The Emperor of All Things

5

Impossible Things



QUARE WOKE TO find himself naked in an unfamiliar bed. An unfamiliar body, also naked, was nestled familiarly within the curve of his own, facing away. Wisps of blonde hair, edged with gold in the fall of sunlight past a drab curtain, tickled his nose. He smelled sweat and sex, stale beer and tobacco smoke. His mysterious companion was snoring; he had no idea who she was or how they had come to be together. There was a sour taste in his mouth, as though he had vomited during the night. His head throbbed, and his brains seemed to have been reduced to a semi-liquid state: the slightest movement sent them sloshing against the walls of his cranium. Meanwhile, his bladder burned. To relieve the latter misery was to invite the former; he lay still, suspended in a murky zone of suffering in which the flow of time itself seemed to have, not stopped precisely, but rather encountered an obstacle. It circled sluggishly, like a backed-up eddy in a street sewer.

The previous night was a smear of colour and noise across his memory. He recalled a succession of toasts that spread from table to table until the whole tavern was taking part. Songs were sung to the accompaniment of the one-eyed fiddler and his dancing monkey. Eternal friendships were pledged and broken and tearfully pledged again. He remembered conversing with the red-haired journeyman, what was his name, Argyle? No, Aylesford. The two of them sitting with arms flung about each other’s shoulders, commiserating over the sad lot of journeymen in the guild, the forfeiting of honour and other sacrifices that could only be alluded to … at least, Quare hoped he had gone no further than allusion. Surely he hadn’t said anything about the Most Secret and Exalted Order, his recent mission to Wichcote House, Grimalkin, or the uncanny pocket watch in the possession of Master Magnus. He racked his brains but could think of no indiscretion. This was not entirely comforting, however, since so much of the night was a blur.

There had been a disturbance. A fight … The Pig and Rooster in an uproar, chairs and fists flying, swords unsheathed, the little capuchin, its turban knocked off, screaming as it leapt from table to table and took refuge at last in one of the wagon-wheel chandeliers, where it crouched gargoyle-like within the swaying circle of candles, teeth bared, eyes agleam, seeming to preside over the madness below like some savage demigod. That nightmarish image was the last thing he remembered.

He disengaged himself from his companion, careful not to wake her, and sat up with a groan at a sharp twinge in his upper back, between his shoulder blades, as if he had pulled a muscle during the night. He thought for a second that he might be sick, but nausea receded as his bladder reasserted its primacy. He got to his feet, shivering in the morning chill, espied the chamber pot tucked beneath a cabinet across the room, and set out for it as though embarked upon a journey of miles. Other aches and pains announced themselves with each step. The bandage on his thigh bore a dark stain, as if the wound had opened again … though it didn’t seem to be bleeding at the moment.

He recognized nothing in his trek across the shabby room save his own scattered clothing. He hooked the chamber pot out with his foot and relieved himself with another groan, this one expressing a pleasure almost sexual in its intensity. When he had finished, he turned and saw that the sleeping blonde was asleep no longer. She lay on her side, propped on one elbow and regarding him with amusement, as if she was not only aware of his confusion but enjoying it. A dingy bed-sheet draped the plump swell of one hip, leaving pendulous breasts the colour of rice pudding exposed. Both her face and its expression were known to him.

He cleared his throat and assayed a smile and a bow. ‘Good morning, Arabella,’ he said as if it were the most natural thing in the world to find himself here, stark naked.

Arabella smirked, tossed her blonde curls, and said, ‘I’m Clara.’

At which he blushed from head to toe.

Her laughter was easy and forgiving. ‘It’s all right, love. You’re not the first, and you won’t be the last. Share and share alike, that’s what I say.’ She sat up, rearranging the sheet to cover her breasts. ‘Where’s Tom got to?’

‘Tom …?’ Quare’s hands cupped over his cock, which, a bit slow on the uptake, had only begun to respond to the sight of her voluptuous body now that she had covered herself.

Clara seemed not to notice. ‘Your friend. Redhead, looks about sixteen or so?’

‘Aylesford.’ He had no memory of coming here in his company. Or, for that matter, coming here at all. Wherever here was.

‘That’s the one.’ Clara got to her feet, the sheet tucked about her, and approached him with short, mincing steps. He drew back to let her by. She looked back coyly over her bare shoulder. ‘Can’t a girl get a little privacy?’

He blushed again and turned away. ‘Sorry.’ What had happened last night? He retrieved his clothing from the floor and laid it out on the bed as, behind him, Clara’s forceful stream rang against the sides of the chamber pot. There were some unsavoury-looking stains on his breeches and stockings, and dark splotches of what appeared to be dried blood on his shirt and coat … and, he now saw, more bloodstains on the sheets as well. A cursory examination of his body revealed some minor scrapes and scratches on his arms and chest, not enough to account for the stains. He supposed it must have been the wound that Grimalkin had given him. Or perhaps Clara had started her monthlies.

‘What’s your rush, love?’ Clara called.

‘I’ve an appointment.’ According to his pocket watch, it was nearing eight-thirty, and nine-thirty was the time Master Magnus had set for their morning meeting. The actual time, he knew, must be somewhat later, as his watch bled minutes if not kept tightly wound, a duty he’d neglected to perform last night. He remedied it now. But even so, he had no idea what the true time was. The uncertainty only added to his sense of dislocation.

‘But I haven’t had a chance to thank you proper for last night.’

Quare turned. Clara was advancing towards him, bed-sheet cast aside. Gravity and time would bring those pert breasts low one day, but this, he noted, was not that day. Her creamy white hips and belly had the soft roundness of still-ripening flesh, and the hair between her thighs was so blonde and fine that he could see right through to the pink flower beneath … at which point he, or rather a portion of his anatomy, decided that his meeting with Master Magnus was perhaps not so urgent, after all.

‘That’s more like it,’ she said with a smile, her gaze rising to meet his own.

‘I’m afraid I’ve bloodied your sheets,’ he said, embarrassed.

‘Your poor leg. But don’t fret, love. What’s a little blood between friends, eh?’ Taking him in hand, she pressed him back onto the bed.

‘Wait,’ he said, though he offered no resistance. ‘What did you mean about thanking me?’

She knelt on the edge of the bed. ‘Why, you saved my life last night, Dan. You and Tom both. Don’t you remember?’

‘Well, er …’ He shifted as she stroked his erection.

‘There was a brawl, a big one.’

‘I remember that. Or some of it, at least.’

‘The worst I’ve seen,’ she declared with relish, continuing to stroke him as she spoke, ‘and the Pig and Rooster’s had its share of nasty ones. I don’t know what started it, but all of a sudden the whole place was a battlefield. Martha and Arabella and I tried to get away through the kitchen, but we got separated, like, and I was cornered by five blackguards with more than brawling on their minds. Said they was going to carve their initials into my pretty face, they did.’ Her eyes widened as she produced – from where, he knew not, nor cared at the moment – a pig-bladder sheath, which she slipped over his manhood.

‘That’s to keep the brats off, love. A girl can’t be too careful.’

Nor a man, he thought; he had been lucky in his amorous pursuits, never having contracted the pox, but he had witnessed enough of its effects never to enter the lists of love unarmoured. To say nothing of his determination to bring no more bastards into the world.

Clara straddled him and guided him inside her. ‘I had a knife from the kitchen,’ she went on breathlessly, ‘but they had swords. Young noblemen, by the looks of them. Out for a bit of fun.’

‘You’re’ – he gasped as she rocked above him – ‘saying I stopped them somehow?’

‘And Tom, yes. Came to my rescue like knights in shining armour.’ She grunted and ground. ‘He took one through the back before they even knew you were there.’

‘What? Killed him, you mean?’

‘All I know is that the villain went down and didn’t get up again.’

‘The damned fool!’ He squirmed to get out from under Clara, but she redoubled her efforts, perhaps mistaking his panic for passion, or just not caring. Nor did his erection wilt along with his spirits, deciding, not for the first time, to go its own way regardless of his wishes. Quare’s groan had more than just frustration in it. But his mind, walled away from his body, worked with the precision of a timepiece. A commoner drawing a blade against a nobleman was serious business. To wound one, or God forbid kill one, even in self-defence, was a death sentence. The Worshipful Company couldn’t protect them from that. What had Aylesford done?

