The Watchtower (24 page)

A half hour later Will sat exhausted on the first floor, back against the front door, legs stretched out wearily. He stared dazedly at the blank wall opposite. He'd been around the interior of the house three times and found no one and nothing, indeed no sign that anyone had ever lived in the house. And no workman. Been through every closet, every nook and cranny, stared hard up the chimney, scoured the ancient, stone-damp cellar. Nothing. Clearly she had gone from here, probably from London, perhaps from England. She could be anywhere now. Or nowhere.

As he got up to leave, dead with despair, he caught sight of a fragment of parchment in a corner of the foyer, its color so closely matching the paint's that he had previously missed it. He went over, saw two torn sheets of parchment, and suddenly fevered over with fresh anticipation. A light was in his eyes. Will picked up the parchments.

The first sheet had the letters
te
and
ve
on top of it, with smudges of black ink between the letters, as if more writing had been rubbed away. The second sheet had a detailed ink sketch of a church. It meant nothing to Will in the instant he beheld it, but in the pregnant seconds that followed, he stumbled over the sketch's mate in his memory, in a French history book he had pored over with his tutor. It seemed more plausible with each passing second that this was a sketch of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, the oldest church in Paris.

This realization had a mate in his thoughts, too, just like the sketch: Marguerite loved him! Why else would she be signing him with this church? She must be beckoning him to meet her at the church, circumspectly. The demonic attack suffered by these sheets of parchment, their tears and smear, showed she had plenty to be fearful of. Will had no doubt the sketch was a summons, any more than he doubted the message
Love, Marguerite
had been smeared to ...
ve
...
te.

Demon-mangling. Tears and smears. That was the second message of these parchments. He suspected John Dee, but couldn't fathom a motive, as Will needed to see Marguerite for Dee to obtain the box and the ring. That horrid Lightning Hands was another candidate. But Will realized it didn't matter how these sheets had gotten defaced, nor why the vandalizing was incomplete. He was sure that this was a summons, and that its meaning was that Marguerite loved him.

Will decided to leave for the church right away, to get to Dover on horseback and board the first boat to Calais, then take a coach to Paris. He could purchase a new set of worldly goods there, humble as they would be. All that mattered now was Marguerite. Carefully folding and putting the sheets of parchment in his pocket, he left the house and started running toward his horse's stable, to begin the journey that would bring Marguerite back into his arms.

* * *

Two days later, Will dismounted from the Calais-to-Paris carriage, about two blocks west of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. He wanted a chance, however brief, to gather his thoughts. Lodgings, clothes, provisions, could wait. He would think while walking to the church. And he walked, with ailt in his step unlike any he'd felt since his days of strolling toward a rendezvous with Marguerite in London.

Dawn bouqueted the cobblestone streets with rose and lavender light, and Will breathed the sweet summer air of a neighborhood distant from the knock and murk of Paris commerce. He wasn't 100 percent certain he would find Marguerite in the church upon his arrival, but he was sure they would be meeting soon. He couldn't fathom any other reason for her leaving the sketch behind but to direct him to a rendezvous. Just as Will thought he might jump out of his skin with excitement, he rounded a corner and there was the church, and the park adjacent to it.

Will calmed himself down with an effort; he needed to compose himself. Marguerite could be waiting for him in a church pew! He pictured her in a rose dress with a gold veil--the colors of the Paris dawn--her loveliness illimitable, veiled in awe before the god of love. The pagan god of love that was, Will conceded to himself with a blush, for their love was not of the bodiless and self-sacrificial kind revered in churches. His wasn't, that was for sure.

The front doors of the church were made of heavy oak. They faced southwest and were in the shadows of stone arches, the brilliant splash of dawn outlining the church spire above them. To their left was a grove of elm and maple trees; in between the grove and a church rampart was a grassy area encircled by a wooden fence, containing a sapling about five feet high. A stone bench sat right outside the fence.

