Timepiece (7 page)

Brown remembered quite well. “Yes,” he growled.

“Yes,” the man in gray repeated. “So which of us would you say had the right of it?”

Brown glared at him.

“I’m here bearing more advice, General,” the man in gray said. “Do you think you might like to heed it this time?”

The fire in the brazier snapped and popped. Outside, a swell of voices grew momentarily loud enough to be comprehensible, then subsided. Brown unclenched his fingers from the arms of his chair and swallowed the desire to shout for guards to come and drag this man away in chains.

“Tell me,” he managed.

The man in gray crossed to the desk in one stride, whipping a map from his pocket. “You’re here,” he said, pointing. “They’re there. Your scouts have reported to you that the monsters hold the high ground across the valley, is that not so? So you are planning accordingly. But they’re wrong, General.”

“The monsters do not hold the high ground?”

“They do not hold it securely. There are fewer of them on that hill than it seems, and their reinforcements will not arrive until mid-morning tomorrow. You have men enough to roll right over them if you attack at first light. And then
you
will hold the hill when the reinforcements arrive. You will crush two small waves of monsters, one after the other. But wait any longer than dawn, and the ground is theirs. You’ll spend three days throwing yourself against them, uphill. Then you will be forced to retreat, and then the war is lost.”

Brown looked from the map to the man’s face. The bruise gleamed in the firelight—definitely, though impossibly, the same bruise. “Winning this battle will win us the war, is that what you just said?”

“If you lose this battle,” the man in gray said, “you lose the war. The lines run straight from this moment to the building of Brown’s Wall. Yes, like Hadrian’s, named for you—not a pleasant way to be remembered in the history books, is it? But if you win this battle...then you
might
win the war. Then we’re off the charted regions of the map, where anything might happen.”

“If we win the battle, you don’t know what might happen.”

“Exactly.”

“But you know what will happen if we lose.”

“Yes.”

 “Who the hell are you?”

The man in gray smiled faintly, straightening from the map. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

Brown turned it all over in his mind—then bellowed for his aide. The boy’s pale face appeared in the tent flap, and Brown sent him running to summon his generals from their campfires and out of their beds.

A scant few hours later, he stood with the man in gray on the hillock that commanded the best view possible of the valley and the opposite hill, squinting at said hill through a remarkably fine spyglass. The man in gray had offered it to him, and Brown hadn’t asked where he had acquired such a thing any more than he had pressed for the origin of the man’s battlefield intelligence. The intelligence had better prove to be of comparable quality to the glass, Brown thought, or he would strangle the man in gray and enjoy the job. 

He watched the rippling red line of infantrymen cross the valley, start the climb. A cannonball whistled through the air and crashed through the ranks. Then another. Then they flew in earnest. The line shuddered, but did not pause in its advance. Brown nodded to himself. Russell could bleat about “harsh discipline” all he liked. Russell was an idiot. Harsh discipline was what made men unafraid of cannonballs.

Before very long, the monsters had spent all the cannonballs in their possession, and the line moved faster, impeded now only by small-arms fire from behind rocks. Brown saw each shot as a pin-prick of flame against the gray-green hill. He heard each sharp pop a disconcerting few seconds later. The infantry paused, took aim, and sent a ringing volley back, filling the air with gunpowder smoke that briefly obscured Brown’s vision. The smoke cleared in time for Brown to see them follow their volley with a sweeping charge, and they gained a few more paces of ground before the monsters reloaded and the pin-pricks of fire started up again from among the rocks. 

There were fewer pin-pricks this time. The monsters were nearly out of ammunition for musket as well as for cannon. Brown watched without speaking, vaguely aware of the nervous shifting of the man beside him but having no intention of relinquishing the spyglass. Through it, he saw the monsters erupt from behind the rocks in a counter-charge.

They should not be able to move so gracefully. He had thought that before now. The thrusting heads and swinging arms should overbalance them, pull them pitching forward, but they poured around the rocks with an economy of motion that put him in mind of India’s quiet leaping tigers. They swung battle-axes as though the things were part of their arms, and they howled fit to freeze the blood of any man lesser than a British solider.

