The Clockmaker's Daughter

by Kate Morton

Mamma laughed. ‘Oh, darling, you are hardly alone. There’s Miss Thornfield, and Miss Radcliffe, and look behind you at all those lovely girls.’

  Ada glanced over her shoulder through the window and as if on cue a slew of girls – English girls with long blonde curls tied back with ribbons – appeared in the garden. They were walking towards the house in a series of small groups, laughing and talking, some of them carrying easels and paint sets.

  The whole experience was so unexpected and inexplicable that even then Ada failed to grasp precisely what sort of place this was. Later, after she had finished castigating herself for her stupidity, a small voice of self-defence would pipe up to remind her that she was only eight years old and had heretofore had no experience with schools; indeed, nothing in her life could have hoped to prepare her for what her parents had in store.

  At the time, she had simply allowed her mother to hug her goodbye – yet another unexpected turn in a thoroughly strange day – taken a firm shoulder pat from her father teamed with an admonishment to do her best, and then watched as the pair of them linked arms, turned on their heels, and swept, together, out through the door and back along the halls to where their carriage was waiting.

  It was Miss Thornfield who told her in the end. Ada had started after her parents, thinking to ask a little more about what it was precisely that they expected her to do that afternoon, when Miss Thornfield grabbed her wrist to stop her. ‘Welcome, Miss Lovegrove,’ she said, with a pained smile, ‘to Miss Radcliffe’s School for Young Ladies.’

  School. Young ladies. Welcome. Ada liked words – she collected them – but those four hit her like bricks.

  Panic ensued, and she quite forgot the manners that Mamma was always reminding her to use. She called Miss Thornfield a liar and a baboon; she said that she was a wicked old woman; she might even have shouted ‘Bevkuph!’ at the top of her lungs.

  Then she pulled her arm free and ran like a cheetah from the house, past the other girls, still milling in the corridors, straight into a tall golden-haired girl who exclaimed loudly. Ada hissed through her teeth and pushed the bigger girl aside, running down the passage, through the front door, and all the way to the drive where the carriage had deposited her with her parents not an hour before.

  The carriage was gone now and Ada let out a cry of angry frustration.

  What did it all mean? Her mother had said that she was to stay for the afternoon, but Miss Thornfield had made it sound as if she were to stay here, at this school, for … for how long?

  Longer than the afternoon.

  Ada spent the next few hours stalking along the river, pulling reeds from their sheaths and then slaying the tall grasses that lined the bank. She observed the horrible house from a distance, hating it with all of her might. She shed hot, angry tears when she thought of Shashi.

  Only when the sun began to set, and Ada realised that she was alone in the middle of a darkening copse of trees, did she start to head back across the meadow, skirting the stone wall that surrounded the house, to arrive at the front gate. She sat cross-legged on the ground where she could keep an eye on the lane that led from the village. That way she would be able to see the carriage as soon as it turned towards Birchwood Manor. She watched the light turn from yellow to less yellow and her heart ached when she pictured the jagged scars of palm trees on the purple and orange horizon at home, the sharp smells and the bustle, the hymns of the praying Parsees.

  It was almost dark when she sensed someone behind her. ‘Come now, Miss Lovegrove.’ Miss Thornfield stepped from the shadows. ‘Dinner is being served. It would not do to go hungry on your first night.’

  ‘I will dine with my mother and father when they return,’ said Ada. ‘They will be back for me.’

  ‘No. They will not. Not tonight. As I tried to explain, they have left you here to go to school.’

  ‘I don’t want to stay here.’

  ‘Be that as it may.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Miss Lovegrove—’

  ‘I want to go home!’

