The Watchtower

and then adjusted her bodice without her usual pretense of modesty. “I have so little confidence in us having a life together! Perhaps you would be happier with that weird man, even if he is old enough to be your father.”
    Will grinned at her ingratiatingly, then pulled her to him for a kiss that lingered. Lingering kisses were known to soothe Bess—and not just Bess. The last point being, after all, the heart of the problem the poet had been hired to address. Bess—who in any event had been deemed unsuitable by his father—had her competitors. But none of them, including Bess, persisted in Will’s thoughts the way the poet or his words did. A few of the poet’s lines were running through Will’s thoughts now, as he and Bess hurried down the footpath that exited the estate at a location where large bales of hay were stored:
    The truth in love inebriates like wine,
    until time turns it false as mountain snow
    white clouds will conjure, giving us a sign
    we never know the truths we think we know.
    Will didn’t fancy himself a poet yet, but these lines by his tutor ran in his mind right now so compellingly that he suspected he might want to someday try spinning a poem of his own. Or maybe it was just the charismatic influence of the poet that made these lines surge within him. The poet’s eyes twinkled, and his pale lips curved into a quick smile, but it was the sense of almost immeasurable depth about him that Will found irresistible.
    Maybe the man’s depth also made him write and speak so convincingly about immortality, about how begetting children could make a father live forever.
    Of course, that was the message the poet had been hired to deliver, as Will knew his father was anxious to have him give up dalliances and focus on a special someone, in the interests of both procreation and probably also some lucrative interfamily business arrangement Lord Hughes could finagle from his only son’s nuptials.
    Though lately the poet had been flirting with another theme—how poems themselves could provide immortality—and for some reason that had seemed to draw Will even more forcefully to him.
    Then we never know the truths we think we know was interrupted in his head as he realized he’d lost track of time standing at the boundary of the estate, Bess glaring at him.
    “Will!” This exclamation, uttered as she stomped her foot, cut off his reverie. She held out her arms and stood poised, waiting for the expected kiss. He obliged her, and with a caress beyond that, and finally they parted. Will watched Bess continue on her way with a hopefully sufficient pretense of concern, until she vanished behind the hill.
    Bess had recently been getting more insistent on their future together, yet there was, even his father’s wishes aside, to be no future. She was quite the satisfying lover, with her ample curves and bright blue eyes, but he needed to at least feel for her what he could for a poem: The truth in love inebriates like wine. He needed to be in love like that if he was going to love at all. Bess’s perfumed curves and sensuous lips weren’t getting him there. He sounded out the line now as he headed back toward Swan Hall, in an emphatic iambic beat that was all the rage of England, sweeping over the countryside alongside the popularity of the sonnet.
    The lines would sound even better in a few minutes, coming at Will’s request from the beautiful lips of the poet.
    *   *   *
    When Will came into the great hall, the poet was sitting exactly where he had expected him to be sitting. But his expression radiated despair, not impatience.
    “I am sorry for the delay,” Will said stiffly, uncomfortable at the man’s expression. “I was … detained.” Then he winked to suggest the risqué nature of his detention. “Lost track of time.” No point in lying. When it came to love and its lesser cousins, the poet could see through flesh and bone.
    There was no response in the poet’s features to Will’s words or presence. He continued to look agitated; his high, round brow was furrowed, one of his cheeks was damp as if he’d just wiped away a tear, and his eyes darted nervously as if on the lookout for a rabid bat. But after a while he reached out his hands to take Will’s.
    “I came here with exciting news today,” the poet said, “and also anticipating as always another of our beautiful hours. But who did I find waiting in the hall but your father. Fine enough. But my conversation with him