The Black Tower

by Louis Bayard

  Some three hundred yards east of the Parc de Bagatelle, he stops abruptly. Wrinkles his nose and gazes round.

  “Do you gentlemen know what a linden looks like?”

  “Tilia cordata,” answers Charles, with a trace of outrage.

  “Oh, dear me! A fellow Linnaean! Very well, my young worthy, tell Hector what he should be looking for.”

  “Well, lindens don’t drop flowers till June. But I’ve always thought they have an April smell. You must imagine a toad, Hector. Lying in hay for several days altogether, not a care in the world. That’s what it smells like. You’ll also find very distinct bore holes in the linden’s bark, courtesy of Chrysoclista linneella. I could trace them out for you, if it—”

  “Please,” I say, putting out my hand. “I know what lindens look like. But there are hundreds in this vicinity alone. Which one are we to look for, Monsieur?”

  “Oh.” Father Time’s mouth unhinges, then quickly snaps to. “Why, the one with the X on it, of course.”

  We walk now in slowly contracting circles, and the light from Father Time’s lantern walks ahead of us, startling the buds from the trees. For the first time tonight, I notice the cold. Waves of wind, rolling in from the east. At last one gust catches Father Time by the arm and nudges the lantern from his grip. The taper gutters out, the shadows dissolve…and moonlight rains down.

  A full moon. It’s taken me this long to notice.

  Father Time reaches into his pockets for a sulfur match and strikes it against the nearest tree. Instinctively, I turn to look for Charles…and find him ten yards off, standing before a linden tree. Slowly tracing a long cross.

  The initial wound of that X has been healed over so many times that I might have walked by it a hundred times and noticed nothing out of order. But it’s there all the same.

  From Father Time’s limp mouth, a yellow smile buds forth. “You’ve done it!” he shouts. “All we need do now is look up. Find Jupiter. Ah, there he is! And now…walk north.…”

  He takes one pace…two…three. With his boot, he gouges a circle in the ground.

  “Shall we begin?” he asks.

  “Begin what, Monsieur?”

  “The digging!”

  I strip off my coat. Grab the spade and drive it straight down. The soil, still compacted from a long winter, answers with a dreary clink.

  “How far do we need to go?”

  “Oh, no more than four or five feet,” says Father Time, easily. “Do get a move on, my boy. It’s a bit nippy.”

  On its first sally, the spade claws out no more than a few thimblefuls of dirt. It’s several minutes more before the surface layer is cleared away. From there, the soil grows more yielding but only for a short time—until I reach the stratum of clay.

  And now the sweat blossoms right out of me…the breath comes in gasps…I hear:

  “May I try, Hector?”

  If anyone else had asked me, I should have answered yes immediately. What makes me hesitate with him?

  “Please,” says Charles. “I’m very good at this sort of thing.”

  In fact, he’s a natural wonder. Exerting half as much effort as I, he works at three times the pace. Every so often, he pauses to finger a lock of hair from his eyes, but mostly he digs, with a fixity of purpose that breaks down the earth’s last reserve.

  I watch, dazzled, as the chunks of soil fly past me. The only thing that stops him finally is a sound—can you hear it?—a muffled concussion like…

  Fwook.

  “Uh-oh,” says Charles.

  “What is it?” cries Father Time. “What’s happened?”

  “We’ve struck something,” I answer. “A stone. A root, possibly.”

  “No root,” says Charles.

  Fwook, cries the spade once more. At last Charles bends down and extracts his prize.

  A simple wooden school box. The kind that, as a boy, I might have used for storing my pencils and quills.

  “What’s in it?” asks Charles.

  “Why, it’s the archive!” answers Father Time.

  I gaze at that strange box, with its carved swan, its flaking green and gold foliage, its painted tulips popping out of a rust red field. An archive.

  “But why did you bury it?” I ask.

  “Oho! You’d have left it in the house, is that it? For the Committee to find? Dear me, I’d forgotten about the lock. Hector, can you…?”

