Chapter 20
KEEPING TIME
That watch was the most dangerous object in my possession.
If anyone from court saw it, they would know firstly, that it had not been made by mortal hands, and secondly, that I did not have the requisite mechanical skills to have assembled it myself.
And since I, like the rest of my kin, was incapable of lying, the truth about Glen’s secret fondness for horology would come out, followed by all the other secrets the two of us had been keeping.
I had not asked him to craft it – I had not thought such a thing was even possible.
But he had always loved to take objects apart and learn how they worked.
He enjoyed the painstaking labour of it.
Erring. Doubling back. Trying again, until he got it right.
My family could conjure anything they desired in the twitch of a rabbit’s tail; Glen earned his joy.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, he began to draw designs for a pocket watch that would not only synchronise us with Greenwich Mean Time, but also include a calendar in a tiny inner window, a seasonal forecast illuminating its face.
It was not an exact measure of the time difference between our two worlds – nothing across the border is exact – but it was better than anything I could have hoped for.
Before I made my first crossing, he made two watches and gave one to me. We could thus track how many hours (or approximations thereof) we had been absent from either world, and go about our business in both without fear of discovery.
‘My mortal heritage and my glamour, united,’ he’d said upon presenting me with mine. ‘I am proud and ashamed in equal measure.’
‘Never be ashamed around me. I will not allow it.’
‘The silver is glamour-coated,’ he added, moving it back and forth so its stardust sheen glinted. ‘Mortal eyes should gloss right over it.’
They should have. And for years, they did. Until Trix.
In April, knowing we were about to head into Coppélia, I needed to check how much longer I could delay returning across the border before I became too swept up in rehearsals.
A single glance at the face was not enough – it was less like checking a clock, more like picking up a newspaper and closely reading the headlines.
I was so preoccupied with calculations that I failed to noticed Trix’s footsteps.
Even when she was close enough that I was breathing in her perfume – jasmine after rainfall – I thought she was waiting for someone else to move so that she might pass.
When I finally realised what she was seeing, the air around me turned to ice, ready to shatter with the impact of a single question.
‘Is that an antique?’
Her having found me in the Nijinsky studio a few weeks earlier had been cause for alarm; now, I was terrified. I held her gaze for only a few seconds, but they stretched between us like the darkness between stars. How can this be?
Either Glen had been misinformed about the strength of our glamour, or he had not cast the spell correctly, or… perhaps mortals were still capable of seeing beyond their own world. Their own frames.
Rather than take offence at my refusal to answer, or interrogate me further, she stepped back, leaving me and the watch in peace. My glamour played no part in that. My secrets remained so because of Trix’s grace.