The School of Night (37 page)

The letter is as much as a week old, Margaret. Your mother, God rest her soul, is very likely dead. Perhaps even buried. Beyond the power of you or anyone else to comfort her.

This, too, Harriot would say:
The moment you enter your mother's house, the door will be barred against you. A deputy of the city government will be placed outside to ensure you never leave. Your only hope of egress, Margaret—
your only hope
—will be to die yourself. As you almost certainly will.

And should this argument fail to move her, Harriot would recall her to the urgency of her experiments.

Already, for the sake of transmutation, you have let everything else fall away: your health, your peace of mind—our love—

No, he would be too decorous to bring up that last part. But his point would be taken. By leaving now, she would be abandoning not just her work but her newly smithed identity. To succor the woman who fought so hard to suppress it.

For hours, Margaret sits staring at her mother's words until they cease to be readable.

Nothing is any clearer when she goes to bed, though one memory does seep through: the afternoon she found her mother staring at her writing. Unable to make sense of the markings, Mrs. Crookenshanks's eyes leaked with shame. And with rage, too, was that it? For the chances that had been denied her.

A fugitive weakness, quickly suppressed, but cracking open a whole history of loss. And this is the moment to which Margaret cannot help but return. For it is the moment in which, strangely enough, she and her mother were most united.

*   *   *

Harriot returns the next evening: aching in every corner of his body, cross with boredom. Crosser still to find no one but the Gollivers waiting for him and his papers still not packed away. And the earl's entire household due to leave tomorrow!

—Where in God's name is Margaret?

They make no reply. They just hand him the paper.

Tom—

My mother has asked me to come to her. She is not well.

I did not stay for your return because you would have bid me stay. And I might have listened.

My debt to you is greater than I can say. Pray do not consider your faith in me squandered.

I have not acted rashly.

Words are nothing. Know my heart.

Margaret

So slowly does he drop that he is not even aware of what's happening until the floor catches him and the wall comes at him from behind. In every other respect, his mind is lucid.

She has gone to London.

With rare tact, the Gollivers quit the parlor. He scarcely notices. He is utterly still, and all the same he is tumbling through space and time, and nothing is as he left it.

—Margaret …

He covers his face. Ten minutes pass. Twenty. At last he draws his hands away, and his eyes, freed from darkness, fasten on something in the near distance. A small white object in the back of the hearth.

Slowly he rises and walks toward the remains of yesterday's fire. There lies a fragment of paper, spared from destruction by the wood's dampness.

His first thought is that it is
another
note from her. A revision of the first. She has changed her mind. Even now, she is winging back to him, begging forgiveness for her foolishness.

But this is not Margaret's hand. This letter comes from someone he has never met.

To Miss Crookenshanks,

Your sister wished to apprise you that your mother went to her Maker this Wednesday past. Her suffering was considerable but brief in duration. She was reconciled to her God.

You have my profou

The Rever

The lower corner has been burnt away, but the rest of the document is shocking in its clarity.

Pressing the sheet between his hands, he walks down the hall to the kitchen, where the Gollivers are bowed over cups of muddy ale. He sets the paper in front of them. He watches their eyes widen. And in a tremulous voice, he says:

—You have been clumsy, it appears.

How stupid they grow in this moment of revealing: their heads ducking to one side, their gazes shifting away.
Like cornered dogs
, he thinks.

—Unless I mistake, this was the letter that Margaret
should
have received.

Still they won't look at him.

—You gave her
another
letter, did you not? A forged letter. You led her to believe her mother was still alive. And was expecting her.

He can't bear to look at their faces now, so he circles around behind and stares down at their blockish heads.

—I'm sure you know what you have done. You have
murdered
her, the both of you. As surely as if you had taken a dagger and plunged it into her heart.

It is characteristic of them that, at the first sign of pressure, they should break ranks.

—
He's
the one that wrote it.

—'Twasn't my notion, 'twas
hers.

—Ooh, he was quick to go along, wasn't he?

—Never thought the girl'd rise to it.

—You let her walk out that door, didn't you?

—Same as
you,
woman.

Harriot's hand slams down on the section of table between them.

—You are vile. The both of you.

He turns away and gazes out the kitchen window and waits until he is master of himself again.

—Did you hate Margaret so very much?

He has no expectation of an answer. He certainly does not expect this: the surge of bile rising straight up from Mrs. Golliver's throat.

—
I
might have been of use, too! Once!
It isn't fair!

 

ISLEWORTH
,
ENGLAND SEPTEMBER 2009

45

C
LARISSA
'
S FLESH WAS
pressed against mine. Her legs were twined around my hips, her breath was warm on my neck, her hand was cupping my cheek, she was stroking me back to life … she was …

Cold as death.

I woke. To find someone else's hand pressed against my cheek. A dead hand.

With a roar, I jerked myself free, watched the bone fingers sail into the darkness. I sat there, half expecting them to crawl back, but the only thing moving now was me. My lungs, my heart, my skull … every last part vibrating from cold and pain and shock.

Where am I?

As best I could tell, I had tumbled not so much down as
back.
Through something like six centuries. For this cold, dank, recoiling space could only have belonged to the abbey from whose ruins Syon House rose.

And it was with a gulp of sorrowing laughter that I recognized how fitting a place I'd found within which to be buried for all time.

By now I'd forgotten all about Seamus, still waiting atop the tower. I'd forgotten about Alonzo, last heard trying to extricate himself from Syon Park security. I'd even forgotten about Clarissa and what would happen if I didn't give Bernard Styles what he wanted by three o'clock in the morning.

No, my memory could stretch back only so far and no more. So I returned to that moment—five minutes ago? fifty?—just before my fall. And I remembered, with a flush of second discovery, just what I'd been standing on when everything gave way.

