The School of Night (34 page)

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 arms 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 scout
master
, 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

H
E 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.

—The challenge, Margaret, at least as I see it, is to destroy all the impurities in the base element while, in the same breath, reconstituting the balance of elements that adheres in Nature. The resulting metal would perforce share in the, the
quintessence
which may be found in the planets and stars and heavens.

He would carry on, but he has come to dislike this teacher's voice of his. And would it not indeed tempt fate to speak of the alchemist's true object? That philosopher's stone whose very perfection would have the power to transmute creation itself?

Men as great as Aquinas and Roger Bacon have broken themselves against that rock, and it is with no small qualm that he enlists Margaret in their ranks. He can have no great expectations of her success—or anyone's—but he cannot bear to bar this door against her any more than he could have closed it on himself. And so, on that first day, he can do no more than smile and take two steps back.

—Call out if you have need of anything.

And here is his final touch: the damask curtain, which he's attached to the ceiling by iron rods, dividing the laboratory in half. With a courtly nod, he closes the curtain after him. She is alone.

A full minute passes before she is able to move. And even then she trusts herself to perform only the simplest acts.

Pick up lead bar.

Drop bar in glass flask.

Place flask in rack above brazier.

Light coals.

Wait.

The transformation is slow at first, nearly invisible. First a skin of sweat appears on the bar. Then a bubble of silver wells up. The lead shimmers, bubbles—then, with shocking abruptness, throws off a coruscation of red flame, which dies in the next instant, leaving behind a coat of brittle ash. Having expressed itself in this fashion, the lead withdraws into itself, and no amount of heat will coax it back.

With her cotton gloves, Margaret lifts the flask off the coals and peers inside. Black. The color of failure, she knows that much. A sign that the dross, after its brief flirtation with “other,” has gone back to being dross.