Ten Hooded Apprentices Sat at the Black Slate Table With Only Their Palms Showing. The Finger Under the Master’s Brass Key Was Tied With a Red Thread in a Knot She Had Not Seen for Twenty-Two Years

My name is Ruth Calloway. I’m sixty-three, and I am the last master of the Calloway Clockmakers’ Guild, which has kept the same black slate hall on Harrow Street since 1888.

Every twenty years we hold the Blind Choosing. Ten apprentices sit along the long slate table in ivory linen hoods pulled low over their faces, hands open, palms up. No names, no faces, no favorites. The master walks the line with the hall’s brass key in her fist and lets it fall into the hand of the person she trusts, judged by the work alone.

I had watched these ten for three years. I knew them by their hands: the burn scar on the fourth, the bitten nails on the ninth, the ink-stained thumb on the second. I had already decided on the fourth, Dorian, who could regulate a movement by ear. I walked the line with the key hidden in my fist and my mind made up.

Then I passed the seventh hand, and my feet stopped on their own.

It was steady, and a thin red thread was knotted around the little finger. A double sailor’s bend, with the tail tucked under instead of trimmed. My husband Ansel invented that knot to tie tags on watch movements. In forty years he taught it to exactly one person besides me, my younger sister Marta, and Marta walked out of this hall twenty-two years ago after we quarreled over selling the guild’s escapement patent to a factory. She never wrote. I never asked anyone to find her.

Every hood in the room tipped an inch toward me. Dorian, in the fourth seat, went very still. I opened my fist above the seventh palm, and the key slid free and dropped, and the fingers closed around it without a single tremble. I bent toward the edge of the linen and said, quietly enough that only she could hear, “Who taught you that knot?”

She lifted the hood with both hands. Gray eyes, Marta’s gray eyes, in a face of about twenty-six, with a small scar through the left eyebrow. “You would have known my face in a moment,” she said, “so I will only say the name. Wren Marlow. My mother said you would recognize the knot before you recognized me.”

I sat down on the arm of the nearest chair because my knees decided for me.

Wren told it in a low, steady voice, with nine hooded apprentices and one very still Dorian listening. Marta had settled in a coastal town and repaired clocks in the back of a bookshop, and she had never stopped. She had died in March, quickly, of a heart that had been failing for years without telling anyone. In her last week she wrote Wren a letter and asked for one thing: go to Harrow Street, do the work, and sit at the table when the Choosing comes. “She said if I came through the front door as her daughter, you would turn me away,” Wren said. “She said you would forgive a stranger with good hands faster than a sister’s child.”

I would have turned her away. That is the truth, and I said so out loud in front of the whole guild, which is not a thing I do.

Wren had been hired in September by my foreman for the night bench, under her mother’s maiden name. For six months she had done the fine work nobody else wanted at two in the morning. I had signed her wages without ever seeing her hands. She had earned that seat on the work alone, which is all the Choosing has ever asked.

Dorian took it hard, and he was right to. I had all but promised him with my eyes. I stood up and told the hall what the Choosing is: the key falls where the master’s fist opens, and it fell in the seventh palm. The rule holds for a year and a day, and then the guild votes. But I also told them that Dorian would be our second master, with his own bench and a voice in every decision, because a guild needs a man who can regulate a movement by ear as much as it needs a woman who can tie Ansel’s knot. Dorian looked at the slate for a long minute. Then he held his hand out to Wren, palm up, the way apprentices do when they mean it. She put the key in it for a moment, and took it back. “Ask me again in a year and a day,” she said.

When the hall had emptied, Wren asked to see the back room. I had not opened it in twenty-two years. Marta’s bench was exactly as she had left it, under a linen cloth: a pocket watch lying open on the felt, missing its mainspring, and a note in her small square hand that said only, Ruth, when you are ready. I had kept that door locked because I was not.

Wren took the letter out of her jacket and we read it together at Marta’s bench. It said nothing about the quarrel. It said: the knot is for Wren, the bench is for Ruth, the spring is in the drawer.

The spring was in the drawer, wound in tissue paper, a little rusted at one end. I fitted it with my own hands while Wren held the lamp. When I closed the case and lifted it to my ear, the watch began to tick.