Ten Minutes Fast

I came to Wetherby Grange on the last Tuesday in October, with my rods tied in a bundle across my shoulder and my brushes wrapped in sacking. I had buried my wife, Ellen, in the spring, and since then I had taken any work that paid in coin and asked no conversation of me. The lane was rutted and the gates stood open on one hinge. Every window on the east front had its shutter drawn, and the gravel before the porch was printed with cart wheels where the dealers had already been.

Mr Fennimore, the auctioneer, met me in the hall. He was a broad man in a grey waistcoat, and he held a pencil behind his ear and a printed catalogue against his chest. Each of the lots had a paper ticket tied to it with string: the hall stand, the barometer, the brass fender, the very coal scuttle by the door.

"Cardew, is it? Maurice Cardew?" He laughed. "We share a Christian name, then. Every flue in the house, mind. Twenty-two of them. The buyers will want to light fires and see them draw before they bid on a single grate."

I asked him where I should begin, and he took me up the back stair to the nursery, which was at the top of the house under the slates. The room smelled of damp plaster and mouse. There was a rocking horse with no tail, a narrow iron bed stripped to its webbing, and against the far wall a longcase clock in a brass-bound case, taller than I was. Its brass face was painted with a ship and a moon, and its pendulum swung behind a little pane of glass with a slow, dry knock.

"That one runs ten minutes fast," said Mr Fennimore, and laughed again. "Always has, they tell me. Nobody's ever mended it. It won't fetch a shilling."

He went down to his ledgers. I stood a long while before the clock. I had no money for fine things, but I had my fee coming, and I thought a clock that no one wanted might go for the price of a pint and a pie. I saw it in the corner of my room in Tanner's Row. I heard it knocking there of a night, where there was otherwise nothing to hear. Before I had even unpacked a brush, I had counted it mine.

I spread my sheets across the hearth and weighted them with bricks from the yard. I screwed the first rod into the head of the brush and pushed it up into the dark, then the second rod, then the third, twisting as I went. Soot came down in a long sigh and settled on the sheet. It was old soot, dry as snuff, and it smelled of nothing at all.

When I drew the brush back out and knelt to fold the cloth, I stopped.

The soot had come down in flat cakes, the way it does when it has lain undisturbed for many years. Pressed into every cake was the shape of a small hand, fingers spread, thumb splayed outward. There were dozens of them, and each one was turned so that the fingers pointed up the flue.

Behind me, the clock struck the quarter, ten minutes before its time.

• • •

I did not call out. I folded the sheet with the hands inside it, corner over corner, and laid it by the fender, and I told myself that soot will take any shape a tired man cares to give it. Then I went into the hearth myself.

The nursery flue was wide at the throat, wider than any I had swept in Lambeth or Southwark, wide enough for a grown man to stand in with his head bent. I lit my stub of candle and stood up into it. The brick was cold and furred. Above the smoke-shelf it narrowed, and there, at the height of my raised hand, I found a ledge where a brick had been left out of the course. Something lay in the gap. I closed my fingers on it and brought it down into the light.

It was a tin whistle, a penny toy, dented along one side as though it had been bitten. The mouthpiece was black. When I turned it over, a little soot ran out of the finger-holes and onto my wrist.

"You found his whistle, then."

The porter stood in the doorway with a lot ticket in one hand and a pot of paste in the other. He was a lad of eighteen or nineteen, Harold Pennington by name, all elbows, with a clean collar he was plainly proud of. He came in and looked at the toy in my palm without touching it.

"Whose whistle?" I said.

"The boy's. Old Mr Lark's climbing boy, the first master here. Everyone in the village knows it." He set down his paste. "Mrs Lark was lying sick in this very room, in eighteen fifty-one, and Lark sent the boy up to clear the stack so she'd have a fire. And the boy got up top and sat there whistling, the way they did, to say he'd come out. Only she died while he was whistling. Lark said he'd whistled her soul up the chimney. So he had the hearth bricked over that same night, with the boy still inside."

While he talked, I looked past him at the clock. I had looked at it when I came in from the yard, and I had marked then that it showed four minutes to four, and I had marked too that it was right, for I had set my own watch by the church at Hollins Cross that morning. I had thought nothing of it. A clock that strikes early may still be right by chance.

