Timepiece (5 page)

But then, no other young lady would have started the conversation by using his Christian name in the first place. He supposed it should be therefore no surprise that Elizabeth smiled at his offer, looking both relieved and pleased. “William and Elizabeth, then.”

“I apologize for startling you,” he added.

“Oh, it’s no matter.” He noticed that she kept her eyes on his. Not on his limp arm, not deliberately everywhere else but his arm, and not modestly cast down. For a moment he wondered at that—then he realized that although her china-blue eyes were wide and innocent, her hands were moving, and he understood that she was trying to hold his gaze so he would not notice her tucking the pocket watch back into her reticule.

He tried to think of something else to say, and ended up taking refuge in commonplaces. “I hope you and your family are in good health?”

“Yes, thank you,” she said, “and you?” She had gotten hold of the wrong corner of the reticule, and was carefully easing the timepiece into fold of cloth that was not actually the mouth of the bag. He contemplated telling her that, but wasn’t quite sure how to phrase it.

“Well enough, thank you,” he said instead.

“That’s good,” Elizabeth said. “Does that mean we shall have the pleasure of your company in the Assembly rooms, the next time there is a ball? You came so rarely into company this spring, and we should all be glad if your health had sufficiently recovered to allow you to—”

The pocket watch slipped through the loop of cloth, landing rather obviously on the path at her feet. She scrambled at once to catch it up, face very red now, but William’s fingers closed over it first. He straightened, forcing a smile and hoping it looked genial. “What’s this, then, Miss Elizabeth? The token of some admirer?”

“Er,” Elizabeth said, cheeks the color of the scarlet coat that hung in William’s wardrobe. Which seemed to rather conclusively answer that question, at least until he held the watch out to her and it fell open in his hand.

William stood still in the sunlight, staring at it.

He realized later that those minutes were the longest time he had spent
not
preoccupied with thoughts of Napoleon since March, and the longest time he had gone without thinking of his arm since he had first woken after the battle. For the moment, he was oblivious to Elizabeth Barton’s presence as well, able to focus on nothing but the impossibility in his hand. He came back to himself when she laughed at his gape-mouthed expression.

“That’s more or less how I reacted also,” she said.

“Forgive me.” He handed it back to her. “What on earth—?”

“I’ve no idea,” she said. “Someone sent it to me by post, and I don’t know who or why or what it is. You’ve...you’ve never seen anything like it either, then? Not in London, or on the Continent?”

“No.” He shook his head.

“It was even more extraordinary a little while ago,” she said. “This face here had images in it. Pictures that moved. Truly.”

He stepped around to see better, but the face she indicated was dark and lifeless. Still, the watch was extraordinary enough without that detail. He stared at the quiescent faces, focusing after a moment on the one that looked most like it belonged to a watch. “Does the timekeeping part of it work? I mean, can it be wound and set?”

“I don’t know yet.” Elizabeth flashed him a smile and dug through her reticule. She pulled out a velvet bag. “The watch came in this,” she said. “Perhaps there’s a key—” But there proved not to be. There was no keyhole in the watch, either.

“There must be some way to set it,” William said, and, looking back on the scene later, he rather thought that was the moment when he had sat down beside her, so enraptured by the puzzle in her hands that he forgot how terribly he would compromise her reputation if anyone came upon the two of them sitting close enough to touch in a secluded corner of the orchard.

Elizabeth turned the watch over and over, examining it from all directions, running her fingertips over the etched vines and flowers. “Oh,” she said in tones of surprise. “Here—” She showed him dials running along the inside of the casing, tiny things that she could only just manage to turn with her fingernail. Turning them made the hands on the timekeeping face move, but it did not make them start telling time. Nor did pressing down the ornate stem above the “12,” nor the plain stem beside the “3.”  Similar dials changed the nested wheels on the second and third faces, but similarly failed to set the wheels moving or deliver any clue as to what they might be measuring. William found himself reminded of the wheels of the water-driven mill he had seen at Cheshire, but that
was hardly a helpful comparison.

The fourth face had remained blank all this while, no matter what they did. Elizabeth continued to insist it had displayed images a short time before, and William tried to believe her, an effort that became abruptly much easier when the watch lit up in his hand.

 “Look!” Elizabeth said, leaning so eagerly forward that her curls brushed his shoulder. “That’s what I meant.”

