Danby, Yorkshire, August 30, 1885
The overheated little room was absolutely silent for the space of three heartbeats. Then William heard Katarina Rasmirovna whisper, “Bloody hell.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her grope for the sofa and lower herself into it as though finding her legs inadequate to the task of keeping herself upright. The rest of his attention was captured by the old man who faced him—body bent over a cane, but eyes still alert.
“So you were there,” Christopher Palmer said in a tone of satisfaction. “After all.”
“I was,” William said. “I was there when you were wounded at Waterloo.” His knees felt as though he was there right now. For a moment, his ears rang with the sound of booming cannon, screaming horses, men crying out as they collapsed halfway to the field hospital. “It was only the day before yesterday, for me. God, Chris.” He stretched his left hand toward the old man, an inarticulate and awkward grasp. Palmer took it in a grip of surprising strength. “You did make it back, then. You made it back to England.”
“I did.” A brief smile added to the wrinkles on Palmer’s face. “To meet my son, as you goaded me. I never could be quite satisfied with the idea that I had dreamed that encounter. Why would my dreams clothe you in a uniform of the 52nd? Good afternoon, Katherine,” he added, and his lips turned upward in a hint of a smile. “What an interesting visitor you’ve brought me.”
Katarina was shaking her head, eyes fixed in wonder on William. “It never occurred to me...” she whispered, and stopped. She cleared her throat and went on in a voice closer to her own, “It literally never occurred to me they could be telling the truth. But if you know him, Mr. Carter—”
“I know him,” Palmer assured her. “This is my wife’s brother. He vanished from Hartwich in 1815. And...that’s ‘Mr. Palmer.’” His chest expanded with the barest puff of pride. “Captain Christopher Palmer, late of His Majesty’s Army.”
Katarina’s breath caught, and she levered herself back off the sofa, pushing back escaping tendrils of hair that clung to her cheeks. “But I know that name. Everyone knows that name. You’re the one who—in Provence—that was you?”
“Indeed it was,” Palmer said, with more than a hint of pride this time. “Immediately thereafter, I found it prudent to rechristen myself, for reasons I trust are obvious. She’s never heard my real name before,” the old man added to William. “Nor has Frederick Kent. They couldn’t have told you if they had wanted to.” Palmer looked past William to the others. “Will you not introduce your friends?”
“Oh—of course. Of course.” William turned, donning a veneer of formality that felt as unnatural as new boots. “Miss Barton, may I present Lef—Captain Palmer. Chris, I don’t believe you ever met Miss Barton, back in the old days.”
“I do not believe I ever had the pleasure, no. Miss Barton.” Palmer bowed, correct and old-fashioned, but his eyes glinted as Elizabeth curtseyed in turn. “I have, however, heard a great deal about you. It is an honor to finally make your acquaintance.”
Heard about her from whom? William wanted to ask, but pressed on with his duties first. “And this is our friend Mr. Maxwell.”
“Emil Schwieger,” Katarina introduced the young Prussian. “He has entered Mr. Kent’s employ since last we came to see you.”
“Captain Palmer,” Schwieger said, eyes shining with an almost feverish intensity, “it is an honor to meet you, sir. Your exploits in France are legendary. I knew I was to have the honor of meeting a great freedom fighter, but I never dreamed—” He waved an inarticulate hand.
“You’d have the honor of meeting two?” Palmer finished for him, eluding the compliment as deftly as he might once have evaded a fencing thrust, smiling with open amusement now. He laid a hand on the shoulder of the blinking turtle by the hearth, making it plain this was the second freedom fighter under discussion. “My friend here also bears a name not his by birth,” he said. “He has been known as West these many years, but he and Miss Barton met once before that.”
“You were a very pretty girl,” the second old man informed Elizabeth.
“May I present Mr. Charles Wilton.”
Elizabeth’s face went pale with shock. “Mr. Wilton. Oh…I…What a pleasure, sir.”
“He lives more in the past than not,” Palmer said, glancing at his friend. “I am sure your remembered face is clearer before his eyes than mine or Janet’s. Though he did recognize you as well,” he added to Katarina. “So it’s a good day, then. Well, now, we cannot entertain in the style I wish we could, but it’s a fine day for sitting in the garden, and Janet can put something before us. And then you will solve this mystery for me. At my age, I cannot afford to wait longer than half an hour to have my curiosity satisfied.”
