Word spread quickly in a village the size of Oakhaven.
By Friday morning, Samuel had received three notes through the workshop letterbox — one from the Alderman formally confirming the repair contract was complete, one from Mrs. Holloway at the flower shop reporting that her husband had heard the tower bell at noon and cried at his desk, and one from his nephew Ned, written in the large, affectionate handwriting of someone who had never quite mastered the art of the short letter, expressing delight and also asking if Samuel had eaten recently.
Samuel replied to all three with postcards, which he wrote in his large careful script at the kitchen table while Copper ate his evening meal.
The clock had been running for four days without adjustment. Samuel had been back to the tower twice since the initial repair — once on Wednesday morning to check the beat consistency and make a fine pendulum regulation correction, and once on Thursday afternoon because he had genuinely wanted to hear the mechanism running at speed in the still cold of the tower chamber.
The movement was performing within twenty seconds per week — better than the specification, better in fact than the clock had performed in the last decade before the chain had failed in 1996. The new pallets were the key: the worn impulse faces had been stealing energy from the pendulum for years, forcing it to run with less amplitude than it was designed for, which had cascaded into timing irregularities.
Clean pallets, properly fitted, had given the pendulum its full designed arc.
He had documented the entire repair in his log book with careful notes on every dimension and every oil application. The log book entry was now thirty-two pages long, the longest single repair record in his forty years of practice.
On Friday, he opened the workshop as normal at eight o'clock, and found that he had seven enquiries waiting in a folder that Ned had left on the doorstep — three for repair work, two from people who had read a short piece in the county newsletter about the tower clock restoration, and two from museums further afield who had heard his name from other restorers.
He sat at the workbench and read them all through in his peripheral vision, slowly and carefully.
Copper lay at his feet, tail moving at its steady sixty-beat-per-minute rhythm.
Samuel picked up his pen and began to write the first reply.
He was not fixed. The macular degeneration was progressing on schedule, the way these things progressed, and the day would come when even the large-format peripheral workaround would not be sufficient. He knew this the way he knew the service intervals of a fusee clock — it was a fact of the mechanism, not an opinion.
But the work in front of him was real and present and demanding, and there was a spaniel under his bench who had helped him find a method through an apparently impossible problem.
He would deal with the next problem when it arrived.
For now, he would answer his correspondence.
Ned arrived on Saturday morning with a bag of groceries and the news that three people in the village had stopped him on his way through to ask whether his uncle had really fixed the tower clock. He reported this with some pride.
Samuel made them both scrambled eggs and they ate at the kitchen table while Copper watched the groceries with focused interest. Ned asked if he could come and hear the noon bell strike the following Friday, and Samuel said yes.
Ned said he would bring his daughter, who was four years old and had never heard a tower clock strike the hour. Samuel said that seemed like a good reason to come.
The museum enquiries were the interesting ones. Both came from institutions that had been referred to him by a restorer colleague in Bristol, and both involved unusual movements — one a mid-19th century turret clock with a gravity escapement, one a marine chronometer with a detent escapement that had been in private hands for eighty years without service.
Both would be technically complex. Both were exactly the kind of problem he had always enjoyed.
He wrote acceptance letters to both and made tea.
Outside, the tower bell struck three o'clock, clear and steady, just as it should.
The tower clock chimed four o'clock across the village as he sealed the envelope.
He sealed the envelopes and put them in the post tray by the door.