The River of No Return (13 page)

“Yes,” Arkady said. “But there are too many feelings, and a lot of them reach outward to the future. Misery. Excitement. Longing. Crashing over one another.”

“I couldn’t tune in to the mystical vibrations,” Nick said. “But I was there once, in the late eighteenth century—”

“Hush!” Alice looked around, but the snob screen shielded her view. “For God’s sake, Nick.”

“Sorry.” He dropped his voice. “I was there with my mother when I was a kid. And if it helps, I know we were feeling smug.”

Alice smiled at Nick and sipped her half of bitter. “Smug, huh? I bet you were a cute little lordling.”

“If you say so.”

She pushed her beer away. “So it isn’t a scar. But what does that mean about today? Arkady, were you overwhelmed with despair when you stood there? Because I wasn’t, not at all.”

“No.” Arkady shrugged. “But all those babies. It made me weep.”

“Yes,” Alice said gently. “Yes, my tea cake.” She put her hand on his.

Nick put his pint to his lips and let the good, bitter beer wash down his throat. Arkady was really just a big baby himself, he thought, watching as Alice comforted him. “Why did you cry?”

“My tears were old tears. Tears I have cried before and will cry again.” Arkady freed his hand from Alice’s and steepled his fingers under his chin, his ruby ring glowing like an ember. “I do not believe that the emotions Nick felt at those gates today were the emotions of the Foundling Hospital,” he said to Alice. “I think they were the emotions of Mr. Mibbs himself.”

“Yes,” Nick said. “That makes sense. And he put fear into me earlier, at Euston Road. That wasn’t some deep historical fear I felt. Unless you can tell me that there was a hangman’s tree at the corner of Judd Street and Euston Road at some point.”

Alice glanced at him. “There might well have been. There is a scar at Marble Arch for that very reason.”

“Tyburn.”

“Yes.”

Arkady spread his hands. “But Nick said it earlier. The man controlled him with emotions, not thoughts. It is only by accident that this happened near the Foundling Hospital.”

“That’s an interesting possibility,” Alice said. “It could be a new development. A new way to use the river. They’ve discovered it, and they are testing it out on Guild members.”

“They?” Nick raised his eyebrows.

Alice and Arkady regarded him soberly for a moment. Then Alice took a deep breath and let it out through her nose. “The reason we need you, Nick . . . the reason we are taking you back to your natural time, is that a war is about to begin in that era. It will be a war over the fate of the past, over history itself.”

And so here was the other shoe, dropping at last. He had been right all along. He was here to kill.

Alice continued. “I told you there were others. People who aren’t in the Guild. They don’t agree with the Guild’s principles. They think we should intervene in history. Try to change it. They are experimenting with the talent, working to learn more about it. Some of the things they have discovered recently in . . .” Alice glanced at Arkady. He nodded. She continued. “The things they have discovered in Brazil are alarming.”

Brazil! So Meg
had
heard Alice talking that day in the bathroom. She had been telling the truth. And Nick was, after all, an asshole who deserved to have his friends desert him. But Nick’s heart lifted. Maybe Meg and Leo were alive, in Brazil. Maybe they had made it.

Alice was looking at Arkady, and Nick followed her eyes. The Russian was staring into some grim distance that only he could see. “Arkady, my darling. Come back to us.”

The Russian focused again on the little table. Then he wiped his eyes with the back of a hand. “Yes, yes. Brazil. Beautiful Brazil.”

Alice spoke softly, stroking Arkady’s thick white hair. “I was about to tell Nick about the orphan.”

“The orphan! Bah.” Arkady spoke with loathing in his voice.

Alice turned back to Nick. “The orphan are a thorn in our side,” she said. “And they have been, oh, forever. But things are changing. We can’t just continue on, with little skirmishes here and there over nothing. The stakes have become too high. The orphan have found something. A new skill, or maybe even an object of some kind that enhances their power. Whatever it is, we must get it.”

“Wait. You’re going too fast. Who is this orphan? Sounds like Oliver Twist.”

