Rain struck the cobbles of Hollowmere with the insistence of a debt collector tapping fingers on mahogany. Each drop carried the weight of a village that had stopped expecting visitors long ago, and the wind off the moor carried the scent of wet slate and something older, earthier, like a cellar left sealed for decades. Eliza Quinn slowed the hired carriage to a crawl as the wheels found the worn ruts of the main street, and she pressed her gloved hand against the fogging glass to peer out at the row of darkened shopfronts.
The gas lamps were lit but guttering, their flames bending sideways under the gusts that swept down from the hills. A sign creaked somewhere overhead, its iron hinge singing a thin note that rose and fell with the weather. Past the chemist and the shuttered butcher's, past the post office with its clock stopped at quarter past three, the street bent toward a square dominated by a stone cross green with moss and a building that looked as though it had been standing since the first quarriers broke the hills open.
The Wheatsheaf Inn leaned into the rain like a man tired of standing. Its thatch was patchy in places, the straw darkened with damp, and the whitewash on its front wall had peeled back in long strips to reveal the grey stonework beneath. A lamp burned in the window of the taproom, casting a warm smear of amber across the wet flagstones outside. Eliza handed the reins down to the boy who had walked beside the horse since the last turnpike, pressed a coin into his cold fingers, and stepped down onto the street with the leather satchel clutched against her hip.
The satchel held the ledger. The ledger held her father's debts, the careful columns of figures in his cramped hand, the names of men who had advanced him credit for stone that never found a buyer, and at the back, in a separate envelope sealed with red wax, the single sheet that named the creditor who now held the deed to the house in which Eliza had grown up. Margaret Thatcher had written that name in her own hand at the bottom of the page, in ink the colour of old blood, and beside it she had written the sum owed.
Eliza pushed the inn door open and stepped into a low-ceilinged room that smelled of woodsmoke, damp dog, and spilled cider. A fire burned in the grate but gave off more sound than heat, the logs shifting and sighing as the resin bubbled in their cores. Behind the bar stood a man broad as a barrel, his sleeves rolled to the elbow, his hands wrapped in a cloth as he polished a pewter tankard in slow, considered circles.
"Room for the night," Eliza said, and she set her satchel down on the counter with a deliberate weight. "And a meal, if the kitchen is still awake."
The innkeeper set the tankard down and looked at her for a long moment, the way a man looks at a traveller who has arrived at the wrong end of a long road. His eyes were small and deep set, framed by the ruddy creases of a face that had known more rain than sun.
"Room there is," he said. "Kitchen is. But I'll tell you plain, miss, as I'd tell any soul who walked through that door. You don't go up the old quarry road after dark. Not tonight, not any night. The road's been shut these five years past, and what walks it now is not what walks it by day."
Eliza rested her gloved fingers on the satchel strap. "I'm expected at Fenwick Lane by morning. The lane runs off the quarry road, does it not?"
Something crossed the innkeeper's face, not quite a flinch, more a tightening, as though he had pulled a door shut behind his eyes. He set the tankard on the shelf behind him with the care of a man placing a brick on a wall.
"Fenwick Lane," he repeated. "Then you'll want the north gate in the morning, and the path through the lower pasture. The lane meets it past the old limekilns, where the wall has fallen in. You'll see it. There are ways round the quarry road, if a body knows them."
"And if a body does not?"
He drew a cloth across the bar in a single slow stroke. "Then a body learns them quick, or a body does not come back the same."
The fire popped, sending a knot of resin hissing into the grate. Somewhere in the back of the house, a clock struck nine, the chime muffled as though the air itself had grown thick. Eliza kept her gaze level.
"Thank you for the warning," she said. "I'll take the room with the window facing the square, if you have it. And the meal, when it suits."
He inclined his head and reached beneath the counter for a key on a wooden tag, the number 3 burned into its face in uneven strokes. She took it, and as her fingers closed around the tag she felt the wood was warmer than it ought to be, as though some heat had been stored in it, waiting for her grip.
