London, September 1, 1885
Kent’s face went white. “I’ll have her hide for a drum skin.”
Schwieger flinched, but did not say anything. His report given, he fixed his eyes on the wall over Kent’s shoulder and schooled his face to blankness. William wore a similar expression, Elizabeth noted, and concluded it must be a military trick, a means of fading into the background to escape an angry commander’s notice. She glanced at Maxwell to see if he too was employing the technique, but found herself unable to be certain. His face was dull and expressionless, to be sure, but he had not deliberately adopted the self-effacing look in response to Kent’s anger. He had looked like that for two days now, for the entirety of their journey back to London.
In any case, Kent scarcely seemed to be seeing any of the four of them. He turned away, shaking his head, taking abbreviated steps as though the ruin of their plans were a physical thing that blocked his path. He put a hand out toward one of the straight-backed chairs, seeking support.
But as soon as the wood brushed his fingers, he pushed away from it, using the chair to launch himself into a stride that made short work of the distance to the far wall. “She’s been upset for some time,” he muttered, “frustrated at how slowly I move—this has been brewing. But I never thought I had cause to actually worry. How could she think she had to do this herself? How could she not trust me?”
“I don’t think she mistrusted you,” Elizabeth ventured. Kent looked back at her.“I think she mistrusted us. And, ah, and Gavin Trevelyan.”
“Yes.” Kent had stopped behind the wing chair. He drummed his fingers against the back of it. “Is it true, what she inferred? Concerning Brenda?”
“Mrs. Trevelyan was dead in the other universe,” Elizabeth admitted. She had been reluctant to speak these words aloud before, but it seemed a greater risk to keep silent now. “But she was killed by a Wellington monster during a mine uprising. If, in a third universe, the monsters were not present, there’s no reason to think she would be in danger. It’s—it’s—a risk, not a certainty. And another universe holds the same risk for any of you, for everyone everywhere. Would Gavin Trevelyan truly—?”
“Yes,” Kent said flatly. “I agree with Katarina’s assessment thus far. He loves her…beyond reason. I had the opportunity to observe for myself what he would do to ensure her safety. Leaving comrades on the front line was the least of it.” William moved slightly, and Kent turned his full piercing attention to William’s face. “You wish to make a comment about the discipline of my organization, Mr. Carrington?”
“I wasn’t planning to comment on it, no,” William said mildly.
“This is not the Royal Army as you remember it,” Kent told him. “Not even the guerrilla army Carter commanded. It’s a patchwork quilt, not a woven braid, and I cannot choose my materials. I make the best use I can of the ones to hand. I forgave Gavin Trevelyan’s desertion last year because I needed his talents.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “I need them still. Thank whatever God may be he’s not here. We have a chance of smoothing this over.”
Elizabeth seized on the one statement that seemed tangible. “Where has he gone?”
“He and Brenda were called away on personal business. More precisely, Brenda was, and Trevelyan would not permit her to travel without his protection.” The would not permit jangled oddly against Elizabeth’s ears—oddly, for she knew full well that barely a week ago, such a statement would have seemed nothing but reasonable. Well, no doubt it seemed reasonable to Brenda still. Brenda had never traveled by pocket watch. “They are due to return the day after tomorrow,” Kent continued, “not an instant too soon, as certain Russian gentlemen of means are due to call upon us two days after that, and the prototype construct must be in a fit state to present to them when they arrive. We’ll never have a real chance of throwing out the French without Russian support, nor a real chance of winning Russian support without something like a construct to catch the Bear’s eye. This entire plan is a sequence of tiles, one poised to strike the next as it falls, each balanced as though on the point of a knife, and more than half of them needing Trevelyan’s hand to personally push them over. And Katarina knew all that,” he added with another flare of anger. “By God, I’ll have her hide! A fire—” He started pacing again, jerky and unsteady steps. “I would never have believed it of her. Putting that whole household in danger—putting two old men and their housekeeper in danger—men she’s known since her childhood—how could she?”
“We don’t know for certain that part was hers,” William reiterated. He had said that before, was clinging to it stubbornly. Elizabeth knew why. She didn’t want to believe it of Katarina either. “Wilton said he did have a candle,” William went on. “Palmer said they had enemies.”
“You think it was her, though?” Kent looked at Schwieger.
“I—sir, I could not say.” Schwieger stammered a little. “We returned here at once because I cannot know for certain.”
“And because you knew I could find her.” Kent smiled without humor. “I am very good at finding people. Yes.” He frowned off into the middle distance, thinking about it. “She has a broken pocket watch, her pistol, and the money in her pockets. Is that all? Did she have anything else, Mr. Carrington?”
