The Toymaker's Apprentice Page 6

  They were in a narrow cloakroom with another hidden door in the far wall. Christian inserted his key, then turned and caught Stefan with his single-eyed gaze. “You’ve heard the phrase ‘too many cooks in the kitchen’? Well, there were too many clockmakers in Nuremberg. I built my masterpiece, but they would not accept it.”

  “Was it another Advent clock?”

  “No, something far smaller. A wristwatch.”

  “I’ve heard of those. British, aren’t they? Wearable clocks for women that look like bracelets.” He had only ever seen pocket watches, himself. In workshops, anything on the wrist could be dangerous if it snagged on a tool.

  “Correct. Wristwatches do already exist. So, what do you think would make mine a masterpiece?” Christian asked.

  Uh-oh, Stefan realized. This was a test. They had stopped in the antechamber. Stefan stared at the hanging coats and chewed his bottom lip.

  “I suppose it would be easier to see. You wouldn’t have to open your coat and jacket to get to it.”

  “Yes?”

  “But . . . well, wouldn’t winding something so tiny be a chore? And all that movement would jostle the mechanism. The gears would shift too much.”

  “Unless?”

  Stefan bit his lip.

  “Use every fault to your advantage,” Christian advised. “That’s how the best inventions succeed.”

  Stefan pictured a clock strapped to his wrist, the way his arm swung back and forth as he walked. Like a pendulum. Like clockwork. Like—

  “A self-winding watch!” he exclaimed.

  “Excellent!” Christian grinned. “You’ve a good head for visualization.”

  “But, that’s brilliant!” Stefan cried. “A watch like that could keep almost perfect time!”

  “Yes. Good news for the wearer, but . . .” Again, Christian gave him an expectant look.

  “But . . .” Stefan’s mind raced. If clocks kept perfect time, they would never need to be set or recalibrated. “Who needs a clockmaker with a perfect watch?”

  “Precisely. Clockmakers would lose customers. The guild did not approve—of the work, or the maker.”

  But Stefan did. It was an amazing idea. “So what did you do?”

  “I took my clockworks, and I left.”

  Christian unlocked the second door and led the way into the heart of the guildhouse.

  It was a neck-craning, ear-assaulting experience. A thousand clocks lined the walls. Clocks of gold, and clocks run by water that dripped clear liquid into cups shaped like lily pads. There were grandfather clocks set in casings of rare and fragrant wood, small clocks on long shelves like never-ending fireplace mantels, formed of porcelain figurines and rustic cuckoos.

  Stefan had never seen so many beautiful timepieces in his life. He passed a glass case of pocket watches, each gleaming in brass, silver, or gold. There were clocks with precious stones encrusted into each numeral. There were some of such odd shapes that they did not appear to be clocks at all—one that was merely a series of lines on the wall, with a narrow window cut into the opposite side of the hall. A small sign declared it some sort of sundial—it marked time by how many of the lines were covered in shadow. Most remarkable of all, each clock kept the exact time so that, when they ticked, it was a resonant sound that vibrated the building. The striking of the hour must be deafening, Stefan thought. His chest expanded with each tick, filling him with the most remarkable sense of rightness. And these were just timepieces. With carpentry and a little ingenuity, imagine what more he could do.

  “Welcome to the clockmakers’ guild,” Christian said, leading the way through the gallery and up a banistered stair. “Ignore the clocks in this room. They’re mostly rubbish. But there is something I want to show you.”

  “Rubbish?” Stefan highly doubted that, but he rushed to keep up with his long-legged cousin.

  “Not rubbish, I suppose, but nothing you haven’t seen before—hands, numbers. The same as you’ll find at any street fair or decent shop. But this . . .” Christian said as Stefan gained the top step. “This is extraordinary.”

  At the back of a long white room, empty of all other timepieces, sat a glass case with a box inside. Stefan peered through the glass.

  “It looks like a pile of gears,” he said at last. Indeed, it seemed to be a drawer of spare clock parts arranged in a vaguely circular pattern, piles of golden gears and cogs stacked on top of each other, as if a child had tried to create a sunflower from the discarded pieces.

