The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

by Natasha Pulley

  More to soothe his own unease than out of any real fear for her, he sent a telegram to her post office in Edinburgh from the desk at work, in case she had had to go home already. He bought some biscuits and some sugar for proper tea on his way home, though, in case she hadn’t. The grocer at the end of Whitehall Street had started opening in the early mornings to catch the home-going night-workers.

  Annabel wasn’t there when he got back but he was cooking when there came a small tap at the door. He opened it with his shirtsleeves still rolled up, beginning to apologise that the flat smelled of dinner at nine in the morning, then stopped when he saw that it wasn’t Annabel but a boy with a post office badge and an envelope. There was a clipboard for him to sign. He signed it. The telegram was from Edinburgh.

  What do you mean? Am in Edinburgh as usual. Never left. HO driven you mad at last. Will send whisky. Told can be beneficial. Happy returns. Sorry to have forgotten again. Love A.

  He put the paper face down next to him. The watch was where he had left it on the chair. Because of the steam from the pan, it was dull from condensation, but the gold still hummed its voice colour.

  He went to the police station on his way to work the next morning, incoherent from the switch of time that always made midweek difficult. He was snorted at by the desk officer and asked not completely unreasonably whether the culprit might be Robin Hood. He nodded and laughed but as he left a creeping worry seeped back. At the office he mentioned it during a tea break. The other telegraphists looked at him oddly and made only vaguely interested noises. He stayed quiet after that. For the next few weeks, he expected someone to own up, but nobody did.

  The sound of the ships creaking outside his window was not something he usually noticed. It was there always, louder when the tide was in. It stopped on a cold morning in February. The river had frozen the hulls into place overnight. The quiet woke him. He lay still in bed, listening and watching his breath whiten. Wind hissed in the window frame, which was loose where the pane had shrunk. The glass had mostly steamed over, but he could make out part of a furled sail. The canvas didn’t move even when the hiss became a whistle. When the wind dropped, there was nothing. He blinked twice, because everything looked suddenly too pale.

  Today the silence had a silver hem. He turned his head against the pillow, toward the chair of collars and cufflinks, and a faint sound became clearer. The outer side of the blankets felt clammy when he moved his arm to lift up the watch. It was much warmer than it should have been, as usual. As he moved it, the chain slipped almost off the edge of the chair, but it was long enough not to fall and made a gold slack rope.

  Holding it close to his ear, he could hear mechanisms going. They were so quiet he couldn’t tell if they had started just then, or had been turning all along and masked by other things. He pressed it against his shirt until he couldn’t hear it at all, then lifted it again, trying to compare it to his memory of yesterday’s version of silence and its shadow colours. Eventually he sat up and pressed the catch. It still wouldn’t open.

  He got up and dressed, but stopped with his shirt half buttoned. He didn’t know whether it was even possible for clockwork to start itself after two months dead. He was still thinking about it when his eyes caught on the door latch. It was up. He pushed the handle. The door was unlocked. He opened it. Although the corridor was empty, it wasn’t quiet; water mumbled in the pipes and there were steps and sudden bright thumps as his neighbours got themselves ready for work. He hadn’t left the door unlocked once since the burglary in November, or not that he knew; he did forget things spectacularly every now and then. He closed the door again.

  On his way out, he stopped, thumped his knuckles slowly against the door frame, and went back for the watch. If somebody were tampering with it, leaving it out in his room all day only made the task easier. The thought made his stomach turn nastily, though God knew what kind of burglar came back to adjust previously deposited presents. Not the cricket-bat-and-mask kind, but then, he didn’t know all of the kinds. He wished the policeman hadn’t laughed so much.

  The open latch was still on his mind as he climbed up the yellow stairs, unwinding his scarf. From a combination of the cold and tapping at telegraph keys, his fingertips had roughened and kept catching on the wool. He was halfway up when the senior clerk came down and pushed a sheaf of papers into his chest.

