Timepiece (28 page)

“Which tells me you do not understand what it is actually like.”

“I was in that alley with you,” Elizabeth said. “I think I understand.”

“If you understood, you would want to get back to your drawing rooms while you had the chance. Lord knows I would like nothing better than to escape to that pleasant green haven.”

“A pleasant green haven is a cage if you cannot choose to leave it,” Elizabeth said sharply.

“An adventure is a torment if you cannot choose to abandon it.”

“But you have the chance to
do
something.”

“And therefore the duty, and therefore the culpability for all the—If I
do
have the ability to change it, do you have any idea how many deaths there are to my account because I could not stop the turning wheel?” Maxwell got up with a jerk, walking a few paces away and rubbing a hand over his face. He turned, black figure merging with the almost-black sky, face impossible to discern.

“So let us help you,” Elizabeth said.

“Absolutely not,” Maxwell said again.

Elizabeth scowled at him. “William is a soldier, and I have said I am willing to take the risk. If Katarina Rasmirovna can do it, so can I. Why should our lives be more valuable than yours?”

“It’s complicated,” Maxwell said, and there was something in his voice that made her look quickly up at him. But the rising moon did not yet provide enough light; she could not see his face. “For one thing,” he went on, after a pause and in a noticeably different tone of voice, “even if I were willing to let you anywhere near it, which I am not, the pocket watch itself won’t permit it. A person cannot be in a two places at once, and you are already part of eighteenth June, 1815. You are in England, sitting in a garden. Or, I suppose, sneaking out of a garden to come to Orkney. It simply won’t be possible for you to also be part of eighteenth June, 1815, in Belgium; your watch won’t take you there.”

“But if that’s the primary objection, then we ought to at least try,” William said. Either he had not caught the shift in tone, or he was pretending he had not. “You could be wrong about the way the watch works. At least let us try to come, before you say it’s impossible.”

“No,” Maxwell said. His features were coming clearer as the rising moon spangled the sea and rocks with silver. He pulled his watch out of his waistcoat pocket, tilted it toward the moonlight, and began deftly to set its dials. “I’ll go see to Waterloo, and you’ll take Miss Barton home.”

Elizabeth made a noise of inarticulate protest, but Maxwell acted as though he had not heard her. He checked the watch again, tucked it back into his pocket, and held his hand out toward William. William reluctantly unthreaded the second pocket-watch and handed it over.

Maxwell set these dials expertly as well, with the barest touch of a fingernail. “I am,” he said without looking up, in a voice curiously thickened, “very grateful to have had your companionship thus far. It has been...most valuable...to hear your advice, and I thank you for it.” He looked up from the watch, at William, and William rose to his feet in response to the solemnity in the older man’s voice. “But this isn’t yours to worry over,” Maxwell said, handing him back the glinting golden orb. “You’re not even twenty, either of you—and Mr. Carrington, you’ve already been injured in service of the Empire. I’m a soldier of sorts as well. Go home and have the rest of your childhood, and let me handle the danger.”

“I...” Whatever William saw in the old man’s face dried the protest in his throat. He stood a moment meeting Maxwell’s eye, then inclined his head, and Elizabeth wanted to bite again. “It’s been an honor, sir,” William said, meeting formality with formality. He held out his hand, and Maxwell clasped it.

Then Maxwell reached toward Elizabeth, and she let him aid her to her feet. “Miss Barton,” he said, and bent over her hand, brushing her knuckles with his lips. “The honor has been entirely mine.” He stepped back, drew his watch back out, and bowed to them both. “On three, then?” he said to William, and William nodded, shifting toward Elizabeth. She laid her fingers on his right arm, and he held the pocket watch ready in his left hand. Maxwell lifted his watch, and the moonlight ran in silver rivulets all over the engravings and scratches. “One,” Maxwell said. “Two. Three.”

The moonlit rocks shimmered before Elizabeth’s eyes. The sounds and smells of the sea receded, the dark sky seeming to take on a certain distant aspect, and she thought she caught a glimpse of evening sun through apple blossoms. As though from a long distance away, she saw Maxwell holding up his pocket watch, fingers closed over the top stem. She barely had time to reach out and grasp his sleeve.

Waterloo, Belgium, June 17, 1815

The last three times, the watch had taken her in the blink of an eye, with no physical effect at all. This time, Elizabeth felt as though some unseen force was trying to rip her tongue out of her mouth, while her lungs attempted to crawl up her throat and something tugged her arms so fiercely she thought they might pop off. All was black before her eyes, and the blackness seemed to scream. She had a handful of cloth gripped in each fist, and she was able to remember that she must keep hold of them both. She dug her fingers in desperately, and howling wind tore at her.

