Grimalkin shrugged. ‘People say many things, my lord. One grows weary of idle talk.’
‘Then I shall come straight to the point. I wish to employ you as my confidential agent, sir. Whatever the Worshipful Company is paying you, I shall double it. They need never know.’
‘I have told you that I am not in the service of that guild.’
‘Who then?’ A look of repugnance, as if an offensive odour had wafted into the room, came over the powdered features. ‘Surely not the Frogs?’
‘I serve no master,’ Grimalkin repeated. ‘Not English, not French. None.’
Lord Wichcote smirked, revealing teeth as yellow as aged ivory. ‘Every man serves a master, my dear Grimalkin. Whether king or commoner, all of us bend the knee to someone or something.’
‘And who is your master, my lord?’
‘Why, His Majesty, of course. And Almighty God.’
‘So say you. Yet by the laws of His Majesty, only the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers has the right to such a workshop as this.’
The man bristled. ‘Do you take me for a shopkeeper, sir? A common artisan? I am a peer of the realm! Such petty restrictions do not apply to the likes of me. Nor do I claim exemption on the grounds of rank alone. I am a natural scientist. An investigator into the secret nature of the most elusive and mysterious of all substances in God’s creation. I refer, of course, to time. That is our true master, is it not, Grimalkin?
Tempus Rerum Imperator
, as the Worshipful Company has it. Time, the emperor of all things.’
‘Not of me.’
‘You would be time’s master?’ Lord Wichcote laughed. ‘You have the
heart
of a rebel, I find. Well, no matter. Worship who or what you will, or nothing at all, if it please you. I care only for my collection and my experiments. With your help, Grimalkin, that collection can be the finest in the world, and the fruit of my labours can be yours to share.’
‘What fruit?’
‘The very distillate of time, sir.’
‘You seek immortality?’
Lord Wichcote twitched the barrel of the pistol in a dismissive fashion. ‘That is the least of it. What men call time is the mind of God in its most subtle manifestation. Its purest essence, if you will. Imagine the potency of that divine essence, distilled into an elixir! To drink of it would be to become as God Himself.’
Now it was Grimalkin’s turn to laugh. ‘And you call
me
a rebel?’
‘I had hoped that you, of all men, might understand.’
‘Oh, I understand very well, my lord. Very well indeed. How much of this fabulous elixir have you managed to distil thus far?’
Lord Wichcote frowned. ‘Certain … difficulties in the refining process remain to be overcome, but—’
‘In other words, none,’ Grimalkin interrupted. ‘I thought as much. Alas, I fear I must decline your offer.’
‘Do not be hasty. You will not find a more generous patron. My fortune is vast, my influence at court vaster still. All I require to succeed are various timepieces that I regret to say are beyond my reach at present. My reach, but not yours.’
‘Your confidence is flattering. But the only collection that interests me is my own. As for this elixir of yours, it smacks more of alchemy than natural science. I do not believe that you have the skill to make it, nor even that it can be made.’
‘Is that your final answer?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
Lord Wichcote sighed. ‘A pity. But not entirely unexpected.’ He pulled the trigger of the duelling pistol. There was a spark, a roar, a cloud of smoke that reeked of sulphur.
Grimalkin flinched as the clock, struck, was torn free of the hand that held it.
At the same instant, the front panels of three other tall clocks swung
open
. From each emerged a man with a drawn rapier. One to Grimalkin’s right; another to the left; the third stood beside Lord Wichcote, who seemed vastly amused.
‘The clock,’ he said, ‘was of course a facsimile only.’
‘I am relieved to hear it,’ said Grimalkin, flexing the fingers of a now-empty hand. ‘Your lordship is a most excellent shot.’
‘I spend an hour each day at target practice.’ As he spoke, Lord Wichcote began the laborious process of reloading his pistol. ‘I want him alive,’ he added, addressing the three swordsmen without bothering to look up. ‘And take care you do not damage any of my timepieces in the process.’
‘Aye, m’lud,’ chorused the new arrivals. Rapiers held en garde, they converged on the intruder with the wary grace of professionals; they were met by a grey blur. The music of swordplay filled the room, providing a lively accompaniment to the stolid ticking of so many clocks.
