The River of No Return (30 page)

I
believe we
all
need a drink after that,” Marjory Northway said, and there was laughing agreement around the table.

Saatçi got up and did the honors—“Since tonight I am dressed as a footman,” he said.

As he worked his way around the room, the Guild members talked eagerly about what they had just done in controlling the bullet. Each wanted to brag about the part he or she had played; no one wanted to listen to anyone else.

“You talk as if this is the first time you’ve done this,” Nick said into the clamor of voices.

Silence fell.

“Ah.” Nick put his hands behind his head and grinned at them. “This
is
the first time you’ve done this.”

“You remember, Nick,” Alice said. “We talked about it.”

“Talked about what?”

“It was when you were being followed by Mibbs. We wondered for a moment if he had used some new Ofan skill on you. Arkady said it might be group time control, and I told you about what they’ve been up to in Brazil. The Ofan have really been making headway with it and we’ve learned a few of their tricks. So you were perfectly safe. We practiced last night.”

“On a living subject?”

No one said anything. Saatçi came past with the bottle and Nick pushed his glass forward. “Better make it a large one.”

Ahn got to his feet. His gold clothing shimmered in the candlelight, and as he raised his drink, supporting his right arm with his left hand. “Nick, in Korea we turn our backs to those of higher rank when we drink. Here, among these comrades from around the world and across time, it is impossible to say who ranks the highest. But tonight you have shown yourself to be a prince.” He turned his shoulder to Nick. “
Gun bae!
To courage!”

“To courage!” Everyone drank. Nick drank too, although what he had endured had not required courage; he’d had no choice but to face the bullet.

Arkady got to his feet and raised his glass. “I give you a Russian toast. To Father Frost and the Snow Maiden!”

“Make a toast that’s about Nick, Arkady,” Alice said. “Not about you.”

“Wait.” Nick got to his feet. “If we are toasting women, I have one.” He cleared his throat. “‘Here’s to the charmer, whose dimples we prize . . .’”

Alice groaned.

Nick smiled at her and carried on. “‘Now to the maid who has none, sir. Here’s to the girl with a pair of blue eyes, and here’s to the nymph with but one, sir!’”

Everyone laughed, and drank.

Except Penture. The Frenchman sat back in his chair, swirling his brandy in his glass. When the laughter was done he got to his feet. “To our once-beloved sister who has turned against us, and against whom we have turned. Alva Blomgren!”

“To Alva,” Nick echoed, and clinked glasses with the Alderman, and then with the others, who toasted as if to a dead friend: “To Alva.”

Penture put his glass down but remained standing. He leaned over the table and waited until he had everyone’s attention. “Now,” he said, “I’m afraid we must tell Mr. Davenant about the future.”

It was as if a cold wind had blown through the room. People shifted in their chairs, and Nick watched as Alice transformed from a relaxed friend among friends to a tightly controlled Alderwoman among colleagues.

He glanced back at Penture and found that those flat green eyes were bent on him. “What do you know about the future, Davenant?”

Waterloo? The scramble for Africa? Hoover Dam? The Cultural Revolution? The Beatles? AIDS? “A great deal,” he said. “Mostly useless.”

“No. Not what’s coming. What is. What does the future mean to the Guild? What does the Guild mean to the future?”

“The Guild protects the future from the past,” Nick said. “You protect the flow of history from the Ofan, who think it is possible to change the river, and change the future.”

“That is the theory. If history is a river that flows to the sea, the Guild is the guardian of that flow. But recently . . .”

The Alderman paused and looked down at his hands, which rested on the table. He wore a heavy golden ring with a polished purple stone. It looked very old, almost crude. Nick twisted his own ring on his finger. Arkady had his hand around the stem of his glass, and that enormous ruby winked in the dim light. And Alice’s pale yellow stone; Nick couldn’t see it, for her hands were in her lap, but she wore it always. Ahn’s hands were on the table; he wore what looked like a plain gold wedding band on his ring finger. And Saatçi? Marjory Northway? Their hands were out of sight.

