The Watchtower Read online

  The pointed-ears waif twisted out of Will’s grip and vanished into the shadows. Swearing, Will dug in his satchel, expecting that his money would be gone, but found that everything was intact. In addition was a scrap of paper with an address written on it: 39 Rood Lane, written in a flowing script that Will was instantly sure must belong to his beloved Marguerite. It was far too fine and feminine a hand for the androgynous waif. Will kissed the paper, imagining that he kissed the fingertips of she who had written it.

  His steps were much lighter all the way back to the inebriated din of Mrs. Garvey’s tavern. The occasional torch was more than a match for the blackened gloom of London’s night. He was in love, so swept up in his passion that he did not notice the old Italian priest, who had eavesdropped on his encounter with Finn, following him back to his lodgings.

  5

  The Labyrinth

  I slept late the next morning—past nine—for the first time since I’d arrived. I awoke to the sounds of guests eating their breakfasts in the courtyard garden. When my father had called the Hôtel des Grandes Écoles to get me a room on such short notice, Madame Weiss, the owner, said she would of course find a way to fit in the daughter of their dear old friend Margot James. On arrival I found that “fitting me in” meant giving me a ground-floor room the size of a largish walk-in closet. But, though I imagined that the ground floor wouldn’t be everybody’s choice, I found I rather liked it. It was just around the corner from the kitchen, where I could get hot water for tea at all hours of the night, and I was close to the pretty garden. So close that I had to keep the shutters of one window closed because it looked out over the little tables where breakfast was served. The other window faced the side garden, which was gated off from the other guests. A black iron grating (but no window screen) was over the window to keep out intruders, and a tall, leafy sycamore blocked the view from the neighboring buildings. The huge tree took up the entire view, filling the room with dappled green light and birdsong. Lying in the double bed that took up most of the room, I felt as though I were floating in a rustic gazebo, an effect reinforced by the room’s blue toile wallpaper featuring frolicking shepherds and shepherdesses, grazing deer, nymphs, and fauns.

  This morning the room was also filled with the smell of coffee and buttery croissants, and the voices of two small American children discussing what they wanted to do that day.

  “The puppet show!” the little girl shouted.

  “The sailboats!” her brother insisted.

  “Another day at the Luxembourg,” the mother sighed.

  “I’ll take them,” the father said. “You go shopping in the Marais and we’ll meet you for falafels on the rue Rosiers.”

  Give the man the Father of the Year award, I thought as I got dressed in navy capris, a crisp white, buttoned shirt, and slip-on canvas shoes. The puppet show and the boat basin at the Luxembourg sounded fun, but I was headed in the opposite direction to find someone called Monsieur Lutin at the Jardin des Plantes. I checked my outfit in the mirror, wondering if it was chic enough to meet a Frenchman in, and decided to add an Indian print scarf around my neck.

  By the time I got out to the courtyard the American family had gone and a German couple had taken their place. I nodded to them because I’d exchanged a few words about the weather with them yesterday in stilted English—which made us old comrades in the world of the Hôtel des Grandes Écoles. The hotel had the air of an old pension out of an E. M. Forster novel where English spinsters and clerics go year after year and all get to know each other. Only my getting up before breakfast hours and spending my days in a musty, old church had kept me from becoming better acquainted with my fellow guests. I didn’t know the mother and the daughter whose table I sat across from—Canadians, I soon guessed from their conversation—or the man sitting by himself in a shady corner writing in a leatherbound journal. He did raise his eyes from his notebook when I sat down, though, and inclined his head to me in a courtly, old-world bow. I smiled back, pleasantly struck by his eyes. They were deep chocolate brown—the same color as his longish, silky hair—with a touch of creamy gold at the center like a dollop of foam resting on a cup of dark coffee. He smiled at me, too, and realizing I’d been staring at him way too long, I ducked my head to retrieve my Paris guide from my bag.

  When I looked up again, he was bent over his journal. A writer? I wondered. Perhaps gathering material for a book set in Paris? An academic or a journalist? His rumpled linen suit, worn leather attaché case, and straw hat looked curiously antiquated for someone in his early thirties. Since he hadn’t spoken, I didn’t know what nationality he was, but from his coloring I would guess Italian. A newspaper was folded on the table beside him, but I couldn’t see what language it was written in.

