on account,' he said, his narrow eyes locking once more on to mine. 'For your work to be done yet.'
Then he was gone, the shop door slamming behind him, and the clatter of hooves on cobbles and a hansom cab's wheels fading into the street's constant murmur.
'Lord, I told you he were a mad one, didn't I? Just didn't I!'
I looked around and saw Creff watching from the stairway, one hand again clutching the dull kitchenknife. Without looking at the coin that the Brown Leather Man had handed me – the flash of silver and its familiar weight assured me of its being a crown – I slipped it into my waistcoat pocket. 'There's a bit of mess in the workroom,' I said. 'Some blood on the floor-'
Creff's eyes widened as though inflated by his sharp intake of breath.
'An accident,' I assured him. 'Nothing but a broken watch spring. Would you be so kind as to clean it up?'
A few moments later, as I stood behind the counter examining the device left behind by my morning's visitor, with an odd premonitory unease staying my hand from lifting the lid, a shout came from the workroom. Creff appeared in the passageway, wadded rag in hand.
'There's no blood here.' He sounded annoyed, as if having discovered a jest played on him. 'It's all wet, right enough, but there's no blood.'
'You must be mistaken,' I said. 'In the back, by my father's old things.'
'See for yourself, then,'
I followed him down the steps. In the workroom, by the brass wall of my father's creations, where I had seen the jagged edge of metal tear the brown skin, I knelt down on the stone floor. Creff held the lantern above, illuminating the spattered wetness from my client's wound.
Even before I touched it, a faint scent traced across my nostrils, evoking memories of childhood: the aunt who raised me, and our visits to the seashore at Margate. I dabbed a finger at one of the spots. The fluid on my fingertip was perfectly clear, rather than the thick scarlet I had expected. Curious, I tasted it.
Not blood, but brine. As I knelt upon a stone floor in the heart of London, memories of sand and wheeling gulls deepened, unlocked by the sharp, vivid tang of sea water.
2
I have returned from my regular morning perambulation. Long acquaintance with my father's devices, and the eliminative functions of a dog grown old even before he became my companion in travail and peril, have made my habits as rigidly timed as those mechanical figures that parade in and out of the faces of certain Bavarian clock towers.
In a smoke-darkened courtyard branching off my route, a group of children in tattered smocks, bare feet as black as the street grime they skipped upon, sang and played a simple hand-clapping game. The dog barked, as though to join in their shrill, innocent glee, but a chill settled around my own heart as I made out the words that accompanied their criss-crossing dirty arms and slapping palms.
Georgie's fiddle
Georgie's clock,
Georgie sets him in the dock;
With his bow
And ladies low,
Georgie's fiddle and clock!
The children ran off, laughing and shouting rude gibes at the man who gazed after them with stricken expression. Painful memories, evoked by the childish song, marched behind my creased brow as, dog at heel, I retraced my steps homeward. The game's jingling rhymes were, no doubt, a decaying echo of those street ballads – complete unto infamous detail! – that first sprang up when my affairs came under the eye of public attention. I recalled the horrid evening, when I, thinking I had at last been returned to safety and anonymity, stopped at the perimeter of a crowd assembled to listen to an itinerant singer. Within minutes, I had realised that, to the tune of 'Hail, Smiling Morn,' a bawdy account of my recent perils was being related to the audience. Above their heads a coloured board had swayed on the end of a pole, with an artful caricature of my own face leering at maidens swooning to my supposed violin-playing; one ladylike hand had been depicted by the artist as trembling to touch the exaggerated clock-winding key into which a private section of my anatomy had been transformed. The sight of this villainous depiction in the hands of the balladeer's accomplice had staggered me backwards; the nearest faces had turned towards me and had spotted the resemblance between me and the demon fiddler on the placard; across dizzy-heaving streets I had been forced to flee before a general hubbub could arise. Shortly after, I had decamped to my new residence and hidey-hole, in a less populous district where my alleged crimes might go unnoticed against the backdrop of the inhabitants' grey squalor.
Having returned to my desk and pen, the dog once more at his somnolent station by the coal-grate, I strive to banish the singing, mocking voices from my thoughts. To no avail: they form a constant obbligato to the actual words and tones I seek to conjure from the past.
The day on which the Brown Leather Man first made an appearance in my life would have remained memorable for that alone. That he should be followed by other visitors, who would prove to be equally significant, illustrates that principle best described as the Superfluity of Events.
My puzzlement at the morning's caller and the commission he had given me circulated through my thoughts for the balance of the day. A fit of pique had been engendered in Creff by my failure to heed his dire warnings about the 'Ethiope' or, perhaps, by the same's obstinate refusal to actually murder me. The lack of his willing assistance left me unable to do more than carry the mahogany casket, weighty device inside, from the shop counter to the workroom bench. Under the lamp, the intricate brass assemblage seemed as intimidating as before; I left it for the next day, when my resources – and Creff – might be better marshalled.
No further custom came that day. It seemed increasingly likely that the Brown Leather Man's device would have to be the salvation of my accounts. The coin he had deposited as partial payment weighed heavy in my waistcoat as I pulled the shutters against the evening's approaching darkness.
As I was about to extinguish the shop brackets, a knock came upon the door. I lifted the shade and peered through the glass at the barely discernible figure beyond. The weight and fine tailoring of the cloak revealed the person's gentlemanly status. Before I could speak, he rapped again on the glass with the silver head of his cane. 'Come on, come on,' he called in a slightly coarse accent, unplaceable to me. 'Jesus H. Christ,' I heard him whisper to another figure behind him. 'Sure gotta deal with a lot of dim bulbs around here…'
The unfamiliar inflection and incomprehensible terms I attributed then to foreign or modish affectation. My reclusive habits kept me apart from those cant phrases 'What a shocking bad hat!' and the like – that flourish on everyone's tongue for a season, to be replaced by something equally foolish. That this gentleman had time for such frivolity bespoke money, and the urge to spend it; I unlocked the door and bade him enter.
He swept in with magnificent carriage, the ebony stick planted in sharp arrogance with each step. The cloak was worn with Byronic panache; the waistcoat had been embroidered with gilt thread far beyond economy or taste. His hawkish, faintly pocked countenance was surmounted by spectacles of dark blue glass, hiding his eyes, although the only illumination on the street had been the yellow, mist-shrouded glow of the corner gas lamp. He made no motion to remove the spectacles, but examined me through them as though bending forward to the lens of a microscope.
His companion draped herself on his arm, one hand resting in the crook of his elbow. I had only a moment to note her fair, somewhat sharp-nosed beauty; the gaze she levelled at me from under her dark lashes drove my own away in confusion, while the gentleman's bark turned me on my heel towards him.
'You're Dower?' He lifted his cane to point at me with its silver tip.
