Timepiece (27 page)

Maxwell looked at Elizabeth. “What has Katarina already told you?”

“The Royal Academy of Sciences learnt to do what the Genevese had done,” Elizabeth remembered. “She said they created a great many when England feared Bonaparte’s invasion—ten years ago, then? I mean, ten years ago for us? In 1805?”

Maxwell nodded slowly. “They began work in 1804,” he said. “In 1804, it even seemed...I cannot fault them for concluding it a prudent thing to do. Bonaparte held the Continent in his hand and had his eyes cast across the channel. He was heard to say—by the year 1885, it is considered a matter of historical record—that he had some one hundred thirty thousand troops and three thousand gunboats
only awaiting a favorable wind
in order to place the Imperial Eagle on the Tower of London. A boast perhaps, but Whitehall considered it sober threat enough to wish to have a surprise awaiting any Frenchmen who set foot on English soil. The monsters—the ‘special battalion,’ they were called—were intended for our defense when the future seemed darkest. As it turned out, we had no need of them in 1804, and in 1805, Admiral Lord Nelson did us proud at Trafalgar and settled by other means the question of Frenchmen on English soil.” He paused. “But the Royal Academy continued their researches anyway.”

William’s brow furrowed. “Why?”

“Because there were men in the government interested in seeing the research pursued. Because there were men in the Academy interested in solving the Genevese’s riddle.” Maxwell shrugged. “Because sometimes the crank turns itself. By 1814, the riddle had been solved and monsters created in great numbers, housed and trained in some secret facility in a barren corner of the Highlands, ready to be deployed to the Peninsula if need be. But then Bonaparte was defeated by mundane means and exiled to Elba. The secret offices of Whitehall debated whether to put the special battalion to some other use—in the Empire’s colonies, perhaps? Slaughtering them seemed wasteful, after all...Meanwhile the not-secret offices of Whitehall discharged soldiers and sailors in huge numbers, wartime being over. This you know, of course.” His eyes went from Elizabeth to William. “You have lived through it.”

“Within the last twelvemonth,” William said. “Bonaparte escaped exile in March, and seized Paris again. And the Duke set out to meet him on the Continent, with—” He broke off. “Oh.”

“With an army a shadow of its former size and strength,” Maxwell said. “Do you understand now?”

“I
do not,” Elizabeth said. “Do you mean to say it was the Duke who did this to us? He took the monsters with him to the Continent? Why not call again to service the English soldiers who fought for him on the Peninsula last year—I mean, in 1814?”

“You do not understand the dangers the Duke faced.” Maxwell saw her expression, and added, “I mean you no insult. It is fact. You don’t have an appreciation for the situation; you can’t.”

Elizabeth stared at him. “All right,” she said finally. “So explain it to me. What don’t I understand?”

Maxwell sighed, resettling himself. “Well, to begin with, you think of Napoleon as a—The word monster has been somewhat over-used of late, so let us say, as the Devil incarnate. He’s a fiend in human form; his followers are minions; all good Frenchmen wished to see their King restored, and their righteous souls rejoiced in 1814 when the tyrant was sent to Elba...no? So that is the first thing you do not understand. Because it will not have been widely publicized in England, and certainly, no offense, not among the ballrooms and drawing rooms you frequent, that Napoleon was welcomed back with tears of joy by the soldiers who had once been his.” His eyes went to William. “You know this.”

“I do,” William said. “It took him less than three weeks to regain control of Paris, and during that time his forces were not obliged to fire one single shot, because no one opposed them. Those men in his army...they’d follow him to hell.”

“Yes,” Maxwell said. “Now for the other half of the story. Wellington’s force was not ‘his’ in any meaningful way. They were not the force he had built up between 1808 and 1814, the ones devoted to him personally; those men had been discharged or sent to see to matters in the Colonies.
Some
of the men Wellington commanded in 1815 were veterans, of course, but the rest were supplied from Hanover, Brunswick, Nassau, and the Netherlands, and they and the Duke did not so much as share a common tongue, let alone common training methods or battlefield experiences. He said he had been given ‘an infamous army, very weak and ill equipped, and a very inexperienced staff.’”