  Madame Weiss interrupted my speculations by coming herself to say good morning and take my order. “Mademoiselle James,” she cooed in the same tone as the pigeons in the garden, “we have seen so little of you! You are very busy doing your research, eh? Just like your mother when she stayed here, always busy!”

  I smiled at Madame Weiss. She must have been at least eighty, but she was slim as a girl of twenty in a black pencil skirt, loose cream silk blouse, and high-heeled sandals. Her gray hair was impeccably cut in a soft, chin-length bob. A silk scarf patterned with seashells was deftly knotted on her shoulder. “Really?” I asked. “Do you know what she was so busy doing?”

  shrugged and pursed her lips. “There is so much to do in Paris. Who can say? Would you like a café au lait? Croissant? Jus d’orange?”

  I said yes to everything and Madame Weiss patted me on my shoulder, covertly rearranging my scarf as she did so. I was sure it looked ten times better. I turned my attention back to my guidebook, determined not to stare back at the Italian journalist (as I’d decided to think of him). I was here to find Will, I told myself sternly.

  But it’s not as though you’re married to him, another voice intruded into my head. I recognized this voice as belonging to my friend Becky Jones. She would probably point out that Will had betrayed me and that only yesterday I’d been about to give up on finding him. But then my encounter with Jean Robin had changed all that. I had been waiting for a sign, and although I hadn’t gotten one that told me how to find the Summer Country, I’d gotten a referral to someone who could help me.

  I looked up the Jardin des Plantes in my guidebook and read that it had been founded in 1626 by Jean Hérouard and Guy de la Brosse. I recalled that Jean Robin had mentioned them last night as the two men who’d been inspired by his work to create the botanical garden. The garden featured a natural-history museum, a botanical school, a zoo, an alpine garden, and a labyrinth, which contained the first wrought-iron structure—a gazebo built in 1788—and a “majestic” cedar of Lebanon that had been planted in 1734.

  I wondered if the cedar of Lebanon housed a bevy of tree fey. Perhaps that was where I’d find Monsieur Lutin. Jean Robin hadn’t given me any more specific instructions than to go to the Labyrinth. I didn’t even know what kind of creature Monsieur Lutin was.

  I flipped to the map section at the back of the book and plotted out a route to the park, which looked to be a ten-to-fifteen-minute walk away. I closed the book just as a waitress appeared with my breakfast tray. I looked up, hoping to get another glance at the handsome Italian journalist, but he was gone. He’d left his paper, though, and I decided to swipe it to get a clue to his nationality. When I’d retrieved the paper—an International Herald Tribune—I forgot all about trying to find out more about my fellow hotel guest. Staring out from the page was a picture of Amélie, the homeless woman from the Square Viviani. The caption below said that she’d been found dead at dawn, drowned in the Seine.

  * * *

  I walked to the Jardin des Plantes thinking about poor Amélie. According to the newspaper she’d been a great beauty once, an artists’ model and mistress of several well-known artists, but she’d fallen on hard times. The reporter implied that her death was most likely a suicide
. Pausing above a flight of stairs, I recalled Amélie’s yellow, nicotine-stained fingers, scabby knees, and toothless gums. How sad to go from being a vaunted beauty to a scrawny creature sleeping on park benches. As I passed the Arènes de Lutèce, the remains of a Roman arena, I noticed a few more homeless people gathered on the benches in the adjacent park. I stopped and looked at the scene. There was the man in the Renaissance beret—Amélie’s friend. Did he know that Amélie was gone? Should I speak? I took a step into the park, but then I looked across the sandy circle and noticed that someone else was watching the group of homeless people—a tall man in a long coat and wide-brimmed hat. Could it be the same man whom I’d glimpsed last night standing outside the Square Viviani? I took another step forward and the man suddenly retreated into the trees. When I looked back at the area where the homeless people had been gathered, they were all gone. I looked all around the arena for any sign of Amélie’s friend, but finally gave up and continued on my way to the Jardin des Plantes. All along the rue Linné, though, I had the feeling that I was being followed. At the corner of rue Cuvier, next to a fountain featuring snakes, crocodiles, lions, and other exotic beasts, I turned sharply around, half-expecting to surprise the man in the long coat and wide-brimmed hat, but all I found were the scaly snakeheads on the fountain spewing water—and they were creepy enough. Still I couldn’t shake the sensation that something bad was at my heels—or maybe up ahead. After all, I was on my way to a labyrinth—which, I reflected uneasily, was the legendary home of the Minotaur. I wasn’t going to meet a Minotaur, was I?

