The River of No Return (31 page)

“Yes, or maybe you still have some thinking to do.”

“‘UP, man of reason! Rouse thee UP!’ . . . mercy, mercy!” Jemison cowered, laughing, beneath Clare’s brandished papers.

“But how will Blackdown vote?” Julia asked.

“He won’t,” Clare said. “He won’t take up his seat.”

“No, no, Clare! You have heard the truth, and out of the mouths of babes!” Jemison waved his apple at Julia. “Which of the two marquesses will vote on the Corn Bill? My Lord Backward Looking, or My Lord Forward Looking? He’s taking the oath of allegiance tomorrow, so he’s planning to have a voice.”

“He’s taking the
oath
?” Clare looked astounded.

“Yes, indeed. Prinny sent him a Writ of Summons and by God he’s answering it. Word is, he’s supposed to give his maiden speech on the Corn Bill. Nobody knows which side he’s on.”

“Well!” Clare propped her own behind on the table beside Jemison’s. “I never.”

Julia looked at them both in some confusion. “What’s so strange about Blackdown’s voting?”

“It’s like I said.” Clare leaned back on her hands. “He’s changed. He left Spain a scapegrace. I would have laid money on his never entering the House of Lords. Now he’s so much more serious in his demeanor. And his face! Maybe it’s that scar, but he looks older than he should. As if he’s seen something terrible . . .”

“He has,” Jemison said. “Believe me. He has. And when he disappeared—”

“What do you mean?” Clare turned to him, eager.

Jemison’s face closed in and he stood away from the table, walked away a few steps, and turned back. “You know as well as I. He was lost in Spain for years on end. . . .”

“Yes. And he’s told me nothing about that, either.”

Why had Jemison closed in like that? There was something he knew about Blackdown that he wasn’t telling. Julia stared at him, willing him to tell. Infusing him with her own powerful desire to know everything about Nicholas Falcott.

Jemison turned his head slowly toward her. When he met her eyes, she extended herself fully to him, flooding him with her need, her passionate curiosity. She pictured him opening his mouth and speaking. . . .

“Young lady,” he said. His voice was quiet but firm. “Pray, what are you doing to me?”

Julia drew back, blinking. “I beg your pardon?”

“I think you know.” He laid his apple core on the table, uneaten, and walked toward her, his eyes very intent. “I want you to stop.” He took her hand, and she felt his resistance to her will in his very fingertips. “I am a free man, my dear. And I do not choose to tell you anything about Lord Blackdown.”

Clare looked quizzically at Jemison and then at Julia. “What on earth are you talking about?”

“It’s nothing.” Jemison came back to his position beside Clare, but his eyes were still on Julia. “Miss Percy was just looking at me so appealingly. I had to explain to her that Lord Nick’s secrets and mine are our own. To share when and with whom we choose.”

Julia stood rigid. Had she really just penetrated Jemison’s mind with her own emotions? That wasn’t a normal thing to do. Normal people couldn’t do that. And yet . . .

She had done it once already today. She had done it at dinner, and she hadn’t even realized it until just now. She had done it when she had extended herself to the Russian and made him trust her. She had put her trust in herself into his head, and he had accepted it as his own emotion. Believed it. He had even sung her praises at the end of the evening.

And now she had tried to make Jemison talk to her, tried to make him tell her his secrets. She had done it thoughtlessly. But he was right. She’d intruded on him. Put her own feelings into him and tried to make him act on them.

It was a terrifying power. No, it was
another
terrifying power. She cowered in her own skin, yearning for Grandfather, yearning for a friend.

Some time later, Clare touched her arm.

Julia came back to herself. “I’m all right,” she said. “I was just woolgathering.”

“Woolgathering! How could you, while we were talking about the possible destruction of this house by a mob of angry Londoners!” Clare laughed, but Jemison was concerned for her, she could tell. His dark eyes seemed to see right through her.

“Let’s go back to bed, my dear,” Clare said. “It is very late, and who knows when Nick will return. He mustn’t find us consorting in the basement with a radical tallow chandler, dressed only in our nightclothes.”