  I grab the spade and swing it down. Three blows, and the lid springs open, like a mouth gulping for air. And there lies a tiny sketchbook, bound in green calf’s leather and girt with a linen cord.

  I open its thick, calcified pages. I read:

  13 THERMIDOR YEAR II

  1st meeting with Prisoner: shortly after 1 A.M. Prisoner alone in cell. Dinner had not been eaten. Nor breakfast.

  “But whose is this?” I ask.

  “Come now,” says Father Time, bending his mantis-frame toward me. “You must recognize the hand. It’s your father’s!”

  CHAPTER 27

  A Boy Named Hector

  WITH A SHOW of reluctance, Vidocq takes up the green calf’s-leather sketchbook from his desk. Gives the spine a stroke, inspects the residue on his finger. Then inspects the even grubbier prospect of Father Time, surely as unlikely a visitor as his office has seen in some time.

  “Professor Corneille, is it?”

  The old man has been studying an etching of François Villon so intently that the sound of Vidocq’s voice makes him jump like a puppet.

  “Oh, my! Yes. That’s the name.”

  “I want to be sure I have this right. Twenty-three years ago, you and Hector’s father decided to—bury this journal in the middle of the woods.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Now maybe you can tell me why.”

  “Why? Because we didn’t want the authorities to find it! If any of the Jacobins had known the—the full extent of Dr. Carpentier’s sympathies for the royal family, he might have been arrested. At the very least! Not to mention Monsieur Leblanc, who was every bit as complicit.”

  “Then why didn’t you just destroy the damned thing?”

  The old man’s eyes graze over the journal now. How small it looks in the expanse of Vidocq’s desk.

  “I believe Dr. Carpentier wanted people to know what happened in that tower. When they were ready to hear it.”

  Vidocq turns completely away now. Fills the window frame with his bulk and takes the sunlight with him.

  “And he never told anyone else? His wife? His son? Seems odd he should leave such a valuable addition to History in the safekeeping of…”

  A doddering old man. My thought, not Vidocq’s. But a note of apology does seep into his voice now, as if the same idea had crossed his mind.

  “You must admit,” he says, “it wasn’t a very rational thing to do.”

  “They were hardly rational times, Monsieur.”

  “Strange days,” I say, echoing Vidocq’s own words back to him.

  He cocks his chin at me. Cocks it back toward Father Time.

  “I assume, Professor, that you’re familiar with the journal’s contents.”

  “Dear me, yes.”

  “Do you have anything to add to what’s been writ down in this book?”

  “I don’t believe so.” His hands come together at stiff angles like a Gothic saint. “Of course, it was so very long ago. But if anything pops to mind, I shall—I shall certainly come and tell you, Monsieur…oh, I’m sorry, I’ve quite lost the name.”

  “Never mind. If something occurs to you, just tell Hector, there’s a good fellow. In the meantime, we do thank you for your assistance. Shall I have one of my men drive you home?”

  “Oh, no, I’m quite capable of walking, thank you.” A strain of milky hope shines from his eyes. “Unless you have someone exceptionally pretty on the premises? No? Well, I’ll be off, then. I shall look for you back at the family manse, Hector!”

  Vidocq closes the door gently after him. Lets out a soft whistle.


  “Well, what do you know?” he says, dropping heavily into his seat. “Your father’s own words. Crawling out of the earth just when we need them. Quite a coincidence.”

  “Not at all,” I remind him. “I’d already—I’d raised the subject with the old man, remember? Before we even went to Saint-Cloud. It just took him time to—snap the pieces together.”

  “And you think because some pruny bugger dredges some pages from the Bois de Boulogne, our king is going to hand over his crown to a Swiss gardener?”

  Strange to say, the words have a physical effect on me. They fold me in on myself, leave me saying my piece to the floor.

  “Charles hasn’t declared himself to be…anyone.”

  “Not yet he hasn’t.”

  Once more, he sets to stroking the journal’s binding.

