The Clockmaker's Daughter

by Kate Morton

  I heard him speaking to Sarah again last night. He was not as patient as he had been previously, saying, ‘That was a long time ago; there’s been a lot of water under the bridge,’ and lowering his voice to a slow, calm tone that was worse somehow than if he’d shouted: ‘But, Sar, the girls don’t even know who I am.’

  Evidently he convinced her of something, for it was agreed that they would meet for lunch on Thursday.

  After that phone call, he seemed unsettled, as if the victory were one he hadn’t planned on winning. He took a bottle of ale outside to one of the wooden picnic tables that the Art Historians’ Association has arranged on the grassy clearing near the crabapple tree, overlooking the Hafodsted Brook. On Saturdays the area is filled with visitors trying not to spill the trays of tea and scones and sandwiches that they’ve purchased from the cafe, which now fills the old barn where the schoolgirls used to stage their concerts. During the week, though, all is quiet, and he cut a lonely figure, shoulders tight and balled as he drank his beer and watched the gunmetal-grey river in the distance.

  He reminded me of Leonard another summer long ago, back when Lucy was on the verge of handing over the house and its administration to the Association. Leonard used to sit in the same place, a hat low down across one eye and a cigarette permanently on his lip. He carried a kit bag rather than a suitcase, neatly packed, everything in it that he thought he would need. He had been a soldier, which explained a lot.

  My young man is off to the kitchen now to start the water boiling for his cup of breakfast tea. He will move too quickly and slop some over the bench and curse at himself, but not with any real malice, and then he will take a few deep slurping gulps, leaving the rest to sit and cool in its mug, forgotten on the windowsill while he has his shower.

  I want to know why he is here; what he does with the shovel and whether the photographs relate to his task. When he heads outside again, with his shovel and his brown camera bag, I will wait. But I am becoming less patient, less content to observe.

  Something, somewhere, has changed. I can feel it, the way I used to be able to tell when the weather was turning. I feel it like a shift in atmospheric pressure.

  I feel connected.

  As if something or someone out there has flicked a switch, and although I do not know what to expect, it is coming.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Summer, 2017

  Elodie sat in the window of her flat, wearing her mother’s veil and watching the river heave silently towards the sea. It was one of those rare, perfect afternoons when the air is infused with the scent of clean cotton and clipped grass, and a thousand childhood memories glint in the lingering light. But Elodie wasn’t thinking about childhood.

  There was still no sign of Pippa on the High Street. It had been an hour since her call and Elodie had been unable to settle to anything since. Her friend had refused to go into detail on the phone, saying only that it was important, that there was something she had to give to Elodie. She’d sounded urgent, almost breathless, which was nearly as unusual as her suggestion that she come down to Barnes on a Saturday evening.

  But then, it seemed that nothing was normal this weekend. Nothing had been normal since Elodie found the archive box at work and unearthed the sketchbook and photograph.

  The woman in the white dress. Tip had continued to deny all knowledge of her that morning, clamming up when Elodie pressed him further. He’d bundled her out of the studio as quickly as he could, muttering that he was late opening his shop and that, yes, yes, of course he’d see her at the wedding. But his reaction had been unmistakable. He had recognised the woman in the photo. And, crucially, although Elodie still wasn’t sure how, his recognition tied the two items together, for Tip had known the house in the sketch, too. He had stayed there with his family as a boy.

  After her ejection, Elodie had headed straight back to the Strand and into work. She’d typed in the weekend door code and let herself inside. It had been dark and even colder than usual in the basement, but Elodie hadn’t stayed long. She’d retrieved the framed photograph from the box beneath her desk and the sketchbook from the archives and then left again. This time she hadn’t felt one bit guilty. In some way that she couldn’t yet explain, the photograph and sketchbook belonged with her. She had been meant to find them.

  Now she picked up the photograph, cupping it in her palm, and the woman met her gaze, that look of defiance, which was almost a challenge. Find me, it seemed to say. Find out who I am. Elodie turned the frame over in her hands, running her fingertip along the spider-web fine scratches in the silver. They were on both sides, close to matching, as if a pin or something similarly sharp had been used to etch the marks on purpose.