Alice laughed. “Not orphan! Ofan.” She spelled the word. “The name is a contraction of a Hebrew word—Ophanim.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Have you heard of Ezekiel’s vision? Of the angels who transport the throne of God?”

“Ezekiel . . .” Nick cast his mind back.

“Ezekiel had a vision of strange angels. Each angel had four faces and many wings. They saw all, could travel in every direction, and they never slept.” Alice closed her dark eyes and quoted: “‘And when they went, I heard the noise of their wings, like the noise of great waters, as the voice of the Almighty, the voice of speech, as the noise of an host.’”

“Okay,” Nick said. “So these Ofan, these bad guys. They are deformed angel creatures?”

“Of course not. They are humans, like you and me. It’s only a name. It signifies that they are watching, that they can travel the river in whatever direction they like, that they have righteousness and truth on their side. Et cetera, et cetera. Of course we . . .” She smiled. “We think righteousness and truth are on our side.”

“And Mibbs is one of these Ofan?”

Alice glanced at Arkady. “What do you think?”

“Maybe,” the Russian said. “But . . .” He shrugged. “I don’t think so. It doesn’t seem right to me.”

“But he must be,” Alice said. “It’s really the only explanation. Maybe those things he could do with feelings—maybe that’s their new skill. What else would he be? A lone gun?”

Arkady drank deeply from his pint and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I don’t know. The Ofan, they are cowards. But this? This control of feelings? It does not describe what they are like. They are stupid, careless. Smashing what is good for no reason. Always they chase a fantasy. A fantasy that things can change. Idealists.” He scowled into his beer. “They do not have enough of the balls to be like this Mibbs.”

“Wait, your enemy is a bunch of idealists? Time-traveling hippies? That doesn’t sound very scary.”

“Oh, they are scary,” Arkady said. “They steal our children. They teach them unspeakable things. They fill their heads with dreams.”

“Arkady.” Alice shushed him. “Please.” She spoke to Nick. “Arkady really doesn’t like them,” she said with a little smile. “But it is like this. They are a loose affiliation of people who disagree with the Guild and who believe our talents are greater than we know. At various points in time they are very powerful. At other points, they are more disorganized. There are some places in history where we even work in close association with them, where people are both Guild and Ofan at once. But now we have reason to believe that the Ofan have changed, drastically, and are becoming a very real threat. Like I’ve said, they’ve found something. They’ve managed to alter . . . well. You will learn about that from the Alderman—” She lowered her voice. “In 1815. This is more his business than mine.” She looked at Arkady. “I think Mibbs is a clue to what the Ofan can do. Even if he isn’t Ofan himself.”

“They have not changed that much, Alice.” Arkady sneered. “They are still scrambling to find—” He closed his mouth with a snap on whatever he was going to say. Then he drained his glass. “But we!” He held his empty glass aloft. “We are the Guild. We will squash them. We have not worked so hard, for so long, to protect the river, only to have them ruin it!” He slammed his empty glass down on the table.

“Yes, my ructious darling.” Alice stroked her knuckles down her husband’s cheek. “And whether Mibbs is Ofan or not, his days of secrecy are over. The Guild is watching for him. I’ve sent that clip to Chile and soon enough I will send it around the world, and send his description down through time. I’m sure he’s hiding somewhere, but when he turns up again, we’ll find him.”

Nick leaned back against the carved screen and half closed his eyes, letting the golden glow of the pub’s electric lighting shimmer into a semblance of candlelight. The Ofan. He let that name sink into his head. Not
orphan
.
Ofan.
Fearsome, many-faced angels. Beautiful, androgynous bodies, wings of shadow and light, eyes bright with visions. Voices rising together like the rush of waters. Straining up, reaching—but cast down by an implacable hand. Down into eternal flame.

Nick closed his eyes completely.

Badajoz.

T
wo weeks later Arkady and Nick were in Arkady’s 1972 MG Midget. (Nick had teased him about a Guild car that wasn’t a BMW, but Arkady explained somewhat defensively that MG had been owned by the German manufacturer for a few short years in the 1990s.) Now they were driving through Devon on the A396, and Arkady was bellowing Russian folk songs at the top of his lungs. They had left London at dawn, Alice standing on tiptoe to kiss them both soundly on the cheek, like a fond aunt. “Is that all I get?” Arkady had asked.

