The River of No Return (8 page)

T
wo days had passed since Eamon had confronted Julia in the study. He had spent the time running the full gamut of threats. Without result, of course, for Julia had no idea what Grandfather’s talisman was or where it might be hidden. Indeed, she didn’t even believe in it. She thanked God she didn’t know, didn’t believe. It was easy enough to keep a secret she didn’t know.

“You are a damned witch, Julia,” he growled over breakfast on the third morning after the scene in the study. “The servants are all wrapped around your finger. My meals have been inedible, my bed was short-sheeted, and my fire smoked all night. They have made it perfectly clear that they disapprove of me and favor you. But mark me, Julia, your friends below stairs cannot protect you. You are going to help me find that talisman.”

“I assure you, Cousin, I never saw any talisman, nor did Grandfather mention one. The occasions when I saw him play with time were purely for fun. He used it as a trick to make me happy when I was sad or angry.”

Eamon looked down his nose at her. “But still you knew
.
You saw
.
What did he do exactly? Tell me again how it worked.”

Julia sighed and went through her story. “Nothing that I could see. He would simply catch my attention, wink, and then the fun started.”

“But what did he
do
?
Did he do anything different with his hands or his eyes?”

“No. Nothing like that.” Julia’s spine tingled when Eamon mentioned eyes, for of course it had seemed to be something Grandfather did with his eyes, concentrating on a small thing, ignoring the larger space, and focusing his intent onto a meaningless object. Then there would be that telltale rush behind her ears as the moments slowed or sped. There was no visible talisman. It was simply something Grandfather could do.

Eamon stalked back and forth. “He must have been staring at something, or perhaps holding something. Did he say any words? Any incantations?”

“No. He just . . . did it.”

“Blast it all to hell!” Eamon pushed his chair away from the table, stormed past Julia, and slammed the door of the breakfast room behind him, but immediately opened it again and stuck his head in. “You, Julia, are not to leave the house for any reason. No rides, no pottering about the estate. You will stay indoors until the talisman is found.”

“Yes, Cousin.”

Eamon slammed the door again. Julia made a sharp, very rude gesture at its blank, unresponsive face.

* * *

Arkady and Nick were sitting in matching leather armchairs before a roaring fire in the Mayfair mansion Arkady shared with Alice. Back in the day, this had been the city home of the Duke of Kirklaw. Nick had smoked cigars and quaffed illegal French brandy with the young duke in this very room the night before he left for Spain. The room and its décor were only slightly different now, and it gave Nick a decidedly vertiginous feeling to be sitting here again, another well-aged brandy in his hand and another well-cured cigar sitting half-smoked in another ashtray. But he shoved that distraction out of his mind and tried once more to concentrate. “Describe the feeling to me again,” he said.

Arkady twirled his cigar between his thumb and forefinger. “Time slows down around you. It stops. Unless you can feel it happening, you will slow down and stop, too. That is bad. That is what happens to Naturals. You are not one of them. You must learn to
feel
it. You must learn to
know
when time is slowing down. If you feel it, if you know, you will never be caught. You will stay awake and not be frozen.”

“But how can I know how to feel it if I don’t already know how to feel it?”

“You English! You have no imagination. I describe it to you so you understand. Do you recall the first time you desired a woman?”

Nick sighed, half amused. He had learned across the course of the afternoon that the older man was very fond of sexual metaphors. “Yes,” he said. “Of course I do.”

“Describe it to me.”

Nick cast his mind back. “I was ten,” he said.

“Such a big boy.” Arkady pulled on his cigar.

Nick resisted the urge to roll his eyes and continued. “I was hiding in the creamery, crouched down behind a mess of pails that needed mending. My sister Clare and I were playing hide-and-seek. It was a hot day, but the creamery was cool and dark. The door opened, and I peeked out, expecting to see my sister. But it was a dairymaid, coming in with two pails of milk hanging from a wooden yoke she wore over her shoulders. She wore a tight-fitting bodice. . . .”

“Yes, yes,” Arkady said, leaning forward. “It was so in Russia at that time, with the dairymaids and their tight bodices.”

“Are you of my time, then?”

“Yes.” Arkady sharpened his focus on Nick. “And of your class as well, Lord Blackdown.”

Nick started. No one had used that title or that name since the butcher, in the Guild hospital. Now Arkady used them with, if not exactly respect, then some sort of acknowledgment. Nick coughed. “What . . . what am I to call you, then?”

