The School of Night (41 page)

And so I was utterly unprepared for the vision that actually greeted me on the northern side of the bridge: Agents Mooney and Milberg.

Wearing the same bespoke suits they'd worn at Heathrow but looking decidedly less affable. Striding toward me with intractable purpose.

And there I stood, watching them come, every last protest frozen inside me. They could have hoisted me in a single swoop and carried me off, and I wouldn't have made a peep.

But, as it turned out, I didn't need to. They swept past me without so much as a sidelong glance and kept walking in the same hard, sweet, implacable rhythm. And I remembered then what Agent Mooney had been trying to tell me earlier.
You're not even in this,
he'd said.

Alonzo had been their quarry all along. And this time there would be no escape. The high-wire leveraging act he'd been carrying off all these years—borrowing piled upon borrowing, creditor played off against creditor—it was all about to come crashing down.

And the thought of Alonzo underneath that rubble was enough, in the end, to rouse me. I wheeled around. A warning cry rose up from within me and forced my mouth open.…

Only there was no one to warn. Alonzo wasn't there.

Which is to say he wasn't where I'd just left him. I had to shift the angle of my vision to find the large man, surprisingly nimble in his trench coat, clambering onto the bridge's parapet. A man with not a second to waste.

Even as I sprinted toward him, I knew it was too late. He jumped without a word, without a sign, without a backward glance. By the time I got there, he'd vanished beneath the river's surface.

*   *   *

On the occasion of his second death, Alonzo Wax had plenty of witnesses. A mother pushing her young daughter in a pram. An Anglican priest, pausing briefly to adjust his iPod shuffle. Two teenage girls with shaved heads, pushing their skateboards. An old gentleman in an ascot, dragging his knotted-wood cane behind him like a leash.

I heard a scream, a pair of answering cries. I saw strangers rushing to the parapet, squinting down with a philanthropic zeal as though they might coax the jumper back to the surface.

I saw Agents Mooney and Milberg pause for the barest second and keep walking.

None of it mattered now, for Alonzo was beyond all care. He had sunk as truly as a meteorite, and the pewter-colored water had folded around its newest freight and carried it toward sea.

Part Four

O eloquent, just, and mightie Death! whom none could advise, thou have perswaded; what none hath dared, thou have done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only have cast out of the world and despised. Thou have drawne together all the farre stretchèd greatnesse, all the pride, crueltie, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words,
Hic jacet!

—S
IR
W
ALTER
R
ALEGH
,

    Preface to
Historie of the World

 

ISLEWORTH
,
ENGLAND 1603

48

H
ARRIOT IS UP
at dawn. Dressing quickly, he hurries down to the Syon landing and tries to flag a boat. But there's not a waterman alive who will consent to travel to London now. It is an insult even to ask them.

—What do you take me for?

—There's
death
that way.

This, then, is what Thomas Harriot is forced to do on this September morning. Digging deep in his purse, he must purchase an entire wherry, climb into it unaided, and row himself downriver.

His mission is urgent but the tide is against him, and rather than fight it he forces himself to relax into the river's rhythm. An hour and a half later, he sees Westminster's roofs clawing through the midmorning fog. All the old sights pass by in their accustomed order: the Abbey, the Star Chamber, the gates of Whitehall, the marble upswelling of Charing Cross. It takes Harriot upward of a minute to realize what's missing.

Boats.

The Thames is empty.

Downriver fleets and upriver farmers are holding themselves free of contagion, and so Harriot, much as he did in the old days in Virginia, drives his oars through untraveled waters, hearing only the slap of waves against his hull.

No one hails him from the jetties. The Old Swan stairs have not a single welcoming torch. No horses are to be had for love or charity. If Harriot is to find St. Helen's Bishopsgate, he will have to do it on foot.

He takes a reading from his compass. Pulls his cloak around him—the air is still cool—and takes the first long strides up Fish Street.

