The Clockmaker's Daughter

by Kate Morton

  A pair of birds swooped from one of the boughs of an enormous oak to perch at the top of the steeple and Leonard whistled for Dog. They left the churchyard together, circling back towards the pitted stone plinth known locally as ‘the crossroads’.

  The triangle-shaped green was just beyond, a large oak at its centre and an elegant two-storey pub called The Swan on one of the corners opposite. A woman was out on the pavement sweeping around a bench beneath the window. She lifted a hand to wave at Leonard and he returned the gesture. He took the narrowest of the three roads, passing the memorial hall building to arrive at a row of terraced cottages. Lucy Radcliffe had told him number six, which was the furthest one along.

  The cottages were of pale honey-coloured stone. Each had a central gable with chimneys on either side and pretty bargeboards rising to its peak. Matching sash windows were set into each of the two levels, and an entrance portico with a roof pitched to match the gable stood above the front door. The door itself was painted a pale lilac-blue. Unlike the front gardens of the other cottages, which were overflowing with a perfect chaos of English summer flowers, number six contained a number of notably more exotic species: a bird of paradise, and others that Leonard couldn’t name and knew he hadn’t seen before.

  A cat meowed from a patch of sunlit gravel stones before standing and arching and pouring itself through the door, which Leonard saw now was on the latch. She was expecting him.

  He felt unusually nervous and didn’t cross the road at once. He allowed himself another cigarette as he went over the list of talking points he’d prepared. He reminded himself not to set his expectations too high; that there was no guarantee that she would hold the answers he sought; that even if she did, there was no certainty she would share them with him. She had been very clear on that front, saying to him as she left the churchyard, ‘I have two conditions, Mr Gilbert. The first is that I will speak only if you promise strict anonymity: I have no interest in seeing my name in print. The second is that I can give you one hour, but no more.’

  With a deep breath, Leonard unlatched the rusted metal gate and closed it carefully behind him.

  He didn’t feel comfortable simply pushing the door open and arriving inside with no announcement, so he knocked lightly and called, ‘Hello? Miss Radcliffe?’

  ‘Yes?’ came a distracted voice from inside.

  ‘It’s Leonard Gilbert. From Birchwood Manor.’

  ‘Well, for goodness’ sake, Leonard Gilbert from Birchwood Manor. Come in, won’t you?’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The cottage was pleasantly dark inside, and it took a moment for his gaze to arrive at Lucy Radcliffe in the midst of all her treasures. She had been expecting him only a minute before, but clearly had more important things to do than to sit in readiness. She was engrossed in her reading, posed as still as marble in a mustard-coloured armchair, a tiny figure in profile to him, a journal in her hand, her back curved as she peered through a magnifying glass at the folded page. A lamp was positioned on a small half-moon table beside her and the light it cast was yellow and diffuse. Underneath it, a teapot sat beside two cups.

  ‘Miss Radcliffe,’ he said.

  ‘Whatever do you think, Mr Gilbert?’ She did not look up from her journal. ‘It appears that the universe is expanding.’

  ‘Is it?’ Leonard took off his hat. He couldn’t see a hook on which to hang it, so he held it in two hands before him.

  ‘It says so right here. A Belgian man – a priest, if you can believe it – has proposed that the universe is expanding at a constant rate. Unless my French is rusty, and I don’t think that it is, he’s even calculated the rate of expansion. You know what this means of course.’

  ‘I’m not sure that I do.’

  Her cane was leaning against the table beside her and Lucy began now to pace across the worn Persian rug. ‘If one is to accept that the universe is expanding at a constant rate, then it follows that it has been doing so since its beginning. Since its beginning, Mr Gilbert.’ She stood very still, her head capped neatly by her white hair. ‘A beginning. Not Adam and Eve, I don’t mean that. I mean a moment, some sort of action or event that started it all off. Space and time, matter and energy. A single atom that somehow’ – she flexed open the fingers of one hand – ‘exploded. Good God.’ Her bright, quick eyes met his. ‘We might be on the verge of understanding the very birth of the stars, Mr Gilbert – the stars.’