‘After that, it come fast and furious,’ Clara continued meanwhile, suiting her actions to her words. ‘I wanted to run, but I was terrified. I couldn’t hardly bring myself to look. I thought you and Tom was finished, outnumbered two to one. Then it would be my turn.’ Clara gave a little scream, her breasts smacking against her chest as she climaxed, and he felt his own climax rise up in answer. Clara clung to him. But even then, her stream of words did not slow. ‘Turned out to be the other way round. Your friend mightn’t look like much, but he’s a demon with a sword. Two clockmen plucking those feathered popinjays: it did my heart good to see!’ She laughed, then at last took notice of his struggles. ‘Why, what’s the matter, love? Crushing you, am I?’

‘Nothing personal.’ Quare pushed her away and sat up. He pulled the sheath from his drooping member and let it fall to the dirty floor. He must have been drunk indeed to have drawn his sword against nobility, regardless of the provocation. No doubt the hot-headed Aylesford had acted first, and he’d followed suit, swept up in the excitement. But that wouldn’t save him from punishment. That he remembered none of it only added to his anxiety. He wondered what had happened to Mansfield, Farthingale and Pickens. ‘It was just the two of us, you say? No others?’

‘That’s right.’

He rubbed his throbbing temples and groaned. ‘Then what happened?’

‘Why, you cut down one man, and Tom took care of two.’ Clara, sitting cross-legged beside him, pantomimed two quick sword thrusts to his chest. ‘The last man tried to run, but the two of you got him before he’d taken half a step.’ A third thrust illustrated the man’s fate.

Clammy horror settled over Quare. ‘We killed them all?’

‘Nobody stopped to check the bodies,’ she said with a shrug. ‘The three of us beat it out the back door before the Charleys or the redbreasts could show up.’

Quare groaned again. If any of the men had survived, no doubt they’d already provided descriptions of their attackers. If, on the other hand, he and Aylesford had killed them all, it was possible that the Charleys – the city watch – didn’t have any leads. But that wouldn’t be the case for long. The watch – or, more likely, Sir John Fielding’s red-waistcoated Bow Street Runners – would want to interview all those present at the Pig and Rooster last night, and the table of journeymen hadn’t exactly been inconspicuous. With the exception of Aylesford, a stranger (who would have attracted notice for that reason alone), they were all regulars at the tavern, known by name. Sooner or later, the Charleys would hear of them and come looking. And when, inevitably, someone – perhaps Mansfield or one of the others – spilled the beans about Aylesford’s penchant for duelling, the prickly redhead would find himself a wanted man. And if, as seemed likely, the two of them had been seen together during the fracas, so would Quare. He felt the remorseless logic of the situation closing around him like the bars of a Newgate prison cell.

‘It’s funny,’ Clara mused meanwhile. ‘The fight sobered Tom right up, but it made you even drunker. You could barely walk. The two of us practically had to carry you through the streets. I was afraid you’d been wounded, stabbed; there was blood on your coat and hands. But you swore you was fine. I didn’t like to send you off in such a state, so I brought you here instead, both of you. My heroes.’

Quare still remembered none of it. She might have been talking about someone else entirely. It gave him an eerie feeling, as if his body had a life of its own, separate from his mind, and though he’d just had a vivid illustration of that very fact here in bed with Clara, what she was relating to him now went well beyond that momentary estrangement.

‘I offered to take you on free of charge, however you wanted, one at a time or both together,’ Clara went on, blushing like the innocent girl she must have been once upon a time. ‘Tom was shy, said he was saving himself, but you were willing enough. He went out onto the landing to give us a bit of privacy, but we’d barely started before you jumped up, ran to the window and … Well, you can guess the rest, I’m sure, love, even if you don’t remember. A blessing there. Afterwards, you came back to bed and passed out, like. That left Tom and me. I wanted to do something for him – to show my appreciation – but he brushed me off again, told me he couldn’t even if he’d wanted to, that he was too tired to think of anything but sleep. I said he was welcome to share the bed with us, and so he did.’

‘I wish he had woken me before he left,’ Quare said. ‘We could be in big trouble. We need to get our stories straight.’

At which Clara blushed more deeply than ever.

‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘It’s just’ – she shifted, averting her eyes, then looking at him again – ‘I did wake up once last night and saw the two of you …’

‘Yes?’ he prompted.

‘Mind you, I’ve nothing against it. Live and let live, I always say.’

‘I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.’

‘Don’t worry, I won’t breathe a word to anyone.’

Comprehension dawned. ‘You think …?’ He burst into laughter.

‘I know what I saw.’

‘And just what was that?’

‘Tom was cleaving to you from behind, one hand clapped over your mouth. He saw me looking and winked at me over your shoulder, hissed at me to go back to sleep.’

‘You were already asleep,’ Quare said, disconcerted by the image. ‘You dreamed the whole thing.’

She shook her head and repeated, ‘I know what I saw.’

‘And I suppose I slept right through everything?’

‘Slept through it?’ She gave a disbelieving laugh. ‘Why, bless me, you were grunting like a pig the whole time!’

Quare’s amusement had soured altogether. He got out of bed and began to dress. ‘I think I’d remember if anything like that had happened.’

‘Like you remember killing them men in the Pig and Rooster?’

That gave him pause. After all, what did he really know about Aylesford? The man was a stranger. Perhaps he had attacked him in the dark. But it strained credulity to think that he would have slept through such an assault as Clara had described. Quare considered himself a man of the world; his life as a journeyman had brought him into contact with men who loved other men, or who sought out both sexes. Though sodomy was a crime punishable by death, his philosophy, like Clara’s, had always been live and let live. There had been furtive gropings in his boyhood with others his age, but those games had stopped even before his seduction, at the age of thirteen, by Emma Halsted, the wife of his master. But the whole thing was ridiculous. Surely there would be physical evidence of such an assault, and while his body bore its litany of cuts and scratches, aches and bruises, there was nothing to suggest he’d been raped. Either Clara had been dreaming, or, more likely, she’d misinterpreted what she’d seen. But what, then, had she seen? ‘And afterwards? What did I do then?’

‘Why, slept like a baby. But here’s a laugh! Maybe you was done in, but Tom was just getting warmed up, like. Took me twice before he left, he did!’

‘And I slept through that as well, I suppose.’

‘Like a lamb,’ she said.

‘I never knew I was such a heavy sleeper.’

‘A good rogering will do that. I’m feeling a mite sleepy myself,’ she added with a giggle.

He sighed. ‘Believe what you like, Clara. I’ll not argue with you.’

‘Why, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, love. Don’t I like it that way myself sometimes?’ She turned onto her knees and waggled her fleshy backside at him, though whether in mockery or invitation he couldn’t tell. ‘No need to go rushing off,’ she said, gazing over her shoulder with a wicked grin that seemed to settle the question.

But Clara’s abundant charms were not as enticing as they’d been a moment ago. There was too much he didn’t know about what had happened last night and what might be awaiting him this morning. Aylesford might have been taken already; the Scottish journeyman could have spilled his guts by now, blaming everything on Quare. He didn’t think it likely, but it was certainly possible, and growing more so with every moment. There was no time to lose. He had to find Aylesford, and fast. If only he hadn’t drunk so much last night … That had been his undoing. He pulled on his coat, searched the floor for his shoes. ‘I’ve got to go, Clara. I need to find Aylesford before he’s picked up. No doubt they’ll question you as well. Don’t tell them anything.’

She flounced on the bed. ‘What kind of rat do you take me for?’

‘Sorry,’ he said with an apologetic smile. ‘I know you’re no rat.’

‘Hmph.’ She tossed her head. ‘Under the bed.’

‘What?’

‘Your shoes.’

‘Oh.’ Sure enough, there they were … splashed with blood and other stains he preferred not to examine too closely. Quare sat down on the bed and pulled the shoes on over his stockings, then stood.

Clara leaned forward. ‘Give us a kiss before you go, love.’

He obliged. ‘You won’t be seeing me at the Pig and Rooster for a while.’

