The Clockmaker's Daughter

by Kate Morton

  Some nights he took down the game of Snakes and Ladders. They’d always played with the same counters. Leonard’s a perfectly rounded grey stone he’d found when their mother and father took them to the seaside at Salcombe; Tom’s a silver coin, a tuppence given to him one day by an old man he’d helped after a fall in the street. They’d been religious about their lucky counters, each insisting that his was the finer, but Leonard could remember being envious of Tom’s, because nine times out of ten times his brother won the game. Tom had always been the luckier of the two. Except, of course, the one time it had mattered.

  One day in early 1924, Leonard’s legs were especially restless. He packed some water in his kitbag and went out for a walk as he often did, but when darkness began to drop, he didn’t turn around and head back towards the house; he kept walking. He didn’t know where he was going and he didn’t care. He slept eventually where he fell, in an open field, the half-moon gleaming above him in the cloudless sky. And when a lark at first light woke him, he gathered his things and set off again. He walked from one side of Dorset to the other and on into Devon, finding and following the paths of Dartmoor, communing with its ghosts. He began to notice how many different shades of green there were, layers of foliage in the trees above him, the way strands of grass faded to white as they neared the earth.

  A beard grew and his skin browned. He gained blisters on his heels and toes that hardened so that his feet were those of another man, a man he preferred. He became expert at selecting a stick to walk with. He learned how to lay a fire and grew callouses on his fingers. He took work where he could get it: odd jobs that required no commitment and forged no connection, and when he finished the task he took his meagre pay and walked on again. He met people sometimes, strangers on the same path, and they exchanged a nod or even a wave. On rare occasions he spoke to a fellow traveller in a country pub, surprising himself at the sound of his own voice.

  It was at one such pub that he saw his first photograph of England taken from the air. It was lunchtime on a Saturday and the pub was full; a man was sitting alone at one of the wooden tables out front, a dusty black bicycle leaning beside him and a leather cycling cap still on his head. He was poring over a large printed photograph, taking notes, and hadn’t noticed at first that Leonard was observing him. He scowled when he saw, moving instinctively to cover his work with his arm, looking for all the world like he might have been about to snap at Leonard, but then something in his expression changed and Leonard knew that he’d been recognised. Not that they knew one another; they’d never met before. But they were all of them branded in some way after where they’d been, the things they’d seen and done.

  The man’s name was Crawford and he’d served in the Royal Flying Corps. He’d been employed afterwards by the Ordnance Survey and was now travelling the counties of Wiltshire and Dorset, plotting the location of archaeological sites; he’d already identified several that were previously unknown. Leonard had always preferred to listen than to talk, and he drew comfort from the things that Crawford told him. They confirmed for Leonard a number of the vague, unformed notions he’d been feeling about time and its malleability. Crawford’s photographs brought together time and space in a single image, showed the past co-existing with the present; and Leonard realised that he felt a greater connection to the ancient people who’d tracked the very paths across the land that he followed now than he did with the bright young things dancing the nights away in London. He was aware as he walked of belonging; in an essential way he knew himself to be of the earth, and with each footstep he drew further solidity from it. Belonging. The word lodged in his mind and when he resumed his travels that afternoon he found his feet moving to the rhythm of its syllables.

  It was late that day, when Leonard was deciding where to set up camp for the evening, that a thought had come to him, a distant memory from his first-year History course at Oxford: a paper that he’d read about a Victorian movement, which included an artist called Edward Radcliffe. Although there were a number of artists in the self-termed Magenta Brotherhood, Radcliffe had been memorable due to the tragic story attached to him: the murder of his young fiancée and his subsequent spiral into decline. Even so, the group had not interested Leonard at the time: he’d been bored by the Victorians. He’d resented their certainties and scoffed at their fusty black lace and cluttered hallways. Like all modernists, like all children, he had sought to define himself in defiance of the looming granite stature of the Establishment.

