The Emperor of all Things

by Paul Witcover

  ‘Master Magnus wishes to see you, sir,’ the servant intoned. His powdered face, rouged lips, and pale blue livery put Quare in mind of a well-spoken carp.

  Quare gestured for the servant to precede him, then limped in his wake. Candles set in wall sconces cast a murky, tremulous light, like moonlight sifting into a sunken ship. Quare always felt a peculiar shortness of breath here in the guild hall, as if the presence of so many clocks had concentrated time itself, causing a change of state analogous to the condensation of a gas into a liquid. He even thought he could smell it – time, that is: an odour composed of smoke and wax and human sweat, of ancient wood, and stone more ancient still, of lives forgotten but not entirely vanished, ghostly remnants of all those who had walked these halls.

  Dark oil paintings of guild masters and grandmasters from the last three hundred and fifty years glowered down at him from the walls of the narrow hallway like Old Testament prophets. Bastard , he imagined them sneering. Failure . Now he must face the judgement of Master Magnus.

  Magnus and the Old Wolf were rivals for power, each believing that he and he alone knew the best way to shepherd the Worshipful Company through these perilous times. Grandmaster Wolfe clung to the past, to the guild’s traditional prerogatives, as a bulwark against the uncertainties of change, while Magnus championed a future in which innovation, rather than hoarded knowledge, would be the guarantor of the guild’s wealth and influence. Each man had his followers, but Quare – although his personal sympathies were with Master Magnus – had done his best to steer a middle course between them, knowing that the key to advancement lay in keeping his options open. He had no father or family to look to for support and could depend only upon his own native wit. Yet despite his care, he had become caught between them, like Odysseus between Scylla and Charybdis. Now, if he were not careful, they would grind him down to nothing. Indeed, he reflected gloomily, had not the process already begun?

  At last the servant pushed open a door and stepped aside. Quare walked past him into a small room whose wood panelling bore gilded bas-reliefs of grandfatherly, bearded Chronos with his hourglass and hungry scythe, winged cherubs carrying bows and arrows in their pudgy hands, and scantily clad nymphs cavorting amidst scenery symbolizing the changing of the seasons. There was a smell of beeswax, though the candles were unlit, the room illuminated by the morning sun streaming through two large windows. One of these looked out upon a busy street – whose cacophony of carriages and wagons, pedestrians, sedan chairs, and pedlars crying their wares was so intrinsic a part of London’s aural landscape that Quare scarcely noticed it any more, though upon his arrival in the city just over five years ago he had imagined himself in a very Bedlam of noise – the other upon a time garden: a secluded outdoor space, reserved for the meditations of the masters, in which a variety of timepieces antique and modern, from simple gnomons to more fanciful sundials, along with water clocks, hourglasses, and other constructs, sprouted with the profligacy of weeds.

  In the centre of the room, on a spindly-legged wooden table so delicate in appearance that it seemed in danger of collapsing under the weight of Quare’s gaze, was a clock topped by the figure of fleet-footed Hermes captured in mid stride, caduceus upraised. A settee upholstered in red and white striped satin stood against one wall, beneath a large oval mirror set in a dark wooden frame carved into the semblance of a wreath of burgeoning grape vines. Against the wall opposite were two chairs done in the same style as the settee.

  The room was otherwise empty; there was no door save the one through which he had entered. Quare did not think he had come here before, though it was difficult to be sure; the layout of the guild hall – the gloomy corridors, tight, twisty staircases, and mazelike clusters of rooms – seemed to change from one visit to the next. ‘I thought you were bringing me to Master Magnus,’ he said, turning to the servant.

  ‘The master asks that you wait,’ the servant answered. He bowed low and departed, pulling the door shut behind him.

