Timepiece

by Heather Albano

  He entered to hear his sister Caroline’s voice raised in a complaint. “And the Duchess is giving a ball! Has given it, by now, for that notice in the paper was many days old. I really do not see why I should not have accompanied Christopher to Belgium. I should have enjoyed myself greatly with all the other officers’ wives.”

  “Will you have some coffee, William?” Mary cut in, rather obviously passing over her father and her husband to distract William’s mind from the subject of Belgium. She held the coffee cup toward his right hand, and he reached without comment to take it with his left. Mary flushed and looked away.

  Mary was Lady Anderson, wife of Sir Henry Anderson, and Caroline was Mrs. Palmer, wife of Lieutenant Christopher Palmer. Before William Carrington and Christopher Palmer had been brothers-in-law, they had been brother officers; but the Lieutenant had returned with their regiment to the Continent when Bonaparte escaped from exile, and William, who had left the Peninsula with his right arm dangling as limply as the sleeve that encased it, had not.

  There was no hope of discussing openly the happenings on the Continent with Caroline in the room, for she was in delicate condition and must not be upset with worry over her husband. William therefore took his coffee cup over to the window and out of the circle of conversation. His father’s estate spread before him, green and golden-brown against the dark blue sky.

  He tried to focus his attention on the richness of those colors. On the taste of real coffee, sweetened with cream. On the smell of earth wafting through the open window. On the soft-voiced conversation behind him, concerning the everyday trivialities of country life. Under the brass-hot Spanish sun, he had dreamed about this. He had wanted nothing but to make it back to this. He ought now to devote at least a portion of his attention to this, rather than allowing his thoughts to always wander back to the warfront.

  But perhaps he could be forgiven for considering the warfront the only matter of any real importance. Napoleon had burst the bonds of his prison. The monster who had cast a shadow across William’s childhood was once again on the march. When news of his escape had reached the shores of Britain back in early spring, William had only just surfaced from his latest relapse, and to his fever-drenched mind it seemed to him inevitable that Bonaparte should have escaped. Bonaparte was like nothing so much as one of those menacing dark things out of a country tale, the sort that haunted the wood and followed in your footsteps and could not be killed...A few days later, William had shaken his head sternly at himself for even entertaining such nonsense, but supposed it was an understandable delusion for a man in the grip of fever. After all, he could literally not remember a time when Bonaparte’s name had not stood for everything Britain must fear.

  William had been only two years old when Napoleon seized power in France, and he remembered his boyhood as being conducted to the beat of the war drums on the Continent. Napoleon had gobbled France, Italy, Germany, and the Hapsburg Empire; stripped lands from Prussian and Austrian control; waged a bloody invasion in Spain; and left at last only Britain standing fast against him, alone and with the knowledge that the tyrant schemed to cross the water and hang the tricolored flag on Buckingham Palace as well. William had always known that Napoleon plotted the destruction of England; and William had always known that at sixteen, he would enter the Army and help bring about the madman’s downfall.

  Well, he had entered the Army. But he had not seen so very much combat on the Peninsula before receiving the wound that ruined his right arm and his military career, and though Napoleon had indeed been defeated not long after, William had not been present to aid in the defeat. Worse, Britain’s victory had not lasted even a year, and Napoleon now again held France in the palm of his hand. He had marched into Paris three months ago without firing a single shot. Without needing to fire a shot, because not one Frenchman lifted a hand in opposition. Since then, he had reassembled most of the force that had allowed him to conquer Europe before.

  William tightened his left hand around the coffee cup, then forced himself to relax it. He would have clenched his right hand instead had the muscles been willing to obey him. His scarlet-coated brothers, and their Dutch and Prussian allies, would face Bonaparte’s fanatic French in a drawn battle sometime soon. Sometime very soon—the cannons might be firing even now. But William Carrington, worn and weak from his winter’s illness, strength gone forever from his right arm, could do nothing but sip coffee in a drawing room and beg his London brother-in-law for news.

  The ladies behind him had moved on from balls in Belgium to social matters nearer home. “Charles Wilton has come to visit at last?” Lady Anderson said. “I do hope to catch a glimpse of him at some Assembly or another. I declare I had begun to doubt his existence, all these years we have heard of him and never seen his face.”

  “Mrs. Wilton pledged to bring him to call one morning this week,” Mrs. Carrington said. “We must be content to wait our turn, of course. With all my daughters so advantageously married, there is not so much to interest him here as there might be elsewhere.” William could not see her, but he could tell from her voice that she was smiling first upon Mary, then upon Caroline, and then at the portrait of Frances.

  “Has he been long in the neighborhood?” Mary asked.

  “He only arrived yesterday,” Mrs. Carrington said. “Today his aunt took him to call upon the Bartons at Westerfield.”

  “Better him than me,” George muttered, suddenly close beside William. “From all I hear of that young dandy, he’ll find something to like in Elizabeth Barton’s impertinence, and perhaps then her mother will cease foisting the chit on the rest of us. You’d think she was some cottager’s brat, the way she romps about.”

