Timepiece (11 page)

He released her at last, but still stood looking down at her, blocking the path that led home. To one side was the duck pond, to the other a great open pasture. Behind her snaked the road back to the village. Nobody would be walking it this time of day. All the men would be crossing fields to their own homes. If she screamed, would anyone hear her?

“Listen to me,” the stranger said abruptly. “Gavin sent me to take you and your mother and father away from here. Just for a day or two. You’re in danger. You need to come away somewhere safe.”

“What?” Brenda stared at him.

He nodded. “It’s true. Your life is in danger, Miss Evans. You need to come away from here. I have money enough for train fares—”

“Train
fares?”

“—you can spend a day or so in London. I’ll take you up to Gavin in London, and you can surprise him.”

“I can surprise him? Who are you?” The stranger didn’t answer. Brenda backed away, crumpling her letter between her sweating hands. “I had a letter from Gavin this very day. He didn’t mention any danger, and he didn’t mention anything about you, Mr. Jones. I don’t know who you are, or what kind of joke you’re having with me, but it’s not a very funny one. Now go away. I have to get home for tea.” He was still blocking her path. His eyes burned with intensity, but the rest of his face sagged in a way that looked so very tired.  “My father will come looking for me if I’m not home directly,” she said. He still didn’t step aside to let her pass. She stood trembling for one moment—then she darted for the pasture fence at the same time he dove for her.

His hand snapped in the air just above her arm. She twisted and eluded him and ran two steps before he seized a fistful of her gown. She writhed in his grip, but his arm across her chest was like iron. “Help me!” she shrieked. “Mr. Davies! Johnny! Help—”

The stranger’s calloused palm clapped over her mouth like a blow, with enough force to rattle her teeth. “I shan’t hurt you,” he breathed in her ear as she thrashed against him. “I’m here to see to it nothing happens to you. I’ve gone about this all wrong, Brenda, and I’m sorry, but I only mean to—oof!”

Her boot heel connected with his knee, a strike more of luck and desperation than cunning, but it was enough to free her mouth for an instant.
“Help!”
she cried again, lunging from his arms in the direction of the pasture. It was a large field, but she could see the Davies’ house. Surely someone there would hear—

He really struck her that time, hard enough that her head snapped back and she reeled with the shock of it. She could summon no resistance for a moment or two, and he dragged her away from the fence and the safety beyond it. He was holding her only with the one arm, she realized dimly. The hand that had been over her mouth, the hand he had used to strike her, was fumbling at his waistcoat pocket. Brenda felt sick. She was a married woman, after all, with enough experience to guess what he wanted. One heard of fearful stories of girls gone to cities in search of work—but those things happened in
cities,
not villages—

Head spinning, she threw herself against his restraining arm.
“Help me!”

She couldn’t get her vision clear. The field before her seemed to tilt and wobble and tilt again. But there were spots in the middle of it. Moving spots. People. Running toward her.

The stranger jerked something from his pocket—
Oh God,
Brenda thought,
a pistol?
But no. It was something else. She couldn’t see what, but the stranger was fiddling with something he held in his left hand as Johnny Davies leapt the fence and struck him with a spade.

They put him in a holding cell in the village, one that had never before had the honor of containing anything more interesting than a drunkard. Constable James, who had also never had the honor of looking after anything more interesting than a drunkard, settled stolidly in to guard him until a sergeant could be fetched down from Cardiff.

The stranger talked with scarcely a pause for breath, staring at James with pleading eyes. “I’m sorry I scared her,” he said. “But she is in danger. It doesn’t matter what you do to me, but you’ve got to send her away from here.”

James carefully noted down all the wild words, but did not reply.

“You’re all in danger!” the man said suddenly. “The monsters in the coal mines are at the point of bursting their bonds! They will break free tonight, they will swarm down from the mountains and take what they want from this village—food, money, women, revenge—you are
all
in danger. You have to find a safe place for everyone to gather, a place you can defend. Pendoylan will be burning by midnight.”

James noted those words as well. The man kept repeating them, with only slight variations and in an increasingly hoarse voice, for hours. Every time he came up with a new phrase, James wrote it down. For the rest of the time, the constable kept his eyes fixed on the wall above the stranger’s head and gave him no encouragement.