“Did you hear this from
him?”
William demanded suddenly. The tone in his voice was one of awe rather than challenge.

Maxwell smiled a little. “No. I have never had the honor. Waterloo is not one of the places I have been. But I have read His Grace’s writings on the subject. Lord Seward was an incomparable source of history the British government would as soon be kept quiet.”

“Kept quiet?”

“His Grace the war hero was quite critical of the whole special battalion matter, and Whitehall therefore went to some effort to keep his memoirs suppressed. In any case—” Maxwell paused for a mouthful of brandy. “On eighteenth June, 1815, Wellington set out with his motley crew to stand against a force of French veterans.”

Elizabeth drew in her breath. “The eighteenth June. But that’s now. I mean, then. I mean, when the pocket watch arrived, yesterday, when I was sitting in the garden, the date was the seventeenth June.”

“It is happening while you sit in the garden, Miss Elizabeth,” Maxwell agreed.

“So what’s happening?” Elizabeth said. “What happened?”

“Wellington is not without allies. A Prussian force is nearby, and if the two can join, they can surely stand against the Emperor. But they have not joined yet; the Prussians have unexpectedly met with the right wing of Bonaparte’s army and been defeated and forced to retreat north. On the morning of the eighteenth, Wellington faces the French artillery and cavalry alone, though expecting Prussian reinforcements at any moment. He and his men have camped all night in a deluge of rain that made it impossible to sleep and turned the battlefield into mud.”

Maxwell took another swallow from the flask, and maneuvered himself around on the pallet until he was facing the hearth. “Look,” he said, and taking a handful of soot, arranged it in a line along the hearthstones. “Wellington arranges his men along a ridgeline, facing the French across a valley. In the morning, the French artillery starts shelling the British lines, and the British hold fast, for Prussian reinforcements are expected to arrive at any moment. They do not. In the afternoon, an entire Belgian brigade breaks, flees, and deserts under the charge of French cavalry, and the British cavalry destroys itself in an attack on the French line.” He ran his fingertip along the line of soot he had created until it was half its former thickness. “The British line thins.

“Late in the afternoon, the defenders of La Haye Sainte farm are overrun and slaughtered.” He smudged his finger through the line of soot, and Elizabeth found the resultant break curiously unsightly and alarming. She wanted to reach out and mend it. “There is a gap in the line, and the Duke no longer has reserves sufficient to plug it. He pulls men from the left flank to reinforce the center, but now the left flank falters.” Maxwell added soot to the gap in the center, then used his thumbnail to create tiny breaks along the left. “A full quarter of the men who stood beside Wellington that morning are dead, dying, fled into the woods, or too hurt to stand. The line will break under the next French charge, or the one after. Evening is approaching, but the line will break before night falls. And the Prussians are still not there.

“And
that
is when he sends a rider for the special battalion.” Maxwell looked up at her. His eyes were William’s color, she thought, but not warm like William’s eyes. They had an intensity, an anxiety to them that William’s never had. “It is the sort of heroic tale one tells children: the Duke’s aide-de-camp spurring through the woods with his message, the desperate Englishmen staying steadfast as their posts for just that little bit longer, the—” He made a face, tossed back a swallow from the flask, and the timbre of his voice changed. “The army of monsters pouring through the woods and over the ridge, British ingenuity come to triumph over Napoleon. The French Garde breaking at the sight of them, fleeing and leaving the Eagles behind them in the mud. Wellington sends a messenger with those Eagles at once across the Channel, and the man stumbles—with the mud and blood of battle still upon him—into a ballroom where the London
ton
parades in glittering splendor, to drop to one knee and lay the Eagles at the feet of the Prince Regent...And within a fortnight, every single man, woman, and child in the British Isles knows how ‘Wellington’s monsters’ won the Battle of Waterloo and rid the world of the tyrant Napoleon. At that point, there is no chance whatsoever that Britain will turn aside from its wonderful and terrible creation.

