The Scholars of Night

by John M. Ford

Genres: Alternative History sci-fi; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Nicholas Hansard is a brilliant historian at a small New England college. He specializes in the life and work of Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe.
But Hansard has a second, secret career with The White Group, a “consulting agency” with shadowy government connections. There, he is a genius at teasing secrets out of documents old and new. To call him merely a code-breaker would
be an understatement.
When Hansard’s work exposes one of his closest friends as a Russian agent, and the friend then dies mysteriously, the connections seem all too clear. Shaken, Hansard turns away from his secret work to lose himself in an ancient Marlowe
manuscript. Surely, a lost four-hundred-year-old play has nothing to do with a modern-day murder.
He is, it turns out, very wrong.

Release date: September 21, 2021

Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Print pages: 416

Sample

PART ONE

FAUSTUS MUST BE DAMNED


The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,

The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.

—Doctor Faustus, V, II

Nicholas Hansard knew that he was trapped. He looked into the face of the last heir of the House of York, and knew that Richard Duke of Gloucester meant to be King of all England; he saw the naked dagger in Richard’s hand, and knew the duke meant to stop at nothing. There was no way to fight his way clear; Richard had twenty picked men behind him. But maybe there was a way out.

“You don’t want to kill me, Your Grace,” Hansard said calmly.

“I don’t? Tell me why I don’t.”

Hansard kept himself from smiling. Richard was given to striking in haste; making him pause was half the battle, if not much of the war. “Because of what I can give you, Your Grace. I have some wealth, I have houses that can shelter and feed you—”

“All of which will belong to me anyway.”

“The gold, the stones, yes, but the people within? And the people without—in one of those houses is the contract for a hundred Burgundian crossbowmen and fifty lances of horse.”

“They’ll fight for me as well as you, if I pay them.”

“Indeed, indeed—or anyone else, if he pays them. And I regret to say that on my death that contract will most swiftly be delivered to—well—another, who also has the means to pay them.”

“You’re trying to blackmail me for your own life.”

“A man might have worse reasons for it.”

“True enough,” Richard said. “But do you know, I’d rather take the chance of having a bunch of fickle Burgundians against me than your fickle self with me. I’m going to kill you.”

“Christ, Rich.”

“Praying won’t help, Professor Hansard. You’re dead.”

“Well, you’re in character, Rich,” Hansard said, reaching out to the table and picking a piece from the gameboard. “Okay, I die, I sink.” Hansard scooped a stack of cards from the table on his side of the board, and handed them to Richard Sears. The twenty-year-old Duke of Gloucester was wearing black twill jeans and a VALENTINE COLLEGE: You Gotta Have Heart T-shirt. “All my transferable properties and estates.” Hansard picked up another card, held it out to another player. “But Lady Anna gets the Burgundians.”

Anna Romano, the senior surviving Lancastrian heir, was a graduate student, a small, slim woman with short dark hair. She took the card representing the mercenary troops and added it to the stack of her faction’s forces. “Thank you, Professor. We shall offer prayers for your departed soul.”

“Watch the ‘we’ until you’re crowned,” Richard said, and sat back in his chair. “I thought he was bluffing about the Burgundians.”

Hansard turned to Paul Ogden, the fourth player. Paul was seventeen, just out of high school and visiting the Valentine campus before starting classes in the fall. “Well, Paul, we now have the classical three-way endgame of a strong faction from each royal house and a third party—you—in control of Parliament. What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking I could use a beer,” Paul said.

The other students laughed; Hansard said quite seriously, “Bad enough that you’d concede the game for it?”

“What?” Paul said, then, “Oh, I get it. As Chancellor of England, I could call a Parliamentary vote on the kingship, and I control enough votes in both houses to force the outcome … but I can only make Rich or Anna win, I can’t do it myself.”

“Go on,” Hansard said. He scratched at his blond hair and rubbed his sharp chin.

“To win for myself, first I’d have to get a senior heir away from one of them … and that could take years. I mean, hours.”

“‘Years’ is okay,” Hansard said. “You should be thinking in game time, months and years instead of so many turns.”

Richard said, “It’s why we play out those little scenes, instead of just saying, ‘I kill your character and take his cards.’ If you don’t think about what a real person in your situation might have been thinking, then the game’s just Kingmaker with some house rules.”

