The Watchtower Read online

  Lord Hughes was tall and retained both the lean muscles of his youth and the severe expression of his time as a military commander. Though long out of the king’s service, he wore a uniform this afternoon. His features had so many angles to them they might have been a geometry lesson; they were dominated by two piercing eyes that would have done any raptor proud. The angles sharpened and his eyes glared as he observed his son’s rudeness. But Lord Hughes was not going to stand down from the appropriate polite formalities with a sudden expression of wrath, at least not if he could help it.

  “Son, this is Lady Celia, the future Duchess of Exeter, whom you have once before met at court in London. Your ladyship, this is Will Hughes, my only son and heir.”

  The bow and the curtsy that followed were as feeble as if those performing them were no longer living. The lady had noted Will’s cold arrogance and might well have been said to be mortally offended already. Nonetheless, she began to steal furtive glances at his sleek and luminous features even amid her wounded irritation, showing a sudden spirit that Will had a history of evoking even among the most sheltered of females. For him, her presence was so heavy it seemed to have caused all air to be drawn out of the room, leaving him no options for breathing. But he tried not to direct further exasperation at her. The source of his repression was his father, not her.

  Will’s loyalty to Swan Hall swung on one side of an alchemist’s balance right now, while the other weighed a possible new life in London. Avoiding Celia was on the same iron tray as the poet, the poet’s sonnet, and the Globe Theatre. On the opposite tray a grand pile of gold bars lingered powerfully, gleaming.

  “May we enter?” the lord asked sarcastically, as Will continued to stand in the doorway. Will whipped away from him with an obedience so quick it also flirted with sarcasm and went back to his desk. Lord Hughes strode heavily into the center of the room, Celia a few paces behind him. The poet stepped forward to face Lord Hughes; from the rear it looked to Will as if he might have been trembling slightly. He bowed and mumbled, “My lord,” in a voice so tentative Will had to strain to hear it. Lord Hughes nodded impassively, then presented Lady Celia with a small gesture.

  “My lady graces this afternoon and lights up the room as if a second sun has suddenly arisen,” the poet said.

  Will marveled at the man’s ability to let images flow even in the most adversarial of settings. His father addressed his next words to the poet.

  “You must pardon this interruption. An urgent matter has arisen which the three of us must resolve.” A wave of the lord’s right hand seemed to include the window behind the desk as a fourth party to the negotiations. There, a heavy curtain embroidered with a biblical scene of Jesus turning water into wine was drawn against the afternoon sun, obscuring the stained-glass window itself. “I am mindful of our discussion a short time ago and have reached a decision whch should enable you to go on with your life.”

  Will was struck by how much his father’s beneficent tone toward the poet contrasted with the tension in his physical bearing. Perhaps his father was directing his internal wrath right now more at his son than his son’s tutor. Perhaps Will should have been a little more cautious in his dismissal of Lady Celia.

  The poet bowed again and said, “Yes, my lord?”

  “You have served well as my son’s tutor and have been an admirable model for him with your brilliance. I am sure he has absorbed a lifelong benefit from knowing you. However your outrageous demand as to ending instruction early, and, even more shocking, your intention to break your marital bonds, have convinced me that these lessons must cease immediately. I have found a better method for persuading Will of his obligations. The Lady Celia will be the perfect bride for him. Let us waste no more time. I will more than generously pay you for all your lessons through today, and you can go on your merry way. As for you,” the lord added, gazing with some ferocity at Will, “your trifling with my wishes is over. You must ask the Lady Celia’s hand in marriage.”

  “When, my lord?”

  “Now.”

  “Now? I have only been in her company a few minutes.”

  “You have known her long enough. Too long, in fact. You should have proposed at the very sight of her. But from what I know of this young woman’s kind and forgiving nature, I suspect she may not hold your slight against you forever. Isn’t that right, my lady?”

  The lady nodded the most demure of nods, but looked unhappy.