‘You know where I live. Stop by sometime.’

‘Maybe I will,’ he said; he did not bother to inform her that he had no idea where he was at present – he would discover that soon enough. He paused at the door to belt on his sword. Then, drawing the blade halfway from its scabbard, he noted with a sinking heart that brown streaks of dried blood were clinging to the steel; he would have to clean and oil the weapon as soon as he got back to his lodgings. ‘Have you seen my hat?’ he asked, looking for his black tricorn.

‘Another casualty of the night, I suppose,’ Clara said from the bed. ‘Here, take my cloak, love. You can’t step out like that – you look as if you’ve just come from a murder.’

‘I’m obliged to you.’ He took the dark brown cloak that hung from the back of the door. Though short on him, it covered the worst of the previous night’s leavings. He waved a last goodbye to Clara and hurried out into the morning.

As eager as Quare was to get to the guild hall, where Master Magnus was waiting, no doubt impatiently, to resume their conversation of the day before, and where he hoped as well to hear news of Aylesford and the others, he knew he needed to clean up and change into fresh clothes first. Wrapped in Clara’s cloak, he kept to back streets and alleys as he made his way from her lodgings in Clerkenwell to his own in Cheapside; it made for a longer journey, but he met fewer people along the way, and those he did encounter seemed as shy of attention as he, keeping their heads down and their 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 least, so it seemed to Quare and his fellow guildsmen, whose sensitivity to such things was far more acute than that of even the most time-conscious curate or man of business, men who made use of time but did not, so to speak, inhabit it as Quare and his fellows did.

He could delay no longer. Telling himself that he was being foolishly suspicious, he took a deep breath and came out into the street. Though he felt as if a hundred hostile eyes were following him, he reached the boarding house without incident and entered, only to find himself face to face with his landlady, Mrs Puddinge, who drew back from the door with a small shriek of surprise, her face going as white as her apron. In her fifties, the childless widow of a master in the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers, she was a merry matchstick of a woman who took a lively maternal interest in her ‘young men’, as she called them.

‘Merciful God in heaven, is it you, then, Mr Quare?’ Mrs Puddinge’s brown eyes narrowed beneath her cap as she took in his dishevelled state. ‘Lord bless us, but he told me you were dead!’

‘Dead?’ Quare echoed, the surprise now on his side. ‘What do you mean, Mrs P? Who told you?’

She pursed her lips, giving her face the aspect of a shrivelled prune. ‘Why, your friend and fellow guildsman, Mr Aylesford. He told me there was a brawl last night at the Pig and Rooster. How often have I warned you young men against that den of iniquity?’ Tears sprang to her eyes, and she wrung her hands in the folds of her apron. ‘He told me you were all killed.’

‘All?’ Quare’s brain was reeling.

‘Mr Farthingale, Mr Pickens, Mr Mansfield and yourself.’ She raised the apron to dab at her eyes. ‘He said some young lords started it, and that they were killed as well. Made it sound a regular massacre, he did! And now here you are, a bit worse for wear but still among the living, after all! Why, ’tis a miracle! That’s what it is. A blessed miracle. And the others? Are they also alive and well?’

‘I-I don’t know,’ he stammered, trying to make sense of things. ‘We were separated … When did Mr Aylesford tell you this?’

‘Why, not half an hour ago! The poor lad was beside himself with grieving. Said he’d come straight from the guild hall, with orders to clear out your room before the city watch could trace you here. Seems the masters are afraid of scandal. They know where the blame will fall, with aristocrats and journeymen among the dead!’

An icy quiver ran down his spine. ‘You let Aylesford into my room?’

‘And why would I not? With you dead and him about the business of the Company?’

‘But I’m not dead!’ Nor, Quare was beginning to think, had Aylesford been about Company business – now or ever.

‘Oh, aye, and God be praised for it. But how was I to know that at the time? Go up, Mr Quare, and surprise him! The poor lad will be overjoyed to see you, I’ll warrant. Quite downhearted, he was.’

‘What, is he still here?’

‘Unless he’s gone out by the window. I— merciful heavens!’

Quare pushed past Mrs Puddinge with a hasty apology, mounting the stairs two at a time, then strode down the empty third-floor landing and flung open the door to his room.

It was as empty as the landing. His trunk was open, his things strewn across the floor. Quare crossed to the open window, which gave onto an alley behind the boarding house, but there was no sign of Aylesford below. Cursing under his breath, he turned back to survey the mess Aylesford had left behind … only to see the man himself step from behind the door, closing it with the heel of his boot.

‘Mr Quare, as I live and breathe,’ said Aylesford wonderingly, sword in hand.

‘Not for long,’ said Quare, shrugging out of Clara‘s cloak and drawing his own sword, ‘unless you supply some answers, and quickly. What are you doing here? What happened last night? Where are Pickens and the others?’

‘You have a lot of questions for a dead man.’

‘You are overconfident, sir. You will not find me an easy mark.’ Quare hoped he sounded more certain of that than he felt. Up until yesterday, he had never drawn his sword in earnest. Now, for the third time in as many days, he was facing an armed foe: first Grimalkin, a fight he had been lucky to win, much less survive; then last night, at the Pig and Rooster, a fight he barely remembered; and now, facing a man he felt sure was not what or who he claimed to be.

Aylesford gave a nervous titter. ‘Why, I left you stabbed through the heart in that harlot’s bed! I made sure of it. Are you a ghost, then? I’m not afraid of you! I’ll send you straight back to hell!’

Yet he did not attack, or even step forward. And, Quare noticed, his sword arm was trembling.

But Quare did not move, either. He was trying to construe the man’s words. He remembered what Clara had told him she had witnessed during the night, only it seemed, at least according to Aylesford, that what she had taken for an act of sodomy had in fact been murder. And yet, despite Aylesford’s apparent confusion and fright in encountering him here, alive, Quare couldn’t credit such an outlandish claim. How could he? Stabbed through the heart? It was preposterous, insane. He had no memory of being stabbed or of any struggle whatsoever. It made no sense. A man did not die and then rise again to walk among the living. But then how to explain Aylesford’s seeming certainty or his evident fear? What kind of game was the man playing? ‘You are no journeyman of the Worshipful Company,’ he said, forcing his mind along more reasonable lines of inquiry.

‘Je suis de la Corporation des maîtres horlogers,’ Aylesford answered in Scots-accented French, giving the name of the Parisian clockmakers’ guild, great rival to the Worshipful Company.

‘So, you are a traitor to your country and your king,’ Quare said with contempt.

‘My country is Scotland,’ Aylesford replied. ‘And Bonnie Prince Charlie is my king.’ This affirmation seemed to infuse the man with fresh courage, for now, circling his sword point with lethal intent, he came forward.

Quare advanced to meet him. In his rooftop clash with Grimalkin, Quare had let panic overwhelm him, driving out his training in the art of swordplay. Now he resolved to keep a cooler head.

They came together in the centre of the room, a quick exchange of thrusts and parries, each man feeling out the defences of the other.

‘Did you kill Pickens and the others?’ Quare demanded, drawing back.

Aylesford smiled and circled, looking for an opening. ‘With this very blade. In the confusion of the brawl, a quick thrust through the back, with no one the wiser.’

Quare pushed aside his grief and anger. They could not help him now. ‘But why? What wrong had they done you?’

‘’Twas nothing personal. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I saw my chance, and I took it. Are we not at war?’

Quare had eaten and drunk with these men, laughed with them, worked beside them. This news of their cowardly murders stabbed him as surely as any sword. But it was hot anger, not blood, that spilled from the wound. He squeezed the grip of his sword as though it were Aylesford’s scrawny neck. ‘They were journeymen, not soldiers.’

‘They were Englishmen,’ Aylesford answered, as if that explained everything.

Quare snarled and struck at him, coming in with a high thrust and then disengaging the tip of his blade as Aylesford moved to parry. He flicked his wrist, bringing the point around in a cutting motion that slashed down the side of his adversary’s sword arm. Blood bloomed against the white of Aylesford’s sleeve. But even as Quare took satisfaction in the touch, Aylesford’s sword point came flashing in towards his face, and his frantic parry was barely in time to slap the steel aside. The man was devilishly fast. He danced back, only then becoming aware of a burning along the shoulder of his sword arm, right through his coat.

