Danny set his mug down with a loud sigh.
“That good, is it?” Matthias asked, smiling.
Danny sloshed the golden liquid, careful not to spill any. The color inanely reminded him of Brandon’s eyes. “You taught me how to drink, remember?”
“I did, didn’t I?” Matthias laughed. “Shame on me, then. What’ll I say to your poor mother?”
“That her son is now a drunkard.” Danny drained his mug and banged it on the table. The unimpressed barmaid snatched it up. The only thing preventing Danny from being thrown out was that he was sitting with Matthias, arguably the pub’s most frequent patron.
Matthias set down his own mug, his first of the night and barely half-drunk. “Danny, I know something’s the matter.”
“The truth, then?” Matthias nodded, so Danny leaned forward in a conspiratorial manner. “I’m actually Queen Victoria. Fooled you, didn’t I?”
He snickered, but when a muscle in Matthias’s jaw feathered, Danny silenced himself.
“S’nothing much,” he mumbled to his hands, which were curled on the sticky tabletop. “Just thinking about Dad.”
The barmaid came and left. The newly filled mug of beer sat within easy reach, but Danny didn’t touch it.
“Been three years,” Matthias said, taking a sip of his own pint. “I can hardly believe it.” He shook his head slowly, blue eyes darkening.
“I suppose you haven’t heard anything more about the new tower?” Danny asked.
“It isn’t coming along the way the mechanics want it to. They say there’s something off about it. Doesn’t help that the protesters are being tetchy, demonstrating all around the construction site.”
Danny frowned. “I want to help, but the Lead won’t let me. He doesn’t believe I’m … recovered.” When Danny had approached him after installing the minute hand, he’d been rewarded with the same string of words: patient, wait, sorry.
Matthias kept his hands clutched around his mug, gaze fixed on the murky drink. He took a breath as if to speak, then let it out again.
“I know,” Danny said, finally collecting his mug. “‘Don’t despair.’ ‘It’ll come to rights, Danny.’ ‘You’re being too pessimistic, Danny.’ Well, Danny knows the truth, and he’s not an idiot.”
Matthias put a strong hand on his arm. “It’s good to be realistic. No false expectations. But don’t give up hope.”
Danny nodded and the hand slipped away. He took a sip, but found he had no desire for the drink anymore.
Matthias knew all about grief. Danny remembered when his father had sat him down and explained that he should never ask Matthias about his late wife, Alice. She had died young, just four years after their wedding, leaving Matthias to grieve for twenty more. Christopher had told his friend to take a new bride, but Matthias had stubbornly refused.
Then Matthias had been assigned to Maldon’s clock tower just over three years ago. People believed that while he was there, Matthias had fallen for a woman and lost focus of the job he was sent there to do. While distracted, he had done something irreparable to the clock—something grave enough to be fired as a mechanic and exiled from Maldon, although nobody could say what that was. A private meeting had occurred between Matthias and the Lead, where Matthias had entered the office as a mechanic and left only as a teacher.
That was the story everyone knew. The one Matthias told went a little differently.
In his version, Matthias claimed to have met the tower’s clock spirit.
He told the story the same way he told all his stories, in that slightly lilting voice, his eyes dark and turned to something distant. Danny might as well have been a child again, sitting at his side with the man’s arm across his shoulders.
“She was lovely,” Matthias would say. “And she could feel time in a way no one else could, not even me. She was time.”
Danny had grown up with the myth of clock spirits. Some claimed that each clock’s power over time manifested itself into a spirit that guarded the tower and the delicate clockwork within. Others said it was leftover power from Aetas that clung to the towers when the god died. That’s what his father believed.
Danny wanted to believe it, too, but never could. As much as he devoured stories, he always held a kernel of doubt in his pocket.
Still, superstitions were hard to snuff out. No one liked to be reminded of the mechanic in Glasgow who had fallen so in love with his tower that time reversed every time the sun set, making the day start over and over again in an endless loop. Or the mechanic in Paris who had caused a citywide disaster when time crawled almost to a stop within a one-mile radius from the tower where she had been secretly living.