  “Look again,” Christian said. “There is a design to the madness.”

  Stefan leaned closer until his breath fogged up the glass. “It’s a clock,” he realized.

  “Built in 1606 by a Benedictine monk.”

  “But . . .” There were no hands or numbers to count off the hours. As Stefan watched the gleaming wheels of gold, some of the larger gears moved slowly. It was like spying on an ant colony from far above. “What does it do?”

  “Nothing. This is just a replica. Would you like to know how it works?”

  Stefan tore his eyes away from the remarkable device. “Yes, I would.”

  Christian seemed pleased. “Excellent. Now, for your first assignment.” He turned and led the way downstairs again.

  Stefan pulled his notebook from his pocket, torn between wanting to sketch the curious clock and needing to take notes for his first duty as journeyman.

  “I have people to see,” Christian explained as they clattered through the hidden doors and out past the sour-faced clerk.

  “Your foster family?”

  “Among others. You’ll be on your own for the rest of the day. See what you can find.”

  Stefan blinked, once again hurrying to keep up. “Find? Find what?” he asked, gaining the sidewalk once more, pencil at the ready.

  Christian turned around and smiled. “The krakatook, of course.”

  • • •

  HE’D STARTED OUT methodically enough. From morning until noon, he visited the nut sellers themselves, and the warehouses where imports were brought in by the wagonload. From there, he’d eaten his way through a dozen bakeries, ordering hazelnut tortes and walnut pfeffernüsse, always asking to see the baker’s store of nutmeats. But he’d had seventeen pieces of cake so far, and no sign of the krakatook.

  He visited physicians and herbalists, all manner of people who used nuts—stationers who used crushed shells of raw walnuts to make brown ink, apothecaries that ground nut shells into powders fine as ash for polishing faces, boots, and silver. He even climbed a few trees looking for the elusive krakatook.

  But Christian had hunted for seven years with no success. How was Stefan supposed to do better in a single day? The difficulty was this—no one knew what a krakatook looked like. The very nature of the nut was that each one was different. It was said to resemble an almond, a walnut, and occasionally a hazelnut, but never a cashew (which Stefan learned wasn’t really a nut at all). That much, at least, Christian and Samir had divined from their research. Yet Samir assured them they would know one when they found it. Stefan hoped that was true, and that he hadn’t already eaten it.

  At his wits’ end, he headed toward the botanical garden.

  The entire length and width of Nuremberg was littered with gardens, large and small. Horticulture had been the pride of the city since the 1500s. Stefan could spend his entire journeyship searching in people’s courtyards and fields for the nut. But the Nuremberg Botanical Garden had existed for almost two hundred years in one form or another. Surely they would have at least heard of the krakatook. Maybe the groundskeepers at the garden would have some advice for him.

  The botanical garden was a patch of paradise on earth. A vast expanse of greenery, from shrubs to trees to flowers, stretched out in rows as far as the eye could see. Walled in by the city, it seemed a secret place, although it was open to anyone. His mothe
r had taken him here when he was very young. Aside from a game of hide-and-seek that had been mostly one-sided, the place had not made much of an impression on him. Now, however, it could have been the Amazon, that great jungle in the New World that seemed to laugh at Portuguese explorers and swallow them whole.

  He avoided the outdoor planting beds and found the greenhouse, a pretty structure of whitewashed metal and soaring windows that held tropical plants. He stepped inside and was met with humidity and the scent of exotic flowers. Wandering the winding path through the center of the greenhouse, he followed the sound of a spade and rake until he discovered the source—a groundskeeper kneeling in the dirt. The little man looked up as Stefan approached.

  “Hoy there, young sir! Pleasant day, isn’t she?”

  “Yes, very pleasant. As are your gardens,” Stefan replied. When asking for help, it never hurt to start with a compliment, particularly one that was true.

  The old man grinned. “If you’re here to meet with your young lady, I believe you’ll find her by the tulips.”

  “What? Oh, no, I’m not meeting anyone. I was looking for you, in fact.” The heat rose in Stefan’s cheeks at the very thought of a girl waiting for him. The only girls Stefan knew were under the age of eight and pining for his father’s dolls.

