The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

by Natasha Pulley

  He set off in the thready mist. It was still dense over the river, where it made skeleton ghosts of the ships’ masts and trapped the stale smell of the water. The way took him past Parliament and Westminster Abbey, whose high walls threw the path into a shadow that still held the night-time cold, then up to Whitehall Street and its rank of new, bright buildings. The knot that had been forming deep in his intestines tightened. The bomb at Victoria had been a little clockwork device that might have fitted into a shoebox. The springs of even an ordinary watch could go strong for more than a day. There was every chance that the new bomb was in place already.

  The yellow of the stairs sounded far away, and the telegraphy office on the second floor seemed further up too. He had to stare at the nearest telegraph machine for a few minutes before he could lift his hands and wind in a new reel of transcript paper, and when he did, he gripped it too hard and bent the upper edge in five places where his fingers had been. He had no time to put in a straighter one before the machine thrummed and began scratching out a message. Being forced to concentrate, and do something, made him pull himself together. It was stupid to think there would definitely be a bomb in Whitehall. If everybody went about paralysed, Clan na Gael wouldn’t need to bother with dynamite to bring the civil service to a grinding halt. He had never even met an Irishman, but he felt suddenly determined that he’d be damned if he was going to worry and shudder his way through the day.

  The clicks and pauses came in the hiccuping rhythm of Williamson’s code.

  Clockwork bomb found and— disabled at base of Nelson’s Column. Field officer reports it looks— complex. Decent springs used and sixteen packets of dynamite. Timer set to go in— thirteen hours i.e. 9 p.m. Sending uniforms to search HO again today please confirm receipt …

  While the code ran, Thaniel held the end of the transcript paper with one hand and rested the other on the bronze knob of the key. As soon as Williamson stopped, he replied, GM Dolly message received.

  A pause. GM was good morning, but Thaniel realised then that Williamson, with his meticulous typing, probably did not know it. His own English had devolved rapidly since he had become a telegraphist. There was a shorthand for everything. GM, good morning, GA, go ahead, 1, wait a moment, BO, bugger off, generally to the Foreign Office.

  How do you— always know it’s me?

  The way you type.

  You HO boys are— disturbing sometimes. Going— for a drink after? Everyone seems— to be planning to descend on the— Rising Sun.

  It was a bar opposite the Yard, just down from Trafalgar Square.

  Hope so, Thaniel sent back. Plan not to die in service of British Government. Pay insufficient. Remember that watch that was left at my house?

  Y—es?

  It was locked before. It opened this morning. I think you should have a look at it.

  How big?

  Watch-sized.

  Not explosive then. It’s— bloody odd, but no time today for anything without— dynamite in it. Sorry. Must go.

  Wait. You said the timer on the column bomb was set for nine tonight. If there are other bombs, should we expect those at the same time?

  A long pause. Then, Yes.

  Thaniel delivered the first message to the senior clerk and threw away the rest of the transcripts. By the time he came back, they were uncrumpling slowly in the wastepaper basket like the tendons of a dead thing relaxing. He watched them and felt crumpled too. His neck had been aching lately because there was never time to stretch or walk.

  ‘Williamson says to expect it all at nine o’clock tonight,’ he said to the room.

  There was a small silence as the other three paused in their coding. As they did, a boom of gunfire cracked the air. It made the four of them jump, before they all dissolved into nervous laughter. It was only Horse Guards. They fired shots in the parade ground at eight o’clock every morning. Thaniel lifted out the watch anyway to be certain. Sure enough, the filigree hands showed eight. The rose gold sheened its familiar voice-colour.

  ‘Phew!’ Park said, with a brittle enthusiasm. ‘Where did you get that?’

  ‘It was a present.’

  Park’s transcript paper creaked and then crackled as it buckled in on itself. When he had written down the message, he peered down at the watchpaper in the lid. ‘Mori,’ he read. ‘He’s quite well known, isn’t he?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Thaniel honestly. The other central exchange machine started up too, and they had to turn away from each other.

