The Third Nick

by John Whitehurst, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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Thursday. The clock standing at twenty minutes past four.

The clock at Bradlow had been stopped by a hand, and not for want of winding. I saw that before I had my coat off. When a clock is let run down, the going weight descends to the end of its line and rests there, and the pendulum, having nothing more to drive it, swings shorter over a minute or two and is still; the hands stand wherever the train left them. But the going weight of this clock hung near the top of its fall, twelve or fourteen feet above the floor of the ringing chamber, with very nearly a day's going still in it. Somebody had wound the clock and then, within an hour or two of winding it, had laid a hand on the bob and held it until it stopped.

The dust told me the rest. It lay along the rim of the great wheel and on the flat of the bob, grey and soft and even, and where I drew a finger through it the brass beneath was bright. In a tower open at the louvres, in May, with the jackdaws going in and out, that is the dust of three weeks, or a little more.

Mr Twigg, the curate, had written to me at Derby that the clock was broken and the keeper could do nothing with it. He stood at the foot of the ladder and called up to know what was amiss.

"It wants cleaning," I said, which was true, and is true of every clock in England.

The keeper was an old miner named Abel Wildgoose, who had the winding of it at eight shillings a year, and who, Mr Twigg said, had not been well. He had sent his granddaughter with the key. She was waiting at the foot of the tower stair when I came down: a tall girl of eighteen or nineteen, her sleeves rolled and her forearms grey to the elbow with the slime of the buddle. Before she gave me the key she held out a stone.

"You're the Derby man as knows rock."

I said I was a clockmaker.

"Mr Twigg says you've been down at Castleton and at Wirksworth, and wrote down which bed comes under which. So what's that?"

It was toadstone. I did not need to turn it to know it, but I turned it, because the stone in the hand is never quite the stone in the memory. It was the size of a small loaf, dark and greenish grey, and full of round holes, some the bigness of a pea and some of a lentil, and every hole was stopped with something white, so that the broken face had the speckled look of a toad's back, which is where the miners have the name. She had broken it fresh that morning; on the new face the holes were stopped as well, right through. I scratched one with my knife. Spar.

"Where did you have it?"

"Bottom of our shaft. Throstle Venture, up on the moor. Fifteen fathom down, and the vein runs into that, and Grandad says that's the end of it." She looked at the stone and not at me. "Barmaster's nicked our stowe twice. Third time's Saturday."

Anyone who has been about the King's Field knows the custom. A mine that stands unworked has a nick cut in the spindle of its stowe by the barmaster's knife; three nicks, three weeks apart, and the stowe is thrown down and the ground is free to any man who will work it.

"And your grandfather will not work it."

"He'll not go down. He'll not let me go down, and he'll not take nobody on." She took the stone back from me. "He says there's nowt under toadstone. He says it's the bottom."

"The bottom of what?"

She did not answer. She gave me the key of the tower, which was a heavy thing and warm from her hand, and went off over the churchyard wall toward the moor.

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Thursday. Evening.

I had the pallets out and the scape-wheel pivots cleaned and oiled before the light went from the louvres, and found nothing worn that would not serve another ten years. I had let the weight down to take the train apart, and meant to wind it up full when it was together again. Then I walked up to the moor.

On the lane below the village there had once been an ore-hearth, long out of work, and the slag of it lay along the bank in black lumps among the nettles. I picked one up. It was full of round holes, the bigness of peas and of lentils, where the air had been caught in the melted stuff as it cooled. Not one of the holes was stopped. I put it in my coat pocket.

Throstle Venture was a stowe over a shaft, a coe of dry-stone with a turf roof, a hillock of deads, and the buddle where the girl had been at work; the dressed ore lay beside it in a heap the size of a hen-coop, which is not a great deal of ore for a winter. The stowe's spindle had two fresh nicks in its end, a hand's breadth apart. Abel Wildgoose sat on the step of the coe with his hands on his knees. He was perhaps seventy. His hands were very large, and the knuckles of the right were worn shiny on their backs.

"Tha's been at my clock."

"I have. It is not broken."

He said nothing to that.

"It was wound, and then it was stopped."

"Ah," he said.

I sat down on the hillock, and we looked at the stowe for a time. The girl, whose name was Martha, came round the coe with a bucket, saw us, and went back.

