The School of Night (32 page)

“American, are you? How do you fit in?”

“I'm Aurelia's cousin. From New York.”

Her perfectly manicured left eyebrow rose half a centimeter.

“She's never mentioned Yankee relations.”

“Why should she? We're an embarrassment. I was told on no uncertain terms to keep to myself and speak to nobody.”

“You have failed at your charge.”

“Under the circumstances, I can't regret it.”

I smiled, and after some consideration she did, too.

“Tell me, Mister…”

“Daniell.”

“Where are you staying?”

“Kew.”

“They
do
want to hide you away.”

“I can't complain, it's Aurelia's day.”

She passed her hand over her mouth.

“Well then, I shall have to keep you to myself, Mr. Daniell.”

“I'm happy to be kept. But what am I to call you?”

“Millicent.”

“Is that your real name?”

“For now.”

I took out a cigarette of my own, and we puffed together in silence. Then she hooked her hand lightly around my arm.

“Back to the horror,” she announced.

At the sight of me, the executioner's face tightened appreciably. His shoulders squared, his hand went to his earpiece … and then Millicent drawled:

“Mr. Daniell is with me.”

Five words in a languid public-school accent, and the proletarian giant backed away.

No time to savor my triumph, for the moment we entered the tent, the sunlight fell away and we were swaddled in a crepuscular pall, relieved at intervals by tiki torches, which blazed away in defiance of any fire code, broiling the air into incense. Sweat sprang from me as I peered through the helices of smoke and listened to the jangled accents of harps and pennywhistles and hammered dulcimers.

“Can you believe the shit they serve?” Millicent said. “Smoked turkey legs.
Ale.
Who wouldn't I screw for some champagne right now?”

Gradually, as my retinas let in more light, the jumble of limbs around me began to cohere into guests … who were no less discordant for being fully formed. Queen Elizabeth chatted on happy terms with Mary Queen of Scots. Henry the Eighth necked with the pope. A young bishop gavotted with an ancient milkmaid. And a madrigal choir of stout matrons sang:

Up and down he wandered

whilst she was missing;

When he found her,

O then they fell a-kissing.

Millicent's fingers were dancing on my wrist. She had been talking to me for at least two minutes.

“… Well, never mind, what right have I to complain?
My
wedding was an agony of tulle. It pains me to think of it.”

I stared at her ring finger.

“Is your husband here?” I asked.

“Possibly.”

And now a hive of fire jugglers had surrounded us. The heat was flying off them in punishing waves—I was too scorched even to perspire—and when I closed my eyes, the tent ceiling came rushing toward me.

I gasped … blinked myself awake. Millicent, in my brain's absence, had somehow procured two goblets of champagne.

“Ain't I the cleverest thing?” she crowed.

“They're saving that for the toast, aren't they?”

“Our need is greater.”

Her hand had stolen into mine, and the touch of her skin was strangely healing. I was close enough now to see the fineness of her bones, to smell the talc beneath her Elizabethan wig, and to imagine her driving me to a pied-à-terre in Notting Hill with a plumply cushioned daybed.…

And then, puncturing that image: a stab of scruple. For standing outside this tent, not fifty yards away, was Clarissa Dale. And the distance between me and her struck me now as an affliction. Even as my new companion wove lines of chatter around me, touched my hand, my arm, my waist, all I could think was: Where is Clarissa? How can I get her here?

Ironically, it was Millicent who came to my rescue. After we'd taken a rather awkward turn across the dance floor to “Now Is the Month of Maying,” she drained another glass of champagne and then slid two crisp fifty-pound notes into my hand.

“Be a dear and ask the bouncer for some coke.”

I stared at the bills.

“Come now,” she said. “You've done this before.”

“Only with men who won't kill me.”

“Ohh.” She caressed my jaw. “He's
in that line
, you know. We've done business before.”

And still I hesitated, at which point she planted her hands on me as preemptively as Clarissa and Alonzo had done.

