This isn’t a post about The Muppets. It also isn’t a post about Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. It does, however, contain spoilers for both, so proceed at your own risk. Read the rest of this entry »
… winner of the Book Review Party Game! Many thanks to everybody who wrote a review!
Ken gets this beautiful handcrafted box from Knot A Box:
Gorgeous thing, isn’t it?
I have to admit, it’s a little hard to let it out of the house. 
If you’re disappointed at not getting to take it home yourself, don’t despair! Knot A Box has many lovely designs, several of them currently in stock and therefore available for the holidays. Include a link to your review of Timepiece (on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, or Goodreads) when you place your order, and Richard will give you 10% off.
Joseph: Ms. Katarina, what is your signature song?
“Well, there’s…” She seems a little embarrassed. “There’s what I’m best known for, and then there’s what I prefer to do. I use the one to slip in the other. And neither are arias, let’s be clear, but maybe someday…”
She clears her throat. “The trick to a male impersonation act is to do it almost flawlessly. The costume is padded in all the right ways, and my hair is bound back and hidden under a hat, and then there’s a way of moving. Very different for a man than a woman—even a woman wearing trousers. Here, if I may borrow your jacket, I’ll show you.” She pulls her hair up into a knot, finds a hat in the pile of discarded props, dons your jacket, and lights a gasper. “Terrible for your throat, these things,” she says, “but very good for the act.” When she walks across the room, it is astonishing how much she does move like a man, despite the hastiness of the disguise.
“I’m Burlington Bertie,” she sings, and heads turn all over the room. “I rise at ten thirty, and saunter along like a toff. I walk down the Strand with my gloves on my hand, then I walk down again with them off.”
She sets the cigarette down on an empty sandwich plate. “My voice is low enough that I could almost complete the illusion, if I wanted to, but the trick is to keep it incomplete. A woman’s voice coming from a man’s form—they like that, the folk in the audience. I think they… like it when the boundaries blur. First it makes them wonder what they’re hearing, then it makes them guess, then it makes them laugh, and I mock the bloodless specimens of the upper class for a short time… and then I do this.” She slips off the jacket, tosses the hat to you, and lets loose her hair. Without the jacket concealing her hips, the snug fit of the trousers on a female form is quite evident, and obviously the tight-laced bodice enhances the effect. “I don’t look like a toff now,” she says, taking up the gasper again. “I look like… something quite different. So there are different songs for this part of the act.” She shakes her hair back and sings another snippet.
“Have you ever noticed when you’re going by the sea,
The things that people do with impunity?
Father, Mother—all the family—
Trundle down to have their paddle by the sea.
Mother takes her stockings off upon the sandy shore,
And shows a lot of… linen that she’s never shown before.”
Katarina ends this bit with a foot on a chair and a hand caressing her calf. Not risque at all by modern standards, but in an era when respectable women wear dresses like cages…
“Or there’s ‘The Boy I Love Is Up In The Gallery’—all about coming from the country to perform in London—they like that, too. It’s a bit softer, not quite so—” She gestures to her trouser-clad calf. “Makes them think I must be sweet, or it makes them laugh because I’m so obviously not.
“The boy I love is up in the gallery,
The boy I love is looking now at me,
There he is, can’t you see, waving his handkerchief,
As merry as a robin that sings on a tree.
If I were a Duchess and had a lot of money,
I’d give it to the boy that’s going to marry me.
But I haven’t got a penny, so we’ll live on love and kisses,
And be just as happy as the birds on the tree.”
You said that was what you were best known for, but not what you like to do? What songs do you slip in?
She smiles at you. “What kind do you think?
“Come all you cotton-weavers, your looms you may pull down;
You must get employ’d in factories, in country or in town,
For our cotton-masters have found out a wonderful new scheme,
These calico goods now wove by hand they’re going to weave by steam.
There’s sow-makers and dressers, and some are making warps
These poor pincop-spinners, they must mind their flats and sharps
For if an end slips under, as sometimes perchance it may,
They’ll daub you down in black and white, and you’ve a shilling to pay.
The weavers’ turn will next come on, for they must not escape,
To enlarge the master’s fortunes they are fines in every shape.
For thin places, or bad edges, a go, or else a float,
They’ll daub you down, and you must pay three pence or a groat.
If you go into a loom shop where there’s three or four pairs of looms,
They all are standing empty, encumbrances of the rooms;
And if you ask the reason why, the old mother will tell you plain,
My daughters have forsaken them, and gone to weave by steam.
So, come all you cotton-weavers, you must rise up very soon,
For you must work in factories from morning until noon;
You mustn’t walk in your garden for two or three hours a-day
For you must stand at their command, and keep your shuttles at play.