Julia picked up her burned-out candle. She wished Nick would find her tonight. Even his disappointment or his anger would feel like human contact. Even the fact that she couldn’t tell him about her talent, even the terrible fact that she must hide it from him at all costs . . . being with him and keeping secrets from him felt better than this loneliness.

Jemison levered himself back into his coat and tucked a third apple into its pocket. “Good night then, and Godspeed.” He sketched them both a bow. “Let’s hope the marquess votes against the bill and makes himself a hero. There are some lords’ houses in Berkeley Square that will certainly draw the ire of the crowd after the bill passes. I won’t be able to protect this one if they turn their rage in its direction.”

Clare nodded. “I shall do my best to convince him, but the choice must be his.”

“Yes.” Jemison picked up his lantern. For the first time his voice was cold. “The precious marquess must make his own choice.” But the sparkle returned immediately, and his grin flashed in the glow of his lantern. “‘UP, men of reason . . . !’”

He opened the kitchen door with a flourish and was gone.

F
rom some hidden pocket, Ahn produced what looked like a silver card case. He placed it on the table in front of him and said, “First image.” A three-dimensional, fully colored moving image appeared, hovering over the length and breadth of the table. It showed a city in flames, and the sky boiling with red and black clouds. A great ruined dome rose in the center. With a start, Nick recognized St. Paul’s Cathedral, half blasted away. “London, 2145,” Ahn said. “In my time, Nick, the world is in crisis. The Guild is in disarray. The Ofan have taken advantage of the confusion and are gaining in power.”

Nick whistled. “Did they cause this destruction?”

“Second image.” A new picture replaced the specter of London. This time it was the Guild compound near Santiago, also entirely in ruins. “No,” Ahn said. “The Ofan didn’t cause it. Humankind has reached this state unaided.”

“I suppose I’m not terribly surprised,” Nick said, and no one contradicted him.

“Close image,” Ahn said, and the picture of the Santiago compound winked out. Ahn put the card case back in his pocket. “As perhaps you know, the Guild tries not to interfere with the vast movements of human history. The opposite, in fact. But the Ofan have their beautiful dreams.” Ahn steepled his fingers. “In my time, ecological devastation and a world war have made it impossible for the Guild to maintain its operations on a global scale. The Ofan find it easier to gain members among those few who are unfortunate enough to jump into our desolate world. Using their knowledge of the future, they are traveling back and trying to establish powerful cells in earlier eras. This era, and this city—Georgian London—is just such a stronghold. They are doing their best to dig in deep here and now, because they believe they can influence some things in the early nineteenth century that will pan out much later on. Their goal is to intervene in human history, keep the earth clean, and safe; to prevant that ecological devastation, that terrible war . . .”

“And that’s wrong, why?”

Ahn let his steepled fingers interlace. “It would be nice if we could go back and fix our mistakes,” he said carefully. “Apologize and try again. But that isn’t the way it works. This new horror, this turning back of time itself? It must be because the Ofan have meddled with the future. That is the only possible explanation. The Ofan have changed something, who knows what. It could be anything at all. And now the future, as terrible as it was, has turned on us, like a cornered tiger. That is worse, surely, than simply trying to survive the difficult times ahead.”

Nick looked up at the bulbous chandelier glimmering with the light of hidden candles, then back at the Alderman of the future. “If you can’t jump past the Pale, how do you know it stays bad? What if it’s some sort of salvation? ‘The world’s great age begins anew, the golden years return, the earth doth like a snake renew’—that sort of thing.”

“You would not think that if you saw what it is like. If you felt the pressure, the storm of time blowing toward us, catastrophe piling ruin upon ruin . . .”

“My daughter,” Arkady said in a broken voice from across the table, as if he had not been listening to Ahn, “my Eréndira . . .”

Ahn glanced at Arkady, then passed a hand over his face, clearly glad to be interrupted.

“My Eréndira was in Brazil. She was part of a group that were trying to pierce the Pale, to learn what lies beyond it. The Ofan were reaching toward it, pushing, working together. I do not know exactly what happened, but they lost her. She alone had managed to jump beyond the Pale, and then—she could not return. They could sense her trying, trying . . . and then they lost even that faint image of her.” Arkady looked at Nick, and his blue eyes were like two empty holes right through his head, with the sky shining through.

