The Emperor of All Things (34 page)

‘But your clock is already broken, Herr Doppler. I have seen it but once, briefly, and from the outside only. It is undeniably impressive: a masterpiece, without question. It would be a crime to destroy such a clock. A sin. Once my tool kit is returned, I should like to try my hand at repairing it.’

‘The clock does not require repair. It is in perfect working order.’

‘I would hardly call it perfect, Herr Doppler! I realize I haven’t been in Märchen very long, but all the same, I have not heard it strike the correct hour once in that time.’

‘I would be surprised if you had,’ he said. ‘As far as anyone knows, Herr Gray, not once in all the time the clock has been running – more than fifty years now – has it indicated the correct time, either by peal of bells or position of hands. That is a record of perfection as extraordinary in its way as a clock that has never once been wrong, for as you know, a timepiece that runs slow or fast will eventually mark the correct
time
, if only briefly and, as it were, in passing. Even a stopped clock tells the correct time twice a day. But our clock, to the extent it has been observed, has never, ever been right.’

‘Not once? For that to be true, the hands would have to move backwards as well as forwards!’

‘And so they do, back and forward and back again, as if time were as capricious as the wind. The minute and hour hands often move in opposite directions, at disproportional rates. Have you ever encountered such a marvel, Herr Gray?’

‘I confess I have not.’

‘Surely you can see that to repair such a clock would be tantamount to destroying it.’

‘I don’t agree. To impose order upon this chaos would be—’

Doppler interrupted, leaning towards me intently. ‘But there is already order here, Herr Gray.’

‘If by
order
you mean the clock’s record of being consistently and invariably wrong, I suppose I must grant you the point in a philosophical sense. But it is an impractical sort of order, to be sure.’

‘Are all things to be judged by their practicality? What about a painting, a statue? Does not a different standard apply to such works of art, one of beauty rather than utility?’

‘Even beauty has its uses, Herr Doppler, if only to give us pleasure. But the highest art unites beauty and utility. What, after all, is more beautiful and useful than a well-made clock? An accurate clock is beautiful in its functioning, regardless of the trappings in which it is set. A timepiece that embraces inaccuracy, however beautiful in appearance and impressive in design, is a perversion of the true clockmaker’s art, which, after all, seeks but to reflect with ever-greater precision the divine ordering that men call time.’

‘A pretty speech,’ Doppler replied. ‘But have you considered the possibility that this clock reflects that divine order more accurately than any other?’

I laughed. ‘Now you are being absurd, Herr Doppler!’

‘To human senses, time seems to flow in one direction only, by a progression of discrete intervals, like grains of sand through an hourglass. But to the Almighty, whose senses are infinite and omnipresent, surely
time
is something quite different. An eternal instant in which past and future are equally perceptible, equally accessible. Equally real. Have I shocked you?’

‘The concept is interesting, but hardly shocking,’ I replied. Yet in truth, my hand trembled as I raised the mug to my lips and took a deep swallow, though less from shock than from excitement. I remembered how everything had shone with a peculiar blue light in my dream, and how I had associated that radiance with the sacred essence of time. What Herr Doppler was saying resonated with that dream epiphany, confirming my intuition that the clock had much to teach me, if only I could examine it.

‘No doubt you are well versed in all manner of horological speculation,’ Doppler continued. ‘Like Papist Inquisitors, the journeymen of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers are more knowledgeable about heresies than the heretics themselves, eh?’

‘Are you a heretic, then, Herr Doppler?’

‘One can hardly live in proximity to Wachter’s Folly without developing a unique perspective into the nature of time.’

‘That much I’ll grant you. Who was this Wachter? Did you know him?’

‘I was a boy when he disappeared.’

‘Disappeared?’

‘Herr Wachter was not a native of Märchen. He arrived one day with his daughter. No one knew whence they had come. He was a clockman, a master of the Worshipful Company, or so he said.’

‘You had reason to doubt him?’

