The Chemistry of Tears (15 page)

If voltaic cell meant a battery (and I confirmed it did) then it seemed anachronistic. But of course it wasn’t. One did not seek science fiction from Henry Brandling.

Carl, according to Henry’s account, laid the batteries on the road outside the inn and produced a dead mouse which he proceeded to connect to cables. The mouse leapt into the air, its eyes bulging “in astonishment,” its teeth bared to bite the unprotected neck.

Then “the Holy Child” “scampered” back across drying flax, his “instruments” inside his “sac.”

Much more than a century later the reader in Kennington Road drank her vodka icy cold. She looked away from her lonely reflection in the black glass of the kitchen and found the fleeting image of the angelic trickster arriving at the inn with a tiny “engine.” What did “engine” even mean in 1854? It is hard to visualize a motor with “one big wheel and one small” which “limps and hobbles” and goes “roaring down the road in a cloud of smoke.”

Of all these “tricks and notions” Henry’s chief concern was that they took precious time away from the manufacture of his duck.

To the grieving horologist, working daily at the Swinburne Annexe, it was very clear that, if Sumper had been a crook, he was also a highly advanced technician. It was difficult to name more than two of his contemporaries who might have devised and produced work at this sophisticated level. Presented with the obstacle of Sumper’s size and personality, Henry was more naturally disposed to accept the Arnaud version in which the clockmaker was a violent brute.

Every morning I knew this was not true.

As for Arnaud himself, my (rather inspired) guess was that he was neither a spy nor a pedlar but an itinerant silversmith whose identity was kept secret from the sponsor—to learn his true occupation would have warned Henry that a great deal more money would be extracted yet.

This was also consistent with the daily evidence in Studio #404 which revealed an exceptionally single-minded and wilful character. Sumper had clearly done whatever Sumper wished, and it was upsetting
to read the word “duck” so often in the customer’s manuscript and know that the undead creature had been, and always would be, a majestic swan—113 solid silver rings fitted in such a way as to make a long swan neck; each of these rings engraved with the pattern of swan feathers; everything photographed, measured, weighed, identified.

At my side, the Courtauld girl was immensely diligent, and she was certainly a whiz with Excel, a computer program that had always irritated me. Yet work went slowly. By myself I might have done eighty-six rings in a day and loaded and identified the JPEGs. Working with an assistant it took over two days.

I often imagined that Herr Sumper had foreseen that Amanda and I would grapple with his puzzle. He was certainly a lot more helpful to us than he had been to Henry Brandling, providing us with assembly instructions by stamping numerical coding on the rings.

“Is this damaged?” asked Amanda Snyde. “Is this a stress fracture?”

I was pleased she saw things, but although she was fresh and thirsty for knowledge, I was still looking for excuses to send her away—so I could read our emails. In truth, this was the reason our progress was so slow.

For instance, there were 122 silver leaves which would surround the automaton in a fringe or wreath. I had her take one of these leaves to Metals. There was a pretty boy down there, rather of her tribe, clean-cut and pink-cheeked who arrived each day in his father’s too-big coat.

She returned to announce the swan had been made in France.

This was twaddle, but I was very pleased as it would require another errand.

“Alas,” I said, “we happen to know it was made in Germany.”

“How do we know that?” she asked, and of course I was not going to produce Henry’s evidence.

“It has Minerva stamped on it,” she insisted. “Doesn’t that mean it was made in France?”

“Did the young man help you?”

“He seems very knowledgeable.”

I smiled at her and caused her to blush. I was pleased she liked the Metals boy with his rather posh blue-and-red striped tie. Would a boy kiss a pretty girl with a hearing aid? What a stupid question. She was a beauty.

“Yes,” I said, “but it was really made in Germany.”

“How do we know?”

“I’ll show you,” and I showed her the little mark I had found. Nothing more than an A. In truth it could be anyone’s.

“This is the mark of a silversmith named Arnaud,” I said. “His name is Huguenot, but in fact he worked in Germany.”

I should have been ashamed (even if I would later turn out to be precisely right).

“As for the Minerva, it has been stamped by the French assay office in order for it to be sold in France. There was a Paris International Exhibition in 1870. It is possible the swan was displayed there. So this is the next project for you, Amanda. Are you familiar with the British Museum?”

Of course she was. She was a gem.

It did not yet occur to me that I would miss her, or that I would be actually waiting for her return on the following afternoon. She came in at around three, dressed for her weekend with her Burberry bag and her Liberty scarf. Why do those Sloaney girls dress like that, in those awful coloured tights?

“You’re off for the weekend?” I asked when she had delivered her findings.

“My grandfather.”

“That’s nice.”

“I love him. I know that sounds rather odd, but I do.” She rather glared at me. “Do you have a place in the country?”

I had been deleting JPEGs of the green at Southwold. I did not laugh or even smile, just shook my head.

“I’m sorry about your friend.”

At first I was grateful for her intuition, and then, immediately, certain that she knew far more about me than she should.

S
INCE REMOVING THE TARPAULIN
I had lived with what the procedures minutes had inaccurately described as a chassis. It was better understood as a timber hull slathered with pitch. That it had once contained the clockwork engine was obvious, although this insight was of no use in the present exercise—our job was to restore the mechanism and mount it in and on a modern plinth.

It was irritating, therefore, to return to my workroom and find the Courtauld girl studying, not the huge feast of Sumper’s wizardry, but this nasty hull which was as attractive as a squashed hedgehog on a country lane.

Three times I had reason to physically draw her away from it, and the fourth time I snapped, “Get back to bloody work.”