  Elodie propped the frame on the sill in front of her, the way she imagined James Stratton must once have displayed it.

  Stratton, Radcliffe, the woman in white … all were connected, but how?

  Elodie’s mother, Tip’s childhood evacuation, the friend who told him the tale of the house on the Thames …

  Elodie’s gaze drifted out of the window again to her bend of the river. She was aware, faintly, of the layers of previous occasions on which she’d done the same thing. It was a great silent carrier of wishes and hopes, of old boots and pieces of silver, of memories. One came to her now suddenly: a warm day when she was still a little girl, the breeze brushing against her skin, her mother and father and a picnic on the riverbank …

  She traced the ivory scallops of the veil, smooth beneath her fingertips. She supposed her mother might have done the very same thing thirty years before, perhaps as she stood outside the front of the church and prepared to walk towards Elodie’s father. What song had played as Lauren Adler made her way down the aisle? Elodie didn’t know; she’d never thought to ask.

  She had been watching the videos all afternoon, stopping only when Pippa called, and her thoughts swam now with cello melodies. ‘It will be as if she’s there,’ Penelope had said. ‘The next best thing to having your mother by your side.’ But it wasn’t like that at all. Elodie saw that now.

  Had her mother lived, she would have been a woman approaching sixty. She would not have been young and dewy, with a girlish smile and laugh. Her hair would have been silvering, her skin relaxing. Life would have left its marks on her, body and soul, and the ebullience and emotion that leapt out from the videos would have calmed. People would still have whispered words like genius and extraordinary when they saw her, but they would not have then lowered their voices to add that great magnifier, tragedy.

  That’s what Pippa had been thinking when she’d asked whether Elodie agreed that they should play videos of Lauren Adler at the wedding. She hadn’t been jealous and she wasn’t being unkind. She’d been thinking of her friend, aware before Elodie was that it would be less like having her mother beside her down the aisle and more like having Lauren Adler walk on stage first, cello in hand, casting a great long shadow for Elodie to follow in.

  The intercom buzzed and Elodie jumped up to answer it. ‘Hello?’ she said.

  ‘Hey, it’s me.’

  She pressed the button to release the security door below and opened the door to her flat. Familiar Saturday afternoon street sounds and the faint aroma of fish and chips wafted in on the breeze as she waited for Pippa, who was running up the stairs towards her.

  Pippa was out of breath when she reached the top. ‘Lord, this stairwell makes me hungry. Gorgeous veil.’

  ‘Thanks. I’m still deciding. Cup of something?’

  ‘Glass, please.’ Pippa thrust a bottle of wine into Elodie’s hands.

  Elodie slipped the veil from her head and draped it over the end of the sofa. She poured two tumblers of pinot noir and brought them to where Pippa was perched now in the window. She’d picked up the framed photograph and was studying it. Elodie handed her a drink. ‘So?’ Anticipation had burned up any small talk.

  ‘So –’ Pippa set down the photo and focused on Elodie – ‘I saw Caroline last night at the party.
I showed her the photo on my phone and she thought the woman looked familiar. She couldn’t immediately place her, but she confirmed that the styling in the photo was definitely suggestive of the 1860s; more specifically, as we thought, the photographers associated with the Pre-Raphaelites and the Magenta Brotherhood. She said she’d need to see the original to date it with any degree of accuracy, but that the photographic paper might give some clue as to the photographer’s identity. Then I mentioned Radcliffe – at that stage I was thinking of the sketchbook you said you’d found with the photo, the possibility that it might give us a hint as to a lost painting – and Caroline said she had a number of books about the Magenta Brotherhood; that I was welcome to come over and pick them up.’

  ‘And?’

  Pippa dug into her backpack and pulled out an old book in a tattered dust jacket. Elodie tried not to wince as her friend cracked open the spine and flicked rapidly through the powdery, yellowed pages. ‘Elodie, look,’ she said, arriving at an illustrated plate in the centre and stabbing it with her fingertip. ‘It’s her. The woman from the photo.’