  The senior clerk passed a folder full of notes over his shoulder while he wrote. The notes were messages to be telegraphed today. Still listening to the central exchange and transcribing with his right hand, Thaniel opened the file and began to tap out the top messages with his left, to the rhythm of the opening chorus of Iolanthe. He had seen it last year. Arthur Sullivan’s music tended to be disguised behind silly lyrics in comic opera, but underneath, its real colours were as good as anything by more respected composers. He still had the programme and a lithograph print at home, locked in the music box.

  ‘How do you do that?’ Park said, talkative now that they had broken their usual silence. The two operators on his far side glanced toward Thaniel too, eavesdropping.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Write with one hand and code with the other.’

  ‘Oh. It’s like playing the piano.’

  ‘Where did you learn to play the piano?’ said Park.

  ‘My … father was gamekeeper at a big house, and the gentleman there was a concert pianist with no children. He was bursting to teach. If I’d said no, he would have tried the dog.’

  They laughed. ‘Are you any good?’

  ‘Not any more.’

  Williamson’s officers arrived soon after. Thaniel wanted to make them look at the watch, but Williamson had said it was nothing, and insisting would have frightened the other operators. Once they had searched under the telegraphs, Thaniel faded back into the scratching of the code, and worked his way through the file of notes. They were mostly meaningless to him, being snippets of conversations whose totality he had not heard. A few did make sense. The Foreign Office was throwing a ball next month and there was a message confirming an order of six casks of champagne for the Foreign Minister.

  ‘Steepleton, is that from Gilbert and Sullivan?’

  He looked round at the senior clerk. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Pay attention to the messages! The fate of the nation might well be in your hands!’

  ‘It isn’t. They’re full of Lord Leveson’s champagne.’

  ‘Get on with it,’ the senior clerk sighed.

  The policemen returned three hours later and declared an all clear. In that time they couldn’t have done anything but stroll the halls and glance in a few cupboards. The senior clerk announced suddenly that all those who had begun on the early shift should pause for tea and some food. They would work on until nine. They would be free after that, one way or the other.

  Glad for the chance to stretch, Thaniel drifted to the small canteen, where he waited in line for a cup of soup that was, just for today, being provided free of charge. The usual canteen chatter had dulled almost to silence. The sound of soup being ladled into cups was too loud. He tried to think how he had ended up here.

  He had taken the job four years ago and had considered himself lucky to get it. Before that, he had been a ledgers clerk at a locomotive factory in Lincoln. That had been cold and horrible. The Home Office paid more and did not expect its employees to buy their own coal. But telegraphy never varied. It was as easy as writing, once you knew Morse Code, and he wasn’t educated enough to advance much further. There were vague prospects of becoming an assistant senior clerk at some point this year. He had been pleased about that when he heard, then horrified to be pleased, because being pleased with something so boring meant that without noticing, at no particular point that he could see, he had shrunk to fit the job. He had never meant to be a telegraphist for four years.

 
But the fact was that you could not support a widow and two boys with orchestral work. After Annabel’s husband had died he had sold the piano. He hadn’t been able to go to concerts or opera for a good while, but gradually that wore off. Now, he bought a cheap ticket once every season or so. The part of himself he had amputated still twinged sometimes, but letting her go to a workhouse would have been worse than a twinge.

  Now, when the Irish were not threatening to blow up Whitehall, he worked between eight and eleven hours a day for six days or nights a week except at Christmas. He was not poor – he could afford ten candles and two baths a week. He wasn’t going to throw himself in the Thames for the misery of it all, and God knew most of London was worse off. All the same, he had a feeling that life should not have been about ten candles and two baths a week.

  ‘D’you reckon we’ll blow up today, then?’ the cook asked him as he handed over the soup. He had a South Riding accent that sounded like home.

  ‘Not up here. Last time they threw a bomb at the ground-floor window, didn’t they?’ He caught the cook’s disconcerted expression. ‘Still, blowing up would be a change from paperwork.’

  The cook laughed, too high.

