Timebound

Chapter 2-1

Chapter 2London, November 23, 1848 and 1910

Track One

He wore the locket that held her picture hidden beneath the collar of his shirt, and he carried volume three of Hume’s History of England everywhere he went. He kept hoping the book would crumble to dust in his hands, or he would open it to find it no longer contained the engraving of the fainting Elizabeth Barton, or he would wake with memories of a childhood in which he was welcomed home from school by a mother’s warmth instead of an aunt’s thinly-veiled dislike. Surely some attempt would work, and he would emerge into a happily-ever-after that had always been.

He did not know what on earth had possessed her to cap her time-traveling career by posing as a prophetess in Henry VIII’s court. Even for the reckless, impetuous, adventurous girl he had come to know from the pages of her journal, it seemed an unnecessary, not to say a suicidal, risk. Yet she had done exactly that: Hume’s History of England confirmed William’s letter.

Elizabeth Barton, variously known as the Holy Maid of Kent and the Mad Maid of Kent, had claimed to be born in 1506, but nothing could be substantiated about her early life. She might have suddenly appeared, full-grown, at the age of nineteen—which was, Maxwell had cause to know, exactly what she had indeed done. She took a job as a servant girl in Thomas Cobb’s household and was working there when she fell seriously ill on Easter Sunday of 1525 and began to speak in rhyming prophecies. St. Sepulchre’s in Canterbury had opened its doors to her, and thereafter Sister Elizabeth rubbed shoulders with some of the most influential men of the day—Wolsey, More, even Cramner. Cramner said she had, by the power of the Holy Ghost, told him of many things done and said in other places—places where she could never have gone herself, places from which she could have received no word.

Of course she had.

At first Sister Elizabeth confined her prophecies to general warnings against sin and vice, but when King Henry declared his intention to have his marriage to Katherine of Aragon annulled in order to marry Anne Boleyn, she suddenly became specific. Elizabeth Barton spoke openly against His Majesty, gathered about her a group of important supporters, and went so far as to force herself into the King’s presence. She publicly warned him that if he divorced Katherine and married Anne, he would no longer be king of the realm, would reign a mere seven months after his second marriage, and would die a villain’s death.

Of course she had.

Given the personality revealed in her journal, given William’s clue that she had died by the hand of Henry VIII, Maxwell could have picked her out of Hume’s History even if she hadn’t called herself by her real name.

What he could not infer from the pages they had left behind was why. William had not explicitly said in his letter. Elizabeth’s last journal entry said only something cryptic about “one last journey, to rescue a friend in need”—though she had scribbled rather than carefully written the words, and the word “friend” might have been “fool.”

William’s last entry definitely used the word “fool.” In a deliberate parody of his wife’s phrasing, he had written, “One last journey, to rescue two fools in need.” Elizabeth and who else? No one else in Hume’s History immediately leapt to Maxwell’s eye as a time traveler.

Confronting a king rarely ends well for the person who forces herself into His Majesty’s presence, and it had not ended well for Elizabeth Barton. She and her supporters had been arrested on charges of treason. The “Mad Maid of Kent” confessed, probably under torture, that she was a “poor wench without learning” who had invented all of her “visions,” and she and all her supporters except Thomas More were sentenced to death. Elizabeth Barton’s head was struck off, parboiled, and impaled upon a pole of London Bridge—the only woman in British history to be accorded such an honor.

And William Carrington had spent the next forty years trying to rewrite the timeline and bring her home.

It’s too late for me, he had written in the letter that had changed Maxwell’s life one gloomy November afternoon. I am about to die as an old man in 1819. There’s nothing you can do for me. All I’m asking you to do is rescue her.

But Maxwell, who after all had studied logic in some of the most privileged classrooms in the Empire, was able to work out that rescuing Elizabeth, if it could be done early enough, would have the side effect of preventing William ever starting his doomed quest. It was not too late for William. It was not too late for either of them. For any of the three of them.

It was never too late if one had a timepiece.

Sitting on the floor of Georgie’s guest room, frantically flipping the pages of his father’s journal until golden candlelight faded into dawning day, Maxwell had seemed to see the universe smoothing itself into an orderly pattern. For the first time in his life, he had known what to do. For the first time in his life, something other than a moment’s pleasure compelled him forward. When he reached the last page, he had snapped the journal shut, risen from the floor, straightened his ruffled hair in a gesture that looked, in the mirror, like a knight pulling down the visor of his helm, and set off to right this wrong.

He was not certain now how many years ago that had been. It was still November of 1848—it was eternally November of 1848—but Maxwell was aging in leaps and bounds as his father had.

The timepiece would not take him to Henry’s court, no matter how hard he tried, but at first that had not troubled him. He could go other places. With all of time to play with, surely there was some thread he could pull free and thereby unmake the whole tapestry. He wrote letters, appeared as a heavenly messenger, tried to ingratiate himself with an earlier generation of the Cobb family that would someday employ Elizabeth Barton…but no attempt had any effect.

