Prologue
London, England
May 1987
The smell of cinders permanently etched the abandoned Bessette Match Factory into the minds of all who passed. If asked about the factory, people rarely remembered the details of the brick towers, iron gates, and black-painted sign with carved letters, their gilded edges now gone . . . but they inevitably recalled the general specter of smoke and soot—a vestige of industrial revolutions and factory strikes and all manner of Victorian lore.
The towering roofline dwarfed the homes and shops that, over time, had popped up near the vacant building in old London Town. Yet not so long ago, for over a century, the Bessette Match Factory, Purveyors of Pure Light, had produced the metal hum of industry, issuing a steady stream of wooden sticks from its depths. Those sticks were then sent to the glass house. Not a house of glass, but a brick outbuilding whose walls housed the glass-grinding quarters. There the sticks were treated, their tips dipped in powdered glass, glass born of fire—and to fire they were destined to return.
Once they were cloaked in chemicals, the strike-anywhere matches were bundled and sent off to Market Street and Covent Garden and on to the Lake District and the dales and the seaports circling the green island nation, until parlor fires and hearth fires and cooking fires and fires of camps all owed their warmth to that match factory.
But time swept through, as time does. Two world wars embedded themselves into the souls of the land, and with war came new innovations promised to cast out darkness. Great Britain learned to twist light bulbs into sockets and fill hand torches with batteries, until that steady stream of matches from the factory slowed to a trickle and then . . . to a stop. The Bessette Match Factory, Purveyors of Pure Light, gaped empty for a year . . . then two . . . then three decades.
Until one drizzly May morning in 1987, when Gerald W. Bessette, reluctant inheritor of “The Fossil,” as the family had come to call the factory, visited the place with a land agent to see what could be done about selling.
Blinking into the darkness as they entered, he kicked something that caused him to stumble. He retrieved the culprit: a hand torch, the very thing that had led to the factory’s demise. He flicked it on and by its tired beam saw blankets and boxes spread everywhere—evidence that people had moved into the old factory, set up camp on the lower levels.
Torch in hand, he had what he would later call his “light-bulb moment.” If people were already living here, why not capitalize on that? Gerald W. Bessette left the factory that day with a vision of pounds paving his every step and set to transforming the place with the help of his family’s coffers. A few dozen well-placed walls inside the expansive complex, bricks scrubbed clean of soot until they shone red against the grey sky, and clever wording to make the lofty ceilings sound like echoes of palace living instead of a thoroughfare of chilly drafts, and the Bessette Match Factory became Candlewick Commons: Fine Flats at Fulham.
Toward the end of the project he hired a local watchmaker, one Simon Claremont, to repair the broken tower clock that looked out over the concrete courtyard from above the arched entrance. And finally, on an unremarkable Tuesday afternoon almost a year after Gerald started the reconstruction, the two men stood on the roof, waiting for the clock to strike three and prove itself repaired.
“This marks the end of an era,” Gerald W. Bessette said, clapping the watchmaker on the back as if they were old school chums. “Workers once tuned their ears to this very tower to keep watch over the beginning and end of their toiling each day. And now”—the man spread his arms wide, as if unrolling the horizon of the whole city—“it marks the beginning of a new epoch. A time of . . .” He furrowed his brow, apparently having used up all his words to capture his grandiose swell of feeling. “A time of something really, really good.”
With a nod, Simon walked to the clock, tightened a gear in his pensive way, and stood back, waiting. Seconds ticked on . . . and the clock struck three o’clock right on cue, limping its slightly off-kilter song into the world in between Big Ben’s own declarations pealing down alleys and avenues across the Thames.
“Ha!” Gerald W. Bessette pumped his hands into the air in victory. “New life, my friend.” He surveyed the brick building beneath them, its wings that cloistered three sides of a courtyard, and the small cottage standing squat and humble at the far corner of the land, beneath the property’s lone tree.
“That’ll be the caretaker’s quarters,” he said, pointing. “Glass grinder’s cottage, it was. But now it’ll be hearth and home to some lucky soul who’ll keep this place hale and hearty.”
Simon narrowed his eyes, his gaze landing upon the sleepy cottage with its dripping glass windows, squat brick walls, and arched black door. “A thing of beauty, that is.”
And Gerald, whether swept up in the grandeur of his kingdom or recognizing a visionary and able man all wrapped up in one package, shrewdly offered the position of caretaker to his new friend, insisting that he could still keep his shop on Cecil Court, only a few minutes’ walk away.
And so it happened that Simon Claremont, watchmaker, story keeper, last of a dying breed, came home to Candlewick Commons with his wife, Penny. And a little over a year later, as they each neared forty, they added the surprise and joy of their lives: a wee bundle of a daughter.
“Lucy,” he said, as they stood over her bassinet by the light of the fire on their first night home from hospital. “Her name is Lucy.” He placed her in her cradle in the glass house, naming her light itself. For her life, they were sure, would mean something.
one
Candlewick Commons
London, England
2000
To step inside the watchmaker’s cottage was to step outside of time. Lucy grew there, a waif of a thing and a solitary soul. Her mind was full of wonderings and wanderings. She spent her days at school, and her afternoons circling Candlewick’s round courtyard fountain as she studied maps or read books.
Her evenings, however, were magic. Each day, as the sun began to set over Candlewick’s towers and the stars began to appear, and flats across the courtyard were coming to life with the blue glow of tellies, she returned to the glass house and felt the rush of the city drop away. The cottage was a place where tales spun inside every dusty shaft of golden-hour sunlight. Where each evening, stories and riddles were told around flickering flames—crackling hearth fire in winter months, pirouetting candlelight in the summer.
They had no telly. She sometimes burned with embarrassment when she couldn’t join in the conversations at school, but in the moment, in the warm glow of their cottage home, she did not mind. The mellowed wooden floors creaked with the rush of her feet, racing to turn off the lamps and leap into the embrace of the old stuffed armchair in the corner. Her young fingers wrapped around chipped mugs of chamomile or, on Sundays, sipping chocolate. “Monday is upon us,” her mum would say with a conspiratorial wink. “We must prepare. Chocolate all ’round.”
The watchmaker would invariably dust off his hands after laying the fire, plant a kiss on his wife’s rosy cheek, and look his daughter in the eye. “Make a friend today, Lucy?”
He asked every day. Sometimes it bothered her. She did not mind being alone. “Just wait,” he always said. “The best of friends come in the unlikeliest ways.” He always winked at Mum when he said it, and she’d swat him playfully with whatever she had in her hand—usually a dirt-smudged towel. She always seemed to be loosening the roots of her lilac plants.