Free The School of Night: A Novel by Alan Wall Page A

will provide endless possibilities for dispute. And so it has proved. The crucial lines for me were these:
     
    O paradox, Blacke is the badge of Hell,
    The hue of dungions, and the Schoole of night.
    Creative emendations have not been slow in coming and school has been changed in one edition after another: to suit, scowl, stole, soil, to almost anything in fact except what it says, the School of Night. But, for the purposes of my study, I had to assume that in this one instance the compositor, despite himself, had it right; that School of Night was precisely what Shakespeare intended, even though there was simply no way of proving it. Short, that is, of the momentous discovery of an unknown and undiscovered text.
    The School of Night. So the reality of this glittering cohort of human daring and folly, which was said to surround Walter Ralegh, hung by a single thread, thin and bright as gossamer: one half of a disputed line in Shakespeare’s play Love’s Labour’s Lost. They were a group of men who had renounced the company of women so that they could give their lives over entirely to study. Other phrases had been used to describe them, including Robert Parsons’ ‘school of atheism’, but the School of Night was what intrigued me. It conjured the danger, the secrecy, the notion of a truth so bright it must be shrouded in darkness. These were men with very dangerous ideas. Some of them spent most of their lives in prison. Some of them died at the hands of the State. They were careful that the words they shared with one another were never made public, and they never have been. The contents of the notebooks before me now have not been understood by a single human being between Hariot’s day and mine. And I have just made out another entry:
     
When we knew that Kit Marlowe was to return to Star Chamber for questioning, we spoke of the possibility of him disappearing; living elsewhere and otherwise; continuing his important work in secrecy.
    I can still remember my tutor’s monologue as he descanted on the long and often troubled marriage between evidence and belief, how history is always and everywhere whatever is forever gone before us, so that what we are left with is never history itself but merely its study, the pursuit of that which has already disappeared over the horizon. I could never understand why he seemed so cheerful about it and occasionally wondered if perhaps he might have been right about my choice of subject after all. But if a man can’t travel into the past for certainty, then where is he supposed to go? At first I panicked when I realised that there were no documents to confirm there even was a School of Night, a group of dark and fearless intelligences, exploring with scepticism everything previously deemed unapproachable in any mode other than venerable credulity. Then I accepted the riddle as a gift. By now all my certainties about Shakespeare had disintegrated, except for one: that whoever wrote the works of William Shakespeare, it wasn’t the man from Stratford called William Shakespeare. In regard to the authorship question I was at sea, and not always above the waves. It was almost enough to make you turn away from the past altogether and put your faith in the present instead. Which is perhaps why, when Dominique Grayson invited me into her college bed, I accepted the offer with barely a backward glance towards Sally and the feelings I’d once had for her, now squandered in the recklessness of passion. Her passion for my friend Daniel. Daniel Pagett. Dear dead Dan.

13
     
    In my last term I gave my talk to the Historical Society on the history of Renaissance alchemy. Charlie Leggatt was there, drunk but characteristically articulate.
    ‘They were searching for a world of slaves and gold. They just thought alchemy was a cheap way of getting there, that’s all.’
    ‘Ralegh never wanted slaves,’ I said. ‘He never treated anyone like slaves.’
    ‘He treated the Irish like slaves.