The Emperor of all Things Read online

  By now the fire had raised the temperature of the room a considerable amount. Quare had long since divested himself of the second-best coat; only with difficulty had he refrained from throwing the odious – and odiferous – garment on the flames, reminding himself that his prospects were uncertain, and that he might very well be glad of a warm coat soon enough. It lay like a heap of refuse on the floor in the furthest corner. Quare, tired of his circular perambulations, sat on the edge of the pallet and stared into the flames as if their dancing shapes held the answers to all the questions that plagued him. Yet he found no answers there, only further questions, not the least of which was whether the fire had been lit not for his comfort but as a preliminary to other, graver tortures. He could not help recalling that Master Magnus had threatened him with devices as wondrous in their way as the stair-master, only turned to a darker purpose. Now the decision to introduce him to any such devices rested with the Old Wolf and Master Malrubius. Quare could not be sanguine at the prospect.

  He considered scattering the logs to diminish the blaze, but to do so would have required him to enter the cavernous mouth of the fireplace, which was so deep that it might almost have been a separate room. Besides, there was no poker at hand, and he didn’t think his well-worn boots were up to kicking apart such a conflagration. He would have to wait for the fire to burn itself out. He wished now that he had thought to ask Longinus for water. When would the man return? How long had he been gone? Quare fished out his pocket watch: barely two hours had gone by since he’d left Mrs Puddinge’s house. He would have guessed twice that, and he found the discrepancy unsettling; his two clocks, the inner and the outer, so to speak, were usually in closer agreement, and the fact that he should be so badly mistaken in his estimate now seemed due less to the finicky nature of time than to the radical upending of his life. He was running out of true, and he did not know how to put himself right again.

  As Quare’s anger ebbed, wilting in the heat, grief took its place – a grief that had been there all the time, biding beneath the agitated surface of his feelings. The faces of Farthingale, Mansfield and Pickens appeared to his mind’s eye as he last remembered seeing them, flushed with drink and laughter in the smoke-filled confines of the Pig and Rooster. Try as he might, he could not recall anything of the fight that had ended the night … and their lives. His memories cut off so abruptly that it was as if they had been surgically excised, and he wondered if the cause had less to do with the amount of alcohol he’d consumed than the watch that had somehow, or so he believed, protected him from what should have been a fatal wound.

  The trio of grinning faces seemed to reproach him now – for what, exactly, he didn’t know. Perhaps for having survived. He mourned them, and in doing so mourned something in himself. He prayed for the repose of their souls.

  His grief for Master Magnus was of a different order, mixed as it was with anger, guilt, gratitude, and a host of other emotions he felt keenly but could not put a name to. He well remembered his first sight of the man. It had been six years ago, in Mr Halsted’s Dorchester shop, late on a Saturday morning in June. Mrs Halsted, who usually manned the front desk, was busy in the kitchen, while Master Halsted and Quare’s fellow apprentice, Jim Grimsby, were in the back room that served as both a workshop and sleeping quarters for the two apprentices.

  Quare had been examining a mantel clock brought in for repair by Mr Symonds, the vicar, who stood on the other side of the desk, gazing down at the disassembled timepiece spread out between them, an anxious look on his face as though it were a sickly living creature, a beloved pet, perhaps, and not a mechanical device. Elsewhere in the shop, the vicar’s wife and his beribboned young daughter, thirteen-year-old Emily, a vivacious blonde-haired girl whose bright blue eyes were of more interest to Quare at present than the insides of her father’s clock, were examining a case of pocket and pendant watches: Mrs Symonds with unfeigned interest, while Emily’s blue eyes kept rising to meet Quare’s gaze, then darting away, a pretty blush colouring her cheeks. This heated if innocent flirtation, which had been going on between them for months now despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that the participants had not spoken more than a handful of times, and then only to exchange platitudes in the constraining presence of their elders, had made for as diverting a morning as Quare could desire, but he knew at once, upon looking up at the jingle of the bell announcing a new customer, that things were about to get a lot more diverting.

