The Singing Spanner: The Mayors Pride

The double doors of the Atelier flew inward with a violence that set every hanging tool swinging on its hook. Mayor Thornberry stood framed in the threshold, his velvet lapels askew, his waxed moustache bristling like the antennae of an offended beetle. Behind him, the morning fog of Cogsworth clung to his trouser cuffs and made his polished boots hiss against the slate floor.

"Madame Cogswick." His voice arrived before his feet did, thin and pinched and smelling faintly of vinegar and boiled onion. "I require your immediate, undivided, and frankly urgent attention."

From the workbench near the eastern window, Pip Bellows lowered his magnifying glass. The brass mouse he had been repairing twitched one copper whisker in the sudden draught, then went still. Pip had known Thornberry for three terms now, had watched him win his first election by promising to paint every drainpipe in the borough a prudent grey, and had long since learned to read the small disasters written in the set of the man's jowls. The Mayor's chin was tucked. The Mayor's pockets were clenched. The Mayor had come to make someone else's problem his own.

"Sir," Pip said, slipping from his stool with the practiced ease of a boy who had spent half his life ducking under tables. "Bit early for a civic visit, isn't it? The sun's barely bothered the chimbleys."

Thornberry's nostrils flared. "This is not a matter for civic pleasantries, young man. This is a matter of municipal pride. A matter of the Harvest Festival. A matter of brass and tune and civic dignity, which I daresay you cannot begin to comprehend."

A spark popped from beneath the furnace grate. Tinder's pointed ears appeared over the edge of the coal bunker, fur glowing ember-orange in the dim. "Eh, what's all this clatter then? Some fool gone and sat on a rivet?"

The Mayor turned sharply. His pince-nez caught the light and flashed. "That creature is not to speak in my presence."

"Tinder's not a creature, sir," Pip said, his voice steady. "Tinder's an engineer, same as Madame."

Tinder's muzzle scrunched. A thin ribbon of smoke curled from one nostril. "Engineer and a half, I should cocoa. An' I'll speak where I blooming well please."

The Mayor drew a handkerchief from his breast pocket and pressed it to his upper lip as though warding off contagion. "Madame Cogswick," he called, pitching his voice above the rising crackle from the bunker. "Madame Cogswick, I must speak with you. At once. Immediately. This very instant."

A curtain of iron beads parted at the back of the workshop. Madame Cogswick emerged from the calibration room, wiping her fingers on a square of chamois. She moved with the unhurried certainty of a woman who had spent forty years coaxing stubborn mechanisms into obedience. Her workshop coat was spotted with solder burns and lamp oil, and a pair of tinted goggles rode high upon her forehead like a peculiar crown.

She looked at the Mayor. She looked at the door. She looked at the puddle of fog still evaporating from his boots.

"Mayor Thornberry," she said, her voice carrying the warm gravel of someone who had shouted over furnace roar for most of her adult life. "You appear distressed."

"Distressed." He repeated the word as though it were a distasteful vegetable on his plate. "I am not distressed. I am inconvenienced. I am put upon. I am forced by circumstance to seek the aid of an, an, establishment, when I had every intention of conducting this matter through proper municipal procurement channels."

"Proper channels being what, sir?" Pip asked. "The Tender Board, which meets quarterly and never before lunch?"

"The Tender Board," Thornberry repeated with tremendous dignity, "which exists precisely so that the city is not subjected to the whims of, of, freelance intervention."

Tinder's tail lashed the coal bunker. "Freelance," he muttered. "Bloomin' freelance. Like the work we do feeds him less than his lordship's three dinners."

Madame Cogswick held up one calloused hand. The workshop settled. Even the furnace seemed to draw a quieter breath.

"Tell me the trouble, Mayor."

Thornberry stepped forward. He placed both hands flat upon the workbench, and Pip saw the faint tremor in his fingers and the way the Mayor swallowed once before beginning.

