London, August 29, 1885
There were, William reminded himself, several matters more worrisome and more worthy of his attention than this business of Elizabeth Barton spending the day on Emil Schwieger’s perfectly functional arm. Many matters. Of far greater importance. It was not even as though the pairing represented any stated preference on her part. It was a masquerade, no more.
William was still hard-pressed not to grind his teeth at the thought of it. He had yet to discuss with her the topic of their kiss in the village of Waterloo—they had shared very few moments alone since, and none had seemed quite the time to open the conversation—but right now, he wished he had opened it anyway, suitable opportunity or not. What were she and Schwieger talking about in the sitting room, anyhow? He could hear their voices, but not their words.
He stood in the scullery with Katarina Rasmirovna, once his friend, now a suspicious stranger, submitting with ill grace to her fingers tying his limp right arm up in a sling. A sling at least implied a recent injury; a war wound with no war save rebellions in the immediate past might well draw attention their party didn’t need. He hated how every disguise must work to take the arm into account, and he hated how the sling forced him to wear Emil Schwieger’s second best coat shrugged around his shoulders instead of properly fitted. Nor was he overly pleased at the idea of entrusting his safety and that of his two companions to the plainly hostile Katarina and the unknown Schwieger for the entirety of a journey to Yorkshire. He wanted to grind his teeth at that thought, too.
“—giving them kerosene and matches and setting them playing near a gas-main,” Trevelyan’s voice snapped from the corridor just outside. “What makes you think you’ll prefer whatever universe they create next? What makes you think this one isn’t preferable to the last?”
“We’re through with this argument,” Kent’s voice responded. “You had your say last night. Now I’ve given my orders.”
“Damn it, I have a family to protect—” Trevelyan said.
The voices passed on, and William looked up to see that Katarina’s attention was fixed in the direction of the corridor, as his had been. It must be as uncommon here as in the other London for Trevelyan’s colorless voice to so flush with warmth. Once William would have thought Trevelyan too cool of spirit to speak passionately of any subject at all; but since then he had seen the flash of relieved joy on the Welshman’s face when the rail-gun worked, and the lightning-flare of hatred when he turned the rifle on a construct. There was not much Trevelyan cared about, William thought, but he cared intensely about those few things. Those few people.
The connection formed itself in William’s mind with a suddenness that made his breath catch in his throat. I have a family to protect. Not a wife, a family. And, The constructs are the only weapon that has a chance of making a difference in the next seven months. William now thought he understood why seven months might be a meaningful measurement of time. And—God, and Brenda Trevelyan had been dead in the other 1885. Trevelyan couldn’t know that, though, surely? Even if he did suspect—she had been killed by Wellington monsters in the other world; with no Wellington monsters, there was no reason to suppose her life in danger in some third universe. But William had the cold feeling that if Trevelyan once realized the risk, he would not be content to thus coolly reason out her chances for survival. Particularly not given her current condition. Men did...unreasonable things when children were at stake. William thought of Christopher Palmer struggling to walk on a mangled leg, struggling to live long enough get home to William’s sister and their unborn child.
His thoughts were shattered by the sharp rapping on the front door, delivered in sets of three loud enough to shake the warehouse. “Emil?” Kent’s voice called. “Your carriage is here.”
The “carriage” was a pony-trap, such a conveyance apparently the one best suited to the roles the four of them were to play. Its driver, a young red-haired man named Johnston, silently lifted the brass-bound trunk containing their change of costuming, and Schwieger gave Elizabeth his hand to help her into the trap. William and Maxwell took their places, and the trap clattered away.
It was still early morning, but the air was already thick and heavy. Dead, William could not help thinking. The other London had been characterized by its noise—the constant undertone hum, the stomping of the constructs, the shrilling of the factory whistles. This London was profound in its silence. The very buildings seemed to sag into their foundations, enlivened by neither industry nor hope of any.
