The Curious Case of the Clocktower Cuckoo: The Beekeepers Secret

The bees found Wren first.

She was crossing the meadow behind the churchyard, boots damp with the previous night's rain, when the sound reached her: a low, contented hum drifting from the hawthorn hedge at the field's far edge. The morning mist had not yet burned off, and the shapes of the hives, pale wooden boxes arranged in a neat row beside an old stone wall, seemed to float above the grass. From a distance, they could have been coffins waiting for names.

Wren slowed her pace. Her grandfather's pocket watch, the one she wore on a leather cord around her neck, ticked softly against her collarbone. She pressed her thumb to its warm face, feeling the steady pulse beneath the glass, and turned her attention to the figure kneeling among the hives.

Otis Penny looked up at her approach. His face, already pink from exertion, flushed a deeper shade. He rose too quickly, knocked his knee against a hive stand, and clutched a smoker as though it were a small, smoldering child.

"Miss Calloway," he said. "I didn't, that is, I wasn't certain you'd, um, accept."

"You wrote 'urgent' on the envelope," Wren said. "Three times. In different colors."

"Ah. Yes. I did." He tucked the smoker beneath one arm and brushed his hands against his trousers, leaving pale streaks of wax on the fabric. "I do apologize for the, the theatricality of it. But this seemed rather important, and I, well, I wasn't sure who else to, to tell."

The hives surrounded them in a loose semicircle, their entrances alive with bees coming and going in golden threads of motion. The scent hung heavy in the cool morning: honey and propolis and something faintly medicinal, the way a doctor's waiting room smells before anyone has been called in. Wren breathed it in and felt her shoulders drop, just slightly, from where they had been climbing toward her ears.

"Tell me what?"

Otis glanced toward the lane, then back at Wren, then at the hives, then at Wren again. His Adam's apple bobbed. "Inside," he said. "I have tea. And, um, the journal."

He led her to a small wooden she'd tucked behind the hives. Inside it smelled of old newspapers and woodsmoke. A kettle sat on a camping stove, already steaming. Otis gestured toward a folding chair draped with a knitted blanket, then busied himself with two enamel mugs, clattering them together as he poured.

"The journal belonged to my grandfather," he said, without turning around. "Edmund Penny. He was a beekeeper before me. Kept his colonies here, same as I do. Died in the spring of 1984."

Wren sat. The chair was softer than it looked. "1984," she repeated. "The same year the clock stopped."

"The very same." Otis turned, both mugs in hand, and crossed to her. He set hers down on a stack of seed catalogues with exaggerated care. His fingers, Wren noticed, were trembling. "He left me the hives. He left me the cottage. And he left me this."

From the inner pocket of his coat he produced a notebook bound in dark green cloth. It was slim, no thicker than a finger, and its edges were worn to a pale beige. He held it as though it might unfold into something larger, something with wings.

"It is written in code," he said.

Wren took it from him. The cloth was soft under her thumb, almost velvety with age. She turned it over. No title on the cover. No name. Just the green cloth and the smell of old paper.

"What kind of code?"

"I have been trying to, to decipher it, you see, on and off, for years. Since I was a boy, really. But I have made, um, only limited progress." Otis perched on an upturned crate across from her. His knees bounced faintly. "There are dates. There are names. And there is a phrase that repeats. Over and over. The clock stops again."

The words settled into the small space between them, mingling with the steam from the tea. Wren opened the notebook to a page near the middle. The handwriting inside was neat, the letters small and even, but arranged in no pattern she recognized. Words ran together. Some were reversed. Some were written in a mirror script that required tilting the page to read.

"Why me?" she asked.

Otis opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. "Because your grandfather, Arthur Calloway, he, um, he and Edmund were friends. Close friends. They corresponded. And in his final letter to me, Edmund wrote that if the clock stopped again, I should go to the keeper of the tower. That is you now, Miss Calloway. Whether either of us likes it or not."

The kettle behind him gave a small, final hiss. Neither of them moved.

"Show me," Wren said.

Otis took the notebook back with the careful reverence of a man handling a reliquary. He flipped several pages, his finger tracing down the coded lines, then stopped.

"Here," he said. "This passage. I have been working on it for, oh, twenty years, on and off, and I believe, I think, this part refers to someone who vanished."

