What the Clocks Know

by Rumer Haven

  It was also from that night onwards that Mama was all the more determined to make a lady of me yet.

  Whilst I considered it distasteful even then as a child, she once consulted a chiromancer with whom she had become acquainted in the parlor of one of her garish friends—she had employed him to trace along the lines of my palm and speak of my future. Instead, he spoke of my past. Greedily eyeing the additional sixpence Mama withdrew from her pouch, it is a wonder he found opportunity to look away and read what he did on my hand. Nonetheless, what he revealed was that, in a former life, I had, in fact, been male.

  “Of peasant stock,” he said. “Eighteenth-century France.” I had evidently rejoiced in the jubilation to follow the storming of the Bastille prison and partaken in evil revelry, debauching myself on wine and whores, only for the “toffer” I would covet one day to cost me my head.

  I snatched my tiny palm away at once; I was astounded Mama had allowed him to utter such vile words in our presence. How indeed was that intended to advance my instruction on becoming a lady?

  Needless to say, Mama sent me away directly for my insolence and thereafter strove that much harder to overcome an unruly, masculine, and impoverished “past” and groom me into something more feminine and genteel. As my formative years slipped by, she ran a hairbrush through every errant fiber of my being, smoothing and glossing my curious, innocently wicked ways into straighter posture, whiter gloves, quieter words (lest they be spoken at all), then plaited them into the web-work of her grand designs for my “future.”

  I suppose I ought to be grateful for the careful attention she paid my education. Her father had been a learned man and read with her in candlelit hours after her mother’s lessons concluded. It was when Mama spied me clutching an oiled scrap of newspaper with my nose almost certainly imprinting itself with its ink—so buried it was in this unexpected treasure—that she did perceive in part what shifted my gears from within. The scrap, you see, had been wrapped around butter newly purchased at market, and on peeling it off, I had liberated poetry into the light.

  From then on, I was mesmerized and nourished soulfully by my maternal grandfather’s little library, bestowed unto Mama on his passing prior to my birth. Mama had, alas, lost her use for such beauty as means of ascending to higher social ground. So it was that I, in delving through these dusty archives, found my heart in earlier voices, most notably that of Wordsworth.

  Ah! How Wordsworth has allowed me to dance with the daffodils, if only in mind amidst those low tides of emotion, which otherwise dry my spirit in their ebb and leave me barren, unfruitful.

  Unworthy. A specter in my own home, flitting listlessly to scarcely rustle the curtains, let alone anyone’s notice.

  But to return my tale to its proper chronology, my training under Mama compensated just enough for my lack of breeding so as to make myself presentable amongst society. At one particular fancy dress occasion, I managed to capture the eye of a certain gentleman of means; indeed, he was the son of a judge and had himself studied to become a barrister only to pursue business in the law’s stead. Always diligent and apt with regard to whatever he pursued, he possessed in his heart, although few realized it, a suppressed penchant for the visual arts—a proclivity that attracted him to the notion of one day becoming a patron. Whatever vision I supposed I was to his eye, so he was to my heart when during the quadrille I heard him speak the poetry of my mind through strokes and shading, colors that swirled in my fancies like the champagne tickling my thoughts. His waltz sent me reeling in a heady whirl.

  Our wedding was an intimate occasion, as I had not so many to attend on my side, and he—well, his side had not so many to attend the nuptials of one condescending to marry beneath him, or so I was put upon to understand. Yet Mama was in raptures, naturally, and Papa…Papa bestowed his blessings from above, God rest his soul, having lost to the cholera so long ago.

  My being provided for relieved an immense burden from Mama’s breast, yet a lingering regret gnawed at her intestines—a frustration that she had not procured from Papa the precise whereabouts of the inheritance she was so certain he did acquire through his legal tribulations, and likely kept hidden away in order to keep us meek.

  Indeed, Mama deceived no one but herself in this, but still she participated in séances whenever she could in order to divine the truth, dragging me along into my twentieth year and beyond under the assumption that my precocious, sometimes nervous temperament would attract Papa’s spirit to our table.

