Pocket watch, roses and heart on a forearm

Up on Gallow Hill, in the year the river froze solid, there lived a watchmaker called Silas Brandt who could mend anything with a spring in it, but could never mend his own temper. Each Sunday a girl came up the lane with a barrow of pink wild roses, Clara Venn by name, and each Sunday he told her the time was none of her affair. She bought a rose anyway. By spring he had sold her a gold pocket watch at cost, she had paid him in roses, and neither of them would say who had got the better of it.

He hung the case key on a grey silk ribbon round his neck so he would never lose it, and he was careful to wind her watch every morning at seven. Then one March he took a fever, and he forgot. The watch ran down at ten past four on a Sunday, the hands sat still, and Clara stood at the gate with her barrow and no notion of what hour it was.

Here is the bit you will want to remember when your own clocks start misbehaving. She did not go home. She climbed the step, found the ribbon tucked under his collar where he lay sweating, and wound the watch herself with the key still warm from his skin. Tick, went the watch. Tick, and then the heart of the thing began again, and so did he, though it took him another six years to admit it.

So when you see the pair of them dance, raise your glasses to the ribbon, and to whoever in this family still knows how to wind a clock.