The page he showed her contained a cluster of symbols that might have been letters. Beneath the cluster, in Edmund's neat hand, were three words written plainly, without code: THE BIRD WATCHER.

Wren looked up. "Bird watcher?"

"Edmund was a beekeeper," Otis said. "But he was also, um, a watcher of birds. As am I. It is something of a, a family preoccupation." He flushed again. "I keep a record of the cuckoos. Every spring. I note when they arrive, when they call, when they leave. It is a very English thing to do, I suppose. Rather harmless. But the cuckoo, Miss Calloway, the cuckoo has been behaving strangely. For weeks now. And Edmund wrote about a cuckoo, in this journal. Many times."

The she'd seemed to contract around them. Wren set down her tea, untouched, and leaned forward. The watch at her throat ticked its steady measure.

"What do you mean, strangely?"

Otis stood abruptly. His knee cracked against the crate. He paced the narrow aisle between the seed catalogues and a tower of empty honey jars, his shadow jumping on the wall as he passed the small window.

"The cuckoo in the churchyard," he said. "The one that sits in the old yew tree at the edge of the cemetery. Every spring for as long as I can remember, it has called at dawn. Four notes. Two in ascent, two in descent. Cuc-koo, cuc-koo. Standard. Textual. But three weeks ago, it stopped calling at dawn. It started calling at dusk. And the call itself has changed."

He stopped pacing and turned to face her. His eyes were bright, a little too bright.

"It calls only once now. A single note. And then it waits. And then it calls again. The same note. Over and over. Until the light fails. And then it goes silent until the next dusk."

Wren felt the familiar prickle at the back of her neck. The same sensation she had felt the night the clock stopped.

"Three weeks ago," she said slowly. "That was the night of the storm."

"Yes," Otis whispered. "The same night."

The bees outside offered their low commentary. Wren took the green notebook from where Otis had set it on the seed catalogues and turned again to the page marked THE BIRD WATCHER. Beneath those three plain words, in Edmund's coded script, was a single line of symbols followed by a date: 12 May 1984.

"My grandfather's letter arrived on the twelfth of May," she said. "The one informing me of his death."

"I know." Otis's voice had gone very quiet. "I have read it. In the parish records. Miss Pemberton let me see them, some years ago."

"Hattie Pemberton?"

"She and Edmund were acquainted. She is, um, the village historian. She knows everything. She remembers everything. She may, in fact, be the only person alive who knew both Edmund and Arthur."

The thought arrived unbidden: four friends, gathered now in Wren's mind like figures in a faded photograph. Arthur Calloway, the clocktower keeper. Edmund Penny, the beekeeper. A bird watcher, unnamed. And Hattie Pemberton, who knew them all.

"How did they know each other?" Wren asked. "The four of them. How did they come to be friends?"

Otis sank onto the crate again. He seemed smaller than when she had arrived, as though the telling had shrunk him.

"There was a fourth," he said. "A girl, I think. Or a young woman. Someone who, um, vanished. In 1984. And then again, I suppose, in some other sense, more recently. I do not have her name. Edmund was careful not to write it. But he wrote about her. Often. And he wrote that Arthur Calloway was the only person who could find her, if anyone could."

Wren turned the page. The code continued. But at the bottom of the next leaf, in plain English, was a sentence that made her breath catch.

IF THE CLOCK STOPS AGAIN, THE GIRL WILL RETURN.

She read it twice. Three times. Then she looked up at Otis, who was watching her with the anxious patience of a man who had waited twenty years to unburden himself.

"Mr. Penny," she said. "The clock stopped again. Three weeks ago. At midnight. And it has not run properly since."

Otis nodded. His hands had stopped trembling.

"Then," he said, "we have a great deal of work to do."

Outside, the morning mist had lifted. The hives stood in clean sunlight, their wooden faces warm to the touch. The bees continued their patient errands. And from somewhere beyond the churchyard wall, faint but unmistakable, came the single note of a cuckoo, calling once and falling silent, calling once and falling silent, as though it were waiting for an answer it had not yet learned to ask.

The archive room smelled of old paper and cold stone, and somewhere in the walls, a pipe ticked with a rhythm that almost, but not quite, matched the silenced clock overhead.