Brenda’s mother had fed her brandy and then tucked her into bed with the extra blankets and the hot water bottle that shock and distress required. Despite them, Brenda had felt chilled through. Her mother had sat in the rocking chair, singing her lullabies as she had done at bedtimes long ago, and somewhere in the middle of them, Brenda had dropped off to sleep.

She woke with a jump, to find her bedchamber lit by a red glow.

The hands of the little clock at her bedside pointed to a quarter past two, and she had the sense of having just woken from a nightmare. The red glow was real, however. It came from the window, from a gap in the curtains. It was not unlike the blue moonlight that sometimes bathed the room—but this was the wrong week for that. The moon had been only the slenderest crescent the night before, and besides, the color was wrong...Wondering dazedly if something had
happened
to the moon, Brenda slipped out of the bed and went to the window.

She saw a halo of orange and red blazing from the peak of the mountaintop, stretching high into the sky. Smaller orange blotches shimmered here and there on the side, wending their way downward, toward Pendoylan. 

The Evans’ house was the one nearest the mountain; they never had a chance. Brenda had only just convinced her parents that she had
not
been dreaming, that they must come and look from her window, when the first monster broke down the kitchen door. He was followed by a swarm of others. They left the family dead and the house in flames.

Nearby dwellings fared almost as badly, though there were some survivors who streamed away from the holocaust of their homes.  By the time the monsters reached the village proper, the alarm had been given and the men were organized with fowling pieces. Fewer people died after that point, but the damage to homes and farms was considerable. More horribly, women separated from their families were cruelly used.

The man in the cell shouted all night for someone to let him out, in tones piercing enough to be heard outside the prison. He fell silent as the sun rose, however, and spoke no word afterward. When Constable James, burnt and bloodied from the night’s fighting, stumbled back to his post around midday, he found the cell empty and the lock still fastened. His prisoner had somehow managed to vanish from behind the bars. No one in Pendoylan or out of it ever looked into solving the mystery, however. The “tame” monsters had burst their bonds all over the countryside, and Wales had bigger problems to occupy its attention. The south was burning. 

London, August 27, 1885

The fog pressed hot and choking, worse every minute. Elizabeth cleared her throat again and again, but could not get rid of the tickling almost-need to cough. Walls of black-smeared brick and weather-worn wood pressed close on either side, so close that she could have stretched out her arms and spanned the alleyway had she wanted to trail her fingers through the layer of soot that coated them. The ever-present rattling drone bothered her less now, but the thunder that heralded the approach of the metal giants still made her jump, and still left her ears ringing when it passed. She craned her head upward each time it broke upon her, and had twice caught a glimpse of a sapphire-and-copper head through gaps in the buildings and breaks in the fog, but had not yet managed anything like a good look at the things. The second time she gave up the attempt and turned her eyes back to the alley before her, it was to find that Katarina had vanished.

Elizabeth caught her breath and darted forward. Panicking would be foolish, of course; she would not panic. Katarina could not be more than a few steps ahead, must be only briefly concealed by fog, surely would not intend to leave Elizabeth behind. But between the mist obscuring her vision and the ringing in her ears, Elizabeth felt as though all connection to the world around her had slipped away. Katarina was the only touchstone she had, the only proof that she was not marooned in a blizzard or an Arabian sandstorm or possibly fairyland. She was
not
panicking, but she was very relieved indeed to see Katarina’s coil of black hair come back into view—of course no more than a few steps ahead, of course having suffered no graver fate than to be hidden by fog. Katarina turned a corner, and Elizabeth scuttled after her, only just managing not to plow into the gypsy woman when Katarina suddenly stopped. 

They stood in a courtyard of sorts, filled to the brim with jostling humanity. Slump-shouldered men in laborers’ clothing wandered about, smoking tiny cigars. Over their heads, laundry hung in straggling lines between buildings that sagged toward each other as though the linen was too great a burden for their frames. Two women in skirts and caps stood still, holding bawled conversations with upper-story windows, and two others—younger, their faces brightly painted—sat on what looked to be damp and uncomfortable ground, their backs to a wall, and passed a bottle from hand to hand. One of the latter wore a cheap-looking gown that appeared to have been made for her before she reached womanhood: the skirt fluttered above her knees and her bosom strained against the bodice. Her companion wore breeches and a blouse pulled low, and Elizabeth felt an uncomfortable suspicion regarding the costume she had so eagerly adopted.

