The Watchtower Read online

  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 risqué 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.

  There was no response in the poet’s features to Will’s words or presence. He continued to look agitated; his high, round brow was furrowed, one of his cheeks was damp as if he’d just wiped away a tear, and his eyes darted nervously as if on the lookout for a rabid bat. But after a while he reached out his hands to take Will’s.

  “I came here with exciting news today,” the poet said, “and also anticipating as always another of our beautiful hours. But who did I find waiting in the hall but your father. Fine enough. But my conversation with him did not go well.”

  “My father! He’s not due back until after sundown. He’s here?” Will would never have risked his dalliance with Bess had he known his father to be at the estate. The gruff, old autocrat’s obsession with the marriage issue—and his capacity for disinheriting Will—made being caught with Bess too outrageous a chance to take. Suspicions among the servants about his activities were tolerable. But not a chance encounter with the lord while Will was with so inappropriate a lady.

  “He’s gone off again but will be back soon. He’d come back early on some pretext from business in London. It sounded like the real reason for his sudden return was you.”

  “Me!”

  Edgar, his father’s footservant, emerged from the passageway that opened onto the great hall near the front door and began to officiously polish the handle of a sword hanging on the wall to his left. Will and the poet were lingering longer than usual in the hallway before entering the study, and even their subdued voices could probably be heard elsewhere in the cavernous, drafty house. This moment wasn’t propitious to do anything unusual. Will rose in silence, letting go of the poet’s hands, and walked toward the study, the poet following him. Edgar allowed himself a glance behind him before returning to his polishing. It was just as well that Edgar hadn’t seemed to catch a glimpse of their hand clasp.

  Entering the study, Will sat in a chair at an oak desk where his favorite onyx writing pen gleamed on its marble stand, and the poet sat in a plain maple chair facing him, from where he had a clear view of Will’s features though his own were in shadow. “Lord Hughes said that you and I should remain here until he returns, even if it is several hours. The good lord has a special person he wants you to meet.”

  Will groaned.

  “He also said to convey his caution to you that you are to be punctual for all future meetings between us. If there are any.”

  “But why are you so agitated? I’m the one he’s bringing som
eone to meet! Or, something, more likely.”

  “Because I came here today, in addition to the usual instruction, to tell you remarkable news. Unfortunately I blurted it out to him. He took to my news like a sledgehammer to glass. So I’m sitting here now plucking the glass slivers out of my soul.”

  Will winced. He’d never known the poet to use such dramatic language in conversation before. And he was baffled as to the facts. “What is shattered?”

  “My life circumstances, since your father will not pay me what I am owed for tutoring you.”

  “But why would you ask for payment now? Our studies continue through the end of the year.” It was May.

  The poet stood up for emphasis. He extended his hands in front of him, palms up, in a gesture of beseechment.

  “Anne and I have not had the happiest of unions, Will. You must have gleaned this a hundred times, a thousand, from things I have said. Indeed the heart of my message to you has been for you to select your own mat and not let circumstances do it as I unfortunately have, though I understand your father’s oversight is a burden I did not have to cope with. But I have made my mistake and paid my price in suffering, though I cannot swear that all my moments with Anne have been miserable—we’ve had some happiness, too …

  “But now, in the past year in London, I have met the woman of my dreams, my soul mate, the infinitely lovely and tender Lady Marguerite D’Arques, whom both my blood and my mind summon me to be with. And if I do not go to be with her now, she will be returning to France in a fortnight, because of a family crisis. Her sister—an evil woman—is plotting to take over the family estate in Brittany. I have beseeched Marguerite to put aside all thought of her ancestral riches and throw in her lot with me. But I must at least be able to provide her with a roof over her head. I cannot go to her penniless!” At this thought the poet gasped, and his palms closed to fists. He trained his gaze more directly on Will, though his eyes were filling with tears.

  Will was speechless. The crisis sounded dire, but some good news was in what the poet was saying, for the poet. But no good news for Will. After a pause he offered modest congratulations and best hopes for the crisis. Then he added, anger welling at the apparent end of his own relationship with the poet, which had meant so much to him, “What of all your speeches to me of the sanctity of marriage? On offspring as immortality? Are you having children with Lady Marguerite?”

  Will wished he’d replied more sympathetically. But he did not want his tutoring by the poet to end. And he knew that his father, on the subject of contracts, including marital, would be implacable. Lord Hughes’s worldview had no shades of gray. And no sympathy for romantic love.

  “That’s the view your father hired me to promote. But I’m tired of deceiving for pay. Children do bring a kind of immortality, yes. One subject to the whims of fate, but one that can go on a while with good fortune. But a greater immortality is the love that should precede them, and that can inspire great art as well. My sonnets for example, which are not subject to war, or accident, or illness. I hold no hope for the salvation of Sundays, so love and art are my beliefs, and their immortality is greatest when they combine to create great love and art. This is the truth I have discovered in life, not the clichés your father hired me to spout.

  “Even the actor who recites great lines onstage achieves immortality, for lines can live on in the minds of his audience. It’s a crime that I’ve been speaking to you of rank begetting, which a mongrel or rabbit is capable of.

  “But I rant too long. I must leave Stratford for London because if I don’t, Marguerite, the only woman I have ever loved, will go. That is the heart of it.”