A box.

A wooden box, its contents not quite visible. Falling just in advance of me, crashing on the same stone floor.
Waiting
for me in this impenetrable darkness.

And now I was
crawling
across that floor, windmilling my arms in every direction—and discovering, with each sweep, new wellsprings of pain in my ribs, my knees, my shoulders. The cold soaked through my skin, and before long I was swinging my arms simply to keep my blood flowing … until my left hand landed on something hard and unyielding.

Slowly, I traced its outlines. A corner. Another corner.

And then a lid, splintered into nothingness.

I bent over the opening. Something stirred from the blackness. A metal object, bright enough to peel away some of the shadows.

I closed my hand around it, raised it to my eye, but the darkness was still too thick. My brain, though, was slowly filling with light because it was in this moment that I remembered my climber's lamp.

Somehow, through all my collisions, it had remained fastened to my head. Somehow, God knows how, it was still shining its fine straight beam into the empty air.

They make these things tough
, I thought.
Like Seamus.

Unstrapping the lamp now, I directed its beam at the object lying in my palm.

A ring.

Simple and elegant. Gold. With four words inscribed inside, barely legible but immediately resonant:
Ex nihilo nihil fit.

The very words from Clarissa's vision.

With the lamp's help, I inventoried the rest of the box's contents. And then at last I turned away. Propped myself against the box and stared straight ahead, deaf to the world—until a strange scratching sound met my ears.

I took it at first for rats. But the sound died abruptly away and then, after another ten or fifteen seconds, mounted a hundredfold. Without warning, the wall in front of me burst open, and a shower of dust and stone rained down as two figures staggered into the room, brandishing LED flashlights that seemed to fill that black space with cones of fire.

The first figure, instantly familiar, was Halldor, still in the Elizabethan officer's costume he'd sported at the wedding reception. Following close behind: Bernard Styles, in a pink-striped white suit, pointing his umbrella like a saber.

“Mr. Cavendish,” he said.

He looked like one of those gentleman eccentrics of the nineteenth century, stepping from the balloon that has just landed him in the Pyrenees. He seemed genuinely surprised when I started laughing.

“Well, now,” he said, brushing the masonry powder from his sleeve. “I am glad to find you in good spirits, Mr. Cavendish. By my watch, it's just a hair past three in the morning. You are a man of your word, I congratulate you.”

“And I congratulate you,” I said. “That was some fucking entrance.”

“Halldor, I am happy to say, has absorbed many useful skills in his career, demolition being just one of them.”

“You didn't think you might demolish
me
?”

“Do you know it never occurred to us? Were you badly injured?”

“Not by you,” I said, rubbing my ribs. “I took the long way here.”

“Well, never mind, you shall have acres of time for convalescence. Now if you would kindly step away from the box…”

I rose to my feet.

“Correct me if I'm wrong,” I said, “but I believe we spoke of an exchange.”

“Indeed we did.”

He nodded to Halldor, who leaned through the opening in the wall. A second later, Clarissa was walking toward me. Pale and small and nearly illusory.

“Are you…?”

I didn't finish my question. Or rather I answered it for myself by wrapping my arms around her—with a force that surprised me. And her. Pore to pore we stood, and my relief was so great that I might have stayed many hours like that … had she not pulled away so abruptly and with an air of such blushing regret.

“Well, there we are,” said Bernard Styles, sounding only slightly embarrassed. “All's well that ends well, wouldn't you say, Mr. Cavendish? And now at the risk of being rude, I shall have to repeat myself. Kindly step away from the box.”

“On second thought,”
came a thundering voice.
“Stay right where you are, Henry!”

Silly me, thinking there was no way to top Bernard Styles's coup de théâtre. But what Alonzo's entrance lacked in pyrotechnics, it made up for in sheer effrontery. Very nearly comedic, the way he strode through that crater in the wall, belly leading, chest following close behind, declaiming like Sir Donald Wolfit as the LED torches converged on him like spotlights.

“Good evening, everyone. Or perhaps I should say good morning.”

Morning,
I thought.
Is that what it is?

And that was the final blow to my sense of reality. The idea, I mean, that, a dozen or so feet over our heads, the world was carrying on as before. While, down here, two of the world's preeminent book collectors were circling each other like Bowery brawlers.

“Alonzo.”

“Bernard.”

The enameled overtones of clubmen. Oddly poignant under the circumstances, for there was Styles, still baptized in pulverized stone and mortar dust, and there was Alonzo, dragging his absurd Tudor raiment after him. Neither of them conscious of any loss in station.

“Henry,” said Alonzo. “May I ask you something?”

“Mm.”

“Why would you cut a deal with such a putz?”

“Because he was going to kill Clarissa.”

“No. He wasn't.”

“You don't
know
—”

“I
do
know. Clarissa is one of
his.”

And, in the very moment he said it, I happened to be looking straight at her. Wondering why she wouldn't bridge the six feet of space that she'd put between us. Such a short distance, after all, and nothing to fill it but Alonzo's voice.

“Didn't you ever wonder, Henry? How Styles was able to keep on top of us from the start? How he was able to follow you to D.C. and North Carolina and now
here
? It's really astonishing when you think about it. He knew exactly where you were at every moment of every day. Either he had to have the most spectacularly well-engineered crystal ball or—well, I concluded a
mole
was the likelier prospect.

“At first, I admit, I figured it for being Amory. A dear fellow, yes, but he could be had for the price of French toast. Unfortunately, just as I was preparing to confront him on the subject, he took the rather surprising step of dying. Which means he could never have told Styles we were bound for England. Let alone which wedding we were attending on which evening. That particular intelligence would have had to come from some other source. Would it
not,
Miss Dale?”