The Watchtower

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 along 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:
    G UY L IVERPOOL
    A LCHEMIST IN THE E MPLOY OF S IR J OHN D EE
    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