The Clockmaker's Daughter

Summer 2017. Elodie Winslow, who works at a business that manages the archives of Victorian reformer, James Stratton, opens a box that contains a well-preserved leather satchel. Inside she finds a sketchbook monogrammed with the initials EJR and an antique photograph of a beautiful, long-haired woman wearing a white dress. Elodie scans through the sketchbook and sees a drawing of a large house with two gables, eight chimneys, and a weathervane decorated with celestial symbols. The image of the house evokes a strong feeling of déjà vu, and Elodie takes the sketchbook with her as she leaves work.

James Stratton, son of a banker, had been a good man, committed to social improvements, and Elodie has enjoyed working in his archives. On the bus to her father’s flat, she looks at the sketchbook again and is struck by the drawing of the house. It evokes a story her mother told her at bedtime, a story that, after her mother’s death, became Elodie’s “secret place” (17).

Elodie eats dinner with her father, who teaches music. Though it happened 25 years ago, her father still grieves the death of Elodie’s mother, Lauren Adler, a famed cellist. Her father gives Elodie recordings of her mother’s performances along with her bridal veil. At her own flat, Elodie tries on the veil and thinks of Alastair, whom she is going to marry in six weeks. She falls asleep thinking of the picture of the house.

The narrator reflects on living at Birchwood and how people believe that it is haunted. She thinks about the visitors she’s liked: the soldier, the widow, the lonely schoolgirl, “the solemn little lad who sought to mend his mother’s heart” (28). She has a new visitor now who seems to be looking for something.

Summer 2017. As she returns to work, Elodie declines a call from Penelope, Alastair’s mother. She knows that Penelope will ask if she’s chosen a recording of her mother to play at the wedding. Lauren Adler died in a car crash when she was traveling with a violinist with whom she’d performed in Bath. At work, Elodie inspects the satchel. Her friend Pippa, an artist, identifies EJR as Edward Radcliffe.

Elodie researches Edward Radcliffe and discovers that he was born in 1840 and raised in Wiltshire, the grandson of Lord and Lady Radcliffe. He was beginning a distinguished career as a painter when his fiancée, Frances Brown, was killed during a robbery at the young age of 20. The masterpiece that Edward was working on at the time disappeared and he took up an itinerant life, eventually drowning off the coast of Portugal in 1881. He was a founding member of the Magenta Brotherhood.

Elodie looks up Frances Brown, who is not the woman in the photograph. Elodie thinks that the mysterious woman is beautiful and illuminated.

Pippa and Elodie meet for lunch. Pippa thinks that the photograph dates to the 1860s and is reminiscent of the pre-Raphaelites and Julia Margaret Cameron. She explains that Edward Radcliffe’s abandoned work has become a myth in art history circles. Pippa snaps a picture of the photograph to help her design Elodie’s wedding dress and Elodie is surprised by how possessive she feels about the image.

Elodie sits on a bench near the Thames and thinks about James Stratton’s efforts to install a city sewer system and clean up the river. Back at work, she looks for mention of Edward Radcliffe in the archives and finds a journal entry in which James Stratton describes how Edward came to see him “in a ruinous state” with a grief “wretched to watch” (53). Edward left the satchel and sketchbook with James, and Elodie wonders how the men knew each other. She catalogues her new items, then takes a picture of the photograph and the sketch of the house.

The narrator says she has been thinking about Mrs. Mack and Martin and Lily and the Captain and Pale Joe, the first person whom she truly loved. She reflects that time passes differently for her. The Art Historians’ Association has opened her house to the public. She notes that her new visitor takes a lot of pictures.

Her new visitor is muscular and rugged but not that young. He keeps a picture of two twin girls, very small, and she overhears a conversation with someone named Sarah in which he asks to see them. The narrator thinks of her own father, a clockmaker, who told her that, just like a person, a clock’s face “is but a mask for the intricate mechanism it conceals” (64). Her mother, who was of higher status than her father and ran away to be with him, died when the narrator was four. Her father called the narrator Birdie. He was working on a project, a Mystery Clock, and taught Birdie that there is no such thing as the right time: “Time was an idea: it had no end and no beginning” (66). He takes her to the Royal Observatory to look through the telescope and the narrator becomes obsessed with light, trying to capture it in a tin can with punctured holes in the lid.

After Birdie’s mother died, her father started spending time with a man called Jeremiah. Her father drank and gambled, and his business declined. They planned to leave for America, but Birdie grew ill with a fever, and Jeremiah persuaded the father to leave without her. Birdie woke up in a room with Mrs. Mack, who says that they will take care of her until her father returns. Birdie says that she was born again to Mrs. Mack when she was seven, living above a shop that sold birds and cages in an area of Covent Garden known as Seven Dials.

Summer 2017. Elodie returns to her flat, which Alastair describes as homely, and she chats with her landlady, on older woman named Mrs. Berry. They discuss Elodie’s wedding. Mrs. Berry quotes Tennyson and describes how she met her husband, who was brought to England from Germany on the Kindertransport at the start of the Second World War.

Elodie watches the videos of her mother and understands why everyone raved about Lauren Adler’s talent. She remembers little of her mother but sees how much her father misses her mother. Elodie wonders if Alastair loves her that much. Unable to sleep, she watches the videos late into the night.

Elodie goes to visit her great-uncle, Tip. He was dear to her mother, and after Lauren’s death, Tip made Elodie a charm box covered with “a wondrous array of shells and pebbles, broken tiles and shiny pieces of glass” (85). Elodie pauses above the Thames at the spot where Lieutenant Charles Wood dove into the river to rescue a drowning woman in 1919. The woman survived, but Wood died from tetanus. Elodie pictures the streets as they would have looked to James Stratton.

Elodie finds Tip’s studio and reminds Tip to send in his RSVP. Tip tells her that Lauren sat in the same place when she came to tell Tip about her wedding. He mentions that Elodie’s dad, Winston, stepped up so that Lauren did not have to set aside her career. Tip recalls that his mother was a journalist and he remembers his father smoking a pipe while she wrote, and they’d talk and laugh. Elodie tells him the story that her mother recited and Tip says that he told it to Lauren. Elodie asks who told it to him, and he tells her how his family were evacuated from London during the war. They went to a house in the country: “Wonderful old house it was, filled with the most incredible furniture—almost like the people who’d lived there before had left for a stroll and never come back” (92). Someone who lived there told him the story. Tip says that Lauren asked him the address of the house the week before she died. Elodie shows him the image of the woman in the white dress and Tip says that he’s never seen her, but Elodie can tell that he is lying.