The Emperor of All Things - By Paul Witcover Page 0,75

up at Master Magnus. ‘I assume I am to be punished?’

‘Oh, indeed,’ said the master. ‘Most dreadfully punished. To begin with, you may consider your apprenticeship with Master Halsted over.’

Again Master Halsted began to speak. Again Master Magnus silenced him with a gesture. No one else said a word.

So that was it, then. It was to be expulsion. Now, indeed, Quare felt crushed, the very breath squeezed out of him.

‘You will be coming back to London with me,’ Master Magnus continued. ‘You will continue your apprenticeship there, at the guild hall, under my supervision.’

‘I … what?’

‘Go and get your things ready, Mr Quare. We leave within the hour.’ He turned towards the others as a dazed Quare rose to his feet. ‘Mr Grimsby, your presence is no longer required. Perhaps you can assist Mr Quare in packing.’ Grimsby nodded, looking as dazed as Quare, and stood.

As Quare left the room, Grimsby trailing behind him, he heard Master Magnus’s voice: ‘If I might trouble you for another cup of tea, Mrs Halsted, your husband and I will work out the transfer of Mr Quare’s indenture.’

In the workroom, he hurriedly packed his things as Grimsby pestered him with questions he scarcely heard and in any case could not answer. His life had been turned upside down in an instant, and his thoughts, divided between what he was leaving behind and what awaited him in London, had no purchase on the present. In what seemed the blink of an eye, he was shaking Mr Halsted’s hand as his master – former master! – stammered out an awkward goodbye, then embracing a tearful Mrs Halsted, who pressed him to her ample bosom with more-than-maternal zeal, or so it seemed to Quare, though no one else appeared to find the embrace remarkable. Nor were his own eyes empty of tears; he was, after all, leaving the closest approximation to a family that he had ever known.

Then he was seated across from Master Magnus in a jolting carriage that bore the arms of the Worshipful Company – a great golden clock showing the hour of twelve, surmounted by a crown and cross, itself surmounted by a plumed silver helmet, which was in turn topped by a banded sphere of gold; the whole supported on one side by the figure of Father Time with his scythe and hourglass, and on the other by a monarch with a golden sceptre, and beneath it all, as if inscribed on a flowing scroll, the words of the guild’s motto: Tempus Rerum Imperator. Time, Emperor of All Things.

Quare watched the familiar sights of Dorchester pass by the open window of the carriage. Streets and buildings he had seen a thousand times without emotion tugged at his heart like burrs that had become fastened there without his knowledge and now came away grudgingly and not entirely without pain.

‘Dry your eyes, Mr Quare,’ commanded his companion, who even now, in the dim confines of the conveyance, wore his dark glasses. The man’s perch on the padded bench was a precarious one; each bounce and swerve threatened to throw him down and doubtless would have done so already were it not for a strap that was bolted to the bench and which he had drawn about his waist and torso upon first clambering onto the seat – ‘My own invention,’ the master had explained in response to Quare’s inquiry.

‘After a day or two in London,’ he continued now, ‘Dorchester will seem no more than a childish fancy, a dull dream from which you will be glad to have awoken. Your real life is about to begin, sir. It will not be easy, but you will have a chance to put your talents to their best use, I assure you.’

‘I can scarcely credit all that has happened to me today, Master Magnus,’ Quare said. ‘I hope I don’t seem ungrateful or ignorant of the honour you have shown me. I will do my best to be a good apprentice to you and assist you in all your labours.’

The master laughed. ‘You mistake me, sir. I do not require your assistance. Perhaps one day, if you are diligent and obedient, and progress to the rank of journeyman, I will make use of you. But that day will not come for years, and to be frank may never come. “Many are called, but few are chosen”, Mr Quare.’

‘Then whose apprentice will I be?’

‘Why, on paper, my own. But I have many such apprentices. Do not consider yourself