The Clockmaker's Daughter

by Kate Morton

I wanted you to see what a balm love is. What it is to share one’s life, to really share it, so that very little matters outside the certainty of its walls. Because the world is very noisy, Elodie, and although life is filled with joy and wonder, there’s evil and sorrow and injustice, too.”

Elodie had a vague memory of having been told that her mother suffered with bad morning sickness in the first few months. According to her father, Lauren Adler’s pregnancy was responsible for one of the only occasions on which she’d needed to cancel a performance. “I don’t think I was planned exactly.” “I should say not,” he agreed. “But you were loved, which is arguably more important.”

This I know: to be murdered is to become eternally interesting. (Unless, of course, you are a ten-year-old orphan living on Little White Lion Street, in which case to be murdered is simply to be dead.)

“You are in love,” he said, “for that is exactly how love feels. It is the lifting of a mask, the revealing of one’s true self to another, and the forced acceptance, the awful awareness, that the other person may never feel the same way.”

Ad occasum tendimus omnes, he had read once on a grey, pitted gravestone in Dorset. We are traveling each towards his sunset.

On Radcliffe’s headstone, in smaller text beneath his name, was written, Here lieth one who sought truth and light and saw beauty in all things, 1842-1882. Leonard found himself staring as he often did at the dash between the dates. Within that lichen-laced mark there lay the entire life of a man: his childhood, his loves, his losses and fears, all reduced to a single chiseled line on a piece of stone in a quiet churchyard at the end of a country lane. Leonard wasn’t sure whether the thought was comforting or distressing; his opinion changed, depending on the day.

one must forgive oneself the past or else the journey into the future becomes unbearable.”

Her voice was like a bell, pure and unsullied, and he wanted to run over and take her by the shoulders and warn her, to tell her that life could be brutal, that it could be relentless and cold and wearying. He wanted to tell her that it was all meaningless, that good people died too young, for no good reason, and that the world was filled with people who would seek to do her harm, and that there was no way of telling what was around the corner or even if there was any corner ahead at all. And yet— As he looked at her, and she looked at the house, something in the way the leaves of the maple caught the sun and illuminated the woman beneath it made his heart ache and expand, and he realized that he wanted to tell her, too, that by some strange twist it was the very meaningless of life that made it all so beautiful and rare and wonderful. That for all its savagery—because of its savagery—war had brightened every color. That without the darkness one would never notice the stars. All of this he wanted to say, but the words caught in his throat, and instead he lifted his hand to wave, a silly gesture that she didn’t see, because by now she’d looked away.

When she’d returned to their room at the Swan that day, after they’d kissed and made up, the two of them had lain together on the little bed with its pretty iron rails, Alan’s hands either side of her face, his eyes searching hers, and he’d promised solemnly never again to insult her by suggesting that she work less. And Juliet, with a kiss to the tip of his nose, had promised never again to stop him from giving up acting if he wished to sell shoes instead.

How remarkable that the human race valued the lives of its individual members sufficiently to commemorate each one’s brief time on the ancient earth; and yet, at once, could engage in slaughter of the most meaningless and general kind.

“Bea said that Daddy wouldn’t be able to find us here when he comes home.” “Did she?” “And Red said that Daddy was a magician and that he could find us no matter where we were.” “I see.” “And I came upstairs because I didn’t want to tell them.” “Tell them what?” “That Daddy isn’t coming home.” Juliet felt light-headed. “What do you mean?” He didn’t answer but instead reached his little hand up to press lightly on her cheek. His small heart-shaped face was solemn and Juliet could see at once that he knew.

Even as I watch, they traipse through the rooms of the house, pointing their devices at this chair or those tiles. Experiencing the world at one remove, through the windows of their phones, making images for later so that they do not need to bother seeing or feeling things now.

Parents and children. The simplest relationship in the world and yet the most complex. One generation passes to the next a suitcase filled with jumbled jigsaw pieces from countless puzzles collected over time and says, “See what you can make out of these.”

At one point, another train traveling in the same direction swept onto an adjoining line, and when she looked across and into the other carriage, it appeared stationary beside her. There was a man sitting adjacent and their eyes met, and Lucy fell to thinking about time and motion and speed, and began to glimpse the possibility that they weren’t actually moving at all—that it was the earth instead that had started to spin rapidly beneath them. Her knowledge of the fixed laws of physics suddenly loosened and her mind exploded with possibilities.

“So. You’re not in love with him and you think he’s in love with your mother. Why are you getting married?” “The whole thing is arranged. The flowers, the stationery . . .” “Ah, well, then, that’s different. Stationery in particular. Not easy to return.”

People value shiny stones and lucky charms, but they forget that the most powerful talismans of all are the stories that we tell to ourselves and to others.