Time's Mistress by Steven Savile

sorry. I … what happened? Can I ask?”
    “She saved someone’s life,” I said, “but no one saved hers.”
    I really was crying now, not just a single tear. The painter sat me down on the tarpaulin he’d laid out on the ground. I told him what I was doing, my pilgrimage, and about the old couple I’d met in Paris a few days ago. I don’t know how long I sat there. I couldn’t take my eyes off the paining. By the time I stopped looking at it, it was past midnight and the tourists had gone home.
    “It seems to me this journey of yours is being steered, my friend. Call it fate, call it chance, you were meant to be here, tonight, because you needed to be here. I want you to have this,” he said, taking the painting off the easel.
    “I can’t … let me give you something for it.”
    He shook his head, “You already did, believe me. Just by being there you gave me part of your life and made it such an important part of mine. Let me give it back to you.”
    I couldn’t argue with that.
    I held the painting like it was the most precious thing in the world as I walked back to my room in the old Dominican monastery, and hung it on the wall.
    I lay in my bed looking up at the painting of when I meet Isla Durovich for the first time. Four hearts.
    But there were only three of them now.
    At three-fifteen the next morning my watch stopped and I couldn’t get it going again. It was only a small thing, but it felt like the greatest tragedy in the entire world. I cradled it in my hands like a dying child, willing it to tick. It didn’t.
    I’d seen a place in the Jewish Quarter called Old Watches. It was a tiny antique place with a watchmaker who looked like a gnome with mad whiskers and madder eyes. I set out at first light. I couldn’t sleep. I needed to get it fixed. I couldn’t bring Isla back, but I could fix this. It’s funny how little things become obsessions. I didn’t care about my train to Vienna, I wasn’t leaving until my moon landing watch was keeping good time.
    The morning air was brisk. There was rain in the air. Locals bustled toward the underground station, Staroměstská. It was too early for the shops; they were all boarded up or shuttered. It felt like I was seeing a secret part of the city, like watching a lover in bed, drowsy and not quite ready to face the world. I couldn’t remember exactly where I’d seen the watch shop, somewhere close to the old Jewish cemetery and the synagogues, so I just wandered around for a while drinking in the architecture of dreams and desires that had fired those imaginations oh so long ago, marveling at just how beautiful the buildings were and wondering—not for the first time—what future generations would think of the modern monstrosities we left as our legacy with the ugly but functional lines.
    The shop was open.
    There must have been ten thousand watches and parts of watches in the window, all of them at least fifty years old, most a lot older, all of the working parts ticking away to different rhythms. I opened the door. A little bell rang. There was no room inside—there was a one-foot square space in front of the watchmaker’s counter and the rest of the shop was taken up by mechanisms. He looked up from the timepiece he had been tinkering with and waggled his bushy eyebrows. There where tiny hairsprings and mainsprings and little coils scattered across the counter, some of them almost microscopic.
    “What can I do for you, young man?” He asked, in perfect English. I hadn’t been expecting that. I’d been all primed for five minutes of miming to get my point across.
    I took my watch off and put it on the counter between us.
    “It stopped last night and I can’t get it going again.”
    “Well, let’s have a look at it, shall we?” He studied it, reached into one of the drawers beneath the counter and brought out a little tool to screw the back off it. He put a jeweler’s monocle in his eye. Using a fine pin he teased the mechanism,