“I’m sorry,” Nick said.

Arkady didn’t reply. He wasn’t listening to Nick. Indeed, he wasn’t really even in the same room. “They simply lost her,” he said again, and his voice quavered like an old man’s. “Then I got a call one day when I was at the Santiago compound. She had reappeared. Not in Brazil but here, in London, in 1793. She was dying. I flew to London. I jumped back. I found her with the Ofan, in a house in Chelsea. They were the followers of that coward Ignatz Vogelstein!” He spat the name. “It was the Ofan who were with her, those riffraff! Not her own papa! But I got there, in time to kiss her, in time to say good-bye.”

Alice put her hand on her husband’s shoulder but he shrugged it off.

“She could not speak. I could only hold her. She died. Her beautiful hair, it had turned white, like mine. Her face was young but her hair was white, and her eyes! Despair like that? I have never seen it. And in the eyes of my own child . . .” He wept, his face uplifted for all to see the tears. His big hands, open on the tabletop, shook helplessly.

There was silence around the table as Arkady wept, and Nick realized that there were tears on his own cheeks, as well, for Eréndira.
She
had been courageous.

There were other emotions in the room, emotions directed at him, and Nick felt strangely immune to them all. He could feel the power of these men and women’s collective fear and grief, their sense of failure, their rage. Alice, whom he had come to admire and enjoy. Arkady, whose strange definition of friendship maddened and delighted him. And the others, even the cheese inspector. Even Penture. They were all well-intentioned people who loved the Guild and were willing to do anything to save it. They feared the Pale, but more than that they feared the end of their fraternity.

Penture spoke into the thick atmosphere, and his voice was hushed and serious. “Now, Nick Davenant. Now that you have joined us, accepted your duty, and we have told you of the terrible things that will happen downriver, you must be told what we really want you to discover while you are in the arms of Alva Blomgren.”

Everyone around the table went very still.

Ah. Nick tipped his chair back onto its hind legs.

Saatçi reached over and tapped Nick’s shoulder. “The chair!” he whispered in tortured tones.

“Sorry.” Nick righted himself.

Penture waited, with a frown for Saatçi, until all was quiet again. “A story has traveled up and down the river in recent weeks,” he said, “among those few who have seen the future. The rumor is this. There is something, somewhere—an object, of some description—that can save us from the disaster that is coming toward us, closer with every passing day. Something that magnifies our talent, perhaps, or something that can alter time mechanically. We do not know. Is it big or small? Is it from the future—from beyond the Pale itself? Some advanced technology? Or is it from the past? The more credulous think that it has magical powers. Others believe that it is from outer space, or that a nuclear accident has mutated something already known. Still others are sure that it is God’s work: the salvation of humankind from Armageddon.”

“What do you think it is?”

Penture allowed a small, pinched little smile to touch his lips. “I do not even allow myself to believe that it exists. Our talent has never relied upon objects. It is located in our emotions, in our connection to the feelings of other human beings down through time. But this much is clear. If it exists at all, the recent escalation in Ofan activity suggests that they might have it in their possession, or they know where it is and are working to retrieve it. Perhaps the object is in fact to blame for what has happened to the future. Perhaps it is something terrible, not something good. But if there is such a thing, the Guild must have it. We must not let the Ofan learn its powers. We must either find it before the Ofan do, or if they have it already, we must get it back from them.”

“And you think Alva might have this thing, this . . .”

“People are calling it simply ‘the Talisman.’ And if there is any Ofan up and down the river who knows what and where the Talisman is, that Ofan is Alva Blomgren.”

T
he next morning after a cup of coffee and a bite of toast, Julia curled up in a winged armchair in the library, trying to untangle a snarl of embroidery thread for Clare. Instead, she found herself blinking dreamily at the fire. She hadn’t slept after returning to bed, or at least not until she’d heard Blackdown and Count Lebedev return, soon after dawn. Then she had awoken again only an hour later, from a confused dream that fled the moment she tried to recall it. So she had risen, rung for the maid, dressed in her diurnal black gown, and taken her hussif down to the library . . . but now the armchair was so comfortable, and the fire in the big fireplace so cheerful. She nodded off into a delicious slumber.

