The River of No Return (26 page)

N
ick stood on the top step and took his time adjusting his hat to his satisfaction, enjoying the sight of Arkady, already in the street, scowling and tossing his stick from hand to hand. “Surely this could wait until tomorrow, Arkady. It is well past midnight.”

“Tonight you begin your service to the Guild. You should be eager, like the young hound! But you worry over your hat like a woman. Come! We will be late.” Arkady turned and started walking.

Nick walked lightly down the stairs, glanced up at the stars, then sauntered after his friend. “I do hope we are taking a hackney? Or are you going to jump us to the twenty-first century for a tube ride? Because I for one am unarmed.”

“Do not be a coward. I have a cudgel.” Arkady slapped the heavy brass knob at the top of his stick into his palm. “A hack! The tube! I spurn them both! It feels good to be alive when there is danger. The stars and the moon, they shine. The city may stink but she is very beautiful. She smiles on us. We are her kings, her masters. In all ages she recognizes us and welcomes us as a lover.”

“Hmm. The stinking city welcomes us both as her lovers. What a vision. You are a terrible poet.”

“Pah!” The Russian snapped his fingers. “That is for your criticism.”

They went down Berkeley Street toward Piccadilly, then east toward the City. Arkady wasn’t wrong. The night was beautiful and perilous, and as he walked Nick felt an answering courage flow through his veins. Footpads, cutpurses, highwaymen, and all the other Georgian bad guys—Nick was ready for them. Why did that readiness feel so much like happiness?

Julia. That was the answer. She had come to him in the cupola and he had drawn out her sighs like spun sugar. Nick surrendered to lascivious thoughts. Why not? He was home again, London was filthy and dangerous again, he was alive. What better way to celebrate than to imagine the delicious deflowering of Julia Percy?

For a while Nick and Arkady walked in silence. The streets were dark but they weren’t sleeping. Here and there small groups of men were making their way homeward. Now and again a woman, leaning in a doorway, made clear what she was offering. A dog barked and was answered by another, and out of the corner of his eye Nick saw a rat slip over the cobbles in the shadow of a crumbling wall. When they reached the Strand, the street grew more crowded. Down side streets to the south they could see the Thames—it was at low tide, and the night-fishing boats, each with its dancing lantern, crowded the center channel. The long, sloping banks were dotted here and there with people, some tending small fires, others combing for treasure among the rocks and bones and broken pipe stems that littered the mudflats.

Out of nowhere, a clutch of children appeared, scarcely older than infants. They trotted at Nick and Arkady’s heels, begging for money. The stars ignited their hungry, hopeful eyes. Nick was about to toss them a few coins when he remembered that to do so could well make him a target of older children or even adults, watching and waiting in the shadows.

Nick looked sideways at Arkady, the man who had brought him back here. The Russian’s smile was as tranquil as the slender moon. He turned a ragged child gently aside with his stick. He did it expertly, lifting it slightly under one thin arm and redirecting its steps. It was as if the child were a cat that had sidled up, hoping to be stroked. The child turned to try again, its little face lifted up, but Arkady’s stick was in the way and Nick watched as the child’s face lost its look of hope and closed in. The children fell behind, their pleas turning to shrill little curses as the two tall aristocrats strode out of their lives forever.

“You ask no questions,” Arkady said, breaking the silence. “That is unusual for you.”

“I have learned that I will receive no answers.”

“Yet I have told you I am taking you to a rendezvous far from gracious Mayfair. I lead you into the dark City, to meet strangers. You are either very brave or very stupid, my friend.”

“That’s easy. I am very stupid.”

“Don’t you want to know where we are going and why?”

“Oh, no.” Nick waved a hand. “Lead on! You see, I have realized that I am but a humble pawn. I play on several different chessboards, it’s true, but I am always a pawn.”

“What other chessboards? There is only one. The Guild’s.”

Nick smiled. “You have brought me home, Arkady, to this sunset of the aristocracy. You have given me back my name, however temporarily. So unless you’re going to tell me that the Prince Regent is a time traveler, I’m afraid I’m bound to play on his chessboard, too. Did I not tell you? He sent me a Writ of Summons. I am to appear in the House of Lords tomorrow.”

“Was that what you were going on about at dinner? My priest, how dreary!” He laughed. “Maybe it is the sunset of the aristocracy, but money—it is always high noon with the money! That is why the Corn Bill—it passes. People suffer. Decades later it is struck down, but oh dear—it is too late to save the Irish!” Arkady yawned. “This is the foolery of Naturals. It has nothing to do with you, and there is nothing you can do that could change it.”

