The Clockmaker's Daughter

by Kate Morton

  ‘She didn’t publish it because of the accident?’

  ‘She said it didn’t feel right in the circumstances. Also, because of you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘The news coverage included footage of you. Caroline said that she saw you, holding your dad’s hand, walking into the church, and she just knew she couldn’t publish the photo.’

  Elodie looked again at the two young people in the ivy-covered grove. The way her mother’s knee was brushing against his. The intimacy of the scene, the comfort of their postures. Elodie wondered if Caroline, too, had perceived the true nature of their relationship. Whether that explained, in part, her decision to keep the image to herself.

  ‘She thought of you on and off over the years, she said, and wondered what had become of you. She felt connected to you because of what had happened – as if by taking the photograph on that day, preserving that particular moment between them, she had become part of their story. When she realised that you and I were friends, when you came to see my final-year art show, she told me that the urge to meet you was irresistible.’

  ‘That’s why she came for supper with us that night?’

  ‘I didn’t realise at the time.’

  It had been a surprise when Pippa mentioned that Caroline was going to join them; at first, Elodie had been intimidated by her presence, this accomplished artist of whom Pippa had spoken so highly, so often. But Caroline’s manner had set her at ease; more than that, her warmth had been alluring. She’d asked questions about James Stratton and archive-keeping, the sort of questions that made it seem that she was really listening. And she’d laughed – a spirited, musical laugh that had made Elodie feel cleverer than she was and more amusing. ‘She wanted to know me because of my mother?’

  ‘Well, yes, but not like that. Caroline likes young people; she’s interested in them and inspired by them – that’s why she teaches. But with you it was more. She felt bonded to you, because of what she saw that day and everything that happened afterwards. She’d been wanting to tell you about the photo since the first moment you met.’

  ‘Why didn’t she?’

  ‘She was worried it might be overwhelming. That it might upset you. But when I mentioned you this morning – your wedding, the concert recordings, your mum – she asked me what I thought.’

  Elodie studied the image again. Pippa said that Caroline developed the photo only days after she took it, and that by then her mother’s funeral had made the news. Yet here she was, sharing lunch with the American violinist. They had performed in Bath on the 15th of July and died the following day. It seemed likely that this photograph had been taken on their way back to London; that they had stopped for a lunch break somewhere en route. It explained why they had been driving on the country roads instead of the motorway.

  ‘I told Caroline that I thought you’d be glad to have it.’

  Elodie was glad. Her mother had been much photographed, but this, she realised, was the last picture ever taken. She liked that it wasn’t a posed image from a photo shoot. Her mother looked very young – younger than Elodie was now. Caroline’s camera had caught her in a private moment, when she wasn’t being Lauren Adler; there wasn’t a cello in sight. ‘I am,’ she said now to Pippa. ‘Thank Caroline for me.’

  ‘’Course.’

  ‘And thank you.’

  Pippa smiled.

  ‘For the book, too – not to mention, bringing them all the way here. I know it’s a trek.’

  ‘Yeah, well, turns out I’m going to miss this place. Even if it is halfway to Cornwall. How did your landlady take the news?’

  Elodie lifted the pinot bottle. ‘Top-up?’

  ‘Oh, dear. You haven’t told her.’

  ‘I couldn’t. I didn’t want to upset her before the wedding. She’s put so much thought into selecting the reading.’

  ‘You realise she’s going to figure it out when the honeymoon’s over and you don’t come back?’

  ‘I know. I feel wretched.’

  ‘How much longer do you have on the lease?’

  ‘Two months.’

  ‘So, you’re thinking … ?’

  ‘Ride it out in complete denial and hope something comes to me in the meantime?’

  ‘A solid plan.’

  ‘Alternatively, I simply take out another lease and turn up twice weekly to collect my mail. I could come upstairs sometimes and sit right here. I could even leave my furniture in situ, my tatty old chair, my odd assortment of teacups.’

