The Clockmaker's Daughter Read online

  Her father fell into a melancholy silence, but Elodie, who was usually mindful not to trespass on her father’s old grief, pressed on gingerly. ‘I wonder, Dad – is it possible that the story actually came from a book?’

  ‘Would that it had. I’d have been saved a lot of time trying to console my inconsolable child. No, it was an invention, a family story. I remember your mother saying it had been passed down to her when she was young.’

  ‘I thought so too, but perhaps she got it wrong? Maybe whoever told her the story had read it in a book? One of those illustrated Victorian books for children.’

  ‘It’s possible, I suppose.’ He frowned. ‘But what’s all this about?’

  With a prickle of sudden nerves, Elodie withdrew the sketchbook from her bag and handed it to her father, open to the drawing of the house. ‘I found this at work today, in a box.’

  ‘It’s lovely … and obviously drawn by a fine artist … wonderful penmanship …’ He looked at it a little longer before glancing at Elodie uncertainly.

  ‘Dad, can’t you see? It’s the house from the story. An illustration of the very same house.’

  He returned his attention to the sketch. ‘Well, it’s a house. And I see there’s a river.’

  ‘And woods, and a weathervane with a sun and moon.’

  ‘Yes, but … lovey, I dare say there are dozens of houses fitting that description.’

  ‘So precisely? Come on, Dad. This is the same house. The details are identical. More than that, the artist has captured the same feel as the house in the story. You must be able to see it?’ The possessive instinct came upon her suddenly and Elodie took the book back from her father. She couldn’t explain more emphatically than she already had: she didn’t know how, or what it meant, or why the sketch had turned up in the archives at work, but she knew it was the house from her mother’s story.

  ‘I’m sorry, love.’

  ‘Nothing to be sorry for.’ Even as she said it, Elodie felt the sting of impending tears. Ridiculous! To cry like a child over the provenance of a bedtime story. She grasped for a different subject, something – anything – to move the conversation on. ‘Have you heard from Tip?’

  ‘Not yet. But you know what he’s like. He doesn’t believe in the telephone.’

  ‘I’ll go and see him at the weekend.’

  Silence fell once more between them, but this time it was neither easy nor companionable. Elodie watched the warm light at play on the leaves of the trees. She didn’t know why she felt so agitated. Even if it were the same house, what did it matter? Either the artist had made sketches for a book that her mother had read, or it was a real-life house that someone had seen and enfolded into the story. She knew she ought to let it go, to think of something pleasant and benign to say—

  ‘They’re predicting fine weather,’ her father said, at the very same moment Elodie exclaimed, ‘The house has eight chimneys, Dad. Eight!’

  ‘Oh, lovey.’

  ‘It’s the house from her story. Look at the gables—’

  ‘My dear girl.’

  ‘Dad!’

  ‘This all makes sense.’

  ‘What does?’

  ‘It’s the wedding.’

  ‘What wedding?’

  ‘Yours, of course.’ His smile was kind. ‘Big life events have a way of bringing the past back to bear. And you miss your mother. I should have anticipated that you’d be missing her now more than ever.’

  ‘No, Dad, I—’

  ‘In fact, there’s something I’ve been wanting to give you. Wait here a minute.’

  As her father disappeared down the flight of iron stairs that led back to the house, Elodie sighed. With his apron tied around his middle and his too-sweet duck à l’orange, he just wasn’t the sort of person with whom one could maintain a state of prolonged irritation.

  She noticed a blackbird watching her from one of the twin chimney pots. It stared intently before responding to a command she couldn’t hear to fly away. The littlest of the children on the green began to wail, and Elodie thought of her father’s account of her own petulance in the face of his best bedtime story efforts: the years that had stretched out afterwards, just the two of them.

  It couldn’t have been easy.