Paul said, “In other words, do I want to give up winning because I’m tired and it’s late … or historically, let some other noble faction control England because the war’s gone on so long already.”

“He achieves synthesis,” Anna said.

“Of course,” Paul went on, “I’m also thinking, ‘Why not quit? After all, it’s just a game.’”

Anna said, “Two syntheses in three minutes. Bravo, Paul.”

Hansard said, “That’s exactly right. It is just a game, not historical fact. If Kingmaker or Diplomacy ever repeated the events of the real York-Lancaster war or World War One, I might start believing in the Tooth Fairy again. But there are lots of facts around—and lots of things pretending to be facts. I’m trying to teach process, the things that go through people’s minds at ‘historical’ points. Your desire to quit the game because you wanted a cold beer isn’t the same as wanting a long dynastic war to be over—but there is an analogy there, and I believe it’s a useful one. If you can think like a person of the fifteenth century, or whatever period you’re researching, the real facts will stand out from the fake ones, just as a man in doublet and hose would stand out in midtown Darien.”

“In certain parts of midtown Darien, at least,” Anna said. “Are we still on the subject of a cold beer?”

Hansard said, “It’s up to Paul and Parliament.”

Paul said, “You’re kidding.”

Richard said, “He isn’t, Paul. Professor Hansard is Socratic to the limit. You want a brew, you’re going to have to call Parliament.”

Paul looked at Hansard. Hansard grinned. Paul said to Anna, “Do you want a beer badly enough to marry me for it?”

“Marry—why, you precocious bastard,” she said, and looked at the board. She shoved the piece representing Margaret of Anjou into the Canterbury Cathedral space. “All right. Margaret marries the Chancellor of England, who had better not be a near relative, we’re in enough trouble with Rome as it is. Now call Parliament and let’s get that beer.”

“You didn’t even send me a wedding invitation,” Richard said, and hunched his shoulders. “Oh, well, now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of … uh, Lancaster.”

“I told you not to kill me, Rich,” Hansard said. “The beer’s in the refrigerator.”

Back in Hansard’s den after the refrigerator raid, Richard and Paul and Anna sat on the leather couch with a beer each and a shared reefer. Hansard sat in a wood and fabric armchair, drinking coffee from a mug labeled HEMLOCK. (“I told you,” Rich told Paul, “Socratic to the max.”)

“What happens if they catch us with this stuff?” Paul asked, between cautious tokes.

Richard said, “This is Connecticut. They put you in the stocks.”

“See what happens when you take up with evil companions?” Anna said. “Rich’s a junior, he can plead on his age, but me, I’m a grad student, I’ve got no excuse.” She giggled and glared at Hansard. “And don’t you dare say ‘insanity defense,’ Nicholas.”

Paul said, “I mean, what happens to you, Professor Hansard? Isn’t this like, well…”

“Illegal? Last time I looked. But don’t worry about it, Paul. Valentine College is too liberal to push an issue like grass and too small to have a reputation to worry about. Anyway, I’m not a full professor here, I don’t have a regular course schedule. I run seminars, which are very often games—like this one, but more elaborate, with more players—and I’m away some of the year, on research.”

“You can make money doing historical research?” Paul said, a little hazily. Richard laughed.

Hansard said, “It can be done.” He looked at his coffee mug, at the poison label. “Are you interested in being a career historian?”

“I didn’t know … I mean, I wasn’t sure there was such a thing.”

“It happens. It happened to me.” Hansard tapped the mug. “Sometime I’ll tell you about the fellow who gave this to me.”

“Homo fuge; flee, man,” Richard said in a deep voice, “flee, lest you become … a protégé!”

Paul’s eyes were suddenly quite clear. “Would you be my faculty adviser, sir?”

“It’s a little early for that,” Hansard said. “Fall term doesn’t start for four weeks yet, and you won’t properly be a student till then. Give it a while.”

The beer and the conversation ran out a little before midnight. Richard and Paul were headed for the summer-residence dorm, Anna for her apartment just off campus. As Hansard closed the door behind them, he heard Paul say, “So is it always like this around here?”

