Timepiece

by Heather Albano

  He lifted his chin to look straight into her eyes. “I’ve seen it now. I understand what you meant earlier. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, Lord,” Elizabeth said, “William.” She ran down the last two steps so that she could face him. “You haven’t done anything you need apologize for. I shouldn’t have—have made such a fuss. I just wanted to—But I shouldn’t have, and I’m sorry, for—”

  A wave of relief broke over his face. “No,” he said, catching one of her hands to stop her talking, “you don’t need to apologize either. I told you, I’ve seen it.”

  There was another emotion beneath the relief, something grim and hard. She had never seen William’s face look like that. He was squeezing her hand tightly, as though using the sensation to remind himself of a world other than the one he had just seen.

  She squeezed back. “Did you find the little girl?”

  The hardness about his jaw eased. “Yes,” he said, relief uppermost again, “thank God. She’s safe back with her mother now. At least I could change something. I could do one little thing.”

  “I’m glad you could,” Elizabeth said without rancor. “I’m glad one of us could, at least.”

  “It’s a shame your gown would have given you away,” he said, “for you would have done the bit at the factory much better than I did. I nearly muffed the whole thing, I was so nervous. I don’t think I could have done it at all if I’d had more time to think about it.”

  She smiled a little. “I want to hear all about it.”

  “Well, it doesn’t do me any credit except that it worked anyhow,” he said, “but I’ll tell you. Later. Shall we go and have a look at Trevelyan’s rifle now? Er—” He seemed to realize for the first time that he was holding her hand, and a flush spread to the tips of his ears. She feared for a moment he would drop it like a coal, but after a brief hesitation, he transferred it to his arm instead, and led her toward Trevelyan’s laboratory as though escorting her into a ballroom.

  The worst of the clutter had been cleared—or, at least, piled up onto the workbenches, out of the way. Nothing now distracted the eye from the gleaming lines of the weapon that was too small for a cannon and too big for a musket. Elizabeth really could not decide what it was more like—it had a bit that nestled into the shoulder and a trigger at about the length of a man’s arm, but surely it was too heavy for one man to lift, and the wooden stand looked like a cannon mount. She looked at Trevelyan. Since he was here, without a hammer poised over something delicate, and possibly even in what passed with him for good humor, she might as well make an attempt at asking.

  “How does your rifle work?”

  She did not actually expect more than a two-word token answer, if that. To her astonishment, he looked up from the cloth he was using to polish greasy streaks off the barrel, and gave her a full one.

  “An ordinary musket ball can’t pierce the hide of a construct,” he said. “Particularly not the hide right over the boiler, which the most heavily armored because the boiler is the construct’s most vulnerable part. The bullet simply hasn’t the force to get through the skin, do you see?” Elizabeth nodded. “So the trick is to increase the force. Steam won’t give you the energy you need, nor will tension, nor will gunpowder. Nothing man-made—” He smiled a little, a bare twitch of thin lips. “—would serve. That’s why we can only test the rifle in a lightning storm. We’re going to extend that rod there—” He pointed with a shrug of one shoulder, and for the first time she noticed the long slender pole running from floor to ceiling. “—out through the roof, and lightning will run down it and be trapped here.” He touched the side of the gleaming silver barrel.

  “Like a genie in a bottle,” Elizabeth murmured.

  Trevelyan snorted. “Like lightning in a bottle.”

  “The rifle will fire lightning?”

  “No, no—the lightning will be the power behind the bullets. Which are not the ordinary kind either, but javelins. The barrel of the gun has little rails inside it, and the javelins are pushed along them. Like the cars on the railway, if you saw the railway.”

  “I did.” Elizabeth looked at her own twisted reflection in the barrel, with its wide eyes and tangled hair. “I am all impatience to see it working.”

  “You will be doing no such thing,” Maxwell said, straightening sharply from his examination of the trigger. “It is too dangerous to have you two anywhere near this field test. I am sending you home before we begin.”

