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Overview
In the late sixteenth century, five brilliant scholars gather under the cloak of darkness to discuss God, politics, astronomy, and the black arts. Known as the School of Night, they meet in secret to avoid the wrath of Queen Elizabeth. But one of the men, Thomas Harriot, has secrets of his own, secrets he shares with one person only: the servant woman he loves.
In modern-day Washington, D.C., disgraced Elizabethan scholar Henry Cavendish has been hired by the ruthless antiquities collector Bernard Styles to find a missing letter. The letter dates from the 1600s and was stolen by Henry's close friend, Alonzo Wax. Now Wax is dead and Styles wants the letter back.
But the letter is an object of interest to others, too. It may be the clue to a hidden treasure; it may contain the long-sought formula for alchemy; it most certainly will prove the existence of the group of men whom Shakespeare dubbed the School of Night but about whom little is known. Joining Henry in his search for the letter is Clarissa Dale, a mysterious woman who suffers from visions that only Henry can understand. In short order, Henry finds himself stumbling through a secretive world of ancient perils, caught up in a deadly plot, and ensnared in the tragic legacy of a forgotten genius.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250002303 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Press |
| Publication date: | 02/28/2012 |
| Pages: | 368 |
| Sales rank: | 487,396 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.54(w) x 8.54(h) x 0.98(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Prologue
Three or fourtimes a week, it comes.
Not a dream: closer to a vision, apart from her but obscurely meant for her, too.
And each time the vision converges on a man. Working late into the evening. Streaks of sweat across his brow and neck. His head bowed—in prayer, she thinks, except she has never heard a prayer quite like this.
"Ex nihilo . . ."
Lapis stones clatter in a copper pan.
". . . nihil . . ."
Beneath the copper, a tallow flame crackles into life.
". . . fit."
A pewter mist billows up, then resolves into a powder. The air grows heavy with current. The man thrusts up his hands and roars. Four centuries later, she can still hear him.
"Long live the School of Night!"
Part One
Three new marriadges here are made
One of the staffe and sea Astrolabe
Of the Sonne & Starre is an other
Which now agree like sister & brother
And charde and compasse which were at bate,
Will now agree like a master & mate.
—Thomas Harriot,
"Three Sea Marriages"
Washington, D.C. September 2009
1
Against all odds, against my own wishes, this is a love story. And it began, of all places, at Alonzo Wax's funeral.
Now I'd known Alonzo pretty much all my adult life, but in the months after his death, I learned a surprising number of things about him. For instance, he chased his morning shots of Grey Goose with Rocky Road. He had never read a word of Alexander Pope—too modern—but he followed every single comic strip in The Washington Post (even "Family Circus"). He was a sneak and a liar and a thief and would have slain every grandmother he had for an original edition of Bussy d'Ambois. And he loved me.
But in those early months of mourning—or whatever it was we were doing about Alonzo—the biggest surprise was this: He had become Catholic. And had never gotten around to telling his parents, loosely observant Rockville Jews who found the baptism certificate while sorting through his filing cabinets. After some family debate, Alonzo's sister Shayla began shaking the trees for priests, until a friend told her that suicide was a mortal sin for the Church. So she opted to hold the memorial service at the Folger Shakespeare Library, which, in addition to being marble, was home to the world's largest collection of printed Shakespearean works and to a small mountain of preserved and cataloged Elizabethiana. The Folger, in other words, was engaged in roughly the same business as Alonzo had been: ransacking boxes and chests for centuries-old documents that were, in most cases, considered highly disposable by the original writers.
Shayla was glad to have missed the incense, but something else struck her as she stood greeting mourners at the entrance to the great hall.
"Henry," she whispered. "I forgot. I hate lutes."
It could have been worse, I reminded her. The last memorial service I'd attended at the Folger was for a Buddhist restaurateur, and we were subjected to an hour of Tibetan music: finger cymbals and skull drums and, glowering over everything, a massively built throat singer, swaddled in goatskin, belching up chord after chord.
"And besides," I added, "the lute quartet was your idea."
"You know, I thought maybe they'd bring a viol. Or an hautboy."
"That's how it works. An Elizabethan collector dies, out come the lutes."
More than lutes. Significant People had come to pay respects to Alonzo, and here and there, framed by long swords and halberds, one could make out the graven profiles of More Than Usually Significant People. An assistant librarian of Congress, a Smithsonian undersecretary, an ambassador from Mauritius . . . even a U.S. senator, longtime friend and beneficiary of the Wax family, who worked the room as deftly as if it were a PAC breakfast. Alonzo, I thought, would have been appalled and flattered all at once.
"Did I mention you're his executor?" Shayla said.
She turned just in time to catch the look on my face.