  Ah, but I shall speak more on this presently.

  Chapter 3

  Old World, New World

  21st-Century London

  IT WAS LATE MAY when Margot first set foot on United Kingdom soil. Her program didn’t start until the first week of June, but she wanted to acclimate and explore before studies took up her days. Rand—more poshly known as Randolph Wyndham III—would be leaving on an extended business trip to the Continent, so Margot could enjoy the place to herself the first couple of weeks. Enjoy being the operative word, as she was determined to snap out of her funk once and for all.

  After trudging through Immigration, she spotted her new flatmate among the crowd holding up signs with passenger names. Sight of all others fell away as pressure mounted on her chest.

  The long-talked-about situation was finally coming to pass, and, fact was, they hadn’t seen each other in well over two years and had only worked together. For as casually as Margot had played it off around her friends and family, bunking up with Rand would definitely be weird, at least at first. And she had to brace herself for the fact that his girlfriend Gwen might not be so cool about the living arrangement after all.

  Margot dropped her gaze and bit her lip with a nervous giggle as she gripped her suitcase handle tighter. Her steps faltered, but on locking eyes on Rand’s again, she felt a chord in her stomach pull her toward him as fast as those suitcase wheels would roll.

  “’Allo, guvna!”

  “Greetings and salutations, miss,” he said with a graceful bow. Rand had always been a gentleman. With no prompting, he’d stated his plans to meet Margot at Heathrow as though a matter of course and not the generous, out-of-the-way favor it really was.

  Her nerves melted away at his familiar lean frame and dancing eyes. He’d always had that good-humored magnetism about him, yet he was even more handsome than she remembered. His full, wavy chestnut hair had grown out, and he looked dashing in a well-tailored dress shirt and slim trousers. And there was no contest against his smile. It wasn’t the bleached-white and capped American grin of false promises, but a natural and slightly asymmetrical one that seemed to earnestly believe in keeping calm and carrying on.

  Once she set her bags down, Margot beamed at him with arms outspread. “It’s been so long! I could hug the dickens out of ya!”

  “The Charles Dickens, mind. You’re in London now, Yankee.” He grinned. “And you damn well shall hug me.”

  Margot could have stood in the welcome comfort of his arms for ages, feeling silly for her nerves just moments ago, but she made herself break away.

  “This is surreal. I haven’t seen you in almost three years, and here I am shacking up with you.”

  “Don’t let Gwen hear you put it that way.” He laughed.

  Ah. Just what she’d thought. “Seriously, though, Rand. You’re so nice to do this.” She widened her eyes in full puppy-dog adoration of her former mentor.

  “Well, it’s about bloody time you took me up on my offer to host you here.”

  Margot just stood exchanging smiles with him, elated to be reunited and wondering why she’d ever let life and its busy-ness keep them apart until now. She was going to enjoy herself here; she just knew it.

  “Let me take your cases,” he said. “I’ve hired a car, as the Tube’s novelty will wear off soon enough.”

  A half-hour commute delivered them to his door. The Victorian building was one of a cluster of identical terraced houses forming the perimeter of a square. Spherical to
piary bushes and flowers bloomed from nearly every sill, boasting the local penchant for nature. An old Anglican church stood just right of center, and across from that was a gated garden.

  She’d barely been in the country an hour, and it was already so true to what she’d expected from countless film versions of A Christmas Carol, right down to the charming period banister that held her hand up the stairs to Rand’s flat. From the moment she felt its polished wood, a new energy surged through her, and she felt at home.

  “Some of these old stairwells have been retrofitted for lifts,” Rand said as they rounded their way up the flights, “but hopefully you don’t mind some old-fashioned exercise.” With a smile, he opened the door to his unit and gestured, After you.

