Timekeeper

Chapter 3

Chapter 1London, August 28, 1885

The silence in the little sitting room was so profound that Elizabeth could hear the rain pattering on the cobblestones outside. Her soaked shirt and trousers had been hung to dry in the scullery, and she was now clad once more in a gown—her own, one of the two she had brought from 1815 in William’s rucksack—with a worn gray blanket about her shoulders to ward off chill. Not that she felt chilled; the air inside the warehouse-hideaway was so hot and still that she was more likely to melt than freeze. But Brenda Trevelyan had offered the blanket as an expression of kindness, and moreover playing with its frayed edge gave Elizabeth something to do with her hands, so she hugged it close and kept her attention on the loose threads under her fingernails. She did not want to meet anyone’s eyes—especially not Katarina’s, familiar and unfamiliar and unfriendly, or Maxwell’s, bloodshot and anguished.

Finally she heard the expected step on the boards outside, and William came sidling through the door, a blanket wrapped around his own upper half and the young Prussian Emil Schwieger a watchful pace behind him. Schwieger had to hold the door open, as William’s left hand was occupied in keeping the blanket clasped and his dangling right arm, injured back on the Peninsula, was no longer capable of opening doors or doing anything else.

Schwieger might have made the gesture look friendly, but he did not. He looked still like the guard he was, shoulders straight and mouth uncompromising. In response, William had arranged his own face into a look of resolute calm, but Elizabeth wasn’t fooled.

“All right,” Frederick Kent said then—not loudly, but in a tone that did not brook refusal. The tawny-haired man rose to his feet, drawing all eyes to himself. “Sit down. All three of you.” Elizabeth was already seated at the dining table. Kent waited until Maxwell and William had drawn back chairs and joined her, then strode around the table to take the seat opposite. Katarina Rasmirovna sat in the chair on his right and Emil Schwieger moved to stand at his left—a decidedly unfriendly arrangement, Elizabeth thought. It reminded her of newspaper descriptions of a tribunal, or of being summoned to answer for naughtiness to her mother, father, and aunt all at once. Kent looked over as though to inquire whether Gavin Trevelyan wished to join the panel, but Trevelyan was seated on the arm of his wife’s wing chair and did not look inclined to move. He was, Elizabeth thought, more witness than judge in any case.

Kent turned his attention back to her, and she had a sudden sympathy for the way a mouse must feel under the gaze of a hawk. Kent’s intense blue eyes moved from her face to William’s, then to Maxwell’s. “Now,” Kent said. “Start over from the beginning.”

Maxwell ran a hand through his disheveled white hair, pressed his palms flat against the tabletop to stop their shaking, and started over from the beginning.

It sounded like a madman’s story, Elizabeth had to admit that. The words sounded mad to her, and she had lived it. She could only imagine what they sounded like to the three on the other side of the table. Kent’s posture pretended relaxation, but his hands rested only lightly on the arms of his chair, and he watched Maxwell almost without blinking.

“I am a time traveler,” Maxwell began as he had the first time. “My young friends and I have most recently been in a version of 1885 very different from this.”

“When and where were you born?” Kent interrupted him.

Maxwell hesitated a bare instant. “The year eighteen hundred and eighteen, in the north of England. But…I believe it was an 1818 very different from the one in your history books. It will have changed since last I was there.”

“Because you changed it,” Frederick Kent said.

“God help me,” Maxwell said, “yes. I changed it while trying to change 1885.”

There was another pause. The rain drummed the street outside, and Maxwell did not meet anyone’s eyes. Elizabeth found herself stealing surreptitious glances from under her lashes to the others seated around the table. Kent’s sternly handsome face was as expressionless as he could make it. He was deliberately reserving judgment, which was both somewhat reassuring and a fit with all Elizabeth had heard about him. But Emil Schwieger’s face displayed open hostility, and—what was more painful—so did Katarina’s. Elizabeth could understand why this Katarina would not immediately accept an unknown traveler with an incredible story, but they had become friends in the other 1885, and the seething mistrust in Katarina’s luminous dark eyes now made Elizabeth feel as though she were in a boat cut free of its moorings.

Brenda Trevelyan’s wing chair was positioned in a sheltered corner, where the shadows fell so Elizabeth could not see her expression. Not that it would have helped much if she could; there had so far been no hint as to what the sweet-faced woman thought of them all. From her shoulder, her husband watched the scene with perfectly readable sardonic eyes, and Elizabeth felt a flash of anger toward him. This Trevelyan knew Maxwell—not as well as had his counterpart from the other London, but at least a little. It was on Trevelyan’s word that Maxwell and his friends had been permitted entry into this hiding place. Trevelyan really ought to be helping Maxwell tell his impossible-sounding story now. But he said nothing as Maxwell described the other timeline—the Battle of Waterloo, the special battalion, the monsters that roamed Britain in the years thereafter.

“Tell me about ‘the other 1885,’” Kent said.

Maxwell took a breath. “To do so, I must tell you about the other 1815. In the world in which I was born—and in which Miss Barton and Mr. Carrington were born—the Duke of Wellington was not killed on the field of Waterloo. Indeed, he won the day and broke Bonaparte’s power.”

Kent leaned forward, interested as though despite himself. “How?”

“When the British feared Napoleon’s invasion in 1805,” Maxwell said, “they set to work on a weapon to defend their shores. Some fifteen years earlier, a young Genevese had built a secret laboratory on an island off the Orkneys, and in 1800 the, er, results of his experiments drew attention to themselves and were captured by British soldiers. By studying their captives and the Genevese’s notes, the British bred an army of monsters—creatures created from dead flesh, from corpses cut apart and stitched back together, then re-imbued with the spark of life—taller and stronger than any man alive. When Bonaparte escaped from Elba in 1814, the British sent this ‘special battalion’ with Wellington and his ragtag army. The monsters were with Wellington at Waterloo.”