 The ripping and tugging suddenly ceased, and the blackness lightened into grayness, but Elizabeth could see nothing clearly and could hear nothing at all. Her ears rang with a shrill shriek like howling wind. She was crouched on her knees, fingers digging into slimy leaves and cold clammy earth, and then Maxwell was shouting almost loud enough to be heard over the roaring in her ears.

“—are you out of your
mind,
you could have gotten us all
killed!
” Suddenly he was kneeling in front of her, his white hair wild and his eyes wilder. He took her by the shoulders and shook her. “This is no place for a woman, Elizabeth, are you out of your
mind?”

Elizabeth couldn’t answer. She could almost see clearly now, but dizziness plagued her. She wrenched away from Maxwell only just in time, and was sick all over the twisting roots of a very large tree.

A handkerchief appeared before her tearing eyes. She took it and looked up, expecting to see William. It was Maxwell, who turned away without offering any words of comfort.

With his broad back gone from her field of vision, Elizabeth could see that they had landed in a forest. Trees twisted into fantastical shapes all around them, and where there were not trees, there was undergrowth. William was a few feet away, crouched as she was against a trunk. As she watched, he rose shakily to his feet, very pale and running his tongue over his lips. He started to make a comment to Maxwell, looking down at the watch in his hand—and then froze, eyes fixed on it.

Elizabeth lurched to her feet. “What? What is it?”

William didn’t say anything. He looked, in fact, as though he might be incapable of speech. But he took two unsteady steps toward her, and held the watch out for her to see.

It lay in his hand like a dead thing. All four of the faces were cracked. None of the hands moved. No image appeared.

Elizabeth felt sick all over again. “Oh, no. I shouldn’t have—I shouldn’t have made it—try to go two places at once—”

“No,” Maxwell snapped, looking over her shoulder at the watch, “no, you should not have. Nor do I have any notion of how you’re to get home again, since you are already
there
. You may well have made it impossible.”

“We’re there,” William said, “but only until seven o’clock on the eighteenth of June. We’re not there at quarter past seven—we were in Orkney by then—so wouldn’t it let us get to quarter past...?”

He trailed off in response to Maxwell’s glare. Maxwell didn’t want to hear reasonable and conciliatory solutions, Elizabeth could tell. He wanted to be furious. She felt like that too often herself to feel she possessed any moral high ground, and besides, she knew she deserved his anger. The sight of the inert watch made her feel as though she had killed something helpless.

William cleared his throat. “What day is it now?”

Maxwell held out his own watch without speaking. Elizabeth peered at it, trying to make sense of the dials, trying to remember which was latitude and longitude, which was hour, which was day, month, year—

“Midday, seventeenth June, 1815?” She whirled to confront Maxwell. “I thought we talked about allowing more time!”

“You are
truly
in no position to lecture me,” he said, and there was no argument she could make to that. Silence fell between them, cold and uncomfortable.

“Well.” William cleared his throat again. “We can’t change either of these things. We have the time that we have, and all three of us are here for at least a day. So...we should figure out how three people might best use twenty-four hours.”

If only they had longer, William thought. Even forty-eight hours more would make a difference. Had they arrived on the fifteenth, they might well have been able to wrangle an invitation to the Duchess of Richmond’s ball. They might have even had time to scrabble together appropriate clothing. They could have sought Wellington there, spoken to him in private before news of the French incursion into Belgium reached him. And if two days more would have made a difference, two weeks more would have made it easy. They would have had plenty of time to waylay His Grace and explain…

Though two weeks would have also have been more than enough time to be caught, and that was a consideration. William Carrington was, after all, known to some percentage of the officers assembled here—those of his own regiment of course, and those with whom he had attended Eton. Though it was conceivable that a wealthy injured and discharged officer might have returned to the warfront as a spectator, a wealthy ensign was nearly a contradiction in terms. Besides which, William Carrington was at that moment not only known to be in England, but actually there. Two weeks was plenty of time for that inconvenient fact to impede their plans. William understood some of Maxwell’s desire for discretion—but at the same time he felt his heart pounding and his mouth dry. Seventeenth June! Twenty-four hours! What in hell could they do with twenty-four hours? The Duke was on the field already. The British were even now making for Waterloo, and very shortly they would be doing it in driving rain. Messages had gone to and fro from Wellington to Blücher; the strategy was decided; the special battalion was encamped and waiting as a last line of defense. The crank was poised and ready to turn itself. He could see history about to crash down on them all like a clockwork-driven construct’s foot.