“I was planning to vote for it.”

That wiped the smile from Arkady’s face. He stopped walking and stared. “What? But you know it is terrible, this bill!”

“Ah.” Nick twitched his cuffs. “I thought you said it didn’t matter what I did. I thought you said the bill was boring.”

Arkady’s stare softened. “You are pulling the leg! You trick me!”

“Perhaps.” Nick smiled. “You’re afraid that things
can
be changed, Arkady, admit it. That the Ofan can change things. That I might change things. You don’t want me to think for myself in case I screw up the future.”

“Is that what you think?” Arkady set out walking again with a jaunty swing of his stick. “That you could change the world? I laugh at you.”

“All right, but if I can’t change anything, why do you care? You clearly don’t want me to play even my small role in British politics. Why?”

“I do not care. I only tell you, it makes no difference. Vote for the bill and stain your immortal soul, or vote against it and make the saints smile. How you vote? It tells me if you are a good man, but it does not
matter
. The Corn Bill will pass. People will starve. The barons and earls will be rich for another generation. But you? You are bound to the Guild. This is why I do not want you distracted by these small turnips.”

“Potatoes,” Nick said, absently. He dug his hands into his pockets and found the acorn. They were walking around St. Clement Danes. Nick glanced up at the fairy church, its tiered steeple standing black against the slightly less black sky. Oranges and lemons say the bells of St. Clement’s. Arkady was right, of course. Turnips and potatoes. Oranges and lemons. Apples and oranges. What did Nick’s little problems—his prince, his unsavory ex-friends, his sister, his onetime comrade in arms—have to do with the River of Time? And yet the Writ of Summons, Kirklaw, Clare, and Jem Jemison—they were real. He couldn’t just ignore them.

Arkady ranted on. “Say that somehow you convince one hundred other lords to vote against this bill that protects their money and their power. Say the bill does not pass. You, Nick Davenant, have changed history! But what happens? Do the poor get rich? Do the hungry eat? No. If bread is cheap, factories pay lower wages. Your Corn Bill? It is a fight over who gets to use the poor as a golden goose.” Arkady jerked his head toward the Thames. “They are down there now, the poor, picking through the bones. They will be there forever.”

Nick looked down the crooked street to their right and caught a glimpse of the river. “That’s your precious eternal history, then? A riverbed of bones and garbage?”

“Bah!” Arkady gripped Nick’s arm and spoke, hot and angry, in his ear. “The river flows to the sea, Nick Davenant! You are a servant of the Guild. Act like one.”

Nick wrenched away. “Well then, can the Guild write a note to my other master? ‘Dear Prince George: Please excuse Master Nick for not participating in historical events today. He had to defend the River of Time from angels with four faces who want to take it over.’ I hope that will work, Arkady, because otherwise I’m expected in the Lesser Hall of the House of Lords tomorrow.”

Arkady threw up his hands. “Go, then! Go and be damned!”

Nick made Arkady an elaborate leg. “Thank you, Lebedev. I am grateful for your permission. Now, may I push your beneficence an inch further and ask where we are going?”

The Russian glowered at him and ground the words out like sausage meat. “To a ball.”

Nick was shocked into silence for a moment, but then he laughed. “A ball! Who does that make me? Cinderella? Or Prince Charming? I suppose you are the fairy godmother?”

“There are other characters,” Arkady said. “The unpleasant sisters. The pumpkin.”

“I do have big feet. . . .”

“But your head . . .” Arkady considered him. “It is also big. And your hair. It is red. I think you are the pumpkin.”

“My hair is not red. It is light brown.”

“It is . . . what do they call it? The strawberry yellow.”

“It most certainly is not!” Nick was horrified. His hair was not as dark as he would have liked, but it was not strawberry blond, not by any stretch of the imagination.

Arkady laughed. “My priest! I have discovered your vanity!”

“Hair is your vanity, Arkady, not mine.”

“Yes.” The Russian stood tall. “My hair is very beautiful. Always it has been beautiful. When I was young, it was the shining black. Women, they loved it. Now it is the bright white and still, women—”

“Yes, yes, the women. I know. Tell me about this ball.”

They were walking now along Fleet Street, coming up upon the debtors’ prison; a few voices called out from behind the barred windows, begging alms to pay for their keep even at this hour of the night.

“It is the yearly celebration for Guild members who live in and near London.”