  Pippa smiled sympathetically. ‘Maybe Alastair will change his mind?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Elodie topped up her friend’s glass. She didn’t feel like another conversation about Alastair; they invariably turned into inquisitions that led to Elodie feeling like a pushover. Pippa didn’t understand compromise. ‘You know what? I’m hungry. Want to stay for a bite to eat?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Pippa, a tacit agreement to let the subject drop. ‘Now you mention it, I’ve got a hankering for fish and chips.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  Elodie had planned to spend Sunday listening to more recordings so that she could deliver the promised shortlist to Penelope, but sometime the night before, somewhere between the first and second bottles of red wine, she’d made a decision. She wasn’t going to walk down the aisle to a video of Lauren Adler playing the cello. No matter how much Penelope (and Alastair, too?) loved the idea, it made Elodie feel uncomfortable to picture herself in a wedding dress, heading towards a large screen of her mother in performance. It was a bit weird, wasn’t it?

  ‘Yes!’ Pippa had said as they lounged by the river, finishing their fish and chips and watching the last of the day slip behind the horizon. ‘I didn’t think you liked classical music, anyway.’ Which was true. Elodie preferred jazz.

  And so, as the first pealing church bells of Sunday morning drifted through the open windows, Elodie packed the videotapes back into her father’s suitcase and sat on the velvet chair. The new photograph of her mother was propped on the shelf of treasures between Mrs Berry’s watercolour of Montepulciano and Tip’s charm box, and Elodie’s thoughts had started to clarify into a list of things she wanted to ask her great-uncle – about her mother, and the house in the sketch, and the violinist, too. In the meantime she was going to dive into Caroline’s book and learn as much as she could about the woman in the photograph. As she opened it on her lap, she felt an immensely satisfying sensation of coming home, as if this, right now, was the very thing that she was supposed to be doing.

  Edward Radcliffe: His Life and Loves. The title was a bit sappy, but then it had been originally published in 1931, and it didn’t do to judge by contemporary standards. There was a photograph of the author, Dr Leonard Gilbert, on the inside of the dust jacket, a black-and-white image of a serious young man in a light-coloured suit. It was hard to guess his age.

  The book was divided into eight chapters: the first two gave an account of Radcliffe’s childhood, his family background, his interest in folk tales, and his early artistic abilities, highlighting his particular affection for houses, and positing that the thematic focus on ‘home’ and enclosed spaces in his art might have been the result of his fractured upbringing. The next two described the formation of the Magenta Brotherhood, profiling its other members and outlining Radcliffe’s early achievements at the Royal Academy. The fifth chapter took a turn for the personal, detailing his relationship with Frances Brown and their eventual engagement; the sixth arrived finally at the model known as Lily Millington and the period in Radcliffe’s life during which he created his most extraordinary works.

  It went against her grain, but Elodie couldn’t resist starting at chapter six, sinking into Leonard Gilbert’s account of a chance meeting in London between Edward Radcliffe and the woman whose face and bearing would inspire him to create some of the aesthetic movement’s most striking pieces of art – a woman with whom Gilbert claimed the artist would fall deeply in love. He likened Lily Millington to the Dark Lady of Shakespeare
’s sonnets, making much of the mystery of her true identity.

  As Pippa had forewarned, a lot of the information, particularly that of a biographical nature, had come from a single ‘anonymous source’, a local woman who had ‘enjoyed a close association with the Radcliffe family’. The source, according to Gilbert, had been especially close to Radcliffe’s youngest sister, Lucy, and offered important insights into Radcliffe’s childhood and the events of the summer of 1862, during which his fiancée was shot and killed and Lily Millington disappeared. Gilbert had met the woman when he visited the village of Birchwood to complete his doctoral thesis; he had then conducted a series of interviews with her between 1928 and 1930.

