The Watchmaker of Filigree Street (Watchmaker of Filigree Street, #1)

by Natasha Pulley

‘Oh, don’t whine. You come back forty seconds after he’s gone. Mystery person breaks into my flat, does the washing up and takes nothing. I’d like to know why.’ ‘Sure it wasn’t your mother?’ ‘Yes.’ George sighed. ‘Small brown boots. Foreign writing on the heel. Maybe a boy.’ ‘I want my four pence back.’

The heels of his brown boots were imprinted with the mark of a Japanese manufacturer in their dense pictographic writing.

‘Of course.’ She took his arm. At first he almost pulled away, but then he leaned against her fractionally and she squeezed his hand. ‘You seem to trust me an awful lot,’ she said quietly.

‘You’re a scientist.’ ‘Not any more.’ ‘You never explained about that.’ ‘Well, I’ve left university.’ ‘But you were talking about a house of your aunt’s, or—’ ‘Oh. It’s … yes,’ she said, surprised that he remembered. ‘She left me a house, but as part of a dowry, held in trust to be handed to my future husband because the women of the family are traditionally stupid and my father won’t put it in my name. If I want it, and its very spacious and laboratory-sized cellar, I need to marry. There’s money too, which is also not in my name. Very simple really.’ She thought of stopping there, but his was an open, inviting quiet. ‘But not likely. The main candidate was Francis Fanshaw, which you know, but he’s a widower. His boy is five. Sensibly enough he doesn’t want the child running about after a stepmother whose cellar is full of noxious chemicals.’

‘However you do it, doing it is better than giving it up. You can publish under my name if you like. I can send your post on and no one would know.’ She looked up. ‘Would you really?’ ‘You didn’t have to come here today. If I could set you up in a laboratory, I would.’

‘Well, you could, actually,’ Grace said at last. ‘All that’s needed is a warm body. I want my laboratory. Do you want a house in Kensington?’ He laughed, not much. She felt it through his ribs. ‘Your family would have a thing or two to say about that.’

‘No, no. Unsuitable matches are very easy to make if one just walks around Hyde Park until midnight. Immediate disgrace and a certain urgency ensues. One of the Satterthwaite girls did it a few years ago so that she could marry a Catholic Frenchman. When a sign says don’t walk on the grass, one hops.’

‘Are you feeling well?’ Alice said. She preferred Grace not to write out equations and talk about them in the house. She seemed to acknowledge that while numbers were a necessary part of life, they were, like French postcards, not suitable for a lady.

Thaniel set down his glass, and took out the watch. Mori’s black eyes followed his hand. ‘You left this for me, didn’t you? Why?’

‘You’re my friend and you would have died. You wouldn’t have listened to a stranger in a coffee house. It had to be something you were wondering about for a long time.’ ‘I did. What was the extra clockwork for?’ ‘To measure where you were. If the alarm went off at the wrong moment you would have been in the blast when you stopped, not outside it. You didn’t know to listen for it, so it had be variable. Makes it a bit heavy actually, I can take it out now if you like.’

‘But I tried to get rid of it. If the pawnbroker had taken it … ’ Mori smiled again. ‘Have you read the warranty?’ ‘Of course I haven’t read the warranty.’ ‘Paragraph three. All watches belong to their owners for life. If you break your watch, I’ll repair it for no charge, and if you lose or sell it, it will be returned. Pawnbrokers won’t buy them any more, they disappear too quickly. Obviously some people don’t want their watches back if they’ve sold them, but it’s good to have a bit of mystery around things.’

He had thought it had all gone, but all he had done was lock himself up in a few little rooms and assume the rest of the house had fallen down. It hadn’t. There were doors and doors, and dust, but when the curtains opened and the drapes came off, it was all where he had left it and hardly faded.

She looked up at him. ‘We’re marrying because I want a laboratory and he has a widowed sister with too many sons. It’s a business arrangement.’