Penture covered the fingers of his left hand with his right, obscuring his ring. “The Guild has always protected the river of history, Davenant, since time immemorial.”

“Can time be immemorial for the Guild? Surely you know everything, back to when we were hunting wooly rhinos in the Dordogne.”

“Have you ever met a caveman?”

“Yes.” Nick pointed to Arkady. “There he sits.”

Arkady nodded, accepting this as an accolade.

Penture smiled thinly. “I mean a real caveman. I know the answer; you have not. Any single person’s window of travel is about a thousand years back, give or take a century or two. If you were to jump back to the Norman Conquest, you might meet someone from the age of Chirst, so we can talk to people from the past across a gap of roughly two thousand years.”

“And what is the window for jumping forward?”

Penture said nothing. The silence around the table was complete.

“My greeter jumped forward from Charlemagne’s empire. Ricchar Hartmut,” Nick continued.

“Yes, we still get people from a thousand years ago who jump to the twenty-first century,” Alice said. “Like Ricchar. But after the turn of the twentieth to the twenty-first century, the traveling begins to get very difficult. People make shorter jumps. People who jump from the twenty-first century . . .” She shook her head. “It gets harder and harder to jump forward, Nick. We don’t know why. Usually people make an initial jump like you or me. Several hundred years. Well beyond their natural life spans. But recently, people who jump from their natural time in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries can only make a small leap. A few decades at most. It’s very awkward; their spouses and children might still be alive. And for those of us who know how to travel in time, jumping past the twenty-first century is almost impossible. It takes incredible energy and concentration, and we have to find very specific places where we can latch on to a current that will carry us there. It’s as if there isn’t any feeling further on downriver that we can recognize. It’s as if the entire future is becoming a scar.”

“And this is new? You used to be able to go to the future more easily?”

“No, not exactly,” Marjory said. “It was always harder to jump after the twentieth century. Like the Alderwoman said, it’s scarred up in the future. Once you’re there it isn’t all that pleasant. Things are rough further along. Very rough. But we used to be able to go there. And some people were still making their initial jumps there, poor things.”

Nick watched as Alice reached her hand out to Arkady, beside her. He took her hand and stroked it. “What’s changed,” Alice said, “is that after a certain date, we cannot jump at all. It is like hitting a moving wall. No matter where we go, no matter how hard we try, we cannot penetrate past a certain date. We don’t know if the Guild exists anymore after that date. If humanity itself exists.”

“Wait—after a certain date? What date?”

Everyone turned to Ahn in his glimmering golden clothing. “Today the Pale is at the nineteenth of December, 2145,” he said.

“The Pale?”

“The barrier. The moment after which we cannot jump.”

“
Today
it is at the nineteenth of December? What was it yesterday?”

“The twentieth.”

“And tomorrow it will be the eighteenth,” Marjory said.

Nick looked from face to face. “What are you saying?” His voice came out a hoarse whisper.

“We are saying that the future has turned around,” Penture said. “It is pushing back, consuming the past. Day by day. Our time is getting shorter and shorter.”

Everyone was looking at Nick. Everyone’s hands were now on the table. Everyone, he noted in his rising panic, was indeed wearing a ring. He pushed back his little chair and stood up. “What the hell are you people talking about?”

“The future, Nick,” Alice said. “It is pushing the river back against itself. Against us. Like a tsunami.”

J
ulia looked down at the three men, frozen at her whim. They were fifteen feet away or more—much further than she had thought her powers could extend. In the bedroom to the left, Clare was probably frozen in her sleep. If the effect spread up as well as out, the servants upstairs were frozen in their narrow beds. And the mice in the walls. Julia crossed her arms, hugging her ribs, feeling her breath flutter, her heart beat. It was a fearsome gift she had. To pluck herself out of time and stand alone, at the center of a great stillness.

She let time start again and watched as the three men picked up where they had left off, the one writing on his paper, Jemison and the other man looking at the door in the narrow beam of the dark lantern. Then they moved on to the next house. Julia watched for ten minutes as the lantern bobbed slowly all the way around the square, winking out for long periods as the trees blocked her view, but moving steadily on. When they got back around to the Falcott mansion, Jemison closed the shutter on his lantern, shook hands with the other two men, and waited as they walked away down Berkeley Street. When they were gone, he turned back and looked up at the façade.

