The Watchtower (10 page)

Will knew these to be the thoughts of a poet more than a rational thinker, let alone a scientist, but he was convinced his atomsight had been real. Then he turned onto Rood Lane and felt the sudden palpitations of a wild heart, driving all other thoughts and sensations away. He could almost not bear the surge of anticipation. He approached the poet's very doorstep, where Marguerite might likely be! As to considering her not being there, he didn't; he had thrown all emotional caution to the winds.

The quality of the streets had increased during his walk, Will had noticed, but he was still startled by the grandeur of 39 Rood Lane, the poet's address and the finest building on the block. The poet had been working as a tutor, so Will wondered over the affluence of 39's appearance, though he knew tutoring wasn't the poet's only income.

Thirty-nine Rood was a five-story town house of polished rose brick, with two expensive Florentine glass windows on each floor like the square, polished eyes of a geometer. Glass windows were the latest trend, and Will had only seen them in elegant neighborhoods. As to polish, the brass knocker on the front door, four steps up from the street, was so brilliant Will could not look at it for long.

The gleam that penetrated next was not from an architectural embellishment but from the jacket buttons, belt and boot buckles, and sword hilt of a footman with an unusually regal bearing, who stood at the top of the steps as if waiting to greet him. Will recognized the dark-skinned Moor he'd seen at the party and suspected the footman could be out there as a warning to a love-crazed interloper such as himself. Even the ability to reduce himself to atoms would not suffice to slip past this puffed-up warlord. Will reached in his pocket for the note he had brought for such an eventuality, and as he did so, the sentry extended a note to him as well. Will ignored it.

"Would you be Mr. Will Hughes,
sir
?" There was no mistaking the dismissive tone of his
sir.
He moved the note closer to Will's chin.

"
Lord
Hughes," Will said, his heart sinking at this confirmation that the sentry posting was for him. Marguerite must have told the poet
everything
for this footman to be there. Reflecting on that horrible fact, he took the note. It could be the only communication he'd ever receive from the poet or Marguerite again.

"Thank you for this kindness," Will said, referring to the note, though he doubted its contents were kind. He went two steps up and said, "Now I must formally request admission to call on the most gracious Lady Marguerite." He bowed, alertly, keeping in mind the possibility of being shoved down the stairs.

The footman laughed. "Is milady expecting you?"

"Not precisely. But there is an urgency."

"Well, be off with you then! I've not heard good things about you." The Moor cocked his fist and circled it in a vague way not far from Will's jaw.

Swordsman that he was--though without sword--Will could scarcely suppress challenging this overmetaled oaf to a duel. But he did not know what Marguerite's relationship with the creature was, and clearly the man was following someone's orders.

Just as clearly, he might well have miscalculated Marguerite's reaction to meeting him. Will needed to retreat and reflect. Marguerite had certainly shown loyalty to the poet over him, a display that cut him like a scythe. Better now to just hand over his own note, be gone, and hope for the best in the end.

The footman took his proffered note with a grimace, ripped it into several pieces, and then, by some sleight of hand that Will was not able to follow, lit the pieces on fire! His note fragments blazed bright in the morning air--as bright as his hopes had been mere moments ago--and then were extinguished in a rain of ash.

At least he'd memorized the love sonnet included in the note, Will thought with remarkable patience. This was severe provocation, but the need for restraint still applied. He went back down the steps, turned, and said, "You've elicited extraordinary self-control from me, man. That's your great fortune. It's my duty as the noble person you're not and never will be to warn you that my pacifism is not infinite." Will cocked the feather of his hat at him, as if mockingly suggesting a duel, then went on his way. He heard the footman laughing softly at him as he walked on.

A couple of blocks away, where the footman could not have seen him any longer, Will opened the note he'd been given. The envelope was white, but the parchment inside was black, written on in a hand Will recognized as the poet's in an ink of bright red. Eight lines of iambic pentameter:

For Will

"Betrayer" is too kind a word for you:

I treated you just like a son and now

you try to steal my love! The night sky's blue

and dung bright gold when I ever allow

you near my love or me, ever again.

