The Emperor of all Things

by Paul Witcover

  Quare accepted the challenge with a nod, remembering how, at his first meeting with Master Magnus, years before, the master had similarly challenged him with a pocket watch. Now, turning back to the worktable, he fished a loupe from his waistcoat pocket and held it to his eye while examining the watch more closely in the candlelight – though, as before, his eyes slid past the figures painted onto the dial, as if their flowing shapes offered no purchase for his sight.

  ‘These markings are most curious.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Master Magnus agreed. ‘What do you make of them?’

  ‘I assume they are numbers, though none that I recognize. Still, there are twelve of them, arranged in the traditional manner upon the face – what else could they be?’

  Master Magnus shrugged in a most maddening manner.

  Quare told himself that he would subject the numbers – if numbers they were – to a more rigorous inspection at some later time. They were, after all, the very least of the wonders and mysteries of what was unquestionably a masterpiece. The detail of the draconic hands was particularly well done, the filigree as fine as gilded frost, evidence of a keen eye and an exceptionally steady hand. Yet the secret of its winding eluded him, unless …

  Could the watch be self-winding? Such a timepiece was theoretically possible, and many gifted clockmakers, Master Magnus included, had sought to solve the considerable practical difficulties involved in making one. Yet as far as Quare knew, no one had succeeded, or come close to succeeding. Certainly his own efforts in that line had met with abject failure. How likely was it that some solitary genius had done it more than a century ago? He needed to open the case.

  Quare could feel Master Magnus’s probing gaze. The master was studying him as intently as he was studying the watch … and with an identical purpose: to divine his secrets. He had said he trusted no one, suspected everyone, and just because Quare was no traitor did not mean he had no secrets he wished to hide.

  Of course, Master Magnus had been correct in his suspicion that Quare had not been entirely forthcoming about his rooftop encounter with the woman – a woman whom, despite the master’s scorn, he still believed to have been the real Grimalkin and not an imposter.

  After all, she had told him so.

  She had regained consciousness while he was still marvelling at her unmasking. Master Magnus had asked if he had found her attractive, but the truth was that neither at the time nor later had he thought in such conventional terms. The woman was not beautiful but uncanny, her pale blonde hair seemingly spun out of moonlight, her skin like ivory, an exotic cast to her angled features – features streaked now with soot and grime and blood from where he had struck her – that provoked his fascination rather than his admiration. He saw a blend of races there but could not identify the mixture. She might have fallen from the moon, a handmaiden of Selene.

  She didn’t make a sound. All at once the dark pools of her eyes opened, and she regarded him with frank but calm curiosity. Such self-possession threw Quare further off his mark. It was as if their positions had been reversed, and he was the one who had been surprised and rendered helpless, his secret exposed, his prize stolen, his honour – indeed, his very life – hanging by the thread of a stranger’s mercy. He felt interrogated by her stare and drew back, as if, bound though she was, she still constituted a danger. ‘I warn you,’ he said. ‘Do not cry out.’

  She laughed softly … and, he thought, sadly; the sound sent a shiver down his spine. ‘I congratulate you, sir.’

  ‘What?’ Her voice made him think of fresh country breezes and springtime rain showers, as if he were back in his native Dorchester and not squatting upon a foul London rooftop. Her accent, like her features, was hard to place.

  ‘You have caught the great Grimalkin.’ She seemed to mock herself, and him. ‘Now, what will you do with her?’

  Quare felt drunk, or under a spell. He swallowed and attempted to marshal his wits. ‘You are my prisoner, madam. I will ask the questions.’

  She laughed again, but this time there was no sadness in it; eagerness, rather. ‘Ask, then. I am bound to answer.’

  ‘Are you really Grimalkin? A woman?’

  ‘Have I not said it? You are a spendthrift with your questions, man. That is one of your three gone already.’

  ‘Three? What folly is this?’

  She grinned. ‘And there is question two, fled as quickly as a man’s life. But I shall answer, as I must. You have captured me, sir, knocked me out and restrained me as I lay senseless. Yet it is not these ropes that bind me. By ancient compact must I answer truthfully three questions put to me by any man who holds me in his power.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ he said.

