Timepiece

by Heather Albano

  “—trying to save,” Trevelyan said. “We’re trying to save them all. If we can get my rifle working tonight, we’ve a chance, a real one. We haven’t time for anything that distracts from that object. If you could for once keep your mind on the larger picture, we might actually be able to—”

  “Oh, damn you and your larger picture to bloody hell!” Katarina’s voice held a trace of the guttersnipe again, a thin, ugly sound. She drew a breath as if to say more—then stopped, rubbed both her hands over face, pushed the breath out hard through her teeth, and turned to face William.

  “We got off on the wrong foot earlier,” she said, once more in the low, melodic, carefully correct accent. “I was...discourteous because my pride was hurt, and I am sorry. I truly am—and I hope you can forgive me, because there is a child in danger, and I would—I need to—It would be terrible if you were to refuse your aid because it was I who asked it.”

  Everyone else in the room stared at her. “My...aid?” William said.

  “I can’t get the girl out of Murchinson’s any more than her mother can. It’s obvious what I am, and I haven’t any better clothes. I need someone with the look and manners and speech of a gentleman. Please.”

  “You didn’t want to take him with you earlier because his clothing would attract attention,” Trevelyan pointed out acidly.

  “The stakes were different then.”

  “No, they weren’t. The stakes are precisely the same now as they were a few hours ago.”

  William looked from one of them to the other. “Might Mr. Maxwell have a coat more the current fashion?”

  “He might,” Katarina said, “and even if he doesn’t, it’s worth the gamble. Come upstairs with me and we’ll see what Max has left behind, and I’ll explain what you need to—”

  “No,” Trevelyan said, getting to his feet. “You have no right to endanger what I’m trying to do here for the sake of one brat from Spitalfields.”

  Katarina whirled on him, dark eyes blazing. “Oh, of course not, because we all know one person can’t possibly affect the larger picture. Not unless he’s a lord or a general or a time-traveler. A girl from Spitalfields couldn’t possibly change anything, couldn’t possibly put out a hand and change everything.” Trevelyan rolled his eyes and turned to get another metal piece from the worktable to his right. And that, Elizabeth thought, that unhurried movement, too casual to even bother being contemptuous, was why Katarina took another step toward him and why her voice dropped into a hiss like crackling flames. “A Spitalfields child could never change anything,” she repeated, “any more than a bastard from Devon or a nobody London University student. Or a Welsh farmer’s daughter—”

  Trevelyan slammed the spanner into the worktable so hard the wood cracked underneath it and the air seemed to crack around it. He looked up, his face full for one instant of the anger Katarina had been trying to provoke from him. Then it smoothed over as though it had turned to ice, and the crack spread through the iced-over air between them. Katarina never flinched, but Elizabeth could not breathe.

  “At the moment,” Trevelyan said without raising his voice, “you are distracting the one person who can change the world today from doing the thing that can change it.” He picked up the spanner with a jerk, as though it were a blade and he were yanking it free of the wood, but his eyes never wavered from hers and his voice stayed calm. “Go and waste your time however you like, but do it somewhere else.”

  Mr. Maxwell had in fact left an overcoat behind, but it was sufficiently broad in the shoulders to look dubious rather than fashionable on William’s trim frame. More to the point, Maxwell had left it behind because the city air was sweltering like a blacksmith’s forge; Elizabeth pondered whether an ill-fitting and unseasonable ensemble would not attract more attention than William’s smart but seven-decades-out-of-date blue coat. She looked to see what Katarina thought, and realized that although Katarina was gazing at William, lips pursed, her unfocused eyes were studying something other than the young man before her.

  After a moment, Katarina blinked, seemed to realize that both Elizabeth and William were waiting for her to speak, and reached out as though to briskly adjust the collar of William’s borrowed overcoat. But a tremor ran through her fingers as she touched the cloth. “That’s the worst thing I could have possibly said,” she commented, almost steadily. “In fact, I can’t believe I actually...” She drew her other hand over her eyes, then dropped it with what looked like an attempt to smile. “I suppose I may claim as excuse that I haven’t slept since—I think it was Tuesday.”

  William met her eyes. “Why the worst?” he asked. Quite gently, as though he genuinely wanted to know.

  “No one,” Katarina said with another strained smile, “talks to Trevelyan about his wife.”

  “His wife?” Elizabeth couldn’t stop herself from blurting it out. She was surprised by the sense of betrayal that flooded her. Being a fallen woman was all very well, still retained a tinge of romance even after the squalor of the painted girls, but to do something as sordid as stealing a man from his wife was unworthy of the Katarina she thought she was coming to know. “He’s married?”

  “He was married.” Katarina thought about it for half a second, then amended, “No, you had the way of it the first time, he is married. She’s dead, but he’s still married. He wears her ring on a chain around his neck, and he might as well wear it on his finger.”

  “ ‘No one hates the constructs or the men who created them more than he does,’ ” Elizabeth quoted slowly, trying to put it together. “That’s why, then? Was she killed by constructs—and that’s why he hates the men who made them, that’s why he’s devoted his life to finding a way to bring them down?”

