Kate Morton - The Clockmaker's Daughter

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 exhibition 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.