  Although Gilbert’s intimate portrayal of Radcliffe and his model must necessarily have been largely imagined – extrapolated from fact, if Elodie were to be generous – it was rich and nuanced. Gilbert wrote with insight and care, weaving a story that brought the pair to life, culminating in their final summer together at Birchwood Manor. The tone was unusually affecting, and Elodie was pondering why that might be, when she realised the answer was simple: Leonard Gilbert, the author, had fallen in love with Lily Millington. So appealing was his depiction that Elodie found that she, too, couldn’t help but be drawn to this woman of brilliance and beauty. In Gilbert’s hands, she was enchanting. Every word caressed her character, from the initial description of a young woman whose ‘flame brightly burned’ to the poignant turn as the chapter reached its end.

  For in chapter seven, the story arrived at Radcliffe’s downfall, and Gilbert went against conventional wisdom to propose his new theory: that the artist’s decline was not the result of his fiancée’s death but was in fact due to the loss of his great love and muse, Lily Millington. Based on information gleaned from ‘never before seen’ police reports, Gilbert posited a theory that the model had been an accomplice to the robbery in which Frances Brown was shot dead, fleeing afterwards with the intruder to America, taking with them the Radcliffe family’s heirloom pendant.

  The official story, Gilbert claimed, had been massaged over the years by the Radcliffe family themselves, whose influence in the village extended to sway with the local constabulary, and the family of Miss Brown, in whose mutual interest it was to erase all mention and memory of ‘the woman who had stolen Edward Radcliffe’s heart’. Far more palatable to both families, each of whom took a view to posterity, preferring tragedy to scandal, was the official narrative that an unknown thief had broken into the manor house to steal the necklace, killing Frances Brown and devastating her devoted fiancé. A search was mounted for the pendant, but aside from occasional false reports no trace was found.

  Compared with the rest of Gilbert’s book, the theory relating to Lily Millington’s perfidy was proposed in an almost mechanical tone, the text based heavily on direct quotes from the case notes Gilbert had found in the police files. As a researcher, Elodie could understand Gilbert’s reluctance to believe such treachery of the woman he’d conjured into life in the previous chapter. This chapter read as if two aspects of the same man were doing battle: the ambitious academic in possession of an intoxicating new theory, and the writer who had come to feel great affection for a character he’d spent so long depicting. And then there was that face. Elodie considered the way the woman in the silver-framed photograph had got beneath her skin. Even as she reminded herself sternly of the dangers and powers inherent to beauty, Elodie knew that she, too, was resistant to the notion that the woman in white could be capable of such stunning duplicity.

  Despite his unwillingness to accept wholeheartedly the idea that Lily Millington was central to its disappearance, Gilbert went into some detail about the pendant, for it turned out that the diamond it contained was no ordinary gem. The twenty-three-carat stone was a blue diamond so rare and valuable that it had its own name: the Radcliffe Blue. The lineage of the Blue could be traced back in time to Marie Antoinette, for whom the remarkable stone had first been set in a pendant; back further to the mercenary John Hawkwood, who obtained the gem during a raid on Florence in the fourteenth century and couldn’t bear to be parted from it, going to his deathbed, according to one report, ‘loaden with honour and riches’; back further still to tenth-century India, where it was said – apocryphally, in Gilbert’s opinion – that the stone had been plucked by a travelling merchant from the wall of a Hindu temple. Whatever the case, when the stone fell into the hands of the Radcliffe family in 1816, it was reset in a filigree gold casing and threaded onto a fine chain to sit at the hollow of the neck. Spectacular, but of prohibitive value: for the half-century or so that the diamond remained in the possession of the Radcliffe family, it was kept almost exclusively in the family’s safety deposit box at Lloyd’s of London.

  Elodie wasn’t particularly interested in the history of the Radcliffe Blue, but the next line made her sit upright. According to Gilbert, Edward Radcliffe had ‘borrowed’ the pendant from the safety deposit box in June 1862 in order that his model could wear it in a great work he planned to complete over the summer. This, then, must be the unfinished painting that had come to be regarded by art lovers and academics with mythological longing.

