It wasn't like she needed the money, she reminded herself. Not if she could get home. Her heart started to beat a little faster at the prospect of departure. She walked a little away from the hansom cab, her arm draped around Gracie's shoulders. Her new friend, soon to be lost forever, leaned into the embrace.
“I'll miss you, Janey,” she said in a quiet voice. “You are the most fun I have ever had.”
“Backatcha,” Cady replied. Grace seemed to understand what she meant.
Cady didn't imagine they'd make it home on the first attempt. But there was always a chance. Always some hope. Likewise, she wasn't quite sure how they were going to get rid of their new friends, and was beginning to suspect Smith intended to jump right in front of them if necessary. The fog was so thick and the night so dark that it wouldn't take much to disappear. Just a few steps into the murk and they could be gone forever.
“So, where exactly is this mystery carriage to collect you?” Bertie asked. They had alighted from their hansom cab near the winding alleyways Cady had noted earlier in the day. Lit by a few scattered gas lamps, they looked even more picturesque in the gloom. The scene was something closer to Shakespeare's London in Cady's imagination, half-timbered houses with slumping bay windows and gables almost meeting over the middle of the muddy cobblestones. It was much less crowded now, but a few lone souls still drifted about, peering into the windows of the old shops.
“Would you like to have a look?” asked Grace, in a surprisingly conspiratorial tone. “You can't visit London and not take a quick looksy-dooksy at Holywell Street.”
“Oh, no, Gracie, you wouldn't,” her fiancé protested. “The Times says it's the most vile street in the whole of the civilized world.”
“The Times can go toast their blooming eyebrows,” she shot back. “Come on!”
She had her arm through Cady's and dragged her out into the scrummage of traffic before Bertie, or Smith, or even Cady herself, could protest.
“Miss Ca—Jane!” the marshal cried out. “Jane, don't go missing. We have to leave.”
He sounded genuinely helpless, the first time she had ever heard that note in his voice. Cady almost turned back, but a wagon, piled high with potatoes, all but ran them down when she tried to reverse course.
“Open yer fuggin' eyes, you dim strumpet!” yelled the driver, adding a crack of his whip as an exclamation point. It seemed easier, then, to just carry on over the road and get turned around on the other side. But Gracie was having none of it.
“Come along,” she said when they reached the relative safety of the footpath.
“But Smith and Bertie!”
“Smith who?” said Grace, still tugging at Cady's elbow. It was like fighting with a bargain hunter on Black Friday; Grace knew what she wanted, and nothing was holding her back. She forgot about this mysterious “Smith” almost immediately. “Come on, Janey. Just a quick look.”
Smith's voice boomed out of the fog and darkness, searching for her. “JANE!”
It sounded much closer this time. And then the marshal was there, with a bemused-looking Bertie in tow, dodging and weaving though the wagons, carrying all of their luggage in the two dry-bags. His face was thunderous.
“Now is not the time, Jane—” he started.
“But it's the perfect time,” Grace said, giggling with excitement. For her, the night was just a long and fabulous adventure. “Come on.”
“Don't you get away again,” Smith warned.
“I won't,” Cady promised, and she meant it, “but we've got a little while yet, don't we?”
“Nine minutes.”
“My word, you Americans are punctual,” said Bertie.
The group of four friends, reunited again, walked a little further into the alleyway. Now that she was there, Cady thought the scene was more Harry Potter than William Shakespeare. It looked the sort of place a young wizard might go to buy his first wand. A faded half-moon, once painted gold, hung over the door of the nearest shop. Droopy eyelids and pouting lips painted in red gave the face of the moon a sulking expression. In the window lay piles of books and china plates.
Interesting business synergy, thought Cady. Content and crockery.
Gracie was giggling uncontrollably now, and Cady finally understood. The next few stores were also bookshops, but of a very particular sort.
Ye olde Victorian porn merchants.
One of the shops, although closed, was still lit by gas lamps inside, allowing her to pick out titles such as Captain Stroke-All's Pocket Book and Gay Girls of New York.
Cady burst out laughing, which sent Gracie into peals of hysteria and drove away the few lone window shoppers, all of them men in long, dark coats and top hats. Having protested the idea of venturing into the most vile street in the whole of the civilized world, Bertie pressed his nose up against the glass of the bookstore to get a better look. Cady smiled as she watched the two long-dead lovers twine their fingers together. She carefully stepped backwards, away from the window, finding Smith waiting for her. He placed a hand on her shoulder.
“Best you not stray, ma'am.”
“So we're back to ma'am, now?”
“I'm just about done with all this play-actin'. I got me a headache just from keeping my own name straight, let alone yours, Miss Jane.”
His tone, which had been stern, was softening. She could tell he was relieved to be all but gone.
“That was your idea, not mine, buddy.”
Bertie had slipped his arm around Gracie's waist, which Cady assumed would be a terrible scandal were anyone to see them. But the alleyway was all but deserted now. They had driven off the last of the lonely perverts and the night and the fog shrouded them so completely that nobody more than a few steps away could have made them out as anything more than indistinct shapes.
