The River of No Return (22 page)

It was then that all hell broke loose. Eamon reached up to the mantelpiece and grabbed a china statuette of Shakespeare leaning contemplatively against a tree, and he smashed it against a nearby table. He brandished the base of the figure, which now sprouted two graceful legs and a stump, all ending in razor-sharp edges. “Leave my house!” the earl screamed, charging at them with his weapon.

Clare gasped, and Julia acted without thinking. She began to stall time, focusing all her powers of concentration out through that tiny peephole and down onto the gentlemen below. But almost immediately she felt something, someone, fighting her. Eamon! He must have divined that she was the Talisman, must have found a way to use her strength against her. The worst had happened. He was using her. She concentrated her attention, straining against him until she thought her head would burst.

He was pushing back against the strength of her will. She watched through the peephole as time slowed and Eamon’s motions became ponderous, but try as she might she could not stop time altogether. Her head hurt with trying, and she managed to slow the scene only a fraction more, before her concentration snapped as if it were a dry, dead stem. She pulled back from the peephole with a gasp, clutching her head.

The pain faded almost immediately. She turned quickly to Clare, who was still pressed to her peephole. They had to run. Farther away than Blackdown House. She had to leave the country. Eamon knew!

She grabbed at Clare, whispering her name, but her friend did not respond. Clare was frozen in a moment in time. Her hands, spread against the wall on either side of her peephole, were still as death. Julia glanced at the candle. It didn’t move.

Eamon had stopped time. He had overpowered and used her. She was the Talisman and he was channeling his will through her.

“Oh, my dear God,” she whispered, and slowly put her eye back to the peephole, letting her shaking fingers rest on Clare’s unmoving wrist.

* * *

The earl was suspended in midair, his absurd weapon held triumphantly aloft like Excalibur itself. “That wasn’t part of the plan,” Nick said. He turned to Arkady and was shocked to see that his friend was shaken and sweating. “What’s wrong with you?” He helped him to a seat.

Arkady pointed at Darchester. “That man is something extraordinary. He is as mad as your King George, but he is powerful. Didn’t you feel it?”

“I felt you stop time. It took you long enough. The blasted fool was about to slice my face off with Shakespeare’s codpiece.”

Arkady wiped his forehead. “You are too inexperienced to understand what happened here.
He
tried to stop time first. I had to fight him. I won. He is not strong enough. Few people are strong enough to win in a duel with me. But still he is very strong. I could feel—he should have been able to fight me, if he were trained. Perhaps he is inexperienced, or perhaps it is that he is crazy, or it is both things combined.”

“All right . . .” Nick wasn’t quite sure he understood what Arkady was saying, but it was clear they were in some sort of mess. “What the hell are we going to do now?”

Arkady was not to be rushed. He was calmer now, and contemplated the earl with a scholarly eye. “I don’t understand. Why is he now frozen? If he can freeze time himself, he should also be immune to being frozen. Remember how I trained you to notice when I stopped time? And then you could avoid being frozen with it? And yet you see him there. Even the spittle. It is like ice on his lips.” He stared up from his chair at the earl, suspended in mid-leap. “He cannot be Ofan. The whole purpose of Ofan resistance to the Guild is knowledge, education. An Ofan would know everything about his talent. He would know everything about how to use it.” Arkady propped his head in his hands and stared again at the immobilized earl. “This untrained maniac. He distresses me. Never have I seen anything like him. So strong the talent, and so ignorant the man.” Arkady walked up to Darchester, peering at him closely. “Are you Ofan?”

The contorted face said nothing.

“Let me kill him.” Nick heard the words leave his mouth, and realized he meant them. “I want to!”

Arkady turned, laughing. “The warrior priest! Why do you want to kill him? You who are so squeamish?”

Nick raked his hands through his hair in frustration. “You brought me here to kill Ofan. You uprooted my life to bring me here for this task. I will gladly begin right here and now and crush this serpent for us all.”

