by Kate Morton
‘And you did.’
‘As you see. A wise woman once told me that there were certain items that brought a person good fortune.’
He’d liked the sound of that and had asked her where he could get one for himself. He explained to her that his father had just been killed in the war and he was worried about his mother, because it was his job now to look after her and he wasn’t sure how to do it.
And Ada had nodded wisely and said, ‘I’m going to come and see you at the house tomorrow. Would that be all right? I have something I’d like to give you. In fact, I have a feeling that it belongs with you. That it knew you’d be here and found a way to get to you.’
But it must be a secret between them, she’d said, and then she’d asked whether he’d found the hidden chamber yet, and when Tip said that he hadn’t, she’d whispered to him about a panel in the hallway, and Tip’s eyes had widened with excitement.
Next day she’d given him the blue stone.
‘What will I do with it?’ he’d asked as they sat together in the garden at Birchwood Manor.
‘Keep it safe and it will do the same for you.’
Birdie, who’d been sitting beside him, had smiled her agreement.
Tip no longer believed in amulets or good luck, but he didn’t disbelieve, either. What he did know was that the idea of the stone had been enough. Many times, as a boy – at Birchwood, but more so after they’d left – he’d held it in his hand and closed his eyes and Birdie’s words had come flooding back into his mind: he would remember the lights in the dark, and the way he’d felt when he was in the house, as if he were enveloped, and everything was going to be all right.
Thinking of Lauren and the little girl who was now without her mother, Tip began to have an idea. He had a trove of trolleys in his studio, each loaded with items he had found when he was out walking: things that spoke to him, for one reason or another, because they were honest or beautiful or interesting. He began to pick out some of the finest, arranging them on the bench before him, returning some to the trays, exchanging them for others, until he was happy with the selection. And then he began to mix up the clay.
Little girls liked charm boxes. He had seen them at the markets on Saturdays, lining up at the craft stalls, looking for little cases in which to keep their treasures. He would make one for her, Lauren’s daughter, and he would decorate it with all of the items that meant the most to him; the stone, too, for it had found a new child to protect. It wasn’t much, but it was all that he could think to do.
And maybe, just maybe, if he did it right, when he gave the gift to her, he would be able to imbue it with the same powerful idea, the same light and love, that the stone had held when it was given to him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Summer, 1962
She parked the car on the verge and turned off the ignition, but she didn’t get out; she was early. The wave of memories had been behind her all day, threatening to break, and now that she’d stopped, it had rolled over the top of her and spread out in a glittering wash. Juliet was beset, suddenly, with a visceral remembrance of the night they’d arrived off the train, the four of them, weary and hungry, no doubt traumatised after being uprooted from London.
It had been one of the most horrific periods in her life – the destruction of her home, the loss of Alan – and yet, in some ways, Juliet would have given anything to go back. To step through that gate over there, into the Birchwood Manor garden, and know that she would see five-year-old Tip, with his hair like a curtain; Bea, a surly pre-teen too proud to accept a hug; and Red, just Red, irrepressible, with those stubborn freckles and the gap-toothed smile. Their noise, their squabbles, their incessant questions. The stretch of time between now and then, the impossibility of going back, even for a minute, was a physical pain.
She had not expected it to feel like this. For her connection to the house to pull so hard at her chest. It wasn’t a weight upon her; it was a great sudden pressure inside her, pressing against her ribs in its urge to escape.
It had been twenty-two years now since Alan had died. Twenty-two years that he hadn’t lived, in which she had gone on ahead without him.
She didn’t hear his voice any more.
And now, here she was, her car parked on the verge outside Birchwood Manor. The house was uninhabited: she could see that at once. It wore the patina of neglect. But Juliet couldn’t have loved it more.
Sitting in the driver’s seat, she took the letter from her bag and read through it quickly. It was short and to the point; not his usual style. Little more than today’s date and a time.
Juliet still had every letter that he’d sent her. She liked knowing that they were all there in hat boxes in the back of her wardrobe. Beatrice liked to tease her about her ‘pen pal’, though since Lauren had been born, she didn’t have as much energy for stirring.
The clock in the dashboard clicked forward by a minute. Time was passing at a snail’s pace.
Juliet didn’t much fancy sitting in the confines of the Triumph for another forty minutes. She glanced at herself in the rear-view mirror, checked her lipstick, and then, with a decisive breath, hopped out of the car.
She followed the winding lane towards the cemetery, blinking away the ghostly image of Tip, stopped along the way to search for odd pieces of quartz and gravel. She turned left towards the village, and as she reached the crossroads was pleased to see that The Swan was still there.