“It will have to hold you until you return.” Alice patted her husband’s stomach. “Perhaps it will make you be good.”

“Never.”

Alice turned to Nick. “He’s all talk.”

“That’s not what you said last night.” Arkady twitched his scarf rakishly over his shoulder.

Alice ignored him. “Now, as for you, Lord Blackdown. You are to be very, very good.” She was smiling, but he saw the grave intention in her eyes.

“Yes, my lady,” he said, sketching her a perfect bow.

For two weeks he had been in an immersion course, with Arkady serving as tutor. The task was to suppress everything he’d learned at the Chilean compound and the years following. He had to remember his old self and step back into the Marquess of Blackdown’s shiny black boots. From dawn to dusk in Arkady’s study it had been 1815: every word they said, every gesture they made, all their food and drink and clothing. Nick had disappeared in 1812, but was traveling back only as far as 1815 because, Arkady said with maddening reserve, 1815 was when the Guild needed Nick’s services, and no sooner. But those three missing years were a problem. His excuse was to be a bump on the head and a spell of amnesia. Whatever he didn’t remember he could blame on his injury. The trouble was more likely to be what he remembered rather than what he forgot: the twenty-first-century phrases and habits that had become second nature. So Arkady drilled him. History, politics, manners. How to signal disapproval and approval. How to stand and how to sit. Boxing, fencing, taking snuff. Almost every muscle must relearn the more arrogant tension of the Regency. Much of it felt effeminate to Nick now, and what didn’t felt so aggressive as to border on the criminal. It was a strange mix, to be sure, but Nick found that it was all coming back very quickly.

“I’ll remember this man’s world stuff on my own,” Nick had said after only two days of it. They were finally collapsed in the leather chairs at the end of a dreary afternoon spent playing hazard and gossiping about political and sexual scandals two centuries old. “It’s the women I’m afraid of.” Nick worked on untying his cravat. “I need to remember dance steps and the language of flowers and the names of all of Lady Corinna Alistair’s grandchildren.”

“Bah,” Arkady said, flinging his own cravat aside and beginning to tug at one stiff boot. “I cannot pretend to be a woman and prance about with you.”

“Why not? For God’s sake, we look a pair of fools already. Allow me.” Nick reached for Arkady’s leg. Arkady extended it, and Nick pulled his boot off for him. “Holy shit, Arkady—your feet stink.”

“Language!”

“Bloody hell, your feet stink,” Nick said. “Though for your information,
shit
is one of the oldest words in the English language and was in full circulation—”

“Just get this second shitting boot off,” Arkady interrupted, shoving his other leg forward.

Nick laughed as he tugged. “Cursing correctly is the highest test of fluency, Arkady. I’d advise you to stick to polite language.”

“
Shitting boot,
it isn’t right? But I can say
fucking boot,
yes?”

The boot came off and Nick stumbled backward. “Yes,” he said, recovering his balance and tossing the boot away. “That’s right. Who knows why.”

Arkady pursed his lips, committing the information to memory. Then he smiled. “But women,” he said. “I can talk about women in any language. And I do not want you, my priest, to worry about the women. It is like, how do you say it? Like riding a bicycle.”

Nick was fairly certain that it was nothing like riding a bicycle. He struggled to extricate himself from his incredibly tight jacket. Arkady smirked at him, offering no help, his arms behind his head, his stockinged feet stretched out to the fire.

Ever since that drink in the Lamb, Nick had played nice and kept his own counsel about most things, including how he intended to behave once he was back in his own time and his old persona. He had no intention of blindly following Guild orders, or slaughtering Ofan just because the Guild pointed and said
kill
. But in spite of his reservations, he was eager to return, and the two weeks of practice had opened the floodgates of his memory. He hadn’t even wanted to go out into contemporary London again, and not because he was afraid of Mr. Mibbs, who, according to Alice, had disappeared into the river, leaving no trail for the Guild to follow. No, the next time Nick walked down Pall Mall, he wanted to see Carlton House ablaze with lights.

