Timepiece (36 page)

“I said douse your light,” Gavin Trevelyan hissed as he stepped out of the shadows. “And stop that row. Anyone would think you were
trying
to be caught. What the devil are the lot of you doing out after curfew, anyhow—?” Reaching to shutter Maxwell’s lantern for him, Trevelyan got a good look at the older man’s face. And went still himself.

“Oh,” he said. “Mr. Maxwell. In that case, I...suppose I understand what you are doing out after curfew.” William tried to collect his scattered thoughts while the sharp eyes went to each of their faces in turn. “It’s as you said it would be,” Trevelyan said in a tone of wonder. “You two paces from arrest and me with a chance to repay you for the past—Right, then, you’d best come with me. Quick.”

“At once,” Maxwell agreed, and Trevelyan plunged into the darkness of the alley, away from the main street and the approaching lamp. 

They managed to scramble about halfway up the alley before Trevelyan lifted one hand to call for silence and nodded to Maxwell to darken the lantern. The four of them crouched breathless behind crates, waiting. William heard a regular step beneath the soft patter of raindrops, louder and closer every second. A faint flush of light shone somewhere down the main road. The steps grew closer—a lamp appeared at the entryway of the alley—paused one heart-stopping moment—and kept going.

Trevelyan let out a breath. A familiar faint creak came to William’s ears, and the Welshman proved to have a dark lantern of his own in his left hand. “We ought to be able to avoid the patrols long enough to get home,” he said.

“Lead on,” Maxwell said.

As they negotiated the second alleyway, William stepped into the beam of Maxwell’s lantern, and the older man glanced at him through the dancing light. “Does this happen to you
often
?” William demanded.

Maxwell did not ask what he meant. “More often than the laws of probability would permit on their own. I have no explanation for it, other than that perhaps the watch knows?”

“Has it ever stung you?” That was the important point. It did not matter who Trevelyan might have been once, in some version of London that had never existed and never would. At the moment, he was nothing more or less than a guide about whom they had no information whatsoever.

“Well,” Maxwell answered after a pause. “Twice. But I think we’re all right.” He added in explanation, “I’ve never told this one I would need his help.”

It took William the rest of the alleyway to work out why this was cause for reassurance rather than alarm.

The buildings were laid out in a different sort of chaos from the one William had begun to learn during his last sojourn in 1885, and the streets wound in unexpected directions. So it was something of a surprise when Trevelyan led them around a corner that William thought he had seen before, stopping before a door that was very familiar indeed. William looked a question at Maxwell, and Maxwell only shrugged, as untroubled by the second flouting of the laws of probability as he had been by the first.

There were some differences. Trevelyan did not knock twice and twice again, but drew a latchkey from his pocket and unlocked the door himself. It swung soundlessly open, and Trevelyan gestured them to precede him into a shabby corridor of bare boards and dingily whitewashed walls. “Hullo?” he called past them, shutting the door and fastening the bolt with nimble fingers. A muted chorus of voices, male and female, answered from somewhere in the darkness ahead.

Trevelyan’s lantern showed a small corner table, scored and scratched and burnt, with a battered and empty candle sconce above it. Scuffed white walls led down a narrow hall with a dim light at its very end. Trevelyan doused the lantern and headed for the faint glow—apparently needing no time to allow his eyes to adjust—and his guests followed. A draft blew from the left-hand fork in the passageway, suggesting it still led to a great hollow room that might serve as an inventor’s laboratory. Trevelyan’s lanky form led them to the right and the living room.

Which had definitely changed.
It was still sparsely and cheaply decorated—a single table, half-a-dozen straight-backed chairs, and a low bookshelf were its only furnishings—but now it was scrupulously clean, as well-swept and well-dusted as any goodwife’s cottage. No blacksmith’s tools littered the corners or the shelves, and the bookshelf actually boasted three volumes that were not textbooks, bound in tattered red, green, and blue cloth. A smoking lamp sat in the center of the table, concealing rather than illuminating the faces of the two men and the woman who sat playing what looked like a game of lanterloo.

They glanced up as Trevelyan entered—and then dropped their cards at the sight of his guests, the young man and the woman jumping to their feet. “It’s all right,” Trevelyan said. “Friends of mine from long ago. It’s safe.”

“You could have said something,” the woman chided, and a flash of relieved joy seared William through at the sound of her voice. “You’ll kill us all from heart failure, Gavin.”

“Madam Katherine,” Elizabeth said at William’s side, swallowing as though something thickened her throat, “it is so very good to see you again.”

Katarina Rasmirovna stepped into the light, turning curious eyes in the younger woman’s direction. She looked exactly as William had last seen her, even to the trousers and bodice. “I beg your pardon,” she said in the same smooth dark voice, “have we met?”

“Not...exactly,” Elizabeth admitted. “It’s...complicated.”

“I will explain,” Trevelyan said. “At least, I believe this gentleman and I between us can explain. This is Mr. Maxwell, whom I met some years ago under what you might call peculiar circumstances. And his companions—” He paused interrogatively.

“Miss Elizabeth Barton and Mr. William Carrington,” Maxwell said.

