The Watchtower

or, if some obstacle to such time had appeared, where they could arrange a second rendezvous for later. Will had not yet come to Marguerite’s lodgings—the ones she had obtained after her flight from the poet—because of the danger of the poet spying on her there. Nor had she come to his, for similar reasons. In the rare instance when Marguerite had not been able to come to their rendezvous, she had sent him a note before he left to meet her.
    But for three days after returning from the trip to the north, Marguerite did not appear for their rendezvous, and Will had not heard from her otherwise. He’d waited more than an hour for her each appointed time, gazing into the flow of pedestrians in all directions like a sea captain’s wife peering into distant waves for a familiar ship. But crowds remained coldly alien, people mere whitecaps lifted by an inhospitable wind. And the hours after these disappointments had been barren and broken, except for an occasional firestorm of rage or regret. He raged at such an oppressive fate in love, regretted that he had not made clearer (or known sooner) to Marguerite his desire to go on with her no matter what the barriers between them.
    Of course he preferred that they go forward as immortals, and of course it seared him to think that he would lose her so quickly to a multitude of future lovers. But just a few moments that first midday without her convinced him that having Marguerite around in the present was much more crucial than morose speculation about some abstract future. In any event, if they could only spend time together again now, he would gradually become so much a part of her that she would be overwhelmed by his pain; then she would feel compelled to make him immortal.
    When he doubted such a benign outcome was possible anymore, he found bleak inspiration for the writing of new sonnets in his torment, scribbling in iambic pentameter on scraps of paper he kept in his back pocket while endlessly wandering London streets:
    Her ship’s dark shape drifts slowly toward the sun,
    whose flaming sphere floats briefly on the sea;
    and Marguerite, whom I’ll no longer see
    invades my thoughts: my suffering’s begun!
    Impossible, that she and I are done!
    Yet as the ship turns dot there’s no more “we,”
    and once it vanishes our history
    is boundaried in the past, like time undone,
    as hard to cling to as the pink twilight
    or salt-veined breezes winging past the shore.
    The sun descends; eternal victor night
    engulfs the presence that I so adore.
    Nor will new love console me; it’s my fate
    to understand my heart an hour too late.
    He’d made up a seaside narrative in this poem, to fit a wholly uncertain set of facts. Tragic poems were an outlet, and he often recited “Farewell” and others like it on the long walks he took to distract himself from his sorrow.
    On the fourth day of Marguerite’s absence, Will gave in to desperation and started to wander toward her lodgings, which were in Mynchen Lane. He did this against fierce internal resistance that had stalemated this impulse on the first three days. His resistance was made up of fear of further rejection, of not wanting to take any chances of running into the poet, and of pride resisting the implied surrender of going to her lodgings. But in the end nothing could suppress his overwhelming need to be with Marguerite. He felt a need to embrace her that was deeper than his need to breathe.
    But Marguerite wasn’t at her lodgings. Not on the first knock and not on the hundredth. He had refrained from pounding too loudly in deference to the neighbors, but there was no way she could have been inside and not heard him.
    He’d glanced furtively about for some other means of entrance besides the front door, but even if he’d discovered one, there was no sense to attempting such entry in daylight. Dense curtains rendered all windows inscrutable. Peering down the alleys lining each side of the house, he made out a walled garden well to the rear, belonging to either the house where Marguerite lodged or to a neighbor. Its eight-foot walls topped with thick and sharply pointed black iron spikes did not invite casual entrance, night or day. But he could try coming back with a small ladder, since he was athletic enough to take the wall on from a lesser height. No other possibility came to eye or mind.
    Will finally got himself to leave, but only with a promise to himself to return after dark.
    He wandered nearby