  Trevelyan glanced over his shoulder at a barometer pinned to the wall. “No, Max, I’m not thinking you are. The storm won’t hold off until three tomorrow morning.”

  “Good,” Elizabeth said, greatly daring. “You dragged me all over this miserable city, then left me trapped in here and incapable of aiding it. At the very least, I want to see what you are going to do with this miraculous—”

  “No,” Maxwell said, but in the manner of a schoolmaster beginning to lose control of his class. “Absolutely not. Even if I cannot send you back, I will not see you exposed to that danger.”

  “With all our associates raising hell out there,” Trevelyan said, “this is very likely the safest place in the city. Unless you want to take them completely elsewhere.” He nodded to the watch chain stretched across Maxwell’s waistcoat.

  Maxwell frowned. “I don’t want to leave this juncture unless I must.”

  “Then just keep them by you,” Trevelyan said. “If the plan works as it’s meant to, there’s nothing to worry about. If not, the three of you can pop out of time.” Maxwell started to argue further, but Trevelyan raised one imperious hand. “Did you hear that? Thunder, far off. We’ve no more time for talking. Let’s get ourselves ready.”

  It was not exactly uncomfortable to be dressed in her own clothing, but Elizabeth found it odd after a day spent in breeches. She also felt the absence of the pocket watch like an ache—William had it now, since she had nothing in which to tuck it, and this reversion to the customs of 1815 annoyed Elizabeth even as she acknowledged the need.

  The wind annoyed her as well. She had never before particularly noticed wind, not even when it swirled cold in winter, but now she found herself irritably aware of every gust that tangled her skirt against her legs. She wondered how she had ever found it easy to climb trees in a gown.

  There had been no tree to climb tonight, only a ladder leading from the attic of the warehouse through a trapdoor and onto its flat roof. Mr. Maxwell had not wanted her to risk even so much, but Elizabeth did not consider it necessary to worry over what Mr. Maxwell wanted. There was, as Katarina assured Maxwell and as Elizabeth thought obvious to any observer, no real danger. She would hardly fall while climbing the ladder. She might, she supposed, fall off the roof, but she would have to try hard in order to manage it. A low wall ran all the way around the edge, easily concealing from the casual observer anyone who sat behind it. “A duck blind,” Trevelyan had called it. “Cruder than I’d like, but it’s worked so far. No copper’s ever noticed anything amiss.” If one should come right up to the rooftop, it would be able to see over the wall; but Elizabeth gathered such a thing had never happened. As long as none of them stood upright with light behind them, there was no danger.

  There was similarly no reason to stand. Katarina crouched beside Elizabeth, equipped with what Elizabeth persisted in thinking of as opera-glasses-on-a-stalk, despite Trevelyan’s derisive snort when she used the term and his subsequent explanation as to their correct name (periscope field glasses) and design (apparently it had something to do with the design of a spyglass used by Navy captains; apparently double spyglasses called “field glasses” been invented not long after 1815; apparently the addition of the stalk was Trevelyan’s own modification; Elizabeth stopped listening thereafter, recognizing Trevelyan’s relentless detail as a manifestation of nervousness, though she had no doubt the man himself would have angrily denied any such accusation). The glasses, admittedly too heavy and crude for any opera, were attached to a pole and thereby to another set of len
ses that looked out like eyeballs over the wall. Those behind the duck blind could therefore look in any direction without the risk of a lifted head. Katarina did most of the looking herself, but was kind enough to occasionally allow Elizabeth to peep through her glasses. Maxwell likewise occasionally allowed William to look through his. Trevelyan, manning the third pair, dealt with William and Elizabeth’s presence by pretending they did not exist.

  The city did not sleep the way the country slept—or, at least, the country of 1815, Elizabeth reminded herself, for who knew what the country was like now. But she remembered spending the occasional sleepless night at home looking out of her bedroom window to a view quiet hills and fields and unseen houses. Unseen, for there were no lamps in the windows, no light to mar the soft dark anywhere.

