The School of Night Read Online Free

first taste of Bernard Styles’s savagery.
    â€œNothing that won’t keep,” I said.
    Another fluttering of his fingers, and Halldor was there with a leatherbound checkbook and a Cross pen. The greater you are, they say, the smaller your signature. The old man’s, at any rate, was a couple of Japanese strokes. In the very next moment, the check was resting in my hand.
    â€œChemical Bank,” he told me, rising to his feet. “It should clear instantly. The rest, as I’ve said, will be yours when you deliver the document. In person.”
    â€œWhere will you be staying?”
    â€œWith friends,” he said simply, “for another week or so. I assume that will give you sufficient time to finish the job.”
    â€œHow do I reach you?”
    He tucked his umbrella under his arm. “I’ll reach you . And now I must be off, I’m afraid. I’ve been promised a private tour of the archives. If it’s not too much trouble, please do convey my deepest sympathies to Alonzo’s family. Such a loss to the world. And now”—he rose in a straight line—“at the risk of sounding tasteless, Mr. Cavendish, it’s been a pleasure doing business with you.”
    â€œAnd with you,” I said.
    No final handshake. He sealed our compact with a nod and an almost bashful smile. Only in the act of leaving did a new thought strike him.
    â€œDo you know, I’ve carried off some of my best transactions at funerals? From death springs life, I always say.”

3
    M Y INTRODUCTION TO the School of Night I owe to Alonzo Wax’s elbow.
    It came at me in the winter of our freshman year, about two hours and twenty minutes into a student production of Love’s Labour’s Lost , which he and I were attending for entirely different reasons. Alonzo was testing his theory that the American dialect was better suited to Shakespearean English. (“Elizabethans loved their consonants, Henry.”) I was warm for the junior playing the Princess of France. Once, in the act of asking me for my Chaucer notes, she had smiled at me, and in this smile lay such a world of promise that I honestly wasn’t listening to the King of Navarre confess his love for the Princess. I was just waiting for the Princess to come back.
    For this reason, I missed the crucial moment altogether. And would never have known what I’d missed had it not been for Alonzo’s elbow, gouging out a uniquely tender spot between my fourth and fifth ribs.
    â€œWhat the fuck?” I gasped back.
    There was a pause of maybe two or three seconds, in which all my unworthiness gathered and mounted toward the heavens.
    â€œNever mind,” he muttered.
    Through the rest of the play he was silent, and for a good time afterward. But later that night, over gimlets at the Annex, he agreed to give me another chance. Walking his fingers across the sticky tabletop, he re-created the exact moment in Act IV, Scene 3, when the King’s men, having sworn off the company of women, must now confess themselves foresworn. They are men in love.
    Having made a clean breast of it, they are now free to criticize one another’s taste—which they do, with a will. The King, in particular, taunts his buddy Berowne for craving dark-haired Rosaline. Black as ebony, the King calls her. No face is fair that is not full so black , Berowne retorts. To which the King replies—and here you must imagine every last beer mug in the Annex buzzing with Alonzo’s declamation:
    O paradox! Black is the badge of hell,
    The hue of dungeons and the SCHOOL … OF … NIGHT.…
    Ellipses, his. Capital letters, too.
    â€œSo what?” I answered. “It’s a passing metaphor. The sonnets are full of them. The dark lady—my mistress’s eyes—nothing like the sun…”
    Cheap gin always made Alonzo magnanimous. Which is why he just fussed with his napkin.
    â€œI can’t really