The Clockmaker's Daughter

Summer 2017. Elodie sits in her flat, wearing her mother’s veil and watching the river. She thinks about the photograph and the sketchbook and the feeling that they belong with her and she had been meant to find them. She thinks about how her mother would be regarded if she were still alive. Pippa visits and confirms that the photograph is mid-1860s, possibly associated with the Pre-Raphaelites and the Magenta Brotherhood. She gives Elodie a book on Edward Radcliffe. In it is a picture of a painting called Sleeping Beauty that has the woman in the photograph as his model. The books says that the woman was his muse, his model, and his lover. She was known as Lily Millington, and she broke Radcliffe’s heart by stealing a family heirloom and running off to America with another man. However, the author of the book never identified his source for this information.

Pippa also gives Elodie a photograph that her friend Caroline took long ago. It shows two people, Elodie’s mother and the violinist, on a picnic in a beautiful garden. Caroline was traveling in July 1992, saw the couple, and snapped their picture. Lauren Adler died shortly thereafter and, when Caroline realized that she was the woman in the picture, she decided not to publish it. Elodie knows with a “deep, human, intuitive knowing” (116) that her mother was in love with the violinist. Pippa asks Elodie about her upcoming wedding and Elodie changes the subject.

Elodie sits to read the biography of Edward Radcliffe and feels “an immensely satisfying sensation of coming home, as if this, right now, was the very thing that she was supposed to be doing” (120). The book was published in 1931 by Dr. Leonard Gilbert. Gilbert shares Radcliffe’s biography and the theory that he was devastated not by the death of his fiancée but the loss of Lily Millington. The police reports said that Frances had been shot during a robbery and Lily was an accomplice. The jewel stolen was a 23-carat blue diamond, rare and valuable, called the Radcliffe Blue.

The house, Elodie learns, is called Birchwood Manor. She looks up the address and learns it was used sometime as a girl’s school, then given to the Art Historians’ Association. The pictures that she finds online reveal that Birchwood is indeed the house in the sketch and the house from her mother’s story—the house her uncle Tip was evacuated to during the war.

Elodie feels compelled to know more. She takes off the back of the frame of the photograph of the woman and finds a letter, addressed to J and signed BB.

Birdie reflects on the visitors who view the house when it is open to the public on Saturdays and is amused by the way they discuss Edward and Frances (Fanny). She is always surprised when they refer to her as Lily Millington, but she is aware of what Leonard wrote in his book. She says that she has been many things—a thief, an imposter, a lover—but she did not fire the gun that killed Fanny Brown.

She learns that her visitor’s name is Jack Rolands, and he has been sent by a woman named Rosalind Wheeler to find a stone. He says that he’s searched all the places mentioned in Ada Lovegrove’s letters. Birdie recognizes that name. She whispers to Jack to come inside the house. He only looks around for a moment.

Birdie reflects on her time with Mrs. Mack and her schemes in which she pretended to be lost, looking helpless in her fine dress, and then picked the pocket of people who tried to help her. In the winter months, when it was cold, Birdie would travel by bus and pick the pocket of those who sat next to her. She was usually successful; the French magician taught her distraction.

While she watches Jack search, the narrator reflects on her time in the house with Edward and how he wanted to paint a work he called the Fairy Queen in which she would wear the Radcliffe Blue. She remembers learning that Edward had died when Lucy, his sister, inherited the house and came to inspect it. Birdie reflects on when Lucy turned the house into a school for girls. Mrs. Mack always told Birdie that her father was in America and read letters promising that he would send for her soon. Birdie remembers Ada Lovegrove.

Summer 1899. Ada Lovegrove is eight and lives in Bombay, the child of British parents. Ada is surprised to learn that the family is taking a trip to England. Ada loves living in India and trips to the market with her nurse, Shashi. Ada’s father describes England as a small island that contains “the engine that drives the world” (150).

Ada does not like England and is not happy when her parents pay a call at Birchwood Manor. She is introduced to Mrs. Thornfield, who takes her to the library to wait for her parents. Ada looks with interest at a collection of fossils. An older woman enters who shows her one that is an amulet. She introduces herself as Lucy Radcliffe. Ada’s parents enter and say that she is to stay for the afternoon. Only after they leave does Mrs. Thornfield inform Ada that she is now a pupil at Miss Radcliffe’s School for Young Ladies.

Ada huddles in a small compartment inside the wall in a hallway, hiding from two older girls, Charlotte Rogers and May Hawkins. Charlotte makes fun of Ada for being from India. The only thing that Ada likes about the school are the classes that Miss Radcliffe teaches, science and geography, and being part of the Natural History Society. Miss Radcliffe shoos the girls away and tells Ada to come out of the compartment; she was the one who showed it to Ada. Instead of music class, Ada goes to her room to check on a kitten that she rescued when she found a boy drowning kittens in the river. As punishment for missing music class, Ada is directed to help sew costumes for the end-of-term concert.

Ada decides to get her revenge and adjust Charlotte Rogers’ costume so that her skirt will be loose and bothersome during the concert. To Ada’s great delight, the skirt falls to her feet during Charlotte’s solo, humiliating her. At the end-of-term picnic, Charlotte suggests a truce and invites Ada to go boating with her and May Hawkins, though Ada cannot swim. As they float on the river, Charlotte produces Ada’s kitten and holds it over the side of the boat, saying that kittens are not allowed in the school. Ada reaches for the kitten and falls in. As she sinks to the bottom of the river, she sees “a bright blue shining light, a jewel, a moon” (182).

Birdie reports on another visitor: Elodie Winslow, an archivist with Stratton, Caldwell & Co., who looks after the archives of James William Stratton. Birdie is struck by that name. Birdie follows Elodie through the house, wishing that she could “grab her by the wrists and implore her to tell me everything” (186). She wants to know how Elodie came by Edward’s sketchbook. Jack invites Elodie to come back the next day.

Birdie thinks about Pale Joe and how they met. Birdie got caught picking a woman’s pocket on the bus. She ran from the police, climbed a rooftop, and ducked into a window. She found herself in a boy’s bedroom, with the boy, young and pale, staring at her from a bed across the room. The boy ordered the policeman to go away and then offered Birdie food from his tray. He explained that he was ill and did not often leave his room, which is full of toys. He says that his name is Joe, and she tells him that she is Birdie. He shows her a toy called a thaumatrope and invites her to visit again. Birdie says, “he became my secret, just as surely as I became his” (196).

After Edward, Pale Joe is the person whom Birdie misses the most. She wonders if he knew what was said about her or if he read Leonard’s book. Pale Joe was the one who guessed that she was in love with Edward when she visited to talk to him the night that Edward’s painting, La Belle, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1861. Pale Joe says that love “is the lifting of a mask, the revealing of one’s true self to another” (199), even if that love is never returned.

Birdie thinks then of Leonard, who was working on a dissertation about Edward. He played a record player, smoked an opium pipe, and had nightmares in which he called for someone named Tommy.