When they turned onto a street that fronted the Thames, William could see men dressed in rough laborers’ clothes unloading cargo from a ship that flew the tricolor flag and was ornamented at every joint with ornately carved bees. The prow was a screaming eagle with outstretched talons. The crew unloading that ostentatious great ship seemed to be the only specimens of humanity at work that morning; whole long stretches of dock stretched silent and still under the rising sun, as though the turgid August air pressed too heavily to make movement worthwhile. Or perhaps it was the eagle’s talons that restrained any who might otherwise have ventured out-of-doors. The effect of all the slow nothingness was mesmerizing—block after block of quiet street went by, until you stopped expecting to see anyone bustling about their affairs. William saw Elizabeth shift against the constraints of her gown, and he fought a similar urge to stretch against the trappings of his sling.
“There is not work enough at the docks for all who would seek it,” Schwieger remarked like an answer to William’s thoughts. “Since it has become nearly impossible for any to run a shop without French patronage, other options are few. Some say the city is dying, although that I suppose depends on your perspective.” No one answered. After a time, Schwieger added, “Two or three French firms have factories farther down the Thames. Sometimes there is talk of others building here, but only talk so far.”
“Why only talk?” William started to ask, but three men in blue coats stepped out from the cross-street just ahead, and the words dried up in his throat. The uniform had changed some in seventy years, but not nearly enough.
“Your business?” the guard greeted them.
Schwieger held out a sheaf of papers, all ornamented with colored ink and wax seals. “We have tickets for the dirigible to York.”
The guard took his hand away from his pistol and plucked the bundle of passports and tickets from Schwieger’s grip. His two comrades stayed alert, still fingering their weapons. “Prussia?” the dark-haired guard said, and looked up. “What do you do here, then?”
“My wife’s father was born here,” Schwieger said, nodding to Maxwell. “He emigrated to Prussia long ago. We have come to see the old country. My wife and her brother have never before visited.”
The guard’s eyes ran over Elizabeth, then turned to William. “What is wrong with your arm?”
William did not have to pretend the grimace. “Our carriage suffered an upset on the journey to take ship to England. I suppose I was fortunate to break only the arm.”
The guard handed the papers back to Schwieger without further comment, and waved them on their way. William managed to hold his peace until he was sure they were out of earshot.
“I thought we would need the papers for the dirigible,” he hissed to Schwieger then. “London is occupied still, seventy years later?”
Schwieger shrugged a little. “Under Napoleon I, it was the policy of the Empire to humiliate Britain as much as possible. The Emperor’s own words. And policies have a way of outlasting their creators. Besides—” He chuckled a little. “—Britain has done all possible to make it known the yoke sits uncomfortably. Even seventy years later. Each time the Imperials turn their heads away, the British revolt in the mines, or explode a train, or some such. That is why the talk of factories is only talk.”
The architecture had begun to change subtly around them. William had never been in Paris proper, and so it took him some time to identify the niggling familiarity as having come from sketches he had seen. These wide arcades and ironwork balconies were built in the French style—so this must be the respectable part of town. Here servants in livery scrubbed steps and otherwise prepared business for the day, and here other carriages clattered along the streets. Here, too, a great oval balloon blotted out the skyline.
They had nearly reached it when another set of soldiers stopped them. “Out early, aren’t you?”
Schwieger produced again his papers and his explanations. This time the guard looked sharply at Maxwell. “When did you leave England? Why?”
“During the Troubles, in the spring of ’45,” Maxwell said. William wondered how many identities and life stories he had memorized at short notice, trying to fit into one time or another. “We were starving, as so many did in the north. The opportunities elsewhere in the Empire were better.”
“You yourself were not part of the Rising?”
“Oh, no indeed,” Maxwell assured him, and that, William thought, was at least true enough. The guard looked him over once more—paused long enough for cold sweat to start oozing down William’s back—then returned the papers to Schwieger and waved them on.
The riverbank opened up into what was definitely a dockside. It would have made William think of Portsmouth, with its milling crowds waiting to board packet ships leaving for the Continent, except no ships nestled in the water. Instead, the huge dark balloon rose above the river, casting a silent shadow like a curved-beak hawk gliding over a meadowful of mice. The angle of the rising sun stretched the shadow, rendering it even more grotesque. The pointy nose of the prow bisected the street where the carriages rattled, while the mass of balloon and propeller stretched over the dockside itself. Like the cargo ship further downriver, it had Napoleonic bees worked in the basket suspended beneath the balloon, and a great screaming eagle painted upon the silken balloon itself. Upon the envelope, Kent had said it was called.
