The School of Night

by Louis Bayard

  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.

  She does nothing more than look back at him. Then she raises a single finger.

  Her right index finger, he has enough presence of mind to note that. She holds it there, then lets it fall to one side … until it is pointing in the exact direction from which he has just come.

  Go back?

  She can’t mean it.

  But in answer, she makes a slow declarative nod. And so vehemently now does she jab her finger that he falls back as before an actual shove and, with deep unwillingness, retraces his steps down the alley, past all those heaps of ash and ordure, silently calling her, already mourning her.…

  Margaret. Margaret.

  There is no sense in him of larger plans, only of private and excruciating duty. So that her scream, when it finally comes, is more than he can bear. His arms flop to his side. His lungs squeeze into silence.

  And then he is running.

  Running with a fleetness that only terror could grant him, and up ahead he can see the watcher, baffled from torpor, rising slowly from his chair, less alarmed by the cry, perhaps, than by the sight of Thomas Harriot running toward him like a Bedlamite, filling the street with famished croaks.

  —You must open the door! A woman is dying!

  The watcher scowls.

  —I know she’s dying, don’t I?

  —No! No, I mean she is dead.…

  They are three feet apart now: Harriot panting and wheezing, the watcher squinting him down. Then, with an air of great umbrage, the man takes the key from his pocket and sets it in the lock.

  A good twenty seconds pass while he struggles with the door. Then at last it grinds open, inch by inch, to reveal a stark pallid figure. A supine woman, we
aring nothing but a shift, her mouth ajar, her eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling.

  Margaret.

  He hears the watcher shouting:

  —Stay away!

  But there are no proprieties now. He folds like paper, collapses onto Margaret’s dead body, presses his face against hers, shrouds her with his breath.

  And then he watches one of those staring eyes slowly—slowly—shut. To form what can only be called a wink.

  Is it a sob or a laugh that breaks from him now? No matter. He knows all he needs to know.

  —I was right, he announces. —She is quite dead.

  —Let me see, then.

  Gently Harriot rakes his hand over Margaret’s face, draws the eyelids shut.

  —As you wish. I cannot be held to account for—

  He need not finish. The warder, as indifferent as he is to fear, is proud of his own rude health, jealous of it, cannot bear its being tainted. So he stands there, grudging and sullen, while Harriot passes through the motions of feeling for breath, pulse, life.

  —It is most unfortunate. So young.

  The watcher says nothing. And Harriot, feeling the pressure of that silence, hastens to add:

  —I am a physician, of course.

  He hears the falsity in his voice, but he presses on.

  —Naturally, I shall see to the body. I happen to know of a—I believe there is a cemetery—not so very far from here.…

  —A cemetery.

  An ominous tone to the watcher’s voice. His eyes burn with tidings. His lips part to reveal a black-gummed smile.

  —That is most Christian of you, sir. But it appears you shall be relieved of your burden.

  Harriot doesn’t take his meaning at first. Then he hears the sound of a bell, followed by another man’s voice—high and occluded—calling down the street.

  —Cast out your dead.… Cast out your dead.…

  Glancing through the open door, Harriot sees a three-wheeled wagon trundling through the street mud, drawn by a straw-haired giant with a bright red wand.

  Like a scene from mythology, Harriot thinks, benumbed. But what catches his eye is not the man or the vehicle but the cargo. A tangled weave of human limbs. Body piled upon body upon body.

  The dead cart.

  49

  IT IS BECAUSE she is so wholly bent on muffling every pulse, every sense, that Margaret is so slow to understand her fate. She hears Harriot cry:

  —There is no call! This is monstrous. I forbid it.

  She hears the watcher’s cool reply.

  —And who are you to be forbidding? Have you been deputized by the Lord Mayor? No? Well, then. Edgar!

  Who is Edgar? Eyes shut, she listens now with a new level of discernment. The squeak of cart wheels. The friction of a man’s coarse wool trousers. The watcher’s pandering grunt.

  —Got one for you.

  —Age?

  —You tell me.

  —Name?

  —Crookenshanks.

  —Christian name?

  And then she hears it: the name she hasn’t heard in nearly fifteen years, the name she’s forgotten she ever had. Dragged from the old baptismal records.

  —How long dead?

  —This very minute. As this Christian gentleman can tell you.

  There is nothing to fear, she tells herself. Edgar is a parish clerk. He is recording her demise, just as he must have done with her mother. Closing the books on her. It is almost a relief to hear how thoroughly she has gulled them.

  Why, then, is Harriot so agitated?

  —You cannot!

  —It’s none of your concern, sir.

  —You have no right!

  —You would be warranted in retiring, sir.

  Is Harriot listening? Can it be he is going to leave?

  Again, it is her skin, growing incrementally colder, that senses the change. And would cry out if it could.

  Stay …

  But as soon as she hears the watcher’s voice, she knows it is no good. For he is speaking out loud, as he never would if the gentleman in question were close by.

  —Body snatcher, if you ask me.

  —All sorts, answers Edgar the cartman.

  —Lucky I didn’t clout him.

  Why do you not cry out, Margaret? Why do you let them take you?