Delicious except for that annoying sound . . . Julia opened her eyes, just as something white flew past her chair into the fire.

She leapt to her feet with a gasp, sending the little workbag and the thread tumbling to the floor, and spun to face the room.

“Holy . . . !”

It was Blackdown, and he was staring at her as if she were a ghost.

Julia looked at his shocked face, and then at what he was wearing, and she collapsed back into her chair, laughing.

“Oh, for God’s sake.” He came forward with a sheaf of papers in his hand, bending to scoop up what she’d dropped. He slumped down into the chair that was pulled up in front of the fire beside hers. “You scared the hell out of me. I didn’t see you there. What are you doing?”

Julia wiped her eyes. “I was untangling that snarl for your sister.”

Blackdown looked at the thread and then the hussif. He held the pouch up with a grin, displaying the sloppy
J.P
. picked out in irregular Berlin work. “Was this made by your own fair paw?”

“No, most certainly not—I could not set a stitch to save my life. Bella made it for me when she was twelve.”

“Why even carry it, then? Just to appear a lady?”

Julia rolled her eyes and held her hands up, and he tossed it to her, along with the threads.

She caught them, and stuffed the now more tangled mess down in among the few little treasures she carried in her hussif instead of sewing notions. “I carry a few keepsakes in here. A memento of my grandfather; it’s a stone insect, actually. And a funny twisty ring—nothing but a fairing—the only thing I have that was my mother’s.” She tied the ribbon around the hussif, glanced at Nick, and started laughing once more. “But at least I am trying to make myself useful as well as ornamental. What are you doing? No—answer me this. What are you wearing? You look like an enormous maypole.”

Lord Blackdown looked down at his brilliant red robes banded with three broad stripes of ermine and gold. “I know. Isn’t it hideous? They were my sainted father’s, and his father’s before that. The old buzzards at Ede and Ravenscroft had them in storage. It seems
they
knew I was coming back.” He jerked his thumb, gesturing behind him to the table. “There’s the hat. And the stick.”

Julia twisted in her chair and looked at his accessories. “Oh, dear.”

“Yes.” He slumped further down and frowned at the fire.

“So you are going to take the oath?”

“How did you know?”

“It’s all over London, apparently.”

“Oh, God.” He pushed a hand into his hair. “I can’t tell you how unhappy that makes me.”

“Why do it, if you find it such a burden? Most lords don’t darken the door. My grandfather stopped going years ago. According to him, arguing a point in the House of Lords is like speaking to the dead, in a vault, by the glimmering of a sepulchral lamp.”

“I’m sure he was right.” Blackdown stared into the fire for another moment, then he rolled his head to the side and looked at Julia. His morose expression transformed into a sleepy smile. “You’re pretty,” he said.

She raised an eyebrow. “You’re ridiculous.”

“Come sit on my lap.” He patted his thighs. “I’ll be Santa Claus.”

“Who?”

His smile faded. “Oh. Right . . . Father Christmas?”

“Are you foxed, my lord? Why would I want to sit on Father Christmas’s lap? And anyway, you look nothing like him. He wears green, and he’s fat and has a beard.”

His arm snaked out and hauled her, yelping, out of her chair. “Stop being pernickety. Come snuggle up.”

After a few moments of elbowy rearrangement, they were both settled in Blackdown’s chair, Julia’s legs over his, his arm around her shoulders, his sheaf of papers stuffed beside him. “Mm.” He pressed her close. “Your hair smells good.” His other arm found its way around her waist. “And this feels good.”

“And you feel like an unfortunate cross between a sheep and a stoat.” She stroked one of the ermine bands that crossed his crimson chest. “You smell musty.”

He put his head back against the chair and looked down his nose with mock solemnity. “I’ll have you know that these robes are the sign of my great dignity and magnificence and superior . . . superiority.”

“Well, then.” She moved to stand up. “Best if I leave you in majestic isolation.”

