The Watchtower

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 at 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 beauty 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