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jaws and hearts from then on. Rosemary missed none of them.
    A parallel library of hinges and paneling and glass. Rosemary had sometimes wondered if there was an acquisition gene, one passed from mother to daughter in the many generations of their family, a mitochondrial desire to collect and store and preserve. (Bright jars on a shelf, the sharp mirror of light on wax polish, a rainbow of slipcovers. Pickles and clawed feet and gold lettering on hinged spines.) Each of the family librarians had had their own interests, but Rosemary, the librarian of all librarians, cared for these interests only as they pertained to the coins as a group—new wings of the collection, preserving facets of human history. Rosemary valued each addition even if she didn’t care overmuch for the realities behind it, and even if she wasn’t interested in collecting sideboards and jamming them into every available room like some demented wood-loving magpie, she still kept a close—if unsentimental—eye on the relevant dealers of both sorts.
    On certain items, most often another clock, her mother was plaintive. “Doesn’t it mean something to you that it belonged to your great-grandmother and to me? All that family history . . . one day it will be yours. Doesn’t it mean something?”
    To Rosemary it didn’t matter one little bit, didn’t mean anything. No matter how plaintive the appeal or how long it had been in the family, the clock was hideous. It didn’t even
sound
like a clock, more like a demented call to the lifeboats. Her mother might love it, but Rosemary had associations of nothing but nuisance. It was a
thing
and only a thing. Its presence intruded, and the endless frantic noise gave her headaches and stoked her temper. She could not shut it out. If she wanted to hear a clock, she could hear one in her own time, and better. She could not value it, and did not wish to pretend.
    “When you kick the bucket I’m selling it,” she said, to her mother’s dismay. Then, “You can leave it to my cousin, if you want,” but this was a sop that Rosemary’s mother did not want. The clock squealed in rhythmic dismay.
    “When you’re lying on display before the funeral, that bloody thing is going in your coffin,” said Rosemary, unsympathetically. “You can listen to it for
eternity.
”
    “I suppose you can always sell it,” said her mother. “And if you put my dead body on show I’m coming back to haunt you.”
    There wouldn’t have been space for that sort of display had either of them really wanted it. Clocks cluttered each room like disembodied souls, the beating hearts of a shadow family watching from corners, from table tops and bookshelves. The unfortunates were thrust under the stairs, their chimes silenced, smelling of dust and dead time, but they were kept.
    Unused, unloved, they were still part of a collection. Nothing was thrown away. Rosemary could see the sense in this regarding the library, but not the objects inspiring it. If it was going to intrude on her everyday life, if she was going to be forced to experience it, she might as well enjoy it.
    “You don’t even
like
that one,” she had pointed out, but “It was a gift,” said her mother, as if that was all that mattered.
    “From someone you don’t even
like,
” said Rosemary. “Someone who’s
dead.
They won’t know if you get rid of it,” but “
I’ll
know,” said her mother, with undiminished certainty of tone, and a jaundiced eye.
    There was a reason the house was so cluttered.
    When her mother died, it was more difficult than Rosemary had expected—the disposition of a life, of all the little reminders. Clothes that would fit no one else but still smelled familiar, the books left half read. It was easier with the furniture; Rosemary had long made up her mind what would happen there. She had sold some, kept only a few pieces where her taste had coincided with her mother’s and enjoyed the increased floor space, the quiet halls. The rest