The Watchtower (19 page)

I awoke in my room at the Aigle Noir, my heart pounding. The now maddening drone of the carousel and the voices of people in the square filled the room. In my confused half-asleep state I imagined the voices came from the figures in the wallpaper. The raucous laughter was from the leering shepherds--had they looked quite so lecherous before my nap?--the high-pitched squeals from the fleeing shepherdesses--had they looked quite so fearful before? But what was making those bleating sounds? They weren't just in my dream--they were here in Fontainebleau.

I got up and went to the window. My first surprise was that it was full dark. The clock on the night table read 22:33--ten thirty-three, my sleep-addled brain deduced after a sluggish moment. I'd slept for over ten hours.

Ten hours stuck in that maddening wallpaper. No wonder I felt tired!

My second surprise was that I had apparently been transported to seventeenth-century France. Specifically a seventeenth-century performance of the Comedie-Italienne. The square was full of masked people dressed in elaborate costumes. I recognized the whitened face and loose white blouse and pantaloons of Pierrot, the tattered dress, heavy eye makeup and tambourine of Columbine, and the diamond-patterned costume and black-and-red mask of Harlequin. The actors were circulating among the crowd, drumming up enthusiasm for the coming performance, no doubt.

There was nothing sinister in that, I assured myself as I got dressed and went downstairs. I had time for a quick bite in a cafe before heading off for my meeting. I picked an outside table so I could watch the theatrics. There were jugglers and flame-eaters and a man in an owl mask doing magic tricks, but the main narrative thread consisted of the love triangle between Harlequin, Pierrot, and Columbine. Pierrot was forever mooning, his white face a perfect doleful moon, for his beloved, but whenever he seemed about to realize his dream of winning her, Harlequin would devise some way of keeping them apart. Then he would sweep in himself and whisk Columbine away in his arms.

"Poor Pierrot," I heard someone say in English. "He never wins."

I turned around and saw Sarah with her friends Carrie and Becca at a table behind me. They waved for me to join them and I went over to their table for a coffee and to see the sketches they'd done of the chateau and gardens. Their happy, sunburned faceers full sketchbooks left me feeling like a mole rat for sleeping the day away, but I enjoyed looking at each girl's work--and I was relieved to see that no harm had come to them during the day. Carrie was clearly the most technically skilled of the three, but Becca had a nice lyrical touch for landscapes, and Sarah had a real flair for capturing gesture and expression--and she was the one who had drawn the most. Even as we spoke, she was sketching the figures in the crowd on her paper place mat. She was working on a portrait of Harlequin.

"You've really captured his devilish air," I told her, admiring her sketch.

"He
is
a little devil, isn't he?" Sarah said, furrowing her brows together. "But also ... kind of handsome, don't you think?"

I looked at the figure in his diamond-patterned tights and fitted jacket hewing closely to a slim but muscular form. A black-and-red mask concealed the top part of his face, but his eyes seemed to glitter behind it and his mouth seemed very red beneath it.

"Yes," I agreed with a little shiver. "He's both--devilish
and
handsome. I read somewhere that Harlequin originated in a figure from the French passion plays called Hellequin, and he's supposed to be an emissary of the devil..." I trailed off, recalling something else I'd read last night when I'd googled the
Wild Hunt.
Hellequin had been identified as one of the traditional leaders of the hunt, and the pack of evil spirits he led were called la Mesnee d'Hellequin. Was it a coincidence that a Harlequin performed in the square on the same night the Wild Hunt rode through the Forest of Fontainebleau?

A strangled cry--like the ones I'd heard earlier during my nap--startled me out of my speculations.

"What
is
that?" I asked the girls.

Carrie and Becca laughed, but Sarah was intent on her sketch.

"Peacocks," Carrie told me. "They're in the Garden of Diana right through that gate. You can still go see them. They're keeping the park open late tonight for the fete."

"Oh, let's go!" Sarah said suddenly, looking up from her sketch. "I bet the gardens are beautiful at night!"

