The garden had been her mother's and was now mostly the cat's. There was a bench under the quince tree, a tap that dripped in winter, and a sundial that had never been accurate, which Margit had long ago decided was its charm. She found Mr Pemberton sitting on the sundial, which he had never done before.
He was, she was almost certain, slightly younger. Nothing dramatic: the grey around his muzzle had thinned, his coat lay flatter, and when she picked him up he had the weight of the cat he had been a few years earlier. She carried him inside and set him on the bench and looked at the clock, whose second hand went on turning the wrong way.
That evening she wrote in her notebook: the clock keeps time; it is the garden that does not. She underlined it, then crossed the underline out, because she did not yet know whether it was an observation or a complaint.
The code word on this page is cinder-2583.
The Clockmaker's Garden | Chapter one | Chapter two | Chapter three | Chapter four | Chapter five