“Go.”

From the back, the bouncer looked even larger. Some massive block of granite that the oceans had been washing over for centuries and had succeeded only in finishing to an onyx gleam.

“The lady,” I blurted.

The muscles around his jaw began to gather.

“She wants to know,” I said, “if she might have something more stimulating than tobacco.”

For at least five seconds, he seemed to be picturing what my face would look like once it had been driven through my skull. Then he took a half step back and jerked his head to the right.

I followed, waving my hands behind me. The gesture felt futile, but when I turned around, I was pleased to see my co-conspirators passing like a breeze through the now-open doorway. I followed a minute later, with my pockets of dime bags.

“Clever boy,” said Millicent in her throaty alto.

She had no intention of sharing. She clutched her booty to her corset and made straight for the handpainted sign that read
PRIVEE
.

“Never stand between a woman and her blow,” said Alonzo.

With those disproportionately small feet of his, he had once again managed to sneak up behind me.

“Where's Seamus?” I asked.

“Napping.”

“That's not possible.”

“We found a quiet place between the virginals and the clavicytherium. Now listen. I'm talking to you as if we've just met. One minute, no more, and then we part. Please remember this principle. You don't know me any better than the other guests. And you are not to react in any way when I give you this.”

Something sleek and cool slid into the sheath alongside my right hip.

“What's that?” I asked.

“A rapier, of course. No Elizabethan gentleman would have been without one.”

“Doesn't seem long enough.”

“Well, excuse me, a carving knife was the nearest thing to hand. I stole it from one of the caterers.”

“And I need this because…”

“Because one never knows, do one?”

“Okay, just tell me where Clarissa is.”

“
Some
where, that's where. Waiting to stumble into you. Kindly avoid any libidinal eruptions.”

Territorial urges, though, were another matter. When I found her ten minutes later, she was locked in conversation with an amorous goatherd, who was doing everything but wrap his crook around her neck. I had the pleasure of seeing her mask of boredom crack open at sight of me.

“Oh, hey,” she said, tapping the goatherd on the shoulder. “Could you refill my flagon of mead?”

He obliged, a bit sulkily. I swerved right into his abandoned space.

“We have one minute to speak,” I said. “According to Alonzo.”

“In that case … I love you.”

To which my first response, I'm ashamed to say, was a guffaw. Loud enough to send at least three heads rippling our way. Then I looked more closely into her eyes, which had not a spark of humor in them.

“You don't believe me?” she asked.

“I don't believe or disbelieve. I don't … I'm just—”

I loved you from the moment you walked into Alonzo's funeral.

The words were queued up on my tongue, and maybe I would have said them, or maybe I would have been too stunned by the suddenness with which we had just vaulted past months and months of boundary-setting and indirection and misdirection. A part of me, a large part of me, couldn't believe in this moment. For the simple reason that nothing could ever be as simple as saying
I love you
and meaning it and having someone else say it right back and mean it.

And so I ceased even to sputter, and I stared at her helplessly and watched the light behind her eyes fade, and I would have said something, anything, to bring it back, but then I felt a tap on my shoulder. Not the goatherd, as I first thought, but a heavy-faced, baggy-eyed man in his early sixties, wearing a Thomas More costume like Marley's chains.

“Would you tell my wife?” he said in a once-robust North Country accent.

“Your wife?”

He nodded toward the far end, where Millicent, shiny and transported, was wrapping one of her legs around the tent pole. Her wig had tipped to one side, her bodice was stained, and her shoes had gone missing.

“Tell her I'm fagged out,” her husband was saying. “She can find me in the car.”

He stood alongside me for another minute, watching his wife shake her slender haunches and douse her wrists with champagne.

“She does love to dance,” he allowed.