The expected guards were here, and Schwieger embarked upon the now-familiar ritual. “We are from Prussia; my wife and her brother were born there and have never seen their father’s home village; we go now to visit it.” This time a guard looked sharply at all the faces and their corresponding passports, making William hope with all his might that the forger Kent employed would live up to his patron’s boast. The guard looked twice from Elizabeth’s face to Maxwell’s, but seemed to relax when he compared Maxwell’s to William’s. You two look enough alike for the story to be believed, Kent had commented. Similar complexion, same color eyes. If you are challenged, say Madame Hoffman takes after her late mother.
Madame Hoffman. It shouldn’t irritate him so much to hear her called so, not with so many real dangers confronting them.
The guard returned their papers, and then there was nothing for it but to dismount from the trap and join the throng of gibuses and gleaming gold-topped canes, bustles and big hats heavy with flowers. The crowd spoke in well-modulated low tones, but the effect of so great a number could not help but be a roar—and they were all talking French. It was in its own way as frightening as Waterloo.
Maxwell twitched a little. “It sounds like Paris.”
Schwieger smiled without humor. “I suppose much of southeast England might as well be. Frenchmen come for administrative posts, or French second sons for the opportunity, and then they stay. Their sons speak French in the home, go to French boarding schools, employ Englishmen who have learned to speak the lingua franca without accent. And so it goes. Some of these here speak English at home, but you will not find any in London who speak only English. For that you must go far outside the palisade, into the wild lands past York.”
William watched the crowd, listening to the overlapping conversations. One group he took to be men of finance, some French and some Gallicized English. That priest there he thought to be English-born, though how odd to see an Englishman in Popish dress. Those two women—dressed in gowns that looked even more elaborate than Elizabeth’s—were likely the English wives of the Frenchmen standing not far away. The women were discussing their sons, presently together at a Paris boarding school.
A whistle blew, and Elizabeth flinched from it. Schwieger patted her hand, and William gritted his teeth again. The crowd formed itself into an impressively orderly queue and commenced its slow promenade up the gangplank. It was in fact quite like boarding a packet ship, even to the way the deck seemed to shift slightly underfoot as William’s boot touched it. Overhead, the edges of the elongated silken balloon, striped red and white and blue beneath the eagle, fluttered in a breath of air off the water.
Schwieger handled all necessary transactions for his “wife” and her “brother” and “father,” shepherding his three charges under the curving bee-encrusted prow and safely to the observation deck. Here the shiny polished wood and gleaming brass reminded William even more strongly of a sailing ship. Poised as it was over the Thames, you could even look over the rail and through the enclosed glass window and fancy yourself about to set sail—if you took care to angle your view to hide the several-foot drop between the bottom of the basket and the water.
Elizabeth did not seem disconcerted by the drop, but she did seem to be having difficulty with the odor that wafted from the water. She sneezed once delicately, then again, and fished her handkerchief out of Brenda Trevelyan’s borrowed reticule.
“How does the balloon fly?” she asked her “husband,” leaning more closely to him than William thought was necessary, even for verisimilitude.
“The first ones had an open flame between the envelope and the basket,” Schwieger answered. “The hot air rose as it does in a smokestack, and carried the balloon with it. But one could only float with the wind; it was not possible to steer. Elongating the envelope allowed them to add a rudder. See, you can see it, there.”
“Where?” Elizabeth leaned forward eagerly, shoving her handkerchief back into her reticule with careless fingers. It was not the first time she had mistaken a fold of cloth for the opening of a reticule, William thought. The handkerchief fluttered free as a pocket watch once had, but Elizabeth did not notice. She was craning to look at the rudder.
“The elongated envelope proved to have its own problems,” Schwieger continued. “Hot air will rise, but not spread. It was not until the use of helium was perfected that the dirigible would operate properly. The prototype was launched in 1818 or 1819. The fleet—” He spread his hands. “—well, as you know, set sail in 1820.”
“Madame?”
All three of them turned at the voice, in time to see a sleek dark young man stoop and rescue Elizabeth’s handkerchief from the other feet milling about the deck. He handed it to her with a bow, and she thanked him in English, then caught herself and repeated the thanks in French.
