Timepiece (35 page)

There was little else in the room beside the bed: a table with a lamp and a jug of washing water set upon it; the kit of whatever officer whose bedroom this had been, stowed neatly in one dark corner; William’s rucksack tossed beside it; a chipped mirror above a chest of drawers, on which sat a heap of glinting paraphernalia. Belgian spoils of war, no doubt—coins, rings, lengths of braid, fine lawn handkerchiefs, a golden locket and a silver one, and several pocket watches. Including two familiar ones.

Elizabeth restrained both the cry of satisfaction and the impulse to dash across the room. She stole to the chest of drawers instead, taking great care with each step.
All
she needed now was a creaking board. If that or the clink of valuables being removed reached the ears of the guard outside, she was lost.

Her image appeared in the mirror, twisting and wavering with the flaws in the glass—a boy in a mud-streaked shirt, battered cap pulled down low but not quite concealing the seam down one cheek where the branch had left its mark. She thought of sitting before her own glass the day before yesterday—the seventeenth of June—while Sarah brushed her hair. It might have happened a hundred years ago. She watched her pale, mirror-twisted hand steal out toward the glass and the heap of objects piled before it.

The silver locket was on top. She took it, for Maxwell had seemed pained to let it go. She moved slowly lest it clink, extricating its chain from the chain of the nearest pocket watch, and fastened it around her own neck. Her fingers encountered the lump of chloroform bottle in her breast pocket as she did so, and she drew it out and set it on top of the chest of drawers for the moment. Freemantle stirred again, and she glanced sharply in the reflection, but he settled down to sleep once more. All the time she had her ears strained for a sound on the other side of the door, but none came.

She picked up the pocket watch nearest to hand. A piece of glinting braid came with it, and she pulled it free. She snapped the watch open, and the image face flickered reassuringly at her, waves tossing so realistically that she half-expected salt spray. She reached for the other watch.

Just as her fingers touched it, the image on the first watch changed to one she had never seen before. It bore some resemblance to the initial image from 1885, but no construct peered through the fog. Could that possibly mean—? She didn’t have time to waste studying it, not with Freemantle stirring for the third time. She slipped the broken watch into her left-hand trousers pocket and the working watch into the right. Then she took one of the fine white handkerchiefs from the dresser top. A man’s, clearly; an officer’s, by the quality. Freemantle’s? From the bottom of William’s rucksack? Stolen from someone else found in the woods?

The little brown bottle was easy enough to uncork. The scent that rose from it had Elizabeth almost wishing for smelling salts. She held it hastily farther away from her face and poured about half its contents onto the handkerchief. She didn’t know how much Maxwell had used. She didn’t dare underestimate. She stole across to Freemantle, wondering if was only her fevered imagination that made it seem as though his eyelids were fluttering.

She held the square of cloth to his nose and mouth as Maxwell had done, and watched as his face went slack. It seemed much easier to maintain the faint than cause it; Freemantle had struggled wildly in Maxwell’s strong grip for the three breaths it had taken for the fumes to work. And with that thought, Elizabeth realized the flaw in her plan.

She had been thinking to use the chloroform on the guard outside, as Maxwell had on Freemantle—but she would never be able to hold him still, never, not even for three breaths. She looked around the room. She could slip back out the window and—

No.
No.
He had the key to the cellar. She
had
to get to him, and she had to make him sleep so she could search his pockets. And she had to do it now. The sun was darker red all the time. Sundown was coming. The battle would end soon, one way or the other, and His Grace would return and demand to see the French prisoners.

Elizabeth took a strangled breath—and nearly fell over from the force of the fumes. Hastily she rose from Freemantle’s side and held the handkerchief as far as possible from her face. That was enough. She couldn’t risk more. He looked to be sleeping soundly now anyway.

Guard the door,
Nysell had said to his subordinate.
He may wake and be able to tell us part of the story.
If the guard heard a sound, then, he would come in. He would come in and go to the man on the bed. Elizabeth eyed the space between the bed and the door—and then looked all around the rest of the room for inspiration. Her eye fell on the table with the water jug, and suddenly she knew what to do.

The jug was empty, and, in fact, very close to bone-dry. It made it easier to heft. Elizabeth took it with her left hand, curling her fingers around the jug handle, pinching the chloroform-soaked handkerchief between the handle and her thumb. With her right hand, she picked up the lamp. Step by careful step, she took all of her plunder to the other side of the bed, behind the door, and she did not creak a single floorboard in the journey.

Her pulse hammered in her veins, making her nearly lightheaded with the force of it. Or maybe that was the chloroform handkerchief—She couldn’t wait. For so many reasons, she couldn’t wait.

Elizabeth threw the lamp with all her strength.

It sailed neatly over the bed, crashing to the floor like an entire crockery set smashing, glass flying in so many directions she could see some of the splinters from where she stood. From the other side of the door came a startled oath, followed by quick footsteps. Elizabeth grasped the jug with both hands.

