The Watchtower Page 7

  “That sounds pretty barbaric,” I said when Monsieur Lutin paused at a low, arched door to fumble in his pocket.

  “The lords and ladies of Ys came to thrive on such displays of … loyalty. Some say it was decadence that destroyed the city.” Retrieving a large ring of keys, he counted off keys until he produced a big brass skeleton key, which he held up, gripped in his fist. “The king’s daughter gave the key to the sea gate to an evil sorcerer who promised to take her away, but who opened the gates instead. The city was drowned, most perished, but some survived. They fled to the mainland seeking refuge. Along the way they created doors to the Summer Country so they’d be able to go back.”

  As he mentioned the doors, he fitted the key into the lock and opened the door in front of us. I followed him through, out into the open air, and was startled to find myself in a densely landscaped garden. Narrow paths twisted through groves of pine and fir and rocky outcroppings planted with a myriad of flowers and shrubs. The garden was sunken below ground level, secluding it from the rest of the Jardin, and was empty except for one gardener, who was wearing the same type of blue jumpsuit as the gardener from the labyrinth. “Bon jour, Solange! Ça va?” Monsieur Lutin called to the gardener. “I just need to pick a few samples for a friend. D’accord?” The gardener smiled and waved back at Monsieur Lutin as if he was used to seeing three-feet-tall gnomes wandering around the Alpine Garden.

  “So what happened then?” I asked as Monsieur Lutin stooped to pick a long-stemmed, blue flower.

  “As the boat people created their doors, they shut others. The fabric of mist, which had flowed freely over this world, evaporhey Creatures like myself could no longer slip from world to world. Some were trapped in the Summer Country, others like myself were trapped in this world.”

  “Kind of like the Berlin Wall.”

  “Yes, and the boat people became the gatekeepers, deciding who could and couldn’t travel to the Summer Country. As you can imagine, that made them unpopular with some, but then it also made it very important to keep on their good side if you wanted to ever be able to visit your relatives.… Ah, blue gentian, she’ll like those.… But then even the boat people began to lose their ability to move from world to world. If they became too attached to a human, for instance…”

  Monsieur Lutin interrupted his narrative to scramble up a rock outcropping to pick a white, woolly flower that I thought might be edelweiss. I was standing by a small ornamental pool into which a miniature waterfall flowed. The scene reminded me of the brief glimpse I’d had of the Summer Country, when I’d had to step in front of the silver box to close it. I’d seen the enchanted pool with a black swan floating on it. Transported back in time, I’d seen an ancient story reenacted before me: a youth who’d followed his true love to the swan pool at sunset even though he’d been forbidden to do so, watching the woman he loved turn into a black swan. The swan maiden, seeing that she’d been betrayed, had begun to fly away, back to the Summer Country, and the young man, unable to bear losing her, had lifted his bow and shot her.

  “Like the first Marguerite,” I said to Monsieur Lutin, who’d climbed back down and was standing by my side looking into the little pool. “She made her beloved promise not to come to the swan pool when she turned back into a swan, but he did and then shot her with an arrow.”

  “Only to keep her from leaving him,” Monsieur Lutin said, taking my hand and leading me to a little bench in a patch of sunshine in a secluded spot. “She wasn’t killed, but she could never go back to the Summer Country again. For love of the young man she pledged herself to protect humankind forever. She became one of the four Watchtowers.”

  “But why? A human had betrayed her. Shouldn’t that have made her hate human beings?”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Most of the fey who are betrayed by humans do hate them. They become vengeful.” He motioned for me to bend down so he could whisper in my ear even though we were alone in this part of the garden. “Some say that the fey who were captured and tortured by humans because the humans believed they were demons became demons. Imagine being tortured by the creatures you loved, whom you thought of as your children.”

  Although we were sitting in the warm sun, I shivered. If what Monsieur Lutin said was true, then human beings had created demons. “It would drive you mad.”

  “Yes. But your ancestor Marguerite became all the more attached to humans. Marguerite knew that her human lover betrayed her because he wanted to keep her with him. She never forgot the intensity of his love for her. Now the boat people, they both love and hate humans. They’ve tasted the human’s ability to love and theyd the hbecome addicted to it. They seek out human lovers who will sing their praises, sculpt them in marble, paint their faces, and write love poems to them. In exchange the humans they touch taste immortality. The world’s greatest art comes from these unions, but they’re fragile. They never last long.”

  I nodded. “I know. My father is an art dealer so I grew up among artists. I’ve seen what happens to them when their inspiration deserts them.” I remembered my father’s protégé, Santé Leon, who killed himself just before his first big show at the Whitney. And my father’s best friend, Zach Reese, who had turned to drink when he couldn’t paint anymore. At least Zach had started painting again, but so many others had been damaged by their brush with the muses. It was why I had decided to become a jeweler instead of an artist. “You make it sound very dangerous to go near the boat people.”