Less than a year has passed since Harriot had last wandered through London, but it could be another city altogether. Not a single whore waylays him. All feasts and assemblies have been canceled; all fairs have been banned within fifty miles. Inns are boarded up, guildhalls sit idle. There are no ballad singers, no street cryers. Not even a barking dog, for city officials, believing dogs to be the main agents of infection, have slaughtered them by the thousands.

How uncanny it is, how ungodly, to hear
wind
in a London street. Wind rattling through the abandoned houses, browsing through alleys. Wind and church bells, which ring out at punctual intervals from every parish, tolling more and more souls to heaven.

On he walks, through the webs of damp air, sipping from a flask of Devon cider, breaking open walnuts and tossing the shells behind him, pausing only when something actually blocks his path: an abandoned dray, a dead horse (its nostrils still stuffed with herb-grace). Just past the Cross Keys Inn, he nearly stumbles over a human skull, its eye sockets fixed on the sky. Hurrying on, he finds a human thighbone, split down the middle, its marrow sucked out.

Near the corner of Grace Church and Aldgate Street, a beggar staggers past him. The first human being Harriot has seen in blocks—and just a few steps shy of being bones himself.

—Alms, sir.

But when Harriot offers him a shilling, the man stumbles on, unseeing.

—Alms … alms …

*   *   *

The sun is just past its meridian when Harriot comes, heavy-legged, to St. Helen's Bishopsgate. No bells are ringing here. The parallel naves are empty and dark, and Harriot is about to sit in one of the pews and grab a few minutes' rest when he sees a corona of light around the sacristy door.

A young vicar is there. His sleeves are rolled up, as though he were on the verge of polishing the thuribles that lie all around him, but his hands sit idle in his lap. His beard is long, his surplice sodden and gray, and there is a kind of wild hollowness in his eyes that dissipates slowly at the sound of another voice.

—Crookenshanks?

—That is the name.

—Bless me, she was buried some four days past. We reported it to the parish clerk.

—I know. Her daughter has asked me to see to her belongings.

—Not many of those, I can assure you.

His mouth creases as he studies Harriot.

—You are newly arrived in London?

—This very morning.

—Then you will pardon me speaking so openly with you, sir. If the Lord has seen fit so far to spare you, He would wish you to quit this place at once.

And then, as if he has been guilty of some intolerable rudeness, the vicar hastens to add:

—Notwithstanding I should be glad of the company.

—You are most kind. As is He. I fear, however, that my duty calls me, and I am bidden to answer. If you would be so good as to tell me where I might find the Crookenshanks house?

A tiny swell of rage blossoms from the vicar's red-rimmed eyes, just before they go hollow again.

—Bevismarks. East of St. Mary Axe.

—I thank you.

Harriot is just leaving the sacristy when he hears the vicar's voice trailing after him.

—Would you be so good as to close the door after you? I am not at all sure I can bear another visitor.

*   *   *

It is a fitting symbol of how things have turned. The London wall, built by the Romans to keep strangers out, is now performing the task of keeping citizens in. Bevismarks runs just south of that wall: a small age-worn street, no more than a few feet wide in places, with garrets that lurch toward one another like drunken lovers. Yet on a normal summer afternoon, this cramped channel would be full of children carrying water from the cistern and women emptying pots and hanging clothes, jakesmen and draymen, leather sellers and rat catchers, the occasional Jew, walking past with head down.

Today there is but a single boy, no more than eight or nine, sitting on a calico blanket, nearly naked but for the dogskin wrapped around his waist and—small touch of heresy—the St. Christopher medallion around his neck. His bones are like blades beneath his skin. His mouth is a black-gummed crater.

Harriot fishes out a handful of shillings and drops them in the boy's inert palm.

—Crookenshanks?

The boy's fingers close around the coins. His head tips slowly back, as though he were dropping off to sleep.

In fact, he is gesturing. And there, six doors down on the southern side, stands a three-story oak-frame house. Sere and peeling, it would bleed entirely into its surroundings were it not for the foot-long cross painted in cardinal red on its door. And the bill posted just above it.