The guard entered the room with his eyes already on the bed, expecting to find a man waking from nightmare or delirious from pain. If he had looked toward the mirror he might have seen a flash of Elizabeth’s white shirt in the shadowed corner, but she gave him no chance to look. As soon as he took the step that brought him to Freemantle’s side and into her line of sight, she smashed the jug over his head.

It wasn’t hard enough to stun him—she didn’t think, at least, though she didn’t really know. But it was hard enough to stagger him, and that was all she needed. His knees buckled for a moment, he couldn’t fight her for a moment, and the moment gave her the chance to slam the handkerchief over his face. She pressed her whole hand over his nose and mouth. This had to work. Had to.

One breath, two breaths, three—and a sliver of white showed as his eyes rolled back. His body went limp against her. He might not be as deeply asleep as Freemantle, but he wouldn’t chase her for a few minutes at least, and that was all she needed. And she couldn’t wait, for if there
was
anyone else in the house, they must have heard the smashing lamp.

With feverish haste she ran her hands over his uniform coat. A key, a key, where would he have put the key—She undid the buttons and thought she saw his face tighten. She grabbed for the handkerchief again, holding it to his face as she patted his shirtfront with the other hand.

It proved to be in his breast pocket, a worn brass thing that certainly looked right for a coal cellar. Elizabeth almost sprang up, then took an extra second to check his trouser pockets in case he carried more than one key. He didn’t.

She staggered to her feet, grabbed William’s rucksack, and plunged out the door. The passage was narrow, and dark, and smelled of something moldy. All the fresh air was apparently held on the other side of the closed bedroom doors. She had a moment to notice chalk scribbles on each one, but had no attention to puzzle that out.

South side of the building. So the main stairs would be that way—Elizabeth turned and ran in the other direction. A coal cellar would be at the back of the house. Near the kitchen. Narrow twisting stairs sprang into view and she flung herself down them, clinging for support to a nerve-wrackingly rickety banister. The rucksack swung against her side, delivering a bruising thump in the ribs from what had to be the dark lantern inside it.

She hit the ground floor and stood one moment, looking in every direction like a deer in a meadow. Which way? She was in a back corridor, all dim wood and shadowed corners. She didn’t
hear
anyone pursuing her. Was there no one else in the house? Dared she shout William’s name?

She picked a direction and ran. But this was the wrong way—a carpet suddenly sprang into being under her feet—this was the front hall. She turned and ran the other way. She thought she might be detecting kitchen smells, and here was a corridor full of doors. Elizabeth started pulling on handles at random, finding pantries and storerooms.

And eventually, a locked door. She almost dropped the key in her haste, hissing with impatience as her sweating fingers fumbled it once, twice. She finally got it inserted. From somewhere else in the building, she was sure she heard footsteps.

It turned. Thank God. The handle yielded to her, and she wrenched the door open. Stone stairs led downward into blackness.

“William?”

It felt like a year at least before one pale face and then another appeared in the shaft of dim light, two sets of brown eyes looking up at her with identical astonishment. 

Elizabeth dropped the key and the rucksack to the ground. Heavy booted feet thundered on the stairs above her head. “Hurry,” she said as she yanked the working pocket watch out of her pocket. The chain caught on the cloth. “They’re chasing me—”

At the sight of the watch, William laughed aloud and Maxwell swore—in almost exactly the same tone, Elizabeth noted distantly as she detangled the chain. William came running up the steps two at a time, disheveled and dirty, coat gone and shirt streaked with grime, but grinning like a schoolboy. Elizabeth, succeeding only at that instant in getting the pocket watch free, looked up at him just in time to take in the grin. She was so utterly surprised when he pulled the cap off her head and kissed her that she almost dropped the watch.

“Do you think,” Maxwell growled, “we could possibly get out of here first and you could do this later?” But it sounded as though there was some affection beneath the usual crustiness.

The booted feet reached the landing just around the corner. There might have been other feet approaching from elsewhere, Elizabeth couldn’t be sure. There was, in any case, no time to try to reset the tiny dials—they would have to see if the watch would let them go to a change 1885. William caught hold of her right arm, and Maxwell seized William’s sleeve, grabbing the rucksack with his free hand. Elizabeth pressed the top stem, the top stem, and the side stem, and the world went velvety black.

London, August 28, 1885

And the rain came down like a waterfall.

Elizabeth yelped and Maxwell swore, but William found that he had been instinctively expecting it, that his shoulders had begun to hunch against it while Elizabeth was still fumbling with the watch. Of course it would be raining when they got to 1885. It had been raining when they left, and what had they done in 1815 that would have any chance of affecting the
weather?

