The River of No Return (15 page)

“When did you put on caps?”

Clare took a delicate sip. “Last year.”

Nick was silent, not knowing what to say. Would his old self have been silent, too? Clare seemed to think so.

“I can see what you are thinking, Nick, and I assure you, I want to hear no words about it.”

He nodded. “As to whether or not you look older,” he said, “I always think of you as a kid, dragging me behind you into trouble.”

“A
kid
?”

“I’m sorry.” He had slipped up already. “A kid. It’s . . . it’s soldier’s cant for a child. I meant that I always see a young girl when I look at you.”

“That’s kind of you. But I know my age. And I no longer expect to be married.” She looked at him closely. “I can comfort myself that my little brother looks years older than I do.”

Nick knew that his face told its own story. He had been three years her junior when he went off to war. Now he was four years her senior.

“Your scar. How did you get it?”

“This?” He touched his eyebrow, the ramparts of Badajoz looming in his memory.

“Yes.”

“A taproom disagreement.”

Clare frowned but said nothing.

“I think you are beautiful,” he said, both to break the silence, and because it was true.

“Thank you. I suppose I should learn that when you ask for compliments, the compliments you receive always sound like false coin.”

“You never used to be this self-doubting.”

“Your death changed everything. We have not known how to be happy for three years.” Between one breath and the next Clare was crying.

Nick gathered his sister into his arms, pushing the wretched cap from her head and stroking her hair. “Hush,” he said. “Hush now.”

She gripped his shoulders and wept for a moment, then she pulled away and rearranged herself on her chair. With her face turned from him, she replaced her cap carefully back over her hair. “Oh, dear.” She wiped her eyes with her napkin. “I am sorry. It is such a shock.” She looked at him again, her eyes a little red. “Such a lovely, lovely shock to see you, Nick. I’m afraid I lost control.”

“I am glad you could show me your tears. It makes me feel . . .” He stopped, surprised to discover that the feeling was pride. It was in relation to the emotion that had surprised him a few moments ago, when Clare had been flirting with Arkady. Except that he wasn’t angry now.

“It makes you feel like you’re home again? To have your sister dissolve into tears like a ninny?”

Yes. It had to do with being home. He realized it now. These feelings had been waiting for him. Waiting here in this house, like ghosts. These were the emotions of that man he would have become, had he never jumped. He had left home so young and gone to the wars and then to the future. He had become someone else entirely. A modern man. Half an American. Yet here they were, that other man’s emotions, roiling inside him. The Marquess of Blackdown. A proud man. Inflexible. Competitive. Like his father.

Nick didn’t care much for his nineteenth-century self but he smiled into Clare’s eyes, even as he tamped the marquess down. “Yes. It makes me feel that I am home.”

“I am sorry to welcome you in such a fashion. I haven’t wept, oh, in years. Mother has been desolate without you. She lost all her vigor. She never entertains anymore, and it took all my ingenuity and Bella’s combined to get her to take our sister to London.”

“Why aren’t you with them? Surely you could have participated in the Season, as well. You aren’t so old, however much you may hide your hair beneath a cap. As I recall, the only unmarried men in the neighborhood are the vicar and old Lord Percy. You should be in London.”

“Old Lord Percy is dead. They buried him two weeks ago. The new earl seems vile. Everyone says so.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” Nick thought for a moment about Lord Percy, the bombastic old earl. He had been a powerful man, healthy as an ox, and as much a part of Castle Dar as the stones themselves. “I didn’t realize Percy even had an heir. I seem to recall him talking about being the last of his line.”

“That’s the worst thing about it,” Clare said. “The estate was entailed after all. Apparently old Lord Percy had been trying to break the entail ever since his son’s death, that’s how much he hated his successor. But to no avail.”

Nick found he didn’t really care about the new earl. Julia Percy had to be married by now, and that was his only interest in Castle Dar. And he found he didn’t want to know anything about whom she might have married, or when. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “An unpleasant neighbor will be a burden.”

“Yes.” She put her teacup down. “There are bigger questions facing us, though.”

“Oh? What are they?”

Clare didn’t speak.

“Clare?”

