Timepiece (15 page)

“What does go on there?” Elizabeth ventured after a pause.

“A child who cannot be cared for or who has been found abandoned may be brought to the Murchinson orphanage. Murchinson’s gives a small consideration to the one who brings the child, then undertakes to care for it.” Katarina almost spat the last. “Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? But children’s clever fingers are big enough to make matches, and if they are yours, living in your orphanage, well, you need not pay them even a pittance, and that increases profits significantly. A one-time payment to acquire the child in the first place is much more economical. And the fact that they
pay
for the children has led to some, shall we say, irregularities in the procurement of said children, which neither Murchinson’s nor the bobbies seem to find it worth their while to investigate. No one would have checked Martha’s assertion that Annie had abandoned the child. And indeed, Annie had been gone three days. That it was working a seamstress’ job for rent money...well, what does that matter?”

“We have to stop this,” Elizabeth said.

“We will. This one we
can
do something about.”

“Not just this one thing. All of it. We have to stop it.”

Katarina turned to meet her eyes again. “Yes. We do.” She half-smiled, and Elizabeth thought it was genuine, though it did not do anything to mitigate the fierceness in her eyes. “I am pleased you see it that way. Welcome to the resistance, Miss Elizabeth.”

Tavisford, Devonshire, March 15, 1876

Even as a child, Genevieve Ramsey had been ill-suited to life in a small Devonshire village. Sir Charles Buford once compared her to an exotic bird trying to nest among wrens and swallows, a spot of color among all the grays and browns. As Sir Charles had spent half his life in South Africa and was therefore the only person in the vicinity of Tavisford with firsthand knowledge of exotic birds, Genevieve’s neighbors presumed the comparison to be apt. He missed the point when he spoke of color, however. It would have been more accurate to say that she was an exotic songbird attempting to blend into a chorus of starlings.

Her father, a widowed country doctor with a threadbare practice, could never have managed to afford the kind of training her voice called for, but Sir Charles knew people who knew people. He did not offer to pay the fees himself—he had too much respect for the doctor’s pride—but he arranged for an audition, and Genevieve won a scholarship and departed to study on the Continent. Tavisford did not see her face for years thereafter, though she wrote often to her father and each letter caused quite a nine-days’ wonder in the village. She climbed as high as the La Scala opera house in Milan the year before the doctor died, and her father managed one trip abroad to hear her. On the journey home, he contracted the illness that eventually turned to pneumonia and carried him off.

Two years later, Genevieve retired abruptly from the stage and returned to Tavisford heavy with child. She claimed marriage to a now-deceased foreign nobleman and the name “Rasmirov,” but the tongues clacked behind her back even so. Her savings were enough for the purchase of a small cottage, and Sir Charles advised her on the investment of the rest. He would have gladly been of more service to her, but she would take no more from him than his advice. At first she tried to supplement her tiny income with music lessons, but when it became apparent that no one from Tavisford would entrust their daughters to her care, she swallowed her pride and supplemented it with sewing.

Her thirteen-year-old daughter could not remember a time when she had not known all this—most of it from her mother’s lips, the rest from the background murmur of village gossip. She had never asked her mother to confirm or deny the more uncharitable parts of the gossip for the simple reason that Genevieve would have answered her honestly, and in lieu of an honest answer there was still the chance that he had married her, that he had been a nobleman, that he had loved her, that he had not in fact been some gypsy stagehand trash. By thirteen, Katherine was no longer certain she believed in the fairytale of the handsome Russian lord, but she was more comfortable with the uncertainty than she would have been with banishing it.

She was still going by “Katherine” then. Her mother called her “Katarina,” but everyone else said “Katherine”—and she introduced herself that way, as though a foreign
name
were the reason she too failed to blend into the grays and browns, as though fitting into Tavisford were not an utterly lost cause. In later years, she would come to embrace her exotic appearance, exaggerating it with every means at her disposal, cultivating every possible alluring mannerism, bartering foreign charm for the things she needed, introducing herself as Katarina Rasmirovna and graciously permitting those who could not pronounce the Russian to say “Katherine” while she smiled at the irony behind her gypsy-dark eyes. But in 1876, the year the constructs came to save Tavisford from the monsters on the moor, she was still calling herself Katherine and still trying to pretend she was as Devonshire as the rest of them.