The wall against his back had the gritty texture of brick. Otherwise the entire universe might have been made up of black rushing water, for all he could tell. He literally could not see his hand before his face, and hastily returned the hand to Elizabeth’s arm. She shifted a little, but toward him rather than away, and he dared to run his palm down her soaked sleeve until he found her fingers, clasping them and the cold metal of the watch together.

Dared? He had kissed her on the steps of the coal cellar, and she hadn’t objected. Surely the touch of his hand was nowhere near so bold, and he might assume it would be welcome if the kiss had been. Though to be fair, she might have been too surprised to resist the kiss, and he might in fact be presuming…

She wriggled her fingers, and his heart momentarily froze. Then she succeeded in extracting the pocket watch from between their palms, and, after the briefest of hesitations—brief, but he still would have been prepared to swear it took a month to resolve—she squeezed his hand back.

His heart resumed beating with a thud, and a foolish grin stretched his mouth wide under cover of the darkness.

He did not think he had ever been so terrified as during that seemingly endless period in the coal cellar—and that included his time on battlefields, under the feet of constructs, and as the prisoner of a grinning, knife-wielding Belgian. In the pitch black chill, he and Maxwell had worked at each other’s bonds with grim, sweating desperation—Maxwell demonstrating that he had done this sort of thing before, and William cursing his clumsy left hand in language explicit even for a former soldier—arguing in whispers what they ought to do once they managed to free themselves. Where was she? Had there been more Belgian deserters in the wood? If any came upon her and recognized her for a woman—more, for an Englishwoman—

William could not bear to think of what would happen after that. If Nysell captured her as a third presumed French spy, the possibilities were equally grim.
How are we ever to find her?
William had wondered, staring into the blackness of the cellar.
How are we to find the pocket watch? How can we possibly manage an escape for all three of us before His Grace returns from the field and Nysell discovers our absence?

It appeared he—to put it mildly—needn’t have worried. The remembered sight of her standing at the top of the stairs, watch in hand, made him want to laugh aloud again.

On his other side, Maxwell was muttering imprecations loud enough to be heard over the rain, and twisting himself into an improbable eel-like configuration that William could feel even if he could not see it. “What are you doing, sir?”

“Matchsticks,” Maxwell snapped, straightening, and something gossamer-soft and not yet drenched fluttered past William’s face.

He understood then, and let go Elizabeth’s hand. “Stay still,” he told her—reflecting with another private grin that she might, this once, actually obey the instruction—and grabbed for the soft floating thing that was undoubtedly one of her gowns, shoved back into the rucksack by Nysell’s men and now being used by Maxwell in an attempt to keep the precious matchsticks dry.

His elbow connected, rather hard, with something rather solid. Maxwell expressed his opinion in one of the military turns of phrase to which William had introduced him a quarter of an hour earlier.

“Come, come, sir,” William said mildly. “You really ought to mind your tongue. There’s a lady present.” He heard Elizabeth bite back a giggle.

“I was planning to use that eye for something, once we got the lantern lit,” Maxwell grumbled. That told William where his head was and where the cloth might be best positioned, but it was another of those tasks for which it would have been quite helpful to have two working hands. He and Maxwell got thoroughly tangled in the muslin as he struggled to be of assistance.  “Oh, for—” Maxwell snapped, but cut himself off. “Really, Mr. Carrington, it might be better if you
stopped
helping. All right, that’ll do.” He had succeeded in draping the material over both of their heads and shoulders, sheltering the rucksack and lantern under impromptu tent. “Hold it steady a moment.” There was a pause, and William had time to reflect that the fine muslin was hardly the best choice of a garment to ward off rain. It was going to be soaked in a matter of seconds more, and then the matchsticks would be at risk again. “There,” Maxwell said. “Found them. Thank God. Just hold that still another moment.”

A clank of metal latch and a scrape of metal hinge, barely perceptible under the drum of the rain. William did not hear the hiss of the match at all, but he did see Maxwell’s hands spring into being in the sudden circle of light. He pressed closer, holding the not-quite-yet useless gown over the flickering little flame. Maxwell maneuvered it through the door of the dark lantern, and the wick caught.

They stood in an alleyway, William saw at once. Dingy brick rose up behind them and not very far in front of them. The ground at their feet was a litter of rubbish and broken crates and a soaked newspaper or two. Maxwell looked at it with a grim expression, unwilling to draw any favorable conclusions from what he saw, but William turned his head to find Elizabeth beaming. Her hair clung lank and streaming to either side of her face, the cap having apparently been left in 1815. Her torn and muddied shirt looked all the worse for its impromptu bath. He thought she had never seemed lovelier. “We are in 1885?” he asked.

“The twenty-eighth of August, 1885!” she said, stretching out her hands to hold the pocket watch within the lantern glow. Rain streamed down its faces, and the light glinted and rainbowed in each drop so that he could not see for himself, but he trusted her. “Ten o’clock in the evening, the day after we left.”