Part of her wished she could take her new friends along with her. They had already declared themselves outsiders of a kind in their own world, and Cady felt certain she could help them find a place in hers. She'd have the resources to do so, just as soon as she got back there.
Gracie giggled as Bertie nuzzled at her ear and drew her further into the gloom, away from the time-travelers. Smith linked his arm through Cady's, juggling the two sacks as he did so.
“Ya have to let them go, Miss Cady. I know it's hard. But it is the only way. See? We are gone in four minutes.”
With her arm tucked securely into his, Smith held out the pocket watch for her to see. It looked as unremarkable as ever. He put it away in his vest pocket again, and squared his shoulders.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“Nope,” he said. “You get it right, you won't even notice. Come this way. We arrived a little ways down Half Moon Passage there.”
He nodded to where an even smaller alley cut away from the backstreet with all of the bookstores. It smelled strongly of urine and vomit, even more so than the rest of the city. She resisted the urge to call out goodbye to Gracie. In a few moments she would be long gone, long dead and—
Cady heard a scream. A terrible scream that sent waves of gooseflesh up her arms and made her shiver.
The marshal stiffened beside her, and she could sense him wanting to draw his pistol, but he was encumbered holding onto her and all of the baggage.
Another scream, ending in a grunt and a horrifying sound. A sort of wet, ripping noise.
“Goddamn it,” said Smith, and he did reach for his gun then, while awkwardly keeping Cady's arm tucked into his. He had the gun out in one hand and the watch in the other, with the neck of the possibles bags bunched into the same fist, when Chumley emerged from the fog with a knife.
His arms were covered in blood.
He wasn't grinning maniacally. He wasn't cackling like a fiend.
His face, which had been so animated earlier in the night—by excitement, by fellowship, by nervousness and at the end by humiliation—was now as blank and expressionless as a blackboard washed clean.
Cady screamed Gracie's name, but nobo
dy replied.
She lost her footing as she gripped Smith's arm, pulling his aim off when he fired. The bullet meant for Chumley shattered the window of a store somewhere in the creeping dark.
The killer came on, not pausing, not even flinching. The long blade of his knife, painted with blood, seemed almost black in the weak lamplight.
His eyes were fixed on Smith, who had set himself to receive the attack and get off one more shot.
He never got the chance.
Before he could pull the trigger, Cady grabbed at the watch and squeezed. Twice.
15
INTERLUDE.
The Watchmaker leaned over his workbench. He seemed too elderly to still be doing such fine work. His eyes were milky with cataracts, his fingers long and hooked into claws, the joints and knuckles inflamed with arthritis. The skin on the back of those pale hands was paper thin and dark veins crawled over them between liver spots and fine grey hairs.
The bench was long, disappearing into darkness beyond the fitful candlelight in which he fussed at an ornate time piece. Hundreds of mechanisms, tiny pieces of carefully crafted silver and gold, twinkled in the warm glow: pinions and pivots, balance springs and safety crescents, repeaters and meantime screws, all of them laid out on a large square of black velvet, weighted down at each corner with silver ingots.
The Watchmaker bent low to his toil. Lost in concentration, his breath wheezed heavily through his open mouth. His hands did not shake, however. The tools he took up, the calipers and stakes and files, he wielded with infinite precision and surety of purpose.
The chronometer in his old, gnarled hands was complicated. Such things always were. This was not the first occasion on which he had been required to tend to the piece. A small fault, uncorrected for too long, was threatening to turn into something of much greater moment. He shook his head, disapproving, but he was barely conscious of the movement, so fierce was his concentration on the problem. Long, grey hair, which fell in lank strands over his bristled, sunken cheeks, brushed the back of his hand.
He peered deeply into the works, resisting the lure of losing himself in there. Even flawed as it was, the timepiece was a construction of peerless beauty; its depths completely unfathomable to any not trained in the art. Whole worlds lay within when one knew where to look for them. So, too, though, the flaw which required his attention.
There could be no doubt of it. He'd had his apprentices searching, but perhaps that had been a mistake. Perhaps the real fault was his in not maintaining the piece properly.
He grunted, dismissing the idea. He had ever been the very model of industry and diligence. He would apply all necessary rigor and prowess to this present difficulty, teasing and probing and bringing to bear the hard-learned lessons of his long service to the chronometric arts and science.
The old Watchmaker rummaged through his tools, selecting a brass loupe with three quite particular bespoke lenses, affording him the magnification needed to peer into the works at the scale necessary to detect such an infinitesimal discontinuity.
Part II
16
It were a hell of a thing. Every goddamn time. Titanic Smith never did reconcile himself to it. There a man stood, in one particular time and place, and then there he did not.
He understood what'd happened of course. He and Miss Cady had traveled in an instant from Queen Victoria's London to …
Well, for a wonder, it looked awfully like her home town. If “town” weren't too meager a word for the vast and gaudy cordillera of colorful lights that climbed into the dark night sky down yonder way. He was certain he recognized that particular tower, the one that reminded him of a spear or an arrowhead pointed at the heavens. He'd seen some wonders the last thousand years or so, and that was one of them.