She raised her cup of tea, then replaced it untasted. Perhaps you have considered it already. It concerns the succession here at Falcott.”

“What of it? I have returned.”

“And I am so glad you have, Nickin.” He thought she might start crying again, her eyes were so sad and happy all at once. “But surely you realize that we thought you were dead. We proceeded as if you were. You left a will.”

Nick went still. So he had. Before leaving for Spain he had drawn up a will, bequeathing all of Blackdown—the house and its lands, its system of tenancy, all its cares, and all its income to his capable elder sister. Until this very evening Clare had thought herself an independent woman.

“Oh,” he said.

She nodded. “Yes. And believing you were dead . . . well, let’s just say you came back in the nick of time.”

Nick of time! Nick swallowed a laugh. His sister had no idea how pertinent her pun was. “Were you about to sell up and move to Bath? Has my return banjaxed your dreams?”

“Is that more soldiers’ cant? You needn’t laugh at my having dreams, Nick.”

“Oh, God.” Now he felt like a scoundrel. And he couldn’t explain his laughter or his language, not without telling her the impossible truth. “I’m sorry, Clare. I’m not laughing at you. Tell me what’s happened.”

“When you died the marquessate became extinct, and the Blackdown estate turned into saleable property, like any other. And I . . .” She took a deep breath, and to his surprise he realized that her hands were trembling. “Oh, dear. Well, it’s best to get quickly over rough ground, isn’t it?”

“Are you telling me that Blackdown is sold? Lock, stock, and barrel?”

“No. Not yet. And I was never going to sell it all. But I was planning to put quite a large segment of it into trust. The papers were to be signed next week. So you see, you did come home at exactly the right moment.” She squared her shoulders, almost as if she were bracing herself for an explosion.

And indeed, he could feel the ghostly marquess building up a head of steam, could even taste the aristocratic outrage in his mouth: rusted metal. It must have been that man’s outburst that Clare was expecting. He let his gaze rest on his elder sister, saw the courage in her calm self-possession. She who had learned her arithmetic and her history by listening at the keyhole to his sessions with his tutor, and then doing his lessons for him every evening. She who had taken the beating for that escapade, when it was discovered that Nick didn’t, in fact, know into how many parts Gaul had been divided. His anger dissipated as fast as it had built. “It should have been yours anyway,” he said, and put his teacup down with a clatter. With the bright noise a rebellious joy burst in his heart. “You are the eldest and by God, I will sign it over to you in life as I did in death. Blackdown shall remain yours. It always should have been.”

Clare blinked. “I don’t understand what you’re saying, Nick. You cannot gift it to me. You have returned. Blackdown is yours and it cannot be otherwise.”

“I’m saying I don’t want it, aren’t you listening?” The words came tumbling out of his mouth. “You take it. Take it and sell it all. I don’t care. I will renounce the title and give you the whole estate.” Nick had to bite down on the urge to tell her everything. Once upon a time, a man went and lived in a future age. In this future, the human race had walked on the moon. Buildings scraped the sky. Mechanical carriages went four times faster than the fastest horse. There was no primogeniture.

But he couldn’t tell her. She was right: the choice wasn’t his to make. His ebullience died, fast, like a man shot through the head. He was left staring at her blank, white face and he knew his own was equally expressionless.

She probably thought he was mad.

“Nick—”

“Please, Clare. Give me a moment.” He turned from her, twisting in his chair to look out of the window. Outside the soft night was brooding over the awakening earth. The commons. He could feel it out there. The ancient will of the land to be free of him.

“Nick?”

He turned back slowly, gathering himself together again.

“Shall I pour you another cup?” She spoke as if nothing had happened and held the teapot, that most benign weapon of civilization, poised above the china.

He breathed in, then out, and summoned up a small smile. “No thank you, Sister. I’m sorry I . . .” He fought the phrase
stressed you out
and came up, after a panicked trawl through his memory, with the correct expression. “I am sorry I discomfited you. I quite literally forgot myself in Spain, and I am afraid I forgot myself again just now. Of course I will not, indeed cannot, renounce my title. I am glad to be home, and I am eager to take up the reins again.” He inclined his head to her. “And I am quite willing to apprentice myself to your greater knowledge of how to manage this blasted place. Are you willing to serve as my steward? Alongside Mr. Cooper, of course.”