  ‘Ask your third question, and you shall see my madness,’ she promised. And there was that in her voice and her dark eyes which made him shudder and draw back farther still.

  ‘I know not what tricks you have up your sleeve, nor do I care.’ Quare sheathed his dagger and drew his pistol, which he cocked and held at the ready. ‘Do not think your sex will save you. Believe me, I will not hesitate to fire.’

  This seemed to recall the woman to the reality of her circumstances. Or perhaps it was the reassuring feel of the pistol grip in his hand that made him see her in a more realistic light. In any case, she no longer seemed so eerie. The wild provocation of her manner, which had puffed her up like the bristling fur of a cat seeking to warn off a larger enemy, fell away, revealing a bedraggled creature more to be pitied than feared, a young woman – certainly no older than he, and perhaps younger – who lay entirely at his mercy. ‘Don’t,’ she said, and shrank back against the filthy tiles of the roof. ‘I beg you …’

  ‘I won’t, unless you force me to it,’ he reassured her. ‘Now, you will tell me who you are working for, and why you have stolen this timepiece from Lord Wichcote.’

  She answered with another question. ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Give me yours, and perhaps I will tell you.’

  ‘You know my name.’

  ‘Grimalkin? That is but an alias. I mean your true name.’

  She glared at him defiantly.

  He shrugged. ‘No matter. I am more interested in hearing the name of your masters.’

  ‘I know your masters,’ she replied. ‘You are of the Worshipful Company. There is the stink of the regulator about you.’

  ‘The existence of the Worshipful Company is no secret,’ he said, ‘but few indeed are those who know of the regulators, and common thieves are not of that number.’

  ‘There is nothing common about me,’ she declared, eyes flashing with a trace of their former fire.

  In that, he was forced to agree, though he was not about to admit it to her. ‘Come now,’ he said instead. ‘I watched you enter Lord Wichcote’s attic through the skylight and leave the same way, bearing your prize. Those are the actions of a thief.’

  ‘A thief steals the property of others. I take what belongs to me, wherever I chance to find it.’

  ‘Chance?’ He laughed. ‘I suppose you will tell me next that you were simply out for a moonlight stroll across the rooftops of London and happened to fall through Lord Wichcote’s open skylight!’

  She glowered but said nothing in reply.

  Keeping the pistol trained upon her, he lifted the clock from the rooftop with his free hand. ‘So, you maintain that this clock is your property. That Lord Wichcote stole it from you, and you were but retrieving it.’

  ‘Careful,’ she cautioned, and it seemed to him that there was more than just concern for a rare and valuable timepiece in the tone of her voice.

  ‘It seems an ordinary clock to me.’

  ‘It is no more ordinary than I am.’

  ‘Indeed? I am glad to hear it. I should hate to think I have engaged in this merry chase for nothing.’

  ‘You are a fool.’

  He felt the blood rush to his face. ‘At least I am no traitor, madam. You would betray your country, and your king.’

 
‘There is more to the world than England. If my allegiance lies elsewhere, that does not make me a traitor.’

  ‘No matter. Whatever you are, my masters will ferret out your secrets. Just as they will the secrets of this timepiece.’

  ‘I do not think so.’ Suddenly the woman was free, her hands no longer bound behind her; they were pointing at him, and they were not empty, either, but held a brace of small pistols. He had seen only a grey blur. He cursed, realizing too late that she hadn’t been cowering at all but somehow cutting herself free of the ropes he had lashed about her wrists. Or, no … not cutting herself free, but instead being freed by the sharp teeth of a small grey mouse that he now saw scamper up her sleeve and disappear into the folds of her cloak.

  Though he could scarcely believe his eyes, he forced himself to show no surprise. ‘Your little pet is resourceful,’ he said.

  ‘Henrietta is no pet but a friend and companion. And now’ – she gave him a mocking smile – ‘hand over the clock, and I will spare your life.’

  He shook his head. ‘Lay down your pistols, and I shall spare yours.’