  When he had gone, no sign of the door was visible in the carved panelling. Likely there were other concealed doors in the room. And not only doors. Quare felt the prickly sensation of unseen eyes. In the guild hall, it was always safest to assume that someone was looking on or listening; the Old Wolf and Master Magnus, along with their factions and others harbouring ambitions or resentments, schemed incessantly with and against each other, jockeying for information and the power that came with it. Let them look, he thought; he would betray nothing. That was one lesson among many that bastardy had taught him, and he had learned it well.

  Quare approached the mirror. His light brown coat and the cream-coloured waistcoat beneath it, as well as the white shirt under that, bore sweat stains from the inferno of the Old Wolf’s private study. He could do nothing about that. But he could and did wipe the sweat from his stubbled face and neck – he had not had time to shave – with an almond-scented handkerchief, then gathered up some lank black locks that had slipped free from the ribbon with which he usually secured his long hair; he detested wigs and wore them as seldom as possible.

  Turning from the mirror, Quare fished his pocket watch from his coat and checked it: seventeen minutes past ten. He was gratified to note that the table clock showed the identical time, to the minute. He’d crafted the watch himself, incorporating certain innovations he’d come across in his travels … innovations proscribed to the general public.

  By royal decree, the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers was the sole arbiter of the techniques and tools that horologists throughout Britain, whether members of the guild or amateurs, were permitted to employ in the manufacture of timepieces. All journeymen of the Worshipful Company had the duty of protecting its patents and interests. Any timepiece that utilized an already forbidden technology was destroyed, its maker reported to the local authorities, while those clocks evidencing new technologies and methods were confiscated and sent to London for study. The prosperity and safety of the nation depended upon superiority in business as well as in battle, and nothing was a surer guarantee of dominance in both realms than the ability to measure the passage of time more accurately than one’s adversaries. Whether coordinating the shipment and delivery of merchandise over land and sea or troop movements upon a battlefield, the advantage belonged to the side with the best timepieces.

  Quare considered himself as patriotic as the next fellow, but it was really his fascination with clocks – or, rather, with time itself – that had caused him to accept Master Magnus’s invitation to join the Most Secret and Exalted Order of Regulators, an elite corps of journeymen trained as spies and dispatched on missions throughout the country and beyond.

  But in this, too, he found himself at odds with Grandmaster Wolfe and his faction: men who regarded all horological innovation with profound mistrust, forever apprehensive that the measurement of time would slip out of their grasp and control, rendering the guild superfluous. Such had been the fate of other guilds, left behind by the rapid changes of the modern world. Thus they behaved as jealous priests, withholding approval from all but the most innocuous improvements while keeping the truly important advances to themselves. As a consequence, the timepieces made by the journeymen and masters of the Worshipful Company, whether for the public or for private collectors, no longer embodied the latest technologies, as they once had; now, by design, they were always some years behind the true state of the art. Only the scientists of the Royal Society, and of course the army and navy, received the benefit of the guild’s secret knowledge, and even there, or so Quare would have been willing to bet, certain things were kept back. The result of this (in his view) short-sighted policy was that practical innovation in the horological arts no longer came from within the guild, but from without: from self-taught amateurs – like Lord Wichcote, he was chagrined to admit – whose work was often strange and eccentric, wild. Quare loved the life of a journeyman because it brought him into contact with ideas and methods that had not yet come to the attention of the guild’s censo
rious authorities. On occasion – by no means often, yet not infrequently, either – he had encountered timepieces of such radical ingenuity, not to say genius, that he had trembled with excitement as he plumbed their workings and let the beauty of another man’s ideas take fire in his mind. No matter that his sworn oath required him to destroy or confiscate these timepieces and suppress the knowledge behind them; he took no pleasure in his inquisitorial powers but exercised them with cold-blooded efficiency because that was the price of admission to and advancement within the guild. He had accepted Master Magnus’s invitation to join the Most Secret and Exalted Order for the same reason, figuring that, as a regulator, he would be able to dip into streams of knowledge more esoteric still, though he’d realized that his acceptance would make it more difficult to avoid becoming enmeshed in the byzantine coils of guild politics … as indeed had been the case.