“My pleasure, Madame,” Katarina Rasmirovna said—in English, and in a voice half an octave below her usual throaty tones. If William had not known who spoke to them—if he had not already seen the guise back at the warehouse—he never could have guessed. She moved with a swing of her hips and shoulders that was absolutely unlike any woman William had ever seen—even a woman wearing breeches. Even Katarina wearing breeches. The illusion was magnificent; William could not tell if he were more impressed or more disconcerted. “Colin Ramsey,” Katarina added, touching her hat to Elizabeth. “At your service.”
“Madame Emil Hoffman,” Elizabeth murmured, indicating her “husband,” and Katarina—Colin Ramsey—shifted to bow to him as well.
“Prussia? But your accent is so flawless, Madame. I would have taken you for an Englishwoman.”
At this cue, Maxwell joined them, and it became the most natural thing in the world for he and young Mr. Ramsey to fall into conversation. “—to see the old homestead,” Maxwell said for the fourth time that morning. “And you, sir, what brings you to York?”Above them, the boiler coughed, spluttered, then suddenly roared. Only for a moment; but Elizabeth’s hand tightened reflexively on Schwieger’s arm. Damn him, William thought. A pretty young woman standing near Katarina—near Colin Ramsey—shrieked and stumbled and clutched at the air for support. Katarina/Colin caught her, speaking cheerfully and soothingly until the young woman was reclaimed by her mother and father—both English, William thought, but aspiring to Frenchness—who scolded her in low icy tones and glared at Colin Ramsey until he retreated. Katarina looked up once they had gone, her sardonic eye catching William’s for an instant.
After the first burst of noise, the dirigible rose—no, the water fell away—in utter spellbinding silence. William tried not to gawk. A man of his position must have certainly seen such a sight before, dirigibles being in use everywhere in the Empire. Another burst of noise, and the huge bee-encrusted prow swung about, and the balloon glided its silent way over London.
Behind him, Katarina and Maxwell resumed their conversation, exchanging bits of their pre-arranged and utterly false stories in English. Maxwell added an unrehearsed bit about his fictitious late wife. She was brave and outspoken, he said. To his great grief, she had died before her children were old enough to know her. William thought of the locket Maxwell kept hidden inside his shirt collar, and wondered if any of that story might be true. He did not know whose face might be within, as Maxwell took great care always that no one should see. If it held the face of some lost love, there was no way to tell the year of her birth—or the year of her death. William reflected, not for the first time, what an impossibly strange life this man must lead.
Above Maxwell’s tale rose the conversation of the English mothers, still discussing their sons. The French businessmen were complaining about current economic conditions. Schwieger still kept Elizabeth on his arm, pointing out to her various items of interest. William looked down at the country below, slipping by all quiet and green.
The balloon’s shadow moved as slowly as poured honey, drenching each swath of farmland in turn, passing smoothly on. The land below looked like a painting, captured on canvas, unchanging and unchangeable. Or trapped in amber, perhaps, frozen solid. Unable to breathe, William thought, looking up to find his eye caught by Elizabeth’s tightly corseted waist. Unable to breathe, let alone move, let alone grow. Is this what defeat looks like? Placid green farmland and the aspiration to speak accentless French? It was obscene that this great sailing monster should move so silently and be so clean. It ought to be belching black smoke clouds into the sky, so the people below would hate it and remember to struggle.
“And then there is all that nonsense with those rebels in the northwest and the coal trains,” one of the French businessmen said, and William caught the twitch of Katarina’s smile. Schwieger had said that Britain had revolted against the Empire every time the Imperial attention was momentarily distracted. Well, at least some people remember to struggle. And we’ll fix it. We will. We’ll go back with a message and mend our error and this will never happen.
“Perhaps you would care to share a coach with us, young man?” Maxwell said to Katarina, easy and jovial, as the dirigible descended toward York some hours later.
“I’d be pleased to, sir,” Katarina said, just as casually. Surely none of the finely dressed French speakers surrounding them could suspect collusion. “The countryside is a bit rough around here, but I know it well, and our paths lie together.”
