The River of No Return (5 page)

“Are you calling me a liar?” Meg was technically sitting in the back, but she was so angry that she had thrust her skinny shoulders up between the front seats.

Nick turned his head and looked her in the eye. “I’m not calling you a liar, Meg. I’m calling you a drunken left-footer.”

After that there was complete silence between them.

* * *

The next day, Meg and Leo were gone. Disappeared from the compound.

For a couple of days everyone gossiped about it. The general consensus was that they’d been cherry-picked for jobs in the Guild, airlifted out of the compound to glorious new lives in London, at the Guild headquarters.

Nick knew better.

Either his friends were on their way to Brazil, seeking their fantasy of a resistance movement, or they were dead. In Wellington’s army the smallest infraction had been a capital crime. Theft. Insubordination. What Meg and Leo had voiced last night was bigger than that: tantamount to treason. They had broken the fourth rule: Uphold the rules. No questions. No unhappiness. No disloyalty. Perhaps the car
had
been bugged. Maybe the cost of dissent was death. Maybe the Guild had taken them away and killed them.

Nick stopped going to classes, stopped socializing. He was thrown into grief—for Meg and Leo, and back into all his original grief for what he had lost when he jumped. For everyone he had ever known. His entire world.

He would have been completely alone if not for the girl with the dark eyes. At least she hadn’t deserted him. Her eyes, her smile—they absolved him. As they had that first time, and every single time afterward. He floated around his pool in Leo’s panda and dreamed of that warm, comforting gaze.

* * *

Exactly a year after his arrival, Nick had left the compound outside Santiago and begun his life in the United States. Nine years later he was still here. He told people he was thirty-three years old. But when he counted to himself, he counted in centuries.

He divided his time between a loft in SoHo and his house in Vermont. He managed, for the most part, to forget about the Guild. He followed the four rules, and he attended the Guild convention, held biannually in either Santiago or Mumbai. It was basically a mandatory weeklong cocktail party, and Nick hated it. Every kind of human from down the timeline, and all they could think to do was stand around and brag about how they spent their money. Most were collectors. Antique dowry chests. Antique guns. Antique musical instruments. Always it was antiques—or if it wasn’t antiques it was BMWs and Apple gadgets. The Guild patronized both brands with equal fervor.

Nick didn’t collect antiques and he drove an old Chevy LUV pickup. It pretty much expressed the state of his emotions: misspelled, and a little cramped for space. But he knew that in spite of his small resistances, he was like any other Guild member, skimming the fat off the top. It was a good enough life, tinged at the edges with loneliness, but padded, too, with luxury. Of course he might have had another story, if he’d survived the war and not jumped. He might have gone home and settled down. Fallen in love. Found the girl with the dark eyes grown up and waiting for him. Married her. Set up his nursery. Lived out his life surrounded by the hustle and bustle of servants and children and a wife, dogs and horses and tenants and seasons. Never leaving Devonshire. Eating beef and drinking claret and dandling fat babies on his knee.

But that other life existed only in Cloud Cuckoo Land. He was here in Vermont in 2013 and that was all there was to it.

Nick stretched his feet out to the fire and put his hands behind his head. He stared at the letter on the mantel. Instead of the girl with the dark eyes he had the Guild. The generous foster mother of time’s little orphans. Generous and controlling. He thought of Meg and Leo. Controlling and maybe even murderous.

The envelope seemed to stare back at him. What the hell did they want? All his skills were obsolete. Slaughtering Frenchmen; ignoring the stench of open sewers; dressing in absurdly tight clothing; seducing the buxom, sleepy-eyed daughters of innkeepers. Useless talents in this slick and modern present. These days Frenchmen were nice and unavailable for slaughter. Pretty women were skinny and looked at a single man like Nick with starving intensity, as if he were a piece of low-fat cheese.

Nick stood up, letting the throw fall away from his body. The fire was burning well now, and he could feel the heat increase as he stepped forward. He plucked the envelope from the mantel.

With the letter heavy in his hand, he remembered the dream that had awoken him. His terrible intention to kill, and then the will to follow through. The boy dying. Perhaps the dream had been prophetic. Maybe the Guild needed a hit man. Well, they could look elsewhere. He was done with killing.

He slipped his finger under the flap of the envelope and slowly ripped it open along its crease. The bright sound of tearing paper set his teeth on edge. He drew the single sheet out and unfolded it.

