Abel Darkwater and Mrs Rokabye were sitting over the fire in the study. Silver was fast asleep in her bed. The great house Tanglewreck was keeping watch over its new prisoners.
At eight o’clock that evening, Sniveller the manservant had delivered fish, chips and peas and jam roly-poly pudding to Silver in the little wooden-panelled rooms that sat by side on the third floor of the house. He put down the plate, and knocked out a huge dollop of tomato sauce on the side.
‘The more you eat the bigger your feet,’ Sniveller had said, putting down the plates. ‘Eat today, gone tomorrow.’
‘Are you talking to me or someone else?’ said Silver.
‘I don’t know who and neither do you. Ignorance is a closer friend than knowledge.’
‘Why is this house full of clocks?’ asked Silver.
‘Why is the sea full of fish?’ replied Sniveller.
‘Why do your trousers only come down as far as your knees?’
‘But my legs come down as far as my feet.’
‘But you aren’t wearing any socks or shoes,’ said Silver.
‘It’s after eight o’clock. No shoes or socks after eight o’clock. Wouldn’t want me to run away, would you?’
‘Would you run away if you were wearing socks and shoes?’
‘Oh, I would, if it was past eight o’clock. Yes, I would, everybody knows that. Now eat your supper and go to sleep. Tails and heads in the bed. Which is which?’
Sniveller spun a coin in the air.
‘HEADS,’ shouted Silver.
‘Heads to the window, tails to the door,’ announced Sniveller, pocketing the coin, and re-arranging the pillows on the little iron bed. ‘That’s your head lying North and your feet lying South, all compass-like and content. Goodnight.’
Sniveller had made a little bow and backed out of the door, sniffing his way down the stairs.
Silver was sleepy after the journey, and the strangeness of the place, and although she wanted to keep awake, her eyes kept dropping shut. The room was warm and soft, with its low fire burning in the grate, and its two candles flickering on the table. The food was plentiful and hot, but as soon as Silver had finished eating, she forced herself to get into her pyjamas before she went to clean her teeth at the little washstand in the room. She was so tired that she couldn’t even pull faces at herself in the mirror, which was what she usually did while she cleaned her teeth.
She was busy scrubbing away with the toothbrush when she suddenly looked up. In the mirror she saw Abel Darkwater’s face – yes, it was his face! She spun round, but the room was empty.
Silver was feeling uneasy. She went through into the connecting room, with its little iron bedstead. The bed looked soft and inviting. She swung up her legs, then suddenly, for no reason, decided to turn round the pillows and sleep the other way. Yes, that felt better. She leaned on her elbow to blow out the candle, then changed her mind.
‘I won’t blow out the candle. I’ll play a game with the shadows until I fall asleep. I’ll pretend I’m on a ship sailing out to sea with Sir Roger Rover.’
Then she thought of her daddy, and how he would have kissed her and told her not to worry about anything at all.
‘I wish Daddy was here,’ she whispered to herself. ‘He’d tell me what to do.’
And Silver’s eyes were full of tears but she was brave too. She burrowed herself deep under the blankets and let herself go to sleep.
Down in the study, Sniveller was serving wine to his Master and Mrs Rokabye.
‘I am going to hypnotise Silver,’ said Abel Darkwater.
‘I was once hypnotised,’ observed Mrs Rokabye. ‘I was told I was a chicken and I laid an egg.’
‘This is not seaside entertainment,’ snapped Darkwater. ‘I shall draw Silver back through Time until I reach the moment where her father tells her what he intends to do with the Timekeeper.’
‘If he ever did tell her,’ said Mrs Rokabye. ‘I believe that child is as ignorant as a cockle.’
‘Even cockles have their uses,’ replied Darkwater. ‘Silver has already fallen into a deep sleep. All that remains is for Sniveller to bring me to the child and I shall do my work.’
Mrs Rokabye had no worries about what might happen to Silver, but she was brooding about Bigamist.
‘I hope your horrible henchmen haven’t upset my rabbit,’ she said. ‘When I said you could search Tanglewreck, I told you to be especially careful of Bigamist.’
Abel Darkwater’s eyes swelled with irritation. ‘My henchmen, as you call them, seem unable to answer their mobile phones. We must assume they have failed in their mission and that possibly they are dead.’
‘Dead!’ cried Mrs Rokabye. ‘What are you saying, Mr Darkwater? Is it not enough that I have to pass my days in a horrible house without carpets or central heating or even a fridge, and now you tell me that there are two dead bodies there as well?’
‘I cannot say, but I can say that Sniveller will go back with you if you prefer, and remove any offending objects.’
