The Watchtower Read online

  “As I thought about all our circumstances during the very long afternoon, however, I forgave him his acrimony and cruel expulsion and decided to try to reconcile. After all, it was the depth of his passion that had incited his crazed proposal—alongside his deep sense of betrayal by you, if I may be so bold—and I could forgive him such passion, especially as he’d never laid a hand on me nor threatened to.

  “But when I came back in the early evening, just a few hours ago, with an open heart and even a tiny regret for not marrying him, I was treated on the doorstep to the sound of a woman giggling from an open third-floor window, our bedroom window, followed by loud, raucous laughter from two. I hesitated but continued to the top step, from where I heard the poet shout mockingly, ‘Marry me, marry me,’ in an affected high-pitched titter. Then he lowered his voice to an unnatural boom: ‘But I’m already marrd, you whore.’ The ensuing peal of laughter from whomever he was with was enough to frighten a crow from its senses, and indeed the sky then turned black with fleeing, cackling crows.

  “I saw no need to go upstairs and surprise him and whatever creature he consorted with. The picture was clear. Who knows what the poet told the poor wretch? Certainly, he couldn’t neglect his own loins for even a day.

  “I have chosen to move on. The poet is morally worthless. His words may be beautiful, but they grow like fetid orchids in rank soil.”

  Marguerite began to sob again, heaving sobs that would have made other heads in the tavern turn had anyone else been there. This time she was less alone in her sobs. She had collapsed as if unthinkingly into Will’s arms; Will picked her up and put her in his lap, and there she stayed.

  While holding Marguerite so, and the facts of her story, put Will infinitely ahead of where he had been just a few minutes earlier, he now began to lament his lack of prominence in her narrative. He seemed to have been a mere catalyst for tumult. After Marguerite regained her composure and returned to her chair, Will asked, “What possessed you to tell the poet about me in the first place? You might have suspected he would see my approach as a betrayal.” Her answer might not be kind, but after his suffering he had a preference for truth over fantasy.

  Marguerite wiped away tears with the delicate heel of her hand, then fastened her gaze upon him once more. Despite his trepidation, Will thrilled to this gaze, his blood tingling.

  “We share everything, the poet and I,” she said. “We are one. Or were until this evening.”

  The first of these words were as well received as an executioner’s ax, but Will kept his composure. And waited. Hoped, in silence. For more words.

  “Still, there is … maybe … another reason.”

  “What?”

  “There’s no point denying that I did feel … something … when you approached me last evening. Nothing romantic, mind you,” she said sharply, eyeing his hand, being lifted as if to grasp hers. He withdrew it at once. “Something, indeed, I’ve never felt before, and which I did puzzle over afterwards. It had nothing to do with heart or body, or even mind, but maybe it did have something to do with my soul—until I cut it off. Yet, I haven’t quite suppressed it. I even felt it a bit this evening when I first saw you, to be honest. It’s like a spiritual elevation, but so very fleeting.

  “The poet by the way is not only a man of phenomenal eloquence, he also does have a spiritual awareness in him despite his lack of religion. Perhaps I thought I might find understanding for my sensation in speaking to him about it. But all I got was rage. And I can’t believe the poet went so swiftly to another’s arms when he was supposed to be so delirious with love for me as to be willing to defy law and tradition! Cannot!”

  Marguerite began to weep again, but her tears were more shallow this time. That emboldened t Wi grip her hand now. “A spiritual bond is the deepest bond two people can have,” he whispered. “We need not be church believers to recognize that our immortal souls are more important than anything else.”

  Despite her grief, Marguerite’s lips curled into the faintest of smiles. “On whose authority do you speak so of souls?”

  “‘Man’s loving heart is the savior,’” Will echoed the poet. He leaned toward Marguerite and brushed his lips against hers. She did not recoil.

  The silver light in her glass seemed to have turned red suddenly, as if the love pulsing through Will’s veins surged outside his body now, into the tavern’s dense air, red atoms dancing amid colorless ones in joyous excitement, water reflecting his atomic dance the way a pond would sunlight.