  Not here. Big Ben had tolled two o’clock, but the shadows on the street below still fidgeted with restless movement under the blue-white beams of light thrown by the constructs’ patrols, as the enormous feet drove a monotonous beat into the ground. They never came very close to the warehouse, but Elizabeth found “not very close” to be quite sufficiently nerve-wracking for the two or three minutes every half-hour it lasted. During the twenty-seven minutes in between, the shadows were even more restless, an almost-silent scurry of activity as the London underworld engaged in whatever clandestine activity took it out after curfew. “Fools,” Trevelyan muttered, with no apparent sense of irony. Once a star gleamed suddenly far below, and Elizabeth stiffened in alarm—before the man’s cupped hands brought the star up to his face, held there for a moment, and then waved it out. A matchstick. She followed the faintly glowing red of the cigarette-end until it disappeared around a corner. If she could see it, couldn’t the construct pilots see it? Fool, indeed. How many such fools did the patrols catch every night? And what happened to them afterward?

  There was no doubt that a storm was indeed coming. The wind smelled of clean water—oddly so, for the nearby river was anything but clean. Every draught brought a moment’s relief from heavy, breathless air, and Elizabeth gulped each one gladly. In the country, she thought, the leaves would be tossed upside down, the underside proclaiming the advent of thunder. She noticed her skirt attempting to fill that role instead, and impatiently smoothed it down again.

  The sky growled. It was symptomatic of Elizabeth’s state of mind that her first thought was panic that an off-schedule construct was approaching them. In the next instant, she pulled herself together, recognizing the sound to be the thunder so long sought. It rumbled again, and the sky off toward the river flashed abruptly bright.

  The first fat drops of rain splattered against the roof, and Trevelyan abandoned the third set of opera-glasses-on-a-stalk and got to work. There were two trapdoors—the one with the wooden ladder, and another some few feet away, this second one no more than a small round hole with a crude oilskin covering. Trevelyan pulled the oilskin back and weighted it down with a shingle, then headed for the ladder. William followed, backing down the steps carefully, holding on with his left hand.

  The creaking sound of a winch started a few minutes later. Elizabeth cringed at the shrillness, thinking it was lucky the thunder drowned out the sound and that there was no one close to hear in any case. The tip of a thin metal rod poked its way through the hole in the roof. As Trevelyan turned the winch below, it extended itself smoothly up and up and up.

  Elizabeth did not dare go near the metal rod—“it’s safe as houses,” Trevelyan had said, “provided you don’t touch it”—but she peered through the larger trapdoor to see what transpired in the room below. Trevelyan was working with only a dark lantern to aid him, a lanky dark outline that ran nervous fingers over the great shiny barrel of the gun. Elizabeth saw the moment when he took a deep breath, took his hands away from his invention and clasped them behind his back, and took two deliberate steps backward to join William.

  Lightning lit up everything for one instant—the room below, Trevelyan’s set face, the wood grain of the ladder that crossed Elizabeth’s field of vision, the patch of sky that formed a background for it all. Elizabeth winced away, eyes dazzled.

  When her vision cleared, she noticed the tension in Katarina’s shoulders as the older woman pressed her eyes to her opera glasses. Elizabeth squirmed around to look through Trevelyan’s abandoned set; no reason not to, he wasn’t using them.

  The first thing she saw was a spark of light to the northwest, deep within the maze of buildings that comprised the financial district known as the City of London. It was as bright a star as the momentary match gleam had been, but this one did not instantly vanish. It stayed steady, and then it was joined by another. Then a third. And a fourth. Lanterns, Elizabeth thought.

  One of the lanterns flashed hot white in a way that seared her eyes again. The boom came to her ears several heatbeats later—or perhaps not, perhaps it was only the wind. “One,” Katarina said beside her, voice low and satisfied.