  ‘I’ve been saving this for you,’ he said, reappearing at the top of the stairs. She had presumed that he was going to fetch the tapes she’d asked him to put aside, but the box he was holding was too small for that, not much bigger than a shoebox. ‘I knew that one day – that the time would be right –’ His eyes were beginning to glisten and he shook his head, handing her the box. ‘Here, you’ll see.’

  Elodie lifted the top.

  Inside was a swathe of silk organza, light ivory in colour, its scalloped edge trimmed with a fine ribbon of velvet. She knew at once what it was. She had studied the photograph in its gilt frame downstairs many times before.

  ‘She was so beautiful that day,’ her father said. ‘I’ll never forget the moment she appeared in the doorway of the church. I’d half convinced myself she wouldn’t show. My brother teased me mercilessly in the days beforehand. He thought it was great sport and I’m afraid I made it easy for him. I couldn’t quite believe that she’d said “yes”. I was sure there’d been some sort of mix-up – that it was too good to be true.’

  Elodie reached to take his hand. It had been twenty-five years since her mother’s death, but for her father it might as well have happened yesterday. Elodie had only been six, but she could still remember the way he used to look at her mother, the way they’d intertwined their fingers when they walked together. She remembered, too, the knock at the door, the low voices of the policemen, her father’s awful cry.

  ‘It’s getting late,’ he said with a quick pat to the top of her wrist. ‘You should be heading home, love. Come on downstairs – I’ve found the tapes you were after, too.’

  Elodie replaced the lid of the box. She was leaving him to the burdensome company of his memories, but he was right: the journey home was a long one. Besides, Elodie had learned many years before that she was not equal to the task of healing his sorrow. ‘Thanks for keeping the veil for me,’ she said, brushing a kiss on his cheek as she stood.

  ‘She’d be proud of you.’

  Elodie smiled, but as she followed her father downstairs she wondered if that were true.

  Home was a small, neat flat that sat at the very top of a Victorian building in Barnes. The communal stairwell smelled like chip grease, courtesy of the fish shop below, but only the merest hint remained on Elodie’s landing. The flat itself was little more than an open-plan sitting room and kitchenette and an oddly shaped bedroom with a tacked-on bathroom; the view, though, made Elodie’s heart sing.

  One of her bedroom windows overlooked the back of a row of other Victorians: old bricks, white sash windows and truncated roofs with terracotta chimney pots. In the gaps between drainpipes she could glimpse the Thames. Better yet, if she sat right up on the sill she could look all the way upriver to the bend where the railway bridge made its crossing.

  The window on the far wall faced the street, lining up with a mirror house on the other side. The couple who lived there were still eating when Elodie arrived home. They were Swedish, she had learned, which seemed to explain not only their height and beauty, but also their exotic Nordic habit of dining after ten. There was a lamp above their kitchen bench, which looked to be made of crepe and sent light shimmering pinkly onto the surface below. Beneath it, their skin glowed.

  Elodie drew her bedroom curtains, switched on the light, and took the veil from its box. She didn’t know much about fashion, not like Pippa, but she knew this was a special piece. Vintage by dint of its age, covetable owing to Lauren Adler’s fame, but precious to Elodie because it had been her mother’s and there was surprisingly little of her left. Surprisingly little of a private nature.

  After a moment’s hesitation, she lifted the veil and held it tentatively at the crown of her head. She slipped the comb
into place and the organza unfurled over her shoulders. She let her hands fall to her sides.

  Elodie had been flattered when Alastair asked her to marry him. He had proposed on the first anniversary of the day they’d been introduced (by a boy Elodie had gone to school with who now worked in Alastair’s firm). Alastair had taken her to the theatre and then to dinner in a fancy Soho restaurant, whispering into her ear as the cloakroom attendant stowed their coats that it took most people weeks to get a reservation. Whilst the waiter was fetching them dessert, he had presented the ring in its robin-egg-blue box. It had been like something from a movie, and Elodie had seen the two of them as if from outside: he with his handsome, expectant face, his perfect white teeth; and she in the new dress Pippa had made for her when she’d given the Stratton Group 150Year Presentation speech the month before.

