Black Swan Rising (38 page)

I held the lover’s eye between my thumb and forefinger and looked at it. The almond-shaped brown eye narrowed, as if studying me, and then, to my amazement, winked. I laughed out loud and then, turning the eye away from me, lifted the brooch and held it up to my own right eye, fitting it into my eye socket like a jeweler’s loupe.

For a moment my vision blurred and doubled. A kaleidoscope of images revolved across my field of vision. When I covered my left eye, the disparate images resolved into one. It was not Dee’s lair, though. I stood in a garden at night, lit by gaily colored paper lanterns and peopled by men and women dressed in eighteenth-century costume. The men and women both wore wigs, the women’s hair piled high on top of their heads and crowned with flowers and birds’ feathers.

“What do you see?” I heard Oberon ask.

“I think I’m watching one of her memories,” I said. “I’m in a garden . . .” I was walking down a dark path bordered by white roses. At the end of it was a marble fountain, its water jets aglow in the light of a hundred torches. “I think I’m in Versailles! At some kind of party.” A girl in a yellow silk dress rushed by me, laughing, pursued by a young man in blue silk. They both wore masks. “A masquerade party! You said Madame Dufay was at the court of Louis the Sixteenth. Does that mean I might see Marie Antoinette?”

“This isn’t a sightseeing trip,” Oberon said primly. “Can you ask Madame Dufay to show you Dee?”

“Could you show me John Dee, please?” I asked, and then, resurrecting my high school French,
“Je voudrais voir John Dee, s’il vous plaît.”

I felt the body I was in stumble.
Well, no wonder,
I thought, looking down at the dainty, petal-pink, high-heeled slippers on Madame Dufay’s feet,
who could walk in these? They are gorgeous, though.

Madame Dufay pointed her toe and turned her heel, showing off the spray of feathers on the heel of the shoe. She knew I was there! She could hear me.

“John Dee, s’il vous plaît,”
I repeated.

She picked up her head and started walking toward the fountain at the end of the path. A circle of revelers surrounded a man in a fawn-colored frock coat and black cloak. He wore a mask shaped like an owl’s face and seemed to be performing some sort of magic trick. He waved his hand above a crystal goblet and a bouquet of roses appeared. The crowd applauded and he swept down in a low bow, revealing that the top of his head was bald. When he looked up, I saw amber eyes glinting through the slits of the owl mask.

“John Dee!” I gasped. “He’s at the party.”

“Tell her you want to see John Dee
now
! In 2008.”

“Will she understand that?” I asked, but she was already turning away from Dee and walking toward an open pavilion where couples danced a minuet. She was headed toward a man in a dark peacock-blue coat with white lace at his throat and a black-feathered mask over the top part of his face. He bowed low and I felt myself—or Madame Dufay—curtsying in return. Then I was placing my hand in his and I was swept into the dance. The brightly colored lanterns blurred into a
rainbow circle around us, the gray eyes behind the mask the still focal point in the swirling world. I felt I knew those eyes.

“This must be the man she fell in love with,” I said. “The one she gave her portrait to.”

Oberon sighed. “Can’t you hurry her along?”

“I don’t think so. I think she wants to show me these things. She’s been trapped in this painting for over two hundred years. Who am I to rush her?”

The truth was I didn’t want to rush her. I could feel my body swaying in time to the music, those gray eyes holding me as tightly as an embrace. I wanted to dance forever, but suddenly I was jolted out of the moment. Someone had bumped into Madame Dufay on the dance floor. As she turned to see who it was, I caught a glimpse of a black man in a long green silk caftan, a white turban on his head, and a thin white mask over his eyes. “Hey—,” I began, but the feeling of being jostled transposed itself to present-day New York. The brooch came dislodged from my eye, shattering the vision into a million fragments of flowers and fountains and masked faces.

I quickly put the brooch back to my eye, but the scene had changed. I—or Madame Dufay, rather—was sitting in a cold, bare room facing a wall of windows that framed a view of tiled rooftops. A little to my right a pale young man with tousled blond hair and a paint-spattered blue smock stood behind an easel, dabbing paint to a canvas with a paintbrush.