“You disappeared,” Charles Wilton said to Elizabeth, struggling to overcome the pull of blankets and rise from his chair. Palmer tried to shift around to help him, but Katarina was there first. She drew the old man smoothly to his feet, and Wilton accepted the help, eyes still fixed on Elizabeth. “Everyone said Gretna Green, since you’d climbed out your window on bedsheets and William Carrington was gone too, but Chris always said there was more to it than that.”
William’s gaze snapped to Elizabeth. Bedsheets? Elizabeth gave him a defiant look in response. “It was a cause worth the burning of bridges,” she murmured.
“I thought Chris was likely right,” the old man went on. “Because you never returned. Or wrote a letter, or anything of the sort.”
“It was an odd elopement,” Palmer said, recapturing the conversational reins as he led them through the passageway at the shuffling pace that was all he could manage. “Quite a nine-days’ wonder, or it would have been, had the war news not overwhelmed it. Many facets of it were puzzling. The two of you could not be traced to Gretna Green—or indeed, out of Hartwich. William had not taken funds sufficient for a journey of any length. And as Charles puts it so succinctly, you never returned. Not though William’s father advertised; not at his death; not when the French marched through Kent and we needed every man, able-bodied or not. And so…it never quite satisfied me, that explanation. I kept thinking of Will Carrington in a uniform of the 52nd, and wondering what it was I’d been a part of.”
The passage gave way to a blinding bright sky, and then to a scrap of back garden where Janet was laying a blanket upon the grass. She turned back for the kitchen, smiling as she passed them, and Katarina got Charles Wilton settled in one of the two comfortable-looking garden chairs while Christopher Palmer settled himself in the other. The blanket was obviously for the young people and Maxwell. “I’m afraid it’s the best we can do,” Palmer murmured, and they all hastened to assure him it did not matter.
Wilton looked even more lizard-like out in the bright sun. His blinking bright eyes stayed on Elizabeth, watching as she settled herself. William wondered if it were only his own inappropriate imagination, or if Wilton’s eyes had indeed settled upon her shapely ankles as she drew her skirt back from them. “A great shame we never got to dance,” Charles Wilton said, leaning down toward Elizabeth in a confiding manner. “I was quite good at it, back then! And everyone said you were the jolliest girl to partner. Not stuck-up like some of the minxes, but game for a good time and with a spring in your step.”
“Charles,” Palmer said, and gestured apology.
“It’s all right,” Elizabeth assured him. “I rather imagined they were saying worse things.”
“They were saying you eloped.” Palmer settled back and regarded her. “Erroneously, so it would seem. What happened instead? What form of magic brings you un-aged to my doorstep—a faerie hill, perhaps? You see, I presume upon my great maturity to insist you tell me your story even before drinking your tea. I ceased being a patient man upon my eighty-first birthday.”
William looked at Elizabeth, and then at Maxwell, but there was nothing for it. It was much harder to tell this tale to a comrade in arms than to a stranger. He better understood Maxwell’s shaking of the night before. He cleared his throat, but the words still came out hoarsely. “We did this, Chris. We brought Napoleon crashing down upon you.”
“It would seem you had a great deal of help,” Christopher Palmer said a long time later. The afternoon shadows were growing long across the back garden, and a nearby, a treeful of birds had started a twittering chorus. William kept his eyes on the shadows, and tried to hear the birds and not the cries of dying men.
“Will?” Palmer said. “Look at me.”
William lifted his head, stunned at the gentleness in that creaking old voice. Forgiveness was the very last thing he had expected. Palmer regarded him for a moment with eyes that seemed to see a great deal. “I can’t remember,” he said. “How old are you?”
“Nearly twenty,” William said.
Palmer shook his head, smiling a little. “You had a hand in this, yes, but you also had a great deal of help. Unless you have omitted parts of your tale, you did not shoot the Duke of Wellington.”
“No. But...”
“No ‘but’ about it. Waterloo is too great a debacle to be laid at the door of any one man—or any three.” Palmer glanced at Elizabeth and Maxwell. “You did not shoot Wellington. You did not appoint Uxbridge to succeed him. You did not retreat across the Channel and invite a siege, and you did not leave a small portion of the monster battalion behind to be captured—”
“Guard our retreat, my arse,” Charles Wilton murmured to himself.
