The Emperor of All Things

2

Master Mephistopheles



A SECTION OF panelling scythed inwards, and a liveried servant glided into the room like a spectre. Quare, who had just lowered himself gingerly onto the settee – his leg was troubling him – sprang up with an oath upon catching sight of the man.

‘For God’s sake,’ he cried in irritation, ‘must you skulk about like some damned red Indian?’ No sooner were the words out of his mouth than he regretted them; the real source of his anger was the Old Wolf, not this blameless – and to all appearances bloodless – factotum … but it was too late now; he would not apologize to a servant.

‘Very good, sir,’ the man intoned as if incapable of taking offence. He inclined his head towards the open door through which he had entered the room. ‘Master Magnus will see you now.’

Quare strode past him into a closet bare of all amenities save a thin wooden railing that circled the enclosed space at waist height, two wall sconces with burning candles caged in glass, and a tasselled bell pull hanging in one corner, beside the door. He did not understand why the master would want to meet him in such close confines. Mystified, he turned to address the servant, who, meanwhile, had stepped in behind him and pulled the door shut. Before Quare could get a word out, the man, with no warning or explanation, tugged the bell pull.

The closet jerked and slid sideways, throwing Quare into the servant. Almost immediately, it changed direction like a swerving carriage, and he was flung away, his shoulder striking hard against the opposite wall. ‘What in God’s name …!’

‘Your pardon, sir.’

‘The room is moving!’

‘Indeed, sir.’

Grasping the railing with both hands, Quare shot the imperturbable servant an exasperated glance but knew better than to press him further: the guild hall servants could make life miserable for journeymen if they chose – as, no doubt, he was being reminded after his impolitic outburst of a moment ago. Nor, to be honest, was he capable of speech. Indeed, it was all he could do to keep from screaming, for the closet now abandoned the horizontal for the vertical, dropping like a stone.

It was a common conceit among the journeymen of the Worshipful Company that the guild hall was itself a great clock, and that to step through its doors was not merely to enter into its workings but to become a part of them, incorporated into a vast and intricate – if maddeningly obscure – design; Quare suddenly felt that this was no mere metaphor but the literal truth, and that he stood now inside the plunging weight of what must be the guild hall’s remontoir. Though he was well acquainted with the functioning of this device, which provided motive force to the escapement of a timepiece, his mechanical knowledge was no comfort. On the contrary, as in a nightmare, the familiar was turned strange and inimical. His heart was racing, his reason overcome by a vertiginous terror that shamed him but could not be dispelled by any appeal to reason. The tight dimensions of the closet only made things worse, as if he had been locked, still alive, in a coffin that devils were dragging down to hell. Quare squeezed his eyes shut and glued his hands to the railing.

At last there came a loud clicking noise, followed by a drawn-out growl that made him wince and brace in expectation of a shattering impact. The closet began to shudder, but it also began to slow, and the more it slowed, the less it shuddered, until, mercifully, it came to rest. Quare let out a breath he hadn’t been aware of holding and dared to open his eyes.

The door through which he had entered the closet was open again, and beyond it, like a vision of some dishevelled paradise, lay the private study of Master Magnus, though there was no sign of the master himself. Nor did Quare wait for one. He bolted from the room like a prisoner escaping his cell. Once outside, he turned to examine the torture chamber that had conveyed him here, but the servant was already pulling the door closed.

‘Wait, damn you—’

Too late; the door snicked shut, fitting so snugly into the wall that there was no sign of its ever having been there at all; nor was there a knob or handle of any sort to pull it open again.

Quare laid his hand against the wall. He felt a steady vibration through his palm, an industrious humming that suggested a hive of bees. Intrigued, he placed his ear where his hand had been and heard the muted music of gears and pulleys – a pleasing harmony nothing at all like the cacophony of screeches and rattles that had attended his arrival. Why, the impudent rogue, Quare thought, straightening up. The servant had interfered somehow with the proper working of this device, whatever it was, in order to teach him a lesson. Such cavalier treatment went well beyond the pale; he would have to devise a suitable revenge.

