Timepiece (23 page)

Hartwich, Kent, June 17, 1815

He had been falling into a crate. He had felt the sharp corner of it against his leg, felt his knee strike it and buckle even as he tried to support Elizabeth’s weight and keep her upright. Then the splintery prickle was gone, and he landed sprawled flat on his back on soft earth, and the air all around him was warm and calm and sweet with the scent of apple blossoms.

His left hand still gripped her arm, and his collapse brought her falling with him, on top of him. For one moment she was all he could see—his entire universe was made up of her dilated eyes and wild brown curls. Some of the water on her face might have been tears. He wasn’t sure which of them was gasping. Both, he decided after a moment.

Water droplets bunched on the ends of her curls and fell onto his face, and he would have reeled back from the icy shock of it if he had not already been prone. He was desperately cold, he realized suddenly, fingers numb and teeth chattering, and he could feel shivers running through the length of Elizabeth’s body.

Because she was still on top of him. And although propriety was far from foremost on William’s mind at the moment, there still seemed like a number of good reasons why he ought to correct that situation before doing anything else. He shifted his grip so that he was holding her off rather than pulling her close, and eased them both into a sitting position. She went with him, pliant and shuddering. The blue sky above the apple tree tilted around them for a moment, and he didn’t let go until it steadied itself and he was sure they would both stay upright.

“Elizabeth?” he started to say, taking his hand from her shoulder so that he could use it for something else—bracing himself, or possibly touching her face, he hadn’t quite decided—but her name died in his throat when he saw the red smudges he had left on her white gown.

Because his palm was slick with Gavin Trevelyan’s blood.

There was no reason for him to want to vomit. He had been a soldier; he’d had blood on his hands before. He turned his head sharply to one side, closing his eyes against the renewed dizziness, swallowing so hard he thought he would choke. He had to break off the swallow to breathe, but none of the rising bile escaped his throat.

The darkness behind his eyelids seemed full of lashing blue lightning and pumping red blood. He wrenched his eyes open, to the sight of white blossoms, and made himself turn back to her. Made himself look at her face, not at her shoulder or at his own hand. “Elizabeth?” he said again, and counted himself lucky it came out in a croak rather than a gasp.

She looked at him, but her eyes had an unfocused quality. She was shivering as though she had been drenched in ice water, and so was he—and that wasn’t right, he thought. Yes, they were both soaked to the skin, but the air around them was mild, there should be no reason for such desperate, convulsive shuddering—What was it you were supposed to do? Brandy and warm blankets? He didn’t have either. He unbuttoned his coat and tried to shrug it off one-handed. It was as soaked as her gown, but it was of a heavier material, so perhaps it would help a little.  He couldn’t think of anything else to do.

He got the thing off finally, and reached to put it around her shoulders. She put a shaking hand to her throat, holding the collar closed. He couldn’t tell where his shivers left off and hers began.

“Did he get out?” she whispered. “Did you see?”

William hesitated. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “We left before he did.”

“They killed him.”

“Elizabeth...”

“They must have. They were all around him—how could he have possibly—” She shuddered hard. “Because of me. Because I was in his way.”

“No,” William said. “Because they were fighting a war, because they were doing something dangerous, because their plan went awry. It wasn’t a different plan because we were there. We didn’t draw the construct’s attention or choose the route to the river or tell Trevelyan to fire—”

“He sent us home before he escaped himself,” she said. “He told you to keep me safe. It
was
because of me. Not Madam Katherine or Mr. Trevelyan, but Mr. Maxwell—” Tears spilled down her cheeks.

William could see Katarina as clearly as if she had been there in the orchard—freezing in her scramble for the rail-gun, dropping in a heap of limbs. He could see Trevelyan, eyes glazing over as his blood pumped between Maxwell’s fingers. He could see Maxwell, looking every way at once at the men who surrounded him as he—

William cut off the unhelpful sequence of thoughts right there.

“Come,” he said to Elizabeth, “come with me, come to the brook. A drink of water will help.” Hot tea and some blankets would help more, but he didn’t want to risk going home or to Westerfield yet. He got very awkwardly to his feet, barely managing minimal assistance as she got to hers. Once they were both upright, he offered her his arm, and she took it. He drew her down the path.

“Did it hurt terribly, when you were wounded?” she asked.

He looked at her, startled. “Well—yes, it did, it hurt quite a lot, for a long while after.”
Shock,
he thought.
I wish I had brandy to give her.
“Why...?”

“I just wondered...Mr. Trevelyan didn’t scream, so I thought maybe...” She took a deep breath. “Maybe it wouldn’t hurt right away, maybe Madam Katherine didn’t have time to hurt before...”

“She didn’t,” William said with certainty. At least he could provide reassurance on that point. “I’m sure she didn’t. It was too quick.”

“She loved Mr. Trevelyan,” Elizabeth said. “I mean, she truly did. I don’t think he—But maybe it would have come right if there had been time.”