  Marguerite returned his kiss.

  9

  Edelweiss

  Madame La Pieuvre had told me to arrive at her apartment at ten thirty that night, so I decided I’d better take an afternoon nap to be alert for my foray into the nighttime world of the Parisian fey. A wind had come up on my walk back along the rue l’Estrapade, rattling on their hinges the giant key and the man cranking his cookpot. It smelled like the sea and promised rain. The tree outside my window was thrashing when I lay down; the rain when it came sounded like a volley of gunfire. Instead of keeping me awake, though, the sound pulled me into a deep sleep and followed me into my dreams.

  It was the swan dream again, the one I’d had dozens of times before, only it had never rained in this dream before. Now I stood at the edge of a pool watching a white swan gliding across rain-spattered water. Above the steady beat of the rain rose another sound—hoarse, bleating cries that rent the air as regularly and painfully as the lightning split the darkness. One of the flashes of lightning revealed a figure on the other side of the pool—a woman in a white nightgown that clung to her like a second skin, revealing each curve and swell of her lithe figure. Another flash of lightning bleached her figure to marble white and revealed her face … my face. I might have been staring at my own reflection in the water rather than looking across the water, only while I stood on the edge of the pool this doppelgänger was wading into it, the white cloth of her nightgown billowing up to the surface like a bank of clouds bearing the moon aloft through a dark storm-riven sky. She was making her way toward the white swan, who was swimming in circles, craning its neck to the sky and uttering those piteous, wild cries. It seemed to be circling some darker mass within the water, but it wasn’t until the woman (Marguerite, I suddenly knew) reached out her arms and gathered up that darkness that I saw it take the shape of a black swan. As Marguerite cradled the limp creature in her arms, I smelled the acrid tang of sulfur and singed feathers on the air. The lightning flashed again, this time not just illuminating Marguerite and the swans, but striking them, making them glow incandescent. I expected Marguerite and the living white swan to burst into flame—or at least collapse and drown—but neither took any more notice of the lightning flashing through them than of the steady stream of rain falng over them. Suddenly I knew what I was watching. The white swan was one of Marguerite’s sisters, but the black swan, its lover, was a mortal creature subject to the vicissitudes of flesh. Marguerite had come to comfort her sister because she knew the pain of seeing her mortal lover die. How many mortal lovers must she have seen grow old and die—or be struck down—in the long centuries of her existence? I felt her weariness—her grief—as she held the dead swan in her arms and lay its long neck against her breast. The white swan twined its own long neck around its lover’s, then both it and Marguerite keened their sorrow into the rain. Their voices sluiced through my breastbone so sharply I awoke, shivering in my darkened bedroom at the Hôtel des Grandes Écoles. The rain had come into the room through the open window, soaking the sheets twisted around my legs. For a moment I thought it was the dead swan wrapped around my limbs, dragging me down into the dark water.

  * * *

  The rain had stopped by the time I reached the avenue de l’Observatoire, but flashes of lightning still lit up the Paris skyline, and I could hear the steady drip of water falling from the trees in the park as I walked along the boulevard Saint-Michel. The garden gates, I saw as I rounded the corner of the rue Auguste Comte, were lock
ed. How did Madame La Pieuvre plan to “walk me over”? Was the Luxembourg like New York’s Gramercy Park in that the surrounding apartment tenants had a key to the park? No. 1 avenue de l’Observatoire, a lovely beaux arts building with marble caryatids and columns framing the windows, was right across the street. Looking up, I saw that it was topped by an octagonal tower that stood out against the night sky like an echo of the Observatory dome at the end of the street. I wondered if Roger Elden was there now, watching the sky. I felt for my cell phone in my pocket. I was half tempted to call him and ask for that after-hours tour he’d offered. Gazing at the night sky seemed a lot safer right now than going to meet the queen of the forest in a locked park.