But this was not the time. Sighing, he turned about. As ever, Master Magnus’s study was in a state of disorder bordering on chaos. Books and papers covered every available surface, including the floor and the tiled fireplace across the room, in whose capacious interior bound volumes and loose papers were piled as if in readiness for an auto-da-fé. In fact, with candles as likely to be found balanced on stacks of manuscripts as stowed in sconces and candelabra, it was a wonder the master hadn’t burned the entire guild hall to the ground by now. On one wall, behind the mound of debris that Quare knew from previous visits marked the master’s desk, was a map of Europe reflecting the boundaries drawn in the second Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, which had ended the War of the Austrian Succession ten years before, in 1748 – boundaries the current conflict had rendered irrelevant. The map’s surface bristled with pins that had variously coloured ribbons attached, giving the appearance of a half-unravelled tapestry; these indicated the locations of regulators dispatched across the Channel as well as other spies and agents in the master’s wide-flung network of informants. The wall opposite was given over to bookshelves that stretched from floor to ceiling; so packed were the books in this space that Quare doubted a mouse could have wriggled between them. Master Magnus had charge of the guild library, and he treated its contents as his personal property. Though the other masters grumbled at this presumption, the Old Wolf tolerated it for reasons beyond Quare’s understanding.

Quare, picking up a candle along the way, trod a careful path across the room to the shelves, still favouring his wounded leg, and let his eyes rove over the books assembled there. They were not organized by title, author, date of publication, or any other discernible bibliographical system; they weren’t even all upright, with spines facing outward for ease of inspection, but jammed higgledy-piggledy wherever there was space, like fieldstones in a wall. It bothered Quare to see books treated like stones; there were treasures in the library of the Worshipful Company that could be found nowhere else in the world, ancient horological texts long forgotten or believed irretrievably lost, as well as more recent publications and private correspondence by some of the greatest minds of Europe, the Orient, and the New World. Master Magnus respected knowledge, indeed had an insatiable appetite for it, but he was less than scrupulous about books, like a connoisseur of wine who cared nothing for the bottles it came in. Why, there, wedged into a space that would not have easily admitted a volume half its size, was the Horologium Oscillatorium of Huyghens! Quare reached for it.

‘I have always maintained, if one wishes to discover the true character of a man, it is but necessary to set him loose in a library and let him think himself unobserved.’

Quare turned towards the voice, a smile on his lips. ‘Your pardon, Master Magnus. I did not see you.’

‘Few do,’ came the reply, ‘unless I wish to be seen.’

Across the room, beside the desk, a vigorous-looking elderly man as slender and hooked as a sickle stood hunched over a pair of stout black walking sticks. The pronounced curvature of his spine forced him to look up at Quare, although if he could have stood unbowed he would have been Quare’s equal in height. His dark breeches were finely tailored but could not disguise how twisted were the legs within, and from the cut of his blocky shoes it seemed more likely that they contained pig’s trotters than human feet. He had a pronounced humpback, a nose that echoed his posture in miniature, and a wild if thinning mane of white hair that framed his craggy face as if the area around his head were subject to violent crosswinds. A pair of round, dark-tinged spectacles reflected the flames of the candles scattered about the room, giving Quare the disconcerting impression of being stared at by a creature with eyes of fire. Little wonder that fearful, malicious apprentices had bestowed the nickname Master Mephistopheles upon him. Twining in and out of the space between his legs and the two sticks were a number of cats that, like the man, seemed to have materialized out of thin air. The notion that this person could make himself inconspicuous or unseen would have been laughable were it not for the fact that Quare had ample evidence of its truth.

‘The moving closet, master,’ he burst out, navigating his way past piled books and manuscripts on which certain of the cats – there seemed to be more of the animals by the second – had taken up residence; some ignored him, others regarded him through slitted eyes with something like contempt, a few hissed at his passage. ‘Is it your invention? How does it work?’

Master Theophilus Magnus bared white teeth in the feral grimace that served him for a smile. Those teeth were the only uncrooked thing about him. ‘You like that, eh? Just a little something I threw together. Employs the same principle as the gravity escapement. Saves me the trouble of climbing stairs. I call it the “stair-master”.’

‘Ingenious,’ said Quare.

Master Magnus tossed his head dismissively. ‘A curiosity, nothing more. Of use only to cripples like me.’

‘What is the name of the man who operated it?’

‘Ha ha! Did the rascal give you a scare? Ruffled your dignity, did he? I’ll speak to the fellow, never fear. Now, my boy, take a seat and tell me how things went with Sir Thaddeus. Don’t worry – here of all places, in the very bowels of the guild hall, you may speak freely. This is my domain.’

Quare could not find a chair that wasn’t covered with books or cats, or both, so remained standing. ‘As well – that is to say as badly – as one could have hoped. I am suspended from the Most Secret and Exalted Order of Regulators.’

‘Capital,’ said Master Magnus, flashing his bright grimace again. ‘The Old Wolf took the bait, eh?’

‘I begged him to reconsider, but he refused.’

‘Of course he did. Predictable as a pendulum. And the clock? Any suspicions there?’

‘Not that I could see. He identified the improvement to the escapement and dismissed it out of hand, just as you said he would. But I confess, I don’t understand the need for this obfuscation.’

