morning of March 24, the queen passes to her reward. Harriot records the event in a subversive fashion.
Kewasowok
is the Algonquin word for “images of gods in the form of men.” As for Kewasowok's
bier
, where else would it be but in the place where Elizabeth drew her last breath?

Richmond Palace in Surrey. Due south of Syon House, on the other side of the Thames.

“Which not only confirms my theory,” I added, “but narrows our historical window. We can say for certain now that this map was composed sometime after March 24, 1603.”

Alonzo's face began to twitch. “But not too long after,” he said. “Remember those phrases from Ralegh's letter?
Parlous times. My woundes.
With James on the throne, he knew what danger he was in.”

“What danger
was
he in?” asked Clarissa.

“Well, put it this way. The queen died in March. In July, Ralegh was arrested for treason. In November, he was sentenced to death.”

“And not just any death,” I added. “Judge Popham decreed that Ralegh should first be hanged and then cut down while he was still alive, and then his heart and bowels were to be plucked out and his genitals cut off and thrown in the fire—right before his eyes—and then his head lopped off and his body divided in three quarters—”

“I get the picture,” said Clarissa.

“Luckily for Ralegh,” I added, “King James overturned the death sentence. But he was still locked away in the Tower for the next thirteen years.”

“And don't forget,” interjected Alonzo, “what
else
Popham said at Ralegh's trial.”

“How could I? ‘
Let not any devil Harriot, nor any such doctor, persuade you there is no eternity in Heaven. If you think thus, you shall find eternity in Hell fire.
'”

“‘
Devil Harriot,
'” echoed Clarissa.

She strolled to the window. Coiled the blinds cord around her wrist.

“Well, Henry. There's only one problem I can see with your theory. The
whale.
”

We all stared at the map in front of us.

“That's where I got stuck the longest,” I conceded. “All I can say is thank God for Professor Google. A few years back, it seems, a seven-ton whale swam up the Thames—past the Houses of Parliament—got as far upstream as Chelsea before it got stuck. Never made it back.”

“God, I remember reading that,” gasped Alonzo.

“So you'll also remember that the Thames is a tidal river. Every so often a whale gets disoriented and wanders in. It's been happening for centuries; you can look it up.”

Once again, I waved my hand over Harriot's map.

“That body of water isn't an ocean at all, it's a river. The river
Thames
. And there,” I said, planting my finger on Harriot's cross, “just where we'd expect to find it—Syon Park. Where his treasure is.”

All was silent. Nothing was silent. The jaded rattle of the window units, the wire-taut hum of a mosquito, exploring our nether quarters … and from Alonzo Wax a hiss so soft it sounded like his dying breath.

“Perfidious Albion.”

I understood his sadness. All his Saturday-afternoon-serial visions of buried chests and trails of blood and Spanish doubloons had been torched. As comprehensively as a captured galleon.

But there was a countervailing heat for which I had not reckoned. Gold fever. Not scourged at all, just reattaching itself to a new host.

“How soon,” he asked, “may we catch a flight to London?”

“Well, I don't know,” I said, folding my arms. “How soon can a dead man roust up a passport?”

This clouded him, but only briefly.

“I'll give Imahoro a call!”

Four syllables, and a new realm of mystery:
Imahoro.

And still another mystery: Clarissa chose that moment to slide her hand into mine. Not a covert action at all but a manifesto, punctuated by a crackle of static. The School of Night had let in a bit of light.

Scowling, Alonzo stared at the exact point where our hands were interlocked.

“You know how I feel about
emotion
, Henry.”

“I know.”

“It complicates. It bifurcates.”

“I know.”

He stared into our grinning faces and, finding no leeway, heaved a groan of Job-like proportions.

“Oh, all
right.
But I forbid you to kiss in my presence.”

Part Three

Our soules, whose faculties can comprehend

The wondrous Architecture of the world:

And measure every wandring plannets course:

Still climing after knowledge infinite,

And alwaies mooving as the restles Spheares,

Will us to weare ourselves and never rest,

Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,

That perfect blisse and sole felicitie,

The sweet fruition of an earthly crowne.

—C
HRISTOPHER
M
ARLOWE
,

    
Tamburlaine the Great

 

ISLEWORTH
,
ENGLAND 1603

30

T
HEY ARE NO
longer obliged to meet in darkness, but neither of them thinks to change it. They pick up exactly where they left off: the master assuming his place by the worktable, Margaret smoothing the paper before her, taking up the ink-stiffened quill—

Only to find the quill being taken from her. By the master himself.

—You are no more my housemaid.

His import is slow in reaching her. Can he really mean her to take the measurements herself?

—My theories can bear no weight, Margaret, unless some other arrive at the same results.

She approaches the table like a new midwife, fearstruck by her own hands. She takes up the half-disk protractor. She positions it against the beams of light. She summons up each angle's name …

FCD
 …
ECG
 …

She hears her own voice, dry and weightless.

—
Angulus refractus.
Ten degrees. I pray your pardon,
eleven
degrees. Shall we say
forty-eight
minutes?

After an hour or so, the interrogative lilt leaves her voice. After a few nights more, the task of measuring angles is as simple as sewing a seam. Simpler, in a way, for if she measures true, there can be but the one result.

May passes into June, solids give way to liquids. Salt water, turpentine, spirits of alcohol—each solvent poured into a hollow glass prism and bombarded with light at angles of 5 and 10 and 20 and 30 and 40 and 50 degrees, each change in incidence producing a corresponding change in refraction, each measurement taken twice, then laid down in columns.

The computations are saved until the very end, and here, too, the master demands that she rise to her new position, even if it means rehearsing her in mathematical rudiments.

—As you may recall, Margaret, sine is the length of the opposite divided by the length of the hypotenuse.

—But which is the opposite side, sir?

—Why, the side
opposed
to whichever angle we are studying. In effect, sine tells us how quickly that angle
ascends
, whereas cosine tells us how far it moves
laterally.
An eternal tension between rise and run. Do you follow?

She doesn't. Not at first. And then, slowly, she does. No searing revelation, just a slow accretion of confidence. In her mind, it is something like plunging into a lowland mist. Vision fails you, all the other ways of coping drop away, only doggedness takes you to the other side. The
opposite
side.

—Extraordinary, isn't it, Margaret? Always the same proportion between incidence and refraction. If one were looking for—for a priori evidence of the divinity's existence, one might do far worse.

*   *   *

They are together from nine in the evening until four in the morning: gravely polite, eating but little, conversing less. The master is still so used to his solitude that he speaks largely to himself and dispenses with most civilities, and there comes a moment every night when, driven to some pitch of restlessness, he dashes from the room without a word, taking only the nearest candle.

Watching him go, she cannot help but fear for him, wandering alone in the dark. What if the guard dogs attack? What if the grange keeper mistakes him for a poacher? But he passes always in safety and returns always in a flush of rude health, bearing some offering: an old weather vane; the discarded skin of a grass snake; a bucket of rainwater, teeming with baby newts. One evening, smiling enigmatically, he presents her with a pig's bladder, inflated to its full capacity.