  “That’s a pity,” the old man said. “She’s an easier sight on the eyes than me.” Stefan helped the man rise to his feet and waited while he dusted off his hopelessly stained trousers. “All right, then. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m looking for a nut.”

  “Oh, nut trees and bushes are down to the left, the last corner lot. We had to separate them from the other plants so they wouldn’t sprout their seeds all over tarnation.”

  The man nodded and turned back to his plants.

  “Actually, I’m looking for something rare. It’s been impossible to find. It’s called a krakatook?”

  “A krakatook!” The man broke into an even wider grin, and his shining white teeth became almost menacing. Stefan took an involuntary step backward.

  “You might as well be looking for a mermaid! The krakatook. I haven’t heard that one in years. It’s fool’s gold, young man.”

  “But you have heard of it,” Stefan said, relieved. He couldn’t stand returning home a complete failure on his first day, even if he had been given an impossible task.

  “Sure, I have,” the gardener said. “A mystical nut from the Far East. Marco Polo wrote about it in his diaries.”

  Stefan was staggered. The nut was real!

  “But it doesn’t exist,” the man continued, “or we’d have one by now. Someone’s playing a prank on you, I’m afraid.” The gardener gave him a considering look. “Are you newly apprenticed?”

  “No, I’m a journeyman,” Stefan said. But for how long? he wondered. The man gave him a dubious look.

  “A new master, then. Yep, those fellers are always pulling some new boy’s leg. I’m afraid they’ve firmly yanked yours. Speaking of which, these weeds won’t pull themselves, so if you’ll excuse me.”

  Stefan let the gardener return to his work. “A prank,” he muttered.

  It wasn’t unheard of. Journeymen played jokes on apprentices all the time. His own father had pulled one or two over on him—telling Stefan that sea horses were shaped like the letter “C,” leading to an entire mobile of ridiculously shaped creatures that had his father bent over with laughter. Or when he was given a strange piece of wood to carve a cup from, only to discover upon drinking from it that the soft wood had in fact been very hard soap. He’d gotten a foam mustache for his troubles.

  “A rare nut,” he said. “And I fell for it.”

  Christian’s whole fairy tale had been exactly that. So had the journeyship, no doubt. Christian and his father were just putting him in his place. That whole story about the princess and Boldavia—all just to show Stefan he belonged at home with his father and not off on an adventure. His neck flashed hot beneath his collar. He felt a headache coming on. They were probably relaxing in some biergarten having a good laugh. Well, maybe not laughing—he couldn’t imagine his father would ever do that. Still, he felt like a fool.

  He reached the end of the greenhouse and stopped in front of the doors, resisting the urge to bang his head against them. Through the glass he could see a field of tulips, red-and-white striped flowers nodding sleepily in the breeze.

  Tulips had been his mother’s favorite. There had been a vase of yellow ones by her bed when she died.

  Without warning, tears rolled down his cheeks.

  “If it’s rare, it won’t be here,” said an amused voice. Stefan turned on his heel, wiping furiously at his eyes, but they would not stay dry.

  “What makes you think so?” he asked in a gruff voice, addressing the row of plants behind him. Rubber trees, the sign said, exotic-looking things with trunks like twisted vines.

  A pair of eyes peered at him from behind the large, shining leaves. They belonged to a girl seated on a low bench with a bit of embroidery in her lap.

  She held up a piece of linen. “What do you think? I’m meant to be embroidering these in the parlor, but I hate sitting inside on a day like this. Not that this isn’t inside, but it’s peaceful and green. Will this do?” She handed him the linen. It was a small handkerchief embroidered with a pale blue “S” and small dark blue flowers.

  “It’s . . . it’s very nice,” Stefan said awkwardly.

  “Thank you. Have a seat.” She patted the bench beside her. Stefan sat.

  “I really think it’s rather rough,” she continued. “Feel that on your cheek.” She took the handkerchief from him and wiped his eyes.

  “It’s . . . fine,” he managed to say. She had taken him by surprise. He couldn’t think.