“Charles.”
“It’s what you always say,” Wilton protested.
“Yes, but I don’t say it in front of ladies.” Palmer sighed. “I apologize, Miss Barton. I was about to say— Monsters in small groups can be overwhelmed and taken down, and so what did Uxbridge do? Leave behind a small group. Gave the French the perfect opportunity to figure out how we’d done it and start making their own.” Palmer shook his head. “You didn’t mishandle the ’41 Rising, either.”
“All the trouble we went to, getting Frankenstein’s journal home,” Wilton confided, “and Fitzclarence goes and tips his hand before Bonaparte actually crocks it, and anyone with experience enough to make use of the monster notes is killed.”
“Those were terrible years.” Palmer’s eyes were shadowed. “Charles and I stayed on the Continent for the duration, had to.”
“Chris was always going on about living dogs and dead lions,” Wilton told them, “but what I said was, better to live to fight another day.”
“It might have been,” Palmer said grimly, “except we never did. We harried the Imperial rear a bit, perhaps, but we never had another chance to fight them here, not on the ground that mattered. By the time there was an opportunity, we were too old to take a hand in it.” He looked up at his guests, and tried for a smile. “Had to hand it over to the young lads. And lasses, of course.” He nodded to Katarina.
“Giving us a considerable standard to live up to,” Katarina told him, “even before I knew you were the two from the Provence story. You harried the Imperial rear pretty effectively, sir.” Palmer snorted, waving that off.
“Wait,” William said, caught by the phrasing. “You said—Mr. Wilton, what did you just say? ‘Anyone with experience to make use of the monster notes’—is that what happened in Provence? Is Frankenstein the name of the Genevese? Schwieger said something about the Genevese’s journal being gotten out of France by a pair of Englishmen—”
“And the penny drops.” Palmer’s grin took the sting from the words. “Yes, that escapade was executed by the unorthodox partnership of Palmer and Wilton. Our contribution to war effort, as it were.”
“Those were the days,” Charles Wilton sighed to himself.
“Charles here played a collaborator,” Palmer explained, leaning forward a little as he warmed to his tale, “married a Frenchwoman and all, became popular and trusted among the Parisians, and soaked up every useful tidbit of information that came his way. I planned out what to do about it, and hired the skills I needed—mostly from my men, the ones who fought with me the guerilla days. Old Sergeant Hull knew where I could find hands used to burglary, or munitions, or sharp-shooting. Or whatever was needful.” Palmer smiled at some memory. “Frankenstein’s journal was the coup of my career. Second career. Third, I suppose, if you count the guerilla warfare right after 1820 as separate from my army days. In any case, yes, we’re the ones who got it out. Wilton, Palmer, Sheffield, and Hull.”
Elizabeth looked at Charles Wilton and seemed to only barely stop herself from shaking her head in disbelief.
Palmer caught the abortive movement. “You wouldn’t think him capable of it, I suppose,” he said. “But you didn’t know him very well, did you? Sat with him once in a drawing room for a quarter-hour, if I’m not mistaken? I don’t expect the setting showed either of you to your best advantage.”
“Nothing to be done, in a drawing room,” Wilton said. “Nothing that needed doing—not then, at least. Not until later.” He leaned forward with that same confiding air. “First thing my wife ever did was pass along something she’d heard her papa say. She didn’t think it meant anything. I didn’t act like it did.”
“Sometimes you don’t know what you can become, until you must become it,” Palmer said softly. “I suppose he wouldn’t have ever become more than a drawing room fop, had the French not invaded.”
“They didn’t think I was quality.” Wilton smiled like a cat with a mouthful of feathers. “Didn’t think I was dangerous. Nor was I, not at first. I didn’t learn how to be until later. I was hiding in plain sight by then. Plain sight is a grand place to hide. Those were the days.”
