by Lee Carroll
I had no intention of telling him about the blue figures . . . but then, looking into those hypnotic silver eyes, I did. The words seemed to spill out as if he were sucking them out of me. I told him about the symbols that changed in front of my eyes and the blue smoke that rose from the box. Then I told him about the blank eyes of the robbers, the smell of sulfur that trailed behind them, the fog that followed me home last night, the way my metal sculpture had seemed to come to life, and, finally, about my father’s visit from Santé Leone, who died in 1987.
When I finished, Will Hughes bent down until I could see his face and his silver eyes flashing like coins. “My dear Garet, after all that, do you have any doubt that something out of the ordinary is happening?”
“I don’t know what you mean by out of the ordinary,” I said carefully.
He sighed and sat down in the chair. He reached for my hand again. “Your mother gave you the ring, but she didn’t tell you where she got it or what it meant?”
“She died soon after,” I said, embarrassed to feel my eyes instantly fill with tears. I looked away, toward the north window and the Cloisters.
“That explains it,” Hughes said. “She didn’t have the time. Assuming her mother had been able to tell her. You say her mother died young as well . . . in the war?”
“Yes, she was caught hiding Jewish refugees and was executed.”
“That’s terrible. So perhaps your mother didn’t know either.”
“Know what?” I looked back to face Will Hughes. The minutes gazing away from him had given me the nerve to question him. “What does this have to do with my mother?”
“Everything. Your mother comes from a long line of women who have a very important role. Here, look at my ring.” He took off his gold ring and handed it to me. When I looked at it more closely, I saw that the stone was actually an intaglio inscribed with a coat of arms. I took my jeweler’s loupe, which I always carried with me, out of my bag and held the ring up to it. The design sprang to life: a stone tower surmounted by a disembodied eye, rays coming out from it. Latin words surrounded the tower but they were backward so I couldn’t make them out.
“The inscription reads, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” he said.
“ ‘Who watches the watchmen?’ ” I translated. He tilted his head at me and smiled. “I’ve made a study of heraldic mottoes,” I explained, holding up my pendant for him to see. “I feel like I’ve seen this one before.”
“Perhaps your mother showed you a picture of it. Are you sure she told you nothing about the Watchtower?”
“No . . . what’s that? It sounds like Jehovah’s Witnesses.”
“Same symbol, different purpose,” he said, sitting back. “The watchtower is an ancient symbol of protection against evil. It stands on the border between the seen and the unseen, between the natural world and the unnatural world, between good and evil.”
“That’s a pretty tall order,” I said. “But I still don’t understand. What is it?”
“Not what; who. You’re the Watchtower, Garet James.”
I tried to laugh—the sentence was so portentous!—but my throat was dry so I coughed instead. He handed me my glass of sherry and waited while I took a sip.
“What in the world do you mean?” I asked when I could speak again.
“It’s what your name means, for one thing. From the Old French garite, which means watchtower. It means that you’re the appointed guardian—”
“The guardian of what?” I asked, unable to restrain my impatience.
He stared at me—I’d have bet he wasn’t used to people interrupting him—then he sighed. “It’s difficult to explain. A guardian against evil, I suppose you could say. It’s a role handed down from mother to mother.”
“Like some sort of secret society?” I asked, incredulous. It was like something from one of Jay’s books, the Central Council of Anarchists, or the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. “Do you know how ridiculous that sounds?” I started to get up, but he was suddenly beside me, a restraining hand on my arm. The quickness of his movement made my head spin. I sat back down, afraid to move until I stopped feeling dizzy.
“I know this all must sound crazy to you, but why don’t you just listen? Pretend it’s a legend you’re reading about in a book, why don’t you?”
“A legend?”