  His mission to the attic workshop of the very eccentric, very wealthy, and very well-connected collector and inventor Lord Wichcote had been his first solo assignment after more than a year of intensive training in spycraft, swordplay, and bare-knuckle boxing … among other subjects he had never thought to learn. Master Magnus had told him only that the viscount had acquired a most unusual and potentially valuable timepiece, one whose secrets could not be allowed to fall into the wrong hands, either within the country or abroad – not with war between the Great Powers in this Year of Our Lord 1758 approaching a climax on which the fate of England hinged.

  Quare had set off at nightfall from the top of the guild hall and made his way swiftly but with care across the eerie moonlit and fog-wrapped roofscape of London, his only witnesses skulking cats and startled birds, until he reached Wichcote House, an imposing edifice that towered immodestly above its neighbours. He had studied plans of the house and knew that access to the attic could be had through a skylight; to reach it, he would have to climb.

  The brickwork afforded sufficient purchase for him to clamber up the wall with ease, moving with a silence that was already second nature. And this ingrained caution was rewarded: before his head topped the ledge, he heard the faint sound of a creaking hinge from above. He froze, clinging to the wall, whose bricks soon showed themselves to be far less suited for hanging on to than for climbing. He dug in with his fingers and toes, muscles aching and sweat drenching his clothes. When some moments had passed with no further sound, he ventured to peek above the parapet.

  At this height, the fog was thinner than it had been when he’d started his climb, and the moonlight was bright enough to read by, quite diminishing the stars. As he’d suspected, the skylight had been opened. The roof was deserted; whoever had opened the skylight was now inside the workshop below. His pulse quickened: the mission had just grown more complicated – and dangerous – than he’d been led to expect. But what of it? Whoever had entered the workshop would have to leave it at some point, no doubt through the skylight, and Quare would be waiting when he came out. The fact that someone else should be prowling about the roof of this particular house of all houses, on this particular night of all nights, was sufficient proof for Quare that the prowler, whoever it was, was here for the same purpose as he. Quare would allow the interloper to do all the work and then step in to claim the prize.

  He hoisted himself onto the roof and took cover behind one of the house’s many chimneys. From there he had a clear view of the skylight, though he could neither see nor hear what was taking place in the attic below. He drew his primed and loaded pistol, and waited.

  It was not long before the sound of a pistol firing broke the silence, sending pigeons wheeling from their roosts and making Quare start and curse under his breath. Seconds later, the music of swordplay rose from the open skylight. Part of Quare’s training as a regulator had involved learning to distinguish the salient details of a melee by sound alone, and he judged that there were at least four men engaged below. In a belated rush of understanding, he realized how close he had come to walking into a trap.

  The sounds of fighting ceased. The always surprising quiet of a London night resettled over the rooftop. What was happening down there?

  ‘Help! Help!’

  Quare drew back behind the chimney at the shrill cries rising from the attic. When he peeked again, billowing clouds of grey smoke were pouring from the skylight. Then, from the midst of the fog, like a materializing phantom, stepped a figure cloaked all in grey.

  Quare felt a thrill of fear: it could only be the notorious thief, assassin and spy, Grimalkin.

  Nothing was known for certain about Grimalkin. His name, his face, his history: all was mysterious, the subject of endless gossip and conjecture among the apprentices, journeymen and masters of the Worshipful Company. Some said he was a rich and eccentric private collector, of the same irresponsible stamp as Lord Wichcote. Others held him to be a member – or former member – of the Worshipful Company. Still others maintained that he was a spy in the service of a foreign power: France or Austria, or even of an ally, like Prussia, for alliances were matters of expedience among the Great Powers, and allies no more to be trusted than enemies … indeed, sometimes rather less so.

  Not even Master Magnus, with the resources of the Most Secret and Exalted Order of Regulators at his fingertips, and his connections to the vast intelligence-gathering network of Mr Pitt, had been able to dig up any useful information about Grimalkin. For years, the man had been hunted … without success. All the efforts of the Order had failed to kill, capture, or even, it appeared, inconvenience the rogue – which had only led to another surmise, the most outrageous of all: that Grimalkin was himself a regulator.