After a minute of consideration, she summoned up the courage to go inside. Thirty-four years since she and Alan had arrived from London on the train, Juliet doing her best to conceal her pregnancy. She had half expected Mrs Hammett to arrive at the door to greet her, to start talking as if they’d only just had dinner the night before, but there was a new young woman behind the bar.
‘Changed hands a few years ago now,’ she said. ‘I’m Mrs Lamb. Rachel Lamb.’
‘Mrs Hammett – is she … ?’
‘Not likely. She’s moved in with her son and daughter-in-law, down the road.’
‘Close by?’
‘Too close. Forever popping in here to give me advice.’ She smiled to show that she was speaking fondly. ‘You might catch her before her midday nap, if you hurry. Takes it like clockwork.’
Juliet hadn’t thought to visit Mrs Hammett, but she followed Rachel Lamb’s instructions anyway and arrived soon enough at the cottage with the red front door and black letterbox. She knocked and held her breath.
‘I’m so sorry, you’ve missed her,’ said the woman who answered. ‘Down for the count and I daren’t wake her. She can be testy when she hasn’t had her winks.’
‘Perhaps you could mention me to her,’ said Juliet. ‘She might not remember. I’m sure she saw so many guests come and go, but she was kind to my family and me. I wrote an article about her. She and her WVS ladies.’
‘Oh, well, you should have said so! Juliet of the Laneway! She still has a framed copy on the wall beside her bed. Her claim to fame, she says.’
They exchanged pleasant chat for a few more moments and then Juliet said that she ought to be going, she was meeting someone soon, and Mrs Hammett’s daughter-in-law said that it was just as well as she had some pantry-sorting to be getting on with.
Juliet was turning to leave when she noticed the painting on the wall above the sofa. A portrait of a striking young woman.
‘Beautiful, isn’t she?’ said Mrs Hammett’s daughter-in-law.
‘Intoxicating.’
‘Came to me from my grandfather. Discovered it in his attic after he passed away.’
‘What a find.’
‘Quite the hoard, I assure you. Took us weeks to clear it – mostly rat-eaten rubbish. His own father had the house before him.’
‘Was he an artist?’
‘A policeman, back in the day. When he retired his boxes of old notes were put up top and forgotten. Don’t know where she came from. She’s unfinished – you can tell by the edges, where the colour isn’t right and the br
ushstrokes are rough – but there’s something in her expression, don’t you think? You can’t help but look at her.’
The woman in the painting stayed with Juliet as she started the walk back towards Birchwood Manor. She wasn’t familiar, not exactly, but the essence of the painting was reminiscent of something. Everything in her face, her expression, radiated light and love. It made her think of Tip for some reason, and Birchwood Manor, and that sunlit afternoon in 1928 when she’d fought with Alan and become lost and then found again, when she’d woken up in the garden beneath the Japanese maple tree.
No surprise, of course, that she should think of that day now. Juliet and Leonard had been exchanging letters for almost twenty years, ever since she wrote to ask him to contribute to a ‘Laneway’ article she’d planned to write but never got around to, about the many different lives led in one house. He’d received the letter too late, as it happened, and by the time he wrote back she was in London again and the war was wearily winding down. But they’d stayed in touch. He also liked writing, he said; he got along better with people on the page.
They had shared everything. All of the things she couldn’t write in her columns, the anger and grief and loss. And, by turns, the things that happened to them along the way: the beautiful, the funny, the true.
But they had never met in person, not since that afternoon in 1928. Today would be the first time.
Juliet hadn’t told anyone what she was doing. Her children were always encouraging her to go out for dinner with one eligible fellow or another, but this, today, him, was impossible to explain. How could she ever make them understand what she and Leonard had experienced, the two of them, that afternoon, in the garden of Birchwood Manor?
And so, he remained her secret; this journey back to the house their own.
The twin gables came into view, and Juliet felt herself begin to walk faster, almost as if she were being pulled along towards the house. She put her hand in her pocket to check that the tuppence was still there.
She had kept it all this time; now, at last, she could return it.
XII
Jack and Elodie have gone for a walk together, the two of them.
She said something about wanting to see the clearing in the woods for herself and he was only too happy to offer his services as a guide.
And so, here I am, sitting again in the warm spot at the turn of the stairs, waiting.
One thing I know for certain: I will be here when they get back.
I will be here, too, when they are gone and my next visitors arrive.
I might even tell my story again someday, as I did to little Tip and, before him, Ada, weaving together threads from Edward’s Night of the Following with the things my father told me about my mother’s flight from home, the tale of the Eldritch Children and their Fairy Queen.
It is a good story, about truth and honour and brave children doing righteous deeds; it is a powerful story.
People value shiny stones and lucky charms, but they forget that the most powerful talismans of all are the stories that we tell to ourselves and to others.
And so, I will be waiting.