Mrs Rokabye was about to say that she found Sniveller himself an offending object, but he had returned to the room to tell Darkwater that the child was ready for hypnosis.
‘Are you sure she is quite asleep?’ said Darkwater urgently.
‘Quite asleep, Master. I put opium in the tomato sauce.’
‘What a marvellous idea!’ said Mrs Rokabye, looking at Sniveller with new eyes. ‘I hope you will tell me where I can buy some. London has everything!’
‘I get mine from a Chinaman in Whitechapel,’ said Sniveller. ‘Three stops on the Underground and a hundred years back in Time.’
Mrs Rokabye was looking confused and Darkwater was glaring. He took out his enormous gold pocket watch, and examined it closely, like a face in the mirror.
‘Excuse us, Mrs Rokabye. Help yourself to wine and chocolates, won’t you?’
‘Don’t mind if I do,’ said Mrs Rokabye, settling down as best she could in the hard high-backed wooden chair. Still, the wine and chocolates were very nice and she was suddenly feeling sleepy herself.
‘Don’t mind if I do …’ she said, as the glass slipped from her hand.
Abel Darkwater and Sniveller made their way slowly up the stairs.
‘What did you put in her wine?’ asked Darkwater.
‘Chloroform drops,’ said Sniveller. ‘Undetectable in claret.’
‘Excellent,’ said Darkwater. ‘Help me with the child, then carry Mrs Rokabye here up to bed. Are we heads or tails tonight?’
‘Heads is North-facing. Wind quite bracing,’ said Sniveller.
‘Heads,’ repeated Darkwater, opening the door into the shadowy room. ‘Heads.’
Silver heard the door open, as the boards creaked under the weight of the two men. She pretended to be asleep.
Sniveller stepped forward quickly and clipped a thick cloth, stretched like canvas, to the four upright rails of the little bed. It was like lying under a flat tent.
Abel Darkwater drew what looked like two interlocking triangles, making a pointed star on the canvas, and in the middle of the star, he placed a ticking clock. Then he said something in a language Silver couldn’t understand, and a bright green flame lit up the room. She could see the outline of the men clearly now, at the foot of the bed.
Abel Darkwater began to pass his hands across the top of the canvas and directly over her feet.
‘You are going back in Time,’ he said, ‘back in Time, not far, not far at all, but a few years, oh yes, just a few, and your father and mother are still alive.’
Silver lay absolutely still and rigid with terror. Then a very strange thing started to happen.
As Abel Darkwater spoke on and on in the language she couldn’t understand, she felt herself slipping and shifting, like she was disappearing from her own body and going somewhere else. She felt very light. She was moving very fast. She was crossing time like it was a street. She was moving from Time Now into Time Then.
Then she saw it. She saw it exactly as though someone was projecting it on to a wall. Behind Abel Darkwater was the face of her father. Her beloved father!
Darkwater turned, and because Silver was lying the wrong way round, she risked raising her head on the pillow, hoping he wouldn’t see her under the canvas. They were back at Tanglewreck …
It was a cold day and the bear in the garden was covered in snow. It was a hedge bear, made out of box plants and shaped and trimmed by their father. There were foxes too, and a deer standing with its face towards the forest.
‘Once,’ said her father, ‘these creatures lived here when the forest came as close as the edge of the garden. There were still bears in England when this house was new.’
Her father was wearing a knitted tie and a thick wool shirt, and a big loose heavy jacket. He took something out of his pocket and the children looked at it in wonder.
‘This is the most beautiful object in the world,’ he said, ‘but I think it is alive too.’
‘Is it a watch or a clock?’ said Silver.
‘It’s called the Timekeeper,’ said her father. ‘Its mysteries are hard to understand. I don’t really understand it myself. I’m taking it to London tomorrow to show it to a man who will tell me everything about it. He wants me to sell it to him, but I won’t do that.’
‘Can I come with you?’
‘Not this time. Next time. This time we’ll take Buddleia because she needs to see a doctor about her leg.’
Their father was gazing at the clock. ‘Our ancestors were given it to keep safe by someone who was very unsafe himself. It was a long time ago, and they looked after him, and he asked them to keep this for him. It’s been in the family for hundreds of years – nearly as long as the house – and now it’s my turn to look after it, and one day, it will be your turn.’
‘You never showed it to me before.’
‘No. I keep it hidden.’
‘Why do you hide it?’
‘Oh, just because I have a feeling that someone else might want it.’
‘Where do you hide it?’
As she said that, the image of her father holding the clock became bigger and bigger, then it began to waver and fade. Abel Darkwater started shouting at the top of his voice, and the light in the room was so bright that Silver fell back and closed her eyes.
