Tide and Time

The meeting hall of the Saltside Clock Tower filled up the way it always did before a vote, which was to say slowly and with a lot of grumbling about the stairs. Clare Marsh had been going to these things for two years now, first as a junior clerk for the Guild and then as HR manager, and she could time the room by heart. Old Piet Verren arrived forty minutes early to claim the chair nearest the tide chart wall. The Carrington sisters came together and sat apart, as they always did, because neither of them could stand the other's elbow on the shared armrest. And Suzi Grayson arrived twenty minutes before the gavel with a folder of printed arguments, because Suzi never met a neighborhood dispute she didn't want to win on paper.

Clare was thirty-five, two months out of a four-year relationship, and she had promised herself on the walk over that she would not spend the whole evening thinking about the empty side of her bed. She had done enough of that in October. The whole point of coming tonight, other than the fact that the bell schedule vote actually mattered to her job, was to be around people and clocks and brass and the smell of machine oil, all the things that had not changed while the rest of her life apparently had.

Then Andre Kang walked in.

She noticed him the way you notice weather coming in off the flats, all at once and without any deciding on her part. He was tall, thirty-four, with sun creases at the corners of his eyes and the kind of tan you only get from working outdoors in all seasons. He had sea salt in his hair still, and something sweeter under it, moonflowers maybe, the ones that grow along the dune path and only open after dark. He wore a canvas coat with a sextant case slung over one shoulder, and he stood in the doorway a moment as a man reads a room's currents before committing to one.

His eyes found hers across the crowd. Not scanned and landed, she would have sworn later, but found, the way a compass finds north. She looked back. She was out of practice at this and it showed, she was sure, in the half second too long she held it before looking down at her voting card like it needed studying.

Well. So much for not thinking about it.

The vote itself was the usual sausage. Suzi got up with her folder and argued for the new bell schedule, the one that would ring the hours against the tide tables instead of the civil hours, which sounded trivial and was actually the kind of thing that reorganized a whole port town's morning. Edmund Watson, the lead horologist, spoke against it, gently, on the grounds that the strike train would need rework and the ancient escapement was not as forgiving as it looked. Clare knew Edmund from her first days at the Guild, when he had taught her how to read a wheel train, and she knew his gentle tone meant he had already priced the rework in his head and found it annoying but survivable. He was married, sensible, and completely immune to Suzi, which made their exchanges almost restful to watch.

It was during the third lull, while somebody recounted the north benches, that the tide man drifted over to her.

"The astronomical dial," he said, tipping his head up at the great painted face above the doors, the one with the moon's age and the dragon hand that shows the nodes. "The locals keep arguing about what the little golden fish means. I've heard three different stories in three towns and none of them agree. You look like someone who'd give me the actual answer."

Clare laughed before she could stop herself. "The fish is the drag of the tide on the moon's path. It points to the Perigean spring, when the big tides run. It's not decorative, whatever the fishermen tell you."

"So it's a warning label." He grinned. "Four hundred years old and it's a warning label."

"It's a very dignified warning label." And then, because he looked genuinely interested and not just charming at her, she walked him through it, the eccentric mounted on a gear, the moon's age in the little window, how the dragon hand ran backwards because the nodes regress. She heard herself settle into the cadence she used for onboarding new Guild staff, clear and level, and he listened with his whole face.

"You're doing the HR voice," he said, when she paused for breath.

She blinked. "My what?"

"The voice. Patient, structured, three points and a summary. I'd bet money you explain things for a living." He looked delighted about it. "It's very good. I just want you to know I noticed."

"I'm Clare Marsh. I do the hiring and the firing for the Horologists' Guild, and apparently I cannot turn it off even at a neighborhood vote."

"Andre Kang. I compile tide tables. I turn up, measure, argue with harbormasters, and leave before the weather turns." He said it lightly, the way people say things they have said many times, and something in Clare noted it and filed it under useful information and not under anything sad, thank you very much.

The recount went the way everyone knew it would. Suzi's faction carried the new bell schedule by a comfortable margin, and Suzi permitted herself exactly one small satisfied nod, because she was a professional. Edmund shook her hand and said something about the strike train needing a new set of lifting pins and Suzi said the committee would gladly fund the pins, and the matter was settled. The hall emptied in its usual slow spill of coats and candles.

