It was not Thomas' father who scorned him, but his mother. Perhaps even at his young age, she sensed he was not made like other children—he had no interest in pulling a girl's hair nor the desire to get insufferably dirty, choosing instead to spend his hours in quiet solitude, making up clever games and cleverer stories. He had little tolerance for the bullying that inevitably came from others his age. And when pulled from his isolation, he couldn't hold his temper, striking out and howling and "scowling like the next coming," as his mother often said.
"There is a wrong about you," she said. "A look. There, can't you see his face, Theodore? He thinks himself so much better than me!"
"I can't imagine that's the case, my dear," Thomas' father said. When she turned with a huff to the pot on the stove, he winked at Thomas.
Thomas did not often smile, but this provoked such an occasion to arise. He tried to hide it with his hands, but could not do the same for his eyes. His father had been teaching him to wink, but he was not quite so talented yet and didn't want to reveal his efforts until they were perfect.
Thomas' father was a quiet man to match his son. He had pepper in his hair and beard, coloring entirely unlike that of his child, and a thick mustache that did not entirely cover his good humor. He was highly observant; he could tell what a man in the market was going to buy with only a glance, and he relayed his observations to Thomas in the shop as he was bent over the workings of some timepiece. "See there," he would say, "that man is buying an engagement ring for someone who is not his wife." Or perhaps, "That woman there, she has forgotten what ingredients she needs to buy for her planned dinner. Poor thing, I hope she recalls them soon."
Beneath the worktable, Thomas curled up beside his father's legs and listened to the sounds of tiny pings and clicks—noises of the trade, of long hours spent winding and bending metal and replacing glass. Whenever his father finished a watch, he would dangle it down beside Thomas' cheek and ask, "Can you hear its workings?"
Many years later, Thomas would still be able to hear the precise ticks embossed against his ear even in his sleep. Time, moving forward with the assurance no one human could afford.
His father understood him. At least, Thomas liked to imagine so—he'd never had the opportunity to ask before his father died in his sleep of something more natural than naught. But he instilled in Thomas a simple idea: that all workings were different, that every timepiece held a secret that made it beautiful, and no matter how often one was thrown away, someone else might come to pick you back up and wear you proudly on their arm. That to want something, to want it badly, was not a bad quality.
Before he left for Downton, and as nervous as he'd ever been, Thomas told his father: "I don't know that anyone will understand me there."
His father tangled fingers in his hair, as gentle with his son as his lifelong trade. Thomas looked up at him, but could not read his face.
"Oh Thomas," his father said, "nobody understands you here. Don't you worry. Sooner or later, someone will pry you open."
"Oh, that's nice," said Thomas. He pretended box his father's ears and then laughed, holding him close, smelling on him cigar smoke and metal filings and home, as close as he'd ever come to it.
(Years later: the clockmaker is dead and Thomas lays awake at night, listening to his heartbeat clipped and wound in his chest. He's been twisted up many times, but no one yet has been able to open him. He waits.)