  “Well, I’d sooner lie with a rotting horse,” Will said. “And if I knew her fifty years, I wouldn’t ask for her hand in marriage.”

  Then Will took a deep breath. He’d astonished even himself with such provocative language. But he had felt a deep sense of relief uttering these obnoxious words. As if he no longer had to live the lie of obedience to his father.

  Lady Celia stamped her feet furiously and said to Lord Hughes, “Sir, I cannot stay in the presence of such a lout. He speaks filth to me! Your son has a beautiful face but his soul is revolting.”

  She began an exit but found her way impeded by the grip of the lord on her elbow. A dowry of fifty thousand pounds plus a partnership in the prosperous import business that her family owned wasn’t a matter to be flamed away in the heat of the moment. Nor was the lord going to give up so easily regarding his son’s recalcitrance. Admittedly these nuptials weren’t off to a promising start. But he’d see what could be done about that.

  He drew his sword, to suggest to Will and the poet his passion to protect the lady and her dignity. “Further insults, men, will be cut off.”

  The sight of the sword was cautionary. Both Will and the poet knew the lord kept in good shape and did not have the most prudent judgment.

  “Do stay with us here, my gallant lady,” Lord Hughes went on. “My son will be on his knees before you in a minute, weeping his apology and requesting your hand as I have so ordered.” He tentatively let loose of her wrist. She shuddered, then cowered in place.

  Sword in left hand, Lord Hughes approached Will, leaned forward, and slapped his cheek with his right hand, reaching across the desktop with enough force to knock Will out of his chair and send him sprawling. The lord was big, but it was still a startling feat of strength. Will uttered a cry of pain threaded with embarrassment. Then he recovered enough to get back up and glare at his father, muttering threats, before sending a glance at Celia so savage she recoiled from it. He was rubbing his cheek with a solicitude reserved only for himself and those of fairer visage than the lady.

  The poet, appalled at Lord Hughes’s brutishness (not that his pupil was being gallant), strode toward him and waved an impassioned hand. “I must protest,” he proclaimed. “This lad has done nothing to deserve your contempt for him. He has tried to heed your message. It’s only that he has a fine soul and needs time to discover himself and find exactly the right companion. I would have you refrain from further violence.”

  Lord Hughes laughed despite his bitter mood at the thought of taking direction from a wife-betrayer. He slapped the poet across his cheek using the flat side of his sword blade. Only the faintest line of blood was drawn, nothing significant; the litheness and accuracy of his sword’s upswing were impressive to behold. The poet fell back down hard and barely managed to keep his head from knocking against the slate floor. He struggled upright as Will gasped and Lady Celia fled.

  As he rose, his features crimsoning, he reached behind himself for the maple chair and whirled and hurled it at the lord with a strength not obvious in his slender frame. The chair struck Lord Hughes a full blow in his midsection, knocking his sword away and the wind out of him. Will’s father crumpled, then stretched full out on the floor moaning.

  The poet quickly picked up the sword. He backed away to the window, then ripped the curtain down with one motion. Will had to cover his eyes against the dazzle of sunlight flooding the room. The poet’s gesture had revealed a stained-glass scene of a beautiful youth playing his lyre to a black swan that glided over a blue pond. The poet pointed wildly a
t the window.

  “See here the swan, symbol of your family, harkens to Orpheus, god of poetry and music. This is the heritage Will should be loyal to. This is a worthy god for Will to follow,” the poet shouted at the prostrate Lord Hughes. “Not the mammon of your idea of matrimony.”

  Will, observing all this, might have been expected to feel some filial loyalty at his father’s moans and the poet’s condescension. But the only loyalty he felt was to the poet.

  “He has sonnets and theater in him, not obedience,” the poet went on. “But you don’t want those things in him, you soulless creature.”