‘It is obedience that I require from you, Mr Quare, not understanding,’ Master Magnus replied.

‘But surely you don’t suspect the Old Wolf of treason!’

‘I suspect everyone, yourself included. That is the task appointed to me by Mr Pitt and His Majesty. Your task is to follow my orders without tedious questions and objections. And I must say, my boy, you did well with Sir Thaddeus. Very well indeed. Should your horological talents ever desert you, I advise you to take up the stage.’ Raising one stick in a swordsman’s flourish, he repeated: ‘Now, sit, sir – take the weight off that leg of yours.’

As Quare sank dejectedly into the nearest chair, a calico cat leapt clear with a yowl. ‘If I were on the stage, at least my efforts would be applauded.’

‘Have I not applauded them? You must be satisfied with an audience of one, my boy. Such is a regulator’s lot.’

‘But thanks to you, I am no longer a regulator.’

‘Pishposh. Regardless of what Sir Thaddeus and the rest of the Order may believe, you are a regulator until I say otherwise.’

‘That is small consolation, sir, for the public humiliation. News travels fast within these walls – and beyond them. Soon all of London will think me disgraced.’

‘Hardly all. All of London does not know of our Most Secret Order’s existence. Even the masters of the Worshipful Company know little enough of our business, and the majority of journeymen still less. We are a subject of rumour and speculation, not knowledge. But perhaps you deserve a little disgrace, sir. You let a rare opportunity slip. That grey-clad popinjay has robbed us of too many prizes.’

‘But—’

‘You had Grimalkin at your mercy,’ Master Magnus interrupted sternly. ‘With only the moon as witness. Sir Thaddeus may be wrong about any number of things when it comes to the management of this guild, but he is right to be angry when a regulator fails in the clear requirements of his duty.’

‘Master, as I told you when I placed the clock into your hands last night, I was concerned about my wound and feared the rogue’s blade was poisoned. There was no time to question or dispatch him.’

‘I know you, Mr Quare. I trained you. You are no milksop to flinch from what needs doing. So do not think to pull the wool over these eyes. There is more to your rooftop encounter with Grimalkin than you have divulged to me. I knew it at once, as soon as you began to spin your preposterous tale, but I decided to wait until this morning, after your interview with Sir Thaddeus, to prise the truth out of you. I knew it would be easier for you to play your part with the Old Wolf if you believed your story had taken me in. So I pretended to believe that poppycock about a poisoned blade, and I pretended to be relieved when my surgeon determined the wound was not poisoned after all. That you should attempt to deceive me was surprising, I confess – but I had other priorities than ferreting out the truth just then. Namely, the clock you had placed into my hands, the secrets of which could not be trusted to anyone else but me, not even Sir Thaddeus. That is why I rehearsed you in a tale more preposterous still, a tale of gross ineptitude conducted under the flag of honour, a tale apt to be so infuriating to a man of Sir Thaddeus’s saturnine temperament that he would overlook any inconsistencies in the timepiece before him and focus instead on the inadequacies of the man who had recovered it.’

‘I did as you asked, and look what it has cost me. Do I not deserve to know why?’

‘Why? Because it suits my purposes to have the Old Wolf and his partisans believe you dismissed from the Order and out of my favour. But do not attempt to divert me, Mr Quare. You would do well to remember that I am not so credulous as Sir Thaddeus. No, not by a long shot. So do not try my patience with any more flimsy fictions, sir – or you will find me as temperate as the Lisbon earthquake. Now, if you please, the truth. What really happened between you and Grimalkin on that rooftop?’

Quare swallowed, his mouth gone dry. ‘I fear you will not believe me.’

‘I will believe the truth, when I hear it.’

‘Will you hold it in confidence?’

‘Why, damn your impudence!’ Master Magnus slammed one of his sticks hard against the floor, putting a passel of cats to flight. ‘I will not parley with you! If you would remain a regulator, then speak. But understand this – one way or another, I will learn the truth. I have other devices at my disposal, devices every bit as ingenious as the stair-master … though much less pleasant to ride upon, I assure you.’

At this, Quare realized that the servant had been following Master Magnus’s orders in conveying him here so roughly. The master had foreseen this moment from the first and had planned accordingly; truly, he had a better chance of trouncing the great Philidor across a chessboard than of winning a battle of wits with Master Theophilus Magnus, who had built the Most Secret and Exalted Order of Regulators into a secret service said to rival that of Pitt himself. Yet the knowledge that he was almost certainly overmatched served only to stiffen his spine. ‘I do not take kindly to threats,’ he said, glowering.