Julia ducked behind a curtain, peering out again cautiously. Jemison stood with his hands on his hips, scanning the house. Then she heard a window scrape open, and something must have been tossed down, for Jemison bent and plucked an object from the dust near his feet. He held it up to show that he had found it, and it caught the light of the moon: a key. He moved away around the house, toward the side kitchen entrance.

Julia grabbed her candle, and, shielding its flame with her hand, she flew to her bedroom door and wrenched it open.

There was Clare beetling down the hall, wrapped in a dressing gown and carrying her own candle in a holder with a glass shade. She stopped when she heard Julia’s door open, then turned slowly. “Oh. Hello, Julia.”

“Hello, Clare. Are you sleep walking?”

“I’m . . . hungry. I’m going down to raid the kitchens.”

“You threw a key down to Mr. Jemison!”

“Ah. Yes. Yes, I did.” Clare frowned. “And I must go meet him in case he runs into difficulty. Go back to bed. Forget you ever saw anything.” She started off down the hall again.

“I’m comimg with you.”

Clare turned, exasperated. “Go to bed!”

“No! I’m not letting you meet a man alone. Who knows what might happen?”

Clare leaned forward, holding her candle out to illuminate Julia’s face. “Who knows? You don’t. And that is how I want it. I insist as your hostess that you return to your bed.”

“Don’t be a fool. No friend worth her salt would let you scamper off in your nightgown after a man. Your steward, Clare, for God’s sake! I’m getting my slippers and my wrap and I’m coming with you.”

“It is you who are being very foolish. . . .”

But Julia was already back in her room, awkwardly shoving her feet into slippers and scrambling into a wrap while trying to keep her upheld candle from lighting her hair on fire. When she came back out into the hall she was relieved to see that Clare was waiting, her face a picture of frustration. “You are a pest, Julia Percy.”

“Good. You clearly need one.”

Clare stalked away down the hall like an angry lioness and Julia followed after, excitement beginning to buzz through her veins. Clare was having a clandestine affair with her steward. And Julia was saving her from her folly. It was like when the Countess of Wolfenbach—

Julia stopped walking. This very afternoon she had been half undressed in Blackdown’s arms, and happier than she had ever been in her life.

Full nakedness. All joys are due to thee.

“Clare . . .”

Her friend turned.

“Perhaps it is better that I leave you alone?”

“I wish you would.”

Julia nodded, once. “I shall, then.” She turned on her heel.

“Oh, for pity’s sake, you ninny!” Clare grabbed Julia by the arm. “Come along. Better you accompany me than that you go back to your bed imagining that I am down in the kitchens among the onions, locked in an embrace with Mr. Jemison.”

“Well, wouldn’t you be?”

Clare pulled Julia along the corridor, so quickly that Julia’s candle guttered out. “I know it is impossible for you to imagine, my dear, but men and women can make more together than babies. I am going downstairs in the dead of night to talk to Mr. Jemison about an impending riot.”

“A riot!”

But Clare said nothing more as they descended the stairs, and soon enough she pushed open the door to the basement kitchens. Mr. Jemison was standing there eating an apple, his lantern and his leather satchel on the stocky kitchen table beside him.

He swallowed hurriedly when he saw Julia.

“I couldn’t stop her,” Clare said, setting her candle next to his lantern on the big kitchen table. “She insisted on protecting me from you. She will keep our confidence, though, will you not, Julia?” It was an order, not a question.

“Yes, of course.”

Julia found herself the subject of Jem Jemison’s consideration, and it was disconcerting. His eyes were as dark as her own, and they scanned her slowly, critically. Finally he sighed. “What’s done can’t be undone,” he said, and bowed. “Miss Percy.”

Julia inclined her head. “Mr. Jemison,” she said.

“Let me help you with that,” Clare said, and Julia watched with some shock as a lady eased a steward out of his coat and hung it over a chair.

