steps hurried, as if upon urgent business of their own.
It occurred to him that he was not the only one with secrets to hide; it was a peculiar sensation to imagine that everyone he encountered, young and old, rich and poor, had committed some crime or harboured some guilt that, if it were publicly known, would take them to the pillory or to Tyburn. He had often felt himself part of the London mob – known that joyful if also thrillingly perilous sense of belonging to something greater than himself, which buoyed him up and swept him along: a vigorous, industrious, prosperous, high-spirited throng. This was the obverse of that, furtive, skulking, mistrustful … yet still, he realized, a true if heretofore unsuspected aspect of the city, the experience of which he would have gladly forgone. But London was always revealing fresh aspects of itself. He could live here a hundred years, he thought, and still not scrape the bottom of it.
He kept a wary eye out but saw no evidence of undue interest or pursuit from any quarter. So far, his luck was holding.
Guild masters and apprentices alike enjoyed free room and board at the guild hall in Bishopsgate Street, but journeymen were expected to fend for themselves. For the past year, Quare had taken lodgings at a comfortable if somewhat run-down house in Basing Lane, near Cheapside, that catered to journeymen of the Worshipful Company.
Quare surveyed the approach to this establishment from the shadows of an alley across the way. He watched carriages and wagons move along to the cracking of whips and curses as pedlars afoot sang out their wares, everything from candles to flowers to lemons and limes; saw ragged urchins darting quick as starlings up and down the walks, ignored by one and all, while overhead, like flags of battle displayed by a victorious army, ponderous painted wooden signs creaked as they swung, as if stirred by no other wind than that which arose from below, and higher still, from open windows along the street, women leaned out to shout down orders for whatever was needful: in short, all the normal colourful caterwauling that constituted life on Basing Lane or indeed any other London street.
The bells of St Mary-le-Bow began to ring out. Quare started then fished out his pocket watch, which displayed a time of nine minutes to ten. He wound the watch and adjusted the hands, gratified to see that the timepiece was still, as it were, within striking distance of the correct hour. Not that the bells of St Mary’s were to be trusted, exactly, but for the moment they were no doubt a more accurate indication of the proper time than his own neglected watch. He wouldn’t encounter a truly trustworthy timepiece until he reached the guild hall. But this would do for now. Amidst all the irregularities of the morning, and indeed the previous night, this small measure of certainty, however imperfect, was most welcome. Though the reminder that he was late and growing later for his meeting with Master Magnus was not.
Meanwhile, other bells had begun to chime in, adding their disparate voices to the hour. The monumental clocks of London, resident in cathedrals and churches, or presiding over public squares, did not keep a common time. They struck askew, filling the air, as now, with a cacophony made worse by the fact that, while the bells of each clock were tuned to produce a pleasant melody, no thought had been given to the effect of a number of pleasant melodies ringing out on top of each other – which, as it turned out, proved neither pleasant nor melodious. A clockcophony, Master Magnus called it. There had been talk of regulating the striking of the hours, so that only one clock’s bells would be heard at a time, but the owners of the various clocks, who had spent large sums of money in building and maintaining their instruments, fought every proposal. Instead, they vied – with the assistance of the Worshipful Company available to all who could afford it – in making their particular clocks either the first or the last to strike, and this incremental competition, which had been going on for years now, with passions swelling in inverse proportion to the ever-smaller intervals of time involved, had served only to render the bells increasingly useless in what was, after all, their primary function: the imposition of a central temporal authority over the city and its environs. At