The River of No Return (2 page)

He took a deep breath. He was miles and years away from that battlefield. “Miles and years,” he whispered, and then started playing with rhyme, as he did sometimes to calm himself down. “Tiles and beers. Piles and jeers. Niles and tears.”
Niles and tears
was a good one, he thought. It captured the weariness of the distances he’d marched and the sorrow of the years he’d lost. “Niles and tears,” he whispered again, and yet again, letting the sound of his own voice drown out the sound of his heart. The woman next to him was curled into an S, sleeping quietly. “Niles and tears,” Nick said more loudly, perfectly aware that he wanted her to wake up and keep him company.

But she slept on and now he was wide awake. He sat up, letting the down comforter fall away from his bare chest. The cold against his skin reassured him; he never turned up the heat, even on the bitterest nights. He kept the thermostat just high enough to stop the pipes from freezing. Just high enough to feel like an English wintertime of long ago.

The night was dark; there was no moon. He could see the showy splash of the Milky Way through the wrinkled old window glass. He savored the feeling of the cold air in his lungs and the sweet smell of the wood fire they had enjoyed after a first frenzied tumble on the couch, their thick winter sweaters still on.

The pond on the other side of the driveway was frozen over. The frogs of summertime were sleeping under the ice, the crickets gone to wherever they went. Cricket Valhalla? He seemed to remember from some nature show that crickets hibernate. He wished they’d wake up. There was no sound except his shallow breathing, and his heartbeat, beginning to boom again. “Niles and tears . . .” He squeezed his eyes shut. The panic was winning. Nick gave up the rhyming game. It clearly wasn’t going to work tonight.

So he reached, in his mind, for her. And she was there. As she always was. She stepped into his consciousness with a certain lightness of tread, as if she were walking over wet ground. The dark-eyed girl. Nick’s thoughts cleared; his breathing slowed. She was standing at the shadowy edge of a summer wood. Her eyes were candid, friendly. She watched him until he felt his heart begin to mend. Then she faded.

His bedfellow shifted in her sleep, uncurling toward him, her face turning into the starlight. “Get over here,” she said in a bossy, sleepy tone. She reached for him and, realizing that he was sitting up, murmured grumpily and flounced over onto her other side, soon to be lost deep in sleep again.

He liked her better asleep than awake. She was the kind of person who took life by the scruff of the neck and made it dance to her tune. It was an admirable trait, but experience had taught Nick that such people were best admired from a safe distance. And he was right. But now here he was.

In bed with the new cheese inspector.

Yesterday she had scrutinized every corner of the farm’s operations. When she’d passed the garbage can full of cheese and hay she had stopped and snuffed the air like a bloodhound. Then she’d turned and fixed Nick with a long stare. “You own this farm?”

He’d seen her take in his pristine wax jacket. “Like to come up on the weekends from New York and play with the cows?”

He’d been surprised at how much that had stung. “I live in New York, yes,” he’d said. Then added defensively, “But I was raised in England.”

“Well now, England,” she’d said, lingering over the -
gland
with contempt. She had a southern accent of some sort or another. “I’m guessing you have some rather fine raw-milk Camembert in your fridge on . . .” She looked at her copy of the form where Nick’s info was printed. “Jenneville Road. I’ll follow you home and give it a try. Then I’ll report on this farm.”

Now Nick looked at the curve of the cheese inspector’s shoulder, barely visible in this light. Thruppenny Farm would be getting its good report, and the cheese inspector would be off after breakfast, in that jalopy of hers. Back to her usual Burlington beat. The old cheese inspector would return to duty next month.

He sighed and stared out of the window.

The stars seemed close. It was hard to believe that they were, in fact, very far away, in time as well as space. How many light-years into the past was he looking? Long before his own birth, surely. Each one of those stars was an inferno, a terrible burning hell, spilling its light from endless raging fires out into time and space. But from this distance they were beautiful. Watchful. Like the eyes of animals in a midnight barn, shining in the swinging light of the farmer’s lantern.

The stars reminded Nick of bivouacking on frosty winter nights in Spain, a rabbit stew warming his belly, the sound of the slumbering army soothing him to sleep. The stars had been bright and close then, too. Now the war was far away and long ago, very long ago. The world had become a different place. Yet the war still shed the light of its conflagration down through his dreams. Nick pressed his palms against his face. The girl with the dark eyes. She was also from that time long ago. Only the thought of her could ever beat the dream back into the past.