‘Behold, a ghost that bleeds,’ said Aylesford with a wolfish smile.

Quare did not dare shift his eyes to take stock of the wound. ‘And what of me?’ he asked, continuing to circle his blade as he moved to Aylesford’s left. ‘Why did you not kill me with the others?’

‘I would have,’ Aylesford said, turning with him, his sword in line, ‘but when I found you, you were facing down five men in defence of that harlot’s honour – which, I feel sure, is more than she ever did. Still, a woman’s a woman for all that, and no honourable man turns his back on a member of the fairer sex in need. Besides, it was a chance to add a fine gaggle of English lordlings to my night’s tally. Then, once we had dispatched them, the arrival of the watch compelled me to postpone our reckoning again. And, I confess, when it became clear that the wench intended to reward our services with her own, I thought to myself, ‘Why not give the poor sod one last happy memory?’ Ah, my gentle heart will be the death of me! But from what the sow told me, you were too pissed to take advantage. She offered me her bed, and once she dropped off, I clamped one hand over your mouth and with the other drove my dagger between your shoulder blades and into your heart. Do you know, your struggles woke her! Yes, and the wench must have thought we were going at it fine and proper, for she smiled at me in the moonlight and giggled and turned her back to give us a bit of privacy. And what is more, the sight of her bare rump stirred me, sir, indeed it did! I left you dead as a doornail and had my way with her twice – God willing, I planted a Scotsman in her belly. Yet here you are, all lively and disputatious, bleeding like a stuck pig. I confess, I am at a loss to account for it.’

‘You’re a madman. And a murderer. There’s your accounting.’

‘I know what I know,’ Aylesford insisted, and lunged.

Quare parried and counter-thrust. Aylesford knocked his blade aside with a snap of his wrist and riposted, and Quare, realizing a beat too late that he had fallen for a feint and was overextended as a consequence, had to scramble back for dear life. Aylesford came on, his sword a silvery blur. Quare, hard pressed, was backed towards one wall. Sweat poured off him, and he couldn’t help but recall Aylesford’s boast of having fought and won five duels since coming to London; that was one claim he found all too easy to credit. He had no breath left for idle speech, but Aylesford more than made up for the lack. He was one of those fighters who seeks to distract his opponent with words. Quare knew he shouldn’t listen, that he could trust nothing of what he heard, yet the man’s words were as deft as his sword strokes, and more difficult to deflect.

‘Last night, in your cups, you mentioned a clock,’ Aylesford said now, ‘a most wondrous clock. And do you know, it was in quest of just such a timepiece that I was dispatched to London. Here I would find a clock, or so my masters told me, whose secrets, once unravelled, would confer so great an advantage upon whichever side possessed it as to all but guarantee victory upon the battlefield … and beyond. The mechanics of a clock, after all, differ merely in degree, not kind, from those of certain engines of war, and a device that can more accurately measure out minutes and seconds can more rapidly fling shot and more accurately hurl shell. Or perhaps the clock contained a solution to the problem of longitude at long last, conferring supremacy of the seas. Whatever the truth, it was plain that this paragon could not be allowed to remain in English hands. Lord Wichcote had it in his possession until just two nights ago, or so my informants told me – but it had been stolen from him … and by no less a thief than the fabled Grimalkin, come out of retirement expressly for the purpose, apparently! Well, when Grimalkin steals something, it stays stolen. Everyone knows that. It seemed that my mission was a failure before it had scarce begun! So you may imagine my surprise and joy when I chanced upon you last night, sir. A most opportune encounter!’

All the while he spoke, his blade was never still. It darted like a needle, seeming to stitch an invisible net in the air, the strands of which inexorably tightened about Quare, constricting his possible countermoves, like an attack in chess that does not succeed by a lightning strike of checkmate but rather by closing off every avenue of opportunity until only defeat remains, a defeat not so much inflicted as collaborated in. That Aylesford had not drawn blood again seemed less due to Quare’s defensive skills than to a smothering intent which Quare could sense enveloping him but could not comprehend fully enough to escape. It was maddening. He was fighting tactically, Aylesford strategically. He knew it, but the knowledge was no help to him. His wounded shoulder was stiffening up, which was no help, either.

‘From what you let slip,’ Aylesford continued breezily, ‘I realized that the clock must be in the guild hall, in the possession of that aptly named monstrosity, Master Mephistopheles. So, early this morning, with the guild hall in an uproar following news of the tragic deaths of four journeymen in a tavern brawl the night before, I took advantage of the confusion and went in quest of the clock.’

At that, Quare found his tongue again. ‘If you’ve harmed him …’

‘Oh, aye, what then?’ Aylesford mocked. ‘But ’twas not I who harmed him. I could not even find him in that blasted labyrinth! Yet it seems I was not the only one to seek him out. Some Theseus had threaded the maze before me. Or such was the rumour on every man’s lips. Why, even those liveried corpses you employ as servants spoke of little else.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘Is it not clear? Master Minotaur is dead. Someone – I know not who; perhaps Grimalkin himself, or a man dispatched by Lord Wichcote to retrieve his property, or a patriot like myself, or a French assassin; or one of the Old Wolf’s cubs; the man had no shortage of enemies who might wish him dead – visited the cripple in the night and slew him.’

‘You lie,’ Quare said, wishing it to be so but afraid in his heart that the man spoke the truth. Aylesford cast death about him the way other men cast a shadow.

‘I merely report what I heard. I do not vouch for its truth. But with that avenue closed to me, I came here, thinking I might find some clue to the location of the clock, or to its nature, in your belongings, before the watch beat me to it. Imagine, then, my surprise, when I found myself interrupted in my search not by some bumbling Charley but by a man I had left for dead scant hours ago! Ah, well, I suppose I shall just have to be more thorough this time.’

And with that, before Quare could reply, or even react, Aylesford’s blade spun through a dazzling series of moves whose result was to disarm him as easily as he might have plucked a wooden sword from the grip of a child. In the blink of an eye, or so it seemed, the tip of Aylesford’s blade hovered at his throat.

‘I do not think you will rise again from this death,’ Aylesford said with a satisfied smile. ‘But the priests do tell us that confession is good for the soul, Mr Quare. So may it prove for you. Tell me all you know of the clock, and I will make your end quick and painless. Perhaps I will even spare your life.’

‘I would be a fool indeed to believe that,’ Quare rasped, his mouth dry with fatigue and fear. ‘And even if I did, I would not tell you anything. Perhaps you should have questioned me more closely last night, while I was too drunk to guard my tongue. You know – before, as you claim, you killed me.’

Aylesford winced. ‘Aye, ’tis poor spycraft, I’ll grant you, to kill a man first and then put the question to him. My masters tell me I am too impulsive, and I do acknowledge the fault. Clearly I should have made more certain of your demise. But I can’t regret it, since I have the chance now to rectify my mistake. So, I’ll ask you but once more before I begin carving – what do you know of this marvellous clock?’

‘Go to the devil.’

‘Let us see if—’

‘Merciful heavens!’

This exclamation was followed by the sound of smashing crockery. Mrs Puddinge stood in the doorway, gazing at them in horrified dismay, her hands clutching the folds of her white apron. A serving tray and the shards of a teapot and cups lay on the floor at her feet. ‘Mr Aylesford! Mr Quare! What is the meaning of this?’

Taking advantage of the distraction, Quare swung his arm to club Aylesford’s sword point out of line. Before he could recover, Quare darted inside his guard, slamming his good shoulder into the other man’s chest to shove him backward. Aylesford reeled, cursing, a panicky look in his blue eyes. For a moment it seemed he would fall, but somehow he managed to stay on his feet and bring his blade back into play. Yet by that time, Quare had retrieved his own blade from where it had fallen.

‘Gentlemen,’ cried Mrs Puddinge shrilly, her face flushed with anger beneath her white cap, ‘put up your swords this instant! I’ll have no bloodshed here! Why, the very idea!’

‘He’s a French spy,’ Quare snarled out.

‘A spy? Lord help us!’ The landlady raised the hem of her apron to her face and peered wide-eyed over the edge of it as though looking on from behind the safety of a brick wall.

