Timepiece (6 page)

When her vision cleared, she was sitting in one of the straight-backed chairs, bent forward and with someone’s hand heavy on the back of her neck. She could see the skirt of her slime-coated gown, and the top of her mud-encrusted shoes. As well as the thin and unsteady black leg of a table she was certain she had never encountered before today and was therefore unlikely to be dreaming into existence.

Voices washed over her.

“—haven’t any brandy,” the old man said.

“There’s gin,” a woman’s voice replied, “but that hardly seems appropriate.”

“No, it does not. Perhaps tea?”

“All right, very well, I’ll wash these up and make some.”

“And I’ll get the blanket off my bed,” the old man said. His footsteps moved away, out the door and heavily up a stairway. Crockery clinked near Elizabeth’s ear, but she kept her eyes closed until that sound moved away as well and the sound of splashing water began somewhere farther off.

Then Elizabeth straightened against the pressure on her neck, and it withdrew instantly. She lifted her head and looked into William’s brown eyes, and his face went slack with relief.

“I’m glad you’re still here,” she whispered.

“I don’t think it is possible for us to both be having the
same
dream,” he said in agreement. “If we are both still here, it must truly be happening. Are you feeling better?”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said in embarrassment, “yes, I’m fine, my knees just went wobbly for a moment.”

“A not uncommon reaction to one’s first encounter with artillery,” he said, and she noticed for the first time how strained he looked about the eyes and mouth.

“Artillery?” she repeated. “What could—”

“Who the devil are you?”

Elizabeth jerked her head around and William sprang to his feet, fumbling with his left hand to catch up one of the tools on the table.

The voice had come from the doorway, and its owner proved to be a tall, thin, hawk-nosed man of perhaps thirty-five. He was dressed like a farm laborer in nothing but trousers and a shirt—both much-worn, much-patched, and very dirty—but he regarded them with a mixture of amazement and annoyance that Elizabeth did not find in the least respectful.

“Don’t be touching that,” he added, gesturing to the tool in William’s hand. “Put it down.” His speech had a slight sing-song intonation that did not sound respectful either. He took a step toward them, and William, instead of putting the tool down, brandished it like a weapon—which it was, or at any rate the closest thing they had.

The hawk-nosed man ignored him completely. “Is that Maxwell’s watch?” he demanded, pointing with a grimy finger at the timepiece that lay on the table, next to Elizabeth’s chair.

“No,” Elizabeth retorted, finding herself all at once more angry than frightened. “It’s mine. Who—”

“Ohhh,” the man said, looking from one of them to the other. “I see. Would this be your first journey, then?” At their blank expressions, he clarified impatiently, “What year was it when you awoke this morning?”

“What?” 

Footsteps on creaking stairs heralded the old man’s hasty return. “Mr. Trevelyan—!”

“What in blazes have you been about, Max?” Trevelyan swung to meet him. “Bringing home guests at a time like this? I thought you were after something more important out there.”

“I was, and I got them for you, and here they are.” The old man drew a packet from within his coat and handed it to Trevelyan. “I encountered these two young people on the way back, and I could not leave them to be stomped on by constructs.”

Trevelyan made a derisive sound as he pulled a multiplex knife from his pocket and slit the parcel’s wrapping paper. “Top on the list of things we do not have time for just now—”

“That may well be, but it doesn’t matter, as they are here whether we choose it or not—”

“Excuse me,”
William said firmly, beating Elizabeth to it by about half a second.

Both men turned, and the one Trevelyan had addressed as Max came forward, with a reassuring if hastily donned smile. He started to say something, but William spoke over him.

“Who are you? And where have you brought us?”

“My name is Maxwell.” Now that Elizabeth saw him in good light—well, not really all
that
good, but better than the dancing lantern-beams—she could tell that he was not, in fact, so very old. His hair was white, to be sure, but thick; his face was mostly unlined; his brown eyes shone fiercely alert. Nor did he move like an old man—and nor had he during the run through the alleyway. Energy radiated from him with an intensity that almost hurt the eye. If anything, he seemed fuller of life than the supercilious Mr. Trevelyan at his shoulder. “And you, sir?”

After the briefest of pauses, William took refuge in the formula. “William Carrington. And this is Miss Barton.”

“Are you feeling better, Miss Barton?” Mr. Maxwell transferred his attention to Elizabeth, regarding her with a tender sort of concern. “I have brought you a blanket, if the shock has—”

“No, I’m fine,” Elizabeth said impatiently. “I mean, no thank you, sir, I appreciate your concern, but I am quite recovered. Where
are
we?”

