The Clockmaker's Daughter

by Kate Morton

  Lucy spent the next few hours digging. She’d found a shovel in the field barn and carried it up to the front garden. Her muscles ached, unaccustomed to the repetitive motion, and she had to stop every so often to rest. She realised, though, that stopping only made it harder to start again, and forced herself to push on until the cavity was deep enough.

  At last it was time to fill the coffin. First, Lucy enclosed the copy of Daemonologie, which contained the letter by Nicholas Owen and the plans for Birchwood Manor explaining the priest holes. She had climbed into the attic and been glad to find the box of costumes where they’d left it. The white dress that Lily Millington had been wearing when she modelled for Edward was still amongst them, and Lucy had wrapped the bones from the priest hole carefully within it; now, she set the bundle gently inside the box. Twenty years had not left much behind.

  Last, but not least, she put in a letter that she had written (cotton paper, non-acidic), outlining what she knew of the woman whose mortal remains now lay inside the coffin. It had not been easy to learn the truth, but finding information about the past was what Lucy did best, and she was not the kind of person to give up an enquiry. She had needed to rely on almost everything that Lily Millington had told her, and everything that Edward had reported, and the details that came back over time from what the man, Martin, had said that afternoon at Birchwood Manor.

  Bit by bit, she had put the story together: the house above the bird shop on Little White Lion Street, the pair of rooms in the shadow of St Anne’s, the early years spent by the river; slipping back across time to the birth of a baby girl in June 1844, to a woman named Antonia, the eldest daughter of Lord Albert Stanley, and a man called Peter Bell. A clockmaker, who had lived at number forty-three Wheatsheaf Lane, Fulham.

  Lucy sealed the lid just as the sun was starting to slip behind the gables. She realised that she was weeping. For Edward and for Lily; for herself, too, and the guilt from which she would never be free.

  The porter had been right – the coffin was very heavy – but years spent in nature had made Lucy strong. She was also determined, and so she managed to heave the box into the ground. She filled in the dirt and patted it down hard on top.

  Any latent religious inclinations that Mr Darwin had not killed, Lucy’s life experience had vanquished, and so she did not say a prayer over the fresh grave. Nonetheless, the moment called for ceremony and she had given much thought as to how she might best mark the spot.

  She was going to plant a Japanese maple tree on top. She had already procured it, a lovely sapling with pale bark and the most elegant limbs, long and even, fine but strong. It had been one of Edward’s favourite trees, the leaves were red in spring, turning by autumn to a most beautiful bright copper colour, just like Lily Millington’s hair. No, not Lily Millington, she corrected herself, for that had never been her real name.

  ‘Albertine,’ Lucy whispered, thinking back to that mild Hampstead afternoon when she had seen the shock of red in the glass house at the bottom of the garden and Mother had instructed her to take two cups of tea ‘in the finest china’. ‘Your name was Albertine Bell.’

  Birdie, to those who loved her.

  Lucy’s attention was on the patch of flattened dirt in the garden bed by the front gate, so she did not notice; but by some strange trick of the dusk, just as she spoke the words, the attic window seemed ever so briefly to glow. Almost as if a lamp had been switched on inside.

  XI

  I told you. I do not understand the physics of it and there is no one here to ask.

  Somehow, without understanding how or why, I was out of the hideaway and in the house again. Moving amongst them as before, and yet nothing like before.

  How many days passed? I do not know. Two or three. They were no longer sleeping here when I returned.

  The bedrooms were deserted at night, and during the day one or another would arrive to fetch an item of clothing or some other personal effect.

  Fanny was dead. I heard the policemen talking about ‘poor Miss Brown’, which explained the gunshot but not the thump.

  I heard them speaking, too, of the Radcliffe Blue and the tickets to America.

  The policemen also spoke of me. They collected everything they could pertaining to me. To Lily Millington.

  When I realised what they believed, I was aghast.