The fourth face displayed a fog-bound city street, with carriages rattling to and fro in the foreground. A gas-lamp burned through the fog, casting just enough light that William fancied he could see shapes moving behind the carriages. Large shapes. Indistinct, but somehow menacing.

Just as he thought the words, the scene changed. Elizabeth exclaimed in surprise, and William hastily shook his vision clear to study the new picture. This one was less complicated, consisting of a meadow by a brook, with clouds and grasses reflected in the water. It was a scene that could be from any estate on the English countryside, and William was about to comment to that effect when the image changed again, and now it was a castle perched upon the crags of a mountaintop. A narrow winding trail led down into the forest below, tiny specs of color moving along it.

“Are those—could they be men on horseback?” Elizabeth asked, and William squinted, holding the watch close to his eye.

“I believe they are,” he said slowly. “Elizabeth, I believe they are knights in
armor.”

“Truly?” She leaned in again, and as he moved the watch so that she could see, the mountaintop became an embattled ship, dodging blasts of cannon-fire and riding heaving waves so realistic his insides lurched. As they stared at the ship, the fourth face flickered and went dark. Elizabeth shook her head, blinking.

“Look!” she said then. “There’s writing around the picture face. An inscription.” William brought it closer to his eye. If there was a name, he could not decipher it, but the rest of the inscription read,
for service to the Empire.

A painful burst of light seared his eye as the fourth face came back to life. William flinched, fumbling his hold on the watch case, and it slipped from his grasp. He and Elizabeth grabbed for it at the same time, and his fingers brushed her knuckles at the same moment her palm touched the watch. She managed not to drop it, but it was a near thing; she caught it by closing her hand around it. Her thumb bumped the top stem, depressing it briefly and then letting it spring back as she shifted her grip.

The world had seemed to hold its breath for that moment. The air had been momentarily colder, and the sunlight had dimmed as though covered by a sudden cloud. William looked up in reflex, but there was not a cloud to be seen. For an instant he had not heard birds singing either, but he heard them now.

Elizabeth Barton stared at him with wide eyes. “Did you feel that?” she whispered.

If she had not asked the question, he would have thought it the first wave of a fever dream breaking over his head. He was not sure whether to be relieved that this was in fact not another relapse, but rather something perceptible to those outside his own mind. “Yes,” he said, voice catching slightly in his throat, “I did.”

She looked back down at the watch and got slowly to her feet, thumb brushing over the top stem.

“Wait,” he said, rising with her, reaching to lay a restraining hand on her wrist. “Don’t. I don’t think we should—”

But she paid him no heed whatsoever. All her attention was for the watch. He had never seen anything to match the delight in her face as she fixed her eyes on the timepiece and pressed the top stem all the way in.

And the bright June day turned into night.

London, August 27, 1885

For a moment, Elizabeth thought she was in a thunderstorm, though no rain fell. Lightning lit up the sky in a flash of blue-white, then was gone. It was followed by a crash of thunder, deafening, just overhead. A sudden cold wind sprang up and rushed over her, tugging her breath along with it.

“William—”
she gasped.

“Here—” The wind tore the word away from her ears, as it had torn the breath from her throat. But he was right beside her, a vague source of warmth, and then a definite one as he pulled her closer. “I’m right here.”

But where was “here?” Somehow, impossibly, they were no longer in the orchard. The lightning flash had shown her not trees, but high brick walls. The wind carried with it not leaves, but sheets of paper, tumbling against her skirt and plastering themselves there.

There was no second flash of lightning, but there was a second boom of thunder. It shook the ground under Elizabeth’s feet.

And it shook the ground again.

She couldn’t see, no matter how hard she tried, but she knew that there was something enormous coming toward her. It took another stomping, earsplitting step. For the first time in her life, Elizabeth was too frightened to move. Beside her, William drew a breath to say what she knew would be “Run!” and tensed to drag her with him—

Something grabbed her arm and tore her from William’s grasp.

Her shoes scrabbled for purchase, but found none on the slick surface beneath her, and she went down, hard, onto bruising cobblestone. She couldn’t catch her breath or find her footing. She couldn’t do anything except fumble in the slippery muck. There was someone above her, looming over her—someone she could sense but could not see. Farther away, William called her name in a tone of desperation, while the ground all around them shook, and shook again, as something immense passed them by. The jolts grew fainter and less frequent as the thing, whatever it was, moved away.