Free of his heavy coat, Jemison looked even thinner than before; Julia wondered if he ate only apples. “I brought you the latest,” he said to Clare, opening his satchel and removing a mismatched stack of papers. He held them in his long, narrow hands for a moment and smiled at Julia, including her. “Have you heard of the Corn Bill, Miss Percy?”

“We talked of it only this evening, over dinner.”

“Did you? With Lord Blackdown in attendance?” He glanced at Clare. “I must hear about that. But meanwhile . . .” He divided the pile of papers in half and handed a sheaf to each of them. “You’ll see that things are heating up as the vote draws nigh.”

“When is the vote?”

“It could be any day now. Perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps next week. It depends upon when all the lords are finished giving their speeches.”

Clare rolled her eyes and began flipping through her stack of papers, scanning them quickly and laying them on the table as she was finished. Julia glanced at her stack. It was a collection of broadsides and sheets from a newspaper called
The Political Register
. The top one was a broadside with verses printed on it, entitled “British Freedom.”

Clare looked up. “I can see, just from a glance,” she said. “There will certainly be a riot when the bill passes. Listen to this: ‘Bread! Bread’s our right!—Bread’s our need! Like air and water—ours as yet! Bread! Bread! We
must
—we will have bread!’”

“The tide is turning,” Jemison said.

“What have you got there?” Clare looked over Julia’s shoulder.

“‘And free we’re born,’” Julia read aloud, “‘to sow the corn, and free, when ripe, to reap it. And when we do, the ruling few, are free to come and eat it!’”

Jemison laughed. He had propped his narrow behind on the table and now he leaned at his ease in this kitchen that wasn’t his own. “I hadn’t seen that one. May I?” She let him have it and he read it over, chuckling to himself and eating his apple.

“But the bill might not pass,” Julia said. “Surely if it’s so wrong . . .”

“Oh, it will pass,” Clare said. “No doubt about it.”

Jemison glanced up. “What is ironic is that if we still had an estate to work with, the Corn Bill would have helped our little dream, Clare.”

Ah. So he called her Clare when his guard was down. “What dream?” Julia asked it softly.

Clare shrugged. “A small-scale one. Jemison and I were going to turn Blackdown into a model farm. Soldiers and sailors returning from the war with nowhere to go—a new system of cooperative farm management that would slowly do away with tenancy and put the land in the hands of those who work it. But it was just wishes and horses. And who knows? The Corn Bill might have helped, Jem, but it also might well have squashed our plan. So many things might have squashed it.” She reached out and touched the round haunch of an apple in the bowl. “So many things did squash it. Best perhaps that it didn’t happen.”

“And now here we are in London,” Jemison said brightly. “Where those same soldiers and sailors will be smashing windows and dragging fat lords into the streets and dancing the hornpipe on them in a few days’ time.”

Julia raised her eyebrows. “Surely not!”

“Oh, you don’t know our London mob,” Jemison said. “A venerable creature, the mob. And it won’t be the lords’ houses, alone. Whole parishes will feel their wrath. Three London parishes have refused to organize against the Corn Bill, and can you guess which ones they are? St. Mary-le-Bone, Hanover Square, and St. James. Tomorrow Westminster is delivering forty-two thousand, four hundred and seventy-three signatures against the bill. But the great men of Mayfair? Who get their money from rents, rents they can keep high if the price of corn is fixed? Not a single name. Not one.”

Julia said nothing. What could she say? She felt like a milk pumpkin, raised all alone under a protective cloth, fed rich, unnatural food, and grown pale and strange as a result.

Jemison seemed to understand. He put a thin hand on her shoulder in a brotherly gesture. “All this talk, this heightened feeling, it’s about more than the Corn Bill,” he said gently. “It’s important because it’s about the future, Miss Julia, when we shall have fellowship among men, and common property, and fair wages. But before all that, we must have a cheap loaf. Grub first, then ethics! That’s why we fight the Corn Bill so fiercely.” He gestured to the papers. “That’s a few weeks’ outpourings only. This bill, you see, it’s turning the tide of feeling. It’s so bloody cynical that everyone can see it, pardon my language. When the lords pass the bill, it will be like they are saying to their tenants, ‘Yes, Joe, I’d rather see you starve than make a living. Now pull that forelock and bend that knee.’” He squeezed Julia’s shoulder. “You will see the future when they pass that bill, Miss Julia, if you are still in London. You will see the future begin.”