“Are you asking me my name? The name to which I was born?”

Impatience pricked him. “I know that’s against Guild etiquette. But for God’s sake, Arkady, I’m sitting here in London waiting for the Guild to send me back to my time. I’m breaking cardinal rules every way I turn. I’m simply asking you to tell me whatever it is that I need to survive this escapade. Perhaps your blessed birth name is one of those things.”

Arkady blew a smoke ring. Nick watched it rise tremblingly and then dissipate. He puffed on his own cigar but performed no smoky tricks. He was in no mood for them. Arkady took another puff, then spoke, the smoke boiling out with his words. “You were allowed to keep your signet ring when you jumped.”

“Yes.” Nick glanced at his hand.

“I too. I kept my ring.” Arkady held his hand out to display his ruby ring. The jewel was huge and looked like a wound on Arkady’s bony hand. “The Guild chose us early on.”

“But how could they know?”

“We are aristocrats. Power likes power. The Guild is always happy to welcome a leader.”

“But I gave up my title. My land. My name.”

“Yes, yes.” Arkady waved his hand and the ruby glinted like an eye. “In your mind, yes, you became the simple man of the people, the commoner Nick Davenant. But the Guild has always known. You are
Blackdown
. The Guild let you believe it was forgotten. But the Guild did not forget.”

Nick had been happy to be allowed to keep his ring. Was he still? “And you? What manner of aristocrat are you? How noble, Arkady? Are you a prince? A czar?”

“I am Count Lebedev.”

Nick nodded his head in the old gesture of respect between equals. “Lebedev.”

Arkady smiled thinly. “Nice to meet you, too, Blackdown. But do you think I believe in this thing, this aristocracy? I know the future. I am not the fool. I am merely happy to be the count when it is good for the Guild. And you will be happy to be the marquess.”

“If you say so.” These old titles, these old gestures—Nick felt a little dizzy.

“I say so. I know it. You will have to struggle against how much you are happy to be the marquess. In fact, he will try to eat you up, this marquess who waits for you in the past. You will have to fight him. I will help you in that struggle.” Arkady spread his hands. “I am coming with you. Back to 1815.”

“You’re coming too?”

“Yes.” Arkady leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. “Does that please you?”

“I’m not exactly pleased with anything having to do with this mess.”

“Such friendliness. But you will be glad, I assure you. In the meantime, Nicholas Falcott, Marquess of Blackdown, we must accustom you again to your old names and your old personality.”

Arkady had said those names—names that had once been his—three times in a minute. In this room, no less; the same room where Nick had spent his last night in London before leaving for Spain. Before breaking his mother’s heart. Before destroying his patrimony. Before ruining his sisters’ lives. Before damning his own sorry soul to hell at Badajoz.

Arkady’s voice was tender when he spoke again. “Shall we return to the more pleasant topic of the lovely dairymaid?”

“The dairymaid. Yes.” Nick took a deep breath, let it out, and packed his bad feelings away for another day. “She was lovely. Buxom. She came in, set the pails down, and drew the scarf from her bosom. Her bodice was low-cut, but the scarf hid everything, you understand.”

“Yes, I do understand.”

“She took it off, and her breasts rose up plump. One nipple peeked over the edge of her bodice. She used her scarf to wipe her face and stood fanning herself with her hand for a moment in the cool of the creamery. Her cheeks were flushed, and then as she bent to scratch her ankle, her breasts simply seemed to spill out. I was only about a foot away, crouched at that level. The world turned upside down. I was flooded with sensation. It seemed mostly to be in my head, a rushing of blood, or something like that.”

“Did you do anything?” Arkady puffed his cigar.

“No. Of course not. I was ten.”

“But I, I would have taken the opportunity. I would have said, ‘Now is my chance to become more educated.’”

Nick took a sip of his brandy and eyed the lanky Russian. His head was thrown back and he was blowing smoke rings again, clearly lost in his own fantasy. “Remind me why we are even discussing this?”

Arkady rolled his head to one side to look dreamily at Nick. “I am trying to describe to you the feeling. You do not know what it is. Like a little boy who does not know what it is to desire a woman. Then suddenly you do know what it is. Forever afterward you know. At first you cannot control this feeling; it is—how do you say it nowadays—the boss of you. It arrives when it arrives. But soon you learn how to control it. You can make the feeling come and you can make it go. You are the boss of it. Do you see?”

