‘See here—’ Quare began.
She interrupted: ‘I believe you have mistaken me, sir.’
Quare knew that voice. Those dark eyes newly revealed in the light of the candle. ‘Grimalkin,’ he whispered.
With infuriating insouciance, she lifted his mug of ale, saluted him, and sipped from it. ‘I promised we would meet again.’
‘You are a fool to come here.’ He made to rise, then stopped as the point of a sword pricked his belly. He felt the blood drain from his face. The minx had drawn on him under the table.
‘Do not prove yourself a bigger fool. Sit down, Mr Quare.’
He settled back in the chair. ‘How do you know my name?’
The sword point did not retreat an inch, even as she took another sip of ale. ‘I have many resources at my disposal,’ she said with a smile made grotesque by the red paint smeared over her lips. When she lowered the mug to the table, a grey mouse darted from her sleeve, ran across the table top to his plate, and nibbled at his steak and kidney pie.
‘Look here!’ he exclaimed, and would have shot to his feet had not the tip of the sword impressed upon him the wisdom of remaining seated. ‘Can you not control that infernal rodent?’
‘Come, Henrietta,’ she called, and the mouse, after standing upon its hind legs to observe him, pink nose twitching, scampered back up her sleeve like a witch’s familiar.
‘Why do you carry that vermin upon your person?’
‘You have seen yourself how useful she can be,’ Grimalkin replied. ‘Now, sir: to business.’
‘I do not see what business you can possibly have with me, or I with you.’
‘Can you not? Have you forgotten that we are linked, you and I? Blood calls to blood, Mr Quare.’
‘Blood …’ He could not suppress a shudder. ‘Has this aught to do with that cursed timepiece?’
‘Cursed, is it? You were singing a different tune last night.’
‘I have since had the opportunity to examine its workings more … intimately.’ His finger throbbed at the memory.
‘Then you understand the danger.’
‘I understand nothing whatsoever! How it works, or how such a thing could even exist. ’Tis unnatural, an affront to God and science alike.’
‘That’s as may be. Yet it does exist.’
‘What do you know of it?’ he asked. ‘Who made it, and why?’
‘None of that matters now,’ she said. ‘I have come to ask your help – to beg it, rather.’
‘Beg, is it? At swordpoint? I believe the proper word is threaten.’
She winced at that, and, beneath the table, he felt the blade withdraw. ‘Your pardon. We must trust each other, you and I.’
‘You have given me no reason to trust you.’
‘I have not killed you. Is that not reason enough?’
‘You said yourself there were other reasons for that – reasons that have remained as cloaked in mystery as everything else about you. You wish my trust? Then speak plainly.’
‘Very well. Bring me the watch, Mr Quare. I would steal it back myself, but I dare not enter your guild hall. It is not safe for such as I.’
‘What, for a thief, you mean?’
‘If you like. Will you help me?’
‘I did not give you the watch last night, madam, when I knew nothing of its true nature. Now, having experienced the horror of it for myself, I am even less inclined to do so. I know nothing of who you are, really, or of why you want the watch. I only know that it is too dangerous to fall into the wrong hands.’
‘Where that watch is concerned, there are no right hands,’ she said.
‘Right or wrong, I should prefer it remain in English hands.’
She frowned; for an instant he thought to feel himself pierced by her blade. But then she sighed, and her shoulders slumped. ‘I was a fool after all. To come here and expect your help. Why should you help me when you understand nothing of what is at stake?’
‘Enlighten me, then. After all, we are bound, are we not? Blood to blood?’
Her eyes flashed. ‘You would not joke if you understood what that meant. It is the watch that binds us, for it has drunk of our blood.’
‘You speak as if it were alive.’
‘It contains life and death, yet is beyond both.’
‘More obfuscation. I begin to wonder—’
A shout interrupted him. ‘Quare! Ho, Quare, old son!’
Quare turned his head and squinted through the drifting smoke
towards
the front of the Pig and Rooster, where four men had just entered. He recognized three of them as friends and fellow journeymen. The quartet made for him at once, calling loudly for ale.
Grimacing at the interruption, Quare turned back to Grimalkin. She was gone. He shot to his feet, searching for the blue bonnet, but there was no sign of it, or of her, amidst the patrons of the Pig and Rooster. Once again, it was as if she had vanished into thin air.
