Samuel stood at the base of the cobblestone lane that curved up toward the village square, looking at the tower of St. Crispin's Hall through the soft gauze of his narrowing central vision.
From here he could see its general shape clearly — the honey-coloured limestone facade, the four clock faces set high under the eaves, each one roughly two metres in diameter. The hands of all four faces were frozen at seventeen minutes past three, which was the exact moment in the autumn of 1996 when the driving weight chain had snapped inside the movement chamber and brought the mechanism to a halt.
A bird had built a nest in the bell frame that year. The nest was long gone, but the clock had never been restarted.
Copper sat at Samuel's heel, tracking the direction of his gaze with alert brown eyes.
"The question is not whether I can fix it," Samuel said aloud, not quite to the dog and not quite to himself. "The question is whether I can see well enough to fix it."
He had restored seventeen clocks in that tower over the decades, including two complete movement overhauls that had required dismantling and reassembling the driving gear train in the narrow chamber at the top of the one hundred and forty stone stairs. He knew the mechanism's architecture the way he knew the layout of his own workshop — by feel, by sound, by the language of mechanical systems that had become his second native tongue over fifty years.
But knowing the architecture was not the same as being able to see the hairspring coil under a loupe at arm's length.
Copper pressed against Samuel's leg as they began to walk up the cobblestones.
The village square was quiet on a Tuesday morning. The market was on Fridays. A delivery lorry was parked outside the bakery, its engine running. Mrs. Holloway from the flower shop waved to him from across the square. He lifted his hand in return.
At the base of the tower door, Samuel found the old iron key that Alderman Breck had left for him in the lockbox. He turned it in the lock — three-quarter turn right, slight lift on the handle, then a firm push. The mechanism was unchanged from 1978. Some things did not need replacing.
The interior of the tower smelled of cold stone and dry wood and the faint iron trace of old oil. The staircase was unlit. Samuel produced a torch from his jacket pocket, and Copper preceded him up the first flight of stairs, his toenails clicking on the stone in a rhythm that Samuel had long since memorized.
One flight. Rest.
Two flights. Rest. The torch caught the outline of a carved date in the stonework: 1847.
Three flights. The draught from the belfry above was cold and smelled of old timber.
At one hundred and four stairs, Samuel stopped for a longer rest, his hand on the iron rail.
"You can go ahead if you want," he told Copper.
The dog looked back at him and sat down on the stair.
"Fine," Samuel said. "We go together."
On the hundred-and-forty-first stair, the movement chamber door was exactly where it had always been — a low oak door with iron hinges, latched with a simple iron bar. Samuel lifted the bar and pushed the door open.
The movement chamber of the St. Crispin's Hall clock was a room roughly four metres by three, constructed entirely of heavy timber framing with the clock machinery occupying a central iron frame that stretched from floor to ceiling. The driving weight chain still hung slack from the great-wheel drum, its end dangling somewhere in the wall cavity below.
Samuel raised his torch and examined the movement in the way he always had — not with his eyes first, but with his ears.
He listened for any irregularity in the way the space held sound. A well-maintained clock movement changed the acoustic character of a room, absorbing and reflecting sound in specific ways. This room was as silent as a held breath.
Then he began to look, tilting the torch to throw light across the gear surfaces, watching for the characteristic dull patches where oil had dried or oxidation had taken hold.
Copper moved to the corner of the chamber and sat watching Samuel work, his eyes bright and patient in the torchlight.
Samuel locked the tower door behind them and stood for a moment in the cool of the vestibule, making his notes.