I Set to Work

I shook my head.

'Mistress, I don't understand. Why might you have to leave the shop? It belongs to you now, doesn't it? Haven't you inherited it from Master James?'

Mistress James slowly shook her head. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Elias grinning at my ignorance. It seemed that he knew more than I did.

'If the shop had belonged to Master James then I would have inherited it from him. But it did not belong to him. It belongs to the Middlewich Trustee Bank.'

'I'm sorry, Mistress, but I still don't understand. Why didn't Master James own the shop? His father owned it before him, didn't he?'

'Yes, he did. But Master James has - had - a younger brother.'

'I didn't know that! I've never heard of him.'

'He is not spoken of.' Oh. I thought for a moment.

'But wait. Master James was the elder brother?'

'Yes'

'So why didn't he inherit the shop when his father died?'

'He did inherit it. But not long afterwards his brother got into trouble of an… an ecclesiastical nature. It required a considerable gift to the Church before they would consent for him to be forgiven his sins, which were manifold and grave.'

'What sort of trouble was it?' Mistress James frowned and Elias grinned again, enjoying my discomfiture. 'I'm sorry, Mistress. It's none of my business.'

'No, Peter, it is not. At any rate, the only way that Master James could raise the money to save his brother from the close attentions of an Inquisitor of the Consistorial Court of Discipline was to mortgage the shop to the Middlewich Trustee Bank. That mortgage was repayable over a twenty-five year period, of which five years still remain to run.'

'How much...?'

'Fifty pounds a month. Six hundred pounds a year.'

I sat back in my chair, gobsmacked again for the second time in a week. Six hundred pounds a year! That was a terrible financial burden for the shop to bear.

'Won't the bank give us a breathing space until the shop gets going properly again?'

'We have already missed four payments, totalling two hundred pounds. The bank have said that they will foreclose on us at the end of the month if we do not immediately make payment to them of two of the outstanding instalments. I have their letter here.' Mistress James indicated a buff envelope lying on the desk.

'What about the Guild? Won't they help?'

Mistress stood up, her eyes filled with anger. 'The house of James and James does not beg for charity!'

'But Master paid his Guild subscriptions every month, didn't he? They ought to support us now!'

'We will not beg!' The matter was evidently closed.

'What I propose to do is this. I will write to the bank, letting them know that the business is once more upon a firm footing and viable. I will ask their forbearance in extending the term of the mortgage by a year and rescheduling our payments.'

'Will they do that, Mistress?'

'They may, if they are inclined to believe my assurance that the shop is a real going concern. They must be convinced of that, or they will give us no more time. They will repossess the premises and turn us all out.' Mistress James looked straight into my eyes and I suddenly understood exactly what it was that she was saying. 'Will you help us Peter? Viola?'

'I…' She cut me short.

'You must understand this: you have not yet attained your Mastery. The name of the shop will remain James and James for the foreseeable future. You would be an employee of the business, not a partner in it. Furthermore, I would be unable to pay you regular wages or provide you with any more recompense than your basic bed and board.'

'Mistress, you honour me with your candour.'

That was certainly true. This was the deal she was offering me: that I must give up my position at Moore's in Brummagem, where I was under the guidance of two Masters of the Guild and could expect, if all went well, to gain my own Mastery within ten years. In exchange for the sacrifice of my professional career she could offer me little more than a resumption of my old status of employee, with no clear path to attaining my full Guild Membership nor of ever being able to launch an enterprise of my own. I had always dreamed that one day, when I was a Master myself, Master James would take me into partnership with him and that the sign above the door would read James and Joyce. Now I did not see how that could ever be possible. In addition, Mistress James and I had never been friendly; had hardly spoken to one another except when necessary. I did not know if I would be able to work for her.

It was the worst offer I had ever received and I made my choice with no hesitation whatsoever.

'Yes Mistress, I will do all I can to help,' I said, and Viola kissed me as I said it.

This was how it was all to be arranged: Elias Cholmondley would resume his position behind the counter in the shop. I did not like this, but there was little alternative – we could not afford to advertise for a new shop assistant and there was the extra benefit that his presence there would give a good impression to the public of Business As Usual. Mistress gave him a duster and a broom and told him to clean the place up. Emily would have to give up her schooling and take over Carrie's old job as maid-of-all-work. She didn't like that either. Mistress James would manage all the financial aspects. She shut herself into the office with strict orders that she was not to be disturbed and started work on the books and ledgers.

And I… I took the key from its hook in the office and walked down the steep stairs to the ground floor. There it was; the workshop. The place where I had learned just about everything I knew about clocks and instruments, and the world of work. I would have to use that knowledge now, and my skills, to earn the money that was needed to keep us all afloat. I had no idea of how easy or difficult that would turn out to be. I suspected that I was facing the biggest challenge of my life.

I turned the key in the lock. It grated slightly as if the wards had not been recently oiled and the barrel had become stiff with lack of use. The hinges creaked as I pushed the door open. Nobody had been into the workshop for many months; that was clear. Dusty light filtered through the windows in the walls on the kitchen, shop and passageway sides of the room.

What had I expected to find? I know what I'd dreaded – that the workshop would be dirty and disordered, with parts and tools scattered about; damaged or broken. I should have known my old master better than that. I should have trusted him. In the dim light – we had always had to use additional naphtha lamps in there, even in midsummer – I could see that the benches were immaculately tidy, and that the larger tools were all properly clipped in their correct positions on the pegboards above. I walked over to Master's old workbench and opened one of the drawers. Yes, the smaller tools were there – screwdrivers, augers, picks, spring compressors, all in the right places, all gleaming with a light sheen of preserving oil and free from rust. The workshop was pristine, perfect – just as it had been left.