He was still standing, mouth agape, when the new arrivals reached him: Francis Farthingale, a handsome, dark-haired giant who claimed to be the illegitimate son of a European monarch – which monarch, he was never prepared to say, but his insistence upon this circumstance, plus the fact that he received a regular sum of money from a mysterious source, had earned him the nickname Prince Farthing; fat Henry Mansfield, whose round, smallpox-ravaged face always wore a baffled smile, as if the world were a perpetual wonderment to him; and Gerald Pickens, the youngest son of a master clockmaker in far-away Boston in the Colonies, who had a comfortable allowance from his father but no hope of inheriting the prosperous family shop, which would go to his elder brother. The fourth man, a slender, red-haired youth, Quare did not know.
‘You look as though you have seen a ghost,’ said Mansfield, clapping Quare on the back. He pulled out a chair and sat down, as did the others.
Quare sank back into his own chair. Not a ghost, he thought, yet was there not something ghostlike about Grimalkin? She was as uncanny in her way as the timepiece she sought. And as dangerous.
Mansfield reached for the steak and kidney pie. ‘I say, Quaresy, are you going to finish this?’
Before Quare could reply, Farthingale interjected with a laugh: ‘Speaking of ghosts, did you hear about Master Mephistopheles? It seems the old boy poisoned his pussycats!’
Quare bristled. ‘You shouldn’t be spreading lies, Farthingale.’
‘It’s true,’ the dark-haired youth protested indignantly, looking to his fellows for support. ‘I had it from one of the servants, who saw it with his own eyes. A whole roomful of dead cats! And the master right there in the midst of them, cool as you please, picking
out
corpses for dissection as if choosing melons at the market!’
Mansfield spoke around a mouthful of steak and kidney pie, his lips glistening with grease. ‘His children, he liked to call ’em, remember? Some father, eh?’ He licked his fingers as fastidiously as any cat cleaning itself.
‘It’s as close to paternity as he’s ever likely to come,’ laughed Farthingale. ‘Even if he could pay a woman enough to lie with him, what’s between his legs is probably just as shrivelled and useless as they are!’
‘For God’s sake, Farthingale,’ said Mansfield. ‘Some of us are trying to eat!’
‘Even if it were true,’ Quare said tight-lipped, ignoring the sniggers provoked by Mansfield’s remark, ‘it must have been an accident.’ He wanted to say more, but the master had sworn him to silence. And even if he had not been so sworn, he knew that he could not unburden himself of what he had seen and experienced, not to this audience or any other. Men of reason would dismiss him as a lunatic, while the religious would see proof of witchery. Nor was he by any means certain that witchery had not been involved. Or lunacy, for that matter.
He doubted that he would ever forget those fraught, disjointed moments, the dark flash of the event itself, and, in some ways worse, the dreadful aftermath: how he’d cleared a path through the cats, gingerly lifting the limp, still-warm bodies and moving them aside, and then, more gingerly still, as if reaching for an infernal device primed to explode, picked up the watch … or tried to, for the timepiece, which was glowing with an unnatural white light, like a scale of moonstuff fallen to earth, had burned his fingers, though with cold rather than fire, forcing him to fetch a pair of iron tongs from the fireplace in order to ferry it back to the worktable.
There a shaken Master Magnus had confessed himself unable to go on. He’d instructed Quare to come back in the morning, when, the master promised, he would answer his questions as best he could and give him a new assignment: a confidential brief that would make up for the sting of his suspension from the Most Secret and Exalted Order.
Now, surrounded by his high-spirited fellows, Quare was sensible of a gulf between them – a gulf of knowledge and experience. Of terror.
He
looked at their lively, animated faces with a pang of loss, and of envy.
‘Accident or not,’ Mansfield said meanwhile, ‘what’s he doing with poison anyhow? Is the man a clockmaker or an apothecary, eh?’ He helped himself to Quare’s mug of ale.
Gerald Pickens spoke up for the first time. ‘Why, he’s both, Henry. And a bit of an alchemist into the bargain. After all, he is in charge of the Most Secret and Exalted Order. Oh, don’t fret, Daniel,’ he added, noting Quare’s sharp, admonitory glance towards the fourth member of the quartet, the slight, red-headed stranger, who had been following the conversation with glittering blue eyes and a ready if rather brittle laugh, ‘I’m not spilling any secrets. Aylesford here is a fellow journeyman, newly arrived from … from … what was the name of your village, Tom?’