LORD HAVE MERCY UPON US

Leaning his chair against the front door is a man of twenty-some years, bootless, shaggy, mysteriously entitled, like a freeholder gloating over his fifty acres. He is a watcher. One of the men engaged by the Lord Mayor to keep vigil on infected houses and arrest anyone who tries to escape.

Harriot draws himself behind a bow-front window. Listens very carefully to the sound of his breathing.

Act with no rashness. One wrong step will be your last.

So chastened, he reconfigures the man he has just seen into a symbol of hope. For a watcher does not waste his time on a house of dead people, does he? There must be a living soul inside.

And sure enough, when Harriot lifts his eyes to those boarded-up windows, he can make out a dim, flat ocher light, trapped like a moth in the house's interior.

She's there. Margaret is there.

And even this joy he resists. For it pales before the improbability of ever freeing her.

Watchers can be bribed, they say. But
this
one is large-boned, with swelled nostrils and a truculence in his very stillness and, at his side, an evil-looking halberd, hook and ax and bayonet all conjoined, waiting to be thrust or thrown at anyone who gets in his way.

The halberd is not a thing to be gainsaid, and even if its owner were open to overtures, Harriot has but a few coins left in his purse. And should the man prove cruel or capricious, Harriot might well be clapped in irons and sent to Newgate, carrying with him Margaret's last hope of liberty.

Something else. Another way …

And here is where, much to his chagrin, his body takes over. His eyes first: spotting a break in the building fronts. His legs: sidewinding around privies and empty stables and dead gardens. His
arms:
pushing aside pile after pile of discarded linen and platters and candlesticks—all the items that scavengers should have made off with long ago—hacking his way through to the alley that once lay here.

With a stagger of surprise, his brain understands what the rest of him is doing: finding a new route.

He feels a tiny lilt in his heart … followed by a sharp contraction. For as he circles to the back of the Crookenshanks house, he realizes nothing has become any easier. The rear is every bit as impassive as the front. Solid timber. Layer after layer of clay and plaster. A lone door, resolutely locked. A cruciform of boards across every window.

The heels of his hands spring to his face, gouge at his temples. And from the dazzle that fills his vision, something emerges.

A window.

He looks again.

Yes. Yes.

Through haste or oversight or maybe even by design, the rightmost window on the third floor has been left unboarded in its upper half. No more than six feet square, but a way
in.
Or out.

For a moment, he thinks he might climb to her. But no amount of leaping or scrambling can give him a purchase on these beams. And how impotent and childlike he feels, thrusting himself against this barren surface. Not daring to shout her name. Able to do nothing more than hammer the plaster with his fists.

So hard does he pound that he actually breaks away a chunk of mortar. At first his care is reserved solely for the divot. He measures it … tries his boot in it … assesses how easily he can make it into a toehold … and from there another toehold … scaling the whole edifice.

Then his eyes light on the chunk itself, resting by his feet. He picks it up, weighs it in his palm. Then, drawing a sight line, heaves it straight toward the window.

It lands a foot short and clatters back to earth. Again he picks it up, again he throws. And this time his aim is truer. The thump of stone against glass seems to reverberate all the way into the ground beneath him. He waits. Ten seconds, twenty. But no one comes running.

Undaunted, he throws the mortar chunk again. Again. He is lifting it for the fifth time when, like a note of music, a light wafts from the darkness, narrowing and concentrating as it approaches the window.

He holds his breath. And in the next second the pale oval of her face is pressed to the glass.

It is a feeling he could never have imagined before. Seeing
her
see him.

In the next instant, his hands have grown mad with speech.

Open the window. Open the window.

She makes a show of pushing the sash up, but it is only a show, for she knows something he is only rising to. The window is nailed shut.

Whatever joy had filled the space between them vanishes in a breath. Haggard, he presses his hands to his brows and stares up at that window, beseeching.