A Tinker’s Cuss

The swollen round of the roughened toe cap of his old boot, speckled with age, nestled against a glowing buttercup. The other boot lay buried in deep grass. Both were connected via the legs of Tobias Colton strewn akimbo as if he had been thrown aside onto the verge. Around him, the fields, hedgerows, and coppices were fresh in the bright sun. Throughout the Spring, nature had been busy grooming itself: the sap had risen, juices had flowed, the chlorophyll had steeped all with its verdant hues; the trees now stood washed clean by the showers, branches ruffled by the breezes, the grass had been combed upright and amongst this spray of abundance, every plant stalk had been adorned with a meadow flower, thousands of delicate points in a green sea.

Entirely careless of all this meticulous effort on the part of nature, indifferent as to the impress of his weight upon the delicate structures beneath, Tobias had thrown himself into the grass on the edge of the indistinct path that trickled through the banked meadow like a stream through a valley. Despite the warm weather during the day, the recent nights had been very cold and he did not sleep well in the cold. So now he took a little time to snooze in the sun.

However, he did not snooze for long. Something anxious in his stomach or in the recesses of his dozing consciousness reminded him that eating was as important as sleeping – certain constitutions would argue, more important – and lying on your back in the sun put nothing into the belly. Soon after stirring into wakefulness he got up slowly but not labouredly; he was used to tiredness, habituated even, to a measure of exhaustion. He began, as he sometimes thought of it, to saddle himself up. He looped several long leather belts over his head to lie across his chest, to these were attached many small tools: small pliers, nippers, hand nips, and small hammers of various sizes and shapes. There were also rolls of other small tools in the way of files, chisels, carving tools, a tiny plough plane, small screwdrivers, gimlets, bradawls, drills and so on and so forth. Where necessary these tools were wrapped in dirty strips of cloth so that he could not be heard coming a jingling and a jangling half a mile away.

He attached a small earthenware fire pot to his belt on one side and a few copper tipped irons on the other side alongside a battered kettle. Finally, he took up the heavy items: a very small but nonetheless weighty anvil and an equally small smelting furnace. These were wrapped in old pieces of sacking and woollen blanket to protect his back from their edged weight since he carried them over his shoulder on either side of his spine.

Thus laden he set off. Fortunately, it was over no more than a handful of hills and dales, none of them too steep, before he reached a small town and was able to start banging away at his old kettle to try to drum up, with this tuneless, tinny beat, a little trade. He sat down somewhere not far from the market square in a street coming off from it; which was not so busy he would have been an inconvenience but not so empty he would have come to no one’s attention. He sat on the ground, his legs crossed, his leather trousers peppered with small burns, his larger pieces of equipment beside him and he waited, an inexpectant expression on a face darkened by the sun, dirt, and toil.

His first pieces of work were routine like hundreds he had had before: a blackened pan that had a hole burnt through its bottom, a kettle whose handle had come off, several forks with missing tines, and a broken rake. All of these he mended easily but they brought very little recompense. A slow day. It seemed that he would not eat like a lord that evening or even much like a lord’s servant.

As the market stalls began to gather themselves together and prepare to head home, he too picked himself up, collected his various pieces of equipment, and prepared to head off, if not home – for he had none – then somewhere he might be served a cheap meal. He had hardly got underway when he heard a loud voice issuing forth through a half open window.

“What’s this, Madam, not turned up?” strode the strong legs of this powerful voice, “Not been at all. Why this is intolerable. Indeed, I will not tolerate it. He shall find that I’ll not be treated so. Damn the man, damn’d clock tinkering wretch. He would not bother to attend an appointment made with me, would he not? I shall make it my business to see him put out of business. Good God, madam, this will not pass unreprimanded…”

Having slowed and then come to a stop not far from the open window, Tobias stayed to hear the strident chords detail a list of those who might be approached to fulfil this ruination of the absentee. A deputy lord lieutenant was mentioned, along with a justice of the peace, and even the Court of Aldermen. Since this list also contained mention of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers and since the ‘wretch’ had been described as ‘clock tinkering’, Tobias was able to arrive, via a very short journey, at the conclusion that the fellow in question was a clockmaker and mender. This in turn clearly implied a clock or clocks that were in ill health or otherwise broken down.

As the one sided conversation continued slightly less loudly than before, Tobias walked a little further on toward the front door. He paused for a moment since the house was a large one and radiated prosperity in a monumental manner. Then he banged on its huge wooden solidity.

