Timepiece (25 page)

Well, ladders could be woven from material other than a prince’s silk. And now that Elizabeth thought about it, she seemed to remember bedsheets figuring in one of those novelized escapes Mirabelle so enjoyed. Elizabeth took the muslin sheets off her bed and found her sewing scissors.

She hesitated for one instant before she made the first cut. If there had been ivy, she might have slipped out and back and no one ever been the wiser. But if she tore up her bedsheets, they would know. She didn’t know what they would do in response, but nothing would ever be the same again.

In her mind’s eye, constructs thundered through the streets of London and Katarina fell in an alleyway. Elizabeth took up the shears and got to work.

By the time the downstairs clock struck half past six, she had a ladder of sorts, wrapped twice around a post of her heavy bedstead. She looked at it with satisfaction, and went to dress.

She would have given almost anything for a pair of Katarina’s breeches. She put on a gown instead, wriggling to fasten as many buttons as possible. It was harder to do them up than to undo them, but she thought she managed enough to keep the thing from gaping. She took her gloves from their drawer. What else? She tried to think what would have been useful in 1885. Something to carry things in. She fetched her reticule. Something to keep off the rain. She fetched a spencer. She added a second gown and a change of stockings to the pile, tied the whole thing up in a bundle, and took it to the window.

She was never going to be able to climb down with such a bulky parcel under her arm. How did the fast young ladies manage it? She stood frowning down at the drop until a creaking floorboard out in the hall made her jump. Then she froze, listening, but it was not repeated. No one was coming toward her room. Or at least, she didn’t think so, but she could be wrong, and there was no more time to waste.

Elizabeth tucked up her skirts, pulled on her gloves, dropped the bundle to the grass below, prayed no one had been near a downstairs window and seen it, and scrambled up onto the window ledge.

Climbing down a muslin rope-ladder was harder than climbing up a tree, but it was not much harder than climbing down. She clung to the ledge until her feet found the first knot, then transferred her grip to the bedsheet-ladder. She fancied she felt it strain under her palms. She eased downward, feeling with her feet for the second knot. She shifted her grip and felt for the third.

About halfway down, it became much harder than a tree. Her feet couldn’t find a knot to support them. She hung, legs flailing, knowing she wouldn’t be able to hold up her own weight for long. Didn’t sailors go hand over hand up and down ropes? How? Her knees scraped against the brick of the house.

And then the muslin was slithering through her gloves and she was falling.

She landed with a thump on her bottom, breath knocked out of her, staring up at the window and the slowly-swinging muslin ladder.

I’m all right,
she told herself.

She wasn’t completely sure she believed it.

I’m all right. I’m not hurt, only bruised. I need a minute to catch my breath, but I’m all right.

She didn’t get even the minute, though. Just then she thought she saw a movement from the other side of the ground-floor window, and she knew she heard a cry of surprise, and she scrambled to her feet, grabbing her bundle and running full tilt for the orchard.

William was waiting for her under their tree, a rucksack over his left shoulder. He looked up when he heard her coming, and straightened. She thought he was smiling, but it vanished from his face when he got a good look at her expression. “What’s happened?”

“Nothing,” Elizabeth gasped, breath gone more from the fright of the fall than from running. “I had to—sneak out—is all.” She didn’t want to tell him how she had done it, how irrevocable a decision she had made. She fumbled to pull her skirts down where they belonged. “I think they—saw me.”

“Right. Quickly, then.” He pulled out the pocket watch.

“Did you—check the—?”

“Latitude and longitude, yes. Ah, frequently.” He gave her a self-deprecating half-smile. “About once an hour for the last twenty-three.” He was clearly checking it again. “The date too. It’s right. Are you—?”

“Ready,” Elizabeth said. She reached a hand for his arm. She thought she heard a shout from back toward the house.

“Then one,” William said, depressing the side stem. “Two—” He pressed it again. “Three—”

Orkney Isles, September 15, 1790

She stood on a rocky shore. The light was fading fast, and there was not enough of it remaining to discern the sea—but Elizabeth could sense it anyway, an amorphous dark menace somewhere off to her left. Waves broke hard upon the shingle, and the echo of them bounced off the rocks, filling the air in every direction with the sense of something encompassing and remorseless. To her right, a cliff rose up, indistinct like an inkblot against the indigo of the sky. William’s form was an inkblot also, his features impossible to read.

“Right,” he said in a voice not entirely steady. “It worked.”

“It worked!” Elizabeth agreed, elation singing through her. For just a moment, she forgot about Katarina and Trevelyan and blue lightning, not to mention rope ladders and windows—it had
worked
, they had
done
it, they were
here
, and she wanted to shout.

