Pocket watch and daisy on a thigh

The watch came up from the village on Tuesday wrapped in a wet handkerchief, and Brother Columba has given it to me because my hands are the steadiest in the house now that my eyes have stopped complaining. The case is dented where someone dropped it down a well. A daisy has been scratched into the back, and beneath it a compass rose, so fine it must have been done with a needle, as though the maker wanted the thing to know where it stood.

I spent three evenings with a loupe and a bottle of clove oil. The works had seized with grit and a mouse's nest, and the chain of little beads was rusted solid to its links. On the fourth morning I set the crown between finger and thumb and wound it three turns. The hand gave a small shiver and began to walk. Brother Columba was sorting goose feathers for the scriptorium, and he came in to see what the ticking was. He said the abbey clock has not kept true since the flood, so we have been ringing the bell by guesswork ever since.

The owner, a widow named Eleanor Haig, sent word that she does not want the watch back. She wants it set to the minute her husband died and kept there. I wrote to tell her that a watch can be made to show any hour, but it cannot be made to forget the ones it has counted. I have set it to the bell instead, ten past twelve, the hour the daisies open in the south garden.

Come at Easter and hear it tick in the chapter house.

Brother Anselm