‘I confess I am rather enjoying this,’ she confided as they walked up the alley side by side, avoiding as best they could the night’s detritus thrown from upper storeys. The stench was enough to make him glad of the second-best coat, whose dank odour, however unpleasant, was preferable to that of offal and excrement. ‘Why, it’s as if it were five years ago, and Mr Puddinge still among the living! Many the morning I would walk him to the guild hall, he wearing the very coat you have on now, the two of us talking of everything and of nothing, happy as two peas in a pod!’ As they reached the end of the alley and turned into the bustling thoroughfare beyond, she slipped her arm through his, giving him a warm smile, which he could not help but return.
But his own thoughts were far from dwelling on happier days of yore. Instead, they were all on what news he would find at the guild hall. Was Master Magnus really dead? He could not imagine a world without that outsized personality and quicksilver mind trapped in its stunted, misshapen body. As an orphan with no memory of his parents, Quare had been raised in a Dorchester workhouse, and from there, to his great good fortune, had gone in an apprenticeship to Robert Halsted, who had initiated him into the clockmaker’s art … and whose wife , some years later, had initiated him into other, equally pleasurable arts. The couple had been kind to him, and generous, but he had at no point thought of them as substitutes for the parents he had never known yet often fantasized about, especially at night, when he lay abed unable to sleep, his fellow apprentice, Jim Grimsby, snoring and snuffling beside him like a hibernating bear. Then he would feel his loneliness most keenly and imagine himself surrounded by a loving family, or, in his more melancholic moments, as having been stolen away from his parents, a lord and his lady who had never ceased to search for him and would one day sweep him up in their arms and return him to his rightful place as heir to a title and the fortune that went with it.
Quare had given up such fancies long ago. He knew that no such life would be restored to him, even if he had once briefly possessed it – which, of course, he hadn’t. He had long since come to accept that the only life he would have was what he made for himself, fashioned from the materials at hand with what skills he could master, assembling it piece by piece as if it were a kind of clock, one that would take an entire lifetime to finish. And in that respect, it was Master Magnus who stood in the nearest approximation of a father to him. Or, not quite a paternal influence, but an avuncular one. It was Master Magnus, not some mythical knight or lordship in shining armour, who had rescued him from Dorchester: a journeyman passing through town had brought the master a report of his horological skills, the master had come himself to inspect his work, and afterwards, Halsted had released Quare into his care. Master Magnus had struck him at the time as both frightening and comic, like a figure out of a fairy tale, Tom Tit Tot sprung to life. He hadn’t realized then what a singular occurrence it was for Master Magnus to travel out of London to fetch a new apprentice, nor had he appreciated the agony the master had endured in the simple act of travelling the hundred-odd miles between London and Dorchester in a carriage that rattled his bones like dice in a cup. That Master Magnus was an orphan – to Quare’s way of thinking, kissing-cousin to bastardy – constituted another bond between them. This was never talked about; indeed, sometimes months would pass in which he did not catch a glimpse of the man, much less exchange a word with him – even longer once he had attained the rank of journeyman. Yet Quare was always somehow aware that Master Magnus was keeping an eye on him and had his future in mind – as proved to be the case when, just over a year ago, the master had recruited him into the ranks of the regulators.
But it was not just gratitude for all that Master Magnus had done on his behalf that made Quare’s heart ache with apprehension. He had embraced the master’s plan without knowing its full extent, and now, like it or not, he was stuck in the middle of it, like a man crossing a flooded stream who finds himself in higher waters than he’d anticipated. It was too late to return to the safe shore from which he’d started; he could only press forward, into waters that might well sweep him away. He had lied to the Old Wolf, lost his place among the regulators, put his reputation and his hopes for advancement into the hands of a man who on the authority of a confessed murderer was now dead. And where would that leave Quare, who had always tried to cut an inconspicuous course through the treacherous shoals of guild politics? He feared that, without the master’s protection, he would be expelled from the Worshipful Company or at best discarded, relegated to some backward sinecure, a small town far from London, where he would be permitted to open a shop but would never again taste the excitement of life so near to the centre of things. Nor, without the assistance of the master’s intelligence network, would he ever learn the identity of his father.
And what of the watch he had taken from Grimalkin, the beautiful but deadly hunter with its bone-white workings and evident thirst for blood? Who else but Master Magnus could decipher its secrets? The mystery of it lay at the heart of everything that had happened. It was the reason Aylesford had been dispatched to London in the first place, the reason for the murder of his friends and the others Aylesford had killed, the reason Aylesford had lain close behind him in Clara’s bed and slipped a knife between his shoulder blades. And it was the reason, too, that he had survived what should have been a mortal wound.
Quare knew this without question, deep in his bones. He had seen the hole punched into his back, the flowering bruise and scab. How, after the violation of such a stabbing, could he be walking now, heart beating , lungs drawing air? It was, he knew, a pure impossibility. Yet equally impossible was a pocket watch that derived its motive energy from blood and was capable of killing a roomful of cats in the blink of an eye. That these two impossible things should not be linked as closely as effect and cause struck Quare as a third, and even greater, impossibility.
Somehow, when the watch had drunk his blood, it had done something to him, changed his inner workings. There was no other explanation. Yet what the change consisted of, he could not say. Certainly it had not rendered him impervious to injury, as his wounded leg and shoulder both reminded him at every step. What then? It was a mystery as profound as that of the watch itself. Quare considered himself to be a man of science, of reason, but this went far beyond any science or reason that he knew of or could even imagine. It was as if objects had begun to fall upwards in his vicinity, the laws of Nature, and of Nature’s God, suddenly and arbitrarily set aside. And what of Grimalkin, who sought the watch for her own purposes, and had tracked him down on the basis of some asserted sanguinary bond to demand or rather beg his assistance in stealing back the very object he had stolen from her in the first place? What had happened to her? Where had she disappeared to … and why, if she were looking out for him, as she had implied, had she not helped him in turn, when he was most in need of it? The whole business was disturbing on a number of levels, from the physical to the metaphysical.
To Quare’s relief, he and Mrs Puddinge arrived at the guild hall without incident. He had chosen a somewhat roundabout route for the journey, via Bread Street, Milk Street, Aldermanbury and Jasper Street, thence to London Wall and eastward to Wormwood Street, but approaching now down crowded Bishopsgate Street he had a good view of the venerable Gothic-style building with its broad front steps, thick wooden double doors, and, presiding over the façade from above, the great turret clock built by Thomas Tompion more than fifty years ago to replace the clock that had been there since long before the guild was founded, it having been decided around the turn of the century that the timepiece which was, as it were, the public face of the Worshipful Company should at least be seen to keep accurate time. Tompion’s clock, known affectionately as Old Tom, with its hourly parade of fanciful figures from fairy tales, mythology, and the Bible, all somehow related to time – cowled Death with his hourglass and scythe; Joshua commanding the sun to stand still; the christening of Sleeping Beauty, with the twelve invited fairies, and the unlucky thirteenth, clustered around the cradle – presented a marvellous spectacle to the eye but was equally marvellous in what was hidden from public view: a double three-legged gravity escapement, one of the many horological innovations jealously hoarded by the guild – a secret technology which, even after more than half a century, had yet to pass into common knowledge. That, Quare thought now, and not for the first time, was a perfect allegory for the guild itself: a beautiful exterior concealing something wondrous made ugly – the avariciousness with which the masters sat atop their piled treasures like cold-blooded dragons coiled on heaps of stolen gold.