The River of No Return (29 page)

Nick twitched his cuffs into place. “I am sorry that you find yourselves in a sticky situation with your ancient enemy,” he said. “And I am flattered that you think my towering prowess as a lover will breach the defenses of a woman you have described as a sexual, entrepreneurial, and political mastermind. But I hope you will forgive me when I say that you are fools. Sex only makes people more like themselves. A powerful, secretive woman becomes only more powerful and more secretive in the throes of passion. Whereas an easygoing, gullible fellow like myself, confronted with a woman like Alva Blomgren?” He shrugged. “She would have me singing Guild secrets from the rooftops, and I would come away having learned nothing from her.”

“Why do you think we haven’t told you any Guild secrets?” Arkady growled.

Penture held up his hand, silencing the Russian. “So this is why Arkady calls you his priest. You are belligerently pure.” He shrugged. “So be it. I cannot force you into her arms. And perhaps you are correct that she would not sing her secrets in the midst of passion. You are wiser than I thought. But however you go about it, your assignment is to infiltrate the Ofan and learn Alva’s secrets. Let’s see . . .” He looked around the room. “What skills does our friend Mr. Davenant have besides womanizing? Cheese making? Will he perhaps succeed in gaining Alva’s trust with a fine wheel of Cheddar?”

“Actually, he’s good at farm management in general,” Marjory Northway said brightly. “He owns a couple of other organic operations in Vermont.”

“Well, there we are.” Penture turned to Nick. “I’m sure the most intriguing woman in a glittering era of fashion and romance will be transfixed by your tales from the tilth. Anything else?”

Nick scratched his head. “That is about the best of it. Of course I can also kill Frenchmen in hand-to-hand combat. . . .”

Penture’s eyes gleamed. “Ah!” He flexed his hands, cracking his knuckles.

“Boys . . .” Alice let her exasperation show. “Please, play nicely.” She turned her shoulder to Penture and addressed Nick, as if he were the only person in the room. “Please listen to me. However unsavory you find the job, I’m afraid we must insist. If you can do it without sleeping with her, all well and good. None of us cares.”

“I care,” Arkady said, finally looking up from his clasped hands. “Do it for me, Nick!”

“It must be you, Mr. Davenant,” Penture said.

“Ah.” Nick turned and pointed at the Frenchman. “Now we are getting somewhere. This isn’t about sex, and it isn’t about killing. It isn’t even really about Alva. It’s about me. Why? Why must it be me? Why drag me out of my happy complacency to do this small job for you, a job you could get anyone to do? Why
me
?”

Penture’s eyes flickered. “Because,” he said, softly. “Just because.”

Nick shook his head. “You’ll have to do better than that.”

“Don’t push it to this, Nick,” Alice said.

“To what?” Nick rounded on her, his anger finally taking over. “Empty threats and noninformation, that is all you have offered me. Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t just join the Ofan myself.”

Alice thinned her lips as she looked at Nick, her own beautiful face grim with disappointment. Then she turned to Penture with a weary sigh. “We are in your era, Alderman. Not mine. How do you want to proceed?”

Penture narrowed his eyes. “There are times, Nicholas Davenant, when you must choose sides. Times when, even though you do not have all the information, you must decide to act for one cause or for another. Now is one of those times. I am going to help you make your decision. The right decision.”

Penture nodded to Saatçi and the tension in the room mounted. They were all suddenly anxious—he could feel their shared emotion spread like an oil slick through the room. And then it changed, moved . . . shimmered from simple feeling to a fully active manipulation of time. The air around him seemed to be thickening—it was the depth and breadth of time compacted into space. The others were all getting to their feet. What were they doing? Ah—Saatçi had an ornate silver pistol in his hand, worthy of a Hollywood cowboy. He passed it to Penture, who calmly raised it and aimed between Nick’s eyes.

“Oh, my God.” Nick scooted back in his too-small chair and spread his hands. “This is a farce. What is that thing, something out of a Wild West show?”

Penture pulled the trigger.