  But, no, Madame La Pieuvre was expecting me; I couldn’t disappoint her. As I started to cross the street, a movement on my right in the shadow of the park’s iron gates caught my eye. I glanced in its direction and a shadow detached itself from the gloom—a shadow shaped like a man in a long coat and a wide-brimmed hat.

  “Hey!” I called, throwing all caution to the wind. This was the fourth time I’d seen this guy. Clearly he was following me. At the sound of my voice the shape rippled, bunched, and then shot upward. I froze, watching the man vault straight up and over the high spiked gates. The only person I’d ever seen move like that was Will Hughes, but it couldn’t be Will, could it? I’d seen him in the daylight. And why would Will flee from me? Unable to answer that question—or any of my questions—I gave up staring at the locked gates and crossed the street. Maybe Madame La Pieuvre would have answers. At least she might have a key.

  I rang the bell beside Madame La Pieuvre’s name and was rung into an elegant courtyard full of potted camellias. Gas lamps added to the air of nineteenth-century Paris. I might have been paying a visit to Dumas’s famous courtesan instead of a librarian. An octopus-librarian, I reminded myself as the ornate cast-iron elevator carried me up to the sixth floor.

  The elevator let me out on a marble landing also full of potted plants. In addition to the camellias there were azaleas, miniature roses, orchids, plumeria, bougainvillea, and other, exotic flowers I couldn’t identify. They were all in shades of coral, shell pink, and bone white so that I felt as though I might be under the sea. The splash of water added to that impression. I followed the sound through wide-open doors into a foyer with a marble fountain of a naked nymph held aloft by a fish-tailed triton. The statue was so old that the fingers of the triton grasping the nymph’s hip had all but merged with her flesh. The nymph’s face was worn down to the smoothness of a mask. Still, the panic in her eyes was as immediate as if she had only this moment been seized. I had an urge to intervene … to save her … only in the few seconds I had looked into her eyes I was already unsure if what I saw there was panic or excitement. While one of her hands pushed the lustful triton’s face away, the other gripped his muscular thigh, her fingers taut against his scaly flesh.

  “My dear friend Gianni had a trick for capturing the moment of capture, did he not?” a voice behind me inquired.

  I turned and found Madame La Pieuvre in a floor-length, sea-green caftan embroidered with white tentacles. She held a glass of champagne in one hand, a bottle in another, and an empty glass in a third. A fourth arm snaked out from behind her back and gently caressed the nymph’s marble face. “I recall the young girl who posed for this. She was half in love with Gian Lorenzo and half frightened of him. I used to say that he seduced his models and then abandoned them just to give them this conflicted look on their faces.”

  “Gian Lorenzo?” I asked. “Do you mean Gian Lorenzo Ber—”

  “Please don’t get Octavia started on all the famous artists she’s known,” a woman’s voice called from another room. “You’ll never make your appointment in the Luxembourg.”

  Madame La Pieuvre smiled and, leaning closer to me, whispered, “She’s jealous of the ones who painted me nude. But Adele is right. You have a rendezvous in the park at midnight and I have a few particulars to share with you. Come…” She draped one arm around my shoulders and steered me in the direction from which the second voice had come. We entered an elegant salon furnished in gilt and silk-upholstered Louis Quatorze furniture and thick Persian rugs, all in shades of blue and green that recalled the sea. Floor-to-ceiling windows were open to a terrace affording a view of the Luxembourg and, in the distance, the Eiffel Tower lit up like a Roman candle. I was so taken by the view that I didn’t immediately notice the petite woman seated in a deep, silk-upholstered bergère armchair. When I did look at her, I gave a little start of surprise. It was Madame Weiss, the proprietor of the Hôtel des Grandes Écoles.

  “I believe you’ve met Adele before, oui?” Madame La Pieuvre asked, pushing me gently forward with one arm while pouring champagne into a glass with another.