"If you want to pass," she said, "I'll understand."
"No. I'm honored."
"There's some money in it, I think. Not a lot . . ."
"Does it matter if I don't know what I'm doing?"
"No," she said. "Your remarks—that's all you need to worry about today."
She narrowed her eyes at me. The stripe of unretouched hair along her scalp shone like war paint.
"You did prepare, right, Henry? Alonzo hated stammering; you know that."
For that very reason, I had written my remarks on index cards, but as I laid them in ranks across the podium, they filled me with a strange revulsion. And so, at the last instant, I decided to wing it. I gazed out across those three-hundred-plus mourners, spread across nearly three thousand square feet of terra-cotta tile, under a massively vaulted strapwork ceiling . . . and I went deliberately small. Which is to say, I spoke about meeting Alonzo Wax.
It was the first day of our freshman year, and Alonzo was the very first student I met, and because I didn't know any better, I thought all students were like him. ("I'm sorry now they weren't," I said.) The first thing Alonzo did was to offer me a tumbler of Pimm's—he kept it in a tiny cut-glass container in his hip pocket. And when he found out I was planning to major in English, he demanded my opinion of A Winter's Tale. I got out maybe three sentences before he cut me off and told me how benighted I was. (" 'Benighted' was the exact word.") And when I told him I'd never read Chapman—well, I thought he was going to wash his hands of me then and there. Instead, he invited me to dinner.
"It was a real dinner," I said. "With courses. He explained to me that university food was a known carcinogen. 'Of course, the science has been suppressed,' he said, 'but the findings are unanimous. That shit will kill you.' "
Before I could retrieve them, the words—kill you—went shivering through the climate-controlled air. And in that moment, yes, I wished I could turn the clock back to Elizabethan days, when this great hall would have been a hive of distraction. Masques and plays and dances. Rushes covering the floor, dogs roaming free, a smell of agriculture everywhere. My voice just one thread among many.
Alonzo, I hurried on, paid for our meal, as he usually did. The tip was about the same size as the bill. And he allowed as how my ideas on Winter's Tale weren't quite so daft as he first thought. But I should still read Chapman.
" 'You'll never get anywhere,' he said, 'until you find a nice minor poet.' "
I stacked my unused index cards in a nice little pile. I squinted down at the finish line.
"Alonzo's self-assurance seemed to me something colossal. I was just this kid from the burbs, and here was this guy my own age carrying himself like a professor. And the real professors, they were as scared of him as I was, and why wouldn't they be, he was—"
He was what? I can't now remember what I was going to say because she, in effect, finished the sentence for me. Or began another one altogether. Just by walking into the great hall.
At least forty minutes late.
To this day I'm not sure I would have noticed her if she'd dressed properly. Like the rest of us, I mean, in our black wool and crepe. She was wearing an old-fashioned A-line dress, cotton—scarlet!—tight in the bust, loose and jovial in the skirt. She walked like somebody who was used to wearing such a dress. She looked more comfortable than anyone else in the room.
Nobody said a word to her. We were all probably just waiting for her to see her error. Oh, the wedding's across the street! At the Congregational church!
But she gave no sign of having come to the wrong place. She took a seat at the end of the third row and, without embarrassment, turned her attention on the speaker.
Who was me.
I had briefly forgotten this.
"Alonzo," I said, "was a—a great collector, we all know that. That's why there are . . . so many of us here, right? But to me, nothing in his collection was . . . ever as unique as he was. So . . ."—Finish. Finish—"so that's what I'll remember."
Who spoke after me? I couldn't tell you. By the time I sat down, I was gathering data. A tough job, because she was two rows behind me and slightly northward, which meant I had to wheel about in my seat at regular intervals and pretend I wasn't being the most irksome guy in the room. Somehow, through the heads and hats, sections of her came back to me. A profusion of dark hair. A creamy arm, draped across the back of her chair. And, most enticing of all, a ledge of collarbone, striking a note of pioneer resilience against the slenderness of her neck.
And then, from the podium, came the throbbing contralto of Alonzo's mother.
"My heart is so full," she said. "So very full to see all these people gathered to honor my son."
You might suppose I felt guilt. Given that, in this moment, I wasn't honoring her son. You would be half right. But here's the thing. You can get just as lucky at a funeral as at a wedding. In fact, luckier. Someone always needs to be comforted.
And Alonzo, more than anyone else, would have guessed how complicated the act of grieving him would be. He'd left behind no children. He'd never courted sentiment, he'd never courted anything—or anybody. But all the same he understood me. Just come back when you're done, I could hear him saying. There's a letter I want to show you in the Maggs and Quaritch catalog. Written to the Laird of Craighall . . .