A light flared, dazzling in the darkness.

“Get away from her!” William shouted, and flung himself forward. The flame went out. “Unhand her, sir, at once—”

“I don’t want to hurt you!” a second voice snapped, but William did not wait for explanations. There was a brief scuffle that Elizabeth could feel and hear but could not see. She had just time enough to think again of gathering herself and struggling upright, and then the fracas before her ended in a “oof” of pain—from William, she thought with a jolt of sickness. The flame flared alight again, a blinding glare that set Elizabeth’s eyes tearing before it settled into a larger, duller gleam. A lantern.

“I’m not trying to hurt her!” the voice behind the light repeated. It was an old man’s voice—it had the crotchety, creaking sound of an exasperated old man. “I’m trying to save you both, you young fool! What on
earth
possessed to go wandering about after curfew? And what the devil were you doing, standing in the middle of the street?” The voice and the lantern moved closer to Elizabeth, and the owner of the lantern crouched down beside her. “You could both have been killed!” he continued. “Don’t you know enough to get out of their—” The lantern shone full on her face then, and the words broke off.

“...way,” he finished after a moment. “Well. Well, I imagine...I imagine you don’t, in that case. I...presume this is your first foray.”

“What?”
was all Elizabeth could manage.

“I have one too,” the man said. He transferred the lantern to his left hand, and withdrew his right into the darkness beyond the spill of light. He motioned in a way Elizabeth thought was a fumble at his waistcoat—and then the right hand reappeared, holding for her inspection an overly large golden pocket watch. Lantern light gleamed softly in the crevices of etching and scratches.

From the darkness behind the old man, something screamed.

Elizabeth jerked and kicked and somehow got enough purchase against mud and cobblestones to lurch upright. Her outflung arm struck something warm and solid, and William seized hold of her and pulled her the rest of the way up. The swinging circle of lantern-light told her the old man was on his feet now too. He slammed down the lantern’s shutter, dropping inky blackness over them all, and then his hand met her shoulder with almost the same force.

The brick wall bruised her back and knocked the breath from her lungs for a second time, and between that and his hand over her mouth, she could not possibly scream. “Hush,” he commanded, his lips close to her ear. “Both of you.” Still pressing Elizabeth to the wall with his body, he took his hand off her mouth long enough to reach out and pull William to huddle with them. “It will come back this way, and it mustn’t find us.”

The shriek came out of the darkness again, somewhere in front of Elizabeth and to her right. It was nothing like the thunder: this sound was unmistakably animal, a cross between a man in pain and a bull enraged. There was one moment of awful silence, then from the left came another crash that shook the ground. Elizabeth, pinioned by the old man’s surprising strength, found herself as frozen and helpless as in any nightmare.

Blue lightning seared her eyes again...and this time, did not fade. A white-tinged half-light lit the sky above the buildings—tall buildings; she could see them plainly now; her earlier brief impression had been correct. They
were
in a city. Around her was a city street—or more precisely a city alleyway, strewn with broken things and filth. Over the old man’s shoulder, she could see the entrance to the proper street and a bit of the street itself, wider and cleaner and more evenly cobblestoned. The sobbing roar had come from there, but she could not see who or what had made the sound. Her view was cut off by the dilapidated walls that rose all around her, more than three stories high with chimneys even higher, their stacks straggling unevenly against the sickly colored sky.

Above the chimneys, the nightmare came. It came in the shape of a man, a giant out of a fairytale—except the giant Jack found up a beanstalk had been made of flesh and blood and so could be killed, and this giant’s skin shone copper like a teakettle. It moved with heavy, jerking motions, and each time its foot drove into the cobblestones, a jolt ran through them and Elizabeth’s teeth chattered in her head. This monster would not even feel a tumble down a beanstalk.

It took another step forward, and Elizabeth could see its face. She bit her lip to keep from crying out in horror. It had no mouth or nose, and somehow the blank impassive countenance was worse than the ponderous thundering feet. From its eyes streamed blue-white light, not unlike a lantern in some ways, but so much colder and more remote, and strong enough to light the whole sky. 

“Shh,” the old man murmured. His hands trembled as he held her against the wall.

