The Watchtower (2 page)

After I left the park and took the metro to the Marais, I spent a few hours happily etching the last details on the timepiece. I had modified the design by adding a tower topped by an eye with rays coming out of it.

"That's an interesting motif," Monsieur Durant remarked when I showed him the finished piece. "Did you copy it from someplace?"

"It was on a signet ring I saw once," I replied, without mentioning that it had been on Will Hughes's ring. Will had explained that the ring had belonged to my ancestor Marguerite D'Arques. The symbol represented the Watchtower, an ancient order of women pledged to protect the world from evil. Four hundred years ago Will had stolen the ring from Marguerite and left in its place his own swan signet ring, which had subsequently been handed down from mother to daughter until my mother had given it to me when I was sixteen just months before she died.

"A watchtower for a watch," Monsieur Durant remarked, squinting at it through his jeweler's loupe. When he looked up at me, his eye was freakishly magnified and I felt exposed. Did Monsieur Durant know about the Watchtower? But he only smiled and said, "How apropos!"

After I left Monsieur Durant's I stopped on the Pont de la Tournelle. As I watched the sun set behind the turrets of Notre Dame, I realized I hadn't made my evening vigil at Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. Checking my new watch, which now hung around my neck, I saw that it was almost ten o'clock. The long days of the Paris summer had fooled me. I felt a twinge of guilt then, followed by a pang of grief. I wasn't going to get a message. If Will had really sent the painting of the church--and even that certitude was fading fast in the limpid evening light--perhaps he had only sent it as a farewell. An apology for betraying my trust and stealing the box. A reminder that he'd needed it to embark on his own quest for mortality. Perhaps it served no more purpose than a postcard sent from a foreign land with the message
Wish you were here.
It hadn't been an invitation at all.

With another pang I recalled another moment by a river. That very first night I had spent with Will we had sat on a parapet above the Hudson and he had told me his history. "When I was a young man," he had begun, "I was, I am sorry to say, exceedingly vain of my good looks, and exceedingly shallow. So vain and shallow that although many beautiful young women fell in love with me and my father begged me to marry and produce an heir, I would not tie myself to one lest I lose the adulation of the many."

I remembered looking at his profile against the night sky and thinking that he might be forgiven a little vanity, but that he had surely gained depth over the centuries.

But had he?Might I not be just another of those young women who had adored him and whom he had spurned?

The sun-struck water blurred into a haze of gold light in front of my eyes. I thought it might be one of my ocular migraines, but then I realized it was only my tears blurring my vision.

He isn't coming, he isn't coming.
I heard the words chiming inside my head as the bells of Notre Dame began to toll the hour.

How many disappointed lovers had stood on this bridge and thought those words? How many had leaned a little farther over the stone parapet and given themselves to the river rather than face another day without their beloved?

Well, not me,
I thought, straightening myself up. As I did, I felt the timepiece ticking against my chest like a second heart. I looked at it again, pleased with the work I'd done. The week hadn't been a total waste. The timepiece would be the basis of a new line of jewelry when I got back to New York. I'd found exactly the inspiration I'd told my friends I'd come here looking for. Could I hate Will for calling me to Paris if this was the result?

No. The answer was that I couldn't hate him. But that didn't mean I had to spend the rest of my vacation sitting in a dark, musty church waiting for him.

I walked slowly back toward the Square Viviani. I had never tried to go to the church after dark, mostly because of the concerts that were held there at night. Tonight was no exception, but I thought if I waited until after the concertgoers left, I might be able to sneak in. I felt I had to go tonight while my mind was made up. I had to go one last time to say good-bye.

The concert was still going on when I got there, so I waited in the square for it to finish. At first the square was crowded enough with tourists that I didn't worry about being safe here at night. This area by the Seine, across the river from Notre Dame, was especially popular with the students who filled the schools on the Left Bank during the summer. I listened to a group of American girls laughing about a man who had approached them outside Notre Dame that day.