“She wore a—a cloak of some sort,” William said. “Chris Palmer seemed to think the journal could be hidden inside it.”
“I know which cloak,” Kent said. “More can be concealed in the lining than you’d think, but still not enough to start a life anew. She didn’t take anything else from the house? Not that they have much valuable…”
“She did not,” William confirmed. “Palmer and Janet both said nothing was missing, not even loose coins.”
“Then she hasn’t money enough to get far. Not to Paris—or Petrograd—nowhere by dirigible even if she had the funds, not when she was dressed as Katarina Rasmirovna instead of Colin Ramsey. She could earn her way, of course—” Kent grimaced. “But not so easily in the back of beyond. She did have the railway ticket…I wonder…”
Elizabeth could see the gears moving behind his eyes. He had focused upon the one problem like a hawk’s eye fastening upon a songbird’s flight, and she thought she knew why. The other problems for which he had assumed responsibility were personal and painful or large and fluid, would sting like nettles or slip like water from one’s grasp: the balance between Trevelyan and the time travelers, the need to slip a nurse in under Palmer’s guard, the sands of time running out for Wilton. Not to mention the impossibility of aiming time travelers without the directions burnt to a crisp in the Yorkshire trunk. But finding Katarina—that was a small, solid, tangible thing. Not easy, perhaps, but graspable. It must be a relief to focus on it.
Elizabeth wished she had something comparable to which she might give her attention. But there were only three journals left from Captain Palmer’s lost treasure horde, none of them having anything to do with Dover, two indeed more memoir than daily account and the last covering only Viktor Frankenstein’s unhelpful early life and resuming to record his last days in Orkney. She did not see how she could use them to mend the disaster of Waterloo or anything following shortly from it.
In the place of that problem, what was there to focus upon? Maxwell? His silent defeat was a puzzle of sorts, but not one she knew how to solve. She had banished the exhausted desire to weep for the duration of this interview with Kent, but she felt it creeping back up her throat now.
“Emil,” Kent said, “I think we had better start with basic reconnaissance. Do yourself up as a beggar and go for a wander through the music hall district. I’ll summon some of the others to do the same.”
Schwieger looked startled. “Do you think she’s in London, sir?”
“I think it’s easier for a woman to earn money in London than in Yorkshire, and I think she had a third-class ticket that would have brought her here.” Kent’s expression was not really a smile. “I think we ought to search here first before venturing farther afield.”
“And you want me to go?” Schwieger said. “No disguise of mine will fool Katarina.”
“You don’t need to fool Katarina,” Kent said patiently. “You only need to fool those who might have seen her, and that you can do easily enough. So long as you remember to change your boots for the old patched ones this time,” he added, voice going rather caustic. “And leave your watch and pocket handkerchief at home. Now, about you three—” He turned from Schwieger to face the time travelers. “I had best find you another place to stay before Trevelyan returns. That will take a day or so to arrange, but I have a day or so to arrange it.”
“You’ll protect us and our pocket watch from him?” William’s tone was studiously neutral. “I thought you just said you needed him.”
Kent met his eyes. “I do need him—and his constructs—but I need you and your pocket watch as well. I am attempting to balance on more than one knife’s edge. I would understand if you did not trust me,” he added, “all things considered. If you wish to take additional precautions, I would not fault your caution or be affronted; but I do most strongly advise you stay here under my protection while you take them.” He twitched a rueful smile. “I think we may agree that it is contrary to both your interests and mine to see that timepiece of yours fall into French hands.”
William looked to Maxwell—who did not respond, either with words or with a change of expression—and then to Elizabeth. “Our additional precaution might take the form of standing watches,” he suggested. “If one of us were always awake with the timepiece upon his or her person, it would be much more difficult for someone like Katarina to make off with it unawares.”
“But surely you do not consider that necessary while in the warehouse?” Schwieger protested. It seemed that he was affronted at the insinuation, even if Kent was not.
“I consider it prudent,” William said mildly.
“And I consider it understandable,” Kent cut off whatever else Schwieger might have said. “Whatever they need do to feel themselves secure, Emil. Now go off about your business, will you?” Still frowning, Schwieger turned for the door.
William touched the back of Elizabeth’s bandaged right hand. “I’ll take the first watch. Why don’t you go and sleep awhile?”
“I—” As soon as she allowed herself to entertain the idea, it was all she could do to keep her eyes open. “Yes—yes, all right. Thank you.”
“Sir?” William prompted Maxwell as Elizabeth turned for the stairs. “You ought to rest as well.”