Preoccupied with the pistol, it was some seconds before Lord Wichcote, in response to a groan that seemed more a product of dismay than pain, glanced up to gauge the progress of the fight. There were now two men facing the masked intruder; the third was sprawled on the floor, a rose blooming on his chest. Frowning, Lord Wichcote returned to his work, a certain agitation visible in his movements. When next he glanced up, the intruder was facing but a single man. Lord Wichcote’s efforts now took on an unmistakable urgency, accompanied by a marked deterioration in manual dexterity. Gunpowder spilled over his shirt, and the ball he was trying to insert into the pistol’s muzzle seemed possessed of a perverse desire to go elsewhere. At last he rammed it home. But no sooner had he done so than he found the red-stained tip of a blade hovering near his throat.
‘Perhaps you should devote more time in your practice sessions to the loading rather than the firing of your pistols,’ Grimalkin suggested, somewhat breathlessly.
‘No doubt you have a point,’ Lord Wichcote conceded through gritted teeth.
‘Indeed I do. And you will become more intimately acquainted with my point unless you drop your pistol.’
The pistol dropped.
Grimalkin kicked the weapon aside.
‘You would not dare to shed even a single drop of my blood,’ Lord Wichcote declared, though he did not sound convinced of it. The powder on his face was streaked with sweat. The skin underneath was neither so white nor so smooth.
‘Would I not?’ The tip of the blade indented his throat, where the skin was as yellowed – and as thin – as ancient parchment. A red bead appeared there.
The man gasped but said nothing more.
‘Give me your parole, as a gentleman and a peer of the realm, that you will not cry out or otherwise attempt to impede me, and I will take my leave without doing you graver injury.’ Grimalkin pulled the blade back a fraction of an inch.
‘You have it,’ Lord Wichcote said.
As Grimalkin retreated a step, still holding the blade ready, the other pressed a white handkerchief to his throat and said in a tone of deepest disapproval, ‘What manner of fencing do you call that, sir? Three of my finest swordsmen dispatched in under two minutes! I have never seen a man wield a blade in such an outlandish fashion!’
‘I have travelled widely, my lord, and learned much along the way – not all of it to do with clocks.’ Grimalkin leaned forward to wipe the blade clean on the edge of his lordship’s sky-blue coat, then returned it to its scabbard.
This affront Lord Wichcote bore with barely controlled fury. ‘Do you know, Grimalkin, I don’t believe you are a gentleman at all.’
‘I have never claimed that distinction. And now, sir, I bid you adieu.’ Grimalkin gave another precise bow and backed away, moving towards the rope that dangled from the open skylight. In passing a table bestrewn with timepieces in various stages of assembly and disassembly – the very table, as it happened, where cat and mouse had earlier disported themselves – Grimalkin paused. A grey-gloved hand shot out.
Lord Wichcote gave a wordless cry.
‘I’ll take this for my trouble.’ A clock very like the one that had been the target of the gentleman’s pistol disappeared into the folds of Grimalkin’s cloak – as, moving more swiftly still, like a liquid shadow,
did
the mouse that had escaped the cat. ‘Did you really think you could hide it from me?’
The gentleman’s only reply was to begin shouting for help at the top of his lungs.
‘I don’t know what England is coming to when the parole of a lord cannot be trusted by an honest thief,’ Grimalkin muttered, reaching into a belt pouch. A small glass vial glittered in an upraised hand, then was flung to the floor. Thick clouds of smoke boiled up, filling the room.
By the time the air in the attic had cleared, the masked intruder stood on an empty rooftop half a mile away. Tendrils of fog and coal smoke eeled through the streets below, but a strong breeze, carrying the effluvial reek of the Thames, had swept the rooftops clear. Grimalkin fished out the timepiece and turned it this way and that in the silvery light of the moon. The exterior was unremarkable.
The whiskered nose of the mouse peeked out inquisitively from the collar of the grey hood.
‘Well, Henrietta,’ whispered the thief. ‘Let us see what hatches out of—’
A muffled footfall. Grimalkin spun, blade already sliding from scabbard …
Too late. With a sharp crack, the hilt of a rapier slammed into the side of the grey hood. The thief crumpled without another word.