“And Wellington—” Maxwell was slurring his words by now, a flush of color high in his cheeks. “—Wellington spends the rest of his life enjoining those around him to call the creatures something else. The older he gets, the more plainly he speaks his dislike that they should be christened after him. The more plainly he speaks his regret that he was forced to engage their services on the battlefield. In the memoirs that were never published, he said that the monsters were unfairly awarded the credit for the Battle of Waterloo, that his brave lads were robbed of accolades that should have been theirs for standing so long against such punishing odds. He wrote that he wished he had never sent for them—that he regretted that victory as he never regretted any defeat—for had he held his hand, his men and Blücher’s could have routed Bonaparte. He wrote that the British could have held until sundown, and had he
known
the Prussians would be there by sundown, he would never have sent for the monsters.”

“And what do you think?” William asked, quite softly.

Maxwell looked over at him out of glittering, near-feverish eyes. “I think His Grace was never wrong in such matters,” he said with the distinctive slurred precision of a man who has indulged in too much brandy. “If he says the British could have held, then they could have held. Had there been no special battalion, brave Englishmen and their allies would still have won the war. We needed no monstrous help at Trafalgar, did we?”

“Then why,” Elizabeth said, “are you not at the Battle of Waterloo, preventing the Duke from summoning the special battalion?”

Orkney Isles, September 15, 1790

“It won’t work,” Maxwell said again. “It simply will not. I have seen battles before. I have attempted to impact battles before. Battles have too many pieces to them, too many opportunities for the effect to be washed away.”

The sky had darkened once again to evening blue, changing the color of the waves beneath it from silver to cobalt. They were even higher up this evening than they had been the last, at the top of a green and rocky hillside some distance inland from the Genevese’s cottage. They had been here for much of the day, and the argument had been going on for most of that time.

“You’ve done more than attempt,” Elizabeth argued, exasperated. “You
have impacted
them. Did you not say it used to be called Brown’s Wall, before you convinced General Brown to heed your advice?”

“I did, and you make my point for me,” Maxwell said, identical exasperation in his tone. “I affected one tiny piece of a war, and the rest of the war proceeded as it would have done without me. The same wall went up under a different name.”

“The situations aren’t congruent, though,” William said slowly, his eyes on the distant, dimming waves. “If you go to Waterloo, you’d be attempting to change the end of a campaign rather than the middle. If Bonaparte is brought down by some other method on the eighteenth of June, 1815, there will never be a need to summon Wellington monsters to do anything. The conflict will be over.”

Maxwell turned a cynical eye on him. “I believe you underestimate the ability of the offices of Whitehall to find a war suitable for employing the weapon they have crafted.”

“But by that logic, we’d never try to change anything!” Elizabeth said. “We’d sit here and say, ‘There is no point, it will all put itself back, would that we could make a difference but we can’t, such a pity,’ like women twittering over tea back home! Katarina Rasmirovna changed things and Gavin Trevelyan changed things, and why should we be any less—It’s the
future,
it hasn’t
happened
yet, why isn’t it ours to change if we wish to?”

“If the problem is stepping into an existing situation as an outsider,” William said, slowly still, thinking it out, “if the problem is that an outsider has limited tools with which to work, perhaps the correct approach is to allow more time.” Exactly what Elizabeth had been thinking the night before, but William was more courteous in his phrasing. “Don’t set the watch for the day of the battle. Set it a week before. A month before. Years before. Live through the entire campaign with the principles. Give yourself plenty of time to craft a lever of length sufficient to move the world. Craft
many
such
.
Would it not then be more likely that one will work?”