  “Your family?”

  “Susanna and Judith will be provided for. Unlike Anne, I love them, but I cannot live a lie with them any longer. If your father cuts me off from the ten thousand pounds I am due, I am offered employment in London as an actor and writer. I had hoped to go to her better provisioned, but she cares so little for material things that I believe we can get by. Still we must have something…”

  Then the poet, his eyes glistening, approached Will. He stretched his hands out and took Will’s hands. Will let him do it with reluctance; he understood the force of his tutor’s emotion, but was appalled at the sudden end to their tutorial friendship, and the indifference toward him it suggested. True love notwithstanding.

  But the poet went on, “Don’t think I am neglecting our bond. I will approach the subject of your future with a new sonnet, composed feverishly this very morning and already recorded in my memory.” He recited it while gazing into Will’s eyes. The tremor in his voice told Will that every word of it was genuine:

  When London sags with mediocrity,

  your presence on the stage will thrill, astound,

  and save next winter from despondency:

  you will be King of Thespians. So crowned!

  Late winter streets are dark there, teem with cold,

  but even shadows will have learned your name,

  a prominence to warm you when you’re old,

  such acting and such writing granting fame

  to outwit death. Will Hughes you are the sun

  to shine on all of England!—greater than

  mere birthchanced heir, The Hughes’s only son:

  the legacy of such a gifted man

  should be his fire within, that’s never ash,

  his blood that flows immortally. My wish!

  The poet dropped Will’s hands as if overcome by emotion and retreated a few steps from him. Will was dumbstruck at the enormity of the poet’s belief, and at the prospect of the upward cataclysm that would occur for him were he to take this message literally.

  The poet went on, “So I urge you, with every fiber of my being, to accompany me to London and join the much esteemed acting company at which I have been offered employment. My assessment of your talents is as objective as Pythagoras’s the area of a triangle. Leave this crass estate, this money-monastery. Your gift for poetry and your sheer presence can make you an immortal and allow you to escape from the clutches of whatever creature Lord Hughes is bringing to you this very hour.”

  Will thrilled to the poet’s confidence in him. The poem’s rousing conclusion, its references to immortal blood and fire, set off some tingling, suppressed sense of destiny. He had the intuition that this destiny could be buried in his family’s primordial past, an awareness with a quite tenuous basis—some whispers he’d heard among the servants when he was much, much younger; ambiguous words his long-departed mother had once said to him—regardless, the word blood seemed to revive this consciousness. Perhaps among his remote ancestors one had once achieved great glory. And he should—must!—do the same. Blood—possibly something about the kind running in his veins was special.

  Will then tried to dismiss his reaction, as it seemed ridiculously self-important, and he had practical concerns to weigh. But it wouldn’t go away even as he voiced his concerns to the poet.

  “Swan Hall may be a money-monastery as you put it, but it has been home all my life. I am flattered that you would even consider asking me to accompany you to London, but my father would disown me if he knew I considered the notion.” The exchange of the lands and wealth of his inheritance for the trumpeting of a sonnet seemed more reckless to him with each word he uttered.

  “You can be employed as an actor with none other than the King’s Players themselves at a considerable stipend,” the poet countered. “For they are my new troupe. We can continue our private lessons. You will become the great poet and actor destiny wants you to be.” The poet clapped Will enthusiastically on the shoulder. “You can be my protégé, Will Hughes. My offspring in the realm of beauty. As my own son, Hamnet, would have been had he survived. Think about it, man! An immortal. Living forever on the page and in the hearts of the English nation. The world!”

  Will was moved by the soaring enthusiasm of the poet. But though he admired the poet’s willingness to risk the small fortune Will’s father
owed him, his bravery concerning Will’s far greater personal legacy seemed a trifle facile, like the brave noble fighting in the rear to the last yeoman. It hurt him to hurt the poet, but he stepped pronouncedly away, retreating into an alcove above which hung the family coat of arms—a black swan rising on a silver field—and a pair of crossed swords. Responding to the wounded look in the poet’s eyes, he murmured, “I need time to take this in. It would be such a different world. I feel like I’m standing now with both feet planted on either side of a chasm while the earth is shaking, the chasm widening.”

  “I do understand, Will.” Slowly, a bit sadly, the poet returned to his chair and sat down.

  Then came a fierce knock on the door. They knew from the imperiousness of the sound that Lord Hughes had returned. Will walked unenthusiastically to the door and opened it. He offered his father a distant but respectful bow, then stared appraisingly and for a painful length of time at the bashful young woman his father escorted, whom Will recognized as Lady Celia, the future Duchess of Exeter. She was attired in a billowing floor-length dress so modest it were as if the spirit of a nun massacred by King Henry VIII inhabited her. Her face was broad at the temples and narrow at the chin, giving the superficial effect of some strange drinking cup. Her shadowy gray eyes—at first cast down and then raised slowly to meet Will’s—glowed only like the faintest embers of dying coals. The scar across her lower left cheek did not helper loveliness, nor the faintness of her eyebrows. Will looked away with a cruel abruptness as her eyes met his, a mocking half smile playing at the corners of his lips. It was dangerous to behave this way in front of his overly dignified and occasionally bellicose father. But he couldn’t help himself. This woman could be the death of him!