‘Get help, Mrs P – I’ll hold him here!’

‘It will take a better man than you to do that,’ Aylesford answered and rushed past the now-shrieking Mrs Puddinge. Quare started after him, but before he had taken two steps, Aylesford had thrown the hysterical woman into his path. She clung to him as fiercely as a drowning cat to a tree limb. In the moments it took him to calm her sufficiently to, as it were, retract her claws, Aylesford made his escape. As Quare moved to follow, she latched on to him again.

‘Don’t leave me, Mr Quare,’ she begged, shaking like a leaf in a storm.

‘I must make certain Aylesford has fled,’ he answered, disengaging himself from her grasp. ‘Stay here, Mrs P. You’ll be perfectly safe, I assure you.’

She nodded, seemingly incapable of further speech.

Quare edged out through the doorway, alert for an ambush. The landing was empty. At this hour, all the lodgers would be about their business in the guild hall and city. He continued down the stairs and then out of the house, still meeting no one. The street outside, and the broad expanse of Cheapside beyond, were more crowded and bustling than they had been when he had entered the house just moments ago. There was no trace of Aylesford. London had swallowed him up, not caring a whit that the man was no friend to it or to England.

Quare sheathed his blade and made his way back to his room, where he found Mrs Puddinge seated on the bed, wringing her hands together. Her tear-stained face rose fearfully as he entered, and she sprang to her feet. ‘What of Mr Aylesford? Is he …’

‘No sign of him, I’m afraid,’ Quare said. ‘But I doubt he’ll be back.’

‘To think that one of my young men should turn out to be a spy,’ she said.

‘What, do you mean that Aylesford was lodging here?’

She nodded, drying her face with the edge of the apron. ‘Since yesterday evening – Mr Mansfield brought him to me. Poor Mr Mansfield!’ And the tears began flowing again. ‘Oh, Mr Quare,’ she said between sobs, ‘do you suppose it was Mr Aylesford who killed him and the others?’

‘I’m afraid it rather looks that way.’ Quare moved to comfort her, patting her heaving shoulders as she wept into her apron. ‘There, there, Mrs P,’ he said. ‘There, there. You must try to get hold of yourself.’

She nodded, drying her red-rimmed eyes. ‘Such sweet young men,’ she said. ‘Not an ounce of harm in any of them.’ She gave him a bashful, half-embarrassed smile that became a look of concern. ‘Why, you’re wounded, Mr Quare! Your shoulder … You must let me see to it at once!’

‘I’m perfectly well,’ he told her.

‘Nonsense,’ she said, already moving to divest him of his coat.

‘There’s no time for that, Mrs P,’ he said, attempting no more successfully than with Aylesford to keep her at bay. ‘I feel sure the watch will learn of my presence at the Pig and Rooster and come looking for me here. I will speak to them, but not until I have spoken to my masters at the guild and warned them of the spy in our midst. And before I do that, I must have a quick look through Mr Aylesford’s things. Will you take me to his room?’

‘Oh, aye. Just as soon as I’ve seen to that shoulder. Do not struggle so, Mr Quare! I know you are pressed for time, but bleeding to death won’t make things go any quicker. Now, sit down on the bed, sir. Sit, I say!’

Quare sighed grimly and gave himself up to her ministrations. In a flash, she had helped him out of his coat and waistcoat, both of which looked to be quite ruined with blood. The shirt beneath was in even worse shape. After her initial assertiveness, Mrs Puddinge appeared uncertain how to proceed, as if it had been a long time indeed since she had undressed a man.

‘Can you …’ She motioned with her hands, a blush rising to her cheeks.

Quare stripped off the shirt, wincing at the pain in his shoulder. Mrs Puddinge, meanwhile, had gone to a table across the room, where there was a wash basin and a pitcher of water, along with some folded cloths. She filled the basin, grabbed a cloth, and carried them both back to the bed. Setting the basin down beside him, she wet the cloth and began to wipe the blood away. He winced again at her touch, light as it was.

‘There, there, Mr Quare,’ she said as she cleaned the wound, seeming to have recovered from her earlier upset, as if caring for another was the best medicine for what had ailed her. ‘’Tis not so bad, after all. A nasty gash, to be sure, but not a deep one. You’ll not be needing a surgeon to sew it up. Here … Press the cloth to the wound, just there – that’s right. I’m going to fetch some clean cloths to make a bandage. I’ll just be a moment.’

And with that, she bustled out of the room.

Quare got to his feet and crossed to the table from which Mrs Puddinge had taken the wash basin. There was a fly-specked square of mirror hanging frameless on the wall above the table, and Quare now angled himself so as to be able to see his back reflected in the glass. Specifically, the area between his shoulder blades, where Aylesford said he had stabbed him as they lay in Clara’s bed.

The indirect light from the window, coupled with the awkward positioning necessary to see anything useful, defeated him. He groaned in frustration. But he could at least examine his shoulder. Lifting the cloth, he saw a long, shallow gash; a sluggish upwelling of blood accompanied the removal of pressure. No doubt there would be a scar, to go with the one that Grimalkin had given him. He had never imagined that a career in horology would mark him so. He thought of the grizzled old soldiers he had seen in taverns, swapping stories and matching scars over glasses of gin. At this rate, he would soon be joining them.

‘Mr Quare, come back to bed this instant.’

He turned to see Mrs Puddinge glaring at him from the door, her arms bearing enough cloths to swaddle a small army. ‘A man would have to be foolish indeed to reject that invitation,’ he replied rakishly.

She blushed again, but couldn’t suppress a smile. ‘Get along with you.’

Once he was seated on the edge of the bed, she tended to his shoulder with practised efficiency, first cleaning the wound again, then placing a folded cloth over it, which she secured with a long strip of cloth wound about his torso. He had intended to ask her to have a look between his shoulder blades, but, as it turned out, there was no need.

‘Merciful heavens!’ she cried out.

‘What is it?’

‘Why, another wound. A worse one. Much worse! Can you not feel it?’

‘No. Or rather, a slight discomfort only between my shoulder blades, like an annoying itch I cannot scratch.’

‘That would be the scab. Here, let me show you …’ She fetched the mirror down from the wall and returned to the bed, where she held it at such an angle as to give him the clear view he had been unable to acquire for himself.

What he saw both shocked and fascinated; it felt strangely removed from him, or he from it, as though he were looking at someone else’s body, or, as in a dream, gazing down at his own from a superior vantage like a ghost or angel. Nestled between his shoulder blades was a blood-crusted incision no more than an inch long. The skin to either side was as purple as the petals of a violet, yet also streaked with scarlet and yellow and a sickly, algal green. It was a wonder that his fight with Aylesford had not reopened the wound. A clammy sweat broke out on his skin, and he felt as if he’d swallowed a knot of writhing eels.

‘Are you all right, Mr Quare?’ Mrs Puddinge asked in concern at his sudden pallor.

He took a deep breath and looked away. ‘I’m well,’ he said, but the croak of his voice belied it. Obviously, Aylesford had failed to pierce his heart with his knife thrust in the dark. But even so, Quare felt sure that a wound such as this should have done more than merely itch. It seemed the sort of wound one might see upon a corpse. Yet there was not even a twinge of pain. His heart was beating strongly, rapidly, and his lungs had no difficulty drawing breath. He didn’t understand it.

‘I’m afraid that’s beyond my poor skills,’ said Mrs Puddinge, shaking her head. ‘You’ll need a surgeon to sew that up, you will.’

‘I’ll have it seen to at the guild hall,’ he promised; now that he wasn’t looking at the wound, he was able to think more clearly, though the nausea showed no sign of receding. ‘Can you just bind it up for now?’

‘I’ll try, but God help you if it opens again.’ She set to work. ‘This is older than the one on your shoulder,’ she observed as she twined a strip of cloth about his chest. ‘You must’ve got it at the Pig and Rooster, a craven blow from behind, in the midst of the brawl.’

‘No doubt,’ he said. Perhaps it was the sensation of her hands upon the skin of his back, but he began to feel the stirrings of memory; or, rather, it was as if his body remembered what his mind could not. He began to tremble.

