The Watchtower

eyes I was already unsure if what I saw there was panic or excitement. While one of her hands pushed the lustful triton’s face away, the other gripped his muscular thigh, her fingers taut against his scaly flesh.
    “My dear friend Gianni had a trick for capturing the moment of capture, did he not?” a voice behind me inquired.
    I turned and found Madame La Pieuvre in a floor-length, sea-green caftan embroidered with white tentacles. She held a glass of champagne in one hand, a bottle in another, and an empty glass in a third. A fourth arm snaked out from behind her back and gently caressed the nymph’s marble face. “I recall the young girl who posed for this. She was half in love with Gian Lorenzo and half frightened of him. I used to say that he seduced his models and then abandoned them just to give them this conflicted look on their faces.”
    “Gian Lorenzo?” I asked. “Do you mean Gian Lorenzo Ber—”
    “Please don’t get Octavia started on all the famous artists she’s known,” a woman’s voice called from another room. “You’ll never make your appointment in the Luxembourg.”
    Madame La Pieuvre smiled and, leaning closer to me, whispered, “She’s jealous of the ones who painted me nude. But Adele is right. You have a rendezvous in the park at midnight and I have a few particulars to share with you. Come…” She draped one arm around my shoulders and steered me in the direction from which the second voice had come. We entered an elegant salon furnished in gilt and silk-upholstered Louis Quatorze furniture and thick Persian rugs, all in shades of blue and green that recalled the sea. Floor-to-ceiling windows were open to a terrace affording a view of the Luxembourg and, in the distance, the Eiffel Tower lit up like a Roman candle. I was so taken by the view that I didn’t immediately notice the petite woman seated in a deep, silk-upholstered bergère armchair. When I did look at her, I gave a little start of surprise. It was Madame Weiss, the proprietor of the Hôtel des Grandes Écoles.
    “I believe you’ve met Adele before, oui ?” Madame La Pieuvre asked, pushing me gently forward with one arm while pouring champagne into a glass with another.
    “I didn’t realize”—I faltered awkwardly as Madame La Pieuvre handed a glass to me while refilling Madame Weiss’s glass and casually draping an arm over her friend’s shoulder—“that you were acquainted with the fey, Madame Weiss. Did my mother know when she stayed with you?”
    “Please call me Adele … and, yes, your mother knew of my … liaisons . Our families were long acquainted. During the war your grandmother and my mother worked in the Resistance together. And it was your mother who introduced me to Octavia.” Adele smiled lovingly at Madame La Pieuvre—a look that suddenly recalled to me the conflicted longing in the marble nymph’s eyes. But why conflicted? Octavia La Pieuvre looked gentle and refined—no rapacious triton. It wasn’t fear that was mixed with Adele’s love, though; it was sadness. When I looked back at Madame La Pieuvre, I saw that same sadness reflected in her dark obsidian eyes. But when she trained her eyes back on me, the sadness vanished.
    “Adele’s family has long been friends to the Watchtower—as have my people despite the occasional differences of opinion. The more snobbish of the mer fey looked down on Marguerite for choosing to become mortal, but I have always respected her choice. She did it out of love—”
    “And look what she got for it!” Adele interrupted angrily. “That silly boy became a vampire just as she became mortal. So after all that they still couldn’t be together.”
    “Yes, it was regrettable that Marguerite sacrificed her immortality for a lover who was clearly not worthy of her love at the time . But I have noticed as the years have gone by that Will Hughes shows signs of maturing into the kind of man who might someday be worthy of the Watchtower.”
    As Madame La Pieuvre spoke, her eyes remained on me, but one of her hands slipped into Adele’s lap to grasp her hand. I reflected that their version of the Will and Marguerite story was not exactly as Will had related it to me, but I didn’t think it prudent to get in the middle of their argument.
    “If he were worthy, would he have taken the box from Garet and abandoned her?” Adele demanded.
    “How—?” I began, appalled that the details of my love life were public knowledge. But the two