“Home,” she confirmed, her voice shaking. “I'm home.”
“Maybe,” said Smith, who was a cautious man to begin with, and who had learned to give full rein to that native caution on the long, strange trail he had traveled since crossing paths with the Chinaman Wu.
And then the shock took his companion and she slumped against him, shaking.
“Oh, God, Smith. What happened to them? Why was Chumley there? What did he do?”
Smith thought she might utterly collapse and take to howling in the manner of an hysterical woman, but Miss Cady pushed away from him, standing a little apart in the night, her arms wrapped around herself as if to wrestle directly with the fear run wild inside of her.
“He killed them,” she said, her unsteady voice almost, but not quite, wailing. “Why?”
“I do not know, Miss Cady,” he returned, “but I fear now that Chumley may not have been as he represented himself. I fear that he may have been one of them that have been hunting me.”
Her hands made a harsh whispering sound as they rubbed at the oilskin coat she had bought, either to warm herself or to calm the tremors that had seized upon her.
He could see it all contending on her delicate features. The distress and surprise of unexpected violence, the guilt of escaping, both of them at odds with the need to go back and help a friend, and the rational, intelligent mind recalling their greater predicament. When she spoke, her voice was brittle.
“But why? Why would he do that? Why would he pretend? Why attack Grace and Bertie?”
“I do not profess to know, Miss Cady. I am as unsettled as you by the incident.”
“Incident? God, Smith! He killed them!”
“Figure as much. Don’t know why.”
“Can we go back?” she begged. “Is there some way we can help?”
It sounded less a genuine question than a desperate plea with no expectation that his answer would satisfy. Before Smith could even get going on a reply, Miss Cady had thrown one hand up as if to stop him wasting the effort.
“I know, I know. We can't, can we?”
“Not for twenty-four hours,” he confirmed.
She shivered then, with a full body shudder that appeared to arise from deep inside.
“Oh, God,” she said in a small, frightened voice, “Gracie, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.”
“Ma'am?” said Smith, unsure of how to handle her. She was obviously not given to the sort of frailty he might have expected from a citified young woman, but neither was she hardened by the experience of life beyond the boundaries of civilization, like so many frontier women of his acquaintance.
“Twenty-four hours,” she repeated, looking around to take her bearings. “Right. So if I can figure this out, we could, like, step back a day from now and make it right?”
“Go back to London, you mean, from when we just left?”
“Yeah.”
Smith shrugged in a gesture which committed him to no promises and testified to his paucity of comprehension.
“If you can figure to do that, Miss Cady, you will have set me on the true and certain path to my Elspeth, and I would do whatever you asked in the way of setting right those things we may have done wrong by our very presence.”
She took a moment to stare into the distance where the city lights of Seattle blazed under the stars. He thought he could see tears in her eyes.
“What's the time? Right here and now?” she sniffled. “We should have noted that as soon as we arrived.”
She was still upset, but he could see her choosing to dig in the spurs and ride the wild horse of her emotions into submission. He checked the watch, squinting a little under the moonlight.
“I would estimate we arrived here at a quarter of ten in the evening.”
“All right,” she said, through clenched jaw muscles, struggling to take control of her feelings. It was like watching her stuff one item after another into a crowded saddle bag. Guilt, fear, shock, confusion. Jam them all way down in there. “We need to check the date,” she said, “and get a fix on exactly where we landed.”
They were stood on the edge of a forest, by the side of a road, one of the wide, gloriously smooth stretches of black macadam he remembered from h
er world and a few others like it. The city was some distance away. Uncertain of the scale, Smith would not hazard a guess at how many miles. Those twinkling towers, he knew, were so much taller than the tallest building he had ever known before losing his way through the years that he dare not even speculate.
Miss Cady wrote something down in one of her notebooks, before hauling the binoculars out of the same bag. Her hands shook as she raised them to her eyes.
“Looks like a gas station just up there…”
The words fell away and she let the glasses drop.
“Look,” she said, suddenly pointing and yelling. “Hey! Hey, you two!”
Smith peered in the direction she had indicated and after a moment he picked out the form of two figures, trudging away in the dark. A man and a woman, it seemed. Miss Cady cried out again.
“HEY!”
They turned. First the man, and then the girl, and Smith felt his testicles crawl up inside his body. It was exactly the same reaction he'd had the morning he'd woken up with a rattlesnake coiled at his feet.
He was certain he recognized the twin figures.
It was them. His own self and Miss Cady.
And then they were gone. Disappeared into a darkness as black as the feathers of a carrion crow. Miss Cady called out again and ran a little ways up the road, using the binoculars to search for them. Smith followed her, carrying the two bags, making sure he could get to his pistol quickly if needs be. He could see the tension in her outline as she searched, saw it ease off when she gave up and turned back to him.
“You saw that, right? That was … that was us.”
“I believe so,” Smith agreed. He passed her the lighter bag and she put the binoculars away before returning to the exact spot where they first arrived and making a small cairn of stones she collected by the side of the road.
A Girl in Time Page 11