“She’s having her portrait done,” I informed Oberon.

“Wonderful,” he remarked drily. “Perhaps we’ll be treated to a visit to her hairdresser next.”

“No, this is important. She’s telling the painter that she
wishes she could see through the eyes he is painting so that she might watch
his lordship
while she’s not with him.”

The painter looked up from his painting and met her—my—eyes. “Perhaps, madame, you would not like what you saw,” he said.

“I would always rather know the truth,” Madame Dufay replied.

A shadow fell over the young man’s face. The sun had moved below the roof of the building opposite the painter’s garret. “We’ll have to stop,” he said. “The light’s gone for today.”

The scene went dark and then I was standing on a street—or rather in a doorway—sheltering from the rain. A carriage passed by and splashed cold water on my feet. I looked down and saw that the hem of my dress had been muddied, and then, when I looked up, my attention was drawn by a flash of blue across the street. It was the young painter going into a shop. There was a sign of a disembodied eye hanging over the doorway.

“It must be Dee’s shop,” I said aloud. “The painter must be going to find out how to give the lover’s eye the power of sight. If I could see inside—”

As if in response to my wish, Madame Dufay stepped out onto the street. I felt the rain falling on my head and shoulders, smelled the dank odor of sewage and refuse. The glass window of the shop was fogged over but I could make out the outline of the painter as he approached a counter where a man was bent over something.

“A mortar and pestle,” I said aloud. “The shopkeeper is grinding something. It must be an apothecary’s.”

“Yes!” Oberon said impatiently. “Dee often posed as an apothecary. Now ask her to show us Dee
now
!” He said the last
word so loudly I jumped. On the street in Paris Madame Dufay tripped. A view of rain-slicked cobblestones swam up toward me, then the scene abruptly shifted. I was sitting up high, as if in a balcony, looking down on a small amber-colored room, the floors covered with Persian rugs, walls lined with paintings. Somewhere below me a fire crackled; it reflected on the face of the man sitting before it in a red chair.

“This is it!” I cried, recognizing the room I’d glimpsed below the East River and seen on the TV set. Only the angle was different. I was looking down at the room because I was in the painting above the fireplace. From this angle I could see now that the room was shaped like an octagon.

“It’s a tower room, I think,” I said aloud.

“Are there any windows?” Oberon asked.

I scanned the wall opposite me. It was covered with amber panels and paintings . . . but then I noticed a narrow gap between two of the panels. “It looks like a tall, skinny window, like the kind you’d have in a medieval tower . . . only . . . damn!”

“What?” Oberon demanded. “Can’t you see anything?”

“No.” The window was dark. “Of course not. It’s already dark outside.” As I spoke, though, I realized I
did
see something. “There’s a red light in the distance . . . some kind of beacon.”

Oberon made a sound of disgust. “That could be anything! She showed you her memories before, can’t she show you the room in daylight?”

“I don’t think so,” I answered. “Those memories all had meaning for her. I don’t think much if anything that happens in this room matters to her.” I was startled to hear my voice crack. The sadness had stolen over me stealthily, the agony of spending eternity trapped in paint and canvas seeping into my
own bones. I could feel tears gathering in my eyes. One welled in the space between the brooch and my eye. The scene of John Dee’s lair wavered and swam in front of me, the red light outside the window swelling like a dying star. But suddenly, with a small gasp, I recognized the light. I couldn’t tell if my perception came through sight or memory or stirred somewhere deeper—in the flickering embers of knowledge that Ddraik had bequeathed me, perhaps.

“I know what that light is!” I said, letting the brooch slip out of my eye. “It’s the beacon on top of the Cloisters. I saw it from Will Hughes’s apartment.”

“Perhaps John Dee’s tower is in Will Hughes’s apartment building,” Oberon suggested.

“No, I don’t think there’s an octagonal tower on that building. There’s only one tower I recall in that neighborhood.” I got up and went to my father’s bookshelves. My father loved New York City history, and I’d given him many books over the years on various topics about New York. I picked out one and quickly looked up what I wanted and brought the open book back to the couch for Oberon to see.