  As nine o’clock edged around, the office began to slow. The clip of Morse was more spaced as the telegraphists listened for an explosion. In the larger office across the corridor, the typists lost their rhythm and lowered their voices. Thaniel saw Park’s knuckles whiten over his telegraph key. He leaned across and took it from him gently, and got up to cross the corridor. The telegraph room was windowless, but the typists’ office had huge windows overlooking Whitehall Street. The others followed him. They found the typists standing too, going to the same window. It was open now and letting in the smell of ozone. Thunder growled around the city steeples, quietly, as though it knew that hundreds of men were trying to listen.

  Nine chimes tolled out from Parliament and the city remained its ordinary self, unlit by flashes or smoke. Rain tapped on the window panes. The clerks exchanged glances, but nobody moved. Thaniel took out the watch. A minute past, two minutes, and still nothing. Ten. Then a gust of laughter came from the street. The clerks from the Foreign Office were already on their way home. They were sharing umbrellas.

  The senior clerk rang his bell.

  ‘Well done, everyone! Early shift is over, late begins in two minutes. Clear out, and if you see an Irishman on your way home, give him a good kick from the Home Office.’

  There was a cheer, and he took his first deep breath for months. He hadn’t been aware of breathing shallowly. It had happened gradually; someone had put a penny on his chest every hour since November, and now the weight of thousands of pennies had lifted at once.

  Everyone was going to the Rising Sun and to other bars and clubs near Trafalgar Square. He walked along Whitehall Street among the exodus of clerks, past the long rank where the night cabs waited in the rain. He always kept an umbrella at the office, and once he had put it up, he half closed his eyes as he listened to the thrum of the rain on the canvas. It made a wash of rippling half colours. While somebody behind him told an Englishman, Irishman and Scotsman joke, he bent his neck and lifted his shoulders to let his spine stretch. The wet cobbles were orange with the reflections of the lamps. He couldn’t remember seeing that before.

  A man standing in the doorway of the Rising Sun would see a man standing in the doorway of Scotland Yard, and as such, it was the most orderly pub in London. He pushed open the doors and walked into the smell of beer, furniture polish, and damp clothes. It was filling fast with clerks and policemen, and though nobody was drunk yet, they were calling across heads and laughing. Dolly Williamson was at the bar, chatting to the girl behind it. He was a big man with a beard that he had cropped since Thaniel had seen him last. He saw Thaniel in the mirror and turned around, beaming.

  ‘You’re here! Drink? What d’you like?’

  ‘Brandy, thanks,’ Thaniel said. He shook his hand, and Williamson thumped his arm.

  The girl, whose name was Miss Collins, was pouring out their brandy when he felt the watch in his pocket clicking. When he opened it, the dense clockwork behind the timekeeping set was going fast, and getting faster. He just had time to wonder what it was doing before it screamed. Not an alarm, but a horrible, keening siren noise. He spun it over to search it for a catch, painfully conscious of the startled looks coming from all around, and half expecting to be tackled and shot. There was no catch.

  ‘Sorry,’ he shouted to Williamson over the noise, and ducked outside with it to the deserted alley on the right of the building. Some waiting cabbies looked across curiously from where they stood with their horses. He was able to keep just out of sight, as long as he kept his back pressed against the Rising Sun’s angled wall.

  The watch stopped. He sighed, and half came out.

  A titanic bang made the ground leap. Smoke and fire roared out from the Yard. A wave of heat shoved him, and he saw a cabby fly across the road, then smash into the front windows of the pub. There were a series of crashes from inside that were the heavy tables dominoing. The noise made white bursts across everything. A spray of typewriter keys floated by. When he turned his head away, his skin was stiff from a coating of soot. Standing in the alley, he was shielded almost completely, except from the few shards of glass and brick from the far edge of the blast. They pattered down around his shoes. Then all the noise was gone and there was a long silence, filled with smoke plumes and rags of floating paper, and isolated fires. The aftershocks of the flashes stayed in his eyes and sank slowly, then rose again whenever he blinked.

