The Watchtower Read online

Go slither off, foul snake, your hole awaits,

  midhell, red hot. Beware my love that hates.

  Will walked for a while with the rapidity of a madman, as if physical exertion might sweat the now even-further-sharpened pain out of him. He zigged and zagged the teeming streets, walking a rough rectangle among Fylpot Lane, Thames Street, Petit Walas, and Tower Street, finally beginning a roundabout semicircle back toward Harp Lane and Mrs. Garvey’s. The day was as hot as his early sense of it had predicted, as if Hades were paying a visit by air as well as incident. By the time Will had caught his first glimpse of the sun-splashed Thames, the river filled with a variety of vessels flying multicolored nautical and national flags with an array of symbols on them, his gaudy attire was soaked through with sweat to a near uniform gray.

  The hope that kept him half sane while on this most despondent walk was that the front-step encounter had been the poet’s doing alone, as the note seemed to be. Though Marguerite must have been trusting enough of—and sufficiently allied with—the poet to have mentioned Will’s approach to her, perhaps she hadn’t anticipated such jealous anger. Perhaps her ensuing protest against the poet’s instructions to the footman had been so fervent that she was bound and gagged this very moment on one of the upper floors, weeping and moaning. Such a mental picture enraged Will so at a couple of points that he actually turned and headed back toward 39 Rood, but recollecting his lack of a sword and the miserable fact that Marguerite must have told the poet about him, he caught hold of himself and resumed his melancholy meander.

  Another possibility, of course, was that the poet and Marguerite were of one mind concerning his brazenness, in which case he might as well pitch forward into the sizzling, fetid street now and lie there until he expired.

  All his conjecture, whether of the more or less hopeful kind, was excruciating in another way. Despite his attraction to Marguerite, Will still felt a deep, near-filial bond with the poet, and the notion of the poet’s hating him now added a deep lugubriousness to all his moods and thoughts. He’d neither considered nor expected that the poet would learn of Marguerite’s effect on him so quickly, and that he had was a crushing reality.

  Finally Will grew tired to the point of collapse from his fevered meanderings and developed a blazing thirst to go alo with his bleak ruminations. He slumped down into a chair at an empty table at Baker & Thread’s, a large, early-opening saloon in the Seething Lane section about two miles northeast of Mrs. Garvey’s.

  Drying his face with a napkin, he ordered two foaming glasses of ale from a serving woman whose aging features were as wind-creased as a ship’s prow.

  “What size, sir?” she asked him.

  “The largest size you’ve got. And a pudding to go with them.”

  “What kind?”

  “Any kind!” He was exasperated, but she was, after all, simply trying to take his order. “Sweet,” he relented. “Please make it sweet.”

  And there Will was sitting nearly two hours later, in the same slouched-back posture as when he had given his order. His chair, barely in the shade when he’d first sat there, now took the full blaze of the sun, but he was too lost in despair to move. Will was halfway through his sixth drink now, all paid for in advance as he was not previously known to the establishment. The remains of a largely uneaten luncheon order of beef stew lay pushed aside on a plate to his left.

  Just then a lumbering bear of a man approached him, tipped a rakishly perched ship captain’s hat at him, and asked if he could join him. Will had observed the man gazing at him for a time from a table in the inner recesses of the tavern.

  “Who would you be, sir?” he asked, glancing at him.

  The man had a heavy, black beard, sunken, dark eyes, and deep jowls and was wearing a many-buttoned coat the dark gray wool of which was too thick for the weather. In the blurring effect of a blinding sun, Will thought he could indeed have been taken for the offspring of a bear and a human. Taking Will’s question as an invitation, the man sat down with a force that jarred table, plates, and glasses. The serving woman cast a glance in their direction. Will pushed his own chair back from the table to contradict any sense of hospitality.

  “Guy Liverpool’s the name,” the man said heartily, passing a finely engraved calling card—it looked as if it had been sprinkled with gold dust—to Will, who didn’t immediately take it. Liverpool then put the card faceup in the middle of the table and extended his beefy right hand toward Will instead. Will was tempted not to take the hand either, finding this man somehow repulsive, but after an insulting pause he did give a light grasp in return, calculating that the man would grow insistent if he refused. He glanced down at the card:

  GUY LIVERPOOL

  ALCHEMIST IN THE EMPLOY OF SIR JOHN DEE

  No address, or other information of any sort.

