Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Everyone else was utterly spellbound, drinking in Horace Vale’s every word, but Pippa’s head was stuck somewhere else entirely.
Sebastian’s whisper kept looping round her brain like an annoying jingle.
Was he just stirring the pot for the fun of it, or did he actually know something?
And if he did … how on earth did he know it?
‘So,’ Theo began, ‘Horace, let’s talk about your obsession with time. When did it all start?’
Horace propped up his cane at the side of his chair. ‘It’s not time I was obsessed with, not really. At least, not in the way people assume. It was the certainty of it. The rhythm. The structure. You see, I grew up in a household where nothing was ever on time.’
A soft chuckle ran through the crowd.
‘We grew up right here on Puffin Island,’ Horace continued, leaning back into his chair.
‘Clockmaker’s Cottage was our family home, though it was Walter who later stayed on and made it his own.
He married Agatha Turner, who had grown up just across the way at Puffin Island Farm where her family ran the dairy.
Our very first workshop was actually in one of their old barns.
We started small, with more cows peering in through the windows than customers, but that’s another story.
’ Horace gave a mischievous glance at Theo.
‘Walter, younger than me by two years, was always the home bird. Never happier than with his hands in the soil, or at his bench, or with Agatha by his side. Me?’ He tapped his chest. ‘I was the one itching to see what lay beyond Blue Water Bay. Always scribbling letters to suppliers in London, dreaming of Pall Mall shop fronts and pocket watches displayed in glass cabinets.’
He paused, leaning towards the microphone with a conspiratorial twinkle. ‘But the reason the fascination with clocks began was a little less glamorous than all that.’
The room hushed again.
‘My father was a fisherman,’ Horace continued, ‘and my mother ran a tiny post office from the front room of our cottage. Between the tides and the postal lorries, everything in our lives ran on what you might call “Island Time”, which is to say, you never knew if dinner would be at five … or ten past midnight.’ The audience laughed.
Horace’s expression softened. ‘Then, one day when I was about nine, a man came to our door with a box. Inside was an old mantel clock my uncle had sent my mother from Paris for her birthday. It was chipped, dusty, and didn’t work, but I thought it was magic.
I remember turning it over in my hands and thinking: inside here is a world of cogs and gears just waiting to wake up again. ’
He shook his head at the memory. ‘Walter told me I’d probably break it before I fixed it, but Agatha said if I got it working, she’d let me borrow her best fountain pen for a week, and that was it.
A wager, a broken clock, and a boy who’d rather miss supper than miss the chance to find out how a tick became a tock. ’
Pippa felt a warmth through her chest at the way Horace described falling in love, not with a person, but with the thing that shaped his life forever.
‘That Paris clock became our teacher. Walter, of course, insisted on doing everything properly – measuring every tooth of every gear, polishing until the brass gleamed. I, on the other hand, couldn’t wait to prise it open and poke about inside.
’ He spread his hands in mock innocence.
‘I got in terrible trouble with my mother for scattering half the mechanism across the kitchen floor. She swore she found screws in the sugar tin for weeks afterwards.’
The audience was hanging on to every word.
‘But between Walter’s steady hand and my, shall we say, restless curiosity, we managed to coax it back to life.
The tick echoed through the cottage like a heartbeat.
I don’t think either of us slept that night; we lay awake just listening to it in our shared room.
That was the beginning. From that day on, time wasn’t just something that happened to us, it was something we could shape, mend, and even improve.
’ The words struck a chord with Pippa, and she made a quiet vow to get her mother’s old pocket watch working again.
He gave a small, affectionate smile. ‘Walter had the patience of a saint. He could file a balance spring for hours until it was perfect. I had … rather less patience, but a flair for seeing how things might be redesigned, improved, made beautiful. I was the designer of the clocks, Walter the engineer, and between the two of us, we were quite the pair.’ For a second, Horace’s voice faltered and he looked visibly upset, but he composed himself quickly.
‘He kept my wild ideas tethered to reality, and I stopped his precision from becoming too plain. We were two halves of a whole, people used to say.’