The words were printed in big black letters across the top of the page, with the tulip seal of the Guild embossed over them: “Summons Direct.” Then below it, dashed off at a casual angle in Alice Gacoki’s hand: “Never mind the rules. Catch a flight. See you at Heathrow.”

J
ulia wandered aimlessly through Castle Dar, waiting for the men to return from the funeral. It was half castle, half house, and it had piled up over the centuries around a square Norman tower. The tower’s broken-toothed crenellations still crowned the rest, poking up in the midst of sloping roofs and mismatched gables. Julia knew every inch of the place, and before Grandfather’s death she would have said she loved it. But now she walked through the rooms as if she were a stranger and the house a ruin. It felt like a ruin without Grandfather’s voice filling it, without his long strides eating up the hallways as he charged from one end of the castle to the other. There used to be a thrumming energy here, a thrill in the air. But with every day that passed since Grandfather’s death, it grew less. Castle Dar was Eamon’s now, silent and unwelcoming.

Julia hugged her arms around her ribs, noticing how dark the house was, how crumbling. The portraits that lined the hallways seemed to have receded further into black, greasy obscurity since last she looked at them, with Grandfather by her side. They didn’t recognize her, these painted ancestors. Even the one of her young father, Grandfather’s son. She stood and looked up at him now. The portrait had been completed the month before he went to Scotland, where he had met and married Julia’s mother in a whirlwind romance. He’d stayed there with his bride until she was brought to bed of a daughter, and then the three of them had set out for the south. A carriage accident in the borderlands had taken her parents’ lives; little Julia survived. Grandfather had never even met his daughter-in-law, and suddenly he was rushing north to bury her and to take her baby girl back south. Julia had no image of her mother, only a couple of trinkets that had been hers. But she used to love this portrait of her father. Now his eyes seemed as distant and cold as any of the others’. They all stared over her head, looking past her . . . they were looking for the earl. Looking for Eamon.

The house wasn’t entirely Eamon’s yet, however. Grandfather’s collection of stones still cluttered every available surface. Julia picked one up from a windowsill as she passed. It had been his habit to return from journeys with his greatcoat pockets full of them. Stones with things in them. A fern. A fish. Or stones that were things. This one, for instance, was an enormous tooth, like a giant’s molar.

“The world is old, Julia,” Grandfather had said once, when she was fifteen. “Older than old. Older than anyone guesses. Time is long. It stretches back and back and back. . . .”

“Older than Eden?”

“Much older than Eden.”

“But God made the world in seven days.”

“Perhaps. If each day was an eon of eons.”

“How do you know?”

At that he had patted her cheek, as if she were still little. “Questions, questions. Time enough for answers when you are older.”

“I am fifteen. How old must I be before you tell me?”

He had frowned at her words. But then he had winked, again as if she were a child. And he recited the nursery rhyme that used to freeze her blood when she was little. “‘Whither old woman, oh whither so high?’” He used a creaky voice and opened his eyes wide, so that white showed all around the brown iris. “‘To brush the cobwebs off the sky! Shall I go with thee? Aye, by and by!’”

She had smiled to please him, but she wasn’t pleased.

After that she stopped asking anything about the stones he continued to bring back and leave in piles around the house.

Aye, by and by. Julia squeezed the tooth in her hand until she could feel it almost bite into her skin. He was gone, like that old woman they had tossed up in a basket, seventeen times as high as the moon. He had never taken her with him, on any of his journeys. Now he was brushing the cobwebs off the sky all by himself, and she was here in his lonely house, a house that no longer loved her.

Once, just once, when she was nine, he had brought back something that wasn’t a stone. It was a brightly colored, tiled lacquered box, and he had tossed it to her as he climbed down out of the carriage. “See what you make of that,” he’d said. She’d caught it in her hand. It was much lighter than it looked.

She examined the pretty thing. She knew there must be a trick to opening it. She had heard about such puzzles. Oriental boxes with secret hinges and buttons. She found that this one could be twisted, but it never seemed to want to open. The lacquer was very fine. “Is it a Chinese box, Grandfather?”

“Yes, it was made in China. See if you can discover its trick.”

She quickly twisted it, matching colors until each side was fully one shade, thinking that then it might open. But it remained closed. “I can’t do it. Show me.” She glanced up to find him looking at his pocket watch, and then at her, a gleam in his eye. She held the box out to him, and he took it, tucking it away in his pocket. “Another time,” he’d said. But he never brought it out again. He just piled up more and more stones, with their strange captive bones and insects and bits of leaf.

