The Tale of Fenwick and the Clock Brownie

The Tale of Fenwick and the Clock Brownie

Isambard Fenwick had been repairing clocks and timepieces for nigh on fifty years, but never before had he taken on so many repairs in a single week. Business was brisk, a good thing. But had he any hope in fixing these clocks with sufficient speed to please everyone? His only assistant, Tompion, was ill with the mild form of influenza gripping the Strand and Covent Garden. And besides, Tompion was best suited for simple work, like cleaning clockworks and minding the shop.

It was Friday afternoon, and the shop’s flagship, a stately Bennett longcase near the front door, chimed at four. Fenwick sat before the large mullioned front window, tools laid out before him, half the inner workings of a Frodsham carriage model spread across the table surface.

It was dusk, and a heavy snow was blanketing the cobblestones. He paused in his work to watch the storm and heard the shop sign squeaking in the cold, gusting wind. He blew on his hands to warm them and returned to the task at hand. A gaslight, hanging just above his head, provided ample illumination, but he’d supplemented with two candles standing on the far end of the table, their flames flickering near the drafty window.

Fenwick worked another hour but found nothing amiss. The time train and chime train gearboxes, along with the chiming drum, were functioning correctly. So why had the owner claimed it was “chiming at incorrect times”?

He’d just reassembled the thing when he realized there was nothing like demonstrating the fault to himself, so he advanced the hands to four o’clock and waited. Nothing happened for the first few seconds. He removed his spectacles and rubbed them clean with a handkerchief, then sighed as the clock remained silent. It wasn’t until a half minute later that it finally chimed.

“Almost is never enough,” he muttered to himself. “A clock like this must chime within a second or two, not a half minute.”

Then he advanced the clock to five minutes ‘til five, thinking that perhaps the chimes might also ring too early in certain cases.

He ate a sandwich – his dinner – as he waited, and not until eleven and a half minutes after five did the clock finally deign to chime. This was both perplexing and annoying, and over the next hour, he demonstrated to himself that the amount of incorrectness at which the chimes rang wasn’t a constant, but floated willy-nilly from zero seconds to twelve minutes.

He rapped a knuckle against the base of the clock and scolded it. Then, below the whistle of the wind, he heard a faint noise from inside – a kind of rubbing sound on wood, as if something were moving around the gears.

Out of patience, he hurriedly undid the back of the clock, and while doing so, heard the rubbing noise again. With the back removed, however, nothing untoward presented itself. Fenwick had no idea what he’d hoped to find – a mouse perhaps, or… No, that was impossible. Those were childish fancies, tales his father had told him as bedtime stories, about gremlins and clock brownies and heavens knows what else. He thought back to one cold evening, during a snowstorm much like this one…

Young Isambard lay in his bed, snug beneath his favorite winter blanket as wind rattled the wooden siding of their home.His father, spectacles perched on the tip of his nose, was amusing his son, not by reading from a book, but recounting something he’d witnessed several times as a clocksmith.

“There, atop the main gear of the drive chain, stood the strangest little creature I’d ever laid eyes on. Two inches tall, he was, like a tiny man, and dressed in coarse brown homespun – looked honestly like a bit of old household scrap fabric he’d scrounged. He was walking atop the gear, his tiny shod feet following the teeth as they made their way slowly around and around.”

“Who was he, Papa?”

“He’s what we clocksmiths know as a clock brownie. Now, I’m swearing you to secrecy on this. You have to promise you’ll not go spreading this around or reveal the nature of this magical creature to anyone!”

“I swear, Papa! I won’t tell!”

Then his father smiled, ruffled his son’s hair, and continued on…

To this day, Fenwick had wondered about the tale. After all, it was the only fantastical story his father told without reading it from a book. Could there be some truth to the clock brownie mythos after all?

Fenwick gently lay the clock on its front face, procured his most powerful quizzing glass, and began to closely inspect the interior. That’s when he saw them – tiny multi-legged creatures of some kind – like microscopic fleas or ticks, with pale colored legs and body. He spied a half dozen of them when he noticed something else – a small wooden compartment at the top of the clock’s interior, with what looked like a tiny wooden hatch on its bottom.

With a pair of tweezers, he pulled at the miniscule handle opposite the hinged side of the hatch. It swung open, and a tiny man, about two inches tall, dropped through from inside the secret compartment! He landed on the gears and raised his fists, boxer style, as though preparing to defend himself.

