Timebound

Chapter 2-2

Lightning lit up the sky, and Maxwell saw that he was facing opponents, plural, all ragged- looking men like the first. They circled him, closing in. He stumbled to engage with one, then another, in a drunken ballet. Somehow he lost the satchel. Then his nose exploded with blood and a distant, muted pain, and he collided with slow inevitability into one of those perplexing brick walls.

It was very difficult to keep upright. He slithered down onto the cobblestones, then found himself unable to rise. A heavy weight pinned him down and a leathery hand slapped itself with indecent haste over his mouth. “Shut the bloody hell up!” the owner of the hand hissed in Maxwell’s ear.

Maxwell realized distantly that the ground had been shaking all this time, and the lightning flashing with increasing regularity. Another blue flash seared his eyes…and this time, did not fade.

Now he could see that he was lying in an alleyway, one strewn with broken things and filth. Over his captor’s shoulder, he could see a bit of the intersecting street, wider and more evenly cobblestoned, but no cleaner. The surrounding buildings rose four or five stories, and higher still, a distant wall blotted out the horizon.

A foot the size of a boulder stomped down onto the cobblestones. Under the blue light, it glinted copper-red. Maxwell’s captor shrank back from it, but his hand did not leave Maxwell’s mouth and his weight did not leave Maxwell’s back.

The boulder-sized foot was attached to a tree-trunk-sized leg, also copper. Maxwell’s eyes traveled slowly upward, annoyed at the way the leaning buildings interrupted his view of the torso, until his eyes rested on the head. It was level with the top of the distant wall. Without mouth or nose or ears, it put him in mind of a Tudor knight’s helm, except for the blue-white light that poured from its eyes and lit up the entire street. It tilted its head this way and that, shining light into shadowed corners, and Maxwell had time to wonder if it would be able to see his little group crouched in the alleyway. It occurred to him that perhaps it would not be such a good thing to be caught.

But the giant passed on. Lighting flashed in the direction it had gone, and tremors ran faintly through the cobblestones for quite a long time after. Only when they were completely gone did the weight atop Maxwell fractionally relax.

This seemed like important information, but Maxwell could not remember what to do with it. He was musing over the presence of the copper giant. And, more distantly, still puzzling over the presence of brick walls in a London sufficiently far in the future to be inhabited by copper giants. And finally, he was wondering how he could be this dizzy when lying prone. The last few shreds of consciousness were slipping from his grasp.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” his captor demanded in an Irish brogue. “Don’t you know enough to get out of their way?”

“I don’t think he knows much of anything,” another voice pointed out. “He’s drunk as a lord.”

“Spider,” said the man holding him down, inexplicably.

“The Spider’ll have to know,” the other agreed. “We better take him in.”

And that was the last Maxwell heard before unconsciousness claimed him.

Someone was coughing.

The sound splintered through his aching head, and his stomach lurched upward in response. He rolled to his side with an effort. He did not actually vomit, but perhaps that was only because—judging by the smell—he had already emptied his stomach. He fell back with a groan.

“There, there, sir,” a voice murmured soothingly. It was a woman’s voice, old and rough and raspy, heavily Cockney, one he was sure he had never heard before. “You’re in good hands.”

He barely managed a word of response. “What…?”

“You were knocked down in the street by runaway horses,” the woman said. He didn’t remember being anywhere near horses, but certainly it felt as though something had pummeled him. “It seems you took a drop too much first.” That he did remember. He could see his own hands opening the second bottle of brandy. “So no doubt you feel quite wretched, but I don’t think you took any real damage.” She broke off, coughing again. “Ah, forgive me, it’s the damp gets into my throat. Can you tell me your name, then?”

He slitted his eyes open. The room was mercifully dim, lit only by a flickering candle near his face and a smoldering fire a little further off. In between the two, a woman sat in a rocking chair. With the candle positioned as it was, he could see very little of her face. He discerned the outlines of her cap clearly, but would have been hard-pressed to tell the color of the hair that straggled from it. From the way she hunched over the knitting in her lap, he guessed the hair must be gray.

“What’s your name, lad?” she persisted.

It was a kindly voice, for all its roughness. Maxwell let his eyes close. “Carrington.”

“There we are, and that’s just what the card in your pocket said. My lads would have it you’d been killed, but I told them you weren’t much hurt, a strong man like you. And the date, sir, do you know that?”

Sometime in the future, was all he could think. And, If I can get to the future, I didn’t kill myself tonight.

He must have said some of that aloud, for she agreed. “No, you didn’t get yourself killed tonight, though near enough to it. Can’t you tell me the date?”

He tried to open his eyes again. There was something wrong about the room. How had he come to be here? The last thing he remembered was opening a second brandy bottle. He supposed he might have gone walking while several sheets to the wind, and it would have been easy enough to fall under a cart’s wheel in such a condition, but how would he have managed to get so far from home? The room, what little he could see of it in the uncertain light, was the poorest of poor hovels.

