Timepiece

by Heather Albano

  With feverish haste she ran her hands over his uniform coat. A key, a key, where would he have put the key—She undid the buttons and thought she saw his face tighten. She grabbed for the handkerchief again, holding it to his face as she patted his shirtfront with the other hand.

  It proved to be in his breast pocket, a worn brass thing that certainly looked right for a coal cellar. Elizabeth almost sprang up, then took an extra second to check his trouser pockets in case he carried more than one key. He didn’t.

  She staggered to her feet, grabbed William’s rucksack, and plunged out the door. The passage was narrow, and dark, and smelled of something moldy. All the fresh air was apparently held on the other side of the closed bedroom doors. She had a moment to notice chalk scribbles on each one, but had no attention to puzzle that out.

  South side of the building. So the main stairs would be that way—Elizabeth turned and ran in the other direction. A coal cellar would be at the back of the house. Near the kitchen. Narrow twisting stairs sprang into view and she flung herself down them, clinging for support to a nerve-wrackingly rickety banister. The rucksack swung against her side, delivering a bruising thump in the ribs from what had to be the dark lantern inside it.

  She hit the ground floor and stood one moment, looking in every direction like a deer in a meadow. Which way? She was in a back corridor, all dim wood and shadowed corners. She didn’t hear anyone pursuing her. Was there no one else in the house? Dared she shout William’s name?

  She picked a direction and ran. But this was the wrong way—a carpet suddenly sprang into being under her feet—this was the front hall. She turned and ran the other way. She thought she might be detecting kitchen smells, and here was a corridor full of doors. Elizabeth started pulling on handles at random, finding pantries and storerooms.

  And eventually, a locked door. She almost dropped the key in her haste, hissing with impatience as her sweating fingers fumbled it once, twice. She finally got it inserted. From somewhere else in the building, she was sure she heard footsteps.

  It turned. Thank God. The handle yielded to her, and she wrenched the door open. Stone stairs led downward into blackness.

  “William?”

  It felt like a year at least before one pale face and then another appeared in the shaft of dim light, two sets of brown eyes looking up at her with identical astonishment.

  Elizabeth dropped the key and the rucksack to the ground. Heavy booted feet thundered on the stairs above her head. “Hurry,” she said as she yanked the working pocket watch out of her pocket. The chain caught on the cloth. “They’re chasing me—”

  At the sight of the watch, William laughed aloud and Maxwell swore—in almost exactly the same tone, Elizabeth noted distantly as she detangled the chain. William came running up the steps two at a time, disheveled and dirty, coat gone and shirt streaked with grime, but grinning like a schoolboy. Elizabeth, succeeding only at that instant in getting the pocket watch free, looked up at him just in time to take in the grin. She was so utterly surprised when he pulled the cap off her head and kissed her that she almost dropped the watch.

  “Do you think,” Maxwell growled, “we could possibly get out of here first and you could do this later?” But it sounded as though there was some affection beneath the usual crustiness.

  The booted feet reached the landing just around the corner. There might have been other feet approaching from elsewhere, Elizabeth couldn’t be sure. There was, in any case, no time to try to reset the tiny dials—they would have to see if the watch would let them go to a change 1885. William caught hold of her right arm, and Maxwell seized William’s sleeve, grabbing the rucksack with his free hand. Elizabeth pressed the top stem, the top stem, and the side stem, and the world went velvety black.

  Chapter 21

  London, August 28, 1885

  And the rain came down like a waterfall.

  Elizabeth yelped and Maxwell swore, but William found that he had been instinctively expecting it, that his shoulders had begun to hunch against it while Elizabeth was still fumbling with the watch. Of course it would be raining when they got to 1885. It had been raining when they left, and what had they done in 1815 that would have any chance of affecting the weather?

  The wall against his back had the gritty texture of brick. Otherwise the entire universe might have been made up of black rushing water, for all he could tell. He literally could not see his hand before his face, and hastily returned the hand to Elizabeth’s arm. She shifted a little, but toward him rather than away, and he dared to run his palm down her soaked sleeve until he found her fingers, clasping them and the cold metal of the watch together.

  Dared? He had kissed her on the steps of the coal cellar, and she hadn’t objected. Surely the touch of his hand was nowhere near so bold, and he might assume it would be welcome if the kiss had been. Though to be fair, she might have been too surprised to resist the kiss, and he might in fact be presuming…

  She wriggled her fingers, and his heart momentarily froze. Then she succeeded in extracting the pocket watch from between their palms, and, after the briefest of hesitations—brief, but he still would have been prepared to swear it took a month to resolve—she squeezed his hand back.

  His heart resumed beating with a thud, and a foolish grin stretched his mouth wide under cover of the darkness.