  An elderly woman sitting at the table beside them had said to her companion, ‘Isn’t that lovely. Look! She’s blushing because she’s so in love.’ And Elodie had thought, I’m blushing because I’m so in love, and when Alastair lifted his eyebrows she’d watched herself smile and tell him yes.

  Out on the dark river a boat sounded its foghorn and Elodie slipped the veil from her head.

  That was how it happened, she supposed. That is how people become engaged. There would be a wedding – in six weeks, according to the invitation, when Alastair’s mother said the Gloucestershire gardens would be at ‘their late summer best’ – and Elodie would be one of those married people who met up at weekends to talk about houses and bank loans and schools. For there would be children, presumably, and she would be their mother. And she wouldn’t be like her own mother, talented and sparkling, alluring and elusive; but her children would look to her for advice and comfort and she would know what to do and say because people just seemed to, didn’t they?

  Elodie set the box on the brown velvet chair in the corner of her room.

  After a moment’s uncertainty, she slid it under the chair instead.

  The suitcase she’d brought back from her father’s house was still standing by the door where she’d left it.

  Elodie had imagined getting started on the tapes tonight, but she was suddenly tired – intensely tired.

  She showered and then, guiltily, switched off the lamp and slunk into bed. She would start on the tapes tomorrow; she had to. Alastair’s mother, Penelope, had already called three times since breakfast. Elodie had let the calls go through to voicemail, but any day now Alastair would announce that ‘Mummy’ was cooking Sunday lunch and Elodie would find herself in the passenger seat of the Rover, being transported up the tree-lined driveway to that enormous house in Surrey where the inquisition would be waiting.

  Choosing the recording was one of only three tasks she’d been set. The second was visiting the reception venue owned by Penelope’s best friend, ‘just to introduce yourself, of course; leave the rest to me’. The third was liaising with Pippa, who’d offered to design her dress. So far, Elodie had completed none.

  Tomorrow, she promised, pushing all thought of the wedding aside. Tomorrow.

  She closed her eyes, the faint sounds of late-night customers buying battered cod and chips drifting up from downstairs, and without warning her thoughts returned to the other box, the one beneath her desk at work. The framed photograph of the young woman with the direct gaze. The sketch of the house.

  Again that strange sensation, like the glimpse of a memory she couldn’t grasp, disquieted her. She saw the sketch in her mind’s eye and heard a voice that was her mother’s, but somehow also wasn’t: Down the winding lane and across the meadow broad, to the river they went with their secrets and their sword …

  And when she finally fell asleep, at the very moment that consciousness slid away, the pen-drawn picture in her mind dissolved into sunlit trees and the silver-tipped Thames, and a warm wind brushed her cheeks in an unknown place she somehow knew like home.

  II

  It has been a quiet existence, here at Birchwood. Many summers have passed since ours, and I’ve become a creature of habit, following the same gentle rhythms from one day into the next. I haven’t a lot of choice. I rarely have visitors and those that do come these days don’t stay long. I am not a good host. This is not an easy place to live.

  People, by and large, are fearful of old buildings, just as they fear the elderly themselves. The Thames Path has become a favourite rambling route, and sometimes in the evenings and early mornings people stop in the laneway and peer over the garden wall. I see them but I do not let them see me.

  I rarely leave the house. I used to run across the meadow, my heart thumping in my chest, my cheeks warm, the movement of my limbs strong and bold, but such feats are beyond me now.

  Those people in the laneway have heard rumours about me, and they point and dip their heads together in the way of gossips everywhere. ‘That’s where it happened,’ they say, ‘That’s where he lived,’ and ‘Do you think she did it?’

  But they do not trespass when the gate is shut. They have heard this is a haunted place.

  I confess to paying little attention when Clare and Adele spoke of spirits. I was busy, my thoughts elsewhere. Many a time since, I have regretted my distraction. Such knowledge would have come in useful over the years, especially when my ‘visitors’ have come to call.

