The School of Night (30 page)

“She bailed us out of one hell of a fix, Alonzo. We wouldn't even be here without her.”

“Agreed.”

“More to the point, she can't
control
her visions, you said so yourself. That's why you believe in them.”

“I have no doubt they're genuine. I'm just not persuaded they're helpful anymore.” He popped the last link of sausage into his mouth. “And by the way, didn't you say she took Ambien on the plane?”

“So?”

“Well, on the rather long list of Ambien's side effects—right up there with sleepwalking and sleep eating—you will find
amnesia.
A cousin of mine took two of those pills, lost an entire night in Dubai. Came to just as she was plunging down a waterslide.”

“Clarissa hasn't forgotten anything. If anything, she's—”

Remembering,
is what I was going to say. But it was instantly replaced by another predicate.

Going mad.

Because, when she turned and looked at me in that room, all I could see was the shadow around her eyes. It seemed to me I was peering straight into the recesses of her mind. And there was no end.

“The point
is,
Henry, once we leave these walls, the Lady Macbeth routine needs to stop. If she can't contribute, she should just stay in her room and wash her hands.”

But when Clarissa bounded down the stairs, a little after nine, she looked far fresher than Alonzo or me. She downed two coffees, a glass of grapefruit juice, and two stacks of wheat toast, lavishly buttered.

“Shall we?” she cried.

*   *   *

We approached the house not from the west, as the Earl of Northumberland's more esteemed visitors would have come, but from the north, in the manner of a tradesman or peddler. It was a long walk. We passed a large clearing that would, in short order, become a Hilton hotel … squat institutional buildings … an indoor adventure playground. And the final touch of modernity: jet planes, buzzing over our heads every few minutes, carrying new tourists into Heathrow.

We came at last to the Syon Park garden center, with a refectory and tearooms and an aquatics store where you could buy your very own three-step waterfall kit for 359 pounds. We limited ourselves to the nine-pound admission price, then passed onto a gravel pathway that curved around the building's northern perimeter. And as we went, the rasp of our soles took on both undertones and overtones, so that we seemed to be walking right on top of ourselves. The clouds began to squeeze out more and more of the sky, and a wind sparked up from the north, pressing my trousers against my legs.

And suddenly we weren't traveling forward or back but
through
. It was the same feeling I'd had at Fort Ralegh: that I'd slipped into one of time's crevices and, at any moment, I might be confronted by a man with a ruff and doublet or a woman in petticoats, and the farther I went, the farther I would wander from anything that was mine.

“Henry?”

I felt Clarissa's hand on my arm. We were standing under a porte cochere. And that was enough, finally, to break the spell, for this structure had never existed in Thomas Harriot's time, and the great hall into which we stepped was nothing Harriot would have recognized. Gone were the pitched roof, the mud and mortar, the leather and wood. In their place: marble, stucco, Greco-Roman statuary. The improving hand of Scottish architect Robert Adam had transformed a crumbling Tudor hall into a resplendent showcase of neoclassicism. By the time he was done, he had extinguished everything but the bones of Henry Percy's house.

Or at least he had tried. The one room that still smelled of olden times was the long gallery, where the Wizard Earl had once roamed from shelf to shelf, exulting in his luxuriously bound volumes. But the gallery gave way to a print room, festooned with eighteenth-century artists like Gainsborough and Van Dyck, which opened onto a sitting room, all mahogany and satinwood, which opened onto a green drawing room with a scagliola fireplace … and by degrees, the notion that anything of Thomas Harriot's might still be secreted here became too much to conceive.

With each new room, my spirits sank lower, and when a stout woman in an argyle cardigan came striding toward us, we gazed at her in a perfect stupor.

“Do you have any questions?” she asked.

“None you can answer,” Alonzo muttered at last.

We were inside that house no more than ten minutes, but by the time we reeled out, it no longer mattered that the wind had died down or that we could see patches of sky simmering with sun or that there were cows lowing us back to old England. Old England had never seemed farther away.

I couldn't even muster a smile at Alonzo's disguise, which lay strangely exposed in the noon half-light. Custardy golf shirt, Sansabelt referee pants, Conway Twitty hair—singly and in sum, they proclaimed our defeat.

“Well,” said Alonzo. “Well then.”

From the cramped confines of his slacks, he drew out a copy of Harriot's map. Gave it a magus stare.

“You know,” he said. “There's no reason to think it's in the house.”

An effortful brightening in his brow, which found its match in Clarissa's voice.

“If it
were,
they'd have found it by now. All those renovations, all those walls getting knocked down…”

“He'd have been a fool,” I said.

And in this manner, we hoisted ourselves toward hope. Why, the house was the last place we should be looking! If Harriot had something to hide, he'd have found someplace on the grounds. Somewhere only
he
knew about. Somewhere he could go back to whenever he needed.

“All we need to do now,” said Alonzo, pointing to Harriot's cross on the map, “is figure out the starting point.”

“And from there,” said Clarissa, “we just have to walk fifty feet north.”

“In
that
case,” I said, “why not start with Harriot's house?”

There was at least one good reason why not. There
was
no house. Only some foundations, roughly a hundred yards from Syon House, buried under at least three feet of solid earth.

We went there anyway. Entered a gate, passed an old icehouse and stood at last on a hillock—in the exact spot where Harriot had once lived and worked.