There were children running about everywhere, and other adults whose situation in life Elizabeth could not categorize, and all along the walls, piles of rubbish and great dark sacks. At first Elizabeth paid no attention to the sacks. She was absorbed in studying the girls with the bottle, for they were the first women of easy virtue she had ever personally encountered, and they did not appear to be deriving as much enjoyment from their role as Katarina seemed to derive from hers. Then one of the sacks
moved,
and Elizabeth jumped back from it. Looking at it more closely, she saw that it had matted hair—and a bearded face—and a mouth open in a yawn that turned into a racking cough. For a terrified moment, she thought it one of the dead-faced, droop-skinned monsters from the night before, but no. This face was drawn and lined, but human.

“Men whose health has broken down such that they cannot work,” Katarina supplied in a low voice, and then clarified, “Ones who didn’t scrape up enough yesterday for a night’s lodging.”

A pair of children appeared out of nowhere, careening into Elizabeth and knocking her backward a step. Katarina caught her arm, and the children dashed past without a pause or apology.

“Where—?” Elizabeth’s eyes were still on the man who was neither a monster nor a sack, and she couldn’t manage more than the one word.

“The children? Headed for their work,” Katarina said. “Everyone here will be, before very long. It’s nearly that time.”

Indeed, the mass of figures in the courtyard had begun to drift toward the alleyway. Even some of the dark heaps on the ground began to stir themselves, and one or two joined the shuffling exodus.

“I thought you said they couldn’t—?”

“They can’t work in the factories. They can make a few pennies begging, and the businessmen who come on the early trains are a good mark for that. The children do a variety of jobs. Or they pick pockets when there are no odd jobs to be found.” The painted ladies had gotten to their feet, leaving the now-empty bottle abandoned on its side, and were heading for a water pump at the far enough of the courtyard. Katarina followed Elizabeth’s glance in their direction. “Those two will be off to catch factory workers headed home from the night shift. They’re hoping for the price of a meal and then a place to sleep.”

Elizabeth swallowed. “Isn’t there somewhere—charity from the parish, or—”

“There are places.” Katarina’s voice was flat. “They’re not places you want to see the inside of, if you’ve any choice in the matter.”

The mob had thinned considerably by now, but a knot of laborers still stood at the far end of the courtyard, smoking their little cigars and watching the wanton girls wet their hair with water and use their fingers to style it into frizzy curls. The two women in caps were still engaged in their screeching parley with the occupants of the upstairs windows. Each woman carried a mop and a pail, Elizabeth could see now, and their overlapping conversations seemed to be with offspring. “You stay right where you are!” the taller of the two concluded. “I don’t want to come back and find you’ve stirred a step, not with those nasty Wellingtons hunting last night!”

“And don’t let the baby fall from the window!” finished the other, and both turned for the alley.

Elizabeth dodged out of the way that time. Katarina stood her ground. The taller woman shouldered past her without a comment, but the other stopped. “Madam Katherine!”

“Mrs. Thompson,” Katarina answered. “How do you find yourself today?”

“Here, Thompson, look who’s here!” the woman called over her shoulder, and one of the laborers leaning against the wall by the water pump looked up. He stared a moment, then pushed himself upright and hastened over the cobblestones, his fellows peering after. Katarina took a step to meet him, but not more than that, and Elizabeth wondered if there were some etiquette about guests not entering the courtyard.

“Madam Katherine, here’s a surprise,” Thompson said, and raised a finger to his cap. “You’re up early.”

“She’s not been home to bed yet!” the girl in the too-short gown called from the pump.

“True, as far as it goes,” Katarina said pleasantly. She spoke less like a guttersnipe now, but still not quite in the voice she had used in the warehouse. Something in the vowels suggested a kinship with these ragged folk. “I’m not yet so high at the Shoreditch that I don’t have to take my turn at cleaning, and if the cleaning goes late, well, then I’m stuck there for the night, aren’t I? I can’t be walking about after curfew.”