"My parade-automaton. The one I commissioned for the Harvest Festival. The one that is to lead the procession down Brasswalk, past the cathedral, through Founders' Square, and into the civic stage where I shall deliver my address to the assembled citizenry." He paused for breath. "It will not play the anthem."

"Will not," Madame Cogswick echoed.

"Will not. Cannot. Refuses. Three days from now, on the third morning of the Harvest Festival, the great parade will commence. Bands will play. Children will cheer. Confetti will fall. And my automaton, my pride, the very symbol of this office and of this city's industrious spirit, will stand at the head of the procession in absolute, mortifying silence."

Pip set down his screwdriver. "Has it stopped altogether, or is it making sounds that just aren't the anthem?"

"It is making sounds," Thornberry said stiffly. "Of a kind. Humming. Whirring. Clicking. The entire mechanical choir of its operation. Everything except the anthem itself. The anthem is, ah, locked. The valve, or the cylinder, or whatever fiendish nomenclature you people employ, is jammed."

Tinder scrambled fully out of the bunker and trotted across the floor, sparks scattering from his paws. He stopped three feet from the Mayor and sat back on his haunches, tail curled primly around his forelegs.

"Three days," the spark-fox said. "Three bleedin' days, and the great man waits until now."

"I did not, I was not, that is to say, the matter only manifested this morning at the ungodly hour of six. I had planned to summon a reputable firm from the upper city, but the cost of even a consultation was, was, prohibitive."

"Prohibitive," Pip said. He knew the word. Prohibitive meant the Mayor's purse had whispered the figure into his ear and the figure had been rude about it.

"Prohibitive," Thornberry confirmed, with the air of a man confessing a small crime. "One thousand crowns, merely to walk through the door. And the upper city firms charge by the quarter hour. By the quarter hour, do you hear. As though I were commissioning a portrait."

Madame Cogswick circled the workbench and drew out a stool. She sat upon it with the patience of a woman who had heard many desperate speeches in her time and knew which ones truly bled.

"Describe the anthem mechanism," she said. "From the beginning. Slowly."

The Mayor straightened his waistcoat. "It is a brass cylinder, three inches in diameter, fitted with seventy-two pins arranged in a spiral. The pins actuate a series of delicate valves that admit steam to twenty-three tuned whistles. The arrangement was copied from a music box I saw in a catalogue, and then adapted, at considerable expense, by a specialist from the northern provinces."

"Seventy-two pins," Madame Cogswick murmured. "Twenty-three whistles. Cylinder drive."

"Steam," the Mayor added importantly. "The automaton is steam-driven throughout. Clean steam. Filtered. I will not have soot on my parade."

Tinder sneezed. A tiny ember landed on his own nose, and he batted it away with one paw. "And the jam? When did the jam start?"

"This morning. I went down to the carriage house to inspect it, as is my custom. I wound the mainspring. I engaged the drive. The wheels turned. The pistons pumped. The whistle rose to pressure. And then," Thornberry said, his voice dropping, "it played the national mourning dirge."

Pip blinked. "The mourning dirge."

"From beginning to end. Forty-six bars. The dirge for the passing of kings."

"That ain't the anthem," Tinder said.

"It is not the anthem. And when the dirge ended, there followed, in sequence, the lullaby for foundlings, the wedding march for the lower gentry, and the, the, frankly scandalous tavern reel whose name I refuse to repeat in mixed company."

The workshop fell quiet. From the furnace came the soft tick of cooling iron. From the street came the distant clatter of a milk cart on cobblestones. From somewhere deep in Madame Cogswick's chest came a single, considering hum.

"The pin cylinder," she said. "The pins can be reset, but the tune program is determined by their order. If the cylinder has slipped, or if a pin has broken and lodged in a valve seat, you would hear music, but not the music you wanted."

