The clock took her three winters. She made the gears from a bronze that would not fatigue, cut the escapement twice because the first was a hair too eager, and polished the dial until it held the window like water. It was on the fourth morning after she first set it running that she noticed the second hand.
It was running backwards. Not fast, not slow: one second each second, precisely, in the wrong direction. She stopped the clock, took the motion work apart, found nothing out of place, put it together again, and set it going. The second hand ran backwards.
Mr Pemberton, who had been asleep on the bench, got up, stretched, and walked to the door, where he sat down and looked at her. It was, she would say later, the first time she had seen him look expectant rather than merely patient. She opened the door and he went out into the garden, and she went back to the clock.
The code word on this page is bramble-9006.
The Clockmaker's Garden | Chapter one | Chapter two | Chapter three | Chapter four | Chapter five