She loved him, but she knew it wasn’t going to come right,
William thought. He knew something about wanting what you could not have, had recognized a particular look on Katarina’s face as one he had seen in the glass when contemplating his lost career. Katarina had, however, made peace with her situation in a way he had not; she had at least made an attempt to want something else. On the way back from Murchinson’s, she had spoken a little about her mother the opera singer, and William had heard enough to be fairly certain her plan for “after the war” had not been to settle down with Trevelyan but rather to make tracks for La Scala.

Not that it mattered what the plan was. She’d had one. It was all wrong that people with future plans should die on battlefields. Particularly when there were so many others who didn’t care whether they died or lived. Trevelyan had been one of the latter, William thought, but Katarina’s death was a tragedy. And then there was Maxwell, the enigma, the mystery, who didn’t easily fit into any category, but who—

“We can’t let it happen,” Elizabeth said, stopping and pulling her arm free so that she could face him. “We
can’t.
We’ve got to stop it.”

“Come here,” William said, gesturing in the direction of the water that bubbled just out of view. “No, come, we’ll talk about it in a minute, just come and have a drink first.”

She followed him. He plunged his left hand into the water, rubbed it against the grass, and managed to get it mostly clean. Then he got her to drink and dab her face with a wet handkerchief, and it seemed to help a little. Water on his own face and down his own throat helped too. Neither of them had completely stopped shivering, but at least he could think more clearly, and Elizabeth’s eyes seemed to be focusing.

“He was going to Orkney,” she said. William looked over at her, and she clarified, “Maxwell. I heard him tell Madam Katherine that he was bound for Orkney whether the night’s work succeeded or failed. Orkney in 1790, to stop it all before it started. If he—” She took a deep breath. “—if he died in the alleyway—if he died because of me—then what we saw is going to happen. There will be no one to stop it from coming true.” 

“That’s not necessarily so,” William said, trying to marshal his thoughts. “Now the two of us know the future, we can work here to change it.” But he knew where she was headed. “You want to go to Orkney in his place?”

“If he can’t do it,” she said, “and it’s because of me that he can’t, then...”

“What would we do there?”

“Stop the Genevese,” Elizabeth said. “Convince him not to make the first monster. Stop all of this before it starts. Maxwell said he retired to the smallest island off the Orkneys, as far north as you can get and still be on British soil. We could find that. And I know the date—I heard Maxwell tell Madam Katherine. The fifteenth of September, 1790.”

William thought about it all for a moment. “We can’t,” he said.

Her eyes flashed. “William—”

“Not for a full day, we can’t. The watch won’t work again until—” He fumbled in his pocket for his actual watch, nestled next to Elizabeth’s uncanny one. He drew it out and popped it open to check the time, which had begun to seem like an odd thing to do with a pocket watch. “—a quarter to seven tomorrow evening.”

Elizabeth scrubbed the wet handkerchief over her face again. “Well, that’s plenty of time to consult an atlas.”

William nodded. “I ought to be the one to go,” he said carefully.

He was expecting the flash of eye that time. “No,” she said. “It’s my watch, and it was my fault.
We
must go.”

“You shouldn’t,” William said, “be anywhere near it. You should let me do it alone, you should let me protect you from the dangers—” She drew breath to protest, but he shook his head. “You should, but you won’t, will you? Of course you won’t. You’re Elizabeth. You wouldn’t be Elizabeth if you were willing to be kept safe.”

After a moment’s amazement, she seemed to recognize the compliment he had intended. She smiled a little. “No,” she said. “We’ll go together.”

“Yes.” He sighed. “We can’t spend a full day in wet clothing,” he said. “We have to go home. We’ll need to come up with some excuse for why we’re both sopping...If I could row, we could say I took you out on the dory and it overturned, but as it is...”

“It wouldn’t work in any case,” she said—absently, as though she were accustomed to concocting creative falsehoods. He was reminded of Katarina outside Murchinson’s. “We’d have to actually go to the pond and turn over a dory, and we’re sure to be seen by
someone
if we try that. We’d better say—” She thought a moment, then sighed. “We’d better say I climbed a tree and fell in the pond and you came in after me.”

Even with the images of blood and lightning still dancing before his eyes, he had to smile. “Won’t you be in dreadful trouble at home?”

“I’m always in trouble at home,” Elizabeth said, and he smiled again.

“Here,” he said. “There’s—I’m afraid I got blood on your gown. Let me just—” He reached to smear some dirt over the stains. “I’m sorry. I fear the gown is ruined either way.”

She reached in a matter-of-fact manner for a handful of mud, dribbling some along her skirt for good measure. “It’s rather small fish, in comparison with—with the last few days. What was it Mr. Trevelyan said? ‘Top on the list of things which do not matter’?”

“Something like that.” A breeze sprang up, and they both shivered—and that was enough, he decided. It was time to get indoors unless they both wanted to truly fall ill. He got to his feet and stretched out his hand to help her to hers. “I had better see you home. How shall we...what shall we do tomorrow? Shall I call in the evening?”