The School of Night (3 page)

“None.”

“Then by all means,” said Bernard Styles, unfolding the paper.

It was absolutely quiet in that balcony, and yet everything around me registered with the force of sound. The poplarlike altitude of Halldor. The slight inclination that Styles's head made toward mine. My own hand, bathed in the flashlight's puddle. The words themselves, which seemed to be scratching across the paper as I read them.

Hee wold not be the first louer so to be served by Kit, who wold burn Hotte and Cold in the space of but one breth and who cold conjure up proofs for the Deuil or our Savior, howsoever the winde tourned him. Many was the time Chapman grew most greeued at some heresie, only to bee asured that Kit spoke but in jeste, as was his wont.

Yew will excuse mee, I trust, for laboring in this veyne. I cold faynde noe bettere plaster for my woundes than memorie. In parlous Times, it is grete joye to thincke vppon our homelie Schoole, where wee were glad to gathere, and where your tvtelarie Genius outsvnned ever Star.

Accompanyed with my best wishes, from

And even before I got to the closing, I could see that all-too familiar signature:

Your most asured frinde and humbell sarvant,

W Rawley

Derum Howse

This 27 of March

“Walter Ralegh,” I said faintly.

I looked up. In the half-light, the old man's eyes glittered like fish scales.

“Oh, it's much more, Mr. Cavendish. It's what you and Alonzo have been searching for all your lives.”

“Ah, well, as to that—”

“My dear boy, there's no need to take that air with me. I've just shown you definitive proof that the School of Night existed.”

“So it would seem,” I allowed. “On first inspection.”

“And tenth and twentieth inspection, too, I assure you. Say what you like, Mr. Cavendish, this is an exceptional historical find. I suspect it might form the springboard for quite a—quite a
splendid
academic treatise. Such as might restore a man's career.”

He paused, before carrying on in a breezier vein.

“Unfortunately, neither you nor I can restore anything with a mere digitized copy. A nine-year-old could produce the same thing on his family's computer. No, to forward our joint purposes, we
will
, I'm afraid, require the original.”

I stared down at that paper, checkered with creases. The digitized words rose up once more:
Our homelie Schoole, where wee were glad to gathere
.

And then again I remembered Alonzo's last message to me.

“May I keep this?” I asked faintly.

“Of course.”

It went straight into the pocket of my jacket. I gave it two quick pats; I almost thought I heard it coo.

“Well, Mr. Styles, I can promise you this. Over the next few days, as you know, I'll be sorting through Alonzo's papers. If your document is there—well, let's just say I'll keep a weather eye out. How does that sound?”

“
Weather eye
,” he said, musingly. “That's a lovely expression. To my ear, it lacks urgency.”

“I could be more urgent,” I said. “If the situation called for it.”

A brief pause. And then a laugh, bounding across the Tudor beams.

“With the right incentive, is that what you mean, Mr. Cavendish? I should have thought an entrée back into academia was incentive enough.”

“Who says I want to go back?”

He grinned at me, frankly admiring. “So academia's loss is commerce's gain. Very well, I shall offer you a retainer of ten thousand dollars. Another ninety thousand dollars when you return the document to me. Or perhaps, in light of the prevailing exchange rates, you'd prefer euros?”

But once I heard those numbers, I was beyond considering exchange rates—or even Walter Ralegh. In no particular order, I was thinking about the rather terse letter from my landlord's attorney; my '95 Toyota Corolla, which needed a new belt transponder and which was not strictly speaking mine; the glove compartment of said car, currently crammed with overdraft notices. (In certain moods, I used them for Kleenex.)

“Dollars will do,” I said.

He leaned toward me.

“And you're sure you don't have
weightier
projects to command your attention?”

This was my first taste of Bernard Styles's savagery.

“Nothing that won't keep,” I said.

Another fluttering of his fingers, and Halldor was there with a leatherbound checkbook and a Cross pen. The greater you are, they say, the smaller your signature. The old man's, at any rate, was a couple of Japanese strokes. In the very next moment, the check was resting in my hand.

