Danby, Yorkshire, August 30, 1885
“Fire!”
The word rent the sleeping air, and William was instantly alert, on his feet, thoughts of tents and trapped horses tumbling through his mind.
“Fire!”
Except he wasn’t in a tent. There were no horses trapped; he heard none squealing. He heard frightened human cries instead, female as well as male, and feet scrambling against floorboards. Floorboards? He was in a house. A house in England. Beneath the scent of smoke, the air smelled heavy and rich. Definitely England.
England, yes, right, a cottage in Yorkshire, Christopher Palmer’s house, seventy years after the tents of the Peninsula. He remembered now. He was sleeping in an empty downstairs room with Maxwell and Schwieger—camping on the hard floor—while Elizabeth and Katarina shared the cottage’s one spare bedchamber and bed, located a little farther down the corridor. And that was Katarina’s voice he heard, urgent and commanding. “Fire! Everyone outside!”
William felt as though he had been standing stupidly for hours, but in truth it could have been no more than a count of three. Maxwell was only just disappearing through the doorway in front of him. William caught up his clothing in one awkward handful, and ran. “Elizabeth!”
Smoke choked the corridor, foul-smelling as other-London fog. William’s eyes stung just looking at it, but he plunged in anyway, shouting. Maxwell’s shirt-tail was just visible in front of him, Maxwell’s hoarse voice shouting too. Shouting the same name that was on William’s lips. “Elizabeth,” he croaked out again, but had to stop and cough, and he knew no one could hear him. Not even Maxwell, just ahead.
It got worse, opaque and smothering. They should have run the other way, William thought. He had assumed without giving the matter any consideration that the fire had broken out in the kitchen, that the correct way to flee was therefore through the front door. But the smoke proved to be thicker at the front of the house. Around the bend in the corridor, an ominous orange light crackled.
There were footsteps on the stair above his head, and he caught the sound of Katarina’s voice, speaking with deliberate calm. William turned in time to see her emerge from the billowing smoke as though she were descending from storm clouds, Chris Palmer’s arm draped heavily over her shoulders. A sobbing Janet came after. Katarina’s eye fell on Maxwell and William, and she snapped “Outside!” in a much sharper voice than she was using toward Christopher.
They stumbled toward the front door. Out of the corner of his eye and through the shroud of smoke, William caught a glimpse of orange flames devouring the sitting room’s curtains and carpet. Before him yawned a doorway, clear black night on its other side. Schwieger and Wilton already stood in the front garden, near the sundial, Wilton excited and voluble and straining to see into the house, Schwieger physically preventing him from going any nearer to the fire.
Two steps into the garden, Maxwell stopped short. “Where’s Elizabeth?”
Just ahead of him, Katarina jerked around without losing her grip on Palmer. “She’s not here? I sent her out ahead of me—”
“God damn it,” Maxwell said with feeling, and spun for the house.
But William was already turning, already pitching his bundle of clothing as far into the garden as he could manage one-handed, already swinging back to face the flames. He knew exactly where she was. The trunk. Christopher Palmer’s trunk of priceless papers, the entire reason for their Yorkshire journey, the letters and journals that were their only source of information on the years between 1815 and 1885—the trunk had been left in the sitting room when the household retired the night before. William knew exactly what Elizabeth had turned aside to do.
The sitting room looked like the antechamber to hell. Flames replaced the curtains, the elderly wing chairs and sofa, the wooden frame of the curio case. The smoke stung his eyes so that he could hardly see, but he made out the wild-haired figure in the borrowed white night-dress, fumbling with desperate haste at a chest already engulfed by flame. Beside him, Maxwell swore, snatched his own overcoat from the peg by the door, and rushed past William into the room.
“No!” Elizabeth fought him as he flung the coat around her and wrestled her back toward the doorway, but Maxwell had her well outmatched in size and strength. “No, the papers, we have to save the—”
William tried. Crouched down in front of the trunk, it was easier to breathe, though the heat still blistered his skin like a baker’s oven. He looked around for something not yet aflame with which he could wrap his hands and save at least one book or two. His desperately searching eyes found nothing, but did note that the hot spitting flames now blocked his retreat. He began to tear off his shirt as fast as he could. One-handed and light-headed as he was, it was not a rapid business.
The splash of cold wetness restored him halfway to his senses, though not enough to immediately realize what had landed on him. “Get the hell out of there!” Katarina snapped from the doorway, and reached to take a second bucket from Schwieger. A second spray of water drenched the nearest curtain, but did not completely douse the fire. “Carrington, now!”