The taproom held four other souls. Two men sat in the far corner over a game of dominoes, their tiles clicking in a rhythm that had the patience of ritual. A woman in a dark shawl nursed a half pint at the bar, her eyes fixed on the middle distance, and a younger man sat alone by the window with a book open on the table before him, his finger marking a place he did not seem to be reading. None of them looked up when Eliza passed. The rain on the panes provided a kind of privacy, a moving curtain between the room and whatever stood beyond it in the dark.
She climbed the stairs with the satchel pressed to her side, the wood of the treads soft underfoot and bowed in the middle from decades of use. The landing smelled of camphor and old linen, and a candle burned in a niche at the end of the corridor, its flame guttering in the draught that came up from somewhere below. She turned the key in the lock of number 3 and stepped into a room small as a cell, furnished with a brass bed, a washstand, and a chair whose seat was stuffed with horsehair that had lost the will to spring back.
The window faced the square. Eliza set the satchel on the chair, lit the candle on the washstand with the vesta from her pocket, and crossed to the glass. The rain had thinned to a steady mist that silvered the stones of the square and turned the moss on the cross to a darker green. Across the way, a church stood with its tower half lost in cloud, and beside it, set back behind a low wall, the vicarage showed two lit windows and the shape of a man moving past one of them.
She watched the shape cross and recross, and the rhythm of it steadied something in her chest that had been unsettled since the carriage had turned off the London road. There was a kind of order to a stranger's routine, a pattern that could be learned and held onto, and Eliza had learned to anchor herself to patterns in the years since her father's debts had come due.
The ledger lay in the satchel, and within it the column marked T, Thatcher, Margaret, carried its own pattern, a rising tally of sums advanced, sums repaid, sums carried forward, and at the foot of the page, the final figure with its date and the initial M.T. beside it. Eliza had stared at that figure on the train, and on the coach from the junction, and she had stared at it now as the candle on the washstand burned steady in the still air of the small room.
A knock at the door, soft as a knuckle wrapped in cloth.
"Miss?" The innkeeper's voice, low and even. "Your tray."
She crossed and opened the door. He stood in the corridor with a wooden tray balanced on one hand, the cloth that had been wrapped around the tankard now folded beneath a plate of cold meat, a wedge of cheese, a heel of bread, and a small pot of mustard that had the dull yellow of aged egg.
"I brought you mustard," he said. "There's a woman at the bar says she remembers the Quinns of Maresfield. Says she worked the house as a girl. Says your father laid the hearthstone in the parlour with his own hands."
Eliza stepped aside to let him pass, and he set the tray on the bed with the care of a man setting down a coffin.
"Her name is Holloway," he said. "Beatrice. She asked me to tell you, when you came down, that if you want to know what the village has buried, you start by asking what the village has forgotten."
He straightened, and the candle flame in the niche guttered as the draught moved past him.
"The quarry road," he said again, and the way he said it, the two words carried a different weight, as though the road itself were a name he did not wish to speak aloud. "Do not go up it, miss. Not tonight."
He left, and Eliza closed the door behind him and stood with her hand on the latch. The rain had thickened again against the window, and the sound of it on the glass was the sound of something searching, patient and unceasing, for the cracks.
She sat on the edge of the bed and ate the bread and the cheese, and she looked at the satchel on the chair, and she listened to the clock in the square strike the quarter hour with a chime that seemed to come from a great distance, as though the hour had to travel a long way to reach Hollowmere, and was tired by the time it arrived.
She set the tray aside, drew the satchel onto her lap, and unlatched it with the careful motions of a woman accustomed to handling documents that would mark her for ruin if she lost them. From the interior she drew the bundle wrapped in oilskin, untied the cord, and laid the leather-bound journal on the small table that served, in this narrow room beneath the rafters, as her desk, her library, and her altar.
The attic of the Crossed Keys Inn smelled of old timber and lamp oil and the faint, sweet decay of apples stored in the corner upon a shelf. Rain tapped the dormer window in an uneven rhythm, and somewhere below, in the common room, a man laughed and was hushed, and then the hush itself became louder than the laughter had been.
Eliza opened the journal.
The leather was the colour of bruised plums, cracked along the spine where it had been opened and closed too many times by hands that had loved it. Her grandmother's hand. Cordelia Ashworth, of whom the village still spoke in lowered voices, the way one speaks of weather that has done damage.