On a maple branch extending over the enclosure, a distinctive-looking pigeon perched. Will had not seen the likes of it in England, with its exceptionally long neck and brown feathers. The bird seemed to have a peculiar intelligence in its eyes, and its gaze held Will's for a lingering moment. As Will stared, the bird gestured with its beak at the church doors twice, then winked. Accidental motions, perhaps, but when Will pointed at the doors in a questioning manner, the pigeon nodded vigorously. Will was so fascinated by the bird's apparent intelligence that he set off toward it now instead of the doors, wishing to get a closer look, wondering if it had any more messages for him, but it responded by flying off. Then Will, his eyes bright enough to burn a hole through the church's stone walls, walked calmly to the front door and slipped inside the dim, shadowy interior.

The church was smaller than he'd anticipated, maybe ten or so pews in all, and right now no one was in it. This zero registered without even having to cross his consciousness. He took a sharp breath, the damp and chill air feeling like a dagger in his chest. Just then a priest strolled out from behind the altar, beginning to light candles. Will could think of nothing but finding an obscure place among the pews, anonymous enough that he could recover his equilibrium after this disappointment. After all, nothing was lost. It might have been unreasonable to expect Marguerite at dawn. He did not know how long it had been since she'd left the sketch for him. She could not spend all her waking hours here! Patience! Let him give it a day,
at least,
before feeling any disappointment.

Will sat at the end of a pew a few rows from the rear. There he could swivel his head and see the entrance behind him, yet he was not an obtrusive presence to the priest. And he need not turn his head constantly. The rustle of a garment, exhalation of a breath, creak of the door, would announce a newcomer. He tried to relax, gaze affixed near an altar buried in shadows. The first glimmer of sunlight was coming through mottled-glass windows but hadn't reached the main body of the church yet. Will sat in a half world of drowse and love, trying to recover from his disappointment, soon in a reverie of prospective reunion with Marguerite, of her removing her veil to proclaim him her "god of love."

A rustle came from the doorway. A slight head motion told him four women were arriving together, the first of the morning's congregants. None of them Marguerite. Such disappointing rustles repeated themselves right up to the 8:00 a.m. mass. When Will was sure that Margeurite wasn't coming to attend the morning service, he exited the church, preferring to soothe his disappointment in the fresh air and sunlight. He sat on the stone bench facing the sapling, which also had a view of the entrance. But Marguerite did not come to Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, not that sun-washed August day or during its pink-veined evening, nor on the subsequent day, on which a wan sky mirrored his declining mood. Nor during the thunderstorms
that
evening, when he refused to shelter even briefly lest he lose sight of the entrance. Logic said Marguerite would search the grounds for him if she came and did not find him in the church, but logic held no sway. Will sat rain-soaked and grim in the storm for an hour, the very atoms in the lightning bolts visible to him like incandescent pinpricks. Marguerite never came.

Had she left the sketch to taunt him? Was she urging him to seek
Christian
immortality, as she was never going to give him any other sort? Or was something more awful lurking behind her absence--some mortal fate that had waylaid her on the way from London to Paris? Or had the insidious Mr. Dee, whom Will now thought he should never have confided in, decided to cut Will out of the situation and pursue box and ring on his own? Being immortal might not prevent Marguerite from being locked in a tower somewhere, until she gave up box and ring, or prevent her from being tortured for them. As far as Will knew, there was nothing unusual about her physical strength.

Or maybe she'd gone back to the poet?

Or maybe she just didn't care?

* * *

The church locked its doors every evening at eleven. Just once, on the night before this gloomy storm, Will had stayed on afterward anyway, sitting on the bench for a prolonged dark while until at last slumping over into sleep. The rising sun had awoken him, a caress so fine on his eyelids that at first he thought the rays were Marguerite's fingertips, until he opened his eyes onto an empty bench.

Tonight, even as rain relented and a warm breeze picked up from the south, he knew he couldn't maintain another vigil. Hot as he might want his hopes to be, the storm had washed away fire to reveal ice. As high as his spirits had soared on recognizing the sketch, so low did they plummet now. Chilled, even trembling, with rain as he was, Will closed his eyes with fatigue and felt as if he had dived into a black pool, an anti-pool to the one he and Marguerite had lingered by. The swans from that pool were circling him now, but he could only see the black one, and him vaguely, a faint outline in murk. His white mate was invisible. Marguerite was gone.

As soon as the 11:00 p.m. priest padlocked the doors, Will trudged back to his lodgings.