  “I didn’t realize”—I faltered awkwardly as Madame La Pieuvre handed a glass to me while refilling Madame Weiss’s glass and casually draping an arm over her friend’s shoulder—“that you were acquainted with the fey, Madame Weiss. Did my mother know when she sta with you?”

  “Please call me Adele … and, yes, your mother knew of my … liaisons. Our families were long acquainted. During the war your grandmother and my mother worked in the Resistance together. And it was your mother who introduced me to Octavia.” Adele smiled lovingly at Madame La Pieuvre—a look that suddenly recalled to me the conflicted longing in the marble nymph’s eyes. But why conflicted? Octavia La Pieuvre looked gentle and refined—no rapacious triton. It wasn’t fear that was mixed with Adele’s love, though; it was sadness. When I looked back at Madame La Pieuvre, I saw that same sadness reflected in her dark obsidian eyes. But when she trained her eyes back on me, the sadness vanished.

  “Adele’s family has long been friends to the Watchtower—as have my people despite the occasional differences of opinion. The more snobbish of the mer fey looked down on Marguerite for choosing to become mortal, but I have always respected her choice. She did it out of love—”

  “And look what she got for it!” Adele interrupted angrily. “That silly boy became a vampire just as she became mortal. So after all that they still couldn’t be together.”

  “Yes, it was regrettable that Marguerite sacrificed her immortality for a lover who was clearly not worthy of her love at the time. But I have noticed as the years have gone by that Will Hughes shows signs of maturing into the kind of man who might someday be worthy of the Watchtower.”

  As Madame La Pieuvre spoke, her eyes remained on me, but one of her hands slipped into Adele’s lap to grasp her hand. I reflected that their version of the Will and Marguerite story was not exactly as Will had related it to me, but I didn’t think it prudent to get in the middle of their argument.

  “If he were worthy, would he have taken the box from Garet and abandoned her?” Adele demanded.

  “How—?” I began, appalled that the details of my love life were public knowledge. But the two women ignored me.

  “Clearly he loves her. Why else would he send her a sign to join him on the road to the Summer Country? Perhaps he only wished to spare her the difficulty of the initial stages of the journey.”

  Madame Weiss made an exasperated sound. “Typical of you immortals—always thinking you know what’s best for us poor weak humans.…”

  As Adele continued, complaining about the high-handed approach of supernatural beings to mortals, I realized that the women weren’t really talking about me and Will anymore—they were enacting some old conflict in their own relationship. I could see the women’s love for each other beneath the anger in the way Madame Weiss looked into Madame La Pieuvre’s eyes and in the way Madame La Pieuvre’s hands roved restlessly over her lover’s hair and arms, trying to soothe her. Clearly, that one of them had two arms and the other had eight was not the problem. The problem was that one of them, Adele Weiss, would age and die and the other, Octavia La Pieuvre, would live forever. At first I thought that perhaps Madame Weid sound begged Octavia to make her immortal—as Will had told
me he had begged Marguerite—but as I listened I realized it was the opposite. Madame La Pieuvre was offering to end her life with her Adele.

  “I could go with Garet to the Summer Country and ask her to make me mortal. Then we could age and die together. It’s what I’ve always wanted,” Madame La Pieuvre said, turning to me, her black eyes glistening with unshed tears, “to end my long life with the person I love the most.”

  Adele opened her mouth to say something but Octavia placed a long finger on her lips. “It might be our only chance, darling. I’m sure that Garet is meant to make the journey. I could go with her … let me go with her, please!” Then, turning to me: “That is, if you don’t mind, my dear. I promise that I can be of help to you along the way as guide and interpreter.”

  “I suppose…,” I began, but stopped when I saw Adele’s tear-streaked face. She shook her head, the droop of her shoulders expressing a resignation that seemed habitual.

  “I see there’s nothing I can say to stop you,” Adele said to Octavia. “And you…” Adele turned to me. “I just hope that the creature you find at the end of the road is worth it.”