Inside the front cover, in ink that had faded from black to a rust-coloured sepia, was written: For my granddaughter, who must learn to keep better time than I have kept.
Beneath that, a date. Eighteen years past.
Eliza turned the page.
The entries were dated, some by day, some only by season. The earliest were in a young woman's hand, the loops of the letters still uncertain, the downstrokes too heavy. Cordelia had been seventeen when she began the journal, and she had begun it, so the first entry claimed, because her father, a clockmaker of some small repute in the county town of Maresfield, had died in the autumn and left her his workshop and his debts and a single unfinished commission for a mantel clock intended for a house she would not name.
I do not know what to do with the wheels, she had written. They are so small. They are so precisely made. I think I am afraid of them.
Eliza's throat tightened. She knew that feeling, the particular terror of inheriting a mechanism one did not fully understand, the sense that the gears might, at any moment, betray her. She had felt it when her father's ledger had first been placed in her hands, the columns of figures like the teeth of some carnivorous thing.
She turned more pages. The handwriting changed, year by year, becoming more confident, more slanted, the punctuation idiosyncratic. Cordelia had developed a habit of striking through words she disliked and writing above them; she had developed a habit, too, of drawing small clocks in the margins, their faces marked with Roman numerals, their hands frozen at odd hours.
Eleven minutes past four. Twenty-three minutes past one. Seven minutes past nothing at all.
There were sketches of mechanisms Eliza did not recognise, diagrams of escapements, of pendulums suspended from improbable places, of a clock face within a clock face, the outer ring turning one way and the inner the other. There were recipes for cleaning solutions, for oils, for the polishing of brass that had gone green with verdigris. There were, interleaved with the technical matter, lists of names.
Alderman Crane. The Reverend Mapes. Mr. Hollings of the bank. Mrs. Pargetter, who keeps the post office. The names were grouped by year, and beside each name was a sum of money, and beside the sum a single word: Lent, or Borrowed, or Given.
Eliza copied several of the entries onto the paper she had brought with her, transcribing carefully, the nib of her pen scratching in the lamplight. She copied, too, the margins, the small clock faces, the scratched-out words.
Then she came to the entry dated eighteen months before her grandmother's death.
I have been a fool, Cordelia had written, and the pen had pressed so hard that the ink stood in relief upon the page, like a scar.
There is a woman in this village who knows what I have done, and what I have not done, and she will not be satisfied with anything less than the whole of the truth. I had thought I could manage her. I had thought, because she is small and because she is old and because she has the misfortune to be a woman without a protector, that she would be tractable. She is not tractable. She is the most dangerous person I have ever met, and I have met the Alderman and the Reverend and Mr. Hollings, who are dangerous men, and they are children beside her.
Her name is Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher. She holds papers on half the village, and she is patient, and she does not forget.
Eliza stopped writing.
She sat very still. The candle flame did not move. The rain did not stop.
She read the entry again, and a third time, and then she turned the page and found the next entry, which was dated only two weeks later.
I have spoken with Mrs. Thatcher. She has agreed to a certain arrangement, the nature of which I shall not set down, even here, because even here I cannot be certain. There are eyes in this house. There are ears in the walls. I am growing paranoid in my old age, which is the first sign of a sound mind.
Below this, in a hand that had grown smaller and tighter, as though the writer had been hunched over the page:
The clock is finished. I have set it in the church, and I have wound it, and it will run for a hundred years, and when it stops, the village will know what I have done.
Eliza turned more pages. There were no more entries.
She sat back in the chair. The wood of it creaked beneath her, and the sound was unexpectedly loud in the stillness. She looked at the window. The rain had thinned to a grey veil across the glass, and beyond the glass, the square was dark, and the church was a shape against the sky, and the clock face, if she strained her eyes, was just visible, a pale disc with the hands frozen at a quarter past three.
A quarter past three. The hour at which the clock had not moved since she had arrived.
She looked at the journal. She looked at the candle. She took a small pocket knife from her satchel and trimmed the wick, and the flame leapt up, brighter, and threw her shadow against the sloping wall behind her, enormous and wavering.
She turned back to the entry about the Thatcher arrangement. She read it again, word by word, and she copied it out, exactly, including the struck-through corrections, including the small clock drawn in the margin with its hands at seven minutes past nothing.
