Timepiece (16 page)

In 1873, tin mining resumed—by men rather than monsters, and with heavily armed soldiers as escorts. In 1874, whispers circulated through Tavisford that Sir Charles was involved in some plan to tilt the odds back in the humans’ favor. The gentleman himself never confirmed it, but his frequent visits to London and liquidation of Buford heirlooms seemed to admit of no other explanation. In 1875, the factory was built, and the Tavisford stockade extended to enclose it.

The latter precaution was almost unnecessary. The factory required enormous quantities of peat, and between the scars of large-scale peat cutting on the moor and the huge clouds of smoke belched into the air, the monsters seemed to find the area around Tavisford a less attractive place to raid. Once Tavisford came to display the typical disadvantages of a city—dead farmland and a military presence—the monsters ceased raiding entirely, shifting their efforts elsewhere. Had they known what the factory was constructing, they might have acted differently, but by the time the first construct marched out of its doors, it was too late for them to stop it.

Katherine was just turned thirteen on that cold March morning—trying to fit into the gray-brown life of Tavisford, calling herself Katherine and not Katarina. She stood with her mother just outside the stockade, surrounded by Tavisford factory workers who chuckled with delight at their accomplishment and with relief at finally being permitted to speak of it. Before them on the moor, the thing Sir Charles called a
construct
strode and lunged and showed what it could do.

It was piloted by men inside, Katherine knew that. One of them had stood before the crowd, upright and splendid in his scarlet coat, and had spoken a few words about Queen and country before disappearing through the tall, wide doors of the factory. But even
knowing
he was inside it,
knowing
his hands on a lever were making its knees lift and its arms swing, Katherine could not help but think of the construct as alive. It looked like a man, after all—like a twenty-foot-tall man covered in armor, like one of the Tudor knights in the exquisitely illustrated book in the Buford Hall library. Katherine had fallen hopelessly in love with the book, and had learned the proper names for every piece of armor that protected a knight from buffets in the joust, and she could see them all here. Greaves covered legs thick as tree-trunks. Shining rivets held a breastplate bolted in place. The head had only eyes, no ears or mouth or nose, and so was as closed and anonymous as a visored helm. The whole ensemble shone copper instead of silver, liquid fire against the bright blue sky—but it could still be a knight, couldn’t it? Hadn’t King Arthur had a Red Knight? That was in a different book, one Katherine did not know as well, and she could not quite remember.

Only the creature’s arms ruined the illusion of its humanity. No gauntlets covered five-fingered hands. Instead, the arms ended in mouths like those of a cannon, which Sir Charles explained could shoot musket balls of many sizes.

The construct was too large to move fast or gracefully, but it did move steadily and without stumbling on the boggy ground. The crowd outside the village stockade applauded, and the construct gave them a slight but definite bow. Then it turned and pointed with a misshapen cannon-mouthed arm back to the factory.

The crowd turned in time to see a second construct march from between the high doors. And then a third. And then a fourth, a fifth, a sixth. The first half-dozen constructs in Britain were piloted by men who had been working out drills within doors for eighteen months, and it took them very little time to put their theoretical knowledge to practical use. They pranced about the moor before the village gates like show horses on parade. Briefly, that morning, playing to their audience; then seriously and for hours every day thereafter, and Sir Charles gathered all of his tenants within his walls once more.

On the sixth night after returning to Buford Hall, Katherine lay long awake, staring at the swirling patterns in the darkness overhead and listening to the others in the room snore and cough. After she heard the enormous old clock in the main hall strike midnight, she gave up on sleep and rose quietly to her feet. She slipped between the other pallets scattered over the ballroom floor and let herself out into the chilly corridor.

A draft whooshed down the hall and up her legs, bare under her nightdress and dressing-gown. The more nights she spent in this house, the more she understood the old ghost stories; it was draftier than any of the cottages on the moor. She shivered with the sudden chill, but did not retreat to her bed. There ought to be a candle and lucifers on the table just to her left—and there were. She got the candle lit and headed down the creaking old passage for the library. She would cuddle in a chair there and read something until she felt sleepy. Perhaps she would have a hunt for the King Arthur book, and see if there had been a Red Knight after all.

But someone was in the library before her. Two figures, only just visible by the light of the banked fire, turned from the window as she pushed the door open. After a moment, she recognized the larger one as Sir Charles.

“Katarina?” her mother’s voice said from the shadows by Sir Charles’ side. “What are you doing here? Put out your candle.”

Katherine blew it out. “Is something happening?” she asked.

“Not yet,” Sir Charles said.

“But something will?” Katherine felt her way through the room and to the window. A woolly blanket of fog lay over the moor, stretching cold fingers almost to the gates of Buford Hall. There was only the barest sliver of a moon, and not one scrap of light shone from village abode or the factory. Every inhabitant of Tavisford was to all appearances fast asleep. Even the constructs stood quiescent inside the factory gates, looking less like sentries than like men asleep on their feet.

“What’s happening?” she asked again.

“Nothing yet,” Sir Charles said, “but wouldn’t it be a perfect night for the Wellies to try to climb the stockade and get at the constructs?”

Katherine stared at him, trying to make out his face in the darkness. “But they can’t. They know they can’t. They’re not
stupid.
I thought that was the point.”

“Perhaps they might have tried a bit of sabotage night before last,” Sir Charles offered blandly, “and perhaps we might have acted as though we hadn’t noticed.”

