He’d risen to fame when he’d built a clockwork fortune-teller that, when a certain lever was pulled, would move its polished wooden hand over your palm and predict your future. A merchant brought his daughter to the shop before her wedding. The fortune-teller had clicked and clanked, opened its wooden jaws, and said, “You will find great love and more gold than you could wish for.” He bought the clever automaton for his beloved child as a wedding gift, and everyone who attended the celebration agreed they’d never seen a bride and groom more in love. But the ship his daughter boarded to begin her honeymoon was so heavily weighted with goods and coin that it sank at the first breath of a storm and all were lost to the uncaring sea. When the news reached the merchant, he remembered the automaton’s clever words and, drunk on misery and brandy, smashed the thing to bits with his own fists. His servants found him lying amid the wreckage the next day, still weeping, shirt stained, knuckles bloody. But the sad tale drew new customers to the clocksmith’s door in search of the marvelous and uncanny.
In his shop, they found many wonders: tawny golden lions who hunted mechanical gazelles across a velvet veldt; a garden of enamel flowers pollinated by jeweled hummingbirds that whirred and buzzed on wires so thin they truly seemed to be flying; a rotating calendar clock—kept on the highest shelf away from curious young eyes—populated by human automata who committed different ghastly murders every month. On the first of January, a duel was fought on an icy field, puffs of smoke emerging from the combatants’ pistols with tinny pops. In February, a man climbed atop his wife to strangle her as her lover cowered beneath the rumpled bed. And so on.
Despite his accomplishments, Droessen was still a young man, and he became a coveted party guest among the merchant families who served as his customers. He dressed well, conversed pleasantly, and always brought charming gifts to his hosts. It was true that when he entered a room, the people there would find themselves shifting uneasily on their feet, rubbing their arms at the sudden chill, wondering if a door somewhere needed closing. Yet, somehow, it only made him more interesting. Without that sense of the unwholesome, Droessen might have been a pathetic character, a grown man fiddling with what were little more than elaborate toys. Instead, there was much talk of his smart velvet coat and his nimble white fingers. Mamas clutched their handkerchiefs and daughters blushed when he was near.
Every winter, the Zelverhauses, a wealthy family of tea merchants, hosted the clocksmith at their country home for the parties and entertainments given during the week of Nachtspel. The house itself was a model of merchant restraint, all dark wood, stolid brick, and hard lines. But it was perfectly situated by a lake that froze early for skating, and it was effusive in its comforts, with fireplaces alight in each room to keep the house always snug and merry, and every floor polished to the warm syrup shine of a glazed cake.
From the very first year Droessen visited the house by the lake, troubling rumors followed. During his first stay, the Zelverhauses’ neighbors, the De Kloets, wore mourning through Nachtspel and into the new year after Elise De Kloet gave birth to a baby composed entirely of dandelion fluff. When a careless maid opened a window, it blew away at the first gust. The next year, one of the Zelverhaus cousins had a bloom of little gray mushrooms break out over her forehead, and a boy visiting from Lij claimed he’d woken to find a single wing jutting from between his shoulder blades, but that it had burned to ash when he’d passed through a sunbeam in the hall.
Were these strange occurrences linked to the clocksmith? No one could be certain, but they whispered about it.
“That young man Droessen is a charming fellow, but most unusual, and peculiarities seem to follow him,” a woman once said to Althea Zelverhaus.
“Most unusual,” Althea agreed, but she knew that Droessen accepted few invitations, and that this woman with her fussy lace collar could only hope Droessen might someday make an appearance at one of her salons. So Althea smiled, repeated, “Most unusual indeed,” and left it at that.
It all seemed harmless at the time.
Droessen was not just unusual in his talents or his habits, but also in his greed. He had spent his life tinkering in corners, bowing and scraping to the merchants who graced his door, and he had learned early that talent was not enough. When he realized customers preferred to buy from handsome faces, he had his hair cut into a fashionable style and made himself a set of even white teeth so fine that they sometimes fooled even him. When he saw the respect his patrons gave military men, he’d worn a painful brace to correct his stoop and had the shoulders of his jackets padded so that he could affect a soldier’s upright bearing. Because he’d discerned that popularity was dependent upon demand, he made sure to refuse two out of every three invitations.
But he grew tired of eating cold dinners in his darkened shop, the doors locked and lights turned off to create the illusion that he was somewhere having fun. He wanted a grand house instead of a dank rented room. He wanted money for his inventions. He never wanted to have to say yes sir, no sir, right away sir again. So he would have to marry well, but whom could he make his bride? The young women of marriageable age who came to his shop with their fathers and flirted with him at parties saw him as a bit of danger. They would never take a mere tradesman seriously as a prospect. No, he needed a girl, still malleable, one that he could make admire him.
Clara Zelverhaus was not yet twelve then, lovely enough, rich enough, and of just the dreamy disposition he required. He would learn her wants and wishes. He would deliver them to her, and in time, she would come to love him for it. Or so he thought. Droessen knew the properties of every kind of wood and paint and lacquer; he could finesse the gears of a clock until they spun with silent precision. And yet, though he could smile readily, charm easily, and play the part of a gentleman, he had never truly understood people or the workings of their steady-running but inconstant hearts.
The house by the lake bustled with excitement whenever the clocksmith arrived, and the children were always first to greet him when he emerged from his coach. They would trail after the house servants who unloaded his luggage, the trunks and chests invariably filled with splendid objects—dolls in the costumes of the Komedie Brute, music boxes, rows of cannons, even a grand castle to defend.
Though young Frederik liked to stage long battles, he would eventually grow bored—no matter how finely made the tiny armaments and troops—and put on his coat to go find mischief in the snow. Clara was different. To Droessen’s dismay, she ignored the elaborate clockworks and mechanicals he brought her, and spared only a small smile for the exquisite replica of a Ravkan palace with its carved wooden arches and domes plated in real gold. But she could play for hour upon hour with the dolls he made, vanishing into the house and emerging only when the dinner bell had been rung more than once, and her mother had been forced to shout up the stairs and down every corridor for Clara to cease her make-believe and come be fed.
So over many long nights in his workshop, Droessen made for her an elegant, pale-eyed nutcracker with a bright blue coat and shiny black boots, a wicked little bayonet tucked into one blocky fist.
“You must tell him all your secrets,” said Droessen as he placed the doll in Clara’s arms, “and he will keep them safe for you.”