He let that hang in the air for a moment, his expression shifting just slightly, a glimmer of something unspoken flickering again behind his eyes.
‘Of course,’ he said briskly, clearing his throat, ‘no partnership is without its storms. But in those early days, in that draughty barn with the cows lowing and the sea wind rattling the shutters, it felt as though the world itself was winding up before us, ready to begin.’
The audience sighed with pleasure, caught in the spell of his storytelling.
Pippa felt her heart swell. This wasn’t just history; it was theatre, romance, tragedy, and triumph all woven into the tale of a broken clock from Paris. She stole a glance at Theo. He was leaning forward, utterly enthralled by Horace’s story.
‘How long did it take to fix the clock from Paris?’ asked Theo.
‘It took me three weeks and one cut thumb. But when that little clock ticked again, I remember thinking: finally, something in this house does what it says it will.’
The crowd laughed, and Pippa could see why this man had a beautiful relationship with time, not just as a science, but because it satisfied his need for order in chaos.
Horace’s voice softened. ‘That clock was the start of our story, and as soon as we left school, we decided that was exactly what we were going to do. Truth be told, we had a handful of options: become fishermen like our father, take turns behind the counter at the post office, lend a hand on Agatha’s family farm …
or pretend we knew everything about clocks. ’
Everyone was listening intently.
‘Our fate, as it turned out, was sealed one stormy night. I had just returned from university, which was a very different experience than it is today. Back then, it was mostly reserved for the privileged. My parents had sacrificed everything to send me: my father worked long, gruelling hours as a fisherman, and my mother ran the post office from dawn till dusk, often giving up her own rest just to make ends meet. They couldn’t have afforded to send both me and Walter, but luckily Walter was a homebird, and he had no desire to leave the island.
Instead he worked on the farm, fixing everything mechanical.
‘The storm was so fierce it rattled the windows clean out of their frames. Lightning struck the island’s clock tower – the very one everyone depended on to know the tides, or when the causeway was safe, or even when to get the bread in the oven. Suddenly, the heartbeat of the island was silent.’
The audience, too, was silent.
‘I volunteered us – Walter and me – to put it right. Walter wasn’t entirely thrilled by my bravery on his behalf, but he came all the same.
We worked through the night, the rain pouring through the broken roof, our lanterns flickering with every gust. I remember thinking, “If the tower doesn’t fall on us, Mother will, when she realises we’ve ruined our boots and coats.
” But somehow, by morning, we’d coaxed that old clock back to life.
Its first chime after the storm… Ah, it felt like the whole island was breathing again. ’
He paused, smiling fondly.
‘After that, people stopped asking if we wanted to be fishermen or postmasters. We had our answer. We hired out the draughty old barn from Agatha’s father, moved in a workbench and some second-hand tools, and began designing and making clocks and watches.
Our name – the Vale Brothers – started to spread, and soon my mother was persuaded to shift the post office across the harbour so we could turn her front room into our first official shop.
She complained for years that she now had to walk to work instead of just walking down the stairs, but she was secretly proud. ’
Theo asked a question everyone was waiting to hear the answer to. ‘Can you tell us a little about your partnership with Walter?’
Horace gave a brief nod, but Pippa noticed the way his fingers tightened on the arm of his chair.
‘We worked together on inventions, new pieces. Walter was content with the work,’ he began, his voice softer now.
‘He wanted to be hands-on, turning screws, filing springs, fitting cases with his own two hands. I, well … I was the business design brain. We complemented each other beautifully for a long time … until we didn’t. ’
The room hushed, leaning in to find out the secret behind the Vale Brothers’ split.
‘We had different ways of doing things,’ Horace admitted. ‘I wanted scale. Mass production. London was calling, streets lined with jewellers, money changing hands faster than you could wind a mainspring. To me, that was progress. Opportunity. A future we could build on.’
He glanced down briefly. ‘But Walter … Walter had Agatha, and he had Puffin Island, and this place was in his veins. He didn’t want change.
He didn’t need it. His happiness was right there in the cottage, in the barn, in every clock he could make polish until it gleamed.
And I … I couldn’t blame him. Not really. ’
A faint sigh rippled through the hall.