William took a deep breath.
Sand in the gears,
he thought, remembering his conversation with Katarina on the way back from Murchinson’s. Little things, many of them. Make it harder for the wheel to turn, and that might be enough.

It would have to be. What else could they do with only twenty-four hours?

He tried to keep the panic off his face, lest Elizabeth and Maxwell see. The three of them had beaten the oncoming storm—just barely—to a moldy-smelling barn between the Forest of Soignes and the village of Waterloo. The owners of the barn had fled ahead of the approaching armies, and the British officers were likely to be quartered closer to the presumptive battlefield; while they could not count on absolute freedom from discovery anywhere, William had agreed with Maxwell that this hiding place was the best of the available choices. Now he watched the rain pound down, watched the earthen road stream by in slick brown rivulets, and thought about hauling guns and horses and all the impedimenta of a battle through this sea of mud. Men in scarlet coats were doing so right now, not far away. He wondered where his old regiment might be positioned.

He wrenched his mind back to his actual role in the upcoming conflict, took a biscuit from the rucksack—not because he was hungry, but because munching it served as a fine way of feigning calm—and returned to eliciting from Maxwell the details of the following day, searching for any chinks that would allow them to slip grains of sand into the gearworks.

By the time full dark had descended, the three of them had amassed a reasonable list of moments they thought it possible to change. They had also amassed a shopping list of clothing and tools they would need to implement their plans. Maxwell rose and helped himself to a dark lantern left in the corner of the barn, lighting it with matchsticks he had acquired in 1885.

“Pen and ink and paper,” he recited, sounding like a country woman preparing to go to market. “One lieutenant’s uniform. One sergeant’s uniform. Needle and thread to—”

“We have needle and thread,” William said. At Maxwell’s surprised look, he clarified, “In my rucksack. I thought it might be useful.”

He thought the older man looked impressed. “Indeed.”

“While you’re acquiring the uniforms,” Elizabeth said, face a glimmering oval in the lantern light, “perhaps you could also find some boy’s clothing. Not a uniform, just something a lad from the village might wear. Also, a cap big enough to hide my hair. I can’t do the sorts of things you plan to do,” she added in response to their raised eyebrows, an edge to her voice, “but I can’t do anything at all dressed like this. As a boy, I could at least linger behind the lines and learn whether your attempts are having an effect.”

Maxwell started, “You shouldn’t—”

“I am
not
going to sit in the hayloft and wait for you to come back or not come back.”

“If you don’t get the clothing and the cap,” William said, rubbing at a spot between his eyes, “she’ll sneak off tomorrow once we’re gone and get them herself. I expect you’re more experienced at this sort of thing, and less likely to be caught with disastrous consequences. Would you please get boy’s clothing and a cap while you’re out, sir.”

“Was it unclear what I meant, when I said ‘keep her safe’?” Maxwell spoke between his teeth.

“Perfectly clear. Have you advice as to how?”

Maxwell started to reply, broke off with a snarl, then jerked open the door and plunged into the black and blowing night.

“He’ll come to terms with it eventually,” William said into the darkness, and Elizabeth laughed, soft and surprised and delighted.

“Er,” she said. “Does that mean you have?”

“Come to terms with the idea that I can’t stop you, so any plan had best include you in it? More or less.” He had badly wanted to shake her in the first hour following their unexpected diversion to Waterloo, but at the same time, he had been forced to admire the brazenness of it. After all, he had wanted to come as well, but hadn’t thought to force the issue by grabbing Maxwell’s sleeve.

“I’m sorry about the watch,” she whispered.

“It will be all right,” he said. “Getting home, I mean. We’ll manage. Elizabeth, if we have to, we can take a
ship
.”

She laughed again, surprised. “I hadn’t thought of that. But what if we’re there?”

“We’ll manage,” he said again. “Don’t worry about it now. One thing at a time.” If they
were
forced into taking a ship, he thought, if they returned home after a shipboard voyage, the damage to her reputation and his would be considerable, unless they also...He cut off the thought. One thing at a time.

They were both dozing by the time Maxwell returned. William jumped awake at the creak of the door, blinking in the dazzle from the lantern. “I’m astonished,” Maxwell said. “You are both where I told you to stay.”

“Were you successful?” Elizabeth asked, ignoring his tone.

“Very.” Maxwell opened the pack with the air of a conjurer. “Pen. Ink. Paper. For Mr. Carrington, one lieutenant’s uniform—of the 52
^nd
Foot. For me, one sergeant’s uniform from the Coldstream Guards.”

“How did you—?” William started.

“It’s better you don’t ask,” Maxwell said. “I did not kill anyone to get them, I can at least assure you of that.”

“And for me?” Elizabeth demanded.