  “Does she?” William said without much interest. He had only recently grown well enough to be dragged into company, and he could not remember Elizabeth Barton doing anything so very noteworthy at last week’s Assembly. “I hadn’t noticed.”

  “Well, you haven’t been obliged to dance with her, now have you? Pretty enough, I grant you, but I assure you the elegance goes no deeper than her skin.” There was a pause. “Thirty thousand pounds, of course,” George added, in an overly hearty tone. “There is that.” He appeared to have belatedly remembered that he ought to be encouraging his brother to meet young ladies.

  William tried to clench his right hand again, but of course could not manage it. The fingers would curl a little, but most of their dexterity was gone. He had not been obliged to dance with Elizabeth Barton or anyone else because he could not manipulate his right arm sufficiently to dance a quadrille.

  There was in any case no point in clenching anything, for George was right. George would inherit the estate and Thomas had the family living. The girls were all provided for. And a soldier unable to soldier...had best find an heiress to marry. All three of his sisters had offered to have him visit their establishments, that he might meet new young ladies at their local Assemblies. Mary had indeed spent the entirety of dinner insisting that he come along when she and Henry and the children departed Hartwich after their annual visit. William found himself unable to imagine an heiress willing to marry a third son without a profession, an easy jesting manner, or the ability to lead her onto a dance floor, but he also found himself lacking the energy to make much of an argument. He had made noncommittal replies instead, until Mary mercifully dropped the subject.

  He was now saved from answering George by their mother’s voice proposing a game of cards. The party commenced a debate concerning the merits of lanterloo versus speculation, and William excused himself.

  He ended up wandering through the orchard more because he had picked a direction at random than because he found within himself any great interest in apple trees. He ought to be interested, he thought. It was the finest sort of summer day; he ought therefore to be charmed by the cloudless sky and the scent of grass and earth. He tried to summon the appropriate feelings of appreciation, but they would not come. It was as though there were swaths of gauze bandage la
yered between himself and the rest of the world, making it impossible for anything of that world to actually touch him.

  After a while he stopped trying, and gave in to the images that never ceased to haunt his mind’s eye: dust and blinding sun and troops drawn into formation. British troops might be formed into ranks even now. They might be facing the French across a Belgian battlefield even now. The cannon might be booming even now...He was so far lost in thoughts of Spain and Belgium that the white streak at the corner of his vision startled him badly, and he jumped to face it.

  It proved to be nothing more alarming than Elizabeth Barton flying down the hillside, skirt held up above her knees with both hands, bonnet hanging by its strings down her back and curls streaming out behind her, reticule looped over her wrist and swinging from side to side. Well then, William thought, perhaps the ballroom elegance was indeed only skin-deep. He smiled at the sight—then stopped, surprised at the odd feel of that expression upon his lips. He couldn’t remember the last time he had smiled out of genuine amusement rather than politeness. The swaths of gauze seemed to shift slightly, allowing an instant’s gust of wind to touch his skin.

  He watched Elizabeth skid to a stop, plump herself down on a fallen tree, jump up again, shake a shawl from her shoulders, and spread it out underneath her before resuming her seat. She loosened the strings of her reticule and pulled out a man’s pocket watch, and the swaths dropped back into place. A love token? Most likely. William sighed to himself and turned away.

  A branch snapped under his foot, and Elizabeth’s head came up like a deer’s. “William!” Then she colored. “I mean, Ensign Carrington.”

  He had been intending to lift his hat and walk on, but this greeting startled him so much that he answered without considering the demands of proper manners. “William, if you like. It was ‘William’ and ‘Elizabeth’ before I left.”

  Now why had he said that? It was true in one sense—they had indeed called each other “William” and “Elizabeth” once—but that had been before he left for Eton, not before he left for the Continent. Quite a long time ago, back when childhood manners were still acceptable. They had not had much occasion to see each other since, so what on earth had possessed him—? Any other young lady would have been offended at his presumption.

  But then, no other young lady would have started the conversation by using his Christian name in the first place. He supposed it should be therefore no surprise that Elizabeth smiled at his offer, looking both relieved and pleased. “William and Elizabeth, then.”

  “I apologize for startling you,” he added.

  “Oh, it’s no matter.” He noticed that she kept her eyes on his. Not on his limp arm, not deliberately everywhere else but his arm, and not modestly cast down. For a moment he wondered at that—then he realized that although her china-blue eyes were wide and innocent, her hands were moving, and he understood that she was trying to hold his gaze so he would not notice her tucking the pocket watch back into her reticule.

  He tried to think of something else to say, and ended up taking refuge in commonplaces. “I hope you and your family are in good health?”

  “Yes, thank you,” she said, “and you?” She had gotten hold of the wrong corner of the reticule, and was carefully easing the timepiece into fold of cloth that was not actually the mouth of the bag. He contemplated telling her that, but wasn’t quite sure how to phrase it.

  “Well enough, thank you,” he said instead.

