Timepiece (9 page)

It was, she supposed, the effect achieved by those fast young ladies who were said to dampen their muslins. Certainly William could never have seen so much of her lower half before, and so perhaps it was understandable that he turned the color of lobster and redirected his eyes hastily to the paper in his hand. But Elizabeth felt her own face grow hot at his disapproval. Well, perhaps it
wasn’t
modest, but it
was
wonderfully easy to move in and eminently practical, and he must know she didn’t mean anything
harmful
by it—

“Oh, good,” Katarina’s voice said dryly, and Elizabeth saw she was looking at William rather than at herself. “It fits.”

Trevelyan flicked a look upward. “Oh, good,” he echoed. “Another distraction. Take the children out of here, Katarina, I have work to do.”

“I assure you, sir,” William said stiffly, “we have no intention of disturbing you. Miss Barton and I can wait in the outer room until Madam Katherine and Mr. Maxwell return from   their—”

“You’re going out?” Elizabeth blurted, taking a step forward. William stared at her, but she didn’t care. She kept her eyes fixed on Katarina’s. “May I come? Please?”

“Elizabeth,”
William said, “have you gone
mad?
We were almost stepped on by a metal giant
firing artillery.
London is in the middle of a—”

“But they’ve stopped fighting for the moment,” Elizabeth said. “It’s safe enough for Mr. Maxwell and Madam Katherine to go out, so it’s safe enough for someone to be with them. I’d stay close,” she promised, turning back to Katarina. “I wouldn’t go running off, and if something happened, well, you have that pistol, you said you were a good shot with it.
Please.
I just want to go for a bit of a walk and see—”

“Dressed like
that?”
William demanded. Katarina looked at him, and the flush reappeared on his cheekbones. “Er,” he began. “I didn’t quite mean—”

“Yes, you did,” Katarina informed him dryly. “But times have changed, Mr. Carrington. It isn’t quite so scandalous as it would have been in your time, for two women dressed in trousers to go walking alone. At least, not in this part of the city.”

“And that’s the point,” Elizabeth persisted. “I’m dressed like you. I’ll look like I belong here. I won’t do anything you say is unsafe, I promise, I just want to see it. This is the only new place I’ve ever been, and the only new place I ever
will
be where I
can
just go walking without a chaperone and dressed in trousers, and I—I need to—I just want to—”

“See the world down the rabbit hole?” Katarina supplied, looking amused. Elizabeth furrowed her brows. “Alice in—” Katarina started to explain, and stopped. “Never mind, it would have been after your time. A book I had as a child. ‘This brave new world,’ then, how about that?”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “This brave new world.”

Katarina studied her with eyes that seemed to strip away her skin and peer inside. “All right,” she said abruptly. “Very well. You can come.”

“Then I shall accompany you also,” William said.

“No, Mr. Carrington, I’m afraid I can’t permit that.” Katarina’s voice was cream-smooth. “We’ve no men’s clothing that will fit you, and your coat is seventy years out of date. You’ll attract too much attention. But I assure you I can do everything needful to keep Miss Barton safe. I am, as she points out, an excellent shot.”

“That’s not the point,” William said. “I have a responsibility to—”

“I understand, but there is truly nothing you can do. We haven’t another pistol here to lend you, even if—”

There was an instant’s worth of terrible pause.

“Even if I could prime it,” William finished for her. “Which I can’t. Of course. Forgive my presumption, Madam Katherine; I am sure you have the situation well in hand.” He turned his back and plucked a sheet of paper at random off the nearest pile.

Katarina stood still. “I didn’t mean that,” she said.

William barely glanced up. “Yes, you did. Why should you not? You said nothing untrue. There is nothing I can do to aid you, and you are perfectly capable of seeing to Miss Barton’s safety. I should doubtless only distract you.”

“The lot of you,” Trevelyan growled, “should stop distracting
me
this instant if there’s to be any chance of testing tonight. Katarina—”

“Yes, of course.” Katarina glanced once more at William before turning for the door. “Come, Miss Elizabeth.”

Elizabeth hesitated. She wanted to say something—anything—to mend matters with William, but she had no notion what words would be suitable to the task. She wanted to meet his eyes at least, but William did not look up from the scribbled diagram clenched in his fist. Katarina was not slowing her steps, and in another instant the opportunity the gypsy woman represented would be gone for good. Elizabeth turned and ran after her, out into the brave new world.

 London, August 27, 1885

The air was as thick and acrid as though a fire had broken out somewhere near. Elizabeth coughed as it struck her throat, but Katarina seemed to notice nothing amiss, only glancing quickly up and down the street before she drew the door shut after her. Elizabeth could not imagine why she bothered to look about. It was not yet sunrise, and between the dim light and the smoky cloud, visibility was uncertain at best.

