fic: The Clockmaker
note: this was my holiday project for writing group. each person in the group contributed a plot point, and we had to incorporate each one of them in order. it was not my first or even second idea, and for that i blame dear-tiger. (for once something isn't wrenlet's fault!)
Snug in its blanket of snow, next to the frozen lake, the city sleeps. Cats prowl the streets, searching for early-morning mice and slinking after the dairyman and his cart of rattling milk bottles. A patrolman passes through quiet neighborhoods, whistling, and behind their locked doors and shuttered windows, men and women snore and dream.
And the clockmaker hurries home, scarf tight around her neck, her boots marking a straight path in the new snow. She glances left and right as she passes houses and storefronts, imagining the timepieces sitting on mantels and leaning against walls, their steady ticking like the city's heartbeat.
There is a dog waiting for her just inside the front door of her shop, a medium-sized black dog with pointed ears and a pointed nose and one white paw. There is a green leather collar around his neck bearing a small wooden tag shaped like a clockface, to identify him as hers.
“What are you doing down here?” she asks him, bending to rub his head and let him sniff her mitten. “Did you follow me out?” He does, sometimes, trotting down the stairs that lead from the back of the shop up to her flat.
The clockmaker follows the dog through the dark shop, into the workshop in back, and up the stairs. She did not light the fire or a lamp before she left, and the front room of her flat is dark. But the clocks are wound, all of them, their gentle ticking comforting the clockmaker that all is right in her world.
The bell over the front window jangles, indicating that someone is downstairs, at the shop door. The clockmaker pulls in the window glass so she can open the shutter and peer out. In the light of the slowly rising sun she can see enough of her visitor's coat and cap to guess that it's a messenger, most likely a boy, but she can't tell where he might be from.
“I'll be right down,” she calls, closing the window. “Stay,” she tells the dog, who sits.
She goes downstairs and opens the shop door.
“Message for the clockmaker, miss,” the boy says. He pulls off one mitten with his teeth, retrieves a folded piece of paper from his coat pocket, and hands it to her. “I was told to wait for a reply.”
The clockmaker unfolds the note and reads “It stopped. Please come. N.”
“Say I'll be there in an hour,” she tells the boy. She has no coins for him, but he doesn't wait, simply bobbing his head before dashing away. She locks the door behind him and goes back upstairs.
She cuts herself two pieces of bread and a piece of cheese and puts them in her coat pockets, then writes a quick note for her assistant: “I’ve been called away on an emergency. Say so if anyone asks. You have my permission to take on a small project of your own, if one should be offered. I should be back by tonight, otherwise I'll send word."
She rubs the dog's head and takes herself and the note downstairs, where she lights a lamp in her workshop so she can see the worktables and the drawers and boxes and shelves where she keeps her tools and the many small components that make up the inner workings of her clocks. She packs tiny tools and even tinier components, gears and springs and wires and winding keys, a jeweler's loupe, a black cloth, a white cloth, and a red one. She leaves the note on the counter, where her assistant will see it. She stands in her workshop, two repaired clocks on a shelf ticking away in tandem, and wishes with all her heart that she had received a different message.
I told him, the clockmaker thinks as she hurries down the street, the snow disturbed now from the passage of the city's early-morning residents, the rising sun tinting the sky pink and orange and silver under the clouds.
I told him to pay attention. I told him to keep watch.
She knows what could happen now, and as she walks she prays to every master and every journeyman who ever watched over her training, every god and every saint who was ever said to look after the clockmakers, that she can solve this problem.
There are few lights lit in the house when she arrives, but a servant in livery is waiting for her at the front door. He leads her up stairs and down hallways to a large bedroom with every lamp blazing and a young woman, still as death, in the bed. A man paces around the room, muttering to himself. There are two serving maids, looking nervous.
But the clockmaker is only concerned with the small, ornate clock sitting on the nightstand. It is a confection of silver and gilt and enamel and mother-of-pearl, with a tiny crescent window set in the clockface showing the phases of the moon. The clockmaker has made timepieces as beautiful and as fine, but this is not her work. But she is the only one in the entire city who can restart it once it has stopped, or repair it if it has broken.
“I told you,” she says to the man pacing around the room, drawing his attention. “Wind it every third day. Not too tight.”
“Iren,” he breathes, relieved. “Thank the saints you've come.” He crosses the room towards her, hands out in greeting, but she waves him away.