  I’d met a dragon in New York and survived it, I reflected as I followed a sign pointing to LE LABYRINTHE up a steep path. I passed a tall, feathery tree labeled CÈDRE DU LIBAN and scanned its roots for any portals, but found none. I continued on the hedge-bordered path, which circled around a small but steep hillock. Less a labyrinth than a spiral. Good, I thought, no minotaurs lived in spirals as far as I knew.

  At the top of the path was the cast-iron gazebo, a pretty, whimsical “folly” capped with two interlocking rings that looked like one of the astronomical devices I had been sketching in the Musée des Arts et Métiers recently. When I got to the foot of the stairs leading up into the gazebo, I stood panting slightly from the climb, staring up at the gazebo. On top of it was a bronze arrow pointing northwest. I knew because back in New York an earth elemental named Noam Erdmann, mild-mannered diamond dealer by day, had implanted a compass stone into the palm of my hand. I wondered if the direction meant something. Was it pointing toward where I had to go to meet Monsieur Lutin? How was I supposed to find Monsieur Lutin? Should I stand in the gazebo and shout his name?

  I was about to give it a try when a man in a blue jumpsuit appeared around the last curve of the spiral path waving his arms and shouting something in French. From the official-looking patch on his jumpsuit I guessed he was a gardener, but I couldn’t figure out what he was yelling about.

  But he wasn’t yelling at me; he appeared to be yelling at the hedge. He bent down, thrust his arm into the branches, and pulled out a small, squirming child—a little boy wearing red shorts and a Tintin T-shirt. The gardener deposited the boy on the path and, waving his finger in the boy’s face, delivered an impassioned tirade, the gist of which was that the boy was going to get his eyes poked out if he kept climbing in the hedges. The boy listened, his eyes wide as saucers, then ran away. About five feet from the irate gardener he plunged back into the hedge.

  I had to stifle a chuckle. I saw now that low, narrow tunnels snaked throughout the hedges. It was a maze. I knelt down to look through one of the tunnels … and met two large, yellow eyes. They belonged to an extremely small and wrinkled old man who sat cross-legged under the hedge. His skin was the color of old paper, his beard snow-white. He wore blue trousers, a white shirt, red suspenders, and a red cap. He was the spitting image of a garden gnome.

  “Garet James?” he asked in a surprisingly deep voice for such a little person.

  “Monsieur Lutin?”

  “C’est moi.” He patted his chest. Then he crooked one gnarled finger and gestured for me to follow him into the tunnel.

  I looked behind me to see if the angry gardener was still patrolling the hedges. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how pissed off he’d be by an adult crawling into the hedges, but then, I reflected as I started crawling, that was probably the least of my problems.

  * * *

  I saw immediately that the gardener had been right about the threat to corneas. I was so busy fending off stray shrubbery branches that I lost sight of Monsieur Lutin’s blue-clad derrière … and when I looked up, it was gone. But where could he have gone? I hadn’t passed any intersecting tunnels.

  I got my answer two minutes later when I fell into a hole. I dropped about four feet onto a stone ledge next to Monsieur Lutin, who was sitting cross-legged and chuckling.

  “Thanks for the heads-up,” I said in English.

  “De rien.” He tipped his red cap at me, then, switching to English (as most Parisians did when they heard my French), he pointed to something behind me. “You will be more comfortable walking the rest of the way, Mademoiselle.”

  I got up, brushing the dirt from my capris, and looked behind me. The inside of the hill was hollow. A narrow pathway, hewn into the stone-paved walls, circled down into darkness. It was impossible to tell how far down it went, and the outer edge had no railing.

  “It’s better if you take the inside,” Monsieur Lutin said, touching my elbow. “I know the path. You might want to have your own light, though.”

  He snapped his fingers and a small flame leaped from his thumb. Oberon had taught me this trick back in New York, but after the High Bridge Tower fire, my hands had been bandaged for weeks and then … well, I’d been afraid to try it again. The scars still on my hands reminded me too painfully of what it felt like to be burned.