In the same instant, time hardened around Nick. He was frozen, but he was horribly conscious. The others stood beside their chairs, and he could feel the force with which they were each directing their talent at him, keeping him motionless. The gunpowder flashed as it ignited, and bright smoke mushroomed slowly. Then the bullet emerged and began to move through the air toward Nick’s head. Penture laid the gun down on the table and spoke. His voice was chillingly regular in its speed. How did he
do
that?

“As you can see,” he said, “this bullet is traveling toward your head, Mr. Davenant. If we do not pluck it from its course, it will kill you. You will experience your death quite slowly, as the bullet first touches you, then pierces your skin, and begins to flatten out as it bores through your skull. By the time it blows off the back of your head you will of course no longer be able to experience what is happening to you. I suggest that you choose sides now. Blink if you agree.”

Alice spoke with embarrassed urgency. “Nick, my good friend. I’m very sorry it had to come to this. We like you very much, and admire you. But you don’t have a choice.” Nick listened to her and watched the bullet crawl toward his head. He was curiously unafraid.

The bullet began to deform as it sped, slowly, through the air. Fascinating.

So many conflicting loyalties. The Guild, his sisters, Julia . . . even Kirklaw and Jemison. And now there was Alva. They were right about her—she was an enchanting woman, and she had already staked a claim in his affections. It wasn’t her beauty, and it wasn’t even the fact that she had rescued him from that moment when the river had rushed through him, dragging him back to that memory of group rage, that collective desire. It was because she had offered something—sex—and stepped away, unfazed, when he had refused. Like a gentleman. She hadn’t slandered his sisters, or reminded him of all that he owed her, or pointed a damned gun at his head. She hadn’t tried to tie him down with duty or debt. Instead, she had told him that, if he wanted one, he had a friend. And then, for no reason other than that she seemed to like him, she had revealed her greatest secret. She was Ofan. Instead of warning him that he must keep his mouth shut, or telling him that he was now bound by some blood brotherhood of shared knowledge, she had put her finger to her lips and twirled away. As if she trusted him—he, who was so obviously a Guild spy.

The bullet was close enough now that, had he the use of his limbs, Nick might have plucked it from its course himself. But apart from his eyelids, his captors wouldn’t let him move a muscle.

Well, he thought, as the bullet got so close that he couldn’t focus on it anymore, there is nothing like staring your own slow-motion death in the face to bring clarity to a situation. He had no intention of being the Guild’s good soldier and vicarious lothario, but the time for argument was at an end.

He must pretend to do their bidding. He must learn everything he could about the Ofan and tell none of it to the Guild. He blinked. Yes, Bertrand Penture, he would choose a side. The side of the angels.

When the bullet touched his forehead, as lightly as the kiss of a raindrop, Penture reached out, took it, and put it in his pocket. With a rush of blood in his head, Nick felt time resume its normal course. The air in his lungs came out in a whoosh, and he collapsed, gasping for breath.

Everyone was silent, waiting for Nick to regain his dignity. Saatçi poured him a drink from a decanter and put it next to him.

When he could breathe normally, he downed the contents of the glass without even noticing which liquor it was that burned his throat.

Penture watched Nick drink. “You are a brave man,” he said.

“I enjoy melodrama.” Nick set his empty glass down on the table. “That was rather cheap melodrama, mind you, but at least it captured my attention. I applaud you all.”

Nick was shocked to see Penture smile, a big, natural smile. It transformed him from a grim politician into a dashing ruffian, with a deep dimple in one cheek—from Gregory Peck to Cary Grant. “I thank you,” Penture said. “I was an actor in a former life. I am glad that our little performance was able to convince you of your loyalties.”

Nick put his hands together as if in prayer. “‘Behold the handmaiden of the Lord.’”

“My priest!” Arkady proclaimed. “I told all of you that he would come around.”

For her part, Alice reached across the table and took Nick’s hand. “Thank you, my friend. Please forgive us.”

Fat chance, Nick thought to himself. But he said otherwise: “Really there is nothing to forgive.”

J
ulia stood by the window of her bedchamber, holding the little white book of poetry in her hand. But she wasn’t reading. She was watching Count Lebedev. He was standing down there in the dark street, tossing his stick from hand to hand, and scowling up at the door. And here was Blackdown coming down the stairs, his hat at a rakish angle. It was after midnight, and they walked away down Berkeley Street like two alley cats, off for a night of fun.

