The Emperor of All Things - By Paul Witcover Page 0,134

by side, our hands clasped, her head resting on my shoulder, our hearts too full for speech, basking, as it were, in a world newly born. Then, as if it had long been decided, we began to talk of the future, of how, when spring came, and the snows melted, and the paths were clear once again, we two would leave Märchen, embarking on a life together here in London. It all seemed so simple, so obvious. I wished to do the honourable thing and ask Herr Doppler for his daughter’s hand, but Corinna forestalled me.

‘That you must not do!’ she said, gripping my hand, her gaze locked with mine. ‘Far from giving his consent, he would banish you at once … or worse. You must promise me that you will not ask him!’

‘I am not afraid of him,’ I told her.

‘You should be,’ she replied. ‘I have learned to be. In this, you must let me be your tutor, dearest Michael.’

How it wrung my heart to hear that false name so lovingly on her lips! Yet I did not tell her who I really was. In truth, I was afraid to. Afraid that I would lose her if she realized I was not the man she thought I was – not the man she had fallen in love with but an imposter, a liar. I told myself that there would be plenty of time to confess everything in the weeks ahead, that it would serve no purpose to reveal myself now. Instead, I promised that I would be instructed by her in this and in all things.

That earned me another kiss – a sweet reward for a base betrayal. But I did not spurn her lips on that account. On the contrary. Their velvet caress absolved me of all my sins … for a while. As I breathed in the fragrance of her breath, which seemed to contain the springtime we had just been speaking of, I swore to myself that if I did not yet deserve the love of this goddess, I would merit it one day by my words and actions.

But rather than drawing nearer, that day seemed to recede into a hazy future. As our closeness grew, the lie at the heart of it became all the more difficult to expose. To do so would have put everything at risk: Corinna’s love, Wachter’s secrets – they were too tangled in my mind to allow any easy unravelling. To lose one was to lose the other. It was the pursuit of those secrets, after all, that had brought us together, that sustained us in a common purpose and gave us hope of a shared future.

From that point on, our daily lessons had little to do with horology. We put aside clocks and watches and all the finely calibrated instruments of our craft and instead devoted ourselves to the study of each other. Not our bodies alone but our minds, our very souls – always excepting that kernel of untruth which, hard as I tried, I could not forget about for long, however deeply I buried it. Corinna approached these investigations in the same bold and insatiable spirit of inquiry that had characterized her pursuit of horological knowledge. I will say no more of what we shared – it is enough that she became my wife in every way that mattered to us, if not to the rest of the world. I have taken no other wife in all the years since. I never shall.

We took care that we should not be discovered, though we had some close calls, with Inge especially, for she was always looking in on us. But her size made stealth impossible; one could always hear her coming. Doppler might have done better, but he made no effort to surprise us. On the contrary, he seemed pleased with the reports I gave him, content with the pace and progress of Corinna’s lessons – though of course there was little truth in what I told him.

Corinna, meanwhile, continued to press me to visit Wachter’s Folly, and at last I gave in, unable to refuse her anything and wanting as well to be rid of the unreasoning fear that had all but paralysed me in this matter. Besides, I did not want her to think me a coward – the more as I knew myself to be one.

‘But how shall we determine when to go?’ I asked. ‘The automatons only emerge when the clock strikes, or