“Chemical Bank,” he told me, rising to his feet. “It should clear instantly. The rest, as I've said, will be yours when you deliver the document. In person.”

“Where will you be staying?”

“With friends,” he said simply, “for another week or so. I assume that will give you sufficient time to finish the job.”

“How do I reach you?”

He tucked his umbrella under his arm. “I'll reach
you
. And now I must be off, I'm afraid. I've been promised a private tour of the archives. If it's not too much trouble, please do convey my deepest sympathies to Alonzo's family. Such a loss to the world. And now”—he rose in a straight line—“at the risk of sounding tasteless, Mr. Cavendish, it's been a pleasure doing business with you.”

“And with you,” I said.

No final handshake. He sealed our compact with a nod and an almost bashful smile. Only in the act of leaving did a new thought strike him.

“Do you know, I've carried off some of my best transactions at funerals? From death springs life, I always say.”

3

M
Y INTRODUCTION TO
the School of Night I owe to Alonzo Wax's elbow.

It came at me in the winter of our freshman year, about two hours and twenty minutes into a student production of
Love's Labour's Lost
, which he and I were attending for entirely different reasons. Alonzo was testing his theory that the American dialect was better suited to Shakespearean English. (“Elizabethans loved their consonants, Henry.”) I was warm for the junior playing the Princess of France. Once, in the act of asking me for my Chaucer notes, she had smiled at me, and in this smile lay such a world of promise that I honestly wasn't listening to the King of Navarre confess his love for the Princess. I was just waiting for the Princess to come back.

For this reason, I missed the crucial moment altogether. And would never have known what I'd missed had it not been for Alonzo's elbow, gouging out a uniquely tender spot between my fourth and fifth ribs.

“What the fuck?” I gasped back.

There was a pause of maybe two or three seconds, in which all my unworthiness gathered and mounted toward the heavens.

“Never mind,” he muttered.

Through the rest of the play he was silent, and for a good time afterward. But later that night, over gimlets at the Annex, he agreed to give me another chance. Walking his fingers across the sticky tabletop, he re-created the exact moment in Act IV, Scene 3, when the King's men, having sworn off the company of women, must now confess themselves foresworn. They are men in love.

Having made a clean breast of it, they are now free to criticize one another's taste—which they do, with a will. The King, in particular, taunts his buddy Berowne for craving dark-haired Rosaline.
Black as ebony,
the King calls her.
No face is fair that is not full so black
, Berowne retorts. To which the King replies—and here you must imagine every last beer mug in the Annex buzzing with Alonzo's declamation:

O paradox! Black is the badge of hell,

The hue of dungeons and the SCHOOL … OF … NIGHT.…

Ellipses, his. Capital letters, too.

“So what?” I answered. “It's a passing metaphor. The sonnets are full of them. The dark lady—my mistress's eyes—nothing like the sun…”

Cheap gin always made Alonzo magnanimous. Which is why he just fussed with his napkin.

“I can't really blame you, Henry, for missing it. The audiences of 1594 or '95 or whenever it was, they would have missed it, too. Only a handful of spectators, I think, would have known what was going on. And in that moment, Henry!” He smiled blearily. “I like to think their gasps would have carried all the way to Shakespeare himself. Waiting in the wings.”

Alonzo began to massage the air around us until I began to feel, yes, something like a stir along my hairline.

“Why were they so shocked?” I asked.

“Because this little northern upstart, this son of a Stratford glover, was mocking some of the greatest men England had ever known. No, it's true. Walter Ralegh. Christopher Marlowe. A good half dozen others.
Love's Labour's Lost
is nothing more than a satire of these great men and their pretensions. With that one phrase—
the School of Night
—Shakespeare was hauling them into the light of day, leaving them naked for all to see.”

“And for evidence you have…?”

“Oh, for God's sake, read Bradbrook. Read Tannenbaum. Read Shakespeare's goddamned plays, if you don't believe me. The King of Navarre and his court. The Duke of Arden and
his
court. Prospero. Hamlet! Again and again, Shakespeare came back to that same theme. Scholars—men of real
originality
, Henry—working in isolation from the world. Banished, basically, for their very thoughts. And they're all just variations on Ralegh's original school.”

