Timepiece (19 page)

Elizabeth shot one last look at William. She would have been satisfied with a look of sympathy, even if they must bow to Katarina’s wishes, but instead William shook his head. Regretfully perhaps, but with eyebrows raised as though she were indeed the child Katarina had called her. Elizabeth’s eyes filled with hot tears.

London, August 27, 1885

The shabby woman fixed red-rimmed eyes on him as though on fog-beacon, and William found that his heart was pounding harder than it had in well over a year.

“Mr. William Carrington,” Katarina’s voice said at his elbow, in smooth explanation, “a young relation of Mr. Maxwell, just down from Oxford. Mr. Carrington, Annie Drew.”

“Mrs. Drew,” he said. He didn’t see a ring, but chose the courteous option as being also the simplest. He didn’t know how to assess the likelihood that she had pawned it versus the likelihood that she had never possessed one, and he had no attention for the puzzle in any case. He was occupied with thoughts of walking alone through this fantastic battlefield, completely without defense except for the bits of information Katarina had fed him as they walked, bearing sole responsibility for this woman and her child.

For Katarina was not to accompany them to Murchinson’s. She said she dared not, with a gesture at her trouser-clad legs that confirmed his earlier suspicion of their significance. She would disappear a street or so away, so that Annie and William could approach the factory gates without a whiff of indecency attending their appearance. She assured William that it would be simplicity itself for him to get inside, as long as he acted as though he had an unassailable right to do so. He was then to tell the matrons that the woman beside him was a friend of his family’s cook, victim of a malicious joke, and that they were to return her child directly. He was to use certain slang phrases that Katarina believed would confirm him as a “young Oxford dandy” and would therefore explain his odd clothing. He tried to remember what they all were, and then tried to remember exactly what he had been thinking when he agreed to this task. How the devil was he to explain the arm, if someone noticed?

“Best leave us now, hadn’t you, Katherine?” Annie said diffidently. “I mean, I can show Mr. Carrington to Murchinson’s.”

“I’ll walk with you a bit,” Katarina overrode her. “I can vanish quick enough once we’re closer.”

She obviously had no intention of leaving Annie and William alone together a moment longer than necessary. Perhaps because she did not really trust William to successfully maintain the fiction. She was justified in her fear, if so; he had never acted a part in his life. What had he been
thinking?

“You will want to agree on the name of the cook,” Katarina said as though she always thought this way, as though assuming a role was the sort of thing she did all the time. It probably was. “May I suggest...” She paused. “...Dora Brewer. Can you both remember that? Otherwise, there is nothing you need agree upon, no need for you to pretend to know each other any better than you do.”

“Mrs. Brewer,” Annie repeated. “This is...so kind of you, Mr. Carrington.”

“Not at all,” he said, and then, feeling the flick of Katarina’s dark eyes, tried to infuse the tone with the proper drawl and the rest of the sentence with the proper vocabulary. “Jolly pleased I can be of help.” He didn’t dare turn head to see Katarina’s reaction to that, as he was rather afraid it might involve rolling eyes. He had never heard anything quite so unnatural as those words on his tongue.

Katarina left them a street or so later, drawing William into a shadowed alcove that smelled of horse and worse things to slip the overcoat off his shoulders. “I’ll just hold that for you, shall I, sir?” she said for Annie’s benefit. “They’ll stare at your fine Oxford clothes, I’m sure, but there’s no help for that. It’s not as though a young gentleman such as you belongs in these streets.”

He got the point. At least, he thought, it would not be terribly difficult to act the part of someone not from this part of the city who was taken aback at what he found. He clenched and released his left hand, and nodded to Annie to lead the way.

He was a little surprised by the size of the brick building that appeared out of the smog. It might have been a manor house, or even a French castle, with turrets rising on each side of a courtyard. Then he got closer to the great iron gates that separated the yard from the street, and saw that the turrets were chimneys. The right half of the building put him in mind of soldiers’ barracks, so he guessed that to be the orphanage and the other side the factory proper. Where to start?

“I dunno—” Annie murmured beside him, answering the thought he had not spoken. He turned to her, startled, and she flushed. “Excuse me, sir, I didn’t think of the gates being locked. Maybe we could—maybe there’s a servants’ entrance, round the back—?”

“Nonsense,” he said, making up his mind all at once, trying to sound certain. “We’ll enter by the front door.” He turned to the left, away from the enormous gates, and headed for a door in the brick wall. He assumed it led to the business office.

It did. The spare, neatly dressed clerk seated at the front desk widened his eyes at the sight of the Oxford dandy’s blue coat and brass buttons. They were pale gray eyes; everything else about the man was similarly gray and pale. So were the plaster walls and the papers on the desk. The very wood of the two doors behind the clerk looked faded and worn.

“May I...help you, sir?”

The quality did not come to transact business in this establishment, William inferred. Obviously not; the quality bought their matchsticks in shops elsewhere. Very likely this man handled the accounts between Murchinson’s and those shops. “Indeed you may, my good man,” he said, trying to drawl it a little, trying to remember the attitudes struck by some of his brother’s Oxford friends. “My name is William Carrington, and I’m here on a little commission for my mother. This lady here is cousin to our cook—” Cousin? Had he been meant to say cousin? Might it have been sister, or friend? It didn’t matter, he told himself; the detail would never matter, but a noticeable hesitation would, so he plunged forward. “—and it seems someone brought her daughter along here by mistake. The child’s name is Margaret Drew. Would you be so good as to fetch her out for us?”