  The only natural light in the room came from the small front window of the house, and it graced the surface of her face, which was a study in wonder. It was beautiful and engaged, and Leonard could see in it the young girl she must once have been.

  Before his very eyes, though, her expression faltered. The light drained from her features and her skin appeared to sag. She wore no powder, and her weathered complexion was that of a woman who had spent her life outdoors, the lines on her face telling a hundred stories. ‘Oh, but it is the worst thing about getting old, Mr Gilbert. Time. There isn’t enough of it left. There is simply too much to know and too few hours in which to know it. Some nights that terrible fact keeps me from sleeping – I close my eyes and hear my pulse ticking away the seconds – and so, I sit up in my bed and I read instead. I read and write notes and memorise, and then I start on something new. And yet it is in vain, for my time will end. What wonders am I going to miss?’

  Leonard didn’t have much in the way of consolation to offer. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand her regrets, only that he’d seen too many die who hadn’t had a quarter of the time that she’d been given.

  ‘I know what you are thinking, Mr Gilbert. You needn’t say it. I sound like a selfish and irascible old woman, and by God I am. But I have been this way for too long now to think of changing. And you are not here to discuss my regrets. Come, sit down. The tea is brewed, and I’m sure I have a scone or two tucked away somewhere.’

  Leonard opened by reiterating his gratitude that she had selected his application for the residency at Birchwood Manor, telling her how much he loved staying in the house, and how gratifying it was to have the opportunity to get to know a place about which he had read and thought so much. ‘It’s helping enormously with my work,’ he said. ‘I feel close to your brother at Birchwood Manor.’

  ‘I understand the proposition, Mr Gilbert; many wouldn’t, but I do. And I agree. My brother is a part of the house in a way that most people cannot appreciate. The house was a part of him, too: he fell in love with Birchwood Manor long before he bought it.’

  ‘I’d gathered as much. He wrote a letter to Thurston Holmes in which he told him about the purchase and intimated that he’d known the house for some time. He didn’t go into detail, though, as to how.’

  ‘No, well, he wouldn’t have. Thurston Holmes was a talented enough technician, but unfortunately for all concerned he was a vainglorious prig. Tea?’

  ‘Please.’

  As tea gurgled from the spout she continued: ‘Thurston had none of the sensitivity required of a true artist; Edward would never have willingly told him about the night that he discovered Birchwood Manor.’

  ‘But he told you?’

  She regarded him, her head tilted in a way that brought to mind a teacher Leonard hadn’t thought of in years; rather, the parakeet that the teacher had kept in a golden cage in his classroom. ‘You have a brother, Mr Gilbert. I remember reading it in your application.’

  ‘I had a brother. Tom. He died in the war.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that. You were close, I think.’

  ‘We were.’

  ‘Edward was nine years older than I, but circumstances had thrown us together when we were young. My earliest and fondest memories are of Edward telling me stories. If you are to understand my brother, Mr Gilbert, you must stop seeing him as a painter and start seeing him instead as a storyteller. It was his greatest gift. He knew how to communicate, how to make people feel and see and believe. The medium in which he chose to express himself was irrelevant. It is no easy
feat to invent a whole world, but Edward could do that. A setting, a narrative, characters who live and breathe – he was able to make the story come to life in someone else’s mind. Have you ever considered the logistics of that, Mr Gilbert? The transfer of an idea? And, of course, a story is not a single idea; it is thousands of ideas, all working together in concert.’

  What she said was true. As an artist, Edward Radcliffe could transport people, so that they were no longer simply spectators of his work but participants, co-conspirators in the realisation of the world that he sought to create.

  ‘I have an excellent memory, Mr Gilbert. Too good, it has sometimes seemed to me. I can remember being a tiny thing; my father was still alive, and we all lived in the house in Hampstead. My sister Clare was five years older than I was and used to grow impatient playing with me, but Edward would keep us both spellbound with his tales. They were often terrifying, but always electric. Some of the happiest moments of my life were spent listening as he wove his story. But one day everything changed in our household and a terrible darkness descended.’