It was an understandable aspiration on the part of a thirteen-year-old girl, lost cause or not, and Katherine forgave herself for it—later, after she had come to think of herself as Katarina—for the simple reason that it had also been the tactically correct choice. Back then, the entire village had been crouched behind a landowner’s sheltering walls, and that which is alien does not tend to be tolerated in cramped quarters. Monsters truly roamed the moor in those days—not ghostly ones out of fireside tales, but the ones the taletellers had themselves bred and taught, and against whom they had no defense but iron-wrought buttresses. Rejecting the conventions of Tavisford would have prompted its denizens to reject her in turn, more conclusively and more disastrously than they already had, and the only way any of them survived the years when the monsters roamed wild was by watching each other’s backs. She would never have lived long enough to reinvent herself, had she chosen to embrace the dark-skinned stigmata that marked her “not really one of us” before it was safe to stir outside the walls.

She had been nine when the walls went up and so remembered the days before them, when wolves in the wood and ghosts on the moor were things in which only peasant children believed. Well-educated women such as her mother dismissed such fancies with a lifting of eyes to the ceiling. “The
Wellingtons
,” her mother always corrected with disdainful patience whenever someone used a less-refined word in her presence, “work the tin mines, and there are no such things as monsters.”

Not that her mother had approved of the Wellingtons. She had once, in Katherine’s hearing, gone so far as to argue with Sir Charles over Parliament’s breeding program—having apparently been infected by Continental sentimentality, or so Sir Charles phrased it, speaking in a tone not quite light enough to make the words a joke. Her mother had watched him narrowly, but had pressed her argument.

“Nonsense,” Sir Charles had reassured her, bluff good humor restored. “There’s nothing to worry over. We brought a great many of them to work the ranches in South Africa, you know, and in a rough society like that, one lives at closer quarters than we would with our Wellies here. I got to know some of mine quite well. Good working partnership, in fact. For all they’re so fierce and dour, some of them really are capable of loyalty—even devotion. They like having someone to guide them. Bred for it.”

“Presumably,” her mother had said acidly, “the ones running loose in Scotland were bred for it also?”

“No, no, those were bred to be soldiers. Entirely different thing. I do assure you, madam, we have no cause for concern. As I have heard you say yourself, there are no such things as monsters.”

But when Katherine was just turned nine—too old to be frightened by the wolf who waylaid Red Riding Hood or the ghosts who inhabited Buford Hall, and almost too old to believe in handsome Russian princes—the sort of monsters that were not supposed to exist came bursting out of the fog.

They came from the tin mines, and from there across the moor to Tavisford, terrorizing outlying farms along their way—though Katherine and her mother, situated as they were on the far side of Buford Hall, did not learn these details until sometime afterward. Their first warning of danger came in the form of Sir Charles’ groundskeeper, who hurtled up to their gate in a dog-cart pulled by a lathered pony. He gasped out an explanation in a few confused words. “The master sent me for you,” he concluded, and Katherine’s mother needed no more persuasion than that to climb into the cart and gather Katherine up behind her. They dashed for the hall as though a hound nipped at the horse’s heels.

Lights shone in nearly every window of the manor house, and inside a babble of voices echoed painfully off the stone walls. Sir Charles was sheltering as many as he could within doors and more in tents pitched upon the grounds, safe behind the high iron gates. He had not been able to save everyone, of course; the families of the men who ran the tin mines were forfeit, as were most of the families in the more remote farmhouses. Still, his quick orders had resulted in the rescue of an impressive number. The life of an English country squire had taken a toll on him over the last two decades, and he no longer cut a particularly impressive a figure with his ponderous belly and reddened nose, but the years fell away as he rallied his household and sent them to protect his tenants. He might have been back on a South African ranch once more.