"My father sank yon," he said at last, and lifted his chin a little toward a ring of tumbled stone some twenty yards off along the line of the rake, where the turf dipped. "Old Jacob's sump. Seventeen hundred and four. Same vein as this; it were the same ground then. Come into toadstone at fifteen fathom, same as here, and he went on in it. Nine fathom of toadstone, he said, and never a speck of ore, and never an end to it. Partners took their money out. He never sank again."

"He said nine."

"He said nine." Abel looked at his hands. "There's those in Bradlow said he never went above three, and drank the rest of the partners' money at the Bell. I were eleven. I wound for him."

"Then you counted the rope."

"I wound the stone up. I never counted owt. I were a lad." He was quiet. "Nine fathom of that and no bottom to it. You've been down a deal of holes, Master. You tell me what's under."

"Is the old sump open?"

"Open at top. There's nobody been down it sixty year. The stemples'll be rotten."

---

Friday. Morning.

I asked Martha for a piece of galena the bigness of a walnut, and she brought me a clean cube from the dressed heap without asking what it was for. I tied it in a cradle of waxed thread, and with the two-foot rule from my pocket I measured off from the knot on the thread to the middle of the lump thirty-nine inches and an eighth, which in our latitude is the length of a pendulum that swings once in a second, going or coming. I hung it from a nail I drove into the lintel of the coe, and gave it a short swing to see it was free.

Abel watched from the step. He did not ask.

"When I say, drop a stone into the old sump," I told Martha. "Not throw it. Open your hand."

She took a stone off the hillock about the size of her fist and went and stood at the lip of the ring, where the turf had slipped, and I set the galena swinging and watched it until I had its beat in my head, and said, "Now."

One. Two. Three. And a little way into the fourth swing the sound came up: a dull blow, not a splash, and then small stones rattling a long time after.

"Again."

We did it four times. Three beats, and the sound coming a little way past the third every time. A body let fall goes sixteen feet in the first second, sixty-four in two, a hundred and forty-four in three; the sound coming back up wants something under a seventh part of a second over such a height, and I took it out. A hundred and forty-four feet is twenty-four fathoms. I told them so.

"Toadstone came in at fifteen fathom on this vein," I said. "Then the sump went nine fathoms into it. There is some rubbish fallen in at the bottom, by the sound, and so it was a little deeper once, if anything."

Abel got up off the step. He walked over to the ring of stones and stood at the lip of it and looked down into the dark for some while, and then he came back and sat down again.

"Nine," he said.

The pendulum had nearly come to rest. I stopped it with a finger.

"That's how deep he went," Martha said. "It's not what's under."

"No."

I took the two stones from my coat, the slag from the lane and the piece of toadstone she had given me, and set them side by side on the step between Abel's boots. He looked at them.

"That one came out of a fire," I said, and touched the slag. "When was the old hearth working?"

"My father's time."

"Forty years, then, or fifty. The holes are the air that was in it when it ran, and they are empty yet." I touched the toadstone. "So are these, the same holes, the same air, the same running. But every one of them has been filled since with spar, a grain at a time, by water going through the stone. How long does water take to fill a hole the size of a pea with spar?"

He turned the toadstone over in his hand, and then the slag.

"There's no fire in Derbyshire," he said.

"Not now."

"Where's it come from, then?"

"From underneath. It ran in between the limestone beds when they were lying there already, as you might run lead into a crack between two boards. There was limestone under it before it ever came. That is what I have seen at every place where a shaft has gone clean through toadstone: limestone again below, the same as above. It is a thing that came in between; it is not the floor of anything."

"And if it's ninety fathom thick?"

"Then it is ninety fathoms thick. I cannot tell you that from up here. It was not laid down level by water, like the limestone; it ran, and so it lies thick in one place and thin in the next, and there is no telling but by going through." I put the slag back in my pocket. "I should like to see the bottom of your shaft."

---

Friday. Afternoon.

The working shaft was sound. The stemples were oak and someone had kept them; I counted ninety-one steps of them, which near enough agrees with fifteen fathoms. Martha came down after me with the candles, quicker than I.