  In his fury the poet gripped the sword handle with both hands and shattered the window with a spinning blow. “You will not so shatter Will, whose beauy has been wasted on you!” he exclaimed. He dropped the sword, climbed through the window, and set off down the hill toward the closest exit from the estate.

  Will watched him depart. Shards of glass, strewn from the sword blow across the stone pavement bordering the house, glittered as if they noted the extinction of art. Indeed, it gave him pause that a man with such a sense of art as the poet could have destroyed such beauty. But it must have been the actor, the dramatist in him that felt the need to add such an exclamation point to his assertions, Will reassured himself. If his own wicked father hadn’t foolishly slapped him, none of this would have happened.

  He knew, without even needing to think about it, that his father’s violent intimidations had made his decision for him. An inchoate force seemed to summon itself up from deep within him and coalesce into a single message. Through a trick of fate the one image preserved in the wreckage of the window was the black swan. Outlined now against the blue sky, it seemed to hover, as if ready to take flight. A sign, surely, that the time had arrived for Will to take flight as well.

  As his father climbed to his feet, still glaring at him and then shaking a fist impotently in the air as if that gesture might restore his dignity, Will said, “You cannot rule over me. I am going away to London, with the poet.”

  His father’s fist-shaking ceased with a shudder that always made Will think afterward, reflecting back, of someone cowering before eternity.

  Will went over the window ledge, careful not to disturb the glass swan, and down the hill, following the poet, carrying his father’s sword. Everything else at Swan Hall he left behind. There might have been a final faint cry behind him, a beseeching, cut-off wail—but whether it came from his father or issued miraculously from the glass swan as a clarion cry to adventure—Will wasn’t sure. He would not pause to listen more.

  3

  Jean Robin

  I followed the pigeon through the arched opening in the tree, leaving the streetlights of the Square Viviani behind me. Their light was replaced by an incandescent glow from deep within the tree … too deep. The tree shouldn’t have gone back that far. It was as if I were looking through the tree and the stone walls of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre into the church itself, where a thousand panes of stained glass glittered in the dark. Only Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre didn’t have stained glass. Not like this anyway. The only place I had seen stained glass like this was at Sainte-Chapelle, that perfect jewel box created by Louis IX in 1248. But that was across the Seine on the Île de la Cité, and that chapel was reached by narrow stone steps that climbed up. This stained-glass sanctuary was below me at the bottom of a flight of spiral stairs that dropped into the earth like a well. The brown pigeon waited on the top step. When I moved forward, he cooed and hopped down to the next one. I followed, pulled as much by the glittering, multicolored light as by the steady chortling that came from the bird like the patter of a tour guide.

  “Watch your step, please, come this way, this is one of the most remarkable sights in all of Paris…,” I imagined him saying as we made our way down nto the underground hall of stained glass. I recalled the first time I’d gone to Sainte-Chapelle with my mother; I’d been grouchy and tired from waiting on line, complaining to her that I didn’t need to see yet another church. They all looked alike after a while, I’d said, as I followed her up the tightly twisting stone steps. Then we emerged into the upper chapel and I was silenced. It was like popping your head out of a rabbit hole and finding yourself in the Emerald Palace of Oz. A blaze of light, distilled through innumerable panes of brightly colored glass, enveloped us. The room seemed to be floating like a hot-air balloon. I remember feeling as if we had come untethered from the earth.

  I had that same feeling now even though I was descending into the earth. At the bottom of the stairs I stepped into a high-ceilinged room, its arched roof supported by twisting columns and covered with an intricate pattern of stained glass in every color of the rainbow. One moment it seemed as if the predominant color was blue, then violet, and then crimson. The colors were changing, shifting as I watched them. It was like standing in a planetarium watching the dome of the heavens move above me. Then something else occurred to me: if I was below the ground, and it was night, where was the light coming from?