  ‘Why do you not fire?’ she demanded. ‘Are you a coward?’

  Truthfully, he did not think he could beat her to the trigger. She was that fast. He would have to find another way. ‘You have not fired, either,’ he observed. ‘It would appear we are at an impasse.’

  For a moment, they faced off in silence. Then the woman groaned with frustration. ‘Damn you, sir, for a dunce! Why will you not ask your third question?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Your third question, man! Until you ask it, I am bound to do you no harm, unless you should first attempt to harm me. If you would but try to shoot, or if you would but ask – yet you do neither, as if you somehow know our ways!’

  He blinked, taken aback by the return of the madwoman of moments before. Mad, yes, but could he not use that to his advantage? ‘Perhaps I am not such a dunce after all, madam. And perhaps I know more of your ways than you think.’

  She regarded him with something like horror. ‘No. That is not possible.’

  ‘And yet, as you say, I have not posed my third question.’ Until she’d spoken of it, he’d had no idea that he hadn’t asked her a third question; indeed, even now he could not have sworn to it with certainty. Yet she obviously believed it, and, with the capricious logic of the mad, attached a dire significance to the omission. Thus Quare resolved to continue as he had started – though he soon discovered that it was more difficult to avoid asking a question than he would have imagined, even knowing that his mission, and likely his life, hung in the balance. What ignorance had allowed him to accomplish with thoughtless ease took all his concentration to continue now that his mind was fixed upon it. ‘Nor shall I pose it,’ he added. ‘No, nor attack you, either, though I will not hesitate to defend myself. I have the clock, after all, and I reckon that my masters and I may pose it as many questions as we like without fear of retribution.’

  ‘You could not be more wrong.’

  He couldn’t help chuckling at such arrant lunacy. ‘Why, you speak as if I held a weapon rather than a timepiece!’

  ‘That is precisely what you hold. A weapon so dangerous, so deadly, that it cannot be allowed to fall into careless hands. That is why I was sent to retrieve it from that supercilious bumbler, Lord Wichcote. And why you must return it to me now. Believe me, it is for your own sake. For the sake of all mankind.’

  A thousand questions clustered at his lips; he bit them back. ‘Better that such a weapon – if weapon it be – fall into English hands than into the hands of the French and their allies. These are perilous times for England , madam. We fight for our survival against foes – as I have no doubt you know very well – who would show us not a scintilla of mercy. Against such enemies, the champions of an absolutism abhorrent to every freeborn Englishman and woman, we must grasp at every advantage, no matter how slight. It is our duty, to ourselves and our posterity.’

  ‘You speak of your petty wars as if they matter.’

  ‘They matter to me.’

  ‘There are other wars, sir, greater wars than you know, the consequences of which you cannot begin to imagine.’

  ‘Then I will leave such imaginings to you.’

  ‘If only you would. Yet in your ignorance, you and your masters thrust yourselves into matters that are beyond you in every way. In doing so, you will bring ruin upon the very posterity whose safety you seek to ensure.’

  ‘I am touched by your concern.’

  Now it was the woman’s turn to chuckle. ‘If that were all, I would leave you to your fate, and gladly. But like curious children bearing lit candles into a cellar where gunpowder is stored, thinking to find toys and sweetmeats hidden amid the barrels, your greedy stupidity threatens more than your own lives. This clock will not yield up its secrets to such as you – no, nor to your masters, not even the greatest of them. Believe me, rather than answer your questions, it will punish you for asking them – and it will be a punishment that strikes the guilty and the innocent alike.’

  ‘What sort—’ He stopped himself in time. ‘That is to say, even if this clock were stuffed with gunpowder and primed to explode like a grenado, it would scarcely pose a danger to anyone beyond its immediate vicinity.’