  What did Edward think? Had he been told the same theory? Did he accept it?

  When he finally came back to the house, he was pale and distracted. He stood at the desk in the Mulberry Room, staring out towards the river, turning to gaze sometimes at my clock, the minutes sliding by. He ate nothing. He slept not at all.

  He did not open his sketchbook and seemed to have lost all interest in his work.

  I stayed with him. I trailed him wherever he went. I cried, I shouted, I begged and pleaded, I lay down beside him and tried to tell him where I was; but my abilities in that area have grown with time. Back then, in the beginning, it just exhausted me.

  And then it happened. They all left and I could not make them stop.

  The carriages retreated along the coach way and I was alone. For such a long time, I was alone. I evaporated, returning to the warmth and stillness of the house, slipping between the floorboards, settling with the dust, disappearing into the long, dark quiet.

  Until one day, twenty years later, I was pulled back together by the arrival of my first visitor.

  And as my name, my life, my history, was buried, I, who had once dreamed of capturing light, found that I had become captured light itself.

  PART FOUR

  CAPTURED LIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Summer, 2017

  Day broke with the sort of electric clarity reserved for the morning after a night of storms.

  The first thing Jack noticed was that he wasn’t in the godawful uncomfortable bed in the malt house. He was somewhere even less comfortable and yet he felt far more buoyant than usual.

  The lush tangle of green and purple wallpaper told him where he was; ripe mulberries, and an engraving above the door that read, ‘Truth, Beauty, Light’. He had slept on the floor of the house.

  A stirring on the sofa beside him and he realised that he wasn’t alone.

  Like a kaleidoscope shifting into place, the night before came back into focus. The storm, the failure of the taxi to come and pick her up, the bottle of wine he’d bought on a whim at Tesco.

  She was still asleep, delicate, with her short dark hair cut around her ears. She was like one of those teacups in fancy places that Jack had a knack for breaking.

  He tiptoed down the hallway and into the kitchen in the malt house to make them tea.

  When he carried the two steaming mugs back, she was awake and sitting up, the blanket wrapped around her shoulders.

  ‘Morning,’ she said.

  ‘Morning.’

  ‘I didn’t go back to London.’

  ‘I noticed.’

  They had talked all night. Truth, beauty and light – the room, the house, had some sort of magic in it. Jack had told her about the girls, and Sarah. About what had happened in the bank, just before he left the police force, when Jack had gone in against orders and come out with seven rescued hostages and a gunshot wound to the shoulder. He had been a hero, all the papers said so, but it had been the last straw with Sarah. ‘How could you, Jack?’ she’d said. ‘Didn’t you think about the babies? The girls? You could have been killed.’

  ‘There were babies in the bank, too, Sar.’

  ‘But not yours. What kind of a father are you going to be if you can’t even see that there’s a difference?’

  Jack hadn’t had an answer. Not long afterwards, she’d packed up the girls and told him that she was going back to England to live closer to her parents.

  He’d told Elodie about Ben, too, who had died twenty-five years ago on Friday, and how it had broken his dad. Elodie, in turn, told him about her mother’s death – also twenty-five years ago – and her own father, who
was similarly weighed down by grief, but with whom she’d decided she was finally going to speak when she returned to London.

  She told him about her friend Pippa, and the way she felt about her work, and how she’d always thought it might make her a little odd, but that now she didn’t mind.

  And finally, because they seemed to have talked about everything else and the omission was notable, he’d asked her about the ring on her finger and she’d told him that she was engaged to be married.

  Jack had felt a disappointment far out of proportion with what he considered reasonable, given that he’d known her for the sum total of forty hours. He’d tried to keep it casual. He’d expressed congratulations and then asked her what the lucky man was like.

  Alastair – Jack had never met an Alastair he liked – was in banking. He was nice. He was successful. He could be funny at times.

  ‘The only thing,’ she’d said with a frown, ‘is that I don’t think he loves me.’