“Yes, a legend that began very early in the seventeenth century when your ancestor met my”—he tilted his head toward the portrait on the wall—“predecessor and exchanged rings with him. That’s why you have the swan ring and I have the tower ring. Will Hughes . . . my ancestor . . . wrote a detailed account of his encounter with a French woman by the name of Marguerite. Marguerite possessed a silver box which contained . . . well, let’s say it contained some valuable information . . . especially valuable to the alchemist John Dee. It was very important that John Dee not get the information inside the box, so Marguerite and Will Hughes sealed it using this ring.” He touched the ring on my hand.
“That’s quite a story, Mr. Hughes, but even if the jeweler I met yesterday was a descendant of the original John Dee, how could he have known that I was going to wander into his shop? And why would he need me to open the box? And then why steal it? I’m sorry, but none of this makes any sense. Why would a complete stranger do all this to me?” For the second time since I’d come into this apartment I was close to tears. I didn’t want Will Hughes to see me cry. With a great effort, I got to my feet.
“Your whole story about guardians and watchtowers and alchemists, it’s just too much. I can’t believe it. And even if I did, what good does it do me? All I want to know is if you can help me find this man who calls himself John Dee so I can find out if he had anything to do with the burglary, so I can prove that my father didn’t have anything to do with it. Can you do that? Can you help me?”
The shimmering light in his eyes seemed to flare for a moment. It lit his whole face up and it nearly took my breath away. He looked younger—he looked like the man in the painting—but then the light faded from his face, extinguished like a dying ember.
“No,” he said. “I can’t help you find Dee.”
“That’s it?” I asked, my voice rising shrilly. “You tell me this wild story about guardians and watchtowers and alchemists and then you tell me you can’t help me?”
“I’m sorry.” He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking out the north window, to the Cloisters, where a red light had just come on atop the tower. I stared at it too, drawn to the beacon much as I had been drawn to Will Hughes’s eyes a few moments ago. When I looked back, I saw that he had gotten to his feet. I was being dismissed.
“I really am sorry that I can’t help you,” he said at the door to the elevator.
“Not as sorry as I am,” I said looking into his eyes—I’d be damned if I’d shrink away afraid to meet his gaze. But I must have been looking at the red light on top of the Cloisters too long because I saw it again, twinned and flickering, at the centers of Will Hughes’s pupils.
The Manticore
In the lobby the driver stopped me and told me he had instructions from Mr. Hughes to take me wherever I wanted to go.
“No, thank you,” I told him. “I’ll walk to the subway.”
I went briskly up Cabrini Boulevard, past Mother Cabrini High School and the chapel where Mother Cabrini was buried, to Margaret Corbin Circle and the subway station at 190th Street, which was near the entrance to Fort Tryon Park. Although the sun was low in the sky and would soon set, plenty of people were still enjoying the unusually mild weather. The same normal scene I’d seen from Hughes’s car coming uptown, but now it all appeared surreal. Had I really just been listening to a story about four-hundred-year-old guardians and alchemists? I was too upset and confused to sit in a subway for thirty minutes. I had to keep moving. I joined the tide of late-afternoon strollers, nannies with their charges, courting couples, and joggers all heading into the park.
I wandered for a while through the Heather Garde
n, where a few late-blooming flowers glowed purple and blue in the ruddy light of the setting sun, trying to absorb some calm from the peaceful setting. My mother had loved this garden, probably because the purple heather had reminded her of those lavender fields of her childhood, and I had come here often when I was doing research at the Cloisters. It was a place where I had felt close to her, but it didn’t give me any peace right now.
As crazy as Will Hughes’s story was—and it was definitely crazy—the part that most upset me was the idea that if there was a kernel of truth in it, and my mother had known about this history, she hadn’t told me. How could she keep something so important from me? It was as if she had hidden away her real self. So, it couldn’t be true. But then why would Will Hughes make up such a story? Could it have any basis in reality?
I climbed up to the flagpole above Linden Terrace, the highest natural spot in the city, where a few teenagers in sweatshirts and low-slung jeans were skateboarding. They politely made way for me as I approached the stone wall overlooking the city. To the south I saw storm clouds gathering over the skyscrapers of Manhattan; to the north was the fortress of the Cloisters, the red light on its tower shining like a beacon.