“What did you think I was doing,” Maxwell said heavily, “living the life of a resistance fighter in 1885? Do you think I haven’t tried that approach before? It has worked no better than the other. It fails in different ways—more time to work means more time to fail. The same wall goes up under a different name, or I have to leave because I’ve aroused suspicion and my own life is forfeit, or the person I think I have convinced has time enough to change his mind back, or I delay by months but cannot prevent the ruination of Seward’s conspiracy. I think I might be forgiven for concluding that Time or Fate or some such is resisting me. That it isn’t actually possible for someone like me to change history.” He looked away from the two of them, down to the Genevese’s cottage far below. Their hilltop was a good ways away, but had a clear line of sight, and Maxwell had kept a wary eye on the cottage throughout the day. It was now too dark for him to see anything of it, but he kept glancing that way still.

According to his recollection of history, the Orkney farmers who would find the Genevese’s body were not due to make their discovery until tomorrow. However, since Maxwell’s information had proven itself faulty before, he was disinclined to take the risk that they might arrive early and find intruders in the cottage along with the corpse. As soon as it was light enough to see, he had therefore searched the Genevese’s trunks for anything that might be useful, liberated some hardtack and dried fish from the lean-to pantry, and led Elizabeth and William up the mountain. He said he knew of a cave, and indeed he found it with no trouble, suggesting that some portions of the Genevese’s journal were more accurate than others. It was pleasant enough, as far as caves went, a good place to spend the hours of the shortening September day. A good place to argue over next steps.

Maxwell studied the darkness as though he could see the cottage. “I have hoped,” he said, “now and then, that my suspicion was the truth. If I am actually unable to change any of this, then I may be forgiven for failing to do so.”

“No,” Elizabeth said, furious. Maxwell’s head turned toward her, surprised. “No, you may not be forgiven. Not for
surrendering
when there are avenues still left to pursue. Even if—” She fumbled for an example. “—even if Napoleon is only awaiting a favorable wind, it’s better to try to fight than to hang the tricolor flag on Buckingham Palace yourself. Would your—You said your parents were time travelers. Would they have abandoned—”

“Elizabeth,” William said softly, in gentle reproof.

“I
won’t
hush. It’s an important point. Your parents were time travelers. Did they try to change things? Did they succeed? Did they never tell you how they went about it?”

“I never had the opportunity to discuss the matter with them,” Maxwell said in a voice gone tight with anger. “But you are—” He took a deep breath. “—you are perhaps correct that they would not have surrendered to Napoleon or anyone else. I find it...admittedly hard to picture.”

“At the very least,” William said, taking firm hold of the conversational reins, “it is possible to change small things. The wall is named for Moore and not Brown, because of you; you therefore had an effect. Unless the child Meg is kidnapped back to Murchinson’s again, I had an effect too. It mattered little overall, true, but surely it mattered greatly to her? It was only luck I was there, that Madam Katherine could ask me in your absence, but we did succeed in fixing that small thing...” He trailed off, his own eyes wandering toward the invisible cottage. “Perhaps the moral is that small things are easier to affect than large ones.”

“I had already come to that conclusion,” Maxwell said. “I have for some time now been trying to change the paths of individual people—the Genevese student, the Welsh farmer’s daughter—”

“—trying to find the ones who set larger events in motion, yes, I see,” William said. “But that doesn’t mean a battle is impossible to affect. A battle is a whole collection of individual moments, decisions by individual people. The ensign who decides only whether to duck to the left or the right while holding regimental colors—” The tone of his voice was too dry to be amusement. “—does nothing to affect the greater picture, true, but the rifleman who decides whether or not to squeeze the trigger when his gun is aimed at the enemy general, or the captain who orders his men to take the high ground, or the private who decides to take this path versus that when bringing a message—The Battle of Waterloo is a collection of these moments, because
every
battle is a collection of these moments.”

“So you think I should go and try to dismantle Waterloo,” Maxwell said.

