It was, he saw at once, a pocket watch of the type known as a hunter, the case of which included a metal lid covering the dial. The watch was ovoid, as he had already noted, the case of polished but otherwise unembellished silver, including the cover.
‘Well, sir?’ demanded Master Magnus.
‘But that is not the clock I brought you!’
‘No, it is not … and yet it is. Here, take it.’
Quare accepted the watch. It was unusually thin, less than half the width of his index finger, and lighter than he had expected. He prised the cover apart with his thumbnail and swung it open, revealing a mi-concave crystal and an enamel dial with twelve black symbols – neither numbers nor astrological signs; at least, not any that he recognized – painted upon it. His horological studies had exposed him to the alphabetic and numerical systems of foreign lands: he could recognize Cyrillic, Chinese, and Arabic, among others, but these symbols were new to him, rendered in a style so fluid as to almost swim before his eyes, as if the marks were changing in subtle ways beyond his ability to register. He found it difficult to focus on them; they seemed to squirm not only against the backdrop of the dial but, as it were, against the backdrop of his mind. The sensation was uncomfortable enough that he let his gaze slide away, to the inside of the silver cover, which he noticed was engraved. He held it closer to the candle, angling it until he could make out the initials JW in fancy script, and a date: 1652 .
Quare frowned; given the thinness and lightness of the watch, he would have guessed it to be of more recent manufacture. The hour and minute hands were gilded and fancifully shaped to resemble the head and tail, respectively, of a dragon, and, as he determined after a quick check against his own pocket watch, were not positioned to anything near the correct time. He raised the watch to his ear, but heard no ticking; the mainspring had run down and was in need of winding. But the stem proved decorative only, and there was no opening for a key. Nor any indication that there ever had been. He shot Master Magnus a questioning look, but the master returned his gaze expressionlessly.
‘Well?’ he repeated.
‘An intriguing watch,’ Quare acknowledged. ‘Am I to infer that you found it secreted inside the clock I brought you?’
‘Like a pearl within an oyster.’
‘Was there a master with the initials JW on the rolls of the Worshipful Company in 1652?’
‘More than one,’ said Master Magnus, manoeuvring himself towards a nearby armchair covered with loose papers and cat hair, into which he collapsed with a grunt of voluptuous satisfaction. ‘Journeymen, too. But after studying the archives thoroughly, I have ruled out each of them as the maker.’
‘Perhaps JW was a foreigner,’ Quare mused. ‘Or an amateur, like Lord Wichcote—’ He paused, struck by a sudden notion: ‘What is that gentleman’s first name, by the way?’
‘It is Josiah,’ the master said, stroking a fat black and white cat that had wasted no time in leaping into his lap and settling itself there with an air of entitlement a pasha would have envied. ‘But that is mere coincidence. Why, the man was not yet born in 1652! And his father, the late Lord Wichcote, was named Cecil … and had no better acquaintance with the insides of a timepiece than does this cat. No, it is the watch you should be interrogating, sir, not me. The answers you seek lie there, provided you can unlock them.’
Quare accepted the challenge with a nod, remembering how, at his first meeting with Master Magnus, years before, the master had similarly challenged him with a pocket watch. Now, turning back to the worktable, he fished a loupe from his waistcoat pocket and held it to his eye while examining the watch more closely in the candlelight – though, as before, his eyes slid past the figures painted onto the dial, as if their flowing shapes offered no purchase for his sight.
‘These markings are most curious.’
‘Indeed,’ Master Magnus agreed. ‘What do you make of them?’
‘I assume they are numbers, though none that I recognize. Still, there are twelve of them, arranged in the traditional manner upon the face – what else could they be?’
Master Magnus shrugged in a most maddening manner.
Quare told himself that he would subject the numbers – if numbers they were – to a more rigorous inspection at some later time. They were, after all, the very least of the wonders and mysteries of what was unquestionably a masterpiece. The detail of the draconic hands was particularly well done, the filigree as fine as gilded frost, evidence of a keen eye and an exceptionally steady hand. Yet the secret of its winding eluded him, unless …
Could the watch be self-winding? Such a timepiece was theoretically possible, and many gifted clockmakers, Master Magnus included, had sought to solve the considerable practical difficulties involved in making one. Yet as far as Quare knew, no one had succeeded, or come close to succeeding. Certainly his own efforts in that line had met with abject failure. How likely was it that some solitary genius had done it more than a century ago? He needed to open the case.
Quare could feel Master Magnus’s probing gaze. The master was studying him as intently as he was studying the watch … and with an identical purpose: to divine his secrets. He had said he trusted no one, suspected everyone, and just because Quare was no traitor did not mean he had no secrets he wished to hide.
Of course, Master Magnus had been correct in his suspicion that Quare had not been entirely forthcoming about his rooftop encounter with the woman – a woman whom, despite the master’s scorn, he still believed to have been the real Grimalkin and not an imposter.
After all, she had told him so.
She had regained consciousness while he was still marvelling at her unmasking. Master Magnus had asked if he had found her attractive, but the truth was that neither at the time nor later had he thought in such conventional terms. The woman was not beautiful but uncanny, her pale blonde hair seemingly spun out of moonlight, her skin like ivory, an exotic cast to her angled features – features streaked now with soot and grime and blood from where he had struck her – that provoked his fascination rather than his admiration. He saw a blend of races there but could not identify the mixture. She might have fallen from the moon, a handmaiden of Selene.
She didn’t make a sound. All at once the dark pools of her eyes opened, and she regarded him with frank but calm curiosity. Such self-possession threw Quare further off his mark. It was as if their positions had been reversed, and he was the one who had been surprised and rendered helpless, his secret exposed, his prize stolen, his honour – indeed, his very life – hanging by the thread of a stranger’s mercy. He felt interrogated by her stare and drew back, as if, bound though she was, she still constituted a danger. ‘I warn you,’ he said. ‘Do not cry out.’
She laughed softly … and, he thought, sadly; the sound sent a shiver down his spine. ‘I congratulate you, sir.’
‘What?’ Her voice made him think of fresh country breezes and springtime rain showers, as if he were back in his native Dorchester and not squatting upon a foul London rooftop. Her accent, like her features, was hard to place.
‘You have caught the great Grimalkin.’ She seemed to mock herself, and him. ‘Now, what will you do with her?’
Quare felt drunk, or under a spell. He swallowed and attempted to marshal his wits. ‘You are my prisoner, madam. I will ask the questions.’
She laughed again, but this time there was no sadness in it; eagerness, rather. ‘Ask, then. I am bound to answer.’