Meanwhile, other bells had begun to chime in, adding their disparate voices to the hour. The monumental clocks of London, resident in cathedrals and churches, or presiding over public squares, did not keep a common time. They struck askew, filling the air, as now, with a cacophony made worse by the fact that, while the bells of each clock were tuned to produce a pleasant melody, no thought had been given to the effect of a number of pleasant melodies ringing out on top of each other – which, as it turned out, proved neither pleasant nor melodious. A clockcophony, Master Magnus called it. There had been talk of regulating the striking of the hours, so that only one clock’s bells would be heard at a time, but the owners of the various clocks, who had spent
large
sums of money in building and maintaining their instruments, fought every proposal. Instead, they vied – with the assistance of the Worshipful Company available to all who could afford it – in making their particular clocks either the first or the last to strike, and this incremental competition, which had been going on for years now, with passions swelling in inverse proportion to the ever-smaller intervals of time involved, had served only to render the bells increasingly useless in what was, after all, their primary function: the imposition of a central temporal authority over the city and its environs. At least, so it seemed to Quare and his fellow guildsmen, whose sensitivity to such things was far more acute than that of even the most time-conscious curate or man of business, men who made use of time but did not, so to speak, inhabit it as Quare and his fellows did.
He could delay no longer. Telling himself that he was being foolishly suspicious, he took a deep breath and came out into the street. Though he felt as if a hundred hostile eyes were following him, he reached the boarding house without incident and entered, only to find himself face to face with his landlady, Mrs Puddinge, who drew back from the door with a small shriek of surprise, her face going as white as her apron. In her fifties, the childless widow of a master in the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers, she was a merry matchstick of a woman who took a lively maternal interest in her ‘young men’, as she called them.
‘Merciful God in heaven, is it you, then, Mr Quare?’ Mrs Puddinge’s brown eyes narrowed beneath her cap as she took in his dishevelled state. ‘Lord bless us, but he told me you were dead!’
‘Dead?’ Quare echoed, the surprise now on his side. ‘What do you mean, Mrs P? Who told you?’
She pursed her lips, giving her face the aspect of a shrivelled prune. ‘Why, your friend and fellow guildsman, Mr Aylesford. He told me there was a brawl last night at the Pig and Rooster. How often have I warned you young men against that den of iniquity?’ Tears sprang to her eyes, and she wrung her hands in the folds of her apron. ‘He told me you were all killed.’
‘All?’ Quare’s brain was reeling.
‘Mr Farthingale, Mr Pickens, Mr Mansfield and yourself.’ She raised the apron to dab at her eyes. ‘He said some young lords started it, and
that
they were killed as well. Made it sound a regular massacre, he did! And now here you are, a bit worse for wear but still among the living, after all! Why, ’tis a miracle! That’s what it is. A blessed miracle. And the others? Are they also alive and well?’
‘I-I don’t know,’ he stammered, trying to make sense of things. ‘We were separated … When did Mr Aylesford tell you this?’
‘Why, not half an hour ago! The poor lad was beside himself with grieving. Said he’d come straight from the guild hall, with orders to clear out your room before the city watch could trace you here. Seems the masters are afraid of scandal. They know where the blame will fall, with aristocrats and journeymen among the dead!’
An icy quiver ran down his spine. ‘You let Aylesford into my room?’
‘And why would I not? With you dead and him about the business of the Company?’
‘But I’m not dead!’ Nor, Quare was beginning to think, had Aylesford been about Company business – now or ever.
‘Oh, aye, and God be praised for it. But how was I to know that at the time? Go up, Mr Quare, and surprise him! The poor lad will be overjoyed to see you, I’ll warrant. Quite downhearted, he was.’
‘What, is he still here?’
‘Unless he’s gone out by the window. I— merciful heavens!’
Quare pushed past Mrs Puddinge with a hasty apology, mounting the stairs two at a time, then strode down the empty third-floor landing and flung open the door to his room.
It was as empty as the landing. His trunk was open, his things strewn across the floor. Quare crossed to the open window, which gave onto an alley behind the boarding house, but there was no sign of Aylesford below. Cursing under his breath, he turned back to survey the mess Aylesford had left behind … only to see the man himself step from behind the door, closing it with the heel of his boot.