“The High Bridge Water Tower,” I said, pointing to a picture of the tall skinny tower that stood beside the Harlem River. I had asked my father about it once, and he had explained that it had been built along with the Croton Aqueduct to provide water to higher elevations in Manhattan. “See, it’s octagonal
and
it’s connected to the water system—or at least it once was. It hasn’t been used in years, but the tunnels that connected it to the old Croton Aqueduct are probably still there.”

“And those tunnels meet the new water system at Jerome Park Reservoir in the Bronx,” Oberon finished for me. “He
might not be able to send water through the old tunnels, but he could send fog. Yes, it makes sense.” As he was speaking, Oberon had taken out a pack of Post-it notes from his pocket and now he sketched an octagon on it.

“It’s at 174
^th
Street and Amsterdam Avenue,” I said, pointing to a map next to the picture of the tower, thinking that Oberon would want to write that down. But instead Oberon drew a sideways
S
through the octagon—like half an infinity symbol—and added a dot to the center of the picture.

“Wha—?” I began, but then Oberon slapped the note on my forehead and my mouth—my vocal cords, my throat, my whole body—turned to stone.

“I’m so sorry, Garet,” Oberon said. “But Ddraik is right: you are becoming much stronger, much more quickly, than I’d anticipated.”

He leaned forward until his face was only inches from mine. Instinctively I wanted to put more space between us, but I couldn’t even blink.

“Nor had I anticipated that you would be able to communicate with former Watchtowers who might explain to you why you shouldn’t let me have the box. Your mother was bad enough, but once you were able to contact Marguerite Dufay, it was only a matter of time before you found out that I’m not supposed to have the box again.”

If I could have gasped and widened my eyes in surprise, I would have, but I couldn’t even breathe . . .
I wasn’t breathing! How long could I stay alive in this state?

“For about an hour,” Oberon said, apparently reading my thoughts. “Now what was I saying? Oh, yes, Marguerite Dufay—now there was a most uncooperative Watchtower and, like you, foolishly attracted to that vampire.”

An image from Madame Dufay’s memories replayed before
my frozen eyes: a man in a peacock-blue coat and feathered mask bowing low and then sweeping us into the dance, familiar silver eyes behind the mask . . . it was Will! He’d been the man whom Madame Dufay had loved.

“I had no choice but to keep them apart,” Oberon said.

Now I recalled the rain-soaked Paris street, but when I looked at the fogged-over apothecary’s window, I recognized the figure at the counter—it was Oberon. It was he, not John Dee, who had sold the painter the magic paints to paint the lover’s eye.

Oberon smiled. “Sometimes I think I will spend eternity keeping you two apart. A hundred years will go by and I’ll think I’ve finally broken the bond between you two and then—” Oberon reached his hand up to my neck. I couldn’t feel a thing, but from the tilt of his head I guessed he was looking at the bite marks on my neck. When he moved his head, I saw something else out of the corner of my eye—a flutter of wings. “Voilà! Here you two are again!”

He sat back. The flutter of wings moved closer. It was Lol, hovering on top of a bookcase a few feet behind Oberon.

“You keep finding each other, life after life.” I was paying more attention to Lol than to what Oberon was saying, but that comment distracted me. What did he mean that we kept finding each other? Will had said he’d had almost no contact with Marguerite’s descendants since they’d parted in the early seventeenth century. But I couldn’t very well ask Oberon what he meant. And then my attention was taken up by Lol, who looked as if she were doing some kind of yoga pose on the top bookshelf. She was bent over at the waist, both her arms stretched out behind her like a swimmer warming up for a race. Then she lifted herself onto the tips of her toes and sprang off the bookshelf into the air, soaring so fast that she became a
blur of yellow and orange—a meteor hurtling toward my forehead. She was going for the Post-it note, to remove the spell, only before she reached me, Oberon raised his right hand and without even so much as breaking eye contact with me swatted Lol aside.