He remembered something about unexpected brick walls. And an enormous metal foot. And spiders.

“There was a spider,” he said. No, that wasn’t right. The old woman coughed again, and when the spasm had ended, he tried to rephrase. “Men set upon me, out in the alleyway.”

“No, no, sir,” she soothed. The knitting needles clicked. “’Twas a cart near ran you down. And you’d had more than enough to drink, no doubt you’re remembering dreams.”

“No,” he said from a great distance, shutting his eyes against the pain. “They attacked me. And said they were taking me to see the Spider. Who’s the Spider?”

“That’s a funny thing to hear. I shouldn’t wonder if that knock on your head is to blame. You’d a card in your pocket, so my lad went to your house to fetch your servants, but have you other family? We could send for them. Write to them, maybe.”

“I’ve no family. My mother’s dead, and my father with her. I keep trying, but I can’t…” Abruptly, Maxwell remembered he shouldn’t speak of that. He dragged his eyes open completely. “Wait, where am I?”

“My kitchen,” the old woman said, pausing in the rhythmic clicking of knitting needles to look at him with serious dark eyes. “The lads brought you here, where you’d be safe. Tell me the date.”

“Who are you?”

“What’s the year?” she countered.

Every muscle in Maxwell’s body had tensed. “Why do you want to know?”

“What year was it when you awoke this morning?” she said, and for the first time, Maxwell caught sight of what she had half-hidden beneath the half-complete blanket.

He lunged upright, but far too slowly. His head felt as though it would split open, his sense of balance was gone, and she moved faster than he would have thought possible for a woman that age. She eluded his grasp, then hard hands seized him from behind and shoved him back down.

He hadn’t even realized there was another person in the room, let alone a man practically standing over him. When he could see clearly again, the old woman stood straight behind the rocking chair, aiming with a dead steady hand the smallest pistol he had ever seen. Her knitting had dropped from her lap and lay abandoned on the floor with the rest of her pretenses.

The hand that did not hold the pistol held his pocket watch. “Fascinating trinket you have here,” she said—and her voice was different now, still raspy, but cool and clear and not in the least kindly. “Fascinating suit of clothing. What year was it when you awoke this morning?”

If he had not actually seen her jump from the chair, he would have sworn she was a different woman. Decades younger.

“Age is all in how you move,” she said, sounding amused. The Cockney accent was gone from her voice. “I was an actress for many years. Well, I’m an actress still, in every way that matters. So I should say, I performed upon the stage for many years. When you’ve a voice like mine, you’re often cast as old women even when you’re still quite young. And I…have chosen to take advantage of the freedom such a role provides. I’m the Widow Ramsey, no danger to anyone at all—”

A cough spoiled the last words. For an instant Maxwell assumed it was part of the act. In the next instant, he identified it as an opportunity, but the bodyguard standing behind him pressed a second pistol to his skull while the Widow Ramsey was still groping for her rocking chair.

“Damn,” she muttered after a few moments, dabbing at her eyes and mouth. She had laid the pistol beside her on a little table, but still had hold of the watch. She leaned back in the chair—confidence, or had the coughing fit tired her? Maxwell forgot to wonder as she drew his father’s little journal from her apron pocket. “Fascinating trinket,” she said. “Fascinating suit of clothes. Fascinating—” She flipped the pages with one finger. “—tale. I’d take it for a fairy story, except here’s the watch.”

“You had no right to go through my things—”

“Excuse me,” she cut him off, “you burst onto my street, half an inch from being captured by the Prime Minister’s patrols and giving them all this. I shudder to think what could be done with it in the wrong hands.”

“What’s happened to England?” he whispered.

“What year was it when you awoke this morning?”

He surrendered. If she had read his father’s journal, she already knew most of the story anyhow. “The year of our Lord eighteen hundred and forty-eight. Now tell me, what has happened to England?”

She nodded, apparently accepting the bargain: an answer for an answer. “The Empire is a divided entity. The very rich live high above in their dirigibles. The rest of us live below, kept in check by their constructs. Are you the William Carrington who wrote this account?”

“No. His son. William Maxwell. I go by my second name.”

She nodded, and went back to flipping pages. After a moment or two, she looked back at him inquiringly.

He realized she was granting him a turn to ask a question. Floundering at the unexpected courtesy, he managed, “Is it—is it—what year is it now?”

“The year of our Lord nineteen hundred and ten.” She looked at him thoughtfully. “Would you like some water?”

There was still a pistol clapped to his skull. The dichotomy of threat and courtesy together staggered him more than almost anything else about this night. “I—uh—yes. If you please.”

The Widow Ramsey gestured, and a second man Maxwell had not noticed in the shadows left his place long enough to thrust a chipped cup of warm and odd-tasting water into his hand. The man with the pistol did not move.