  Will gazed wonderingly up into the man’s black eyes, shadowy and impossible to read with any acuteness in their hollows. He’d heard of Dee, of course, if not of this gargantuan employee; John Dee was the best-known alchemist in England, though a table visit from the king himself was not going to impress him much in his love-crushed state. Dee was a learned man of letters as well as an alchemist, and his personal library was reputed to hold tens of thousands of volumes and rival the Crown’s. Dee was so celebrated—a sometime adviser to kings—that Will, upon reflection, could not readily accept that this man had a connection to him. Anyone could print a card!

  Dee was also rumored to have flirted with practicing black arts. On at least one legendary occasion, the so-called Wormwood Convention, he and some associates had tried to summon supernatural beings. It had been written about in “the press” (pamphlets at that time) and also been the subject of posted broadsheets. Some anonymous witnesses stated afterward that Dee had not cared about the nature of the beings summoned so much as that a being from another world appeared. Will, who’d heard about these notorious endeavors even in the countryside, was not attracted to a mind-set in which no difference was detected between angel and devil. He picked up the card and moved it back across the table to Liverpool. If the man was offended, his hirsute features did not show it. But his next words to Will were quite bold:

  “What exactly would your occupation or education be, m’lad?” he asked, eyeing Will’s attire, which, even with the grayish cast his perspiration had given it, was of aristocratic quality. “This is an odd hour of the day not to be gainfully employed!”

  Liverpool glanced up at the sun as if it were a moral censor. Then he took from a gaudy pocketbook that contrasted with his bleak coat two small lumps of metal, one gold and the other lead. He put them on the table, but then covered them with a handkerchief as the serving woman approached them; he sent her off with an order of Spanish wine for both of them, one that Will, tired of ale, did not protest.

  After a pause, Will said, “My situation would be none of your business.”

  Now Liverpool’s features did look hurt: his jaw dropped, his lips formed a compressed oval that resembled a pout, and his eyes narrowed to slits. He moved his chair back from the table as if recoiling from Will’s comment, rattling the table and the dishes on it. Will noticed that nothing connected the chair to the table or the dishes, casting doubt as to how this ripple effect occurred. As he pondered this question, a chill crept up his spine.

  He’d been attacked by the devil once today already, in the form of that miserable footman. Was it happening a second time? He was not going to sit here idly and suffer black wizardry, in the wake of a severed love. Yet, he was not quite ready to get up and leave.

  “It’s just that you look an unusually bright and energetic sort,” Liverpool said plaintively. “No meaning to offend. You look that even with all the liquor you have in you, at this ungodly-early hour. So, here I am, your humble servant Guy Liverpool, with a remarkable opportunity to present to you, and you’re discouraging me. It beats the damnation out of me, I tell you.” Liverpool looked around as if he were desperate to escape this social encounter, so prof
ound was the pain that Will had inflicted on him.

  “portunity?” Will asked. He suspected Liverpool was at best just putting on some silly wizard’s show for him.

  But, he’d almost certainly blown up his acting job this morning, he reminded himself, which was the rationale for even being in London. And he wasn’t returning to his father’s house, he reminded himself more adamantly. Maybe he should hear the oaf out—to a point. “If it’s alchemy, my good Mr. Liverpool, I have to caution you against bothering to speak. I am of noble lineage. A metal trade is, put bluntly, beneath me!”

  Liverpool drew in a long, whistling breath, as if his patience were sorely tried, before replying, “It is a sort of alchemy, lad, but not of the base-metal kind, you may relieve yourself on that point. I must rebuke you nonetheless, though. Sir Dee, one of the great minds of this or any other time, is an alchemist. That’s no mere craft, no sport for gutter guilds. Its source is a heightened spirit, same as any preacher’s is. But please, let me not digress…”

  Will yawned.

