The River of No Return (10 page)

Nothing happened. She let her breath out and tried to remember how it had felt when Grandfather had played with time. He had always focused on something inconsequential, like dust motes. She closed her eyes and slowed her breathing. Then she opened them and let her eyes rest on a little pagoda in the Chinese wallpaper, under the wall sconce. Grandfather, she thought, recalling his smiling face. Winking roguishly before doing his trick.

There it was. There was the rushing at the back of her head, and time began to reverse, ponderous, reluctant, like a team of oxen being made to back up in a furrow. But it was happening. It was like looking out through misty, rainy window glass. Eamon pulled away and melted down the table to his seat.

Julia closed her eyes in relief and time resumed its forward push. She reached up and touched her throat. The wound was closed over, with no trace of blood. She opened her eyes. Eamon was pushing his food around with his fork. He looked up and caught her eye. “Penny for your thoughts, kitten,” he said. “Are you thinking of the talisman?”

“No,” she said, and quietly sliced a medallion of pork in half.

N
ick woke fighting with his sheets, the dream tearing away from him like a cat’s claws, leaving its thin, raw wounds. The room was dark and close, overheated. Nick cursed and kicked the sheets aside, then went to the window and hauled it up. He leaned out into the night, gulping in cold winter air.

The house was in St. James’s Square, almost the only residence among embassies and corporate headquarters. The park itself, filled with mature trees, was unrecognizable to Nick. Back in 1813 the square had been treeless. In fact, it had been entirely cobbled over in white Purbeck stone. There had been a pool at its center, protected from animals and bathers by an octagonal iron fence. On that last night, Nick had sauntered away from this house across the stones, the ripe full moon following him in reflection across the pool. He had walked away into London, a free man. Now the Guild wouldn’t even let him out of this blasted house.

Nick peered up to see if there was a moon now, and indeed, there she was, visible in spite of the bright glow of the city. She showed only the curve of her full cheek to the wintery world. Nick liked the moon best this way—flirtatious. “‘Had we but world enough, and time,’” he said to her, “‘this coyness, Lady, were no crime.’” Quoting poetry to heavenly bodies had once been a fashionable thing for a man to do. Now it was ridiculous . . . but
now
didn’t really mean anything to Nick anymore. He was locked away in this mansion, like an heirloom. Essentially useless in the present, but strangely valuable to the past and future.

It was only when he pulled back into the bedroom and was shutting the window that the rest of the poem stung him like a wasp. He whispered, his breath clouding the glass: “‘Time’s wingèd chariot . . . deserts of vast eternity . . .’” Then he spoke, loudly: “‘Let us roll all our strength and
all our sweetness up into one ball
, and tear our pleasures with rough
strife through the iron gates of life:
thus, though we cannot make our sun stand still, yet we will make him run!’”

Nick stared at the white screen his breath had made. He put his hand on the lean flesh below his ribs; his skin was cold, for the window was still half open, but he could feel the heat beneath. His liver. Once upon a time he had believed that his liver was the origin of his courage and hope and love. All three spreading through him, warm and wet, in his blood. He almost believed it even tonight, as the brave heat in the core of him fought against the freezing night air.

Strength and sweetness. The iron gates of life.

Nick slammed the window shut and turned to grab at his clothes, flung across a chair. Fuck the rules, fuck this inertia. He couldn’t
not
go down into his city, he couldn’t not see what time had done to it.

Walking out the front door of the mansion set off a braying alarm, but let them send the time police after him. He wagered he could lose them for a few hours, anyway. He trotted down the steps as he had two hundred years ago and headed through the bleak predawn for Pall Mall. He was going, of course, to the river. Pall Mall to Cockspur Street, then down Hungerford Street to the Hungerford Stairs. A matter of a few minutes’ walk.

But first, as he emerged out of the square and onto Pall Mall, he had to confront the fact that Carlton House, the Prince’s palace and the glittering hub of the social universe, was gone. He stared at the white buildings that stood on the old palace’s gardens. They gleamed in the phosphorous glow of the streetlamps like the grin of a skull. This avenue of mausoleums wasn’t living, breathing London anymore. The city had to be alive and changing and vital somewhere else. Nick glanced up at the moon, then thrust his hands into his pockets and turned left. Find the river, find the city.

