by Louis Bayard
“God.”
“Because she was an English teacher. And because if it passed muster with her, Sally Markowitz would have to, you know, fall in line.”
“So your mom read it…”
“And started laughing from the very first line. I think it was maybe the best laugh she’d had in—maybe ever? And then she showed it to my dad, and he started laughing.”
“And what’d you do?”
“Um … I went back to my room. And I pretty much torched that poem from my consciousness. I couldn’t even begin to recite it for you now.”
She placed her hand on my sternum.
“I’m sorry, Henry.”
“No. I mean, you asked me, and that was the first thing I—”
“Okay.”
“So don’t be.”
“I won’t.”
She lay still for a while.
“Was that when you became a writer?” she ventured.
“That’s when I grasped the value of studying other writers.”
With a peal of laughter, she rolled on top of me. Her hair was falling between my lips, and her black eyes were shining, and she was playing with my forelock, curling it around her index finger. Her breath smelled like cardamom.
“You know what, Henry? If you made that up, I will kill you.”
“And you probably could, too,” I said. “But it happens to be true.”
“All right then. I won’t even ask if you cried.”
“I did not. It was a point of pride.”
“Mm.” Her eyes closed in slow stages. “You know what, Henry? We could have put your mom in the car with my dad and solved all our problems.”
For the rest of the afternoon, we lay in bed, dozing in and out, softening and hardening. Never quite pulling away. I would wake at intervals and find myself at some different quadrant of her—tasting an earlobe or the braid of spine in her lower back, describing circles around her aureole—stunned by the variety of her. For something like ten minutes, I dedicated myself to the lunar landscape of her pubic bone, the way the angles bled into roundness and the whole structure flirted with verticality before giving way to declivity.…
“Henry?”
Her voice floated down as if through an arbor.
“Are you hearing me?”
“Yep.”
“What if we left?”
“What if we—”
“What if we just gave up? Went home?”
I raised my head.
“Why would we do that?” I asked.
“Because we can.”
I rolled myself on top of her. Rested my chin on her flat, immaculate abdomen.
“Okay,” I said. “Where would home be, exactly?”
“I’ve given that some thought.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m currently inclined toward Kiawah Island.”
“Wow.”
“It’s lovely there.”
“Of course it is, I’m just—what would we do? There’s caddying, I guess. Groundskeeping…”
“I see you as a park ranger. Somewhere on the mainland.”
“Steady work,” I conceded.
“And you’d look great in the uniform. And while you’re busy, I’d be—you know, making jewelry from recycled elements. And learning golf, and we could go on poker cruises, Henry.”
“And with you around,” I said, “we’d never have to worry about muggers.”
“There are no muggers on Kiawah. A couple alligators, that’s it. You could read on the beach. Every sonnet Shakespeare ever wrote. Toes in the sand, Henry. Mojito thermos at your elbow. Imagine it.”
I tried, I really did. But when I closed my eyes and thought of beaches, I just dozed off again—only to be jarred awake by the dream-memory of Amory Swale’s hand poking through the sand. I blinked myself back to consciousness and found myself gazing up the smooth white plain of Clarissa’s torso. Found her watching me back.
“Or, you know, maybe I was kidding,” she said.
“It’s a fine idea.”
“I know.”
“It’s just—practicalities…”
“Forget I mentioned it.”
She didn’t sound angry, but just to be sure I crawled toward her, until my face was directly over hers.
“So one more question,” she said.
“Okay.”
“If Alonzo weren’t in the picture, would you leave now?”
“What do you mean if he weren’t? He is.”
She said nothing, and with a long-dying groan, I rolled off her. Stared up at the coffered ceiling.
“Alonzo took me in,” I said. “When no one else would. I owe him.”
“I get that, I do. I just wonder—I mean, how do you know when you’ve stopped owing someone?”
Her finger made a skiing motion from my ear down to my clavicle.
“Because if you need someone to take you in, Henry, I’ll do it.”
This was all the invitation I needed. At least, I took it for an invitation, and indeed, when I rolled back on top of her, her face blossomed with consent. It was only days later, when everything had come apart, that I wondered if I’d quite taken her meaning.
* * *
The sun went down, but I couldn’t have told you when. In our room, it was a kind of permanent twilight, twinned with dawn, so that every time I thought I was waking up, I was really going back down. The outside world dimly interceded: a wheezing water pipe, fragments of a street argument, a siren (imagined, maybe). At some point, I heard the hall clock tolling the hours. One, two … I lost count after eight … and I would have sailed right back to sleep, but instinctively, I reached for the other side of the bed and, finding no one there, jerked straight up.
“Clarissa?”
Squinting into the shadows, I found her, naked, half gilded by the streetlights. Nothing more than an outline, adding weight as my eyes adapted.
She was standing near the window. Her hair was sleep-mashed, but her posture was erect and attentive.
“Clarissa?”
She turned toward me. With the most vacant eyes I have ever seen on a human being. And then she spoke.
“She’s dying. We’ve got to help her. Margaret’s dying.”
37
“LORD HELP US,” said Alonzo. “What do they do to the chickens over here?”
He pushed away his gunmetal-gray scrambled eggs, folded his massive arms against his chest.
“And why the hell does this Margaret woman keep intruding? Who is she, anyway? And why should we care if she’s dying?”
“I’m just the messenger,” I answered, putting up my hands in surrender.
“Very well, Hermes, should your little chippie ever decide to come down, please relay the following message. She needs to channel some new visions. On the order of gold. Spell the word if you must. G-O-L-D.”
I herded my baked beans and grilled mushrooms around my plate. Twelve hours of sleep, and I still wasn’t hungry.
“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
HOW 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.
