The Black Tower

by Louis Bayard

  CHAPTER 14

  Treasures of a Reliquary

  “YOU MUST EXCUSE the…so seldom get visitors up here…not much in the way of a chair…”

  Father Time, my new friend, sputters his apologies as he prods open the balky door.

  And it’s true, when a man ceases to pay his rent, no one comes any longer to sweep his floors. The dust that adheres as a matter of course to Father Time’s belongings has become, over the past few months, a damp, brownish rime that leaves translucent slicks on the floorboards and on the patches of plaster that show wherever the flower-speckled wallpaper has pulled away.

  The curtains are gone. There’s an old rosewood dresser with twisted-copper drawer handles. An old washstand with a wooden top. No trace of a fire in the fireplace—how he must have shivered—and scant trace of the room this used to be. For when I was a child, it was my father’s workshop, and every bit as forbiddingly private as he was.

  Standing now amid the old detritus, I’m stabbed by the memory of him: stooped over his lathe, grinding out lenses for spectacles, telescopes, microscopes. I remember the smell of the turpentine and the melted pitch and the copper nitrate. I remember stepping on the old cartridge shells he used for cutting glass—they lay in the hallway like sprung traps.

  My mother used to reprove him for the mess he left behind—the mounts, the brass tubes and spindles, centrifugally whirled in every direction. Beneath all her complaints lay the suggestion that a physician might have found a more suitable second career. To which he had but one reply:

  “It was good enough for Spinoza.”

  All of that’s gone now, even the smell. All except for Father’s desk, still squeezed into the same lightless corner. One of the legs has gone missing, and the current tenant has taken the unorthodox step of replacing it with a molasses barrel, which turns out to have a door, carved rather artfully along the barrel’s own grains, releasing with a single pulse.

  “Here we are,” murmurs Father Time.

  Not even pausing for a candle, he plunges his hands into that dark cavity. And draws out…

  We will call them history’s tendons.

  A Chinese fan, that’s the first item in the inventory. It unfurls to reveal Liberty’s rouged face. Then comes a tricolor snuffbox. Inkwells made from the rubble of barrières. Tickets (unused) to a Beaumarchais farce. A pewter mug of the Bastille, straddled by an enormous rooster.

  Father Time is rich, it turns out, in precisely the sorts of relics that France no longer has use for. Ceramic renderings of the Tennis Court Oath. Saucers of patriotic children declaring their allegiance to the Convention. Sheet music for…

  “Ça Ira!” cries Father Time. “That was quite the rouser, wasn’t it? ‘All the aristocrats will hang la-la….’”

  Even the wrappings prove to be relics: old issues of Annales Patriotiques, Feuille Villageoise, L’Orateur du Peuple….

  “Le Courrier Universel! Why, do you know I used to write for them? Very—very febrile essays under the pseudonym of Junius. And here’s, oh my, Lequinio’s Patriotic Prayer, wasn’t that on everyone’s lips for a…for a…now here.…” He drags out a mass of icicle blue yarn. “I am pleased to tell you this is an old mitten of Rousseau’s. He left it behind on a hike. Usual great-man reverie, I expect. Hand must have been quite chapped by day’s end.”

  “Monsieur, please.” I give him a propitiatory smile. “You were going to tell me about my father.”

  “Yes…” He peers into the barrel’s vault as though his old friend’s face might come blazing forth from the darkness. “So I was….”

  “Maybe you could tell me how you met him.”

  “Ah!” His face brightens instantly. “The Collège d’Arcourt, that’s where. I was a professor, of course; he was a student. Not one of my students, no. I was all about botany in those days. I was very busy refuting Reynier’s findings on the—the amputation of sexual organs in hollyhocks. Work which was quite favorably mentioned, I don’t mind saying, in—in Jussieu’s Genera Plantarum.…”

  “What was he like?” I ask, more loudly. “My father.”

  “Well, he was—he was quiet, yes. Not so quiet as he became later, but he had—I would call it a natural gravity. A way of being still, I mean. He was unfailingly polite, he was—very dogged, as if he mistrusted his own gifts. I used to give him advice about, oh, courses to take, professors to avoid, that sort of thing. Unsolicited advice, goes without—he rarely took it, but I think he appreciated someone giving it. He’d never had much of that.