“So it feels like desire? Someone near me is shifting time and I think, ‘That’s lovely. I want to have sex.’”

“No. Deliberately you misunderstand me. It feels like . . . like you almost trip and think, ‘Oh! I am falling.’ But then you do not fall. Or you are drinking and you think, ‘Oh! If I drink more the room will spin.’ But you do not drink more and then it does not spin. Do you see?”

Nick drew on his cigar and didn’t answer. Sex, drinking, falling. He was beginning to suspect that this old Russian had led a far more interesting life than he had.

Arkady tried again. “Do you remember the feeling the moment you jumped in time?”

“Yes.” Nick recalled Jem Jemison fighting near him. Catching his glance. The bloody gravel under his fingers as he scrabbled for purchase. He recalled the cold intent in the Frenchman’s eyes, and then the terrifying, blind sensation of being yanked forward, as if by a team of wild horses. “It was like I was being pulled forward uncontrollably, and at great speed.”

“Yes. This is the feeling I describe, only much, much smaller. Softer, this feeling. Someone near you is playing with time. You feel it; it is like a little pull in your belly. A little rushing in your ears. That time you jumped, it was a big pull, a big rush. You were saving your own life. You think it was an accident, a strange trick that takes you from the battlefield to the future. No, it was you. It was your gift, something inside you that was saving you. But you had no control over this thing, this gift. You were unaware. Much like a boy when he dreams of a woman, and when he wakes he finds that—”

Nick held up a hand. “Please, Arkady. Is it possible to continue this conversation without constantly referring to sex?”

“But why? Sex is related to everything. It is the most powerful human drive.”

Nick sighed.

Arkady pointed at Nick with his cigar. “Your years in America have ruined you. You are prudish, like a priest. Remember your old self, Blackdown. Would he have said to me, ‘I will not talk with you about women’? ‘I am embarrassed to talk with you about women’? No. He would have said, ‘Arkady, we are friends. Let us drink brandy and smoke cigars and talk about women.’”

“But we aren’t talking about women. We are talking about freezing time. I am still not entirely sure what dairymaids have got to do with it.”

Arkady unfolded himself from his armchair and stood glaring at Nick from his beanpole height. “Our skill—it is sensuous. It is warm. Making time stop at your will, it is like caressing a beautiful woman. Caressing her and feeling her surrender.”

Nick slumped back in his chair. “Fine,” he said. “I am merely the student here.” He could not believe this man was Alice Gacoki’s husband. But across the few days that he had lived with them, he had learned that in private Alice was a very different woman from the cool and collected Alderwoman he knew. They wouldn’t let Nick out into London—“You must still abide by Guild rules as far as possible”—and so they ate at home together. Alice was an inspired cook, reciting English poetry or singing in Kikuyu as she moved around the kitchen, unless—and Nick couldn’t bear to be in the kitchen at these times—she was listening to
The Archers
on the old-fashioned radio that sat like a cat, humpbacked and purring, on a sunny windowsill. She was a mean poker player and she liked her drink. She flirted constantly with her randy husband, while he, for his part, worshipped his beautiful, powerful wife. But Nick now also understood why Arkady was so seldom to be seen at official events, and was silent and mysterious when he did attend. The man was incorrigible.

Arkady stood beside Nick’s chair. “Close your eyes this time, Blackdown,” he said. “I am going to stop time. Try again to feel it.”

Nick closed his eyes. The room was silent except for the crackle of the fire. They had been through this again and again already this afternoon. Each time Nick missed it, and between one second and the next Arkady would seem, as if by magic, to have flown across the room, or moved Nick’s cigar, or built up the fire to a roar. Now Nick didn’t even try. He let his mind drift back to that voluptuous dairymaid, and the thing he hadn’t told Arkady. When she bent down, she had seen Nick gawping at her. Instead of screeching, or hiding her breasts, she had simply smiled. “Hello,” she said. Then she straightened again and carefully rearranged her fichu, taking her time. Whether she knew that she was tormenting him with her exquisite beauty, or whether she thought of him as an innocent child, Nick could not tell. But the replacement of the scarf became the fuel for years of dreams. She had taken her sweet, sweet time tucking the fabric in, arranging it, making it perfect. The process was infinitely more erotic even than when she had taken it off, for now Nick knew she knew he was watching. Then, with a twitch of her skirts, she was gone, and Nick was left alone, a very different boy than he had been when he scampered in to find a good hiding place.