‘There, there,’ Mrs Puddinge repeated. ‘Almost done …’

No, it was not memory. More like the way he had seemed, upon being shown the crusted wound, to separate from his own skin. So now did he see in his mind’s eye the stark tableau, lit by moonlight, of himself and Aylesford pressed close on Clara’s bed in a travesty of intimate congress. He seemed to feel the other man’s body cleaving to his own, his hand clamped over his mouth; saw, or imagined that he saw, the wide eyes of Clara gazing at them, and then her knowing smirk as she turned away into shadows and tangled bed-sheets.

He rose to his feet and rushed to the open window, arriving just in time to spew the contents of his stomach into the alley below. Ignoring Mrs Puddinge, who, after an initial exclamation, had hurried to stand at his side, one hand stroking his arm, her touch like sandpaper despite her kindly intent, he leaned forward, arms bracing himself on the sill, closed his eyes, and let the cool city air – carrying its quotidian stinks of coal smoke and river stench and the waste of animals and human beings, odours that had sickened him during his first days and weeks in London, but which were now as familiar as the smells of his own body, and as reassuring – play over his face and torso. He was alive, damn it. Despite Aylesford’s efforts. And he had work to do.

Taking a breath, he straightened and pulled away from Mrs Puddinge. ‘I’d better have a look at Aylesford’s room,’ he said.

‘Shouldn’t I call for a doctor, after all?’ she asked, concern in her voice and in her eyes.

He shook his head. ‘Please, Mrs P. I’ve no time to argue.’ He crossed the room and pulled a clean shirt from amidst the scattered pieces of clothing Aylesford had strewn about in the course of ransacking his trunk. ‘There is more at stake here than one man’s health. At any rate, as I told you, I’m perfectly well.’ He turned away from her and drew the shirt over his head with a grimace, but schooled his expression to equanimity when he faced her again. ‘Now, if you will lead the way …’

‘Perfectly well, he says,’ Mrs Puddinge muttered as she preceded him out of the room, down the still-empty landing and up to the fourth floor. ‘With a hole in his back and a shoulder sliced open like a side of roast beef.’ She stopped before a door, produced her ring of keys from somewhere beneath her apron, and glared up at him. ‘You’re not a well man, Mr Quare. Deny it all you like, but the longer you do, the worse price you’ll pay. Heed your stomach, sir. It’s wiser than you are.’

‘The door, if you please, Mrs P.’

Scowling, she fitted the key to the lock. ‘Why, it’s unlocked!’ She pushed the door open. ‘Here you go, then, Mr Quare. I hope you find enough to hang—’

She broke off, and Quare pushed past her into the room, his hand on the pommel of his sword.

The room was empty, which was no more than he had expected. But it was not simply empty of Aylesford – it was empty of all trace of the man.

‘Why, his things … they’re gone!’ Mrs Puddinge said from just behind him.

‘What things?’ he asked, turning to her.

‘He had a small trunk that he carried in on his shoulder last evening,’ Mrs Puddinge said. ‘It was still here this morning – I’m sure of it. He … Oh, dear Lord in heaven!’ She looked as if she might faint, and Quare reached out to steady her. ‘There on the floor!’ She pointed with the hand that held the keys; they rattled with her shaking. ‘Blood, Mr Quare! He must’ve come back here after he fled your room! He must’ve come back here and waited until you had satisfied yourself that he was gone from the house! Then, when you returned to your room, he must have taken his trunk and crept out of here as quiet as a mouse!’

Quare felt close to fainting himself. Mrs Puddinge was right. The drops of blood on the wooden slats of the floor confirmed it. He’d assumed that Aylesford had escaped into the bustling streets, but instead he’d retired here, to this room, biding his time until Quare had given up the chase. Then – he could picture it as clearly in his mind as if he’d witnessed it himself – he’d hoisted his trunk onto his shoulder and left … along with any evidence that might incriminate him or shed light on his mission. Quare cursed – he had badly misplayed the situation. Master Magnus would not be pleased.

Master Magnus!

Aylesford had said the master was dead. Murdered in the night, like Mansfield and the rest. Quayle prayed to God that it was a lie, but he was forced to admit that everything Aylesford had told him this morning had thus far turned out to be true. He had to get to the guild hall.

Mrs Puddinge, meanwhile, was edging into hysterics. ‘Why, he could have slipped back into your room while you were searching the street outside and slit my throat! Or when I went to fetch bandages, I might have met him in the hall or on the stairs, and what then? Oh, Mr Quare, he might still be lurking about, waiting for the chance to finish me off!’

‘I’m sure he’s not,’ said Quare. ‘He’s gone to report back to his masters, just as I must do.’

‘No,’ she shrieked, grabbing hold of his arm. ‘You can’t leave me! He’ll kill me, he will! Just as he did those poor young men!’

‘Mrs Puddinge,’ Quare said as forcefully and yet calmly as he could, ‘Aylesford has no interest in harming you, I assure you.’

‘Oh, aye, like you assured me I would be perfectly safe when you went gallivanting off after him!’

Quare felt his cheeks flush. Damn it, the woman was right. He had left her in danger. Once again, as in his confrontation with Grimalkin, he was forced to admit that he was ill-prepared for this game in which he suddenly found himself immersed right up to his eyeballs. He knew that he was lucky to have survived this long. And, no thanks to him, so was Mrs Puddinge. Nevertheless, he felt certain that Aylesford was long gone, and that Mrs Puddinge was in no further danger. ‘It’s me that he’s after,’ he told her now. ‘But if it will set your mind at ease, I’ll look for other lodgings as soon as I’ve spoken to my masters.’

‘What, so that you can put some other innocent at risk? But even if you were to move out, Mr Quare, he still knows that I know he’s a French spy,’ Mrs Puddinge pointed out, not unreasonably. ‘He’ll still have cause enough to want me dead!’

‘Once I’ve exposed him, the whole guild will know – and my masters will see that the news reaches the ear of Mr Pitt himself. Will Aylesford kill us all, then? Don’t you see, Mrs P? The more people who know, the safer we are. Your surest protection lies in my getting to the guild hall!’

She pondered this for a moment, then nodded, a look of steely determination on her face, where, just a moment ago, he had seen only terror. ‘I’m going, too, Mr Quare.’ And, before he could object: ‘I won’t sit here all alone, waiting patiently for my throat to be cut. Say what you will, but you can’t know for certain that he’s not lurking about somewhere close by, watching and waiting like a cat at a mouse hole. As long as he sees that we’re together, he’ll not dare to strike. And if he sees us both go to the guild hall, he’ll know the jig is up, and that it will avail him nothing to creep back here in the dead of night and silence me.’

Quare could not fault the woman’s logic. ‘Very well, but we must make haste. Give me a moment to clean myself up and finish dressing, and we’ll go together.’

‘I’m not letting you out of my sight,’ she declared.

In the end, he prevailed upon her to allow him a modicum of privacy, standing with her arms crossed and her back to him just outside his cracked-open door. After dumping the bloody water out of the window and refilling the wash basin with the last of the fresh water from the pitcher, he undressed and hurriedly wiped the worst of the blood, grime, and sweat from his skin, shivering all the while. Then he dressed more quickly still, pulling fresh linen and clothes from the floor. He drew his hair back in a tight queue. His coat, if it were even salvageable, which he doubted, required more time and attention than he could spare just now, and so he wore only a waistcoat, once blue but now so threadbare and faded that it merely aspired to that colour. He tucked his spare hat, a battered tricorn, under one arm.

‘Well?’ he demanded of Mrs Puddinge at last. ‘How do I look?’ He did not want to draw unnecessary attention on the streets.

She opened the door fully and regarded him with a critical eye. ‘I shouldn’t care to present you to His Majesty,’ she said at last, ‘but I suppose it could be worse. Have you no spare coat?’

‘Such luxuries are beyond a journeyman’s purse, Mrs P.’

‘Why, ’tis no luxury! Here, now, I’ve still got my husband’s second-best coat – I buried him in his best, God bless his bones. I believe it will fit you very well indeed. Come along while I fetch it.’