“You
shouldn’t
be,” a voice said from just outside the courtyard. It belonged to the taller of the two women possessed of mop and pail, who had apparently not gone on her way after pushing past Katarina. Her emphasis said plainly both that Katarina was often out after curfew and that everyone knew it. “There was a pack of Wellingtons out last night,” the tall woman added with relish. “Who knows what devilry they were about before the coppers brought them down. They’ll eat you sure, if you don’t take more care.” With these words she took her departure, and no one appeared to care enough for her company to call her back.

“How would you know what happened last night unless you broke curfew yourself?” Katarina asked the air, and there were some appreciative chuckles from her audience. Quite a crowd had gathered, Elizabeth noticed: most of the laborers, both of the painted girls, and the remaining woman carrying a mop.

“Just come to say hello on your way home, then?” Thompson asked.

“Just so.”

“Have a gasper?” He offered her one of the tiny cigars, and Katarina took it. Thompson’s eyes slid to Elizabeth. “And one for your friend?”

“I think she’d choke on it,” Katarina said, amused. “She’s only just up from Kent, hasn’t had time to learn city ways. Give her a day or so.” She slipped the cigar between her lips and leaned forward, and one of the other men produced a tiny box. He fumbled with it, and with a snap flame appeared between his fingers. Elizabeth stared as he touched the little wooden stick to Katarina’s cigar. A matchstick, was it? She had heard of the things, invented by a Frenchman and considered to be quite clever, but too dangerous and too expensive to be widely popular. They appeared to be less expensive now, to judge by the surroundings in which this one was being used. She hoped they were similarly less inclined to explode.

“Is it true what those wicked paper-boys were saying last night?” the woman with the mop demanded. “About Lord Seward being taken by the coppers?”

“Quite true, I’m afraid.”

“Wicked,” the woman proclaimed, and the men nodded, looking grimly at each other. “I was hoping it wasn’t true, so I was, but if you say so—”

“I heard the papers said he was doing terrible things.” The man with the matchsticks looked at Katarina. “They said he had a pack of Wellingtons under his control, and—”

“Wicked lies, those papers print,” the woman said. “Why, he’s given away more to charity than—well, than I’ll ever see in a lifetime! Saved us from being thrown into the street, he did, when Thompson lost his work in the Ingleham fire. You didn’t see Mr. Ingleham putting himself out, did you? The idea of Lord Seward doing anything he oughtn’t. Wicked lies.”

“His honor’ll be all right, a rich man like him,” a third man said, words catching around a soft Irish brogue. “Even if someone’s printed lies about him. Won’t he?”

“Oh, no doubt of it,” Katarina said. “I’m sure it’s all a mistake. Tempers run high when the heat is so horrid, after all.”

“No doubt it’s that,” Thompson said, watching her as narrowly as Johnson had back at the docks.

“And I can’t think but that it’ll break soon,” Katarina went on. “There’s a storm coming tonight, I shouldn’t wonder.”

“Tonight?” the Irishman said.

“Oh, I think so.” Katarina waved a hand. “Can’t you feel it?”

“I can, and a blessing it’ll be if it brings a breath of clean air with it,” the Irishman said. “What—”

Somewhere nearby, a church bell tolled out the three-quarter chime.

“A’right, lads.” Thompson tugged his cap more firmly over his ears. “Shift-change whistle’s about to blow, better be stepping. Hope you’re right about the weather, Madam Katherine.”

“Tell the others,” Katarina said. “See what they think.”

“We’ll be doing that,” the Irishman promised. He touched his cap to her and joined the men already filing out of the courtyard. Mrs. Thompson and her mop brought up the rear. Within minutes, the courtyard was filled only with half-grown children, dark sack-like shapes huddled against the walls, and an old woman Elizabeth had not previously noticed, slumped on a step in a drunken stupor.

“We can’t do better than follow them,” Katarina said. “We’ll be at the factory gates when the whistle blows, catch those going home. Just on the off-chance.”

“On the off-chance of—?” Elizabeth hastened to follow her, but received no answer.