  Grimalkin had not been seen in the city for some years, leading to the general belief – or rather hope – that he had been captured or killed elsewhere. But recently there had been rumours of his return – rumours that were apparently well founded.

  The thief, without a glance in Quare’s direction, set off across the roof at a loping run and disappeared over the ledge. The outraged shouts from below convinced Quare that it was time for him to make his escape as well. Tucking away his pistol, he followed Grimalkin across the roof, pausing at the ledge to peer down – just in time to see a lithe grey figure sprint up and over the tiled roof of a neighbouring townhouse. Grimalkin had left a rope behind, which Quare wasted no time in shimmying down.

  The chase was on.

  In his training, Quare had played the roles of fox and hound in gambols across the rooftops of London, but those affairs were mere amusements compared to the reality he experienced now. The need to remain unseen was paramount, and yet he also had to keep his quarry in sight while managing not to fall to his death – three imperatives that proved difficult to reconcile given the speed and daring with which Grimalkin navigated a terrain as treacherous – and starkly beautiful – as the crags and crevices of a desolate mountain range. Yet even as he laboured to keep up, Quare couldn’t help admiring the man’s graceful athleticism. There was something almost uncanny about the sureness of Grimalkin’s balance and the swiftness of his reactions as he hurtled along narrow ledges of marble or slate tiles slick with damp soot and the slimy droppings of birds and leapt without hesitation across open spaces where the slightest misstep meant certain death. Equally amazing was the fact that he made no more sound than his feline namesake might have done.

  Quare could not keep pace; with each rooftop he surmounted, scrambling up the tiles, heart hammering in his chest, Grimalkin was farther away, a shadow half lost amidst other shadows. Nor could Quare , for all his efforts, keep quiet; tiles came loose beneath his feet, skittering down the long slopes to crash upon the ground – yet not once did Grimalkin glance back, as if ignorant or scornful of pursuit.

  Just when Quare was about to give up the chase, Grimalkin halted. Quare flung himself flat, but his quarry appeared to take no notice. Instead, angled to make the most of the moonlight – which kept his back to Quare – he pulled an object from the folds of his cape. Quare’s heart throbbed. The clock – fo
r so the object must be, though he could not see more than the rough shape and size of it, as big as a big man’s fist – was nearly in his grasp. All thought of Grimalkin’s fabled fighting prowess was gone from his mind; a predatory instinct welled up from he knew not where. He slid back down the slope of the roof, then rose to a crouch and circled to the right, where, he had ascertained from his former perch, a path led to Grimalkin across a series of connected rooftops.

  After what seemed an eternity, he crossed to the flat roof on which Grimalkin stood, intent on his prize. A warm breeze freighted with the stink of the Thames kept the fog at bay. Holding his breath, he slid his rapier from its sheath and crept forward a step, then another.

  A tile shifted beneath his foot.

  Grimalkin spun, sword in hand, with a speed beyond anything Quare had ever seen … but Quare was already lunging to close the distance and could not pull back. All his training in swordplay deserted him in that terrifying instant. He made no attempt to bring his point en garde but instead stepped close, inside Grimalkin’s guard, and punched wildly, frantically. More by luck than skill, the hilt of the rapier slammed into the grey-hooded skull, and the man collapsed like a puppet with cut strings.

  The clock dropped from Grimalkin’s hand and fell towards the roof. Almost indolently, Quare plucked it from the air. Then reeled, stumbling, as if the weight of the clock had unbalanced him. But really it was just the weight of all that had happened this night: the unlooked-for appearance of Grimalkin; the long, harrowing chase by moonlight; the confusion of his clumsy attack – which had by some miracle ended with Grimalkin, a master swordsman, lying unconscious at his feet. Or was the villain shamming?