  “Well, one thing and another, we began meeting for coffee. Thursday mornings at the Wise Athenian. I paid, of course, at the beginning, he didn’t have the means. And do you know, for years, we never missed a single one of those coffees? Not even when he was in the worst throes of medical school. Not even when the world was falling apart. We used to—we used to joke about it. Because we were much more regular about the Athenian than mass.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Oh, girls, of course,” says Father Time, raking his beard. “Your father was always—ha!—more marriage-minded than I. I remember the day he told me about your mother. Yes, he was—he was blushing almost as much as you are right now.”

  Something unexpectedly cunning in his eye. If I weren’t blushing before, I am now.

  “And, of course, we talked politics. That’s what people did then.”

  “Was Father a true republican? A believer?”

  “Weellll…depends on how you define believer. He wasn’t your sans-culotte type. Didn’t wear the clogs, didn’t carry the pike—kept his hair powdered—but he believed, yes, in his own way. What I mean is there was always, how to put this, a core of skepticism behind everything he affirmed. If I was the Rousseau man, he was Voltaire through and through. And of course, he never aligned himself with the Girondins or the Montagnards. Never had to. He was too busy—ha!—patching them up. Doctors had more work than they could handle in those days.”

  I jam my hands in my pockets. I flex the toe of my boots.

  “So…my father had a practice?”

  “He was a surgeon, my child. At the Hôpital d’Humanité. But his skills made him quite coveted among a—among a certain set. Oh, yes, rumor had it even—even Marat, who was a doctor himself, even he asked for your father. Ha! Might’ve saved the old sod’s life—second opinion, eh? Out of that grimy water, you dishrag!”

  “Did he ever…?”

  That’s as far as I get until I am stopped by…my father himself.

  THE MEMORY OF HIM, I mean.

  Alone, as usual. Coveted by no one. Having his late-afternoon tea. (An English custom, who knows how he came by it?) The tea he always drank quickly, down to its last leaves, and then he set to buttering his toast, with every bit as much fixity as he brought to lens grinding. It took him a good minute, usually, to drag that butter across every last square of blackened bread—to scrape it down until nothing of the original solid remained. Diligent, yes, and at the same time, furtive, like an anchorite prying an old piece of chocolate from a crevice.

  The idea that this man—this man—could be the coveted Dr. Carpentier…

  “NEVER MIND,” I say.

  “Oh, but you were going to ask me something.”

  “It’s nothing. I was just—I was going to ask if my father ever met Louis the Seventeenth.”

  And as soon as it’s out, I’m trying to call it back in.

  “I don’t really have any reason to—”

  “But of course he met Louis the Seventeenth. He was the boy’s doctor.”

  CHAPTER 15

  The Black Tower

  ONLY LATER, WHEN I am shaking the webs from my brain, will I have the space to recall the look in Father Time’s eye. The coolness that lingers there, a dry clarity—neither gentle nor cruel.

  “You mean he never told you? Well, isn’t that funny?”

  Though he doesn’t look amused. Particularly.

  Without knowing it, I’ve plopped mysel
f down on his bed. I’m smoothing out the rag that passes for his coverlet. A whirring cloud of dust is trailing after me.

  “When?” I ask. “When did he ever have cause to meet that boy?”

  “Oh my, it was summer of ’94. Just a few weeks past the height of the Terror. I was there, you know, the day they took Robespierre. Horrible business. He was bellowing the whole way. Well, you might have complained, too, if—if you were missing half your face—”

  “Please, Monsieur, I didn’t ask about—”

  “Oh, but the point is with Robespierre gone, people could afford to be a bit less abstract, couldn’t they? The fever broke—the fever of Theory, yes—and everyone sat up in bed and looked about. Asked after friends and relations. So it was only natural someone would ask about that boy. Because nobody had seen him in—well, it felt like forever….”

  IN FACT, IT HAD been two years.

