The Emperor of All Things by Paul Witcover Page B

did the hands themselves … which, as he now ascertained, moved with equal facility in a counterclockwise direction. But these idle exercises brought him no nearer to his goal. What was he missing? He ground his teeth in frustration. Again he thought of Grimalkin. He did not doubt for an instant that she would have already prised the watch open somehow. He felt clumsy and stupid, like a thief standing before a locked steel vault deep in the bowels of the Bank of England.
    Then Quare smiled. Of course. The master himself had provided a clue. Watches and locks were not so different, after all. Not inside, where it counted. He gave a little laugh of admiration at the cleverness of it.
    ‘Got it, have you?’ asked Master Magnus.
    ‘We’ll see.’ What if the number inscribed on the inside of the cover, 1652, was not just a date but a combination? It was both obvious and ingenious; yet there were many possible ways of representing that number, or sequence of numbers, using the hour and minute hands of the watch. For all he knew, some complicated formula was required. But he would eliminate the obvious choices before worrying about more arcane possibilities. Could it be as simple as moving one hand to sixteen and the other to fifty-two? The strange glyphs on the face of the watch had no meaning to him in themselves, but that did not mean they could not correspond to the numbers he knew; after all, there were twelve of them, just as with any ordinary timepiece. But on further reflection, that solution made no sense … for then the case would automatically open twice every twenty-four hours, whenever the minute and hour hands, in their quotidian revolutions, passed over the necessary points on the watch face: not at all the sort of feature typically valued by purchasers of pocket watches.
    Indeed, this objection held for any sequence of numbers arrived at by rotating the hands in a clockwise direction. Thus, Quare reasoned, the numbers of the combination, or at least one of them, must be arrived at by means of a retrograde motion, by which the locking mechanism would be engaged or disengaged. He began to try various possibilities, moving the hands backwards and forwards around the dial until, after no more than five minutes, to the accompaniment of a sharp click, he felt the back of the watch detach from the case and drop into his palm.
    ‘Bravo,’ said Master Magnus. ‘Well done!’
    ‘You provided the clue,’ Quare acknowledged, grinning, ‘when you challenged me to unlock the secrets of the watch. Otherwise I could never have opened it so quickly, if at all.’
    ‘You would have hit upon it sooner or later,’ the master said. ‘But that is only one mystery solved. You have work yet to do.’
    Quare nodded and turned back to the table, feeling quite pleased with himself – an opinion not shared by the black cat, Calpurnia, who was grooming herself fastidiously, taking no notice of him whatsoever. A man could not get too full of himself, Quare reflected, in the company of a cat.
    Placing the scalpel on the table beside the loupe, Quare shifted the watch to his free hand and set the detached back of the case on the flap of his tool kit alongside the crystal he’d placed there earlier. Only then did he turn the watch over to reveal the exposed movement.
    His initial impression was of a three-quarter plate construction, with overlapping wheels and pinions neatly packed into the available space, all of a silver so pale that it seemed almost translucent. Yet no clockmaker with an ounce of experience or common sense would choose silver over brass and steel for the inner workings of a watch. But then, he thought, perhaps the metal was not silver after all. He was reaching for his loupe when a sudden hissing caused him to start. ‘What the devil?’
    Beside him, standing with spine arched, tail stiff, ears flat, and fur gone all spiky, a hissing and growling Calpurnia eyed the watch in Quare’s hand as if it were a serpent