“London,” Trevelyan said, without looking up from the box in his hands.

“London?”

“London.” With a delicacy of touch somewhat surprising for such dirty fingers, Trevelyan extracted a small glinting thing and held it critically up to the nearest candle.

“Will they do?” Maxwell asked him, distracted from his concern over Elizabeth’s comfort.

“Indeed they will,” Trevelyan said with satisfaction.

“There are monsters in London?” Elizabeth demanded.

“Indeed there are.” Trevelyan raised his eyebrows as though enjoying her confusion. “You haven’t asked the right question.”

“This is my colleague, Mr. Trevelyan,” Maxwell broke in before Elizabeth could answer, “who possesses a genius for mechanical things and rather less of one with regard to social courtesies. I apologize for his manners.”

 “I haven’t asked the right question?” Elizabeth repeated, instead of acting like a well-bred young lady and accepting the apology. “What, pray, is the right question? Does it regard this, perhaps?” She held up the pocket watch.  “What is it? Where does it come from?”

“I found mine in a garret,” Maxwell said. “I’m afraid no one knows where they originated.”

“But you know what it is?”

“I know what it
does.”
Maxwell hooked a finger on the chain in his waistcoat. It was an oddly tailored waistcoat, Elizabeth noticed for the first time, extending over the waistband of his breeches in elongated triangle points—and they were not breeches, either, but something closer to Cossack trousers—She shook her head impatiently at herself and redirected her attention from the strangeness of the clothing to the strangeness of the watch, which was clearly of some actual importance.

Maxwell drew it out in exactly the manner of a gentleman wishing to consult the time, detached the chain, and set the watch on the table beside Elizabeth’s. As far as she could tell under the light of three guttering candles, they were identical as to engravings, though not of course as to scratches. Maxwell popped open both lids. They were identical inside as well, with dials and faces such as never belonged to any proper gentleman’s pocket watch.

Maxwell indicated each dial in turn. “This sets the date to which you wish to travel—year, month, day. This allows you to give a precise location, by latitude and longitude, if you know it. You set these dials, and then depress the side button twice and top once. But that isn’t what you did, is it? For this is neither today’s date nor our current location—You must have done it the other way. When the image displayed in this face is one that seems attractive, press the side button once and the top one twice, and the watch takes you there.”

“This was hardly the best selection for your first adventure,” Trevelyan observed from the doorway. “That nice bubbling brook would have been a much better choice.”

“Knights in armor,” William said, stunned. “The watch lets one...journey to the past?”

“And the future.” Maxwell smiled at him in a fatherly sort of way. “What year
was
it, when you woke this morning? Eighteen hundred...ten? Or twelve? Thereabouts?”

“The...the year of Our Lord eighteen hundred and fifteen,” William answered after a pause.

“I was close,” Maxwell said. He looked at Elizabeth with the same sort of fondness. “I knew you were a traveler like me as soon as I saw the watch, but truthfully, I would have been able to tell anyway. Your gown is becoming, but not at all the current fashion. My mother had one very like it.”

“So we are in London,” Elizabeth repeated. “But
where
we are is not the important question.” She understood what Trevelyan meant now. “What is the year?”

“The year of Our Lord eighteen hundred and eighty-five,” Maxwell said. “You are seeing a future that will not take place until after your death.”

Carron Valley, Scotland, November 1, 1855

It had been what might be mildly termed a trying day, and the message set the final spark to George Brown’s always explosive temper. “There’s a
what?”

His aide winced. The boy would never make a soldier, Brown thought disapprovingly. He shied like a rabbit at every little thing. He would have liked to run like a rabbit rather than face his general’s displeasure—Brown could tell by the faint twitching of the muscles under the jawline—but at least he was not such a coward as to actually do it. Instead he repeated, almost steadily, “There is a government observer here to see you, sir.”

“Here? Now?
Tonight?”
Brown flung a hand at the tent flap, meaning to indicate the camp beyond it and the valley beyond that. “Ridiculous. You’ve been taken in, boy. It’s a reporter. A ‘war correspondent,’ here to compete with that milksop Russell.”

“No, sir—” The boy shook his head. “He’s white-haired, sir, not a young man. And he’s not dressed like a reporter. He says he’s come from the government offices at Whitehall, and his credentials look right...I mean, so far’s I can tell, and they must’ve to the others or he could never have gotten so far within the camp...”

“A ‘government observer.’” Brown snorted. “You tell him I am conducting a God-damned battle and haven’t time to hold his little hand.”