Despite being bred and trained for mining rather than warfare, the Wellington monsters were canny enough—or at least organized by one canny enough—to press only so far as their advantage allowed. They terrorized Tavisford and its environs as long as darkness covered them, then retreated. Sir Charles knew he did not have weapons or trained men enough to pursue them onto the moor and face them there, so he instead used the morning’s cease-fire to send men to the village and outlying settlements, with orders to bring to Buford Hall any who had not made it to safety the day before and had managed to survive the night. He did not expect there to be many still alive, and in fact there were not, but the handful retrieved blessed him for his forethought.

As afternoon came on, fog started rolling in off the moor. The advantage tipped over to the side of the monsters and their cat-eyes, and the raids started again. The monsters confined themselves to taking food and other spoils from deserted houses, not venturing near enough to the gates of Buford Hall for the armed groundskeepers to shoot them. Since that also kept them at sufficient distance to avoid panic among the refugees, Sir Charles considered it a fine bargain.

Katherine spent the second night lying awake on her pallet in the huge disused ballroom, listening to whispers of news brought back from the day’s reconnaissance. She did not understand all of what was said—many of the words were unfamiliar—but she grasped enough to know that horrible things had been done to the overseers of the tin mines and to their families. “Monstrous,” Sir Charles said, furiously and without any hint of irony.
“Unthinkable,
that they could do such a thing to
us
, to their own overseers, the men who trained and reared and cared for them—!”

Katherine heard her mother’s musical voice, though she could not distinguish words.

“I must confess you were right, madam,” Sir Charles said heavily. A sudden riot of voices rose out in the corridor, and both of them hurried to see to whatever new crisis had presented itself. Katherine sat up, craning her head, but did not manage to glimpse whatever was occurring in the hall before the heavy door closed and the voices on the other side muted into murmurs. She lay back and stared through the nearest of the many huge windows. Its diamond panes of glass blurred and warped the twinkling lights outside—the fires on the moor and in the village.

The second day dawned clear, and since it seemed in the opinion of many who had dwelt their entire lives on the moor likely to stay that way, Sir Charles took advantage of the daylight to send for help. Help was long in coming, it being required all over Britain at once. Someone, it seemed, had coordinated simultaneous uprisings in every mining community, every forestry detail, and everywhere else Wellingtons were used. It was never conclusively determined how that had been arranged, but a theory gained widespread credence that some of the wild monsters from beyond Moore’s Wall had infiltrated the communities of erstwhile-tame ones.

Soldiers did not arrive in Tavisford for another week. By then the monsters had settled into a pattern of nighttime raids, and had established some stronghold on the moor to which they disappeared every morning. The commander of the rescue force wanted to go chasing after them at once, but Sir Charles used a mixture of charm and authority to persuade the man to delay a day or so until the protections around Tavisford could be completed. A stockade was already underway, and it was finished much more quickly with the soldiers’ aid. The safety of the civilians thus seen to, the commander led a raid on the monster base the following morning.

The following night, the remnants of his force returned, in bloodied and straggling twos and threes. Katherine remembered that night forever after as a cacophony of shouted orders and men crying out under the surgeon’s knife. She remembered the blood on her mother’s hands and apron. Bred for mining or not, it seemed the Wellingtons were capable of learning the guerilla tactics of their northern brethren. It seemed the northern brethren had been teaching them and supplying them with firearms. They were not as well-trained or well-drilled as the human soldiers, but they were
much
harder to bring down. The cities of Britain were safe, of course, but any wild place now carried the risk of a nearby monster base and nighttime monster raids. And so the mining villages of Britain settled into a state of quasi-siege, behind newly built walls defended by cannon.

The life became almost normal, in that way anything can when given enough time. One did not leave the protection of the Tavisford stockade after dark, full stop. Farmers could go out and work the fields during the day, anyone could walk or drive between villages as long as he returned before dusk, but it was as much as one’s life was worth to be caught on the moor at night. Even going out on a foggy day was a risk. Most of Sir Charles’ tenants adjusted to these new conditions with relative ease, since they had traditionally avoided the moor during night and fog anyway, for fear of old folk stories. It was only the educated folk who had to learn new habits.