The Clockmaker's Share

A collector pays on Friday for a famous clock’s slow, strange tick. You start it, and it ticks like a kitchen clock.

dry · warm · exact · tense · Medium, about 30 scenes

You play

Laurie, Laurie, forty-six, a clock conservator who learned the trade as Helen Coyle's apprentice in this coach house, came back in July to rent its second bench, and is writing the regulator's condition report before Friday's sale

How it begins

Everyone who had ever been to a clock fair knew that the Coyle regulator walked. Other clocks ticked their seconds round the dial. The Coyle regulator's great seconds hand waited, and then took one slow, deliberate step every two seconds, and in 1981 that step had won Adrian Coyle the Makers' Cup and a lifetime of strangers asking to watch it. On Friday a collector in Hampshire was paying for that step. On Monday morning the regulator stood at the end of Laurie's bench in the coach house at Sallow Hill, stopped, its pendulum hooked to the side of the case, and somebody had to start it.