“I’ll always watch over you, Marguerite,” my mother would sometimes say. And she always used the French version of my name when she said it . . . unless she wasn’t saying Marguerite at all, but was actually saying Ma garite: my watchtower. Had my mother known this story about her family? And if she did, had she meant to tell it to me before died?
I stared at the tower as if it could tell me . . . maybe it could. My mother had done her own research at the Cloisters for years when she was studying for her master’s in French medieval literature at Barnard, and she’d made friends with many of the curators and librarians there. When I’d gone there to research jewelry designs, one of the librarians who’d been friends with my mother was especially helpful to me—Dr. Edgar Tolbert, a specialist in French medieval iconology. I didn’t know if he still worked there, but if he did maybe he’d be able to tell me if my mother had been particularly interested in any tradition surrounding a watchtower.
I knew that even if I found some historical basis for Will Hughes’s crazy story, I still wouldn’t be any closer to helping my father, but something compelled me to head down toward the path that led to the Cloisters. Maybe it was having had my faith in both parents challenged in one day.
As I turned to leave the flagpole circle, I noticed that although the skateboarders had left, there was a man in a red hooded sweatshirt watching me. Or at least he was facing in my direction. His hood was pulled so far forward that I couldn’t really see his eyes. He was probably harmless, I told myself, but still, I should find an area with more people.
The path to the Cloisters, though, was nearly deserted. I considered turning back and exiting the park at Margaret Corbin Circle, but then I’d miss my chance to talk to Dr. Tolbert at the Cloisters today. I glanced back . . . and saw the man in the red sweatshirt about twenty feet behind me.
I sped up, practically running toward the lawns surrounding the Cloisters where I could see a few late-afternoon strollers. When I got closer, I noticed that the people were all coming out of the museum and walking away from it. Where would I go if the museum was closed? And how would I get rid of the man following me? When I reached the downstairs entrance, the guard at the door told me that the museum was closing in fifteen minutes.
“I’m a friend of Dr. Edgar Tolbert, one of the librarians,” I said, my voice coming out in breathless gasps. “I just wanted to talk to him for a minute. Do you know if he’s still here?”
The guard smiled. “Dr. Tolbert is always the last to go home. I think he’s giving a lecture in one of the cloisters. Go on in.”
Before I went in, I turned around to look for the man in the red sweatshirt, but I didn’t see him.
I walked up the long vaulted passage to the Entrance Hall and told the guard at the desk that I was looking for Dr. Tolbert, and he directed me to the Cuxa Cloister. I went through the Romanesque Hall and entered the cloister through an arched doorway flanked on either side by two crouching-lion statues. I saw Dr. Tolbert right away, his shock of snow-white hair atop a regal leonine face making him instantly recognizable across the courtyard. He was lecturing to a small group, pointing up at a figure carved into the capital of one of the columns supporting the arcade around the central courtyard. I took a seat on a low marble wall that rimmed the enclosed garden, thankful for a moment to catch my breath and recover from the fright of being followed in the park. It had been stupid to walk by myself in a city park at dusk, but that was all it was, I told myself, a mugger looking for an opportunity to rob a solitary woman who looked distracted. Surely he’d give up now that I was inside the museum.
I took a deep breath and looked around the cloister, trying to draw calm from my surroundings. After all, monks had come to this place to meditate. The cloister had originally been part of a twelfth-century Benedictine monastery. Even now, when it rested inside a New York City museum, it retained the quiet of centuries within its pink marble walls. The last of the late-afternoon sunlight filled the courtyard like honey spilling into a stone box. A sheet of glass separated the arcade from the central garden, but the sun had still warmed the wall. I leaned against it and looked up at the figures carved into the columns. Fantastic beasts swallowed other animals and men. I remembered learning in art history that the motifs represented the struggle between good and evil, reminders to the monks to remain ever vigilant against the forces of darkness. It certainly seemed that the wrong side had the upper hand in the battles waged by the marble creatures.