Becca and Carrie said they were too tired and wanted to go to bed. Sarah looked as if she was about to argue, but she was distracted by the sudden appearance of Harlequin at the table. He'd popped up as quickly as a jack-in-the-box and grabbed the picture Sarah had done of him off the table. He looked at it, and then, holding it to his lips, bowed at Sarah. As he righted himself, I caught a glimpse of his eyes behind the mask ... green eyes with glints of gold in them ... definitely devilish and somehow familiar. Sarah blushed bright pink. I decided to use the moment to steal away for a quick turn around the garden. I didn't want Sarah getting the idea to come along with me. I couldn't bring anyone where I was going, and I didn't want her wandering away from me in the dark forest by herself.

I approached the fountain at the center of the garden wondering how I could make everyone leave. A small group of tourists were gathered around the fountain taking pictures. As I got closer, I saw of what. A young woman, skin painted verdigris green and dressed in a belted stola of the same color, posed in front of the circular fountain. She was identical to the statue of Diana standing on top right down to the four hound dogs that surrounded her. The live dogs had also been painted verdigris green, hopefully with no damage to their skin, and sat as still as their bronze counterparts.

"Magnifique!"
a woman in a stylish Breton fisherman's shirt and capris murmured as she clicked her camera. It
was
impressive that the street performer had trained her dogs to remain so still; they even managed to mimic the doleful expressions of the hounds on the fountain, and they didn't even flinch when a white peacock strolled by within an inch of their noses. I was so caught up in admiring them that I didn't notice the time passing until the clock in the town hall began chiming midnight.

Damn,
I thought,
how will my escort appear with all these witnesses?

I needn't have worried. As the bells tolled, the tourists and performers began to file out of the garden as if called away by the sound of the bells. They moved robotically, their eyes strangely glazed. It reminded me creepily of a scene from
The Time Machine,
in which the gentle Eloi responded to a summons to sacrifice themselves to the cannibal Morlocks. I had an uneasy feeling, though, that they were being led to safety while I was being left alone like the goat tied up for T. rex's snack in
Jurassic Park.

When the clock had chimed twelve times, the only other living beings left in the garden were the Diana impersonator, her dogs, the peacocks, and myself. Perhaps the performer
was
my escort.

"Pardon moi," I began. "Etes-vous mon guide?"

She didn't even blink. She was frozen in the perfect guise of a statue. I thought this was taking her act a bit too far and was going to tell her so when I felt something tug at my hand. I looked down into the amber eyes of a verdigris hound. It held my hand in its mouth gently, but when I tried to pull away, his jaws clamped down. There was a hound on either side of me, hemming me in, and one behind me. I could feel its hot breath on the small of my back.

"Okay," I said, 9;t01C;you don't have to ask twice. I'm ready to go."

14

Euclid

Will's unease began the moment he dismounted from the carriage in front of the crumbling ruins of what the Mortlake watchman had called the Cottage. Perhaps it had been a mistake to come. The cottage looked like a ruined miniature castle, heaps of stones along its flat, timbered roof resembling the remnants of turrets; slits instead of windows in the stone first-floor walls; and a huge pile of rubbled masonry to the side that exceeded the scale of the standing building. A gleaming scimitar moon floated over the roof to the east. The place looked like the frontier outpost of a medieval army for which the battle had gone badly, and Will even felt an empathetic twinge for how these soldiers might have fared. For a fleeting second he even thought he could smell the hint of still-burning, tortured flesh in the damp and darkening air. But the remaining timbers looked sturdy enough, so at least the roof was unlikely to collapse on his head during the hoped-for interview.

Will watched the driver, whom he was paying a hefty fee to wait for him, tie up his horses and carriage to a wind-weathered timber pinned upright between two paving stones. Then the man returned to his elevated seat and put his chin in his hands, as if preparing to rest in that posture. Will knocked on the front door.