William grabbed his shirt with his left hand, shook the fabric over his arm, and with that meager protection plunged his hand into the center of the chest where the flames had not quite reached. He seized what two or three slender volumes he could grip at once, and then Schwieger’s arms closed around him from behind and they were stumbling back toward the hall. Schwieger caught the overcoat from Maxwell and used it to beat out the flame that had begun the journey up William’s shirt-sleeve. William staggered, dizzy, glimpsing in a confused way Maxwell’s white face and beyond him, Katarina and Schwieger and buckets.
“Carrington, garden,” Katarina ordered, and pushed William toward it. “Stay there. See to it the others stay there. Maxwell, help us here!”
William stumbled toward the clean dark air, eyes streaming, throat seared, a tendril of hot pain beginning to bite along his forearm. Elizabeth ran to him out of the darkness, reaching to catch hold of him despite her red and blistered hands. He collapsed to his knees, coughing, and she sank down with him. He let Frankenstein’s journal and the other two dossiers spill to the ground so he could pull her closer.
From the sundial, Christopher Palmer watched the flames with a set face. “So then,” he said, almost without inflection. “It seems they’ve found us.”
l
They contained the fire before it spread beyond the sitting-room, though the smoke permeated what seemed to be every corner of the house and the furnishings of the room itself were destroyed entirely—sodden where they were not blackened, wallpaper peeling like dead skin. Some of the books behind the glass of the curio case were salvageable, but the contents of the trunk were lost, the brittle old paper disintegrating under the touch of fire and water. All that was left of Palmer’s treasure trove were the three volumes Elizabeth’s blistered hands and William’s burned forearm had purchased: Frankenstein’s notebook and two journals of men who had served under Fitzclarence during the 1841 Rising. Nothing on Dover. Nothing on the years between Waterloo and Dover. They had no information on the time period they most wished to affect save what they might have memorized after one reading the night before, or what might be lodged in Christopher Palmer’s unreliable memory.
William sat at the kitchen table and rested his head against the wall with his eyes closed as Janet dressed the burn on his arm, but he rose as soon as she was done. The chairs should be left for the older residents of the house, much more shaken than he and much less equipped to handle the shock. He looked about for his clothing bundle, thinking to shrug on the waistcoat. It was not the waistcoat he wanted so much as what was threaded through it; the pocket watch’s weight would be comforting. The bundle proved to have been deposited by the cold hearth, where a fourth chair had been placed for Elizabeth. He offered her a smile as he reached past her for his clothing, grateful, as his eye lit on her bandages, that his own burn was on his forearm and he at least had the use of his left hand. He only needed one hand to haul the bundle into the light of the carefully placed candles and sort through it. He pulled the waistcoat free of the rest of it—and his heart seized when he saw no watch dangling from the cloth.
“It’s all right,” Elizabeth said. “I have it.” She held it out to him, cupped between her bandaged hands in a gesture that made him think of a child holding snow between awkward mittens. He took the watch and managed to thread it back where it belonged, feeling more settled once it was in place. Not that the broken watch was terribly useful to them—Maxwell held the whole one—but it was the principle of the thing. He had taken charge of it and would not fail his duty if he could help it. He reached his left forefinger to trace Elizabeth’s bandages.
“Does it hurt much?”
“Not very much,” she said, and he had to admire both the courage and the ability to tell a lie while looking right into his eyes. He restrained himself from squeezing her hand, but continued to stroke the back of it. She closed her eyes with a sigh and leaned against the wall.
Shuffling steps from down the corridor heralded Palmer’s return from his expedition to view the damage. Leaning on Katarina’s arm and ominously white about the lips, he appeared in the kitchen doorway. “We’re lucky it was only the one room,” he murmured, but he sat down heavily, and Katarina demanded of Janet where the spirits were kept.
Charles Wilton looked over from the chair at the far end of the table, where Schwieger was trying to keep him seated and soothed. Wilton had seemed to enjoy talking with him, but now worry turned his face turtle-like again and he tried to rise against the young Prussian’s restraining hand. “Chris?”
“All’s well, Charles,” Palmer said at once. “I’m fine.” The second brave lie told in two minutes, William thought. Katarina brought Palmer a glass of brandy, and Chris stared into it before he took a sip.
“Chris?” William spoke up from his corner. This was in many ways not the time, but on the other hand, the question could not wait. “What did you mean, when you spoke outside? Who’s found you?”
Palmer did not answer.
Schwieger looked from one of them to the other. “No one, I do not think,” he said. “I—it was an accident, the fire.”
Katarina looked over at him. “What do you know of the beginning, Emil? I woke and smelled smoke and was two paces down the corridor when I heard you shouting. How did you come to find the fire first?”
“Something woke me,” Schwieger said. “Something falling over, I think it was? I listened and heard the sound of someone in the sitting-room. Rattling about, I thought. I went to see who was wakeful, and if he was well. I found the front door open, Mr. West in the garden.” He eyed Charles, then Chris, then swallowed. “The candle was on the side table, tipped over, and the carpet and curtains already alight.”