“Everyone out,” she commands. The serving maids scurry out of the room, followed by the servant who led the clockmaker in. “You stay,” she tells the man. “Clear the desk.” She gestures to the small writing desk by the window, which is covered in papers and envelopes and pens. The man obediently stacks the correspondence and moves it to the dressing table. The clockmaker leans over the bed, her ear turned to the young woman's mouth to listen for her breathing. She pulls off a mitten and gently lays her hand against the young woman's throat.
“Why did you wait?” she demands. “Why didn't you send for me yesterday, or the day before? What are you thinking?”
“I can't lose her, Iren,” is all he says.
“Who was responsible for the clock?” The clockmaker pulls off her other mitten, her hat and scarf and coat, and drops them all on an armchair. She opens the satchel holding her tools and components, elbows the man out of the way, and starts laying things out on the writing desk, readying her makeshift workspace.
“She was. She is.” He gestures to the young woman in the bed. “I had left the city on business. All the servants know to make sure the clock is wound. I don't know who is at fault.”
“You are.” The clockmaker fixes him with a stern look. He takes a step back, away from her. “You could have brought it with you. You should have assigned the job of winding it to one person. The servants all assumed someone else had done it. You need a keeper, Nicola. The both of you.”
“She has a maid.”
“Then you should have had the maid watch it. Don't sack her now, it's not entirely her fault.”
The clockmaker carefully picks up the clock, holds it to her ear, and sighs. Nothing. No ticks, no clicks, no barely perceptible turning of gears. She peers at the clockface. Two-twenty-four. It could have stopped yesterday afternoon.
“When did you notice?” she asks Nicola.
“Early this morning. When I sent for you.”
“You need to wind it every third day. How many times must I tell you? Do I need to write it down for you? Do you need it imprinted on your forehead, so every time you look in the mirror you'll be reminded?”
She sets the clock down on the white cloth now spread out on the writing desk. Nicola creeps up behind her.
“Bring me tea and something to eat,” she says. “Otherwise I can't be disturbed.”
Nicola hurries away and the clockmaker opens the round of curved, highly polished glass that protects the small clock's face. The hands turn easily when she spins them. She will have to get inside the clock to see how the disk with the moon phases turns, but she can assume that it works as well and as smoothly as the hands.
“You are a fool, Nicola,” she sighs. “You always were.”
When he married this woman, when he brought her to his house and his city to live, he should have brought the man who built her ornate little clock. He should not have assumed that his household staff would all believe that the silver and gilt timepiece by her bed was the thing that kept her alive.
Nicola returns with a pot of tea and an elaborate breakfast. The clockmaker eats the hothouse strawberries and spreads preserves on the rolls but leaves the rest untouched, and directs Nicola to sit and be quiet, if he must stay in the room with her.
“It can't be wound now,” she explains. “I need to open it and restart it.”
“Will it hurt her?” he asks.
“I don't know.”
Restarting a clock that has stopped is well within the clockmaker's skill. But this clock, with arcane power behind its conventional workings, is not something for which she was trained. And she has never been called out here because it has stopped.
She takes her pocketwatch from her skirt and lays it on the desk, then pulls on a pair of thin white fabric gloves.
She carefully removes the clockface, unscrewing tiny enamel-faced screws and laying them on the black cloth. The inside of the clock is pristine, no dust or broken springs or crooked gears. The clockmaker does not think she will have to replace any of the components, but all the same, she wants to dismantle it, clean it thoroughly, put it back together, and start it as if it were new-made.
The very first time Nicola had her out to look at the clock, shortly after he brought his new bride to the city, he explained that it ran as conventional clocks did, but was tied to his young bride's heart, and as long as it worked, so would she. If it slowed, she would slow, and if it stopped for too long, she would die. The clockmaker had opened it up then, to watch its workings and listen to its steady ticks, and was relieved to discover that there was nothing to distinguish it from any of the other timepieces in Nicola's house, other than its exquisite exterior and its arcane connection to his wife.
Now the clockmaker takes it apart as carefully as she can, laying components on the black and red cloths. The faint ticking of the pocketwatch is soothing. She counts screws and gears and springs under her breath.
And then she discovers a screw missing. A tiny silver screw. She curses, loud enough to startle a noise out of Nicola.
“I need a screw,” she tells him, without looking up from her makeshift worktable. “Send someone to my shop to fetch two spares.” She picks up a screw from the black cloth and twists it into a piece of paper. “Here is an example, so my assistant knows what size. Tell her they must be silver.”
