The School of Night (45 page)

“Okay.”

“But it wasn't a romance of equals. They were the same age, sure, they both had fathers in trade, but Marlowe went to university, he read Machiavelli, he was full of that ‘new philosophy,' it shows in all his plays. Compared to Marlowe, Shakespeare was less learned, less accomplished. A real
rube.”

“And Marlowe made him suffer for it.”

“From the sounds of it. And not just Marlowe. It sounds like the whole School found young Will a bit wanting.
Warwickshire stripling. Howe little wee regarded him.
I'm guessing they never asked him back, and I'm guessing, too, that Marlowe discarded him before long. Which, when you're an infatuated young man—”

“Ambitious.”

“—is going to sting like a million lashes.”

The sun was out in full strength now, bringing the white paper to full dazzle.

“So what does Shakespeare do?” I asked. “He builds a life—a life's
work
—in direct opposition to the School of Night. He mocks their pretensions in his plays. He plants his flag in the camp of Essex, their enemy. And maybe he doesn't stop there. Maybe he testifies against Marlowe, maybe he slanders Harriot.”

“You're speculating.”

“But
someone
leaks word about what the School was up to. Who has a better reason? The jilted lover. Think about what happens when Ralegh gets in trouble with King James. Out of nowhere comes a poem, ‘The Hellish Verses,' attributed to Ralegh, full of atheistic sentiments. Pretty much the stake in Ralegh's heart. Who's likely to leak such a damaging document? Someone with a serious grudge. And someone with firsthand knowledge of what the School was up to.”

Clarissa frowned into her hands. “Suddenly, Shakespeare doesn't sound like such a nice guy anymore.”

“Nice or not, it doesn't matter. He's a
different
guy. Not just a survivor, a
player.
Avenging himself on the men who rejected him.”

The fire in my brain was almost too much now. I had to bury my face in my hands. I had to …
Breathe, Henry.

But I was thinking of the last ten years of my life. My little wasteland of self-unemployment. My amassed debts, financial and spiritual. And now, with the help of Alonzo Wax and Bernard Styles, all that was on the verge of changing. A single two-page letter was going to be—how had Styles put it?—
the springboard for quite a splendid academic treatise. Such as might restore a man's career.

“Christ!” I wheeled toward Clarissa. “Do you have the original?”

“I didn't handle Bernard's security for nothing. I've got the original, and it's tucked away. How about you? Do you have the other one?”

“I do.”

“Then we're good to go.”

She said it so simply that I almost let the momentum take me. But sadly it is part of my nature always to look beyond the verb to the entire predicate. Good to go …
where?

“We can't,” I said, gritting my teeth. “We
can't.
This is not even legal.”

“Why not?”

“The letter belongs to the Styles estate.”

Like a tightrope walker, Clarissa raised one of her jeaned legs. Angled her face toward dogwood overhead.

“In theory, I'd agree with you, Henry. Except I'm pretty sure Bernard didn't come by the letter innocently. That whole story about finding it in some law firm's archives? I checked it out; it doesn't hold up. And think about it. If he came by the document legally, why didn't he call in the police when it went missing? He could have saved himself a lot of trouble.”

“So … is there anything left to tie the letter to Styles?”

She gave it some thought. Then shook her head.

“Not anymore.”

“Does anybody else know about it?”

“Far as I know, only dead people.”

But dead people can still fuck you up.
My career had been derailed by an eighteenth-century dilettante. The whole thing could be—

“A forgery,” I said, dismally. “Likely as not.”

“Could be,” she said. “I guess that's for you to figure out.”

“Me?”

“Who else?”

And then she smiled. Just enough to break my heart.

“Because ideally, Henry? It should be someone who's still alive a year from now.”

53

E
VERY DOCTOR AGREED
: It was the damnedest thing.