But Brown’s men held. They fired, reloaded, fired again in a wave of popping flame. Some of the monsters took bullets, but as far as Brown could make out, none of them fell. The infantry line switched to bayonets. Then the monsters were among them, laying left and right with enormous curved axe-heads. Brown could see what he thought might be limbs flying about. He saw monsters reeling back, only slightly impeded by bayonets pierced through them. Then he saw more infantrymen surge forward to take the place of those who had fallen, and the muscles of his back relaxed. They’d bring the ugly damned things down eventually. There were so many human soldiers on that hill that they could not but prevail eventually. Bloody tough, bloody fast, bloody well-trained—the only way to bring Wellington’s sodding creatures down was to overwhelm them with numbers and bullets. It wasn’t a model Brown could use on a larger scale—he simply didn’t have men enough—but it was working passing well on the hill now. Brown waited to be sure the tide had turned, then handed the spyglass back to the man in gray.

His mysterious advisor snatched it, held it to his eye, and let out an audible breath.

“You said the rest won’t arrive until mid-morning?” Brown did not pause to wait for an answer. “Couldn’t ask for better. We’ll be well dug in by then.” He turned his head and shouted for his aide.  

The Battle of Carron Valley was to capture the British imagination as thoroughly as had the Battle of Waterloo. William Howard Russell’s stirring account, written up the very night of the victory and sent to the
Times
a few days later, was largely responsible for its fame.

The monsters had used devious methods to make themselves appear more numerous than they were, Russell wrote, so that the British would believe they irrevocably held the high ground and would decline to attack. But General Brown could not be fooled by such nonsense. He acted without hesitation, seizing by the throat the unusual opportunity and sending his infantry in a charge across the valley and up the hill. He was right—those among his staff who had advised caution wrong—and an inexorable thin red line of Englishmen routed the monsters off their hill before the sun was well in the sky. Another quick victory followed, over a second wave of monsters who tried to take the hill back from the British and were cut down doing it.
The tide of the war has surely turned,
Russell wrote, and England believed it was so.

Brown’s praises were now sung by the very same people who had the week before condemned his harshness. The British public would forgive a good deal of a man who won battles on its behalf. He was still not considered to be so great a man as Wellington, but the comparison was now delivered in considered tones that made it more of a compliment than otherwise. The British public was also disposed to admire the mysterious man in gray of Russell’s account—a scout of some sort who had appeared out of the darkness with news for the General that had prompted him to order the brilliantly successful dawn attack, and who had disappeared by the time the monsters were on the run and the evening celebrations underway. No one ever learned the identity of the man in gray, for Brown did not live long enough to answer anyone’s questions. He was killed by a sniper’s bullet a week later, confirming his status as “nearly as great a man as Wellington” as nothing else could have done. 

Whether his brand of throat-tearing enthusiasm could have won the war became a matter debated by historians. Many declared it to be so, but others, more measured, said that courage and swiftness alone could not have triumphed over such stacked odds. They maintained that the war had been lost as soon as it began, back in 1852.

The rest held that such a sentiment was nonsense, that Brown had been winning, and that the war was lost by his replacement John Moore. Moore was a cautious man by nature, new to command, slow and methodical and by-the-book in his maneuvers, and no qualities could have been less appropriate to the contest.  By the time he had gotten himself well-sorted and his Army functioning to his liking, it was spring, and the monsters were once more entrenched in all the lovely bits of high ground so characteristic of the Highlands. Moore sent infantry waves marching across a variety of valleys, in perfect formation, under heavy fire, in pursuit of ground that could not be taken, until at last the attrition became too much for Whitehall to bear. Construction on Moore’s Wall began in late 1856, and Whitehall abandoned Scotland to the monsters.

London, August 27, 1885

“Eighteen hundred and eighty-five,” Elizabeth repeated in a whisper, and then could not come up with anything else to say. William, too, seemed stunned, staring at Maxwell with lips slightly parted but with no words falling from them. Maxwell waited, posture courteous, for one of them to ask another question or offer another comment. In the doorway, Trevelyan studied his trinket, faint sardonic amusement at the corners of his mouth. The silence lay like a blanket of fog.

A female voice broke it, in tones of amusement. “Was it something I said?”

Elizabeth looked up with a start, having forgotten the woman who had gone to make tea. She stood now in the darkened doorway, mostly hidden by Trevelyan’s angular shadow, the candlelight revealing only suggestions of her appearance: a coil of black hair, skin like cream, a high cheekbone and a raised eyebrow. The tea tray might have been floating on disembodied hands, as the candle had earlier. Where, Elizabeth wondered suddenly, had the doorkeeper gone? 

“No,” Maxwell said, a note in his voice answering the dry humor in hers. “You have merely chosen an auspicious moment to return with the refreshment. Here, allow me.” He came to meet her—both of them ducking around Trevelyan, who stayed where the light shone most strongly on the bauble in his fingertips, without any apparent recognition that it was also where he would most effectively block the doorway—and took the tea-tray from her hands.