  The grand tour took all of two minutes. The flat wasn’t so small by London standards, but she was daunted by the tight space of her new bedroom, where Rand first ushered her to park her luggage. The little armoire in there would accommodate the few bags she’d packed fine enough, but she couldn’t fathom actually living here with all of her clothes. There was no built-in closet, and the room barely fit the bed, let alone the wardrobe and desk. Rand explained that this was probably a dressing room originally, given that the Victorian master bedroom would have occupied his entire living room and open-plan kitchen. So, what he now considered the master bedroom—his room—would’ve been only a secondary one. The flat upstairs would’ve been the children’s or servants’ quarters, and the two flats below were once the drawing, morning, and dining rooms, with the kitchen being all the way down in what was now the garden flat.

  Though Rand’s unit was only one floor of what used to be a multi-story house, he had his own little set of stairs at the end of his hall, leading to the flat’s only bathroom.

  “I suspect it was once part of a servant’s stairwell,” he said, with the original “bathroom” probably just a hipbath in one of the bedrooms before there was plumbing. That was the best explanation, anyway, for the bathroom’s sunken layout and spaciousness.

  Margot glimpsed out the large window above the bathtub and saw a group of backyards. Fenced off by brick walls, they opened up to the overcast sky. “So that’s why they’re called garden flats,” she aha-ed. “In Chicago, garden apartment just means ‘dark subterranean bunker with no patio or sign of life beyond rodents.’”

  Suddenly desperate to use the bathroom for its modern purpose, she politely excused Rand’s presence. Once she’d figured out how to flush with one of the two buttons on the wall, she stood at the sink to wash her hands and glanced out the small window beside it. All she saw at first was a brick wall where the back rooms of the house next door jutted out in the same way, probably also a former stairwell. But stepping closer to examine the recessed wall between these rear extensions, she noticed an upstairs window…

  …just as the grayish outline of a profile came into view. A woman, seemingly. She appeared distressed, raising her hands to her face to sob into them.

  Margot looked away, ashamed of catching such a private moment.

  In this short time, a pressure also began to weigh on her eye, and a glowing in her sight intensified. She sensed the stress of travel, dehydration, and sleep deprivation was probably bringing on a migraine, which loved to announce its arrival with a little squiggle warping her sight. Locating a bottle of ibuprofen tablets beneath the counter, she popped a couple to avoid the nauseating headache that would follow.

  Back upstairs, she found Rand standing in his kitchen at the counter. “Hey, fella. I think I’m gonna lie down for a bit, if that’s okay.”

  “Certainly, my dear. My home is now yours, so do whatever, whenever.”

  His warm grin liquefied her heart with such a reassuring sense of home. “You’re the best. I promise not to get in your way.”

  “You needn’t worry about that.” His pale blue eyes softened as he added almost shyly, “Please do get in my way.”

  Margot returned his sweet smile until her distorted vision blurred it away. Time to rest.

  Moving her biggest suitcase from the bed to the floor with a whump, she hopped onto the mattress and sighed at the trees and church roof spanning her room’s view. The grand steeple loomed larger than the migraine squiggle in her sight, and she grinded the tall sash window upward to poke her head out. Mansard rooftops lined the square. With their dormer windows and chimneystacks, Margot could imagine Dick Van Dyke and his troop of chimney sweeps leaping and twirling atop them all.

  But then a gust of cool air made her yawn, so she crept back inside. Swinging her bedroom door shut, it lost momentum just before catching in the lock. Slowly, it creaked back open.

  Rand had said the old place was “a bit wonky,” so she gave the door a firmer push and got it to lock in place before returning to the bed. She crawled beneath the duvet and relished those initial seconds of shivers before her body heat warmed the covers. Her eyelids lowered over the steeple and Mary Poppins roofs behind it.

  I can’t believe I’m really here. England. Europe. Not-United States. Sleeping in a room from the 1800s. The people who lived in this house over a hundred years ago would’ve seen exactly the same view from here. Unreal.

  With a dull eyebrow headache, she drifted off.