“Some philosophers maintain there is nothing on this earth wholly bad,” Palmer said, watching Wilton’s face. “Wars breed heroes as well as nightmares. The question therefore becomes, would I trade—” He broke off. “To which the answer is, absolutely. You could have roused yourself out of the drawing room at any point, Charles, even without a French invasion. I hope you do—because we are about to stop the French from invading.” He turned back to William. “You didn’t come to see me, Will, you didn’t know I was here. You came to see Kent’s old mentor Carter, and there is only one reason I can think of why Kent would send time travelers to his old mentor. Thank God, there’s a battle I’m not too old to help fight.” Palmer turned to Katarina. “Take young Mr. Schwieger up to my room, and bring down the chest at the foot of the bed. Now—” Palmer turned his attention back to Elizabeth as Katarina hastened off on her errand. “—can you bring the journals and whatnot back with you, or are we restricted to memorized messages?”
“We bring with us the clothing we wear,” Elizabeth said, “and the items in William’s rucksack. Surely a dossier carried in the rucksack would travel…? Though I don’t know if, when this future stops being—if it stops—stops being the future—” She broke off.
“Yes,” Maxwell said. His hand drifted toward his throat, then stopped and adjusted his collar in a businesslike manner. “It is possible to carry along items from a timeline that no longer exists.”
“As far as I am concerned, you may have it all,” Palmer said.
But there was clearly too much for that to be a practical solution. The trunk was so large that Katarina and Schwieger staggered, carrying it between them, and when the lid was thrown back, it was revealed to be crammed to the brim with brittle yellow paper.
“Chris collects old journals and letters,” Wilton explained unnecessarily. “Frederick brings them when he visits. Chris says it’s easier for us to keep them safe up here, where no one ever bothers to look. And he says someone has to. They’re history, and they might be wanted someday.”
“Someday,” Katarina said, running reverent fingertips over the cracked bindings and yellowing paper, “we’ll send the French back where they belong, and Kent will be able to give you a true safe place to store them. A museum to the Resistance.”
Palmer smiled at her. “Kat, they’re safe enough here until then.”
“Plain sight is often safe,” Charles Wilton said. “I hid in plain sight in Paris, all those years ago.”
Palmer patted his shoulder. “Yes, you did, Charles, and you did it very well.”
“Mein Gott,” Schwieger breathed. “Is that it?”
Against the side of the trunk, crosswise to the bulk of the documents, nestled a notebook bound in red-brown leather. Embossed on its spine was a coat of arms, an odd shape like an anchor turned on its side. Schwieger reached past Katarina to pull it out, and William was surprised to see his hands shake.
“Frankenstein’s journal,” Schwieger said, tracing the outlines of the anchor. “I’ve heard legends of it since my childhood. I never thought I would hold it in my hands.” He squeezed it, as though afraid it would vanish.
Palmer eyed him.
“He believes an army of monsters is the best hope for our freedom,” Katarina explained.
“I agreed with him, back in ’41,” Palmer said, “or I wouldn’t have risked so much to steal the journal. But that path is closed to us now.”
“Why should it be, sir?” Schwieger opened the journal and eagerly rifled through its pages. “Surely there is someone, if not in Britain than elsewhere, who can learn to—” He stopped suddenly and sat frozen, staring down at the book in his hands. William leaned to see what had so distressed him, and saw the jagged gash. The middle third or so of the journal had been cut free of the binding.
“We removed the relevant scientific information,” Palmer said. “In 1841. It had to get to England, you see, whether we did or not.”
“But—” Schwieger looked up, stricken. “Where is it now?”
“I could not tell you,” Palmer said. “Safely hidden, I dearly hope. More likely destroyed, if it has not surfaced in all these years.”
Schwieger’s face went bleak.
“Hidden,” Charles piped up. “We used to hide in plain sight, Chris and I. Those were the days. Plain sight is a grand place to hide.”
“More likely destroyed,” Palmer said, silencing him with a hand on his arm, “and better so. All Charles and I managed to accomplish in 1841 was to remove it from French hands, and I would shudder to see that small advantage taken from us. It is true Britain cannot again breed an army of monsters—but neither can the Empire. At least there is that.”
Schwieger took a long breath.
“Emil, what good could it possibly do us?” Katarina asked him, gently enough. “It was never a practical solution. How could we ever hope to breed a monster army without the Empire discovering it and stopping us? At least we can rejoice that Mr. Carter—Captain Palmer—made it impossible for the French to respond to a British rebellion with monsters wearing blue. Come, we’ve another strategy in hand now.” She rearranged herself on the blanket, sitting at Palmer’s feet. “Tell us about Dover, sir?”