A cat or fox, or even a stag, would certainly have made for a more convenient familiar. Something that could move on its own, do minor chores, the sort that didn’t need hands, and curl up next to her in bed on cold nights.
But still, Cecilia wouldn’t have wanted anything other than to inherit her grandmother’s old clock. Grandfather clock, the closest thing she’d ever known to an actual grandfather, oak and stately in the corner of her grandmother’s parlour for all the years of Cecilia’s childhood. She had sat many an evening at the foot of it, and if her parents heard her asking it for stories, her mother would titter nervously, while her father clammed up tight and red with embarrassment, or anger at being embarrassed, or fear. What his mother, Cecilia’s grandmother, was, and what Cecilia herself was, wasn’t the safest thing to be, after all.
A cat or fox or stag might have been able to do a little more to protect its keeper and the one it kept. But Cecilia had never been much for the outdoors sort of magic, or even the outdoors brought indoors, paws on carpets or eyeshine blinking in a dark bedroom. Every plant she’d ever tried to grow had withered, almost as if that were her magic; she’d wept many a frustrated tear over bare garden plots. A garden as a familiar could have fed her for all her days.
She wouldn’t have had to work in the general store, part-time when love and the weather and the world were uncertain and everyone needed charms, every day when the world seemed cozy and safe. A cat as a familiar would have greeted her when she came home. A fox would have brought her ingredients and slept like a strange dog at her feet.
A clock only kept space, in the corner of her tiny living room now, and talked. It projected its stately air of peace, all the protection it could offer, and spoke of all it had seen.
And it had seen much in its many years with her grandmother. It knew who Cecilia’s grandfather would have been if she’d ever met him. It had known her father as a boy, and his siblings and secrets, and before…
If she sat at its base as she still did sometimes and leaned her cheek against its glass, if she listened to its whispers instead of its pendulum, she could hear it recall her grandmother as a girl. And the woman who had kept it then, and before, and before…
If she listened well enough, she still hoped, she wouldn’t have to work at the general store forever. Secrets were more cunning and valuable than anything on four feet, after all. Knowledge fed more surely than a garden. If she let it, the clock would teach her how to look after herself and it. It would whisper the magic of indoors, parlours and spaces kept, and someday, a little child of hers might sit cross-legged before it, in a safe, warm, larger home, and learn from it in turn.