Trevelyan gestured to the three who had been playing cards. “May I present Madam Katarina Rasmirovna, whom it seems some of you already know—” Katarina nodded in courteous confusion. “—Mr. Frederick Kent—”

Maxwell snapped his head around. The older of the two men sat in the heaviest shadow, and it seemed Maxwell had not gotten a good look at his face through the lamp’s smoke. Now he took an unsteady step forward, hand outstretched, and the seated man took it with an expression of polite surprise. Maxwell looked as though he were trying to keep his movements casual and any show of emotion off his face, but the attempt failed rather badly. “It is indeed a great pleasure,” he said, clearing his throat as Elizabeth had, “to see you both well.” Kent’s eyes went to Katarina’s, and she lifted equally puzzled shoulders.

“And Herr Emil Schwieger.” The younger of the two men bowed deeply. He was hardly more than a boy, really, a good two or three years younger than William, with hair so fair as to be almost white and eyes so blue as to be clearly seen even in the inadequate lamplight. William glanced at Maxwell sideways, but there was no indication that Maxwell had ever met Herr Schwieger in the other 1885.

“Oh,” Trevelyan added from behind them, “and my wife. This is Mrs. Trevelyan.”

Of course,
William thought, giddy again,
of course, no monsters, she’s alive, she’s fine, they’re living happily ever after. Everyone should find a woman who suits him and live happily ever after.
Oh, but wait—
The giddiness ebbed into confusion.
She’s hardly old enough to have been married to him for fourteen years, is she?

The girl in the doorway, a sweet-faced little slip of a thing with hair hanging down her back in a honey-brown braid, in fact looked no older than Elizabeth. Then she stepped into the light, and William could see lines around her mouth and eyes that proclaimed her to be Gavin Trevelyan’s contemporary, despite her girlish-lithe build and girlish-shy manner. The expression on her face wasn’t exactly fear, but she drew nearer to her husband than she did to his guests, and Trevelyan shifted his stance to lean toward her. She barely came to his shoulder.  

“Miss Barton, Mr. Maxwell, Mr. Carrington,” Trevelyan said to her, indicating each of them in turn. “I didn’t realize you were there behind me; I thought you had long since retired.”

“I never can sleep when you’re out past curfew,” Mrs. Trevelyan said, but ruefully rather than pettishly. Her voice was as sweet as her face, and the singsong Welsh lilt, much stronger than her husband’s, struck William as completely charming. “I gave up trying and thought I might as well come down here. I am so glad to make your acquaintance,” she added to the newcomers. “Did I hear Gavin say you knew him in Vienna? Dear me, Miss Barton, you’re soaked to the skin! Come with me, won’t you, and I’ll find you something dry and put the kettle on—”

“What’s this?” Maxwell demanded.

He had turned from Kent to the bookshelf, as though wishing to have an excuse for looking elsewhere while he regained his composure—but what he found there had undone him completely. There was naked horror on his face now. He had taken up some slips of paper stacked at one end of the shelf, and they shook so in his hands that William could make out nothing about them.

There was a pause.

“You know what it is,” Trevelyan said then—speaking carefully, watching Maxwell with wary eyes. “You know my trade. I’ve a printing press as well as some other tools, in the other room. That particular piece there happens to concern conditions in the mines.”

“Who works the mines?” Maxwell’s voice sounded strangled.

“The British,” Trevelyan said, “who did you think?”

“Not monsters?”

Mrs. Trevelyan took another half step closer to her husband, and Katarina took a half step closer to Maxwell. William could hardly blame them. Max would have sounded mad to him too, if he hadn’t known better. But he did know, and he had moreover caught Maxwell’s urgency. Trevelyan had run away from a patrol. He had taken them to a hidden place, another warehouse that was not a warehouse. This was a time of curfews and political pamphlets and some desperate struggle. But it was a different 1885; the world outside had been different—Who were they struggling
against,
if not constructs bred to fight monsters?

“Who are you fighting?” he managed.

“The Empire,” Trevelyan said, one hand now in his pocket, shoulder between his wife and the rest of the room. “Who did you
think?”

“No monsters,” Elizabeth said. “No constructs. What evil is the British Empire guilty of, to make you—?”

“The
British
Empire?” That was from young Herr Schwieger.

Then William knew. It was only a matter of playing out the final few moves. They must go through the ritual of asking the questions, but he knew what the answers would be. His giddy blood turned to lead, sending him plummeting from a great height, crushing his feet to the floor.

“The French Empire, then?” Elizabeth whispered, not really a question. “How long?” She cleared her throat. “How long have the French ruled this island?”

“Since 1815,” William said, not phrasing it as a question. He was sure. “Since the eighteenth of June, 1815, the day the Seventh Coalition lost at Waterloo.”

Trevelyan nodded, brows drawn.

“Oh, my God.” Elizabeth turned stricken eyes in William’s direction.

“We had an effect,” Maxwell said, a note of something like hysteria in his voice.

“We did this,” Elizabeth said, the same note in hers.

“We’ll fix it,” William told her, and took her hand.