“Why, thank you, Mr. Maxwell,” the woman said, with her head turned toward Trevelyan. “How very thoughtful of you.” Trevelyan paid no attention.

She had an unexpectedly deep voice for a woman—rich and warm and throaty—and Elizabeth suddenly suspected the doorkeeper had gone nowhere at all. Maxwell set the tea-tray on the shaky-legged table and the woman came into the light, and now Elizabeth was sure it had been she who had answered the door.

She wore breeches. Between that and her voice, the mistake was a natural one, but seen with time to consider, she was obviously a woman. Those thick coils of glossy hair, so black that the candlelight struck no spark in it, could never have belonged to a man. And though her legs were indeed clad in dark brown breeches and high-legged boots such as a man might wear riding, the top half of her attire left her gender in no doubt, for she wore a blouse covered by a tightly laced bodice. Elizabeth had time to wonder if she might be a gypsy, and to consider whether that might explain the outfit as well as the dark hair and eyes. Then she caught her breath as the other explanation occurred to her.
Your gown is becoming, but not at all the current fashion.
Was it now fashionable for women to wear breeches? For the woman was staring at her in turn, and with equal surprise, as though Elizabeth’s simple white muslin were the inappropriate apparel.  

The woman took a breath, but Mr. Maxwell spoke over her. “Katarina, I have just met these two young people outside. They are time travelers like myself, and possess a watch very similar to my own. As you can see from the young lady’s gown, they have come to us from the early part of the century. I was saying to her that I remember my mother wearing just such a frock.”

The dark-haired woman said slowly, “I...see.”

“May I present Miss Elizabeth Barton and Mr. William Carrington. Miss Barton, Mr. Carrington, Madam Katherine.”

William bowed and Elizabeth nodded at the same moment the woman held out her hand. Straight out, as a man would; moreover, as a man would to a close friend, never to a new acquaintance. Elizabeth, safe behind the table, did not have to decide what to do, but William was caught. He hesitated. Then the woman’s dark eyes went to his arm, the skin around them tightened in a faint wince, and she put her hand behind her back and inclined her head instead.  

“‘Madam Katherine’...what?” Elizabeth asked, for the sake of saying something.

“Katarina Rasmirovna,” the woman said. “It’s a bit hard on English lips. ‘Madam Katherine’ is quite fine. I am glad to see you are recovered from your fright, Miss Elizabeth; our London must be quite a shock to someone from your background.”

“Is that tea?” Trevelyan said, coming out of his reverie with a start.

Katarina lifted her eyes to the ceiling. “Yes, dear,” she said in a voice too dulcet to be entirely convincing. “Sit and have some?”

“No.” Trevelyan was already reaching around her for the pot. “I’ll take a cup with me. Max got me what I need, so I’ll press on.”

“You intend to sleep eventually, I hope?”

“I’ll sleep after it rains,” Trevelyan said, and turned for the corridor, slurping from the teacup as he went. At the doorway he paused, obviously as an afterthought. “I...do thank you, Max.”

Maxwell nodded. “Just get it working.”

Elizabeth became aware that the sounds of battle outside had died down at some point in the last few minutes. As if in response to her thought, Katarina cocked her head. “It’s finally gone quiet out there,” she said, pouring tea into a collection of chipped and mismatched cups. “It sounded like Waterloo revisited while it lasted, though. Did you see what all the fuss was about, Max?”

 “As far as I could tell, it was about absolutely nothing,” Maxwell replied with deliberate irony. “In fact, I’ll wager anything you like it was a staged hunt. A handful of foxes and an army of hounds. I don’t think there are as many as twelve Wellingtons left free in all of England; six of them have certainly not been hiding out in the East End of London.”

“They were hunting
Wellingtons
?” Katarina repeated, handing Elizabeth a pale blue teacup with a crack running ominously down one side. She did not look at Elizabeth as she did it, keeping her eyes on Maxwell instead. “Oh, I see,” she said then, apparently reading something from his expression. “Released by Seward’s empire of crime, I suppose.”

“The newspapers will doubtless tell us so tomorrow,” Maxwell agreed in the same tone. “Even if they don’t blame Seward, they’ll report in glowing words how the constructs kept us all safe from the most recent unnatural threat. Lest Seward’s crusade start sounding sensible.”

“Do you mean to say that the activity we just witnessed is a commonplace occurrence?” William demanded.

“Tonight was somewhat livelier than usual,” Katarina said, “but yes, common enough.”