She set the teapot down again. “Mr. Cooper ran off with a seamstress from Tavistock. Mrs. Cooper is now the housekeeper at Castle Dar.”

Nick paused, assimilating that information. “And you were selling land because you need the money? The land . . . it isn’t in good heart? What are the problems?”

“No, it isn’t for the money.” She shook her head. “Or rather, it is for the money, but mostly it’s because everything has changed, including money itself. All the silver’s drained away to China and India, and now into the war. There’s hardly enough silver left in Britain to make a child’s rattle! They’re overstriking foreign coins, asking us to accept slips of paper and thin little tokens that represent nothing at all.”

Nick raised his eyebrows. “My apologies, but I have no idea what you are talking about, Clare.”

She looked at him curiously, her head on one side. “I suppose you are more familiar with lead than with silver. But honestly, Nick, you will have to start noticing the way things are if you are to make Blackdown a success. The weight of a coin in your hand will tell you everything about the trouble we’re in. And not just here. All over Britain. Nothing adds up. It’s a different time now.”

“I know it is,” Nick said. “Believe me. And I want to learn from you.”

“So humble!” But her smile was sad.

“Tell me what happened,” Nick said. “Just tell me the truth.”

“All right.” She glanced down, then up at him again. “You know, you are like the old Nick again. The way you were before Father died. Kind. I wouldn’t have thought war would do that to a man. Open his heart.”

Nick blinked, confused. “I thought we were talking about the degradation of British coinage. What does that have to do with my heart? Or with the estate, for that matter?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all.” She sighed. “Except that I am glad you are more like your old self. It makes it easier to tell you the state of things here. You have heard, perhaps, of the riots a few years back? The Luddites? But I am ahead of myself. After you left, we began to lose tenants. To America. To the wars. Two men didn’t come back from Spain. Ben Tucker and Red Wycliff. Jonas Hill came back and he seemed physically fit but . . .” She paused.

“He was unable to work,” Nick said.

“Yes. And one day he just went away.” She searched his face, her eyes lingering again on his scar.

He reached up and touched it, and her eyes shifted away. “It’s just a scar,” he said. “It matters not how or why or when.”

“The war—”

“Was terrible. The land is underworked, then?” He turned the subject firmly around, like a plow at a furrow’s end.

“Yes.” She followed his lead. “We lost more men to the manufactories than we lost to the war; they came one by one to say they were going. It wasn’t that they weren’t well treated here. It was that you were dead, or rather, that the marquessate was dissolved. Suddenly Blackdown was only acreage. The men felt free to put off their fathers’ shoes and strike out on their own. Off they went, filled with hope. But then there were the riots, and one of our men who had left to work in the north was killed. Executed actually.” She drew a shuddering breath. “John Stock.”

“Good God!” John’s face flashed before Nick’s eyes.

“Yes. He was executed with sixteen other men in York a little over a year ago. For machine breaking. His brother Asa was transported. Their wives and children came back to us here.”

“Are there no men left at all?”

“There should have been, but the year before last there was the magnificent harvest, so by the time of John’s execution the tenants were in such low spirits, eight families left en masse for America.”

Nick had to search his brain for why a magnificent harvest would crush morale. The answer came slowly. “Rents,” he finally said.

“The corn, Nick, I wish you could have seen it. By July the stalks were bent with the weight of the seed. It was as if England was Eden, with the fruit of the earth bursting forth in praise of creation. But the more enchanting the countryside, the more fecund and rich, the more the tenants fell into despair. They harvested that magnificent crop in fear. It was the same all over England and it was as clear as day: The price of corn must fall. In June it was at a hundred and seventeen shillings a quarter. A year later, Nick, imagine; it had fallen to just sixty-nine, and it remains so! The tenants could not make their rents, so of course I dropped them, but with John executed, the war over, and all of Russia poised to drown us in corn, everyone knew the prices would not rise again soon. And Blackdown cannot survive on low rents, at least not if it is to remain what it is.”