Kate Morton - The Clockmaker's Daughter

In this corner, there’s a warmth, almost unnatural. We all noticed it when first we came, and over the early summer weeks we took our turns in guessing at its cause.

The reason took me some time to discover, but at last I learned the truth. I know this place as I know my own name.

It was not the house itself but the light that Edward used to tempt the others. On a clear day, from the attic windows, one can see over the River Thames and all the way to the Welsh mountains. Ribbons of mauve and green, crags of chalk that stagger towards the clouds, and warm air that lends the whole an iridescence.

This was the proposal that he made: an entire summer month of paint and poetry and picnics, of stories and science and invention. Of light, heaven-sent. Away from London, away from prying eyes. Little wonder that the others accepted with alacrity. Edward could make the very devil pray, if such were his desire.

Only to me did he confess his other reason for coming here. For although the lure of the light was real enough, Edward had a secret.

We came on foot from the railway station.

July, and the day was perfect. A breeze picked at my skirt hem. Someone had brought sandwiches and we ate them as we walked. What a sight we must have made – men with loosened neckties, women with their long hair free. Laughter, teasing, sport.

Such a grand beginning! I remember the sound of a stream close by and a wood pigeon calling overhead. A man leading a horse, a wagon with a young boy sitting atop straw bales, the smell of fresh-cut grass—Oh, how I miss that smell! A clutch of fat country geese regarded us beadily when we reached the river before honking bravely once we had passed.

All was light, but it did not last for long.

You knew that already, though, for there would be no story to tell if the warmth had lasted. No one is interested in quiet, happy summers that end as they begin. Edward taught me that.

The isolation played its part; this house stranded on the riverbank like a great inland ship. The weather, too; the blazing hot days, one after the other, and then the summer storm that night, which forced us all indoors.

The winds blew and the trees moaned, and thunder rolled down the river to take the house within its clutches; whilst inside, talk turned to spirits and enchantments. There was a fire, crackling in the grate, and the candle flames quivered, and in the darkness, in that atmosphere of delicious fear and confession, something ill was conjured.

Not a ghost, oh, no, not that – the deed when done was entirely human.

Two unexpected guests.

Two long-kept secrets.

A gunshot in the dark.

The light went out and everything was black.

Summer was curdled. The first keen leaves began their fall, turning to rot in the puddles beneath the thinning hedgerows, and Edward, who loved this house, began to stalk its corridors, entrapped.

At last, he could stand it no longer. He packed his things to leave and I could not make him stop.

The others followed, as they always did.

And I? I had no choice; I stayed behind.

CHAPTER ONE

Summer, 2017

It was Elodie Winslow’s favourite time of day. Summer in London, and at a certain point in the very late afternoon the sun seemed to hesitate in its passage across the sky and light spilled through the small glass tiles in the pavement directly onto her desk. Best of all, with Margot and Mr Pendleton gone home for the day, the moment was Elodie’s alone.

The basement of Stratton, Cadwell & Co., in its building on the Strand, was not an especially romantic place, not like the muniment room at New College where Elodie had taken holiday work the year she completed her master’s. It was not warm, ever, and even during a heatwave like this one Elodie needed to wear a cardigan at her desk. But every so often, when the stars aligned, the office, with its smell of dust and age and the seeping Thames, was almost charming.

In the narrow kitchenette behind the wall of filing cabinets, Elodie poured steaming water into a mug and flipped the timer. Margot thought this precision extreme, but Elodie preferred her tea when it had steeped for three and a half minutes exactly.

As she waited, grains of sand slipping through the glass, Elodie’s thoughts returned to Pippa’s message. She had picked it up on her phone, when she’d ducked across the road to buy a sandwich for lunch: an invitation to a fashion launch party that sounded as tempting to Elodie as a stint in the doctor’s waiting room. Thankfully, she already had plans – a visit to her father in Hampstead to collect the recordings he’d put aside for her – and was spared the task of inventing a reason to say no.

Denying Pippa was not easy. She was Elodie’s best friend and had been since the first day of Year 3 at Pineoaks primary school. Elodie often gave silent thanks to Miss Perry for seating the two of them together: Elodie, the New Girl, with her unfamiliar uniform and the lopsided plaits her dad had wrestled into place; and Pippa, with her broad smile, dimpled cheeks and hands that were in constant motion when she spoke.

They’d been inseparable ever since. Primary school, secondary school, and even afterwards when Elodie went up to Oxford and Pippa to Central Saint Martins. They saw less of one another now, but that was to be expected; the art world was a busy, sociable place, and Pippa was responsible for a never-ending stream of invitations left on Elodie’s phone as she made her way from this gallery opening or installation to the next.

The world of archives, by contrast, was decidedly un -busy. That is, it was not busy in Pippa’s sparkling sense. Elodie put in long hours and engaged frequently with other human beings; they just weren’t the living, breathing sort. The original Messrs Stratton and Cadwell had traversed the globe at a time when it was just beginning to shrink and the invention of the telephone hadn’t yet reduced reliance on written correspondence. So it was, Elodie spent her days communing with the foxed and dusty artefacts of the long dead, stepping into this account of a soirée on the Orient Express or that encounter between Victorian adventurers in search of the Northwest Passage.

Such social engagement across time made Elodie very happy. It was true that she didn’t have many friends, not of the flesh-and-blood variety, but the fact did not upset her. It was tiring, all that smiling and sharing and speculating about the weather, and she always left a gathering, no matter how intimate, feeling depleted, as if she’d accidentally left behind some vital layers of herself she’d never get back.

Elodie removed the teabag, squeezed the last drips into the sink and added a half-second pour of milk.

She carried the mug back to her desk, where the prisms of afternoon sunlight were just beginning their daily creep; and as steam curled voluptuously and her palms warmed, Elodie surveyed the day’s remaining tasks. She had been midway through compiling an index on the younger James Stratton’s account of his 1893 journey to the west coast of Africa; there was an article to write for the next edition of Stratton, Cadwell & Co. Monthly ; and Mr Pendleton had left her with the catalogue for the upcoming exhibition to proofread before it went to the printer.

But Elodie had been making decisions about words and their order all day and her brain was stretched. Her gaze fell to the waxed-cardboard box on the floor beneath her desk. It had been there since Monday afternoon when a plumbing disaster in the offices above had required immediate evacuation of the old cloakroom, a low-ceilinged architectural afterthought that Elodie couldn’t remember entering in the ten years since she’d started work in the building. The box had turned up beneath a stack of dusty brocade curtains in the bottom of an antique chiffonier, a handwritten label on its lid reading, ‘Contents of attic desk drawer, 1966 – unlisted’.