The School of Night

by Louis Bayard

Well, let’s see, Detective, I’m about to scale a tower. For the purpose of finding buried treasure. Before the night is done, the woman I love might be dead, and I might be, too. And an officially dead man might be dead once more.

  Or else we might all be billionaires.

  We’ll certainly be criminals.

  “I have just a moment,” I said.

  “Did I get you in bed?”

  “No.”

  “You sound quiet.”

  “It must be the connection. If you must know, I’m overseas.”

  “I wasn’t aware of that, Mr. Cavendish.”

  “I didn’t tell you.”

  If he was surprised by my insolence, he didn’t let on.

  “I thought you might want to know,” he said. “We’ve been investigating Miss Pentzler’s death, and there’s something I’d like to show you.”

  “Yes?”

  “But you being abroad…”

  “Maybe you could tell me what it is.”

  There was a very long pause.

  “I can promise you,” I said. “I’m not a flight risk.”

  The habit of holding me under suspicion must have been a hard one to break, so I can’t really explain why he decided ultimately to take me in his confidence. Or why, having heard what he had to tell me, my brain should have resisted the implications for as long as it did.

  “Mr. Cavendish?”

  “I’ll be in touch as soon as I’m back in D.C. Is that all right?”

  “When will that be?”

  “I only have … there’s a few more hours of business here, so … Monday or Tuesday? That all right?”

  “I guess it’ll have to be, Mr. Cavendish.”

  I drew the phone away from my ear, then put it straight back.

  “Detective? Are you still there?”

  A moment of weakness, I confess. And it took just one look from Alonzo to dispel it. For that look said what I already knew. The time to speak had been on that beach in the Outer Banks, when I first saw Amory Swale’s arm protruding from the sand. We had come too far to go back.

  Detective Acree’s voice was buzzing in my ear. “Mr. Cavendish?”

  “Sorry, I just wanted to say thanks. For the call.”

  “Doing my job, Mr. Cavendish.”

  “Sure.”

  “Good luck with your business.”

  “Thanks.”

  I held the phone in my hand. Then I put it back in my pocket.

  The rain had stopped. A scythe of moon poked through the cloud.

  “It’s time,” said Alonzo.

  41

  HISTORY DOES NOT record why Syon House’s original owner, the Duke of Somerset, decided to build those fifty-foot towers at each corner of the quadrangle. Did he just want a nicer view of the river? His enemies preferred to see the towers as fortifications, aggressive in intent, and Somerset was eventually executed for his sedition.

  Somehow or other, the towers remained standing. And it’s safe to say that even the Duke couldn’t have envisioned an assailant quite like Seamus, who came at the northwest tower not with arquebuses and longbows and siege engines but with a sack of gadgets: étriers and gear slings and angles and bat hooks, each item engineered to pack the greatest tensile strength into the smallest form.

  Seamus himself was engineered along the same lines. According to Alonzo, he had a resting pulse of thirty-six beats a minute (“Like bears in winter, Henry”), and there was something nearly ursine in the way he pawed at his gear and something wild, too, in the sheer tautness of his small frame—he had long since stripped down to a quarter-zip microfleece and zoner shorts—the way his muscles corded and bristled beneath his skin. He was half a foot smaller than me, but I wouldn’t have dreamed of intruding on him. Even Alonzo preferred to absent himself.

  “I’ll just be in the way,” he said.

  “But where are you going?” I asked.

  Alonzo tipped his head toward the neighboring woods.

  “Don’t worry,” he added. “I’m on the qui vive. No one will get by without my seeing them. Now listen, Henry, the moment you’re up there, you call me, is that understood? I want to know the layout. Every crevice, every crack, do you understand? Between us, we are going to find this. Oh, and Henry…”

  “Yeah?”

  “Be great.”

  I couldn’t help it; I smiled. “Just keep ’em out of our way,” I said.

  Thank God there was no question of us hugging. Still, some crackle of feeling must have been exchanged, because when he turned and walked toward the woods, the sight of his bargelike frame (and those discombobulatingly small feet) caught me smack in the chest. Was I seriously proposing to hand over Alonzo’s treasure?