  Leonard had read about the death of Edward’s father, killed when he was run down by a carriage in Mayfair late one night. ‘How old were you when your father died?’

  ‘My father?’ She frowned, but the gesture was soon swept aside by a delighted laugh. ‘Oh, Mr Gilbert, dear me, no. I barely remember the man. No, no, I meant when Edward was sent away to boarding school. It was dreadful for all of us, but nightmarish for him. He was twelve years old and hated every minute of it. For a boy whose imagination worked as Edward’s did, whose temper was unguarded and whose passions were dazzling, who didn’t enjoy cricket or rugby or rowing but preferred to bury himself in ancient books about alchemy and astronomy, a school like Lechmere was a poor fit.’

  Leonard understood. He’d attended a similar school when he was a boy. He was still trying to slip free of its yoke. ‘Was it while he was at school that Edward came across the house?’

  ‘Mr Gilbert, really. Lechmere was miles away, up near the Lakes – I hardly think that Edward would have had the opportunity to stumble upon Birchwood Manor whilst at school. No, it was when he was fourteen years old and home for the holidays. Our parents travelled frequently, so that summer, home was the estate belonging to my grandparents. Beechworth, it’s called; not far from here. Our grandfather saw too much of our mother in Edward – a wildness of spirit, a disregard for convention – and decided it was his duty to beat it out of him so that Edward might be forced to take on the “proper” Radcliffe form. My brother reacted by doing everything that he could to antagonise the old man. He used to steal his whisky and took to climbing from the window after we’d been sent to bed, taking long walks across the night-darkened fields, returning with esoteric signs and symbols drawn upon his body in charcoal, with mud on his face and clothing, with stones and sticks and river weed in his pockets. He was quite ungovernable.’ Her face was full of admiration, before a grim cast replaced it. ‘One night, though, he did not come home. I woke and his bed was empty, and when he finally reappeared, he was pale and very quiet. It took him days to tell me what had happened.’

  Leonard was alert with anticipation. After all of the hints as to an event in Radcliffe’s past that had driven his obsession with Birchwood Manor, it seemed that answers were finally in reach.

  Lucy was watching him closely and he suspected that not much passed beneath her notice. She took a long sip of tea. ‘Do you believe in ghosts, Mr Gilbert?’

  Leonard flinched at the unexpected question. ‘I believe that a person can find himself haunted.’

  Her eyes were still fixed upon him and, at length, she smiled. Leonard had the disquieting sense that she could see inside his soul. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘just so. A person can be haunted. And my brother certainly was. Something followed him home that night and he could never shake it off.’

  The Night of the Following. This, then, was what the young Lucy and Edward had been referencing in their letters. ‘What sort of something?’

  ‘Edward headed out that night with the intention of raising a ghost. He had found a book in the school library, an ancient book, filled with old ideas and incantations. Being Edward he couldn’t wait to put them into practice, but in the end, he didn’t get a chance to try. Something happened to him in the woods. He read everything that he could afterwards and came to the conclusion that he had been followed by the Black Dog.’

  ‘A spirit?’ Vague memories returned to Leonard from childhood: sinister creatures of folklore said to be found in ancient places where the two worlds met. ‘Like in The Hound of the Baskervilles?’

  ‘The “what” is not important, Mr Gilbert. All that matters is that he feared for his life, and as he fled across the fields he saw a light in the attic window of a house on the horizon. He ran towards it and found the front door open to him and a fire in the hearth.’

  ‘And that house was Birchwood Manor,’ Leonard said softly.

  ‘Edward said that as soon as he set foot inside he knew that he was safe.’

  ‘The people who lived in the house took care of him?’

  ‘Mr Gilbert, you are missing the point entirely.’

  ‘But I thought—’

  ‘I take it your research has included the history of Birchwood Manor?’

  Leonard confessed that it had not; that it hadn’t occurred to him that the house’s past, prior to Edward’s purchase of it, was remotely relevant.