“Right,” William said again. Letting go of her hand, he swung his pack to the ground and bent over it. “What do you have there?” he asked, and his hands brushed hers as he reached for her bundle. “I can probably fit it.”

She stopped him long enough to disentangle her spencer and layer it hastily over her gown. Salt-flecked wind gusted off the water, piercing straight through to her skin and setting her shivering. She couldn’t get the buttons done fast enough.

She looked over to see the William-inkblot bent over the rucksack, repacking it with slow, deliberate motions of his left hand. Something about his posture made her think his jaw was clenched, and she suspected the cause to be frustration rather than cold. She thought about offering to help. She studied the set of his jaw again and decided not to. He rose at last, swinging the rucksack over his left shoulder and squirming to get it over his right as well. She did not offer to help with this either.  

 “Right,” William said for the third time, once both straps were settled securely. “What do we do now?”

That was a good question. “We go find the Genevese and persuade him not to...” It sounded rather feeble even to her own ears. It was the first time she had given thought to the “how.”

“Do you know his name?”

Elizabeth shook her head. “No, but there can’t be so very many students from Geneva hiring a cottage here, can there? We should—” She looked about, seeking inspiration, and spied a gleam from the cliff high above them. “There’s a house there—see the lamplight? We should start there and inquire.”

William nodded as though he found the plan sensible enough, and turned his attention to the cliff. “One would imagine, with a house so near, there would be a safe path down to the shore,” he murmured, and they set about looking for it. But none sprang into view, not even when the sky darkened enough for the gibbous moon to do them some good. They walked the length of the beach and back, stopping at each end to stare at cliffs that dropped sheer into frothing water. The slope in between the endpoints was not much more forgiving. Perhaps at low tide, there was an easy path upward, but it seemed as though the tide was now at its highest ebb.

When they had nearly returned to their starting point for the second time, William suddenly paused. “Well,” he said, peering at the jagged rocks nearest to hand, “I suppose that isn’t
so
bad...” It was a testament to their lack of other options that he said so. They would have otherwise rejected the barely existent path as being far too difficult—in fact, they had already done so twice. “Could you climb this, do you think?”

Elizabeth’s answer was to tuck up her skirts again. “I can. At least, I think so. But, er, forgive me—”

“I’ll manage,” he said, still turned away from her and looking at the path. His voice was grim, but she did not think it was angry. “It’s steep, yes, but it’s not a sheer drop. I’ve got one good hand. The problem is, only having one, I won’t be able to help you if—”

“I’ll manage,” she echoed.

She had the oddest sense that he smiled, though she still couldn’t see his face. “All right,” he said. “Once more unto the breach?”

It was not harder than shimmying down the bedsheet, but it was harder than climbing a tree.
I’d give almost anything for breeches,
Elizabeth thought again. Her tucked-up skirts were bunchy and awkward, and the sea-breeze blew numbingly cold on her stocking-clad legs. Three steps in, she revised the thought:
No, never mind. While breeches would be helpful, what I’d really give anything for is better shoes.
The moonlight was a witchy, deceptive sort of thing, making sharp-pointed rocks look like harmless shadows, and hollows look like footholds. Elizabeth found a hollow by putting her foot in it, twisted her ankle, and cast an irritated covetous glance at William’s boots.

“All right?” he said.

“Yes. Fine.”

Her voice must have been a little sharp, for he stopped moving and turned his head. “Take it slow,” he said. “Test with your foot to be sure you’ve got something firm before you put your whole weight on it. Use your hands between steps. It’s all right if it takes longer. We needn’t rush.”

“No,” she agreed, testing the next step with her throbbing ankle. William himself was moving very slowly, feinting each movement before committing to it, putting his left hand down after every step. Not trusting his balance, she thought.

She moved her right foot toward what looked like a rock. It was a rock. She leaned into it, and it shifted. She drew back, tried another angle, found the shifting to be less treacherous this time, and managed to bring her left foot forward.

She looked up to find William watching. He turned his eyes front rather quickly. “Exactly,” he said in an approving sort of voice, but it was a little muffled. He braced his feet and reached for another handhold, and it wasn’t until she was well into doing the same that she wondered exactly what he had been looking at. Well—no help for it. He had already seen her in breeches, anyway, and with muslin clinging to her skin. It seemed ridiculous to worry over modesty now.

Her eyes came at last level with the crest of the path, where rocks and tufts of grass sat outlined in a weird silver glow. With one last effort and scramble, she made it to the flat ground, and William took two long, carefully balanced strides to stand beside her.