‘Think of it rather as a reminder,’ Master Magnus answered.

‘A reminder of what?’

‘Of the oath you swore upon becoming a journeyman of this company. Why, one would think you were trying to protect Grimalkin!’

‘It’s not that. It’s … Well, it’s …’

‘Out with it, sir!’

Quare sighed. There was no help for it. ‘He … Grimalkin, that is … is a woman.’

For a moment, the only sound was the purring of the cats. Quare had always found a cat’s purr soothing, but there was a peculiar quality about a roomful of purring cats that was, he decided, not very soothing at all. Master Magnus, meanwhile, studied him from behind those dark lenses filled with flickering flames. That wasn’t too soothing, either. Despite his twisted legs, or rather because of them, the master possessed unusual upper-body strength – Quare had seen him lift, with minimal effort, gear assemblies for tower clocks that two men would have struggled to raise – and to watch him now, propped upon his sticks, ominously silent, was to see not a crippled man but a coiled spring. ‘A woman,’ he said at last. ‘Grimalkin a woman, you say?’

‘There can be no doubt of it.’

‘Grimalkin, who has outfought the deadliest swordsmen in Europe and outthought their masters, not once but again and again, that Grimalkin, the spy supreme, the paragon of thieves, is a female.’

‘It’s hard to believe, I know. But it’s true. I saw her with my own eyes. That’s why I couldn’t— You said the moon was the only witness, master. But God was watching, too. How could I slay a woman in cold blood?’

Master Magnus grunted as if he might be prepared to offer some practical suggestions. But instead he said, ‘Tell me everything that happened from the moment you first saw Grimalkin. Leave nothing out, Mr Quare, no matter how insignificant it may seem.’

Quare related how he had seen Grimalkin emerge, wreathed in smoke, from the attic skylight of Lord Wichcote’s house, then shadowed the grey-clad figure from rooftop to rooftop under the gibbous moon, crept close enough to deliver a knockout blow, more by luck than skill, and at the cost of a painful gash to his leg, and then lifted the grey mask only to find himself gazing at a face unmistakably female. Apart from the lifting of the mask, and what he had found beneath it, it was all as he had related to Master Magnus the previous night, while his leg was being tended to.

‘Describe this woman,’ Master Magnus instructed with sceptical interest.

‘It was not a face I had seen before,’ Quare replied. ‘Youngish, I would say.’

‘Attractive?’

‘I was too taken aback to notice.’

‘Were you? In my experience, regardless of the circumstances, the attractiveness of a young female is among the few things a young male may be depended upon to notice.’

Quare felt himself blushing. ‘The light was poor, and one side of her face was bruised and bleeding,’ he explained.

‘Did you move her? Staunch the bleeding?’

‘No, master.’

‘You did not … touch her at all?’

Quare bristled. ‘What do you mean?’

Master Magnus raised a bushy white eyebrow above the gold frames of his spectacles. ‘You would not be the first to take advantage of such an opportunity. Alone with a helpless young woman – a woman, moreover, who by her wanton actions might be said to have forfeited the protections a civilized society accords the weaker sex.’

‘Do you think I would spare a woman’s life only to violate that which is more precious than life?’

‘Fine sentiments, sir. They do you credit, I’m sure. Yet I cannot help but notice that you did not attempt to aid her. A strange sort of chivalry, that.’

‘I …’

‘No matter. Surely you questioned the woman once she had regained consciousness.’

Quare started as a cat – the same calico he had evicted earlier – leapt into his lap. He stroked the animal, grateful for the distraction. ‘Er, no. In truth, I was worried that her blade had been poisoned. You will grant, master, that poison is a woman’s weapon.’

At this, Master Magnus gave a stiff nod, as though compelled against his will to acknowledge the point.

Encouraged, Quare went on. ‘I thought it best to return the timepiece to you as quickly as possible – before the poison took effect or any accomplices came to Grimalkin’s aid. I was loath to lose the prize so soon after having won it.’

Master Magnus chuckled. ‘I do not mean to denigrate your bravery and resourcefulness, my boy. But even you must realize how unlikely – inconceivable, rather – it is that a regulator of your limited experience could take a seasoned agent like Grimalkin by surprise. No, sir, no. That alone proves – were the idea itself not absurd on its face – that the woman you overcame on the rooftop was not Grimalkin, but an imposter.’

‘An imposter! But she stole the clock from Lord Wichcote – and, by the sound of it, crossed blades with more than one adversary to do so!’