  The answer comes back with cool clarity.

  Because if you do not carry out this pretense, you will be sent back to this terrible house. And the house will finish the work it has already begun.

  Stay here, and you are as good at dead. In the open air, you have a chance.

  Or so she tells herself. The promise of liberty, though, fades in the few seconds it takes them to wind the sheet around her. She can be grateful not to feel their skin against hers. But then they lift her from the ground … swing her once, twice … release … and with a spasm of horror, she realizes she is flying.

  Not upward, as for a second she could almost believe, but parallel to earth. Landing finally on a heap of cruelly pointed objects.

  Her capacity for self-preservation extends this far: She imagines herself to be lying on vegetables. Knobby turnips and carrots and beets. Her bed for the night.

  But the frond of hair that settles across her lips, this is not vegetative. This belongs to something animal.

  And with that, the illusion is gone. The vegetables become elbows, knees, toes, chins. And before she can think to protest, the cart is shuddering into motion, and the cartman’s bell is once again ringing.

  —Cast out your dead! Cast out your dead!

  She knows now exactly where she is bound. To the pest-pit.

  * * *

  She scarcely notices now when the cart stumbles on a high cobble or lurches into a hole. She does not even wince when three more bodies are flung atop her; she is even grateful for the cover they provide. For now, at last, she can relax her pretense. She can open her eyes.

  Only she is staring straight into a human mouth.

  Male or female, she cannot say. All she can see is a small universe of tongue and palate and gray teeth. Coming for her.

  She would scream, but the pressure of the other bodies stops the cry in her chest. Moving is impossible, breathing a trial. Enduring is all. For, in the performance of his duty, the cartman is strong, patient, inexhaustible. He travels for blocks on end, shouting to the empty housefronts. A man wedded to his trade.

  Pressed among all these ulcerous bodies, Margaret finds herself praying not for release but for … liturgy. In extremis, she wants nothing more than the full retinue of God’s servants—reader, clerk, sexton, priest—shepherding her toward her lodgings.

  And then, as if in answer to her wish, comes the sound of church bells, chiming out in fat chords. A message meant strictly for her.

  We will miss you, Margaret. We will be sad when you’re gone.

  * * *

  For several minutes altogether, she loses consciousness. A flat gray dreamless sleep from which she is prodded by … stillness.

  The cart has stopped.

  How far have they traveled? Where are they? The crush against her is dissipating, a rivulet of sun is traveling down to her. It is still day. Day somewhere.

  To feel the air once more in her lungs! She doesn’t pause to ask why. Only when the body just above her rises toward the sky does she understand the work that is under way. The cartman has reached his terminus, and he is carrying out the last part of his contract. Disposal.

  It takes no more than a minute to consign a body to eternity. Which makes it only a matter of computation to see how much time she has left. Three bodies followed her into this cart; three bodies will precede her to the pit.

  And when her time comes, it is no great difficulty to play dead, not with all the practice she has had. How weightless she is in the cartman’s arms. How sad he must be to part with her, for he leans into her ear and whispers:

  —Heave ho and up we go.

  But not up at all. Down. Down.

  P
erhaps six feet, perhaps ten, she cannot be sure. But she knows what company she keeps. For they lie all about her and beneath her, and new ones are following hard on: body after body, dropping like meteorites from the heavens.

  And when it is over, when they have stopped coming, she lies there a long while, utterly still, her breath coming in thin streams, her senses more aflame than ever.

  The cartman is gone—mark the tapering squeak of his cart’s wheels. The bodies lie uncovered—too late in the plague season to bother with burial. The time of her deliverance is come.

  Her eyes spring open, and it is some relief to know her squeamishness has gone. All these rotting husks that lie about her—their rictus grins, their lidded eyes, their bare blue limbs, still running with sores—impediments, nothing more. Keeping her from the light.

  The only trick is finding some still place from which she can launch herself. For these bodies are shy in her presence, they slide from her touch. She must set her foot on some wretch’s midsection without regard to his comfort and gouge in and push up.

  The smell is enough to extinguish her, but this she pushes away, too, as she pushes away the identity of everyone she meets. Not a mother or grandmother or son but an elbow, a shoulder, a hip. This long flaxen hair never belonged to anyone’s daughter. It is simply the ideal vine for climbing.

  Her groans are terrible, but they are her fuel, too. They give her the strength to find the air pockets, the crevices, to do what must be done to reach the next terrace and contemplate the prospect of the next.

  And as she labors, the world’s axis seems to tilt, so that she is no longer climbing up but out. Swimming through this sea of flesh …

  And all the more astonished to find, at the far end, another swimmer, likewise parting the waters. His arms groping toward hers, his mouth an oval. Her own mouth opening in reply, calling out with what may be her last breath.

  —Tom …

  50

  THEY MOVE PONDEROUSLY, the both of them, as they make their way to the river. Their mouths are dry, their eyes fixed straight ahead. It comes as something of a shock to find Harriot’s boat still waiting at the Old Swan stairs.

  He helps her in. Pauses a moment, as if he were either committing or erasing the city from his memory. Then he digs the oars in.