The School of Night (9 page)

Where it is met in ceremonial fashion by the house's master. No man may turn back the tide—it has been tried—but if anyone could, it would be Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, that paradigm of the modern peer: skeptical but loyal, impetuous but temperate, slow of speech but swift to answer. Abstracted, gregarious, a man of brilliance, a patron to poets and scientists. His ancestry is noble and ancient. Eight earls have preceded him; the queen has dined four times at his table. From the towers of Syon House, he may look north to Ealing, west to Isleworth, east to London, and south to the royal palace at Richmond. Turning in any direction, he may survey some part of the four thousand acres of forest and farm and pastureland over which he holds sovereignty.

It is a sign of his temperament that even his estate, the undisputed evidence of his greatness, can be a fund of mortification and humor. He stares, therefore, at the exact spot where the Thames's turbid stinking water meets the toe of his hunting boot.

—We have become the New Atlantis!

He is addressing no one in particular, but surely he intends the remark for Thomas Harriot, who is standing close by and who has read Plato's account of Atlantis in its original Greek and who is considered by some, the earl included, to be England's greatest natural philosopher—even as he is considered by others a figure of surpassing evil.

The irony is this: No more than two dozen of Harriot's countrymen would even know him by sight. He has passed forty-three years on God's earth, more than either his father or mother, and he has done it far from the common view, and in bleaker moments he thinks he might just as well have stayed in Virginia.

And yet how can he, in good conscience, complain? He has his own house on the grounds and a small retinue of servants, not to mention a hundred pounds a year, and nothing is required of him but to scythe a path through Nature's mysteries.

And yet, as the years pile on his head, the mysteries inside him take up more and more of his time and care. Sadness has become his second skin. It coats him like ash. He passes at least half the night without sleep, and day is worse than night. At any hour, without the slightest warning, he can burst into tears—womanly, corrosive, not always concealable. Two weeks ago he was speaking with the rat man about infestations in the pewter pots, when he felt his eyes suddenly prickle and dissolve.

—Are you quite yourself, Master Harriot?

He forced himself to smile, a note of reassurance that only caused the rat man to take a step backward and stare at his own boots.

—Very sorry to have troubled you.

*   *   *

To judge by the philosophers, his affliction is a gift. Melancholy, wrote Aristotle, lifts man to the level of the divine. “This
humor melancholicus,
” wrote Agrippa, “has such power that they say it attracts certain demons into our bodies, through whose presence and activity men fall into ecstasies and pronounce many wonderful things.” The principle can be seen in Dürer's great engraving: dark-faced Melancholy in the full voluptuousness of her dejection, the ladder of creation rising from her funk. Worlds beyond worlds.

But for Harriot, melancholy is not a stratagem but a birthright. A cirrus cloud, he imagines it, entering him with his first breath. Once, when he was eight or nine, his mother sent him to the butcher for drippings. No different from any other errand, except that the butcher fell apart laughing at the sight of him: a boy so young wearing a look of such primordial woe.

Even Ralegh used to tease him about it.

—Perhaps, Thomas, if you did not wear black at all hours, your spirits might improve. Recall, please, you are no longer at Oxford. You need not go about like a monk.

But during those long-ago evenings at Sherborne Castle, the sight of those white faces swimming in and out of candlelight roused the Anabaptist in him.

—For God's sake, he remembers saying. —We can't even see to write our figures. Is all this stagecraft necessary? Must we turn our work into a
play
?

Marlowe, predictably, was the most amused.

—Surely you do not conceive we are the only ones to be arraigned on that charge. What is a holy mass, Tom, if not a play? A wedding? A lecture? What is a
coronation
? Do you wish to know why I am a playmaker? Because I know that, at every moment, we are in the midst of some play. Only in an arena that calls itself theater may we stand outside the
real
theater—our lives—and see them in all their truth, Tom. By which, of course, I mean their tragedy.

*   *   *

Some years later, on an evilly cold December evening, Ralegh invited him to a play. Dragged him, better to say, for Marlowe by then was dead, and the theater had lost whatever savor it once had. Harriot disliked the forced intimacy … the stew of noise and odor … the courtiers, curried and buffed, perched at the edge of the stage, and the ruffians in the pits, clamoring … the jumble of
idiom
, so un-Aristotelian, comedy and tragedy tossed like stew meat into the same pot.

Tonight, at least, Ralegh was taking him not to the Swan or the Globe but to the Hall of the Middle Temple, where a regiment of law students had gathered under the great double hammer-beam roof to forget whatever it was they were studying.

—You shall relish this one, said Ralegh.

Relish.
A predicate so thickly veiled in meaning that Harriot felt only dread when the four actors, arrayed as richly as any Westminster courtier, gathered before the High Table.

They were essaying the roles of young men of Spain, high-minded fools who had sworn off women for study.
Navarre,
declared their king,

shall be the wonder of the world;

Our court shall be a little Academe,

Still and contemplative in living art.

The shock came slowly—a gathering of unreality. Before the king had even finished talking, Harriot had come to doubt his existence. The existence of the play. Of himself, watching it.

No denying, though, the smile of grim satisfaction on Ralegh's lips. Harriot understood now: He was meant to hear that name one more time. The name they had given themselves all those years ago in Sherborne.

Our little Academe.

*   *   *

They had grasped from the start the presumption of likening themselves to Plato, so they had always made a point of stressing the adjective over the noun. Our
little
Academe.
Large matters for such a little Academe
 …
Might I propose a theme for our wee little Academe?

And now, in an act of rank impudence, the glover's son (as Marlowe, the shoemaker's son, had always called him) had puffed their name into a balloon of pretension.
Academe indeed
, Shakespeare was telling his audience.
Wait till a pretty girl swims past, we shall see how deep their thoughts run.