  ‘You are home, and the sooner you start to accept that fact, the better.’ Miss Thornfield stiffened then, and seemed to grow in length, drawing herself up like a ladder, all the way to her hunched shoulders, so that Ada was put in mind of an alligator stretching its scales. ‘Now then, shall we try again? Dinner,’ she enunciated, ‘is being served, and no matter what you might have become accustomed to on the subcontinent, Miss Lovegrove, I assure you that here we do not serve dinner twice.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  And so here she was, sixty-three days later, crouched in the dark in a secret damp-smelling space in the lining between walls in the first-floor hallway of Miss Radcliffe’s School for Young Ladies. Her parents, as she understood it, were now back in Bombay, although she had not heard the news directly because, as Miss Thornfield had explained, they wished to give Ada time to ‘settle in’ before sending any post. ‘Very considerate of them,’ was Miss Thornfield’s determination. ‘They wished to give you no cause for upset.’

  Ada pressed her ear to the wooden panel and closed her eyes. It was already dark, but the act of shutting them helped to focus her other senses. Sometimes she thought that she could actually hear the whorls within the wood. ‘Whorls’ sounded very similar to ‘worlds’ and it was a pleasant distraction to imagine them as such. She could almost believe that the worlds within the wood were speaking to her in a lovely voice. It made her feel better, that voice.

  Now, from the hallway outside, came two real voices, muffled, and Ada’s eyes snapped open.

  ‘But I saw her come this way.’

  ‘You couldn’t have.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Well? Where is she then? Disappeared into thin air?’

  There was a pause and then a petulant reply. ‘I saw her come this way. I know I did. She must be here somewhere; we just have to wait.’

  Tucked inside her hiding place, Ada exhaled silently. Her foot had gone to sleep; she’d been cramped up in the same position for at least twenty-five minutes now, but if there was one thing she was good at – as opposed to sewing, piano and painting, and almost everything else they tried to teach at this bevkuph school – it was being stubborn. Shashi was always calling her ‘little khacara’ – little mule. Those girls could wait all they liked in the corridor; Ada would simply wait longer.

  Charlotte Rogers and May Hawkins were the names of her tormentors. They were older than she was, twelve years old, and one of them, Charlotte, particularly tall for her age. She was the daughter of a parliamentarian, May of a prominent industrialist. Ada had not had much opportunity to mix with other children, but she was a fast learner and an excellent observer, and it hadn’t taken long for her to ascertain that at Miss Radcliffe’s School for Young Ladies there was a small group of big girls who ran things and that they expected willing obedience from the littler ones.

  But Ada was not used to being told what to do by other children, and her steel sense of justice rendered her incapable of iniquitous compliance. So when Charlotte Rogers demanded the new ribbons that Mamma had bought for her in London, Ada told her no. She liked the ribbons, thank you very much, and would prefer to keep them for herself. When the two of them cornered her in the stairwell and told her not to make a single noise while May Hawkins saw how far backwards her finger would bend, Ada brought her boot down hard on May’s toes and shouted, ‘Let go of my finger at once!’ When they reported (falsely) to Matron that it was Ada who had sneaked into the larder and opened the new jars of jam, Ada spoke up quickly to report that, no, she was not the culprit, adding that in fact it had been Charlotte Rogers who stole down the hallway after dark; she had seen it with her own two eyes.

  None of this had endeared her to Charlotte Rogers and May Hawkins, it was true, but their enmity went back further than that, to the beginning. For when Ada had fled from the library, hoping to catch her parents, it had been Charlotte Rogers with whom she had collided in the corridor. Charlotte had bee
n caught by surprise, issuing a banshee-like scream that drew laughter and pointed fingers from the other girls, even the younger ones. The fact that Ada had then hissed into her face had not helped matters.

  ‘There she is, the little Indian wild cat,’ Charlotte had said, the very next time that she’d seen Ada.

  They had crossed paths in the front garden, Ada sitting alone beneath the young Japanese maple by the wall, Charlotte in the midst of a giggling flock of ringlet-ribboned girls.

  A radiant, hungry smile had spread across Charlotte’s pretty face as she drew the attention of the group to Ada. ‘This is the one I was telling you about, ladies. Her parents brought her all the way from India in the hopes that she could somehow be civilised.’ One of them sniggered at that and Charlotte, emboldened, widened her cool blue eyes: ‘I want you to know that we are all here to help you, Ada, so if there’s anything you need, anything at all, you must simply ask. While I think of it, there’s a water closet inside, but you should feel free to dig yourself a hole out here if that makes you more comfortable.’