Clare found herself, without having decided anything, walking Andre up instead of out. The wind deck was the open gallery just under the lantern, four stories up, where the tower's designers had put a railing and a weather vane and nothing else, on the theory that a person up there had come for the view and should not be distracted by furniture. The tidal flats below were going dark and the first of the sea-fires had lit out near the channel, those cold green-blue glows that come and go with the season. The wind off the water was real up there, it pushed at her coat and pulled her hair sideways, and Andre leaned on the railing like he had been leaning on railings over water his whole life.

"You can see the whole estuary," he said. "I've been charting this coast for one season and I never once thought to look at it from up here. That's a professional failing."

"You're leaving soon, then." She said it to the sea-fires, not to him.

"Thursday. Next station down the coast." He turned his head and looked at her, and there was nothing sneaky in it, which she appreciated more than she could have explained. "Which is a shame, because I've enjoyed the HR voice."

"The HR voice is not an invitation."

"No," he agreed. "But the way you walked me up four flights of stairs might be. I'd rather ask than assume, though. Clare Marsh, would you let me kiss you?"

The wind shoved at both of them. She was thirty-five years old and she had not been asked that plainly since she was twenty-two, and she found that the honest answer had been sitting in her chest since the doorway of the meeting hall.

"Yes," she said.

He kissed her hard against the railing, one hand at her jaw and the wind tearing at both of them, and the sea-fires glowed green out on the flats and the tower's old clock struck the hour above their heads like it was keeping score.

The thing about being asked plainly, Clare discovered on the fourth flight down, was that it kept working on her. She had said yes up on the wind deck and then the yes had followed her back inside, down the spiral stair, all the way through her body like a struck bell still ringing. She was holding a lantern she had grabbed from a bracket in the stairwell without thinking about it, and Andre was following her, and the stairs turned and turned around the central shaft with the tower's own slow machinery ticking overhead.

"Where exactly are we going?" he asked, two landings down. His voice bounced off the stone.

"The gear loft. It's below the clock room. Nobody uses it after the six o'clock winding."

"Is that allowed?"

"It's the tower I work in," she said, which was a slight exaggeration, since she was the HR manager for the Guild of Horologists and not the owner of anything except a good umbrella, but it came out convincing and she decided not to correct it.

The gear loft door was iron and complained when she shouldered it open. Inside, the air smelled of oil and old dust and brass, and the space rose away into shadow where the great cogs hung from the beams, the going train and the strike train stacked in their slow enormous patience. She hung the lantern on a nail that had probably been holding lanterns since the tower was built. Canvas dust covers lay over the floor in pale drifts, and beside the wall somebody had left a roll of oilcloth for wrapping the smaller escapement parts when they came down for cleaning. It was about the size of a small boat.

"This is the best room I have ever been in," Andre said. He had his head tipped back, turning slowly, looking up at the wheels. "Look at the size of that one. That one could tell time for a country."

"That's the great wheel. Edmund Watson would be happy to hear you say that. He once gave me forty minutes on it when I was a junior clerk and didn't know a wheel train from a wheel of cheese."

"Romantic." He was still looking up. "Very romantic room."

"It's a machine room."

"It's a room full of enormous slow beautiful things that are all quietly counting," he said. "That's romantic. I chart tides. I would know."

She pushed him onto the oilcloth. Not violently, she would have said later if pressed, but with intent, both hands flat on his canvas coat, and he went down onto the rolled fabric laughing, the laugh cutting off when she climbed on after him and put a knee on either side of his hips. The lantern made a low amber ceiling of light under the nearest cog, and the dust covers were soft under their weight, and the tower ticked around them like a patient animal.

"Hi," he said.

"Hi." She was thirty-five years old and sitting on a stranger in a gear loft and she felt reckless in a way she had not felt since before the four-year relationship, since before the shared flat and the shared shelves and the slow kind eroding end of it. Two months out. She had counted. "You said you'd rather ask than assume."

"I did say that."

"So. Assume the kiss is established and ask about the rest."

"Clare Marsh," he said, very seriously, hands settling at her waist, "may I take your coat off?"

"You may."

It went the way it goes when two people who like each other try to undress in a hurry on soft uncertain ground, it went badly and wonderfully. His coat had three buckles and hers had a line of buttons that had defeated better women. He got her coat off and then spent a minute on his own buckles while she watched and offered commentary she would not have offered in any professional setting. His shirt came up and there was the flat brown plane of his chest with its sun creases, and she put her hands on it and he made a low surprised sound like the touch had gotten past his defenses.

"Fair trade," she said, and pushed her blouse over her head, and then there was the unclasping, which required teamwork, which required them both