“Oh, no!” He pulled her firmly against him. “If I have to take the oath of allegiance, I need to be drunk . . . on kisses.”

“I am not going to kiss you here, at nine in the morning, with the door unlocked.”

“No? But what if I kiss you?” He suited action to words.

She smiled against his mouth, and a few delightful minutes ticked away.

It was Blackdown who pulled back. “Have you ever made a paper airplane?” he whispered.

“A what?”

He tugged a piece of paper from the sheaf that was wedged beside him. Both sides were covered in big, loopy writing. “A paper airplane. A glider, made of paper.”

“No. And what is written on that paper?”

“Nothing important. Here, let me show you.”

Julia was tucked lusciously up against him, her head resting on one shoulder, and he was able, with his arms around her, to demonstrate folding the piece of paper in half, and then in a series of angles, until it looked like the head of a spear. “That’s a paper glider,” he said. “You hold it like this, by this cluster of folds here underneath. You aim it. . . .” He pointed it at the fire. “Then you give it a little shove. . . .” Nick sent the glider winging into the fire. He made a sound like the wind as it went, and then a crashing sound when it wedged itself between two logs and went up in flames. He immediately began making another. “This one’s for you.” He folded it carefully and put it in her hands. “That’s right. Pinch it there, and then aim it . . . and let go.”

She watched as her glider floated away from her and into the flames. It sat for a moment on some embers, the undersides of its wings glowing pink. Then all at once it became a miniature inferno. She laughed and grabbed his knee. “Make me another one.”

They worked their way through the entire sheaf, sending glider after glider into the flames. Soon it became a rule that they must kiss until each glider was finished burning, and they both became adept at sending their gliders into cooler corners of the fire. But when Julia sent one deliberately outside the fireplace altogether, Nick sent her after it. “You won’t trick me into losing my virtue that easily,” he said.

After she had tossed it onto the fire and turned around, she found him standing and brushing his robes into place. “That’s it,” he said nonchalantly. “That’s my entire maiden speech, burned up. Like the Battle of Britain.”

“That was your maiden speech?” Julia stared at him.

“That’s right.”

“But what will you do? Do you have it memorized?”

“No.” He straightened the robe on his shoulders, then smoothed his hair with a hand, looking at himself in the mirror that hung over the mantel. “Mahvelous, dahling,” he said to his reflection.

“Nicholas Falcott! Be serious. What will you say instead?”

He turned from the mirror, and for just a moment he managed to look dignified. “That I would prefer not to.”

* * *

An hour later Blackdown was gone, and the hallway was filled with the bustling return of Arabella and the dowager marchioness from Greenwich. Julia watched as box after box was unloaded from the carriage that waited at the front door, Arabella overseeing the whole operation; her mother had rushed upstairs claiming a headache.

“All of that for one overnight visit?”

Bella gestured to a neat pile of three blue bandboxes. “Those are mine. The rest . . . Mother’s.”

“Perhaps that is a good sign. She is interesting herself in society again.”

“Yes.” Bella looked doubtful. “Perhaps.”

When the last box was in, Bella asked one of the footmen to hold the horses and the coachman to come inside. He entered, his hat in his hand, and Bella addressed him and the remaining footman with great warmth. “I want to thank you both,” she said, “for sending that madman on his way just now. I would have been quite anxious without the two of you.” She fished in her reticule, took out two coins, and handed one to each man. “If I were a man, I would stand you both a drink, but you will have to raise your glasses to yourselves.”

The coachman bowed and left to drive the coach around to the mews, and the footman returned to organizing the luggage. Bella took Julia’s arm. “I’m so glad to be home, I cannot tell you. Greenwich was a bore.”

“At least you were able to leave the house and see the sunshine. Remember you are talking to a creature who must hide in the dark, wearing black, having miserable feelings for six months before she is allowed to wear the most odious shade of purple.”

“You are allowed to leave the house. Now and then. If you’re very good.”

Julia sighed. Sedate walks in the company of servants did not count, in her book, as freedom, and she knew Bella did not count it as freedom, either. “Anyway,” she said, “even if it was boring I want to hear every tiny detail. Come and tell me everything.” They mounted the stairs. “And it sounds as if you had at least one thrill—what was that about a madman?”

