The 67th of Roalis 2719 - Approximately half-past the 25th hour
Barely.
Tomorrow he will go to the clockmaker’s. Tomorrow he will talk with Ixbridge in his brass-bright, soft-ticking workshop. They will sit in the old chairs, worn by time and stained with virtuous cog grease, drinking well-made tea out of ill-made cups. No, not ill made. Purposefully cheap. They often break. The man has too many careless clients, too many temperamental machines. It will be warm, comforting. Will he have the old watch remade? It could be done, he has no doubt. Ixbridge will have kept the design. Perhaps. No, let the old watch go, let it pass out of his memory, and take the night he was robbed along with it. He will commission a new watch, another custom job. He closes his eyes, imagines gear-teeth and enamel dials, springs like snail shells.
“Shrike, are you planning on sitting there the whole night looking like you have a monumental headache, or are you going to play?” He does have a headache, has had it for days. It ebbs and flows, but it never departs. He blinks three times, resets his vision. The too-handsome face of Wainscoting, with its cultivated sneer and perfectly arched brow stares at him. “The play is, as it has been for the last 3 minutes, yours” Another trio of blinks and looks at the cards in his hand, looks at the trick forming upon the worn green baize table. He cannot read the face of his partner, not with that absurd smirk, and their two rivals are equal mysteries. Whist is not his game. He can count the cards well enough. Better than most in truth. Any number of victories at banking games can attest to this. No, it is the personal factor that always seems to trip him up. It is a failing of his. It will need correcting.
The game is still early. He has too many cards, too many options; all of them bad. He tries to read the faces around him. The angle and the cards obscure them. There is little enough to see in any event. Wainscotting is not helping matters. That would be cheating, an insult to the cards, and Wainscoting would never stoop to such barbarism. Does he have anything upon which to act, some play that will set him up well for the rest of the game? It is too early to tell. The trick on the table gives hi, no clues. He will have to follow suit, but his cards are middling. He blinks again. It would be a tell, were he not so overly prone to it. Is that another way to hide his motives? Behind the nervous ticks? Possible. It is worth investigating.
The seven of moons. It is the least poor option he has. It will have to do. He lays it upon the table and leans back in his chair.
“Well, that took entirely too long.” Wainscoting continues with his most cultivated and most truculent sneer. “The new posting is really taking it out of you, isn’t it.” Oh well done Wainscoting. Shrikeweed suppresses a smile, suppresses a laugh. He could not have asked for a better line, a better opening. He might even consider letting Wainscoting win at their next game of snooker. Might. Well, probably not. It would be an insult to the table.
“It is,” he says, tucking in his hand to shield his cards from any prying eyes, “rather a complex matter. The man’s current staff seems to have nearly vanished and left in their wake either a chaos of papers, or else a desert.” Reassembling the last months of the Incumbent’s career has not been easy, and he is by turns either furious or filled with a strange sort of delight. Puzzling together a coherent image of Incumbent’s actions, making sense of official incompetence, well, that has been rewarding. The headaches have even lessened. They never really go away. The would be smoother if the Incumbent could provide more information. The man cannot. He seems as confused and incomplete as his paperwork. The gaps need filling. What better place to begin the work than here, at the man’s club? The fact that it was his own made matters all the easier.
The salon is not his usual haunt. Too many people, too much noise. The library, the upstairs billiard room, and the coffee room, those are his usual haunts. Better for thinking, and better for gathering the kind of information he has needed up till now. He has had no desire, no need, to drift into one of the political cabals or another. It would not have been proper, not have been sound. A civil servant should not, cannot take sides, however much he might wish to. But now? He is still a civil servant, but he serves one man. Can he afford to widen his scope? He will have to, there is no other option.
“I cannot say I quite grasp the man, but then it seems neither does he. We are feeling our way together, piecing blindly a picture of his thinking before his affliction.” What is the man’s affliction? Unknown. A stroke fits the bill, at least on the surface, but there are other, deeper disturbances that he cannot quite name. That is a matter for another time, another place. “Still, I wish I had a better understanding of the man. Did you ever dine extensively with him? Share a confidence of a cigar?” Does the Incumbent even smoke? He is not sure. He never enters that foetid den. Tobacco is not his vice. He has plenty of others.