Arkady rocked back on his heels, that scholarly gaze turned on Nick, now. “Ah. I see. It is the woman. You will kill for a girl, but not for the Guild. This Julia, she beckons to you with the pretty looks and it makes you disloyal.”

“Do not speak of her that way.”

“What way?” Arkady looked him up and down. “You do not wish to hear her spoken of as a woman? Nor you as a man?” The Russian smiled, and for the first time Nick disliked him. “You are the great marquess now, is that it? The protector of virgins? You who were so recently the tomcat?” He shook his head. “I’m afraid I do not believe it, my priest. This very morning, I saw you heading toward Castle Dar. I saw the flash of a girl’s red cloak against the trees. She is yours already.”

Nick got one punch in before Arkady was on him, tumbling him off his legs and pinning him back against the chair. “Ah, Nick,” he said, almost dreamily. “You are romantic. I like it in you. But you cannot hit me. Not me, your old friend.”

“What makes you my friend, Arkady?” Nick’s face was so close to the Russian’s now that he could see his own face reflected in his pupils. “You expect me to die for a cause I know almost nothing about. You mock a woman I hold in great esteem. You make obscene suggestions about her to my face. Then you claim friendship with me?”

Arkady’s eyes were sparkling with delight by the end of Nick’s speech. He leapt to his feet, hauling Nick up with him. “Yes! You are so impassioned. Almost like a Russian. There is no priest in you now. I embrace you.” He did so. “No man is a man until he is made weak by a woman.” Arkady pulled back and held Nick by the shoulders, gazing tenderly into his eyes. “Kiss me.”

“I am not made weak by a woman, and I will not kiss you.”

“Bah. You lie.” Arkady smashed his lips against Nick’s unresponding mouth. He pulled back, grinning. “You are a man. We will save her. Why? Because it is beautiful and romantic to do so. We will fight this maniac like the men we are—with our fists. Why? Because it is beautiful and romantic to do so.” Arkady released Nick and turned to face Darchester. “Are you ready? I am about to set him free. Prepare, Nicholas Davenant, to defend yourself!”

Nick couldn’t help but laugh. “You are entirely insane!”

The Russian turned a wild, joyous face back to him, and then the earl was upon them, howling, and slashing with the broken statuette. Arkady and Nick milled in with their fists. Nick saw Darchester’s spittle, mobile again, fly from his lips, and then felt his own coat, shirt, and skin sliced open just above the elbow. “Damn you to hell!” He charged, head bowed like a ram’s, fists pumping. Meanwhile Arkady stepped behind the earl and caught him as Nick knocked him backward. Darchester got one more slash in before Arkady grasped his wrist and squeezed until Darchester squealed like a pig and dropped his weapon. Nick laughed in Darchester’s enraged face, only to have his shin viciously kicked. “You little shit sack!” Nick yelled, and Darchester began laughing in his turn. Hauling his arm back, Nick delivered a perfect right cross to the earl’s jaw. Darchester’s head snapped back and he fell, senseless, to the ground. Nick rubbed his fist. “That felt wonderful,” he said. “I haven’t done that in centuries.”

“Hush.” Arkady prodded the crumpled earl with a boot. “Time has started up again. You are the marquess. You know nothing of centuries.”

And indeed, the room was suddenly full of cheering servants, and then Clare and Julia were there, too. Clare hugged Nick. He looked over her shoulder to find Julia’s dark eyes upon him. He had no idea what it was that he saw in them.

W
hat do you think of this one?” Arabella Falcott held aloft a wicker hat that managed to be lushly feminine and disturbingly pagan at the same time. Its crown and brim were so sharply curved, and its trimming so abundantly floral, that it looked like a stag’s antlers protruding from a rosebush.

Julia displayed her own choice. This was a parasol of such minuscule proportions that one would have to be a leprechaun to make any real use of it. But ultimately, after much argument, Bella’s wicker hat was acknowledged the winner. The game, which had been going on all morning up and down the stalls of the Western Exchange, was called “find the most ludicrous thing.” With the triumph of the wicker hat, Bella was now ahead by seven points. Julia laid the parasol down with a sigh. “I admit defeat. Your eye for the vulgar is far better developed than my own. Now I must stand you an ice at Gunter’s.”