  “Along the streets surrounding this tavern, in this very Seething Lane neighborhood sometimes referrred to as Exchange Alley, a new sort of alchemy is coming into our fair land. Slinking in and out of the darkest corners for now, but make no mistake that this is the port of entry and it is coming. From the Low Countries, the exalted spirit of which contradicts their names; note that Holland, for example, is but one added letter from spelling Holy Land.

  “The public isn’t aware of this tide yet, just a select few. Which I am inviting you to join. Visionaries who ride this tide using their energies, intellects, spirits, and—if I may be so presumptuous—fortunes, though only to what extent prudence dictates, will be richer and more venerated than the greatest of alchemists. The new alchemy requires no tools, no chemicals, no base metals. No fire or air. Only the vision to ride the tide and, if I may add this, a facility with numbers.”

  “Numbers?” Will was not a mathematician, but he did enjoy working with the numbers involved in writing formal poetry.

  “Yes, numbers.”

  “What exactly is it you speak of, then?” Will asked in a more energetic voice than before.

  “The stock market, my boy, the alchemy of which can perform miracles no metal ever forged can dream of.” Liverpool propelled his chair back to the table’s edge. “A place where a mere piece of paper is worth a pound one day and a hundred pounds the next. Certain streets are starting to seethe with it, on the sly, of course, as the king’s agents are all about. It won’t be lawful until the chancellor of the exchequer figures out a way for the king to get his fair share! Or more.

  “This is the true alchemy, son! I’d like to introduce you to it. The alchemy of ‘all that glitters is gold.’ Where those in the know reap all that glows.”

  Will allowed himself a minute to ponder the man’s ravings.

  Wealth could make a crucial diffce to him, for whatever of his hopes remained with Marguerite after the morning’s calamity, and for continued independence from his potentially vengeful father. And he was attracted to the number logic of poetry, the math of its rhythms, even if the crassness of commerce had never appealed to him. But he suppressed this reaction. He’d received no tangible evidence to support anything Liverpool had said, and John Dee was someone who had summoned demons with aplomb.

  Liverpool, observing Will’s hesitation, grew more expansive. “If riches are not enough, son, ponder immortality. Eternal glory will come your way for being part of such a grand innovation as the stock market, which will reveal all preceding economies for the crudities they are. But then there’s also the physical immortality this wealth can be used to find. Because, in the end, life’s all in the blood, my boy. In the blood.”

  “What?”

  “If we can transform the nature of human blood in the same way the stock market is changing money, in the same way the ancient alchemists changed lead, we can live forever, man. Simple as that!”

  Will’s thoughts went to that sunlight, passing through his hand as if it weren’t there, hours ago. Delineating the very atoms of his hand! Was a new sort of blood possible?

  But he could not linger on such wild hopes, not with this bearish man still directing a heavy, burdensome stare at him, not on a day when the deepest romantic hope of his life had been dashed. He’d had enough dreams for one day.

  Even as Liverpool removed his handkerchief to show that both metal lumps were gold now, something Will dismissed as magic, he got up without a further word and stalked away from the table, onto the crowded pavements. Ten feet away, he turned back toward Liverpool to say, “I’m at Mrs. Garvey’s in Harp Lane if you care to bring me actual evidence of this alchemy, more than rhetoric and scheming. Documents, for one. I am neither fool nor waif to be trifled with so. Good day, sir!”

  “Expect me soon,” Liverpool replied in a booming voice. “As lead turning to gold before your eyes has not been enough!” His eyes were already scanning the tavern’s shadowy interior, as if for other prospects.

  Will strolled briskly back now to Mrs. Garvey’s. He remained exhausted from walking, drinking, exasperating conversation, and heartache, but the prospect of deep rest in his bed overcame all his fatigue.

  Though, one thing he couldn’t bear much anymore was heat. He crossed abruptly over to the shady side of the street, diving for the shadows as though diving into an ocean of coolness … and collided with a man so muffled in black robes that he’d been indistinguishable from the surrounding shade.

  “Excuse me,” Will said.