So saying, she started off down the landing; her own rooms were on the ground floor of the house. Quare closed and locked the door to his room and followed her. At the top of the stairs, she paused and waited for him to catch up. ‘I’ll feel safer if you go first, Mr Quare.’

He nodded and slipped past her, descending with caution, his hand on the pommel of his sword. But, as before, he encountered no one. Mrs Puddinge unlocked the door to her private chambers, and again Quare preceded her inside, checking to make sure Aylesford was not hiding there. Only when he had searched every inch, including under the bed, did she deign to enter. Then, brisk about her business, she bustled to a trunk, threw it open, rummaged inside and drew forth a drab brownish grey monstrosity of a coat. This relic of a bygone age she unfolded and let hang from one hand while beating the dust from it with the other. Quare found it difficult to believe this garment had been anyone’s second-best anything. He would have been embarrassed to see another person wearing it, let alone himself. It seemed to have been stitched together from the skins of dried mushrooms. He sneezed, then sneezed again more violently, as an odour reached him, redolent of the ground if not the grave.

‘Here you go, Mr Quare,’ said Mrs Puddinge, advancing towards him with the mouldering coat extended before her like a weapon. ‘Not the height of fashion, I know, but sufficient unto the day, eh?’

He eyed the thing with something like horror. ‘Er, I can see how much the coat means to you, Mrs P. As a keepsake of your late husband, that is. I couldn’t possibly take it.’

‘Stuff and nonsense,’ she insisted. ‘I won’t have one of my young men walking about the streets without a coat. What will people think?’ She pressed it upon him again, and, after setting his tricorn upon his head, he reluctantly took it.

‘Got a bit of a smell,’ he suggested, holding his breath.

‘Beggars can’t be choosers, Mr Quare,’ she responded, as if offended by his observation.

Quare bowed to the inevitable with a sigh. He advanced his arms through the sleeves, half expecting to encounter a mouse or spider. Perhaps a colony of moths. The coat proved to be a trifle large, even roomy. It settled heavily across his shoulders, and the stench of it was like a further weight. He didn’t think he could bear it. Yet before he could say another word, there came a sharp rapping at the front door of the house.

Mrs Puddinge shot him a fearful look.

‘That must be the watch or, worse, the redbreasts,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Quick, Mrs P – you delay them, and I’ll go out through the window. You can stay here; you’ll be safe with these men.’

‘I’ll do no such thing!’ Even as she spoke, she was crossing the room to a casement window looking out on the same alley as the window in his room above. She quickly threw it open, then turned to him as another round of hammering began at the front door. ‘We’ve no time to argue, Mr Quare. Are you coming or not?’

Again he seemed to have no choice but to accede. Beneath her matronly exterior, Mrs Puddinge was a force to be reckoned with. Quare helped her over the sill and out of the window, then followed, pushing the glass-paned wings closed again behind him.

It was a chill, grey day, with more than a taste of encroaching autumn. Despite the lateness of the hour – nearly eleven by his watch – tendrils of fog snaked through the air, obscuring the sun and congealing in pockets along the cobbled pavement of the alley.

‘What now, Mr Quare?’ Mrs Puddinge asked, eyes shining beneath her bonnet, for all the world like a girl swept up in a childhood game.

‘Now we make for the guild hall,’ he said in a low voice. ‘We’ll go this way, up the alley, away from your house. Once we reach Cheapside, we’ll blend in with the flow. Just act naturally, Mrs P. Don’t hurry or do anything that might draw unwanted attention.’

‘I confess I am rather enjoying this,’ she confided as they walked up the alley side by side, avoiding as best they could the night’s detritus thrown from upper storeys. The stench was enough to make him glad of the second-best coat, whose dank odour, however unpleasant, was preferable to that of offal and excrement. ‘Why, it’s as if it were five years ago, and Mr Puddinge still among the living! Many the morning I would walk him to the guild hall, he wearing the very coat you have on now, the two of us talking of everything and of nothing, happy as two peas in a pod!’ As they reached the end of the alley and turned into the bustling thoroughfare beyond, she slipped her arm through his, giving him a warm smile, which he could not help but return.

But his own thoughts were far from dwelling on happier days of yore. Instead, they were all on what news he would find at the guild hall. Was Master Magnus really dead? He could not imagine a world without that outsized personality and quicksilver mind trapped in its stunted, misshapen body. As an orphan with no memory of his parents, Quare had been raised in a Dorchester workhouse, and from there, to his great good fortune, had gone in an apprenticeship to Robert Halsted, who had initiated him into the clockmaker’s art … and whose wife, some years later, had initiated him into other, equally pleasurable arts. The couple had been kind to him, and generous, but he had at no point thought of them as substitutes for the parents he had never known yet often fantasized about, especially at night, when he lay abed unable to sleep, his fellow apprentice, Jim Grimsby, snoring and snuffling beside him like a hibernating bear. Then he would feel his loneliness most keenly and imagine himself surrounded by a loving family, or, in his more melancholic moments, as having been stolen away from his parents, a lord and his lady who had never ceased to search for him and would one day sweep him up in their arms and return him to his rightful place as heir to a title and the fortune that went with it.

Quare had given up such fancies long ago. He knew that no such life would be restored to him, even if he had once briefly possessed it – which, of course, he hadn’t. He had long since come to accept that the only life he would have was what he made for himself, fashioned from the materials at hand with what skills he could master, assembling it piece by piece as if it were a kind of clock, one that would take an entire lifetime to finish. And in that respect, it was Master Magnus who stood in the nearest approximation of a father to him. Or, not quite a paternal influence, but an avuncular one. It was Master Magnus, not some mythical knight or lordship in shining armour, who had rescued him from Dorchester: a journeyman passing through town had brought the master a report of his horological skills, the master had come himself to inspect his work, and afterwards, Halsted had released Quare into his care. Master Magnus had struck him at the time as both frightening and comic, like a figure out of a fairy tale, Tom Tit Tot sprung to life. He hadn’t realized then what a singular occurrence it was for Master Magnus to travel out of London to fetch a new apprentice, nor had he appreciated the agony the master had endured in the simple act of travelling the hundred-odd miles between London and Dorchester in a carriage that rattled his bones like dice in a cup. That Master Magnus was an orphan – to Quare’s way of thinking, kissing-cousin to bastardy – constituted another bond between them. This was never talked about; indeed, sometimes months would pass in which he did not catch a glimpse of the man, much less exchange a word with him – even longer once he had attained the rank of journeyman. Yet Quare was always somehow aware that Master Magnus was keeping an eye on him and had his future in mind – as proved to be the case when, just over a year ago, the master had recruited him into the ranks of the regulators.

But it was not just gratitude for all that Master Magnus had done on his behalf that made Quare’s heart ache with apprehension. He had embraced the master’s plan without knowing its full extent, and now, like it or not, he was stuck in the middle of it, like a man crossing a flooded stream who finds himself in higher waters than he’d anticipated. It was too late to return to the safe shore from which he’d started; he could only press forward, into waters that might well sweep him away. He had lied to the Old Wolf, lost his place among the regulators, put his reputation and his hopes for advancement into the hands of a man who on the authority of a confessed murderer was now dead. And where would that leave Quare, who had always tried to cut an inconspicuous course through the treacherous shoals of guild politics? He feared that, without the master’s protection, he would be expelled from the Worshipful Company or at best discarded, relegated to some backward sinecure, a small town far from London, where he would be permitted to open a shop but would never again taste the excitement of life so near to the centre of things. Nor, without the assistance of the master’s intelligence network, would he ever learn the identity of his father.

And what of the watch he had taken from Grimalkin, the beautiful but deadly hunter with its bone-white workings and evident thirst for blood? Who else but Master Magnus could decipher its secrets? The mystery of it lay at the heart of everything that had happened. It was the reason Aylesford had been dispatched to London in the first place, the reason for the murder of his friends and the others Aylesford had killed, the reason Aylesford had lain close behind him in Clara’s bed and slipped a knife between his shoulder blades. And it was the reason, too, that he had survived what should have been a mortal wound.