  The plate was foxed around the edges, but the painting at its centre was still intact. The annotation beneath gave the title as Sleeping Beauty and the artist’s name, Edward Radcliffe. The woman in the painting was lying in a fantastical treetop bower of leaves and flower buds, all of which were waiting in stasis for the chance to bloom. Birds and insects were interspersed amongst the woven branches; long red hair flowed in waves around her sleeping face, which was glorious in repose. Her eyes were closed, but the features of her face – the elegant cheekbones and bow lips – were unmistakable.

  ‘She was his model,’ Elodie whispered.

  ‘His model, his muse, and according to this book –’ Pippa turned the pages eagerly to reach a later chapter – ‘his lover.’

  ‘Radcliffe’s lover? What was her name?’

  ‘From what I could glean this morning, there seems to have been some mystery about it. She used a false name to model. It says here that she was known as Lily Millington.’

  ‘Why would she have used a false name?’

  Pippa shrugged. ‘She might’ve come from a respectable family who didn’t approve; or maybe she was an actress with a stage name. A lot of actresses modelled as well.’

  ‘What happened to her? Does he say?’

  ‘I haven’t had time to read it, but I’ve done a good bit of dipping. The author starts by saying that it’s hard to know for certain when even her true name remains a mystery, but then he relates a new theory that she broke Radcliffe’s heart by stealing some jewellery – a family heirloom – and running off to America with another man.’

  Elodie thought back to the Wikipedia entry she’d read, the robbery in which Edward Radcliffe’s fiancée was killed. She shared the outline quickly with Pippa and said, ‘Do you think it was the same robbery? That this woman, his model, was involved in some way?’

  ‘No idea. It’s possible, though I’d be careful about taking the theories too literally. I did a quick JSTOR search this morning and found some criticism pointing out that the author relied on a single unidentified source for a lot of the new information. What is useful is the painting of our woman in white; now we’ve established for certain that she and Radcliffe knew one another.’

  Elodie nodded, but she was thinking about the loose page in the sketchbook, the scrawled lines about love and fear and madness. Had those desperate lines been written by Radcliffe after the woman in white, his model ‘Lily Millington’, disappeared from his life? Was it she who’d broken his heart by absconding to America with his family’s heirloom treasure, and not his pleasant-faced fiancée? And what of Stratton? What had his relationship to the woman been? For it was he who’d kept her framed photograph, tucking it for safe keeping in the satchel belonging to Edward Radcliffe.

  Pippa had gone to the kitchen bench for the bottle of pinot and was now topping up their glasses.

  ‘Elodie, there’s something else I wanted to show you.’

  ‘Another book?’

  ‘Not a book, no.’ She sat down, a new and unnatural hesitance creeping into her manner, putting Elodie on guard. ‘I’d mentioned to Caroline that I was asking all of this for you, because of what you’d found in the archives. She’s always liked you.’

  Pippa was being kind. Caroline barely knew Elodie.

  ‘I told her I was making your dress and we got to talking about the wedding, about the recordings, the music, and what it must be like for you to watch all of your mum’s concerts, and then Caroline came over quiet. I was worried at first that I’d said something to offend her, but then she apologised to me, excused herself and went to get something from her studio.’

  ‘What was it?’

  Pippa dug again inside her backpack and pulled out a thin plastic folder with a piece of card inside it. ‘One of her photographs. Elodie – it’s a photo of your mum.’

  ‘Caroline knew my mother?’

  Pippa shook her head. ‘She took it by chance. She said she had no idea who they were until later.’

  ‘They?’

  Pippa opened her mouth, as if to explain, but evidently thought better of it, simply handing the folder to Elodie instead.