  ‘Why? What’s the matter with him?’

  ‘I think he might be in love with someone else. I think he might be in love with my mother.’

  ‘Well, that’s … unusual, in the circumstances.’

  She had smiled, despite herself, and Jack had said, ‘But you love him?’

  She didn’t answer at first, but then: ‘No,’ she said, and it sounded as if she might have surprised herself. ‘No, I really don’t think I do.’

  ‘So. You’re not in love with him and you think he’s in love with your mother. Why are you getting married?’

  ‘The whole thing is arranged. The flowers, the stationery …’

  ‘Ah, well, then, that’s different. Stationery in particular. Not easy to return.’

  Now, he handed her a mug of tea and said, ‘Come for a walk in the garden before breakfast?’

  ‘You’re going to make me breakfast?’

  ‘It’s one of my specialities. Or so I’ve been told.’

  They went out through the back door near the malt house, under the chestnut tree and across the lawn. Jack wished he’d brought his sunglasses. The world had been washed clean, everything as bright as an over-exposed photo. As they rounded the corner into the front garden, Elodie gasped.

  He followed her gaze and saw that the ancient Japanese maple had come down in the storm and was lying now across the flagged path, its gnarled roots pointing towards the sky. ‘My museum colleagues are not going to be happy,’ he said.

  They went over to perform a closer inspection and Elodie said, ‘Look. I think there’s something down there.’

  Jack got down on his knees and reached into the hollow, dusting the distant smooth speck with his fingertips.

  ‘Maybe it’s your treasure,’ she said with a smile. ‘Right in front of you all along.’

  ‘I thought you said that was a children’s story?’

  ‘I’ve been wrong before.’

  ‘I guess we should dig it up?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘But not until we’ve had some breakfast.’

  ‘Certainly not until we’ve had breakfast,’ she agreed. ‘Because I heard a rumour that it’s your speciality and I’m expecting big things from you, Jack Rolands.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Summer, 1992

  Tip was in his studio when the news came. A phone call from the woman who lived next door to them: Lauren was dead, killed in a car accident somewhere near Reading; Winston was distraught; the daughter was coping.

  He had reflected on that later. Coping. It seemed an odd thing to say about a six-year-old girl who had lost her mother. And yet he knew what the woman, Mrs Smith, had meant. Tip had only met the child a handful of times and knew her as the diminutive person who sat across from him at the odd Sunday lunch, trying to be surreptitious as she watched, wide-eyed and curious, over the tabletop; but he had seen enough to know that she was different from Lauren at the same age. Far more internal. Lauren had exuded a wound-up energy since the day she was born. As if her voltage were set a little higher than everybody else’s. It made for a fascinating kid – she was certainly a success – but there was nothing easy about her company. The light was always on.

  After he was given the news, Tip put the telephone receiver back in its cradle and sat down at his workbench. His vision glazed as he took in the stool on the other side. Lauren had sat there just last week. She’d wanted to talk about Birchwood Manor, asking him where it was exactly.

  ‘The address, you mean?’

  He’d given it to her, and then he’d asked her why – whether she was thinking of visiting – and she’d nodded and said that she had something very important to do and that she wanted to do it in the right place. ‘I know it was only a children’s story,’ she’d said, ‘but in some way that I can’t explain, I’m the person I am today because of it.’ She’d refused to be drawn further, and they’d changed the subject, but when she was leaving she said, ‘You were right, you know. Time makes the impossible possible.’

  He’d read about the concert she was playing in Bath in the newspaper a few days later, and when he saw who the other soloists were, he’d realised what she’d meant. She’d been planning to say goodbye to someone who had once meant a great deal to her.

  She had sat on that very same stool six years earlier, when she returned from New York. He could picture her the day she’d come to visit him; he’d been able to see at once that something had happened.

  Sure enough: she had fallen in love, she said, and she was getting married.

  ‘Congratulations,’ he’d said, but her expression made it clear this wasn’t an ordinary announcement.