  “Prego,” the dark-robed figure muttered under his breath, darting quickly into the even deeper black of an alley like an eel slithering into the shelter of a shoal. A flash of gold accompanied his retreat—a cross at his neck that Will recognized. It was the censorious priest from the party. Will shuddered at the coicidence as if a black cat had crossed his path, but then dismissed his reaction as an aftereffect of his earlier disappointment and his meeting with Guy Liverpool. It was little wonder that an Italian priest would lurk in the shadows. Catholicism was a serious offense here in England. The priest was the one who should be afraid. Not him.

  7

  The Octopus

  Early the next morning I took the bouquet Monsieur Lutin had given me (kept fresh in a water glass during the night, then wrapped in wet paper towels and secured in my messenger bag) and started off for the Institut Océanographique. I took the rue l’Estrapade past the walled garden of the Lycée Henri IV, just one of the many buildings in Paris named for that monarch. Pausing to read the plaque on the school, I realized that Henri IV had ruled France when Will Hughes first came to Paris looking for Marguerite. As I continued down the street, I wondered what Paris had looked like then. Had Will walked on this very street, searching the crowded Latin Quarter for signs of his beloved Marguerite? Certainly now there were “signs” everywhere—a tin cutout of a man cranking some kind of steaming cookpot, an enormous bronze key hanging from a locksmith’s shop, the seal of Paris carved into the cornerstone of a building …

  I stopped in front of that one to look closer at a ship riding the waves. Ships were all over Paris—even on the lampposts outside the Opera House—because of the crest. I had never thought it strange, but now that I knew about the mer fey I wondered if the symbol was a sign of their dominion over the city. I looked again at the card Monsieur Lutin had given me. Madame La Pieuvre, Conservateur de Bibliothèque, Institut Océanographique. My experience with librarians was limited to the draconian doyennes at the main branch of the New York Public Library, where I often went to research images for jewelry designs. I could only imagine how severe the head librarian at a prestigious Parisian institution might be.

  So when I arrived at the building on the rue Saint-Jacques and found the cast-iron gates of the institute locked, I felt a guilty sense of relief enhanced by the forbidding appearance of the building. Twin gold seahorses stood sentinel on either side of the gate. Above them hovered an enormous gold octopu
s, its tentacles spread out as if to catch the unwary visitor. I quickly checked the library hours on the sign, saw I had an hour to kill, and decided to spend it walking in the nearby Luxembourg Gardens.

  I sighed with relief as soon as I walked through the park gates and into the deep greenery of an allée of pollarded plane trees. Could there be anything more French than a double line of old trees evenly spaced? The proportions felt just right, as if the world were ordered. I felt my pace—and my heartbeat—slow. You couldn’t rush through an allée; you had to stroll.

  The shady allée opened onto a broad, green circular lawn, embraced by a double, curving balustrade topped with marble urns overflowing with purple, yellow, and white flowers. Flowers in the same palette bordered the lawn. I sighed aloud. It was like walking into an impressionist painting—specifically John Singer Sargent’s In the Luxembourg Gardens. As a child I’d often fantasized about being able to walk into a favorite painting …/p>

  I came to an abrupt stop. On the other side of the lawn, in the shadows of the trees, stood a tall man in a long coat and a wide-brimmed hat. I caught my breath at the sight of him not only because he was clearly the same man I’d seen the night before last in the Square Viviani and yesterday in the Arènes de Lutèce, but also because seeing him here, while I’d been thinking about stepping into a painting, had jarred another memory. When I’d studied the painting of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, the one I believed Will had sent me, I had experienced a momentary vision of the painting as a live scene—and into that scene had walked a man in a long coat and a wide-brimmed hat. This man. Could it be that he was an emissary sent to lead me to the Summer Country? If so, he was a rather coy emissary. He’d already turned and was striding away from me.

  I ran after him, into the paths that meandered around the playground and the beehives, bumping into old men playing boules and stylish women on their way to work. I caught a glimpse of him exiting the park through the south gates, but then I got held up by traffic crossing the rue Auguste Comte. By the time I got to the other side, I thought I’d lost him. The avenue de l’Observatoire was divided in the middle by a park punctuated by statues and bordered by rows of chestnut trees. I couldn’t tell what side of the street he’d gone to, and he could be lurking behind any of the trees or statues … then I saw him—or his hat, actually—over a statue of a naked woman halfway down the block. He was walking south.