  “Where?” Elizabeth asked, not looking away from the opera glasses.

  “Bank of England. They’ll be chased away by constructs well before they can actually steal anything.”

  Another white-hot spark flared, farther to the northwest. This one was answered, some few seconds later, by a beam of blue light as a construct stomped to investigate it. “Two,” Maxwell said. “A disturbance near Newgate Prison. Men out after curfew, attempting to distract the guards.”

  Much farther north, though of course they could neither see nor hear it, a pane of glass was breaking in one window of the British Museum, and stealthy feet were creeping toward a treasure so precious that a threat to it would prompt another rush of protective men and constructs. Three.

  Sand in the works, altering the pattern of the night, pulling the constructs away from their usual orbits.

  Katarina swiveled her opera glasses around on their stalk. “Four,” she said, and Elizabeth tried to follow with hers. From the southwest came a dull red glow. “Arson. Police headquarters. Again, no real cause for worry. They’ll have it out before much damage is done.”

  Then came a boom loud enough to rattle the teeth in Elizabeth’s head, and Maxwell swung in the direction from which it had come. “Five,” he said. “Westley’s Steelworks.”

  The streets shook in discordant arrhythmia as constructs moved farther from their usual routes of patrol, shining their lights away from the docks, going to investigate the disturbances in other parts of the city.

  More star-gleams of lantern light lit up the darkness, these due south on the other side of the Thames. “Fighting in the streets,” Katarina said. “Outside Bedlam. How odd; can’t imagine what would cause it. Six,” she added as an afterthought.

  More beams of blue light pierced the sky. Constructs stomped across the bridges to Southwark, leaving whole swaths of Whitechapel and Spitalfields unobserved.

  “Right, then,” Katarina said. “The lightning can hit any time it wants. There’s no one here to see it now.”

  However, the lightning did not immediately oblige. The rain pattered down, and the sky growled, but the lightning forks stayed off in the distance.

  Gradually, the sparks of lantern-light and firelight around the city began to go out.

  “They’ve chased off the burglars at the Bank,” Katarina said, eyes to the opera glasses.

  “It looks like the fire at police headquarters is coming under control,” Maxwell reported a short while later.

  Elizabeth swung her glasses to follow the gaze of first one and then the other. A chill clamped around her heart. The constructs were settling the disturbance, the blue beams of light once more freed to go about their patrol.

  “Don’t worry,” Maxwell said to her, without turning his head. “There was no way to do it without raising suspicion. So many disturbances taking place after curfew, all at once—impossible to manage it without it looking contrived.”

  “So the only thing to be done,” Katarina finished for him, “was use the suspicion to our advantage. Their commander doesn�
��t think all this disruption tonight was random. And he knows about the criminal network working for the traitor Seward. Watch.”

  Some of the constructs were still busy with the fire at the police headquarters, the chase through the streets near the British Museum, and the riots in Southwark. But even those now freed from distraction did not return to their usual patrol routes. They converged toward the northern banks of the Thames instead—uncomfortably close to the docks and the warehouse, as it happened, but it became clear before very long that neither were their goal. They advanced to encircle the Tower of London, where the traitor Seward was being held and from which his criminal empire was no doubt trying to free him, using these citywide disturbances as distraction.

  “Bless you, Seward,” Maxwell murmured. “You’re still working for our victory.”

  Katarina glanced from her opera glasses and to the sky. “Really, though,” she murmured to the lightning. “Anytime you like would be fine.”

  That time it listened. The next crash of thunder was close enough to make Elizabeth jump, and all at once the rain drove in sideways, piercing her thin gown, raking fingernails down her bare arm, singing through her blood. She had never felt so alive as she did now, under the cold rain that poured like a waterfall, looking down at the wondrous coming together of all those brave people who meant to make a stand against a monster. She wanted to shout, or fly, or—