The Clockmaker's Daughter, Page 2

  Her touch was gentle. Her mouth had gathered in a small neat purse of interest and her grey eyes narrowed slightly before widening as she took in the hand-sewn joins, the fine Indian cotton and the precise stitching.

  She ran a soft thumb over the initials on the front flap, faded and sad, and the satchel felt a frisson of pleasure. Somehow this young woman’s attention hinted that what had turned out to be an unexpectedly long journey might just be nearing its end.

  Open me, the satchel urged. Look inside.

  Once upon a time the satchel had been shiny and new. Made to order by Mr Simms himself at the royal warrant manufactory of W. Simms & Son on Bond Street. The gilt initials had been hand-tooled and heat-sealed with enormous pomp; each silver rivet and buckle had been selected, inspected and polished; the fine-quality leather had been cut and stitched with care, oiled and buffed with pride. Spices from the Far East – clove and sandalwood and saffron – had drifted through the building’s veins from the perfumery next door, infusing the satchel with a hint of faraway places.

  Open me …

  The woman in the white gloves unlatched the dull silver buckle and the satchel held its breath.

  Open me, open me, open me …

  She pushed back its leather strap and for the first time in over a century light swept into the satchel’s dark corners.

  An onslaught of memories – fragmented, confused – arrived with it: a bell tinkling above the door at W. Simms & Son; the swish of a young woman’s skirts; the thud of horses’ hooves; the smell of fresh paint and turpentine; heat, lust, whispering. Gaslight in railway stations; a long, winding river; the wheat fragrance of summer—

  The gloved hands withdrew and with them went the satchel’s load.

  The old sensations, voices, imprints, fell away, and everything, at last, was blank and quiet.

  It was over.

  Elodie rested the contents on her lap and set the satchel to one side. It was a beautiful piece that did not fit with the other items she’d taken from the box. They had comprised a collection of rather humdrum office supplies – a hole punch, an ink well, a wooden desk insert for sorting pens and paperclips – and a crocodile leather spectacle case, which the manufacturer’s label announced as, ‘The property of L. S-W’. This fact suggested to Elodie that the desk, and everything inside, had once belonged to Lesley Stratton-Wood, a great-niece of the original James Stratton. The vintage was right – Lesley Stratton-Wood had died in the 1960s – and it would explain the box’s delivery to Stratton, Cadwell & Co.

  The satchel, though – unless it was a replica of the highest order – was far too old to have belonged to Ms Stratton-Wood; the items inside looked pre-twentieth century. A preliminary riffle revealed a monogrammed black journal (E. J. R.) with a marbled fore-edge; a brass pen box, mid-Victorian; and a faded green leather document holder. There was no way of knowing at first glance to whom the satchel had belonged, but beneath the front flap of the document holder, the gilt-stamped label read, ‘James W. Stratton, Esq. London, 1861’.

  The document holder was flattish and Elodie thought at first that it might be empty; but when she opened the clasp, a single object waited inside. It was a delicate silver frame, small enough to fit within her hand, containing a photograph of a woman. She was young, with long hair, light but not blonde, half of which was wound into a loose knot on the top of her head; her gaze was direct, her chin slightly lifted, her cheekbones high. Her lips were set in an attitude of intelligent engagement, perhaps even defiance.

  Elodie felt a familiar stirring of anticipation as she took in the sepia tones, the promise of a life awaiting rediscovery. The woman’s dress was looser than might be expected for the period. White fabric draped over her shoulders and the neckline fell in a V. The sleeves were sheer and billowed, and had been pushed to the elbow on one arm. Her wrist was slender, the hand on her hip accentuating the indentation of her waist.

  The treatment was as unusual as the subject, for the woman wasn’t posed inside on a settee or against a scenic curtain as one might expect in a Victorian portrait. She was outside, surrounded by dense greenery, a setting that spoke of movement and life. The light was diffuse, the effect intoxicating.