1
Honour
DANIEL QUARE, JOURNEYMAN
of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers and confidential agent of the Most Secret and Exalted Order of Regulators, stood in flickering candlelight and listened to the synchronized ticking of the dozens of timepieces that filled the room. The longer he listened, the more the sound suggested the marching of a vast insect army to his weary yet overstimulated brain. He could picture it clearly, row upon row of black ants, as many of them as the number of seconds ordained from the Creation until the Last Judgement. He felt as though he had been standing here for a substantial part of that time already. His injured leg, which had stiffened overnight, throbbed painfully.
Before him was an oaken desk of such prodigious dimensions that a scout from that ant army might have spent a considerable portion of its life journeying from one side to the other. An immensely fat man wearing a powdered wig and a dark blue greatcoat sat across the desk from him in a high-backed wooden chair of thronelike proportions. The windowless room was stifling, with a fire burning in a tiled fireplace set into one wall amid shelves filled with clocks and leather-bound books. It might have been the dead of winter and not midway through an unseasonably warm September. Quare was sweating profusely.
So was the man behind the desk. The play of light across his features made it appear as if invisible fingers were moulding the soft wax of his
face
. At one moment he seemed a well-preserved man of sixty, flush with vigour; in the next, he had aged a good twenty years; and which of these two impressions, if either, struck closest to the truth, Quare did not know. Moisture dripped from the man’s round, red, flabby-jowled face, yet he made no move to wipe the sweat away or to divest himself of his powdered wig or greatcoat, as if oblivious to the heat, to everything save the disassembled clock spread out before him. He examined its innards closely, hunched over the desktop and squinting through a loupe as he wielded a variety of slender metal tools with the dexterity of a surgeon. Jewelled rings flashed on the plump sausages of his fingers. Occasionally, without glancing up, he reached out to shift the position of a large silver and crystal candelabrum, drawing it closer or pushing it away. His breathing was laboured, as if from strenuous physical activity, and was interspersed with low grunts of inscrutable import.
Quare had been ushered into the room by a servant who’d announced him in a mournful voice, bowed low, and departed. Not once in the interminable moments since had the man behind the desk looked up or acknowledged his presence in any way, though Quare had cleared his throat more than once. He did so again now.
The man raised his head with the slow deliberation of a tortoise. The loupe dropped from an eye as round and blue as a cephalopod’s. It came to rest, suspended on a fine silver chain, upon the mountainous swell of the man’s belly. He scrunched his eyes shut and then opened them wide, as if he were in some doubt as to the substantiality of the young man before him. ‘Ah, Journeyman Quare,’ he wheezed at last. ‘Been expecting you.’
Quare gave a stiff bow. ‘Grandmaster Wolfe.’
The grandmaster waved a massive hand like a king commanding a courtier. ‘Sit you down, sir, sit you down. You must be weary after last night’s exertions.’
That was an understatement. Quare had returned to the guild hall late, and had not repaired to his own lodgings, and to bed, until even later – only to be summoned back two hours ago, at just past eight in the morning. Still, that was more sleep than Grandmaster Wolfe had managed, by the look of him. Quare perched on the edge of an
armchair
so lavishly upholstered and thickly pillowed he feared it might swallow him if he relaxed into its embrace.
‘Comfortable, are you?’ inquired Grandmaster Wolfe with the same look of sceptical curiosity he had worn while examining the clock. He seemed to be considering the possibility that Quare was a timekeeping mechanism … and a flawed one at that, in need of repair.
‘Yes, thank you, Sir Thaddeus.’
‘Hmph.’ The man took a ready-filled long-stemmed clay pipe from a stand on the desk. He touched a spill to the flame of one of the candles in the candelabrum and held it above the bowl, puffing fiercely. Grey smoke wreathed his flushed and perspiring face.
Quare waited. Sir Thaddeus Wolfe, who had led the Worshipful Company for more than thirty years, was notoriously difficult to please. The fact that Quare had completed his mission successfully was no guarantee of praise from the man who masters and journeymen alike referred to – though never to his face – as the Old Wolf.
‘You were dispatched to secure a certain timepiece,’ Wolfe said now, speaking in a measured tone, like a barrister setting out the facts of a case. ‘A timepiece illegally in the possession of a gentleman whose connections at Court precluded a more … direct approach. Thanks to your efforts, that clock, and its secrets, now belong to us. And yet, a greater prize was within your grasp. Do you take my meaning, sir?’