Julia came back to herself and realized she was staring blindly from an upstairs window, down over the fields toward the village, the enormous tooth still clutched in her hand. The men were returning from the funeral. She could see them coming from a long way off, picking their way back across the fields in a straggly line. Eamon was the last. He wore his hat crammed down over his ears and he strutted along with a curiously rolling yet elbowy gait that made him look much like a pompous crow. Julia set the tooth on the sill, took a deep breath, and went back down to the hallway to meet them.

The men came in quietly, bobbing their heads to her. Mr. Pringle, the butler, stopped and said a few words to her. The sermon was affecting, though not necessarily suited to Grandfather’s personality. There was a great deal of talk about lambs and meekness. But all the village men had turned out, dressed very neatly, and there were quite a few fine London and even foreign gentlemen in attendance as well, whom Pringle hadn’t recognized. Pringle dropped his voice. And one lady. Yes, a woman had attended. She arrived at the last minute in a shiny black coach drawn by a team of matched blacks. Travel stained, mind you; she had come from afar. Her gown was magnificent—sewn all over with jet beads—and she wore a matching veil that shielded her face and hair entirely. She didn’t stay to see the coffin put into the vault; they all heard her coach pull away soon after the end of the sermon.

Eamon came up while Pringle was talking. “Move along, man,” he said, and shoved his way in. Mr. Pringle stood aside, and took Eamon’s disreputable hat and threadbare coat with obvious distaste. The poor butler was an admirer of fine tailoring, and Grandfather had been, among many other things, a dandy. Pringle felt the loss acutely. “Will that be all, my lord?”

“Brandy in my study,” Eamon said, and set off for that room.

“Cousin?” Julia walked after him. “Will you tell me about the funeral?”

Eamon turned and fixed her with his fishy eye. “A dead man lay at the front of the church, and some forty living men muttered over his corpse. Then he was bundled into a hole beneath the floor.”

Julia stared and he stared back, his nostrils wide and trembling. Was that rage he was suppressing? Or laughter?

In any case he was clearly finished speaking to her. Julia sank into an absurdly deep curtsy. “Thank you, cousin. That was illuminating.”

He inclined his head. “I am always pleased to enlighten you, Julia.”

She watched as he strutted into the study and slammed the door shut behind him. Grandfather had died three days ago. This was the longest conversation she had yet had with the new earl.

* * *

Julia knew that life in Castle Dar would be unbearable after Grandfather died and Eamon acceded to the title. And it was—but differently than she had imagined. Before Grandfather’s death, when Eamon had visited from time to time, he had always taken a cruel delight in teasing her, pestering her relentlessly until she lost her temper. Now that he was living here, he barely spoke to her. Not only that, but he had shut her off from the outside world. Her days were silent, enclosed, stifling.

After breakfast that first morning following Grandfather’s death, Eamon had given orders to the servants that no one was to be admitted to the house until further notice. When Julia protested that the neighborhood would be coming by to offer their condolences, Eamon turned his pale eyes on her. “Pray do not speak unless spoken to, Julia,” he had said. Then he had talked over her head to Pringle. “Castle Dar is not accepting visitors. I will not receive them, and neither will Miss Percy. See that it is so.” He stood, brushed the crumbs from his jacket, and disappeared into the study.

This became the pattern of his days. A morning spent eating breakfast with—but not talking to—Julia, then a long day in the study, then a dinner as silent as breakfast had been. Mrs. Cooper, the housekeeper, told Julia that Eamon spent hour after hour going through every drawer, every paper, every book in the study, sometimes cursing out loud. When he emerged each evening his mood was worse than it had been the night before.

The silent meals were excruciating. And not silent enough. Julia could hear each noise Eamon made, clinking his silverware against the china, chewing, swallowing. As the days went by she grew attuned to more sounds. His sleeves shushing against his jacket as he reached for the salt. His stubble—he was a man who shaved only once a week—scratching against his badly tied cravat. The night after the funeral he managed to extract a truly swampy squelch from the blancmange as he dug his spoon into it. Julia had to stifle the urge to scream. For the two nights following, she claimed a headache and kept to her room.