Otis lifted a sheet from the pile on the desk between them. It was thinner than the others, the edges browned and brittle, and when he laid it down, Wren saw that the handwriting here was different. Larger. Shakier. The pen strokes pressed so hard into the paper that Wren could feel the indentations with her fingertips, ridges like the veins on the back of an old man's hand.

"This is from the final entry," Otis said. "Bartholomew's last night. Um, the night he disappeared."

Wren leaned closer. The page was divided in two. On the left, in Edmund's careful hand, ran another column of the code. On the right, in the stranger's heavy scrawl, a sketch.

She had expected a diagram of gears, perhaps, or some schematic of the clock's inner workings. What she saw instead made her blink.

A bird. A cuckoo, unmistakably, perched on a tiny carved bracket. Its body was rounded, its beak open mid-call, its wing raised at a jaunty angle. But the artist had drawn something that should not have been visible in a wooden ornament: a seam running along the breast, curved like a smile, and beside it, in Edmund's notation, three letters and a number.

C.B.K.-3.

"He built it," Wren said. "Edmund. A mechanical cuckoo. With a hidden compartment inside."

Otis nodded, quick and jerky, like a bird itself. "Yes. A, a, a hobby of his, the entries say. Before the war, he had trained as a, um, a cabinetmaker, you see, and he made automata for a living, small ones, for collectors, and when he came back from France he could not bear to touch proper furniture again, but he could, he could manage birds. He set them in the clock. Three of them. And the third one, the one he called Cuckoo-3, or CBK-3, he fitted with a secret drawer. For letters. For, um, things one did not want a wife to find."

"Which wife?"

"I, I, I do not know. He did not say. Perhaps both."

Wren traced the seam in the sketch with her finger, not quite touching the paper. The compartment was small. The size of a folded letter, perhaps. Or a folded letter and something else, something flat and thin, something that had once fitted snug against the wood of a bird's belly and gone wherever the bird had gone.

"Where is it now?" she asked. "The cuckoo. CBK-3."

Otis's hands found each other in his lap and knotted. "That is the, the, the trouble."

He drew a breath that sounded like it traveled through several chambers of his chest before it reached the open air.

"Bartholomew saw it. On the night he disappeared. Um. Hattie told me, years later, when she had had a good deal of sherry at the heritage society Christmas do. She had been in the churchyard that evening, scattering seed for the, the, the robins, the way she does, and she saw Bartholomew on the tower stairs. He had a flashlight. He told her to go home. She said he looked, um, frightened. Excited. She could not decide which. He went up, and she went home, and in the morning he was gone."

Wren waited.

"She never saw the cuckoo again," Otis said. "None of us did. It had been there for years, and then it was not. Um. There were three birds in the clock, one for the first hour, one for the half, one for the last. When the clock stopped, none of them came out. When your grandfather restarted it, only two came. And Hattie said the third bracket was empty. Not damaged. Not broken. Just, just, just empty. As though the bird had flown."

The archive room was very quiet. The pipe in the wall had stopped ticking. Somewhere far below, in the bowels of the tower, a weight groaned on its rope, and the sound rose through the stone like a sleeper turning over.

"But," Otis said, and lifted a finger, and his voice, which had been trembling, steadied into something that was almost lecture-room formal, "there is one, one, one more thing. The journal does not say where Bartholomew went. But Edmund does. In the margins. And Edmund writes that the bird was not the only thing in the clock that had a secret. The clock itself, he says, has a, um, a chamber. Behind the face. Behind the painted sun. Edmund calls it the throat. He says Bartholomew knew how to open it."

Wren looked up at the ceiling, as though she might see through the floorboards and the joists and the lath and plaster, all the way up to the clock room, and through that, into the painted face of the clock itself, with its golden numerals and its blue sky and its single fat cloud and the great golden sun at the center, its mouth open in a perpetual frozen smile.

The throat.

"He went up to find it," she said slowly. "Bartholomew. On the night he disappeared. He went up to find whatever was in the throat of the clock, and he took the bird with him, or he looked at the bird first, and then he went, and he never came back down."

"Yes," Otis said. "That is what Edmund writes. Um. Almost."

He turned the page over. On the back, in the same heavy hand, was a single sentence. No code this time. No cipher. Just the words, and a date beneath them.