  Lucy lifted her eyebrows with the same mix of disappointment and surprise that he might have expected had he handed her his notebook and asked her to write his thesis for him. ‘The house as you see it today was built in the sixteenth century. It was designed by a man called Nicholas Owen with the intention of providing safety to Catholic priests. But there was a reason that they chose to build in that spot, Mr Gilbert, for the land on which Birchwood Manor stands is of course much older than the house. It has its own history. Has nobody told you yet about the Eldritch Children?’

  Movement at the corner of his vision made Leonard startle. He glanced into the darkest recess of the room and saw that the cat who had slipped through the door earlier was stretching now, shiny eyes turned on Leonard.

  ‘It is an old local folk tale, Mr Gilbert, about three fairy children who many years ago crossed between the worlds. They emerged from the woods one day into the fields where the local farmers were burning stubble and were taken in by an elderly couple. From the start, there was something uncanny about them. They spoke a strange language, they left no footprints behind them when they walked, and it is said that at times their skin appeared almost to glow.

  ‘They were tolerated at first, but as things began to go wrong in the village – a failed crop, the stillbirth of a baby, the drowning of the butcher’s son – people started to look to the three strange children in their midst. Eventually, when the well ran dry, the villagers demanded that the couple hand them over. They refused and were banished from the village.

  ‘The family set up instead in a small stone croft by the river, and for a time they lived in peace. But when an illness came to the village, a mob was formed and one night, with torches lit, they marched upon the croft. The couple and the children clung together, surrounded, their fates seemingly inevitable. But just as the villagers began to close in, there came the eerie sound of a horn on the wind and a woman appeared from nowhere, a magnificent woman with long, gleaming hair and luminous skin.

  ‘The Fairy Queen had come to claim her children. And when she did, she cast a protection spell upon the house and land of the old couple in gratitude to them for protecting the prince and princesses of fairyland.

  ‘The bend of the river upon which Birchwood Manor now stands has been recognised ever since amongst locals as a place of safety. It is even said that there are those who can still see the fairy enchantment – that it appears to a lucky few as a light, high up in the attic window of the house.’

  Leonard wanted to ask whether Lucy, with all of
her evident learning and scientific reason, really believed that it was true – whether she thought that Edward had seen a light in the attic that night and that the house had protected him – but no matter how he rearranged the words in his mind, the question seemed impolite and certainly impolitic. Thankfully, Lucy seemed to have anticipated his line of thinking.

  ‘I believe in science, Mr Gilbert. But one of my first loves was natural history. The earth is ancient and it is vast and there is much that we do not yet comprehend. I refuse to accept that science and magic are opposed; they are both valid attempts to understand the way that our world works. And I have seen things, Mr Gilbert; I have dug things up from the earth and held them in my hand and felt things that our science cannot yet explain. The story of the Eldritch Children is a folk tale. I have no more reason to believe it than I do to believe that Arthur was a king who pulled a sword from a stone or that dragons once soared across our skies. But my brother told me that he saw a light that night in the attic of Birchwood Manor and that the house protected him, and I know he spoke the truth.’

  Leonard did not doubt her faith, but he also understood psychology; the abiding sovereignty of the elder sibling. When he and Tom were younger, Leonard had been aware that no matter how often he tricked his brother or told him an untruth, Tom would trust him again the next time. Lucy had been much younger than Edward. She had adored him and he had disappeared from her life. She might be seventy-nine and impregnable now, but where Edward was concerned a part of her would always be that young girl.

  Nonetheless, Leonard jotted down a note about the Eldritch Children. Frankly, the veracity of the story was of secondary importance as far as Leonard’s dissertation was concerned. It was enough that Radcliffe had been haunted by an idea, that he believed the house to possess certain properties, and fascinating to be able to tie them to a particular local folk tale. Aware that time was ticking, he drew a line under the note and moved on to the next subject. ‘I wonder, Miss Radcliffe, if we could speak now about the summer of 1862.’