Dinners with Grandfather had always been wonderfully loud. He had talked with his mouth full, exhorting her to argue with him about everything and nothing. He had waved his food around as he talked, and once he even inadvertently launched a duck leg down the table. It was Julia’s moment of greatest triumph. She reached up and caught the drumstick midflight, then she ate it with ladylike dignity. The servants cheered, and Grandfather leapt to his feet and made her a toast right then and there.

Well, those days were over, and Julia would have to learn to be deaf to Eamon’s vile table manners. But she suspected that his campaign of slobbering silence had some purpose. It wasn’t that she didn’t interest him. She interested him enormously. She could sense him watching her, and when she glanced up his eyes were always just sliding away from her. She felt sure that all of his energies were directed toward her, even as he affected boredom. When, after her two-night desertion of the dinner table, she received word through Mrs. Cooper that she was not to miss dinner ever again, she was certain.

Eamon was trying to drive her mad.

* * *

Finally, a full week after Grandfather’s death, Eamon looked up from his breakfast and spoke. “Julia.”

She froze, her cup half lifted to her lips. “Yes, Cousin?”

“When you have finished eating you will attend me in my study.”

“Very well.”

He stood, sketched her a mocking bow, then stalked past her and out of the room.

Julia set her teacup down, her hand shaking so badly that the cup clattered in the saucer.

“Miss?”

Julia looked up. It was Rob, the footman. “Yes?”

He came forward quickly. “Miss, I know it is not my place to speak to you, but I wish you to know—we all wish you to know—that we are in your corner, should you need us.”

Julia twisted her napkin in her lap. “Thank you. I am sure all will be well.”

“I don’t like him,” Rob said. “Neither does anyone else below stairs.”

“Change is difficult, I know, Rob.”

“It’s more than that, miss. He’s searching for something, and he isn’t finding it. Last night I heard him as he was going to bed, and he was muttering your name, over and over again. It gave me a chill, and I said to myself, ‘There’s no harm that will come to Miss Percy while I’m here,’ and I said so to everyone at our morning gathering, and Mr. Pringle and Mrs. Cooper agreed with me. We consider you our mistress, miss, despite him being the man who holds the purse strings. We want you to know that.”

Julia had known Rob for years, and liked him, but she had never really thought about who he might be, besides a perfectly amenable footman. Now she saw that he was the earnest sort, the kind of man whose heart shone out of his eyes. “Thank you, Rob,” she said. “I’m sure there will be no need for you to act on your feelings, and you really must keep them to yourselves. Eamon—Lord Percy—is not someone to cross.”

Rob was short and very thin, but he straightened his shoulders and managed to convey a sense of strength. “I know that, miss, and you may be sure we will all be as subtle as snakes, but I thought you should know how we feel. When the time comes that you need our help, you need do nothing more than ask.”

“Thank you, Rob.”

“It is my pleasure, miss.” He bowed. “May I serve you some more coffee?”

“No, thank you. I shall go and beard the lion in his den now.”

“That’s the way, miss.”

Julia stood and smoothed her skirts. She wasn’t sure whether to be comforted by Rob’s promise of support or troubled that the servants had noticed that Eamon’s behavior was strange. Now she couldn’t pretend that everything was as it should be, that Eamon was simply taking his place as earl and they must all adapt. If the servants were disturbed, well then, things were disturbing.

* * *

Eamon was writing. He motioned her to a straight-backed chair placed squarely before Grandfather’s desk. The desk was still cluttered with Grandfather’s favorite objects—stones, bits of sculpture, pots of various colored inks—and a few books remained splayed open to the place where Grandfather had stopped reading them when he took to his bed, his big, bold handwriting in the margins still black and fresh. Julia could read one word upside down, scrawled half across the print of a book of sermons: “Hogwash!” She allowed her lips to quirk upward: Grandfather had raged against the inanities of the world until the very end.

The parasite who now sat in Grandfather’s chair could not have been more different from that fiery old man. Eamon was big and bald like Grandfather, but he was tight. He even held his quill tightly, and his handwriting was choppy. He kept writing, line after line, making her wait. She sat and listened to the scratch of his quill. It needed trimming, and had it been Grandfather sitting there writing, she would have simply taken it from him, wiped it clean, and trimmed it. Grandfather would have snapped his fingers as she worked, trying to hurry her along, even as he talked to her about what he was reading, what he was writing. Now Julia rejoiced in the quill’s irritating noise and in the way it split the line of ink, making Eamon’s ugly writing even uglier.