I AM THE FOURTH. I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN THE FOURTH. IF YOU ARE READING THIS, I HAVE FAILED.

The date was the seventeenth of October, 1987. Twenty-three days after Bartholomew Calloway had walked up the tower stairs for the last time.

Wren read it three times. The archive room had gone cold around them, though the morning was mild outside. She could feel the chill coming up through the flagstones, settling in the bones of her feet, climbing her ankles.

"Mr. Penny," she said. "Who wrote this?"

Otis shook his head. His face had gone the color of old candle wax.

"I have spent twenty years trying to answer that question," he said. "I have, um, I have asked Hattie. I have asked the vicar. I have asked the mayor, in her presence, and she has changed the subject each time, very politely, and I have let her, because I am a coward, Miss Calloway, and because she frightens me more than a little. And I have asked Gerald Mapes, the, the, the sexton, who was here that night, and who found the door of the clock room open in the morning, and who has never spoken of it since."

"And?"

"And Gerald said only one thing. He said, um, he said: the bird had been on the floor. Just inside the door. As though someone had been carrying it and had set it down. And the door had closed. And the door had, um, locked. From the inside."

Wren sat very still.

The cuckoo outside called once more, distant and clear, and fell silent. The silence that followed was the kind of silence that waits to be filled, the kind that has a texture, a weight, a temperature, and Wren felt it pressing against the windows of the archive room like a hand against glass.

She looked down at the sketch again. The mechanical bird, with its open beak and its raised wing. The curved seam across its breast. The little hidden drawer. C.B.K.-3.

And somewhere, she thought, not in this room and not in this village and not in any place she had yet looked, that drawer still held whatever Edmund had put inside it, on the night he had written I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN THE FOURTH, and had carried it up the tower stairs, and had opened the throat of the clock, and had stepped inside.

Or had been stepped inside.

Or had let someone step inside, and had followed, and had not known how to come back.

"Miss Calloway," Otis said. His voice was very small. "What do we do now?"

Wren laid the sketch gently down on the desk, face up, the bird staring at the ceiling with its painted eye. She placed Edmund's coded pages beside it, and the letter from 1987, and the photograph of the four men, and the postcard of the cuckoo on its branch, and she stood, and pushed her chair in, and squared her shoulders, the way her grandfather had taught her to do when a thing seemed too large to carry.

"Now," she said, "we go and speak to Gerald Mapes."

She paused at the door. The morning light from the stairwell fell across her face in a pale bar.

"And Mr. Penny. Bring the sketch. I want to know what that bird looks like. In case I have to find it."

Otis gathered the papers with hands that had begun, once more, to tremble. He followed her out into the stairwell, where the dust motes turned in the light and the great clock above them kept its counsel, silent as a stone, patient as a beekeeper, and heavy with all the secrets it had swallowed in its long, long sleep.

The stairwell door closed behind them with a soft, pneumatic sigh, and Wren felt the morning strike her like cold water. She stood for a moment on the flagstones outside the keeper's cottage, blinking against the pale, rinsed light of an early English summer, the sort of light that made every color seem faintly unreal, every edge faintly sharp. The village lay below her on the slow slope of the hill: red rooftops, the green of the churchyard yew, the silver of the river where it bent around the old mill, and somewhere, far off, the faint crying of a child being called in for breakfast. Smoke rose from three chimneys. A dog barked once, then thought better of it.

Otis came up beside her, the papers tucked under his arm, his spectacles catching the light. He looked, she thought, like a man who has just been shown a lion's den and asked to admire the upholstery.

"Gerald Mapes," he said. "Miss Calloway. You are certain?"

"I am not certain of anything, Mr. Penny. I am certain of less than I was an hour ago. But I am certain that Gerald Mapes knew my grandfather, and that he has not been entirely honest with me about it."

"But," Otis said, and stopped, and adjusted his spectacles, and tried again. "But he is, you know. The beekeeper. He is, um, the sort of man one does not, ah. One does not simply."

"One does," Wren said. "Yes. Come."