“You didn't bring any?” Nicola asks.
“Not silver. The metal itself could have power, and I don't want to replace a silver screw with a steel one.”
She hears him leave the room and goes back to her task. She can still clean and examine, but she will have to wait to reassemble. She spares a look at the young woman in the bed. Nicola's wife has a round, pale face, her fair hair carefully braided for sleeping. The clockmaker silently wishes her well.
Replacement silver screws do not arrive for over an hour, during which time the clockmaker has dismantled the clock, examined all the springs and gears, and cleaned what she could. She has waited to begin reassembly, finishing her now-cold breakfast in the meantime.
“A groom had to be woken and a horse saddled,” Nicola explains, handing her a white paper envelope. “Your assistant could not immediately find silver screws in the right size.”
The clockmaker shakes three tiny screws from the envelope. She cannot tell which came from the clock and which came from her shop.
“What do you need?” Nicola asks her.
“Peace and quiet. But you may stay.”
He pulls the stool from the dressing table over to the side of the bed and sits. The clockmaker turns back to her work.
It takes much longer to reassemble the clock than it took to take it apart, but that is always the way. The clockmaker works slowly, testing every gear and spring and screw, praying to the guardian saints of time and timepieces that she has not disconnected some mystical, arcane wire, that she has not unintentionally hurt Nicola's young wife.
The sun has set and the dinner hour has come and gone by the time she reattaches the clockface. She winds the clock carefully, listening to it as she turns the key, hearing the quiet cranking of gears as they're wound, and then the most perfect sound in all of man's creation - the steady ticking of a well-built, working clock.
She stands, stretches, and takes the clock over to the side of the bed, where Nicola is still sitting, holding the young woman's hand and talking to her in a low voice. The clockmaker touches him on the shoulder.
She holds out the clock with both hands. He stares at her. “Listen.”
He tilts his head towards her, eyes widening, then leans down, resting his head on the young woman's chest. When he lifts his head again, his eyes are wet.
“You're a wonder, Iren,” he tells the clockmaker. “How can I ever repay you?”
“Wind it every third day and don't ever send someone to my door in the early hours of the morning again.” Her words might be harsh but her tone is not. She and Nicola do care for each other, in their own ways, and she would never say no to him if he needed her help.
He stands and pulls the clockmaker into a tight hug, clock and all. “Thank you, thank you,” he says into her hair. “I will wind it myself, every third day, I promise. Let me put you up for the night. It is too late for you to walk home.” He releases her, holding her at arm's length, then pulls her close again and kisses her on both cheeks. Despite herself, the clockmaker feels herself smile.
But it is late, and she would like to pack up her things, eat something, and go home. She would like to pet her dog and look around her shop and her orderly workroom, and she would like to sleep in her own bed.
“I will send you home in a carriage,” Nicola says with finality. “It would be wrong to make you walk.”
“Do you know,” the clockmaker muses, handing him the little clock and going back to the writing desk to pack up, “I was awake before the sun this morning, to wind the clock over the council meeting house. The mayor likes for me to do it when the city is asleep, so it seems as if the clock runs on its own.”
“You were awake when my messenger came for you.”
“I was.” She yawns. “I must go home. I'll send you a bill. I won't charge you for the silver screw.”
Nicola laughs. “Charge me for it, and the spare too. Ask whatever you think is fair. I'll pay it.”
“I know. You may be a fool, Nicola, but you were always an honest one.”
She puts on her coat and scarf and hat and mittens, slings her satchel over her shoulder, and walks out of the bedroom. She can find her own way out of the house, but Nicola chases after her, directing her to the kitchen where he has had the cook pack up some food, and then he waits with her while a carriage is brought around. He kisses her on both cheeks again, helps her into the carriage, and wishes her well.
The clockmaker's shop is dark, but she sees that her assistant has left her a note, no doubt regarding the day’s business. The dog is asleep on the sofa upstairs, but he jumps off it when the clockmaker walks in. She bends down to rub his ears.
“What a day I have had,” she says, setting down the basket that Nicola sent with her and then divesting herself of mittens and outerwear. “I am so glad to be home.” The dog barks and licks her hand, clearly glad as well.
She sits at the table and eats Nicola's cook's dinner, and then she wishes the dog a good night and goes to bed.