At thirty-six, Clarissa Gordon had the biological indicators of a woman of seventy: shortened telomeres, progressively failing homeodynamics, drastic reductions in cell division. She was aging at twice the normal rate, but her symptoms didn't align with any of the defined pathologies (Hutchinson-Gilford progeria, Werner's syndrome, Cockayne's syndrome, ataxia telangiectasia), and parts of her body—her skin, her hair, her bones—seemed strangely impervious to the senescence that afflicted the rest of her.

“It's like Hollywood aging,” she told me. “Very glamorous all the way to the end. I couldn't have arranged it better. And you
know
they're gonna have to name it after me.”

Before we were done, we would see more than a dozen specialists—physiologists, gerontologists, geneticists, evolutionary biologists, embryologists. She would be subjected to microarray analysis, bioinformatics, full genome sequencing. Her hair and saliva would be pored over like entrails. So would her entrails. So would her epithelial cells and bone marrow. A researcher in Bethesda would attempt to give her an entire wing at the National Institutes of Health. A professor from the University of Oklahoma would beg her to leave him her organs.

No one from any field or discipline would be able to explain exactly what was happening or why. The only thing everyone could agree on was the end point.

But I'll say this for her. Clarissa's mission was never just to fold up like an old chair. She had a story to tell.

From the moment she held that old perspective trunk in her hands, the fragments that had been haunting her all these months began to gather into something like a narrative. There were missing chunks, to be sure, holes in the continuity, but as I set it all down on paper, the gaps somehow filled themselves in, and the story began to tell itself. Clarissa talked; I wrote; and if what we ended up with is as much fiction as fact, I know it's true at least to us.

“You know what this means, don't you, Henry?”

I had just printed out our final draft, and Clarissa was holding it rather shyly to her breast.

“It means you're just as crazy as me now.”

I'm not so sure. Of course, I'm no medical specialist, I'm not even a licensed metaphysician, but in those moments when the walls of my empiricism soften, I fall back on a theory of my own. Thomas Harriot did not stand by helplessly while his beloved lay on the verge of death. By luck or by design or some combination of the two, he cupped his hands around her essence and sent it spinning into the future. Never guessing where it would land.

Naturally, we couldn't expect him to get it perfect his first time out. And so, with each incarnation, the spark has been gradually reduced, and maybe it will finally die with Clarissa. Or maybe it will never die.

This much I know. Being with her is a rare and good thing, and the rareness and goodness would be impossible without the shortness. We have vaulted past all the normal stages—exploration, evolution, devolution—and landed right in the home stretch. Our golden
year,
Clarissa calls it.

And so, like any old couple, we spend a lot of time on benches. Quiet as snow. Our history speaks for us, I guess. A history we just happen to share with two people who lived and died centuries before you were born. Among the four of us, I'd wager, we've lived a good long life.

*   *   *

The money? For now, we're skimming interest off Alonzo's principal. Clarissa has drawn up a list of charities she wants to have remembered in her will. And I have my own ideas on the subject, which I'll keep to myself for now.

Ralegh's letter? I had to ponder that for a while, but once I'd decided, it was the easiest thing in the world to drop those two pieces of aged rag paper in a padded manila envelope and mail them, anonymously, to the Folger Shakespeare Library. Let the experts sort out the truth. Grant them the glory, too, if they want it. To my great surprise, my career is here. On park benches.

*   *   *

Once I asked her, “Why did you dress like that?”

“Like what?”

“The day of Alonzo's funeral. The day I first saw you. You didn't wear mourning. You wore a summer dress. Scarlet.”

“Oh.”

She closed her eyes, and for a moment I thought she'd nodded off. (She does that a lot.) But she was just parsing her words.

“I suppose it's because I don't believe in death,” she said. “The capital D part.”

Which, to my mind, is the best kind of apostasy. In my strongest moments, or maybe my weakest ones, I choose not to believe, either. And if that doesn't earn me a diploma from the School of Night, nothing will.