  It turned out that the two parts of the sentence fitted together in a rather more complicated way than he’d assumed.

  She had fallen in love with one of the other young musicians invited to be part of the quintet, a violinist. ‘It was instant,’ she said. ‘It was fierce and complete and worth every risk and sacrifice, and I knew at once that I would never feel the same way about another man.’

  ‘And did he—?’

  ‘It was mutual.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘He’s married.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘To a woman called Susan, a lovely, sweet woman who he’s known since he was a boy and whom he couldn’t bear to hurt. She knows everything about him, she’s a primary school teacher, and she bakes the most delicious chocolate and peanut butter slice, which she brought to the rehearsal room and shared with all of us before sitting on a plastic chair and listening to us play. And when we finished, she cried, Tip – cried because the music had moved her – so I can’t even hate her, because I could never hate a woman who is moved to tears by music.’

  Which might have been the end of it, but there was a third part to the story.

  ‘I’m pregnant.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Not planned.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to get married.’

  And that’s when she’d told him what Winston had proposed. Tip had met the lad a couple of times: a musician, too, though not like Lauren. A good sort, hopelessly in love with her. ‘He doesn’t mind—’

  ‘About the baby? No.’

  ‘I was going to say, that you’re in love with someone else.’

  ‘I’ve been very honest with him. He said it didn’t matter, that there were different types of love and that the human heart did not admit limitations. He said I might even change my mind in time.’

  ‘He could be right.’

  ‘No. It’s impossible.’

  ‘Time is a strange and powerful beast. It has a habit of making the impossible possible.’

  But, no, she’d been adamant. She could never love another man in the same way that she’d loved the violinist.

  ‘But I love Winston, too, Tip. He’s a good man, a kind man; he’s one of my best friends. I know it’s not usual.’

  ‘No such thing in my experience.’

  She�
�d reached across to squeeze his hand.

  ‘What will you tell the child?’ Tip had asked.

  ‘The truth, if and when she asks. Winston and I agreed on that.’

  ‘She?’

  Lauren had smiled then. ‘Just a feeling.’

  She. The girl, Elodie. Tip had found himself watching her occasionally, in turn, across the table at Sunday lunch, mildly puzzled because he recognised something in her that he couldn’t articulate at once; she had reminded him of someone. He realised now, in the sudden focus of her mother’s death, that she’d reminded him of himself. She was a child whose still waters masked her depths.

  Tip went over to the shelf where he kept his jar of whatnots and took out the stone, weighing it in the palm of his hand. He could still remember the night the woman, Ada, told him about it. They’d been sitting out the front of the pub in Birchwood; it was summer and dusk, so there hadn’t been a lot of light, but enough for him to show her some of the rocks and sticks he’d been collecting. His pockets were always full at that time.

  She’d picked each one up in turn and looked at it closely. She had liked collecting things, too, when she was his age, she said; now she was an archaeologist, which was a grown-up version of the same thing.

  ‘Do you have a favourite?’ she’d asked.

  Tip told her that he did, and handed over a particularly smooth piece of oval-shaped quartz. ‘Did you ever find something as good as this?’

  Ada nodded. ‘Once, when I was not much older than you are now.’

  ‘I’m five.’

  ‘Well, I was eight. I had an accident. I fell from a boat into the river and I couldn’t swim.’

  Tip could remember becoming alert then with recognition; he had a feeling he’d heard this story before.

  ‘Down I went, through the water, all the way to the bottom.’

  ‘Did you think that you were going to drown?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A girl did drown in the river over there.’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed gravely. ‘But not me.’

  ‘She saved you.’

  ‘Yes. Just when I felt that I could hold my breath no longer, I saw her. Not clearly, and only for a moment, and then she was gone and I saw the stone, shining, surrounded by light, and I just knew somehow, as if a voice had whispered in my ear, that if I reached out and grasped it, I would survive.’