After a few moments, it was opened by a slender man with a gray, triangular beard and auburn mustache. His long face, with deep-set amber eyes and a prominent nose, resembled the sketch of Dee in the pamphlet Guy Liverpool had given him. But there was something penetrating, and condescending, about his gaze that no sketch could communicate. Dee stared at him with interest, but did not extend a hand. As Will continued to return his gaze, the man's appearance unnerved him. His eyes were intelligent and deep, but also cold, and, in a shadow cast by moonlight, they began to look more yellowish than amber, certainly a pigment he'd never seen in human eyes before. The catlike pupils were so narrow they were almost slits. Will observed that Dee's skin, despite his age, was relatively free of wrinkles, as if Dee, too, had immortality on his mind and had been making alchemical progress in that direction.
Despite his age
... but what was his age, anyway? It was hard to tell in this blade-angled moonlight. In any event, Dee was about to close the door and retreat without another word when Will forced himself to break the silence.

"Good evening, Sir Dee," he said in a quiet voice. "I'm--"

"Here to quiz me about Euclid, are you son? I don't mind the attention, but it's not fair that Henry Billingsley doesn't do his share of tending to the public nowadays," Dee said in a low, meticulous voice. "Oh, well, come in." Dee stepped back and then ushered Will through a narrow hall into a small, square room, well lit by dozens of candles. The room contained several high-backed, velvet-cushioned chairs, arranged around a long oak table that was unadorned. Perhaps this was a place for an entire group to summon spirits, Will thought, not entirely sarcastically. Dee took a seat at one end of the table and gestured Will to the chair opposite. Will was mulling over what Dee's Euclid reference could have meant, and weighing the relative risks of confessing ignorance and sitting in lost since. He chose the latter.

Dee grew impatient again. "You're quite the incurious interviewer, aren't you, boy? Have you at least got a name?"

"W-W-Will Hughes, sir. My apologies, I'm no expert in Euclid. I've heard of him of course and studied a bit of Greek for that matter, but my logical bent is centered on the math of music, as in poetry, and not that of measurement. Except when measuring out sonnets."

Dee stared at Will as if he'd claimed to be an octopus. His eyes blazed briefly, as though they were made of the finest alchemist's gold. "So you have not even
heard
of the new edition of Billingsley's 1570 translation of Euclid's
Elements
with my preface in it?"

The boom in Dee's voice now could have been the reason some of the stones had fallen off the cottage, Will thought.

"My preface which explains how math can transform England into the center of the world? How it can fill the void left by falsified faith and all manner of superstition, replace it with its own miracles but of logic and reason? How our very faculty of math
itself
is a miracle worthy of a new scripture?! Speak up, boy! Surely you know of this work that all London speaks of right now, thanks to the great grace of John Day, printer extraordinaire? Countless youth have been coming here recently to question me about my insights, my wisdom. They have become a nuisance in their numbers, but nonetheless I have continued to admit such youth, marking it the cost of my genius. But apparently that's not the attraction for the great"--Dee seemed to be searching for Will's name--"Houghton, as you are. And if it's not, then what is?" Dee glared at Will.

Will vacillated as to the degree of flattery with which to respond, deciding not to claim to have heard of the Billingsley
Euclid,
let alone this new edition, let alone to have read it. Too much risk of Dee following up with questions. "I come, in all my ignorance, on a different matter, Your Excellency. But surely it takes my breath away that you are so glorious an expert on this geometer as you remind me you are, and yet one of comparable stature in the, pardon the expression, dark arts. It is amazing that one mind can encompass two such areas of genius! And that is the Lord's truth."

"'Dark arts'? What 'dark arts'? There are none, I assure you," Dee answered hotly. "There's only the darkness of the population's ignorance regarding certain matters, a shameful state I have spent my adult life trying to correct. I shine the light of logic in the darkest of corners. For only by math's laws of probability can we witness something truly miraculous. If everyone walked on water, would Jesus doing it have been a miracle? Of course not! Singularity makes the miracle! That's what I do, with sacred math. Prove miracles. What do you do with your gifts--lad?"

"... I am a poet," Will finally said, uncomfortably, since he lacked a book. Then his expression brightened. "And a prospective trader in stock certificates, for which I have been having a discussion with Sir Guy Liverpool." Why not say this? "As you know, it was Liverpool who directed me here this evening. But rgent matter for me on this errand, Your Brilliance, is immortality." Will hoped that Dee would not be offended by such an inventive form of address. "You have a great reputation in this sort of dark affair, as I mentioned, and I thought--"