Paul Witcover - The Emperor of all Things

Then Quare smiled. Of course. The master himself had provided a clue. Watches and locks were not so different, after all. Not inside, where it counted. He gave a little laugh of admiration at the cleverness of it.

‘Got it, have you?’ asked Master Magnus.

‘We’ll see.’ What if the number inscribed on the inside of the cover, 1652, was not just a date but a combination? It was both obvious and ingenious; yet there were many possible ways of representing that number, or sequence of numbers, using the hour and minute hands of the watch. For all he knew, some complicated formula was required. But he would eliminate the obvious choices before worrying about more arcane possibilities. Could it be as simple as moving one hand to sixteen and the other to fifty-two? The strange glyphs on the face of the watch had no meaning to him in themselves, but that did not mean they could not correspond to the numbers he knew; after all, there were twelve of them, just as with any ordinary timepiece. But on further reflection, that solution made no sense … for then the case would automatically open twice every twenty-four hours, whenever the minute and hour hands, in their quotidian revolutions, passed over the necessary points on the watch face: not at all the sort of feature typically valued by purchasers of pocket watches.

Indeed, this objection held for any sequence of numbers arrived at by rotating the hands in a clockwise direction. Thus, Quare reasoned, the numbers of the combination, or at least one of them, must be arrived at by means of a retrograde motion, by which the locking mechanism would be engaged or disengaged. He began to try various possibilities, moving the hands backwards and forwards around the dial until, after no more than five minutes, to the accompaniment of a sharp click, he felt the back of the watch detach from the case and drop into his palm.

‘Bravo,’ said Master Magnus. ‘Well done!’

‘You provided the clue,’ Quare acknowledged, grinning, ‘when you challenged me to unlock the secrets of the watch. Otherwise I could never have opened it so quickly, if at all.’

‘You would have hit upon it sooner or later,’ the master said. ‘But that is only one mystery solved. You have work yet to do.’

Quare nodded and turned back to the table, feeling quite pleased with himself – an opinion not shared by the black cat, Calpurnia, who was grooming herself fastidiously, taking no notice of him whatsoever. A man could not get too full of himself, Quare reflected, in the company of a cat.

Placing the scalpel on the table beside the loupe, Quare shifted the watch to his free hand and set the detached back of the case on the flap of his tool kit alongside the crystal he’d placed there earlier. Only then did he turn the watch over to reveal the exposed movement.

His initial impression was of a three-quarter plate construction, with overlapping wheels and pinions neatly packed into the available space, all of a silver so pale that it seemed almost translucent. Yet no clockmaker with an ounce of experience or common sense would choose silver over brass and steel for the inner workings of a watch. But then, he thought, perhaps the metal was not silver after all. He was reaching for his loupe when a sudden hissing caused him to start. ‘What the devil?’

Beside him, standing with spine arched, tail stiff, ears flat, and fur gone all spiky, a hissing and growling Calpurnia eyed the watch in Quare’s hand as if it were a serpent poised to strike.

‘God in heaven, what’s got into the beast?’ Quare demanded.

‘Fascinating,’ said Master Magnus. The black and white cat in his lap had fled at Calpurnia’s outburst, and now Calpurnia herself did likewise, springing down from the table and rushing headlong away. Her fear had transmitted itself to the other cats, and, in the blink of an eye, the study became a roiling mass of fast-moving felines and their shadows, the two not always distinguishable in the candlelight. Yowls and hisses filled the air. Stacks of books and papers toppled, which further agitated the cats, who in turn knocked over more stacks in a chain reaction that continued for some time as Quare and Master Magnus looked on in astonishment.

‘That didn’t happen when I opened the case,’ the master commented when things had quieted somewhat. He sounded almost regretful. ‘But then,’ he continued, ‘no cat was as near to the watch as Calpurnia was just now. She smelled the strangeness of it, no doubt. Or saw something. They are perspicacious creatures, cats.’

‘They’re only animals, master,’ Quare said with a laugh. ‘They start at moonbeams and chase shadows. They know nothing of watches.’

‘What do any of us know?’

‘Master?’

He shook his head. ‘Go on, Quare. The test isn’t over yet.’

‘Is that what this is? A test?’

Now it was the master’s turn to laugh. But he did not otherwise answer, merely gestured with one hand for Quare to get back to work.

Quare bent close over the watch. With the aid of the loupe, he saw that, as he’d begun to suspect before Calpurnia had gone mad, the wheels and pinions and plates of the movement were not made of silver. Indeed, they did not appear to be made of metal at all. The substance looked more like wood … which perhaps accounted for the lightness of the watch. Yet the grain was curious, like no wood he was familiar with, and not even birch had such a silvery shine. Nor, as far as he knew, was wood of any kind suitable for the stresses and strains, the wear and tear, of a watch movement: even less so than silver, in fact. But perhaps the wood had been treated with some chemical unknown to him to give it added strength and resilience. He set down the loupe and retrieved the scalpel. He scraped softly at one wheel, to no effect. Whatever it was, it was hard . He gave the wheel a cautious tap with the tip of the scalpel. ‘Why, it’s hollow!’ he exclaimed in wonder, looking to Master Magnus, who, after his peculiar fashion, grinned – that is, grimaced – in reply. Quare tapped the escapement, the fusee. ‘They’re all hollow! Master, I don’t believe this is a real watch at all.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘I confess I thought at first that it might be self-winding, but now I perceive that it lacks a winding mechanism of any kind. There is simply no source of power. Yet the wheels turn easily; the teeth of the gears fall smoothly into place; the escapement, the fusee – all else is as it should be. This is a model of a watch, a toy, not the thing itself. And even if it could be wound, what time would it keep, with its parts all of hollow wood?’

‘What kind of wood is it, then, Quare, at once light, hard, and hollow?’

He shrugged. ‘I’m no wood-carver.’ An idea struck him: ‘Why, he wasn’t a clockmaker at all! The mysterious JW, I mean. No wonder he wasn’t mentioned in the archives. He must have been a master wood-carver.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Master Magnus, lurching to his feet with an abrupt rocking motion. He swayed for an instant, then planted his walking sticks on the floor and hauled himself over to Quare, again seeming to wade through some invisible medium sensible to himself alone, as if the air around him were as thick as mud. ‘But do you know, I don’t believe it is carved of wood.’

‘Indeed? What then?’

‘Bone.’

‘Bone?’ Quare glanced at the watch in his hand and shook his head sceptically. ‘What kind of bone is so hard, yet so light?’

‘That I cannot say. But I have examined the movement under the microscope, compared the grain of the stuff with samples of wood and of bone, and though I did not find an exact match, it is unquestionably closer in nature to the latter than to the former.’