‘Mr Quare, as I live and breathe,’ said Aylesford wonderingly, sword in hand.
‘Not for long,’ said Quare, shrugging out of Clara‘s cloak and drawing his own sword, ‘unless you supply some answers, and quickly. What are you doing here? What happened last night? Where are Pickens and the others?’
‘You have a lot of questions for a dead man.’
‘You are overconfident, sir. You will not find me an easy mark.’ Quare hoped he sounded more certain of that than he felt. Up until yesterday, he had never drawn his sword in earnest. Now, for the third time in as many days, he was facing an armed foe: first Grimalkin, a fight he had been lucky to win, much less survive; then last night, at the Pig and Rooster, a fight he barely remembered; and now, facing a man he felt sure was not what or who he claimed to be.
Aylesford gave a nervous titter. ‘Why, I left you stabbed through the heart in that harlot’s bed! I made sure of it. Are you a ghost, then? I’m not afraid of you! I’ll send you straight back to hell!’
Yet he did not attack, or even step forward. And, Quare noticed, his sword arm was trembling.
But Quare did not move, either. He was trying to construe the man’s words. He remembered what Clara had told him she had witnessed during the night, only it seemed, at least according to Aylesford, that what she had taken for an act of sodomy had in fact been murder. And yet, despite Aylesford’s apparent confusion and fright in encountering him here, alive, Quare couldn’t credit such an outlandish claim. How could he? Stabbed through the heart? It was preposterous, insane. He had no memory of being stabbed or of any struggle whatsoever. It made no sense. A man did not die and then rise again to walk among the living. But then how to explain Aylesford’s seeming certainty or his evident fear? What kind of game was the man playing? ‘You are no journeyman of the Worshipful Company,’ he said, forcing his mind along more reasonable lines of inquiry.
‘
Je suis de la Corporation des maîtres horlogers
,’ Aylesford answered in Scots-accented French, giving the name of the Parisian clockmakers’ guild, great rival to the Worshipful Company.
‘So, you are a traitor to your country and your king,’ Quare said with contempt.
‘My country is Scotland,’ Aylesford replied. ‘And Bonnie Prince Charlie is my king.’ This affirmation seemed to infuse the man with fresh courage, for now, circling his sword point with lethal intent, he came forward.
Quare advanced to meet him. In his rooftop clash with Grimalkin,
Quare
had let panic overwhelm him, driving out his training in the art of swordplay. Now he resolved to keep a cooler head.
They came together in the centre of the room, a quick exchange of thrusts and parries, each man feeling out the defences of the other.
‘Did you kill Pickens and the others?’ Quare demanded, drawing back.
Aylesford smiled and circled, looking for an opening. ‘With this very blade. In the confusion of the brawl, a quick thrust through the back, with no one the wiser.’
Quare pushed aside his grief and anger. They could not help him now. ‘But why? What wrong had they done you?’
‘’Twas nothing personal. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I saw my chance, and I took it. Are we not at war?’
Quare had eaten and drunk with these men, laughed with them, worked beside them. This news of their cowardly murders stabbed him as surely as any sword. But it was hot anger, not blood, that spilled from the wound. He squeezed the grip of his sword as though it were Aylesford’s scrawny neck. ‘They were journeymen, not soldiers.’
‘They were Englishmen,’ Aylesford answered, as if that explained everything.
Quare snarled and struck at him, coming in with a high thrust and then disengaging the tip of his blade as Aylesford moved to parry. He flicked his wrist, bringing the point around in a cutting motion that slashed down the side of his adversary’s sword arm. Blood bloomed against the white of Aylesford’s sleeve. But even as Quare took satisfaction in the touch, Aylesford’s sword point came flashing in towards his face, and his frantic parry was barely in time to slap the steel aside. The man was devilishly fast. He danced back, only then becoming aware of a burning along the shoulder of his sword arm, right through his coat.
‘Behold, a ghost that bleeds,’ said Aylesford with a wolfish smile.
Quare did not dare shift his eyes to take stock of the wound. ‘And what of me?’ he asked, continuing to circle his blade as he moved to Aylesford’s left. ‘Why did you not kill me with the others?’