She dreams of clocks, silver and gilt and enamel and glass, ticking steadily like mechanical hearts, turning inside the earth, giant gears powering the world, needing only the conscientious hand of love to keep them wound.
Snug in its blanket of snow, next to the frozen lake, the city sleeps. Cats prowl the streets, searching for early-morning mice and slinking after the dairyman and his cart of rattling milk bottles. A patrolman passes through quiet neighborhoods, whistling, and behind their locked doors and shuttered windows, men and women snore and dream.
And the clockmaker hurries home, scarf tight around her neck, her boots marking a straight path in the new snow. She glances left and right as she passes houses and storefronts, imagining the timepieces sitting on mantels and leaning against walls, their steady ticking like the city's heartbeat.
There is a dog waiting for her just inside the front door of her shop, a medium-sized black dog with pointed ears and a pointed nose and one white paw. There is a green leather collar around his neck bearing a small wooden tag shaped like a clockface, to identify him as hers.
“What are you doing down here?” she asks him, bending to rub his head and let him sniff her mitten. “Did you follow me out?” He does, sometimes, trotting down the stairs that lead from the back of the shop up to her flat.
The clockmaker follows the dog through the dark shop, into the workshop in back, and up the stairs. She did not light the fire or a lamp before she left, and the front room of her flat is dark. But the clocks are wound, all of them, their gentle ticking comforting the clockmaker that all is right in her world.
The bell over the front window jangles, indicating that someone is downstairs, at the shop door. The clockmaker pulls in the window glass so she can open the shutter and peer out. In the light of the slowly rising sun she can see enough of her visitor's coat and cap to guess that it's a messenger, most likely a boy, but she can't tell where he might be from.
“I'll be right down,” she calls, closing the window. “Stay,” she tells the dog, who sits.
She goes downstairs and opens the shop door.
“Message for the clockmaker, miss,” the boy says. He pulls off one mitten with his teeth, retrieves a folded piece of paper from his coat pocket, and hands it to her. “I was told to wait for a reply.”
The clockmaker unfolds the note and reads “It stopped. Please come. N.”
“Say I'll be there in an hour,” she tells the boy. She has no coins for him, but he doesn't wait, simply bobbing his head before dashing away. She locks the door behind him and goes back upstairs.
She cuts herself two pieces of bread and a piece of cheese and puts them in her coat pockets, then writes a quick note for her assistant: “I’ve been called away on an emergency. Say so if anyone asks. You have my permission to take on a small project of your own, if one should be offered. I should be back by tonight, otherwise I'll send word."
She rubs the dog's head and takes herself and the note downstairs, where she lights a lamp in her workshop so she can see the worktables and the drawers and boxes and shelves where she keeps her tools and the many small components that make up the inner workings of her clocks. She packs tiny tools and even tinier components, gears and springs and wires and winding keys, a jeweler's loupe, a black cloth, a white cloth, and a red one. She leaves the note on the counter, where her assistant will see it. She stands in her workshop, two repaired clocks on a shelf ticking away in tandem, and wishes with all her heart that she had received a different message.
I told him, the clockmaker thinks as she hurries down the street, the snow disturbed now from the passage of the city's early-morning residents, the rising sun tinting the sky pink and orange and silver under the clouds.
I told him to pay attention. I told him to keep watch.
She knows what could happen now, and as she walks she prays to every master and every journeyman who ever watched over her training, every god and every saint who was ever said to look after the clockmakers, that she can solve this problem.
There are few lights lit in the house when she arrives, but a servant in livery is waiting for her at the front door. He leads her up stairs and down hallways to a large bedroom with every lamp blazing and a young woman, still as death, in the bed. A man paces around the room, muttering to himself. There are two serving maids, looking nervous.
But the clockmaker is only concerned with the small, ornate clock sitting on the nightstand. It is a confection of silver and gilt and enamel and mother-of-pearl, with a tiny crescent window set in the clockface showing the phases of the moon. The clockmaker has made timepieces as beautiful and as fine, but this is not her work. But she is the only one in the entire city who can restart it once it has stopped, or repair it if it has broken.
“I told you,” she says to the man pacing around the room, drawing his attention. “Wind it every third day. Not too tight.”
“Iren,” he breathes, relieved. “Thank the saints you've come.” He crosses the room towards her, hands out in greeting, but she waves him away.