The sparse brows above the pale eyes lifted. “That is quite impossible, Mr. Carrington. The Murchinson Orphanage takes in children who lose their parents to death or abandonment.”

“And very admirable of you,” William said, “but in this case, seems a trifling error was made, don’t you see. I’m sure it happens even in the best of places—no reflection on you, of course, Mr.—?”

“Perry,” the man said through pinched lips.

“Mr. Perry. Just one of those little mistakes that happen now and again, like putting figures in the wrong column or any other little accounting mishap.” William waved a hand at the man’s ledger book, and only then realized the mistake he had made.

He might not have made it had he been paying attention. The precision of the man’s dress, not to mention precision of the numbers in his ledger and the edges of the foolscap stacked on his desk, ought to have informed that Mr. Perry took a certain pride in exactness. But William had been thinking too hard about the lines he must recite to notice the trap until he was in it.

“Accounting errors do not occur in my office, sir,” Mr. Perry said coldly.

“Of course not,” William stammered, with an inner feeling uncannily like that of missing a step on a darkened stair. He lost the careless drawl in that moment, but tried desperately to recapture it with his next words. “Fact is, Mr. Perry, we think someone was having a, well, a joke with Mrs. Drew here. No need to look too closely at it—wouldn’t want to get anyone in trouble when there’s no harm done. We’ll just take the little girl back and say no more about it. We’ve no intention of Murchinson’s being out the money, of course!” William fumbled in his pocket as though only just then thinking of such sordid and uninteresting concerns as money. “Here we are, then, I believe that’s what’s fair? I haven’t counted carefully; do let me know if I’m short a bit.”

Mr. Perry took the drawstring bag William plunked down before him, and pulled it open. It contained about twice the required sum, William happened to know. Katarina’s strategy again. She said bribes often worked where an attitude of careless authority failed.

Mr. Perry dropped the bag and shoved it across the desk. “I do not take bribes, sir. I must wish you good afternoon.”

Had William taken longer to talk with him first, he might have figured that out too. Had he instead successfully employed the rattling manner, he might have been able to shrug off the faux pas. As it was, he hesitated a moment while the clerk’s face turned turkey-red and Annie made a miserable little moan behind him.

“Of course it’s not a bribe, sir,” he said finally, lamely, not at all with the insouciance the moment required. “I was trusting you for the change. Now, the child, if you please?”

Mr. Perry snorted and picked up his pen, and for a moment William thought he had lost. Before he could regroup and try again, though, Perry plunged his hand into the bag, counted out the coins required, and left the bag and the remainder for William to take. He reached and pulled a bell pull, and when a peaky-looking child appeared out of the left hand door, sent the boy for Mrs. Mason.

William exhaled a breath.
That went terribly,
he thought. And then,
But no matter. It worked.

Mrs. Mason was dressed in an outfit like Annie Drew’s—perhaps a shade newer and a shade worse cared-for, but similarly made of cheap stuff with no hope of lasting long. Mr. Perry identified her as the matron of the girls’ orphanage and explained to her what was wanted.

“Oh, but we couldn’t do that, sir,” she said, eyes wide. “You know as well as I do that we only get such children as haven’t mothers to care for them, and if this woman’s been mistreating her child, surely it’s our duty to—”

“I haven’t!” Annie burst out, and “She’s done no such thing,” William said, forgetting the part for the second time and—separately—making his second mistake.

Because the woman’s eyes were wide with innocent horror, but he could tell now it was manufactured innocence. She was almost licking her lips as she gazed at William’s smart brass buttons.
Here’s where a bribe would have worked,
William thought—and,
Damn! Damn, damn, damn! Another bloody thing I can’t—

“I’m sure the gentleman can see we’re in no position to take his word,” Mrs. Mason said stiffly, drawing herself up. “He might intend a mischief. You read of such things in the papers. No, sir, I’d be remiss in my duties—I certainly can’t without I go to Mr. Jorrick first. He’d be that angry with me if I...”

“If you what? What’s this about, then?” The big middle-aged man who entered, also from the left-hand door, had the build and hard hands of one accustomed to manual labor. He wore a jacket that didn’t quite fit him over a shirt and trousers like Trevelyan’s, and his tie was only loosely knotted about his thick neck.

“Mr. Jorrick is the factory overseer,” Perry said to William. “Mr. Jorrick, Mr. Carrington.”

Mrs. Mason said, “This woman sold her child a while agone, and wants her back.”

“Not quite,” William said. “This woman is a friend of my family’s, and we believe her child was brought here as a malicious joke on the part of a neighbor.” The story was right, but he hadn’t accomplished the requisite delivery, and Jorrick seemed to notice the mismatch between his speech and his clothing, for the man’s small eyes studied him for a disconcerting moment. “The girl’s name is Margaret Drew,” William repeated, giving up on the drawl and the slang as a lost cause. He picked up the bag of coins. “We’ve brought the money you would have given for her.”

“Come with me to my office, Mr. Carrington,” Jorrick said, rousing himself from his study of William’s clothing, “and we’ll sort this out, eh?”