The wind blew harder here, and colder. It whistled in Elizabeth’s ears, and she shivered despite the spencer. Some few yards away sat a crofter’s cottage—a rude, slant-walled affair with a thatched roof, perched nearly on the edge of one of the cliffs whose base was covered by high-tide water. Behind the cottage was a building that might have once been a barn, before its roof fell in. There was no sign of any living thing anywhere the moon shone, but a light winked through the shutters of one window of the hut.

Right. Nothing for it, then. At least the occupant was awake. Elizabeth pulled down her skirts, strode up to the door, and knocked on it.

There was no response.

She glanced back at William. He lifted his shoulders in a shrug, so she knocked again.

Still nothing. This time she held her breath, listening for movement inside, but could hear none over the sound of the sea and the wind—

—except a thump, a slight one, as though something within had fallen from a shelf.

Then the door shuddered hard before her eyes, to the accompaniment of much louder thump. Elizabeth seized the latch and wrenched the door open.

The room was almost bare of furnishings. Her eyes took in a pallet in the corner by the hearth—a rickety table set against the opposite wall—three brass-bound trunks askew and open, their contents spilling every which way. The sparseness made the room seem cold, despite the fire in the hearth. Or maybe the impression of coldness came from the shadow that loomed over everything.

The figure casting it was frighteningly tall in its own right, of course, seven or eight feet in height. With the light behind it, the shadow it threw was immense. Elizabeth could not see the stitches and scars, but the hunched shoulders and drooping skin of the silhouette left her in no doubt that a Wellington monster cast that shadow—not that she had been in particular doubt in the first place; it could not have belonged to a normal-sized man. It was bent over a smaller figure, its ham-sized fists clenched around the latter’s throat. It slammed the smaller figure for a third time into the wall, and as it did so it shifted just enough to allow light to fall on its victim’s face.

Maxwell.

William took a step in front of her, dropping his right shoulder as though to shrug the rucksack off it, but Elizabeth was too frightened to stand still. She ran forward before she had decided what to do, looking in every direction for something—anything—

There was a poker gleaming dully in the fire from the hearth. Elizabeth grabbed it. Even bent over Maxwell’s slumping body, the creature’s head was higher than she could reach, but she swung at it anyway, hitting its back as hard as she could.

It let out a roar that sounded more like anger than like pain, but at least it dropped Maxwell. Elizabeth was striking out again as it rounded on her. This second blow went wide, barely brushing the creature’s ragged sleeve, and the monster swung at her. She tried to dodge, but tripped over something on the floor and then over her skirt, and its heavy hand slammed into the side of her head. She fell, poker flying from her fingers. She heard William shouting something.

For a moment, Elizabeth thought she had hit her head hard enough to see double, for it seemed that two stitched-together faces stared down at her, demonic in the firelight. Then she realized that there actually were two monsters: the one that had struck her, and a smaller one huddled behind it, outlined by a doorway to an inner room that Elizabeth had not previously noticed. A kitchen, most likely.

The larger creature swung away from her, snapping out something...in
French
?  It certainly sounded like French. William stumbled over the detritus on the floor to Elizabeth’s side, but she was already struggling to her feet. The larger creature seized the arm of the smaller one and hustled it through the inner doorway. Elizabeth grabbed the poker again and ran after, William right behind her.

A blast of cool air struck her face just as she reached the inner doorway, and she knew what that meant before she heard the slam in the darkness. There was a back door to this cottage, and the creatures had escaped through it.

She didn’t dare run through the dark kitchen.
They
might be able to see in the dark, but
she
couldn’t, and who knew what menaces might be lurking in the shadows? She turned instead and ran the other way, back through the sparse main room and to the front door. She reached the doorway just in time to see the two creatures running through the moonlight and to the cliffside, the larger one dragging the smaller after it.

Their long legs ate up the distance to the cliff before Elizabeth could run more than two steps in their direction. They paused for a bare instant at the precipice. And then they jumped together, hands linked. Two splashes carried clearly to the ears of the watching humans.

There was something dreamlike about the entire scene, Elizabeth thought. The blue-black night, full of sea-sounds. The dark water lapping far below. The moonlight shining in a silver path along the inky waves. One dark shape and then another crossed into the path of the moon, swimming steadily, moving farther and farther out to sea until they became indistinguishable from the water around them.

“Don’t ever do that again,” William’s voice said in her ear. “Good God, you can’t just go rushing into—At least give me a moment to—You’re not hurt, are you? Are you hurt?”