Katherine stared into the blackness beyond the diamond-pane window. She thought she saw one of the reaching fingers of the fog thicken slightly, but perhaps it was only fancy. Then another seemed to swell briefly, and subside into its original shape. Nothing further happened for a long while, and she had just decided that her tired mind and overstrained eyes must be inventing things, when the fog very definitely distorted its shape, oozing and distending as though it had come to life and meant to swallow in one gulp all of Buford Hall and Buford Factory. 

Shafts of blue-white light shattered the darkness as the constructs’ eyes flared alight, and the Wellingtons skidded to a stop in the act of bursting from the fog. Pinioned by the beams of light, the advantage of their cat-eyes was negated: they could not see beyond the dazzling circle, and the constructs had light by which to see them plainly. Blue fire burst in flashes from the constructs’ arms. A relentless rattling pounded at Katherine’s ears. Six of the monsters dropped where they stood.

“What—” Katherine rubbed at her ears; the rapid musket-fire hadn’t yet stopped, and it seemed to be burrowing inside her head, making her ear canals itch. “What
is
that? How can a musket possibly fire like that?”

“Because it’s not actually a musket, my dear,” Sir Charles said, peering out at the fight below. “It’s something quite new. An American named Gatling came up with the original design, and a team from the University of London improved upon it. Brilliant.”

The other monsters had scattered, were sprinting back toward the fog-bank. The constructs’ arms swept through the air, following their paths, and the rattling blue fire dropped another half dozen. The remainder zigzagged faster than the arms could move, and made it to the lip of the fog, past the point where the blue light shone.

The constructs started in pursuit with deliberate, jerking strides, clouds of steam puffing around their heads like breath in the cold March air. Each seemed to be dragging a wagon of some sort behind it, heaped with piles of something Katherine could not see well enough to identify.

“Fuel,” Sir Charles explained, seeing her squint at it. “We don’t know long the chase will take. There’s a new design being tested now, and if it works, the next generation of these things will run more efficiently and not need the provision train.”

The constructs seemed to have gotten the feel of the moor, for they were moving faster, eating up ground with huge, thunderous strides. Their blue light advanced onto the moor, dwindling into far-off halos, periodically augmented by flashes of gunfire like heat lightning. Buford Hall was awake now, light shining from windows onto the grounds, people shouting and scurrying and calling questions in the corridors outside the library door, but neither Sir Charles nor Katherine’s mother turned from the window

“You have done it,” Genevieve Rasmirov said, in a voice low and choked with emotion. “You have saved us.”

“Others, my dear madam, not me,” Sir Charles replied. “I merely offered what small assistance I could, with capital and raw materials. I haven’t the brains to come up with something like this, but thank heaven that young fellow in London did. Thank heaven for the modern age.”

The following morning, the constructs followed the trail back to the monsters’ stronghold upon the moor, and by the following afternoon, there was no stronghold left to threaten Tavisford. Within a fortnight, the last straggling remnants of the monster band had been accounted for, and the constructs moved on to secure other parts of England, leaving two of their number on guard outside the Tavisford stockade and more coming out of the factory all the time. Within six months, the four-year horror that had gripped Britain was contained. A handful of monsters remained free, in desolate regions, but no large forces and no organized bands. Then the English took the war to Moore’s Wall, leaving enough constructs behind to guard the land they had retaken, while simultaneously construction began on factories in Bristol, London, Birmingham, and Manchester. The English retook the Highlands the next spring.

Life in Tavisford could not return to the way it had been in 1872, of course. With the farmland in ruins, most people worked in the factory and lived within the stockade. Katherine found herself wishing the walls could come down, now that the monster danger was over. They seemed to press tight around her in a way they never had during the years of actual siege. The chattering tongues and sidelong glances cut off her breath like the increasingly tight-laced corsets that were once again so fashionable, and the constructs seemed to block the sun as they stood guard outside the village gates—stood guard still, though it was no longer clear against what.

There were days when she felt like one of the boilers in the factory, heated from all sides until steam hissed under her skin in search of any means of escape. She practiced piano and sang under her mother’s tutelage and helped with the sewing, and wanted all the time to scream loud and long. Or run somewhere. Anywhere.

Ironically, however, she was not actually the first to rebel. Laura Ford escaped the stockade in 1878, eloping with a young artist who had come to paint the fabled beauties of Devonshire and stayed to record the scars of peat-cutting and the angles of the factory rooftops. Laura was not one of the village girls, but the daughter of a man whose estate bordered Sir Charles’—who had been persuaded to take into his home some of the Tavisford refugees when Buford Hall was filled to bursting, but had only done it under protest and only accepted those he deemed of good character. Even at the time, Katherine had been well aware that Mr. Ford would not have deigned to apply such a designation to Genevieve Rasmirov. Had Ford and not Sir Charles been primarily responsible for the safety of those without estates of their own, Katherine and her mother would certainly have been left to the winds of fate and the tender mercies of the monsters.

So Katherine was already little disposed to sympathize with Mr. Ford, and his fury over his daughter’s elopement did nothing to endear him. He referred to Laura in terms that no gentleman should apply to any lady, ensuring that all gossip about her would be conducted in tones of delighted malice. Katherine felt every spiteful murmur like glass shards across her skin—perhaps because she could hear the echo of what these same kind souls must have said about her mother—and the sense of boiling steam built up hotter and fiercer inside her. When her mother died eighteen months later, in the fall of 1880, Katarina had already made the final inward break with Tavisford. She sold the cottage and the piano, packed up the few gowns that were relics of her mother’s bygone glory, and made tracks for London. The morning she burst free from the stockade, she felt as though she had drawn her first deep breath in years, despite the whalebones pinching into her lungs.