The Watchtower

prolonged dark while until at last slumping over into sleep. The rising sun had awoken him, a caress so fine on his eyelids that at first he thought the rays were Marguerite’s fingertips, until he opened his eyes onto an empty bench.
    Tonight, even as rain relented and a warm breeze picked up from the south, he knew he couldn’t maintain another vigil. Hot as he might want his hopes to be, the storm had washed away fire to reveal ice. As high as his spirits had soared on recognizing the sketch, so low did they plummet now. Chilled, even trembling, with rain as he was, Will closed his eyes with fatigue and felt as if he had dived into a black pool, an anti-pool to the one he and Marguerite had lingered by. The swans from that pool were circling him now, but he could only see the black one, and him vaguely, a faint outline in murk. His white mate was invisible. Marguerite was gone.
    As soon as the 11:00 p.m. priest padlocked the doors, Will trudged back to his lodgings.
    In the next two weeks Will visited the church twice daily, at 10:00 a.m. and 10:00 p.m., but his vigils were over. He might stay a few minutes at 10:00 a.m. or an hour or two, mostly the latter, depending on his mood, but he never stayed past the early afternoon. At night he would be there only until the closing. In the early visit the pain of Marguerite’s nonappearance would soon become unbearable, searing like a physical wound, an excruciating sadness. In the second, he often arrived numbed by daylight activities, especially drinking, but the pain would reach him nonetheless. He’d gone beyond casting about for explanations, as if his wound were congealing, but that didn’t help with the pain.
    Hope of her coming had receded, yet he was determined to wait until the end of his life! He might be only nineteen, but there was no life for him beyond Marguerite.
    Eventually, at the end of one of the meandering walks that often filled his afternoons, he stumbled on a street that brought life into this dreadful time, something to anticipate each day besides disappointment. The rue Quincampoix was little more than an alley threading its way through the commercial center, but the alley contained bustle and clamor, hands raised with shouts, animated conversations while printed flyers were flung about. Will’s French was mediocre, yet he recognized that the din in the alley was not French, nor any language he was familiar with, but was a number-laced jargon sequenced to fingers held aloft in various configurations. This number world reached him in the same creative place that had arranged his thoughts into metrical poetry. Soon he realized that this was the phenomenon Guy Liverpool had spoken of, Paris’s primitive stock market, more confined and more boisterous than London’s Exchange Alley. “The future of Europe,” Liverpool had called it.
    Will made Quincampoix part of his postchurch walking routine, luxuriating in mania and cacophony, feeling at home as if Guy Liverpool had been prescient on his future. It was a strange place to be soothed, but it was also the opposite of the dark, cold solitude at the church. The rue Quincampoix was rambunctious with raw emotions, even if they were mostly greed, anger, and envy. At least they weren’t the emptiness of his beloved’s absence. By the fourth or fifth visit, talking to no one and not knowing a word of this tongue, he had figured out what was going on. The flying hands, shouts, and whirled papers were bids to buy or sell stock certificates, which were percentages of ownership in companies.
    His figuring out inspired, one afternoon, historical thoughts. Street markets must have been gathering momentum for a while now, in a citied world well beyond the grassy hills of Somerset in which he’d come of age. Despite their brief past, such markets could have a long future. London and Paris were not the simple castles and manors of medieval times. They were gigantic entities, growing and growing. Indeed rue Q’s mayhem, boom and sink of ask and bid, was like a pulse in the street, maybe the tiny, incipient heart of an endless city to be, a world capital.
    Of course, still, Marguerite was all that mattered. The thought of her drove him back to his lodgings, so he could rest and dine before returning to Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. He must not miss his 10:00 p.m. appointment, ever. It was still his main reason for living.
    The next afternoon, having eaten too heavy a lunch and drunk one too many glasses of