  He did not think he had ever been so terrified as during that seemingly endless period in the coal cellar—and that included his time on battlefields, under the feet of constructs, and as the prisoner of a grinning, knife-wielding Belgian. In the pitch black chill, he and Maxwell had worked at each other’s bonds with grim, sweating desperation—Maxwell demonstrating that he had done this sort of thing before, and William cursing his clumsy left hand in language explicit even for a former soldier—arguing in whispers what they ought to do once they managed to free themselves. Where was she? Had there been more Belgian deserters in the wood? If any came upon her and recognized her for a woman—more, for an Englishwoman—

  William could not bear to think of what would happen after that. If Nysell captured her as a third presumed French spy, the possibilities were equally grim. How are we ever to find her? William had wondered, staring into the blackness of the cellar. How are we to find the pocket watch? How can we possibly manage an escape for all three of us before His Grace returns from the field and Nysell discovers our absence?

  It appeared he—to put it mildly—needn’t have worried. The remembered sight of her standing at the top of the stairs, watch in hand, made him want to laugh aloud again.

  On his other side, Maxwell was muttering imprecations loud enough to be heard over the rain, and twisting himself into an improbable eel-like configuration that William could feel even if he could not see it. “What are you doing, sir?”

  “Matchsticks,” Maxwell snapped, straightening, and something gossamer-soft and not yet drenched fluttered past William’s face.

  He understood then, and let go Elizabeth’s hand. “Stay still,” he told her—reflecting with another private grin that she might, this once, actually obey the instruction—and grabbed for the soft floating thing that was undoubtedly one of her gowns, shoved back into the rucksack by Nysell’s men and now being used by Maxwell in an attempt to keep the precious matchsticks dry.

  His elbow connected, rather hard, with something rather solid. Maxwell expressed his opinion in one of the military turns of phrase to which William had introduced him a quarter of an hour earlier.

  “Come, come, sir,” William said mildly. “You really ought to mind your tongue. There’s a lady present.” He heard Elizabeth bite back a giggle.

  “I was planning to use that eye for something, once we got the lantern lit,” Maxwell grumbled. That told William where his head was and where the cloth might be best positioned, but it was another of those tasks for which it would have been quite helpful to have two working hands. He and Maxwell got thoroughly tangled in the muslin as he struggled to be of assistance. “Oh, fo
r—” Maxwell snapped, but cut himself off. “Really, Mr. Carrington, it might be better if you stopped helping. All right, that’ll do.” He had succeeded in draping the material over both of their heads and shoulders, sheltering the rucksack and lantern under impromptu tent. “Hold it steady a moment.” There was a pause, and William had time to reflect that the fine muslin was hardly the best choice of a garment to ward off rain. It was going to be soaked in a matter of seconds more, and then the matchsticks would be at risk again. “There,” Maxwell said. “Found them. Thank God. Just hold that still another moment.”

  A clank of metal latch and a scrape of metal hinge, barely perceptible under the drum of the rain. William did not hear the hiss of the match at all, but he did see Maxwell’s hands spring into being in the sudden circle of light. He pressed closer, holding the not-quite-yet useless gown over the flickering little flame. Maxwell maneuvered it through the door of the dark lantern, and the wick caught.

  They stood in an alleyway, William saw at once. Dingy brick rose up behind them and not very far in front of them. The ground at their feet was a litter of rubbish and broken crates and a soaked newspaper or two. Maxwell looked at it with a grim expression, unwilling to draw any favorable conclusions from what he saw, but William turned his head to find Elizabeth beaming. Her hair clung lank and streaming to either side of her face, the cap having apparently been left in 1815. Her torn and muddied shirt looked all the worse for its impromptu bath. He thought she had never seemed lovelier. “We are in 1885?” he asked.

  “The twenty-eighth of August, 1885!” she said, stretching out her hands to hold the pocket watch within the lantern glow. Rain streamed down its faces, and the light glinted and rainbowed in each drop so that he could not see for himself, but he trusted her. “Ten o’clock in the evening, the day after we left.”

  “And we’re in the right place?”

  Maxwell took the watch out of Elizabeth’s hands, glancing at the face briefly before clicking it shut and tucking it away in his pocket. “The precise latitude and longitude from which we departed.”

  “And there’s no lightning,” Elizabeth said, as though she were singing it. “No thunder.”

  “No constructs,” William agreed, grinning at her. And no signs that anyone bled to death here last night. His message might have affected Placenoit, then, at least a little. His mind’s eye presented him with a vision of the Prussians seizing and holding the village, then marching up to join Wellington’s left. He could visualize how the British soldiers would straighten in relief, knowing their reinforcements had come. Wellington would wonder why the monsters had not joined the fight, but it would not matter, for the British and Prussians together would achieve victory over the French. And then everything would be all right. Everything was all right. Meg is free from Murchinson’s, Katherine can go sing at La Scala—“Mr. Maxwell,” he said, “I do believe we had an effect. And Miss Elizabeth—” She glanced up at the unwonted formality before she caught the playfulness of his tone. “—that was beautifully executed. We’d still be in that coal cellar if it hadn’t been for you. When we are at more leisure, I think I should like to hear exactly how—”

  “We ought to find some form of shelter first,” Maxwell interrupted, “before we all perish of pneumonia.”

  “Yes, and I should give you back your things.” Elizabeth extracted the broken watch from her left-hand pocket and handed it to William. Then, to Maxwell’s obvious surprise, she reached under her collar and unclasped a silver locket from around her neck.

