Timekeeper

Chapter 5

Chapter 2London, August 28, 1885

“Dover?” Maxwell snapped the instant they were left alone.

Elizabeth reeled from the fury in his voice—or maybe it was only the close air of the garret that caused her near-stumble. The rooms up here were even smaller than they had been the last time—of course they were; this garret was divided into four bedchambers instead of two—and the still, hot air pressed heavy and damp on every inch of her skin, choking her throat and making a deep breath impossible. Her head swam.

They really ought be resting while they had the chance, their growing fatigue being why Kent had sent them up here in the first place—or at least, that was the motive he claimed, though it was obvious that he also very much desired to remove the time travelers from eavesdropping range while he and his people continued their argument below—but instead of trying for sleep, the three of them had crowded into one of the tiny bedchambers to pursue a counterpoint dispute of their own. It was Katarina’s chamber, given to Elizabeth for the few hours remaining until dawn, much to Elizabeth’s discomfort and much against Katarina’s will. Despite Elizabeth’s pledge to touch nothing, the older woman had snapped closed the lock of her trunk with ostentatious anger before storming back down the stairs. There was only one trunk standing against the wall this time, of course, and no men’s boots to trip over. Gavin Trevelyan slept with his wife in the adjoining chamber.

“Dover?” Maxwell repeated, and all at once an answering flush of fury cleared Elizabeth’s vision and stiffened her knees.

“Someone had to say something!” she retorted, facing him. “I didn’t see you taking charge of the conversation!”

“After the c*****e we caused at Waterloo, after the disaster we wrought, you want to meddle with another battle? We don’t have enough blood dripping from our hands?”

“We succeeded at Waterloo!” Elizabeth retorted. “We changed something.”

“You like this world, do you?”

“No, no, of course not, but don’t you see? You’ve never managed to change anything before, you said that. But the three of us together could, we did, so we can do it again.”

“You think we can fix this by meddling with the Battle of Dover?” Maxwell repeated.

“Or something else! Perhaps not Dover. Perhaps there’s some other opportunity—I hope there’s one much earlier—but we can’t know what chances exist until we learn something about their history, and we won’t be able to get to history books and memoirs and old soldiers unless we have an ally willing to help us. Dover was the only battle they had mentioned by name, and I had to say something to catch Kent’s imagination. Otherwise he’d yield to Trevelyan and unleash constructs or to Schwieger and unleash monsters. I had to say something to make him see there was another option. I didn’t,” she added, switching her glare from Maxwell to William, who had been quiet all this time, “notice either of you helping me.”

“I find the strategy perfectly sound,” William said, in a calm and reasonable tone that made Elizabeth want to scream. “But I saw no point in rushing to execute it. Trevelyan isn’t able to unleash an army of constructs tonight, and Schwieger does not even know where those notes on the Wellington monsters might be. Offering a third option might as well wait a day or two or even longer, until we learn enough about our new allies to know what arguments will move them and they learn enough about us to know we may be trusted. This universe is seventy years old. If we succeed in unmaking it, it will never have been—so does it matter if we succeed when it is seventy years and three months of age instead of seventy years and two months? Don’t we have time to move carefully?”

Elizabeth sagged a little. “It just feels as though…if we give it time to—to settle—then it becomes real. If we don’t move immediately to unmake it, it will be harder to dislodge. I keep thinking of wheels sinking into mud.” Which was foolish. The tiny clockwork wheels of the pocket watch were not threatened by mud or anything else. “I don’t want it to be real.”

“No. Of course you don’t,” Maxwell said.

She took his meaning plainly. Before her eyes rose an image of her hand seizing his sleeve. She had forced him to take her to Waterloo, she had forced the issue, she had forced the world to change. Into this. Into this. “Yes,” she said to Maxwell. “It’s my fault. I admit it. I did not appreciate how severe the consequences of my actions might be. But I did something. We changed something, which you’ve never been able to do alone. If you didn’t want me to take action, you should never have sent me the watch!”

Maxwell stared. “What are you talking about?”

Elizabeth threw up her hands in exasperation. “I recognized your handwriting! In the barn outside Waterloo!” The injustice of it made her want to cry again. It made this whole horrible situation worse to know that she need never have meddled in the first place. She had considered herself under something of an obligation to do so—a grand and glorious obligation, to be sure—for when the pocket watch had arrived without explanation, she had assumed without really thinking about it that it had been sent by someone who knew what he was about, who knew what she would do with it, who entrusted her personally with the power to change history. But there was no larger plan and there was no one knowledgeable behind the scenes—just Maxwell, and her, and William. And two pocket watches, one broken because of her impetuousness. And the tricolor flag flying from the Tower of London. She barely managed to keep her voice steady as she added, “It’s unworthy of you to maintain this pretense.”

“No pretense,” Maxwell said. “I’ve never in my life sent a pocket watch to you or anyone. So the question you are asking is, ‘Why will I?’ And the answer is, ‘Damned if I know.’ I can’t imagine what would prompt me to send you such a dangerous tool after knowing the mess you’d make with it.”