  But Professor Harris’s Introduction to the History of Art had been thorough and thus they’d been required to read the paper. It had referenced at one point a ‘manifesto’ penned in 1861 by Edward Radcliffe and titled ‘The Art of Belonging’, in which the artist exulted about the connection he perceived between human beings and places; between places and art. ‘The land does not forget,’ Leonard could remember reading. ‘Place is a doorway through which one steps across time.’ The paper had gone on to mention a particular house that had obsessed the artist and in which he believed he had found his own ‘belonging’. To eighteen-year-old Leonard, Radcliffe’s musings about place, the past and belonging had seemed extraneous and dull. Now, though, a decade later, he couldn’t get the words out of his head.

  When Leonard eventually made it back to his parents’ house, he was thinner than before, and hairier; his skin had weathered and his clothes had become worn. He’d expected his mother to recoil or shriek in horror at his deterioration, and to order him upstairs to wash. She did none of those things. She opened the door and, after a split second of surprise, dropped her tea towel to the floor, wrapping her arms so tightly around him that he thought his ribs might crush.

  She ushered him inside, wordlessly, to his father’s chair and fetched a bucket of warm, soapy water. She took off his old boots and the socks that had moulded to his skin, and began to wash his feet. It was something he couldn’t remember her doing before, not since he was a very small child, and silent tears appeared on her cheeks. Her head bowed and Leonard was aware, as if for the first time, of her greying hair, its changed texture. Over her shoulder, a collection of family photographs stood side by side on the lace-cloaked table: Tom and Leonard in their sharp army kits, as little boys in shorts and caps, as babies in crocheted bonnets. Various uniforms across time. The water was so warm, the kindness so pure and unexpected, and Leonard so out of practice at receiving such things, that he realised he was crying, too.

  They had a cup of tea together later and his mother asked what he’d been doing these past months.

  ‘Walking,’ said Leonard.

  ‘Walking,’ she repeated. ‘And did you enjoy yourself?’

  Leonard told her that he had.

  A little nervously, she said, ‘I had a caller the other day. Someone you used to know.’

  It turned out Leonard’s professor had tracked him down using the records of his old college. Professor Harris had entered one of Leonard’s papers in a competition at the University and he’d been awarded a small stipend, enough to buy a new pair of walking boots and a couple of maps at Stanfords. With the change, he’d bought a train ticket. Leonard had come to feel a kinship with Radcliffe during his walkabout and headed now to York to read Thurston Holmes’s papers. It seemed to him that something must have happened to cause a young man – only twenty years old at the time – to write with such enthusiasm about place and belonging, to make him fall so wholeheartedly in love with a house. Surely only a man who knew himself to be an outsider would think along such lines.

  He hadn’t had much luck. The Holmes archive contained many letters from Radcliffe, but there were none from the period in which Leonard was interested. Exceedingly frustrating, but curious, too. Throughout 1859, 1860 and into 1861, Radcliffe and Holmes had corresponded regularly, their lengthy, conversational letters making it clear that the two men saw a lot of one another and that each found his thinking and his art stimulated by the other. But Radcliffe was reticent to write further about the house
and then, after a brief, rather curt letter in which he requested the return of a borrowed paint set in January 1862, there appeared to have been only occasional, perfunctory exchanges between them.

  It was possible of course that there was no mystery: that the two men had simply drifted apart, or else that they’d continued corresponding, but the more fulsome letters had been lost to a winter fire, a poor filing system, a feverish session of spring-cleaning. There was no way of knowing and Leonard didn’t spend too much time then wondering. Whatever the case, evidently in mid-1862 they had been close enough to go away together for the summer, with the other members of the Magenta Brotherhood – Felix and Adele Bernard – and Edward’s sister, Clare, who was modelling for Thurston Holmes, to Edward Radcliffe’s house at Birchwood.

  And although Leonard hadn’t found precisely what he’d come looking for, he didn’t leave the archives empty-handed. He’d discovered a doorway, and on the other side was a group of young people from over half a century before who’d reached through time and taken him back with them.