Aylesford, who appeared to be still in his teens, his cheeks smooth as a maid’s, blushed scarlet in what Quare took for shyness … until he spoke. ‘Rannaknok,’ he declared rather too loudly, in an assertive tone and a rough Scots accent, as if daring anyone to dispute him. ‘’Tis a town on the Meggerny River, in Perth.’
‘Nobody ever said it wasn’t,’ said Farthingale, rolling his eyes.
‘You wouldn’t think it to look at him,’ Pickens confided to Quare with a wink, ‘but young Tom is quite the swordsman. He’s been in London for but two days and has already fought four duels.’
‘Five,’ Aylesford corrected, then added ruefully: ‘But Grandmaster Wolfe has forbidden me to fight any more. He says I may draw my sword only in self-defence.’
‘That is the rule of the guild,’ Quare pointed out. ‘We are, after all, supposed to repair timepieces, not put holes in their owners.’
‘I have come to London to be confirmed as a master clockman,’ Aylesford stated, eyeing Quare as if daring him to dispute the assertion. It was little wonder the fellow had found himself embroiled in five duels, thought Quare, if this was his customary manner of conversation. He was as brazen and disputatious as a bantam rooster. But Quare had no interest in quarrelling, not on this night of all nights, when he craved distraction above anything. True enough, Aylesford seemed too young to have earned the title of master, but that was not
Quare’s
affair. He offered his congratulations, which the other man accepted as if they were no more than his due.
‘But my dream,’ he went on, lowering his voice but not his intense gaze, ‘is to become a regulator like you, Mr Quare.’
‘Someone has misinformed you,’ Quare answered, glaring at Pickens, who smiled placidly in return. Only Master Magnus and Grandmaster Wolfe knew the identities of those inducted into the Most Secret and Exalted Order: not even the newly inducted agents themselves knew who their fellows were, and each took an oath to keep his membership secret, on pain of death. While in the course of his duties a regulator could expect to learn the identities of some, at least, of his fellows, that knowledge was subject to the same strictures of secrecy, and to the same harsh penalty. Quare suspected Pickens of being a regulator, but he had no proof other than the fact that the man expressed the same suspicion about him and had made a running joke of it.
‘There! Didn’t I tell you he would deny it?’ Pickens demanded of Aylesford, thumping the table top with his open hand for emphasis.
The redhead nodded, as if Quare’s denial constituted greater proof than even an outright admission would have done. ‘I had hoped that report of my skill with a sword would reach the ears of Master Magnus, but despite my efforts, I have not been summoned to meet with that gentleman. Nor have I received the slightest indication that he is aware of my existence. Perhaps, Mr Quare, if you were to put in a good word …’
‘Listen, Mr Aylesford—’
‘Call me Tom,’ Aylesford invited.
‘All right. Tom,’ Quare said testily. ‘But the point is, Pickens here has been having you on. He knows damn well that I’m no regulator. I have no influence with Master Magnus or any of the masters, at least not in the way you mean.’ He gave a sour laugh. ‘In fact, just now a word from me on your behalf would likely do more harm than good. But, do you know, I believe there
is
a regulator among us.’
‘Whom do you mean?’ Aylesford asked eagerly, eyes shining.
Quare pointed with the slender, gracefully curving stem of his clay pipe. ‘Why, who else but Pickens here?’
‘Ridiculous!’ scoffed the man in question.
‘He names others to deflect attention from himself,’ said Quare. ‘What could be a more transparent ploy?’
‘Sheer, unmitigated fantasy!’
Aylesford looked in confusion from one to the other as Mansfield and Farthingale sat back grinning. He pushed back from the table and stood, hand on the pommel of his sword. ‘If either of you gentlemen thinks to make sport of me …’
‘Whoa,’ said Farthingale, leaning forward to grasp him by the elbow. ‘Self-defence, old son. Self-defence.’
The redhead shook him off. ‘I do not know about London, but in Rannaknok a man’s honour is considered a thing worth defending.’
‘Honour?’ Quare laughed again, more sourly this time. ‘How fortunate for you, then, that I was instructed on the subject only today, by no less an authority than the Old Wolf himself. It is a lesson I’m happy to pass along, if you’d care to hear it.’
Aylesford nodded warily, his hand still resting on the pommel.
‘It’s quite simple. Honour is superfluous in a journeyman. We are mere tools to be used by the guild leadership, flesh-and-blood automatons to be sent wherever they will, for whatever reason. What need has an automaton of honour? None. In fact, it’s a positive hindrance. What counts for us is obedience. So relax, Tom. Sit down and drink with us. You have nothing to defend.’