The Watchtower

are one. Or were until this evening.”
    The first of these words were as well received as an executioner’s ax, but Will kept his composure. And waited. Hoped, in silence. For more words.
    “Still, there is … maybe … another reason.”
    “What?”
    “There’s no point denying that I did feel … something … when you approached me last evening. Nothing romantic, mind you,” she said sharply, eyeing his hand, being lifted as if to grasp hers. He withdrew it at once. “Something, indeed, I’ve never felt before, and which I did puzzle over afterwards. It had nothing to do with heart or body, or even mind, but maybe it did have something to do with my soul—until I cut it off. Yet, I haven’t quite suppressed it. I even felt it a bit this evening when I first saw you, to be honest. It’s like a spiritual elevation, but so very fleeting.
    “The poet by the way is not only a man of phenomenal eloquence, he also does have a spiritual awareness in him despite his lack of religion. Perhaps I thought I might find understanding for my sensation in speaking to him about it. But all I got was rage. And I can’t believe the poet went so swiftly to another’s arms when he was supposed to be so delirious with love for me as to be willing to defy law and tradition! Cannot!”
    Marguerite began to weep again, but her tears were more shallow this time. That emboldened Will to grip her hand now. “A spiritual bond is the deepest bond two people can have,” he whispered. “We need not be church believers to recognize that our immortal souls are more important than anything else.”
    Despite her grief, Marguerite’s lips curled into the faintest of smiles. “On whose authority do you speak so of souls?”
    “‘Man’s loving heart is the savior,’” Will echoed the poet. He leaned toward Marguerite and brushed his lips against hers. She did not recoil.
    The silver light in her glass seemed to have turned red suddenly, as if the love pulsing through Will’s veins surged outside his body now, into the tavern’s dense air, red atoms dancing amid colorless ones in joyous excitement, water reflecting his atomic dance the way a pond would sunlight.
    Marguerite returned his kiss.

9
    Edelweiss
    Madame La Pieuvre had told me to arrive at her apartment at ten thirty that night, so I decided I’d better take an afternoon nap to be alert for my foray into the nighttime world of the Parisian fey. A wind had come up on my walk back along the rue l’Estrapade, rattling on their hinges the giant key and the man cranking his cookpot. It smelled like the sea and promised rain. The tree outside my window was thrashing when I lay down; the rain when it came sounded like a volley of gunfire. Instead of keeping me awake, though, the sound pulled me into a deep sleep and followed me into my dreams.
    It was the swan dream again, the one I’d had dozens of times before, only it had never rained in this dream before. Now I stood at the edge of a pool watching a white swan gliding across rain-spattered water. Above the steady beat of the rain rose another sound—hoarse, bleating cries that rent the air as regularly and painfully as the lightning split the darkness. One of the flashes of lightning revealed a figure on the other side of the pool—a woman in a white nightgown that clung to her like a second skin, revealing each curve and swell of her lithe figure. Another flash of lightning bleached her figure to marble white and revealed her face … my face. I might have been staring at my own reflection in the water rather than looking across the water, only while I stood on the edge of the pool this doppelgänger was wading into it, the white cloth of her nightgown billowing up to the surface like a bank of clouds bearing the moon aloft through a dark storm-riven sky. She was making her way toward the white swan, who was swimming in circles, craning its neck to the sky and uttering those piteous, wild cries. It seemed to be circling some darker mass within the water, but it wasn’t until the woman (Marguerite, I suddenly knew) reached out her arms and gathered up that darkness that I saw it take the shape of a black swan. As Marguerite cradled the limp creature in her arms, I smelled the acrid tang of sulfur and singed feathers on the air. The lightning flashed again, this time not just illuminating Marguerite and the swans, but striking them, making them glow incandescent. I expected Marguerite and the living white swan