Story finds light in darkness
Kate Morton’s newest book mines history, acknowledging how the past often haunts the present in a stately manor home
After Kate Morton sent off the final draft of her sixth and latest novel, The Clockmaker’s Daughter, to her editor, she took a walk to clear her head. She was passing by the series of shops at the top of her London street when an old framed map in an antique-store window caught her eye. Morton loves maps, and stopped to take a closer look.
In an uncanny coincidence — or perhaps fate stepped in — the map was of Berkshire, the exact part of southeast England where The Clockmaker’s Daughter is set. Even more remarkable, it was printed in the same era as her novel, before the county’s borders were reorganized and the area was renamed Oxfordshire.
“It was just the most uncanny experience and so, of course, I bought it and it now sits on top of my piano,” says Morton, the beloved author of several international bestsellers, including The Lake House and The Secret Keeper.
Morton’s mysterious discovery would fit right in as a scene from one of her books. The Clockmaker’s Daughter, too, has all the signature twists of a gothic Morton tale: deeply buried secrets, fateful twists, and old homes that almost breathe and reverberate from the energy contained within. But for Morton’s new novel, an actual spirit supplies the otherworldly ambiance.
“I would say all of my books have a thread of the past haunting the present,” says Morton. “So even if it’s a metaphorical ghost, there are those elements in every single book. This time, I took it step further and said, ‘Well, we might as well have a real ghost.’”
Without giving away any spoilers, The Clockmaker’s Daughter follows the modern-day story of Elodie, an archivist who lives in the shadow of her late mother, a famous cellist. After Elodie discovers a leather satchel at work containing a sketchbook from the Victorian painter Edward Radcliffe, she becomes deeply engrossed in its origins, in particular, one sketch of a country house that reminds her almost frighteningly of a tale that her mother told her as a girl. Another drawing that captures Elodie’s imagination is a portrait of a beautiful unnamed woman adorned with the Radcliffe Blue, a spectacular necklace that went missing more than a century ago in an apparent heist and murder.
Unable to let go of the unsettling sense of familiarity around the sketchbook’s contents, Elodie travels to Birchwood Manor, an estate located on the banks of the Upper Thames, to see if she can uncover its mystery and connection to her deceased mother. Her story intersects with that of the book’s titular 19th
century ghost, a charming pickpocket who falls in love with Radcliffe, and who introduces into the plot an entire cast of characters who spent time at the haunted manor.
Morton, who grew up in South Australia before moving to London to study drama at Trinity College in London, was raised with an appreciation of the past. Her mother was an antique dealer, and Morton is still drawn to “strange, beautiful, and intriguing” vintage objects.
“I love history and I love old things, but most of all — I mean you can tell this from my books — I love the tethering of the past to the present,” she says. “Objects, like buildings, are really great signifiers of that link because they travelled time. Antiques are such a great example of an object that we can hold in the here and now, and know that it has had all of these different lives and experiences before it reached our hands.”
Morton admits she has a bit of a “melancholy bent,” and that often she puts her characters through some sort of major loss. But for The Clockmaker’s Daughter, she wanted to infuse what could have been a very dark plot with more light; a ritual she is trying to institute in her own life.
“I started making a conscious effort every day to see tiny moments of beauty, even if it is a hinge on a door or the way the sunset looks, whatever the case. That filtered its way into the book as well,” she says.
“My hope is that the journey through The Clockmaker’s Daughter is one of resilience because the characters, through the help of the house, are able to find some kind of light or beauty in the darkness.”