Timekeeper (Timekeeper #1)(73)

“Thank you for the tea,” Danny said. “Are you, um—are you Matthias’s housemate?” She nodded. “I know you’ve been living with Matthias for a while. I had no idea you were a … I mean, I thought Matthias lived with another man. Are you his … companion?”

She smiled, but he couldn’t tell if it was out of amusement or politeness. “I’m a bit of both.”

“Oh.” Danny furtively glanced at her chest. Why would Matthias say “he”?

This was also the first Danny had heard of Matthias having a lover. It shocked him, to be honest. For years Danny had seen the quiet, longing sorrow that dogged Matthias like a second shadow. When had this woman come into his life?

Silence filled the room as they sipped their tea. The clock ticked on in the background. Looking more closely, Danny saw that the woman wasn’t well. Her eyes were sunken, her skin pale like she hadn’t seen the sun in some time. No one saw the sun for long stretches of time in London, but this seemed a different sort of pale, more gray than blue.

“Are you Danny?” she asked suddenly.

“Yes. How did you know?”

“Matthias talks about you. He’s very fond of you.”

Danny smiled. “I’m glad to hear it. I’m fond of him as well.”

“I’ve always wanted to meet you. I’m glad I finally have the chance.” The words struck Danny as odd, but he couldn’t put his finger on why.

Her gaze trailed over his chest and paused on the timepiece chain hanging out of his left pocket. Her eyes flitted to the right pocket.

“You have something there,” she murmured.

Startled, Danny put his hand over the slight lump where the cog rested. Unsettled by her gaze, he drew it out and held it on his palm.

“Are you a mechanic?” Danny asked. “How did you know I had this?”

“Did you steal it from a clock?” she demanded.

He leaned back at her sudden change in tone. “No. The clock … gave it to me.”

It sounded ridiculous, but it was the truth. For some reason, he had no urge to lie to her.

The woman stared at him, then at the cog, then back at his face.

“Why did the clock give it to you?”

Danny wrapped a protective hand around the cog and put it back in his pocket before she could snatch it away. “Because he wanted me to have it.”

He must have sounded defensive, for she eased back in her chair. “I see. That’s all right, then.” She returned to her tea, sipping daintily, as if they had just spoken of crocheting rather than the gifts of clock spirits.

But then, as he watched her, an awareness slid into place. At first Danny dismissed it as impossible, but the thought came creeping back, begging to be looked at. The more the idea took root in his mind, the harder it was to breathe. His skin prickled, the hairs on his arms lifting as if he were about to be struck by lightning.

Danny lined up the pieces: the louder ticking of the clock in her presence, her golden features, the way her voice sounded like slow gears in need of oiling. The way she regarded things, tilting her head in innocent curiosity. He had seen all of that before. In Colton.

His mouth opened, and he was distantly surprised to hear words come out of it. “You’re a clock spirit.”

The woman peered at him over her teacup. She carefully put the cup and saucer down on the table. He could see now she hadn’t drunk a drop. After all, her kind didn’t need food and drink. She must have had a lot of practice at pretending.

“Yes,” she said.

He gripped the edge of the settee as the clock’s overly loud ticks stabbed him. “Your name?”

“Evaline.”

The world darkened. When it came back as color and shapes, Danny was still sitting on the settee, still staring at the woman who stared back, unruffled.

“You can’t be,” he rasped. “Evaline is the name of the clock tower in Maldon.”

“It was,” she agreed sadly. “But no longer. Evaline is here, now.”

Danny put his head between his knees, as his grammar school nurse had instructed him to do when dizzy. “That can’t be,” he whispered to the floor. “You can’t be Evaline.”

“Why not?”

He lifted his head. “Because the clockwork fell apart!”

She kept her hands in her lap, her fingers rubbing nervously over her knuckles. “That’s not quite what happened.”

Words were difficult to come by as the world unraveled around him, but he tried anyway. “Then tell me what did happen. Please.”

“I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t have even brought you in here, but …”

Danny found another painful similarity to Colton in her eyes, a certain shade of loneliness. Not a prisoner in a tower, maybe, but stuck in this house while Matthias was gone for hours at a time, with no one to talk to.

“I can leave if you want me to,” Danny said slowly, hating himself when he saw the distress on her face. “Unless you’d like to tell me what actually happened to Maldon.”

Evaline bit her lower lip. She looked around the room, as if for inspiration. “Matthias was my mechanic,” she began softly, dreamily, like Matthias used to do when Danny was younger. “He seemed sad, and I wanted to know why, so I showed myself to him. We talked about everything. I was so fascinated by his stories, especially those about London. He said he wished he could take me there, if I wasn’t bound to the tower.