  And then, superimposing itself over our shared history: the image of Clarissa, as I’d last seen her, framed on either side of Halldor’s swiveling body.

  I closed my eyes, but that last image wouldn’t be blotted away, so I looked instead at Seamus, laying out his gear in small clean formations.

  “Seamus,” I said. “Could I ask you something?”

  “Mm.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  The faintest of grunts as he drove the first grappling hook into the mortar.

  “Gonna fund me next climb.”

  “Who is?” I asked. “Alonzo?”

  His shoulders rose an inch. “It’s the big ’un,” he said. “Nanga Parbat. The Man Eater. Forty-six-hundred-meter drop.”

  He gave me a nod for emphasis, but I admit I was less in awe of Nanga Parbat than of Alonzo’s bold-facedness. Whatever happened tonight, the chance of Seamus getting a shilling for his labor was even less than our finding treasure, and I felt something near tenderness watching him strap the Black Diamond Icon headlamp onto his skull and slip his Five Ten Moccasym rock shoes into the web ladder.

  “When I’m up,” he said, “I’ll flash me light at you. Twice and off, no more. You tie the rope to your harness, give me two tugs. I start pullin’.”

  “You’re pulling me up?”

  “I’ve lifted bigger cows than you.”

  Which was both insulting and reassuring.

  “Won’t I need the lamp to climb?” I asked.

  “A pair of feet is all.”

  Seamus made one last survey of his handiwork, fastened me into my harness, and then quickly genuflected before hoisting himself onto the first hook.

  “Cheers, mate.”

  And up he went.

  Except that plain sentence does nothing to convey the purity, the parsimony, the tongue-and-groove rhythm of it. He gouged into the mortar, he planted his boot, he hauled himself to the next level—all in a single unbroken rhythm. It was like watching a life form evolve before your eyes. Or, to be more accurate, two organisms evolving together: the tower and Seamus, twining their DNA pools into a golden strand.

  So it was a shock to look up after just ten minutes and find Seamus no longer attached to the tower’s surface. Would the tower itself come crumbling down? But the only thing that fell, finally, was a length of rope, amazingly thin: polyester sheath around a nylon core. I waited and then, from above, came the signal: two tiny flashes of light, directly over my head.

  I threaded the rope through the belaying loop and knotted it and gave it a pair of tugs. Before I knew it, it had tautened into life and my legs had left the ground. A bubble of panic sprang from my chest as I swung myself toward the wall. My feet, encased in their sticky slippers, scrabbled against the still-damp bricks and then, with the next pulse of rope, took their first coltish step toward the heavens.

  I wasn’t moving as quickly as Seamus had, but there was no getting around what I was doing. I was rappelling up Syon House. And the only way to skate over that reality was to stare up into that velvety orange night sky and tell myself I was descending, not rising. Lowering myself into a warm clementine sea.

  That illusion lapsed the moment my topmost foot slipped, so I replaced it with another image: Clarissa. Waiting at the top, her arm
s in long pale columns. She was what I fastened onto, finally, as I came within sight of the tower’s crenellations and merlons. And she would have held me in good stead, I do believe that, had a voice not rung through the darkness.

  “Who’s there?”

  An eerily ancient sound: It might have been a laird’s sentinel calling down to a stranger on a dusty nag. Perched forty feet above God’s earth, I found myself suddenly arraigned—obliged to answer—but then I heard Alonzo’s voice booming from the woods below.

  “I’m so sorry! Can you help me?”

  The rope was no longer pulling, and I was no longer climbing. I was hanging there in the dark, an imperfect suspension, my feet brushing against the tower.

  Another minute passed. All breathing stopped. Then from below came fragments of Alonzo’s voice, brimming over with apology.

  “So very sorry!… Must have fallen asleep … can’t seem to find the … sorry to be so troublesome … lovely wedding, wasn’t it?”