  The second half of chapter seven was dedicated to the possibility that such a painting, finished or in process, was extant somewhere. Gilbert posited several possible theories, based on his research into Edward Radcliffe’s artistic oeuvre, but in conclusion acknowledged that without proof it was all speculation. For although there were vague references to an abandoned artwork in correspondence between the other members of the Magenta Brotherhood, nothing belonging to Radcliffe himself had yet been unearthed.

  Elodie glanced at the sketchbook she’d found in the archives. Was this the proof that Leonard Gilbert had craved? Had the verification for which the art world had longed been sitting all the while in a leather satchel in the house of the great Victorian reformer James Stratton? The thought brought Elodie back to Stratton, for she knew now that Lily Millington was the missing link between the two men. Stratton knew the woman well enough to keep her photograph; Radcliffe had been in love with her. The two men themselves did not appear to have been closely acquainted, and yet it was to Stratton that Radcliffe had turned in the middle of the night when his desperate heartache threatened to overwhelm him. It appeared that it was Stratton, too, to whom Radcliffe had entrusted the plans for his great work. But why? Learning the true identity of Lily Millington was key. The name was not familiar, but Elodie made a note to check the Stratton correspondence database for any mention.

  In the final chapter of his book, Gilbert returned his attention to Edward Radcliffe’s interest in houses, especially his love for the country dwelling he referred to in correspondence as his ‘charming house … within its own bend of the river’, this time allowing his own story to intersect with that of his subject. For it turned out that Gilbert, too, had spent a summer living within Radcliffe’s ‘charming house’, walking in Radcliffe’s footsteps as he worked to complete his doctoral thesis.

  Leonard Gilbert, the returned soldier, who had suffered his own losses on the French battlefields of the Great War, wrote elegiacally about the effects of displacement, but ended his book on a note of hope, with a meditation on the longing for ‘home’ and what it meant to find oneself at last in a place of comfort after so long in the wilderness. He relied on one of Radcliffe’s contemporaries, the greatest Victorian of them all, Charles Dickens, to convey the simple, enormous power of ‘home’: ‘home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit answered to …’ For Edward Radcliffe, Gilbert wrote, this place was Birchwood Manor.

  Elodie read the line again. The house had a name. She typed it into the search engine on her phone, held her breath, and then there it was. A photograph, a description, an address. The house was on the border of Oxfordshire and Berkshire in the Vale of White Horse. She chose a link and learned that it had been given to the Art Historians’ Association in 1928 by Lucy Radcliffe for use as a Res
idential Scholarship for students. When the costs of upkeep became too high there’d been talk of setting it up as a museum to celebrate the art of Edward Radcliffe and the tremendous flowering of creativity that occurred under the umbrella of the Magenta Brotherhood, but the money required was not immediately available. It had taken years of fundraising, and finally, in 1980, a generous bequest from an unnamed donor, to allow the AHA to make good on its plans. The museum was still there; open to the public on Saturdays.

  Elodie’s hand was shaking as she scrolled to the bottom of the webpage and noted the directions to Birchwood Manor. There was another photo of the house, this one taken from a different angle, and Elodie enlarged it to fill the screen. Her gaze roamed across the garden, the brick face, the dormer windows in the steep roof, and then she drew breath—

  At that moment the image left her screen, replaced by an incoming call. It was international – Alastair – but before she knew what she was doing, Elodie had stabbed the screen to cancel, swiping the call aside to return to the photo of the house. She zoomed closer and there it was, just as she’d known it would be: the astrological weathervane.

  Radcliffe’s sketch was of his own house, on its own bend of the river, which was in turn the house from the story her mother had told her, the house to which Tip had been evacuated during the Second World War. Elodie’s own family was somehow connected to Radcliffe and a mystery that had fallen into her lap at work. It made no sense at all, and yet there was more to the connection than that, for Tip, although he hadn’t been willing to admit it, had recognised the photograph of Lily Millington, the woman in white.

  Elodie picked up the framed photograph. Who was she? What was her real name and what had become of her? For reasons that she couldn’t explain, Elodie was overcome with a passionate, almost desperate need to find out.