They engaged rooms at an inn for the night, as Mr. Colin Ramsey and as Herr Hoffman and his wife and her family. They discussed over supper in the common room their—diverging, naturally—travel plans for the morrow. And then before dawn they boarded the first coach of the day, one that had not been featured in the supper conversation, the costumes they had worn on the dirigible packed away in the trunk and all the grease-paint scrubbed off—except for Katarina’s, as she still chose to pose as a young man. But now she wore comfortable country clothing, as did the men, and Elizabeth appeared in a state of bliss indeed after exchanging the hated walking dress for her own gown.
The complexities of this journey north made William’s head spin. Now that he had time to think, he could not help but wonder whether all these machinations were truly needful, or whether any rather fed some unnecessary dramatic flair on the part of his hosts. He studied Katarina’s and Schwieger’s intent expressions, and came to the unwelcome conclusion that these layers of misdirection were indeed commonplace in the lives they led. “All along the city road, in and out the Eagle,” Katarina murmured to herself as the coach rattled away. At William’s inquiring look, she clarified, “A children’s song. Sometimes heard in the music halls, suitably, er, modified. The Eagle is a tavern. In the children’s song, at least.”
“At least we needn’t climb in one side of a train and out the other,” Schwieger said.
“Only because there isn’t one to hand.” Katarina stretched her legs out as much as she could.
Elizabeth looked up at the word “train.” “I wondered about that,” she said. “Wouldn’t it have been more discreet to travel by railway?”
“It would have been,” Schwieger told her, “but Colin Ramsey, the secretary of M’sieur Levesque, travels on more distinguished conveyances.”
“Yes, but why did Katarina Rasmirovna wish to travel on one?” Elizabeth looked hard at Schwieger. “Why did Mr. Kent have those tickets in the first place? What was it our arrival interrupted?”
“This time?” Schwieger said. “Nothing at all. Some other future dirigible journey might be less peaceful, but we first need to explore—”
“Emil,” Katarina said.
Schwieger did not respond to her rebuke as quickly as he had responded to Kent’s. “I am not telling her anything not public knowledge. All know the French use dirigibles for everything. If the service were to be disrupted, why, that could be most…disruptive to the gentlemen of the Empire.”
“Could they not just use trains?” Elizabeth wanted to know.
“Oh, they could.” Schwieger smiled. “But we’ve been very successful at disrupting those.”
“Emil,” Katarina said, and he subsided.
The coach deposited them at a cross-roads without a house to be seen in any direction. “This far outside the palisade, we may enjoy peace from Imperial attention,” Katarina said. “Unfortunately, that means we may expect lack of decent transportation as well. I fear we have a trudge ahead of us. At least we can engage a hand-cart for the trunk in Danby.” Until then, William inferred, they must carry the thing. He hefted one side with his left hand—because he could do that, damn it, and did not need to relinquish the duty to an older man or to a woman—and was pleased enough to see that the other end occupied enough of Schwieger’s attention to preclude the possibility of the young man playing the gallant to Elizabeth. Freed of the corset and puffed-out skirts, she strode quite comfortably without needing to lean on anyone’s arm, following Katarina briskly down a cow-path and then up an incline.
From the top of the rise, the village of Danby was visible—a ramshackle place boasting only a cluster of cottages and crumbling stone church—and they reached its outer edges perhaps half an hour later. There Katarina engaged a hand-cart from a man who called her “Mr. Ramsey” with matter-of-fact recognition, and the five of them continued on their way.
Their destination proved to be a cottage set some distance farther on from the village—the sort of place that wanted to be neat and pretty, William thought, and only succeeded in stretching halfway to the former. The white paint peeled from the lintel, and the upstairs windows had boards replacing their glass. What ought to have been the front garden was only a stretch of weeds and dirt, with a dilapidated-looking sundial on a brick base presiding drunkenly over all it surveyed.
A flock of chickens rose in a complaining cloud of feathers at the strangers’ approach, and in response a middle-aged woman in a cap and apron came around the corner from the side yard. The anxious crease in her forehead smoothed as her eyes fell upon Katarina.
“Mercy me! Is it—” The woman seemed to choke on the words, and took a moment to swallow and choose different ones, shooting little glances at Katarina’s companions. “—Mr. Ramsey, isn’t it?”
