The Clockmaker's Daughter
Kate Morton
PRAISE FOR KATE MORTON
‘Morton’s writing is consuming … crisp and terrifically satisfying.’ —Good Reading
‘Morton’s finesse with family secrets increases with each novel.’ —Kirkus Reviews
‘Morton has obvious star power … Her novels are Australia’s most successful exports since Colleen McCullough’s Thorn Birds.’—New York Times Book Review
‘Kate Morton is the Aussie queen of historical drama.’—Sunday Telegraph
‘Carefully applied layers of family, history, and moral conundrum … make [Morton’s books] perfect for just about every reader.’—Library Journal
‘Morton weaves an intriguing mystery.’—People Magazine
‘Morton writes with such page-turning ease, you can easily lose yourself in her world for days … a pace that’s more mystery than thriller—perfect when you really don’t want a book to end.’—The Pool
‘[Morton] sustains an atmosphere of quiet dread rivaling that developed by Sarah Waters in The Little Stranger … A rich treat for fans of historical fiction.’—Washington Post
‘Kate Morton is a true talent. Her language and tone are delightful, her characters real, warm and lovable. A truly mesmerising tale that has it all.’—Australian Women’s Weekly (Dymocks Pick of the Month)
‘Morton is adept at weaving her stories together.’—Adelaide Advertiser
‘Morton’s elements of mystery are always tightly wound and expertly plotted.’—Reader’s Digest
‘Secrets told with exquisite timing.’—The Australian
‘Compelling … Morton’s plotting is impeccable, and her finely wrought characters … are as surprised as readers will be by the astonishing conclusion.’—Publisher’s Weekly
KATE MORTON was born in South Australia and grew up in the mountains of south-east Queensland. She has degrees in dramatic art and English literature and lives now with her husband and three young sons in London and Australia. The Shifting Fog, published internationally as The House at Riverton, The Forgotten Garden, The Distant Hours, The Secret Keeper and The Lake House have all been number one bestsellers around the world. You can find more information about Kate Morton and her books at katemorton.com or Facebook @KateMortonAuthor and Instagram @katemortonauthor.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organisations, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
First published in Australia by Allen & Unwin in 2018
Copyright © 2018 Kate Morton
The Author asserts the Author’s Moral Rights in this work throughout the world without waiver.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
ISBN 978 1 74237 652 3 (pb)
ISBN 978 1 76052 700 6 (hb)
eISBN 978 1 76063 653 1
Cover design and illustration: Lisa White
Cover images: Shutterstock / botanicalillustrations.org / Biodiversity Heritage Library
To Didee, for being the sort of mother who took us to live on a mountaintop and for giving me the best piece of writing advice I’ve ever received.
Contents
PART ONE: THE SATCHEL
I
Chapter One
Chapter Two
II
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
III
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
IV
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
PART TWO: THE SPECIAL ONES
V
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
VI
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
VII
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
VIII
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
IX
PART THREE: THE SUMMER OF BIRCHWOOD MANOR
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
X
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
XI
PART FOUR: CAPTURED LIGHT
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
XII
Author’s Note
PART ONE
THE SATCHEL
I
We came to Birchwood Manor because Edward said that it was haunted. It wasn’t, not then, but it’s a dull man who lets truth stand in the way of a good story, and Edward was never that. His passion, his blinding faith in whatever he professed, was one of the things I fell in love with. He had the preacher’s zeal, a way of expressing opinions that minted them into gleaming currency. A habit of drawing people to him, of firing in them enthusiasms they hadn’t known were theirs, making all but himself and his convictions fade.
But Edward was no preacher.
I remember him. I remember everything.
The glass-roofed studio in his mother’s London garden, the smell of freshly mixed paint, the scratch of bristle on canvas as his gaze swept my skin. My nerves that day were prickles. I was eager to impress, to make him think me something I was not, as his eyes traced my length and Mrs Mack’s entreaty circled in my head: ‘Your mother was a proper lady, your people were grand folk and don’t you go forgetting it. Play your cards right and all our birds might just come home to roost.’
And so I sat up straighter on the rosewood chair, that first day in the whitewashed room behind the tangle of blushing sweet peas.
His littlest sister brought me tea, and cake when I was hungry. His mother, too, came down the narrow path to watch him work. She adored her son. In him she glimpsed the family’s hopes fulfilled. Distinguished member of the Royal Academy, engaged to a lady of some means, father soon to a clutch of brown-eyed heirs.
Not for him the likes of me.
His mother blamed herself for what came next, but she’d have more easily halted day from meeting night than keep us apart. He called me his muse, his destiny. He said that he had known at once, when he saw me through the hazy gaslight of the theatre foyer on Drury Lane.
I was his muse, his destiny. And he was mine.
It was long ago; it was yesterday.
Oh, I remember love.
This corner, halfway up the main flight of stairs, is my favourite.
It is a strange house, built to be purposely confusing. Staircases that turn at unusual angles, all knees and elbows and uneven treads; windows that do not line up no matter how one squints at them
; floorboards and wall panels with clever concealments.
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’.
Finding archival materials in the disused cloakroom, let alone so many decades after they’d apparently been delivered, was disquieting and Mr Pendleton’s reaction had been predictably explosive. He was a stickler for protocol, and it was lucky, Elodie and Margot later agreed, that whoever had been responsible for receiving
the delivery in 1966 had long ago left his employ.
The timing couldn’t have been worse: ever since the management consultant had been sent in to ‘trim the fat’, Mr Pendleton had been in a spin. The invasion of his physical sphere was bad enough, but the insult of having his efficiency questioned was beyond the pale. ‘It’s like someone borrowing your watch to tell you the time,’ he’d said through frosted lips after the consultant had met with them the other morning.
The unceremonious appearance of the box had threatened to tip him into apoplexy, so Elodie – who liked disharmony as little as she did disorder – had stepped in with a firm promise to set things right, promptly sweeping it up and stashing it out of sight.
In the days since, she’d been careful to keep it concealed so as not to trigger another eruption, but now, alone in the quiet office, she knelt on the carpet and slid the box from its hiding place …
The pinpricks of sudden light were a shock, and the satchel, pressed deep inside the box, exhaled. The journey had been long, and it was understandably weary. Its edges were wearing thin, its buckles had tarnished, and an unfortunate musty odour had staled in its depths. As for the dust, a permanent patina had formed opaquely on the once-fine surface, and it was now the sort of bag that people held at a distance, turning their heads to one side as they weighed the possibilities. Too old to be of use, but bearing an indefinable air of historic quality precluding its disposal.
The satchel had been loved once, admired for its elegance – more importantly, its function. It had been indispensable to a particular person at a particular time when such attributes were highly prized. Since then, it had been hidden and ignored, recovered and disparaged, lost, found and forgotten.
Now, though, one by one, the items that for decades had sat atop the satchel were being lifted, and the satchel, too, was resurfacing finally in this room of faint electrical humming and ticking pipes. Of diffuse yellow light and papery smells and soft white gloves.
At the other end of the gloves was a woman: young, with fawn-like arms leading to a delicate neck supporting a face framed by short black hair. She held the satchel at a distance, but not with distaste.