The past.

Nick Davenant had far too much past.

He had jumped forward in time. Two hundred years.

Two hundred years. It had been unbelievable when it had happened and it was still unbelievable, ten years later. Nick laughed out loud, and without humor.

“Put a sock in it, England.”

His hard laugh softened into a real smile. He had to hand it to the cheese inspector: She was sure of herself in every way. He was glad she was leaving and never coming back. “Sorry,” he said.

“Hmpf.” She buried her nose into her pillow and veered sharply back into sleep.

Two hundred years were hard to hide, even in casual relationships. He realized now that when his lovers accused him of being “uptight” or “emotionally distant,” what they meant was that he was weirder than even an eccentric Englishman should be. American women would overlook a great deal in a passably good-looking British boyfriend. But eventually they began to pry, wanting explanations.

His terrible scars? A car accident, he said. He
had
been in a car accident, but the scars were obviously war wounds. Hence his avoidance of women who were doctors or nurses. The scar that cut across one eyebrow was dashing and ambiguous enough, but the jagged saber cut up his left thigh was heavily punctuated where the wound had been tied up with thick catgut. Roping his left shoulder, a scar from a gunshot wound. It was the ugliest scar of all, because of the infection that had set in.

There were other, more subtle oddities. The flourishes of his signature were neither manly nor timely. Then there were his antiquated tastes in food. This very evening, as she ate the glorious Camembert, the cheese inspector had reminisced about Oreos and milk and then she had gone on to sing a TV jingle about them. Nick had no favorite childhood commercials, and he craved boiled mutton, beef jelly, blancmange, and bits of pig, pickled.

Sleep was clearly not going to come again tonight. Nick got quietly out of bed and went downstairs, enjoying the bracing cold of the floorboards against the soles of his feet. He loved these floors. The boards were as old as he was. The trees from which the boards had been painstakingly hewn were much older even than that—they must have stood in these hills for hundreds of years before they were felled. This house had been built in the year of his birth—1790—and Nick took comfort from its sturdy construction, the way it had hunkered down through all the years like a bear in its den. He imagined it being raised, enormous beam by enormous beam, even as he had quickened in his mother’s womb. It was as if the house had been built for him and had simply been waiting across so many winters for him to come home.

The embers were still glowing in the fireplace, and he scrunched up some newspaper, made a pyramid of kindling around it, crouched, and blew the fire back to life. As the kindling crackled into flame, he added two apple logs from the old tree that had fallen in a spring storm. Tending a fire made him feel eternal. It made him feel that he could have been born at any time, in any place. It made him feel that there was nothing so very strange about skipping almost two centuries in one’s twenty-third year, then living out the rest of one’s life in a previously unimaginable future. He wrapped his scarred, naked body in a cashmere throw and watched the flames dance.

But as he followed a spark flying upward into the chimney, his eye was distracted by a white envelope propped up on the mantelpiece.

Shit.

The letter from the Guild.

Nick had successfully avoided thinking about it for several days.

He had run into the mailman at the bottom of the long driveway a few mornings ago. “Looks like an old-fashioned love letter,” the mailman had said, admiring the thick wax seal on the back of the envelope. The wax was stamped with the Guild’s symbol: a blooming tulip, bulb and roots and all. He handed the letter to Nick along with the L.L.Bean catalog that seemed to come every week. “Romantic.”

It was anything but. As soon as he’d glimpsed the seal, Nick had guessed. And when he had turned the letter over in his hand and seen that it was addressed in Alderwoman Gacoki’s spidery hand, he had known. The letter was a Summons. Not just any Summons, but a Summons Direct. A tulip in wax. A tulip, when they were coming for their pound of flesh.

He had propped the letter there on the mantelpiece and then he had forgotten about it, willfully. He was good at that. It was another skill he’d learned during the war. Don’t want to think about it? No problem. Don’t think about it. Think about the girl with the dark eyes instead.

Now, in the flickering firelight, the Alderwoman’s writing seemed to scuttle across the envelope. Nick wanted to rush the letter like it was a living thing and sweep it into the fire. But he couldn’t. He had to read it.