“Find out if that’s the scoundrel now!” bellowed the voice with so much renewed vigour that it reached Tobias through the window as if he had still been standing outside it. After a few moments the large, deeply painted door was opened by a woman who looked a little distracted and a little harassed. Consequently, instead of bestowing upon Tobias the look of contemptuous affront that was his usual benediction from those who opened such doors, she looked at him in slight bewilderment.

“Yes,” was all she could manage.

“An’ please you, mistress,” said Tobias in the tone of humility he had so well mastered, “Would you have any timepieces as might want mending?”

“Timepieces?” she repeated.

“Clocks, watches, of any type or construction: I can mend their workings.”

She looked him over, was about to tell him to be off and away, checked her impulse, and then said:

“Wait here. Do not,” she said with, as it were, recovered emphasis, “set foot inside.”

She hurried off up the hallway and turned through a doorway on the left. After a while, during which there had been a few salvos of human barking interspersed with quieter responses, she reappeared.

“Come with me,” she said shortly, turned on her heel, and walked off back through the hallway. She turned once more through the doorway to the left and this time Tobias followed her. He entered a room of polished wood, ornately framed pictures and mirrors, deep upholstery, serenely transparent glass, and many varied but tastefully matched colours. The centrepiece of the room was a large man, he was wearing a waisted, knee-length coat – that tried hard to embrace his stature but failed – a waistcoat and breeches, all in dull shades that in no measure constrained his presence from filling the room.

Tobias had expected to encounter someone with a florid complexion but the man’s face was if anything rather sallow, although well fed. He bristled with whiskers down the sides of his cheeks and when he spoke his eyes became bright with an impatient intensity.

“Foregad! Who’s this miserable wretch?” He turned to the woman. “I thought you said he was a clockmaker, Mrs Brinkley. He looks like he mends pots and pans!” He had inflexible lips and an impassive jaw and it was a marvel his voice emerged with such volume.

“An please your noble honour,” said Tobias, “I am not a clockmaker as makes clocks and yet I am a man who can mend ’em. I was once in the way of working with clocks and am conver’sant with their moving parts and how it is they mingle together.”

“You are ‘conversant with their moving parts’,” repeated the man slowly, his voice full of scepticism. “And you know how they mingle, eh?” Then with more rapidity, he said: “Then come with me…what is your name fellow?”

“Tobias Colton, sir” replied Tobias as he was led into a room as splendid as the one before but which was, instead of the comforts of a drawing room, crowded out with books within its many bookcases. On the mantlepiece, above a glowing fire, rested a large clock. It was not a particularly ornate clock but it was made of a fruitwood with a profound roseate glow within its umber hue and was expertly inlaid with brass. The brass face was sparingly but intricately carved and it had three enamel dials: one main and two smaller above.

“Well then Mr Colton, what do make of this…in the masterful consideration of your great experience?”

“Why, if it please your honour, this is a wondrous piece indeed. If I am not mistaken it is of a chronometric design such as may be used aboard a ship with marvellous accuracy, after the work of Mr Harrison, and can be used to sail halfway round the world to dock alongside a pinhead.”

Tobias then expounded a little on oscillations, balances, escapements, fusees, crown wheels, and on several other horological points that were pertinent to the clock in question.

“By the devil, sir, so you do know your business, well, well.” He looked at Tobias with some residual doubt in his eyes but then his stare seemed to relent. “Very good, Mr Colton, you may undertake the repair but, listen here, I vow to God, if you should damage it further, I’ll see you locked up.” He stared hard at Tobias before adding: “And flogged.”

Tobias worked diligently for several hours but with quiet pleasure. This kind of work was much more enjoyable than the mundane repairs he was used to doing: it involved investigation, the careful disassembling of the puzzle, the satisfaction of discovering, in this case, the two elements that were broken, the skilful carving of a temporary mould, and the precise recasting of those parts. It was, finally, rewarding to reassemble the clock’s movement and, having wound it, to set it off; to both see and hear it working well and as it should.

When the clock’s owner reappeared he was, naturally, pleasantly surprised.

“So, so. The thing is working. Damn’d providential your happening along like that. You’ve done me a good service there my fellow. It will not be forgotten.”

When Tobias indicated that whilst he would be immensely flattered and could think of nothing better than to lodge in the remembrance of so worthy a patron, he was also, for a man must eat, in need of some slight recompense.