“Then in the year 1885, London is a warfront?” William shook his head at the teacup she offered him. “We have to get out of here. I have to get Miss Barton safely home.”

“I would like nothing better than for you to do just that,” Maxwell said, before Elizabeth could contribute her thoughts on the matter, “but I fear it is impossible for the moment. It’s one of the disadvantages of traveling by pocket watch. After the watch is used, it takes twenty-four hours to recharge before it can be used again.”

Elizabeth had never heard the word “recharge” before, but she understood all the other words, and her mouth went dry. “We’ll be—we’ll be away from home a day and a night?” It came out in a squeak, and she took a hasty sip from her cracked teacup. The tea was lukewarm and bitter as wormwood, but she took a second swallow anyway, trying to steady herself. Well, she thought, that was one sure way to put an end to all the matchmaking. If she were known to have been missing from home for a day and a night, no respectable man would
want
to marry her.

“No,” Maxwell said, “I ought to be able to get you back within a few minutes of your departure. But you will be living this life for twenty-four hours, and that does not please me at all. It is dangerous here, and you have no way of knowing how to navigate it.
One of our monsters cherishes a hatred for mankind, and the other cares nothing for who stands in its path. England no longer bears much resemblance to the green haven of your childhood.”

 “You should take them back to that green haven yourself, Max,” Katarina said, husky voice gone unexpectedly gentle.

“I can’t do that. You know I can’t. I may not be able to return here once I leave, and I have to see this through with you.”

 “Why...” William looked from one of them to the other. “Why should we be able to get back to where we have come from, if you cannot?”

“I can get back to where I came from,” Maxwell said. “Just as you can. What neither of us can do is leave a time that is not ours and have any certainty of returning to it. You can’t be in the same place twice, you see; the watch won’t allow it. The watch doesn’t allow you to get anywhere close, in fact. It doesn’t let you affect the same junction more than once.”

The sudden hammering on the outside door made them all jump. Elizabeth choked on her swallow, and the convulsive jerk of her fingers sent a wave of lukewarm tea cascading down the front of her frock. Maxwell stood up so fast he knocked over his chair and nearly sent the table following, and the liquid in all the vessels on its surface sloshed.

Katarina was already on her feet, hands absolutely steady as she checked the priming of the smallest pistol Elizabeth had ever seen. Where it had been the moment before, or how Katarina had gotten it so quickly into her hands, Elizabeth could not fathom. The woman’s dark eyes went to Maxwell’s. “Better take them to the laboratory,” she said, tilting her head toward William and Elizabeth. “I’ll—”

The knocking came again, but this time in groups of two. Twice, and twice again, and twice once more. Maxwell and Katarina both went momentarily limp, but Katarina’s shoulders stiffened again almost at once. “It might still be a trap instead of someone too scared to remember the code,” she said. “Stay here. Keep quiet. I’ll deal with it.”

Maxwell took a step following her. “Hadn’t you better let me—”

“Not when you’re dressed like that, Max,” Katarina said, walking away. “We’ve been through this before. There’s no imaginable reason for a gentleman to open the door of a place like this. Besides—” She paused to toss an unexpected grin over her shoulder. “I’m a much better shot than you are.” With that, she disappeared down the corridor.

Maxwell moved fast then, but silently and not in pursuit. He pulled a second tiny pistol from the clutter on the bookshelf, keeping his eyes on the doorframe as he fumbled behind him in a gesture Elizabeth could not immediately interpret. What was it he wanted her to do? She looked in the direction he was pointing, thought she understood, and seized her pocket watch from the table just as William came to a different conclusion and caught hold of her arm with his left hand. He pulled her with him to the darkest corner the room had to offer.

Elizabeth heard the snap and thump of all the various bolts being drawn back, and the cracking open of the heavy door—then Katarina’s voice, words inaudible but tone relieved, and a babble of higher-pitched voices answering, and the door closing again. “Max?” Katarina called. Maxwell pocketed the pistol at once and left the room.

Elizabeth stirred to follow, at least far enough to hear what was going on, but William tightened his grip and shook his head. She frowned at him, and he leaned in to put his lips close to her ear. “They don’t want the visitor to know about us,” he whispered. “Or Madam Katherine would have brought him in.”

Voices overlapped out in the entryway—the high-pitched ones, explaining something with frantic haste, Katarina’s elaborating and clarifying, Maxwell’s expressing some hesitation. After a moment two sets footsteps came back down the corridor, but they did not enter the living room.

“You have to go,” Katarina’s voice said, low but close enough to be heard. It seemed she had drawn Maxwell aside for a private consultation.