by Andy Gavin
“She’s still alive?” I’m pretty damn sure Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette lost their heads a decade earlier during the revolution.
He gives me a funny look. “Did I tell you I’m making a watch for her? Not that she’s likely to pay me with the war and all, not to mention I’m about twenty years behind schedule. Still, it’s splendid.”
“May we ask your name, good sir?” Yvaine says.
“Forgive me. I get so fixated on my work. Abraham-Louis Bréguet, pleased to meet you.”
“Yvaine,” she says, “and me cousin Charlie.”
It’s my turn to glare at Yvaine, for not promoting me beyond cousin. But Monsieur Bréguet takes to calling us chérie and garçon.
“Your house, sir,” she says. “Did it once belong to the Franciscans?”
He looks surprised. “The oldest wing. But my late wife’s family built the rest. Did you grow up in the village? Or Chantilly?”
Yvaine shakes her head. “Me da did. He taked me here when I was young. But he died.”
Monsieur Bréguet looks morose. “I’m sorry. The long war has cost us all a great deal.”
“We make of it what we will,” Yvaine says.
“What did you say?” the Monsieur asks.
She shrugs. “Thank you for the food.” We polished off two loaves and a cheese, not to mention Yvaine’s three glasses of wine. “But we best be off.”
Monsieur Bréguet is still giving Yvaine the stare-down.
“Do you have somewhere to go?” he says.
“In a couple weeks, Charlie’s takin’ me t’find me only survivin’ relation.” She elbows me.
“My family’s all gone too, Chérie,” he says. “Perhaps I’m merely hungry for new faces, but I’d be happy to have you as my guests.”
Staying in a nineteenth-century French chateau is a tad surreal. I could live without the gold paint, fine china, and fabric colored walls, but slumming in London has given me new appreciation for beds, baths, and windows — not to mention regular meals. And the house is nearly deserted with all the servants off to war. Monsieur Bréguet and I are the only men left, and he spends most of the day locked away in his workshop.
Which leaves us plenty of time to think. The battle and the downtime hop distracted me, but my brain keeps going back to Yvaine’s mysterious brass page. I know she wants to leave it buried, but I can’t help thinking we need all the help we can get.
At dinner, Yvaine shows up wearing a pink dress and white ribbons in her hair.
“Where’d that come from?” I ask.
“Monsieur Bréguet asked Mademoiselle Brigitte to fit it for me.” She twirls around so it lifts. Still no shoes.
“I didn’t know you liked that kind of thing.”
“All ladies like dresses and ribbons.” She beams at me.
“My Aunt Sophie doesn’t.”
The Monsieur pats Yvaine on the head. Unlike Donnie’s attentions, these don’t bother me in the least. It’s nice to see her acting the girly girl, and the old man treats her like a daughter.
“Yvaine,” I say, “we need to dig up that—”
“Not at dinner,” she says.
Afterward, our host lights his pipe and offers us some marc. Yvaine — no surprise — is partial to the brandy.
“Are those your sons?” she asks of a big portrait showing a younger Bréguet with two boys, one in his twenties and the other in his teens. The older looks like his father but the younger is blond and — oddly — turned away from the viewer.
Our host nods. “My oldest, Louis-Antoine, followed me in my trade, but I sent him away to Geneva for safety.”
“Why is your other son facin’ backward?” Yvaine asks.
“He wasn’t when he sat for the portrait, but the painter, David” — he says the name in the tone one reserves for Picasso or Rembrandt — “insisted that was the only way he could complete the composition.”
“What was his name?” she says.
“David,” Monsieur Bréguet says. But I’m pretty sure Yvaine meant the boy, not the artist. “He was frightfully expensive, too, but that was before the war ruined my business.”
“Your younger son doesn’t live here?” she says.
“He’s grown now, married a Scottish Catholic….” The watchmaker shakes his head, looking down. “He visits every few years.”
Yvaine’s looking at him funny. “What was his name?” she asks again.
The Monsieur scratches his head. “My wife chose it. After her great uncle. His portrait is over there.”
We follow his finger to find a swishy-looking French guy, facing sideways, his face mostly covered by the most ridiculous gray wig imaginable. The brass plate beneath reads, Phillipe en 1694.
Yvaine looks ill.
“Your son was also named Phillipe?”
“Of course,” Monsieur Bréguet says. “I must be getting old. It slipped my mind.”
“Does this mean what I think it means?” I ask Yvaine as soon as we’re alone.
She nods. “The Monsieur. He be my… my grandfather.”
“So this is when your dad meant, being born here, uptime?”
“I suppose.”
“Heavy,” I say. “The blond son in the portrait—”
“Is me da.”
“No wonder the Monsieur took a liking to you. His wife must’ve been the traveler — you probably look like her.”
The next morning, Monsieur Bréguet and Yvaine are like peas in a pod at breakfast. He keeps opening different flavors of jam for her to try and she literally eats it up.
I keep thinking about Yvaine’s dad’s magical brass page.
“What if it’s a time traveler handbook?” I tell her.
“I telled you, ghosts!” Her stare stops me cold.
