Timepiece

by Heather Albano

  “And what of the wolves? The monsters, I mean. Where did they come from?”

  “A brilliant young student, a Genevese. A hundred years ago, he set himself to discover a means by which dead flesh could be brought to life.”

  Elizabeth’s skin prickled. “He raised a man from the dead?”

  “Worse,” Katarina said. “He acquired freshly deceased body parts and stitched them together, making one monster out of many men. Then he infused that creature with life.”

  Elizabeth swallowed, thinking of the stitches and the clothes that had reminded her of burial garments.

  “Later, he brought the creature to England. He made himself a laboratory on the smallest island off the Orkneys—an isolated place, far away from everything—as far north as one can get and still be on British soil. There he created a female creature, to be the wife and the companion of his monster. And they...were fruitful, and multiplied, and their offspring became a terror to the Scottish Highlands. They broke into homes, took food...committed outrages upon women...killed any who tried to thwart them. The King sent soldiers. The soldiers did not eradicate the problem, but they did succeed in scaring the monsters farther north, out of civilized areas, and they brought one monster back as a captive.

  “This was in 1800. The Genevese was dead by then, but some of his notes had been entrusted to a collaborator in London and were found. With the living creature and the notes, naturalists working for the Royal Academy of Sciences learned to do what the Genevese had done. To create full-grown creatures in the likeness of the first. They created a great many, and when England feared Napoleon’s invasion—”

  “Katherine!”

  The shout came from behind them—a woman’s voice, choked. Katarina spun around, hand dropping to her hip pocket. As soon as she saw the woman running toward them from the cross-street, she relaxed. “Annie! What in the world—”

  The woman was older than Katarina, face lined and fair hair going gray. She wore a skirt and blouse and cap, dingy but modest, and on her face was an expression that made Katarina go very still. Elizabeth could almost feel the air shift as the gypsy woman drew into herself. “What’s happened?” Katarina asked quietly.

  “Meg,” Annie croaked, coughing, stumbling to a halt. “It’s Meg. I was just coming to the warehouse to look for you—”

  Katarina’s voice was still quiet and steady. “What’s happened to Meg?”

  “That woman,” Annie said. “That old bitch of a—” She took a desperate wheezing breath, and Katarina put a hand on her arm, to steady her or comfort her or both. “I was gone because I was working. She knew that. She knew. I was behind on the rent, but I’d gotten work, I’d gotten—” Another gulping breath. “—a chance to work on some wedding clothes wanted in a great rush. I’ve been at the milliner’s warehouse these three days. They didn’t let us leave, you know how it is, Katherine, you know.” Katarina nodded, thumb smoothing the woman’s threadbare sleeve, everything else about her motionless and held ready. “She knew it, too, old Martha Hewitt. I was working, and Meg was fine alone a day or two, and I have the money, I’ve come back with the—” She started to sob again.

  Elizabeth saw Katarina’s hand tighten into a fist, saw Katarina carefully unclench it and return it to the job of stroking the sleeve. “What’s Martha Hewitt done, Annie? Where’s Meg?”

  “Murchinson’s,” Annie choked through her tears. “Martha sold her.”

  Katarina shut her eyes for a moment.

  “—because I’d left her—I didn’t, Katherine, I wouldn’t, not like that—”

  “Of course you didn’t,” Katarina murmured to her. “Of course you wouldn’t.”

  “I have rent money now, but what good—” Annie choked back a sob.

  “How long ago?” Katarina asked her. “You were only gone three days, is that what you said? Meg can’t have been at Murchinson’s very long.”

  “This morning,” Annie said. “Half a day—not long at all. That’s why I was coming to look for you. That man you go about with sometimes—the white-haired gent. I thought maybe he could go, maybe they’d listen to him if he said—”

  “Yes.” Katarina looked up and down the street, brows drawn in thought. “I’ll ask him. He’ll go, I’m sure he will. If he gets there before sundown, it will be easy for them to believe it was a mistake or a malicious joke, and likely they’d just as soon have the money for her anyhow, so—”

  “Here.” Annie started fumbling in her pockets. “Take it.”

  “No, no, there won’t be any need of that. He has money. You’ll need it to find better rooms for you and Meg when we’ve got her safe back to you.”

  “But just in case,” Annie said. “I don’t want him to think I can’t— Because I can take care of her, don’t you see? I don’t want him to think any different. Take it. Take some of it, at least—”

  “All right,” Katarina soothed her. “All right. I’ll take...half, how’s that? We’ll only use it if we need to, and we’ll give you back anything we don’t need. I’ll go and find Max right now.” She turned and scanned the buildings looming over them. “I oughtn’t take you back to the warehouse with me, though. It’s...not a good day for it. Are any of your neighbors more human than that old crone? Can you stay with one of them?”

  Annie’s lips trembled. “Not one of them stopped her.”

  “Then to hell with them.” Katarina took her by the arm again and turned her gently about. “I’ll take you to a place where I have friends.”