“It’s hard to breathe,” she ventured.

Katarina nodded absently. “I thought we’d be in for a bit of fog this morning. It’s always like this before a storm. We’re frankly lucky it’s no worse—in a real London particular, you couldn’t see your hand before your face.”

“Fog?”
Elizabeth was familiar with fog, a cool friendly gray thing that rolled in off the sea when the weather was right. If this was fog, the phenomenon had changed some in seventy years.

“Have you never been to London?” Katarina asked, surprised. “I should think, even in your time—though it’s worse now, of course, but—” She broke off in response to Elizabeth’s headshake.

“I don’t come out until next year.”

“You’ve never even been to your London?” Katarina repeated. “Aren’t you in for an education, then. Right, well, there won’t be much reason for you to say anything at all, but if anyone asks, you’ve...just come up from the country. From Kent; no reason to invent more than you must. We work together, and I’m showing you about.”

“What, ah...” Elizabeth thought about novels, and naughtier tales of which she was supposed to know nothing. How in the world did one ask the question? “What sort of work?”

Katarina gave her a sardonic look. “Singing. I sing in a music hall. So do you.” She turned and led the way down the fog-bound alley.

Elizabeth scurried after her. “On a stage?”

Katarina flicked the look at her again. “Yes, on a stage. Where did you think?”

“I only meant...is it a respectable...I mean...I’m not trying to offend you. I just wondered if things had changed. Like the breeches. Is it a respectable profession for a respectable woman, performing on a stage?”

“Not really.”

“Oh.”

The fog around them whined with the same muted rat-tat-tat that characterized the corridor outside Trevelyan’s workshop. Elizabeth felt it like an itch in her eardrums, an incipient headache behind her eyes. She looked about, trying to find the source of the sound, but the mist stymied her. A few wisps blew aside long enough for her to make out tall brick buildings, leaning forward as though watching her pass, but she saw nothing else before the curtain fell again.

Then the ground shivered under her feet, and a familiar ponderous thunder cut through drone and fog and straight to the marrow of her bones. She froze, looking in all directions—
Where is it?

“It’s all right,” Katarina said, hand on her arm, drawing her along. “We’re in no danger so long as we stay out of their way. We’re not breaking curfew once the sun is up.”

Elizabeth took a breath, almost choking as the heavy air hit the back of her throat. She grimaced and coughed. “Madam Katherine, there are a great many questions I—”

“Not just now,” Katarina cut her off. They turned the corner.

The air smelled different here, something salty and fishy underlying the smokiness. The fog wafting against Elizabeth’s face went cool, almost fresh,
almost
what she expected fog to be like. She sensed wide open space in front of her, though on either side looming buildings seemed to still watch her every move. Shouts of men and cries of gulls reverberated through the mist. And there was something else. Lapping water?

The scene before her came gradually into focus. She made out the masts of the ships first, then the ships themselves—huge, lean, beautiful things, wood gleaming and brass glittering wherever the fog parted enough to allow light to touch, much bigger and much sleeker than the ships she had seen in her own time, and with much larger sails. They billowed and ballooned into shapes she had never seen in the harbors along the Kentish coastline. Finally she made out the lines of the docks, and the men walking to and fro along them, unloading cargo from a particularly large ship whose figurehead was a snarling lion.  

The breeze changed direction, now carrying a smell of rotting fish. Katarina advanced through the last line of warehouses and into the open, and Elizabeth followed. The men unloading cargo were dressed like laborers, like Trevelyan, but their shoulders slumped in a way Trevelyan’s had not. They gave Elizabeth and Katarina one sidelong glance each, then returned their eyes to the work at hand.

They moved in a rhythm, as though somewhere a drum Elizabeth could not hear beat out a cadence over the ever-present hum—not fast, but unfaltering. Four of them were positioned on the gangplank of one of the great ships, passing cargo hand to hand down its length to the dock, where six more walked in a ragged circle between the plank and a nearby warehouse. Whenever a piece of cargo reached the end of the gangplank, there was a man there to take hold of it. He walked it to the warehouse with measured steps, disappeared inside with it, and shortly afterward reappeared for the next load. No one hurried. No one missed a beat. The only thing they did out of rhythm was to cough, overlapping and wet and strangled-sounding.

Until one pleasant-faced young fellow glanced at them as he left the warehouse, and stumbled to a halt—and Elizabeth nearly stumbled herself, so clear had the nonexistent drumbeat seemed to her ears. The young man smiled a bit, gap-toothed beneath his freckles. “Madam Katherine!” he said, and hurried over to them, pulling off his cap. The cap was nearly black with grime, as was the face it had shielded and the hand that held it, and the mouse-colored hair beneath was dull and lank and greasy. But he had a pleasant voice as well as a pleasant face, Elizabeth thought, and certainly his admiration seemed sincere. “Been a while, love,” he said, smiling at Katarina. “Missed hearing you sing.”

