The Clockmaker's Daughter

by Kate Morton

  ‘Take this,’ said Pale Joe, holding the thaumatrope towards me. ‘It’s yours. And next time you come, I promise, I’ll show you something far, far better.’

  And that is how I came to meet Pale Joe and he became my secret, just as surely as I became his.

  There has been a shift in the house’s temperament. Something of importance has happened while I was thinking of my old friend Pale Joe. Sure enough, Jack is in the hallway, a look upon his face just like the cat that got the cream. It does not take me long to realise why. He is standing in front of the hiding hole, its concealed panel wide open.

  He has gone off now at a trot, back to his room in order to fetch his torch, I imagine. Despite telling Rosalind Wheeler that he would not enter the house before Saturday, I understand curiosity and its demands and have no doubt that he has plans to search every square inch of the hiding hole, every groove within the boards, in the hope that he might find the diamond lurking. He won’t. It isn’t there. But all truths must not be told at all times. It will do him no harm to search. I rather like him when frustration makes him bearish.

  I am going to leave him to it and wait for him in the malt house. I have other things to think about, like Elodie Winslow’s visit. There was something familiar in her bearing when she was here this afternoon. I couldn’t place it at first, but I have since realised what it was. When she entered the house, as she walked about its rooms, she let out a sigh that no one else but I would have been able to detect, and I saw upon her face a look of satisfaction that could almost be termed completeness. It reminded me of Edward. It is the same way that he looked when we first came to this house.

  But Edward had a reason to feel such strong attachment. He was tethered to this place when just a boy, by his night of terror in the nearby fields. Why is Elodie Winslow here? What is her connection to Birchwood Manor?

  I hope that she comes back. I wish it with a fervency that I have not felt in years. I begin to understand at last how it must have been for Pale Joe that first day, when he promised to show me something wonderful if I would only agree to return. One becomes rather desperate for visitors, when one has lost the power to visit.

  After Edward, Pale Joe is the person whom I miss most in this limbo of mine. I used to think of him a lot and wonder what became of him, for he was a special person; he had been poorly for some time when I met him and his life of isolation in that room of untouched treasures made him far more interested than most in the world beyond his window. Everything that Pale Joe knew he had learned from books, and thus there was a lot he did not understand about the way things worked. He could not comprehend when I told him about the poky damp rooms that I had shared with my father in the shadow of St Anne’s; the communal privy and the toothless old woman who cleaned it out in exchange for leftover cinders; what happened to Lily Millington perhaps saddest of all. He wanted to know why people would choose to live in such a way and was forever asking me to tell him stories of the London that I knew, the alleyways of Covent Garden, the dark areas of commerce below the bridges along the Thames, the infants with no parents. He wanted to hear especially about the babies who had come to live with Mrs Mack, and his eyes would fill with tears when I told him of those unlucky little ones who just weren’t strong enough for this world.

  I wonder what he thought when I disappeared so completely from his life. Did he look for me? Not at first, but eventually, when more time passed than could be explained away with logic? Did he doubt and ask questions or did he believe the worst? Pale Joe was the same age that I was, born in 1844; if he lived into old age, he would have been eighty-seven years old when Leonard’s book was published. Being such an avid reader – we read together often, up there in his attic bedroom, the two of us sitting shoulder to shoulder in his white linen nest – he was always aware of what was being published and when; he was a lover of art, too, a passion acquired from his father, whose house on Lincoln’s Inn Fields was filled with Turners. Yes, I feel sure that Pale Joe would have read Leonard’s book. What did he make of its theories, I wonder? Did he believe me a faithless jewel thief who fled to a better life in America?

  Pale Joe certainly knew me capable of thievery. He knew me better than Edward in some respects. We had met, after all, when I was mid-flight from a policeman, and from the start he had been filled with questions about Mrs Mack and her enterprise, delighting in my tales of Little Girl Lost and Little Girl Passenger and, as time went on, Theatre-Going Lady, encouraging me to tell him my stories, as if they described great feats of derring-do.