  He was using his own scale—his size, his volume—to blind them. With each protestation, he drew them farther and farther from the house, and his voice grew fainter and less distinct.

  I waited: one minute, two. Then I braced my feet once more against the tower’s skin and tugged on the rope.

  Seamus was waiting at the top—as I expected, as I didn’t at all expect—and in the instant he pulled me in, the relief squeezed out of me in a long pipe-organ blast.

  I slipped out of my harness. Dragged myself to my feet and stared up into the sky.

  The moon was bright as fever. And as I stood there, Clarissa’s absence affected me like a weather front. I drew in my shoulders and turned around, and there was Seamus, tautly still, waiting for me to … act.

  “Alonzo,” I said, reaching for my cell phone.

  “I wouldn’t,” said Seamus.

  He was right. If Alonzo was in custody, the last thing I should do was phone him.

  “Okay then,” I said. “Can I borrow your lamp?”

  “If you don’t go splashin’ light every-bloody-where.”

  I dropped to my knees and gently guided the light around the base of the platform, watching the stones spark to life and then melt back into obscurity. No magically opening door. No arrow scratched in old blood. Just blankness. And behind it more blankness. I was standing atop one of England’s greatest old homes and no closer to what I was seeking than I’d been on the other side of the ocean.

  “Over there,” said Seamus.

  Seasoned climber that he was, he’d spotted a rectangular line of mortar—large enough in area for a box, or a human, to fit through—and darker by just a few degrees than the mortar on either side of it.

  Darker from use, I thought at once. Darker because someone had once tampered with it.

  “Bit crumbly,” said Seamus, tucking his finger into the crevice. He reached into his sack and drew out an achingly thin, double-tapered blade. “Let’s see what the ol’ pecker will do.”

  If I’d had the strength, I would have laughed. But he was already jabbing the blade into the mortar. And then from the sack he drew larger and larger wedges—knife blades and angles—and he used a wall hammer to pound them still deeper, and the mortar fell away divot by divot, casting up tiny clouds of protest, until finally there was nothing visible but the stone itself, nakedly projecting.

  Seamus wiped his brow, set his wedge down, and took a long breath. He never looked at me, but as soon as I said, “Try it,” he took up his hammer and gave the stone a few exploratory taps. Then he started in hammering for real, muscle against rock. And yet because each stroke was so perfectly struck, the sound died away at our feet.

  Until this point, his gains had been so incremental that I think both of us expected the stone to yield in the same way, square inch by square inch. But the silent work of centuries—of water and cold and heat and time—erupted into sudden fruition at the tenth blow. The stone exploded in a gust of fragments—and then just as suddenly vanished. We were staring into a canvas of pure blackness.

  “Christ,” I murmured.

  I dropped to my knees, ranged my hand through the cavity … and felt only air. Pressing my chest to the ground, I plunged my arm still farther. More air.

  For a long time I stared into that hole, waiting for the darkness to resolve into something. But the only thing that came back at me was a current of smoky cold, like something stealing from a well.

  “You’ve got to lower me down there,” I said.

  One of Seamus’s burly brows rose.

  “It’s a straight drop,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “There won’t be any seeing you. The light goes only so far.”

  “I know. I wish I could see another way.”

  The only protest he raised now was his silence. To which I had just one last thing to oppose.

  “Between us,” I said, “I think I’m the one who knows what to look for.”

  Of course, I didn’t know anything, not really. But Seamus was persuaded enough to help me into my harness and fit the lamp onto my head. Then he took his station by the pulley and, after giving me another few seconds to reconsider, he called out:

  “Ready?”

  Ready.

  Except I couldn’t say the word. All I could do was nod, and even that was more taxing than I could have guessed.

  Although not as taxing as the complex act of getting in. The cavity Seamus had made was wide enough to admit but not to welcome. Previously unseen barriers came from nowhere: tangents and outcroppings that raked my ribs and kidneys and breastbone. The stone scraped my knees and snagged my hips and, just when I thought I was clear, it closed around me so quickly that I felt as if I’d been lodged in the house’s throat.

