Sebastian scoffed. ‘That wasn’t noble; it was idiotic.’
‘What is up with you?’ she whispered. ‘Why are you so angry? This is a moment in history. Enjoy it.’
Someone shushed them from behind and Pippa quickly apologised, but Sebastian leaned in, his voice pitched low, meant only for her ears.
‘Theo might think this is some fairytale reunion,’ he said, ‘but I know different. I know what happened and the only reason I’m here is to make sure Horace Vale tells the truth before it’s too late.’
Pete, whom she’d met in the bookshop, was sitting a row behind her and touched Pippa on her shoulder. ‘Is everything okay?’
She nodded before turning back towards Sebastian.
‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Pippa whispered irritably.
Sebastian didn’t answer, he just looked straight ahead, and the ticking excitement of the afternoon turned into a countdown she feared was ending soon.
ChapterEight
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.’