“Oh, no, Mr. West!” Janet started to cry again.
Wilton looked at her in bland confusion.
“You didn’t leave him in the sitting room, surely?” Elizabeth queried, and Schwieger looked at her. “You and he were sitting and talking there earlier,” Elizabeth said. “I woke and heard voices, and I peeped in the sitting room and saw you. Surely you did not leave him there alone with a lit candle?”
“No, of course not!” Schwieger assured her. “That was earlier—hours ago. I saw him safely to his bed, I thought, but he must have later arisen again.”
“Wandering the house,” Janet said through her tears. “Setting things afire. The whole house might have…”
“I heard the cry go up,” Charles explained, “so I went to the garden.”
“You went to the garden first, sir,” Schwieger said. “I sent up the cry after.”
Charles Wilton thought about it, then shook his head. “No. I was worried about the—the papers, Chris, the old ones. Irreplaceable, you know. Important. There was a fire, and I was worried all the papers would burn. So I went out into the garden…”
But he had gone without the papers. If he had taken some of the journals, or been found with any book at all in his hand, William might have believed the tale. As it was, he could not countenance it. The old man must have been pottering around the sitting room with a lit candle, must have been drawn by some fancy to the yard, and must have tipped the candle over as he left. He could see how it had happened, but saw no benefit to anyone of attempting to convince the doddering fool of the truth.
“I’ve told you, Mr. West,” Janet said miserably, “you have to take care…”
“I didn’t have a candle,” Charles asserted, voice going querulous.
Schwieger spread his hands. “I can only say I saw one tipped over and burning.”
“I didn’t have one,” Charles insisted, and jerked away when Schwieger attempted to pat his shoulder. “How dare you question my word, young sir?”
“There, there, Mr. Wilton.” Elizabeth got up from her seat. “You mustn’t distress yourself. No one doubts your word, of course not.”
Three lies in five minutes, William thought. Katarina watched Wilton and Schwieger for a moment, then suggested she might carefully stir up the fire and make tea.
William drank it gladly, but refused the brandy, suspecting the half-empty bottle to represent the entirety of the household’s supply. Maxwell, he noted with some irritation, displayed no such restraint, downing two generous measures with scarcely a word between swallows. Katarina said nothing of this, only sitting down beside Charles Wilton and coaxing the old man into following Maxwell’s example. Her unspoken reasoning was plain enough to William’s mind: it would be better for all of them if Wilton slept soundly through what was left of the night. Katarina charmed enough of the potent liquid down Wilton’s throat that the old man’s head began to nod and his eyelids droop, and Janet took one of his arms and escorted him to his bed. Wilton stumbled against her at the doorway and nearly had both of them over, and Schwieger jumped to his feet and hurried to help.
In the end, Wilton left the room with one arm over Janet’s shoulders and the other over Schwieger’s, the young Prussian clearly supporting most of his weight. Palmer watched the awkward trio depart, rubbing his thumb along the stem of his mostly full brandy glass. Purple shadows stained the crumpled skin beneath his eyes. Katarina came back to the table, drew back the chair beside Palmer’s, and sat down.
“Is he often this bad?”
“No,” Palmer said, and looked down at the brandy.
Katarina sighed. “Frederick could send you someone. Let us send you someone.”
Something like a smile twitched the skin around Palmer’s mouth. “Who exactly do you think you could send to look after two ancient anti-Imperialist revolutionaries no longer able to keep from babbling seventy years’ worth of secrets?”
“A young anti-Imperialist revolutionary, of course.” Katarina looked at the wall over Palmer’s head as though names of likely candidates were written there. “Brenda Trevelyan, possibly? If this business of Gavin’s takes longer to come to fruition than he thinks it will, she’ll need a safe haven in any case.”
“I thought she was a member of your company because she had refused to leave her husband’s side?”
“Well, but if we could persuade her to leave?” Katarina rubbed her eyes. “I was trying to solve one end of the problem at a time.”
Palmer smiled at her, a real smile this time, and patted her arm with one veined hand. “You’re a good girl to think of it, but no. I don’t want her here. I…can’t trust Charles to know what year he is in, from one day to the next. He’d tell her…all our secrets, everything, Frankenstein’s journal and all the rest, starting with his real name and mine.”
“How can that possibly be worse than her knowing Kent’s real name and all the tactics that didn’t work in the Welsh mines?” Katarina asked. “Forgive me, but your seventy years’ worth of secrets are, many of them, seventy years old. What does it matter any longer?”
“She cannot be made to tell what she does not know. Why do you think I never told you or Frederick who I really was? There’s danger.”
Katarina hesitated. “Still?”