“Yes,” Katarina muttered. “We know. This is history. The Duke held them in reserve in the Forest of Soignes, not wishing to use them unless the need were absolute. In the end he did send for them to reinforce his line, but the message reached them too late, and the British were overwhelmed by the French.”

Because of me, drummed in Elizabeth’s head, in time with the rain outside. Because of us. Because we waylaid the courier. All this, because of me.

“In the world in which I was born,” Maxwell said, “the message reached Burnley and his battalion in time. He brought the monsters to reinforce Wellington, and through them, Wellington won the day. The monsters slaughtered the French, the British captured the French Eagles, a messenger brought them home to lay at the Prince Regent’s feet like the final act of an opera…and ‘Wellington’s monsters’ became the nation’s darlings. They were used, with similar success, in other military operations, and then to mine coal and work ranches in the colonies. And then they rebelled. They were never as stupid as we liked to think them, and they were everywhere, ideally placed to turn on their masters and destroy Britain from within. The revolt happened in stages, but by 1872, all of England was burning.

“We needed a weapon against them.” Maxwell did not look at Gavin Trevelyan. “A student at the University of London—a brilliant young Welshman—created a mechanical monster to overcome the one we had made of flesh. His constructs, as they came to be called, were metal men twenty feet high, with rifles embedded in their arms and—”

Katarina jumped to her feet, her chair slamming into the wall behind her, Kent’s hand raised too slowly to stop her. Trevelyan leaned forward, throwing a lean and rangy shadow across the light. Maxwell broke off, and for a moment the only sound in the room seemed to be Katarina’s quickened breath. As far as Elizabeth could tell, Maxwell was not breathing at all.

After a moment, Katarina turned to Kent. “I told you,” she said, “we could not trust them.”

“No,” Trevelyan said. “Wait. Tell me how they worked, these constructs.”

Maxwell hesitated.

“Tell him,” Kent said. He did not look at Katarina, but his hand reached out, took her arm, and guided her back down to her chair.

“Clockwork and steam,” Maxwell said. “The first prototypes dragged their fuel behind them in wagons. Later, a more efficient boiler system was developed. Three men rode inside them, one to stoke the boiler, one to move the feet, one to fire the artillery. One arm was a cannon-mouth, the other a—a new type of rifle, called a Gatling. They were…very effective.” Maxwell ran out of air and took a ragged breath before continuing. “By 1885,” he said, “by the 1885 I knew, they had restored order and retaken the English countryside, and the Wellington monsters had long since ceased to be a threat. What few specimens remained were caged in zoos or laboratories. Perhaps two or three ran free on an isolated moor here and there. But the Prime Minister did not stand down the constructs. Instead he used them to enforce order in the colonies, in the countryside, finally even on London’s streets. We lived in fear, by 1885. It was a terrible world.

“I knew you there.” Maxwell took another breath. “You were freedom fighters. All three of you.” He turned in his chair to face Trevelyan. “You had switched sides by then. When I knew you, you were creating a rifle that worked on the same principle as railway-cars, to power a javelin sufficiently to pierce a construct’s hide, even the reinforced piece above the boiler. You were trying to destroy the constructs you had created.” Not so much a reaction as a careful absence of one crossed Trevelyan’s face. “You gave your life trying,” Maxwell said. From Brenda Trevelyan came a startled little gasp. “All three of you gave your lives. Lord Sew—Frederick Kent was arrested on a treason charge, and two nights later, Katarina Rasmirovna and Gavin Trevelyan were shot dead by constructs in an alleyway, their rail-gun captured. And I—we—” He gestured to Elizabeth and William. “We went to Waterloo to stop it from happening. Wellington maintained until the end of his life that he could have won the battle without monstrous aid, and so we…took him at his word. We delayed his courier.”

“This is absurd,” Katarina said flatly. She turned angry eyes from Kent to Trevelyan. “You cannot seriously—either of you!—consider this outrageous story at all believable! It is far more likely that—”

“It is believable,” Trevelyan cut her off. “For one thing, there’s the matter of Mr. Maxwell having saved my life in Vienna and telling me we would meet again under precisely these circumstances. For another—do you still have the watch, Maxwell?”

“I still have the watch.” Maxwell drew it from his pocket, popped it open, and laid it on the table before Kent.

Katarina stopped talking.

It was the fourth face that silenced her, Elizabeth thought. The fourth face had a tendency to do that. The first three faces allowed one to set the date, time, latitude, and longitude to which one wished to travel—but it was not obvious at first glance that they did so fantastic a thing. One might conceivably mistake the pocket-watch-with-too-many-dials as the tool of a ship’s captain or perhaps a physician. But the fourth face—the fourth face corrected any such misapprehension. The fourth face displayed images that moved, tiny simulacra as realistic as anything in the real world. Now Elizabeth watched their familiar forms flicker by, upside down.

Sunlight danced on a brook surrounded by waving green grass, fluffy clouds reflected in its depths. Then the brook faded out of existence, to be replaced by a ship struggling to remain upright in a gale, its sails strained to bursting and gray waves crashing against its side. Then the ship was gone, and knights in armor rode horses down a forested mountain path. Then a newspaper blew across a tired-looking London street, coming to rest in a pile of soot and rubbish. Elizabeth would have thought that last scene familiar, except no construct stomped its earth-shaking feet along the cobblestones or lit the sky blue with its lightning-weapons. There were no constructs ravaging London any longer. Because of her. At least there’s that. That’s to the good, surely?