Timepiece (26 page)

Elizabeth shook her head, as much in experiment as in answer. No, she decided, she was not hurt. Her cheek still stung—and no surprise; that was the third time in twenty-four hours it had been struck—but her head did not spin. She felt bruised from hitting the floor, but it was no worse than falling from a horse. She reflected, with a strange sense of calm, that either she had gotten the date wrong or Maxwell had, because it was demonstrably too late to stop the Genevese from making the first monster.

Maxwell—

She said his name in a gasp, and whirled back toward the cottage. But he stood on the threshold, disheveled and coatless, shirtsleeves and hair shining blue-silver in the moonlight. He leaned against the doorway for support and he had his other hand pressed to his throat, but he was alive.

“There is—something comforting,” he choked out, “—about the statistical—inevitability. Suppose you felt—honor bound? Though for all—th’good I’m doing, you ought—t’have let them kill me.” He staggered toward them. “Are either of you hurt?”

“No,” Elizabeth said at once, and “No,” William said, giving her one last anxious look before shaking his head as though trying to clear it. “Two. There were
two.
”

“Yes.” Maxwell looked down at the moonlit waves with an expression of loathing. “I’m too late. Again.”
He turned back to the cottage, stumbling a little. “Safe enough inside now,” he added over his shoulder. “May as well come in.”

There was indeed no longer anything alarming in the outer room, though the signs of violent struggle were now clearly visible in the firelight. The pallet had been kicked away from the hearth, the rough brown blanket dragged off it. A stool had once sat beside the rickety table, and now lay broken in two pieces on the floor. The brass-bound trunks—far too grand for their surroundings, Elizabeth noted for the first time—lay all on their sides, contents spilled across the floorboards. Maxwell staggered about, taking candles from the mantelpiece and the table, and lighting them at the hearth. The room gradually grew light enough for Elizabeth to see that just within the kitchen door lay a huddled form, head covered by Maxwell’s coat.

“Don’t look,” Maxwell said quietly behind her. “It’s not a pretty sight.”

Elizabeth did not go and lift the coat. She did take one of the candles and advance toward the inner room, but she conducted her observations from the doorway.

It had indeed been intended as a kitchen originally. However, its current inhabitant had put it to different use. This hearth was cold. The shelves held gleaming copper instruments and things in jars, not herbs or cooking pans. There were no chairs or stools around the table large enough to seat a crofter’s family, and the table itself was spread with oilcloth and had been fitted with...Elizabeth studied it. It had been fitted with irons, like those of the stocks in the village green back home. She looked at the thickness of the irons and the distance between them, and swallowed. Some huge thing had been chained onto this table by its wrists and ankles. She had no trouble guessing what huge thing that might have been.

“It seems,” Maxwell said, still in that flat, quiet tone, “that our information was inaccurate.” Elizabeth turned back to him. He stood by the unsteady table, gazing down upon it with candle in hand. A thick layer of dust sprang into view in the candlelight, strangely marred by the clear space where a book had sat long open. Maxwell traced his finger around the outlines of the vanished book. “His journal ended with an entry dated September the 16
^th
, saying the work would be completed upon the morrow. Perhaps our young scholar lost track of the days, so far removed from the world.” His tone was very mild, but all at once he slammed his hand hard onto the table, and Elizabeth took a startled step back from him.

Maxwell paused only long enough to set down the candle and curl his hand into a fist, and then he hit the wall so hard that the table seemed to shiver from the nearby impact and the candle flame wavered dangerously. He hit the wall again, harder; stumbled against the pieces of the stool and swore as he kicked them away. Elizabeth had retreated several steps more by then, well into the center of the room. William shouldered past her, somehow managing not to trip over the instruments on the floor as he captured Maxwell from behind in a one-armed bear hug.

Maxwell was bigger through the shoulders, but William was taller and younger and quite determined; Maxwell made one halfhearted attempt to throw him off, then gave up and seemed to go limp. “It’s all right,” William was saying calmly, “it’s all right. Come over here where it’s warm. Come on now. I’ve brought brandy. Elizabeth, can you—?” He made quick eye contact as he manhandled Maxwell past her and to the pallet beside the hearth. “It’s in my pack.” She saw now where he had dropped the rucksack. “And perhaps you could shut the kitchen door.”

Shutting the door on the dead body of the Genevese student did indeed seem like the thing to do. Elizabeth did it gladly, then hurried toward the rucksack. She had to set the candle down to get it open, and so had to sort through its contents blind. With chilly fingers she rooted through various pieces of folded cloth, seeking the solid coldness of a flask. She had just grasped it when a noise behind her startled her into dropping it. Then she belatedly recognized the strangled sound as a sob, rather than as a returning monster, and fished the flask out of the pack again.

She brought it over to William, who had Maxwell seated on the pallet and the rough blanket draped over his shoulders. William stooped and put the flask in the older man’s hand. Maxwell stared at it for a moment unblinking before taking it, uncorking it, and gulping down a swallow. And then another. And a third.