  Pale Joe knew, too, that I had resolved that if my father did not send for me, I would travel to America and find him. For although Jeremiah delivered regular reports, standing importantly in Mrs Mack’s parlour as she read out letters in which my father described his efforts to remake himself and encouraged me to listen to Mrs Mack and to do as she bade me, I was always concerned that there was something I was not being told; for if my father’s new life was progressing as his letters said, then why did he continue to insist that I should not yet join him?

  But later Pale Joe knew that I also loved Edward. Indeed, it was he who saw it first. I can still remember the night, on the evening of the Royal Academy exhibition of 1861, when Edward invited me to see the La Belle painting unveiled, and afterwards I went to Pale Joe’s window. I have had much time since to reflect upon Pale Joe’s words that evening, after I gave him my report. ‘You are in love,’ he said, ‘for that is exactly how love feels. It is the lifting of a mask, the revealing of one’s true self to another, and the forced acceptance, the awful awareness, that the other person may never feel the same way.’

  He was wise about love, Pale Joe, for a boy who rarely left his bower. His mother was always encouraging him to attend Society dances so that he could meet London’s eligible young debutantes, and many times, as I bade him farewell, I left him to dress in his black-and-white suit for this dinner or that. I used to think about him as I hurried back along the laneways towards Covent Garden, my pale, elegant friend with his limp and his kind heart, who had grown tall in the five years since we’d met, and handsome; and I pictured the two of us as if from above, going about our parallel lives in the one great city.

  I suppose Pale Joe must have met a woman at one of those dances, a fine lady with whom he fell in love as completely as I did with Edward, and who perhaps did not reciprocate, because his words that night were perfect.

  He never did have the chance to tell me who she was. The last time that I saw Pale Joe, we were eighteen years old. I had come to his window to let him know that I’d agreed to go with Edward to Birchwood Manor for the summer. I revealed nothing of my plans beyond; I didn’t even say a proper farewell. I didn’t think I had to, not then. I thought that there would be more time. I suppose people always do.

  Jack is back in the malt house and my house is calm again, catching its breath after a day of unusual activity. It has been a long time since anyone ventured inside the hiding hole.

  He is dispirited, but not because he failed to find the stone. Its absence will involve another telephone call to Rosalind Wheeler, which will not be pleasant, for she will not be happy. But the search for the Radcliffe Blue is just a job for Jack; he has no personal connection other than human curiosity driving his quest. His mood is related, I am certain, to his meeting yesterday with Sarah regarding the two little girls.

  I long to know what happened between them. It gives me something to focus on besides my own memories and the endless, aimless stretch of time.

  He has put aside Mrs Wheeler’s notes and floor plan and picked up his camera. I have noticed a pattern with Jack. When something upsets him, he takes out his camera and looks through the lens, pointing it at things – anything, it seems – fiddling with the aperture and the focus, and bringing the zoom in close before retracting it again. Sometimes he takes the shot; more often than not, he doesn’t. By and by, his equilibrium is restored and the camera goes away.

  Today, however, he is
not so easily mended. He returns the camera to its bag and then hangs the strap over his shoulder. He intends to go outside to take more photographs.

  I am going to wait for him in my favourite corner at the turn of the stairs. I like to look at the Thames between the trees beyond the meadow. The river is quiet up here; only the canal boats go back and forth, dragging after them the faint plume of coal smoke. One can hear the plink of a fishing line being sunk, the skid of a duck coming in to land on the surface, laughter sometimes in the summer if the day is warm enough to swim.

  What I said earlier was not entirely truthful, that I have never managed to go as far as the river. There was one time, and one time only. I did not mention it because I still cannot explain it. But on the afternoon that Ada Lovegrove fell from the boat, I was there, in the river, watching as she sank to the bottom.

  Edward used to say that the river possessed a primeval memory of everything that had ever happened. It occurs to me that this house is like that, too. It remembers, just as I do. It remembers everything.

