The Emperor of all Things

by Paul Witcover

  Grimsby’s face bore an expression of intense concentration, as if he were attempting, without notable success, to untangle majestic from mediocrity . ‘Er, you are too k-kind, Master Magnus,’ he said, seeming to have caught Master Halsted’s stammer.

  ‘Not at all,’ the master rejoined and turned now to Quare, who just managed to keep from flinching as Grimsby had done under that blank, reflective gaze, in which he saw himself not merely reflected but belittled. ‘Your master has written to me of you as well, Mr Quare. It is a duty I require of every master in our company, for how else am I to separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were, crippled as I am and able to leave London only with the greatest difficulty and inconvenience?’

  ‘Yet you have come to Dorchester now, master,’ Quare observed.

  ‘Quite,’ said Master Magnus, and without further ado removed a pocket watch from within his black coat. This he laid upon the table, then pushed over towards Quare. ‘Do you recognize this, Mr Quare?’

  Quare shook his head, mystified.

  ‘Go on,’ said Master Magnus. ‘Have a closer look.’

  Quare picked up the watch. He was struck at once by the plainness of it: no lid covered the glass; the hands were simple stark pointers; the black numbers on the white face had been painted without embellishment; the silver backing was bare of any engraved mark or design. He held it to his ear and heard a steady ticking.

  ‘Well?’ asked Master Magnus.

  The others looked on with mystified expressions.

  He was being tested; that much was clear. But as to the purpose of the test, let alone its consequences, he had no idea. ‘It is very plain,’ he said, weighing his words with care. ‘But it seems well made for all that. I would need to open it up before I could venture anything more.’

  ‘Then do so,’ the master said, inclining his head.

  Quare always carried a small tool kit with him; in a moment, he had prised the back of the pocket watch open. The inner workings of the timepiece did not match the drabness of its outer appearance. There were a number of small but significant innovations to the mechanisms that powered and regulated the watch. This in itself was unexpected; he knew very well – what apprentice did not? – that the Worshipful Company took a dim view of innovation, confiscating or destroying outright any timepieces that departed from what had been officially sanctioned. So it came as a surprise to have such a watch handed to him by no less an authority of the guild than Master Magnus. Surprise turned into something approaching shock a moment later when he recognized the innovations as his own. For some time now, Quare had been keeping a notebook that he filled with sketches of improvements to the mechanisms he worked upon each and every day in Master Halsted’s shop. But he had not yet found the courage to actually translate one of his sketches into reality. Nor had he shown the notebook to anyone. Yet here was a watch that incorporated not one but a good half-dozen of his ideas. It seemed impossible.

  ‘I ask again,’ said Master Magnus. ‘Do you recognize anything about this watch?’

  Quare glanced up, surveying the faces that were regarding him in turn. With his eyes hidden behind his dark spectacles, Master Magnus’s expression was inscrutable. Grimsby’s mouth had fallen open again. Mrs Halsted’s blue eyes shone with a tender concern he blushed to see: the look of a fond mistress. Halsted looked away, his cheeks flaming, and Quare wondered if the man suspected what his wife and his apprentice got up to when he was away.

  ‘Well?’ Master Magnus prompted.

  Quare swallowed, mouth gone dry. He felt as if he’d been manoeuvred into a trap. Just a moment ago, Master Magnus had spoken of reports he’d received from Master Halsted; he realized now that those reports must have contained copies of his sketches. He felt a sharp sense of betrayal – ridiculous, as he had betrayed his master’s trust in a more tangible fashion: but feelings are not reasonable things, and he felt what he felt regardless. Apprehension, too, crept along his veins, for he did not doubt that his sketches alone could result in a stiff sanction from the guild, if not outright expulsion. And then where would he go, with no family and no trade? Yet despite this, one other feeling surged through him, stronger than the others.

  Pride.