“It’s Miss Katherine,” Katarina said, with the first smile William had seen from her. “At least, it is if Mr. Carter and Mr. West are home alone today. This lady and these gentlemen are—” She apparently could not bring herself to say the word “friends.” Instead, she amended, “Mr. Kent sent me to bring them to Mr. Carter.”
The woman smiled. “They’re alone today, Miss Katherine.”
Katarina pulled the cap off her head and started tugging pins from her hair. The heavy black coil slithered loose, for an effect that was most disconcerting indeed when combined with breeches and a coat, and Katarina gave a little sigh of relief and rubbed at her scalp. “How are you and your gentlemen, Janet?”
“Oh, well enough, Miss Katherine, can’t complain.” Janet resettled her own mobcap over her knot of fair hair. “Mr. West, he wanders in his mind, like, but Mr. Carter, he keeps his faculties wonderful well for a man so old. And ninety-five his next birthday and only needing a cane to support him! I’ve never seen the like before. But come right in, you and your friends, and I’ll tell the gentlemen you’ve come to call.” She bustled away ahead of them, under the cottage’s crooked lintel.
The hall was likewise crooked and cramped and dark. Even the late summer sunshine could not brighten it. “Mr. West mostly sets in the front parlor these days,” Janet said, pausing in front of the first door to the left. Over her shoulder, William could see a room barely large enough to contain a sofa, two sagging armchairs, a slender side table set against the wall, and a small glass curio case of books. The whitewashed walls were painfully bare, but the room still seemed so crowded he could not fathom how a party of their size could possibly fit into it. A second doorway led off to some darkened side room.
“He gets a bit of sun,” Janet continued, “and besides, it’s warmer for him here.”
Was that really a concern, in August? The northern countryside did not share the oppressive humidity that characterized London, but William would hardly call it cool.
“I’ll leave you with him, Miss Katherine, he’ll be so glad to see you, and then I’ll go and hunt up Mr. Carter.” Janet raised her voice as she led them through the doorway. “Mr. West! Mr. West, look here who’s come to call!”
The front parlor was indeed warmer than the summer afternoon outdoors—unpleasantly close, in point of fact—but the old man in the chair nearest to the empty hearth had wrapped himself in plaid shawls even so. He blinked confused eyes as Janet spoke to him, and extended a shriveled head on a leathery neck to peer at his guests. William could not help thinking of the tortoises he had seen in warmer climates, with their sand-blasted leathery skin drooping away from beaky noses and toothless mouths.
“Why, little Kat!” the old man rasped, and stirred enough to put out a clawlike hand. His smile chased some of the turtle-resemblance from his face. “What a surprise, to be sure. So nice of you to come by. And with more youngsters to liven my afternoon. How very nice indeed.”
Janet beamed at the success of her introductions and bustled back out, now calling in cheerful tones for Mr. Carter. There was a pause, and then a creaky old voice answered, farther away but growing closer.
Mr. West did not react to it. Probably, William thought, Mr. West could not hear it. Instead, West peered past Katarina to the rest of them. He looked with interest from one face to another before his toothless mouth curved upward again in a smile of pleased recognition.
“My goodness me,” he said. “Miss Barton, isn’t it?”
Katarina’s head snapped around to Elizabeth, and Maxwell’s did as well. Elizabeth stood with her lips parted, eyes searching the old man’s face with no apparent recognition. William wondered if meeting him was something she would do someday, and had not yet. If so, that was good, surely? For it meant she at least would live long enough to have some adventure after this one—
Mr. Carter entered from the side door at that moment. He was as lean and spare as Mr. West, and only slightly less reptilian in his facial features. His head still bore some white strands of hair, but it rose out of a shirt collar grown too big for him. He moved with slow, shuffling steps, balancing his feet carefully and bending over his cane, and nothing about his figure should have evoked a dashing young officer.
But William had seen him only two days before. He had been hunched over a staff for support then as well, pain lines carving his face exactly where the age lines carved it now, making his way step by agonized step to the infirmary while the Battle of Waterloo howled around him. William put his left hand out for something to steady himself, and knocked a small book from the side table to the floor.
“God in heaven,” he said. “Chris.”
A slow smile parted Christopher Palmer’s lips. “William Carrington,” he replied—not in shock, but rather in the satisfied tone of a man who has been handed the key to a puzzle.