  Elodie set the photograph aside and took up the monogrammed journal. It fell open to reveal thick cream pages of expensive cotton paper; there were lines of beautiful handwriting, but they were complements only to the many pen and ink renderings of figures, landscapes, and other objects of interest. Not a journal, then: this was a sketchbook.

  A fragment of paper, torn from elsewhere, slipped from between two pages. A single line raced across it: I love her, I love her, I love her, and if I cannot have her I shall surely go mad, for when I am not with her I fear—

  The words leapt off the paper as if they’d been spoken aloud, but when Elodie turned over the page, whatever the writer had feared was not revealed.

  She ran her gloved fingertips over the impressions of the text. When held up to the last glimmer of sunlight, the paper revealed its individual threads, along with tiny lucent pinpricks where the sharp nib of the fountain pen had torn across the sheet.

  Elodie laid the jagged piece of paper gently back inside the sketchbook.

  Although antique now, the urgency of its message was unsettling: it spoke forcefully and currently of unfinished business.

  Elodie continued to leaf carefully through the pages, each one filled with cross-hatched artist’s studies with occasional rough-sketched facial profiles in the margins.

  And then she stopped.

  This sketch was more elaborate than the others, more complete. A river scene, with a tree in the foreground and a distant wood visible across a broad field. Behind a copse on the right-hand side, the twin-gabled roofline of a house could be seen, with eight chimneys and an ornate weathervane featuring the sun and moon and other celestial emblems.

  It was an accomplished drawing, but that’s not why Elodie stared. She felt a pang of déjà vu so strong it exerted a physical pressure around her chest.

  She knew this place. The memory was as vivid as if she’d been there, and yet somehow Elodie knew that it was a location she’d visited only in her mind.

  The words came to her then as clear as birdsong at dawn: Down the winding lane and across the meadow broad, to the river they went with their secrets and their sword.

  And she remembered. It was a story that her mother used to tell her. A child’s bedtime story, romantic and tangled, replete with heroes, villains and a Fairy Queen, set in a house within dark woods encircled by a long, snaking river.

  But there had been no book with illustrations. The tale had been spoken aloud, the two of them side by side in her little-girl bed in the room with the sloping ceiling—

  The wall clock chimed, low and premonitory, from Mr Pendleton’s office, and Elodie glanced at her watch. She was late. Time had lost its shape again, its arrow dissolving into dust around her. With a final glance at the strangely familiar scene, she returned the sketchbook with the other contents to its box, closed the lid, and pushed it back beneath the desk.

  Elodie had gathered her things and was halfway through the usual motions of checking and locking the department door to leave, when the overwhelming urge came upon her. Unable to resist, she hurried back to the box, dug out the sketchbook, and slipped it inside her bag.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Elodie caught the 24 bus north from Charing Cross to Hampstead. The Underground would have been faster, but she didn’t use the Tube. There was too much crowding, too little air, and Elodie didn’t do well in tight spaces. The aversion had been a fact of life since she was a child and she was used to it, but in this instance it was a regret; she loved the idea of the Underground, its example of nineteenth-century enterprise, its vintage tiles and fonts, its history and dust.

  The traffic was grindingly slow, especially near Tottenham Court Road where the Crossrail excavation had left the backs of a row of brick Victorian terraces exposed. It was one of
Elodie’s favourite views, providing a glimpse of the past so real it could be touched. She imagined, as she always did, the lives of those who’d dwelt within these houses long ago, back when the southern part of St Giles was home to the Rookery, a teeming, squalid slum of crooked alleys and cesspits, gin shops and gamblers, prostitutes and urchins; when Charles Dickens was making his daily walks, and alchemists plied their trade in the sewer-lined streets of the Seven Dials.

  The younger James Stratton, sharing with so many of his fellow Victorians a keen interest in the esoteric, had left a number of journal entries recording visits to a particular spiritualist and seer in Covent Garden with whom he’d enjoyed a long-running dalliance. For a banker, James Stratton had been a gifted writer, his diaries providing vibrant, compassionate and at times very funny glimpses of life in Victorian London. He had been a kind man, a good man, committed to improving the lives of the poor and dispossessed. He believed, as he wrote to friends when he tried to enlist them to his philanthropic causes, that ‘a human being’s life and prospects must surely be improved by having a decent place to lay his or her head of a night’.