  ‘For your will,’ was the explanation. ‘No later than the end of next month, understand? Or we’ll drown in paperwork. And sort out Park, will you?’

  Puzzled, he went on to the telegraphy department, where the youngest clerk had burst into tears. He paused in the doorway, then dredged up something that at least looked like sympathy. He believed firmly in a soldier’s right to cry in public upon surviving the attentions of the surgeon, and a miner’s after being lifted from a shaft collapse. He wasn’t convinced in the least that anyone in an office at the HO had anything to cry about. He was also aware, though, that this was probably a very unfair thing to think. Park looked up when he asked what the matter was.

  ‘Why do we have to make out wills? Are we going to be bombed?’

  Thaniel took him downstairs for a cup of tea. When he shepherded him back upstairs, they found the others in a similar state.

  ‘What’s all this?’ he said.

  ‘Have you seen these will papers?’

  ‘It’s only a formality. I shouldn’t worry about it.’

  ‘Have they issued them before?’

  He laughed, had to, but forced himself to keep it slight and quiet. ‘No, but we’re up to our eyes in unnecessary forms. Remember that one about not taking money from the Prussian intelligence services for secret naval information? For what, when we run into a Prussian spy in one of their many haunts near the Trafalgar Square tea-and-horrible-coffee stall? I expect we’ve all been very vigilant there. Just sign it and lob it at Mr Croft when he comes past.’

  ‘What are you going to write?’

  ‘Nothing, I haven’t got anything anyone would want,’ he said, but then realised that it was a lie. He took the watch out of his pocket. It was real gold.

  ‘Thank you for looking after me,’ Park said. He was folding and refolding a handkerchief. ‘You’re awfully good. It’s like having my dad here.’

  ‘You’re no trouble,’ he murmured, before he felt a little sting. He almost said that he wasn’t so much older than all the rest of them, then saw that it wouldn’t have been fair. It didn’t matter how much older. He was older; even if they had all been the same age, he would still have been older.

  They both jumped when all twelve telegraphs burst into clattering. Transcript paper crumpled under the speed of the messages, and there was a scrabble as everybody reached for pencils to take the code down by hand. Because they were all concentrating on individual letters, he was the first to hear that the machines were all saying the same thing.

  Urgent, bomb detonated in—

  Victoria Station destroyed—

  —station severely damaged—

  —hidden in cloakroom—

  —sophisticated clockwork in the cloakroom—

  Victoria Station—

  —officers dispatched, possible casualties—

  —Clan na Gael.

  Thaniel shouted for the senior clerk, who ran in, looking like thunder with tea spilled down his waistcoat. Once he understood, the rest of the day was spent speeding messages between departments and the Yard, and refusing comments to the newspapers. Thaniel had no idea how they managed to get hold of direct Whitehall lines, but they always did. From down the corridor, there came a bellow. It was the Home Secretary shouting at the editor of The Times to stop his journalists blocking the wires. By the time the shift ended, the tendons in the backs of Thaniel’s hands hurt and the copper keys had made his skin smell of money.

  None of them discussed it, but instead of parting ways at the end of the shift, they walked together to Victoria. They found crowds, because the trains had been stopped for the day, and t
hen, closer to the building, bricks everywhere. Since everybody else was more interested in finding out when the services would resume, it wasn’t difficult to get to the edge of the wrecked cloakroom. The wooden rafters were blasted as though something monstrous had broken out. A top hat still sat in the rubble, and a red scarf had turned greyish where frost stuck it to the bricks. Policemen were clearing the wreckage from the outside in, breath steaming. After a while they started to look warily at the four telegraphists. Thaniel could see it must have looked strange, four thin clerks lined up neatly in black and staying to look for much longer than anyone else. They broke apart. Rather than go straight home, he walked around St James’s Park first, soaking in the nearly green grass and the empty, raked-over flowerbeds. It was so open, though, that the great fronts of the Admiralty and the Home Office still looked close. He wished for some proper woods. On the wish’s tail came an urge to go up to Lincoln for a visit, but there was another man living in the gamekeeper’s cottage now, and a new duke at the big house.