"Precisely," Thornberry said, seizing the word. "Precisely. That is exactly what I said. Now, I must have the anthem. The anthem is non-negotiable. The anthem is tradition. The anthem is the sound of Cogsworth's prosperity, the very heartbeat of our municipal identity. Without it, the parade is a funeral. Without it, I am, I am, well, I am ruined."

Pip looked at the Mayor's face. Behind the bluster and the pince-nez and the velvet lapels, the man was afraid. Not of embarrassment, though that was there. Not of expense, though that was there too. Pip saw the thing he had learned to spot in grown-ups over years of climbing through their attics and cleaning out their gutters: the small, private terror of being seen as unnecessary.

Tinder saw it too. The spark-fox's ears flattened, then slowly rose again. He glanced at Pip. Pip glanced at Madame Cogswick.

Madame Cogswick folded the chamois into a neat square and set it on the bench. She stood. She went to a tall cabinet near the back wall, opened its doors, and drew out a leather tool roll that she had carried for longer than some of Thornberry's election posters had been on the walls.

"The carriage house," she said. "How far?"

"Four streets. On Pipkin Lane, behind the old wool exchange."

"Steam pressure at the time of the jam?"

"One and a quarter atmospheres. Standard parade pressure. I have the gauge readings. I have every reading."

"And the cylinder was warm to the touch, or cool?"

"Warm. Quite warm. Almost hot, in fact."

She nodded, as though the answer had confirmed something she had already suspected. She crossed back to the bench and began selecting instruments from their wall hooks with the deliberation of a surgeon choosing knives.

"Pip," she said. "The calibration kit. The pin gauge set. The valve mirror."

"Right." Pip was already moving, his stool scraping back, his hands finding the leather cases in their accustomed places. He could feel the day shifting around him, the way a street shifts when a new season moves in through the alleys.

"Tinder."

"Aye?"

"Fetch the boiler lamp from the lower cupboard. The brass one with the green glass. And bring me a tin of powdered graphite."

The spark-fox turned to go, then stopped. He looked at the Mayor, who stood rigid as a coat rack among the hanging tools.

"We'll want half up front," Tinder said. "Standard rate. Usual terms."

Thornberry sputtered. "Half, half up, that is unconscionable, that is, I have never in three terms, I will not be subjected to, the city does not, the city, the city will not, the city does not, the city cannot, I cannot possibly authorize such an imposition on the public purse without, without, at least a token consultation with the Tender Board, which, which is, ah, which meets quarterly."

"Quarterly," Pip said, settling the calibration kit over his shoulder.

"Town Council meets on the first and third," Tinder added helpfully. "Special dispensation can be lodged by noon if the Mayor attaches his seal and doesn't faint in the chamber."

Thornberry's hand went to his seal. His other hand went to his handkerchief. He stood for a moment, a small pink man in a fog of his own making, while the workshop hummed and the furnace ticked and the brass mouse on the bench twitched its copper whisker once more in the morning light.

"Three days," he said, almost to himself. "Three days. The anthem must play."

"Then step aside, sir," Madame Cogswick said, lifting the tool roll, "and let us through the door."

The mayor stepped aside. He pressed himself against the wall of the workshop with the careful, rigid posture of a man who feared the floorboards might give way beneath his polished shoes, and he watched through pinched, watery eyes as Madame Cogswick marched past with the tool roll tucked under one arm and her spine as straight as a piston rod.

Pip fell into step beside her. His boots scuffed the threshold, and the calibration kit clinked against the small of his back with every stride. The morning air bit at his ears, smelling of foundry soot and wet stone, and the distant clang of the great bell at the foundry tower rolled across the rooftops like a low, bronze thunder.

"You will go to the manse alone," Madame Cogswick said, without slowing. Her boots struck the cobbles in a hard, even rhythm. "You will assess the relay valve and the main vocal resonator. You will not, under any circumstance, allow His Honor to talk you into replacing the entire mechanism. The contract is for a repair. Not a rebuild. Not a modernization. A repair."

