Free The School of Night by Louis Bayard Page B

himself, so he passed hours and days unmolested, never so much as glimpsing another human being. In his quietest intervals, he could imagine himself the lord of his own vast green unpopulated island.
    Here I will be , he remembers thinking . Always.
    But outside his peaceable kingdom, things were falling apart. From the start, the colonists had been at odds with the Indians. Skirmishes had broken out, villages were raided and burned, a chieftain assassinated. When Sir Francis Drake came unexpectedly calling, the colony’s leaders leaped at his generosity. To go back to England! To be free of these savages! It never occurred to them that one of their party might wish to stay.
    They left in the middle of a hurricane. The sky was black, the breakers high as mastheads, and the pinnace carrying Harriot to sea kept grounding on sandbars. Desperate to be gone, the sailors began jettisoning everything on board. In silence, Harriot watched his chests and books, his writings and instruments—his astrolabe and cross-staff and lodestone—sinking in the teeming water. By the time the sailors were done, the only possessions left him were the clothes on his back and the pages he had tucked into his boots and a handful of roots in his pockets.
    From the stern of Drake’s bark, he watched the shoreline blur into mist and hail.
    *   *   *
    Wilderness is a distant memory now, for he lives in the shadow of one of England’s grandest homes. Nature here has been plucked out, pushed back, domesticated. Which makes it a special pleasure for Harriot to watch the Thames oxbow, three or four times a year, overflow its banks, rising up from its gorge and rolling in a fat brown pool toward Syon House’s gallery.
    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.
    â€”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