  The girls had all laughed and Ada’s eyes had stung with hurt and anger. An image had come to mind, unbidden, of Shashi’s sunshine face as they lay side by side on the platform on the roof in Bombay, her broad, bright smile as she told stories of her childhood in the Punjab and teased Ada gently for her life of privilege in the mansion. In some inexplicable way, when Charlotte spoke derisively of India, it was as if she had poked fun directly at Shashi; as if she had made Ada complicit.

  In defiance, Ada had been determined not to give the others the pleasure of a reaction; she swept aside all thought of Shashi and her own painful longing for home, and instead gazed straight ahead, pretending that she could not see them. After a time, in the face of their continued taunts, she started telling herself a story in soft Punjabi, as though she hadn’t a care in the world. Charlotte had not liked that; her gleeful smile had slipped and even as she ordered the others to leave with her, she’d fixed Ada with a puzzled frown, as if Ada were a problem that needed to be solved. A nut in need of cracking.

  Charlotte had been right in one thing: Ada’s parents had left her at Miss Radcliffe’s School for Young Ladies in the misguided expectation that she would be magically transformed into a proper English schoolgirl. But while Ada was quite familiar with a water closet, she was not a ‘young lady’ and had no intention of being turned into one. She had never mastered stitching, she asked far too many questions that did not have ready answers, and her piano skills were nonexistent. In India, while her mother had played beautifully, melodies floating from the library on the warm breeze, Ada had only ever managed to torment the keys such that even her father – traditionally disposed to appreciate her every misstep – had hunched down into his collar so his ears might be protected.

  Most lessons at Miss Radcliffe’s School for Young Ladies were thus a misery. The only subjects from which Ada took some small pleasure were the two actually taught by Miss Radcliffe: science and geography. Ada had also joined Miss Radcliffe’s Natural History Society, of which she was the sole member aside from a girl called Meg, who did not appear to have two wits to rub together and was content to wander about humming romantic dance tunes and collecting clover flowers to thread into elaborate crowns.

  For Ada, though, the Natural History Society was the single redeeming feature of having been abandoned at Birchwood Manor. Every Saturday morning and Thursday afternoon, Miss Radcliffe would lead them on a brisk walk across country, sometimes for hours at a time, through muddy fields and flowing streams, over hills and into woods. Sometimes they bicycled further afield, to Uffington to see the White Horse or Barbury to climb the Iron Age hill fort or even on occasion as far as the Avebury stone circles. They became quite expert at spotting the round hollows Miss Radcliffe referred to as ‘dew ponds’: they were made by pre-historic people, she said, in order to ensure that they always had sufficient water. According to Miss Radcliffe, there were signs of ancient communities everywhere, if one only knew where to look.

  Even the woods behind the school were filled with secrets from the past: Miss Radcliffe had shown them beyond the clearing to a small hill she called the ‘dragon mound’. ‘There is every possibility that this was an Anglo-Saxon burial site,’ she’d said, going on to explain that it was so named because the Anglo-Saxons believed that dragons watched over their treasure. ‘Of course, the Celts would have disagreed. They would have called this a fairy mound and said that beneath it lay the entrance to fairyland.’

  Ada had thought then of the amulet in the library and wondered whether this was where Miss Radcliffe had found her protection charm. ‘Not far from here,’ Miss Radcliffe had replied. ‘Not far from here at all.’

  To Ada, being a member of the Natural History Society was like being a detective, looking for clues and solving mysteries. Every relic they unearthed came with a story, a secret life led long before the object reached their hands. It became a game of sorts to come up with the most exciting (yet plausible, for they were scientists and not creative writers) history for each find.

  Miss Radcliffe always let them keep their treasures. She was adamant about it: the earth gives up its secrets in good time, she liked to say, and always to the person it intends. ‘What about the river?’ Ada had asked one Saturday morning, when their adventures had taken them close to the water’s edge. She’d been thinking about a story Shashi had told her, about a flood that came to her village and washed away her precious childhood possessions. She realised too late her terrible faux pas, for Ada had heard whispers, by then, that Miss Radcliffe’s brother had died by drowning.