"Right," Pip said. "Repair. Not rebuild."

"He will offer you tea," she added. "He will offer you biscuits. He will sigh heavily and suggest that the job is rather larger than anticipated and that perhaps a supplementary fee would not be unreasonable. You will drink the tea. You will eat the biscuits. You will politely decline the supplementary fee."

"Right. Tea, biscuits, no sup, "

"And you will not engage with the butler."

Pip slowed a half step. "Sir Reginald?"

"Sir Reginald Piston," Madame Cogswick confirmed, as though the name left a bitter residue on her tongue. "Third generation in service to the Thornberry line. He will attempt to engage you in conversation about the history of the city. The founding of Cogsworth. The original charter of the Veilford burghers. The drainage reforms of eighteen-forty. He has a particular fondness for the drainage reforms. You will nod. You will say 'fascinating.' You will not allow him to steer you away from the work."

Tinder trotted at Pip's heel, sparks crackling faintly in the copper ruff around his neck. "And if he starts on the Veilford charter again, I'm coming in and setting his cuffs on fire."

"You are not coming in," Madame Cogswick said. "You are staying at the workshop to assist me with the secondary calibration of the backup resonator. We will need it ready in case the mayor's mechanism fails on stage and he attempts to blame our workmanship."

"I could assist by, "

"You will assist by staying."

Tinder's tail sparked once, brightly, then settled. He fell back a step and then another, and at the corner of Tinker Street he stopped altogether and watched Pip continue up the hill alone, the kit shifting on his shoulders and the morning sun catching the brass fittings of his belt.

The manse sat at the crest of Gilt Lane, where the merchant quarter gave way to the old civic quarter and the cobbles grew wider and cleaner with every block. Pip had cleaned every chimney on this street before he was twelve. He knew which gutters leaked, which roof tiles slipped in a hard wind, which attics smelled of mouse and which smelled of something older and sadder. He knew the manse by its chimneys: four of them, tall and square, built of a pale stone that turned the color of old ivory in the rain.

He knocked at the green door.

It opened, after a measured pause, upon a man so precisely assembled that he might have been engineered rather than born. Sir Reginald Piston stood exactly six feet tall, wore a suit of charcoal wool without a single thread out of place, and possessed a face so carefully composed that it appeared to have been lacquered. His eyes were the pale grey of unpolished tin. His mouth was a thin, straight line that did not, under any visible effort, become a smile.

"Master Bellows," he said. The name arrived in the air like a coin dropped onto marble. "You are four minutes earlier than the appointed hour. His Honor is not yet in the west wing. You will wait in the receiving parlor. You will not touch the silver. You will not sit upon the upholstered furniture until instructed to do so."

"Right," Pip said. "Receiving parlor. No silver. No sitting."

"Follow me."

Sir Reginald turned on his heel with the mechanical precision of a tower clock and set off down a corridor of dark wood and darker portraits. Pip followed, the kit clinking softly with each step, and tried not to stare at the gilt frames or the small brass orrery that ticked softly on a side table.

"The manse was constructed in the year seventeen hundred and twelve," Sir Reginald announced, without turning his head. "It was commissioned by the first Mayor Thornberry, a cousin of the present incumbent, though not a direct ancestor. The architectural style is identified by scholars as late Cogsworthian Provincial, though some authorities persist in classifying it as an early example of the Veilford Revival, a categorization I personally find untenable given the absence of characteristic cornice work."

"Fascinating," Pip murmured.

"The cornices, as any serious student of municipal architecture will tell you, are the defining feature of the Veilford Revival. The original Veilford charter of fourteen-oh-three, granted by the Burghers' Council under the authority of the Crown, made explicit provision for the maintenance of public buildings according to a specific aesthetic code. That code included, among other things, the precise modulation of cornice height in relation to doorframe width. The ratio, as established in the charter and subsequently refined in the eighteen-twenty-two municipal ordinance, is three to five."