  Though he had not cut and filed the parts of this watch with his own hands, nevertheless they were realizations of his designs. Something that had existed only on the page and in his mind had been made real and tangible. And, at least as far as he could tell from such a cursory examination, the mechanisms worked as he had anticipated. How could he deny this thing he had created? To do so would be to deny himself.

  ‘I didn’t make this watch,’ he said, ‘but I suppose you could say that I designed it.’

  ‘Daniel, I—’ Halsted began, but Master Magnus, lifting a hand, overrode him.

  ‘So, you admit that the watch is based on your designs?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘By keeping those designs to yourself and not showing them to your master, so that he, in turn, could forward them to me for review, you have failed in your obligations as an apprentice of this guild. Do you dispute that?’

  ‘No. I don’t dispute it.’

  ‘Very well.’ Master Magnus nodded in satisfaction … or so it seemed to Quare. ‘I will tell you, sir, that the small improvements you have made were known to us already. This watch was not crafted to your specifications. I made it myself when I was a mere apprentice, more years ago than I care to admit. Nor is it the only such example in our archives. So you see, you are not as clever as you may think, Mr Quare – not by a long shot. You are not the first to have had these insights. Others have been here before you. Still, I won’t deny that you have talent.’

  As soon as he had registered what the master was telling him, Quare had turned all his attention back to the watch. And indeed, now that he looked more closely, he could see that the various parts of the watch that reflected his sketches did not do so with the fidelity he had at first thought to find there. In some cases, it seemed to him that his design was the more elegant; in others he saw that, on the contrary, he had not found the best solution. But the truth was plain: the sketches he had struggled over in solitude, the innovations he had dreamed would revolutionize horology and win him acclaim and riches, were no more than instances of reinventing the wheel. Yet though he was disappointed, he was not as crushed as he might have imagined; instead, it was as if an unexpected vista had opened out before him. Who could say what wonders were to be found there? He seemed to see them in the distance, glittering like the gold-leafed spires and towers of a fabulous city: a city built entirely of clocks. At the same time, he feared that he would be denied entrance to that city, permitted only to glimpse its wonders from afar. He looked up at Master Magnus. ‘I assume I am to be punished?’

  ‘Oh, indeed,’ said the master. ‘Most dreadfully punished. To begin with, you may consider your apprenticeship with Master Halsted over.’

  Again Master Halsted began to speak. Again Master Magnus silenced him with a gesture. No one else said a word.

  So that was it, then. It was to be expulsion. Now, indeed, Quare felt crushed, the very breath squeezed out of him.

  ‘You will be coming back to London with me,’ Master Magnus continued. ‘You will continue your apprenticeship there, at the guild hall, under my supervision.’

  ‘I … what?’

  ‘Go and get your things ready, Mr Quare. We leave within the hour.’ He turned towards the others as a dazed Quare rose to his feet. ‘Mr Grimsby, your presence is no longer required. Perhaps you can assist Mr Quare in packing.’ Grimsby nodded, looking as dazed as Quare, and stood.

  As Quare left the room, Grimsby trailing behind him, he heard Master Magnus’s voice: ‘If I might trouble you for another cup of tea, Mrs Halsted, your husband and I will work out the transfer of Mr Quare’s indenture.’

  In the workroom, he hurriedly packed his things as Grimsby pestered him with questions he scarcely heard and in any case could not answer. His life had been
turned upside down in an instant, and his thoughts, divided between what he was leaving behind and what awaited him in London, had no purchase on the present. In what seemed the blink of an eye, he was shaking Mr Halsted’s hand as his master – former master! – stammered out an awkward goodbye, then embracing a tearful Mrs Halsted, who pressed him to her ample bosom with more-than-maternal zeal, or so it seemed to Quare, though no one else appeared to find the embrace remarkable. Nor were his own eyes empty of tears; he was, after all, leaving the closest approximation to a family that he had ever known.