  It was Edward Radcliffe whose charisma leapt most vividly from the pages of the letters. His energy and openness, his willingness to engage with life and everything it offered, the inclusiveness of his art, its readiness to grow and transmute and capture experiences, was clear. Each line in each letter pulsed with youth, possibility and sensuality, and Leonard could picture the state of blissful domestic déshabillé in which Radcliffe lived, his perch on the edge of artistic poverty, just as surely as if he were there. He understood their intimacy and ease, the camaraderie that others found both cliquish and alluring; they were a true brotherhood. It was the same way Leonard had felt about Tom, almost proprietorial, as if they were made of the same stuff, and therefore they were the same person. It allowed them to fight and wrestle and then to laugh it off as they lay on the ground panting, for one to lean across and slap a mosquito on the other’s leg just as he would his own. Leonard perceived, too, the way the men, like brothers, had been stimulated by competition, each working feverishly to create works that would leave an indelible mark on the Establishment. Each seeking to attract the praise of John Ruskin, the glowing review of Charles Dickens, the patronage of a gentleman with deep pockets.

  It was intoxicating stuff, and reading the young men’s letters, the joyful flowering of creativity and their attempts to put their thoughts and ideas into words, seemed to reanimate some deep, forgotten part of Leonard. After he left the library in York, he kept reading and walking and thinking, wondering about the purpose of art, the importance of place, the fluidity of time; and Edward Radcliffe slipped further and deeper under his skin, so that one day he found himself back at the University, knocking on Professor Harris’s door.

  The long barn near the house came into sight and Dog raced ahead, straight through the cool flowing water of the Hafodsted Brook, anticipating the breakfast he assumed would be coming his way when they made it back. For an interloper, he had a lot of faith in the kindness of strangers. Not that they were strangers any more.

  Leonard’s shirt was almost dry now, as he left the sunlit field and made his way over the fallen log. He crossed the grass to arrive at the dusty coach way that ran along the stone wall surrounding the front garden of the house. Hard to imagine that this must once have been a busy thoroughfare where carriages arrived and glossy horses hoofed impatiently, anxious for a drink and a rest after the long journey from London. Today it was just Leonard, Dog and the hum of early morning bee-song.

  The iron gate was hanging off the latch, just as he’d left it, its powder-green paint faded to the colour of lavender leaves. Tangled jasmine tendrils grew along the nubbly stone wall and over the arch, tiny pink and white flowers still falling in sprays, their fragrance heady.

  Leonard pinched himself as he did each time he approached the house. Birchwood Manor, Edward Radcliffe’s pride and joy. It really had been a piece of extraordinary good luck. Almost immediately after his doctoral candidacy had been accepted, Leonard had found himself, for once, the right man in the right place at precisely the right time: a woman named Lucy Radcliffe had approached the Art Historians’ Association and announced that she was considering leaving them a significant gift. The house had come to Miss Radcliffe after her brother’s death and she had lived in it ever since. Now, though, only a couple of years off eighty, she had decided to find herself a place with fewer staircases and corners, and wished to endow the house as part of a legacy in her brother’s name. She envisaged it as a place where students pursuing the same interests might go to work; a locus for artists exploring notions of truth and beauty, of light and place and home. Her solicitor had suggested that before she commit to the plan, she give it a test run.

  Leonard had read about the new Residential Scholarship in Cherwell and begun working immediately on an application. Some months after submitting his letter and résumé, he’d received word that the award was his: a handwritten reply arrived, inviting him to take up residence at Birchwood Manor for a three-month period during the summer of 1928. He’d flinched, briefly, at the cited lack of electricity and necessary reliance on candles and lamplight, but had shaken away thoughts of the gloomy chalk tunnels in France, telling himself that it would be summer and he would have no need to face the dark. He would live by nature’s clock. Ad occasum tendimus omnes, he had read once on a grey, pitted gravestone in Dorset. We are travelling each towards his sunset.

