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When St. Marin’s ancient bell falls mute, clock restorer Leona Moraine follows a trail of sound through a sealed tower, a coded automaton, and a city’s forgotten charter. With a retired lighthouse keeper and a blunt electrician, she confronts a councilman’s scheme and restores a tide-tuned peal—and her city’s memory.
By midmorning the fog had thinned enough to show the gulls as strokes of chalk over the harbor. Leona Moraine held the balance of a carriage clock between her fingers, feeling the faint, springy thrum against the pads of her thumb and forefinger. Oil smelled like walnuts; brass dust left a taste like a coin. In the front window of Three Springs, her small shop, a row of mantels ticked in unsynced conversation, each voice precise yet private. She looked the way a careful listener might look: cropped hair tucked behind one ear, a tiny scar across her eyebrow from an old workshop mishap, eyes always leaning toward sound rather than light. When the ten o’clock chime from St. Marin’s tower came floating down the hills, she paused. It wasn’t just time; it was a habit laid across the city like a quilt.
The bell had a name in the old stories—The Song of Tides—and everyone said that when it kept good temper the harbor stayed polite. Boats slid, schedules held, ovens rose right. It was superstition, maybe, but the baker believed it. Sorin waddled in, cheeks flushed, hands smelling of rye.
“Does it live?” he asked, peering over the counter where her spring trays were set like surgical instruments.
“Bites,” she said, smiling. “But it’s mended. Don’t wind fully; the chain is older than you’re admitting.”
“Everything is older than I admit,” he sighed. “Except bad news.” His gaze drifted to the window. Gulls wheeled; a ferry shouldered a path toward the breakwater.
He left with his oven timer wrapped in paper like a pastry. The day wore on. Students from the conservatory brought a metronome with a chipped weight; a fisherman asked why his wall clock lagged in storms; Leona wrote neat notes, put hair-thin dots of oil, listened until voices of gears and pins settled into an accord. When the noon chime came, the high E sang a shade flat. She frowned. Wind? Heat? The tower had spoken to her since childhood. Once, soundproofed school halls felt like a jar; she’d paced until the bell let air into the day again.
At six, she locked up and climbed the stairs to her small flat. From the balcony she could see the copper dome and the square of the tower, its open arches black with swallows. She brewed tea, ate bread and cheese, and set the radio low to a station that only played quietly recorded rainstorms. Midnight was a silly time to wait up for, but on Fridays the tower made a long, old-fashioned peal.