Bella crowed her triumph, and the young women turned away from the stall, much to the relief of the deeply insulted attendant.

Half an hour later they were seated in Berkeley Square, watching a waiter dodge horses and pedestrians to bring them their ices. After several weeks in town, Bella was an old hand at all things Gunter’s, and she ate her rye-bread ice with a blasé air. But this was all new to Julia, and her first taste of bergamot ice was a revelation. It was cold but creamy, sweet but tart. The exotic flavor and delicate perfume made the perfect complement to this upliftingly glorious day in London.

It had been three weeks since Grandfather’s death, and a week since she had been her cousin’s prisoner. Now here she was in London for the first time in her life. Bella, her oldest and best crony, was beside her, and they were seated at the very center of a world designed to delight the senses, eating the most delectable sweetmeats ever concocted by human hand. Julia was dressed in the highest kick of fashion—albeit all in black. The beautiful mourning clothes were a gift of the dowager marchioness. Upon receiving the news that her son was alive and that he planned to bring Julia to London along with his sister and a Russian nobleman, she had arranged for Julia to have a black walking dress, a black carriage dress, and a black evening gown ready and waiting.

Julia took another spoonful, sat back in her chair, and gave herself over to pleasure. She banished all thought, except appreciation of the moment and relish of this most beautiful of beautiful spring days. The town houses around the square sparkled white in the sun. Brightly painted high-perch phaetons pulled by prime horseflesh dashed by on the way to Hyde Park. They were driven by gentlemen of the first stare and carried ladies dressed in all the colors of a spring garden. The oval park itself was full of mamas and nursemaids and scampering children, a few strolling couples, the dedicated patrons of Gunter’s, and of course, weaving through it all, the ever-nimble waiters, carrying aloft their silver trays of sugary iced confections. Julia sighed and wished it could go on forever—but the dancing shadows cast by the overarching plane trees made the scene feel like a flickering dream, and she had to eat her ice quickly or it would melt.

Bella stuck out her tongue and flicked the last of her ice off her spoon. “What shall we do next?”

“Surely licking your spoon is bad ton, Bella.” Julia eyed her own with temptation but set it back in her empty dish.

“You are still afraid of London. I have learned that rules are made to be broken. Although you must pick and choose which ones to break, and when.”

“Hmm. Which rules have you been breaking, pray tell?”

“Nothing very serious.” Bella stood and brushed out her green cambric skirt. “Licking my spoon. Going alone to Vauxhall Gardens. Tying my garter in public.”

“Be serious.”

“How do you know I’m not being serious?” Bella held her hand out and pulled Julia to her feet. “Let us take a stroll around the square and I shall tell you all about it.”

Bella was small, with black hair and hazel eyes. She looked nothing like Clare and Nick, who were both tall and fair. Luckily, there was an uncanny resemblance to a great-great-aunt on her father’s side. The dowager marchioness, always terrified of What Other People Might Think, had rescued the dour portrait of that otherwise forgotten ancestress from the attics and hung it prominently at Falcott House; nobody was going to accuse her of playing her husband false. Still, Bella’s family nickname was “Changeling.”

She was a mercurial young woman, mostly full of fun, though sometimes a darker thread appeared in the bright fabric of her personality. A fervent Romanticist, Bella had committed whole swathes of
Werther
—in German, which she only partly understood—to memory. She could often be found painting by moonlight or sitting at the piano, plunking out the tune of a dreary
lied
with one finger and paging through her German wordbook with the other hand, discerning the meaning of the lyrics. Sometimes she was not to be found at all, for every now and then she took herself off for a long, solitary walk, preferably when the weather was threatening. She was firmly forbidden to wander off by herself in London, but as she now explained to Julia, it was a rule that was impossible to obey. “I have the
wanderlust,
you see,” she said, careful to pronounce the word correctly. “I just can’t help myself. Some days I wake up, and I must simply follow my own footsteps and see where they lead.”