  “Maybe for a boy. It’s a bit too coarse for my taste. And I’ve mangled the embroidery at the bottom.”

  “It’s an ‘S’,” Stefan said. “That’s my initial.”

  “Ah, well, then, it’s yours. It was a practice run anyway.” She thrust the handkerchief back into his hand and picked up her embroidery. Stefan took a moment to clean his face and wipe his nose. He should have been embarrassed, caught crying in front of a stranger, and a girl no less. But she didn’t seem to care. In fact, she appeared so absorbed in her needlework that she didn’t notice him staring at her.

  Her lips were wide, and her eyes large and brown. Her hair was braided into two shining chestnut plaits that hung low over her ears, and she wore a neat day dress of red and white with an apron over it. Skeins of embroidery thread stuffed the apron pockets.

  “Pardon me,” he said. “I thought I was alone.”

  “As did I,” she replied. “But that’s been remedied. Why don’t you tell me about this rare nut?”

  Stefan had no better plans now that his quest had been disproved, so he settled in beside her and watched her needle dipping in and out of the cloth in her hands.

  “I think I’ve been played for a fool,” he said.

  “An apprentice’s prank, like Arno said,” she surmised, with a tilt of her head toward the sound of the old groundskeeper’s raking.

  “I’m a journeyman toymaker, er, clocksmith. My new master’s led me on a merry chase.”

  She looked at him skeptically. “Which is it, toys, or clocks? They don’t let you do both, do they?”

  Stefan blushed. “No. I suppose not . . . not in Nuremberg. I’m journeyed out of country, actually. A kingdom far away.” He attempted a rakish grin.

  The girl smiled. “Now who’s telling fairy tales?”

  “It’s true! I’m leaving town just as soon as I find—”

  “The rare and mythical nut,” she concluded, puncturing Stefan’s pride.

  “Well, yes.”

  The girl patted him sympathetically on the leg and gathered her materials. “I have to be getting hom
e. We young ladies must leave all the adventuring to men, or so my mother insists. But look—” She checked the label for the tree beside them. “Ficus elastica. That’s an India rubber plant, which means I’ve got as far as Bombay today.” She quirked a smile. “As for your nut, if it exists and it’s truly rare, why not try the Natural History Society. They collect the oddest things.”

  “The Natural . . . I’ve never heard of them.”

  “Not many people have,” she said, rising from the bench. “They’re eccentrics. They only speak to each other. For vegetation, see Professor Blume. He’s the foremost authority on botany in all of Nuremberg. Recently returned from a trip around the globe.”

  It was Stefan’s turn to be dubious. “How do you know all of this?”

  “Because I can read,” she said. “And I read anything I can find. Professor Blume’s in all the gardening journals. He’s been to Amazonia and Indochina, Oceania, and even the Arctic, where plants only bloom a few days a year. Ask Arno, he collects all of his journals. He can tell you where to go.”

  Stefan sighed. “My cousin’s been looking for a krakatook for seven years. Maybe the joke has been played on all of us.” It was a terrible thought. Maybe Samir had lied, and this goose chase was Christian’s punishment for angering the king of Boldavia. The whole story began to unravel until he wondered if any of it had been true.

  The girl gave him a mischievous smile as she brushed past. “Even better when you inexplicably show up with one. Tell Professor Blume about the prank. He was a boy once. He’s sure to play along.”

  “That’s brilliant. Thank you.” He rose to his feet and gave her a quick bow. “My name is Stefan.” His heart fluttered oddly in his chest, like a moth.

  “Pleased to meet you, Stefan,” she said, and dropped a quick curtsy. “I’m sorry, but I must go.”

  “Where can I find you?” he asked.

  She took a step back.

  Stefan blushed. “I mean, to return your handkerchief . . . of course.” He mentally kicked himself. He was being too forward, but he could not stop himself. This girl was someone he wanted to know.

  “Oh. No, it’s yours. If you truly are going abroad, take it with you. Imagine, my handiwork visiting places I will never see. Maybe you’ll take it to India someday! Good-bye, Stefan. And good luck!”