“I’ve been saying that for hours now,” Elizabeth muttered. William’s opinion seemed to matter to Maxwell in a way hers did not, and though she acknowledged there to be good reason for such a distinction, it still made her want to bite. “In point of fact,” she added, “I think you ought to persuade the Genevese to dismantle this madness while it’s still only one man’s insanity, but you said that option was closed to you now.”

“It is,” Maxwell said. “This—” He gestured to the invisible cottage. “—was my last chance to affect the Genevese’s path.”

“How do you know which moments are ‘junctions’ and thus closed, and which stay open?” Elizabeth asked.

“Any moment that matters,” Maxwell said, choosing his words carefully, “can only be affected once. Any moment that can be affected more than once does not matter. Think of it this way: if you find you
can
return, there’s no point in returning.”

William’s brows drew down. “I thought you said it isn’t possible to ever return.”

“I did. It isn’t. I—” Maxwell stared at the water far below, searching for words. “One cannot be in two different places at the same time. I cannot ever return to Pendoylan on the eighteenth May of 1872, and try again to save Brenda Evans’ life. I cannot spend the eighteenth May of 1872 anywhere else, either.”

“I understand that,” William said.

“The subtler point is that I also can’t go to the
seventeenth
of May 1872 and try to save Brenda Evans’ life before the eighteenth dawns. I ought to be able to, logically speaking; it’s not as though I’d be attempting to be two places at one time. But the watch won’t allow it. I can set the dials, but when I press the buttons, nothing happens.”

“Because it’s a ‘junction,’” Elizabeth said.

“Yes. I can’t get anywhere near her. I can’t even leave a—a letter in trust for her to open on her sixteenth birthday, or speak to her father before she is born, or anything of the kind. I can’t do anything that might conceivably save Brenda Evans, because I’ve had my chance to do that. Anything I have been able to try twice has proven not to matter, to have no bearing on the unfolding of the larger story. If I can return and try again, there’s no point in trying; anything I can affect can only be affected once; and the Battle of Waterloo is almost certainly the former. There are so many decisions made by so many people that form the shape of the day—undoing one is unlikely to divert the whole river.”

“Yes,” William said, “but what’s stopping you from undoing many? If you go with plenty of time before the battle, time enough to find an ally or several allies—people like Trevelyan, like Madam Katherine—actually, I suppose more like Lord Seward—someone who can get you to the Duke—and if you can explain the entire situation to His Grace—”

“—His Grace would have me locked up as a madman and I’d have no chance at all to affect anything. That has happened to me, with variations, twice.”

“But surely he wouldn’t if you showed him the pocket watch?” Elizabeth said. “If you proved to him—”

Maxwell shook his head. “There’s nothing quite so maddening as being behind bars while the world falls into fire all around you. I won’t risk that again.” He paced a few steps. “But...you have a point. Waterloo is the culmination of many choices, many streams feeding into a river. If even one stream were diverted—Perhaps if Ney had had six horses shot out from underneath him, rather than five, he would have hesitated long enough for the Prussians to come reinforce the English. Or if the men at La Haye Sainte had been better provided with ammunition, perhaps the farm would not have fallen and opened a gap in the line. Or there’s that young aide of Wellington’s, the one who rode alone to summon the special battalion—all I’d need do is delay him, and then Wellington would have no choice but to hold until the Prussians arrived—”

“But this is exactly what you have been doing,” Elizabeth objected. “These little things, unobtrusive and ineffective. If the shape of the day is due to more than one decision, you have to change more than one decision. Divert more than one stream.”

“I don’t think you can divert enough of them by yourself,” William said, very carefully. “I was able to take your place at Murchinson’s, when you could not be in two places at once; I think the lesson to take from Meg’s rescue is that is that two people may accomplish something when one cannot. If you allow me to accompany you, I could—”

“Absolutely not,” Maxwell said. “Neither of you. It’s an unconscionable risk.”

“You seem to think,” Elizabeth said irritably, “that we
want
to be sent back to the balls and the drawing rooms. I would much rather be doing this with you.”