"Right," Pip said. "Three to five."

"Though," Sir Reginald added, pausing at a door and turning to regard Pip with the faint, pitying expression of a tutor addressing a particularly slow child, "the Veilford charter itself makes no mention of cornices. The charter is concerned primarily with drainage. The drainage reforms of fourteen-oh-three were, in fact, the most ambitious public works project undertaken in this district since the original laying of the brick sewers in the year, "

"Twelve something," Pip supplied helpfully.

"Twelve ninety-six," Sir Reginald corrected. He opened the door. "The receiving parlor. You will wait here. His Honor will join you when he has completed his morning correspondence. Do not touch the silver."

He withdrew, and the door closed with a soft, definitive click.

Pip set the kit down on the marble floor, very gently, and looked around. The receiving parlor was a long, high room, panelled in dark wood and lit by tall windows that looked out over the ornamental garden. The silver sat upon a sideboard in twelve gleaming pieces: tea service, sugar bowl, cream jug, biscuit plate. The upholstered furniture was the color of old cream and looked as though it had never been sat upon in its entire existence.

Pip did not sit.

He crossed to the window and looked down into the garden. A single gardener knelt among the rose beds, pulling weeds with slow, deliberate motions. A black cat watched him from the rim of a stone fountain. Beyond the garden wall, the rooftops of Cogsworth rolled away toward the foundry district, where a smear of grey smoke marked the location of Madame Cogswick's workshop.

Three to five, Pip thought. Drainage. Charter. He flexed his fingers inside his pockets and listened to the silence of the manse, which was not really silent at all but filled with the soft tick of clocks, the creak of old wood, the faint, papery rustle of correspondence being sorted in some distant room.

After a moment, he heard footsteps in the corridor. Not the butler's measured tread. Something slower. Something heavier. Something accompanied by the rhythmic, asthmatic puffing of a man who had not climbed stairs in some considerable time.

The mayor entered the room.

Mayor Thornberry filled the doorway the way a cork fills a bottle, which is to say completely and with a certain aggressive inevitability. He was a tall, narrow man with a face that looked as though it had been folded for storage and then forgotten in a drawer for several years. His coat was bottle green. His waistcoat was embroidered with silver thread in a pattern of interlocking gears that was either a fashion choice or, given the dim light, an optical illusion. His hands were clasped behind his back, and his chin was raised at precisely the angle required to look down his nose at a boy of Pip's height.

"You are the tinker," the mayor said. It was not a question.

"Pip Bellows, sir. Apprentice to Madame Cogswick of the workshop guild, and part-time chimney sweep of the Cogsworth Industrial Borough." Pip executed a bow that would have done credit to a music hall performer. It was the sort of bow that contained, in its geometry, a polite apology for existing and a hopeful promise to be useful. "Thank you for engaging our services."

"I did not engage you. I engaged Madame Cogswick, who was unavailable, and who saw fit to send me a substitute." The mayor's gaze traveled over Pip with the slow, meticulous attention of a man inspecting a suspicious invoice. "You appear to be approximately twelve."

"Nineteen, sir."

"You appear to be approximately twelve, and I am disinclined to entrust my household effects to anyone who appears to be approximately twelve." He drew a small leather notebook from his breast pocket and consulted it. "There are forty-three items of silver in this house. Each item is insured for a sum that exceeds your probable annual income by a factor I am reluctant to calculate. There are also seven clocks, three mechanical singing birds, one automaton of significant sentimental value, and a harpsichord that has not been opened since the late Lady Thornberry's funeral, which I do not wish opened now or at any subsequent date."

"Yes, sir."

"The silver is on the sideboard. You will polish it in my presence, in silence, and you will not touch anything else. Upon completion, you will submit an itemized bill in duplicate, one copy of which will be retained by my butler for archival purposes and one copy of which will be filed in the municipal accounts office under the appropriate budgetary heading. You will then leave by the service entrance."