  Katarina looked at her for a moment as though trying to decide whether to say something, even went so far as to purse her lips briefly. But in the end she only said, “Not quite, but close enough,” and turned back toward William. “I think we’ll wrap you in Maxwell’s coat for the journey, and then find an alleyway where you can shrug it off and leave it with me, near the factory. If the coat fit you better, then I’d say—But as it is, it’ll do nothing but attract attention. If you just wear your own clothes, you have a chance at pretending to be an Oxford dandy. I’m told there’s a romantic fashion for old-styled clothing this year, and although I don’t think it quite extends to this level of detail, we may hope that the matrons at Murchinson’s don’t know one way or the other. There are some tricks of speech and slang terms I can teach you, and we will drill them as we walk, all right?”

  “Who am I to be?” Elizabeth asked. “His sister? I should go and see if my gown has dried.”

  Katarina snapped startled eyes to her. “No, you’ll do no such thing. We might just get away with claiming William’s clothes to be Oxford dandy fashion, but your gown is simply seventy years wrong, nothing to be done about it.”

  “I’ll just stay hidden with you, then?”

  There was a pause. “No,” Katarina said, “you’ll stay here, Miss Elizabeth. I can’t take the risk of bringing both of you.”

  “Oh, no,” Elizabeth protested, “no, wait. You can’t show me all that’s out there and then not let me help.”

  “The way you can help right now is by staying safe here,” Katarina said.

  “No,” Elizabeth said, “no, you can’t do that to me, you can’t shut me up again like—like nothing this morning happened, like I’m just a—William—” She turned to him. “You don’t know what it’s like. I can’t know it’s there and not try to do something about it.”

  “There isn’t anything you can do,” Katarina told her. “Nothing useful, at least. All you’ll accomplish if you come along is increase the risk we’ll be spotted. I’m sorry, but it’s true. You need to stay here.”

  “You cannot lock me up here! You can’t give me a taste of what it’s like to mend things and then not let me try, you can’t do that to—”

  “This isn’t about you!” Katarina snapped. �
�This isn’t a bloody game, Elizabeth. There’s a child’s life at stake—a real child, so I’ll thank you to stop acting like one yourself. There will be things you can do, but this isn’t one of them, and that’s the end of it. You’re staying here and William and I are going.”

  Elizabeth shot one last look at William. She would have been satisfied with a look of sympathy, even if they must bow to Katarina’s wishes, but instead William shook his head. Regretfully perhaps, but with eyebrows raised as though she were indeed the child Katarina had called her. Elizabeth’s eyes filled with hot tears.

  Chapter 11

  London, August 27, 1885

  The shabby woman fixed red-rimmed eyes on him as though on fog-beacon, and William found that his heart was pounding harder than it had in well over a year.

  “Mr. William Carrington,” Katarina’s voice said at his elbow, in smooth explanation, “a young relation of Mr. Maxwell, just down from Oxford. Mr. Carrington, Annie Drew.”

  “Mrs. Drew,” he said. He didn’t see a ring, but chose the courteous option as being also the simplest. He didn’t know how to assess the likelihood that she had pawned it versus the likelihood that she had never possessed one, and he had no attention for the puzzle in any case. He was occupied with thoughts of walking alone through this fantastic battlefield, completely without defense except for the bits of information Katarina had fed him as they walked, bearing sole responsibility for this woman and her child.

  For Katarina was not to accompany them to Murchinson’s. She said she dared not, with a gesture at her trouser-clad legs that confirmed his earlier suspicion of their significance. She would disappear a street or so away, so that Annie and William could approach the factory gates without a whiff of indecency attending their appearance. She assured William that it would be simplicity itself for him to get inside, as long as he acted as though he had an unassailable right to do so. He was then to tell the matrons that the woman beside him was a friend of his family’s cook, victim of a malicious joke, and that they were to return her child directly. He was to use certain slang phrases that Katarina believed would confirm him as a “young Oxford dandy” and would therefore explain his odd clothing. He tried to remember what they all were, and then tried to remember exactly what he had been thinking when he agreed to this task. How the devil was he to explain the arm, if someone noticed?

  “Best leave us now, hadn’t you, Katherine?” Annie said diffidently. “I mean, I can show Mr. Carrington to Murchinson’s.”

  “I’ll walk with you a bit,” Katarina overrode her. “I can vanish quick enough once we’re closer.”

  She obviously had no intention of leaving Annie and William alone together a moment longer than necessary. Perhaps because she did not really trust William to successfully maintain the fiction. She was justified in her fear, if so; he had never acted a part in his life. What had he been thinking?

  “You will want to agree on the name of the cook,” Katarina said as though she always thought this way, as though assuming a role was the sort of thing she did all the time. It probably was. “May I suggest...” She paused. “...Dora Brewer. Can you both remember that? Otherwise, there is nothing you need agree upon, no need for you to pretend to know each other any better than you do.”

  “Mrs. Brewer,” Annie repeated. “This is...so kind of you, Mr. Carrington.”

