The Watchtower

for the woods to seek cover from the bird’s attack. Will watched his halting, bird-pecked progress, grateful that the bird had chosen Roget to attack and not him.
    “Oi!” The driver’s exclamation brought Will’s attention back to the coach. “That there gentleman didn’t pay me the last half of his fare.”
    “That man was no gentleman,” Will replied, shaking his head. “How did he engage your services in the first place?”
    “I were drinking at the White Horse and he overheard me to say I was taking a young gentleman to the estate of the great John Dee. He told me he’d pay me handsomely if I’d pick him up on the way back, but he only paid half up front.”
    “That will teach you to trust scoundrels such as he,” Will said, getting back into the coach. “But if you promise to get us back to London without stopping for any new passengers—man nor bird—I’ll make up what you lost.”
    The driver was agreeable to Will’s suggestion and whipped the horses into a fast gallop. Above the hoofbeats Will thought he could still hear the flap of a large bird’s wings, but instead of making him feel threatened, the sound comforted Will, with the notion that he was being watched over from above.

17
    The Astrologer’s Tower
    When I had confirmed with the night clerk at the Aigle Noir that Sarah had come back, I went up to my room to pack and wait for dawn and the first train back to Paris. I was too keyed up to sleep, so I sat at the window watching the stone walls around the château take shape in the gray light of dawn and thought about Melusine.
    Oberon had introduced me to her in New York last winter. I’d recognized the name from the fairy tales my mother had told me, but the old, wrinkled homeless woman I’d first met in Central Park hadn’t resembled the legendary fairy of folklore. Melusine was supposed to have been so beautiful that the moment Raymond of Poitou came upon her in the Forest of Coulombiers he had immediately fallen in love with her. She agreed to marry him on the condition that he never look upon her on Saturdays, but as in all such arrangements the mortal spouse eventually gave in to doubt. Spying on her in her bath, he’d seen her long serpent tail and blamed her for the aberrations in their children. When he rebuked her, she sprouted wings and fled, although she haunted the castle for generations. When I met her in New York City, she hung out by sewer manholes and park fountains. She took me on a tour, while in molecular form, through the city’s waterways and tracked down John Dee to his lair beneath the East River. At least we had thought it was John Dee. The apparition turned out to be a trap and we’d both been flushed out into the bay. Because Melusine was a freshwater creature, she’d begun dissolving instantly. I’d just managed to get her to Governors Island before she dissolved entirely and then decanted her into an empty Poland Spring bottle.
    The bottle was locked in my suitcase back in Paris. Her last request had been to bring her home, and I’d been meaning to take the trip to Lusignan as soon as I got my sign. Now it looked as if I might have received that sign. Maybe if I’d taken Melusine back to Lusignan right away, I wouldn’t have had to wait at Saint-Julien’s for so long or come here to Fontainebleau to meet Hellequin. I shuddered thinking of the ghoulish rider and his cloak stitched out of abducted women. I’ll keep an eye out for you, he’d said. Even now I could hear the echo of hoofbeats. I had a feeling I’d never really be free of them.
    Although it was still too early for the train, I got up to go, unable to stand the quiet of my room any longer. Even the repeating pattern in the wallpaper had become maddening … all those fleeing shepherdesses glancing coyly over their bare shoulders, so many leering shepherds … I looked closer at a patch of paper near the door and saw that one of the shepherds had sprouted horns, cloven feet, and an erection. Worse, the frothy bit of shrubbery behind him now disclosed the hunt in all its horrors—the flayed face of Hellequin, the faces of his victims fluttering in his cloak. I spun around to see if all the vignettes in the wallpaper now held this scene, but suddenly I didn’t want to know. I could hear the hoofbeats in my head. I turned and left my room, closing the door behind me and making myself walk down the long, straight hall without glancing left or right at the