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

by Natasha Pulley

The hinge was stiff but did not squeak. Inside was a pocket watch.

The paste had made it translucent and there was another under that, so that ‘keep watch’ had a diagonal, fading shadow.

He set off in the thready mist. It was still dense over the river, where it made skeleton ghosts of the ships’ masts and trapped the stale smell of the water.

He hadn’t been aware of breathing shallowly. It had happened gradually; someone had put a penny on his chest every hour since November, and now the weight of thousands of pennies had lifted at once.

The rain was coming so hard that there was a mist above the ground where each drop ricocheted back up into the air.

His thoughts were starting to take on a strange ring: they had shrunk from their usual size and now the ordinary attic that was his ordinary mind looked like a cathedral at night, with endless galleries and rafters lost in the dark and nothing but the echoes to show where they were. He forced himself to sip the tea. The echoes eased.

He had to take another breath, although there ought to have been plenty left over after such a short sentence.

He smiled the brief smile of a busy person. ‘Morning.’

He had never understood proper mathematics. There was always a gaping hole in the middle of the idea – namely, that he had never been able to see what three was. From what he could tell, it was a thing of its own, but he had only been able to envisage it as its sign, which was like trying to conceive of a piano by looking hard enough at the letters in the word.

Outside, the heat was as viscous and sticky as honey.

She thought of stopping there, but his was an open, inviting quiet.

Mori didn’t look at him, but his nearer shoulder eased back, like an opening door so that they could speak from adjoining rooms.