They began the descent down the worn stone steps that led from the keeper's cottage to the lane. The bees were audible before they reached the apiary gate, a low, industrious hum that seemed to rise from the very stones of the path. The smell came next, that strange warm sweetness, overlaid with the darker resinous note of the old hives themselves. Wren's stomach, which had been clenched since the tower room, loosened a fraction without her permission. It was impossible, she thought, to remain wholly frightened in the presence of bees. They were too busy. Too purposeful. Too occupied with their own unreasonable, ancient, and entirely correct ideas about the world.

She pushed open the gate. The hinge gave its familiar small cry.

The apiary was empty.

The workbench stood where it always stood, with its scattered frames, its uncapping knife laid down with the casual precision of long habit. The smoker sat beside it, still faintly warm, a wisp of pale vapor curling from its nozzle. The jars of last summer's honey gleamed on the shelf against the back wall of the she'd, labeled in Gerald's neat, slightly left-handed hand: LIME, WHITE CLOVER, HEATHER, WILD. The hives themselves were arranged in their long neat row along the south fence, their entrances busy with the traffic of the morning, the bees lifting off and landing in their unhesitating parabolas, their wings catching the light like struck mica.

But Gerald was not there.

Wren felt a small, irrational disappointment, like a child who has rehearsed a difficult question and finds the interlocutor gone for the day. She set her jaw. She would come back. She would find him. She had waited thirty years without knowing she was waiting; she could wait until teatime.

"Perhaps he has gone to the vicarage," Otis offered hopefully, adjusting his burden of papers.

"Perhaps," Wren said, and turned to go.

It was then, as she reached for the gate latch, that the voice came.

"You are out early, Miss Calloway."

It was a voice that had been shaped, over many decades, to the precise contours of public address. It carried without rising. It warmed without becoming familiar. It was, in its way, the vocal equivalent of the clocktower itself, measured, polished, and entirely aware of the time.

Wren turned.

Mayor Bea Underhill stood at the lane's edge, framed by the low stone wall and the nodding heads of the cow parsley that grew along it. She wore, as she nearly always wore, a tweed coat of a soft, indeterminate green, and a silk scarf at her throat in a pattern of small brown feathers. Her silver hair was dressed in its usual immaculate roll. Her hands, in kidskin gloves the color of clotted cream, rested on the head of a blackthorn walking stick. Her face was composed into its public expression, pleasant, slightly quizzical, faintly maternal. It was, Wren thought, a face that had been practicing the same set of expressions for so long that it had forgotten how to do any others.

Behind her, at a respectful distance, hovered Mr. Fildew, the mayoral secretary, a small anxious man who appeared to have been manufactured specifically for the purpose of carrying things.

"Mayor Underhill," Wren said, and was annoyed to hear the faintest edge of guilt in her own voice, as if she had been discovered somewhere she ought not to be. "Good morning."

"Good morning, my dear. And Mr. Penny. I am surprised to find you so far from the sorting office."

Otis made a noise that resembled a small accordion being sat upon.

"I, ah, um," he said. "The, ah. The, um."

"The bees," Wren said crisply. "Mr. Penny has an interest in apiology. We were just leaving."

It was a transparent falsehood. Otis did not, as far as Wren knew, have any interest whatsoever in apiology. He was terrified of bees in the way that many people of a nervous disposition are terrified of bees, which is to say he respected them from a distance of at least forty feet and preferred to admire them in illustrations. But the lie had the merit of speed.

The mayor's pleasant expression did not alter by so much as a hair.

"I am glad to find you together," she said. "There is a matter upon which I wished to speak with you both. A small matter. But a matter."

She moved, then, with the slow deliberation of someone who has never in her life been required to hurry, toward the gate of the apiary. Mr. Fildew moved with her, as if attached by an invisible thread. She came to stand just inside the gate, in the thin shade of the cherry tree, and she looked, first at Wren, and then at Otis, and then at the papers under Otis's arm, and then back at Wren.

"I have been told," the mayor said, "that you have been asking questions about the clocktower."

Wren felt the muscles across her shoulders tighten. She made herself meet the mayor's gaze, which was not easy to do, because the mayor's gaze was the sort of gaze that made one feel vaguely ashamed of one's shoes.

"It is my grandfather's clocktower," Wren said. "I have been attending to it. As is my duty."

"As is your duty," the mayor agreed. "And a most admirable duty it is. Your grandfather would be proud. I knew him, you know, from the time he was a boy. A fine man. A careful man. He understood, as few in this village have understood, that some things are best left to the people who know how to look after them."