  Then he was seated across from Master Magnus in a jolting carriage that bore the arms of the Worshipful Company – a great golden clock showing the hour of twelve, surmounted by a crown and cross, itself surmounted by a plumed silver helmet, which was in turn topped by a banded sphere of gold; the whole supported on one side by the figure of Father Time with his scythe and hourglass, and on the other by a monarch with a golden sceptre, and beneath it all, as if inscribed on a flowing scroll, the words of the guild’s motto: Tempus Rerum Imperator . Time, Emperor of All Things.

  Quare watched the familiar sights of Dorchester pass by the open window of the carriage. Streets and buildings he had seen a thousand times without emotion tugged at his heart like burrs that had become fastened there without his knowledge and now came away grudgingly and not entirely without pain.

  ‘Dry your eyes, Mr Quare,’ commanded his companion, who even now, in the dim confines of the conveyance, wore his dark glasses. The man’s perch on the padded bench was a precarious one; each bounce and swerve threatened to throw him down and doubtless would have done so already were it not for a strap that was bolted to the bench and which he had drawn about his waist and torso upon first clambering onto the seat – ‘My own invention,’ the master had explained in response to Quare’s inquiry.

  ‘After a day or two in London,’ he continued now, ‘Dorchester will seem no more than a childish fancy, a dull dream from which you will be glad to have awoken. Your real life is about to begin, sir. It will not be easy, but you will have a chance to put your talents to their best use, I assure you.’

  ‘I can scarcely credit all that has happened to me today, Master Magnus,’ Quare said. ‘I hope I don’t seem ungrateful or ignorant of the honour you have shown me. I will do my best to be a good apprentice to you and assist you in all your labours.’

  The master laughed. ‘You mistake me, sir. I do not require your assistance. Perhaps one day, if you are diligent and obedient, and progress to the rank of journeyman, I will make use of you. But that day will not come for years, and to be frank may never come. “Many are called, but few are chosen”, Mr Quare.’

  ‘Then whose apprentice will I be?’

  ‘Why, on paper, my own. But I have many such apprentices. Do not consider yourself a special case. I had other business in Dorchester, and it was convenient to fetch you at the same time; otherwise a journeyman would be conveying you now. Once settled in London, you will not serve a single master but will instead be placed at the disposal of all the masters of the guild hall. Your day-to-day training will be overseen by journeymen – more than that, I cannot say; I find such details tedious and leave them to others.’

  ‘What … what is London like, master?’

  ‘London? She is a painted strumpet – loud, boisterous, full of frantic energy , beguiling seductions, and desperate schemes. She will stroke you with one hand and pick your pocket with the other, and leave you with the pox besides. She is life itself, Mr Quare – and death. And the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers is a microcosm of that city. Life within the guild hall could not be more different than the cosy situation you are leaving behind. We are a brotherhood, true enough, yet Cain and Abel were also brothers, were they not? But you will discover all this for yourself soon enough, as I did. You may not believe it to look at me, Mr Quare, but I was once much like you.’

  ‘Indeed, sir?’ he inquired.

  Again the master laughed. ‘I, too, came to the city full of dreams and ambitions, burning to make my mark on the world and to unravel the secrets of time. Like yourself, I have known the tender embrace of the workhouse – the memory is engraved on my bones, on my very soul. And like you, I escaped that hell on Earth and found refuge within the guild.’

  ‘Why, are you an orphan, too, sir?’

  ‘As good as. I know nothing of my parents – they abandoned me as soon as they had a good look at me. I suppose I can’t blame them; indeed, I am grateful they didn’t smother me in the cradle.’

  ‘Have you made no attempt to find them?’

  ‘To what end? A tearful reconciliation? I leave that to the scribblers. Nor has the prospect of revenge ever interested me. No, I consider my parents dead, and myself an orphan, as I said. It is simpler that way for all concerned. But what of your own parents?’

  ‘They died in a fire when I was but a babe,’ Quare said. ‘Or so I have been told. I have no memory of them.’ This was not quite true; in fact, Quare possessed certain vague memories – impressions, rather – that he associated with his parents. From time to time, most often as he was lying in bed, on the verge of sleep, a warm peacefulness would settle over him from he knew not where, all the strength would ebb from his limbs, and he would feel himself enveloped in a kind of tender, loving regard that he knew at no other moment in his waking life. As far back as he could remember, he had associated this feeling or mood with the presence of his parents, as if they were watching over him from beyond the grave. But he would not divulge such a private solace to Master Magnus or anyone.