  He went home circuitously, avoiding Parliament.

  ‘See this?’ George the beggar said, holding up a newspaper at him when he went by. The front page was mostly taken up with an etching of the blasted station.

  ‘Just now.’

  ‘What times, eh? Wouldn’t have had this when I was a lad.’

  ‘But they burned all the Catholics in those days, didn’t they,’ said Thaniel. He looked down at the picture. Seeing it in a newspaper made it more real than seeing it in person, and suddenly he felt annoyed with himself. They were supposed to have their affairs in order. In order meant a state which relatives could make sense of if it all went badly in May. Annabel would never sell something like a watch, even if she was scraping to keep the boys in clothes that fitted. It was no use willing it to her.

  ‘Oh, har har,’ snarled George. ‘Wait, where are you going?’

  ‘Pawn shop. Changed my mind about something.’

  Just beyond the prison was a pawnbroker who called himself a jeweller despite the three gold balls outside the shop.

  The front window was hung about with shabby-looking gold and pasted with advertisements for other shops or by people with second-hand things too big to bring in person. The newest was one of the police notices to keep watch. It was clerkishly pedantic of him, but he was starting to feel tetchy about those. Bombers did not go about trailing wires and fuses.

  ‘Silly, isn’t it?’ the pawnbroker said, seeing him frown. ‘Been coming round pasting those up all over the place for months. I keep saying, all our bombers are safe locked up.’ He nodded to the prison. ‘But up they go.’ He had one stuck to the top of the counter too, and peeled it off to show another underneath. The paste had made it translucent and there was another under that, so that ‘keep watch’ had a diagonal, fading shadow.

  ‘They’re everywhere at Whitehall,’ Thaniel said, and then took out the watch. ‘What’s this worth?’

  The pawnbroker glanced at it, and then looked again, and then shook his head. ‘No. I’m not taking one of his.’

  ‘What? Whose?’

  The pawnbroker looked annoyed. ‘Look, I’m not falling for this again. Two was enough, thanks. The marvellous disappearing watches, brilliant trick, I’m sure, but you’ll need to try it on someone who hasn’t seen it before.’

  ‘It’s not a trick. What are you talking about?’

  ‘What am I talking about? I mean they don’t stay pawned, do they? Someone sells one on, I pay good money, the sodding things disappear a day later. I heard it all round town, it’s not just me. You get on before I call the constable.’

  ‘You’ve got a cabinet full of watches there that look like they’ve managed to stay pawned,’ Thaniel protested.

  ‘You don’t see one of these, though, do you? Just get out.’ He showed the handle of a cricket bat he had under the counter.

  Thaniel held his hands up and left. There were some little boys playing Indians outside, and he had to weave around them. He looked back at the pawn shop, wanting to go back and ask for the names of the people who had tried to sell on the watches before, but he doubted he would get much but a swing from the cricket bat for his trouble. Frustrated, he went home and put the watch back on to its dressing-table chair.

  If what the pawnbroker had said was true, he wouldn’t find anyone who would take it. A prickling terseness started about halfway down his spine, as though somebody had rested their fingertips gun-shaped between the vertebrae there. He bent his arm back and pressed his thumb into it hard. People did run scams around expensive watches, and he did sometimes forget to latch the door. In the balance of probability, it was unlikely that somebody had broken into his flat twice, wound the watch, then made it impossible for him to get rid of it. The money it would take to upset all the pawnbrokers in London, for a start. He couldn’t convince himself.

  The next day Thaniel retrieved the will papers from the back of his drawer, under the Lipton’s packet. They came out gritty with tea powder. He swept it off and filled out the blank spaces in carefully clear handwriting. As he described the watch and where to find it, a ball of ink tipped down the nib of his pen and burst above Annabel’s name. He shook his head once and went through the rest of the unnecessary pages before signing the last.