Palmer blew his breath out. “Yes. Obviously.” He gestured to the ruined room down the hall. “I don’t want her to know, and I wish you still didn’t know. If I’d been thinking faster this afternoon, I might have—have come up with some way to persuade Will to keep my name secret—something. But it all happened too fast.” He tilted his brandy glass so that the candlelight burned against the amber liquid, but still did not drink. “I really do not want anyone out there knowing that the celebrated Palmer and Wilton, retrievers of Frankenstein’s journal, are helplessly situated here in Yorkshire. And if word does get out, I absolutely do not want a young member of Kent’s organization trapped here with us the next time trouble comes tapping at the door in the dead of night.”
“I don’t think trouble came tapping on the door this night,” Katarina said. “I think Mr. West knocked over his candle. I really think you are imagining danger where there is none—”
“I certainly wasn’t imaging it back then.” Palmer set his snifter on the table with a thump. “God above, Kat, why do you think we changed our names? We weren’t wandering about the Continent for our cowardly health, those years after the Rising. Someone knew we had the journal and knew how to find us. Someone was waiting for us in the Count’s study that very night, and he or another chased us all over the Continent, hideaway after hideaway and false name after false name. We were waylaid and robbed, our rooms searched, in Rome Charles was kidnapped and questioned by someone whose face he never saw—and the only thing that saved us then was we’d managed to get rid of the part of the journal that mattered, so he honestly could not tell where it was. I assumed our enemies were Imperials, though how the hell they kept finding us I could never tell. I know I didn’t betray us, and I’m certain—” Palmer stopped, and swallowed. “I am almost certain that Charles did not either. Nor could it have been Hull —not on purpose—though I suppose perhaps accidentally, he or Sheffield—The persecution didn’t stop after the Rising failed; it worsened, in fact; but I could endure that, because we genuinely did not have the notes. We could handle ourselves, Charles and I, and I would have far rather borne the target on my own back than know it painted on someone less capable at home.” Palmer sighed and downed the brandy in a swallow. “You protect your own family as long as you can,” he said, almost to himself. “Then your responsibility is to the men and women under your command. And then later, under your successor’s command.”
Katarina rubbed her hands over her eyes again. “God forbid you let your successor or the men and women working for him choose their own risks.”
“I do not want any idealistic children taking the axe-blow that’s coming for me.”
“Mr. Carter—” Katarina stopped, and looked up at him with a half-smile. “I won’t be able to stop calling you that, you know.”
“It’s all right,” Palmer said, also smiling a little. “It’s been so long—I won’t be able to stop thinking of myself that way, either.”
“Your service to your country—staying on the Continent to make yourself a target—it humbles me, sir. But that was then. There’s no axe-blow coming for you now. Let Kent send you someone to help nurse Mr. West.”
Palmer turned the empty snifter between his hands. “Are you unwilling to consider the idea that Charles might have been telling the truth? That he might not have started this fire?”
Katarina sighed. “I don’t find it very likely.”
“Then you are not considering all the possibilities, young woman. He says it was not his hand. And if it was not his hand, it was someone else’s. Trying to smoke us out? Trying to burn my memorabilia? Trying to prevent me telling Will and his friends what they need to know?”
“How could anyone know what you were saying to Will and his friends?” Katarina’s voice was the picture of reason.
“The same way they knew to find us in Amsterdam.”
“Mr. Carter—”
Palmer slammed the glass down on the table again, so hard it splintered and shattered. Katarina was there at once, pulling the old man’s hand away from the glass, grabbing for a cloth to sweep the debris away.
The kitchen was silent for several heartbeats, save for the ticking of the clock.
“All right,” Katarina said then, quietly. “You are correct, sir. There is a chance Mr. West’s hand did not knock over the candle. Therefore you should let Frederick Kent send you guards. Some of his people do as well looking after themselves now as Captain Palmer and Mr. Wilton did once upon a time on the Continent. If there is some enemy attempting to burn down your house, we would like to catch them.” She made it sound nothing but reasonable, but William could see the tactic for what it was—giving Palmer a way to agree to a nurse without sacrificing his pride. “We can discuss that further tomorrow,” Katarina continued. “For now, Emil and I could trade watch until morning. It’s not so long until dawn. Could you sleep if we were on watch?”
“You’re a good girl,” Palmer said again. He sighed. “I still think of you as a girl, but you’re a woman grown, aren’t you? I still think of Frederick as a boy, but he controls a web in London and beyond, a larger force than I ever commanded. He’s younger than I was in Provence, but he’s no boy, and you’re no child either. All right.” He levered himself slowly upright, looking every day of his age and more. “I’ll leave you the night watch and sleep. We’ll talk about setting traps to catch miscreants in the morning.”
Katarina rose with him. “As you say, sir. I’ll give you an arm up the stairs. There we are, that’s right.”
