The Watchtower

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 in his improbable 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