  Bustling into the shop like a fairy-tale figure sprung to life was a humpbacked dwarf dressed all in black who pulled himself along with a pair of slender but stout walking sticks, pivoting with each ‘step’ on twisted legs that, wrapped in metal braces, seemed more like clever machines than appendages of flesh and blood. He was lean as a whippet, with a head whose wild mane of white hair made it seem even larger than it actually was, as out of proportion to the stunted body beneath as the heavy head of a sunflower to its stalk. And as the head to the body, so the nose to the head: a carbuncled, tuberous growth that appeared to have usurped the place of a nose; and upon that prodigious organ, nestled there like a black and gold insect, a pair of spectacles so darkly tinted that it seemed impossible anyone could see through them.

  Yet see through them he obviously could, and did, for the man – the apparition, rather, since fifteen-year-old Quare could scarcely credit what his own eyes were showing him – had stumped across the shop floor, bringing all conversation to a halt. Even Mr Symonds drew back from the new arrival as he came to stand beside him. Without so much as a by-your-leave, the man tilted his leonine face up at Quare – he scarcely topped the desk; yet Quare realized that the man was not in truth a dwarf, but only so hunched over as to be indistinguishable from one – and demanded, in a voice that had more than a touch of the lion in it as well, ‘Are you Quare?’

  Quare gazed back open-mouthed.

  ‘Well?’ the man continued. ‘It seems a simple enough question. Are you or are you not the apprentice Daniel Quare?’

  At that, he found his voice. ‘I am, sir. If you would but wait a moment, I will be with you as soon as I finish with this gentleman.’

  ‘I would see your master,’ said the man as if he hadn’t heard. He struck the floor with one of his sticks for emphasis, like a goat stamping a hoof, at which Quare started and Emily gave a cry from across the room. Quare glanced at her and saw that the poor creature was white as a sheet and close to tears, at which indignation rose in his breast.

  ‘See here, my good sir,’ interjected Mr Symonds before Quare could speak, recalled by his daughter’s distress to his paternal and churchly authority. ‘There is no need to be so brusque. Young Mr Quare is having a look at my clock, and—’ He got no further.

  ‘Clock?’ interrupted the man. ‘You call that a clock?’ He seemed amused and affronted in equal measure. ‘Why, I would wager that object is more accurate in its timekeeping now than it ever has been!’

  ‘More accurate?’ the vicar echoed, uncomprehending. ‘But it is broken, as you see.’

  Quare rolled his eyes. ‘The gentleman refers to the fact that even a stopped clock is right twice a day.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Mr Symonds. ‘Why, bless my soul, so it is …’

  Again the petulant stamp of a walking stick. Again a girlish cry.

  Quare felt himself losing the reins of his temper. He looked to Mr Symonds, but the man appeared to be engrossed in contemplation of the horological profundity just revealed to him. Perhaps, Quare thought, he was considering how best to work it into a sermon. At any rate, the task of dealing with this unpleasant little man had now fallen to him.

  ‘I ask you again to wait your turn,’ he said as politely as he could manage. ‘And to refrain, if you would, from upsetting Miss Symonds’ – this with a significant look in Emily’s direction.

  The grotesque creature swivelled its body to regard the young lady in question, who burst into tears. ‘My pardon,’ he said, though there was nothing apologetic in his tone, ‘if
my appearance has upset you, Miss Symonds.’ And here he sketched a bow, or something redolent of a bow; Quare could not decide if he meant the gesture to be as much of a mockery as it appeared, or whether his deformities, and the sticks and braces meant to correct them, rendered his movements, regardless of the intent behind them, naturally – or, rather, unnaturally – graceless and parodistic. ‘I am but as God made me.’

  Mrs Symonds seemed to have no difficulty in deciding the question. ‘Come, Emily,’ she said, throwing an arm about her daughter’s shoulders and shepherding her, sniffling behind a handkerchief, from the shop, all the while staring daggers at Quare, as though he were somehow responsible. ‘Henry,’ she called from the doorway, at which Mr Symonds emerged from his trance.