“I can help,” William said once Katarina and Schwieger had returned to the kitchen. “I could stand one of the watches, if you—”
But Katarina shook her head. “There’s no need,” she said. She looked herself older by years than she had that evening, but she spoke without hesitation. “We’re only indulging our old friend so he can sleep. You and Elizabeth ought to go and sleep as well—you’re both hurt, and there’s more work to be done tomorrow.” She spoke as if Maxwell were not sitting there beside them; but then, William thought, Maxwell was hardly drawing any positive attention to himself. The two glasses of brandy seemed to weigh him down, drowning any words before they got near his lips.
William stretched himself out on his pallet and tried to ignore the sodden, smoke-choked air pressing against his lungs. It did not seem to bother Maxwell—assisted no doubt by the brandy, he had dropped off quickly enough—but William lay wakeful, listening to Schwieger’s slow tread make its deliberate circuits around the house. It reminded him vaguely of Trevelyan’s loom in the other 1885. Or perhaps the cloth-loom he had seen in Cheshire before this mad adventure had begun. Or a heartbeat. Ka-thunk. Ka-thunk. Rhythmic and measured.
After a time it was replaced by Katarina’s lighter step—a smaller loom, William thought drowsily, one spinning quicker. He settled back into sleep then. It was possible to sleep anywhere, even a house reeking of smoke, even a battlefield reeking of death and gunpowder, as long you knew the footsteps you heard belonged to a trusted sentry. And he did trust Katarina—more than he trusted Kent or Schwieger, if it came to it. He trusted Kent only because Katarina did and Maxwell did and Chris Palmer did, only because logic suggested him trustworthy. He trusted Schwieger only because he was one of Kent’s company. Only in theory, as it were.
Katarina, he trusted in fact. Because he had shared a battlefield with her before, in the other 1885. Because he had twice seen her plunge into danger without an instant’s hesitation, once to save a child and once to grasp a rail-gun. Because she had given him her trust, showing him how to affect her 1885 even knowing he might choose to work against her interests. For giving him the opportunity to do something, for teaching him a way of moving the world that did not require his ruined arm, he owed her anything she cared to claim of him. Trust was the least he could give her.
He dreamed that they walked home together from Murchinson’s, as they had once done in fact. His dreaming mind was vaguely aware that the 1885 around him ought not to feel so real, but he could not remember why. He gave up trying after a moment, and his skin settled into the feel of thick textured fog and watching construct eyes. The damp, smoke-saturated air tickled the back of his throat. Far away in the fog, sentry footsteps walked a beat measured by Trevelyan’s loom.
Sometimes the beat faltered, and he knew that was because of the sand Katarina had thrown in the gears. A handful of dust could bring the whole world crashing to a halt eventually, as effectively as a bullet through the shoulder, though not as efficiently. The problem was the need to exist after the destruction. What did one do after?
He asked her diffidently, aware it was no business of his, what plans she might have for after the war. He expected her to say something about Gavin Trevelyan. She told him about her mother the opera singer instead. Her mother had sung at La Scala, and Katarina would like nothing better than to follow in her footsteps. Perhaps it was not too late for her to learn, she said. Perhaps the smoke of London had not irretrievably ruined her throat.
It had been a long day’s work, what with dodging artillery in the alleyway and climbing the cliffsides of Orkney, and William felt his jawbones cracking with stifled yawns. It was terribly discourteous, of course, but he simply could not help it. At least Katarina did not seem offended. “There’s plenty of time before it rains,” she said to him, amusement running through her throaty low voice. “You’d better get some rest. Can’t soldiers sleep anywhere?” The cottage smelled like wet wood and burnt cloth, but he stretched out on the pallet anyway.
In his dream, she came back after a time to check that he and the others slept soundly. Like a nursery-maid looking in on her charges, she stood just inside the door, hands on her hips. Her head blotted out the pearly light that came through the windowpane. The light reappeared as she stooped and fumbled with the shadows at William’s side, vanishing again when she straightened. She turned for the doorway, and in her hand gleamed a captured star on a chain.
William lay for a confused moment before realizing he was awake. Katarina’s dark figure vanished through the doorway. Her quick soft steps retreated down the hall. A moment later, the front door opened and shut.
What had that been in her hand?
William understood it all in a single sickened flash. He rolled out of the bed silently. scattering coat and waistcoat, and sprinted after Katarina on soundless stockinged feet. He ran past the room where Elizabeth slept, past the staircase, past the ruined and blackened sitting room, and out the front door. Katarina was halfway across the front lawn, her bare head gleaming like polished ebony in the gray pre-dawn light.
“Katherine?”