“I do whatever I have to get their attention,” she adds, “and then I slip in what I really came to say.”
“Madam Katherine?” says a voice from the doorway. A stagehand stands there, with two eternal footmen behind him holding her wrap and Trevelyan’s coat.
“Ah,” Katarina says to you. “It would seem it’s time for me to bid you goodnight.”
Trevelyan regards the doorway with bleary eyes, then makes the connection and gets unsteadily to his feet. Katarina slips a hand under his arm. “I’m not that drunk,” he growls at her.
“Yes, you are,” she murmurs back.
“We’ve got the Timepiece timeline boxed up and put away,” the stagehand says. “The Timekeeper timeline is nearly ready. Miss Barton, Mr. Carrington, Mr. Maxwell, five minute warning.”
Katarina blows you a kiss as she collects her wrap from the footman, then she and Trevelyan disappear down the corridor.
Sources: http://www.answers.com/topic/vesta-tilley#ixzz1f1NxL0eE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_I_Love_Is_Up_in_the_Gallery
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/hist256/music_hall_songs.html (written well after 1885 in our timeline, but I figured I could fudge one)
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/hist256/workers_songs.htm
Thanks to Carol and Eileen for their assistance in finding these!
The evening has worn on. The level of alcohol in all the bottles is rather low. Tongues are looser and eyes slightly unfocused, spirits dampened by the typical secondary effect of spirits.
Becky: William, what accomplishment are you the most proud of?
He rubs a tired hand over his eyes. “Until recently, preventing John Freemantle from attending to his duty at Waterloo—but upon further reflection…” He indicates the disordered room and the waiting stage, sighs, and tries to smile. “Forgive me. That’s a churlish answer to a reasonable question. I… suppose it would have to be saving Chris Palmer’s life. Because I’ve done that still, haven’t I?” He thinks about it. “Yes, that stands. Otherwise I might have said ‘saving the child Margaret from the match factory,’ but that was undone with everything else. I undid the world thinking I was going to give her a better life; I might have given her a worse one; in either case, my storming the fortress at Murchinson’s has become meaningless.” After a moment, he adds, “It was still the right thing to do. A gentleman has a responsibility.”
Sarah: Trevelyan, why engineering? Did you have another career in mind before life intervened?
“Oh, no,” Trevelyan answers, glancing up from his beverage and sounding a little surprised. “It was always going to be engineering. I mean, once my uncle’s legacy opened the door. Without that, I would have settled for smithing or some such—as close as I could get. I’ve been taking things apart and putting them back together since I was three.”
Jason: Gavin Trevelyan, for many years now you have devoted all of your energy to creating weapons with which to fight the evils which plague Britain. If it were not necessary for you to do this, what would you do with your time and talents?
“Well, as I said to the young lady, it was always going to be engineering. When I was at university I had ambitions other than fighting Wellingtons—after all, why would I, none of us had any idea of the danger we were in until 1872.
“The year before, a classmate of mine journeyed through France during the summer holiday, and he got a good look at one of those balloons the French military was using to transport mail. It’s ingenius, really, the way the things worked—” Trevelyan pushes his glass to one side, catches hold of a piece of paper at random, flips it over, and starts drawing on it with a pencil pulled from his breast pocket. “They call this the envelope. It’s made of silk, and a basket suspended below it, you see? They have an open flame here, which heats the air inside the envelope, and the hot air rises like a venting smokestack, and carries the balloon with it. The drawback—” Trevelyan looks up to see if you are following. “—is that you can’t steer. You’re dependent on the wind. That won’t do, clearly, but if you could elongate the envelope—” He’s drawing again. “—that might allow you to add a rudder. See, like so. The problem with that is the hot air rising issue. Well, and the need for internal supports within the envelope—I’ve no idea what we could use to reinforce it—but it doesn’t matter, because the behavior of the air is the obstacle to be surmounted first. It’ll rise, but it won’t spread sideways, and therefore an elongated design won’t work. So you’d have to link many of them together, perhaps? Or fill the envelope with something else. Something lighter. Hydrogen or helium, maybe.
“And then think what we could do, if we could get that working. Air-trains instead of locomotive-driven ones, perhaps. Silent, out of the way, no black smoke clouds belching into the air. Or even better—no one knows what’s up higher than a balloon can safely go. ‘Aether,’ some say, but no one knows what that is. If we could find out—if we could get close enough to capture some—we might be able to determine if there’s anything lighter than it. And then we could keep going. My classmate and I did some very preliminary work on all this with a professor before… before 1872. The professor offered us both positions after graduation and… we… well.” Trevelyan deflates almost visibly, lets the pencil drop, and picks up his drink. “We had plans.” He downs the liquid in a swallow and refills the glass. “It doesn’t bear thinking about, does it?” he mutters, almost to himself. “If we hadn’t had this war to fight, we could be halfway to the moon right now.”