It was a gift. Viola and I knew it at once. It was the last gift of Master James to me, his apprentice Peter Joyce. He'd known that I would come here after he had gone, ready to carry on with our work, and he had wanted it to be right for me. I sat on a stool – my old stool – and wept grateful tears.

'I'm glad I stayed, Master,' I whispered.

'We'll do him proud,' said Viola.

Mistress James placed an advertisement in the Oxenford Town Crier. It read:

JAMES AND JAMES

Messrs JAMES and JAMES
crave the Indulgence of
the General Public and
beg leave to inform them
that they are once more
at their Service in the
Manufacture, Repair and Upkeep
of All Kinds And Makes of
Fine Clocks and Instruments.

Our Showrooms in Shoe Lane Display
the Latest and Most Accurate
Clocks and Timepieces
for the Attention and Interest
of the Discerning Connoisseur
of Artistic Craftsmanship and
Mechanical Perfection

Elias and I worked hard all weekend, he scrubbing and polishing the shop (though I replaced the broken glass in the cabinets) and Viola and me busy in the workshop making an inventory of all the parts and metal that we had in stock. If it were at all possible, Mistress had said, I should avoid buying ready-made parts from a materials house such as Cousins'. That would be far too expensive, so I would have to make as much as I could from bar steel and brass.

That meant a lot more work for me, but I understood the reason behind it. We would be seriously strapped for cash – actually I had no idea how we were going to make enough money to pay off the bank, let alone buy in components. Or eat, for all that.

I wrote to Goodsir Moore in Vyse Street, Bromwicham, and explained what I had done, and why. I thanked him for his kindness over the past two years and begged his forgiveness for leaving at such short notice. I should say that he would have been within his rights to withhold my outstanding wages or, indeed, to take me to the County Court for breach of contract, but he did not. Instead, a few days later I received a parcel from him. It contained a letter thanking me for my contribution to the success of Moore's, a company cheque for five pounds, and my tool wallet.

That was it, then. Goodsir Moore had returned my tools to me. It was final – I could not return to Brummagem. There would be no safety net for me if James and James failed and the bank's bailiffs repossessed the property. I would be as homeless as Mistress James and Emily. I simply had to make a go of it.

I want to say a few things about the meaning and the mystery of tools, by the way, but I'll leave them until later on in the story.

So, on Monday morning we opened for business. Elias turned the card around in the door, switched on the anbaric lights, and took up his position behind the counter where he had a little stool to sit on. The shop, I am sorry to say, was terribly bare and empty. The existing stock of timepieces and instruments had been sold off, one by one, during Master's illness and had not been replaced, so that apart from the long case clock by the door and a couple of ugly Lombard bracket clocks in the counter cabinets there was nothing for us to sell. One thing, though – I had raised the grandfather clock's weights and set it going, so at least there was one movement running in the place and one set of chimes sounding the hours, half-hours and quarter-hours. The shop was alive again at last, if not yet in full health.

I sat by my bench in the workshop, ready to be summoned to the front if a customer required my expert advice or assistance. Mistress was busy in the office, writing to suppliers and past customers. She was assuring the first group that we would, very soon, be able to settle our accounts with them. As for our customers; she was assuring them that we were very much in business and ready to fulfil their orders and, in a few cases, pressing for payment on outstanding goods and services already provided. That was a forlorn hope, and we knew it. We could not afford to employ debt collectors.

Emily sat forlornly in the kitchen, listlessly chopping vegetables for our midday meal. She missed her school friends dreadfully and felt, more than any of us, the loss of our position in the town. We all missed Master James, of course, but what good would it have done to say so? A lot, you say, and you're right. Perhaps we were still too close to it all then, and not ready to talk about him. I wish we had, though.

At half-past ten, our first customer walked though the front door. I overheard him speaking to Elias and could not help noticing the disappointment in his voice when he learned that his stopped eight-day carriage clock would not be attended to by Master James, but by his erstwhile apprentice Mister Joyce.

'I wanted the organ grinder, not the monkey,' he said.

'Mister Joyce is very experienced,' said Elias smoothly. I could not see his face.

'Hmmm. Well, see that he does a good job. That clock belonged to my mother.'

'I'll make sure of it. Thank you, sir.' The door closed with a jingle of its bell.

'Here you are, Mister Joyce,' said Elias, handing me a nasty cheaply-made lacquered-brass clock which its owner probably thought was a priceless family heirloom. 'See what you can do with that.'

'Much obliged, Elias.'

'I must say,' said Elias, lingering in the workshop doorway and fondling his rabbit-daemon, 'that I've observed that a little politeness goes a very long way. Wouldn't you agree, Mister Joyce?'

'Yes, Mister Cholmondley. Thank you, Mister Cholmondley.'

'Peter,' Viola said later, as I contemplated the jumble of mass-produced stamped-out clock components that lay in a pile on my bench. 'Don't let him get to you.'

'I won't. Honestly! Now, fetch me the oiler, would you? The clear one, on the left of the rack.'

Viola scurried across the bench, got me the lubricator, and carefully held each arbor in place for me as I reassembled the clock's movement, reminding me to drop the least possible amount of oil onto the pivots.

'What a useful daemon you are!'

'I do my best.'

'I know.'

'I know you know.'

'Good.'

I was home, and we knew it.