The Watchtower

couldn’t make out his eyes. The watch, now firmly in my hand, seemed to pulse, as if the fabric of time itself was a living thing, and the watch was its beating heart. Then I unsnagged my backpack from the railing and darted past the frozen businessman, the sneezing nun, and the Boy Scouts in their soiled uniforms, and dashed through the gap in the train doors. As soon as I did, the doors slid closed behind me, and the motion inside and outside the train recommenced. A whistle blew, a voice announced the departure of the train for La Rochelle Ville, and we were moving. I looked out the glass doors to see the man in the black coat slowly turning to watch the train pull out of the station, his head swiveling to face me.
    Recalling the leap he’d made over the Luxembourg gate, I kept my eyes on him until the train had cleared the platform and he was only a black smudge in the distance. Then I sat down, clutching my watch, staring at the hands placidly ticking off the time. Had it been the watch that made time stop on the platform? But how? I’d made the watch myself and I wasn’t aware of endowing it with any supernatural time-stopping abilities. Still, I was glad the watch hadn’t broken. I spent the rest of the trip fixing its chain with the pair of needle-nose pliers on my Swiss army knife, my mind engaged with another problem. Why had the man in the black coat followed me to Poitiers? How had he been able to move when no one else (but me) could? And was he even now following me to Lusignan?
    I stared out the window uneasily at the green countryside. We’d entered a verdant valley with a river flashing below—the Vonne, I recalled from my guidebook—trees encroaching so close to the track that the car filled with a green watery light. I waited until the conductor announced Lusignan, then leaped up and out the train doors as if I were in an espionage movie trying to evade Russian spies. But no one got out with me. The platform was deserted and remained so after the train pulled out. The station—a two-story, cream stucco house with green shutters and geraniums in the window boxes—was locked and shuttered. I stood for a moment watching the train to La Rochelle Ville disappear in the distance, feeling as if I’d somehow slipped off the map of France.
    All the time I was in Paris I’d listened to American tourists complain about the crowds. They should come here, I thought, starting off down a cobblestone street that ran narrowly between high stone walls. I didn’t see a single person on the walk into the center of town. If people were stirring in the houses I passed, they did so silently behind thick stone walls and heavy wooden shutters. Or maybe they were all on their grandes vacances in Brittany or the Midi. Even the town square was deserted.
    Beside the ancient church I did see a sign for the rue de la fée Melusine and, following that, a bar named for her. I followed signs for “the Vestiges” of the Château into an open square where a few workmen in green coveralls were strewing gravel on empty paths. There was a small Office de Tourisme, but its sign told me it wasn’t open until 10:00 a.m. I climbed a hill, lured by café umbrellas and plastic flags, but found only an empty park with a double allée of pollarded trees, colored lights strung in between them, and stone, lichen-covered benches. I sat down on one of the benches and looked out over the Vonne valley, feeling sadness seep into me with the chill of the old stone.
    In the story my mother had read to me the Château of Lusignan was a great castle with flags flying from its many towers. Melusine had built it for her husband, Raymond, and their descendants ruled there for over four hundred years. Now there was nothing, not even a plaque to commemorate where it had once stood. There wasn’t enough left perhaps to even attract a few tourists. It felt as if Melusine and the dynasty she had founded had evaporated as surely as she had dissolved into water. What was left to return her to? What would she make of her once grand home?
    I wandered back down the hill and past the closed tourist office, noticing now a small wooden sign pointing again to LES VESTIGES DU CHÂTEAU. I followed the arrow down a steep, narrow dirt path that clung to the hillside below the park. As I descended, I heard the rush of water and glimpsed flashes of silver between the trees—the Vonne running below in the valley. I came across a stone wall, a bit of toppled