If he didn’t answer the Summons, they would come for him.

I
t had happened ten years ago. It had also happened two centuries ago, in the hills south of Salamanca. As the Most Honorable Nicholas Falcott—Lord Nick to his men—led his cavalry division in yet another charge, his horse was shot out from under him. He freed his feet as the horse fell, and he rolled away unharmed, looking up and to his left. There was Jem Jemison, locked in combat with a big French foot soldier. Jemison caught Nick’s eye, and Nick saw that he was in trouble; alarm flickered in those black eyes. As Nick began to raise himself, he saw the horse rearing directly over him, the French dragoon on its back, saber lifted high. Jem wasn’t the one in trouble, Nick thought, as the hooves descended.

One moment he was staring at his death, and the next he was in the path of an impossibly bright light bearing down on him with equally impossible speed. Then he was screaming into the roar of a thousand furnaces as the light crashed over him.

When he opened his eyes, that horrible white light still blinded him. But instead of charging toward him, it was glaring from three big rectangles that seemed to be affixed to the ceiling of a blank white room. The light hurt his eyes—hurt his entire head. He groaned.

So this was death.

“Nicholas Falcott?”

Nick turned his head slowly. There was an old man sitting by his bed.

“Where the devil am I?”

“You are in London.” The man had a faint accent and wore an outlandishly oversized yet strangely delicate species of spectacles. “You are in the care of the Guild. The year is 2003.”

Nick laughed, then winced. Laughing was a bad idea. “That’s a fine jest,” he whispered. “Almost literally side-splitting.”

“I’m afraid it’s not a joke.”

Nick closed his eyes. The light was too brutal. “If it’s really 2003, then what has happened to my mother? My sisters?”

“As you would imagine.”

Nick kept his eyes closed. He was surely dead, but his pain was real enough. Perhaps he was alive, but trapped in some blanched and fevered nightmare. How cruel of his dreams to mock him like this, when the war was grim enough.

When he opened his eyes, the old man was still there, watching him with soft-eyed compassion. Nick had to pull himself together. Even in a dream he wanted no mawkish tenderness. He would play his part. “So.” He tried to sound like a gentleman and a soldier, assured and calm in the face of crisis. “They are dead in 2003. But they are not dead in 1812. They need me. You must send me back.”

The old man sucked in his cheeks and regarded Nick over the top of his peculiar eyewear. “There is no going back.”

“Surely if I came to this time I can return.”

“There is no returning, I’m afraid. Progress is only forward. No one has ever gone back.”

“Then I shall be the first.”

“You cannot.” The old man spread his hands, like an innkeeper apologizing for having run out of roast beef. “I’m sorry, but no one ever returns. It is impossible.”

“I am not no one.” Nick made a motion to straighten his cuffs, a gesture that never failed to intimidate, only to discover that he was dressed in almost nothing.

“I’m very much afraid that, in this regard, you are no one. Even if it were physically possible to go back, which it is not, the Guild has rules and you must abide by them.”

“Guild? What control can a guild have over me? I am Nicholas Falcott, Marquess of Blackdown. I am no artisan.”

“Please, listen to me.” The man leaned forward and propped his elbows on his thighs, his hands clasped down between his knees. Behind his freakish spectacles, his hazel eyes were huge and earnest, like the eyes of an old plow horse. “I know it is hard to understand, but please be attentive.”

“Which monarch now reigns? I must speak to the king immediately—”

“Young man!” The hazel eyes flared, their fire stirred. “You will listen to me!”

Nick raised his eyebrows but shut his mouth.

The old man subsided into his seat. “Thank you.” He took a deep breath. “Now. You are in the year 2003. It has been almost two centuries since you are believed to have perished in Spain. You left no heir. The marquessate of Blackdown died with you.”

The marquessate—extinct. It had passed from father to son since Lord Clancy Falcott had routed the nuns and razed the convent that had stood by the River Culm; for his pains he had been made the first Marquess of Blackdown by Henry VIII. Nicholas had never seen a nun until he went to Spain, and then, at Badajoz . . . He shut his eyes. This deathly dream was bad enough. He did not wish to add to its horrors by thinking of Badajoz. Yet how fitting it would have been for the marquessate, born from the destruction of a convent, to expire at Badajoz, in defense of those pitiful women.