“You came here to find a husband, Bella. Not to explore the underbelly of London.”

“I know.” Bella squeezed Julia’s arm to her side. “I shall. The Season is excessively entertaining, Julia. The men are ridiculous and the women are worse, but . . .” She cut her eyes sideways at her friend, one black eyebrow winging up. “There are some good apples in among the bad.”

Julia glittered with intrigue. “Have you discovered any particularly good apples?”

“It depends on whether you prefer them tart or sweet.”

Julia thought of Blackdown striding angrily up the hill in the rain. “I think it’s possible to find an apple that is both tart and sweet,” she said.

“Oh.” Bella’s eyes crinkled at the corners when she laughed—much like her brother’s. “It sounds like perhaps you have come across just such an excellent fruit. I must hear all about him.”

Julia pressed her lips together. She didn’t like to think of Blackdown’s rainy kisses, not since that scene in the Blue Drawing Room.

“Ah.” Bella nodded. “And Julia becomes a clam.”

They were rounding the north corner of Berkeley Square, which meant they passed the Falcotts’ London town house. Bella raised her hand and waved, though Julia could see no one—the windows reflected back the trees and the sky. Then she saw a pale hand rise to the glass of a second-story window. “Is that your mother?”

“Yes. She watches all day when I am out without her, simply waiting for me. Now that Nick is back, she is ten times worse. You’d think she would have rallied with the news of his return. But instead she is even more tormented, because she fears losing him again. Last night she stayed up until three awaiting his return from his club.”

“He was out until three?” Julia slowed her steps.

Bella sighed. “I know. Aren’t you consumed with jealousy? Imagine such freedom! But in actual fact, he was out until even later—or should I say earlier? For it was only that Mother finally gave up and went to bed at three. She came along the hallway weeping, convinced he was dead again, and I had to gather her up and tuck her in like a child. I am surprised we did not wake you.”

Julia hadn’t heard anything. She had lain awake late thinking over her own problems, only to fall into a dreamless sleep just before two. “Do you think the marquess came home at all last night?”

Bella kicked a pebble with her silk slipper, and it skittled away into the grass. “Call him Nick, Julia, like you used to in the old days. It’s so dreary, hearing his title on your lips like he’s something special all of a sudden. Lord, I hope he stayed out all night. Imagine if you were a gentleman and you arrived home after three years. Not just any three years, but years when you didn’t even know who you were. Suddenly it turns out you are not a wandering, penniless soldier, but a great lord with a vast fortune. You discover that you have a town house in the heart of a throbbing metropolis, and everything you see is yours for the asking. Would you spend your first night at home
at home,
if you know what I mean?”

Julia knew exactly what her friend meant, but she wasn’t going to commit to it yet. “I’m not sure.”

“Peagoose.” Bella pinched the skin on the back of Julia’s hand. “Doesn’t blood run in here anymore? I mean that he must have gone out with all his old friends, wining and dining and wenching the night away. At breakfast he denied it. He said he’d been with the Duke of Kirklaw, catching up on old times. But I don’t believe him. Kirklaw is a terrible bore. Nick was carousing, I’ll wager you anything. Just imagine. The jollity, the gay abandon, the laughter and song. I wish I were a man or . . . or . . .” Bella subsided.

“Or what?”

“I don’t know. A woman who could do those things.”

“A member of the demimonde?”

“Well,” Bella said, “why not?” She tossed this shocking statement off lightly, half an eye on Julia. Julia smiled at her friend’s daring but was terribly distracted. She could not now rid herself of the image of Nicholas Falcott, his arm around a beautiful woman. The woman was spilling out of her clothes and kissing him, and he had a bottle of champagne raised high in his other fist. Was he that sort of man? A rake? He had been a bit of a roaring boy before he went to war. Bella clearly thought he still was.