 “He said—” The aide cleared his throat, looking truly miserable. “Sir, he said if you declined to speak with him, I was to give you this.”

“This” was a single sheet of dirty notebook paper, folded in half, trembling with the tremors that ran through the aide’s hand. Not credentials, Brown thought, curious in spite of himself. Not a letter of introduction. A personal note, quickly scrawled. What could possibly be put into a personal note that would prompt him to change his mind and allow this intruder into his tent? He was curious enough to reach out his hand and find out.

The paper read,
“You can talk to me right now. Or I can talk to Russell and you can read about it next week with everyone else. Your choice.”

Brown stared at the scribbled words and felt his collar constrict around his throat. Damn government observers. Damn William Howard Russell, and damn the God-damned
Times.
“Where is he?”

The aide looked surprised. “Uh, waiting outside, sir.”

“Just outside?”

“No, sir, after he gave me the paper he found himself a place by a campfire. Mr. Russell offered him a drink.”

He would. Brown damned Russell and the
Times
again, out loud this time, then tossed the dirty paper at the nearest brazier. “Bring him in here.” He sank onto the chair behind the desk. “Then clear out. But stay close; we’ve a war to fight once I finish talking with whatever pretty-boy Whitehall’s inflicted on us this time.”

The aide saluted and backed away, and General Brown stared at the flame licking along the edge of the grime-streaked paper. 

Damn Russell. Damn Delane of the
Times
, who had sent his young reporter to bivouac with Her Majesty’s Army in Scotland and send home first-hand accounts of the monster war. Russell was a soft little sniveling man whose accounts dwelt heavily on the “inhumanity” of Army practices and Army discipline. The soft and sniveling British public had reacted with predictable horror, and now London was awash in a public outcry over the treatment of its soldiers. As a result, the officials who ran the country from their Whitehall offices had inflicted more than one “government observer” upon Brown. Each was more damnably annoying than the last, tugging upon Brown’s sleeve and bleating platitudes while Brown was trying to win a war.

A war that was all Whitehall’s fault in the first place, for it was Whitehall that had created the Wellington monsters. A proper Army of proper Englishmen hadn’t been good enough for the office clerks who ran the government. Blasted penny-pinchers had decided they would rather not give honest pay for honest work, and instead focused their efforts on creating—
creating,
through confoundedly unnatural means—regiments of monsters that didn’t have to be paid and could stand even worse food and shelter than a human soldier.

Perhaps the first “special battalion” had been a necessity, Brown admitted grudgingly in the privacy of his thoughts. Perhaps Wellington would not have managed to defeat old Boney without them, though Wellington had been heard to say that his brave lads would have won Waterloo even without monstrous help. Brown further conceded that once Britain had at its disposal a battalion of enormous ape-men wielding battle axes, it would have been foolish not to put them to use. Similarly, once the secret of their creation had been mastered, it was tactically sound to increase their numbers. But the idea of sending them to places too dangerous for the average British soldier chafed Brown like an ill-fitted boot. There should be no place considered too dangerous for the average British soldier. And the credit for victory obtained in those dangerous places ought to
go
to brave British soldiers, not to Wellington’s unnatural battalions.

But it was the unnatural battalions—now they were unnatural regiments—who had been awarded credit for the grand victory over the Russians in the Crimea, and then for settling what might have been a nasty rebellion in India. The
Times
had trumpeted both victories to the skies, and “Wellington’s monsters” had become the nation’s heroes. It was rumored among the higher echelons of the Army that Wellington himself had disliked the term, but that was a fact kept secret from the public. Attaching the name of Waterloo’s hero to the creatures conferred upon them a sort of legitimacy, a faint cast-off gleam from the Iron Duke’s halo. Each year since Waterloo, Whitehall had reduced the funds needed to pay the wages of human soldiers and diverted that money to the creation and upkeep of more and more Wellington monsters. There was even a secret training facility far north in the Scottish Highlands—the sort of secret that most Army officers knew, though none discussed out loud. In the thirty-seven years following their first victory, the monsters had been taught steadily more complex maneuvers and armed with steadily more impressive weaponry. They never needed leave or salary or improvement in living conditions; they rarely sickened and recovered quickly from injuries; they were rotated like clockwork between the ever-expanding perimeter of the Empire and the training grounds in the Highlands. They were an effective and easily maintained dream come true.