Here was one of the differences between us. Alcohol made him more expansive. The cheaper the booze, the louder he grew.

“I still don't get it,” I said. “What
was
this school?”

“Only the most secretive, the most brilliant—God, the most
daring
—of all Elizabethan societies.”

He lowered his head toward the table, eyeing me as though I were a cue ball.

“Are you ready, Henry?”

Without any more preamble, he took me back. To 1592.

Walter Ralegh, the great courtier of his time, has incurred the queen's wrath for secretly marrying one of her attendants. Exiled to his estate in Dorset, he comes up with a characteristically ambitious way of passing the time. He will gather the greatest intellects of his generation and give them the freedom they have been seeking all their lives, the freedom to speak their minds.

“It was going to be—Christ, how did Shakespeare put it? In the play we just saw?
A little academe
—”

“
Still and contemplative in living art
.”

“Just so.”

Well, who could turn down such an invitation? Not Marlowe.

Not Henry Percy, the “Wizard Earl” of Northumberland.

Not George Chapman or his fellow poets Matthew Roydon and William Warner. One by one, they flocked to Dorset.

From the start, the school's members understood the risks they ran. They met exclusively in private, exclusively at night. As far as we know, they kept no record of their conversations. They published none of their findings. Until Shakespeare gave them a name, they had none.

“And
yet
”—Alonzo's index finger dug into the table like an awl—“they were one of the greatest threats to the Elizabethan establishment.”

“Why?”

“Because they talked about things no one could talk about. They questioned Jesus' divinity. They questioned God's very existence. They practiced dark arts. Alchemy, astrology, paganism …
satanism
 … nothing was off the table, Henry. They dared to—to imagine a world without creed, without monarchy. With only the human mind as anchor. They were this quiet little
knife
in the heart of Elizabethan orthodoxy.” His eyes gleamed; his voice darkened. “And they all paid dearly for it.”

With unmistakable relish, he outlined their various ends. Marlowe, murdered in a saloon. (“Over a bill? I think not, Henry.”) Ralegh executed. Warner, dead under mysterious circumstances. The Wizard Earl, shut away in the Tower for seventeen years. Roydon, reduced to abject poverty.

“And the only one standing at the end,” I said, half dazed, “was the outsider. Shakespeare.”

For the first time in our acquaintance, I think, Alonzo's eyes glowed with fellow feeling.

“You've hit on it! The sweetest, the bitterest irony of all. This hayseed
actor
with the grammar-school education, the guy who couldn't have gotten in Ralegh's school even if he'd wanted to (and he probably did) was the one who weathered every change of ministry, from Elizabeth the First to James the First. The School of Night had to close its doors, but Shakespeare lived on.”

“His own little academe,” I murmured.

Slowly, Alonzo sank back in his seat.

“Exactly,” he said, a long stream of Dunhill smoke forking from his nostrils. “The School of Night gives way to Shakespeare. The School of Day.”

*   *   *

I'd guess it was two in the morning when we finally settled our bill. Alonzo paid, as usual, and for a tip he left behind a neat little pile of bills. God knows how many, but the bartender was smiling.

“Henry,” said Alonzo. “I believe I'm snockered.”

Now I'm convinced that
snockered
is, by its nature, a funny word. Coming from Alonzo Wax's mouth, it became quite exorbitantly funny. He couldn't understand why this was, any more than I could explain it, but he came around to my way of thinking.

“Snockered!” he shrieked.
“Shhhh-nockered!”

The bartender was no longer smiling by the time we left. Stepping with great care, Alonzo and I filed down the pavement and then, by common impulse, dashed across the street, our arms windmilling. We paused before the gates of Nassau Hall and stared up at its white tower, which held a special terror against the night's black purple. A mass of blue clouds was sweeping in from the south, and a hush lay upon every casement window, every arch, and every gargoyle.