Rake, dandy, Corinthian . . . it didn’t really matter what kind of man Blackdown was. Now she knew something far more important about him, something awful. Blackdown was involved somehow in a much larger world of time manipulation than Julia had dreamed possible. And he was bound up with his terrifying friend, the Russian count.

The kiss seemed distant now, like a dream that fades to nothing. Indeed, as she looked around her everything seemed dreamlike. Berkeley Square, Gunter’s, ices, pretty dresses . . . it was all just a passing vision and would be washed away with time.

Time.

Blackdown and his friend were able to manipulate time, like her.

She could barely make sense of what she had seen and heard during that amazing sojourn in the priest’s hole. It had been the Russian who pushed against her while she tried to stop time. But, thank God, the Russian hadn’t realized that she was his adversary. He thought it had been Eamon. She needed him to keep thinking that. For as long as possible.

The count was searching for “Ofans,” people with talents like hers, and the Russian wanted to stop them. In fact, he wanted to kill them. Blackdown wanted to stop them, too; he had even offered to end Eamon’s life right there.

But Blackdown wasn’t exactly the Russian’s bosom friend. He had been angry at the count, frustrated with him. There had been that tussle, when Lebedev had insulted her honor. Julia had discovered that it isn’t, in fact, pleasant to be the object of a fight between men. Especially not when the man who is defending you is trounced. The count had easily overpowered Blackdown, though Blackdown was tall and strong and a soldier.

Fear tickled up her spine. She had escaped Eamon, only to gain a far more formidable enemy. Julia allowed herself to concentrate on the Russian. He was a wiry, powerful man, well over six feet tall. But his physical strength was not what really frightened her. The Russian seemed coldly intelligent, and he seemed implacable. There would be no time to explain, were he to discover her talent. He would discover the truth, and then he would kill her.

Indeed, Blackdown must be a killer, too. He had said that the Russian had brought him home to kill the Ofan people. People like her. And he must be good at killing, in order to have survived the war in Spain. He had a scar on his face. His kisses had ranged from gentle to fierce. She wasn’t so much of a fool as to think that the passions of love and the passions of war were unconnected.

But love was not something she could allow herself to contemplate, not after what she had seen through the peephole. Thank God Blackdown thought she was just Julia Percy, just a girl with whom he had whiled away a luscious hour. Not even an hour. The fact that he had kissed her might even protect her, for perhaps now she was just one of many others in his list of conquests. A face in the crowd.

He did seem to have lost interest in her since that day. She had been whisked away from Castle Dar in that ridiculous traveling coach. The Russian and Nick had stayed behind to deal with Eamon and had not come back until late. Then the marquess had told her, quite formally, that after some discussion Eamon was content to allow her to accompany the Falcotts to London.

Since that moment Blackdown had kept a strict distance from her. He was never alone with her, and he never addressed her directly. While their entourage of coaches had made its slow way from Devon to London, the marquess had ridden his bay hunter rather than joining the ladies in the traveling coach. Indeed, it was only when Julia chose to ride Marigold for an hour that he had decided Boatswain needed a rest. He had bowed to her, his eyes remote, and had taken her place inside the coach. It had been a relief, in fact. She couldn’t think clearly when she was near him.

Now he had been out all night, doing God knows what while she lay awake worrying about the future. The future and the past and the present and all of time itself. Worrying for her very life.

“Julia? Julia.” Bella was peering at her. “Did I shock you so dreadfully?”

“What?” Julia realized that her steps had slowed until she was almost standing still. “What were you saying?”

“I was talking about becoming a lady of easy virtue. And you go meandering off into your own thoughts. What kind of friend are you? Are you so ready to see me sacrifice my good name?”

Julia frowned. Joining the demimonde; it was the fantasy of a silly child. “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s nothing to joke about. Just a few days ago I was wondering what I would do to keep body and soul together if I were forced to run away from my odious cousin before reaching my majority. Very little stood between me and just such a life.”