And here, in the real-world academe of the Middle Temple, the message could not have been any better received. For two hours, Harriot sat on that cushioned bench, stunned by the laughter around him. All those young barristers, feeding off his corpse.

Later that night, as he was picking his way along the Strand, he turned back and saw that even Ralegh's manservant was grinning from the memory.

—Well now, said Ralegh.

The great man's dress was subdued tonight, which was to say his pearls had been sewn into his black velvet. One might almost have said he was traveling incognito, were it not for the fact that, at six feet, he stood a head taller than anyone else on the street.

—Never mind, Tom. What do we care if the world has swung against us? It will swing back.

Ralegh was limping that evening—a vestige of the raid on Cádiz, when exploding splinters had been driven into his leg like so many arrowheads. For some time they walked, and then, in the broad vowels of his Devonshire home, Ralegh spoke.

—Curious phrase.

—Which?

—The School of Night.

11

A
ND IN THAT
breath they adopted it, just the two of them.

For the name fit, did it not? Hadn't they always made a point of meeting late in the evening? And in the ruins of the old castle, far from the servants' quarters … the eight of them talking until rosy-fingered dawn … every word in strictest confidence.

And if someone cared to discuss a forbidden volume—Machiavelli, Montaigne, Agrippa's
De occulta philosophia
, Hayward's
History of Henry IIII
—the book would have to be smuggled out in a cloth sack. There were no minutes, no abstracts. Each man was allotted but a single beeswax candle to guide him there, which meant that the room at first was even darker than night.

Then, as their eyes adapted, the darkness began to bristle with shapes: blurs of gray, whispering at the edge of sight. Invisible auditors, Harriot sometimes thought, urging the men on as they dashed up against hard questions.

It was Marlowe who dashed the hardest.

—Moses was a charlatan! Prove or disprove.

They might have been back at university, the way they went at it. There was Marlowe, arguing that Moses had used Egyptian magic to cow and gull Hebrew slaves. There was Chapman, warning that the sullying of Moses's revelations would bring the whole temple of Judeo-Christian belief crashing down. And there was everyone else, throwing in tinder. And if, in the end, they reached no conclusion—well, they had never desired one.

At the first glimmer of dawn, Ralegh would reach for his bottle of Canary sack and pour them each a glass.

—To our little Academe.

They would repeat it in unison and with glad hearts, because no matter how hard they had gone at it, they knew it was something of a miracle, finding—not like minds, exactly—like
hungers.
Whatever their differences in station or stature, they wished to know what could be known or couldn't.

And together they made one another brave. So it was that Northumberland, the reformed papist, could do something he would never have dared in public: criticize the Act of Supremacy for turning Catholics into fugitives. Matthew Roydon proposed that the earth, far from being six thousand years old, as the Church fathers said, was closer to
sixteen
thousand. William Warner, in his cups, questioned the resurrection of the body, and Ralegh was moved one night to pose the same question about the soul.

Night after night was spent in this fashion. And every morning, as they fell into their beds, they felt only the aching glow of exertion. Whatever they had spoken of was already half forgotten.

And yet not forgotten at all. Despite all their vows of secrecy, word of their proceedings managed to leak out.

A year later, Marlowe stood accused of blasphemy and heresy, of “affirming that Moses was but a Juggler.” A Jesuit priest had warned readers of Ralegh's “School of Atheism” and “the Conjurer” (Harriot) who taught young gentlemen to jest at the Old and New Testaments and spell God backward.

And before too much time had passed, a glover's son from Warwickshire was writing a comedy about foolish intellectuals who tempt fate and their own natures by sealing themselves in “a little Academe.”

All their old stagecraft, the stuff of their arguments, coming back to them in fragments, warped, scarcely to be recognized. Like boys egging one another out to sea, they had wandered far out of their natural depth. And they would pay the price.

Marlowe was, for no good reason, murdered. Chapman was reduced to near-penury. Ralegh was hauled before an ecclesiastical commission, accused of denying the resurrection of the body and the existence of the soul.

And none of them bore a greater stain than Harriot. Men who had never met him were fully persuaded that he was a devil, a magus, the seducer of young men.

Socrates was called no worse than this. And if Harriot has yet to be proffered his cup of hemlock—well, surely that is because, unlike Socrates, he has taken himself from the world's view.

Yes, in these uncertain times, it is the height of wisdom to be
this
Thomas Harriot. Living on patronage, in quiet and seclusion, with Welsh mountain ewes for company.

*   *   *

Spring is late this year. The cart wheels still get lodged in the road ruts—he can hear the teamsters' curses, like jangling church bells—and the wind still blows in, sharp and damp, from the river, and the milk still crusts over in the pail. But the robins are here, mad with purpose in the water meadows, and the chiffchaffs are in the osiers, and he can smell, for the first time in months, the
earth
, yielding up its scents, one by one.

And even this gives him pause. Aren't secrets yielded up in the same way? Wasn't Marlowe murdered at the height of spring's glory?

And Ralegh—doesn't he have particular cause to dread the end of winter? For the queen has done something no one was quite sure she would: She has died. And from the north, her successor even now sweeps down, and great men who once bestrode the land now hang in the balance. Men like Walter Ralegh.

Ralegh is a bad match for the new king; everyone knows it. James favors peace, Ralegh lives for war. James loathes tobacco, Ralegh trades in it. James is pious, a theologian. And Ralegh … well, everyone
knows
he hails from the School of Atheism. Of which Thomas Harriot is the master.

One way or another, those long-ago nights at Sherborne Castle still have the capacity to harm. What a surprise, then, to read Ralegh's letter, arriving just two weeks after the queen's death. A recitation of doom spiced with the following:

Thou wilt excuse me, I trust, for laboring in this vein. 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.

Harriot stares at those words:
great joy.