"0em" width="1em" align="justify">In the next two weeks Will visited the church twice daily, at 10:00 a.m. and 10:00 p.m., but his vigils were over. He might stay a few minutes at 10:00 a.m. or an hour or two, mostly the latter, depending on his mood, but he never stayed past the early afternoon. At night he would be there only until the closing. In the early visit the pain of Marguerite's nonappearance would soon become unbearable, searing like a physical wound, an excruciating sadness. In the second, he often arrived numbed by daylight activities, especially drinking, but the pain would reach him nonetheless. He'd gone beyond casting about for explanations, as if his wound were congealing, but that didn't help with the pain.

Hope of her coming had receded, yet he
was
determined to wait until the end of his life! He might be only nineteen, but there was no life for him beyond Marguerite.

Eventually, at the end of one of the meandering walks that often filled his afternoons, he stumbled on a street that brought life into this dreadful time, something to anticipate each day besides disappointment. The rue Quincampoix was little more than an alley threading its way through the commercial center, but the alley contained bustle and clamor, hands raised with shouts, animated conversations while printed flyers were flung about. Will's French was mediocre, yet he recognized that the din in the alley was not French, nor any language he was familiar with, but was a number-laced jargon sequenced to fingers held aloft in various configurations. This number world reached him in the same creative place that had arranged his thoughts into metrical poetry. Soon he realized that this was the phenomenon Guy Liverpool had spoken of, Paris's primitive stock market, more confined and more boisterous than London's Exchange Alley. "The future of Europe," Liverpool had called it.

Will made Quincampoix part of his postchurch walking routine, luxuriating in mania and cacophony, feeling at home as if Guy Liverpool had been prescient on his future. It was a strange place to be soothed, but it was also the opposite of the dark, cold solitude at the church. The rue Quincampoix was rambunctious with raw emotions, even if they were mostly greed, anger, and envy. At least they weren't the emptiness of his beloved's absence. By the fourth or fifth visit, talking to no one and not knowing a word of this tongue, he had figured out what was going on. The flying hands, shouts, and whirled papers were bids to buy or sell stock certificates, which were percentages of ownership in companies.

His figuring out inspired, one afternoon, historical thoughts. Street markets must have been gathering momentum for a while now, in a citied world well beyond the grassy hills of Somerset in which he'd come of age. Despite their brief past, such markets could have a long future. London and Paris were not the simple castles and manors of medieval times. They were gigantic entities, growing and growing. Indeed rue Q's mayhem, boom and sink of ask and bid, was like a pulse in the street, maybe the tiny, incipient heart of an endless city to be, a world capital.

Of course, still, Marguerite was all that mattered. The thought of her drove him back to his lodgings, so he could rest and dine before returning to Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. He
must
not miss his 10:00 p.m. appointment, ever. It was still his main reason for living.

The next afternoon, having eaten too heavy a lunch and drunk one too many glasses of ale, he thought for an instant he glimpsed, halfway down rue Quincampoix, Guy Liverpool. He was conversing with two men, one a tall African man in rainbow robes who resembled the Moorish doorman at the poet's London residence, the other leaving a resemblance to Lightning Hands. Will was so startled that he turned and walked in the other direction without observing further. He did not want to make his presence in Paris known to a past assailant, or an intermediary with Dee, or anyone either man knew. But while walking away, he reflected that if he again spotted Guy or the Moor or Lightning Hands, he might find it diverting enough to approach them.

The next morning Will as usual visited the church, did not find Marguerite, and went to his bench to wait another hour or two. If he hadn't been in the throes of despair the fine weather might have cheered him ... might even have inspired him to write a poem ... Instead the warm sunshine on his face coaxed him into sleep. When he awoke, the sunshine was hot on him, then suddenly blocked by a round face, as if a man had arrived before him out of nowhere. Will blinked, attributing this effect to sun dazzle but not
sure
that was the cause and reared back to get a better perspective on the man standing over him. He was one of the oddest-looking men he'd ever seen, with a huge, bald head like a gargantuan eggshell, square and compressed facial features, nervous eyes, and a rotund body not quite as small as a midget's. He wore a gardener's mud-streaked work clothes and held pruning shears in one hand.