  Professionally he had been respected, even liked, by his peers: a bright, sought-after dinner party guest, well travelled and wealthy, successful by every measure a Victorian man might care to name; yet, in his personal life, he’d cut a lonelier figure. He had married late, after a number of short-lived, improbable romances. There was an actress who’d run off with an Italian inventor, an artist’s model who was pregnant with another man’s child, and in his mid-forties he developed a deep and abiding affection for one of his servants, a quiet girl called Molly, upon whom he bestowed frequent small kindnesses without ever declaring his true feelings. It seemed to Elodie almost as if he’d set out purposely to choose women who wouldn’t – or couldn’t – make him happy.

  ‘Why would he do that?’ Pippa had asked with a frown when Elodie mentioned this thought to her over tapas and sangria one night.

  Elodie wasn’t sure, only that although there was nothing overt in his correspondence, no declaration of unrequited love or confession of deep-seated unhappiness, she couldn’t help but sense something melancholy lurking beneath the pleasant surface of his personal letters; that he was a seeker for whom true fulfilment remained forever out of reach.

  Elodie was used to the sceptical look that settled on Pippa’s face whenever she said that sort of thing out loud. She would never be able to describe the intimacy of working day after day amongst the artefacts of another person’s life. Elodie couldn’t understand the modern urge to share one’s innermost feelings publicly and permanently; she guarded her own privacy carefully and subscribed to the French notion of le droit à l’oubli – the right to be forgotten. And yet it was her job – more than that, her passion – to preserve, and even to reanimate, the lives of people who had no choice in the matter. She had read James Stratton’s most private thoughts, journal entries written without a view to posterity, yet he had never even heard her name.

  ‘You’re in love with him, of course,’ was Pippa’s comment whenever Elodie tried to explain.

  But it wasn’t love; Elodie simply admired James Stratton and felt protective of his legacy. He had been granted a life beyond his lifetime and it was Elodie’s job to ensure it was respected.

  Even as the word ‘respect’ took form in her mind, Elodie thought of the sketchbook, deep inside her bag, and her cheeks flushed.

  What on earth had come over her?

  Panic mixed with a terrible, wonderful, guilty sense of anticipation. Never in the decade that she’d worked in the archive room at Stratton, Cadwell & Co. had she transgressed so emphatically the edicts laid down by Mr Pendleton. His rules were absolute: to take an artefact from the vault – worse, simply to shove it in one’s bag and force upon it the sacrilege of being transported on a twenty-first-century London bus – was beyond disrespectful. It was inexcusable.

  But as the number 24 skirted Mornington Crescent station and started up Camden High Street, with a quick glance to reassure herself that no one was watching, Elodie took the sketchbook from her bag and opened the pages quickly to the drawing of the house in its river setting.

  Once again she was struck by a sense of profound familiarity. She knew this place. In the story that her mother used to tell, the house had been a literal gateway to another world; for Elodie, though, curled up in her mother’s arms, breathing in the exotic fragrance of narcissus that she wore, the story itself had been a gateway, an incantation that carried her away from the here-and-now and into the land of imagination. After her mother’s death, the world of the story had become her secret place. Whether at lunchtime in her new school, or at home in the long quiet afternoons, or at night when the darkness threatened suffocation, all she had to do was hide herself away and close her eyes and she could cross the river, brave the woods and enter the enchanted house …

  The bus arrived at South End Green and Elodie stopped briefly to make a purchase at the stall by the Overground station before hurrying up Willow Road towards Gainsborough Gardens. The day was still warm and very stuffy, and by the time she arrived at the door of her father’s tiny house – originally the gardener’s cottage – Elodie felt as if she’d run a marathon.