She paused, and the pause was very carefully shaped, like a comma that has been pressed with a hot iron.

"I am speaking, my dear, of the clocktower."

"Yes," Wren said. "So am I."

The mayor gave her a look of gentle, patient regret, the look of one who has tried to spare a younger person a disappointment and finds that the younger person will not be spared.

"There are questions," the mayor said, "which it does not profit anyone to ask. Not the asker. Not the village. Not the memory of those who are gone. I have lived in this village for seventy-two years. I have seen a great many people come and go. I have seen fashions rise and fall, and scandals bloom and wither, and I have learned, my dear, that the wisest service one can render to a place like ours is to let certain doors remain closed."

She straightened the feathered scarf at her throat with one gloved hand.

"I say this for your own good, Miss Calloway. And for yours, Mr. Penny."

Otis clutched his papers tighter and made a sound like a teakettle coming off the boil.

"And I say it," the mayor continued, "as one who has the welfare of this village very much at heart. The clocktower is the heart of the village. It has been the heart of the village for three hundred years. It must continue to be the heart of the village. It is not, you understand, a thing to be, ah, rummaged in."

Wren felt, rising in her chest, the slow, hot, very familiar heat of being managed. She knew that heat well. She had felt it from the parish council, and from the chair of the heritage society, and from her aunt, and from the vicar, and from every well-meaning person who had looked at her since her grandfather's death and seen a girl who required to be steered. She felt it now, and she felt, beneath it, the memory of the tower room, and the smell of the oiled wood, and the cuckoo's painted eye, and the cold draught from the throat of the clock.

"Mayor Underhill," she said, and was pleased to hear that her voice had not, this time, the faintest edge of guilt in it. "With respect. The clocktower is my grandfather's clocktower. I am its keeper. It is my duty to attend to it. If there are things in it which require attention, then I will attend to them. That is what a keeper does."

The mayor regarded her for a long moment. The pleasant expression did not waver. But something shifted, very slightly, behind it. A door closing, perhaps. A latch falling.

"You are very like him," she said at last, softly, and for an instant, and only for an instant, the polish went out of her voice, and there was something beneath it that sounded almost like grief. "He, too, was fond of doors."

She inclined her head, a fraction of an inch, which was, in the grammar of the mayor, a period at the end of a paragraph.

"I have said what I came to say. For your own good. Both of yours. Good morning, Miss Calloway. Mr. Penny."

She turned, then, with that slow, unhurried grace, and walked back along the lane toward the village, her blackthorn tapping softly on the stones, Mr. Fildew trotting at her heels like a well-trained retriever. The cow parsley nodded after her. The bees went on about their work.

Wren stood for a long moment with her hand on the gate latch, looking after the mayor's retreating back. She felt oddly shaken, and annoyed at herself for feeling shaken, and more annoyed still because she could not quite tell what, exactly, the mayor had threatened, or with what, or why. It was the kind of conversation, she thought, in which the words themselves were not the point, and the point itself had been carefully omitted.

Otis cleared his throat.

"Miss Calloway," he said, very small. "Did, um. Did the mayor just. Was that, um, a warning?"

"Yes, Mr. Penny," Wren said. "I believe it was."

"Oh," said Otis. "Oh dear."

Wren looked down at him. He was pale, and his lower lip was trembling, and his spectacles had slipped again to the very tip of his nose. She felt a sudden, unexpected tenderness for him, this anxious, loyal, stammering man who had brought her a postcard and a mystery and now found himself in a lane being warned off by the mayor of the village for his own good.

"Mr. Penny," she said. "Are you frightened?"

"Yes," he said, simply, and without his usual ums.

"Good," she said. "So am I. We will be frightened together, and we will go on anyway. That is what my grandfather would have done."

She opened the gate. The bees rose in their small bright clouds from the hives, glittering in the pale washed light. The smell of honey and resin came to meet her, warm and complicated. Somewhere, down the slope, the church bell struck the quarter, clear and unhurried, counting the village into its hour.

She stepped out onto the lane, and Otis followed her, and the gate swung shut behind them, and the morning, which had begun in a tower room with a painted eye, went on, as mornings do, whether one is ready for it or not.