Today's Reading
"You have a project already. I'll take this one." Popping off the back again, my fingers immediately searched for the maker's mark, and found no less than four. Each were carved subtly into the movement, three outside and one within, a quiet claim to this exquisite workmanship and all its modifications.
I tightened the coil spring and felt about for anything loose. I gently urged a few bolts and pinions off the movement and felt the problem immediately—oil coated every inch of the verge escapement as if someone had drenched the poor thing every time the mechanics slowed. Now it had thickened and nothing moved.
Foolish people.
Fine flakes of rust had gathered along the pins, and the delicate fusee chain had snapped. I worked out the rust and glanced through the slit in the curtain.
Speaking of foolish people. What did that woman want? Why not simply write again? Her letters had always been sent along from my address in Compton because she'd believed I still resided there with Father—that's how little she knew of my life. Yet now she'd gone to the trouble of connecting the post office box from that foolish ad with our shop, and she'd come to see me directly.
But why?
Clocks made sense. People seldom did. Perhaps if I could pry off the backs of them—people, that is—and peer into their gears, everything would become clear.
I reassembled the movement, secured the back, and threw a passing wink at Aunt Lottie as I carried it back out to the waiting customer. "A simple repair, Mr. Morgan. You'll need to leave it with us for the night."
"Did Mr. Lane say that?"
"Just a bit of oil stopping up the pinions, and a broken chain."
He frowned. "My clock doesn't have pinions."
A tight smile. "It'll be ready for you tomorrow morning, if that is acceptable."
He eyed me suspiciously but took his leave after placing his card on the glass countertop. Exhaling, I peered below the hanging pendulums and weights. My heart thrummed a rapid beat. Had she gone?
There—a swish of fabric, and a veil. And that box. She was still here. "Might I help you, ma'am?"
She lifted her gaze, clutching that box.
But then the door banged open again, bell whipping against the wood frame, my heart hitting my ribs. In strode a bull of a man in a finely tailored suit. A bull who had the right of way on whatever path he trod. He charged up to the counter and planted both palms on the glass, gaze roving over my face. "You're the one." Low and quiet, his voice set off warning bells. "The chit who placed the advert in the personals."
I watched him, eyebrows raised, gaze roving to the rear of the store. The guest had turned her back on the new customer, veil down, blending expertly into the shadows.
Not so very missing, this woman. Not just now.
"Answer me, girl. You're the one looking for Lady Gwendolyn Forrester of Manchester, are you not?"
I looked him up and down. "Sorry. You couldn't pass for her." I slid an open clock toward me—the two-hundred-year—old, gilt-metal-mounted Joseph Antram table clock in ebony veneer that I actually wasn't meant to touch—and threaded out the tiny screws.
Two other men marched in and took up posts behind him, arms folded over their chests.
I couldn't have known that Aunt Lottie's reasons for forbidding me to find my mother were decent ones. My mother, the shooting starlet, as we called her, was actually quite famous—or infamous, rather, posing as a lady and driving up debts, blackmailing married lovers, and leaving a wake of destruction in her path. I had learned all that from placing that advert during a moment of weakness less than a fortnight ago.
The letters that had trickled into my hired post office box offered a rather sorry picture of the woman who was not here to tell the story herself. And now she had brought that infamous life directly to our shop. Along with a passel of wronged men, it would seem.
Aunt Lottie would be hopping mad. If this man didn't strike me dead with his glare first.
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