"They opened it again when Lark was buried," said Pennington. "Found nothing. Not so much as a button."

The minute hand moved. It did not tick. It slid, smoothly, as if a finger behind the dial were pushing it, past the hour and on, and it stopped at ten past four.

I took out my watch. The case was warm from my waistcoat. Four o'clock exactly. I held it to my ear and heard it going.

"It's fast," said Pennington, following my eyes. "Mr Fennimore told you."

"It isn't fast," I said. "It was right a moment since."

He laughed, not unkindly, and picked up his paste again. But I knew it then, as surely as I knew the weight of the whistle in my hand. That clock had never once been wrong. For seventy years it had been telling the hour of something that had not happened yet, and it had stood here in the dark nursery, waiting for the rest of us to catch it up.

Ten minutes. I closed my hand round the whistle and found that the black on the mouthpiece was wet.

• • •

I wiped my thumb across it and the thumb came away black. I did not look to see whether the black was soot or something thinner. I put the whistle in my waistcoat pocket, against the watch, and I went down the back stairs with my brushes still in the nursery grate.

Fennimore was in the long gallery with his ledger open on a sideboard, chalking lot numbers onto the feet of chairs. He had his spectacles pushed up onto his forehead and a stub of chalk behind one ear.

"Done already, Cardew?"

"I'm done," I said. "I'll take what's owed for the kitchens and the east wing, and you can find another man for the nursery."

He chalked a seven onto a walnut leg before he answered. "You'll take nothing. The terms were every flue in the house. The buyers want the stacks sound before they'll bid on the fabric." He blew the chalk dust off his fingers. "Every flue, Mr Cardew. Not every flue but one."

"There's a fault in it. The brick is rotten."

"Then clear it and say so in your note, and I'll put it in the catalogue." He looked at me over the ledger. "And the clock goes under the hammer at five, if you still fancy it. I'll not hold it back for a man who walked off the job."

I stood there with my hands hanging. I could smell my own clothes, the sour char of forty years of other men's fires. I thought of the clock's brass face in the nursery, and of the shilling I had already counted out in my head, and of the rent on my room in Tanner's Row. I said nothing. I turned and went back up the stairs, and I knew, even as I climbed them, that I had been meant to turn.

Pennington had gone to the window with his paste pot and was smoothing a lot ticket onto the rocking horse. He did not look round. The clock stood where it had stood. Ten past four. My watch said six minutes past.

I knelt on the hearthstone and put my head and shoulders into the flue. The cold came down onto my neck. I took the whistle out of my pocket and held it in front of my face, though I could not see it, and I told myself plainly that it was a penny toy, tin and solder, and that a man of fifty-three does not go in fear of a toy. I put it to my lips and blew.

It made a thin, cracked note, very short. The note went up the stack and did not come back down. I listened for the echo off the brick and there was none. Somewhere above me, a long way above, a little grit pattered loose and fell on my cheek.

"Mr Cardew?" said Pennington behind me. "Was that you?"

I fumbled for my watch and tilted its face to the grey light coming past my shoulder. Nine minutes past four.

The brick above me groaned like a door on a dry hinge. Then the whole throat of the chimney came down onto my back, brick and mortar and a hundredweight of soot, and drove me flat into the grate. I could not breathe. I could not see. The weight lay on me from my shoulders to my hips, and in the black, close against my ear, something small began to scratch at the brick, working its way down.

• • •

The scratching came nearer. It was a patient sound, like a fingernail worked into mortar, and it stopped an inch from my ear. Then something took hold of my ankles.

It was Pennington. I knew his grip, a grown man's hand, broad and warm through my stockings. I knew his voice too, which kept saying, "Hold on, Mr Cardew, hold on," as if I could do anything else. He set his boots against the fender and pulled. The bricks dragged at my coat. My chin scraped across the iron bars of the grate and I felt the skin tear. He pulled again, grunting, and I came out of the chimney all at once in a slide of soot and broken mortar. I lay on the hearthstones with my mouth full of grit.

I coughed until I could see. The first thing I saw was the clock.