  “That’s good,” Elizabeth said. “Does that mean we shall have the pleasure of your company in the Assembly rooms, the next time there is a ball? You came so rarely into company this spring, and we should all be glad if your health had sufficiently recovered to allow you to—”

  The pocket watch slipped through the loop of cloth, landing rather obviously on the path at her feet. She scrambled at once to catch it up, face very red now, but William’s fingers closed over it first. He straightened, forcing a smile and hoping it looked genial. “What’s this, then, Miss Elizabeth? The token of some admirer?”

  “Er,” Elizabeth said, cheeks the color of the scarlet coat that hung in William’s wardrobe. Which seemed to rather conclusively answer that question, at least until he held the watch out to her and it fell open in his hand.

  William stood still in the sunlight, staring at it.

  He realized later that those minutes were the longest time he had spent not preoccupied with thoughts of Napoleon since March, and the longest time he had gone without thinking of his arm since he had first woken after the battle. For the moment, he was oblivious to Elizabeth Barton’s presence as well, able to focus on nothing but the impossibility in his hand. He came back to himself when she laughed at his gape-mouthed expression.

  “That’s more or less how I reacted also,” she said.

  “Forgive me.” He handed it back to her. “What on earth—?”

  “I’ve no idea,” she said. “Someone sent it to me by post, and I don’t know who or why or what it is. You’ve...you’ve never seen anything like it either, then? Not in London, or on the Continent?”

  “No.” He shook his head.

  “It was even more extraordinary a little while ago,” she said. “This face here had images in it. Pictures that moved. Truly.”

  He stepped around to see better, but the face she indicated was dark and lifeless. Still, the watch was extraordinary enough without that detail. He stared at the quiescent faces, focusing after a moment on the one that looked most like it belonged to a watch. “Does the timekeeping part of it work? I mean, can it be wound and set?”

  “I don’t know yet.” Elizabeth flashed him a smile and dug through her reticule. She pulled out a velvet bag. “The watch came in this,” she said. “Perhaps there’s a key—” But there proved not to be. There was no keyhole in the watch, either.

  “There must be some way to set it,” William said, and, looking back on the scene later, he rather thought that was the moment when he had sat down beside her, so enraptured by the puzzle in her hands that he forgot how terribly he would compromise her reputation if anyone came upon the two of them sitting close enough to touch in a secluded corner of the orchard.

  Elizabeth turned the watch over and over, examining it from all directions, running her fingertips over the etched vines and flowers. “Oh,” she said in tones of surprise. “Here—” She showed him dials running along the inside of the casing, tiny things that she could only just manage to turn with her fingernail. Turning them made the hands on the timekeeping face move, but it did not make them start telling time. Nor did pressing down the ornate stem above the “12,” nor the plain stem beside the “3.” Similar dials changed the nested wheels on the second and third faces, but similarly failed to set the wheels moving or deliver any clue as to what they might be measuring. William found himself reminded of the wheels of the water-driven mill he had seen at Cheshire, but that was hardly a helpful comparison.

  The fourth face had remained blank all this while, no matter what they did. Elizabeth continued to insist it had displayed images a short time before, and William tried to believe her, an effort that became abruptly much easier when the watch lit up in his hand.

  “Look!” Elizabeth said, leaning so eagerly forward that her curls brushed his shoulder. “That’s what I meant.”

  The fourth face displayed a fog-bound city street, with carriages rattling to and fro in the foreground. A gas-lamp burned through the fog, casting just enough light that William fancied he could see shapes moving behind the carriages. Large shapes. Indistinct, but somehow menacing.

  Just as he thought the words, the scene changed. Elizabeth exclaimed in surprise, and William hastily shook his vision clear to study the new picture. This one was less complicated, consisting of a meadow by a brook, with clouds and grasses reflected in the water. It was a scene that could be from any estate on the English countryside, and William was about to comment to that effect when the image changed again, and now it was a castle perched
upon the crags of a mountaintop. A narrow winding trail led down into the forest below, tiny specs of color moving along it.

  “Are those—could they be men on horseback?” Elizabeth asked, and William squinted, holding the watch close to his eye.

  “I believe they are,” he said slowly. “Elizabeth, I believe they are knights in armor.”

  “Truly?” She leaned in again, and as he moved the watch so that she could see, the mountaintop became an embattled ship, dodging blasts of cannon-fire and riding heaving waves so realistic his insides lurched. As they stared at the ship, the fourth face flickered and went dark. Elizabeth shook her head, blinking.

  “Look!” she said then. “There’s writing around the picture face. An inscription.” William brought it closer to his eye. If there was a name, he could not decipher it, but the rest of the inscription read, for service to the Empire.

  A painful burst of light seared his eye as the fourth face came back to life. William flinched, fumbling his hold on the watch case, and it slipped from his grasp. He and Elizabeth grabbed for it at the same time, and his fingers brushed her knuckles at the same moment her palm touched the watch. She managed not to drop it, but it was a near thing; she caught it by closing her hand around it. Her thumb bumped the top stem, depressing it briefly and then letting it spring back as she shifted her grip.