“Why is it here, in the City?”

“Ah! You are not so stupid. That is a good question. Consider. In the twenty-first century anyone who is rich can be powerful, yes?”

“I suppose so. They must also have ambition and intelligence. But money opens all doors.”

“Exactly.” Arkady twirled his stick. “But here and now, in Britain in 1815 . . . Would you, Lord Blackdown, nod to a man simply because he was loaded down with gold?”

Nick looked down the length of Ludgate Hill to where the smoke-blackened dome of St. Paul’s rose like an ominous moon. The City would change almost beyond recognition across the coming two centuries. Empire would swell it, then German bombs would flatten much of it. Then it would rise again, in glass and steel. “Of course I would not,” he said. “I could not. Nor could you.”

“Indeed. That is why the ball, it is here. In 1815 Guild members are wealthy, they are educated—as it always has been and will be. But they are forever outside of English society. Guild members—they cannot say who their parents are. They make their way without a name. They are foreigners. You will never find a Guild member at Almack’s or White’s. In the City, that is where you will find them.”

Nick shrugged. “Fine. Are you worried that I will sneer at them? You know me better than that. I have not drowned and I will not now. I like the coming egalitarian world, Arkady. I approve of it.”

“Yes. It is a pretty vision, this egalitarian world you speak of. But I wonder. Will you approve of what comes after your beloved 2013?” Arkady slowed his steps, his boots ringing on the cobbles. He spoke more quietly. “But we are not talking of the coming world. We are talking about the Guild. Remember what most Guild members think:
There is no return
. But you and me? We are from the future. So you do not say to anyone that you are in the Guild. Tonight you are a Natural who arrived in 1815 by living through 1813 and 1814. Lord Blackdown, he knows nothing of time travel. I am your loud friend Count Lebedev. I too am a Natural. We are the so illustrious guests of Monsieur Bertrand Penture.”

“Got it,” Nick said. “Pretend to be an ignorant toff.”

“Yes. And the Guild members there, they too will be pretending. The party will appear to be a gathering of foreign merchants and their wives. Monsieur Penture, he imports from the Orient. His ships have returned from China, and now his investors, they are all richer than they were before. They have a party. We come to the party. Everyone is happy.”

“And that’s all? You dragged me back two centuries to send me to a party where I am to pretend to know nothing?”

“Ah! No! And now we get to it. Tonight we begin to find a traitor. The Ofan are strong in London. Penture, you see, he is the new Alderman. He is ambitious. He wants to chase the Ofan out of the nineteenth century. But first he must know who is who. Who is good and who is bad. Before the war, there must come the spying, and so we need you. That is why we come out tonight.” Arkady took Nick’s arm. “Tonight you begin. It must be tonight because tomorrow, I am gone.”

Nick looked at Arkady in some shock. “Where are you going?”

“Back to Devon, but of course. I must go back and ask questions of this Lord Darchester, the mysterious and sadly crazy earl. He is, perhaps, the key to what we seek.”

“The Ofan,” Nick said. “And the skills they are developing. Mr. Mibbs.”

“Yes, the Ofan. But not Mr. Mibbs—I do not believe he is important, this man who dresses funny.” Arkady waved a dismissive hand. “Alice, she is concerned. But me? These things you say he can do—they are not possible. Making people feel things. Controlling emotion. This is not Ofan behavior.”

“It happened.”

“Bah. Forget about this Mibbs. He is far away in the future, following some other nice-looking young man. We are here, now, and so are the Ofan. You have a job to do in London, and I have a job to do in Devon. I must know how great is the talent of this earl. I must find out what the Ofan know of him. It should not take me long. Then I will return. But for two weeks, perhaps, I am gone. And while I am gone, you must work.”

Nick sighed, packing away the desire to defend his honor over the Mibbs affair. It was hard, now, to recall the incident with any clarity; so much had happened since then to upset Nick’s understanding of what emotions even were, and what they were for. Since that day Nick had actually jumped along the flow of feeling and lived for several weeks in the past. Indeed, his emotions had been so overwhelming upon his return that he had almost drowned again in this era. And Arkady, sex-obsessed pain in the ass though he was, had been his faithful guide, leading him forward, warning him of the dangers. Maybe the old buzzard was right. Maybe Mibbs was just a guy in a crazy outfit. “All right,” Nick said. “I’m ready to put my shoulder to the wheel. But I don’t know anything about the Guild in this time. How am I supposed to recognize Ofan? And what do I do with them when I find them?”