  “Oh, it is! Of course you have a touch of them in you and that’s very powerful. I wouldn’t dream of sending you to them otherwise. But don’t forget, you’re also part human. You’ve already succumbed to the attraction of the vampire. There are other creatures who are far more potent and seductive than him whom you will meet.” He held up the bouquet of delicate alpine flowers he had gathered for me. My mother had loved wildflowers and had taught me the names of many. I recognized blue gentian, white edelweiss, yellow cinquefoil, and purple thistle, but a half a dozen of the flowers I didn’t know. He plucked one of these out of the bouquet, a sprig of small, purple orchids. Inside each flower’s throat was a purple heart ringed with white. He tore off one of the green leaves, rubbed it between his fingers, and held it up for me to smell.

  “Mint.”

  “Alpine calamint,” he said. “Keep this one for yourself. If you find yourself falling under the spell of any of the sea fey, take it out and smell it. It might bring you to your senses.”

  “Might?”

  “It’s the best I can do. I could tell you to go home now and forget Will Hughes, the silver box, and the Summer Country, but I don’t suppose you would listen.”

  He looked at me inquisitively. Could I just go home? I wondered. I’d been on the verge of giving up last night, but now … knowing that there was a chance I could find Will…? True, he had taken the box from me, but he had done it so that he could become human again. He had done it so he could sit in the sunshine as I was now. How could I begrudge him that when all I wanted to do was sit in the sun with him just as I was sitting on the bench beside Monsieur Lutin right now? Besides, since I’d gotten to Paris, I had this feeling that Will was heading toward me. I knew it was silly. I knew he was probably far away on the path to the Summer Country, but I also had this strange conviction that we were on parallel paths, like the two paths that spiraled up the Labyrinth, one outside the hill and one inside, with only a thin wall between us. Sooner or later, our paths would have to merge. “No, I don’t think I can,” I said finally.

  “I didn’t think so. Here.” He handed me the bouquet. “Take these to Madame La Pieuvre at the Bibliothèque Océanographique. She’s one of the most civil of the sea fey and acts as a sort of liaison between them and us lesser fairies. If anyone can help you, she can.”

  “Thank you. You’ve been very kind. Earlier when I was walking up the Labyrinth, I was afraid you’d turn out to be a Minotaur!”

  “What an idea!” He chuckled and slapped his hands against
his knees. A cloud of greenish yellow dust—pollen from all the flowers he’d collected—rose around him like a halo. “Everyone knows that the Minotaur lives under the Gare de l’Est!”

  6

  Alchemy of Blood

  The morning after the party dawned with a radiant light, a shimmer of summer. The rays that balmed Will’s cheeks through an open window also awoke him with a pleasant start. He sprang out of bed with a sense of energy and purpose this entire desultory period had lacked: Marguerite. He whispered her name to himself as if it were an incantation, an alchemical caress of his tongue. The thought of her seemed to flow through his veins with flaming resonance.

  Will dressed with whatever peacock tilt his wardrobe allowed: white-plumed, ruby-red hat, ruffled white shirt and silver vest, dark blue trousers, and gleaming-buckled boots, all of it a compromise between exuberant nobility and being a dandy. His attire served no purpose as to approaching Marguerite successfully, but it reflected his mood.

  He lingered longer than usual over Mrs. Garvey’s simple breakfast, as he knew the difference between paying an early call and paying a too early, rude one. After eating endless buttered rolls and drinking several glasses of ale, Will at last saw the sun lift a few inches over the horizon and knew he could go on his way.

  As he started out on this most reckless errand, Will did not conceal from himself the possible lunacy of what he was doing. For one thing, propriety, given the poet’s marital status, required that Marguerite not be at the poet’s lodgings this early in the day. And if she was there anyway, given Will’s new status as the poet’s rival (at least in his own mind), calling on Marguerite with the poet around was the last thing he should do. He was acting as if Marguerite were the poet’s daughter and he was coming to court her!

  Patience should have been his priority with this most dangerous attraction. He should have waited weeks, or months if necessary, to approach Marguerite alone. But he could not control his new emotion, and therefore patience wasn’t a choice.

  Will couldn’t stop recalling for even a minute the moment he’d first looked into Marguerite’s eyes from the bottom of the stairs, a transformative experience that was like a gaze into a second universe much grander than this one; that was why he had set off on this walk. He felt as though a new kind of blood were flowing through his veins this morning. The energy in him was so deep it might have come from primal elements of the physical world, fire in particular. The sun seemed to confirm this. As it rose higher—he could already feel that this was going to be an exceptionally hot day—he could feel its rays as if they were a wind at his back, pushing him on, a coconspirator the physmprobable love.

  When he glanced down at the pavement for a moment and observed his right hand swinging through a swath of sunlight, he stopped still in his tracks with a sensation somewhere between terror and awe. For an instant, his hand seemed to have become transparent. Sunlight pulsed right through it as if shining through flesh-tinted air. At the same time he thought he could detect, faintly, with sight so ethereal it was almost not physical, tiny, whirring particles in the space his hand occupied. Particles so tiny, and colorless. As if the idea of small particles making up matter and flesh were quite real. Such a scientific fancy had been the talk of the London cafés lately after a broadsheet by the renowned scientific thinker Sutherland Hopkins. Atoms, he had called them, the word used by the ancient Democritus.

