Sir Thomas More by Hals Holbein (Accessed via Wikipedia ) During lockdown, we had Time. Remember that? I was in my probationary year of teaching: almost certainly among the most exhausting years for any profession. All my time had been taken up with school work, and I regularly stayed at school until after 6pm, having arrived there at eight in the morning. Now, children, this is not sustainable and, very soon, I decided I didn’t like working where I was. Then I realised that I didn’t like teaching at all. But, in fact, neither was particularly true: I just needed to be true to myself and to say no, which would give me the ability to manage my work/life balance in a more appropriate way. What does this have to do with historical fiction, I hear you say? Well, during March 2020, we went into lockdown and suddenly I went from working ten-hour-days to ten-hour-weeks. I met up with my class on Google Meet, I put work up for them on a meticulously designed Google Classroom, but I just h...
Today, I'm super-excited to be sharing a short story from the fabulous Gothic Horror writer, Judith Crow. Here is her Poe-inspired story, The Clockmaker...
The Clockmaker
I cannot sleep. I cannot allow myself to sleep. In sleep, Death may strike with as little awareness as warning, and I find myself refusing to accept unawareness at the moment of demise. Yet, I wish I were afforded others’ natural ignorance of the timing of death. In the names of heaven and hell: I both curse and envy them for their ignorance!
I, like others, started my final day with little to suggest it may be my last. I was in rude health when I arrived in London twelve days earlier, and today I took the time to call upon Sir Benjamin Pelham, a man I had served alongside in India. Twenty years ago, his interest in science and invention had lured him back to the English universities, while I had stayed abroad to make my fortune overseeing the collapse and redistribution of the once-mighty East India Company.
Sitting in the entrance hall and waiting for Pelham to return from his daily work, I found myself enchanted by a beautiful marble clock just inside the drawing room. I could not see its face, but the marble of its body was coloured by deep purple veins. Once, I heard it chime the hour: a clear, musical note which seemed to sing in perfect harmony with itself.
When Sir Benjamin arrived later, we sat together, and I informed him of the many things which had occupied me since last we had met. He did not immediately discuss his own research, but I assumed he was like many other inventors: fiercely guarding their intellectual property until a patent had been established. However, as I was leaving, I passed the beautiful marble clock and looked at it properly for the first time.
“Your clock has stopped, Pelham,” I pointed out.
Sir Benjamin shook his head. “Not stopped,” he said with a smile. “Only waiting.”
I now regret my decision to request an explanation.
“It is the project to which I have committed my past fifteen years. I have named it the Donne Clock. ‘Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee’? Familiar to a Cambridge man such as yourself, surely?”
“I know the work,” I replied. “But what has Donne to do with this clock?”
Sir Benjamin smiled again.
“This clock is my genius,” he said, gazing at it with the paternal pride of a patriarch admiring their eldest son upon his wedding day. “I have created here a clock which does not tell the time, but an implement which betrays the time. The bell will never strike, save for when it senses that the final twelve hours of a nearby man are upon him.”
I cannot begin to describe the horror I felt as he went on: each syllable of his explanation condemning me to the grave. I wait now, as no man has a right to wait, knowing that Death is coming.
Knowing the exact day, hour, and minute of death.
The bell has tolled for me.
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