He could not have said at that moment what instinct prompted him to call in a whisper. Later, he realized that it was because the situation was salvageable, because no irrevocable step had yet been taken—just a single moment of poor judgment, and surely she was owed a chance to repent of poor judgment; wouldn’t he hope for the same himself? If he raised the alarm, her comrades-in-arms asleep inside the cottage would never trust her again. And that would be too high a price to pay for a moment’s impulse, not when he might persuade her to turn and come back to them.
She whirled at her name, and William froze as light glinted off the tiny pistol she held between them.
The pocket watch dangled from her other hand.
“Don’t come any closer,” she warned, in a low voice that nevertheless carried clear. “Don’t shout for them, or I’ll shoot.”
Deprived of his voice, he had no weapon at all. He had no firearm of his own, couldn’t have shot with it left-handed even if he had owned one. If she was as good a shot as her counterpart had been, he could not take her in a rush; she would fell him before he crossed a quarter of the space between them. Even if she missed, she was an athletic young woman nearly as tall as he and had full use of both her hands and no burn on her arm, and he knew where he’d place his wager in that contest. He faced her in the moonlight, not daring to move or shout, as completely unarmed as he had been in Murchinson’s, in a contest he must not lose and with no lever long enough to move this world.
For a moment his heart beat in his throat, and it was harder to draw a breath than it had been inside the smoke-choked house. Then William forced the breath into his lungs and set his feet. He didn’t have to move the world. He needed only to move one angry woman who held his pocket watch hostage, and surely he could do that. They had shared battlefield danger and a conversation about the future on the way home from the match factory. Surely he knew her well enough to choose words that would move her.
“Katherine,” he said. “Katarina. You don’t want to do this.”
“You do not know one damned thing about what I want or don’t,” she said.
“That’s where you’re wrong, as it happens,” he said reasonably. “I had the honor of getting you know you quite well, in a different 1885. I imagine there are some differences between you and that other Katarina, but all the important qualities appear to be the same.” She looked at him with scorn, but she did not forbid him to speak, so he kept going. “I know you wouldn’t leave an injured man on a battlefield. I know you wouldn’t abandon a mistreated child. I know you’d turn back to save both, because I saw you do it. I know you fight only the battles you believe must be fought. True, you’ll use any weapon that comes to hand and any means you must to ensure your victory—” She clothed herself as a man when that was the shortest path over the ground she wished to cross; she dressed as a woman and dazzled men with her beauty when she needed to distract their eyes from something else; she had primed Elizabeth like a pistol and turned her loose to change history. She had even made a weapon out of a one-armed veteran once, when no other options had been open to her. “—but you’re a soldier for your country, no mercenary for hire. You are ruthless in your means, but only in service of a greater cause. So I know you would not steal my only way home if you did not believe it necessary. I therefore believe your tactical assessment, not your motives, to be in error.” She was still listening. The length of his speech had settled her feet into the ground, and he did not think she would sprint away from him now, so he took another breath and nodded to the pocket watch in her hand. “Why?” He had been thinking desperately all the time he spoke, and only one theory seemed even vaguely probable. “Because Gavin Trevelyan does not want us to change the past?”
“Yes,” Katarina said. “That, exactly.”
“And he…convinced you of his position?” William tried to read her expression in the uncertain light. “Or—no, he did not convince you. But you’ll take him our watch anyhow—why? Because you love him?”
At that she froze. He might have succeeded in rushing her if he had seized that moment. He did not think to seize it. After a long silence, she parted her lips with an apparent effort and said, “How did you know?”
“You told me,” William said. “In that other London.”
The pistol wavered for one moment in her hand. Then she firmed her grip. “Do you mean to say…there is a universe in which it is…other than unrequited?”
“No,” William said after a moment’s pause, and did not feel he told a lie. “It was always unrequited. He was always married. You told me that, too, in the other London. You said—you said that she was dead, but he was still married. That he wore her ring on a chain around his neck, and he might as well wear it on his finger.”
“I said that? It sounds as though I was a wise woman.”
That was mockery in her voice, not bitterness. William relaxed fractionally. “You were,” he said. “You are. Wise and brave both. I know it racks your soul to leave a comrade on the battlefield, but Madam Katherine, do you really wish to prevent us from mending all this, just for the sake of one woman’s life?” He knew as he said it that he was taking a terrible risk. She had, after all, been willing to risk as much at Murchinson’s for the sake of one child’s life—
“Of course I don’t want to prevent you!” Katarina snapped. “Did you think I stole this to drop it at Gavin’s feet in hopes of his approval?”
William was silent. He had thought so. He recalculated as quickly as possible. “If not that, then why? If you want us to change the past—That is exactly what we seek to do. If we are fighting on the same side, why would you take our watch and prevent our changes?”
