By Jessie Clark. A free reader bonus.

A Crestwick Chronicles bonus scene, set the spring after Steeped in Secrets.

Spoilers: this scene is best read after you finish Steeped in Secrets, Book Three of the Crestwick Chronicles. The novel releases December 10, 2026.

I took him a clock on the last Thursday of March.

It had been my grandmother's. It had stood on the shelf above the scale in the back room of the shop for the eleven years I had owned it, keeping time to within a minute a week. A minute a week is the sort of fault a person lives beside for a decade and starts calling a character.

I wrapped it in a tea towel anyway and went up the lane behind the churchyard, which adds four minutes and brings you out at his gate instead of his front door.

He knew the clock did not need mending. I knew that he knew. We got an hour and a quarter out of the afternoon without either of us going near it, and I would do the same again tomorrow.

The lights had come down from the Pelham to the old bank in the second week of January, the way they always do, and the square had been wet cobbles ever since. Vernon stood up at the February committee meeting and said, in about eleven words, that he would not be ringing the bell in December and that Keith Quarrie should be asked instead.

The town was very kind about it, and I want that down before anything else. Nobody made a speech. Nobody asked him why. Franklin Dunn said afterwards in the Pelham that the man was eighty-one and had earned himself a warm Friday indoors, and the room agreed with him and went on to the matter of the bunting. Marguerite Sowerby sent a card. Mrs. Aldecott, who distrusts the weather, told me across the counter that he had done his share — which from her is a civic honour and ought to be entered as one.

December will be the fifty-second year. It will be the first of the fifty-two that he does not ring it, and there is nobody in Crestwick who will set those two facts beside each other except the two of us.

The workshop smelled of oil and brass polish and hammer felts. Three clocks were going. The piano frame still leaned against the back wall with its strings off and its gold gone green. The tins were still in their four shelves, and WASHERS, PROBABLY NOT was exactly where it had been in December. He put me on the crate by the plastic curtain — because that is where he puts everybody.

He unwrapped the tea towel on the bench and turned the case round twice without touching the movement.

"This came out of a workshop in Bristol," he said. "Not a famous one. There were nine or ten men doing this in one street and most of them signed nothing, which is why you can buy one now for the price of a coat." He put a finger on the back plate. "Eighteen sixty, give or take four years. Your grandmother will have had it off somebody in this county, because they came over in crates as ballast and the whole valley is full of them."

"It runs a minute fast in the week," I said.

"It runs a minute fast in the week because the mainspring has taken a set." He got the back off, which took him three tries and a swear word he apologised for. "Sixty years of the same hand winding it the same distance and stopping in the same place. A spring remembers. That is not a figure of speech — it is metal."

"Can you do anything with it?"

"I can do something with it." He laid the back plate down where he could find it again. "I am not going to tell you how long it will take me."

His hands went then, the way they go — all at once and not building. He had the case open on the bench and he took both hands off it and put them flat on the wood and looked at the wall above the drawer until they came back. Four of the little screws were already out and lined up on a strip of blanket, in order, nearest to furthest. He had done that without thinking about it, the way you would set a table.

"The wool is so they don't roll," he said. "A screw on this floor is a screw gone."

I said something about the shop and he said something about the Gazette, and we sat in a workshop in the last week of March talking about a spring that had taken a set, which was the entire purpose of my visit and both of us knew it.

Here is the thing I came away with. I am going to put it down the way he gave it to me, which was sideways and in the middle of something else.

"There was one of the others," he said. "I knew one of them."

I did not move on the crate. I have thought since about how carefully I did not move.

"You knew," I said.

"I never knew." He was looking into the case. "That is not the same thing and I want you to have it the right way round. Nobody ever said one word to me and I never said one to him, and if you put the pair of us in a room and asked us straight out we would both have told you we had no idea what you were talking about — and we would not have been lying so much as declining."

"Then how?"

"He mended shoes," Vernon said. "Thirty-one years at it, with a radio on — and a man like that handles every foot in a town. The best boots in this county came out of his hands, and his own were held together with a strap." He turned a screwdriver over and did not use it. "And one August I came out of the school with an oil can in my hand on a day there was no reason on God's earth for me to be in that school, and he was across the road with his hands in his pockets. He looked at me. I looked at him. And he nodded."

"That's all?"

"That is all. It was enough, and I have never in my life been so glad to see a man cross a road away from me." He set the screwdriver down. "After that we nodded. In the hardware shop. At the post office window. Across the market on a Saturday, over the top of forty people, for about thirty years."

I asked whether they had ever got closer to it than that.

"Once." He almost smiled. "He was behind me in a queue for stamps, and he said, to the back of my head, that August was a long month. And I said it was. And then he bought his stamps."

"And he died," I said.

"Eleven years ago." He set the back plate against the case to see that it still sat true. "I went to it. There were a hundred and twenty people in that church and I was the only one in it who knew what I was burying — and I have thought about that at the sink most days since."

I would like to report that I asked him three more good questions. I asked him none. I sat on a crate in a cold garage with my grandmother's clock open on the bench between us, and what I understood, slowly, was that for ninety years this arrangement had not held by secrecy alone. It had held by courtesy. Two people in a market square, nodding over the heads of their neighbours, keeping a faith neither of them could name and neither of them ever tested.

I will say now what I did that evening, because it belongs here and not four pages further on. I took the index down and opened it to page four hundred and four, which is his, and I put my hand flat on it. Somewhere in the other four hundred and ten pages there is a man who mended shoes and died eleven years ago, and I could have had the name inside half an hour. I closed the book and put it back on the shelf and went and stood in the dark shop instead. Fig came and sat on my foot, and that is the whole of what happened.

* * *

He walked me out through the plastic curtain and past the van, and the light was still in the lane, because it is late March now and we have that back.

At the gate he put his hand on the top bar and kept it there, the way he did in December. In December he asked me whether my grandmother had ever mentioned him. This time he asked me nothing at all, which I have decided was a kindness rather than a failure of nerve — and I am prepared to be wrong about it.

"Three weeks," he said.

"Take four."

"I shall take what it takes." He lifted his hand off the bar. "It will come back to you a minute slow. I want you to know that in advance. I can get it honest or I can get it the way you are used to, and I am not able to do both any more."

"A minute slow is fine."

"It is not fine," he said. "It is what is available."

So I went home down the lane with my hands empty and the tea towel folded over my arm, and I did not mind the empty hands. The shelf above the scale in the back room has had nothing on it since.