At the bottom the vein stood up in front of us, a rake vein between walls of grey limestone, nearly three feet wide of spar and clay, and the ore in it in ribs and bunches the thickness of a man's thumb. Some of it had been got and some left. It went down to our feet and there it met the toadstone, which made a floor across the whole bottom of the working, greenish and dull and cold to the hand, and the ore stopped at it as if it had been cut with a knife. I could see why a man would think it was the end of the world. I have stood at that line in a dozen mines and it looks like the end of the world every time.

I held the candle low and went along the floor on my knees. Where the vein met the toadstone, and in the very line of it, there ran on down into the floor a band of white spar about the width of two fingers. It was clean and it was hard. I scratched it to be sure and followed it with the candle two yards along the floor and it kept its line the whole way, the same bearing as the rake above, thin but unbroken.

"What's that?" said Martha.

"The vein."

"There's no ore in it."

"There is no ore in it here. The toadstone would not take ore. But the crack the ore lies in goes on through it, and the spar is in the crack, and it is keeping the same bearing as above. If the crack goes through the toadstone, it comes out into limestone below. And limestone took ore well enough up here."

She knelt by me and put her thumb on the white band, where I had scratched it.

"Your great-grandfather would have seen this," I said. "In the sump. He went nine fathoms on it."

"He went nine fathoms, and then the partners' money stopped." She did not take her thumb away. "That's not the rock stopping. That's the money."

I said nothing. It was not my mine and it was not my money, and I had no more to give her than the band of spar, which she could see for herself. We went up. At the top the light was very bright, and Abel was not on the step of the coe; he had gone down to the village.

---

Friday. The hour of winding.

I had put the clock together again on Thursday night by lantern, wound it full, and set it going by my own watch, which I had set at Derby by the meridian line in my workshop four days before. I meant to set it by the sun at noon on Saturday, if the sky held, and then to go home.

At seven, which had been the old hour for winding, there were steps on the tower stair below me, slow ones, and Abel Wildgoose came up the ladder into the ringing chamber. He did not look at me. He took the winding handle down from its peg on the frame, where he had hung it himself three weeks ago, set it on the arbor, and wound.

He counted under his breath. I watched the weight come up past my knee and on into the shadow of the frame.

"Forty-three," he said, and took the handle off. "Sixty-two from the bottom. Always has been."

He hung the handle up and stood a little while with his hand on the frame of the clock, feeling it go.

"How long were it, then?" he said. "The toadstone. Filling up them holes."

"Longer than I can count."

"Tha counted the stone."

"That was only falling."

He nodded, as if that were a reasonable answer, and went down.

---

Saturday. Noon by the sun.

There is a dial on the south porch of the church at Bradlow, a good one, cut in a stone plate and set true, which I had taken the trouble to try with a plumb-line on Thursday. At noon on Saturday the sky was clear, and I stood by it with my watch open in my hand until the shadow of the gnomon lay along the noon line.

The sun at noon in the middle of May is a little before the true mean time: three minutes and some seconds fast, by the tables. I wrote the figure on a card for the keeper, with the figures for the other months beneath it, so that he might know the dial from the clock and not think either of them wrong, and I went up and put the minute hand of the turret clock where it ought to be. Then I sat on the bench by the frame and waited for it to come round to twelve.

It struck twelve, and the bell went out over the roofs and over the churchyard wall and up toward the moor.

I had left my waxed thread and the lump of galena hanging on the lintel of the coe, and I wanted the thread, so I walked up after my dinner. There was a man on the moor road ahead of me in a brown coat, walking briskly, with a book under his arm, who turned in at Throstle Venture before I did. That was Mr Bagshaw, the barmaster's man for that liberty, and I knew him by the book.

The stowe was turning. The rope came up out of the shaft wet and dark, and wound on to the spindle, over the two nicks; and the kibble came up after it, with the girl's voice under it calling something from fifteen fathoms down, and in the kibble there was toadstone, freshly broken, grey and green and speckled white.

Mr Bagshaw looked at the rope, and at the stone, and wrote something in his book, and went away again down the road.

Abel Wildgoose was at the handles. He swung the kibble over and tipped it on to the deads, and let it go back down, and took the handles again, and I saw his lips moving.

He was counting.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (17 October 2026), ā Iohanne Whitehurstō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

John Whitehurst, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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