Fenwick trained the glass on him and noticed a series of red blotches on the tiny man’s face, neck, and forearms. Despite trying to look menacing, he couldn’t help but scratch at these spots of irritation, and, when Fenwick trained the glass on one of the spots, he spied one of the multi-legged creatures, a parasite or a mite of some sort, crawling across his skin.

“Oh dear, little fella,” Fenwick said. “Those mites look most unpleasant.”

The brownie, pleasantly surprised by Fenwick’s gentle demeanor, appeared to relax slightly, then nodded his head emphatically.

“I don’t know how to help you, but I know someone who might. You can have a bit of food while I set off to talk to a friend of mine – a woman in Covent Garden who knows everything about brownies and other faerie folk such as yourself. She might be able to suggest a remedy.”

The brownie smiled at that, then sat down upon a slowly rotating gear drum. Fenwick broke off some small bits of what was left of his sandwich and laid them within easy reach. Then he grabbed his coat and hat, put on his tall boots, and plunged into the storm.

By the time he’s reached Griselda’s on Tavistock Street, there were four inches of snow on the ground. He knocked on her door and was thankful when she answered. She showed him into her parlor, diminutive and cramped, though larger and better furnished than his own.

He couldn’t believe he was actually asking her about brownies, but she knew everything there was to know about faerie folk, whether they lived in the forest, marshes, or in the city. Fenwick described the clock brownie he’d found, and how it was afflicted with some sort of parasite. He described, as best he could, the appearance of the pernicious pests, and she knew how to remedy the problem – De-Mite – and she had some of the powder on hand back in her apothecary area.

“Just dissolve one teaspoon of this in a shot glass full of water, and spray it on the affected area. Mites’ll drop dead in seconds!”

“Tell me,” Fenwick continued, “Do brownies who are afflicted with these mites – can they get up to mischief?”

“Oh yes, Mister Fenwick, indeed they can! A disgruntled, miserable brownie can do just as much harm as good!”

Realizing that the improper chiming of the clock might be the work of the mite-infested clock brownie, he paid her for her help and returned to the shop. When he arrived, the brownie was still munching on the dinner morsels he’d provided, so he quickly mixed the talcum-fine green De-Mite powder with some water and carried it to the work table.

“My friend says this should cure your mites, alright,” Fenwick said with a grin, and placed the small glass of solution beside the clock. The brownie climbed down and tried to scale the side of the glass, but it was too tall.

“Hang on,” Fenwick said, then found a very small bowl on a shelf, emptied it of metal screws, and poured the De-Mite solution into it. The brownie climbed inside, clothes and all, and settled into it like a regular person would into a bathtub. Then, as Fenwick watched on through his glass, he saw that Griselda was right! The mites were dropping off his body and floating motionless and dead in the bowl. Soon the brownie climbed out and began motioning to the clock interior. Fenwick remembered that he’d first seen the mites among the clock’s inner workings.

“Ah, I see. Let’s get that whole clock cleaned up then!”

He spent the next hour disassembling the guts of the clock, dipping each piece into the solution, and then skimming the dead mites from the De-Mite solution. Then he rubbed the solution all around the bare interior of the clock case. By eight o’clock, the brownie and the clock were mite-free, and Fenwick had re-assembled most of the clock. Only the back cover remained.

The brownie stood on the table-top, scratching his tiny head in puzzlement as he beheld the long shelf lined with broken clocks. He pointed at the nearest one – a Kingsley mantle clock, and motioned for Fenwick to place the clock atop the table and remove the back cover.

Fenwick did as the brownie asked, and soon the tiny man was busily at work inside the mechanism. By the next morning, the clock had been fixed, and the energetic brownie pointed at the next clock on the shelf.

And thus, over the weekend, Fenwick and the brownie divided up the repair work between them, with the brownie accomplishing well more than half of the repairs. By Sunday evening, all of the clocks and watches were functioning perfectly, including the chimes in the clock that was home to his tiny but expert helper.

As Fenwick needed to return that clock to its owner the following morning, he prepared a warm bath for the brownie and served him a miniature feast of small scraps of beef, potatoes, and a bit of plum pudding. Then the brownie climbed back inside his tiny compartment, and Fenwick sealed it shut. He noted the small round hole at the bottom of the clock’s back – no doubt how the brownie came and went in his search of food and water.

The next morning, a grateful owner, happy as a lark about the working chimes, paid Fenwick double the agreed upon cost and carried the clock home. And though Fenwick never saw the industrious brownie again, he enjoyed more business than ever before after having pleased so many customers, both old and new…