  ‘Rivers are different,’ the headmistress said at last, her voice steady, but her face paler than usual beneath her freckles. ‘Rivers are always on the move. They take their secrets and mysteries with them to the sea.’

  Miss Radcliffe herself was something of a mystery. For a woman who put her name to a school proposing to turn young girls into civilised ladies, she was not particularly ladylike. Oh, she had all of the ‘manners’ that Mamma liked to talk about – she didn’t chew with her mouth open or burp at the table – but in other ways she reminded Ada far more of Papa: her purposeful stride when they were out in the open air, her willingness to talk about subjects like politics and religion, her insistence that it was incumbent on one to strive always for the attainment of knowledge, to demand better information to do so. She spent most of her time outside and had no care for fashion, always dressing in precisely the same way: dark leather button-up boots and a green walking suit, the long skirt of which was always caked with mud about the hem. She had a large woven basket that reminded Ada of Shashi’s, and she carried it wherever she went; but where Shashi filled her basket with fruit and vegetables, Miss Radcliffe’s was used for carrying sticks and stones and birds’ eggs and feathers and all manner of other natural objects that had piqued her interest.

  Ada was not the only person to have noticed Miss Radcliffe’s eccentricities. The school was hers, and yet – aside from delivering occasional fierce and imploring speeches about the duty of ‘you girls’ to learn as much as possible, and offering the general admonishment that ‘Time is your most precious commodity, girls, and there’s none so foolish as those that waste their minutes’ – she left matters of administration and discipline to the deputy headmistress, Miss Thornfield. Amongst the other girls, it was rumoured that she was a witch. To start with, there were all those plant samples and oddities, not to mention the room in which she kept them. It was a small chamber adjoining her bedroom that students were forbidden from entering on pain of death. ‘That’s where she does her spells,’ Angelica Barry insisted. ‘I’ve heard her from the other side, chanting and intoning.’ And Meredith Sykes swore that she had glimpsed inside the door one day and, amongst the stones and fossils, seen a human skull upon the bureau top.

  One thing was certain: Miss Radcliffe loved her house. The only time she ever raised her voice was in castigation of a girl caught sli
ding on the bannisters or kicking along the skirting boards. On one of their walks across Wiltshire, talk had turned to loneliness and special places and Miss Radcliffe had explained to Ada that Birchwood Manor had once belonged to her brother; that he had died many years before; and that although she still missed him more than anything else she’d ever lost, she felt close to him when she was inside his house.

  ‘He was an artist,’ Ada’s fellow rambler Meg had said once, apropos of nothing, looking up from the clover necklace she was threading, ‘Miss Radcliffe’s brother. A famous artist, but his fiancée was killed with a rifle and afterwards he went mad with grief.’

  Now, her reverie interrupted by the proximity of her tormentors, Ada shifted carefully in her hiding place within the wall, mindful not to make even the tiniest of noises. She did not know much about lovers or fiancées, but she knew how much it hurt to be separated from a loved one and she felt immensely sorry for Miss Radcliffe. Ada had decided that it was the loss of her brother that explained the expression of deep unhappiness that came upon her headmistress’s face sometimes when she thought no one was watching.

  As if she had somehow read Ada’s thoughts, there came now a familiar voice on the other side of the wall panel: ‘Girls, what are you doing in the hallway? You know how Miss Thornfield feels about skulking.’

  ‘Yes, Miss Radcliffe,’ they chorused.

  ‘I cannot think what could be keeping you so interested in here.’

  ‘Nothing, Miss Radcliffe.’

  ‘I hope you are not dragging those hockey sticks along my wall?’

  ‘No, Miss Radcliffe.’

  ‘Well, then, off you go, and I will consider not mentioning this infraction to Miss Thornfield for her detention list.’

  Ada heard their footsteps scuttle away and allowed herself a small sigh of satisfied relief.

  ‘Out you climb then, child,’ said Miss Radcliffe, rapping gently on the wall. ‘You must have a class you’re missing, too.’