“This is just summer,” Rich said. “Wait until fall term starts. We get thirty players in a game, and it’s unbefuckinglievable.… Say, you ever been in a Civil War battle?”

Hansard poured himself another cup of coffee and sat down by the Kingmaker board. During the game he’d had an idea for a new rule, for assassination attempts against nobles, and now he wanted to take notes before the thought passed.

The doorbell rang. Anna, he thought at once.

And then he thought of Louise, because he never thought of a woman without thinking of Louise, despite that Louise was dead. Or perhaps because of it; for twenty months of Nicholas Hansard’s life his principal occupation had been watching Louise Hansard die, in and out of hospitals, never out of pain.

Before Louise, he had never seriously considered marriage; for a time after Louise, he could not seriously consider sex. But the one thing had changed, and the other did as well.

Anna.

Hansard opened the door, and it was not Anna. It was a man in motorcycle leathers and helmet, a pouch slung over his shoulder. His bike, a big Harley with huge cargo panniers, was at the curb, lights still on.

“Would you sign for this, sir?” the courier said. There would be no names spoken: The courier would not prompt him with what name to sign, nor say who had sent him.

Hansard knew both already. He wrote Christopher Fry on the courier’s pad, then waited as the man matched the signature against his sample. Hansard felt slightly silly, signing the playwright’s name, as if he were faking an autograph; he made a mental note to choose someone more obscure for next month’s code name.

“Just a moment, sir,” the courier said, went back to his cycle, did something concealed by his body. Hansard had been told the bike carried elaborate alarms, and sometimes explosive destruct charges. The courier came back up the walk with a flat parcel. Hansard took it. “Thanks.”

“Not at all, sir. Good night.”

The courier rode off, quietly. Hansard looked up at the sky; it was a cool night for August, very clear. He went inside, sat down with his coffee, and opened the envelope.

Inside was a set of black-and-white photographs. They had been taken underwater; a frogman was visible in some of the pictures. The main subject of the first two photos was a boxy object Hansard finally realized was a jeep, half buried in bottom silt, a white Army star half-visible on its flank. The next pictures showed a leather briefcase. There were markings on it, barely readable; a long word seemed to be INTELLIGENCE. A chain ran from the case’s handle to—

That was the subject of the next photographs. They were disturbingly clear. Clipped to the last one was a typed sheet reading:

TENTATIVE IDENTIFICATION OF REMAINS AS T. C. MONTROSE, MAJOR US ARMY INTELLIGENCE, MISSING IN ACTION GERMANY 20 MARCH 1945. REMAINS DISCOVERED NIEDERKESSEL GERMANY 10 DAYS PRIOR THIS DATE. RECOVERY IN PROGRESS. RSVP.—RAPHAEL

“Can you make money doing historical research, Professor?” Hansard said softly to himself. “Sure, if you know the right people.”

He picked up the telephone and began to dial.

* * *

The German sky was blue, the grass was green, the crane was olive drab, and the water of the river was dark as private sin. Chains and cables ran down into the brown murk, and on the banks were soldiers, leaving bootprints all over the travel-poster grass. The soldiers were mostly American engineers; some were Bundeswehr. They all had guns, nothing unusual about that.

Two frogmen popped up from the water, and signaled to the crane operator. The big machine rumbled, and the chains went taut. The dark water stirred.

A little distance up the riverbank, a man in a gray leather jacket was sitting on the ground with his knees drawn up. He had bushy black eyebrows and steel-rimmed glasses and a smooth, plain face with a calm expression. A notebook-sized portable computer was propped against his knees, and he was typing on it, a little at a time. Every few minutes he would look up at the crane and the soldiers, and look back down, and write a little more.

A few meters behind him was a black Mercedes sedan, at least ten years old. A hard-faced woman in a green down-filled vest leaned against the driver’s door. The vest was open in front, and the butt of a pistol was just visible within.

A brand-new black Mercedes pulled up next to the old one, and a man in an expensive dark suit got out. He bowed slightly to the woman, who pointed at the sitting man without speaking.

The man in the suit went down to the bank—walking carefully, minding his trouser legs—and looked down. “Mr. Rulin?”

“Ja,” said the sitting man.


Copyright © 1988 by The Estate of John M. Ford

Copyright © 2021 by Charles Stross