  ‘Ah, yes, dear,’ he said, giving Quare a distracted smile. ‘I trust the clock will present no difficulties, Mr Quare?’

  ‘None at all,’ Quare affirmed. ‘It will be ready on Monday.’

  ‘So soon?’ queried the vicar. ‘I would not have you working on the Lord’s day, Mr Quare, not on my account or any man’s.’

  ‘We keep the sabbath in this shop, vicar,’ said Quare.

  ‘I am glad to hear it,’ said Mr Symonds and turned to the dwarf, who was watching this exchange with unconcealed impatience, lips twitching in his eagerness to speak. ‘Good day to you, sir.’

  ‘And to you, vicar,’ he growled. He did not even wait for the man to exit the shop before importuning Quare again, once more accompanying his words with a thump of his stick. ‘Now, Mr Quare, if it would not be too much trouble – your master, if you please.’

  As if on cue, Mr Halsted poked his bald head through the door leading from the workshop. ‘What is that c-confounded noise, Da—’ He broke off upon catching sight of the dwarf. ‘G-good g-gracious,’ he stammered, stepping into the room, his ruddy complexion blanching to the paleness of a sheet. ‘As I live and b-breathe. M-master M-magnus.’

  ‘How are you, Halsted?’ the man inquired. ‘Glib as ever, I see.’

  Quare’s master had a fierce stammer that emerged whenever he was flustered or excited; the neighbourhood street urchins mocked this impediment ruthlessly, both behind his back and, the better to elicit it, to his face, but Quare had not thought to find such cruelty in an adult.

  Making a visible effort, Mr Halsted calmed himself, or tried to – with scant success, however. ‘Daniel, this g-gentleman is one of the g-great masters of our g-guild, come all the way from L-London, or so I imagine.’

  ‘You imagine correctly,’ said Master Magnus. ‘And a damned uncomfortable journey it was, too, with more bumps and jolts in the road than are to be found even in one of your utterances, Mr Halsted.’

  ‘I am sorry to hear it. M-mayhap you will take refreshment here. My home is yours. Daniel, c-close the shop. Oh – my apprentice Daniel Quare, m-master. A m-most promising young m-man. Mr Quare, M-master M-magnus.’

  ‘An honour, sir,’ said Quare, and meant it: though he was only fifteen, it had long been apparent to him that Dorchester was a backwater, horologically speaking, and that the only place for an ambitious and talented young man like himself was London. The journeymen who passed through town had whetted his appetite for years with stories of the great guild hall of the Worshipful Company and the masters who ruled it, led by Grandmaster Wolfe. Halsted had his own tales to tell, for he had travelled to London for his investiture as a master of the guild, and had returned twice, for brief periods, in the years since Quare had become his apprentice, lodging each time at the guild hall, and each time coming home full to bursting with the wonders he’d seen and experienced there. Now one of that august company stood before him in the flesh. And not just anyone, but Master Magnus – or Mephistopheles, as the journeymen had called him – a man they had variously termed a genius, a terror, a monster, a freak of nature, and whom Master Halsted, in hushed tones, as if he feared being overheard even at such a distance, had once compared to a spider in its web. Quare studied the man with fresh interest, wondering what secrets he could impart, what lessons he could offer; Quare had already absorbed everything Halsted could teach him, and his horological skills now outstripped those of his master. ‘I apologize for not recognizing you at once, Master Magnus.’

  ‘And how should you recognize a man you have never seen?’ came the sharp inquiry.

  ‘Why, your reputation precedes you, sir,’ Quare answered, ignoring Halsted’s cautionary glance. ‘The journeymen who stop by our shop on their travels speak of you as a man of great learning and application.’

  ‘Do they now?’ mused the master. ‘Are you quite sure, Mr Quare, that it is not the size of my body, rather than the size of my intellect or accomplishments, that precedes me?’