From documents, we knew the house had been ninety-five feet long and eighteen feet high. Tiled. It had a chamber, long study, dining room, pantry, kitchen, library. The whole place was swimming in paper, in “bookes of all sorts of learning” (so reported the king's agent who searched the house and inventoried its contents). But all that was left now was a feeling. The queer, vertiginous sense of standing where something had once happened.

A minute more passed in silence. And then Alonzo said:

“Let's walk.”

“Where?”

“Where
else
? North. Fifty feet.”

From one of his Sansabelt pouches, he extracted a baseplate compass, and we set off, counting the distance as we went. And when we had finished counting, we were standing … in a grove of trees, all planted long after Harriot had died. No carved arrows, no coded messages, no crosses or markers, just trunks and roots and the season's first deposit of leaves, whispering beneath our shoes.

“What are we…?” Alonzo began to sketch a slow circle among the poplars and birches and pines. “Where do we…?”

I leaned against an old cedar tree. Massaged my temples.

“It doesn't look good.”

Only Clarissa was bound and determined to keep her spirits bright. “Hey, wait a minute. Isn't there still an Earl of Northumberland?”

“There's a Duke.”

“Well, why don't we pay him a call? Tell him we have this exciting project and would he like to be our partner in a—in an archaeological
dig
.”

“Oh, and by the way, there might be some gold at the end of it. But don't worry, we'll just take it with us when we go. Happy Christmas!”

Rather than bridle at Alonzo's tone, Clarissa simply stood there a long while, scenting the air. Then she began walking.

Back to the site of Harriot's house. Back through the gate, where she paused briefly and then turned west, heading toward the long mall of Lime Avenue.

Only when she reached the pepper-pot lodges—those twin sentinels that Northumberland had begun building in 1603—only then did she turn around.

And by now, Alonzo and I were standing on either side of her, and we were all gazing back at Syon House. A classic Renaissance-era quadrangle, three stories high, with an interior courtyard and a crenellated tower at each corner.

In my mind's eye, I rubbed out the central entrance gate, replaced it with two side ones. I scraped away the Bath-stone exterior to reveal the old bricks. I added a pitched roof and penciled in a million chimneys, all belching coal smoke, and sketched out two brick buildings, extending from each side.…

And then I saw Clarissa extend her arm.

“There,” she said.

She was pointing toward the northwest tower. The very tower, brick with ashlar facing, that would have been closest to Harriot's house.

“
There
,” she said once more.

“Alonzo,” I said, quietly. “How high do you suppose that tower is?”

“How should I know?”

Before I could even run to find a docent, Clarissa was snapping a picture of it with her Trio.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Just an app I have. Measures buildings for you.”

A killer app because, in less than a minute, she had an answer.

“Give or take? Fifty feet.”

And that's when I started to laugh.

“Henry,” said Alonzo. “Please don't be macabre.”

“I can't help it,” I said, wiping my eyes. “Harriot's fooled us again.”

“And how is that?”

“Because we thought when he said north, he meant
latitude
.”

“What else could he have meant?”

“
Altitude
.”

Alonzo's mask of bafflement cracked into a wondering grin. He gazed up at that turret and, in a voice of sacred awe, said:

“The bastard. He buried it aboveground.”

“Fifty
feet
aboveground.”

It was left to Clarissa to pose the question that followed as naturally as autumn to summer.

“How the hell are we going to get it?”

38

H
OW INDEED? THE
question was enough to flummox Alonzo into a silence that nothing could break. Only as he strode through the front door of the Dragon's Tongue and marched up the stairs to his room did he think to call back to us.

“Give me the rest of the day,” he said, and disappeared.

“To do what?” Clarissa asked me.

“Well, knowing him, he's going to call people.”

“People.”

“A better word might be ‘confederates.'”

She gave me the full heat of her gaze.

“You're talking about criminals.”

“Nothing of the kind.”

“But how would Alonzo know people like that? He comes from a nice family.”

The very best, I agreed. In earlier times, Judge Wax had been one of the District of Columbia's most eminent criminal defense attorneys. Fraud, sex offenses, DUI, drug possession and distribution, assaults, armed robberies, murders … well, in the course of tilling all that rancid earth, a lawyer can turn up some interesting larvae. And if the lawyer has a smart
son
, well, that son will learn how to harvest the larvae without his father's even knowing.

Clarissa pressed her lips together.

“So Alonzo's got, what, a gangster Rolodex?”

“Nothing that subpoenable. More like a phone chain.”

“Extending all the way to London?”

“It got him here, didn't it? How many dead guys do you know of who can come up with a passport in forty-eight hours?”

We were back in the Pitt the Elder room now, and I was sitting in the cane-bottom chair, and Clarissa was sitting right in my lap, and I was engaged in the deeply satisfying work of untangling her hair when she said:

“Henry.”

“Yeah?”

“When I first told you I'd seen the School of Night, I know you thought I was starkers. No, you
did
, and I don't blame you. I mean, I've watched those psychic shows.”

“So how is it different for you?”

“I'm not a psychic. I've never been able to predict a blessed thing. And no one's talking in my ear, no one's there at all, it's—it's
spasms
.
Flashes
.”

“And that tower was one of the flashes.”

She blew out a cheekful of air.

“I have no idea if there's any treasure up there. I only know
he
was there. And
she
was there.”

With an air of some regret, she hoisted herself from my lap (only that still-tender tumescence to show she had been there).