When I was alive, and the great craze came first upon society – spiritualism and the desire to communicate with the dead – there was an assumption that ghosts and apparitions longed for release. That we ‘haunt’ because we are trapped.
But it is not so. I do not wish to be set free. I am of this house, this house that Edward loved; I am this house.
I am each whorl in each piece of timber.
I am every nail.
I am the wick in the lamp, the hook for a coat.
I am the tricky lock on the front door.
I am the tap that drips, the red rust circle on the porcelain sink.
I am the crack in the bathroom tile.
I am the chimney pot and the black snaking drainpipe.
I am the air within each room.
I am the hands of the clock and the space in between.
I am the noise you hear when you think you’re hearing nothing at all.
I am the light in the window that you know cannot be there.
I am the stars in the dark when you feel yourself alone.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I share Lucy Radcliffe’s anxiety about the number of subjects to be studied and grasped within the limits of a single lifetime, so one of the best things about being a writer is having the opportunity to explore topics that fascinate me. The Clockmaker’s Daughter is a book about time and timelessness, truth and beauty, maps and map-making, photography, natural history, the restorative properties of walking, brotherhood (having three sons shot that one to the top of the list), houses and the notion of home, rivers and the power of place; among other things. It was inspired by art and artists including the English romantic poets, the Pre-Raphaelite painters, early photographers such as Julia Margaret Cameron and Charles Dodgson, and designers like William Morris (with whom I share a passion for houses, and who drew my attention to some of the unique ways in which the buildings of the Cotswolds mimic the natural world from which they emerged).
Places that lent thread to the weave of this novel include Avebury Manor, Kelmscott Manor, Great Chalfield Manor, Abbey House Gardens in Malmesbury, Lacock Abbey, the Uffington White Horse, the Barbury Hill Fort, the Ridgeway, the countryside of Wiltshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire, the villages of Southrop, Eastleach, Kelmscott, Buscot and Lechlade, the River Thames, and of course London. Should you wish to visit a house with genuine priest holes, Harvington Hall in Worcestershire retains seven designed by Saint Nicholas Owen. It also sits upon a moated island.
If you are eager to read more about nineteenth-century London and the streets occupied by Birdie Bell and James Stratton, some useful sources include: London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew (providing insight into such forgotten occupations as ‘The Blind Street-Sellers of Tailors’ Needles’ and ‘“Screevers” or Writers of Begging Letters and Petitions’); Victorian London: The Life of a City 1840–1870 by Liza Picard; The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens’ London by Judith Flanders; The Victorians by A. N. Wilson; Inventing the Victorians by Matthew Sweet; and, Charles Dickens by Simon Callow, being a deeply affectionate biography of one of the greatest Victorians and Londoners. The Seven Dials is still a bustling pocket of Covent Garden; however, should you visit now you will find more restaurants and fewer shops selling birds and cages than when Mrs Mack was running her enterprise. Little White Lion Street was renamed Mercer Street in 1938.
I was inspired by a number of museums whilst writing The Clockmaker’s Daughter, which seems fitting given the novel’s focus on curation and the use of narrative structures to tell cohesive stories about the disjointed past. Some of my favourites include: the Charles Dickens Museum, the Watts Gallery and Limnerslease, Sir John Soane’s Museum, the Fox Talbot Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum and the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. I was thrilled to attend the following exhibitions and am grateful to galleries and curators who make such works available: ‘Julia Margaret Cameron’, Victoria and Albert Museum, 2015–16; ‘Painting with Light: Art and Photography from the Pre-Raphaelites to the Modern Age’, Tate Britain, 2016; ‘Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography’, National Portrait Gallery, 2018.
With special thanks to: my agent Lizzy Kremer and all at DHA, my editors Maria Rejt and Annette Barlow, Lisa Keim and Carolyn Reidy at Simon & Schuster, and Anna Bond at Pan Macmillan. Thanks also to the many people at A&U, Pan Macmillan and Atria who played a vital role in turning my story into this book and sending it out into the world so beautifully. Isobel Long generously provided information about the world of the archivist; and I am grateful to Nitin Chaudhary – and his parents – for assistance with the Punjabi terms in Ada’s story. All errors are of course my own, whether intentional or not. I have, for instance, taken the liberty of situating a Royal Academy exhibition in November 1861 even though during the nineteenth century the annual exhibit
ion of the RA opened in May.
Those who helped in less specific but no less important ways while I was writing The Clockmaker’s Daughter, include: Herbert and Rita, precious departed friends, still in my thoughts; my mum, dad, sisters and friends, especially the Kretchies, Pattos, Steinies and Browns; every single person who read and enjoyed one of my books; my three lights in the dark, Oliver, Louis and Henry; and, most of all, for too many things to count, my life co-pilot, Davin.