But that hadn’t happened. Instead, Lord Blackdown and his title had marched away from Badajoz with the rest of Wellington’s infamous army. He and his title had stumbled together across Spain for a few more hot and desolate weeks, only to die together for no cause at all, scrabbling in the dust, watched by the flat black eyes of Jem Jemison. . . .

The old man cleared his throat, and Nick opened his eyes. “I’m dead.”

“You are not dead,” the man said. “Nor do you dream. The marquessate is extinct. Falcott House is now owned by the National Trust. And the king is a queen.”

“The National Trust? What in blazes is that?”

“It means, essentially, that your former estate is well cared for. By a charity.”

“My former estate.” Nick blew his breath out between pursed lips.

“Yes. I know it is a shock, but I’m afraid I have news you might find even harder to stomach. It is a harsh rule, but the Guild insists that you must leave the country of your birth. Leave and never return. Not ever. Not for as long as you live.”

The dream became truly terrible then. Nick’s head seemed to crack open with pain, and his sight darkened and the room seemed to be full of people. Nick heard his own voice but wasn’t sure if he was speaking words. Then something sharp pinched his arm, and the dream was washed away into blissful nothingness.

* * *

When Nick woke again, he was without pain. But he was still in the too-white, too-bright room, and the old man was still beside his bed, though he was wearing a different shirt, a bright orange one, which had the word
GAP
printed across it in bold, black letters. Nick puzzled over that, then looked up into the man’s face. “You again? Lord grant me a different dream!”

“Good morning.”

“I suppose it is still the future.”

“I am afraid so.”

Ten minutes later, Nick had stormed about, rattled and banged upon the frustratingly locked door, stared mesmerized out of the window at the horseless traffic in the street fifteen (fifteen!) stories beneath him and at the unrecognizable sprawl that was, apparently, London, the river nearly devoid of boats and laced across with bridges. He was, he guessed from the position of a shockingly white St. Paul’s and a few—a very few—steeples, somewhere in Southwark, of all the godforsaken places.

“Is the Abbey gone?”

“Westminster Abbey still stands. You can’t see it for the new buildings.”

Nick turned from the window. “I’m in London, though. London of the future.”

“Yes.”

“Why? Why am I here?”

“I am glad to finally hear a rational question from you. You are in London because this is the Guild’s European hospital. You will stay here until your concussion is healed. But then, you must leave. Forever.” He looked at Nick a little warily.

“So when I am healed you will put me on a ship and send me off? Wherever the winds take me? An exile?”

“Oh, no.” The old man smiled. “The Guild will choose your new country for you, and prepare you in every way to live in it. The Guild will care for you. First you will spend a year at one of our compounds, getting ready to enter modern life. Most people remember their year in the compound as one of the happiest they have known.”

Nick wondered if that was the light of fanaticism behind the old man’s eyes. “And then?”

“At the end of the year you will move to your new home. The Guild will provide you with wealth, property, whatever you need to start life anew. The rest is up to you. You can take a job if you like. Many of us end up working for the Guild. Like me.” He straightened his shoulders. “I am a greeter.”

Nick leaned back against the window ledge and looked the man up and down. His mysteriously declarative shirt had short, cuffless sleeves. His hairy forearms were on show, like a laborer’s.
GAP.
Was that some sort of code? Or was he branded, like a criminal?

“It’s a shock, isn’t it,” the old man said gently. “This city, my clothes, everything. I assure you, you’d think I was exactly as funny-looking if you saw me in the clothes I wore in my old life.”

“Who were you?”

“I am—was . . .” He hesitated. “I still have trouble keeping my tenses straight, and it has been so many years since I jumped. I was a Frank. A butcher by trade. I jumped from Aachen in 810 and landed in 1965. An unusually long leap.” There was a note of pride in his voice. “I was sent to London and I have never returned to Austrasia. Or even to what is now known as Germany. It is forbidden.”

“And you abide by these rules?”

“Yes. You will, too.”

Nick thought he would keep his own counsel on that. “How did you know who I am?”

“We keep a log of people who vanish, and of people who appear.”

