In Which a Human Is Permitted Far Too Much Liberty

There were three principal reasons for which I preferred to live alone.

The first was that humans were noisy. The second was that they possessed an inexplicable compulsion to rearrange things. The third was that, sooner or later, one might enter a room fully expecting to find someone there and discover, instead, an empty chair.

I complained of the first two with considerable regularity. The third had belonged, for nearly two centuries, to a room I no longer entered and a name I no longer permitted myself to say aloud.

Miss Bell contrived to offend against the first two almost immediately.

She hummed while she worked. Not any melody I recognised, but wandering little fragments of one, abandoned halfway through and taken up again several minutes later. When a clock mechanism refused to cooperate, she scolded it with a stern voice, then, upon her third visit, I entered the drawing room to discover my armchair had moved a step closer to the fireplace.

I stopped in the doorway.

Miss Bell, detecting the disturbance in the atmosphere, looked up from the clock.

“You have moved my chair.”

“The light is better there.”

“It has stood in that place for nearly a century.”

She considered this for a moment.

“Then I should think it was due a change.”

“I could see perfectly well where it was.”

“Then you shall be able to see perfectly well where it is.”

She returned to her work.

I ought, quite plainly, to have dismissed her. Indeed, I had dismissed people for considerably less.

Instead, over the course of several Thursdays, I found myself acquiring information about Miss Bell which had no bearing upon the repair of my clock.

Her name was Clara. She was twenty-six. She had inherited her father’s business when he retired, largely because her elder brother regarded clocks as an insult to his punctuality and wanted nothing whatever to do with them.

In return, she acquired a distressing amount of information about me.

She learned that I disliked visitors, sweet wine, unnecessary conversation, badly bound books, and the expression “You are only young once”.

“You have a remarkably long list,” she observed one evening.

“I have had time to compile it.”

She glanced towards the shuttered windows.

“So I gather.” After a moment, she asked, “So, what do you like?”

That brought me up short.

Dislikes came readily. Six centuries had furnished me with an impressive collection of irritations, grievances, inconveniences, and things which were simply not as good as they had once been.

But what did I like?

It had been so long since I had considered the question that, rather embarrassingly, I found myself without an immediate answer.

Clara sat cross-legged upon the carpet, sorting small brass wheels into shallow dishes. A dark smudge marked one cheek. While she waited for my answer, she balanced a tiny gear upon the tip of her finger and watched it wobble there.

“Music,” I said at last.

“What sort?”

“Liszt. Berlioz. Mussorgsky…particularly when he sounds as though something dreadful is about to occur. I have never understood why music ought to be cheerful.”

She smiled. “What do you like about it?”

“The skill of it,” I said after a while. “Something complicated enough that one may hear it twenty times and still discover some small cruelty concealed beneath the rest.”

We continued in that fashion until the tea beside her had gone quite cold.

I had made it when she arrived, having concluded that offering a guest nothing for several consecutive Thursdays might eventually be construed as poor hospitality.

The tea itself proved that good intentions are not the same thing as competence.

She drank half a cup without complaint, which I later came to understand was an act of extraordinary charity.

The following Thursday, she arrived carrying a metal tin.

“What is that?”

“Intervention.”

She set it beside the teapot.

“My preferred blend. If you insist upon making tea, I am going to teach you how.”