"Was it crazy pigeon man again?" a girl with wavy, brown hair and a dimple in her left cheek asked.

"No," a redheaded girl answered. "It was crazy pigeon man's friend Charlemagne man!"

"Oh, yeah!" a third girl with black bangs low over her forehead replied. "The one who went on about how Charlemagne was a great man and he founded the schools so we could come here to study art. Don't you think he's got Charlemagne mixed up with Napoleon?"

"I think he's got more than that mixed up!" the dimpled girl responded.

I listened to them dissect the crazy ranting of the two street characters--I'd seen them myself in the square in front of Notre Dame--and then go on to talk of the paintings they'd seen at the d'Orsay that day, the eccentricities of their art teacher ("What do you think he means when he says my lines need more
voce
?"), and the accordion players on the metro ("I like the one at the Cluny stop whose accordion sounds like an organ"), and I thought, how wonderful to be a student in Paris! Why shouldn't I enjoy myself the way they were, reveling in the whole scene instead of waiting for a sign that wasn't going to come?

The girls talked until the one with the brown, wavy hair looked down at her watch and gasped. "We're going to miss the midnight curfew if we don't run!" she said. I was as startled, looking at my watch, as she was by how much time had passed. As they hurriedly left the park, I noticed that all the tourists were evaporating into the night. The last of the concertgoers were hurrying away--all except one tall man in a long overcoat and wide-brimmed hat who'd paused at the gate staring in my direction. Perhaps he was just waiting for someone--or maybe he was a thief waiting for the park to clear out so he could rob me--or worse. Certainly the homeless people wouldn't be of any help. The ones who were left in the park--Amelie curled up in her raincoat with her companion--were already asleep or passed out.

I got up to go, my movement startling a pigeon roosting on a Gothic turret. It was the long-necked, brown pigeon. He landed a few feet from me and fixed me with his strangely intelligent eye. Then he fluttered up to the leaning tree, landing on the scarred bark just above the cement gash. His claws skittered for purchase there for a moment. His glossy brown wings gleamed in the streetlight, revealing a layer of iridescent colors--indigo, mauve, and violet--beneath the brown. Across the Seine the bells of Notre Dame began to chime midnight. The pigeon steadied himself and began to peck at the cement. Startled, I noticed he pecked once for each toll of the bells.

Okay, I thought, someone has trained this bird and is having a laugh at my expense. Could it be that man in the long coat and hat waiting at the gate? But when I glanced over, I couldn't see the man at the gate anymore. I couldn't even see the gate. A ring of darkness circled the square that was made up of the shadows of trees, but also something else ... some murky substance that wasn't black but an opalescent blend of indigo, mauve, and violet--the same colors in the pigeon's wings--a color that seemed to be the essence of the Parisian night.

As Notre Dame chimed its last note, I looked back at the tree. The gray cement was gone, peeled away like a discarded shell. In its place was a gaping hole, pointed at the top like a high Gothic arch. The brown pigeon stood at the center of the arch staring at me. With a flick of its wing--for all the world like a hand waving me in--he turned and waddled into the vaulted space inside the tree as if going through his own front door. Clearly that's what the gap in the tree was--a door. But to what?

Perhaps I had misread my invitation to come to Paris, but surely this was an invitation. Maybe even a sign. I might not get another. I got up and followed the pigeon into the oldest tree in Paris.

2

Shattered Glass

"The poet is coming!" Will Hughes said.

"What?" Bess, his companion of the moment, asked.

"Christ, I completely forgot!" Will declared. A slender, pale-skinned youth in his late teens, he propped himself up on one elbow in the luxuriant grass. He and Bess had been lying in the shade of his favorite secluded grove on his father's estate, Swan Hall, and now when he reached into his pocket and extended his pocket sundial into a sliver of sunlight, the shadow indicated it was already past two. The sonneteer must be waiting for him in the great hall. The servants wouldn't admit him to the study where they usually worked together unless Will was actually in the house.

