One morning, Ludlow Thomas stood before the mantel in the dining room, the others gone to their tasks and I clearing away what remained of breakfast. I knew he was aware I stood behind him, staring at the smooth finish of his head, at his arms stretched wide along that white mantelpiece. And the clock ticked out between us, the only sound. Tick, tick, tick.

He opened the little door beneath that round white face, reached in, and took the tiny clapper between his fingers. And in that enormous silence, I heard my heart. I could see the clapper twitching in his fingers, only making the absence of the ticking more enormous, as if muted time became a character.

“What would you be now?” he asked. “In this space I have just made—where time has stopped. Who would you be?”

“That is foolishness,” I found the voice to say.

“No.” He did not turn round. “Imagine it.” I gazed at his long fingers delicately pinching the clapper as though it were the stem of a glass, holding this moment.

“I would be …” I began—and I imagined it. I could cast my words out—and they did not fall from off my mark. They stuck, and, sticking, set the souls I traced in motion, cross the past and present, beyond Time’s corset and my poor imagination into—

“I am not free, Nell,” he said softly, still not turning round.

“Free?”

“In that place without time, I would be free. In that place, I would come to you and take you, and you might be mine.”

I heard the words he said, and we neither moved. Neither did he let his fingers loose their firm hold upon that clock. I watched him stand before the mantel, watched him turn his body toward me while with one hand he still held that slender ticking time.

“It does not avail.” I whispered then. He shivered. I walked cross the space between us. “It need not be holy to touch each other.”

“But it is holy,” he protested, taking my hand. “It is—” But then he broke off, blushing, and would not look at me.

I put my hand on his arm. “It is—”

“It is pure meeting.”

“And why should we not, then, meet in such a way?”

“Yes, of course.” He smiled down at me. I could see he was uneasy, however, and soon enough, indeed, he looked past me to the painting behind my head. After a time, he looked back down into my eyes.

And then he let the clapper go, and Time started up again between us.

6 December