  I have a new one, just arrived. I felt it first, as I always do. An awareness, a slight but certain change in the stale currents that lick and settle in the treads of the stairs at night. I kept my distance and hoped that it would not bother me as I waited for the stillness to return.

  Only the stillness did not return. Nor the silence. It – he, for I have glimpsed him now – is not noisy, not like some of them, but I have learned how to listen, what to listen for, and when the movements took on a regular rhythm, I knew that he intended to stay.

  It has been a long time since I’ve had a visitor. They used to bother me with their whispering and thumping, the chilling sense that my things, my spaces, were no longer my own. I kept about my business, but I studied them, one after the other, just as Edward might have done, and with time I learned how best to move them on. They are simple creatures, after all, and I have become practised at helping them on their way.

  Not all of them, mind you, for there are some to whom I have warmed. The Special Ones. The poor, sad soldier shouting in the night. The widow whose angry weeping fell between the floorboards. And, of course, the children – the lonely schoolgirl who wanted to go home, the solemn little lad who sought to mend his mother’s heart. I like the children. They are always more perceptive. They have not yet learned how not to see.

  I am still deciding about this new one, whether or not the two of us can live peaceably together, and for how long. He, for his part, has not yet noticed me. He is much intent on his own activity. The same each day, traipsing a path across the malt house kitchen, always with that brown canvas bag slung over one shoulder.

  They are all like that at first. Unobservant, caught in their own loop, absorbed by whatever it is that they believe they must get done. I am patient, though. I have little else to do besides watch and wait.

  I can see him now through the window, making his way towards the little churchyard on the edge of the village. He stops and seems to read the headstones as if he is searching for someone.

  I wonder for whom. There are so many buried there.

  I have always been curious. My father used to say that I was born wondering. Mrs Mack said that it was only a matter of time before I ended up as flat as the curious cat.

  There. He is gone now, over the top of the rise so that I can no longer tell which way he walks, or what it is that he carries inside his bag, or what he intends to do here.

  I think I might be excited. As I said, it has been a while, and wondering about a new visitor is always buoying. It takes my thoughts away from the bones of habit upon which they usually pick.

  Bones like these …

  When they all packed up and fled, as
the carriages tore like demons from hell along the coach way, did Edward glance behind him and glimpse in the dusk-lit window a sight to replace his nightmare?

  Repaired to London and back behind his easel, did he blink sometimes to clear my image from his sight? Did he dream of me during the long nights, as my thoughts have dwelt on him?

  Did he remember then, as I do now, candlelight flickering on the mulberry wall?

  There are others, too. Bones that I have forbidden myself to polish further. There is little use wondering when there is no one left to ask.

  They have all gone. They are all long gone. And the questions remain mine. Knots that can never be untied. Turned over and over again, forgotten by all but me. For I forget nothing, no matter how I try.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Summer, 2017

  The odd, unsettled feeling was still with Elodie the following day and she spent the train ride into work jotting down everything she could remember of her mother’s bedtime tale. As London blurred on the other side of the window, and a group of schoolboys further down the carriage sniggered at a phone screen, she rested a notepad on her knee and let the real world disappear. Her pen raced across the page, but as the train drew nearer to Waterloo, her enthusiasm began to wane, her pace to slow. She glanced over what she’d written, the tale of the house with its celestial weathervane, and the mercurial wending river and the wonderful, terrible things that happened in the woods at night, and Elodie felt slightly embarrassed. It was a children’s tale, after all, and she a grown woman.

  The train stopped at the platform and Elodie gathered her bag from the floor beside her feet. She eyed the sketchbook – wrapped now in a clean cotton tea towel – and a wave of uncertainty washed over her as she recalled her recklessness the afternoon before, the sudden compulsion she’d felt to take it, her growing conviction that the sketch presaged some sort of mystery. She’d even harboured a suspicion – thank God she’d had enough sense not to share it with her father! – that the sketch had been waiting for her all of these years.