He walked quickly through the too-grand grandeur, around the engorged curve of Cockspur Street . . . and there weren’t the Royal Mews. Lions, fountains, the towering column—so
this
was Trafalgar Square. And that grand building, presiding over the square—wasn’t that Carlton House’s portico stuck on its front? That building was sporting Carlton House’s façade like a tattered columbine mask! Nick laughed out loud. And St. Martin’s, which used to thrust its steeple up out of the melee of stables like a drowning arm, now stood exposed, a pretty toy church. In fact, Nick thought, it all looked as if an enormous child had dropped building blocks and stuffed lions and toy buses here.

Walking quickly, he navigated the deserted roundabout at the bottom of the square. A single cab blazoned with an ad for
The Book of Mormon
spun past him, beeped a question, then whizzed away into the night. Hungerford Street . . . it should be here.

It wasn’t. Hungerford Street no longer existed, far less its noisome stairs down to the river, which had cut between rotting houses swarming with rats. There had been a blacking factory there at the bottom. Well. No more.

Nick set off down Whitehall, assuming he could find the Whitehall Stairs if they still existed, or get down to the water at Westminster Bridge. His steps slowed as he approached the Horse Guards, where he had been transformed into a fighting man. It looked the same. The single guard standing at stiff attention outside the gates was the only other living person in this street studded with monuments. Nick repressed a mad desire to stop and tell the young man his story. But he only nodded as he passed and kept on walking, all the way down to the new Houses of Parliament, which looked, he thought, like the radiators in his SoHo loft. He turned left and headed across the bridge, reasoning that he could find his way down to the river on the other side.

Eventually, past the enormous wheel and the concrete theater complex, he found a broad staircase that led him down to where he wanted to be, among the pipe stems and twisted net, the bits of rope and the shattered bricks that made up the river’s rough bed. Nick took a deep, happy breath as his feet found their level in the debris. He stood by the Thames for a long time, watching its waters glide at their own sweet will through the mighty heart of London.

It was maybe a half hour or more later when he finally came out of his reverie to find the sun well risen. He bent, stiff with cold, to pick up the perfect bowl of a pipe that his foot had uncovered. As his fingers closed around the smooth clay form, the hair lifted at the back of his neck. He was being watched.

Nick took his time. He straightened up with the pipe in hand—it was more intact than he had at first seen; only the end of the stem was broken off. He turned it over in his fingers, this little relic of his own era, then let it fall. He turned and scanned the embankment with a casual air. Men and women were beginning to hurry by on their way to work. A few people were leaning against the railing, looking across the river at the city. Was one of them the Guild’s spy? He passed his eyes across two young Asian tourists, the woman looking out toward St. Paul’s, the man with his iPhone lifted. A jogger taking a rest and swigging from a red bottle. A trio of teenagers in school uniform, smoking cigarettes.

Then he saw him. Not on the embankment, but standing halfway down the steps to the river. The thick brown hair was the same, and the big, meaty body. This time the suit was an absurd three-piece concoction of pale green tweed. The trousers were plus fours, of all the unbelievable things. Mustard-colored socks, brown brogues . . . and big, mirrored aviator glasses.

Mr. Mibbs.

How he thought he could blend in, Nick didn’t know. Or perhaps he wasn’t trying to, for when Nick caught sight of him he made no motion to pretend he wasn’t staring. Nick almost raised a hand and waved, but that blank, mirrored stare reminded him of how he had felt the first time he had seen the man, all those years ago in Chile. And the way that Leo had warned him away when Nick started to approach. And what Leo had said about Mibbs and stolen babies later on.

Nick turned back to the river. So Leo was right. Mibbs was some kind of Guild official. Probably police, or a spy, though you could hardly describe him as “plainclothes.” His taste was atrocious.

Well, let him follow. Nick had no intention of going back to St. James’s Square any time soon. He was playing truant today, and Mibbs was welcome to watch.

* * *

That night Julia exulted in her ability. Locked in her bedchamber long after the household was asleep, she lit five candles around her room so that she could measure the strength of her ability to freeze time. She stood on the bed, holding another candle. For a moment she watched their flames tremble. Then she willed them to stop.

And stop they did.

Excitement bubbled up in her and spilled over, like boiling milk. She gave in to joy, dancing on her bed in the midst of the stalled moment, twirling with her candle held high, its flame still as a painting, her loose hair spinning around her face and shoulders.

“‘I drink the air before me!’”

She pointed her finger dramatically and started time again in a wave, beginning with the candle by the door and bringing each flame back to life one by one.

A moment later she lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling, time moving sedately about her. Her soul was rigid with fear. This was rough magic.