It stood against the far wall in the grey light from the window. Its brass face was dull with dust, and its hands had not moved. Ten past four. When I dragged my watch out, it said nine minutes past and some seconds more. I was out. I was breathing. The flue had come down and spat me out alive, and the clock had not so much as twitched.

I understood it then, lying there. I will set it down plainly, because I have had a long while since to think about it. The house had never wanted me. The fall was not meant to kill me. It was meant to bring someone else to the hearth.

Pennington was kneeling over me with his face streaked black and his hand held out. "Can you stand, sir? Take my wrist. Come on, now." I took it. His wrist was thin, and the pulse jumped in it under my thumb. He was nineteen, perhaps twenty. That afternoon he had told me his mother kept a cookshop in Leeds.

Behind his shoulder the mouth of the chimney stood open and black, wider than before. Out of the black came two hands.

They were small, no bigger than my palm. They were black to the wrist with old soot, with long fingers and broken nails, and they came down slowly, feeling along the brick. I watched them as closely as I had watched the minute hand that afternoon. They found the back of Pennington's collar and closed on it.

At first he did not feel them. He was still pulling me up and saying, "That's it, that's it," and I was half on my feet with my weight on his arm.

I let go of his wrist.

I do not say I pushed him. I opened my hand, that is all. Then I stepped back across the boards to the clock and laid my palm flat against the warm brass of its case. I could feel the pendulum through it, steady and unhurried. Pennington stared at me with his mouth open. Then the hands pulled, and he went over backwards into the grate.

His heels drummed on the hearthstone. His fingers caught the edge of the mantel and slipped off. He did not scream, because there was no room for it. The chimney took him in by the shoulders, then the chest, then the hips. I heard his knees knock on the brick as he went up. Above the knocking, very faint and very high, someone began to whistle.

• • •

The whistling went on for perhaps three notes, thin and pleased, and then it stopped. Something shifted in the flue, a slow scrape of cloth on brick, and a little dry soot came pattering down onto the hearthstones. Then the first boot fell. It was a hobnailed boot with the lace still tied, and it struck the iron of the grate and lay on its side. I counted. I do not know why I counted, but I reached seven before the second one came down and landed on top of the first, toe to heel, as neatly as if a man had set them out to be blacked.

Under my palm the clock gave a small click, like a latch dropping into its keep. I looked up. The minute hand had gone back. It stood a hair past the twelve, at one minute after four, and my own watch, when I drew it out on its chain, said the same. The pendulum swung on as before. Nothing in the room had moved except the boots and the hands of the clock.

I went to the washstand and poured what water was left in the jug over my hands. It came off grey, then black, and I wiped my fingers on my trousers and found they were black still.

Fennimore came up the nursery stairs at a quarter past by the clock. He had his catalogue under his arm and a pencil behind his ear, and he stopped in the doorway with his nose wrinkled at the soot.

"Where's Pennington got to? I've two men waiting on the dining chairs."

"He never came up," I said.

"He told Mrs Garside he was coming up to you."

"Then he told her wrong. I've been alone with this flue the whole hour, and it's come down on me, as you can see." I pointed at the heap of brick in the grate. The boots lay under it, and only one heel showed, and it might have been any old thing left behind by a careless house.

Fennimore sucked his teeth and wrote something in his catalogue. "The flue's your affair. I'll not pay for half a job."

"Then pay me nothing," I said. "Give me the clock instead. I'll bid you a shilling for it now, and save you the trouble of five o'clock."

He laughed at that, the same laugh as in the morning, and looked at the clock as though it had insulted him. "A shilling. You're welcome to it, Cardew, and the dust inside it."

I paid him out of my waistcoat pocket and he went down the stairs calling for Pennington.

The carter brought it to my lodgings in Tanner's Row after dark, wrapped in a horse blanket, and it took the two of us to stand it against the wall by my bed. When he had gone I lit the candle and opened the case. The key hung inside on a hook. I fitted it to the winding square and turned it, eight turns, and each turn left a black thumbprint on the brass face. I had washed my hands three times on the road home. I shut the little glass door and sat on the bed with my boots off.

The clock said nine minutes past ten. My watch said the same. I watched the minute hand, and it moved to ten past, and then it moved again, though the pendulum had not swung, and the room was silent, and it crept on over the black marks of my fingers until it stopped, and stood, at a quarter past.