  “Don’t worry about me. Just go and—”

  “I shall.” Katarina was guiding the woman back the way they had come. With a jerk of her chin, she gestured for Elizabeth to follow. “The place I’m thinking of is barely a step out of my way. I’m losing no time taking you there, and I need to know you’re somewhere safe, you and that money you need to care for your daughter.”

  The place Katarina had in mind proved to be the first courtyard in which they had stopped that morning. So they were very close indeed to Trevelyan’s warehouse, though Elizabeth still could not have found it on her own. Katarina instructed her to wait in the courtyard while she took Annie into one of the domiciles—the one belonging to the Thompsons, Elizabeth thought; Mrs. Thompson must be home from her work. Katarina reappeared five minutes later, without Annie and without any gentleness at all on her face.

  “Come. Hurry.” She led the way at a rapid walk in the direction Elizabeth could only assume was Trevelyan’s warehouse. Once out of the courtyard, her face grew even grimmer. “I’d kill that old bizzom, except it wouldn’t do anyone any good now.”

  “She...” Elizabeth swallowed. “She...sold a child?”

  “Miss Elizabeth,” Katarina said, “that happens in your time too. Families with too many mouths to feed sell their extra children to chimney sweeps. Or to whorehouses. Or to other places where the children may starve more slowly than they would at home. This is nothing new. Murchinson and Sons have merely...formalized the arrangement.”

  Elizabeth didn’t say anything. After a moment, Katarina sighed between her teeth and seemed to make an effort to reign in her temper. “I’m sorry. It’s only that I know some people who grew up there—members of Seward’s conspiracy, as it happens. Few of Murchinson’s children live to adulthood, and those who do are...marked by it. The place is worse than the workhouses, as there’s no one even pretending to keep watch over what goes on behind its walls.”

  “What does go on there?” Elizabeth ventured after a pause.

  “A child who cannot be cared for or who has been found abandoned may be brought to the Murchinson orphanage. Murchinson’s gives a small consideration to the one who brings the child, then undertakes to care for it.” Katarina almost spat the last. “Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? But children’s clever fingers are big enough to make matches, and if they are yours, living in your orphanage, well, you need not pay them even a pittance, and that increases profits significantly. A one-time payment to acquire the child in the
first place is much more economical. And the fact that they pay for the children has led to some, shall we say, irregularities in the procurement of said children, which neither Murchinson’s nor the bobbies seem to find it worth their while to investigate. No one would have checked Martha’s assertion that Annie had abandoned the child. And indeed, Annie had been gone three days. That it was working a seamstress’ job for rent money...well, what does that matter?”

  “We have to stop this,” Elizabeth said.

  “We will. This one we can do something about.”

  “Not just this one thing. All of it. We have to stop it.”

  Katarina turned to meet her eyes again. “Yes. We do.” She half-smiled, and Elizabeth thought it was genuine, though it did not do anything to mitigate the fierceness in her eyes. “I am pleased you see it that way. Welcome to the resistance, Miss Elizabeth.”

  Interlude

  Tavisford, Devonshire, March 15, 1876

  Even as a child, Genevieve Ramsey had been ill-suited to life in a small Devonshire village. Sir Charles Buford once compared her to an exotic bird trying to nest among wrens and swallows, a spot of color among all the grays and browns. As Sir Charles had spent half his life in South Africa and was therefore the only person in the vicinity of Tavisford with firsthand knowledge of exotic birds, Genevieve’s neighbors presumed the comparison to be apt. He missed the point when he spoke of color, however. It would have been more accurate to say that she was an exotic songbird attempting to blend into a chorus of starlings.

  Her father, a widowed country doctor with a threadbare practice, could never have managed to afford the kind of training her voice called for, but Sir Charles knew people who knew people. He did not offer to pay the fees himself—he had too much respect for the doctor’s pride—but he arranged for an audition, and Genevieve won a scholarship and departed to study on the Continent. Tavisford did not see her face for years thereafter, though she wrote often to her father and each letter caused quite a nine-days’ wonder in the village. She climbed as high as the La Scala opera house in Milan the year before the doctor died, and her father managed one trip abroad to hear her. On the journey home, he contracted the illness that eventually turned to pneumonia and carried him off.

  Two years later, Genevieve retired abruptly from the stage and returned to Tavisford heavy with child. She claimed marriage to a now-deceased foreign nobleman and the name “Rasmirov,” but the tongues clacked behind her back even so. Her savings were enough for the purchase of a small cottage, and Sir Charles advised her on the investment of the rest. He would have gladly been of more service to her, but she would take no more from him than his advice. At first she tried to supplement her tiny income with music lessons, but when it became apparent that no one from Tavisford would entrust their daughters to her care, she swallowed her pride and supplemented it with sewing.

  Her thirteen-year-old daughter could not remember a time when she had not known all this—most of it from her mother’s lips, the rest from the background murmur of village gossip. She had never asked her mother to confirm or deny the more uncharitable parts of the gossip for the simple reason that Genevieve would have answered her honestly, and in lieu of an honest answer there was still the chance that he had married her, that he had been a nobleman, that he had loved her, that he had not in fact been some gypsy stagehand trash. By thirteen, Katherine was no longer certain she believed in the fairytale of the handsome Russian lord, but she was more comfortable with the uncertainty than she would have been with banishing it.