  He did not immediately put his hand out to take it. “You brought my...”

  “It seemed to matter to you,” Elizabeth said, when it became evident the end of the sentence had eluded him.

  “Yes,” Maxwell said. He took the little silver ornament from her hand, then gave her the lantern to hold so that he could manage the clasp. He eased a step backwards as he fastened it around his neck, a movement that might have been casual, but that also very effectively hid his face in shadow. “Did you...happen to open it?”

  Elizabeth furrowed her brows at his unseen face. “No. It also seemed private...and I had no chance in any case.”

  “We ought to start by trying these doors,” Maxwell said, as though they had been having an entirely different conversation. He took the lantern back from her, turning away as soon as his hand closed over it. “There are worse places to spend a rainy night than a cellar.”

  He began the enterprise at once, lighting his way with the lantern, leaving Elizabeth and William to follow. William let Elizabeth help him settle the rucksack onto his shoulders. Then he offered his arm, and she took it immediately. “I think the rain’s easing a bit,” William said, to cover the renewed giddy desire to grin like a lunatic. “Just a summer storm, a quick drenching quickly over.”

  “I don’t mind the rain,” Elizabeth said, leaning against him. “It’s not very cold, after all. And so peaceful. No thundering constructs. We might almost be in the country.”

  That was true, William thought, suddenly struck by it. It was peaceful. Now that the rain pattered rather than drummed, he could hear the silence that blanketed the city. And the night was dark as well as silent, soft black like the nighttime countryside. Granted, it was late on a rainy night, and therefore perfectly understandable that the local inhabitants would choose not to traverse the streets, but—oughtn’t there be some light? Some foot-traffic? William found that he was craning his neck to see down the end of the alleyway, in search of a gas-lit glow from the main street. Or a bobbing lantern light. Or the sound of drunken men walking home from public houses. Or something. Maxwell’s fruitless investigation took them closer and closer to the main road, and finally to its corner, and the rain slackened into almost nothing, and there was still not a speck of light or a sound anywhere. William set his shoulder against the brick wall and strained his eyes trying to see something—anything—anywhere down the main thoroughfare. Were it not for the brick and the evidence of the pocket watch, he might have thought them far from 1885 London indeed, marooned perhaps on a desert island or the surface of the moon.

  “Well, this is a fine kettle,” Maxwell muttered.

  “It must have happened to you before,” Elizabeth said, and Maxwell turned on her.

  “Indeed it has. But upon those occasions, I had only myself to worry over.”

  Far down the main street, a single spark of flame flashed into existence. It winked and wavered for a moment, then settled into an easier swinging pattern. A lantern, William thought, either just lit or just come around a corner. The cold fist that had tightened around his heart relaxed its grip. So there was at least one other living creature in Londontown. He had actually feared for an instant that they were utterly alone, as absurd a supposition as that was, and he felt as though he could handle anything else. Even the necessity of hiding from this unknown coming toward them. He reached to touch Maxwell’s arm, to distract him from his argument with Elizabeth and tell him to draw the slide over the—

  “Douse that light,” a voice snapped from the darkness behind them, and William’s blood froze. He had lunged to get between Elizabeth and the stranger, trying to shrug off the straps and ready the rucksack as the best weapon available on short notice, before he realized that something about that voice should have given him pause. Then Maxwell’s lantern shone full on the man’s face, and William stopped.

  “I said douse your light,” Gavin Trevelyan hissed as he stepped out of the shadows. “And stop that row. Anyone would think you were trying to be caught. What the devil are the lot of you doing out after curfew, anyhow—?” Reaching to shutter Maxwell’s lantern for him, Trevelyan got a good look at the older man’s face. And went still himself.

  “Oh,” he said. “Mr. Maxwell. In that case, I...suppose I understand what you are doing out after curfew.” William tried to collect his scattered thoughts while the sharp eyes went to each of their faces in turn. “It’s as you said it would be,” Trevelyan said in a tone of wonder
. “You two paces from arrest and me with a chance to repay you for the past—Right, then, you’d best come with me. Quick.”

  “At once,” Maxwell agreed, and Trevelyan plunged into the darkness of the alley, away from the main street and the approaching lamp.

  They managed to scramble about halfway up the alley before Trevelyan lifted one hand to call for silence and nodded to Maxwell to darken the lantern. The four of them crouched breathless behind crates, waiting. William heard a regular step beneath the soft patter of raindrops, louder and closer every second. A faint flush of light shone somewhere down the main road. The steps grew closer—a lamp appeared at the entryway of the alley—paused one heart-stopping moment—and kept going.

  Trevelyan let out a breath. A familiar faint creak came to William’s ears, and the Welshman proved to have a dark lantern of his own in his left hand. “We ought to be able to avoid the patrols long enough to get home,” he said.

  “Lead on,” Maxwell said.

  As they negotiated the second alleyway, William stepped into the beam of Maxwell’s lantern, and the older man glanced at him through the dancing light. “Does this happen to you often?” William demanded.