The Clockmaker's Daughter

by Kate Morton

“Life is long” was all he’d said, his voice calm; he hadn’t looked up from the film. “Being human isn’t easy.”

1. Privilege makes a person, especially a woman, trusting. Nothing in her experience prepares her for the possibility that anyone might mean her harm. 2. There is nothing so sure as that a gentleman likes to be seen to help. 3. The art of illusion is knowing precisely what people expect to see and then ensuring that they see it.

Hora pars vitae. His Latin teacher had made them write it out in lines. Every hour is a part of life.

War by its nature was surreal: events so shocking that they could never become normal; further shock when inevitably they did. Day after day of dissonance as the old reality and the new sat side by side, as men who’d only months before been printers and shoemakers and clerks found themselves loading bullets into guns and dodging rats in waterlogged trenches.

I have bought a house. A rather charming house, which although not grand is of elegant proportions. It sits like a humble, dignified bird, within its own bend of the river, on the edge of the woods, by a small but perfectly formed village. And Thurston, there is more. I will not commit it to paper here, but will wait until next we meet, saying only that there is something else within the house that draws me, something old and essential and not entirely of this world. It has called to me for a long time, you see, for my new house and I are not strangers.

“There are very few certainties in this world, Mr. Gilbert, but I will tell you something I know: the truth depends on who it is that’s telling the story.”

It was not love at first sight. Such claims make a mockery of love. It was a presentiment. An inexplicable awareness that something important had happened. Some moments are like that: they shine like gold in a prospector’s pan.