  Gravity released me in the end, and as I worked my way down into the darkness the channel broadened like an esophagus. My back was no longer scraping against the stone, my knees were swinging free.…

  And then I landed, with unpardonable rudeness, on something hard and brittle and outraged. No way to touch it—there wasn’t room to bend—so I lifted my right foot and set it down again and listened to the echo. And then I did it again, just to be sure.

  Wood.

  I was standing on a wooden box.

  * * *

  I can’t tell you how much time passed between that moment and the arrival of Seamus’s voice. It took me a good minute just to understand what he was saying.

  “Okay?”

  I was about to answer, but I was distracted by a rich, dark pounding. The sound of my heart, I soon realized. So magnified by this small space that it seemed to be hammering against the house’s foundations.

  “Okay,” I called back.

  And then I remembered: I had a lamp strapped to my skull.

  I tilted my head down, and the light splashed around my feet, pushing away the darkness to reveal … nothing.

  Until, from the darkness, there welled up a length of wood, knotted and oaken, softly splintered beneath my weight. And secreted deep inside, a canvas bag, bunched around something I could neither reach nor see.

  In retrospect, I can see I should have gone back up. Told Seamus what I’d found and worked out a plan for dragging the box to light. But the combination of wanting to know what was in it and not being able to was so bitter and intoxicating I couldn’t leave my post. And so I bent and wriggled and did everything I could to see just what I was standing on.

  It never occurred to me that the same rot and decay that had plied themselves against the building’s exterior might have been at work on the inside. That the ledge supporting this box might have been waiting all these centuries to give way before the shock of one man’s weight.

  But that’s exactly what happened. Before I could utter a prayer or a protest, I was falling in a free straight terrible line.

  And then, even more shocking, I was no longer falling. The rope, still anchored to Seamus’s pulley, tautened around me and snatched me back up. The impact sent a shock
wave straight up my spine, and my stomach lurched against my chest, and my legs dangled now in the void, and from below I could hear the crash of wood on stone … but here I was. Alive.

  * * *

  As to what happened next—well, in less kind moments, I blame my father.

  When I was eight years old, I informed him that my friends Isaac Shapiro and Hans Bjornen had both become Boy Scouts, which clearly indicated I was meant to be one, too. My father reminded me that I was already playing baseball and soccer and that the task of driving me to a third activity every week was more than he or any parent should have to bear.

  “You want to be a scout?” he said. “Give up one of your other sports. And if you expect me to be a scoutmaster, forget it.”

  So I never joined the local pack. And for this reason, I never became truly competent at tying knots. Which meant that, on this particular night, I fastened my harness to the rope with what I thought was a sturdy bowline but was, in fact, an incorrectly tied half-hitch. Closer to a quarter-hitch. Closer to nothing at all because it was now unraveling itself.

  Dull-eyed, I watched as my fingers scrambled to coil the loop back, but the rest of me, the mass of me, was working against them, and from my cold-numbed hands, the fibers of rope began slipping away like grains. And by the time my brain had grasped what was happening, it was too late, and I was once again falling. Only with this difference: Nothing was tethering me to the world above.

  I fell without sound, without impediment. And indeed, beneath my terror, some quiet part of me imagined falling straight through the earth and out into morning.

  It took less than a second for me to be disabused, for the earth embraced me with a lover’s ardor. Pain spangled through every extremity. A new darkness flowered up from inside and joined with the darkness around me.

  “Margaret,” I whispered.

  And then the night swallowed me whole.

  ISLEWORTH, ENGLAND AUGUST 1603

  42

  HE GIVES HER a table of her own. He arranges all the instruments: the scale; the pans and pots; the twenty-six glass vessels, alphabetically organized, their bases luted with fire clay. Page by page, he lays out his notes, shows her the degree of pressure or heat or cold he applied to each substance. More reluctantly, he shows her where each experiment broke off, the mysteries that yielded themselves up and the ones that stayed out of reach.