 

ISLEWORTH
,
ENGLAND OCTOBER 1603

54

S
YON PARK IS
silent. The cuckoos, the swallows, the blackbirds, the thrushes have all moved on, leaving behind the season's last roses and scarlet oaks and pools of elm and beech leaves … and now and then a heron calling across the river. Just to see if anyone's listening. It's a fine time to die.

But death, it seems, has washed its hands of him. Why else did it keep him from following Margaret into the grave? Why, in the intervening weeks, has his health taken not a single turn for the worse? Is he merely being dared to take events into his own hands?

The Earl of Northumberland's steward, returning in early November, is astonished to find Harriot still in his cottage—and sporting, for the first time in memory, a beard. Nothing like the earl's fashionable profusion but weedy and gray and straggling, a perfect misery of a beard, repelling the questions it raises.

Barges are at last coming downriver in full sail. London is safe—though not for Ralegh. A widely bruited set of atheistic lines, attributed to him, has appalled even his most devoted supporters and tipped the balance of opinion against him. On his way to trial, London's citizens line the streets for the sole purpose of pelting him with curses—and tobacco pipes.

But in the course of defending his life, Ralegh carries himself so nobly that, despite his death sentence, he is a hero by the time he emerges. It is said that men who would have gone a hundred miles to see him hanged would now travel a thousand to save him. Rather than weather this sea change of opinion, King James chooses to commute Ralegh's death sentence—and then send him back to the Tower for perpetuity.

Harriot, never one to shirk duty, pays regular visits to his old friend and patron, bearing scientific instruments. But the words of cheer Harriot would normally bear alongside, these are missing. It is left to Ralegh to steer their conversations. One afternoon, as they are strolling past the pigeons on the high walk that overlooks the Thames, the great man offers his own words of cheer.

—The School of Night. It lives on, does it not?

*   *   *

Back at Syon House, Harriot sleeps half the day, shuns all work, walks from room to room. The beard goes away (he hates the scratch of it) but the
hunger
for her, which is deeper than grief or perhaps grief's other face, this remains.

He lives, somehow, without living. The woman who schooled him in that art is no longer here, and how hard it is for the student to step away from the teacher. Perhaps the only thing that saves him is this. On a bright smoky April morning, the Earl of Northumberland pokes his head through Harriot's open window.

—Trout, Tom?

*   *   *

Midsummer's Eve is hardest, for he cannot help but recall that night with Margaret on the tower. Venus's phases … the swell of her lips … the stories she told of ghosts running abroad.

That night, he climbs the steps of the northwest tower. The sky is clouded but mistless. He peers into the rain and waits.

—Are you there, Margaret?

*   *   *

He wishes, often, that he had penned a love lyric to her. Then again, how could he have vied with Astrophel and Stella?

So when he takes up the sheet of paper on which she scrawled her last message, he begins to inscribe … not verses, not even words, exactly, but codes, puzzles, indirections: the currency of their lives together. It pleases him, in fact, to imagine her standing over him as he composes, using a magnifying glass to write in the smallest possible grain.

Yes, I see, Tom. Well played.

*   *   *

It is not plague that comes for him after all but an angry red spot on his upper left nostril. He pays it no heed, and the spot, for its part, is in no large hurry to colonize the rest of his nose. Another thirteen years pass before it bothers to spread to his lip. And here at last it betrays a degree of impatience, spreading with economy to his palate, his tongue, his jaw.

By the end, speech comes with great difficulty. Breath itself is a vexation. He spends his last days in Threadneedle Street, the guest of a mercer who sailed with him to Virginia all those years ago. Physicians are brought in—one goes so far as to blame Harriot's troubles on tobacco—but his most constant nurse is visible only to him.

I know your pain,
she says.
But soon you will get to the other side of it, and you will wonder what all the stir was about.

Ralegh by now has gone to his reward. Northumberland is in the Tower. Three others are standing at Harriot's bedside when he passes, and each believes he is the one being addressed.

—Oh, you were right. Yes, I see. You were quite right.