The pause that followed was long enough for Elizabeth to make her way up half the stairway. She had nearly come to the conclusion that Maxwell would make no response—he had said so little over the past two days, after all, and nothing at all for hours—when the older man cleared his throat and muttered something about needing a drink first. She almost turned back to dissuade Kent from showing him where the spirits were kept, then decided she was too weary for the argument.
l
Elizabeth went to bed, Schwieger went off to commence his reconnaissance, and Kent likewise disappeared into the night to conscript other scouts. Maxwell established himself at the dining table with the brandy bottle and a most unwelcoming set to his shoulders. William watched the older man for a moment or so, then helped himself to a candle, and took it and Viktor Frankenstein’s journal over to Brenda Trevelyan’s wing chair. He sat down, pocket watch nestled securely between his body and the arm of the chair, and began to read.
Frankenstein’s French was extravagantly overwrought, and his handwriting extravagantly ornate, but even so they commanded only a portion of William’s attention. All the time he was reading, he was intensely aware of Maxwell slumped at the table an arms-length away. One might have fancied the older man turned to stone, were it not for the regular lifting of the glass to his lips. The look of defeat lining his face had first settled there back at Palmer’s cottage the previous morning, as the four of them dressed for the masquerade that would take them back to London, and it had not lifted since.
They had taken the train, traveling third class, Schwieger and William and Elizabeth in the guise of poor country folk headed for the city in search of work. In a third class compartment, it was Schwieger’s accent and appearance that posed the danger, but he managed by keeping a cap over his tow-blond head and keeping his mouth shut, nudging William whenever something must be done. William might have enjoyed the reversal of roles under other circumstances, but as it was, he was too preoccupied with thoughts of Katarina. And with thoughts of Christopher Palmer, taken to his bed but still bravely claiming the illness that caused the pains in his chest was a slight one, nothing that Charles should be worried over. And with thoughts of Maxwell, who looked like a trapped animal exhausted by struggling, giving itself up for lost. Dressed in marginally better clothing than the rest of them, Maxwell was intended to pose as a servant sent ahead with his master’s belongings, thereby explaining the trunk in which their fancy dirigible outfits were packed—but he was so bowed down with misery that he succeeded mostly in giving the impression of a very stupid servant indeed, one who could not keep his mind on anything and spent long hours staring dully out of the window.
l
Now Maxwell regarded the brandy bottle with the same dull expression. It was an expression William knew; he had felt it often enough upon his own face, back in the days after the Peninsula. It was the look of a man who needed a rope thrown to him.
Unfortunately, William was not at all assured of his ability to use words to craft such a rope. Three days ago, he might have fancied himself becoming rather good at that sort of thing, but now the disastrous failure with Katarina dragged against the back of his mind. Perhaps he was not so skilled at using words to move others as he needed to be. Perhaps the wrong words would be worse than no words at all. But surely sitting in the same room as Maxwell was better than doing nothing; so he sat, reading through Frankenstein’s journal with half his attention, considering and discarding one conversational opening after another.
The one he finally chose was nothing he could have predicted. He read the paragraph under his moving finger three times before finally deciding it implied what he thought it did—and then he realized he had a means of beginning a most interesting discussion indeed. He deliberated one moment more, watching Maxwell out of the corner of his eye. Then he exhaled an amused, “Ha!” and waited to see if it would have an effect.
Maxwell’s brown eyes lifted incuriously from the bottle.
“I think I’ve found you,” William said.
Maxwell raised his eyebrows, but did not offer any verbal comment.
“In the Genevese’s journal,” William went doggedly on. He got up and went to join Maxwell at the table, a thumb between the notebook leaves to keep his place. Maxwell’s eyes tracked the reddish-brown leather with a little more interest. William set the journal down on the table before drawing back the chair that faced Maxwell’s. “You said you had tried to stop him—you tried to redirect his youthful studies—and I have just read of a mysterious stranger doing precisely that. Now where was it—ah, yes, here.” He found the paragraph once more and read,
On this occasion a man of great research in natural philosophy was with us, and…all that he said threw greatly into the shade Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus, the lords of my imagination…All that had so long engaged my attention suddenly grew despicable. By one of those caprices of the mind, which we are perhaps most subject to in early youth, I at once gave up my former occupations; set down natural history and all its progeny as a deformed and abortive creation; and entertained the greatest disdain for a would-be science, which could never even step within the threshold of real knowledge. In this mood of mind I betook myself to the mathematics, and the branches of study appertaining to that science, as being built upon secure foundations, and so worthy of my consideration. Thus strangely are our souls constructed, and by such slight ligaments are we bound to prosperity or ruin. When I look back, it seems to me as if this almost miraculous change in inclination and will was the immediate suggestion of the guardian angel of my life—the last effort made by the spirit of preservation to avert the storm that was even then hanging in the stars and ready to envelope me…It was a strong effort of the spirit of good, but it was ineffectual.
