The new escapement pallets arrived on Monday packed in a wooden box with a layer of chamois leather. The machinist in Shrewsbury had done his usual excellent work — the impulse faces were ground to a mirror polish, the pallet arms precisely matched to the dimensions Samuel had sent in his specification letter.
Samuel held them up to the workshop light and examined them in his peripheral vision. Clear, clean geometry. Sharp corners on the impulse angles. No tooling marks on the locking faces.
He placed them on the leather mat and reached for the oil bottle.
The next four days were consumed by the movement work: cleaning out the gummy lubricant from every pivot hole using a sequence of thread-cleaning and fresh pivot oil application, resurfacing the pivot holes that had developed shallow scoring, checking and correcting the gear end-shake throughout the train. He worked with his hands and his fingers and the touch-knowledge that forty years had laid down in the muscles of his hands.
Copper lay on the workshop rug through these sessions, sometimes sleeping, sometimes watching with alert brown eyes. He had learned the sound of each tool by its specific acoustic character — the high tap of the hammer-and-punch, the whisper of the oil brush, the tick of the pivot gauge.
He raised his head whenever a familiar rhythm changed, which was how Samuel knew to check his own work. The dog was already functioning as a second pair of senses.
On Thursday, Samuel climbed the tower stairs again, this time carrying the new pallets in their chamois wrapper and a full set of clock oils in the leather case that had belonged to his father. Copper climbed all one hundred and forty stairs without pausing.
The pallet replacement took two hours. Samuel worked from feel, aided by the relay-loupe technique he had developed in the workshop, with Copper providing the steady chin-rest reference point that allowed him to position the lens correctly. The pallet arms seated into the anchor frame cleanly, the locking faces aligning with the escape wheel teeth in the exact geometry the specification had called for.
He hung the new weight chain on the great-wheel drum, threading it through the wall cavity, and re-attached the drive weight.
Then he gave the pendulum its first swing.
The escapement engaged with a clear, precise tick.
The escape wheel rotated.
The beat was: tick... tock... tick... tock.
Samuel counted sixty seconds on his pocket watch, not looking at the movement but listening — listening for any irregularity in the cadence, any asymmetry in the intervals between tick and tock that would indicate an uneven beat.
The movement was even.
He adjusted the pendulum length with one quarter-turn of the calibration key — a correction for the tower's altitude above sea level, which caused the pendulum to run fractionally fast. Then he set the clock hands to the correct time using the square-drive key on the dial work.
He pulled the repeating lever that activated the striking train.
High above the village, the tower bell rang once, clearly and firmly, its bronze tone rolling out across the rooftops and down the cobblestone lanes.
Copper's head turned toward the bell aperture above them.
Samuel listened until the last of the resonance had faded from the stone walls.
Then he descended the one hundred and forty stairs, one step at a time, with the dog walking patiently beside him.
The movement ran with a particular quality that Samuel had always associated with a well-fitted escapement — not just the correct cadence, but a certain crispness in the impulse, a cleanness in the way each tooth of the escape wheel transferred energy to the pendulum without wasted motion. He stood in the movement chamber for a full five minutes simply listening, Copper settled on the stone floor at his feet, both of them attending to the same sound.
Outside, a church pigeon landed on the bell frame above with a muffled thump, considered the situation briefly, and flew off again.
He gathered his tools, folded the chamois wrapper, and slid everything back into the canvas shoulder bag. Copper was already at the staircase door, looking back over his shoulder in the direction of the outside world, where the November air was cold and clean and smelled of nothing at all like clock oil.
Copper descended the first flight without looking back.
He descended the last flight in good order, Copper three steps ahead.
The movement would continue running through the winter ahead.