The Emperor of All Things - By Paul Witcover Page 0,132

too risky. Instead, I suggested that the two of us collude in making it appear that she had reached the natural limits of her abilities and was at last growing discouraged. By the terms of my agreement with her father, he would then yield up his pocket watch for my examination, and Inge would follow with her cuckoo. I would, of course, share the fruits of my investigations of these timepieces with Corinna. She was willing, but preferred to wait until she had learned more of what I had to teach. I agreed. Herr Doppler was right, after all. I had no pressing engagements, and to be trapped for months in Märchen without the solace of Corinna’s company would have been unbearable. The hour we spent together each day, talking of horology and other things, was like gold to me, an interval of time no clock, not even one of Wachter’s, was fit to measure.

Meanwhile, life went on. As the days and weeks passed, snow continued to fall, until it reached and then overtopped the second-storey window behind my bed. No one had thought to wind my pocket watch as I lay in the grip of fever, and by the time the fever had broken, the watch had long since stopped. Herr Doppler had assured me his own watch was accurate, and Inge insisted the same of her cuckoo, and though it was true that the two timepieces agreed with each other, I found it impossible to fully trust any timepiece built by Wachter. I reset my watch, yet for the rest of my stay in Märchen I felt untethered, cut off from the outside world, as if I had entered a kind of bubble where time was not the dependable constant of my experience but instead something as variable as the wind. It sometimes seemed to me that the only clock I could rely on was the rising and setting of the sun. At other times, even that seemed suspect, for I saw so little of the sun, hidden as it generally was behind a thick scrim of grey cloud or snow. Yet I kept my watch wound, and carried it with me everywhere, not only because I needed some yardstick against which to measure the day, however arbitrary or inaccurate in an absolute sense, but because it made me feel safe, protected. I suppose it had stopped being a timepiece exactly and become a sort of talisman. Perhaps that is all our ingenious watches and clocks really are, when you come right down to it.

I had no more strange dreams, no more terrifying visions. In fact, I stopped dreaming altogether – it was as if I were living a dream, and thus had no need for fantasies. Once I felt strong enough, and had replenished my depleted wardrobe, I resumed the visits that had been cut short by my illness. As before, the townsfolk, though friendly, refused to grant me access to their timepieces. Soon my perambulations had made me familiar with the labyrinthine network of passages that was now the only means by which Märchen could be navigated without snowshoes or the danger of becoming lost and freezing to death. Of course, the passages had their own dangers. Occasionally the weight of the snow would cause a section to collapse, but the townsfolk seemed to have a second sense about such things, for I never heard of any deaths or injuries, and either I came to share their sensitivity or was just lucky, as I, too, escaped harm. In the aftermath, the able-bodied men of the town, led by Adolpheus, would gather to clear and repair the damage, and I joined with them whenever I could, hoping to win their trust more completely, to the point that they would give me what I sought. But though they seemed appreciative of my efforts, standing me drinks at the Hearth and Home, even inviting me into their homes on occasion to share a meal, they remained adamant in their refusals – though they did not seem angry or annoyed at my persistence. In truth, after a week or so I had resigned myself to the idea that only with Corinna’s help would I ever gain access to the secrets that lay within Wachter’s timepieces.

The only place I did not visit once I had recovered sufficiently to leave the Hearth and Home was Wachter’s Folly. The mere thought of it left me trembling with fear, an irrational terror that had