William looked up from the page to find Maxwell watching with some alertness now. He prodded, “That was you, sir, was it not?”
“That was I,” Maxwell agreed, in a voice somewhat gravelly with disuse. He lifted one corner of his mouth in a humorless smile. “Ineffectual. As usual.”
It was a response. It was something. It gave him something to argue with. “I wouldn’t say that,” William protested. “You changed his mind for a time.”
“Ineffectually,” Maxwell said. “Equally ineffectual were my attempt to remove books from his purview and my attempt to distract him from his Orkney pilgrimage by inviting him to stay with me in Scotland. Not to mention my attempt to lure Brenda Trevelyan from the Wellingtons’ path. And my attempt to drive the first monster away from capture by British regulars. And my attempt to change the monster war in 1852.” He tipped the brandy bottle vertically over the snifter, and the last thin trickle of amber ran from beveled glass mouth to the chipped glass bowl. “One spectacular disaster after another.”
“No,” William said sturdily. “One failed attempt after another, perhaps, but none were disasters until Waterloo. You needed our help for that.”
Maxwell snorted something between surprise and agreement. There might have been a tinge of amusement to it as well. It was something, William thought again. A crack in the façade. He cast about for an instrument to use in wedging the crack wider open.
“The coincidence of the names is curious, don’t you think?”
Maxwell eyed him without comprehension over the rim of the snifter.
“His young brother William,” William clarified, “and his betrothed Elizabeth. He goes on at some length about them both. They were paragons of perfection, it would appear, Elizabeth in particular.” He flipped back a few pages.
Her hair was the brightest living gold…a crown of distinction upon her head. Her brow was clear and ample, her blue eyes cloudless, and her lips and the molding of her face so expressive of sensibility and sweetness, that none could behold her without looking on her as of a distinct species, a being heaven-sent, and bearing a celestial stamp to all her features.
William glanced up, trying to invite the older man into a smile. “Not much like our Elizabeth.”
“No,” Maxwell said with some emphasis, and tossed down a swallow. After a pause, he added, “But his Elizabeth wasn’t…exactly like that either. I met her, and she was a sweet girl, but not…” He hesitated, then gave up his search for a word and waved a hand at the crabbed writing. “I suppose,” he added, “no one ever is what they seem to be in the pages of a journal. I never thought about it that way before.”
William gave it a moment, but Maxwell did not elaborate, so William nudged the conversation forward with another question. “Do you know what became of them? Of Viktor’s sweetheart and brother?”
“If you read far enough,” Maxwell said, “you’ll find out what happened to William. You’re not very far in, are you?”
“It’s slow going,” William defended himself. “The man has the most overwrought style of prose I’ve ever had to pick through.”
Maxwell did not smile. “The child William was the first one to be killed by Viktor’s monster. I don’t know what happened to Elizabeth. The monster killed Frankenstein once he had what he wanted, but I can’t imagine he would have cared about the girl. Perhaps she married someone else.”
“I’d have thought you’d say, ‘Perhaps she took the veil.’ Her ‘saintly soul shining like a shrine-dedicated lamp’ in the Frankensteins’ peaceful home, and all.”
“She really wasn’t like that.” Maxwell peered down into his glass. “Not so—exaggerated, not so perfect, as Viktor’s writings would have you believe. Journals…journals lie.”
There it was again, that faint note of surprised discovery. William studied the older man. “Do they?”
“Well,” Maxwell said, “look at our Elizabeth. They’re correct as to facts, I suppose—golden hair, brown curls, that sort of thing—and the instructions for using the pocket watch were all exact.” He lifted the glass toward William as if in acknowledgement. “But for the rest, journals lie. No one truly is the way they tell their own story.”
William felt as though he had swallowed ice. Maxwell, once more contemplating the empty bottle, seemed unaware of what he had said—or almost said. William cleared his throat very carefully. “You learned to use your pocket watch from instructions in a journal?”
Maxwell nodded as though it were obvious. “There was no one nearby to teach me.”
William let the breath out, drew another one. “I thought you’d said your parents were time travelers?”
“They were. I received a trunkful of their effects after my aunt’s death—when my cousin inherited her house. His wife came across it while cleaning out the garret. Just after my thirtieth birthday, that was. Among other items of less interest, the trunk held a stack of journals no one had ever bothered to open and a pocket watch—” He waved at William’s waistcoat. “—that obviously no one had ever popped open either. And suddenly…quite a lot made sense that never had before. It was like watching a door swing open. I read through the journals they had kept of their adventures—my father was a methodical man, and it was he who wrote enough about the watch that I could infer how it worked—but my mother wrote only of adventures. Fables, one might have thought, or adventure stories such as boys read, except there was the watch to prove it true. Doors opening in dazzling profusion all around me. I wanted to…do the sort of things they had done.”
