Unfortunately, the tombstone was a cheap one. That was Arthur’s first and most profound disappointment. For a man who had spent his life in the quiet, meticulous trade of antique clock restoration, the shoddiness of the thing was an insult. The granite was a thin, miserable slab, the kind bought in bulk from a catalogue. The edges were rough, not polished, and the inscription was carved with the clumsy haste of a novice.
Eleanor Vance, it read. Beloved Wife. Time Heals All Wounds.
Arthur snorted, a small, dry sound lost in the vast silence of the cemetery. “Time heals all wounds?” he muttered to the damp air. “What a useless, placid lie.” Time, in Arthur’s experience, did not heal. It merely allowed wounds to fester in the dark, to become part of the architecture of one’s soul. Eleanor, of all people, would have hated such a trite sentiment. She would have preferred something like, “She never suffered fools gladly,” which was both true and had a bit of bite to it.
He had chosen the stone himself, of course. In the numb, gray weeks following the car accident, his brother had handled the funeral arrangements, and Arthur, in a state of shock, had simply signed the papers. He’d imagined something solid, dignified, like the dark, veined marble of the headstones surrounding this one. He’d pictured elegant, serifed letters spelling out her name. He hadn’t imagined this… this gravelly biscuit of a rock.
His weekly visits to the cemetery had begun as a duty, a penance for being the one who survived. But over the past year, they had morphed into something else: a quiet, one-sided conversation with the one person who would have understood his frustration. Today, his frustration had a specific focus.
“It’s the Harrison longcase clock,” he said, shifting his weight on the folding stool he always brought. “The one from the old manor house. The moon-phase dial is completely out of sync with the astronomical calendar. I’ve realigned the gears three times, but it’s still gaining two minutes a day. It’s as if the mechanism has developed a stubborn personality.”
A breeze rustled the leaves of the ancient oak shading the plot. Arthur took it as a sign of Eleanor’s impatience. “Get to the point”, she seemed to be saying.
He sighed. “The point is, Mr. Harrison is coming to collect it on Saturday. He’s a pompous man; all huff and no substance. He’ll notice the two minutes. He’s the sort who times his boiled eggs.”
Arthur fell silent, his eyes tracing the poorly carved ‘V’ in ‘Vance’. It was deeper on one side, giving the letter a lopsided, drunken look. He reached out, almost without thinking, and ran his thumb over the grooved letters of “Time Heals All Wounds.” The stone was cold and gritty.
His thumb caught on something. A tiny, sharp irregularity on the surface of the ‘H’ in ‘Heals’. He leaned closer, squinting. It wasn’t a flaw in the carving. It was a hairline crack, so fine it was almost invisible. But as he pressed his thumbnail against it, a small flake of granite came away, revealing not the dull grey beneath, but a glint of something else. Something metallic.
Heart thudding suddenly against his ribs, Arthur fumbled in his pocket for the magnifying loupe he always carried. He held it over the crack. There, nestled within the cheap granite, was a sliver of brass, engraved with what looked like… tiny, perfect gear teeth.
His breath hitched. This was impossible. He looked around. The cemetery was deserted. With trembling fingers, he took his keyring from his pocket. Selecting the smallest, sharpest key, he carefully worked it into the crack. More fragments of granite flaked away. The brass mechanism within was more complex than he could have imagined. It wasn’t a sliver; it was the corner of a plate; a part of some impossibly intricate device embedded inside the headstone.
He worked for an hour, his world shrinking to the few square inches of the inscription. Slowly, he uncovered a brass plate about the size of a playing card. And on it, in script so minute his loupe could barely resolve it, was a new message:
Time doesn’t heal, my love. It simply allows for recalibration. The key is in the longcase. The moon dial turns counterclockwise.
Arthur sat back, his mind reeling. Eleanor. This had Eleanor written all over it. The obsession with precision, the love of puzzles, the disdain for the obvious. She must have arranged this before she died. She must have known the shock would render him incapable of choosing a proper stone, that he would end up with this cheap, flawed thing. She had chosen it because it was cheap. After all, its poor quality would eventually reveal her secret.
He packed his stool and his tools, his hands shaking not with grief, but with a wild, electric excitement. He barely remembered the drive home. He went straight to his workshop, to the majestic Harrison longcase clock. He ignored the pendulum, the weight chains, and the main movement. He went directly to the elegant, painted face of the moon-phase dial.
The moon dial turns counterclockwise.
It was madness. Every rule of horology screamed against it. But Eleanor had never been one for rules. Taking a deep breath, Arthur placed his fingers on the delicate bezel of the moon dial. He hesitated for only a second, then began to turn it, not to the right, but to the left.
It resisted, then moved with a soft, gritty crunch, as if breaking a seal that had been in place for centuries. There was a deep, resonant click from within the clock’s case. The entire moon-phase aperture, a convex glass lens, popped loose into his hand. Behind it, nestled in a cavity he would have sworn wasn’t there yesterday, was a small, velvet-wrapped bundle.
He unfolded the velvet. Inside was a brass key, exquisitely crafted, and a note in Eleanor’s familiar, looping handwriting.
“Arthur,” it read. “If you’re reading this, you’ve finally stopped mourning the container and started looking at the contents. A good lesson for a clockmaker. And a husband. This key winds the mainspring of our story. There’s more to fix than just the clocks. Come and find me. Start with the anniversary clock in the hall. I never liked that “Time Heals All Wounds” nonsense anyway.”
Tears welled in Arthur’s eyes, but for the first time in a year, they were not tears of sorrow. They were tears of awe. He looked from the key in his hand to the grand, silent clock before him.
Unfortunately, the tombstone had been a cheap one. Fortunately, Eleanor had never been one for the obvious.
*****
New Yesterdays can be found at: Books-A-Million, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon, as well as your favorite bookshops. The Audiobook is available from Libro.fm, as well as Amazon.
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