  Such thoughts bring me back to Leonard.

  He had been a soldier but was a student by the time he arrived at Birchwood Manor, working on a dissertation about Edward, his papers spread across the desk in the Mulberry Room downstairs. It was from him that I learned much of what happened after Fanny died. Amongst his research notes were letters and newspaper articles and eventually the police reports, too. What a strange feeling it was to read the name ‘Lily Millington’ there amongst the others. Thurston Holmes, Felix and Adele Bernard, Frances Brown, Edward, Clare and Lucy Radcliffe.

  I saw the policemen as they carried out their investigation into Fanny’s death. I watched as they searched the rooms, raking through Adele’s clothing and stripping the walls of Felix’s darkroom. I was there when the shorter of the two men pocketed a photograph of Clare in her lace slip, tucking it inside his straining coat. I was there, too, when they cleared out Edward’s studio, taking from it everything they could find that might shed light on me …

  Leonard had a dog that would sleep on the armchair as he worked; a great big shaggy animal with muddy paws and a long-suffering expression. I like animals: they are often aware of me when people are not; they make me feel appreciated. It is amazing how far a little acknowledgement will go when one has become used to being ignored.

  He brought a record player with him and used to play songs late at night, and he kept a glass pipe on the table beside his bed, an object I recognised from the time of my father’s nights in the Chinese den in the Limehouse. Occasionally a woman, Kitty, came to visit and he would hide the pipe away.

  I watched him sometimes when he slept, just as I watch Jack now. He had military habits, like the old major who was known to Mrs Mack and the Captain, who could beat a young girl where she stood but wouldn’t countenance falling into bed without polishing his boots and lining them up carefully for the next day.

  Leonard wasn’t violent, but his nightmares were bleak. Neat as a pin, quiet and polite by day, but with dreams of the darkest kind. He would shake in his sleep, and wince, and call out in a voice made raw with fear. ‘Tom,’ he used to call, ‘Tommy.’

  I used to wonder about Tommy. Leonard cried for him as one might for a lost child.

  On the nights when he smoked through the glass pipe and fell into a languorous sleep where Tommy couldn’t find him, I sat in the still of the dark house and thought of my father, of how long I waited for him to come back for me.

  And when Leonard didn’t use the pipe, I stayed with him. I understand despair; and so, on those nights, I knelt and whispered in that young man’s ear, ‘It is all right. Be at peace. Tommy says that he is well.’

  Tom … Tommy … I still hear his name on nights when the wind blows strong down the river and the floorboards quiver.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Summer, 1928

  It was the hottest day so far and Leonard had determined when he woke that he would swim. He’d taken to strolling along the towpath in the early mornings, and sometimes again in the hovering afternoons that burned on and on before fading suddenly like a limelight being snuffed.

  The Thames here had a vastly different character to the wide, muddy tyrant that seethed through London. It was graceful and deft and remarkably light of heart. It skipped over stones and skimmed its banks, water so clear that one could see the reeds swaying deep down on her narrow bed. The river here was a she, he’d decided. For all its sunlit transparency, there were certain spots in which it was suddenly unfathomable.

  A long, dry stretch through June had given him ample opportunity to explore, and Leonard had discovered a particularly inviting bend a mile or two upstream before the Lechlade Halfpenny Bridge. A co-op of scrappy children had set up camp for the summer in a field just beyond, but a coppice of birch trees gave the bend its privacy.

  He was sitting now with his back against the trunk of a willow, wishing he’d finished the repairs he was planning to make to the old wooden rowing boat he’d found in the barn behind the house. The day was perfectly still, and Leonard couldn’t think of anything more pleasant than lying in that boat and letting it carry him downstream.

  In the distance, a boy of about eleven, with long, skinny legs and knobbly knees, ran from beneath the shadows of one tree towards the trunk of another. He streaked across the sunny clearing circling his arms like a windmill, just for the hell of it, a wide grin lighting his face.