Later, instead of working — and to the amazement of the servants — Monsieur Bréguet volunteers to teach Yvaine backgammon. I don’t appear to be invited.
I wander outside and head down the slope toward the cottage and the river — the Monsieur called it the Oise. I make my way up the knoll to stand before the gray-green stones.
It’s for the best, I tell myself as I pick at the ground, first with my knife and then with a shovel-like strip of bark from a nearby tree. As Yvaine herself might say, we make of it what we will, and I just can’t leave the proverbial stone unturned.
The ground is soft and seven-year-olds don’t dig very deep. It takes me less than an hour to find what I’m looking for.
A single brass page about the size of a paperback book is buried with scraps and bits of other stuff, rotted or turned to dust, but the page itself looks fine. Maybe it’s even made of some time traveler metal: the surface seems more focused, more real, than the clumps of ordinary dirt that cling to it.
Engraved across the front are lines of tight text. My adrenaline spikes — this looks like the secret cipher dad taught me.
But before I get any further, the page is snatched out of my hand.
Chapter Fifteen:
Whirlwind
France, 1807
YVAINE LOOMS OVER ME, clutching the page. Her face is pink and flushed.
“How dare you!” Her voice is a hiss.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “But—”
She bolts off, crashing into the brush.
“Yvaine!” I yell. “We have to talk.”
I understand she’s superstitious — hell, she was born two centuries before the Salem witch trials — but the needs of the living have to come first.
She doesn’t stop, and I have to chase her down to the ruined cottage, where I’m forced to tackle her.
“You just be lucky I canna travel yet, Charlie!” she says. “I might’ve gone where you canna follow.”
She has a point.
“I just couldn’t let a clue rot in the ground—”
“This be just like when you taked Billy! You said I could trust you—”
I tell her the page might help us save Ben and Billy. She whacks my head with it �
� I’m lying on top of her, but I neglected to pin her arms.
“Ouch!”
“You be frightful rash.”
“I know. I love you.”
She blinks.
“You dinna know what that means.”
I let her squirm out from beneath me and run off, then I slump against a nearby tree. I’m still pretty sure I’m right, but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel like shit. Yup. Frightful rash.
I wander the woods and fields. The weather is gorgeous, but I don’t care. When the sun touches the horizon, I drift back to the cottage. The place is pretty and forlorn, the lush French vegetation having made a good go at reclaiming it. I contemplate the corner where — a month or two from now — Yvaine and I slept together.
The cynical devil-voice inside my head, the one that can’t accept my own failings, wonders if she’s using me like she used Donnie and even Ben. Or because I’m the only time traveling boy within who knows how many miles or years.
But if that were the case, she might not be so mad at me.
The first of the purple thistles are blooming. I take one, and when I get back to the house, find a dusty book, and press it between the pages to dry.
At dinner Yvaine ignores me completely. And at breakfast Monsieur Bréguet remains oblivious to the tension and the two of them chat like a pair of schoolgirls.
At least he answers my questions.
“Who are your clients?” I ask.
In theory, there’s nothing wrong with making watches, but after our dose of Tick-Tock loving, I can’t say I’m a big fan of anything that needs winding up.
“With all the death and disruption,” the Monsieur says, “there’s not the demand for fine timepieces there used to be. I still file my patents and build my prototypes, but few can afford such luxuries. If it weren’t for my patron, the Marquis de Messidor, I’d even have to sell the estate.”
“It was better before the war?” I say.
“I was Horologist de Roi to the late Louis XVI.”
Somehow, I never put two and two together about my last name. Horologe. French for clock.
“It must be nice to be so respected,” Yvaine says.
The Monsieur puffs his pipe. “The old king’s son prefers cannons to clocks.”
“Deplorable.” She refuses to meet my gaze. “Can I see your work?”
Monsieur Bréguet checks an ornate pocket watch tucked in his vest and nods.
I stop Yvaine on the way out of the room. “You’re going to have to talk to me sometime, you know.”
She pries my fingers off her arm — a response of sorts! — and follows him to the workshop.
It isn’t big, but then neither are Monsieur Bréguet’s creations. Little bits of steel and brass and copper cover the workbenches, gears and springs and wires and whatnot. Tools and parts hang from every surface.
The Monsieur is like a kid in a candy store. He hands Yvaine a pocket watch the size of a bagel.
“This is the prototype for Marie-Antoinette’s timepiece. I’m still working on the movement. It has every known horological complication!”
It does look complicated.
“It’s a perpetual watch,” he says, “one of my earliest and most reliable inventions.”
“I’m sure it’s most trustworthy,” Yvaine says.
He moves the watch back and forth, looking at is as if it had done something astonishing.
“Everyday motion winds it. Just carry it around in your pocket, and voila! It’s always there for you.”
“More than I can say for some people,” she says.
“The Marquis de Messidor is most interested in the mechanical arts,” Monsieur Bréguet says. “And a loyal patron.”
“Loyalty is hard t’come by,” Yvaine says.
“The marquis gave me the idea for this.” He holds up a tiny knot of twisted metal. “My springtorb. It stores mechanical energy at high efficiency. A springtorb watch needs winding just once a year.”