  I will look up the dates later, and I will find that the last time the public at large had glimpsed the dauphin, Louis-Charles, was on the thirteenth of August, 1792. On this occasion, the royal family was being driven from the Tuileries to their new prison in the Temple—escorted by what looked to be the entire population of the Parisian faubourgs. All of them shaking fists, waving pikes, raining down oaths. Pointing to every toppled marble monarch. Do you see the fate that awaits you?

  A good two hours it took to travel a relatively short distance. At last a low drone of pent rage escaped the mob as the berline pulled into the courtyard and the thick iron gates of the Temple swung closed after them.

  For the royal family, the respite was short-lived. Five months later, the boy’s father would be dragged to the Place de la Révolution. (His neck a little too thick for the occasion: the blade had to fight its way through.) Fourteen months later, the mother would follow. Seven months more, the boy’s beloved aunt, gentle Princess Élizabeth, would climb the scaffold.

  But he stayed where he was, that boy with the brook blue eyes and the strawberry-blond ringlets hanging to his shoulders. Immured in a great tower. Behind walls of stone, nine feet thick.

  I was a boy myself when I first saw it. Late summer, and Mother and I had been walking for hours, as we often did in pleasant weather, and we’d just stopped at a chemist’s shop on the Rue du Meslay (Father needed copper nitrate), and on a whim, I suppose, I veered down the Boulevard du Temple.

  Mother hesitated, I can see this now. But the day was lovely, and we were in no hurry to be home, and so she followed. Still hesitating, for she remained a step or two behind me the whole way.

  We speak of buildings rising up before us, as if they somehow unfurled, brick by brick. The tower that met my eyes now had unfurled many centuries ago. It was emphatically past tense—and still very much present. Silly to say you were discovering it. If anything, it was finding you.

  Other towers, other turrets protruded from the medieval château they called the Temple (deceptively religious name!), but this tower was different. Larger—easily sixty feet in height—and black, like the inside of a chimney, and lord of all its secrets. Only after staring at it for some time could I discern the flaws in its masonry: the tiny pinpricks of windows scattered around its skin. Too small, surely, to admit much in the way of light. Or air. Whatever was in there stayed there.

  I knew nothing then of the tower’s history, but I do remember, yes, picturing someone, of no distinct character or color, on the other side of those walls. Looking down at me. Calling out, even, it would make no difference because—this was what unnerved me—I would never be able to see or hear. Whoever it was might just as well have been erased from this earth.

  And the notion that a human being could be erased like that, so easily, so entirely, this was somehow worse than the tower itself. Or perhaps the same thing.

  I felt a prickle in the back of my shoulders, and in the same moment, I saw Mother clasp her arms tightly round her chest.

  “Come, Hector.”

  Down the street she drew me and round the corner. Neither of us looked back.

  By then, the tower had already fallen into disuse, and before I was twenty-one, it had been torn down, on Napoleon’s orders. It rears up again, though, at the mere mention of that name.

  The Temple.

  “HE WENT THERE every single morning,” says Father Time. “Took a cab, though he hated spending the money. Always a different cab, too—different route—never knew if someone might be following you, eh? The Temple commissaries gave him a special pass—he showed it to me once—and then, of course, if you had to see one of the prisoners, why, you needed a visa, too. ‘For the Tower’ it said, or something like that.

  “And that’s right, he could stay no more than an hour. Same hour every day. Any more, he’d have to—what?—oh, petition the commissaries or else—ugh!—that awful Committee of Public Security. And everything was in utmost secrecy. Not a word.”

  “Why did they choose my father?” I ask.

  “Mm.” He weaves his fingers through his beard, as though he were carding wool. “Bit of a fluke, really. Your father had once treated General Barras’ sister. For a goiter. Mightily impressed she was. Didn’t hurt, I expect, that he was—such a handsome cur in his youth. Barras certainly wasn’t above noticing such things, if you—if you take my meaning. Well then, once Barras was put in charge of what was left of the royal family, he realized the boy would need a doctor. Forthwith!”