‘Not at first. He took rooms here, at the Hearth and Home, and began to ply his trade with such skill that no one thought to question his claims. He did not merely repair the timepieces that were brought to him, Herr Gray: he improved them. So it was that when he approached the burgomeister – that is, my father – with plans for a tower clock that would make Märchen famous throughout the empire, a monument to the piety of our town, he was listened to with respect and, finally, refused with regret, for he was an eloquent and persuasive man. My father allowed me to be present, and believe me, when Wachter spoke of the clock he had in mind to build, it was as though
your
own Shakespeare had penned the words. But Märchen was then just as you find it today: a humble town, prosperous enough but far from wealthy. We could not bear the financial burden of such an ambitious project.’

‘And yet the clock was built,’ I observed.

‘When my father conveyed his refusal, Herr Wachter made a generous counter-offer. In retrospect, suspiciously so. But at the time, we thought him merely eccentric. We had ample proof of his genius; we had no reason to doubt his sincerity.’

‘What was the offer?’

‘If the town agreed to provide for all the daily wants of his family, he would pay for the clock himself out of his personal fortune, for he was – or so he said – a wealthy man.’

‘And you believed him?’ I laughed outright. ‘Did your father not stop to wonder why a rich man would require the support of the town?’

Doppler gave me an angry scowl. ‘As I said, we thought him eccentric. Wealthy men often are. And so, for that matter, are clockmen.’

‘I suppose we clockmen have a certain reputation for eccentricity, not entirely undeserved,’ I was bound in all honesty to admit. ‘But we have no great reputation for wealth. A tower clock is a huge expense, as you know. I doubt even the grandmaster of my guild, by far its wealthiest member, could finance such a project.’ This was of course not entirely true. My own fortune, for example, was and is sufficient to build a hundred such towers. But that Herr Doppler did not need to know.

‘Even assuming Herr Wachter possessed sufficient funds,’ I continued, ‘why should he dip into his own pocket? The services of a master clockman are widely sought after and well recompensed. If Märchen could not afford to finance the clock, surely there were other, wealthier towns and patrons to whom Wachter could have applied with every expectation of success, whether here in Austria or in some other country – France or Russia, for instance, if not in England herself, which perhaps more than any other nation holds horology in high esteem. A man with Wachter’s talents could have won the patronage of kings and emperors … if, that is, he was what he claimed to be: a master of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers. But I’m afraid this Wachter of yours was nothing of the sort. His actions prove it. I suspect
he
was an amateur, immensely gifted, to be sure, but also – if, as you say, the clock was intended to function in the manner that it does – more than a little mad.’

‘Mad? Perhaps – though the line between madness and genius is a thin and permeable one, I find. But you’re right that he did not belong to your Worshipful Company. After Wachter vanished, my father wrote to London. The guild had never heard of him.’

‘He should have written sooner.’

‘No doubt. But there was no evidence that Wachter was not exactly who and what he claimed to be. During the time he was with us, he laboured steadily on the tower clock and continued repairing our timepieces, as well as building new ones, all of which functioned perfectly.’

‘And how long was he with you?’

‘Nearly ten years,’ Doppler answered, then added defensively: ‘A tower clock is not built in a day.’

‘Still, Herr Doppler, do you mean to tell me that in ten years, no one in Märchen suspected there was anything odd about the tower clock going up right in their midst?’

‘How could we suspect? We are not experts in such things.’

‘The first true clockman to pass through town would have exposed him as a fraud.’

‘No doubt you are right, but no clockman did pass through. Those were unsettled times, Herr Gray. All of Europe was at war. Men did not wander so far off the beaten track as they do today.’

‘Yet Märchen couldn’t possibly have supplied him with all the necessary materials for such a project. Orders must have been placed, supplies delivered.’

‘Even in dangerous times, men will seek profit. Especially in such times.’

It was strange, but though Doppler’s answers to my questions were quite reasonable, I nevertheless felt myself becoming suspicious of them … and of him. His answers were
too
reasonable, if you see what I mean. Every objection I raised was so smoothly deflected that I couldn’t help wondering what he was hiding. ‘Go on,’ I prompted.