Bella was right. It was dreadful to be cooped up. Julia glowered at the men’s receding backs.

But if the cats were away, Julia thought, the mouse could play. She was determined to practice her time tricks again. She knew, from what she had learned through the peephole, that her skills needed training and honing to become more powerful, but she also knew that she could never practice while there was the faintest chance that either Nick or Lebedev might be home, or might come home.

Stroking its binding with one finger, Julia examined the book she held. It was smooth and small and filled with some secret that was locked up inside it. If she squeezed it, she might feel a heartbeat. Kisses and caresses. Poetry. Pleasant distractions designed to while away the hours.

She glanced up at the window. The men were no longer in sight.

Julia tossed the book onto her bed. What she needed was real knowledge. She had to become a scholar of time, and since she didn’t know whom to trust, she had to tutor herself, devise her own lessons, be an apprentice without a master. Or rather, time itself would have to be her master.

She picked up a silver penny from her dressing table. “Georgius III Dei Gratia,” she read in the flickering light of the candle by her bed. She could make sense of that. “George the Third Thank God.” She contemplated his squashy profile and the silly wig on his poor, deluded head. The other side, with the crown floating over the number
1,
was less legible. It read “MAG BRI FR ET HIB REX 1800.” She didn’t know what that meant, except the date and the
rex
. She had been seven in the year this coin was struck. Now she was twenty-two, and all alone with a gift as big as a kingdom and as mighty.

She closed her eyes to clear her thoughts, then opened them again, regarding the penny not as an object but as a flashing moment in time. She tossed it gently into the air. It took no effort at all to freeze it. Julia kept it in her sights and walked around it, reading again the heads and then the tails side. She turned away and heard it clatter to the floor. She bent to pick it up. The count had kept Eamon frozen for a long time while he talked with Blackdown. He’d even turned his back on him. Julia tossed the penny in the air again, and again she froze it. She turned her back. Down it fell. “Blast.”

An hour later, Julia could keep the penny frozen for a full fifteen minutes while she stared out of the window watching for Blackdown and Lebedev, straightened pillows, counted backward, closed her eyes, and thought of other things. She could freeze time in a circle around her, projecting in a pie shape, or focus the effect on a tiny space, just around the coin itself. Finally, she tried her hand at keeping the coin frozen while reading, but her excitement upon picking up the little book was so great that the penny slipped before she even cracked the cover. Besides, she was exhausted. Controlling time took energy and concentration, and she had achieved a great deal tonight already. Now, she told herself, for lesson number two. Literature. She forgot about the penny, sat down on the bed, and took up the book.

It looked remarkably like the demure white prayer book that the vicar had given her in celebration of her confirmation. Those weekly visits to the vicarage for three months leading up to confirmation when she was thirteen were the only formal education Julia had ever received—and it had disgusted Grandfather. “Get them young,” he’d said every time he saw her practicing her answers. He’d been even more disgusted by the prim little book. “Pap,” he’d spat. “Sugar water.” The next time he had come home from London he had brought her an old, graphically illustrated edition of
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs
. “As an antidote,” he’d said. He’d stomped away, leaving her to pore over gory woodcuts of burnings at the stake, disembowelings, the glorious rewards of heaven, and the fiery torments of hell.

She thought of Grandfather as she read again the golden letters spelling
Elegies
. It wasn’t that he hadn’t interested himself in her education. It was just that it was haphazard and followed his whims, whatever he was interested in at the moment. She had to read, in order to follow him in his reading, so he taught her how. She had to write, in order to write to him when he was away, so he taught her how. His library was at her disposal, but if she asked for anything particular from London, any new book of verse or a specific novel or collection of essays, he would invariably arrive home with a book about the Antipodes or the western wildernesses of America. “Read that out to your old ancestor,” he would say, and slump down in his armchair, light a cigarillo, and watch her through the smoke as she flipped between the pages, reading aloud descriptions of wild savages and mountain lions.

Occasionally he would get her to write a composition to him. “Call this one ‘Little Girls Must Never Lie,’” he said once, when she was ten or eleven. “Two hundred words by tomorrow afternoon.”

