The Watchtower

and made his way back down the long nave, his own footsteps curiously quiet on the stone floor. Perhaps he went barefoot, I thought, as he turned in the single ray of evening light coming through the stained-glass window at the back of the church. For a moment his face shone red-gold—the same color as the Breton cider I’d drunk earlier. Then, as he turned away, his black cloak merged with the shadows and he vanished.
    I took a step forward, a cry rising in my throat, but stopped when I felt a breeze waft against my face. What had the priest prayed for? To be steered by a beneficent wind? I turned in the direction of the breeze until I was facing a side chapel. The small niche was dominated by a raised sarcophagus upon which lay an effigy carved out of black stone. Moving closer, I saw that the figure was of a medieval knight laid out in all his armor. I’d seen dozens like it at the Cloisters—armored knights sleeping for eternity equipped with sword and mace, often at their feet a loyal dog or crouching lion. The feet of this knight, though, lay on the bent neck and broken wing of a dying swan. Dying because an arrow had been shot through her heart. I let my eye travel upward from the swan’s long neck to the knight’s face. There, carved in blackest stone some seven hundred years ago, lay the familiar face of Will Hughes.

21
    Love in the Woods
    Madame La Pieuvre had proven to be a spectacularly different sort of person, Will reflected with some bitterness, a few days after his interview with her. But the results of her guidance had been exactly the same as with all the other “signs” he had tried to follow to Marguerite.
    He was sitting on a boulder in the dense woods adjacent to the gardens at Fontainebleau and felt as bleak as he had in his most discouraged moments in Paris. Madame La Pieuvre had been part octopus and had numerous arms to prove it, she was as witty and charming as anyone he’d ever met, and she had a flotilla of servants in her enormous mansion to serve him an exceptional dinner and a variety of gorgeously colored drinks, all of which he’d never heard of or tasted before. Madame La Pieuvre had freely told him that she had heard from Marguerite recently, that Marguerite was in Fontainebleau, and that she would love for a man named Will Hughes to come there and see her; hopefully Madame might run across Will in Paris and tell him! All Madame asked in return for this priceless information was a bit of advice from Will on investing, upon learning of his own interest in the nascent stock markets of England and France.
    But, having scoured Fontainebleau from end to end now, from the château’s most beautiful corner to the forest’s thickest bramble, from the most intricate walk in the garden to the finest gleam on the château’s sloping roof, from the most obscure window to the noon-splashed depths of the pond in the woods, he’d found no sign of Marguerite. And he was prepared to admit to himself that Jean Robin, church steps’ note, and all else notwithstanding he might be no closer to Marguerite now than he was in their most painful days of separation back in London.
    Will could not gain entrance through any of the château’s heavily guarded doors, for this was one of Henry IV’s most zealously secured residences. Will could have been impaled for giving a guard the wrong look. But he’d managed, climbing thick-foliaged trees that afforded concealment on a moonlit night, to look fruitlessly into quite a number of the château’s rooms. No one.
    Marguerite must have known, when she chose to summon Will here through Madame La Pieuvre, of the obstacles to entry. She’d had ample opportunities to leave him a new sign and had left him none. If she had seriously summoned him here … for his most excruciating thought now was that she hadn’t summoned in any benign way, that she merely toyed with him like wind with a leaf, a dark wind of lingering anger over their last fight, a wind that she lashed out at him with. Marguerite’s inaccessibility, her invisibility, her absence, seemed to suggest one thing: as in Paris, the purpose of offering hope was to torment him. Will was being tortured to death by his own love!
    On the second day he purchased a spyglass in a nearby town and concealed himself in a bramble in the woods to avoid the suspicion of capital espionage. Then he relentlessly scanned all the château’s windows day and night, hoping for the merest glimpse of that