  He stood still. He couldn’t hear anything, although he could see that other people were shouting. In his palm, the tick of the watch felt much too slow. A young policeman caught his arms and looked into his eyes. Thaniel could read his lips just well enough to see that the man was asking if he was hurt. He shook his head. The policeman pointed him back towards the Home Office, to avoid the rubble. It was everywhere, completely blocking the road that should have led to Trafalgar Square.

  Beside him, smoke billowed from inside the Rising Sun. The kegs had exploded and the bar was burning. A few men staggered out, smacking at their sleeves to extinguish the orange ashes there. Dolly was not among them. Ignoring the constable, he bent under what was left of the doorway.

  ‘Dolly!’ He couldn’t hear his own voice, and couldn’t tell if he had shouted loudly enough for anyone to hear over the fire.

  It was a small place, and he soon found Williamson half-trapped under one of the big tables. They had been made to seat twelve people, Viking style, but the blast had hurled them all against the bar. The corner of one had smashed the floorboards where he had been standing before he left. Ruined splinters flanked a hole that looked right down into the cellar. Lit by the flames racing along the spilled brandy over the bar, they were a bloody red. He did not stop and stare but the sight of them branded itself into his mind, and imaginary pain flashed across his ribs where the table would have crushed them if he had stayed.

  He pulled Williamson out. Williamson staggered on the way up, his pupils different sizes, but he seemed to catch his balance after Thaniel held him still for a second. Between them they lifted down the barmaid, who had to climb over the taps. They couldn’t find the door in the smoke, and climbed out instead through the shattered windows.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ Williamson said, gripping Thaniel’s arm. ‘I must deal with all this, understand? Get yourself—’

  He was cut off by a distant boom.

  ‘Christ, another one.’ Williamson stared that way. ‘Get yourself home. Away from the city centre, for God’s sake. Stay by the river, do not go too closely by Parliament. And you, Miss Collins, go on.’ Without pausing, he ran after the policemen already streaming toward the ruined buildings of the Yard.

  The girl stared blankly at Thaniel and began to pick her way over the rubble. He stood still for a second, then turned back the way he had come. Williamson was right; there was nothin
g for him to do but go home and hope that the Irish had no interest in Pimlico.

  The smoke from the explosion drifted with him all the way along Whitehall Street. As he walked he became one of a company of ghosts. The watch’s tick thrummed through his palm. He would have to give it to Williamson, he should have, just now. Only the bombmaker knew exactly when a bomb would go off. That alarm had been set as a warning. The lights of Westminster underground station filtered up its steps and through the smoke. He was further toward the middle of the road than he had thought.

  ‘Out the way, out the way!’

  He stepped to the left for the two men with a stretcher. They were running toward a hospital; the doctors were already outside, rolling up their sleeves as they waited for the injured, white coats already grey along the creases from the grit in the air. The man on the stretcher was dead. Thaniel stared at him. His eyes were still open and he had died with an expression of complete passivity. He had a pair of spectacles hooked over his breast pocket and ink on his fingers. Just a clerk. He looked as if he had seen the flames and let them come.

  It would have been him. Thaniel saw white flashes again, though there was no noise to provoke them. He could see it as clearly as memory, as if he had missed it so closely that his mind had strayed down the wrong arm of time and had yet to come back. He would have heard the bang and turned around; the glass windows would have shattered inward, and then the force of the blast would have knocked him back against the bar as the tables fell. The corner of that nearest table would have crushed his ribcage, and within a minute or so, he would have died of the puncture to his lung, with his fingertips stained silver by the pencil lead from telegraph transcripts.

  He opened the watch lid, which was alternately smoke-smudged and not where his fingers had been closed over it. The round watchpaper was still inside. K. Mori, 27 Filigree Street, Knightsbridge. Fifteen minutes away on the underground. The watchmaker would know who it had been sold to. The familiar well-scheduled pressure on the back of his skull wanted him to go home, like Williamson had told him to, but if he did, Williamson would only have to send someone else to do it tomorrow, and by then, this Mori might have heard enough of what had happened not to want to talk to policemen.