  May 25

  Having a hard time getting started here. Dear Diary-ing my merry way through Jolly Old England should be more interesting than my usual day to day, but so far I’m still adjusting to jet-lag and sleeping in a lot, feeling like the only loser in London without a reason to get up and ready by a respectable hour. I should be taking more advantage of these free days. Thank God Rand’s not here to see my sloth. The rainy weather doesn’t help either.

  His location is awesome, though. It’s near the Tube, pubs, and cafés galore, which should raise my spirits before long. I’m at least managing to get myself out to a religious debate, of all things, tonight at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Random, but I stumbled on it looking up opening hours online—the topic is the nature of the soul in relation to our identity. That deep thought said, gotta go so my arse can get a seat.

  May 27

  The St. Paul’s debate the other night was great. The panel spoke from both theological and scientific perspectives. Amazing to listen to while admiring the inside of that massive dome and all the intricate mosaics, sculptures, and paintings. A surreal kind of solitude even in a room filled with people. The intellectual, the faithful, the curious.

  Yesterday, I pretty much just wandered around the local neighborhoods and got lost. First stumbled on a cool old cemetery—Brompton, one of London’s “Magnificent Seven.” It’s huge and so serene, definitely my fave place so far. Then I cut through streets and squares that all looked like Rand’s until I happened upon Kensington Gardens, where I sat and watched kids playing football (soccer) and amazingly disciplined British dogs running around without leads (leashes) or even barking. From there, I found myself among the shops of a few high (main) streets that all looked alike and didn’t help me find my way. I walked in circles past sundown, which here is pretty late, but in the black, rainy night, the Daunt Books store glowed orange like a beacon, so I warmed and dried there for a bit before making a thank-you purchase—ye olde ghost story!—and meandering back to the flat. I did find it.

  Today, I ventured farther central via the Underground (subway) and crossed Westminster Bridge to walk along the South Bank. Perfect views of Parliament, Big Ben, Globe Theatre, and Tower Bridge (which, it turns out, is not London Bridge!). After some lunch at Borough Market, I crossed the Thames again to get a closer view of the Tower of London. From there, I successfully lost myself in the business district but looked to St. Paul’s dome as my guide.

  (Dream Entry—May 30)

  I laid in paralysis so long, senses dulled as I treaded below the water’s surface, looking up to see the pool of light above—was there a woman who wept at its center?? The one from the window?—but I kept sinking toward what was cool and black, warping my vision and clogging my ears a water-logged
cadaver tangled in weeds where no one could see or hear me. That’s what it felt like, not what happened, nothing really happened, just isolation and smothering stillness.

  June 2

  Just been lying around the last couple of days, not motivated whatsoever. For all my efforts to keep busy before, never realized how not having a schedule could throw me so off. I’d hoped new scenery would ward off old baggage, but now I’m afraid that for all this supposedly good change, I might’ve detoured myself into a dead end. For the first time, being alone is making me lonely. Can’t wait for Rand to return. In the meantime, nothing a little wine doesn’t fix.

  A few days ago, I did make a couple of side-trips outside of the city. First, Stratford-upon-Avon, which is darling. I saw Shakespeare’s home and where he’s buried at Trinity Church, then walked along the River Avon and back around to a museum with wax figures recreating S-u-A’s morbid history of plague, civil war, and murder. Ended up buying an evening ticket, too, that entitled me to a ghost tour (mwa-ha-ha!), which I’d assumed would be out and about town but was actually in the museum itself. Our group was led by lantern light into pitch-black darkness, so thank God I’d already toured the exhibits during the day or those wax people would’ve made me crap my pants in the shadows.

  Anyway, we learned about specific deaths that had happened in that very space: suicide at the noose of a rope, murder on the stairs, death from war wounds on a makeshift hospital bed, decay from contagious disease, etc.—and naturally everyone’s spirits have remained behind. Just as I was mentally bidding the tortured souls farewell, my eardrum seemed to blow in as a response. Not that my overactive sinuses would’ve had anything to do with that, of course… Seriously, my ears keep popping as if I’m underwater all the time lately. Different climate here. Very damp.