  For a split second Leonard could remember the fluid joy of being young and fast and free. ‘Run with me, Lenny, run!’ He still heard it sometimes, when the wind blew a certain way or a bird sailed overhead. ‘Run with me, Lenny.’

  The boy hadn’t seen Leonard. He and his mates were on a stick-gathering mission, collecting sword-like lengths and carrying them to a particular boy by the calico tent who then inspected the offerings, admitting some and shaking his head ‘no’ to others. To Leonard’s adult eyes, there was nothing about that boy that marked him out as the leader. He was a little taller, perhaps, than the others, a bit older, maybe, but children had an instinctive ability to discern power.

  Leonard got on well with children. With them there was none of the duplicity that adults relied upon to ease their way. They said what they meant and described what they saw and when they disagreed they fought and then made amends. He and Tom had been like that.

  A tennis ball soared from nowhere, landing with a soft thud and rolling along the grass towards the river’s edge. Dog raced after it before trotting back to drop the gift at his master’s feet. Leonard accepted the sodden offering, weighing it in his palm briefly before hurling it back in the direction from which it had come.

  There was some warmth in the sun now. He took off his shirt and trousers and, wearing only his trunks, made his way to the water’s edge. He dipped in a toe as a family of ducks drifted by.

  Without giving himself time to change his mind, Leonard dived beneath the surface.

  The early morning cold of the water made his skin tighten. He kept his eyes open as he swam down, down, down, as deep as he could go, reaching out when he met the bottom to clutch at the silt floor. He held on and started counting. Tom grinned back at him from within the clump of slippery reeds.

  Leonard couldn’t remember a time before Tom. There’d only been thirteen months between them. Their mother had lost a child prior to Leonard, a girl called June who’d been stricken with scarlet fever in her second year, and she hadn’t been about to take the chance that she’d be left short again. He’d heard her confess to his aunt one afternoon over tea that she’d have had ten children if not for the ‘women’s problems’ that had stopped her.

  ‘You’ve an heir and a spare,’ the aunt had said with customary pragmatism, ‘and that’s better than naught.’

  It had occupied Leonard on and off for years, wondering whether he was the ‘air’ and whether that was a good or a bad thing. His mother always hated it when the wind blew at night and rattled the windows in their frames.r />
  Tom was the younger one, but he’d been more physical than Leonard. By the time they were five and four years old, Tom was the taller of the pair. He was broader, too, with strong shoulders – like a swimmer’s, their dad used to say with stilted masculine pride – and a charming character, open and easy, that drew people to him. Leonard, by contrast, was more internal. His mother liked to tell them that their personalities had been visible from the moment they were placed as newborns in her arms. ‘You pulled your little limbs tight against you and tucked your chin into your chest like you were trying to escape the world. Tom, though – he clenched his fists, jutted his chin and stuck out his bottom lip as if to say, “Come and get me!”’

  Leonard’s lungs ached in his chest, but he remained submerged. He met his brother’s laughing gaze as a school of minnows swam between them. He kept counting.

  Women liked Tom; they always had. He was handsome – even Leonard could see that – but it was something else. He had a way about him. He was funny, and generous, and when he laughed it was like the sky had cracked open and the sun was shining directly on your skin. Leonard, with plenty of time to reflect upon it since, had decided that it was an innate honesty that people responded to in Tom. Even when he was angry or fierce, there was a truthfulness to his emotion that drew people to him.

  Leonard’s pulse was hammering hot in his ears now. It had expanded to fill his whole skull and he could stand it no longer. He pushed off the bottom and arrowed back through the water towards the glistening top, gasping sharply when he broke the surface. He squinted as the world turned briefly white and then rolled onto his back to catch his breath.

  Leonard floated star-shaped, the sun pleasingly hot on his stomach. Ninety-three seconds. He was still well short of Tom’s record, snatched during the summer of 1913, but he would try again tomorrow. A lark was singing nearby and Leonard closed his eyes. Water lapped gently. The boys whooped gleefully in the distance, mad on summer.