  The weather took a sudden turn for the brighter soon after that. Spring was coming, and he began to catch himself looking at butter and cheese in shops and adding up in his head to see if they might outlive him. He took some old clothes and pillowcases to the workhouse over the river, and cleaned the outsides of the window frames when he came back.

  THREE

  OXFORD, MAY 1884

  The academic year was nearly over. In the almost-summer light, the sandstone had turned gold and wisteria ran down the high walls. Under the blue sky, where the air smelled of hot cobbles, Grace rubbed her hair and felt like a Philistine for wanting rain.

  Throughout winter, she always believed that she was a summery sort of person. Unfortunately, this was not true, and after a week of good weather, she was sick of being too hot. The sky showed no sign of greying, so she had resolved to spend the day in the cool of the library with a book she had ordered the previous week. She had an experiment in mind and wanted to check how it had been done before. It had seemed like a fine idea when she set off; now that she was nearly there, she was sweating and wishing that lemonade was allowed inside.

  As she passed through the main square of the Bodleian, posters advertising college balls and plays fluttered on the walls in the hot breeze. She had been permanently put off the latter by a horrific performance of Edward II at Keble last year. Edward had been an ancient classics professor and Gaveston an undergraduate. Grace did not mind what classics professors and undergraduates got up to in their own time, but she objected to being charged a shilling to watch. Adjusting her false moustache as subtly as possible, she tapped up the steps of the Radcliffe Camera. Its basement floor was the darkest reading room in the library. She touched her hat to the porter at the door. He ignored her, already moving to intercept a young woman not prudent enough to have stolen a gentleman-friend’s clothes.

  ‘’Scuse me, miss. Where d’you think you’re going?’ he said amicably.

  The woman blinked, puzzled, and then remembered that she had no escort. ‘Oh, of course! I am sorry.’ She turned around at once.

  Grace felt her eyebrow twitch and went on down the spiral steps. She had never understood why anyone listened to the rule about unaccompanied women and libraries. Everybody, professors and students and Proctors the same, knew that if the sign said ‘do not walk on the grass’, one hopped. Anybody who didn’t had failed to understand what Oxford was.

  The arrangement of the reading room was circular. All the bookcases were identical, and even though she was now at the end of her fourth and final year, she was disorientated while she looked for the main desk. Until recently, she had navigated by the signs on the pillars that showed which subject the nearby shelves represen
ted, but they had switched around the theology section last month. Having found the desk, she crossed the tiled floor and asked in a whisper for her book. She had ordered them under the name of Gregory Carrow, an ancient cousin who had left the university decades ago, but the librarians never checked names, requiring only that the identity offered belonged to a student or an alumnus.

  ‘The American Journal of Science – whatever do you want that for?’ the librarian asked as he handed it over, a little irritably. Like museum curators, the librarians were loath to allow anyone to touch anything. It was pretty clear that they felt the whole university would be better off it weren’t full of students.

  Grace smiled. ‘I’m putting up shelves. It’s quite solid.’

  He blinked. ‘You can’t take books out of the library.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know. I’ve built a secret cellar. Thank you,’ she added, and took the books away to a desk.

  Food was forbidden in the library, but she had secreted a couple of biscuits in her pocket. Risky, since this was an offence punishable by banishment from the whole library for the day, though necessary. In relation to the centre of Oxford, Lady Margaret Hall might as well have been in Brighton, and she didn’t have enough time left before the end of term to waste library days going back and forth for meals.

  She had, in any case, waited more than a week for the journal. The Bodleian kept a copy of every book ever published since its establishment, but that meant that only the most often-used could be out on the shelves. Unusual books lived deep in the stacks, which covered a space underground much bigger than the library above, and obscure things had to go to old tin mines in Cornwall and be put on a train when a request came through. The only books more difficult to get hold of than little American journals were first copies of the Principia, which were chained to the desks in the manuscript library and inaccessible without written permission from a tutor.