  Father Time shrugs now. The briefest of motions, and yet the fabric of his old coat actually retains its new shape even as the shoulders return to their former position.

  “Naturally,” he says, “the job was advertised as a—a high sort of duty. Requiring a doctor of pure republican credentials. Rare skill. I doubt your father had ever been courted so fiercely before.”

  I close my eyes. I try to imagine—me—surrounded by good citizens, hearing words like honor and calling. Patrie.

  “How long did he attend the dauphin?”

  “Right up to the end, nearly.”

  “But—why did he never tell me?”

  “Oh, well, at the time, you see, you were a little sprig. No more than three, eh? You wouldn’t have known a dauphin from a—from a dolphin.”

  “But, Mother…”

  “She didn’t know, either. He went out, mm, an hour earlier every morning, that was the only difference. Told her he was needed at the hospital. Yes, and always came home for lunch. Punctual sort, your papa. No one…” He reaches over suddenly, brushes a speck of dirt from my vest. “No one would have guessed anything was amiss.”

  “He couldn’t even tell his own wife?”

  “Oh, he didn’t dare. It might have been her death warrant. Don’t you see, your father was taking an enormous risk. In those days, assisting the royal family—helping the children of Louis the Sixteenth in any way—why, you could pay for that with your life. Hundreds already had. Thousands.”

  “But Barras asked him to. The Committee asked him to—”

  “Ah, that’s just it! Today, the Committee’s on board. Tomorrow, it changes its mind. Day after tomorrow, a whole new Committee! And whoever did the bidding of the last one…giving up his head to Old Growler before sundown.”

  Without thinking, he sketches a line across his throat. A firm hand, not a tremor. He might have made a fine surgeon himself.

  “Monsieur,” I say. “You must forgive me, I still don’t understand. How could anyone blame my father for trying to save a young boy’s life?”

  “Oh.” His eyes swirl out of focus. “That’s—that’s not what they—wanted him to…”

  “What, then?”

  Squinting, he crouches and scans the full perimeter of the room—as though the train of his thought were even now scurrying toward the floorboards.

  “Yes,” he says, folding his lips down. “I asked him that myself once. We were at our usual table—the Wise Athenian, I’ve told you about the Wise Ath—I have?—the weekly coffee, yes, it was your father’s turn to pay—he would insist on that,
he would—where was I? Oh, yes, he was going on about these dreadful commissaries and committees. Ha! Death by bureaucracy, he called it. Nicely turned, eh? Well, I suppose I must have become a little irritated on his behalf because I said, ‘Well, now, why would they hire such a—such a sublime physician as yourself if they weren’t going to listen to him?’”

  “And what did he say?”

  “Nothing at first. That was his way, of course, he was—ten parts thought to one part speech. And at last—it was just as we were getting up from the table, we were—ha!—brushing the macaroon crumbs from our coat sleeves—well, that’s when he said—and I’ll never forget it—he said, They don’t want me to heal that boy. They want me to make sure he dies.”

  CHAPTER 16

  A Fatal Disease Is Diagnosed—at the Very Precipice of Death

  LIKE A TALLOW CANDLE, Father Time’s brain gutters and crackles and throws off a good greasy light, but its span is brief and its end conclusive. Speech fails, then consciousness, and before another five minutes have passed, he has fallen across his straw pallet—at a cumbersome tangent, like a dropped ceiling beam. All that’s left to do is to remove his boots before bidding him good night.

  Over the next two days, I do all I can to resume our conversation. Outwardly he is all eagerness. Inside, something balks, and no manner of private hints—the Temple, the Wise Athenian—will quite uncork him. The best I can secure is a promise, vaguely worded, to take me to “the archives” someday.

  Where these archives are, what they contain…none of this can be determined, hard as I ply him. Through all of Saturday and Sunday, I wait for the clouds to pass. Monday comes round with nothing more to show for my labors. Only the old routine, waiting to be shouldered. I leave the house at the same time: nine-fifteen. I am bound for the same place: the École de Médecine. The one difference is this. When I’m twenty or so paces from my door, a fiacre rolls up. A gendarme leans out of it.