  ‘Were I to explain, you would think me madder than you do already,’ she answered. ‘“There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”’

  ‘I am no Horatio, madam; nor, I think, are you Prince Hamlet – though I begin to wonder if you are but mad north-northwest. You speak in riddles and hint at powers beyond mortal ken, yet whether you truly believe these things or say them to play upon my fancy, as if I were some superstitious rustic or smooth-cheeked schoolboy, I cannot tell. But it matters not. I am a man of science. I place my faith in reason. Thus will we unlock the secrets of this clock. Thus will we make use of them in defence of our hard-won liberties. And now’ – he struggled to his feet, keeping his pistol trained upon her and ignoring the sharp, stabbing pain in his thigh, as if his movements had started his wound to bleeding again – ‘as much as I have enjoyed matching wits with you, the hour grows late. I—’

  ‘But you are wounded!’ she interrupted, her pale face turning paler still. ‘Blood has been spilled!’

  ‘Indeed, we have spilled each other’s blood this night.’

  ‘Then it is already too late,’ she said, and, to his astonishment, lowered her pistols. Even more astonishing, a tear rolled down her ivory cheek. Most astonishing of all, at the sight of that glistening track, silvered in moonlight, he felt an answering shiver pass across his heart, and an impulse to comfort her so strong that it took all his will to resist it. ‘But perhaps not,’ she said, wiping the tear away and looking up at him with pleading eyes. ‘There may yet be time to undo what you have unwittingly set in motion, or at least to avert the worst of it. Give me the clock, I beg you. I will take my leave, and no one need be the wiser. You will never see me again, I swear it.’

  And those words, too, flew straight to his heart, echoing in that chamber with a hollow pang. Why should the thought of never seeing her again seem like such a terrible thing? ‘Madam, I cannot. My duty is clear.’

  ‘Then you have doomed us all.’ She put her pistols away – where they went, Quare didn’t see; one second they were in her hands; the next, her hands were empty. She stood with graceful dignity, her eyes fixed on him all the while, full of reproach and disappointment. ‘Would that I had slain you,’ she said with quiet bitterness. ‘Or that you had killed me. Better still if we had never been born. But I see now that there could be no escaping this moment for either of us. From the very beginning, we two were fated to mingle our blood upon this rooftop.’

  As she spoke, her voice heavy with resignation, she pulled the hood back over her head and drew the scarf up to cover her mouth and nose. Yet it was not just a rearrangement of clothing; her voice, her posture, even the quality of her ey
es underwent a transformation, until, at the end of it, the woman was gone so thoroughly as to never have existed, and in her place stood Grimalkin. It was a change so convincing, so complete, that Quare stepped back and brought his pistol – which, without noticing, he had lowered – back into line.

  ‘You do not need to fear me,’ said Grimalkin, sounding very much as if she wished it were otherwise. ‘Even were you to ask your third question, I could not harm you now. We are bound, you and I, by ties of blood and destiny.’

  But Quare asked nothing. He could not find his voice, and even if he could have spoken, he would not have questioned her, wary of a trick. He watched, heart pounding.

  ‘Besides,’ Grimalkin added with a weary shrug, ‘my time here is done. The sky grows pale with the approach of dawn, and I am called Otherwhere.’

  That was news to Quare; as far as he could tell, sparing a quick glance upwards, the sky was as dark as ever, and the light of the moon had no rival. He did not think it could be any later than three in the morning; dawn was hours off.

  The noise of a small concussion, a hollow popping sound, drew his attention. Clouds of thick grey smoke boiled up from the rooftop to cloak the figure of Grimalkin. He cursed himself for a fool. But he would not compound his foolishness by entering that cloud to grapple with her; nor could he bring himself to fire into it. Instead, keeping his pistol raised, he backed away. The cloud seemed to follow him with an intent all its own, as if it might reach out with smoky tendrils to snatch the clock from his grasp.

  ‘We are not finished, you and I,’ came her voice from out of the murk. ‘We shall meet again, I promise you.’

  He saw – or thought he saw – a serpentine form flex within the billowing, and at that he cursed again, in fear this time, and pulled the trigger. The pistol misfired, the hammer clicking without effect. But already the cloud was thinning, breaking into patchy wisps that drifted with the wind, indistinguishable from the general fog of the city. Another moment, and no trace remained. He stood alone on the rooftop. Grimalkin was gone.