Carlton House and the Royal Mews and Hungerford Street, all restored. The pomp and the squalor, the shine and the stench. Now that he could without choking on grief, Nick let himself long for it, let himself drift through the days leading up to his return on a warm current of homesickness.

And now, finally, they were on their way. Hurtling toward his past in a sports car. Practice was over and the game was about to begin. Soon enough they would be pulling in at Falcott House. Visitors could rent holiday apartments there, and Arkady had chosen one that had been converted from the old kitchens. The plan was to spend a couple of days on the property to accustom Nick to the surroundings, then make the jump back to 1815 when Arkady felt Nick was ready.

Arkady’s song ended on a long, warbling high note. He glanced at Nick for approval, but Nick sat thin lipped, staring straight ahead. The warm current ran suddenly cold . . . what the hell was he doing? There is no return . . . there is no return . . . and yet that was the curve of Stoke Hill, and it was rushing toward them fast, far too fast . . .

“Do you recognize anything?” Arkady spoke loudly, over the well-oiled roar of the little car’s big engine.

“Yes. Everything.” Nick gritted his teeth against the feeling that the car was hurtling out of control—though the speedometer read only thirty miles per hour.

“I know what you feel, my friend. It is strange. But never mind. Soon you will be home again and all of this”—he waved at the motorway and the cars—“will seem like a dream.”

“I don’t want it to seem like a dream. I like the twenty-first century.”

“You like ten years at the beginning of that century,” Arkady said. “Do you like the other nine decades?”

“I don’t know about anything except the first decade,” Nick said.

Arkady only grunted, and Nick gazed to his left, at Exeter’s suburbs giving way to winter fields. It was all entirely familiar, even now that most of the hedgerows had fallen to agribusiness and the villages had all swelled to five times their nineteenth-century size.

Around this next bend and he should be able to see Castle Dar, the Earl of Darchester’s estate. But when the MG eased around the curve, the rambling old pile was gone, as if it had never been there. In its place, a massive shed filled with combine harvesters.

Nick forced air into his lungs, and out again.

The girl with the dark eyes had belonged to Castle Dar. She had been walking over from Castle Dar that day. The day his father had died.

Now Castle Dar was gone. Vanished from the face of the earth.

Nick closed his eyes and saw, as clearly as if he were looking at a photograph, the body of his father, crumpled on the ground, his head and limbs at crazy angles, like a rag doll tossed aside.

Nick, on Boatswain, had been in the lead, preparing to take the jump first. But his father had spurred up from behind. No final words, no glance; just his horse leaping, a bark from the dog that lurked behind the hedge, a confused cacophony of sounds as the horse landed wrongly and went down. Then silence.

The horse and dog were both shot, the first bullet fulfilling the demands of charity toward a dumb, suffering animal, the second fulfilling some notion of justice. The culprit dog had been young, liver-spotted, Nick remembered for some reason—the pet of a tenant’s wife.

His father’s body was carried back to Falcott House, met halfway by his running, weeping sisters. How had they known? Yet there they were. Nick remembered Bella’s fingers stroking their father’s cold cheek as they walked along, Father’s body tied by his reins to a board that had been leaning up against the hedge. Then all four of them sitting in the drawing room for hours, waiting for the body to be washed and prepared, listening to the vicar read from the Bible: “‘For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though after my skin-worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.’” Nick remembered watching as his mother, her eyes trained blindly on the vicar’s face, scratched at the back of her left hand until it bled.

Sometime in the afternoon Nick had managed to sneak out. He saddled Boatswain and galloped off, trying to lose himself in fields he had known all his life. Perhaps trying to fall and break his own neck. But he must not have wanted to die, for at the woods that marked the edge of his father’s land—his land—he had dismounted to tighten the saddle girth. That’s when he had found himself sobbing into Boatswain’s neck, clutching the horse’s mane in his fists.