  “You’re sure this is your father’s hand?” he asks.

  “I know it as well as I know my own.”

  Very slowly, he begins to leaf through those age-thickened pages.

  “How long do the entries go on for?”

  “More than a year. I’m still translating from the old Revolutionary calendar, but as best I can tell, the last entry was written on the first of June, 1795.”

  One of his eyebrows kicks up. “That was a week before the prince died.”

  “Yes.”

  His voice stays calm, but his hands lose themselves in the act of riffling through those pages. Coming at last to the final entry, he reads:

  “Enough for now.” He looks up. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I don’t know,” I answer. “I’ve only had the journal a few hours. I’ve scarcely read a word of it….”

  IN FACT, I BEGAN reading from the moment it fell into my hands. At first I was only dimly aware of the words. I was too lost in retracing my father’s handwriting. How it had fascinated me as a child. I would copy those vowels and consonants again and again until they began to creep into my own writing—so that my mother, glancing casually into my copybook one day, was shocked to find her husband’s own signature staring back at her.

  And indeed, as I sat in bed last night, the act of retracing those old letters by candlelight did seem to call him up in some fashion. Hungrily, I combed those journal entries for some mention not of kings but of—me. And when I found it, it was almost more than I could bear.

  A boy named Hector.

  Father’s own words staring back at me.

  —And is he my age?

  —No, he is but 3. Although (I cdnt help but add) he knows at least 200 words….

  The book fell shut, and for perhaps another hour, I sat there, burning with wonder that my father had once—in a moment beyond my recalling—been proud of me.

  Well, all this goes unsaid in the confines of Number Six. Or else it’s all said without my volunteering a word.

  “Wouldn’t you know?” says Vidocq, dancing his fingers across Father’s journal. “The week I want to know about is that last week, which is the only one that’s not here. And from the looks of things, the only two people who can tell us about it are in the grave.” He shoves the journal toward me. “All right, Hector, I want you to give this diary your full attention, do you understand me? Shake out every last line for evidence.”

  “Evidence of what?”

  “Anything. A conspiracy, a plot. Find out who your father talked to, what he saw. Look at the text itself. Are there certain words that keep cropping up? Anything that might indicate a code?”

  “A code…”

  “Yes, damnit! If somebody was trying to spring the dauphin from his cell, I want to know about it.”

  I gather the book into my arms. And just as I’m reaching for my gloves, Vidocq says:

  “One other thing. I want you to take your new friend Charles round the city. He’s a tourist, isn’t he? Show him the sights, for pity’s sake. See what tumbles out.”

  “You think he’ll remember who he is?”

  Vidocq’s face is so close now I can taste the herring on his breath.

  “Hector, as far as the rest of the world, there’s nothing to remember. Louis the Seventeenth is dead. Which means our Charles has to be someone else. The only question is who. Now I want you to take him round the city until he tips his hand—or has it tipped for him.”

  I look at him. Then I look down.

  “So you can arrest him for fraud,” I say. “Is that it? Throw him in La Force with all your precious thieves and murderers? He’d have a better chance in the Bois de Boulogne, I think.”

  Vidocq’s voice wafts down to me.

  “That’s not my decision to make, Hector. Or yours.”

  And then his voice shifts into a sharper register.

  “Of course, if you don’t have the stomach for this work…”

  “I have the stomach,” I answer, lifting my face toward his. “It so happens I have a heart, too.”

  “Oh, yes,” he says, breezily. “I’ve got one of those myself. I keep it in a box somewhere.”

  CHAPTER 28

  A Disappearance Solved

  THE LAST THING Vidocq says to me is this:

  “Never let Charles out of your sight, do you follow? Even if you have to crawl up his asshole and stay through next Easter.”

  Well, you can imagine my feelings on returning home and finding Charles nowhere.

  I run from garret to cellar. I squint under beds, peer into closets and pantries. I jerk open casement windows. I rattle through that empty house like a bird in a chimney.