“That’s enough.” William did not speak loudly. “Sir,” he added after a deliberate moment. “There were three people trying to change history at Waterloo. All three of us have blood on our hands. All three of us have the obligation to make amends for it. And we will.” He took a breath. “We have lost an engagement. It happens. It is a misfortune that has been known to befall even the Duke of Wellington. One retreats in good order, one chooses better ground, and one counter-attacks. The Peninsula wasn’t a single battle, and neither is this. It will be all right. We will fix it.”

“Or we’ll make it worse,” Maxwell said. His brown eyes burned in his pale face. “Genies are bottled because of their power, because of the havoc they wreak when they—”

“I am not going to sit with my hands folded while the French rule Britain, just because I am afraid of what might happen if I act,” Elizabeth flung at him. “You had chance after chance and changed nothing, and I at least managed something, even if it was the wrong something. Here I thought you knew what you were about, but now I think your caution is really cowardice—”

William turned on her. “That’ll do, from you as well,” he said, and though his voice was still quiet, danger outlined each word. She thought they must have taught him how to do that in the Army.

“What lovely symmetry.” Maxwell turned for the curtained doorway. “Disillusionment appears to be the order of the day.” Without offering further explanation for the comment, he stalked off to Kent’s chamber.

Elizabeth lay down upon Katarina’s bed, but she did not sleep. The air was too hot, and pressed too heavily against her skin and throat, and the rise and fall of voices downstairs jerked her awake whenever she did manage to drift off. What would those voices conclude? Whatever would she and the others do if Kent decided not to trust them?

Stay alive until tonight and then use the pocket watch to go somewhere else, she told herself, staring into the darkness above her head. We’ll learn history some other way, we’ll decide where best to affect it, we’ll proceed from there. Assuming, of course, they could persuade any other local inhabitant to trust them where Kent had declined to, which upon reflection did not seem very likely. Without an ally, would they be able to discover trustworthy sources of history? There would be schoolbooks, Elizabeth supposed, but she did not think schoolbooks would answer. Maxwell had drawn his knowledge of Waterloo from Wellington’s private writings; they would need something comparable for Dover and for all the opportunities that were not battles. The memoirs stored in the cottage of Kent’s Yorkshire mentor—Mr. Carter, had Katarina said the name was?—seemed ideal. If only Kent decided to trust them. Elizabeth rolled over and buried her head in the pillow.

The blackness had only just begun to lighten into thick, gritty grayness when Elizabeth heard a step on the stair, and then Emil Schwieger’s voice spoke her name from the other side of the curtain. “Herr Kent wishes to speak with you,” he said. She could not tell from his tone of voice whether he was pleased or displeased at the intelligence he had been instructed to convey. He moved on to give the same message to William and Maxwell. A few short minutes later, Elizabeth followed him down the stair with a feeling halfway between vertigo and what the French called déjà vu—thinking of following Katarina up the same stairway a few days ago in a vanished universe, back when the whole matter was an adventure and a cause for giddy glee.

The sitting room seemed ominously quiet as she approached the doorway. She thought again of being called to face her aunt’s wrath, then impatiently put aside the comparison. Surely her standards of “trouble” should have altered in the last few days.

And indeed, no trouble awaited her. When she entered the room, it was to discover that the silence proceeded from fatigue rather than anger on the part of its inhabitants. Mrs. Trevelyan appeared particularly exhausted, curled again in the wing chair, lashes cast down upon milk-pale cheeks. Her husband again perched on the chair’s arm. He looked nearly as tired as she did, the bags beneath his eyes even more pronounced than they had been, and as the time travelers entered the room, he moved fractionally closer to his wife, looking over her head with the air of a protective bird of prey. Katarina had pushed one of the straight-backed chairs into the other corner and sat with her head leaning back against the wall, her face set and sullen.

Only Kent was still on his feet—hair rumpled, coat cast off and sleeves rolled up, but alight with energy still. Elizabeth suspected at once both that he had carried his point, and that he had done so by talking his opponents into exhaustion. He was standing at the dining table, bent over a pile of papers, but he looked up and straightened as soon as she cleared the threshold.

“Ah, there you are.” He paused to add, “Good morning. I hope you were able to sleep a little?” but did not wait for a reply before continuing. “I believe I have a method for getting you to Yorkshire without arousing French suspicion.”

He had carried his point, then. He would trust them and they were going to see his mentor. Elizabeth felt instinctively it would be the wrong tactic to express delighted surprise, but she had to grope for a moment before she found another reaction to put in its place.

“Oh, have you?” It sounded inane to her own ears. “That’s—ah—wonderful, thank you, sir. How shall it be accomplished?” She suddenly wished she had been able to take advantage of the brief respite to sleep. It might be easier to keep up with Frederick Kent if she were rested.

“It is difficult to travel from one part of England to another,” Kent said. “Without papers, it is impossible, and even with them, difficult. But you are fortunate in your timing. I had in fact secured tickets on today’s dirigible for certain members of my organization. We will put off their journey a week or so, and you will make use of the tickets instead.”

Elizabeth opened her mouth to ask if a dirigible might be something like a locomotive-train, but William was already speaking. “It’s very kind of you, sir. It will make matters easier to have you with us, to be sure.”