Ken: My question is similar to Jason’s, but not identical. I want to ask Gavin what he would have done if the monsters had overrun his village, but Brenda and her family had escaped. If you knew the monsters were a menace but they hadn’t killed your wife, would you still have built the constructs?
“I would still have switched my focus from investigating air-train design to investigating a method of stopping Wellington’s rampaging horde,” Trevelyan says to the half-empty glass. “Everyone at the University of London switched their focus to the war effort; it is the nature of war efforts. Would I still have built the constructs? That I don’t know.” He studies the play of light on liquid as though it is fascinating. “I like to believe she would have stopped me.”
Joseph: Mr. Gladstone, it has been mentioned that the constructs were not successful during campaigns in the East, but was success found selling them in the Americas?
Gladstone helps himself to a sandwich and smiles at you. “My dear young man, I don’t know that I would call them unsuccessful in the East. We suffered a bit of a setback at Maiwand, true, but I’ve never understood why Seward chooses to harp on it the way he does.” He sips his champagne. “You are correct, though—we turned a handsome profit for the Empire, in more ways than one, selling them to the gentlemen of the South during the American conflict.
“In fact, we turned a handsome profit twice. First we made the Wellington monsters available on the open market, and the United States was a most enthusiastic purchaser. Some of our European neighbors took advantage of our invention as well, for their colonial possessions, but none were so enthusiastic an adopter as our young cousin the Stars-and-Stripes. Some said the country would have split on the slave question if there had not been a more palatable alternative to hand—that without our monsters, there might well have been war in the States in 1861—so we had both gold in our purse and the moral high ground for having averted so potentially horrific a conflict.
“At least, averting it until 1875. Not all the disagreements between the American North and South could be deferred indefinitely, particularly not when the Wellington rebellion of 1872 spread across the water. We were busy getting our own house in order and could offer no aid until ’77, but then we were pleased to extend it (and some constructs) through unofficial channels to the gentlemen of the Southern states. Its freedom won, the Confederacy cleaved closer to the bosom of its motherland—so nice to have provided a reason for the errant children to return to the fold, don’t you agree?—and, why, then we had a foothold on the North American continent, and constructs readily to hand, and our enemy’s enemy was exhausted from war and ready for the picking. Well-played all round, I call it.”
Anise: Maxwell, what would happen if they went to the bubbling brook setting?
Maxwell looks rather cross. “Very likely, nothing–a far preferable state of affairs to what actually occurred. As far as I can tell, nothing happens there. It was the first place I went, and I’ve been back several times since, and there’s never anything interesting within a mile in any direction.” He looks thoughtful for a moment. “This being the case, I couldn’t tell you why the watch chooses to show it.”
Angela: Maxwell, if you found the watch in a garret who taught you to use it?
The expression is too twisted to be a smile. “My father, I suppose you’d say. I found his journals in the same garret—different trunk. My aunt had never gone through his things, just shoved them up there. I had no idea they existed, or I would have gone through them years earlier. My father’s journals were… what you might call cryptic, but suddenly made far more sense when I opened the watch.”
Jason: Maxwell, how old were you when you first used the pocket watch to time travel? For how long have you been engaged in your current quest?
“My uncle died when I was just turned thirty, and my cousin’s wife embarked upon a thorough overhaul of the premises when she took possession. I was bidden to go through relics of my parents’ I had never known were there… and there were the watch and the journals. I did quite a bit of adventuring in the years following. So much so that it’s a little difficult to say how many years, or how old I actually am.
“My initial adventures were confined to the past. I first probed into the future… I don’t know, I suppose it would be ten years ago in my subjective time? I spent time tracing the river back to its source, tried a few ill-thought-out methods of diverting it, then spent time more seriously researching and planning equally unsuccessful attempts… thrice now I’ve lived the life of those I was trying to help… yes, I think it must be about ten years all told.”
He abruptly seems to realize how talkative he is being, and glances down ruefully at his empty glass. Then he glances as if casually around the room, and his eyes fall upon Mr. Gladstone, who is speaking with Joseph by the buffet table, and Katarina, who is watching them. “Please excuse me,” he says generally, to you, Anise, Angela, and Julie. “I should probably intervene there.” He goes to engage Katarina in conversation before she engages Gladstone–in conversation, or in any more destructive manner.