“Everyone out,” she commands. The serving maids scurry out of the room, followed by the servant who led the clockmaker in. “You stay,” she tells the man. “Clear the desk.” She gestures to the small writing desk by the window, which is covered in papers and envelopes and pens. The man obediently stacks the correspondence and moves it to the dressing table. The clockmaker leans over the bed, her ear turned to the young woman's mouth to listen for her breathing. She pulls off a mitten and gently lays her hand against the young woman's throat.
“Why did you wait?” she demands. “Why didn't you send for me yesterday, or the day before? What are you thinking?”
“I can't lose her, Iren,” is all he says.
“Who was responsible for the clock?” The clockmaker pulls off her other mitten, her hat and scarf and coat, and drops them all on an armchair. She opens the satchel holding her tools and components, elbows the man out of the way, and starts laying things out on the writing desk, readying her makeshift workspace.
“She was. She is.” He gestures to the young woman in the bed. “I had left the city on business. All the servants know to make sure the clock is wound. I don't know who is at fault.”
“You are.” The clockmaker fixes him with a stern look. He takes a step back, away from her. “You could have brought it with you. You should have assigned the job of winding it to one person. The servants all assumed someone else had done it. You need a keeper, Nicola. The both of you.”
“She has a maid.”
“Then you should have had the maid watch it. Don't sack her now, it's not entirely her fault.”
The clockmaker carefully picks up the clock, holds it to her ear, and sighs. Nothing. No ticks, no clicks, no barely perceptible turning of gears. She peers at the clockface. Two-twenty-four. It could have stopped yesterday afternoon.
“When did you notice?” she asks Nicola.
“Early this morning. When I sent for you.”
“You need to wind it every third day. How many times must I tell you? Do I need to write it down for you? Do you need it imprinted on your forehead, so every time you look in the mirror you'll be reminded?”
She sets the clock down on the white cloth now spread out on the writing desk. Nicola creeps up behind her.
“Bring me tea and something to eat,” she says. “Otherwise I can't be disturbed.”
Nicola hurries away and the clockmaker opens the round of curved, highly polished glass that protects the small clock's face. The hands turn easily when she spins them. She will have to get inside the clock to see how the disk with the moon phases turns, but she can assume that it works as well and as smoothly as the hands.
“You are a fool, Nicola,” she sighs. “You always were.”
When he married this woman, when he brought her to his house and his city to live, he should have brought the man who built her ornate little clock. He should not have assumed that his household staff would all believe that the silver and gilt timepiece by her bed was the thing that kept her alive.
Nicola returns with a pot of tea and an elaborate breakfast. The clockmaker eats the hothouse strawberries and spreads preserves on the rolls but leaves the rest untouched, and directs Nicola to sit and be quiet, if he must stay in the room with her.
“It can't be wound now,” she explains. “I need to open it and restart it.”
“Will it hurt her?” he asks.
“I don't know.”
Restarting a clock that has stopped is well within the clockmaker's skill. But this clock, with arcane power behind its conventional workings, is not something for which she was trained. And she has never been called out here because it has stopped.
She takes her pocketwatch from her skirt and lays it on the desk, then pulls on a pair of thin white fabric gloves.
She carefully removes the clockface, unscrewing tiny enamel-faced screws and laying them on the black cloth. The inside of the clock is pristine, no dust or broken springs or crooked gears. The clockmaker does not think she will have to replace any of the components, but all the same, she wants to dismantle it, clean it thoroughly, put it back together, and start it as if it were new-made.
The very first time Nicola had her out to look at the clock, shortly after he brought his new bride to the city, he explained that it ran as conventional clocks did, but was tied to his young bride's heart, and as long as it worked, so would she. If it slowed, she would slow, and if it stopped for too long, she would die. The clockmaker had opened it up then, to watch its workings and listen to its steady ticks, and was relieved to discover that there was nothing to distinguish it from any of the other timepieces in Nicola's house, other than its exquisite exterior and its arcane connection to his wife.
Now the clockmaker takes it apart as carefully as she can, laying components on the black and red cloths. The faint ticking of the pocketwatch is soothing. She counts screws and gears and springs under her breath.
And then she discovers a screw missing. A tiny silver screw. She curses, loud enough to startle a noise out of Nicola.
“I need a screw,” she tells him, without looking up from her makeshift worktable. “Send someone to my shop to fetch two spares.” She picks up a screw from the black cloth and twists it into a piece of paper. “Here is an example, so my assistant knows what size. Tell her they must be silver.”
“You didn't bring any?” Nicola asks.