Then she went back to the list of names. She read each name aloud, very softly, so that her own voice would not betray her.
Alderman Crane. Reverend Mapes. Mr. Hollings. Mrs. Pargetter.
And then, at the bottom of the page, in an ink that was darker, newer, written in a hand that was not her grandmother's: a single line in different handwriting, slanted and angular and unfamiliar.
I know what you are looking for. You will not find it in this book. Look to the clock.
Eliza stared at the line.
She ran her finger along it. The ink was dry, fully dry, but the paper beneath it was the same paper as the rest of the journal, the same texture, the same age. The line had been written into the book itself, not tipped in. It had always been there.
She checked the inside of the back cover. She checked beneath the end papers. She found nothing.
She sat with the book in her lap for a long time. The rain stopped. The clock in the square struck eleven, each chime a clear, cold note that arrived on time, as clocks should. And then it struck the half hour, and the quarter, and the three-quarters, and the hour again, and each chime was precise, and Eliza listened to each one, and counted, and knew that the clock in the square was not the clock her grandmother had written of.
The clock her grandmother had written of was in the church.
The clock in the square was stopped.
And the clock in the church, if the clock face she had seen was truthful, was running, but it was running at the wrong hour, and had been, perhaps, for a hundred years.
She closed the journal. She wrapped it again in the oilskin. She tied the cord. She placed it in the satchel, and she buckled the satchel, and she set it on the chair, and she looked at the door.
She did not open the door.
Instead, she took from the satchel her father's ledger, the one she had carried all the way from London, the one with the columns of figures that had not balanced for seven years. She opened it to the page where she had marked, in her own hand, the sum owed to a creditor whose name she would not write down because the writing of it felt like an invocation.
She looked at the figure. She looked at the journal.
She thought of her grandmother, who had been seventeen and afraid of wheels. She thought of her grandmother, who had been old and afraid of a woman named Thatcher. She thought of the clock in the church, which had been wound by hands that were now dust, and which was keeping, perhaps, a different kind of time altogether.
She took out a fresh sheet of paper. She wrote, at the top, in her careful clerk's hand: Questions for Holloway.
And beneath that:
1. What did the village bury? 2. What did the village forget? 3. Who wound the clock last? 4. Whose debt does the clock carry? 5. What is the arrangement?
She set the pen down. She looked at the list. She crossed out the last question and rewrote it.
5. What is the arrangement, and who is it between?
She left the question mark. She left the paper on the table. She sat on the edge of the bed and pulled the quilt up over her knees, and the quilt smelled of lavender and dust and someone else's sleep, and she did not undress, because she was not yet certain she would stay.
She listened to the silence of the village. It was not, she discovered, a true silence. There was the creak of the inn settling. There was the distant lowing of a beast in a byre somewhere at the edge of hearing. There was, beneath everything, the faint, persistent tick of the clock in the square, which had struck its hour and was now counting the minutes between, as though the hour itself required measuring, as though one could not trust it to pass on its own.
She thought of the line in the journal. Look to the clock.
She thought of the clock face in the church tower, pale against the dark, the hands fixed at a quarter past three.
She thought of the hour she had arrived, which had been a quarter past three, and of how the innkeeper had looked at her when she had given her name, and of how the name had landed in the room like a stone dropped into still water.
She did not sleep. She sat in the chair, with the quilt around her shoulders, and she watched the window, and the window watched her back, and somewhere below, a door opened and closed, and footsteps went along the passage, and stopped outside her door, and went on.
She got up. She crossed the room. She pressed her ear to the wood.
There was nothing on the other side. There was only the house, breathing, and the rain beginning again, soft and deliberate, upon the glass.
The rain had stopped by the time Eliza crept down the back stairs of the inn, though the stones of the passage were still damp beneath her boots, and the air in the lower corridor carried the mineral smell of wet mortar, as though the village itself sweated in the aftermath of weather. The kitchen was dark. A single banked coal glowed in the range, giving off a faint amber heat, and she eased past the scullery door without disturbing the cat that sat on the threshold, watching her with the flat, incurious gaze of a creature that had seen better thieves.
