The Watchtower

it’s so common a name,” she murmured. “I didn’t realize…”
    “Realize what, darling?”
    But she only shook her head. “You were right. This … coincidence explains so much. We were meant to meet … why fight it?” She was trembling so hard that Will took her in his arms to warm her, but it took a long time to dispel the chill from her flesh.
    *   *   *
    They did not return to the city that night. It was the first time, Will realized with no small excitement and pleasure, that Marguerite had been willing to stay with him overnight. Will could not help but attribute her willingness to the “coincidence of the swans,” as he put it to himself. For the first time since he’d fled his ancestral home, he blessed his lineage.
    Marguerite led them to a tavern with rooms to let not far from the pond, a place she denied any previous experience with (except having heard of it), though in that regard Will suspected otherwise. But her past was her business. He still preferred not to ask too many questions. Their glorious future together was what mattered.
    They dined surprisingly well, given the rural setting, and then, tired from the heat and love of the afternoon, retired early. The sky was now a perfect pitch of lavender outside their room’s window, which looked out from the rear of the tavern onto a straggly yard, then a dense stand of maple trees amid tangled underbrush. The unusual light revealed heavy clouds moving in, the air growing damp and close with impending storm. Will and Marguerite embraced as they stretched out on the narrow bed, as if sheltering from the weather. They’d managed to doze off lightly when a thunderclap severe enough to shake the tavern’s timbers brought them to sitting up straight. Then a few lightning-to-thunder sequences erupted in quick succession, followed by a fusillade of rain against the bark-shingled roof, volleylike, with a sort of military precision. It sounded to Will as if water might be warring on the earth, an audacious attempt at overthrowing one element by another. Then came another bolt of lightning, not followed by thunder but instead by a piercing cry from the woods outside, perhaps from an animal injured by the lightning bolt, or claw, or teeth, or knife.
    Their room was nearly pitch-black now. Marguerite got up clutching her nightgown, then lit the candle on their night table and brought it over to the window, though its glow was not going to penetrate the darkness very far. Beyond the yard, the window looked out on impenetrable obscurity. Will got up as well but more lethargically, not particularly moved by the mayhem of the storm or its possible victim, and came to stand by Marguerite’s shoulder. The next bolt, shimmering silver as if a large diamond in the sky had exploded into splinters, illumined nothing below but the yard’s high grass.
    A second cry pierced the air. Marguerite turned to Will and said, “I’ve got to go see what that is.”
    In the flash following next, her face struck him as incomparably beautiful. The thunder that exploded was so loud Will had to repeat his response. “I’ll go, too,” he told her, though he was still naked. “It’s too dangerous out there.”
    “Silly boy. One of us must stay up here and keep a lookout for the other. Stay by the window. Just in case I wind up screaming, too.”
    Will put a restraining hand on Marguerite’s arm, but she spun away from him and was out the door and down the stairs before he could even find the chair over which he’d draped his clothes. When he heard her open the yard door, he decided he’d better stay at the window to watch her. Marguerite strode out into the center of the yard, her nightdress billowing about her in a warm wind, like the wild wings of an uncertain angel. She glanced around closely in the thick grass; then, apparently having seen nothing in the yard, peered into the woods.
    “Be careful, please!” Will called down to her, with little confidence she could hear him. The wind was blowing the leaves in the woods at an upward angle now, as if it originated in some vent in the earth, and likely it had cast his words away from her.
    A third cry tortured the air. Marguerite must have had a sense of where it came from for she grew more focused in her gaze, looking at the woods to her left. She took three steps in that direction, and then Will saw, to his horror, a bolt flash only about twenty feet over her head and plunge toward the ground. The bolt