  Leonard had arrived with a predisposition to love the place, but the reality, in what he’d observed to be a very rare occurrence in life, was infinitely better than the imagining. He had approached that day from the village rather than the river, down the winding country lane that tapered as it neared the house, leaving the row of cottages on the village outskirts behind so that one was alone for a time amidst fields dotted with bored cows and curious calves.

  The first sign of the house itself had been the wall, eight feet high, and the twin gables of the grey slate roof just visible beyond. Leonard noted with satisfaction the way the slates mimicked nature: tiny, neat rectangles at the peak, gaining size as they fell towards the guttering, just like feathers grading along the wing. Here, then, was Radcliffe’s dignified bird, roosting in its own river bend.

  He’d found the key in a small, deep hollow behind a loose stone in the wall, just as the letter of acceptance said he would. There’d been no one else around that day, and Leonard had wondered briefly who had put the silver key in this most particular hiding place.

  When he turned the handle of the gate, he stood, transfixed, as it opened onto a scene that seemed too perfect to be real. An effusive garden grew between the flagstone path and the house, foxgloves waving brightly in the breeze, daisies and violets chattering over the edges of the paving stones. The jasmine that covered the garden wall continued its spread across the front of the house, surrounding the multi-paned windows to tangle with the voracious red flowers of the honeysuckle creeper as it clambered over the roof of the entry alcove. The garden was alive with insects and birds, which made the house seem still and silent, like a Sleeping Beauty house. Leonard had felt, as he took his first step onto the path, as if he were walking back through time; he could almost see Radcliffe and his friends with their paints and easels set up on the lawn beyond the blackberry bramble …

  This morning, though, Leonard did not have time to picture ghosts from the past. When he reached the gate, there was a very real person standing by the front door, leaning casually against one of the posts supporting the alcove roof. She was wearing his shirt, he noticed, and little else, smoking a cigarette as she gazed towards the Japanese maple tree against the far wall.

  She must have heard him, for she turned and her features rearranged themselves. A slight smile straightened her bow lips and she raised a neat hand in greeting.

  He returned the gesture. ‘I thought you were due in London by midday?’

  ‘Trying to get rid of me?’ She closed one eye as she drew on her cigarette. ‘Ah, that�
�s right. You’re expecting company. Your old lady friend. Want me out of the way before she comes? Wouldn’t be surprised if that’s one of the house rules: no guests overnight.’

  ‘She’s not coming here. We’re meeting at her place.’

  ‘Should I be jealous?’ She laughed, but the sound made Leonard sad.

  Kitty wasn’t jealous, she was kidding; she kidded a lot. Kitty didn’t love Leonard and he never let himself think that she did, not even on those nights when she clung to him so tightly that it hurt.

  He gave her a kiss on the cheek as he reached the door and she returned it with a small unguarded smile. They’d known each other for a long time; since they were kids, she sixteen to his seventeen. The Easter Fair of 1913. She’d been wearing a pale blue dress, he remembered, and carrying a small satin purse. A ribbon had come loose from somewhere and fallen to the ground. She hadn’t realised and no one else had seen; after a moment’s hesitation Leonard had reached down to pick it up for her. They’d all been kids back then.

  ‘Stay for breakfast?’ he asked. ‘Dog has his heart set on eggs.’

  She followed him into the kitchen, which was dark after the glaring morning light outside. ‘Too nervous to eat. I’ll have a cup of tea, though, just to see me through.’

  Leonard fetched the matches from the tin on the shelf behind the cooker.

  ‘I don’t know how you can stay here by yourself.’

  ‘It’s peaceful.’ Leonard lit the tricky burner and scrambled some eggs while the kettle was boiling.

  ‘Tell me again where it happened, Lenny?’

  Leonard sighed. He wished he’d never told her about Frances Brown. He wasn’t sure what had come over him, only that it was so unusual to be asked about his work, and being here at Birchwood Manor had made it all so much more real to him. Kitty had lit up when he mentioned the jewel thief who’d crept into the house one day and shot Radcliffe’s fiancée dead.