The Emperor of All Things - By Paul Witcover Page 0,73

body, replaced the cup on its saucer with a rattle that brought a look of distress to Mrs Halsted’s blue eyes, though her polite smile never wavered. ‘An exquisite brewing, Mrs Halsted,’ the master said graciously.

‘I try, sir,’ she answered, blushing beneath her white cap. ‘I do try. We do like our tea in this house, sir.’

‘You do more than try, madam. Why, it is plain that this house is blessed with two masters. Indeed, I would go so far as to suggest that you might dispense with clocks entirely and open a tea house instead.’

This barbed and backhanded compliment left his hosts speechless. Smiling, with the air of a guest fulfilling his conversational duties, Master Magnus turned his dark spectacles towards Grimsby, who actually flinched back in his chair.

‘Steady, Mr Grimsby – steady on, sir,’ he said as if to comfort the apprentice, who was Quare’s junior by two years. ‘I have read the reports of your work dispatched to me by your good master here. Amidst so much tedious verbiage, one word leaps out, and I find it so apt that I have already employed it in reference to you myself and am about to do so again. That word, if you cannot guess it, is steady. Your hands are steady, your mind equally so; in short, you are as dependable and dull as a bullock, destined, I have no doubt, for a life of plodding but honourable labour in the fields of time, much like Master Halsted himself. Of such as you is the backbone of our guild – and, indeed, our country – constituted, and I salute you, sir, most sincerely, in your majestic mediocrity.’

Grimsby’s face bore an expression of intense concentration, as if he were attempting, without notable success, to untangle majestic from mediocrity. ‘Er, you are too k-kind, Master Magnus,’ he said, seeming to have caught Master Halsted’s stammer.

‘Not at all,’ the master rejoined and turned now to Quare, who just managed to keep from flinching as Grimsby had done under that blank, reflective gaze, in which he saw himself not merely reflected but belittled. ‘Your master has written to me of you as well, Mr Quare. It is a duty I require of every master in our company, for how else am I to separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were, crippled as I am and able to leave London only with the greatest difficulty and inconvenience?’

‘Yet you have come to Dorchester now, master,’ Quare observed.

‘Quite,’ said Master Magnus, and without further ado removed a pocket watch from within his black coat. This he laid upon the table, then pushed over towards Quare. ‘Do you recognize this, Mr Quare?’

Quare shook his head, mystified.

‘Go on,’ said Master Magnus. ‘Have a closer look.’

Quare picked up the watch. He was struck at once by the plainness of it: no lid covered the glass; the hands were simple stark pointers; the black numbers on the white face had been painted without embellishment; the silver backing was bare of any engraved mark or design. He held it to his ear and heard a steady ticking.

‘Well?’ asked Master Magnus.

The others looked on with mystified expressions.

He was being tested; that much was clear. But as to the purpose of the test, let alone its consequences, he had no idea. ‘It is very plain,’ he said, weighing his words with care. ‘But it seems well made for all that. I would need to open it up before I could venture anything more.’

‘Then do so,’ the master said, inclining his head.

Quare always carried a small tool kit with him; in a moment, he had prised the back of the pocket watch open. The inner workings of the timepiece did not match the drabness of its outer appearance. There were a number of small but significant innovations to the mechanisms that powered and regulated the watch. This in itself was unexpected; he knew very well – what apprentice did not? – that the Worshipful Company took a dim view of innovation, confiscating or destroying outright any timepieces that departed from what had been officially sanctioned. So it came as a surprise to have such a watch handed to him by no less an authority of the guild than Master Magnus. Surprise turned into something approaching shock a moment later when he recognized the innovations as his own. For some time now, Quare had been keeping a notebook that he filled with sketches of improvements to the mechanisms he worked upon each