"Yes, sir."

"The butler will supervise. I do not supervise silver polishing. I have not supervised silver polishing in three terms of office and I see no reason to commence the practice now." The mayor turned toward the door, then paused. One thin hand rose to adjust a cravat that did not require adjustment. "The silver belonged to my late wife. It is of no particular monetary consequence. It is, however, all that remains of her in this household, and I would prefer it not to be scratched."

He said this in exactly the same tone of voice in which he had said everything else, which was a tone of voice that suggested the entire world was a minor inconvenience arranged for his personal displeasure. But somewhere, deep in the pinched architecture of his vowels, there was a hairline fracture. Pip heard it. He did not remark upon it. He understood, with the instinct of an orphan raised in workshop basements, the precise grammar of things that must not be remarked upon.

"I will be very careful, sir," he said.

The mayor departed. The butler reappeared. The silver was polished.

It took three hours. The butler, a tall, dry man named Galloway, stood behind Pip's chair and watched every stroke of the cloth with the unblinking attention of a heron. He did not speak. He did not offer refreshment. When Pip's elbow came within a centimetre of the biscuit plate, Galloway made a small sound in the back of his throat that was not quite a word but conveyed, with admirable economy, the threat of legal proceedings.

By the time the last candlestick gleamed, Pip's fingers were cramped and his shoulders ached and the clock on the mantelpiece had chimed four. He packed the kit, presented the bill, accepted the second copy stamped with the Thornberry seal, and was escorted to the service entrance by a footman who pointed, with theatrical finality, at the garden gate.

Pip stepped out into the afternoon. The light was golden. The roses smelled of something he could not name. He walked down the gravel path with his kit under his arm, and his thoughts were already ahead of him, halfway across the city, in the square outside the town hall where the municipal auto waited.

It had been two days since the anthem failed. Two days since the brass auto, that pride of the borough's mechanical corps, had sputtered through the opening bars of the civic anthem and then surrendered to a gargling silence in front of three hundred citizens, the mayor, a visiting dignitary from the steam-powered township of Hexbridge, and a choir of schoolchildren who had burst into sympathetic weeping. The newspapers had called it a malfunction. The mayor had called it sabotage. Madame Cogswick had called it a worn valve seal and a calibration drift in the secondary bellows chamber, which was accurate but did not sell as many papers.

Pip reached the square as the sun touched the rooftops. The auto stood upon its plinth in the centre of the square like a brass monument to civic embarrassment. It was nearly twice Pip's height, a gleaming figure in mayoral regalia, complete with a mechanical arm that waved in programmed greeting and a chest cavity that housed the speaking apparatus. Around its base, a small crowd had gathered despite the late hour, because the square was the place where news went to be aired and complaints went to be lodged, and tonight both were doing brisk business.

He climbed the service ladder and opened the chest panel.

The interior of an automaton is not, as some suppose, a tidy arrangement of gears and springs. It is a cathedral of brass, every surface carved with conduits, every chamber resonant with the ticking of small mechanisms that have opinions about being disturbed. Pip had grown up inside machines like this one. He knew their liturgies. He knew which sounds meant reverence and which meant revolt.

He listened. The bellows wheezed. The valve seat, exactly as Madame Cogswick had predicted, was scored with a fine ring of corrosion. He removed it with a small wrench. He fitted the replacement from his kit. He closed the panel. He climbed down, crossed the square to the control booth, and threw the master switch.

The auto stirred. Its mechanical arm rose in greeting. Steam hissed from its vents. Its chest cavity opened, and out came the first clear, brass-toned notes of the Cogsworth civic anthem, rolling across the square with the pomp and circumstance of a municipal institution that had not embarrassed itself in two days and intended to keep its record clean.