“Recompense? Recompense? Yes, indeed sir, there will be recompense. But see here my fellow, you are not a clockmaker rightly accredited and properly qualified with an establishment to furnish some guarantee of your work. For aught I can know, the hands of the clock will turn a few minutes and then stop. We must have proof of a job well done. Come back tomorrow and we shall see about recompense…if the thing is still ticking.”

Tobias found himself hustled back out on the street and with little option but to seek out the meagre repast that had been delayed by a few, so far profitless, hours.

The next day he returned to the house.

“No sir, no sir. There has not been enough time. More time must pass through the clock to test your work. Come back tomorrow or, better, the day after. Yes, that would be more to my liking.”

The day after the next he returned but Sir Marcus Gundrey, as he had discovered was his empty handed employer’s name, was not at home.

He came back twice more and on the second of those times he accepted, without surprise, that payment was never likely to be forthcoming.

It was not a rage that swelled within him, it was something else. And that too came as no surprise to him: rather it came as a great relief. Neither was it any kind of despair nor was it a sort of frustration. It was as if many emotions came together in a fusion of feelings and bound themselves into something new. Tobias had no way to recognise this strange occurrence in his mind and he did not really try to do so: for he had long expected it. Consequently, it swam in his head like a tight giddiness and yet underneath it all he felt surprisingly indifferent to its happening.

When finally this wave of feeling had almost passed and he had a degree of mastery over himself, he said evenly:

“I curse you Marcus Gundrey.”

In the weeks that followed, he made it his business to come back to that small market town and try to trade a little in his original spot. By becoming a known presence in the town who was a fairly regular visitor and who did good work, he found the trade to be not half bad – and often better than that. He also made it his business to always pass by the house where he had mended the clock and to make the odd enquiry concerning the household.

To begin with he found nothing altered and heard no particular gossip. But then, after a few weeks, he heard talk of some of the servants being discharged from Sir Marcus’ service for no good reason. A few weeks more and he heard rumours of bills that were usually settled promptly now going unpaid. A month or so after that, there was talk of huge investments in the City ‘turning sour’. Not long after, perhaps a fortnight, he chanced to see the woman who had first opened the door to him, seated in a gig, about to be driven off with her luggage piled uncomfortably all around her and beside her driver.

Then after another few weeks, he saw a bill posted up for an auction of the contents of the house. He returned on a date in late September to attend the auction. The auction was held outside and fortunately the weather, though overcast, was free of rain. Quite a crowd was present, filling at least half of the wide street and it had something of the atmosphere of a fair. It was however noticeable that the part of the crowd closest to the house was more affluently dressed and appeared gripped with an air of determined expectation: talking animatedly to their neighbours, referring to the sheets of paper they held listing the lots, looking impatiently toward the auctioneer’s lectern and then repeating the whole round again just as concentratedly.

In the background, just inside the hall of his house, he could see Sir Marcus, if not presiding over the proceedings, then in attendance as a morose witness to them. His face was much changed: it had become saturnine and whilst it had been sallow it was now florid, the meat on his cheeks was now drawn, and the liveliness of the eyes was dulled. His whiskers seemed sparser than before.

A parade of the man’s possessions was brought forth into the light of day carried by the auctioneer’s assistants, to be subjected to the gaze of curiosity and the leer of acquisition as they went under the hammer. Chairs, pictures, domestic utensils, curtains, carpets, and a considerable variety of other, mostly expensive, items drifted like bobbing flotsam out through the sluice gate of the front entrance. The bidding was loud and highly competitive, conducted in high spirits. Tobias was somewhat pleased to note that the clock he had mended, still apparently working, went for a good price.

Later the auction retreated indoors for the sale of books, Sir Marcus’ wardrobe, and the larger pieces of furniture; in other words the disposal of those goods that it would have been impracticable, or perhaps indecorous, to show outdoors.

Tobias would not have been welcomed inside for this more select portion of the sale and so he remained outside as the rest of the less well heeled crowd dispersed. Sir Marcus too remained in his doorway – possibly fearing too much pain over the sale of his more personal effects. Tobias examined him with a more than usual fascination. Eventually the persistent intensity of this examination came even to the attention of its extremely preoccupied subject who viewed Tobias with as much residual disdain as he could muster and said:

“Do I know you sir?” The voice had none of its previous bark and, underneath its manifest tone, fatigue sounded in its depths.

“You do sir.” replied Tobias with, in his turn, none of his previous servility. “I had occasion to mend a clock for you. Lot number 637 as it has now become.”