“Because you won’t do it,” she said fiercely. “You’re already starting to fall in love with these people, already starting to see the threads of their lives as something sacred and not to be broken. Elizabeth is wavering in her certainty already. So you’ll get back to London, and Trevelyan will talk you out of it, or trick you out of it, or sneak upon you in the night and destroy this.” She brandished the watch. “He won’t allow it, don’t you understand? Brenda was dead in the other universe. If I can work that out, so can he, and he won’t allow anything that will put her in danger. He’d set this whole world on fire—allow the French occupation to stand!—rather than see her come to harm. I don’t hate her,” she added, in response to what William knew was on his face. “I don’t wish her ill. Even if she were gone, he’d never see me for the shadow she cast, so what does it matter? I quite like her, truly. But she’s not worth more than this whole world, and he’ll never see the larger picture for looking at her. He’ll convince you or he’ll trick you, but Gavin Trevelyan won’t let you do what you came here to do.”
“I won’t let Gavin Trevelyan stop me.” William took a step forward, hand out for the watch, but Katarina got the pistol between them. “You can trust me to do this,” he protested. “You did trust me once. We rescued a child from Murchinson’s together. You can trust me to do this now.” She shook her head. “Katherine, listen to me. You have not made an irrevocable choice yet. Give me back my watch, and I’ll never say a word. But if you take it and leave now, you will set fire to your entire life—all your lives, all the possibilities, all the things you might do once this mess is mended. You know that. There is no reason for you to set your life on fire, not when Maxwell and Elizabeth and I can do what must be done.” She shook her head again. “This is wanton destruction,” he said. “It is not necessary. You need not sacrifice La Scala to this.”
Her stillness this time was not frozen. “Freeze” had a connotation of sharp edges. This stillness was deeper, softer, more profound. Something belonging to a small woodland creature. “I told you about La Scala.”
“You did. You said your mother sang there.”
Katarina breathed a laugh. “Not in this world. No opera would employ an Englishwoman. She was a music hall girl.”
“How did she meet a Russian nobleman, then?”
“And I told you that, too. We must have been friends.” Katarina shook her head. “She said he was Russian; she said they were married, and both halves of that are errant nonsense, though I believed it when I was a child. Mostly people think he must have been a French soldier.”
“Your name was Rasmirovna in the other London,” William said, “when the French were nowhere near your mother. You looked then as you look now. So I think he must have truly been Russian. And I know she sang at La Scala then, and your voice is like hers, so you could sing there as well if you wanted to.”
There was a pause—a tempted one, William thought—but then Katarina said, “It doesn’t matter. If the French did not rule this island and an Englishwoman could sing at La Scala, I might want to sing at La Scala. If the French did not rule this island and Gavin Trevelyan were free, I might want him. But the French rule this island. That’s all that matters to me. Gavin will not let you change this timeline. And he knows me too well; he knows what I’ll try. I won’t have another chance. I can’t let this one go. I’m sorry, Mr. Carrington.”
Nothing for it, then. William opened his mouth to say the one thing that would definitely change her mind.
A pistol shot cracked through the night behind him, and William’s battlefield reflexes hurled him to the ground. He saw Katarina fire one round back, then turn and sprint. William scrambled desperately to his feet as Emil Schwieger pounded past him.
Schwieger held a pistol in an outstretched hand, and was already lining up for another shot. He got off a second round, thankfully missing for a second time, before William barreled into his knees from behind and took him down. “No,” William gasped through the tangle of arms and legs and a knee to his abdomen, “no, don’t, don’t!” He clawed at Schwieger’s pistol with his one good hand, hissing at the pressure to his burned forearm.
“You are mad, Carrington!” Schwieger bit out. “You cannot let her depart with your pocket watch!”
“Let her go, it doesn’t matter, it’s the broken one!” William managed. The windows of the cottage behind him were lighting one after the other, any hope of smoothing this over destroyed with the gunshots. Schwieger stopped struggling, looking puzzled. “We have two,” William explained around the pain in his gut, “one broken and one whole. She took the broken one!”
Schwieger stared at him in bewilderment. “Then why did you try to coax her back inside?”
“I wanted to give her a chance to change her mind,” William said, looking into the darkness that had swallowed her. “Everyone should have a second chance. She gave me one, once.”
Too late now. If he’d had both his hands, he would have been hard-pressed not to fasten them around the young Prussian’s throat. He scrambled to his feet instead and hobbled off at what speed he could manage in the direction Katarina had vanished.
But she had too great a head start, and they did not catch her. For a time her footprints in the smooth mud led them onward, but once the mud turned to meadow it became impossible to track her further. William followed the lonely trail of female boot-prints back to Palmer’s house, heart heavier each moment.
l
The hardest part was going inside to tell the others. Elizabeth pressed one bandaged hand over her mouth, eyes filling with tears, and Maxwell sat down suddenly, as though it was he who had gotten a Prussian kick to the gut. Palmer turned so white William fumbled for the brandy again, and Schwieger hastened to take it from his clumsy left hand.