*   *   *

The party took its sweet time winding down, but the effects of humidity and wool and salted food, aggravated by the natural hysteria that wedding receptions keep only partly at bay, began to exact a toll. Feeling a little dehydrated myself, I went in search of Clarissa, who was slumped on a milking stool next to the ice station. Not the same tiredness that the other guests were experiencing, closer to the pall that had taken her in Stanton Park. She looked as if the lights were being turned off inside, cell by cell.

“Jesus,” I said. “You all right?”

“Yeah.”

“You sure?”

“Mm.”

I turned half away, stared across the floor. And then I heard her say:

“Henry.”

She tried briefly to stand, then sat back down at once.

“Sorry,” she said. “What I said earlier.”

“Oh. Whatever.”

“The
mead
, I guess. It does something to a girl.”

“No, it's fine.”

And because once again I was powerless to say anything more, I just stood there, waiting for some color to come back to her cheeks.

And then I felt a throbbing against my hip. Not my rapier but my cell phone, chafing with alarm.

“Hello?”

“You fucking owe me,” said Sabina.

“Wait,” I said. “I can't hear you.”

I turned away and, after some searching, found a rack of ermine robes that partially muffled the noise. I plugged a finger in one ear and said:

“Go ahead.”

“Well, to begin with, the bills of mortality only tell you how many people died in any given parish. They don't give you any names.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So, because I'm a fucking saint, I combed through all the parish death records for 1603. Parish by parish, you
so
owe me.”

“And what did you find?”

“Nothing exactly like Crookenshanks. The closest was—um, Croken
shents
. In St. Helen's Bishopsgate. Mother and daughter. Deceased within a couple of weeks of each other.”

“Do the records say how they died?”

“Nope. But given the time frame, you'd have to think plague.”

“Christian names?”

“Okay, the mother's was Audrey.”

“And the daughter's was Margaret.”

“Uh, no, Miss Marple. That's why I held off calling you. But since it was such a rare sort of name—I mean for that day—I figured you'd want to hear it anyway.”

But I
couldn't
hear it, not the first time she said it, so I asked her to repeat it.

“Henry, are you there?”

“Yeah,” I said, feeling the strain in my eye sockets. “Sorry.”

“It's
noisy
where you are.”

“I'm at a party.”

“I suppose your
colleague
is there, too?”

My colleague.

I spun around, parted the ermine robes … and found Clarissa exactly where I'd left her. On the stool by the ice station. Still and spent.

And whatever relief I felt was dispersed in the next moment. For, in the fifty feet of space that separated us, a new figure had interposed itself. And this same figure was walking toward Clarissa in a slow and meaningful cadence.

His size was outlandish, but there was something genteel about Halldor, too, now that he had cast aside the tourist T-shirts of America for the cloak and ruff and feathered hat of an officer of horse. He was moving like a hyperelongated dancer, straight in the spine, liquid in the shoulders, and his torso, as it swiveled, provided passing glimpses of Clarissa's face.

Sabina's voice was jagged in my ear.

“Henry. Henry, what's wrong?”

But I was too busy running to answer.

Or at least I was
trying
to run, but the entire wedding party had joined league against me. A court jester in a papier-mâché crown blocked me on one side; Justice Shallow and Othello on the other. I turned my shoulder like a tailback and broke though their ranks but ran headlong into a group of Shoreditch whores, locked in gossip, and just when I had freed myself from them, a ring of Morris dancers circled me, kicking up their sturdy white thighs. I hurled myself at them, shouting, but no one could hear me over the ocarinas and the hang drums, no one even saw me stumbling toward the ice station, where the chair formerly occupied by Clarissa Dale now sat vacant.

She was gone.

40

I
F A CHASM
had opened up beneath her and sucked her into the earth's mantle, she could have not disappeared more effectually. I canvassed the surrounding area. I fanned out in concentric circles. I sussed out niches and recesses and corners, traced and retraced all possible escape routes, I did everything but whip the wedding guests into a dragnet. It was no use. Clarissa was gone.