* * *

At first it was mildly amusing, leading Mibbs around the city. The man was nothing if not persistent, plodding along a block behind as Nick wandered through the streets, getting reacquainted with London. Nick would catch sight of him now and then in a shop window, his hands always flat at his sides, his mirrored glasses glinting in the sun. Then Nick would forget about him for ten or fifteen minutes at a time. After all, he was in London and there was so much more to pay attention to than one badly dressed Guild thug.

But Nick quickly realized that London wasn’t his city anymore. Many Georgian houses remained and many were missing, knocked out like teeth by bombs or Victorians. Those that did remain weren’t being used as houses; nobody seemed to live in the center of town, though the place was teeming with humanity. Nick cut up through Seven Dials and knew for certain: This new city had long forgotten Nicholas Falcott, Marquess of Blackdown, and Nick Davenant was a tourist here, among thousands of other tourists. He stepped into a thronged coffee shop and elbowed his way toward an organic sausage roll and something called a “flat white.” He paid with his Amtrak Guest Rewards card, and wondered, as the espresso machine shrieked, if he would ever board the Vermonter at Penn Station and rattle over the river and through the woods to his little house again.

After breakfast he stopped counting the things that weren’t there, stopped even noticing what remained. He allowed himself to be entirely in the twenty-first-century present, appreciating London for what it now was, not what it had once been. Sometimes a proud blue plaque informed him of where an important person of his generation had lived, but the news of their sober achievements didn’t tend to match up with Nick’s personal library of information. Nick smiled to himself, reading that William Lamb, that cuckold and spanker of chambermaids, had apparently gone on to become prime minister in 1834. For a giddy moment Nick imagined himself texting Lamb across the ages: “omg! u r pm!” And receiving one back: “1834 rocks!”

He wandered northward, pleased with himself and with the world. The London of his time had petered out just about here, into open fields and pretty villages. How delightful to have missed the decades across which the countryside was desecrated by adipose Victorian sprawl. Now all that smug, ruddy architecture was venerably antique and crumbling. Nick thought with wicked pleasure of the two or three British generations that had followed his own, and for whom he had developed an antipathy since jumping to the future. They were all pushing up daisies in Highgate Cemetery now. Nick straightened his cuffs and lengthened his stride. He was in the mood for a long walk; maybe he’d go and visit them. Then have a pint in a pub somewhere, and totter home to Alice and Arkady in time for tea. He began to sing under his breath: “‘Here I am one and still will be, who spends his days in pleasure! My tailor’s bill is seldom filled; he’s never took my measure!’”

But when he reached Euston Road, he hit a wall.

It was a wall of fear, and it strangled Nick’s little song in his throat. He could look across the streaming traffic to the pagoda roofs of the British Library easily enough. But his heart was slamming against his ribs, and panic seized his limbs. He gasped for air and stumbled backward. As he did so, the fear dissipated, like mist.

He looked over his shoulder and there was Mibbs, a few yards back, standing in the middle of the sidewalk. He looked as gormless as a Belisha beacon.

But he didn’t have his glasses on.

Nick twisted abruptly to face Euston again. He breathed in and out, forcing himself to a sort of electrified calm. As the light changed, he stepped forward.

And was slammed with terror, exactly like before.

Staggering back, he watched as a few pedestrians crossed over to the library, leaving him behind. They looked happy enough, with their computer bags slung over their arms. Academics, off to spend the day nose-deep in books about the past.

It was Mibbs, of course, holding him back with those terrible eyes. Nick wasn’t leading him a merry chase through London. This wasn’t
A Hard Day’s Night
. Mibbs was the master here. Nick simply hadn’t realized that he was the one on a leash.

He rubbed the back of his neck and glanced casually over his shoulder. No glasses. Right. Nick turned smartly, following Euston Road instead of crossing it. He kept his gait the same, looked around him with the same interest as before, but every sense was focused now on the man behind him.

So. The Guild could control him through thought manipulation. Leo had described it all those years ago in Chile. Nick felt as if the back of his head had been taken off and a probe stuck into his gray matter.

Nick tested his theory of the invisible cage by trying to cross Euston Road again at the next light. St. Pancras Station was right there, like a gothic House Beautiful. If Nick could only get to it, he might climb on a train to France. Run away. He nursed that feeling, feeding it images of good wine and cheese, beautiful French women . . . and tried to propel himself into the street when the light changed. But no. A chasm seemed to yawn over the edge of the sidewalk. So he stepped away, smiling lightly in Mibbs’s direction. The man might be able to control Nick’s movements, but he wouldn’t get the satisfaction of seeing him sweat.