Page 66 of The Clockmaker's Cottage
There was even a grainy photograph, showing a man in a waistcoat. He was perhaps in his early thirties, with dark hair and tired eyes. The caption read: ‘Andrew Wetherby, apprentice to the Vale Brothers, circa 1965’.
She kept scrolling. Near the bottom of the page, a paragraph caught her eye:
Following his release, Wetherby self-published a memoir claiming to reveal the secrets behind the brothers’ most mysterious commission and what really happened inside their workshop. However, circulation was short-lived as the Vale family successfully petitioned for its withdrawal, and remaining copies are believed to have been destroyed. A few, it’s rumoured, still exist in private collections.
Pippa blinked and her gaze shifted to the book lying on the duvet beside her.
Sothiswas that actual book… one of the few survivors.
She opened it again and flicked through the yellowed pages. The preface, written in careful, formal prose, started with a line that suddenly seemed a lot more significant now she knew the context:‘History, as told by those with power, often forgets the hands that built it.’
Pippa turned the page, her pulse quickening, wondering if Sebastian had got his hands on this book. Was that anything to do with his outburst today?
The first sentence hooked her right in.
I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, though truth, as I learned, can be dismantled as easily as a clock.
By page three, she was propped up against the headboard, duvet pulled to her chin. Wetherby’s prose was rambling but vivid, as if he was dictating the whole thing from a bar stool, pint in hand. It was like stumbling into one of those cosy BBC4 documentaries narrated by a man who sounds like he’s been reading bedtime stories his whole life, except this one had all the juicy details left in.
Pippa could picture Andrew working with the brothers in their first workshop: a low-ceilinged barn with sunlight slanting through dusty windows, workbenches scattered with cogs and springs, the air thick with oil and polish, the smell softened by the faint sweetness of cut wood. Wetherby set the scene vividly, explaining that each brother had his own right-hand man, supported by a small team of five workers who built the clocks in the workshop. Andrew Wetherby described himself as Horace’s apprentice, while Arthur Blake– Theo’s grandfather– was Walter’s principal apprentice.
Walter, Wetherby wrote, was ‘an approachable genius engineer’. He made time for each worker, remembered whose sister was ill, who’d just had a baby, who was saving up for a house. He’d bring tea to the workroom, happily taste-test someone’s wife’s lopsided sponge cake, and make sure no one left without their wages in hand.
Walter was the doer, the engineer. He lived for the mechanical heartbeat of a clock. His team was the one in the workshop, machining cogs, cutting pinions, and assembling the intricate skeletons of the Vale timepieces. He could build a verge escapement blindfolded, knew by touch alone when a spring was too tight or a wheel was off by a hair’s breadth. ‘Walter built the bones,’ Wetherby wrote.
Horace, however, was another matter entirely. Where Walter was genial, Horace was driven. He moved to London and took Wetherby with him, setting up a workshop in Clerkenwell, just off St John Street, in the very heart of Britain’s clockmaking trade. If Walter’s world was oil, brass, and the aroma of sawdust, Horace’s was polish and precision; a place where design met ambition.
He preferred to work upstairs in the design room overlooking the street. Everything had its place: clean hands, clean paper, ruler and compass always within reach. His desk was lined with sketches of ornate clock faces, intricate cases, and theoretical blueprints that looked more like art than machinery. While Walter’s men built and repaired, Horace and Wetherby designed, imagined, and refined. Wetherby wrote, ‘Where Walter heard the tick, Horace saw the face.’
Horace didn’t just want to make clocks. He wanted to define them. To have his name uttered in the same breath as Harrison and Breguet, men who had bent time itself to their will. ‘Horace wanted to be the man who outlived himself,’ Wetherby continued, ‘in brass, steel, and reputation.’
Walter, for all his talent, was content with the craft. Horace wanted immortality.
And that, Wetherby suggested, was where the cracks first began to show.
Then came Agatha.
Pippa felt a prickle of intrigue. Everyone who knew anything about clocks also knew the name Agatha Vale, the dedicated wife of Walter Vale who most probably was the glue that held the brothers’ partnership together.
In Wetherby’s book, she sprang to life: a woman who moved between Puffin Island and London with a kind of effortless competence, ferrying the designs. Wetherby explained that Agatha was the go-between because the brothers feared their post might be tampered with.
Pippa Googled Agatha. The first image that came up was Agatha and Walter standing outside Clockmaker’s Cottage. The second was her sitting alone at the desk in the snug of the cottage.
Pippa returned to the book and turned the page eagerly.
Then, just when she was fully lost in the rhythm of the thing, came the sentence that set her pulse thudding.
One morning, Blake and I were summoned to Clockmaker’s Cottage. Agatha was also there. We had no clue why.
Pippa’s eyes darted to the pocket watch on her bedside table. It was just past midnight and, though she was tired, she couldn’t put the book down. She pulled the duvet tighter around her and kept reading, the gentle tick of the pocket watch the only interruption to the silence that had descended on the cottage.
Wetherby set the scene.
Horace and I swept in over the causeway by taxi, having arrived on the overnight steamer from the design office in London. Horace had been unusually quiet on the train journey and didn’t let slip why we suddenly had to undertake this trip to Puffin Island. Arthur and I were standing in the living room with our hands jammed in our pockets, fearing the worst– that the Vale Brothers were about to terminate our contracts. I had two young boys and a wife, and I didn’t want to be returning home without a job.
Horace, Walter, and Agatha had disappeared into the kitchen, so Blake and I whispered theories about why we were there. Some wild, some plausible. He claimed we were about to be sacked. I swore it was an announcement about a revolutionary escapement design that would change timekeeping forever… or possibly a royal commission.
Pippa checked her pocket watch again. 12.20 a.m.