Nick hadn’t particularly liked his father, a man whose passions were only roused in competition. The fastest horse, the best brandy, the most expensive snuffboxes. Even as Nick pressed his face into Boatswain’s neck he knew he was weeping for himself, rather than for that man, the seventh marquess. He was weeping for his lack of grief. For his guilt and his loneliness. Nick didn’t want his father’s title. He never had. But, in the twinkling of an eye, or rather, in the snapping of a neck, he had become Lord Blackdown nevertheless.

His tears had subsided. He breathed in Boatswain’s scent. Then he felt it. Someone was close by. He looked up, and there she was. Standing in the shadows of the oak trees, her dark eyes candid. She was watching him, had been watching him cry. But instead of shame, a strange peace washed over him as she smiled. It was a smile that seemed to exist outside of rules, outside of judgment. She reached out to him with it, and his grief and panic receded.

It wasn’t until she had stepped into the sunlight that he recognized her as Julia Percy, his sister Arabella’s best friend. She lived at Castle Dar with her old grandfather, the earl.

Nick could never remember what they’d said then, to each other. They must have spoken, but his memory was only of the smile, and of her stepping out of the shadow and into the light, coming toward him and pushing all the bad feeling away, before he even realized who she was. He must have seen her again, after that day, but he couldn’t remember. He had left Falcott House at age fifteen for Oxford, and he had avoided returning. After Oxford he had gone to London and then to Spain. And then to the future.

Her calm, and that feeling that had come over him when her eyes and mouth had smiled together . . . her eyes and smile had followed him down two hundred years.

Nick wondered if she was buried in the churchyard in Stoke Canon. Most probably she was not buried there. She had been a pretty girl, and he was sure she had grown into a lovely woman. Old Lord Percy probably shot her off at seventeen or eighteen, married her to some baron or earl halfway across the country. She would be buried under that man’s name, in his churchyard, in his county. The green lichen on her tombstone would have filled in even that name long ago. I hope you were happy, Julia of the dark eyes, he thought to himself. I hope your husband loved you and I hope your children were healthy and that you lived to see them flourish.

“You are sighing like a furnace, my friend.” Arkady spoke, but Nick kept his eyes closed. “It is sad to see that Castle Dar is gone?”

“I suppose I’m sad it’s gone, yes. But I was thinking more of the people who lived there.”

“Castle Dar,” Arkady said. “A good name. Almost it could be Russian. I am very eager to visit this castle. We will see it soon, in 1815. Yes, and enter it too, I hope. Will you be happy to see the people there again?”

Nick had no desire to see Castle Dar again, for that would mean seeing it in the nineteenth century, and Nick was still unable to grasp the reality of the return that he was about to make. He hadn’t cared much for the blustery old earl, and Julia, at twenty-two, would certainly be married and gone. But still. It was easier to think of visiting Castle Dar than Falcott House. Which did still exist, and which he would soon be facing. The thought made him feel slightly sick.

“We are here,” Arkady said, slowing and turning the car. Nick kept his eyes closed, feeling the tarmac unroll beneath the car wheels. This must be the long drive up to the house. He pictured it in his mind, the beeches his grandfather had planted, the sweeping lawn dotted with sheep, the windows reflecting back the afternoon sun. . . .

“Stop it.” Arkady slapped Nick’s thigh. “Do you want to pull us back out of a moving car?”

“What?” Nick opened his eyes. There it all was. Falcott House, its Palladian symmetry unmarred, its graceful marble dome glowing almost pink in the afternoon light. The trees much bigger, the lawn sheepless, but otherwise . . . “Stop the car.”

Arkady pulled over. Nick opened the door, leaned out, and vomited his pub lunch onto his ancestral land.

“Nice,” Arkady said. “Classy.”

Nick straightened up and closed the car door, took the handkerchief Arkady held out, and wiped his mouth. He waved his hand in a lordly fashion. “Drive on.”

* * *

Arkady parked the MG and together they walked up the broad steps leading to the grand entranceway. A gray-haired woman of about seventy opened the door before they could ring the bell. “You must be Mr. Davenant and Mr. Altukhov. I’m Caroline. I have your keys here, but I’m off duty in half an hour, so if you want a tour of the house you’ll need to come with me now.”