You blacken words like "mentor," "ally," "friend."

Go slither off, foul snake, your hole awaits,

midhell, red hot. Beware my love that hates.

Will walked for a while with the rapidity of a madman, as if physical exertion might sweat the now even-further-sharpened pain out of him. He zigged and zagged the teeming streets, walking a rough rectangle among Fylpot Lane, Thames Street, Petit Walas, and Tower Street, finally beginning a roundabout semicircle back toward Harp Lane and Mrs. Garvey's. The day was as hot as his early sense of it had predicted, as if Hades were paying a visit by air as well as incident. By the time Will had caught his first glimpse of the sun-splashed Thames, the river filled with a variety of vessels flying multicolored nautical and national flags with an array of symbols on them, his gaudy attire was soaked through with sweat to a near uniform gray.

The hope that kept him half sane while on this most despondent walk was that the front-step encounter had been the poet's doing alone, as the note seemed to be. Though Marguerite must have been trusting enough of--and sufficiently allied with--the poet to have mentioned Will's approach to her, perhaps she hadn't anticipated such jealous anger. Perhaps her ensuing protest against the poet's instructions to the footman had been so fervent that she was bound and gagged this very moment on one of the upper floors, weeping and moaning. Such a mental picture enraged Will so at a couple of points that he actually turned and headed back toward 39 Rood, but recollecting his lack of a sword and the miserable fact that Marguerite must have told the poet about him, he caught hold of himself and resumed his melancholy meander.

Another possibility, of course, was that the poet and Marguerite were of one mind concerning his brazenness, in which case he might as well pitch forward into the sizzling, fetid street now and lie there until he expired.

All his conjecture, whether of the more or less hopeful kind, was excruciating in another way. Despite his attraction to Marguerite, Will still felt a deep, near-filial bond with the poet, and the notion of the poet's hating him now added a deep lugubriousness to all his moods and thoughts. He'd neither considered nor expected that the poet would learn of Marguerite's effect on him so quickly, and that he had was a crushing reality.

Finally Will grew tired to the point of collapse from his fevered meanderings and developed a blazing thirst to go alo with his bleak ruminations. He slumped down into a chair at an empty table at Baker & Thread's, a large, early-opening saloon in the Seething Lane section about two miles northeast of Mrs. Garvey's.

Drying his face with a napkin, he ordered two foaming glasses of ale from a serving woman whose aging features were as wind-creased as a ship's prow.

"What size, sir?" she asked him.

"The largest size you've got. And a pudding to go with them."

"What kind?"

"Any kind!" He was exasperated, but she was, after all, simply trying to take his order. "Sweet," he relented. "Please make it sweet."

And there Will was sitting nearly two hours later, in the same slouched-back posture as when he had given his order. His chair, barely in the shade when he'd first sat there, now took the full blaze of the sun, but he was too lost in despair to move. Will was halfway through his sixth drink now, all paid for in advance as he was not previously known to the establishment. The remains of a largely uneaten luncheon order of beef stew lay pushed aside on a plate to his left.

Just then a lumbering bear of a man approached him, tipped a rakishly perched ship captain's hat at him, and asked if he could join him. Will had observed the man gazing at him for a time from a table in the inner recesses of the tavern.

"Who would you be, sir?" he asked, glancing at him.

The man had a heavy, black beard, sunken, dark eyes, and deep jowls and was wearing a many-buttoned coat the dark gray wool of which was too thick for the weather. In the blurring effect of a blinding sun, Will thought he could indeed have been taken for the offspring of a bear and a human. Taking Will's question as an invitation, the man sat down with a force that jarred table, plates, and glasses. The serving woman cast a glance in their direction. Will pushed his own chair back from the table to contradict any sense of hospitality.