He pictured his tutor sitting on one of the huge wooden benches just inside the front door, legs crossed, his features with a superficial air of patience that didn't quite conceal his irritation at being kept waiting. Which, since his tutor and the poet were the same person, could be a displeased moment that would soon find its way into a sonnet, complaining again about "the young man," whose father, Lord Hughes, knew to be him, Will. Will thought he'd better hurry, especially as he had to first usher Bess covertly off the grounds of Swan Hall via a winding, secretive route. Neither of them were exactly ... dressed yet. Will would pay a price with Bess for rushing her off, yes. But he took a deep breath and clambered to his feet.

"I'm really late," he mumbled.

"You care about that poet so much," Bess complained as Will hoisted her to her feet. She put up her coils of glimmering black hair and then adjusted her bodice without her usual pretense of modesty. "I have so little confidence in us having a life together! Perhaps you would be happier with that weird man, even if he is old enough to be your father."

Will grinned at her ingratiatingly, then pulled her to him for a kiss that lingered. Lingering kisses were known to soothe Bess--and not just Bess. The last point being, after all, the heart of the problem the poet had been hired to address. Bess--who in any event had been deemed unsuitable by his father--had her competitors. But none of them, including Bess, persisted in Will's thoughts the way the poet or his words did. A few of the poet's lines were running through Will's thoughts now, as he and Bess hurried down the footpath that exited the estate at a location where large bales of hay were stored:

The truth in love inebriates like wine,

until time turns it false as mountain snow

white clouds will conjure, giving us a sign

we never know the truths we think we know.

Will didn't fancy himself a poet yet, but these lines by his tutor ran in his mind right now so compellingly that he suspected he might want to someday try spinning a poem of his own. Or maybe it was just the charismatic influence of the poet that made these lines surge within him. The poet's eyes twinkled, and his pale lips curved into a quick smile, but it was the sense of almost immeasurable depth about him that Will found irresistible.

Maybe the man's depth also made him write and speak so convincingly aboutimmortality, about how begetting children could make a father live forever.

Of course, that was the message the poet had been hired to deliver, as Will knew his father was anxious to have him give up dalliances and focus on a special someone, in the interests of both procreation and probably also some lucrative interfamily business arrangement Lord Hughes could finagle from his only son's nuptials.

Though lately the poet had been flirting with another theme--how poems themselves could provide immortality--and for some reason that had seemed to draw Will even more forcefully to him.

Then
we never know the truths we think we know
was interrupted in his head as he realized he'd lost track of time standing at the boundary of the estate, Bess glaring at him.

"Will!" This exclamation, uttered as she stomped her foot, cut off his reverie. She held out her arms and stood poised, waiting for the expected kiss. He obliged her, and with a caress beyond that, and finally they parted. Will watched Bess continue on her way with a hopefully sufficient pretense of concern, until she vanished behind the hill.

Bess had recently been getting more insistent on their future together, yet there was, even his father's wishes aside, to be no future. She was quite the satisfying lover, with her ample curves and bright blue eyes, but he needed to at least feel for her what he could for a poem:
The truth in love inebriates like wine.
He needed to be in love like that if he was going to love at all. Bess's perfumed curves and sensuous lips weren't getting him there. He sounded out the line now as he headed back toward Swan Hall, in an emphatic iambic beat that was all the rage of England, sweeping over the countryside alongside the popularity of the sonnet.

The lines would sound even better in a few minutes, coming at Will's request from the beautiful lips of the poet.

* * *

When Will came into the great hall, the poet was sitting exactly where he had expected him to be sitting. But his expression radiated despair, not impatience.

"I am sorry for the delay," Will said stiffly, uncomfortable at the man's expression. "I was ... detained." Then he winked to suggest the risque nature of his detention. "Lost track of time." No point in lying. When it came to love and its lesser cousins, the poet could see through flesh and bone.