William eased away from him. For a moment, he stood watching; then he turned away. He met Elizabeth’s eyes as he did—a silent question,
Are you all right?
She nodded. William went over to the nearest trunk, righted it, closed it, and dragged it one-handed over to the hearthside opposite the pallet. He met her eyes again, gesturing to it, and she came to sit on the seat he had provided for her as he went to fetch another trunk for himself.

“I’m sorry,” Maxwell said at last, brokenly. “I am sorry.” His shoulders hunched and his head drooped over the flask in his hands. “They were my friends.”

“I cannot even imagine,” William said quietly, standing just outside the circle of firelight. After a moment, he added, “And you have been doing this all alone for quite some time, haven’t you?”

Maxwell leaned back, seeming to make an effort to straighten his shoulders and steady his voice. He looked much smaller than he ever had before, sitting cross-legged on the pallet with the blanket hugged about him. He cleared his throat. “For some time, yes.”

William went over to the far wall, retrieved his pack, and brought it back with him into the firelight. He sat down on the trunk he had claimed for himself, and bent to rummage in the rucksack. “How did it begin?”

“How—?” Maxwell cleared his throat again, then waved one hand to indicate the room. “This story?”

“Your story.” William’s head came up from the pack as his hand drew out a handkerchief-wrapped bundle. He balanced it on his knees and set about working out the knot.

“I...came by it honestly, I suppose.” Maxwell’s lips twisted a little, not really a smile. “My...my parents were time-travelers. I found their watch after they died, and it seemed I inherited some of their taste for adventure. Some of this story did begin within my lifetime. When I first went forward and encountered the future that was to result, I...” He trailed off. Elizabeth looked up, and he was gazing at the far wall, as though there was a message to be seen in the play of the shadows. “I could not let it stand,” he said finally. “Not when I had a way to stop it, or thought I did. I had to try. I have...been trying, ever since. Quite a while now, indeed.”

The far wall seemed to be fascinating him, so much that he lost the thread of what he was saying. William frowned at that, even as he set the handkerchief-full of biscuits where they all could reach. He licked his lips and seemed to be looking for another question, something to keep Maxwell talking. He glanced at Elizabeth as though for help.

“The poor man who’s in there,” she said, nodding toward the kitchen. “That’s the Genevese student?”

Maxwell’s eyes went to her, startled out of wherever he had sunk into. “Yes, of course.”

“I had thought you were coming here to stop him making the first monster? But there were two.”

 “I’ve already tried to stop him making the first monster,” Maxwell said, and his smile was bitter. “I’ve failed there already. I was going to stop him creating a wife for the monster...kill him if I had to, if that was the only way to stop him...But I’m too late again.”

Elizabeth bit her tongue on,
Why did you not plan to arrive a month ago, so you would have plenty of time?
She settled for, “In twenty-four hours, can you not go back one week ago and try again?”

Maxwell shook his head. He took another swallow of the brandy.
“I began to explain this earlier, but I suppose I did not do it properly. The timepiece allows only one journey to each junction. The opportunity to change this moment is forever closed to me.”

“‘Junction’?”

“The places where the road forks and the story changes. The moments that matter. One cannot dip in the same river twice, or whatever that saying is. The watch does not let you return to a place where you have already been.”

“But you could go to one of the other junctions, to stop this?” William asked.

“I’ve been a part of nearly all of them. I’ve been in Geneva, trying to steal away the books that first started the young student down this disastrous path. I’ve been in London, trying to steal the letters sent by his collaborator, the ones that gave the final piece of the puzzle. I created an entire persona and rented a house, so that I could get to know him during his travels, invite him to stay with me, prevent him from coming here...” His voice thickened again.

“So what happens next?” William asked, trying to recapture his attention. “After tonight, what happens, what’s the story?”

Maxwell did not answer.

“The first monster takes the female one to wife,” Elizabeth said, remembering Katarina’s tale. “Their children become a terror to the Highlands, and the King sends soldiers, and the soldiers capture one.”

Maxwell looked up, not asking how she knew. “I was there,” he commented, almost without inflection. “I was hiding in the heather, trying to prevent the capture, trying to save my enemy from my King...”

“But you were unable to,” William said, doggedly keeping to the chronicle of events. “And then?”

“And then—In 1855, I tried to prevent the building of Brown’s Wall. I failed. It’s Moore’s Wall now, but it’s the same barricade. In 1876, I tried to rescue a Welsh farmgirl from the first uprising of the rebel miners, to prevent the constructs from being built. I failed there too. In 1885, I tried to assist the man who meant to forge a weapon capable of bringing down the horror he had created. And failed again.”

The horror he had created.
Elizabeth shivered, but realized she did not feel surprise. William did not look surprised either.

“I had wondered whether Trevelyan was involved,” he said.

“He was studying at university when his young wife was killed in a monster uprising,” Maxwell said, with a gesture of helplessness. “It gave his studies a new goal. He was a genius, truly. They would never have managed to create the constructs without him.” He took another swallow of the brandy.

William thought about it. “You haven’t told us what all the junctions are. What happened between 1800, when a single marauding creature was captured while you hid in the heather, and 1855, when there was an army of them in full revolt?”