  He’s lost.

  I won’t say it, I can’t, and at some point, it ceases to matter, for another sound has stolen forth from the back of the house.

  Why did it never occur to me to inspect the rear courtyard? I can say only that it’s been so many months since I wandered there—Mother reserves it for wealthier lodgers—that it has long since dropped off my map of the place. But Charles is there, all right. In the very position in which I first met him: on his hands and knees, plunging his hands into the earth.

  Standing over him is my mother. Her tulle cap has been traded for a blue calico bonnet. She is holding a parasol with a Chinese ivory handle—I’d no idea she owned such a thing—and someone (Charles?) has woven a tendril of honeysuckle round her ear. She has kicked off her slippers and left her feet to wander bare and white, like fallen clouds.

  And this, too: There is a smile on her face. Which cannot be diminished even by the sight of me.

  “Hallo, Hector! At the laboratory, were we?”

  “That’s right,” I say, haltingly.

  “Oh, what a shame you couldn’t join us! We’ve been having the loveliest morning, haven’t we, Monsieur Rapskeller? Dear me, what your friend knows about gardens, Hector! You remember my poor plantain lilies, don’t you?”

  “Mmm…”

  “Every summer, they get more and more charred—and they’re always in shade! Monsieur Rapskeller found they were getting sunlight by refraction. Bouncing right off the kitchen window, do you see? As for the crocuses…well, the squirrels got them, as usual, but your friend knows a sauce from—where again, Monsieur?”

  “Martinique.”

  “It’s got peppers in it and garlic and I don’t know what else. You soak the bulbs before you plant them, and the little beasties want nothing more to do with them.”

  The shock of finding my mother in this condition gives way to a larger dazzlement. The sun, the air. The garden itself: hawthorn fruits; carnations sprawling across the mossy brick wall; a scouting party of leaves in the plane trees.

  “And do you know what else I learned?” says Mother. “Azaleas dote on coffee! Who would have guessed? You know, I can’t help thinking, Monsieur, that when you come into the Vicomte’s fortune, you’ll have a whole retinue of gardeners to do this for you.”

  Charles knows nothing of any vicomte, but he answers without a moment’s hesitation.

  “Oh no, Madame. I shan’t have anyone do it but me. The plants always know you, don’
t they? They know your touch, your voice, too, I believe that. If anyone else talked to them, they mightn’t behave so well.”

  “Plants with eardrums!” shrieks my mother. “Ha-ha!”

  Yes, it’s true. She laughs.

  Which is to say her teeth, brown with hiding, surge toward the light, shivering apart the lips that had thought to contain them. No one is more stunned than my mother. She drops her parasol and slaps a hand to each side of her head, as though to assure herself that she’s still in one piece.

  And as quickly as that laugh stole over her, a new mood sweeps down. She beholds her bare feet, she feels the tickle of the honeysuckle vine round her ear. Her eyes blacken, and in the next second, she’s half striding, half running toward the house.

  “I’m afraid I’m…you’ll excuse me…errands….”

  I have an errand of my own. For the rest of the afternoon, I stretch out in the window seat overlooking the courtyard and I read my father’s journal. And whenever I tire of that, I need only glance through the glazed panes to find Charles. Spreading mulch. Scattering pomegranate seeds. Planting an oleander in a blue porcelain pot. Digging, weeding, watering, pruning.

  As the afternoon wears on, his neck grows pinker, and great ellipses of sweat bleed across his blouse, and still he works on, and still he colors everything I read.

  This A.M., Leblanc and I surprised Charles in cell w/4 pots of flowers….

  He said he learned long ago—in Tuileries gardens—one must talk to one’s flowers….

  The aversion to being touched. The fear of going to sleep in the dark. Line by line, the congruences yield themselves up.

  When evening comes, Charles is too exhausted for dinner. He makes straight for his room, and after I’ve helped to take his boots off, he drops straight into his bed.

  “I don’t think I shall change tonight….”