  “Not at all,” he said, and then, feeling the flick of Katarina’s dark eyes, tried to infuse the tone with the proper drawl and the rest of the sentence with the proper vocabulary. “Jolly pleased I can be of help.” He didn’t dare turn head to see Katarina’s reaction to that, as he was rather afraid it might involve rolling eyes. He had never heard anything quite so unnatural as those words on his tongue.

  Katarina left them a street or so later, drawing William into a shadowed alcove that smelled of horse and worse things to slip the overcoat off his shoulders. “I’ll just hold that for you, shall I, sir?” she said for Annie’s benefit. “They’ll stare at your fine Oxford clothes, I’m sure, but there’s no help for that. It’s not as though a young gentleman such as you belongs in these streets.”

  He got the point. At least, he thought, it would not be terribly difficult to act the part of someone not from this part of the city who was taken aback at what he found. He clenched and released his left hand, and nodded to Annie to lead the way.

  He was a little surprised by the size of the brick building that appeared out of the smog. It might have been a manor house, or even a French castle, with turrets rising on each side of a courtyard. Then he got closer to the great iron gates that separated the yard from the street, and saw that the turrets were chimneys. The right half of the building put him in mind of soldiers’ barracks, so he guessed that to be the orphanage and the other side the factory proper. Where to start?

  “I dunno—” Annie murmured beside him, answering the thought he had not spoken. He turned to her, startled, and she flushed. “Excuse me, sir, I didn’t think of the gates being locked. Maybe we could—maybe there’s a servants’ entrance, round the back—?”

  “Nonsense,” he said, making up his mind all at once, trying to sound certain. “We’ll enter by the front door.” He turned to the left, away from the enormous gates, and headed for a door in the brick wall. He assumed it led to the business office.

  It did. The spare, neatly dressed clerk seated at the front desk widened his eyes at the sight of the Oxford dandy’s blue coat and brass buttons. They were pale gray eyes; everything else about the man was similarly gray and pale. So were the plaster walls and the papers on the desk. The very wood of the two doors behind the clerk looked faded and worn.

  “May I...help you, sir?”

  The quality did not come to transact business in this establishment, William inferred. Obviously not; the quality bought their matchsticks in shops elsewhere. Very likely this man handled the accounts between Murchinson’s and those shops. “Indeed you may, my good man,” he said, trying to drawl it a little, trying to remember the attitudes struck by some of his brother’s Oxford friends. “My name is William Carrington, and I’m here on a little commission for my mother. This lady here is cousin to our cook—” Cousin? Had he been meant to say cousin? Might it have been sister, or friend? It didn’t matter, he told himself; the detail would never matter, but a noticeable hesitation would, so he plunged forward. “—and it seems someone brought her daughter along here by mistake. The child’s name is Margaret Drew. Would you be so good as to fetch her out for us?”

  The sparse brows above the pale eyes lifted. “That is quite impossible, Mr. Carrington. The Murchinson Orphanage takes in children who lose their parents to death or abandonment.”

  “And very admirable of you,” William said, “but in this case, seems a trifling error was made, don’t you see. I’m sure it happens even in the best of places—no reflection on you, of course, Mr.—?”

  “Perry,” the man said through pinched lips.

  “Mr. Perry. Just one of those little mistakes that happen now and again, like putting figures in the wrong column or any other little accounting mishap.” William waved a hand at the man’s ledger book, and only then realized the mistake he had made.

  He might not have made it had he been paying attention. The precision of the man’s dress, not to mention precision of the numbers in his ledger and the edges of the foolscap stacked on his desk, ought to have informed that Mr. Perry took a certain pride in exactness. But William had been thinking too hard about the lines he must recite to notice the trap until he was in it.

  “Accounting errors do not occur in my office, sir,” Mr. Perry said coldly.

  “Of course not,” William stammered, with an inner feeling uncannily like that of missing a step on a darkened stair. He lost the careless drawl in that moment, but tried desperately to recapture it with his next words. “Fact is, Mr. Perry, we think someone was having a, well, a joke with Mrs. Drew here. No need to look too closely at it—wouldn’t want to get anyone in trouble
when there’s no harm done. We’ll just take the little girl back and say no more about it. We’ve no intention of Murchinson’s being out the money, of course!” William fumbled in his pocket as though only just then thinking of such sordid and uninteresting concerns as money. “Here we are, then, I believe that’s what’s fair? I haven’t counted carefully; do let me know if I’m short a bit.”

  Mr. Perry took the drawstring bag William plunked down before him, and pulled it open. It contained about twice the required sum, William happened to know. Katarina’s strategy again. She said bribes often worked where an attitude of careless authority failed.

  Mr. Perry dropped the bag and shoved it across the desk. “I do not take bribes, sir. I must wish you good afternoon.”

  Had William taken longer to talk with him first, he might have figured that out too. Had he instead successfully employed the rattling manner, he might have been able to shrug off the faux pas. As it was, he hesitated a moment while the clerk’s face turned turkey-red and Annie made a miserable little moan behind him.