Free The School of Night by Louis Bayard Page A

went where it was quiet.”
    â€œI went where I had friends. And by then I had only one: Alonzo. So that’s how I ended up in Washington.” I forced my eyes open. “Alonzo knew people, and I needed work. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Seven years ago. And, by the way, you should be very grateful. I’ve spared you many dark months of the soul.”
    Worse, I thought: gray years of the mind. An adjunct-professor gig at a local community college, teaching freshman composition for $2,000 a semester. Foundation proposals for 501(c)(3)s. Restaurant reviews for an alternative weekly. Proofreading, résumé editing, paralegal gigs. A stretch of advocacy writing, in which, depending on the client, I might be petitioning for fossil-fuel taxes or warning against climate-change hysteria. Brochures for a Jewish summer camp. Teaching night classes at community arts centers. Seasonal employment with Eddie Bauer.
    Yes, I was sparing Clarissa quite a lot. Myself even more.
    â€œSo now you know,” I said.
    â€œNo, wait. There’s a sequel. Years go by. In walks a man named Bernard Styles. He says, Excuse me, I’ve got a Walter Ralegh letter. And there you are thinking—”
    â€œKill me now.” She laughed. “You could have turned him down.”
    â€œYeah, see, he put this little check in my hands. I’m very respectful of liquidity.”
    She gave that some thought. Then, in a voice jarringly bright, she said:
    â€œWant to know what bugs me? We don’t have the first part of Ralegh’s letter. I’d love to know who it’s written to . Who’s this ‘tutelary genius’?”
    â€œYeah. Him.”
    â€œOh, my God.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œYou know who it is, Henry. You do, you know .”
    But I didn’t. Not until that exact moment, when everything that had been building up inside—the events of the past week, the fragments of that letter—merged with old conversations and half-forgotten images and the prospect of those white wind-stropped North Carolina beaches, and everything cohered into one being. And this being had a name.
    â€œHarriot,” I said. “The letter was written to Thomas Harriot.”

Part Two
    All you possessed with indepressed spirits,
    Indu’d with nimble and aspiring wits,
    Come consecrate with me, to sacred Night
    Your whole endeauors, and detest the light.…
    No pen can any thing eternal write,
    That is not steept in humour of the night.
    â€”G EORGE C HAPMAN ,
    Â Â Â Â â€œThe Shadow of Night”

 
    ISLEWORTH , ENGLAND 1603
    10
    H E STILL DREAMS of Virginia.
    It’s always high summer there. The air is piled in damp drifts, and everywhere there’s a smoke of rotting persimmons. The clouds are sun-dizzy.
    He was a young man when he went. Twenty-five: stuffed with books, cringing from the light. In no way prepared—how could he have been?—for the plenitude that met him. Tapestries of silken grass. Cedars and firs and maples and oaks. Gourds and pumpkins. Oysters, mussels. Thick-shelled walnuts and strawberries of supernal sweetness. A river as wide in places as the Thames. It was all more than he could bear in some moments, and yet, after a time, the thought of leaving it was harder to bear.
    Now and then his throat would catch in wonder. Somewhere in this salt-stung wilderness lay (by his own estimate) twenty-eight types of beast never seen by Western man. And who was the man charged with finding them, knowing them, naming them? Tom Harriot of Oxfordshire. Charter of a new world.
    For whole weeks he wandered. Every day a new day: mapping the flight of a marlin hawk, gauging the length of the native herring, comparing the different ways of cooking the okindgier bean (flatter than the English bean and altogether as good in taste as English peaze), studying the dyeing properties of the Tangomóckonomindge bark. By now the Algonquins left him largely to