The anthem swelled. The crowd, recognizing the tune, began to hum along, because humming along with municipal anthems was a civic duty in Cogsworth and had been since the days of the first foundry charter. The auto's brass jaw moved in time to the words, its shoulders squared, its arm extended in the direction of the town hall in what Pip privately considered an overly dramatic gesture but which the city council had voted upon and could not, therefore, be criticized.

Then the anthem ended, and the auto did not stop.

This was not, in itself, unusual. The auto had been programmed, some years ago, with a small repertoire of civic pleasantries: a greeting for the mayor, a salute to the visiting dignitaries, a benediction for the schools, and a short, dignified silence at the end of each in which the mechanism could recalibrate its various pressures. The recalibration was supposed to happen. The auto was supposed to wait for it. The auto had, on this occasion, declined to wait.

From the chest cavity of the brass figure there rose a sound that was not the benediction and not the greeting and not any item of civic repertoire known to the municipal archives. It was, instead, a voice. A human voice, in the tenor register, clear and bright and amplified through the brass resonator until it filled the square like warm butter fills a pan. And the voice was singing.

"Oh, the Mayor's hat, the Mayor's hat," it warbled, in a melody that had no business being as catchy as it was. "Oh, the Mayor's hat of green! It sits upon his noble head, the finest ever seen! With silver buckle, silver plume, and silver lining too, there is no hat in all the realm so fine a hat to view!"

Pip's hand froze on the control lever. He looked up at the auto. The auto's mechanical eyes, two polished discs of brass, gazed serenely out over the crowd. Its jaw moved in perfect time to the words. Its arm executed a small, courtly gesture in the direction of the town hall, where the mayor, summoned by the sound of music, had appeared on the steps and was standing very still with an expression that suggested a man watching his own house burn down from a great distance.

"The Mayor's hat, the Mayor's hat," the auto continued, its tenor voice climbing into a crescendo that Pip had to admit was, against his will, magnificent. "It cost a hundred pounds, perhaps, or fifty, or maybe twelve! The Mayor's hat, the Mayor's hat, upon his hat he dwells! For what is majesty, my friends, without a hat that tells!"

The crowd had gone silent. The silence lasted exactly four seconds. Then, from somewhere near the front, a single voice spoke.

"It's true about the buckle. I've seen it."

The laughter started small, the way laughter does in a crowd that is not entirely sure it is permitted. It built. It swelled. It became a roar that rolled across the square like the tide coming in, and when it crested, the auto threw its arms wide and delivered the final verse with the full-throated joy of a brass machine that had, after two days of public humiliation, found its revenge.

So the Mayor's hat, the Mayor's hat, will sit upon his brow, until the cockles of his heart are warmed, and warmed, and warmed! The Mayor's hat! The Mayor's hat! His Majesty's own crown! For in this town, in all the realm, the hat is the renown!

The last note rang out. The auto's chest cavity closed. Its mechanical arm descended. Its brass jaw set itself into an expression of dignified repose. The square erupted.

Pip climbed down from the control booth with his kit under his arm and his face a careful blank, because if his face showed anything at all he would be sent to Hexbridge in a diplomatic bag and never heard from again. He looked across the square and saw the mayor standing on the steps of the town hall, his face the precise colour of the geraniums in the ornamental garden, and beside him the butler Galloway, whose knees had decided, on balance, that this was an excellent moment to give way.

Galloway fainted with the silent, dignified collapse of a man who has served in good houses and intends to do so until the end of time. He was caught, before he struck the flagstones, by a passing fruiterer who had been on his way home with a basket of pears and was now, instead, supporting the weight of a full-grown butler and the entire Thornberry household dignity. The pears rolled across the steps. The mayor did not move to help. The mayor, indeed, appeared to have stopped moving altogether, in the manner of a man who has been informed by the universe that it intends to make an example of him and sees no reason to interfere with the process.

The visiting dignitary from Hexbridge stepped out of the town hall, took one look at the square, and began, slowly and carefully, to applaud.

The auto, with perfect timing, bowed.