  “Go ahead,” he urged. “Best to get back on the pony, as you Americans say.”

  Embarrassed to look like a coward in front of a three-foot-tall man, I touched my fingers together, recalling Oberon’s instructions: Concentrate on the heat your aura produces.… When you can feel a spark, snap your fingers together.… I could almost hear Oberon’s voice in my head, which was not an altogether welcome sensation. After all, in his quest to get the box first, Oberon had paralyzed me and left me to dieȁwell, Will said he thought Oberon probably knew that Will would get to me first. Still, I hadn’t thought kindly of the King of Fairies since. The fire trick was useful though. When I could see a pale blue glow limning the tips of my fingers, I snapped them together. A small flame leaped from my hand and I held my thumb up to keep it steady.

  “Good,” Monsieur Lutin said succinctly. “Let’s go!”

  “Where are we going?” I asked as we started down the curving path, which was the mirror image of the spiral path I’d climbed outside the hill. I noticed that the walls were roughly paved with broken stones that looked as if they’d been salvaged from Roman and medieval ruins. There were fragments of inscriptions in Latin, shards of stained glass, bits of broken crockery, and stone gargoyle heads—a hodgepodge mosaic.

  “My colleague tells me you wish to contact the boat people. Well, you can’t go to them empty-handed—they’re quite formal about such things—so we are going to the gardens to collect a little bouquet for you to bring with you. They love flowers, but you have to be careful not to bring them just any sort of flower.”

  “They sound sort of snobbish.”

  Monsieur Lutin shrugged, which made his trousers hitch up. “Ah, well, they were the lords and ladies of the Summer Country.” He sighed wistfully when he mentioned the Summer Country.

  “Are you from the Summer Country, too?”

  He laughed. “All our kind were originally from the Summer Country. At the dawn of time the Summer Country and this world coexisted, like two streams that ran parallel to each other, but as humans gained more power and began altering the earth—building roads, damming river
s, draining swamps—the Summer Country became like a mist that lay upon the land, thick in places, thin in others. The humble people of the Summer Country—the fairies and goblins, gnomes and sylphs, elves and brownies—came and went between the worlds freely. In places where humans paid homage to us—a grove they wouldn’t cut, a spring they consecrated with a little statue, a cave they painted with their images—we settled down. Like this place.”

  He held up his thumb-flame to cast a bigger light. We’d come to the bottom of the stairs. The floor was paved with wide, rectangular stones, which were engraved with the shapes of men in armor and ladies in long medieval gowns. Monsieur Lutin touched his thumb to a candle in a wall sconce and lit it. The light filled a tiny niche that held a statue of a diminutive man with a beard and pointed cap.

  “Is that…?”

  Monsieur Lutin struck a pose in front of the statue, one hand on his hip, the other stroking his beard. “A good likeness, don’t you think? Mind you, I only had a little following in the days before the Romans came. And a few Romans were happy to pay tribute to me, too. But then times changed and no one came anymore to keep my shrine. In the Middle Ages the people began to use this as a garbage dump! Well, I couldn’t have that, could I? So I’ve kept it clean inside, used the pieces of things that were worth saving to decorate—what do you Americans call that?”

  “Recycling,” I said, looking up at the crazy-mosaic walls. “You did all this?”

  “Oh, yes, all the interior decorating to be sure. And I gave Edmé Verniquet the idea for the gazebo on top.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I said truthfully.

  Monsieur Lutin shuffled his feet and fiddled with his suspenders. “I’m so glad you like it.… I don’t have many visitors … but we mustn’t waste time.” He took off down a long, low tunnel and I had to scurry to keep up. “What was I saying? Oh, yes, I was telling you the history of how the Summer Country became closed to us. Many of us settled where humans made shrines to us, but the sea fairies wanted their own kingdom from which to rule the humans. They built the city of Ys on an island in the sea, which floated between the worlds, where humans could come pay homage to them. Many-towered Ys with its great seawall that kept the tides between the worlds at bay. More than any of us the sea fairies thrived off their contact with humans, so much so that the nine priestesses of Ys brought a human king to rule over them … or at least they let him think he ruled over them. He was more like a sacrificial goat. The human king of Ys was obliged to go each month to a sacred grove where any human might come and challenge his sovereignty in a fight to the death. Then the new victor would become king.”