‘Pishposh. By your own testimony, you did not see what went on in that attic. For all you know, the woman was aided by an accomplished swordsman, who sacrificed his life – or at least his liberty – in order to facilitate her escape. That seems more likely, does it not, than a lone woman besting multiple swordsmen? No doubt the woman and her accomplice believed their chances of robbing Lord Wichcote would be improved if one of them dressed as the notorious Grimalkin. Such a stratagem would also enable the woman to conceal her gender beneath a mask – thus giving Lord Wichcote the mistaken impression that he was facing two men.’

‘But I saw no evidence of an accomplice!’

‘Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.’

‘If only you had seen the speed and skill with which she moved, master. She very nearly skewered me! How do you explain that?’

‘You believed you were facing Grimalkin – and believing made it so. Preconceptions colour perceptions, my boy.’

‘What of your preconceptions, then? Because you cannot entertain the possibility of a female Grimalkin, you spin hypotheses out of whole cloth!’

‘No, sir, no,’ the master repeated, giving the floor another thump with his stick. ‘Why, it were as likely for me to dance a jig atop this desk as for Grimalkin to be a woman! Put the notion from your mind. That was not Grimalkin you fought. And a good thing, too, else you would not have survived, much less come back in triumph, bearing the prize.’

Quare was not in a mood to be mollified. ‘If not Grimalkin, then who?’

‘That is precisely the question, Mr Quare. And you may rest assured that it is a question I mean to get to the bottom of. Not just the woman’s identity – and that of her accomplice, should he be proved to exist – but the identity of the person or persons who engaged them to steal that timepiece from Lord Wichcote. I do not believe they were common criminals. Far from it. They were in the service of England’s enemies, of that I have no doubt.’

‘Then perhaps they are allied with Grimalkin in some way.’

‘That is indeed a troubling possibility.’ Master Magnus adopted a severe expression. ‘You were wrong to try and keep this from me, Mr Quare, as you were wrong not to question the woman posing as Grimalkin. But I will forgive these wrongs, just this once, because you did bring the clock to me, after all, and played your part to perfection with the Old Wolf. Yet I must say, I find your account, even in its amended form, an odd one – so odd, in fact, that I cannot help but wonder if you are holding something back even now.’

‘I’ve told you everything, master – I swear it!’

‘We shall see,’ he answered, and his expression turned more ominous still. ‘You were not my first choice for this assignment, Mr Quare. Had a more seasoned regulator been available, I would have sent him. But with the French, Russians, and Austrians moving against us on the Continent, as well as in Scotland and in Ireland, to say nothing of the Colonies, I’ve had to dispatch my best men far and wide, and you – to be blunt – were simply the best of what remained. I was, I confess, somewhat apprehensive as to your chances. Nor has your success in securing the timepiece against all odds laid those apprehensions to rest – on the contrary, in some respects what you have just told me has exacerbated them. If you are to continue as my special agent, I must have your solemn oath that you are prepared to harden your heart, put conscience aside, and act in the best interests of your country and your guild as circumstances require. Can you do that, Mr Quare? Because I assure you, if you cannot, I can find another man who will.’

‘I am your man,’ Quare said, anxious to assuage the master’s doubts. It had not only been from a desire to draw closer to the mysteries of time that he had accepted Master Magnus’s invitation to become a regulator; the master had promised to utilize his intelligence network on Quare’s behalf, to uncover the identity of his father. He did not wish to jeopardize that promise now. ‘You have my word.’

‘Hmm … Perhaps there is someone I can assign to help you,’ Master Magnus said. ‘Someone with more experience …’

‘I thought all the experienced agents were on assignment,’ Quare said. ‘Anyway, I prefer to work alone.’

‘Your preferences do not concern me,’ the master answered. ‘There are regulators no longer on active duty but still competent enough to support you in the field.’

‘To spy on me, you mean.’

This the master did not trouble to deny. ‘Do we have an understanding, Mr Quare?’

‘It appears I have no choice.’

‘Quite.’

‘Then, yes, I agree, of course. Who will you assign to me?’

‘I must think on it.’ And with that, the storm clouds lifted from the master’s expression, and he looked younger, almost boyish – as if the flames dancing in his spectacles had burned away half a lifetime in an instant. The change did not make his appearance any more regular or pleasing to behold, yet it made Quare smile even so, for he had never yet witnessed this transformation in Master Magnus without being rewarded by some astonishing glimpse into the man’s fertile mind: a hint of some heretofore veiled mystery of time, or a wondrous invention like the stair-master, which put horological principles to unexpected use.

‘Now, my boy,’ said Master Magnus, a mischievous lilt to his voice, his stature seeming to grow straighter as he spoke, ‘would you care to have a look at the timepiece you have risked – and sacrificed – so much to procure?’