She let herself out by the side entrance. The latch clicked softly behind her, and she stood for a moment beneath the low eave, letting her eyes adjust to the grey wash of an evening that had not quite decided whether it wished to be night.
The village lay around her in a shallow bowl of stone, the roofs black against a sky that was still light at the western edge, a thin strip of tarnished brass between the chimney pots. She could see, from where she stood, the topmost finial of the church spire, and below it, on its plinth, the pale circle of the clock face.
She began to walk.
The lane led her past the smithy, which was closed, its door barred, the smell of old iron and hoof-rot lingering in the cold air; past the post office, shuttered; past a low stone cottage with a light in the window, where someone was playing a hymn on a piano, the notes coming through the glass in fragments, as though the tune were being shaken out of a broken box. She did not hurry. She had learned, in her father's house, that hurrying attracted attention, and attention, in a village like this one, was a currency she could not afford to spend.
The green opened before her without ceremony, a flagged expanse ringed by a low wall and a handful of benches, the grass between the stones worn down to the shape of countless feet. The monument stood at its centre, the hollow-eyed king upon his pedestal of names, and beyond him, at the eastern edge of the green, the clock tower.
She stopped when she saw it.
She had expected, she supposed, a building of some pretension, a miniature cathedral of time, a thing of carven stone and speaking bells. She had expected grandeur, because Hollowmere had been a place of grand projects, and her father had spoken of its clocks with the particular reverence he reserved for anything made well by men whose names the river had not bothered to carry away.
What stood before her was none of those things.
It was a tower in the shape of a lantern. Four slender pillars of grey stone rose from a square base, supporting a roof of lead that had gone the colour of a bruise, and between the pillars, on each of the four faces, hung a clock. The dials were white, and the numerals black, and the hands were long and black, and they did not move.
The nearest face showed her the hour. It was a quarter past three.
She turned. The face to the north showed her the same. She turned again. The face to the south. The face to the west. A quarter past three, on every side, as though the tower were a lantern lit at a single moment, and that moment had been chosen, and held, and refused to let go.
Eliza approached. Her boots sounded very loud on the flags. She felt, suddenly, that she was being observed, though there was no one on the green but herself and the stone king and the four frozen hours.
She reached out and touched the nearest pillar. The stone was cold, and the cold went into her palm and up her wrist and settled somewhere beneath her breastbone, as though she had touched the hand of a sleeper and found the flesh not yet warm.
The clock face, this close, was not painted. She had assumed, foolishly, that it was paint, because paint was what one used on clock faces, and her father had used paint, and the village clock at home had been a thing of milk-white pigment and careful black. This was not pigment. The white was a sheet of porcelain, fitted into the stone with a craftsman's precision, and the numerals were not painted either. They were inlaid. They were small rectangles of a darker stone, let into the porcelain like teeth into a jaw, and they caught the last of the western light and held it.
She leaned closer. The minute hand pointed to the three. The hour hand pointed to the three. They were fixed, she could see now, by means of a small brass pin driven through the centre of each, and the pinheads had been filed smooth and gilded, so that they glinted like two small, patient eyes.
She thought of the journal. Look to the clock.
She thought of the church tower at the centre of the village, which she had been told housed the official timepiece, the one the chiming had come from, and she thought of how the chiming and the silence of this tower did not match, and of what it meant for a village to keep two hours, and to keep them apart.
She was not, she told herself, afraid. She was a clerk's daughter. She had learned to read the language of ledgers, of mortgages, of the small, careful lies men told with their signatures. She had learned to recognise the smell of a debt that had been allowed to sour. She was not a woman given to trembling at the sight of a stopped clock.
But her hand, when she drew it back from the pillar, was trembling a little, and the trembling was not of the flesh. It was in the tendons, in the small bones of the wrist, in the place where the will meets the body and sometimes, on a night like this, loses the argument.
She turned away. She looked out across the green, past the stone king, toward the lane that led back to the inn. The light was fading now in earnest, the strip of brass withdrawn from the sky, the first of the stars coming out above the rooftops with the cautious air of guests unsure of their welcome.
She heard the footstep behind her at the moment she chose to take her first step toward the lane. It was a single footfall, soft on the flags, the sound of a boot with a worn sole, and it came from the direction of the monument.