“It was the strangest thing. It happened just now, as we climbed down from the carriage. A man walked right up to Mother and addressed her. He was very formal, and exceedingly dour. Dressed expensively but in the most outmoded of fashions. At first we thought he must be an old acquaintance of Father’s or something, and Mother greeted him politely enough. But then he began to insist that there was a baby hidden in our house! A baby, can you imagine? He demanded that the baby be given to him. When Mother assured him in the kindest possible way that there was no baby and had been no baby in the house for twenty years, he became quite obstreperous, and demanded to see a man he called Altukhov.”

“Altukhov? That sounds Russian.”

“Yes, isn’t it curious?” Bella opened the door to her bedchamber and invited Julia in. “For of course we do have a Russian in the house, and what are the chances of that?”

“Then what happened?” Julia sat in one of the two little chairs that faced the window looking out onto Berkeley Square.

“The footman was very firm, and told the man to move along, that he had the wrong house, that he was bothering their ladyships, and all of that footmanish sort of thing that they say.” Bella unpinned her hat, took off her pelisse, and tossed them together with her reticule onto her bed. “It seemed at first to work, for the man appeared to calm down.” Bella checked her hair in the mirror and settled herself in the other chair. “But then”—she turned toward Julia, her eyes alight with humor—“I realized that for the whole time that the footman had been talking, the man had not been listening at all. He had been standing like a moonstruck cow, gaping at Mother as if she were a heavenly apparition. Which you must admit she never is, not even on her best days.”

“Your mother is a beautiful woman,” Julia said dutifully.

“Have it your way.” Bella flared her nostrils. “In any case, Mother stared back for a moment, and then—I wish you could have seen it—she clutched her breast and moaned. She stumbled up the stairs to the door, calling back to Coachman to drive the man from the door like a leper! Which Coachman did, by bellowing and flapping his arms at the man until he turned and walked away.” Bella laughed. “She actually said ‘like a leper,’ and her voice turned biblical. And Coachman . . . he looked like an apoplectic rooster!”

“But that’s all terrifying! Thank goodness Coachman was able to drive the madman off.”

Bella sighed. “I know, I suppose I ought to have found it frightening. Do you think there’s something wrong with me? But honestly, Julia, at least it was exciting.” She slumped down in her chair just as her brother had done in the library an hour earlier, and stared out of the window. Julia stared, too. Although she wasn’t actually incarcerated in London as she had been at Castle Dar, the effect was the same, for aside from her brief outing to Gunther’s, she had barely left the house. And yet, for all that the minutes moved as slowly as cold treacle, her life was far too exciting. Exciting—or perhaps she was simply insane, and was even now in the grip of a delusion that she could manipulate time, and that two lords were pursuing her with deadly intent. But . . . Julia smiled to herself. One of those lords was—to call a fig a fig—on the high road to becoming her lover, and she knew that he was real, for if she closed her eyes she could still feel that ermine beneath her fingers and taste his kisses on her lips.

Bella interrupted her reverie. “I think things are drearier now because my value has gone up.”

Julia opened her eyes. “Whatever do you mean?”

Bella’s arms hung down over the arms of her chair like a rag doll’s. “Oh, before Nick’s miraculous reappearance I was a wealthy match, but the title was extinct, so I didn’t bring with me a connection to a powerful family. Any man who showed interest in me was either a fortune hunter, which was thrilling in a piratical sort of way, or else he truly admired me, which was flattering and sometimes even slightly tempting. Now that Nick is home, my stock in the marriage market has risen, and suddenly the most dreadfully important and boring men are monopolizing my time.” She sighed. “You see before you a valuable commodity.”

“Surely you enjoy that. You are in London to catch a husband, remember?”

“I suppose.” Bella propped her slippered heels on the windowsill. “If only there was someone I liked.” She reached out for Julia’s hand. “I wish you were out of mourning so that you could join me. At least then I would have someone to laugh with over it all. Mother is blue-deviled, and Clare refuses to participate in the Season.”