The picture in Hume’s History never changed. His memories of hiding in the window-seat, exiled from the fire lit family circle of aunt and cousins, remained fixed. On the other side of history, his mother’s head still rotted on the pike on London Bridge.

William had not died trying to bring Elizabeth home, not exactly. Maxwell, piecing together the wording of the letter and an old tale of a monk’s body found hanging in a wood near the house his parents had been renting in 1819, had recognized early on what William had done instead. Back then, he had been outraged at his father for giving up. Maxwell had vowed that he would surrender to no such weakness, that he would never be stopped until he succeeded. But tonight—the twenty-third of November 1848—how long had it been the twenty-third of November?—tonight he stared at the image of the Mad Maid of Kent reflected in the glass of the brandy bottle and understood the lure of the rope.

The image wavered and distorted as though the glass of the bottle had been harbor water disturbed by a ship’s wake—reasonable enough, given it was the second brandy-bottle he had opened tonight. If Priscilla had never written that damned letter, if he had never surrendered to that moment’s impulse, he would have never known there was anything to be missed. He might have gone about his hollow pleasurable life, the round of grays and boxing-salon and gaming-hells, with an acceptable degree of contentment. But now there were twin aching holes in his chest, one of angry pity for the boy in the window-seat who should have had a family fireside of his own, and the other a growing, grinding self-loathing as failure piled atop failure.

What the hell was the point of a timepiece, if it could not be used to mend what mattered? What the hell was the point of William bequeathing it to him, if he could not effect a rescue? He remembered now with bitterness that moment of crystal clarity in Georgie’s house. He had seen himself as a knight-errant, sent by a wise man on a quest to undo the unspeakable harm that had befallen the world. Befallen the world of the boy in the window-seat, at least. And that had been illusion. Indulgence. There was no pattern, no grand and glorious obligation, no knowledgeable sage behind the scenes—just himself and the pocket watch and his failure to do anything worthwhile with it. His life was not a facet in some grand plan; there was no meaning to his life at all. No point in forward motion. Nowhere to move to.

He wondered how long he would decide to keep moving, in that case.

There was a way to check, of course. One could not cross one’s own timeline.

His fingers felt as though they had doubled in size. He fumbled at the catch of the pocket watch for long minutes before he forced it open, and it took more than one try to spin the tiny dials. If it takes me to tomorrow, I’m not there tomorrow. But if it won’t take me to tomorrow, at least I’ll know I didn’t kill myself tonight.

Even in his own head, the grammar sounded suspect, but he knew what he meant.

If it won’t take me to New Year’s Day, I’ll know I’ll find reasons for making it through another six weeks.

He could not imagine what those reasons might be, but it would be reassuring to know his older self would discover some.

If it won’t take me to 1858…or 1868…or 1878…or 1888…I’ll know I am to live to a ripe old age. He supposed that would mean he had found a way to accept his failure, though such acceptance seemed impossible now.

If it won’t take me to…to…to 1948, or 2048, or 3048…then I suppose that means…then I’ll know I’m to carry on time traveling.

He guffawed suddenly at the absurdity of it and reached for the brandy, and the unsteady sweep of his arm knocked the bottle to the floor. It touched the soft carpet with hardly a thud, and the amber liquid soaked noiselessly into the embroidery. Maxwell lurched to grab his satchel out of the way of the flood, lest the liquor ruin William’s journal within.

He found himself standing, the room dipping and swimming around him. Going forward to discover what choice he would make seemed, in that moment, a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It only took him four tries to shove the History back in the satchel.

He had set the watch to…something in the future. He couldn’t remember what. 3048, he thought. He squinted, but now could make no sense of the numbers—they bled into each other as the room whirled. He shrugged and depressed the side button twice and the top once. That took several tries as well.

3048, he thought.

The world around him went white, then black, then every color of the rainbow.

For a moment, Maxwell thought he was in a thunderstorm, though no rain fell. Lightning lit up the sky in a flash of blue-white, then was gone. It was followed by a crash of thunder, deafening, just overhead. A sudden cold wind sprang up and tugged at him, and he stumbled forward two or three steps.

He had seen brick walls in that lightning flash. Even through the brain-deadening fog of the brandy, that seemed wrong. He would not have expected the London of 3048 to look quite so prosaically similar to the London of 1848.

There was a second flash of lightning…and hard on its heels, a burst of thunder. It shook the ground under Maxwell’s feet.

And it shook the ground again.

He understood with unconcern that something enormous was advancing upon him. It took another stomping, earsplitting step. It did not occur to him to run; he awaited its arrival with no more than vague curiosity, still puzzling over the longevity of brick buildings.

Something grabbed his arm and jerked him to one side.

Even night-blind and six or seven sheets to the wind, Maxwell’s reflexes knew what to do with an attack like that. He put all the strength of his arm behind an uppercut…but somehow it did not work as expected. He seemed to drive forward very slowly, and his opponent was simply not there when his fist reached its goal.