“Ah, indeed, I do now remember,” Sir Marcus replied in a slightly defeated manner. “If you have come seeking payment, sir, I regret you will find no satisfaction of your suit here: with this sale and that of the house – to be completed tomorrow – all of my estate is exhausted. I shall just, by a hair’s breadth and no more, meet my debts and avoid the jug, sir, the gaol for debtors, but I shall not own a thing, I shall have not a penny’s worth of capital.”

“I do not come here for payment,”Tobias answered him evenly, “but to give you some words with which you may equip yourself for your immediate future, if you should choose to listen sir.”

Sir Marcus said nothing, a mixture of his troubles and the unexpectedness of Tobias’s manner and speech having robbed him, in broad daylight, of his tongue; a tongue that a few months before could not have been stolen by any man or any thing.

“I was not always a Tinker,” began Tobias. “Indeed a few years past I was much as you have been, if not more elevated…in the matter of my worldly goods at any rate.”

Tobias gave him a brief account of himself as a man who had lived in a wide fronted house rising four storeys, who had been conveyed to his work each morning in a landau, and who had presided over a fair sized mercantile empire. He had held a strong position in local society and the sun shone continuously on his fortunes. One day he had decided to exercise and, perhaps more to the point, show off his authority in his own house. Having descended below stairs to see how things were done, and from his meagre knowledge of the domestic arrangements, he had chastised various of his servants. At the same time, he had found a Tinker working in the area outside the kitchen steps. There, he had impugned the man’s work, given instructions that such itinerant labour was no longer to be used, and sent the Tinker packing without pay or food.

Over the following months, two of his ships were lost at sea in most unseasonable storms, another was seized by pirates, a fourth ran aground and the salvagers turned out to be more merciless than the pirates. Though erected on the soundest of footings no business can survive such reversals and the walls of his empire began to crumble.

When, before much longer, he was reduced to next to nothing, he encountered the Tinker once more:

“That Tinker told me a tale,” recounted Tobias, “differing in detail from the one I am telling you now; but in substance differing hardly at all. He told me that I should find in myself a willingness to work for the most paltry reward and to toil in the most reduced circumstance at the most menial labour. If I did so, then as I did so, the slights and dishonours, the insults and weariness that I suffered, footsore and solitary, would build up in me a stock, bit by bit, like grains in a granary, or like water behind a dam, until such time as it would be breached to spill tightly in the form of a unique curse. Since, at this certain point, the curse would be full term and, it follows, must be delivered at the first opportunity; which opportunity would become apparent in the rising up of the curse into a fevered brain. Whomsoever I would curse would have merited this curse – though not necessarily much more than many another – but they would happen to have had the misfortune of being present when the curse had reached its state of plenitude. ‘And you will not have much good fortune until the curse is lifted, and this will be the only means of lifting it,’ he told me, ‘so you had best find that within you to endure your plight’. At this point, the Tinker did bequeath, as it were, all of his equipment to me and so do I now give it all over to you.”

So saying, he unslung the anvil and furnace from his back, he unslung his various leather belts of tools, and he took off his fire pot and irons. He laid all these at the feet of the appalled Sir Marcus Gundrey. Finally, he placed his old battered kettle, an ancient drum stick poking out of the spout, atop the pile. Then he turned and walked away.

He had not got very far before the beneficiary of all these wares, charitably donated, caught up with him, his face more florid than ever.

“You!” he shouted. “You, sir, you are responsible for all that has befallen me…”

Tobias heard him but did not take much notice. It was like being hailed by someone far off in the distance, waving frantically and shouting from out of earshot. Thus, the bellowed remarks concerning Tobias’ supposed culpability and the fearful wrongs done to him, Sir Marcus, did no more than tremble the air – and entertain a few passers by. Besides, as an analogy well known to Tobias might put it, he was well tempered these days: he had endured enough scorching and freezing, both literal and metaphorical, to toughen the most malleable of materials. Harsh words could no longer penetrate his composure.

He remembered himself, a few years before, going after the Tinker, shouting at him, raging at him, trying to express in his fury all of the sense of unfairness that had plagued him for all the months of his plunging, deteriorating fortunes. Yet now, in his profound calm, as his eyes turned once more in the direction of the future, he thought only and with regret that the curse proceeded but in single file. Rather it should be more precise in its initial aim and then spread like a curative plague: scalding and freezing all arrogant and unpitying natures.

But, well, there, he thought, that was not its nature.