This Dudley Masonic watch belongs to a neighbor of mine. If you think Lucky Charms comes in cool shapes, check out the gears on this. Clockwise from the top, they're a trowel, a Bible, compasses, a square, a level, and a slipper. William Wallace Dudley lived up the road in Lancaster, Pa., and started making his patented masonic watches when he was 69. Five years later he was bankrupted by the rise of the wristwatch and had to take a job with a rival manufacturer. Now his watches go for five grand; if you have that kind of change lying around I can put you in touch with the owner of this one.
The watch is to illustrate the first paragraph of my recently-published story, Copper Heart. It's my notion of a queer steampunk working class Poe, viz:
On a night when the city was flogged by rain, when spring dawned like an invader, when all of Philadelphia cowered before the onslaught of March, Lester Clay was seized by agents of the Bureau of Affectional Rectitude and taken into custody. Lester knew better than to be out after curfew, knew better than to be fishing for cod-—as he called it--given the recent spate of ordinances against public lewdness and homosexualist conduct of all flavors. But he had emerged onto Richmond Street after a double shift at the iron works cold, sweat-sodden, and spent, to behold a red haired beauty bright as a hurricane lamp in the storm, just standing on Richmond.
Lester knew that if he went back to the boardinghouse he would be out in the downpour looking for the boy before twenty minutes had passed. The youth loitered in the rufescent glow of an apothecary’s doorway, and the moment Lester took a step toward him, lit off into undulating curtains of rain. Wasn’t it always the red-haired ones who could stir, not only Lester’s sex, but the sclerotic heart within him? And this one had something no other had—-a warm, mesmeric glow, as if the boy’s thick chest hid some cunningly wrought secret, investing him with an occult incandescence.
Heavens! What happens next? Something racy, I'll wager. Find out here.
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