Quare knew this without question, deep in his bones. He had seen the hole punched into his back, the flowering bruise and scab. How, after the violation of such a stabbing, could he be walking now, heart beating, lungs drawing air? It was, he knew, a pure impossibility. Yet equally impossible was a pocket watch that derived its motive energy from blood and was capable of killing a roomful of cats in the blink of an eye. That these two impossible things should not be linked as closely as effect and cause struck Quare as a third, and even greater, impossibility.

Somehow, when the watch had drunk his blood, it had done something to him, changed his inner workings. There was no other explanation. Yet what the change consisted of, he could not say. Certainly it had not rendered him impervious to injury, as his wounded leg and shoulder both reminded him at every step. What then? It was a mystery as profound as that of the watch itself. Quare considered himself to be a man of science, of reason, but this went far beyond any science or reason that he knew of or could even imagine. It was as if objects had begun to fall upwards in his vicinity, the laws of Nature, and of Nature’s God, suddenly and arbitrarily set aside. And what of Grimalkin, who sought the watch for her own purposes, and had tracked him down on the basis of some asserted sanguinary bond to demand or rather beg his assistance in stealing back the very object he had stolen from her in the first place? What had happened to her? Where had she disappeared to … and why, if she were looking out for him, as she had implied, had she not helped him in turn, when he was most in need of it? The whole business was disturbing on a number of levels, from the physical to the metaphysical.

To Quare’s relief, he and Mrs Puddinge arrived at the guild hall without incident. He had chosen a somewhat roundabout route for the journey, via Bread Street, Milk Street, Aldermanbury and Jasper Street, thence to London Wall and eastward to Wormwood Street, but approaching now down crowded Bishopsgate Street he had a good view of the venerable Gothic-style building with its broad front steps, thick wooden double doors, and, presiding over the façade from above, the great turret clock built by Thomas Tompion more than fifty years ago to replace the clock that had been there since long before the guild was founded, it having been decided around the turn of the century that the timepiece which was, as it were, the public face of the Worshipful Company should at least be seen to keep accurate time. Tompion’s clock, known affectionately as Old Tom, with its hourly parade of fanciful figures from fairy tales, mythology, and the Bible, all somehow related to time – cowled Death with his hourglass and scythe; Joshua commanding the sun to stand still; the christening of Sleeping Beauty, with the twelve invited fairies, and the unlucky thirteenth, clustered around the cradle – presented a marvellous spectacle to the eye but was equally marvellous in what was hidden from public view: a double three-legged gravity escapement, one of the many horological innovations jealously hoarded by the guild – a secret technology which, even after more than half a century, had yet to pass into common knowledge. That, Quare thought now, and not for the first time, was a perfect allegory for the guild itself: a beautiful exterior concealing something wondrous made ugly – the avariciousness with which the masters sat atop their piled treasures like cold-blooded dragons coiled on heaps of stolen gold.

He did not advance straight to the hall but spent some moments observing its environs from what he judged a safe distance, looking for any sign that men of the watch were lying in wait. He saw nothing that raised his suspicions, only the everyday hustle and bustle. Mrs Puddinge urged him forward, afraid that Aylesford might take this final opportunity to prevent them from reaching their goal, and at last he bowed to her impatience, and to his own, and led her across the crowded thoroughfare, weaving with practised ease through the noisy flow of pedestrians, carriages and carts, Mrs Puddinge clasping his arm with one hand while, with the other, she lifted her skirts above the appalling filth of the cobblestones.

Quare more than half expected to hear a shouted demand to halt, or to feel a hand clamp down on his shoulder from behind, but no one interfered as they climbed the steps to the front doors. The entrance of the hall was open to all, and thus there was no need to knock; he pushed one of the double doors open and strode into a gloomy, cavernous space, like the nave of a cathedral, in which stalls for the sale and repair of clocks and watches did a brisk business by candlelight and what drab illumination filtered through tall lancet windows high above, the glass of which, though daily cleaned by apprentices, seemed always coated with coal dust and grime.

A swell of murmurous voices echoed in the chill air. In lulls of conversation, Quare heard the ticking of a host of clocks, a welcome sound under the circumstances even though there was scant agreement between them, like a roomful of pedants talking past each other in urgent whispers. Here, too, the Charleys could have been waiting, but even if they had been – which did not seem to be the case – they could not touch him; the Worshipful Company had been granted certain privileges in its charter, prerogatives that it clung to as jealously as it clung to its hoard of secrets, if not more so, and by those terms it was the Worshipful Company, not the city watch, that, at least initially, exercised legal authority over its own members within the environs of the guild hall. Even had the watch been present, and tried to question him, the guild would not have permitted it. He was safe here, among his brothers, his family. He felt a weight slip from his shoulders.

‘The moneychangers in the temple,’ said Mrs Puddinge in a low voice beside him as they crossed the space to the far side, where another door barred the way to the inner reaches of the hall.

‘I beg your pardon?’ Quare glanced down at her, surprised at the vehemence in her tone. She was surveying the stalls with evident disapproval.

‘That’s what Mr Puddinge called them,’ she told him with a self-conscious smile. ‘He thought the guild hall should be free of commerce, that at least here, within these walls, the Worshipful Company should be more, well, worshipful.’

‘Sounds like a man after my own heart, Mrs P.’

She gave his arm a companionable squeeze.

‘Strange,’ he said, dropping his own voice. ‘Everything seems so normal, does it not?’

‘Yes, I was noticing that,’ she agreed. ‘Do you suppose Mr Aylesford was lying about everything? That no one has died after all?’

‘We shall soon learn the truth of it,’ he said.

As they crossed the floor, Quare saw a number of journeymen and apprentices known to him, men and boys he would ordinarily have stopped and spoken to, for this antechamber of the guild hall was a great place for gossip and socializing. But now the urgency he felt in communicating what he had learned of Aylesford, along with his need to know Master Magnus’s fate, impelled him past his acquaintances with nothing more than a nod and a searching glance. He found it odd, however, that not one of his fellows attempted to address him, and that few of them would meet his gaze … and when they did, there was an unaccustomed hardness in their eyes, a kind of reproach that filled him with misgivings. Behind them, he heard fresh whisperings, like dry leaves stirred up in the wake of a breeze. The skin at the back of his neck prickled. Mrs Puddinge seemed to sense it, too, for she grew silent and tightened her grip on his arm.

They drew up to the inner door, and Quare knocked – admittance beyond this point was reserved to guild members. The door opened, and a liveried servant asked him his business, his powdered face expressionless; even his voice seemed dusted with powder.

‘I’ve urgent business with Master Magnus,’ he said. ‘He’s expecting me.’

The man bowed and stepped aside. Quare could not tell if this action constituted an implicit refutation of Aylesford’s claims or not. He made to enter; then, considering, paused on the threshold and turned to Mrs Puddinge. ‘I’m afraid you can’t accompany me any further, Mrs P,’ he said. ‘But if it will make you feel better, I’ll ask the masters to send another journeyman to escort you safely home.’

‘Very kind of you, I’m sure, Mr Quare,’ she said, ‘but I didn’t come all this way just to turn back now. I mean to see justice done.’

‘But—’

‘I’m known here,’ Mrs Puddinge stated. ‘As the widow of a master, it’s my right to enter the guild hall. Why, I’d like to see anyone try to stop me!’ This with a challenging glare at the liveried servant, who showed as much reaction as if she had addressed a brick wall.

Quare shrugged and gestured for her to precede him, not at all convinced the servant would not step up to bar her way. But she bustled past the man without difficulty.

‘Come along, Mr Quare,’ she commanded, glancing back over her shoulder.

Marvelling, Quare stepped through the door.

At once, to his utter surprise and confusion, strong hands took hold of him. It was the servant, and another, indistinguishable from the first, who had been lurking, unseen, behind the door, which now swung shut with a bang.

‘What is the meaning of this?’ he demanded, too shocked even to struggle in the grasp of the two men. ‘Release me at once! When Master Magnus hears of this—’

Mrs Puddinge interrupted him. ‘Master Mephistopheles can’t protect you now, Mr Quare.’ Reaching forward, she deftly unbelted his rapier and its scabbard. Then, addressing the servants in an imperious tone he had not heard from her before: ‘Fetch him along, you two. We mustn’t keep Sir Thaddeus waiting.’