She did not turn at once. She had learned, too, that turning at the first sound gave the listener the measure of one's fright, and that there were men who took a kind of pleasure in the geometry of fear.
She finished her step. She stood still. She counted three of her own breaths, in the manner her father had taught her when she was small and the bailiffs came knocking and it fell to her to answer the door.
She turned.
The woman was standing beneath the plinth of the monument, half in shadow, half in the thin wash of starlight, and she was watching Eliza with an expression that was not, precisely, surprise. It was the look of a person who has arranged a thing in a particular order and has come to find it, on arrival, in a slightly different order, and is adjusting.
"Forgive me," Eliza said. "I did not see anyone on the green."
"You were looking at the clock," the woman said. Her voice was smooth, and low, and carried, even at that distance, with the ease of a voice accustomed to rooms larger than village greens. "Most people, when they come to the green, look at the king."
"I had heard of the clock," Eliza said. "I had not heard of the king."
"The king has been here longer," the woman said. "But the clock has the better story."
She stepped out of the shadow then, and into the light, and Eliza saw that she was not a village woman. The gown she wore was of a dark wool that caught the starlight without reflecting it, and her hands, when she drew them from her muff, were white, and still, and adorned with a single ring, a ruby, set deep in old gold. She was perhaps fifty. She was perhaps sixty. She carried her years the way a good portrait carries its varnish, with a kind of defiant polish.
"I am told," Eliza said, "that the clock has not moved for some time."
"Since the day the last of the masons died," the woman said. "Which is to say, since the day it ought to have moved, and did not. They have tried to wind it. Three men have tried. The first broke his wrist. The second fell from the ladder. The third simply went home, and did not speak of it again."
"And the hour?"
"The hour is the hour the last mason set it to," the woman said. "A quarter past three. The hour at which, by the testimony of his apprentice, he died in the tower. The hour at which, by the testimony of the village, the work was left unfinished."
Eliza looked at the clock. The clock looked back at her, with its two gilt eyes, and the porcelain face, and the patient numerals inlaid into it like teeth.
"And what," she said, "was the work?"
The woman considered her. The wind stirred a strand of grey hair across her brow, and she did not push it back.
"The clock was to strike thirteen," she said. "At the hour of his death. He had designed it. He had cut the teeth of the thirteenth hour into the great wheel, and balanced the pallet, and hung the hammer. It was to be a thing the world had never seen. A clock that counted an hour no other clock could count. A mason of Hollowmere, beating time, as it were, out of joint."
She paused. The wind went past them, carrying the smell of wet stone from the churchyard at the edge of the green.
"He did not live to hear it," she said. "The apprentice found him on the floor of the tower, with his hand upon the winding key, and the key turned, and the clock did not strike. It has not struck since. It will not strike. The thirteenth hour, my dear, is an hour that does not exist in any ledger I have ever been given to read, and I have been given a great many ledgers to read."
Eliza felt the cold go through her again, a different cold this time, a colder cold, the cold of a thing recognised.
"I am Eliza Quinn," she said. "I am the daughter of Thomas Quinn."
"Yes," the woman said. "I know who you are, Miss Quinn. I have known who you were since before you arrived. I know whose ledger you carry in your bag. I know whose debt you have come to discharge, and I know, with some precision, what it will cost you to discharge it."
She drew off her glove, and held out her hand. The ruby caught what little light was left, and burned.
"My name is Cordelia Ashworth," she said. "And I believe you have come a very long way to meet me, though you have not yet known that you have."
Eliza looked at the hand. She looked at the woman. She looked, beyond her, at the clock, frozen at a quarter past three, its hands fixed by their two gilt eyes, holding the hour that had been left to them, refusing to let it go.
She took the hand. The flesh was cool, and dry, and steady.
"Then you will understand," Eliza said, "when I tell you that I have not come to meet you. I have come to see the clock. And the clock has kept its counsel for thirty years. I do not see why you should imagine it will keep it any longer on my account."
The wind rose. The stars came out, one by one, as though the sky were a great clock, and the hands of it were turning, and the hour, at last, was moving.
Cordelia Ashworth smiled. It was a small smile, and a cold one, and it did not touch her eyes.
"Then we shall see, Miss Quinn," she said. "We shall see."