Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
Pippa lay curled under the duvet. The bedside lamp cast a soft yellow glow across the room, picking out the faint steam curling from her mug of tea on the small table next to the bed.
The book she’d bought from The Story Shop, The Real Inside Story of the Vale Brothers, , rested open across her lap and she was just about to start reading.
The house was silent. Theo’s door hadn’t opened once since he’d disappeared upstairs.
She took a slow sip of her tea and thought about the conversation with Rose earlier, whispering into the phone in the living room with the door slightly ajar in case there had been any movement from upstairs. Rose had picked up on the first ring.
‘What fine mess have you got yourself into this time?’
Pippa had told her. About the restaurant, about Sebastian, about the absolute car crash of the conversation that followed.
Rose hadn’t held back. ‘I never liked him,’ she’d declared.
‘That man could charm the paint off a wall if it got him what he wanted. I told you years ago, he’s all ego and ambition, and didn’t I say he had an unhealthy obsession with Theo?
I told you to have a conversation with Theo back then and if you had…
’ Rose had paused. ‘Maybe you would be getting married under a clock tower!’ she’d teased.
‘I know,’ Pippa had admitted. ‘But Sebastian made me feel like I had earned my place at Cambridge.’
‘He manipulated you,’ Rose had corrected her. ‘Now he’s taken Theo’s wife? So that unhealthy whatever-it-is is still festering. Have you any idea why he hates him so much?’
‘No,’ Pippa had replied. ‘He’s never said anything to me.’ Pippa had shared the details of Sebastian’s outburst during the Horace Vale interview, filling in the blanks of what Rose had seen reported online.
‘Whatever Sebastian’s gripe is, I don’t think he’ll sit on it much longer. It seems like it is going to erupt any time now, and with the three of you being rained in on the island, it could be sooner rather than later.’
After they’d hung up, Pippa had sat in bed for ten minutes, replaying the night in her head.
How good it had been, how easy it was being in Theo’s company – him teasing her about her overexcited reaction to seafood; the quiet warmth between them after he’d opened up about Clara.
Then, in one smug, perfectly timed bombshell, Sebastian had blown it all to hell.
There was nothing she could do about it now, so, trying to distract herself, Pippa picked up the book and looked at the cover, then Googled A. Wetherby.
Of course there were many articles about him being the Vales’ apprentice, but she was most interested in the link at the top of the search to an article from 1965 titled ‘Clockmaker’s Apprentice Convicted of Theft’.
The piece was short, but it included all the key points.
Andrew Wetherby, apprentice to Horace and Walter Vale, had been prosecuted for stealing several items from the brothers’ workshop on Puffin Island – most notably, a prototype watch the brothers had supposedly been developing in secret for a private client.
No details of the project itself were given, but the tone was sensational, hinting at scandal.
Pippa scrolled further and discovered that the prototype watch had never been recovered.
According to the article, Wetherby had always protested his innocence, claiming he’d been framed, but the evidence found in his home – tools, gears, and sketches matching the Vales’ designs – had been enough for a conviction.
Pippa had been aware of the allegations against the apprentice, but the scandal had slipped from her memory over the years.
She tapped through to another link: a small write-up from a local heritage site. It filled in more of the story.
After the trial, Wetherby’s life had fallen apart. His wife had filed for divorce and left the area with their two young sons. The article said she’d been ‘ostracised by the village community’ and forced to start over somewhere else.
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.
So this was 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.