The Watchtower

the sanctity of marriage? On offspring as immortality? Are you having children with Lady Marguerite?”
    Will wished he’d replied more sympathetically. But he did not want his tutoring by the poet to end. And he knew that his father, on the subject of contracts, including marital, would be implacable. Lord Hughes’s worldview had no shades of gray. And no sympathy for romantic love.
    “That’s the view your father hired me to promote. But I’m tired of deceiving for pay. Children do bring a kind of immortality, yes. One subject to the whims of fate, but one that can go on a while with good fortune. But a greater immortality is the love that should precede them, and that can inspire great art as well. My sonnets for example, which are not subject to war, or accident, or illness. I hold no hope for the salvation of Sundays, so love and art are my beliefs, and their immortality is greatest when they combine to create great love and art. This is the truth I have discovered in life, not the clichés your father hired me to spout.
    “Even the actor who recites great lines onstage achieves immortality, for lines can live on in the minds of his audience. It’s a crime that I’ve been speaking to you of rank begetting, which a mongrel or rabbit is capable of.
    “But I rant too long. I must leave Stratford for London because if I don’t, Marguerite, the only woman I have ever loved, will go. That is the heart of it.”
    “Your family?”
    “Susanna and Judith will be provided for. Unlike Anne, I love them, but I cannot live a lie with them any longer. If your father cuts me off from the ten thousand pounds I am due, I am offered employment in London as an actor and writer. I had hoped to go to her better provisioned, but she cares so little for material things that I believe we can get by. Still we must have something…”
    Then the poet, his eyes glistening, approached Will. He stretched his hands out and took Will’s hands. Will let him do it with reluctance; he understood the force of his tutor’s emotion, but was appalled at the sudden end to their tutorial friendship, and the indifference toward him it suggested. True love notwithstanding.
    But the poet went on, “Don’t think I am neglecting our bond. I will approach the subject of your future with a new sonnet, composed feverishly this very morning and already recorded in my memory.” He recited it while gazing into Will’s eyes. The tremor in his voice told Will that every word of it was genuine:
    When London sags with mediocrity,
    your presence on the stage will thrill, astound,
    and save next winter from despondency:
    you will be King of Thespians. So crowned!
    Late winter streets are dark there, teem with cold,
    but even shadows will have learned your name,
    a prominence to warm you when you’re old,
    such acting and such writing granting fame
    to outwit death. Will Hughes you are the sun
    to shine on all of England!—greater than
    mere birthchanced heir, The Hughes’s only son:
    the legacy of such a gifted man
    should be his fire within, that’s never ash,
    his blood that flows immortally. My wish!
    The poet dropped Will’s hands as if overcome by emotion and retreated a few steps from him. Will was dumbstruck at the enormity of the poet’s belief, and at the prospect of the upward cataclysm that would occur for him were he to take this message literally.
    The poet went on, “So I urge you, with every fiber of my being, to accompany me to London and join the much esteemed acting company at which I have been offered employment. My assessment of your talents is as objective as Pythagoras’s the area of a triangle. Leave this crass estate, this money-monastery. Your gift for poetry and your sheer presence can make you an immortal and allow you to escape from the clutches of whatever creature Lord Hughes is bringing to you this very hour.”
    Will thrilled to the poet’s confidence in him. The poem’s rousing conclusion, its references to immortal blood and fire, set off some tingling, suppressed sense of destiny. He had the intuition that this destiny could be buried in his family’s primordial past, an awareness with a quite tenuous basis—some whispers he’d heard among the servants when he was much, much younger; ambiguous words his long-departed mother had once said to him—regardless, the word blood seemed to revive this consciousness. Perhaps among his remote ancestors one had once achieved great glory. And he