The Clockmaker's Daughter

Juliet takes her children to the river and tells Bea about staying at the Swan during her honeymoon, when she told Alan that she was pregnant. Alan had been delighted, but he’d also worried that he should give up his job acting in theater and get a sensible profession, like selling shoes. Juliet had been so angry when he suggested that she might have to give up her job writing that she’d stormed off.

Juliet watches her children play by the water, and Tip tells her that a girl drowned in the river. He says that Birdie told him.

Juliet remembers how, after storming away from Alan, she wandered through the woods and came across the house that she now knows is Birchwood. She fell asleep under a Japanese maple and woke to see a man at the gate. He was older, and “she could tell at once that his soul weighed heavy. He had been a soldier, there was no mistaking it” (306). Juliet looked at the house and felt overcome with a strong feeling of love. She returned to Alan and they made up.

Juliet is starting to think of Birchwood as home. She sits in on a meeting of the Women’s Voluntary Service group, which is organizing efforts to support their soldiers, and she writes a column about them. She misses Alan but keeps an attitude of cheer for the children. She worries about Tip and his imaginary friend, Birdie. She and the children take down a boat from the rafters of the barn and find an old coin, a thruppence, inside.

Juliet and the children visit Mrs. Hammett, who runs the Swan, the pub where Juliet and Alan stayed on their honeymoon. They meet an older woman of about 50 who attended Miss Radcliffe’s school and is now an archaeologist and a professor at New York University. Her name is Dr. Ada Lovegrove. Mrs. Hammett says that Juliet should write about Lucy, the sister of Edward Radcliffe, the artist who was broken-hearted when his young fiancée was killed. Ada speaks of the school and the girl who drowned. Juliet confides her concerns about Tip’s imaginary friend. She imagines for a moment that she sees Alan at the top of the inn’s stairs.

Juliet visits the churchyard and finds headstones for Lucy Radcliffe and her brother, Edward. Back at the house, she searches frantically for Tip and finds him in a small compartment in the wall of the hallway. He says that Ada told him how to find it. He was hiding from his brother and sister because he doesn’t want to tell them that Daddy isn’t coming home. Juliet is stunned that he knows because she hadn’t told them. She received the telegram the same day that she received Alan’s last letter, which she carries in her pocket everywhere. Tip says inside the hidey-hole; he can see pinpricks of light.

The ghost of Birdie visits the room where Fanny stayed, where Juliet slept, and where Ada was brought after falling in the river. It had once been full of specimens that Lucy collected. Lucy told Ada that May Hawkins drowned, and Ada said that she saw someone in the river, as well as something shiny. She found the Radcliffe Blue.

Birdie enjoys drifting through the house hearing visitors commenting on Edward’s paintings and his life. She remembers when Edward told her about the night that he was 14 and tried to raise a ghost. He feared that he was being followed and ran through the trees, and then he saw a house, “a light visible from a window at its top, like a lighthouse in a storm, signaling the way to safety” (336). She recalls sitting for Edward for more paintings and meeting his bohemian, disheveled friends.

Birdie is overjoyed when Elodie comes back. Elodie walks around the garden holding a photograph of two people in a garden. Birdie encourages her to knock on the door of the malthouse, where Jack is staying. Elodie shows Jack the photograph and tells him that her grandmother, Bea, lived at the house during World War II. She tells him about the fairy story that her mother told her as a child. Birdie is glad to know that she is Tip’s grand-niece and he has passed along the story that Birdie told him.

Jack makes a call to his father and mentions an anniversary. It seems a sad one. Birdie contemplates Edward’s painting of Frances and thinks that it is the light “that makes his paintings sing” (348). Elodie reminds her of Pale Joe. Birdie enjoyed when Pale Joe took her through his house and showed her things. She wonders what happened to her old friend.

Summer 2017. Elodie is staying at a room in the Swan (the same room in which Juliet and Alan stayed). She contemplates the strange sense of belonging that she feels at Birchwood. She avoids talking to Alastair, who is not happy that she doesn’t want to show her mother’s videos at their wedding; he says that his mother will be upset. She met with Tip before she left, and he gave her clippings of columns that his mother wrote during the war. Elodie shows him the picture and says that her mother betrayed her father, but Tip says that it’s more complicated than that; they loved each other and were the best of friends.

Elodie reads Juliet’s columns, including one where she writes about her son’s imaginary friend, Birdie, “a flame-haired figment in a white dress” (355). This description matches the woman in the photograph. Elodie considers Leonard’s theory about Lily’s role in the theft of the blue diamond, a theory that he later retracted. She worries about the value of her engagement ring and puts it in her childhood charm box. She thinks of all the people drawing her to Birchwood: Leonard and Juliet, Edward and Lily, and Jack.

Jack, with his camera, visits the river and thinks about how, in his childhood in Australia, he and his brother Ben would take a raft and ride in the creeks when they were swollen from rain. The summer that Ben was 11 and Jack was 9, they got caught up in a flood. Ben drowned after he told rescuers to help Jack first. Jack’s ex-wife always accused him of trying to play the hero, as if he could go back and rescue Ben.

Returning to the house, Jack sees a light in the attic window. Elodie is at the house, and he makes them tea. He tells her that he is a detective hired to find something, and she guesses that it is the Radcliffe Blue. She shows him the photograph of the woman in white, and Jack feels like he knows her. Elodie tells Jack about James Stratton. Jack asks what would make a successful man of privilege dedicate himself to social reform, and Elodie says that he had a friendship as a child with a little girl from “unsavory circumstances” (364). She shows him the letter from BB, who tells J she is going away to America and calls him her dearest friend. Elodie thinks that the woman in the photograph, James Stratton’s BB, was Lily, and that is why Edward gave Stratton his satchel and sketchbook. James shares that his client thinks that the Radcliffe Blue is at Birchwood because of a letter that Lucy Radcliffe wrote his client’s grandmother, Ada Lovegrove, in 1939.

Jack takes Elodie to the scene in the photograph of her mother. It was taken in the churchyard. Elodie thinks that it is “a beautiful, peaceful place, and she was glad to think that a young woman whose life was cut suddenly short had spent her last hours in it” (369). Elodie thinks that she can finally grow out of her mother’s shadow. Rain threatens, and she and Jack run hand in hand back to the house.

Birdie is restless at the storm, feeling that something is going to happen. She misses Edward. She gave him a satchel for his 22nd birthday, and he gave her a gift as well. He knew that she was saving up to buy a ticket to America to visit her father as soon as she turned 18. Edward bought them two tickets in the name of Mr. and Mrs. Radcliffe. He is sure that Fanny will find someone else. He gives her another gift, a beautiful clock. He tells Birdie about the Night of the Following, the tale of the Eldritch Children, and says that he wants to hang her clock in his house. They will go there for the summer, and he invites Lucy along.