The Tick of Love

Once upon a sideways Thursday in the Duchy of Saint-Raphael, I, Henri LeClonk, former timekeeper to kings, inventor of the seven-sided sundial, and proud survivor of three croissant-related near-deaths, was charged with a most noble task:

To design the scoring system for tennis.

I, who could not count past 12 without glancing at a timepiece.

I, who considered numbers a polite suggestion.

I, who was three goblets deep into absinthe before the rules even began.

But the guillotine is a fine motivator.

It started well enough.

The Duke declared, “Let the score march like the clock! 15! 30! 45!” and I, dazzled by his chin and distracted by a rogue puff pastry, nodded as if I’d understood.

“Etch it onto the sundial!” he roared.

So, I did.

Well… I tried.

What I etched: 15, 30, 40.

Because, dear reader, midway through, I forgot how to 45. There was a goose in the parlour, the sun was in my eyes, and the number “40” simply looked... friendlier. Rounder. Less judgmental.

I proceeded to choke on a croissant, keeling over into a platter of unamused cheese, and by the time I awoke, the number had already been etched into law. No one questioned it. Nobles rarely do.

Now, about love. A strange zero of a word. It came not from logic (we avoided that), but from the Duke’s moon-eyed brother, Lord Fifteenlove.

He was a symphony of sighs in tights, hopelessly besotted with a barefoot commoner named Margaux. She played tennis like a flamingo on buttered glass. Never scored, sometimes in deliberate anarchy. Yet he kept showing up, flower in hand, chest puffed, whispering sonnets to her ankles.

The Duke once joked, “He plays for love, not for points!”

And thus, “love” came to mean zero; a romantic futility. An empty goblet. A heartbeat spent with no return.

One boiling summer, two knights played; by the seventh hour their forty-all deadlock mocked the sun; I abandoned scoring, my quill bleeding pigeons across the margin.

At sundown, drenched in sweat and honour, they raised their swords and yelled:

 “Let us finish this with a DEUCE!”

I, still hungover from Wednesday’s absinthe, convinced deuce was some sort of Latin for “draw,” and picturing my own neck in that lunette, carved the rule without protest. From that moment on, 40–40 was forevermore Deuce. Players had to win by two, because swords were involved, and frankly, we preferred fewer stabbings.

Then came Lady Claudette, the Duke’s wife…. sharp as a stiletto in a bowl of custard.

“People must be at an advantage,” she said. “In tennis, or in love.”

And so, “Advantage” was born. If you reached that stage and still lost, spectators would murmur, “He had the advantage, but no heart.”

I rather liked that.

Years drift. I dwell beside a swamp, forging clocks that tick backwards, volleying pebbles with a wooden spoon.

Sometimes village children rally over my cracked court. When their shouts ring; “Love-fifteen!” “Deuce!”, I feel phantom steel cool my neck and hear absinthe glug in a glass that is, mercifully, still attached to a body.

The world keeps my crooked time. I lift the spoon but never serve.

F.S.F.