  She was still going by “Katherine” then. Her mother called her “Katarina,” but everyone else said “Katherine”—and she introduced herself that way, as though a foreign name were the reason she too failed to blend into the grays and browns, as though fitting into Tavisford were not an utterly lost cause. In later years, she would come to embrace her exotic appearance, exaggerating it with every means at her disposal, cultivating every possible alluring mannerism, bartering foreign charm for the things she needed, introducing herself as Katarina Rasmirovna and graciously permitting those who could not pronounce the Russian to say “Katherine” while she smiled at the irony behind her gypsy-dark eyes. But in 1876, the year the constructs came to save Tavisford from the monsters on the moor, she was still calling herself Katherine and still trying to pretend she was as Devonshire as the rest of them.

  It was an understandable aspiration on the part of a thirteen-year-old girl, lost cause or not, and Katherine forgave herself for it—later, after she had come to think of herself as Katarina—for the simple reason that it had also been the tactically correct choice. Back then, the entire village had been crouched behind a landowner’s sheltering walls, and that which is alien does not tend to be tolerated in cramped quarters. Monsters truly roamed the moor in those days—not ghostly ones out of fireside tales, but the ones the taletellers had themselves bred and taught, and against whom they had no defense but iron-wrought buttresses. Rejecting the conventions of Tavisford would have prompted its denizens to reject her in turn, more conclusively and more disastrously than they already had, and the only way any of them survived the years when the monsters roamed wild was by watching each other’s backs. She would never have lived long enough to reinvent herself, had she chosen to embrace the dark-skinned stigmata that marked her “not really one of us” before it was safe to stir outside the walls.

  She had been nine when the walls went up and so remembered the days before them, when wolves in the wood and ghosts on the moor were things in which only peasant children believed. Well-educated women such as her mother dismissed such fancies with a lifting of eyes to the ceiling. “The Wellingtons,” her mother always corrected with disdainful patience whenever someone used a less-refined word in her presence, “work the tin mines, and there are no such things as monsters.”

  Not that her mother had approved of the Wellingtons. She had once, in Katherine’s hearing, gone so far as to argue with Sir Charles over Parliament’s breeding program—having apparently been infected by Continental sentimentality, or so Sir Charles phrased it, speaking in a tone not quite light enough to make the words a joke. Her mother had watched him narrowly, but had pressed her argument.

  “Nonsense,” Sir Charles had reassured her, bluff good humor restored. “There’s nothing to worry over. We brought a great many of them to work the ranches in South Africa, you know, and in a rough society like that, one lives at closer quarters than we would with our Wellies here. I got to know some of mine quite well. Good working partnership, in fact. For all they’re so fierce and dour, some of them really are capable of loyalty—even devotion. They like having someone to guide them. Bred for it.”

  “Presumably,” her mother had said acidly, “the ones running loose in Scotland were bred for it also?”

  “No, no, those were bred to be soldiers. Entirely different thing. I do assure you, madam, we have no cause for concern. As I have heard you say yourself, there are no such things as monsters.”

  But when Katherine was just turned nine—too old to be frightened by the wolf who waylaid Red Riding Hood or the ghosts who inhabited Buford Hall, and almost too old to believe in handsome Russian princes—the sort of monsters that were not supposed to exist came bursting out of the fog.

  They came from the tin mines, and from there across the moor to Tavisford, terrorizing outlying farms along their way—though Katherine and her mother, situated as they were on the far side of Buford Hall, did not learn these details until sometime afterward. Their first warning of danger came in the form of Sir Charles’ groundskeeper, who hurtled up to their gate in a dog-cart pulled by a lathered pony. He gasped out an explanation in a few confused words. “The master sent me for you,” he concluded, and Katherine’s mother needed no more persuasion than that to climb into the cart and gather Katherine up behind her. They dashed for the hall as though a hound nipped at the horse’s heels.

  Lights shone in nearly every window of the manor house, and inside a babble
of voices echoed painfully off the stone walls. Sir Charles was sheltering as many as he could within doors and more in tents pitched upon the grounds, safe behind the high iron gates. He had not been able to save everyone, of course; the families of the men who ran the tin mines were forfeit, as were most of the families in the more remote farmhouses. Still, his quick orders had resulted in the rescue of an impressive number. The life of an English country squire had taken a toll on him over the last two decades, and he no longer cut a particularly impressive a figure with his ponderous belly and reddened nose, but the years fell away as he rallied his household and sent them to protect his tenants. He might have been back on a South African ranch once more.

  Despite being bred and trained for mining rather than warfare, the Wellington monsters were canny enough—or at least organized by one canny enough—to press only so far as their advantage allowed. They terrorized Tavisford and its environs as long as darkness covered them, then retreated. Sir Charles knew he did not have weapons or trained men enough to pursue them onto the moor and face them there, so he instead used the morning’s cease-fire to send men to the village and outlying settlements, with orders to bring to Buford Hall any who had not made it to safety the day before and had managed to survive the night. He did not expect there to be many still alive, and in fact there were not, but the handful retrieved blessed him for his forethought.