"Guy Liverpool's the name," the man said heartily, passing a finely engraved calling card--it looked as if it had been sprinkled with gold dust--to Will, who didn't immediately take it. Liverpool then put the card faceup in the middle of the table and extended his beefy right hand toward Will instead. Will was tempted not to take the hand either, finding this man somehow repulsive, but after an insulting pause he did give a light grasp in return, calculating that the man would grow insistent if he refused. He glanced down at the card:

G
UY
L
IVERPOOL

A
LCHEMIST IN THE
E
MPLOY OF
S
IR
J
OHN
D
EE

No address, or other information of any sort.

Will gazed wonderingly up into the man's black eyes, shadowy and impossible to read with any acuteness in their hollows. He'd heard of Dee, of course, if not of this gargantuan employee; John Dee was the best-known alchemist in England, though a table visit from the king himself was not going to impress him much in his love-crushed state. Dee was a learned man of letters as well as an alchemist, and his personal library was reputed to hold tens of thousands of volumes and rival the Crown's. Dee was so celebrated--a sometime adviser to kings--that Will, upon reflection, could not readily accept that this man had a connection to him. Anyone could print a card!

Dee was also rumored to have flirted with practicing black arts. On at least one legendary occasion, the so-called Wormwood Convention, he and some associates had tried to summon supernatural beings. It had been written about in "the press" (pamphlets at that time) and also been the subject of posted broadsheets. Some anonymous witnesses stated afterward that Dee had not cared about the nature of the beings summoned so much as that a being from another world appeared. Will, who'd heard about these notorious endeavors even in the countryside, was not attracted to a mind-set in which no difference was detected between angel and devil. He picked up the card and moved it back across the table to Liverpool. If the man was offended, his hirsute features did not show it. But his next words to Will were quite bold:

"What exactly would your occupation or education be, m'lad?" he asked, eyeing Will's attire, which, even with the grayish cast his perspiration had given it, was of aristocratic quality. "This is an odd hour of the day not to be gainfully employed!"

Liverpool glanced up at the sun as if it were a moral censor. Then he took from a gaudy pocketbook that contrasted with his bleak coat two small lumps of metal, one gold and the other lead. He put them on the table, but then covered them with a handkerchief as the serving woman approached them; he sent her off with an order of Spanish wine for both of them, one that Will, tired of ale, did not protest.

After a pause, Will said, "My situation would be none of your business."

Now Liverpool's features did look hurt: his jaw dropped, his lips formed a compressed oval that resembled a pout, and his eyes narrowed to slits. He moved his chair back from the table as if recoiling from Will's comment, rattling the table and the dishes on it. Will noticed that nothing connected the chair to the table or the dishes, casting doubt as to how this ripple effect occurred. As he pondered this question, a chill crept up his spine.

He'd been attacked by the devil once today already, in the form of that miserable footman. Was it happening a second time? He was not going to sit here idly and suffer black wizardry, in the wake of a severed love. Yet, he was not quite ready to get up and leave.

"It's just that you look an unusually bright and energetic sort," Liverpool said plaintively. "No meaning to offend. You look that even with all the liquor you have in you, at this ungodly-early hour. So, here I am, your humble servant Guy Liverpool, with a remarkable opportunity to present to you, and you're discouraging me. It beats the damnation out of me, I tell you." Liverpool looked around as if he were desperate to escape this social encounter, so profound was the pain that Will had inflicted on him.

"portunity?" Will asked. He suspected Liverpool was at best just putting on some silly wizard's show for him.

But, he'd almost certainly blown up his acting job this morning, he reminded himself, which was the rationale for even being in London. And he wasn't returning to his father's house, he reminded himself more adamantly. Maybe he should hear the oaf out--to a point. "If it's alchemy, my good Mr. Liverpool, I have to caution you against bothering to speak. I am of noble lineage. A metal trade is, put bluntly, beneath me!"