In response she took my hand. “Go on, Miss Gehrig, admit you are just a little bit intrigued.”

I could have slapped her face. God knows what would have happened had not Eric barged in. As usual, he ignored my assistant. He called me Cat and commanded me to wind up the music box. He then performed a touchingly graceless vaudeville dance to the time of the melody.

“Splendid, splendid,” he said, rubbing his dry square hands together. “It is the sixteenth wonder of the world.” Then he left.

Then I had Amanda help me remove the main spring and she seemed to forget about the hull. She got oil on her expensive sweater but did not seem to care. I gave her a big lecture about wearing a dustcoat and she listened with barely concealed impatience.

“Isn’t it lovely,” she said when I had finished scolding her.

“Yes it is.”

“This is my bloody work, innit?”

The little imp. I had to smile.

The music box spring was extremely old and clearly hand-made. It was highly textured and very different to modern springs. Together we managed to get it to the bench and by then we were both very oily. Her sweater was ruined, but her face was flushed and her eyes were very bright.

This brief moment was the first time I felt alive since Matthew died. Of course I didn’t notice until later, when all the warmth had seeped away.

It was already five in the afternoon, but I pretended not to notice and we set to work on the hammer frame and thus became the first people in a century to read the rather alchemical ciphers on the bells. This was a real secret. How delicious it felt. How nice also that I did not need to ask her to set up the lights so we could have a photographic record. She had already proven herself very capable with a camera.

While she was busy I turned my attention to the barrel—although some of the pins had been replaced many were original, meaning some of the music might also be original. I rolled the barrel on carbon paper and thus produced an image which I could scan. Then with two or three clicks I sent the pattern of the pins to a lovely chap at the Museum of Mechanical Music in Utrecht who would, one day soon, play the music on a piano and send me back an MP3 file. I imagined that Herr Sumper would not be at all astonished by these wonders.

When the photography was complete it was almost six o’clock but Amanda stayed while I loaded her images and was, quite rightly, praised. Her work was very crisp and detailed.

“You know that thing,” she said at last. “The thing you don’t like me looking at.”

“Yes, Amanda.” I busied myself on the Mac, rechristening the file numbers of the swan JPEGs.

“I have been looking at it.”

“You have many more worthwhile things to study.”

“You called it a hull.”

“It doesn’t matter. It needn’t concern you.”

One might reasonably have expected an underling to hear this message, but she persisted.

“I tried to work out if it would stay afloat with the weight of the engine.”

I said nothing.

“I am hopeless at physics,” she said passionately. “Really awful.”

“Well then, that’s that.”

“But it would be rather splendid, wouldn’t it? If the imitation water of the swan had been contiguous with real water. I’m sorry. I know I am very irritating.”

Yes she was irritating.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I cannot stay away from it.”

I made no comment.

“I have done a drawing,” she said, opening up her Moleskine book.

“Amanda,” I said, “you are no longer at university. Our curiosity is not disinterested. We will not be having seminars. We are employed to do a very particular job.” But of course I looked at her damn drawing. She had shown the long staves and the double skin of timber. She had a lovely hand, extraordinarily confident for one so young, and that also was the general problem with her character.

“Black chalk,” she said. “I know that’s terribly pretentious.”

“Why?”

“I’m not Giorgione.”

I can’t say how unusual it is when you find a young conservator with this degree of will. I saw it would now be my job, not only to reconstruct the swan, but to harness all this dangerous energy.

I took the book from her and closed it.

“Do you think you might manage to write a condition report? Might that occupy your mind productively?”

I was not simply being generous to a beginner. Indeed I never doubted that I would end up writing most of it myself, but if Crafty really had a catalogue in mind, this finely detailed drawing would reveal so much more than the very best photograph.

“Please,” she said, “could I show you something now?”

Did she not understand the reckless favour I had done her? No, it seemed not, because she was back at the hull again. She was like a blow fly in a temple attracted only to a pile of shit.

“I rather think this might be dry rot.”

And yes, she was correct—here was a spot a few inches below what you might call the ridge beam, or keel. Here a scab of pitch had fallen away and thus exposed an area of grey timber.

“See.” Before I could stop her, she picked at the broken edge of pitch which came free with a lump of flaking wood.

“No!” I was shocked by the ugly noise that had come out of my mouth, torn and ragged like a gull.

“I’m sorry.” I had terrified her.

“Never mind,” I said. “Do me a favour and forget it.”

“Oh but I do mind. I mind awfully. I’ve totally screwed up.”

I looked at the poor messy beauty with her pearls and oil and saw how queer we both must look. I began to laugh. She burst into tears.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’ve hurt it. I’m sorry. Don’t laugh. You mustn’t—”

How could I not feel sorry for her? “Why don’t you fetch me that little pen light from my desk.”

“Pen?”

“It’s a tiny LED, with blue nail polish on its switch.”

She returned all black and smeary, holding out the light.

Examining the damage, it was clear that she was perfectly correct about the rot. This would be a perfect excuse to get the hull removed from her surveillance.

However, the hole was the size of a 50p coin and the LED had a tight sharp focus and when I played its very bright white light into the cavity I saw something most peculiar.

“Amanda, come here,” I said, which was very stupid of me.

“What did I do?”

“Tell me what you see.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you so much.” She took the little torch between her thumb and forefinger.

“Oh, Miss Gehrig.”

“Well?”

“It is a cube,” she said at last. “A one-inch cube. It is cornflower blue. I am good with colour,” she said rather fiercely. “I’ll check the Pantone number but I’m sure it’s cornflower blue.”