“Maybe,” Clare said. “The future has begun many times before and hasn’t come to much.”

“Doubter.” Jemison shook his head. “Why are women such doubters? It really brings a man down.” He took a broadside and struck a pose, one hand uplifted with the paper so he could read it, the other, with the apple core, balanced on his hip. “‘UP, man of reason! Rouse thee UP! AROUSE thee for the strife!’” He waved his apple core suggestively in front of his trouser flap, grinning at Clare. “‘Be UP and doing—for the world with mighty change is rife!’”

“Enough!” Clare laughed and snatched the broadside from Jemison’s hand. “I’m sorry, Julia. Mr. Jemison is . . . well, words fail me.”

He turned that happy grin on them both, then brought the apple stem-end toward his mouth and began eating the core. Julia stared. “Learned to do that in Spain,” he said, mouth full. “Not enough to eat.” He stuffed the last of the core in his mouth.

“He’s just trying to shock,” Clare said, looking bored. “It means he likes you, believe it or not.”

“I suppose I’m flattered.”

“He can behave like a gentleman when he must.”

Jemison swallowed. “Can’t. Tallow chandler’s son.” He licked his fingers.

“Rich as Croesus,” Clare said. “Just playing at being a workingman.”

Jemison reached for another apple from the bowl on the table. “Sticks and stones, my lady. Sticks and stones. So. Tell me. What did your brother have to say about the bill?”

Clare sighed. “He was all in a twist about it. I honestly don’t know what his opinion is. I don’t know what to make of him in general.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s changed. I don’t know how he thinks anymore.”

Jemison polished his second apple on his breast. “War changes a man,” he said carefully. “He was at Badajoz. No man who lived through those days will ever be the same again.”

“What happened?” Clare’s voice was soft, pleading.

But Jemison only glanced at her with those dark eyes. “No, my lady. That’s between a man and his God.” He put the fruit between his lips, and the bright, jolly sound of a crisp apple yielding to the teeth filled the room.

“You probably know Nick better than I do, having served with him.”

“I’m sure I do,” Jemison said. “But I don’t love him, and you do, and that’s a different kind of knowledge. So tell me.”

“It’s like he’s two different men. I wish you could have heard the conversation when I told him about almost selling Blackdown. At first I thought he was more excited by it even than I. But by conversation’s end, it was as if he were the oldest, goutiest, most backward old duke in the Upper House. Ranting at me!”

“That doesn’t surprise me. He’s a brave man, but I suspect he always felt guilty about leaving Blackdown. Now that he’s back he’ll dig right in like a tick.”

“Don’t talk like that about him. He’s my brother. I know you hate him and are sorry he’s returned—”

Jemison’s eyes flew wide. “Is that what you think?” He laughed. “Good God, woman, I almost wept, I was so glad to see him, landlord scum that he is!” He put his apple to his mouth for a bite but lowered it again, and spoke softly. “If I could tell you what I’ve lived through, side by side with your brother. What our eyes have seen. And then at the last, when he . . .” Jemison was holding the apple in front of his heart; Julia could see the red of it between his fingers. “And not to know where he had gone, or how . . .” His eyes were focused on a distant horror.

“Jem?” Clare touched his knee.

“Yes. Enough of that. I’m sorry. Tell me more. So half of him is the great lord, storming around his estate. And the other half?”

“The marquess seems to think that women should be the equals of men. He claims to be a follower of Mary Wollstonecraft.” Clare crossed her arms over her chest. “What do you make of that, Mr. Glorious Future of the Workingman?”

Jemison took a big bite and chewed, his eyes merry. “I think he’s mad,” he said with his mouth full.