“The most impressive collection of deadly beasts adorns this twelfth-century arch from Narbonne, France,” I heard Dr. Tolbert say as he approached my corner. The group gathered under the arch I had come through while Dr. Tolbert described the array of mythical beasts featured on it. When he’d finished describing the griffin, harpy, and centaur, his cane came to rest on the first figure on the left side of the arch. A small boy had begun to drift away from the group; Dr. Tolbert pitched his voice in his direction. “And here is a monster straight out of your worst nightmares!” The boy turned and looked up at the figure on the arch.
“This is the manticore—a beast with the face of a man, gleaming red eyes, three rows of teeth, and a tail that stings like a deadly scorpion’s. It can leap like a lion and its claws are as sharp.” Dr. Tolbert bent down toward the boy, whose face was rapt with attention now. “The only thing good to say about the manticore is that it has a beautiful voice—like a fine flute. But don’t allow yourself to be lulled by its song, because it also has a taste for human flesh.”
“Like a zombie!” the boy declared, shivering with delight and horror. The group laughed and Tolbert dismissed them. I waited until the last one had left before approaching him.
“Margaret James!” he crooned, swooping his arm around my shoulder and drawing me in for a kiss on the cheek. When he held me out at arm’s length to look at me, I saw that his blue eyes were watery. “Ah, you look more like your mother every day. I was just thinking about her today . . . now what was it that reminded me of her?”
“The article in the Times about the gallery being robbed?” I suggested.
His face darkened. “No! The gallery was robbed? I had no idea. I’m terribly sorry. Was anyone hurt?”
“My father was shot, but he’s going to be okay . . .” I couldn’t bear to tell him that Roman was suspected of shooting himself. “But if you didn’t see the article about the robbery, what was it that reminded you of my mother?”
The question distracted him from asking more questions about the robbery. He closed his eyes and tapped two fingers to his forehead in much the same way I tapped my laptop touch pad to wake up the hard drive. “It was an article in a journal,” he said at last, opening his eyes. “It’s in the library upstairs. Do you have time to come up and see it?”
“Yes, of course. Actuall
y . . . I came to see you. I had some questions about my mother and the research she did here.”
“Well, we’re in luck then. The article was on one of her favorite subjects—the watchtower in medieval imagery.”
As Dr. Tolbert escorted me back through the Entrance Hall, I explained that I wanted to see any material concerning medieval watchtowers that my mother had used in her research.
“Yes, I think I have a book she used that mentions a watchtower,” he said while waving good-night to the guard on duty. The guard was ushering the last visitors out; the museum was closing for the night, but I gathered they were used to Dr. Tolbert staying after hours. He unlocked a spiked metal gate and took me up two flights of stairs. Several of his colleagues passed us on their way down saying their good-nights. He ushered me into a square, barrel-vaulted room lined on four sides with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Long wooden tables filled the room. A round leaded-glass window high up on the arched wall at the end of the room glowed dimly, lit by the last fading light of the day. At its center was a stained-glass roundel containing the figure of a winged angel holding a trumpet—one of the angels of the Apocalypse blowing his horn on Judgment Day.
“Have a seat while I find the article,” Dr. Tolbert said. “I think it was in Comitatus . . . or was it Medieval Studies . . . hm . . . maybe I left it in my office . . .”
His voice drifted off as he wandered out of the library and down the hall. I sat at the end of one of the long tables and turned on the last of a row of green-shaded lamps. The chairs were the same as I remembered—wide, wooden, U-shaped frames upholstered in faded green velvet, bolted down with decorative brass tacks. They always reminded me of the chair that Laurence Olivier brooded in when he played Hamlet. If it was as uncomfortable as these, I could see why Hamlet was always getting up to stalk around the castle of Elsinore.