Kate Morton - The Clockmaker's Daughter

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.’