And so, by the time the service was over, I believed I had his full dispensation to proceed. But as I stood up, another woman's voice rang after me.
"Henry!"
Lily Pentzler. Short-waisted and long-abiding. Braced like a professional wrestler, tufts of gray hair straggling over carob eyes, a stack of cocktail napkins in each hand. An air of harassed charity, not specific to this occasion.
"Do you need help?" I asked.
"Do I need help?"
Lily was Alonzo's amanuensis. I use that word because that's how it was printed on her business cards. "It means picking up the master's scraps," she once explained. Exactly what she was doing now.
"The security kept us waiting for nearly an hour," she told me. "The florist screwed up and sent lilies. Alonzo hated lilies. The caterer just got here. Just. Got. Here. People, before they go and, you know, harm themselves in some definitive way, should be required—and I'm talking beyond congressional mandate, Henry, a level of divine mandate that says, 'Know what? Before you do it, organize your own memorial service, 'kay? Buy the wreath, set up the open bar. Hire the fucking caterers and then kill yourself.' "
"I can see your point."
"This"—the piles of napkins began to teeter—"this will have the effect of ending suicide as we know it."
"Do you need any help?" I asked again.
She looked at me.
"We've missed you, Henry. You haven't been by to see us lately."
"Oh, yeah. Kinda busy. Teaching gig. The freelance thing. This, that . . ."
"The next thing," she said, eyeing me closely.
"Yep."
"Well, come by later, anyway. There's a wake at five. We're taking over the top floor of the Pour House, and Bridget is going to sing something mawkish and out of period. 'Last Rose of Summer,' I think. On second thought, save yourself."
She smiled then, just a little bit, and, pivoting slowly, labored toward the banquet table, which was nearly as tall as she was.
By now, no more than a minute had passed, but it was enough. The woman in scarlet was nowhere to be found. Through the great hall I wandered, half inspecting the crossbow bolts and the digitalized First Folio with the touch screen that made the pages turn like magic, and I was aware only of my own defeat, growing around me.
Until at my eastern periphery, like dawn, a long pale arm materialized, pushing against the oaken entrance door.
She was leaving. As quietly as she had come.
And here again fate intervened. Not Lily Pentzler this time but Alonzo's grandfather, ninety-eight, who believed I was his great-nephew and couldn't be told otherwise. Loosening his ancient-mariner grip required the intervention of the actual great-nephew, a pet insurance salesman from Centerville, Virginia. I took three long strides into the entry hall, I shoved open the door, stood there in the blinding heat. . . .
She was gone.
No one but me standing on those marble steps in the early-September blast. Sweat tickled through my collar, and around me rose a smell like burning tires. Magnolias were growing, crape myrtles, and not much else.
Hard to explain the dejection that swept over me. I was a man in my mid-forties, wasn't I? Disappointment was my daily gruel. Back on the wheel, Henry.
And then I heard someone call after me:
"Well, there you are!"
So much familiarity in the tone that I braced myself for another of Alonzo's relations. (The Waxes were a mighty tribe in their day.) This was someone else, a man in early winter: silver-haired, handsome and rawboned, and erect. Hale with a vengeance: his skin looked like someone had gone at it with pumice. He took my hand and held it for perhaps a second too long, but his smile was benign and vaguely dithering. In a BBC sitcom, he'd have been the vicar. He'd have ridden in on a bike with big panniers.
"Mr. Cavendish," he said (and indeed the accent was British), "I wonder if I might have a word with you."
"What about?"
This is where my little track of linearity breaks down. Because when he next spoke, it was as if he'd already spoken. And it was as if Alonzo was speaking, too, from his watery grave. And maybe some part of me was chiming in. All of us in the same helpless chord, not quite in tune but impossible to disaggregate.
"The School of Night."
Excerpted from The School Of Night by Louis Bayard
Copyright 2011 by Louis Bayard
Published in 2011 by Henry Holt and Company
All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher.
Reading Group Guide
"The Inspiration for The School of Night"
Tiny Tim . . . Edgar Allan Poe . . . a French detective named Vidocq . . . one way or another, my books tend to begin with a character. Someone who intrigues me. Someone who raises question marks in me. Someone who may not have had the full hearing he deserves.
My latest book, though, had a very different genesis. It began with a name.
A name conjured up by that wonderful time suck and idea generator known as Google. A couple of years ago, I spent a whole afternoon jumping from link to link, just to see where I landed—and I unexpectedly found myself in a Wikipedia entry. My eyes glided up to the top of the screen, and there read: "The School of Night."
Now, I'd never heard this name before, but once I did, I could not get it out of my head. It had its own pulse, it had a mystery . . . it had a story. I just had to find it.