  Yes, London right now was aflame with scientific fire, Will had been there long enough to know, pioneers and innovators working away in its nooks and crannies, then bringing their thinking to the cafés and meeting halls where much of the city’s robust intellectual life took place.

  The solar effect went away and his hand became fleshly dull again. When he tried to repeat the effect by stopping suddenly and glancing down, he couldn’t. But he continued to reflect on this odd moment. Perhaps his approaching Marguerite had so concentrated his physical being that he was now in a different relationship even with sunlight, he thought feverishly. Perhaps his atoms had lives of their own! Or else he was so much a lover now that his very flesh had fallen in love with sunlight, and that was why he had observed flesh and light in such an intimate merge, if only for an instant.

  Will knew these to be the thoughts of a poet more than a rational thinker, let alone a scientist, but he was convinced his atomsight had been real. Then he turned onto Rood Lane and felt the sudden palpitations of a wild heart, driving all other thoughts and sensations away. He could almost not bear the surge of anticipation. He approached the poet’s very doorstep, where Marguerite might likely be! As to considering her not being there, he didn’t; he had thrown all emotional caution to the winds.

  The quality of the streets had increased during his walk, Will had noticed, but he was still startled by the grandeur of 39 Rood Lane, the poet’s address and the finest building on the block. The poet had been working as a tutor, so Will wondered over the affluence of 39’s appearance, though he knew tutoring wasn’t the poet’s only income.

  Thirty-nine Rood was a five-story town house of polished rose brick, with two expensive Florentine glass windows on each floor like the square, polished eyes of a geometer. Glass windows were the latest trend, and Will had only seen them in elegant neighborhoods. As to polish, the brass knocker on the front door, four steps up from the street, was so brilliant Will could not look at it for long.

  The gleam that penetrated next was not from an architectural embellishment but from the jacket buttons, belt and boot buckles, and sword hilt of a footman with an unusually regal bearing, who stood at the top of the steps as if waiting to greet him. Will recognized the dark-skinned Moor he’d seen at the party and suspected the footman could be out there as a warning to a love-crazed interloper such as himself. Even the ability to reduce himself to atoms would not suffice to slip past this puffed-up warlord. Will reached in his pocket for the note he had brought for such an eventuality, and as he did so, the sentry extended a note to him as well. Will ignored it.

  “Would you be Mr. Will Hughes, sir?” There was no mistaking the dismissive tone of his sir. He moved the note closer to Will’s chin.

  “Lord Hughes,” Will said, his heart sinking at this confirmation that the sentry posting was for him. Marguerite must have told the poet everything for this footman to be there. Reflecting on that horrible fact, he took the note. It could be the only communication he’d ever receive from the poet or Marguerite again.

  “Thank you for this kindness,” Will said, referring to the note, though he doubted its contents were kind. He went two steps up and said, “Now I must formally request admission to call on the most gracious Lady Marguerite.” He bowed, alertly, keeping in mind the possibility of being shoved down the stairs.

  The footman laughed. “Is milady expecting you?”

  “Not precisely. But there is an urgency.”

  “Well, be off with you then! I’ve not heard good things about you.” The Moor cocked his fist and circled it in a vague way not far from Will’s jaw.

  Swordsman that he was—though without sword—Will could scarcely suppress challenging this overmetaled oaf to a duel. But he did not know what Marguerite’s relationship with the creature was, and clearly the man was following someone’s orders.

  Just as clearly, he might well have miscalculated Marguerite’s reaction to meeting him. Will needed to retreat and reflect. Marguerite had certainly shown loyalty to the poet over him, a display that cut him like a scythe. Better now to just hand over his own note, be gone, and hope for the best in the end.

  The footman took his proffered note with a grimace, ripped it into several pieces, and then, by some sleight of hand that Will was not able to follow, lit the pieces on fire! His note fragments blazed bright in the morning air—as bright as his hopes had been mere moments ago—and then were extinguished in a rain of ash.

  At least he’d memorized the love sonnet included in the note, Will thought with remarkable patience. This was severe provocation, but the need
for restraint still applied. He went back down the steps, turned, and said, “You’ve elicited extraordinary self-control from me, man. That’s your great fortune. It’s my duty as the noble person you’re not and never will be to warn you that my pacifism is not infinite.” Will cocked the feather of his hat at him, as if mockingly suggesting a duel, then went on his way. He heard the footman laughing softly at him as he walked on.

  A couple of blocks away, where the footman could not have seen him any longer, Will opened the note he’d been given. The envelope was white, but the parchment inside was black, written on in a hand Will recognized as the poet’s in an ink of bright red. Eight lines of iambic pentameter:

  For Will

  iv height="0em"> “Betrayer” is too kind a word for you:

  I treated you just like a son and now

  you try to steal my love! The night sky’s blue

  and dung bright gold when I ever allow

  you near my love or me, ever again.

  You blacken words like “mentor,” “ally,” “friend.”