The next day she stood up before him and read her composition aloud. “Ahem!” She cleared her throat. “‘Little Girls Must Always Lie,’ by Julia Percy.”

He guffawed. “Minx!”

She curtsied and continued: “‘Little girls must always lie. Their grandfathers are such great bullies that lying is their only hope of survival. If a grandfather asks, “Did you eat the last of the mincemeat pies, little girl?” the little girl who truthfully answers, “Yes, Grandpapa, I did,” will then have to endure hours of storming rage as Grandfather vents his spleen upon her. But the little girl who says, forthrightly and without a quiver, “No, Grandpapa,
you
ate the last of the mincemeat pies and have simply forgotten it,” will need only wait two hours before her grandfather has bullied the poor cook into making a new batch. And then she may eat them all again, just as she did yesterday.’”

At this, Grandfather gathered her up, kissed her, and told her she was a pearl beyond price. “But that was not two hundred words, my little kangaroo. It was only a hundred and eighteen.”

“How can you tell that, Grandfather? I knew it but hoped you wouldn’t notice.”

“Oh, it is just a trick I have. I wager you have it, too. Let’s see. I shall give you a composition, shall I? I have not prepared one, so it will have to be something from my memory. Listen, but do not try to count my words. Don’t even think about counting. Just listen. Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

“Let me see. I must think of something. Just a moment.” Grandfather searched his memory with an exaggerated rolling of his eyes and scratching of his head.

Julia laughed.

“All right, yes,” Grandfather said. He flexed his hands and cleared his throat. “Listen to this.” He began, speaking quickly: “‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.’” Grandfather stopped and looked at Julia. “Now then, how many words was that?”

“But what does it mean?”

“What does it mean? Why, nothing! At least, not yet. Don’t worry about that. How many words long was it? Come, I know you know.”

“Seventy-one.”

“Exactly so! You see, you can do it, too.” His eyes were suddenly sad, and he hugged her again, tightly. Then he set her from him and patted her cheek. “Now. Run away. I have things to do.”

Julia went away puzzled. The words he had recited transfixed her as she listened, the blood rushing at the base of her head. When he was finished she knew exactly how many words he had spoken, as if she had counted as they ticked along. But she hadn’t counted. After that she could always do it, if she wanted to. She never did want to. It was a useless trick.

A useless trick. Counting words without counting them, solving stupid puzzles quickly . . . that was nonsense. When she had a very real talent. And no training. No knowledge. Had he
really
not known that she could manipulate time, just like him?

Julia blinked, and was surprised to realize that she had tears in her eyes. One fell on the pristine binding of Blackdown’s book. She wiped it, and then her eyes.

The book sat in her lap, innocent-looking.

The last poem. That was the one Blackdown had recommended. The last shall be first. She had to start her education too late and backward in every way. She held the book close to the candlelight and opened it at the back, flipping through a few pages of verse until she found the title. “‘To His Mistress Going to Bed,’” she read out loud. She kept going, silently.

Then she laughed. So this is what boys got to read. So much better than Matilda Weimar, forever fainting in the shrubbery.

She read the poem again, and again. When she had arrived for the third time at “Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,” she heard men’s voices in the street. She was so startled that she froze time in a wide circumference, without even considering her actions.

Then she sat on the bed in an agony of fear. What had she done? Surely those men were Arkady and Blackdown, home again, and if so, they would not be caught in the moment. Indeed, they would know that someone inside the house could freeze time. They might even now be opening the front door, ready to come and kill her. She squeezed her eyes shut, listening.

But there was no sound at all. She got to her feet, and each small sound she made struck her ear like a thunderclap. She peeked around the curtain.

Thank God. Down in the street three men stood looking up at the house, as still as statues. Two of them were strangers to her, workingmen in rough clothes, one with a paper in one hand and a stub of graphite in the other. The third was dressed like a gentleman. Julia’s heart started beating again. Three men, frozen stiff, and none of them were Nick or Arkady.

She put her hand to the glass and leaned closer. But the gentleman—she knew him. His eyes shone in the glow of a dark lantern that he held up high, its shutter open. The thin cheeks, the saturnine brows.

It was the Falcotts’ steward, Mr. Jemison.