  ‘Hello, Dad,’ she said, as he gave her a kiss. ‘I’ve brought you something.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ he said, eyeing the potted plant dubiously. ‘Even after how things ended last time?’

  ‘I believe in you. Besides, the lady selling them told me this one only needs watering twice a year.’

  ‘Good God, really? Twice a year?’

  ‘That’s what she said.’

  ‘Miraculous.’

  Despite the heat, he’d prepared duck à l’orange, his speciality, and they ate together at the table in the kitchen as they always did. They’d never really been a dining-room family, only on special occasions, like Christmas or birthdays, or the time Elodie’s mother had decided they should invite the visiting American violinist and his wife for Thanksgiving.

  As they ate they spoke of work: Elodie’s curation of the upcoming exhibition and her father’s choir, the music lessons he’d been giving recently at one of the local primary schools. His face lit up when he described the little girl whose violin was almost as long as her arm, and the bright-eyed boy who’d come to the practice room of his own accord and begged for cello lessons. ‘His parents aren’t musical, you see.’

  ‘Let me guess: the two of you came to your own arrangement?’

  ‘I hadn’t the heart to say no.’

  Elodie smiled. Her father was a soft touch when it came to music and wouldn’t have dreamed of denying a child the opportunity to share his great love. He believed that music had the power to alter people’s lives – ‘their very minds, Elodie’ – and nothing made him quite as excited as discussing brain plasticity and MRI scans showing a connection between music and empathy. It made Elodie’s heart clench to watch him watching a concert: the utter transfixion of his face beside her in the theatre. He had been a professional musician once himself. ‘Only second violinist,’ he always qualified when the subject arose, a trace of reverence entering his voice as he continued predictably: ‘Nothing like she was.’

  She. Elodie’s gaze drifted to the dining room on the other side of the hall. From where she was sitting only the edges of a few frames were visible, but Elodie didn’t need to look upon the wall to know exactly which picture was hanging where. Their positions never altered. It was her mother’s wall. That is, it was Lauren Adler’s wall; striking black-and-white photographs of a vibrant young woman with long, straight hair and a cello in her embrace.

  Elodie had made a study of the photographs when she was a child and they were thus printed indelibly on her mind’s eye. Her mother, in various attitudes of performance, concentration fine-tuning her features: those high cheekbones; the focused gaze; her clever articulated fingers on strings that gleamed beneath the lights.

  ‘Fancy a bit of p
udding?’

  Her father had taken a quivering strawberry concoction from the refrigerator, and Elodie noticed suddenly how old he was compared with the images of her mother, whose youth and beauty were locked in the amber of her memory.

  Because the weather was glorious, they took their wine glasses and dessert upstairs to the rooftop terrace that overlooked the green. A trio of brothers were tossing a frisbee, the smallest one running back and forth across the grass between the others, while a pair of adults sat together nearby, their heads bent close in conversation.

  The summer twilight cast a soporific glow, and Elodie was reluctant to spoil things. Nonetheless, after a few minutes of the easy companionable silence in which she and her father had always specialised, she ventured, ‘Do you know what I was thinking of today?’

  ‘What’s that?’ He had a spot of cream on his chin.

  ‘That bedtime story from when I was little – the one about the river, and the house with the moon-and-stars weathervane. Do you remember it?’

  He laughed with soft surprise. ‘Goodness! That’s taken me back. Yes, of course, you used to love that one. It’s been a long time since I’ve thought of it. I always wondered that it might not be a bit too scary for a child, but your mother believed that children were much braver than they were given credit for. She said that childhood was a frightening time and that hearing scary stories was a way of feeling less alone. It seemed that you agreed: whenever she was away on tour you were never happy with the books I read. I used to feel quite rejected. You’d hide them under your bed so I couldn’t find them and demand that I tell you instead about the clearing in the deep, dark woods and the magic house on the river.’

  Elodie smiled.

  ‘You were not pleased with my attempts. Feet were stomped, words like “No!” and “Not like that!” bandied about.’

  ‘Oh, dear.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault. Your mother was a wonderful storyteller.’