‘I would have,’ Aylesford said, turning with him, his sword in line, ‘but when I found you, you were facing down five men in defence of
that
harlot’s honour – which, I feel sure, is more than she ever did. Still, a woman’s a woman for all that, and no honourable man turns his back on a member of the fairer sex in need. Besides, it was a chance to add a fine gaggle of English lordlings to my night’s tally. Then, once we had dispatched them, the arrival of the watch compelled me to postpone our reckoning again. And, I confess, when it became clear that the wench intended to reward our services with her own, I thought to myself, ‘Why not give the poor sod one last happy memory?’ Ah, my gentle heart will be the death of me! But from what the sow told me, you were too pissed to take advantage. She offered me her bed, and once she dropped off, I clamped one hand over your mouth and with the other drove my dagger between your shoulder blades and into your heart. Do you know, your struggles woke her! Yes, and the wench must have thought we were going at it fine and proper, for she smiled at me in the moonlight and giggled and turned her back to give us a bit of privacy. And what is more, the sight of her bare rump stirred me, sir, indeed it did! I left you dead as a doornail and had my way with her twice – God willing, I planted a Scotsman in her belly. Yet here you are, all lively and disputatious, bleeding like a stuck pig. I confess, I am at a loss to account for it.’
‘You’re a madman. And a murderer. There’s your accounting.’
‘I know what I know,’ Aylesford insisted, and lunged.
Quare parried and counter-thrust. Aylesford knocked his blade aside with a snap of his wrist and riposted, and Quare, realizing a beat too late that he had fallen for a feint and was overextended as a consequence, had to scramble back for dear life. Aylesford came on, his sword a silvery blur. Quare, hard pressed, was backed towards one wall. Sweat poured off him, and he couldn’t help but recall Aylesford’s boast of having fought and won five duels since coming to London; that was one claim he found all too easy to credit. He had no breath left for idle speech, but Aylesford more than made up for the lack. He was one of those fighters who seeks to distract his opponent with words. Quare knew he shouldn’t listen, that he could trust nothing of what he heard, yet the man’s words were as deft as his sword strokes, and more difficult to deflect.
‘Last night, in your cups, you mentioned a clock,’ Aylesford said now,
‘a
most wondrous clock. And do you know, it was in quest of just such a timepiece that I was dispatched to London. Here I would find a clock, or so my masters told me, whose secrets, once unravelled, would confer so great an advantage upon whichever side possessed it as to all but guarantee victory upon the battlefield … and beyond. The mechanics of a clock, after all, differ merely in degree, not kind, from those of certain engines of war, and a device that can more accurately measure out minutes and seconds can more rapidly fling shot and more accurately hurl shell. Or perhaps the clock contained a solution to the problem of longitude at long last, conferring supremacy of the seas. Whatever the truth, it was plain that this paragon could not be allowed to remain in English hands. Lord Wichcote had it in his possession until just two nights ago, or so my informants told me – but it had been stolen from him … and by no less a thief than the fabled Grimalkin, come out of retirement expressly for the purpose, apparently! Well, when Grimalkin steals something, it stays stolen. Everyone knows that. It seemed that my mission was a failure before it had scarce begun! So you may imagine my surprise and joy when I chanced upon you last night, sir. A most opportune encounter!’
All the while he spoke, his blade was never still. It darted like a needle, seeming to stitch an invisible net in the air, the strands of which inexorably tightened about Quare, constricting his possible countermoves, like an attack in chess that does not succeed by a lightning strike of checkmate but rather by closing off every avenue of opportunity until only defeat remains, a defeat not so much inflicted as collaborated in. That Aylesford had not drawn blood again seemed less due to Quare’s defensive skills than to a smothering intent which Quare could sense enveloping him but could not comprehend fully enough to escape. It was maddening. He was fighting tactically, Aylesford strategically. He knew it, but the knowledge was no help to him. His wounded shoulder was stiffening up, which was no help, either.
‘From what you let slip,’ Aylesford continued breezily, ‘I realized that the clock must be in the guild hall, in the possession of that aptly named monstrosity, Master Mephistopheles. So, early this morning, with the guild hall in an uproar following news of the tragic deaths of
four
journeymen in a tavern brawl the night before, I took advantage of the confusion and went in quest of the clock.’