I soon learned that this school wasn't your standard brick-and-mortar establishment. Nor was it a training academy for wizards. It was just a group of men—intellectuals like Walter Ralegh and Christopher Marlowe who (so rumor had it) gathered late at night to engage in dark arts and heresy.
By now, you can probably guess, I was intrigued. I wanted to learn everything I could about this so-called school. The only problem? There wasn't much to find.
Indeed, if you ask a lot of English literature scholars, they'll tell you there may never have been a School of Night—at least not in any formal sense. Certainly, there's no paper trail. If these brilliant scholars ever did come together to pick one another's brains, they left behind no curricula, no dissertations—not even a scrap of homework. We can only intuit what they would have talked about from the writings they individually published in their lifetimes. And from the untimely ends so many of them met.
So, at the start, I had a lot more questions than answers. And you know, if I were a real historian, I might have despaired. But I soon realized that, for a historical novelist, the cloud surrounding the School of Night was something of godsend. Because it meant I could make the school whatever I needed it to be.
Very early on, for instance, I made a conscious decision to push aside the school's star attractions, Ralegh and Marlowe, in favor of one of the least known members: a guy named Thomas Harriot.
And if you're asking, "Thomas who?" . . . well, that's the same question I had. But as I did my research, that question morphed into: "Why don't I know this guy? Why doesn't everyone know him?"
This is the man, after all, who is known in certain circles as "England's Galileo." And for good reason. He was doing pretty much everything Galileo was doing while Galileo was doing it. Measuring the downward acceleration of objects. Using a telescope to map the moon. Witnessing Halley's comet long before Halley did. Discovering a key law of refraction years before the man who's credited with discovering it.
Unfortunately, we're just now getting around to knowing what Harriot knew because he published so little in his lifetime. In fact, the more I pondered his enigma, the more wondered if he wasn't just putting his findings in a kind of trust—for us, the generations of the future. Creating, in effect, a School of Night that could bridge past and present.
The structure of my book really flows out of that fancy. We have, at one level, a love story about Thomas Harriot and the young woman who comes to work for him. We also have a modern-day quest, in which a group of adventurers, some less savory than others, are hunting for Harriot's treasure, the "pope's ransom" that he may have left in, of all places, the wilds of North Carolina (where he was the first English scientist to explore the New World).
At first, these two narratives sit side by side. Then, gradually, they begin folding around each other in ways that I hope are both surprising and moving—until, by book's end, the two stories have converged. This is a novel that embraces many different forms—tragedy, comedy, romance, adventure, even a whiff of the supernatural—but it applies them toward a common end, which is plumbing the depths of a mystery.
And this is the same mystery that washed over me when I first read those words: "The School of Night." A sense of darkness, yes, but boundlessness, too. And if I've communicated any of that spirit to my readers, then I'll feel like I've done my duty. To Thomas Harriot and to his brave fellow scholars, who dared to question orthodoxy and who, in the process, may have made us better and wiser people.
1. Bayard draws many parallels between the worlds of Thomas Harriot and Henry Cavendish. What does Henry Cavendish have in common with the philosophers in the School of Night? Do you think he would he have been invited to attend their meetings, if they were alive at the same time?
2. Imagine you were a member of the School of Night. What treasure would you try to protect? Why?
3. Margaret and Clarissa are both very strong women—one in mind, one in body. How are they similar? How are they different?
4. Had you heard of Thomas Harriot and the School of Night prior to reading this book? If so, did this change your opinion of him? What about the other players in the School of Night? How did this novel inform your knowledge of their roles in history?
5. On page 69, Ralegh writes: "I could find no better plaster for my wounds than memory. In parlous times, it is great joy to think upon that homely School, where we were glad to gather." How does this quotation apply to each character in the novel?
6. The concepts of marriage and love are important throughout the novel. Discuss the different types of marriages we see and how the idea of marriage affects the individual characters (Harriot, Margaret, Henry, Clarissa, the Gollivers, etc.).
7. How did Alonzo's fake death help Henry and the group solve the mystery of the School of Night? How did it hurt them?
8. A fallen academic, Henry Cavendish is a man grasping with his past and trying to save face throughout the story. What do you think of his excitement upon reading Ralegh's letter's first page? What do you think Henry has learned (or not learned) by the novel's close?
9. What did you think about the book's ending? Would you have ended it differently?
10. Discuss the nature of fact versus fiction in The School of Night. You may wish to take this opportunity to bring in other historical novels you've read (as a group or on your own).
11. Why do modern readers enjoy novels about the past? How and when can a powerful piece of fiction be a history lesson in itself?
12. We are taught, as young readers, that every story has a "moral." Is there a moral to The School of Night? What can we learn about our world—and ourselves—from both Harriot and Henry's stories?
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