William was rationing his breaths so carefully each one hurt. “You knew them only from the journals?”
“They died when I was small.”
“Died?”
“Vanished,” Maxwell said, “actually. My aunt told me they died abroad, but I discovered later there had been more of mystery to it than that.”
“And—and did you solve the mystery, once you had the journals?”
Maxwell shrugged. “I did not arrive at a certain solution, but I was able to make an educated guess. In her last entry, my mother wrote of wanting to see the court of Henry VIII, and, well, it’s easy enough to see what happened in consequence. Or some of what happened in consequence, at least. I’m missing a portion of the story, obviously, for the watch somehow made it back when they did not, but…the court of Henry VIII was one of the first places I tried to go.” He downed the last of the brandy in his glass, and added, “I tried over and over and over again. I can’t make the watch take me there. There is nothing I can do to save her.”
So you’ve spent the rest of your life trying to save everything else, William thought bleakly.
“She was brave,” Maxwell said. “Outspoken. She never shied from meeting head-on what needed to be met—and he was brave too, in a different way; he never gave up until a solution was found. I learned that from their journals, the way they spoke of each other. All I could think, all these years, is that they would have known what to do. No one would ever apply the word ‘ineffectual’ to either of them. Except—” He turned bleary eyes to the leather-bound volume sitting closed in front of William. “—journals lie. No one’s really so perfect, seen close.”
No, William thought, no one is. The Lord Seward of Katarina’s description flawlessly executed every plan, and the Kent I’ve come to know is only just holding it together with a hundred tradeoffs. The man who saved us so spectacularly in an alleyway our first night in London drew Elizabeth’s anger later for, after all, only improvising as he went along. Disillusionment is the order of the day. Journals lie. And you didn’t want Elizabeth to see whose picture was in your locket. Dear God.
He could ask. He could ask right now, and Maxwell, well past too drunk to have control of his tongue, would answer. If he asked, Maxwell would answer.
William moistened dry lips. “How old were you, when they vanished?”
“Just over a year, so I am told.”
God. “This was—what, 1820 or 1821?”
“Autumn 1819.”
So he had truly been born in 1818. Somewhere in the north of England—one might as well assume that was true as well. To a mother who was brave and outspoken and whose child had no memory of her, God have mercy. What was the next question? Whose face is in your locket? How did you know at once we were time travelers? What is your full name? Anything he asked, Maxwell would answer.
At the end of the corridor, at the edge of William’s awareness, a key scraped in the lock of the warehouse’s door. Maxwell looked up, tensing suddenly at the possibility of danger, shaking off the outermost layer of the drunkenness that weighed him down. “It’s all right,” William soothed him, but the moment had broken like a pricked soap bubble. The sound of footsteps followed the sound of the key, and then Kent’s weary, unshaven face poked around the doorway, Schwieger’s equally pale and bristled one hovering at his elbow.
“Any of that left?” Kent asked, nodding toward the bottle.
Maxwell tipped it experimentally, then looked surprised at its lightness. “There doesn’t seem to be.”
Kent did raise his eyebrows at that, but did not pursue the subject of his guest’s ill manners. “I suppose it is not as though I need it to sleep in any case,” he said instead.
“No news?” William ventured.
“None. Except of the negative sort, I suppose. I can tell you a great many places Katarina is not.” Kent sighed. “All well here?”
“All’s—quiet, at least,” William said. He could not bring himself to call it “well,” not even for courtesy’s sake. Not when Katarina might be stirring up Wellington monsters against them even now. Not when the first of Trevelyan’s construct army hunkered malevolently in the laboratory down the corridor. Not with Maxwell’s unintentional confession ringing in his ears. The pocket watch ought to provide a means of making it right, William thought in a rush of despair, but without Palmer’s dossiers to point the way, the past presented itself as a tightly woven tapestry, not a collection of threads that might be tugged free or detangled.
When Maxwell drunkenly insisted it was his turn to look after the pocket watch, William let him take it. Maxwell wasn’t fit to have charge of it, of course, but there was nothing to be gained in pointing that out, and William knew he wouldn’t sleep in any case. He didn’t sleep through Elizabeth’s guard shift either, and then it was his turn again. By the time it was once again Maxwell’s responsibility to guard the watch, the older man was sober (and recovered from his headache), and William could scarcely keep his eyes open. He collapsed into sleep without a second thought.