  ‘I was raised in an orphanage,’ he continued, ‘and from there, at the age of seven or eight – to this day, I am not certain of my exact age – was sent to the workhouse, where I remained until, quite by chance, when I was ten, or perhaps eleven, I made the acquaintance of Mr Halsted, who often, out of Christian charity, hired some of us children to help in his workshop. He encouraged my interest in timepieces and, as my aptitude for the work became plain, arranged to take me on as an apprentice. I owe that gentleman everything. He was like a father to me, and more – like an angel, sir. A guardian angel.’ Indeed, as if the truth of that statement had not been manifest to him until he had spoken it aloud, Quare felt his throat constrict with emotion. He dried his burning eyes with the cuff of his coat and looked again out of the carriage window.

  They had left the city of Dorchester behind and were travelling along a dusty road past open fields of rolling farmland. In the distance, under blue skies, he could see the glint of the sun off the River Frome. It was the furthest Quare had ever been from home.

  ‘What if I were to tell you that you are not an orphan?’

  Quare’s head whipped back round to face his companion. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘An orphan is a child deprived by death of father and mother. It’s true your mother is dead – she perished giving birth to you. That is in the parish records. But your father remains very much alive, or so I believe.’

  It took Quare a moment to gather his wits. ‘My father … alive?’

  ‘I have found no evidence to the contrary.’

  ‘Why has he not come for me? Why has he allowed me to believe I am an orphan for all these years?’

  ‘Because he does not wish to acknowledge you, sir. He does not wish to know aught of you, and he desires even less that you should know aught of him.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Is it not obvious? You are no orphan, sir, but a bastard. Some man’s by-blow.’

  ‘How do you know this?’ Quare demanded, his hands squeezed into fists at his sides.

  ‘I make it my business to learn what I can about every apprentice.’

  ‘But then who is my father?’ A sudden foreboding came over him. ‘Is it you, sir? Is that why you have come to fetch me?’

  At this, Master Magnus threw back his head and roared with laughter while Quare turned the shade of a beet. When the master had composed himself, he answered: ‘No, I am not you
r father, young Quare. Have no misapprehensions on that score.’

  ‘Then Mr Halsted! Perhaps that is why he was so kind to me.’

  ‘Nor is Halsted your sire. Put such thoughts from your mind.’

  ‘Then who?’

  ‘Why, I do not know,’ Master Magnus confessed with good humour. ‘What I have related to you is no more than any man could have found at any time simply by perusing the parish records. Your mother’s name was Mary Trewell. A milkmaid. No doubt seduced and cast aside. A common enough tale, though a sad one, I grant you.’

  Quare was reeling; he felt as though he had slipped into a kind of dream. ‘Did … did Mr Halsted know this?’

  ‘Who do you think it was that examined the records? He dispatched the information to me. A boy, Daniel Quare, born to Mary Trewell, father unknown. Your name, sir, is a witty reflection of that fact, from the Latin quare , which is to say “from what cause”.’

  ‘I … I scarcely know what to say, what to think,’ Quare mumbled, passing a hand before his eyes. ‘Why have you told me this?’

  ‘Should I have kept it from you? Surely a man has the right to know the truth of his own parentage.’

  ‘But you have told me a half truth, no more. Now I must wonder at who my father may be. Does he yet live? And if so, does he dwell close by or far away? Have I seen him, all unknowing? Does he know of me? Perhaps he does not, and would acknowledge me if he but learned of my existence. I must find him! Sir, can you not help me?’

  ‘I might look for years and never find him. No doubt the trail has gone quite cold. And who is to say that he wishes to be found? A man might very well know that he has a bastard son and yet desire no more intimate acquaintance with him.’