The dealer's compass
An original fiction passage set in the nineteenth century.
The dealer drew back the cloth with a flourish. Beneath it lay a brass compass which, he had written to Mr Pell, was "an object without equal".
"Carried across three oceans by the same captain," he said.
Mr Pell lifted it as carefully as an egg. The case was dark with age, but its hinge shone as bright as a new pin.
"It has been repaired?" he asked.
"Never opened," replied the dealer. He pulled the cloth partly across the compass. "That brightness is merely a trick of the light."
As he spoke, his sleeve caught the handle of a drawer. It slid open. Inside, another brass rim showed beneath some papers, bearing the same crescent-shaped dent as the compass in Mr Pell's hand.
The dealer shut the drawer. The clock filled the silence with hard little clicks.
"Do old captains generally damage their possessions in pairs?" Mr Pell asked.
The dealer smoothed the cloth and looked towards the door. Mr Pell returned his coins to his purse one by one, slowly enough for each to be heard.
Analyse the changes in Mr Pell's attitude towards the dealer, considering how the writer uses language and structure to shape them. Support your answer with references to the passage.
456 exam-style questions on Edexcel GCSE English Language 1.3 Content: prose fiction study requirements, covering 1.3.1 Read challenging prose fiction for the unseen 19th-century extract. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.