Eventually, Wald came down and said that he and I should make a meal.
“Kill him,” the madman said to Wald, jerking his head to indicate me.
“Speak’st thou now?” said Wald. “Better silence. More to speak is more to lang regret.”
With the sparse food available, we muddled through a kitchen that was futuristic to Wald and antique to me, and managed to make oatmeal topped with sugar. Wald insisted on feeding his captive, and I was allowed up to see Rose while she sipped the sugar water that was all Lilly would allow.
She was pale and soaked with sweat, but gave me a weak half smile as I sat beside her. “Are you sure it isn’t tonight I die?”
I nodded. “I’m sure. If that’s any help.”
“It isn’t.”
“I’m sorry.”
She sighed. “It’s not you that should be sorry. It’s that Clive Beckett.” She stopped for a moment, gasped in pain, then waited a moment as some wave in her subsided. “Dying and leaving me to this. Well. It’s not so long, and I’ll be with him.”
“Don’t think like that,” I said. “You’re going to have Curtis, soon. He’ll live.”
A keening snarl rose up from the wild man below.
Rose ignored it and reached a trembling, sweaty hand to grasp mine. “Funny, isn’t it?” she said. Another wave of pain rolled through her, this one longer and more intense. “All this year, I’ve been hearing about all of you in the future. The stories about Peggy’s love affair with Anthony—” Another pause for pain. “Kenny and Luka. About Kenny and his friends and their adventures, Kenny trapped in the past. I knew you before you came. About you and Luka and what happened between you.” She gave a short gasp, then clenched her teeth together, breathing in short, sharp hisses. Lilly soon hurried me back downstairs.
Lilly took occasional cigarette breaks over the next few hours, and on one of those I asked her why we didn’t find a hospital or a doctor. “We can’t move her,” she said. “She’s had bleeding, and the labor has started. As to bringing someone here, how would we explain ourselves? A madman tied up on one floor, a seventeenth-century blacksmith assisting a nurse from the future on the next.” She shook her head sadly. “Terrible as it is, I think we’re her best hope. I didn’t do training in obstetrics. I was a war nurse. But I’ve had your note for ten years. I knew I would do this. I’ve been preparing, and I have thirty more years of medical science than whatever country doctor we could find. Anyway, in 1917, nobody reserves the best treatment for unwed mothers. They’ll spare the baby if it comes to it, at the cost of the mother’s life.”
More waiting, more cries. Some sleep. Then I woke in a convulsion of panic when I heard a scream of terror and a crash of cutlery and broken glass.
Standing not five feet from me in the doorway of the little house was Mrs. Hollerith, ten years younger than I’d seen her last, holding a tipped tray and staring at a bloody-handed John Wald halfway down the stairs.
Three
Head will hurt. Death’s a cert.
“What … ” said Mrs. Hollerith. “What—what—”
“Oh, what do you think?” said Lilly, descending the stairs. “Your daughter’s giving birth, you fool. Your daughter, whom you knew fine well was pregnant, is having her baby a month too soon.”
Francine Hollerith’s mouth opened and closed.
“What was your plan?” said Lilly. She reached Mrs. Hollerith and dropped her voice to a furious whisper. “Did you want her to die in childbirth so your problem would go away? If that’s the case, you were doing a fine job. With luck, I’ll save her. Is that a problem?”
Mrs. Hollerith’s face settled into an expression I don’t have a name for. Something like a cold acceptance of the new way things were. “Fine,” she said. “And who are all of—”
She was interrupted with a scream. Prince Harming must have fallen asleep some time after I did, but he was awake again. “Kill him!” he screamed to Francine Hollerith. “Kill him! Help me and kill him. He’s going to kill my wife. Everything from him’s a lie. Let me loose and I’ll do it.”
Mrs. Hollerith stepped back and held her tray like a shield.
I spread my hands. “I’m not going to kill anyone. I just came here to help.”
Wald leaped down the last few stairs, picked up Prince Harming’s discarded gag, and struggled it back into his mouth over the madman’s screamed protests.
Mrs. Hollerith looked from one of us to another. “Well, let me see my daughter,” she said at last, and strode to the stairs, pushing past Lilly as she went up. Then she turned for a last word. “And get this madman out of here.”
Behind his gag, Prince Harming gave a heartbroken wail.
“Why is he getting worse now?” I said. “I thought he had started to calm down.”
“Sees it coming,” said Wald. “Whate’er this thing, he feels its shadow.” He took Prince Harming by the shoulders and looked into his eyes. “List me now, witling. Thou wishest to stave some doom, is’t so?”
The madman cocked his head to one side, then nodded.
“Well and good,” said Wald. He turned to me. “I said we’d riddle this one in time. Mayhaps ’tis now.” He met Prince Harming’s wild gaze again, hands still grasping the straining shoulders. “Now list again. I will not let ye kill young Kennit, hear? If there is some doom to stave, we might yet aid thee.” He spoke slowly, as though to a child. “We must have words, na? Peace and words. I’ll loose the clout that stops thy voice. Speak thy bit.”
With that, he took the gag away again, and Prince Harming took a deep breath before speaking. “Not kill then,” he said. “Tie him up. Tie and hold him here.”
Wald shook his head. “No talk of that. Kennit’s a friend. Talk of what thou wouldst prevent.”
Prince Harming gave a small snarl and spoke through clenched teeth. “Listen. Murderer. No friend. Said he was. Pushed her and she’s dead and wouldn’t let me follow. Pretends to be friend. Tie him or stop him or you kill her like it was your own hands. Said he was a friend!”
His words grew faster, more furious, and with a reluctant shrug, Wald replaced his gag.
“He names thee killer,” he said, turning to me. “I know it is not so. Why thinks he that?”
“That’s not the question,” said Mrs. Hollerith coming down the stairs. “The question is why have you brought a lunatic into a birthing house?”
Wald and I looked at each other. “We were … rushed,” I said. “He’s dangerous. We couldn’t let him run loose.”
She shook her head. “Well, it won’t do. D’you hear me? I won’t have my daughter upset by that. Get him out.” Wald, looking as sheepish as I probably did, opened his mouth to speak, but she didn’t let him. “I’m serious. She’s sleeping now, poor thing, though it’s a miracle she can in this madhouse. Go upstairs, and fetch that dresser down. I don’t know where you come from inside that thing, but I want you to take this screaming idiot back into it.” She smiled thinly at the shock on our faces. “Oh, you thought I didn’t know, did you? Well, a mother’s not so stupid as you might think.”
Prince Harming’s cries had acquired a mournful sound, like a locked-up puppy, but she never looked at him as she spoke.
“But I want to help,” I said. “I came all this way to help.”
“And you have,” said Lilly from the top of the stairs. “You brought me.” She walked down wearily and addressed herself to Mrs. Hollerith. “She wouldn’t have survived. You’d have found her dead.” Rose’s mother absorbed this in silence. Even Prince Harming quieted at Lilly’s appearance. “I think she’s right, though, John. I think you and Kenny have to get him out of here.”