The River of No Return

by Bee Ridgway

  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.

  Finally Eamon laid the quill down, sprinkled sand over his page, dusted it off, and set it aside. Only then did he look up at her. She met his eyes for a fraction of a second. “You must pretend,” Grandfather had said. Julia dropped her gaze.

  “Julia, Julia, Julia.” Eamon steepled his fingers and leaned forward, propping his pointy elbows on the desktop. “How old are you now?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “Twenty-two, twenty-two. And not yet married.”

  Disgust traced its way up her spine, like a cold finger. She would not answer a question that was no question at all.

  “No offers?” Eamon’s voice was unctuous.

  Julia snapped her eyes at him for a moment.

  “You haven’t lost that temper, I see. You try to hide it, but . . .” He paused, and she saw the long white fingers descend to the desktop in fists. “Look at me, Julia.”

  She fought to keep her expression bland.

  “You try to hide it, but I see everything. Do you understand? I see everything. You can have no secrets from me.”

  “I have no secrets.” Julia heard the quaver in her voice and hated herself for it.

  Eamon leaned back in his chair. “Have you never been in love, Julia? At your advanced age?”

  Julia said nothing. There was nothing to say.

  “Oh, come now, Julia. Surely you know if you have been in love. Such a dusty, dried-up old maid you are becoming. Surely you must have longed to go to London to catch a handsome, rich husband. Surely you begged and pleaded.” He raised his voice into a sickly falsetto. “‘Please, Grandpapa. Please let me go.’”

  Julia had to fight to keep her temper even. Eamon was so much nastier and more repellant than she remembered. Over the years she had met him five or six times. He would turn up at Castle Dar belligerent and in need of money. He would stay a night or two, and Julia remembered his needling her, teasing . . . she would get angrier and angrier until she was about to burst, and she would stare at Eamon until she seemed to see him at the end of a long dark tunnel, fixed in her gaze like an insect on a pin.

  Always at that moment, just when she had Eamon in her sights, Grandfather would say her name, catch her angry glance, and wink. Then Grandfather would stop time. Eamon would be caught, frozen, and Grandfather would walk over to him and make him stand in ludicrous positions or stick a twist of paper up his nose. Julia and Grandfather would laugh at him, and then Grandfather would put everything to rights and make time speed up again. Eamon would awaken, entirely unaware that any time had passed.

  Now Grandfather was dead and couldn’t use his time tricks to control Eamon anymore. Grandfather was dead, and Eamon had inherited his wealth, his land, and his title.

  “Speechless, kitten? Do not think I’ll take you to London to find you a husband, because I will not. Your grandfather ruined you for marriage, anyway. You, Julia, are abrupt and rude. Half unpolished girl, half uncouth boy. Already twenty-two years old, with only a thousand a year upon marriage or when you turn twenty-five.” Eamon shook his head. “It’s a pity. You ain’t a very good prospect, Cousin. You will have to stay and be a comfort to me in my bachelorhood. And when I find a wife, I’m sure she won’t mind having a spinster cousin to help her tend the babes.”

  Julia was losing the battle to stay calm. When she was twenty-five she would be free . . . but that was three years away. Grandfather should have thought about this. But he had considered himself invincible, a lion. “Time for that tomorrow!” She could almost hear him say it. He was a dead lion now. A tear coursed down her cheek, and she dashed it away angrily with her fist. She took a deep breath and tried to steady her nerves, but her hands were shaking in her lap.

  “Fascinating,” Eamon said. “Are you crying because you don’t want to give up your place in the household to another woman? Or because Grandpapa didn’t give you more money? Neither reason is very flattering, kitten. You are either selfish or greedy or both.”

  Julia grew cold and then fiery hot. “You disgust me. If Grandfather were here he would—he would—”

  Eamon raised his eyebrows in mock surprise. “You stammer when you are angry. It is almost charming.” Eamon got up from the desk and stalked past her until he stood behind her chair. “But I am interested in that hopeless threat you were about to make. If Grandfather were here he would what?”