“Well, come by the hall, then, what’s stopping you?” Katarina countered, and Elizabeth started. The low, melodic voice was gone, replaced by something higher, common-accented, guttersnipey.

“Don’t let you in for free, do they?” the man said. “Not last time I checked, leastaways. But I’ve got myself some work now, as you can see. So tonight, maybe?”

“You might not want to go out tonight,” Katarina said. “There’s a storm coming.”

The man looked at her. “Is there?”

“Can’t you feel it, and you a dockworker?”

The man nodded, glancing out at the oily surface of the river. “I...suppose I can, now you mention it. Tonight, you think? In that case...it might well be a good night to stay in. I’ll come see you another time.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Katarina said, putting her head to one side to smile at him.

The man nodded again, but as though he hardly heard her. His eyes flicked to Elizabeth. “And who’s—”

“Hey!”
The bellow from the dockside made all three of them jump. A broadly built figure strode down the gangplank and onto the dock, and the rhythm crashed to a stop as he barreled through it. But it had been fragmenting even before he shouted, Elizabeth thought. She had been vaguely aware of the dissolution, though she could not have said what—Then she realized. Katarina’s admirer had disordered the pattern as subtly and thoroughly as any couple sneaking away from a quadrille at a country dance.

The big man stopped in the middle of the paused workers, stabbing a finger toward his delinquent dancer. “Stop wasting your time with the ladies, Johnson, and get your arse back here!”

Johnson grimaced a farewell at Katarina. “Coming, sir!” he called, and turned on his heel. Before his boot had struck the pavement more than twice, the others had begun to reconstruct the rhythm. Before Elizabeth could have counted to five, it was as flawless as though it had never been disordered.

At Elizabeth’s side, Katarina dipped her fingers into the hollow formed by the top lacing of her bodice, and came up with a tiny watch on a chain. How she was able to move without reference to the inaudible beat, Elizabeth could scarcely fathom. “We’ll be able to catch most of the others as they head for work, or come back from it,” she said. “The shift change whistle doesn’t blow until six.” Without any further explanation, she led Elizabeth away from the docks and back into the narrow, pinched rabbit warren of warehouses. It did not take very long for the squawk of gulls to be subsumed beneath the distant, unceasing rattle and the occasional thunder of giant feet.

William stalked through the laboratory door with all the dignity he could muster, choosing at the last moment not to slam it, mentally adding one more item to the list of things he could not do. One, protect England from the French. Two, dance a quadrille. Three, protect Elizabeth Barton from 1885. Four, serve as an assistant to a Welsh laborer.

He didn’t know the names of the tools, of course, nor which were likely to be needed for the accomplishment of any particular task. His masters at Eton had not instructed him on such matters. Nor was his right hand capable of holding anything steady, and when he attempted the feat with his clumsy left, the item in question had slipped through his fingers and wedged itself into the mechanism below. It was really no surprise that Trevelyan had responded by inviting him to remove himself, though the form of the invitation made William’s ears burn.

He stood now in the living room, staring at the litter of tools and grime on every available surface, annoyed with himself for not at least gleaning more knowledge from the encounter. That Trevelyan was building a weapon was obvious enough, and the drawings on the walls—of metal giants, or pieces of metal giants, or pieces of metal giants with the metallic skin missing and the interior workings shown—indicated against which of London’s two monsters the weapon was intended to be used. But William was no further along in discovering the parameters of the conflict than that, and Trevelyan had flatly refused to answer questions.

Very well, then, perhaps this room would tell him something. William considered the empty crates, the half-filled cups of cold tea and the scattering of tools whose names he did not know, and made for the bookshelf. He had never seen one so devoid of reading material—only two volumes, and those two textbooks on machinery that assumed a grounding in subjects also not taught at Eton. William set them aside and only then noticed a third tome, hidden by shadows from the casual glance. He drew it out, raising a cloud of dust.

This one was a scrapbook. William took it over to the table, used it to push the dirty crockery aside, and opened it. Each page contained a pasted-in clipping from a newspaper, most only headlines, a few with the article following, none with any annotation or commentary. None with any of the dates preserved, either, so it was hard to tell how old this news might be. Still, it was news—it was history—and William settled in to read. Any illumination shone on this mad new world would be more than he currently had. He turned the pages quickly, running his eye over the headline and initial words of each cutting.

LORD SEWARD ATTACKS PILOT BILL, read the first. Below, in smaller text, appeared the words, “Peer Gives Impassioned Speech to House of Lords.”

PILOT BILL PASSES, read the second.