  Quare saw too late the trap he had fallen into, for in fact the journeymen who had recounted Master Magnus’s accomplishments with awe had also spoken fearfully of his temper and sensitivity to any perceived insult or slight on account of his size or other handicaps.

  ‘C-close up the shop, now, Daniel, as I t-told you,’ Halsted interjected, coming to Quare’s rescue.

  This Quare moved to do, blushing fiercely as he came around the counter.

  ‘To what do we owe the p-pleasure of your visit, master?’ Halsted continued, seeking to shift the conversation to safer ground. ‘If you had but n-notified me that you were c-coming, I would have received you with m-more ceremony.’

  ‘Bah, I require no ceremony, Halsted, as you should know very well.’

  ‘Still, I feel sure, after your long and d-difficult journey, that some refreshment would not c-come amiss. C-come into the k-kitchen, sir, and do me the honour of meeting m-my wife … and, of c-course, my other apprentice, James G-grimsby.’

  ‘A cup of tea would suit me very well,’ Master Magnus admitted.

  Halsted conducted the older man through the door that led to the workshop and, beyond it, the kitchen, while Quare closed up the front of the shop. By the time he had joined the others, Master Magnus was seated at the kitchen table in a chair that accommodated him as well as it would have done a child of ten – less well, in fact, for his metal-caged legs did not bend at the knees but instead stuck out parallel to the floor. His chin barely overtopped the table, where a steaming cup of tea was set on a saucer, beside a plate of biscuits and butter; it did not escape Quare’s notice that Mrs Halsted was using her good china. His walking sticks were propped against the edge of the table, close to hand.

  Standing opposite him on the far side of the table were Mr and Mrs Halsted, along with Grimsby. Halsted and his wife regarded their visitor with some apprehension, nervous smiles plastered on their faces, as if he were not entirely tamed and might be set off by a wrong word or gesture, while the freckled, red-headed Grimsby, who had listened, along with Quare, to tales of mad Master Mephistopheles from the journeymen who lodged with them on their way through town, gawped in open-mouthed astonishment. Everyone, save Grimsby, turned to Quare as he entered the room.

  ‘Mr Quare, thank the Almighty,’ said Master Magnus. ‘Sit you down, sir.’ His gesture encompassed the entire kitchen. ‘All of you, sit, please. You are making me feel like a baboon on display at Covent Garden. And Mr Grimsby, pray close your mouth, lest what little wit you possess escape entirely.’

  Grimsby flushed to the roots of his red hair and shut his mouth with an audible snap. Mr and Mrs Halsted wasted no time in seating themselves, followed, seconds later, by Grimsby, which left but two chairs for Quare, one on either side of Master Magnus. He took the nearer.

  A tense and expectant silence filled the kitchen, punctuated only by the regular ticking of a small tower clock situated above the hearth – an exact replica of Master Halsted’s masterpiece, in fact, the original of which resided, as did all masterpieces, in the vaults of the Worshipful Company; this modest timepiece was the pride of the house, horologically speaking, though it was, in Quare’s considered opinion, barely adequate as a specimen of the clockmaker’s art.

  Master Magnus, as i
f oblivious to the strained atmosphere, reached with some difficulty for his tea, which he sipped noisily and with apparent relish, holding the china cup in both hands; the steam rising from the liquid testified to a heat that should have communicated itself to the cup, but Master Magnus gave no sign of discomfort, though he did blow, between sips, upon the top of the tea, as if to cool it. Quare noticed both the suppleness of the man’s hands and fingers and the fact that they bore a multitude of small scars, as if from a lifetime of nicks and cuts; later he would learn that the master’s hands, for all their dexterity, had not escaped the general blighting of his body: though able to discriminate by touch among gradations of pressure and texture too fine for Quare’s rough senses to perceive, his fingers were entirely numb to pain.

  Master Magnus drank until the cup was empty, at which he smacked his lips and, once again contorting his 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.’