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

by Natasha Pulley

She couldn’t tell whether he was charming because he had a deep-seated love of humanity, or because charm always got him what he wanted. It was tempting to think that the former notion was naïve and the latter far more likely, but he kept it up all the time. Her own reserves of bonhomie ran low after twenty minutes. She shook her head once and went slowly upstairs to change.

Such as they are

The spare room was crooked, as though it had planned to be L-shaped but changed its mind at the last minute.

I love that image

If he had parachuted into his thoughts now not knowing the context, he would have assumed he was seeing a day when he was just coming out of a long, long fever. He could think again.

He's falling in love

Behind the desk was a bank of square drawers, each labelled in even handwriting. It was seventeen drawers wide and seventeen down.

...best show-don't-tell ever

‘Anyway,’ she repeated, ‘ether could explain how real mediums work, and how ghosts could exist, generally how thought has physical effects beyond the cranium. If you could study ether, you would be halfway to understanding what happens to your consciousness after you die.’ ‘Oh,’ said Matsumoto,

Oh, indeed! I wish it existed.

He came in slowly, like somebody else’s cat.

Brilliant

She swallowed. ‘Yes, I deserved that for rather a patronising metaphor. I am sorry, I meant it to be a joke.’ ‘There’s no piano upstairs,’ he said, more like himself. ‘The … floors need to be laid first.’ ‘But this floor looks new.’ ‘It is,’ she said, confused. ‘I see. Anyway, I’d better go, the Christmas orders are coming in already.’

He eviscerated a living opponent Genius

She watched him turn left, toward Knightsbridge, and realised that she had upset him much more than she had meant to.

How dare she

He wished that he could have learned Mori’s knack for speaking to children.

...at his wedding...

She kissed him too lightly, so that it was only a cold brush of damp and the chalk smell of her powder. He flinched and pushed his hand over his mouth before he could stop himself. ‘Sorry – I’m getting a cold. I don’t want to give you—

Now it is plain

‘I thought you two were friends?’ ‘Friends? I threw him out of Japan,’ Ito said.

As he wanted you to. How awful to always Know.

Mori refused even to go upstairs. Instead he hid under a quilt in the parlour with Thaniel’s never-read copy of Anna Karenina. The Russians, he said, knew how to write genuinely boring novels, and he would only stop being afraid when he was bored enough.

Ha!!