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though, as before, his eyes slid past the figures painted onto the dial, as if their flowing shapes offered no purchase for his sight.
    ‘These markings are most curious.’
    ‘Indeed,’ Master Magnus agreed. ‘What do you make of them?’
    ‘I assume they are numbers, though none that I recognize. Still, there are twelve of them, arranged in the traditional manner upon the face – what else could they be?’
    Master Magnus shrugged in a most maddening manner.
    Quare told himself that he would subject the numbers – if numbers they were – to a more rigorous inspection at some later time. They were, after all, the very least of the wonders and mysteries of what was unquestionably a masterpiece. The detail of the draconic hands was particularly well done, the filigree as fine as gilded frost, evidence of a keen eye and an exceptionally steady hand. Yet the secret of its winding eluded him, unless …
    Could the watch be self-winding? Such a timepiece was theoretically possible, and many gifted clockmakers, Master Magnus included, had sought to solve the considerable practical difficulties involved in making one. Yet as far as Quare knew, no one had succeeded, or come close to succeeding. Certainly his own efforts in that line had met with abject failure. How likely was it that some solitary genius had done it more than a century ago? He needed to open the case.
    Quare could feel Master Magnus’s probing gaze. The master was studying him as intently as he was studying the watch … and with an identical purpose: to divine his secrets. He had said he trusted no one, suspected everyone, and just because Quare was no traitor did not mean he had no secrets he wished to hide.
    Of course, Master Magnus had been correct in his suspicion that Quare had not been entirely forthcoming about his rooftop encounter with the woman – a woman whom, despite the master’s scorn, he still believed to have been the real Grimalkin and not an imposter.
    After all, she had told him so.
    She had regained consciousness while he was still marvelling at her unmasking. Master Magnus had asked if he had found her attractive, but the truth was that neither at the time nor later had he thought in such conventional terms. The woman was not beautiful but uncanny, her pale blonde hair seemingly spun out of moonlight, her skin like ivory, an exotic cast to her angled features – features streaked now with soot and grime and blood from where he had struck her – that provoked his fascination rather than his admiration. He saw a blend of races there but could not identify the mixture. She might have fallen from the moon, a handmaiden of Selene.
    She didn’t make a sound. All at once the dark pools of her eyes opened, and she regarded him with frank but calm curiosity. Such self-possession threw Quare further off his mark. It was as if their positions had been reversed, and he was the one who had been surprised and rendered helpless, his secret exposed, his prize stolen, his honour – indeed, his very life – hanging by the thread of a stranger’s mercy. He felt interrogated by her stare and drew back, as if, bound though she was, she still constituted a danger. ‘I warn you,’ he said. ‘Do not cry out.’
    She laughed softly … and, he thought, sadly; the sound sent a shiver down his spine. ‘I congratulate you, sir.’
    ‘What?’ Her voice made him think of fresh country breezes and springtime rain showers, as if he were back in his native Dorchester and not squatting upon a foul London rooftop. Her accent, like her features, was hard to place.
    ‘You have caught the great Grimalkin.’ She seemed to mock herself, and him. ‘Now, what will you do with her?’
    Quare felt drunk, or under a spell. He swallowed and attempted to marshal his wits. ‘You are my prisoner, madam. I will ask the questions.’
    She laughed again, but this time there was no sadness in it; eagerness, rather. ‘Ask, then. I am bound to answer.’
    ‘Are you really