Then three years ago, they had rebelled, turning the dream into a nightmare. They had killed their human officers and taken over the training facility so smoothly and quietly that it was some days before anyone suspected anything amiss. Whereupon Brown and his Light Division had been hastily collected and dispatched north to restore order—with only the sketchiest and most misleading of information as to what they would face. Human soldiers and Wellington monsters did not customarily fight alongside one another, and Brown and his men had no way of knowing how dangerous an enemy awaited them. Damn Whitehall. Not only were the things enormous and fast and capable of seeing in the dark, but they also handled the muskets and artillery that had been part of the training facility with the facility of the very well-trained. After two days of staggering losses, Brown had pulled his men back to a defensible perimeter and wired to London for reinforcements. Which was when the man in gray had turned up.

He had claimed to be from Whitehall, giving a name that was so obviously an alias that Brown had never bothered to remember it. He was armed with the right kinds of credentials and the right kinds of passwords, but for the rest of it, he looked like a madman—covered in mud, white hair askew, a bruise high on his left cheekbone giving him a particularly rakish air. And his talk was as wild as his appearance. He insisted that Brown press the attack immediately, that instant, not pausing to regroup or wait for reinforcements. “They will regroup too,” he had said. “If you do not defeat them tonight, you will never defeat them.”

Defeating them that night had been manifestly impossible, and Brown had refused to sacrifice his men for no purpose, finally ordering the arrest of the importunate man in gray. Which had led to a scuffle in the darkness, and the man in gray had somehow eluded his captors and fled into the night. Brown had ordered the flogging of the soldiers who had lost him, instructed the sentries to keep watch for his return, and settled in to hold the line until his superiors could send him more men and more guns.

The copyboys at Whitehall had shuffled their feet and twiddled their thumbs and finally declared themselves unwilling to recall any of the special force regiments stationed abroad, for fear their members might join rather than oppose their fellows. Instead they retrieved the much sparser regiments of human soldiers and dispatched them north to aid Brown in returning the monsters to their cages. By then, of course, it was far too late.

The monsters had access to the finest light weaponry in Britain. They were skilled at Spanish-style guerilla warfare and had been given time to entrench themselves in the Highlands, an ideal ground for employing such tactics. No one at Whitehall had apparently considered the possibility that they could do more than follow the orders they were given, but it transpired that at least some of their number were capable of formulating strategies and commanding others in their execution. Before the end of the first year, they held Fort William. Before the end of the second, they held most of Scotland in a grip no one had managed since the Jacobite rebels of 1745.

And Brown wondered sometimes—if he
had
listened to the man in gray, could he have actually nipped it all in the bud in 1852? If he had tried and been annihilated doing it, might the news have galvanized London into action? Might it have galvanized Wellington into action? Might purpose have extended Wellington’s life? Brown was irritably aware that Russell’s precious
Times
daily compared him to Boney’s late vanquisher and daily found him wanting. He’d like to see any of those paper-pushing nancy-boys do better.

“Right this way, sir,” he heard his aide’s voice pipe, and he straightened in the chair, glaring at the tent flap and the government busybody who would step through it. 

“Thank’ee, lad,” the busybody’s voice answered. It was a vaguely familiar voice. Brown frowned, trying to place it—and nearly choked when its owner appeared. It was the man in gray.

He had not changed. He was wearing gray again, the same oddly styled tweed he had worn the last time, splattered with mud as it had been the last time. His thick white hair fell untidily over his brow exactly as it had that night three years ago, and—and surely it must be a trick of the light, but it
seemed
as though the bruise on the left cheekbone was likewise unchanged—

The Brown family did not run to madness. It was therefore not possible that the long Scottish campaign had unmanned George Brown and prompted him to see what was not there. Nevertheless, he stared for a moment gape-mouthed at this vision, until the vision smiled crookedly and said, “Ah, good. You remember me. That saves us some time. Do you remember what I said?”

“How in the bloody hell did you get through the picquets?” Brown demanded.

“I said,” the man went on as though he had not spoken, “that they would drive you out of Scotland if you did not subdue them that night. Do you remember what you said?”

“And how did you get away three years ago? Where did you go? I had them scour the hills looking for you—”

“You said that once the first flare of rebellion had burnt itself out, it would be a trivial matter to take back the training center. You said that the monsters might win a brief contest of strength, but without British officers to lead them, their force would degenerate into chaos. You said that once you had reinforcements, it would be simplicity itself for disciplined British troops to take control of them. And that even if they dispersed a little through the countryside before that point, no matter—it was not as though they had the sense to take the high ground, nor the ability to use artillery to defend it.” The man in gray made eye contact. “Do you remember saying that, General?”