“And we’re in the right place?”

Maxwell took the watch out of Elizabeth’s hands, glancing at the face briefly before clicking it shut and tucking it away in his pocket. “The precise latitude and longitude from which we departed.”

“And there’s no lightning,” Elizabeth said, as though she were singing it. “No thunder.”

“No constructs,” William agreed, grinning at her.
And no signs that anyone bled to death here last night.
His message might have affected Placenoit, then, at least a little. His mind’s eye presented him with a vision of the Prussians seizing and holding the village, then marching up to join Wellington’s left. He could visualize how the British soldiers would straighten in relief, knowing their reinforcements had come. Wellington would wonder why the monsters had not joined the fight, but it would not matter, for the British and Prussians together would achieve victory over the French. And then everything would be all right. Everything was all right.
Meg is free from Murchinson’s, Katherine can go sing at La Scala—
“Mr. Maxwell,” he said, “I do believe we had an effect. And Miss Elizabeth—” She glanced up at the unwonted formality before she caught the playfulness of his tone. “—that was beautifully executed. We’d still be in that coal cellar if it hadn’t been for you. When we are at more leisure, I think I should like to hear exactly how—”

“We ought to find some form of shelter first,” Maxwell interrupted, “before we all perish of pneumonia.”

“Yes, and I should give you back your things.” Elizabeth extracted the broken watch from her left-hand pocket and handed it to William. Then, to Maxwell’s obvious surprise, she reached under her collar and unclasped a silver locket from around her neck.

He did not immediately put his hand out to take it. “You brought my...”

“It seemed to matter to you,” Elizabeth said, when it became evident the end of the sentence had eluded him.

“Yes,” Maxwell said. He took the little silver ornament from her hand, then gave her the lantern to hold so that he could manage the clasp. He eased a step backwards as he fastened it around his neck, a movement that might have been casual, but that also very effectively hid his face in shadow. “Did you...happen to open it?”

Elizabeth furrowed her brows at his unseen face. “No. It also seemed private...and I had no chance in any case.”

 “We ought to start by trying these doors,” Maxwell said, as though they had been having an entirely different conversation. He took the lantern back from her, turning away as soon as his hand closed over it. “There are worse places to spend a rainy night than a cellar.”

He began the enterprise at once, lighting his way with the lantern, leaving Elizabeth and William to follow. William let Elizabeth help him settle the rucksack onto his shoulders. Then he offered his arm, and she took it immediately. “I think the rain’s easing a bit,” William said, to cover the renewed giddy desire to grin like a lunatic. “Just a summer storm, a quick drenching quickly over.”

“I don’t mind the rain,” Elizabeth said, leaning against him. “It’s not very cold, after all. And so peaceful. No thundering constructs. We might almost be in the country.”

That was true, William thought, suddenly struck by it. It
was
peaceful. Now that the rain pattered rather than drummed, he could hear the silence that blanketed the city. And the night was dark as well as silent, soft black like the nighttime countryside. Granted, it was late on a rainy night, and therefore perfectly understandable that the local inhabitants would choose not to traverse the streets, but—oughtn’t there be
some
light? Some foot-traffic? William found that he was craning his neck to see down the end of the alleyway, in search of a gas-lit glow from the main street. Or a bobbing lantern light. Or the sound of drunken men walking home from public houses. Or
something.
Maxwell’s fruitless investigation took them closer and closer to the main road, and finally to its corner, and the rain slackened into almost nothing, and there was still not a speck of light or a sound anywhere. William set his shoulder against the brick wall and strained his eyes trying to see something—anything—anywhere down the main thoroughfare. Were it not for the brick and the evidence of the pocket watch, he might have thought them far from 1885 London indeed, marooned perhaps on a desert island or the surface of the moon.

“Well, this is a fine kettle,” Maxwell muttered.

“It must have happened to you before,” Elizabeth said, and Maxwell turned on her.

“Indeed it has. But upon those occasions, I had only myself to worry over.”

Far down the main street, a single spark of flame flashed into existence. It winked and wavered for a moment, then settled into an easier swinging pattern. A lantern, William thought, either just lit or just come around a corner. The cold fist that had tightened around his heart relaxed its grip. So there was at least one other living creature in Londontown. He had actually feared for an instant that they were utterly alone, as absurd a supposition as that was, and he felt as though he could handle anything else. Even the necessity of hiding from this unknown coming toward them. He reached to touch Maxwell’s arm, to distract him from his argument with Elizabeth and tell him to draw the slide over the—

“Douse that light,” a voice snapped from the darkness behind them, and William’s blood froze. He had lunged to get between Elizabeth and the stranger, trying to shrug off the straps and ready the rucksack as the best weapon available on short notice, before he realized that something about that voice should have given him pause. Then Maxwell’s lantern shone full on the man’s face, and William stopped.