January brought a new problem.
Samuel discovered it during his routine Monday opening of the workshop — a sound, barely audible above the ticking of the seventy-two clocks on the shelves, that indicated something amiss in the longcase movement he had been servicing for the Thornton family.
The movement was a fine Scottish example, circa 1790, with a deadbeat escapement and a seconds-beating pendulum. He had cleaned and oiled it in November and hung it back in its case in working order. Now it was producing a faint but distinct metallic tap at irregular intervals — the sound of a pivoting component catching something it should not.
He lifted the case door and listened with his ear six inches from the movement.
Copper appeared at his elbow and also looked into the movement case with his nose forward and his ears pricked.
The tap came again: a light, clear percussion against the inside of the case hood.
Samuel moved his torch.
The pendulum bob was fouling on the case's internal baffle board — a thin mahogany panel set into the case interior that was supposed to prevent draughts from affecting the pendulum arc. The board had swollen slightly in the January damp, moving a fraction of a millimetre into the pendulum's path.
The repair required removing the baffle board, planing two millimetres from its edge, re-sealing the surface against moisture, and re-hanging it.
A straightforward job. Forty minutes of work at most.
Except that the baffle board was fixed to the case interior with four small wooden pins, each pin set in a blind hole — meaning he could not see the pins from outside the case, only feel them. Locating them by touch in order to punch them out cleanly, without splitting the two-hundred-year-old mahogany case interior, required his hands to be positioned inside the case while his eyes needed to monitor the angle of the punch to ensure he drove it accurately on axis.
He needed to see the punch angle from inside the case, from the position of the pins, which were at the back of the lower case — a viewing angle that his remaining vision could not access directly.
He thought about it for a few minutes, then looked at Copper.
"You are going to think this is undignified," he said.
He collected a small hand-mirror from the hall bathroom and a length of bent brass wire from the workshop tool rack. He fashioned a makeshift periscope: the mirror held at the end of the wire at an angle that reflected the interior of the case back at a viewing position where his peripheral vision could read it clearly.
Copper watched this construction with an expression of polite scepticism.
"It is inelegant," Samuel agreed, "but it will work."
It did work. Each pin location was clearly reflected in the mirror. He punched them out cleanly, one by one, without touching the mahogany case interior.
He planed the baffle board on the workbench, re-sealed the edge with shellac, and re-fitted the board using new wooden pins from his stock.
The movement ran silently.
He sat back and looked at Copper.
"One problem at a time," he said. "That is all any of this requires."
The dog's tail moved at sixty beats per minute.
The longcase movement was returned to the Thornton family on a Thursday morning, running accurately and silently. Old Mr.
Thornton stood in his hallway and listened to it for a moment before saying anything. His wife came in from the kitchen and stood beside him.
They both looked at the clock. Then Mr.
Thornton said that his father had bought that movement in 1951 and he had been listening to it tick his entire life and it had never once sounded this right. Samuel thanked him, accepted a cheque, and drove back to the workshop with Copper in the passenger seat and the leather tools case on the back seat and the kind of quiet satisfaction that came from a job properly concluded.
He noted the baffle board repair in the Thornton movement service record, including the improvised periscope solution, with a brief description clear enough that any competent clockmaker could reproduce the method if the same problem recurred. Documentation was courtesy to whoever came after him.
He filed the completed service record in the Thornton folder and returned the folder to its shelf.
The file was complete. He put it away.
He made tea and considered the next entry in his service schedule.