The Wedding Day Part 1

Ernest Teucher woke at seventeen minutes past four on the morning of his wedding.

He knew the exact minute because he had spent the preceding eleven staring at the luminous dial of his bedside chronometer. Four-seventeen. The ceremony was set for eleven o'clock. There was no rational justification for consciousness.

Ernest rolled onto his shoulder, shut his eyes, and counted thirty steady breaths. When he opened them, the brass hand had advanced to four-eighteen.

"Thoroughly absurd," he murmured into the dark.

He had slept through the thunder of four-inch siege guns during artillery proving trials. He had fallen asleep over drafting paper while the basin Bessemer shop ran three weeks behind schedule. During the heavy rock cutting along the Northern line, he had regularly dozed off on a camp cot while blasting crews detonated black powder half a mile up the grade.