Abel Darkwater was leaning over her feet. ‘He hid it somewhere, didn’t he? Where did he hide it? He hid it in the house or the garden, didn’t he? Take me there, follow the day that I have given you – follow your father. Where is it? Where is it?’
Suddenly the room went dark. Abel Darkwater was breathing heavily. Silver felt in her body that whatever had happened to her was over.
Sniveller and Abel Darkwater left the bedroom and went into the adjoining room where Silver had eaten her supper. She could hear them talking in low voices, but they had shut the door and she couldn’t hear what they were saying.
Without really planning it, Silver slid quickly out of bed and pulled on her jeans, fleece and socks over her pyjamas.
She slipped out on to the landing and padded silently down the stairs. How dark it was! The stairs wound down and down like the spring of a clock, and as her fingers felt the walls to steady herself, her body made giant shadows thrown by the candlelight.
She reached the wide hall. There was the telephone on the table. It was a funny-looking thing; upright, like a black candlestick, with a microphone at the top to speak into, and a listening tube hanging at the side, and a dial at the base that you had to spin round to get the numbers. She had seen Abel Darkwater using it that afternoon, so she knew what to do.
Looking round nervously, she lifted the tube and dialled 999.
A voice answered. ‘What number are you, caller?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Silver. ‘I want the police, please.’ ‘Yes, tell me your number, caller.’
‘It’s not my phone. I want someone to help me.’
‘Details, please. Name. Address.’
Before Silver could say anything else, there was a great roar from upstairs, and she heard Abel Darkwater shouting at the top of his voice, ‘You snivelling idiot. Where is the child?’
Silver dropped the phone and ran to the front door. It was locked and bolted. She slid back the big bolt at the bottom of the door, and turned the hoop-topped iron key in the boxy brass lock, but she couldn’t reach the top bolt, and Abel Darkwater was coming down the stairs. She turned away and frantically shook the door handle into the shop. It opened. She rushed inside and closed the door behind her. Was she trapped or was there another way out?
In the shop there was no sound at all except for one ticking clock – just one. The time was five minutes to midnight.
The display cabinets of watches and clocks were lit by dim red lights that made the gold and silver casings glow like the bodies of luminous insects, and the shiny glass faces of the watches were like great round eyes. Like Abel Darkwater’s eyes, she thought.
Silver was too frightened to be frightened. Her whole body was numb but her mind was racing. She had seen that the door at the back of the shop led into a small courtyard. Perhaps there was a way out there.
As she made her way towards the door, the one and only ticking clock suddenly paused, and then began to strike midnight. As it did so, every single clock and watch in the shop, all the ones that hadn’t been ticking at all, chimed and belled and rang the hour, MIDNIGHT, MIDNIGHT, MIDNIGHT.
Silver put her hands over her ears. There were cuckoos flying out of wooden clocks on the wall, and brown-faced men wearing fezzes walking out of a clock shaped like a pyramid, and a dog that flew from its kennel barking the hour, and a woman banging a kettle with a stick, and a bell tolling from side to side in the steeple of a church, and over the top of all of them was Abel Darkwater’s voice coming from nowhere.
‘The universe was not born in Time but born with Time. Time and the Universe are twin souls birthed together. Whoever controls Time controls the Universe. Whoever has the Timekeeper controls Time.’
Abel Darkwater was standing in the open shop doorway in a triangle of light. As he came towards Silver, she dashed between his legs, but he reached down and caught her, and picked her up and slung her over his shoulder.
‘Let me go! Let me go!’
Laughing, Darkwater stepped slowly into the hall, and stood with his back towards the front door of the house, looking up the stairs as Sniveller came down with a steaming purple glass.
‘Drinking stops you thinking,’ he said. ‘Give her this and she’ll be asleep in no time, Master.’
‘You said that earlier and the child is wide awake, as you can see.’
‘I dosed the tomato sauce, yes I did,’ said Sniveller, cowering.
‘I hate tomato sauce!’ yelled Silver, her legs kicking, her head staring at the door. Then suddenly she saw what to do, yes, now that Abel Darkwater had lifted her up, she could pull back the top bolt, then if only she could just …
She wriggled forward with such a thrust that Darkwater lost his balance, and Silver had the bolt in her hands before he stumbled and dropped her. Sniveller lunged forward to catch her but tripped over Darkwater, who was too heavy and slow to move quickly. Silver knew that the door was fully unlocked now and if only she could just turn the knob …
She was free! She was outside in the street! She had no shoes on her feet, but she could run, and run she did, she didn’t know where, until the lights of the city seemed far away and, breathless and sweating, she stood on one sore foot, on a bank by the River Thames.