“Not silver. The metal itself could have power, and I don't want to replace a silver screw with a steel one.”
She hears him leave the room and goes back to her task. She can still clean and examine, but she will have to wait to reassemble. She spares a look at the young woman in the bed. Nicola's wife has a round, pale face, her fair hair carefully braided for sleeping. The clockmaker silently wishes her well.
Replacement silver screws do not arrive for over an hour, during which time the clockmaker has dismantled the clock, examined all the springs and gears, and cleaned what she could. She has waited to begin reassembly, finishing her now-cold breakfast in the meantime.
“A groom had to be woken and a horse saddled,” Nicola explains, handing her a white paper envelope. “Your assistant could not immediately find silver screws in the right size.”
The clockmaker shakes three tiny screws from the envelope. She cannot tell which came from the clock and which came from her shop.
“What do you need?” Nicola asks her.
“Peace and quiet. But you may stay.”
He pulls the stool from the dressing table over to the side of the bed and sits. The clockmaker turns back to her work.
It takes much longer to reassemble the clock than it took to take it apart, but that is always the way. The clockmaker works slowly, testing every gear and spring and screw, praying to the guardian saints of time and timepieces that she has not disconnected some mystical, arcane wire, that she has not unintentionally hurt Nicola's young wife.
The sun has set and the dinner hour has come and gone by the time she reattaches the clockface. She winds the clock carefully, listening to it as she turns the key, hearing the quiet cranking of gears as they're wound, and then the most perfect sound in all of man's creation - the steady ticking of a well-built, working clock.
She stands, stretches, and takes the clock over to the side of the bed, where Nicola is still sitting, holding the young woman's hand and talking to her in a low voice. The clockmaker touches him on the shoulder.
She holds out the clock with both hands. He stares at her. “Listen.”
He tilts his head towards her, eyes widening, then leans down, resting his head on the young woman's chest. When he lifts his head again, his eyes are wet.
“You're a wonder, Iren,” he tells the clockmaker. “How can I ever repay you?”
“Wind it every third day and don't ever send someone to my door in the early hours of the morning again.” Her words might be harsh but her tone is not. She and Nicola do care for each other, in their own ways, and she would never say no to him if he needed her help.
He stands and pulls the clockmaker into a tight hug, clock and all. “Thank you, thank you,” he says into her hair. “I will wind it myself, every third day, I promise. Let me put you up for the night. It is too late for you to walk home.” He releases her, holding her at arm's length, then pulls her close again and kisses her on both cheeks. Despite herself, the clockmaker feels herself smile.
But it is late, and she would like to pack up her things, eat something, and go home. She would like to pet her dog and look around her shop and her orderly workroom, and she would like to sleep in her own bed.
“I will send you home in a carriage,” Nicola says with finality. “It would be wrong to make you walk.”
“Do you know,” the clockmaker muses, handing him the little clock and going back to the writing desk to pack up, “I was awake before the sun this morning, to wind the clock over the council meeting house. The mayor likes for me to do it when the city is asleep, so it seems as if the clock runs on its own.”
“You were awake when my messenger came for you.”
“I was.” She yawns. “I must go home. I'll send you a bill. I won't charge you for the silver screw.”
Nicola laughs. “Charge me for it, and the spare too. Ask whatever you think is fair. I'll pay it.”
“I know. You may be a fool, Nicola, but you were always an honest one.”
She puts on her coat and scarf and hat and mittens, slings her satchel over her shoulder, and walks out of the bedroom. She can find her own way out of the house, but Nicola chases after her, directing her to the kitchen where he has had the cook pack up some food, and then he waits with her while a carriage is brought around. He kisses her on both cheeks again, helps her into the carriage, and wishes her well.
The clockmaker's shop is dark, but she sees that her assistant has left her a note, no doubt regarding the day’s business. The dog is asleep on the sofa upstairs, but he jumps off it when the clockmaker walks in. She bends down to rub his ears.
“What a day I have had,” she says, setting down the basket that Nicola sent with her and then divesting herself of mittens and outerwear. “I am so glad to be home.” The dog barks and licks her hand, clearly glad as well.
She sits at the table and eats Nicola's cook's dinner, and then she wishes the dog a good night and goes to bed.
She dreams of clocks, silver and gilt and enamel and glass, ticking steadily like mechanical hearts, turning inside the earth, giant gears powering the world, needing only the conscientious hand of love to keep them wound.