“Surely people get lost every day.” Nick turned and looked down again at the teeming city. His eyes followed a tiny person as he—she! The person was wearing trousers, but Nick saw now that it was a woman—strode to a street corner. She stepped with confidence into the path of an enormously tall, perfectly rectangular red carriage that was bearing down on her without any visible means of locomotion. Nick gasped, but somehow the ghastly machine came to a stop mere inches from her. She seemed not to notice it at all, but sauntered boyishly on her way and disappeared behind the blank glass wall of another building. Nick turned slowly to face the white room and the little man who was his only anchor in this strange dreamworld. “Please tell me that I am dreaming, or dead. And this is either heaven or hell.”

“No.” The butcher shook his head. “I will not tell you that, for it isn’t true. This is the same world you left, only it is a little bit older, and a little bit grayer.”

Nick looked at the rectangles on the ceiling emanating light. They were miraculous, but they were neither beautiful nor comforting. Was he in hell? “That dragoon was about to skewer me.”

“You could see you were about to die, and so you jumped. It is the most common prompt. I jumped right before a burning beam crushed me; I was trying to save my donkey from a fire.” The butcher sighed. “I am sure she burned, poor Albia.”

“Do you mean to tell me that what happened to me is commonplace?”

“No. Not at all. But it does happen, and when it does, the Guild tries to be ready. We have a global network of researchers who document such cases. There is an enormous library in Milton Keynes and another in Chongqing. Our records go back many hundreds of years. Your disappearance was witnessed on the battlefield and one of your comrades gained a reputation for being insane by telling everyone about it for years afterwards. Your mother was informed that you were dead, but the Guild listened to the rumor that you had vanished into thin air. Sure enough, you appeared again, last week. Quite dramatically—you were mown down by a car.”

Nick frowned. He had been in the maelstrom of battle. Nothing could be more all-consuming, more purely sensual, than the experience of fighting for your life and against the lives of others in a mass of men and horses, choked and blinded by smoke, deafened by gunfire and screaming . . . there was no disappearing in that moment, none whatsoever . . . except into death.

After a moment the butcher spoke again, softly. “You jumped from the Battle of Salamanca. It was the twenty-second of July, 1812.”

“The Battle of Salamanca.” Nick repeated the words slowly. So it had a name. It had already happened. It was over. “Did we . . . ?” Nick stopped. It felt gauche to ask how the day went. The battle had only just begun when he was unhorsed. Many men were still to fight and die or survive.

“It was a glorious triumph. And in 1815, your armies won not only the battle, but the war.”

The whole war. Over. Folded away into history books like bridal linens into an attic trunk. Salamanca a glorious triumph . . . but what did they say of the siege of Badajoz and its aftermath? Everything? Nothing? Nick shook his head. “This is madness,” he said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?” Nick scrubbed at his face with the palms of his hands, then ran his fingers up into his hair. Rage boiled up in him. “What am I meant to say to that? ‘No matter, my dear Sir Butcher’? ‘That’s quite all right’? Good God, man, you have told me how my mother came to learn of my own death. Except that I am not dead and my mother is. Two centuries dead.”

The butcher leaned back in his chair and appraised Nick for a moment, much as he might have assessed a leg of pork before chining it. Then he turned to the bedside table and picked up a large, pale envelope filled with papers. He reached in and found a smaller envelope. “The Guild wishes you to have this,” he said. “The location of your jump and your uniform strongly supported the thesis that you were the long-lost Lord Blackdown, but we knew for certain when we saw this.” He dipped his fingers into the envelope and extracted Nick’s signet ring.

Seeing it there in the butcher’s hand made Nick feel for it, irrationally, on his own finger. His finger was bare. Bare of the ring he had worn since the day his father died. Nick looked and saw that his hand was sun-bronzed except where the ring had been.

His finger was real. His ring was real. Why wasn’t his ring on his finger? How had the butcher come to have it? Nick groped his way back to the bed and sat down. “You are . . . telling me the truth,” he whispered. As he said it, he knew, for the first time he really knew, that it was true.

“Yes.”

“This is the year 2003.”

“Yes.”

Nick closed his eyes for a long moment, then opened them again. “May I have my ring?” he said quietly.