In Which I Am Most Grievously Inconvenienced

The young woman at my door had brought a hammer.

This was an improvement upon a stake, although not a considerable one.

“Lord Severin?”

“Regrettably.”

“Bell. You wrote about a clock.”

I regarded her across the threshold. Rain dripped from her hat onto the stone between us. She wore stout boots and a green coat with a mismatched button. She looked upon me with the serene expectation of a woman who believed that having knocked, she must naturally be received.

A tiresome disposition.

“I wrote to Mr Bell. The advertisement promised 40 years of experience.”

“My father. He’s retired.”

“Retired?”

“Yes, quite thoroughly. He has taken to gardening, afternoon naps, and offering advice to people who have not asked for it. I am afraid there is very little hope of persuading him back to work.”

She lifted the leather tool case by her side.

“I have been repairing clocks for eleven years, however.”

“Eleven.”

“Yes.” Her brows rose. “I had intended to bring the other twenty-nine with me, but they proved rather difficult to fit in the case. Now, shall I come in and examine your clock, or would you like another few minutes to determine whether I am old enough to know what one looks like?”

I stepped aside, and Miss Bell entered without so much as the customary hesitation beneath the antlered chandelier. This was unusual.

Most visitors, upon crossing my threshold, discovered a sudden interest in their surroundings. They would gaze upon the chandelier, then at the narrow staircase disappearing into the gloom above, and take in the portraits which crowded the walls in tarnished gilt frames. The portraits were perhaps the worst of it. My supposed ancestors had, through either remarkable heredity or an appalling lack of imagination on the part of their painters, possessed much the same face.

The house had accumulated rather than been decorated. Six centuries will do that to a place.

Visitors generally studied their surroundings and thereafter remembered, with touching regularity, some urgent appointment elsewhere.

Miss Bell removed her hat.

“Lovely house,” she said, looking about. “Terrible lighting.”

“I find it sufficient.”

“For brooding, perhaps.”

I regarded her. I had engaged a clockmaker to repair a clock. Architectural criticism had not been included in our correspondence. It appeared she was unaware of this omission.

The clock stood in the west drawing room, beneath a portrait painted some hundred and eighty years ago of a man who looked precisely like me because he was indeed, precisely me.

For the benefit of visitors, he was my great-granduncle Edmund. Before him I had been my great-grandfather, before that, an obscure cousin. Maintaining a respectable lineage when one does not possess the decency to age requires a surprising amount of genealogy.

The clock itself had stopped eleven years prior. I had ignored it until its silence began to irritate me more than its ticking once had, thus I had summoned a clockmaker. Such were the diversions available to a man in the sixth century of his existence.

Miss Bell set down her case and leaned towards the painted face.

“Strong family resemblance.”

“So I am told.”

“He looks cross too.”

“An inherited affliction.”

She glanced back at me over her shoulder, and the corner of her mouth curved.

I found this impertinent.

There was, I noticed, a dimple, which was quite unrelated to the work at hand.

Miss Bell opened the case and removed the hood with rather more confidence than I thought warranted. While she examined the mechanism, I examined her qualifications from what I considered a sensible distance.

She raised the lamp and studied the brass movement between its plates, following the train of wheels with her eyes before touching anything at all. One finger rested lightly against the great wheel while she tested the play in its arbor; then she turned her attention to the escapement, watching the pallets meet the teeth and giving the pendulum crutch the smallest experimental movement. When she removed one of the retaining screws, she first spread a square of dark cloth upon the table beside her, setting each piece upon it in careful order.

It was all deeply disappointing.

Since her arrival, I had been constructing several reasonable grounds upon which to dismiss her. She was too young, she had not been the clockmaker I had written to, eleven years could scarcely compare with the forty advertised by her father. Any one of these objections might have served me admirably had she possessed the courtesy to confirm them.

Instead, she proceeded to display irritating competence and it became increasingly difficult to send her away without appearing unreasonable. I resented this considerably.

“It needs a new spring,” she said at last. “And a thorough cleaning. Whoever serviced it previously used the wrong oil.”

“I shall inform him.”

“Was that recently?”

“That depends upon one’s perspective.”

The man had died in 1883.

Miss Bell appeared to consider asking further questions, then thought better of it.

“I shall need to come back,” she said. “Thursdays would suit me, if they suit you.”

“They do. In the evening.”

“Only in the evening?”

“My health does not permit me to keep ordinary hours.”

She regarded me for a moment.

“I see.”

I suspected that she did not.

“After sunset, then?”

“Exclusively.”

“Excellent.” She began returning her tools to their case. “I have always thought daylight rather too pleased with itself.”

At last, the woman had expressed an opinion with which I could wholeheartedly agree.