  As if in answer to my unvoiced question, a shard of colored glass fell from the ceiling, spinning through the air like a maple seedling. Others joined the crimson, blue, and emerald rain. I ducked, sure that the whole ceiling was about to crash down on my head, but when the first shard of glass hit me, it had all the force of a dandelion puff. I held out my hand to catch another. An amber droplet landed in my palm and looked up at me with the face of a Botticelli angel. I looked up again, gasping. The entire ceiling—of a room as large as Sainte-Chapelle—was made up of live fairies, each one glowing like a Christmas bulb.

  “Light sylphs!” I exclaimed, recalling the creatures I’d glimpsed the night I’d spent with Will Hughes in Fort Tryon Park.

  The little creature hissed and threw up its hands. A torrent of unintelligible speech, accompanied by expansive hand gestures, shrugs, and much expressive rolling of the eyes, issued forth. I had the distinct impression that it was not pleased.

  “The light sylphs … are their … American cousins,” a gruff voice from the far end of the hall laboriously croaked. “These creatures prefer to be known as the lumignon.”

  I turned in the direction of the voice. At the far end of the hall I saw a throne elaborately carved out of the same dark wood as the twisted columns. An empty throne. Was the voice coming from behind it?

  “The word … has an inter … esting derivation,” the voice rasped. “From the Latin lux, of course … meaning ‘light’ and the Old French mignon … meaning a ‘favorite’ or ‘darling,’ perhaps … originally from the Celtic min, meaning ‘tender, soft.’ So, ‘tender lights.’ They aren’t always so … tender, though.”

  A deep rumbling noise came from the throne. The wood creaked and groaned. The twisted columns on either side of me shiverwrithed like live snakes, and the black tracery between the panes of light trembled. I saw now that the hall was all of a piece—a giant root system. The black lines between the lights—what would be lead joinery in stained-glass windows—were tiny roots, the columns were thicker roots twisted together, and the throne was the thickest root of all: the taproot. But where was the voice coming from?

  I took another step forward. “But then you would know that, Garet James.” The voice came more fluidly now, as if it had only needed a little exercise to get it working. “You’ve already had some experience of our friends the fairies, haven’t you?”

  I stopped, midway down the nave, frozen to the spot. “How do you know my name?”

  The rumbling sound began again, this time louder. It shook the tiny lumignon from their perches in the high roots so that they fell in a colored rain all around me. He—it?—was laughing.

  “Ah, the name of Garet James, Watchtower, travels far. It’s true I can’t exactly go abroad any longer, but I have my … informants. You could say my roots in this world and yours run deep.” Again the creature’s laughter shook the hall.

  “And what do they say about me?” I asked, approaching the throne while stealthily trying to ge
t a look around it to see where the speaker was hiding.

  “They say you come to the church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre every day, sometimes twice a day. We’ve seen your kind before, waiting for a sign to set off on your quest for the Summer Country. Indeed, we saw another one—one who could only come after dark—quite recently.”

  “A man?” I asked, hating the eager hope in my voice. Hadn’t I decided earlier today to give up on Will Hughes once and for all?

  “Not exactly. A man once … but now a creature of the night … a…”

  “Vampire, yes, I get it,” I said irritably despite my relief at the news. I was beginning to find my interlocutor’s speaking style annoying. And his game of hide-and-seek. I made a quick feint to my right and then dashed left around the wooden throne. There was nothing there.

  Peals of gruff laughter shook the hall—and they were coming unmistakably from the throne. I came around and stood in front of the huge mass of carved wood—only it wasn’t carved, I saw now. The root had grown into the shape of a chair, twisting itself into arms and legs, swelling into rococo curves that suggested some anthropomorphic design. A bulbous area looked like a head, tapering roots suggested fingers at the end of the curved arms and feet at the end of the legs.… I peered closer at one of the feet … and then recoiled in astonishment. There, at the end of the roots, was a sliver of toenail.

  I looked back up at the bulbous area at the head of the chair into two dark knotholes sunk deep into the fibrous wood.

  “What are you?” I asked in a whisper.