Paul Witcover - The Emperor of all Things

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 eyes 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.

Nor did Quare linger, afraid she would return, either alone or with allies who would not let an unasked question keep them from their objective. He set off at once for the guild hall, retracing his path across the roofs, cursing himself for having misloaded the pistol. He had been lucky many times over this night.

He moved slowly, thanks to his injured leg, which had resumed bleeding and soon stiffened into the bargain. All the while, he debated what to tell Master Magnus. It was crystal clear to him that he couldn’t relate all that had occurred, not if he wished to continue as a regulator, or, for that matter, a journeyman in good standing. He knew there was no way he could make the master understand why he had not captured or killed Grimalkin; he did not really understand it himself. It wasn’t because he had found himself facing a woman – or not only because of that … and there, too, was a thing better left unsaid; without proof, no one would credit such an outlandish claim. Grimalkin a woman? He scarcely believed it himself. As for her warnings about the clock … What were they but the ravings of a lunatic? Even if the workings of the timepiece belied its plain exterior, he did not see how this clock, or, indeed, any clock, could be a weapon, unless the woman had spoken metaphorically, referring to some martial use to which the secrets of its mechanism might be put, beating ploughshare into sword, as it were, but even that possibility did not seem of sufficient gravity to warrant such desperate words.