“My Seiko needed a new battery after two,” I say.
“But my most famous creation is the whirlwind.” The French word he uses is tourbillon. “Which counteracts two of the three forces of gravity on its escapement.”
He searches through the pile of parts and hands me an open pocket watch. Inside is a creepy rotating mechanism whose gears crawl around in a hypnotic little march.
“One thing about having so few clients and a generous patron, it frees up my time for the inventing. I’ve almost completed a new gyroscopic tourbillon. It rotates in all three dimensions, but the marquis thinks even that can be topped!”
“How so?” I say.
“Bear in mind he has a little of the crazy.” Monsieur Bréguet winks at us. “But he’s convinced it’s actually possible to counteract four dimensions of gravitational force. Imagine that. Four dimensions — what exactly would the last be?”
I think I might know.
Time.
Yvaine has almost two weeks before she can travel, so I suffer through a few more painful days of evil eye silent treatment before I confront her again.
“I’m sorry,” I say, walking on my knees into the snazzy drawing room where she likes to hang out.
“Good.” She’s sprawled in a chair that probably costs $10,000 back in Philly. “But I’m still not talking to you.”
“Don’t Monsieur Bréguet’s inventions bother you?”
“You bother me.”
I swallow my pride. “There’s no question he’s one of those geniuses — like Ben Franklin — who sees us better than most. But his work seems really Tick-Tocky, particularly that tourbillon thing.”
She stands and puts her hands on her hips and glares at me.
“The Monsieur has nothin’ to do with the Tocks. He be a good man.”
“You said that about Donnie.” I crawl closer before the sneer becomes a retort. “But I agree. He is a good man. But that doesn’t mean the Tick-Tocks aren’t up to something. I’ve been reading the newspapers and questioning the staff. Something’s messed up here.”
She’s still glaring — and sneering.
“I don’t remember all the details,” I continue, “and the Napoleonic wars are complicated, but Mr. Short and Bossy isn’t doing as well as he used to. Lord Wellington landed an invasion force on French soil last year and has Paris under siege. Not to mention the French Revolution never happened.”
“When we go back to help Billy, none of that will matter.”
At least she hasn’t written me off completely.
“How will I know when I can travel?” I say.
“You’ll just feel it. Then downtime. For Billy.”
I grope around for the weird space where the time travel muscle lives. It’s there, but unresponsive.
“Look,” I say, “we have no idea what’s really going on. Bréguet’s patron, this marquis? He reeks like a clockwork fish. We need to go uptime and find my dad. I’m telling you, he knows everything about history—”
“You promised we’d fix things for Billy.”
“We will, but we need help. We don’t even know what the Tick-Tocks want. And in my time, research is way easier. We can find out exactly what happened to Ben and Billy before making a move. You can’t think the Tock went to London just to kill two underage time travelers — he went to Franklin Court first, then back to find Ben himself. That can’t be coincidence. If we just head downtime without a plan, things could get even worse.”
She doesn’t embrace my brilliant logic, but I can tell she’s thinking about it. I’m thinking about Doc Brown’s warning: meeting yourself could unravel the very fabric of the space-time continuum. I’m also thinking how dubious it is taking advice from a fictional character who drives a flying DeLorean.
“Have you tried reading your father’s page?”
Yvaine sighs. “I dinna read so well, an’ I’ve not never seen them funny letters.”
“Let me try. My dad taught me that alphabet.”
“Why should I?�
�
“Because if I’m right — and you know I might be — it’s the best clue we’ve got.”
She gives me a long, hard look, then pulls the page from her dress.
“You swear on the life of your mum you’ll give it back if I ask?”
“I swear.”
She hands it over. “An’ dinna think this means I’ve forgiven you.”
Yvaine and I have separate rooms in a quiet wing of the big house. When we arrived, I considered this a major bummer, but things between us being as they are, it allows me to concentrate on the page.
I stay up all night studying by candlelight, work all morning, collapse the next afternoon. Then again the next night, and the next.
The symbols might be familiar, but damn if I can make any sense out of them.
Assuming it’s a simple substitution like the one Dad taught me, I count the number of uses of each letter. Vowels should be more common. It takes a while to write this down — feather pens are really hard to work with — but I don’t make any headway until I realize the page is written in Latin!
It’s also obscured by some kind of complex sliding encryption. My first breakthrough comes when I identify several of the seven-letter words as all being different encodings for Bréguet. The only other useful word I decipher is tempero, which a book downstairs translates as regulator.
A few days later, I’m forced to admit that I’ve done all I can. I need my dad’s help — or maybe a couple years.
That night, lying in bed, the weird time traveler part of me feels all awake and perky. It’s hard to describe yet obvious, like an itch that’s ready to be scratched. I can travel again! And Yvaine’s cooldown should be up in a day or so.
But how in the world am I going to convince her to take me uptime?
Chapter Sixteen:
Looped
France, 1807
EARLY MORNING LIGHT AND DULL BOOMING SOUNDS drift through the open window to wake me.
“In the interest of full disclosure,” I tell Yvaine at breakfast, “I can travel again. I felt it come on last night.”