From the street came another howl. Pain, Elizabeth thought, it sounded like pain. She had been nearby when one of the men who worked Mr. Carrington’s estate had broken his leg—a bad break, ugly, the bones poking through the skin. She remembered that two of his fellows had held him down for the apothecary, and she remembered how he had screamed. She remembered how heads had poked out of nearby windows in response to the screams—and the windows of these decrepit buildings were lighting up now, pale yellow squares that could not compete with the giant’s streaming light.

The wall pressed cold and rough through the thin fabric of her gown. William was a solid source of warmth beside her, and the old man stood before them both, cloak spread out as though he was trying to shelter them under his wings, keeping them out of the monster’s sight or shielding their eyes from whatever horror played out in the street. But Elizabeth could see a small piece of that street, over the old man’s shoulder and around a fold of his cloak. She could see the white-lit sky and the giant’s impassive face, and she could not bear to hide her eyes and not know.

So when the thing that had howled scrambled to its feet and darted forward, she had a clear view of it. It was more like a man than the great copper giant, but it was bigger than any man had any right to be, with limbs mismatched to its height like the drawing of a gorilla Elizabeth had once seen. The yellowy-white flesh of its face drooped as though too large for the bones. The monster was dressed in what looked to Elizabeth like grave-clothes, and long matted hair swung over its shoulders. It lurched toward the alleyway, dragging behind it something that might have been an enormous bundle of rags or might have been another creature like itself.

Then the entire sky blazed with a riot of light and noise and fireworks, and the beast jerked, swayed, and fell in a heap at the mouth of the alley.

“—now!”
the old man hissed, jerking her by the arm, and Elizabeth stumbled after him, ears ringing with horror and the sound of cannon.

They ran straight into blackness, with neither caution nor a speck of light to guide their way. Behind them the sky flashed and the air shook with a noise that seemed to pierce straight into Elizabeth’s brain, driving away all rational thought. She skidded on the muck, stumbled against piles of refuse, tripped on the hem of her gown, and could not even put out her hands to steady herself, for the old man had one of them and William the other. To a degree, this state of affairs was useful, in that it did help keep her upright, but when she slipped or one of them did, the twisting of her wrists made her eyes well with pain.

The old man stopped so abruptly that Elizabeth stumbled against him and William stumbled against her, like actors in a particularly uninventive farce. “It’s all right,” the old man breathed. “Safe now.” He reached toward one of the buildings that loomed on either side, and knocked briskly: twice, and twice again.

The door jerked open so violently that Elizabeth’s heart jumped all over again. “Thank God,” a hoarse voice muttered from the entryway. “We were about to send out a search party.”

“That would have been imprudent.” The old man hustled Elizabeth and William over the threshold and into the dark and dank entryway, and the doorkeeper fell back with a hiss of surprise. “No, it’s all right,” the old man said, “it’s all right. They’re safe.” He shut the door behind himself with an air of frank relief, and the sudden relative silence rang in Elizabeth’s ears. “It’s safe,” he repeated. “Come inside.”

He led them down a corridor whose floor was nothing but bare boards, whose walls were whitewashed and had seen better days, and whose only light came from a single wavering candle shoved into an old and battered sconce. Behind them, echoing in the pauses between the muted thunder-claps outside, came the sounds of a great many bolts shooting home. Then the flickering candle-flame followed them, as the doorkeeper took it from the sconce and brought it along. A cool draft rushed from a passageway to the left, carrying with it a suggestion of a large open space. The old man led them to the right, to a smaller room.

It seemed to be the sort of one-room living space that housed the poorest of Mr. Carrington’s tenants, and it was in a state of disorder that would have shamed any of those hardworking souls. Dust and grime lay thick on the floor, and cobwebs stretched unhindered in the corners of the doorframe. The only furniture in the room appeared to be four straight-backed chairs surrounding a rickety table. The tabletop would probably also have been dusty and grimy, had it been visible, but it was cluttered with dirty crockery and half-burnt candles—as well as, oddly, a few things that looked like blacksmith’s tools. There was a bookcase immediately beside the entryway, also piled with tools and boasting only two books. The scant space between it and the table was taken up by empty crates stacked one on top of the other.

Elizabeth took all this in, her heart hammering hard in her ears; and then her knees gave way.