  The photograph inside was larger than usual, with the rough edges and crop marks indicating that it had been printed from a negative. The image was black and white, of two people, a man and a woman, deep in conversation. They were sitting together in a beautiful place outdoors, with masses of ivy and the very edge of a stone building in the background. There was a picnic blanket and a basket, and detritus suggesting lunch. The woman was wearing a long skirt and strappy sandals and was sitting with her legs crossed, leaning forward so that her elbow rested on one knee and her face was partly turned towards the man beside her. Her chin was lifted and the beginnings of a smile seemed to be playing at the corners of her mouth. A shard of sunlight had broken through a gap in the foliage to bathe the scene. The image was beautiful.

  ‘She took it in July 1992,’ said Pippa.

  Elodie didn’t say anything. They both knew the importance of that date. Elodie’s mother had died that month. She had been killed in a car with the American violinist, returning from a performance in Bath, and yet here she was, sitting with him in a leafy grove somewhere only weeks – days? – beforehand.

  ‘She said it’s one of her favourite photographs. The light, the expressions on their faces, the setting.’

  ‘How did she—where was she?’

  ‘In the country, somewhere near Oxford; she went out for a walk one day, turned a corner, and saw them. She said she didn’t think twice; she just lifted her camera and captured the moment.’

  Most of the questions she wanted to ask wouldn’t occur to Elodie until later. For now, she was too distracted by this new image of her mother, who didn’t look like a celebrity, but like a young woman in the middle of a deep, personal conversation. Elodie wanted to drink in every detail. To study the hem of her mother’s skirt where the breeze was brushing it against her bare ankle, the way the fine chain of her watch fell low on her wrist, the elegant fluidity of her hand as it gestured towards the violinist.

  It put her in mind of another photograph, a family snapshot she’d discovered at home when she was eighteen years old. She’d been about to graduate from sixth form and the editor of her school newspaper planned to run childhood pictures of the whole class beside their school portraits. Her father was not a neat man and decades’ worth of photos in their Kodak envelopes had been stored inside a couple of boxes at the bottom of the linen cupboard. One of these rainy winter days, he always said, he was going to pull them out and sort them into albums.

  From the bottom of one box, Elodie had plucked a series of square, yellow-tinged photographs showing a group of young people laughing around a dining table covered by half-mast candles and wine bottles with elegant necks. A New Year’s Eve banner was suspended above them. She’d thumbed through the pictures, noting fondly her fat
her’s turtleneck and flares, her mother’s slim waist and enigmatic smile. And then she’d come to a shot from which her father was missing – behind the camera, perhaps? It was the same scene, but her mother was sitting now beside a man with dark eyes and an intense bearing, the violinist, the two of them deep in conversation. In that photo, too, her mother’s left hand had been blurred in motion. She had always spoken with her hands. As a child, Elodie had thought of them as small, delicate birds, weaving and fluttering in harmony with her mother’s thoughts.

  Elodie had known at once when she saw that photo. A deep, human, intuitive knowing. The electricity between her mother and the man could not have been clearer had a cable been strung from one to the other. Elodie hadn’t said anything to her father, who had already lost so much, but the knowledge cast a shadow; and several months later, when they were watching a film together, a French film in which infidelity was a central theme, Elodie had made a barbed comment about the cheating woman. It had come out sharper and hotter than it sounded in her head; it had been a challenge – she was hurt for him, and angry with him; angry with her mother, too. But her father had not risen to the bait. ‘Life is long,’ was all he’d said, his voice calm; he hadn’t looked up from the film. ‘Being human isn’t easy.’

  It struck Elodie now that it was unlikely, given her mother’s fame – and Caroline’s, too – that a photograph as striking as this one had never been published, particularly if, as Pippa said, Caroline considered it one of her favourites. She said as much to Pippa.

  ‘I asked Caroline about that. She told me she developed the roll a few days after taking it and that she loved the image of your mum immediately. Even while it was still in the solution tray she could see that it was one of those rare magical captures where the subjects, the composition, the light – everything was in harmony. Later that same night, though, she turned on the TV and saw coverage of your mum’s funeral. She hadn’t made the connection until then, but they put a photo of your mum on the screen and Caroline said she felt a chill of recognition, especially when she realised that he’d been in the car, too. That she’d seen the two of them right before –’ She gave Elodie a faint, sorry smile.