“And you,” William said to him, glad to have someone on whom to turn his fury, “what the devil is wrong with you? Firing shots at your comrade—”
“My comrade appeared to have lost her mind, as far as I could tell,” Schwieger snapped back. He sloshed some of the brandy into a glass, and this time Palmer choked down a dose without comment. “I heard some of what she said to you. She was about to hurl herself into the void with the only means we have of changing history—stranding you here—with no considered plan! I meant to injure her, not kill her. I could not know you had two pocket watches and one does not function—”
“You what?” Palmer managed.
“It did not seem important to mention before,” William said. “I’m sorry, Chris, I wasn’t hiding it, I only...It didn’t seem to matter.” Since the inadvertent secret-keeping might have just saved them all and any hope of correcting their hideous mistake, he could not find it in his heart to regret it. He tried to force himself to think. “So she’ll try it, and it won’t work—and then what? Will she come back? Or will she think she’s burnt her boats and—”
“Where did she mean to go?” Maxwell interrupted, running his hands through his white hair. His eyes were bloodshot and it looked as though his head pained him after his indulgence a few hours earlier. Good, William thought spitefully. “There are only three journals unburnt, and all three of them still here—unless she made her plan before the fire—”
“I—have to check something,” Palmer said suddenly, and struggled out of his chair. “Stay here. Wait for me.”
He hobbled his way down the corridor. None of them stayed behind and waited—all followed, though they tried to make the distance respectful. Palmer opened the front door to reveal pink sky, and stepped in the garden. He walked over to the sundial and bent down to peer at its brick base. Then he clutched the top with both hands to keep from falling.
Schwieger and Maxwell between them carried him inside, pushing him to sit on the bottommost stair. William knelt in front of him. Christopher had his right hand pressed to his chest, and his breath came in hard gasps. “The journal,” he whispered. “She took—”
“Don’t try to talk,” William soothed him. “Schwieger, we need a physician. An apothecary, something. Do you know the—no, you’ve never been up here before. Wake up Janet and get her to—”
“No,” Palmer gasped. “No, I’m fine, don’t send for anyone, no. The journal. Frankenstein’s—”
“No, no, sir, it’s here,” Maxwell reassured him, and seemed about to go and fetch it.
“No,” Palmer said again. “The rest of it. Hidden.”
William understood with a jolt. “The part you said was no longer in your possession.”
“Yes. Lied. No one knew—except Charles. Sundial.” Palmer closed his eyes. “Sent it home without us, like I said. Let them chase us—around the Continent. Keep it safe. Came home, and—no one could make use of it—had to be hidden somewhere. Safe enough here. Shaken them off by then. Or so we thought. Behind the third brick.”
“Plain sight,” Elizabeth murmured.
“So the fire,” Maxwell said. “She set the—no, I can’t believe that!”
“Think I want to?” Palmer opened anguished eyes. “My granddaughter. Might as well be my...But she knows. Knows the trick. Charles used it. Charles taught her. Set a fire. Then you know—where the treasures are. Funny Charles should fall for it. After all this time.” He leaned back against the wall. “Almost funny. For the rest—it’s like her. She couldn’t trust you to do it. And it had to be done. Very like her.”
“Or that foe you mentioned earlier used the same ploy,” William said. He wanted it to be that. If it were that, he had not read her wrong, he need not discount as worthless all of his newly won skill in reading people, he was not a fool for trusting her—
“Yes.” Palmer looked paler than some corpses William had seen. His eyes slid closed again. “Or that.”
“We must know which it was,” Schwieger said. He looked, if anything, more shaken than Palmer, but he spoke bravely. “She has a pocket watch that will not work—very well. She may also have instructions for creating monsters, not much use to her without a trained scientist—perhaps she will use them to buy her way back into Kent’s good graces?—only dangerous to us if the Imperials lay hands on them. Again, very well, but only if she has them. If she does not have them, your enemy does.” Schwieger clenched his hands into fists. “We must know which. We must look for her again, and if we cannot find her, we must return to London today so Kent can be told.”
“First we need a physician,” William repeated, his fingers on Palmer’s uncertain pulse. “Send Janet for one, before you do anything else.”
“Quietly,” Palmer murmured without opening his eyes. “Don’t worry Charles.”
“No,” William agreed through a thickened throat. “I won’t worry him.”
Palmer’s eyes slitted open at that. “Got too old to fight,” he said. “Had to hand it off to the young lads...Will, I can’t—can’t—see to this. You have to—have to—”
William tightened his grip on the frail hand. “I promise,” he said.