‘There is not much more to tell,’ he said with a shrug. ‘As agreed, we built him a fine house and provided him with everything he needed to
live
among us in comfort, if not luxury. The years passed as I have told you. Herr Wachter became a fixture of the town, as did his daughter, who grew to young womanhood among us – with no shortage of suitors, I might add, though she showed them scant encouragement; Wachter, like many widowers, was a stern and jealous father. Yet they both seemed content enough here. And one day, at long last, the tower was finished. A ceremony was set for the next day, at which the clock would be blessed by the minister and set to running. But Märchen was awakened before dawn that very morning by the bells of the clock, and I’m sure it will come as less of a surprise to you than it did to us that the hour being tolled so beautifully by those bells was not the same hour we saw registered upon our household clocks, many of which had been made by Wachter. A crowd gathered before the clock tower, where it was discovered that the hands of the clock were moving willy-nilly, as if they possessed a life of their own. But it wasn’t until Wachter was sent for that we received the biggest shock of all: he and his daughter were gone, vanished in the night. He must have planned their escape for a long time, using all the genius he employed in his clock-making endeavours, for no trace of them was ever found.’

‘Perhaps they perished, fell into a crevasse like Inge’s husband.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘She told me earlier that he was dead – Herr Wachter, I mean.’

‘A logical enough assumption, but not personal knowledge. Wachter was fifty-two years old when he disappeared. He would be over a hundred today. I suppose it’s possible he might still be alive somewhere, but it hardly seems likely.’

‘And he left behind no explanation for his strange actions?’

‘Only the clock itself. It explains everything … and nothing.’

‘Why in the name of heaven didn’t your father have the clock repaired at once, when the extent of Wachter’s mischief was apparent?’

At this, Doppler tugged at one end of his moustache. ‘He tried, Herr Gray. He wrote to our own Clockmakers’ Guild in Augsburg, requesting that someone be sent to us. A journeyman was duly dispatched.’

‘It proved beyond his skill?’

‘Beyond his sanity, rather. He entered the clock tower and remained inside for a day and a night. At last, the bailiff went in after him. The
man
was found lying in one corner, his eyes wide open and unblinking, his body stiff as a corpse. But he was not dead, merely cataleptic.’

‘My God – what happened?’

‘A significant shock to mind and body, or so said the apothecary. After a few days, the man was able to move again, after a fashion, but his mind never recovered. I won’t trouble you with his ravings. They were utterly without sense. Some time later, the guild sent a master clockmaker. The result was identical. No further attempts were made. The entrance to the tower was bricked shut; no one has entered since.’

‘Why, I suspect you are telling me a fairy tale, Herr Doppler!’ I could not forbear from exclaiming.

‘It is the gospel truth, I assure you.’

‘And I suppose you will have a ready answer as well for why the clock was not destroyed after all this?’

If Doppler took offence, he didn’t show it. In fact, he seemed more amused than anything. ‘That was supposed to happen, Herr Gray. My father received an order to that effect from the guildmaster in Augsburg; such orders, as you may not be aware, being a foreigner, carry the weight of imperial writ. He wrote back stating that he had complied. That ended the matter. As far as the Clockmakers’ Guild is concerned, Wachter’s Folly is no more.’

‘Was your father in the habit of disregarding imperial decrees?’ I asked.

‘Hardly,’ Doppler replied with a tight smile. ‘But in this case, or so he told me later, he felt that disobedience was the lesser betrayal.’

‘I’m afraid you’ve lost me.’

Doppler glanced at his pocket watch, lying open on the table. He picked it up, snapped the lid shut. ‘I will show you.’ He got to his feet, sliding the watch back into his coat. Then he lifted the candle. ‘Come with me.’

‘But where …?’

‘Not far. Come.’ He walked to the swinging door and held it open.

Intrigued, I stood. Hesta, too, bestirred herself. Toenails clicking across the stone floor, she preceded us both through the door. Doppler motioned for me to follow her, which I did, and he brought up the rear.
Then
, holding the candle before him, he stepped past me and alongside the wooden bar, once again motioning me to follow.

He stopped opposite the cuckoo clock that hung on the wall behind the bar. By the light of the candle, which Doppler placed on the bar, I saw that it was just shy of one o’clock.