  Julia could smell Eamon’s acrid eagerness. Her stomach clenched.

  “What would Grandfather do, Julia?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you do know, don’t you?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “It had to do with time, didn’t it?”

  Julia’s breath caught in her throat. He knew! “I don’t know,” she said again.

  “Yes, you do, kitten.” Eamon’s voice surrounded her. “Let me save you the trouble of telling me. The old rogue could pervert the flow of time. He could make it stop. He could do whatever he wanted then. He could quietly rearrange some accounts or some records or some wills to suit himself. Isn’t that so?”

  Julia stared straight ahead, her heart pounding. He knew. It was impossible, but yet he knew.

  Eamon’s breath tickled her hair; he must be bending over her like a vulture. “Your grandfather could play with time like a child plays with mud, isn’t that right? He was a dirty thief.”

  Julia raised her voice before she could sto
p herself: “Grandfather was not a thief! He only did it when—”

  “Aha!” Eamon gripped Julia’s shoulders, pinning her to the chair and pulling the chair up hard against his legs. The breath left her body, and fear stilled her blood. He bent down to breathe in her ear. “He only did it when what?”

  Julia held perfectly still for a moment, then burst into frenzied struggle. Eamon held her firmly, pulling her shoulders cruelly back. She kicked and twisted, and his bruising grip on her shoulders released. The chair fell back, and Julia leapt to her feet, whirling to face him. “Do you really want to know, Eamon? Because I will relish the telling of it. He did it when you visited; I saw him do it. He froze you. You couldn’t move, and he tied a housemaid’s apron around your middle. We laughed at you. We laughed in your horrible gaping fish face! We laughed at you for ten minutes at a stretch before he started time up again. Oh!” She pressed her hands to her mouth.

  Eamon’s jaw clenched and unclenched. His face changed color, from white to red to white again. Then, with visible effort, he smiled. “So it is true.” He dusted his hands together, then gestured for her to sit again. “Please,” he said. “Please be seated. I am sorry if I scared you. But you see, my tactics take me far in a short span of time. And time is what we are discussing, yes?”

  Julia’s heart was pounding. He had tricked her, playing on her temper, which had always been her weakness. She forced herself to calm down. “I will discuss nothing with you.”

  “Sit down, Julia. We have begun our discussion and you cannot choose to stop now.”

  “I have nothing to say.”

  “Sit down.” There was an edge to his voice, and she saw his white hands clench.

  “I prefer to stand.”

  “As you wish. But I shall sit.” Eamon made a show of walking back around his desk and arranging himself in his chair, enjoying every second of his rudeness in sitting while she remained on her feet. Now Julia stood before him as a servant stands before her master, and she felt the insult in her bones. But if Eamon expected to cow her this way . . . She straightened her back.

  “Now,” Eamon said, examining his fingernails. “To our discussion. I have named your grandfather’s little hobby, and you have agreed that he had what you might call a ‘gift,’ yes?” He looked up at her.

  Julia said nothing.

  “I take your silence for assent. He had a gift, and that gift was nothing more nor less than the ability to manipulate time; to wit, he could stop it for considerable periods, and while it was stopped, he could move about, doing what he wished with aprons and the like, was that not so?”

  Julia cursed herself. It had taken Eamon one week of silence and a few insults to break her. He had known it already, but still. She had admitted knowledge of Grandfather’s secret. The deepest, darkest secret in the world. Julia’s earliest memories were of her grandfather drilling her with the necessity to keep quiet about what he could do. On his deathbed Grandfather had told her to pretend. Instead she had given in to her temper and blabbed like a magpie.

  Eamon picked up the carved marble head of Mercury that Grandfather had used as a paperweight. “Your grandfather knew how to stop time. A remarkable gift indeed. You and I may disagree on how he used it; you say he larked about humiliating his relatives, and I say he was a thief. He wanted to steal my inheritance from me, and he tried to use time itself to do it.”

  “He was not a thief, and you are a blackguard.”

  Eamon looked up, hefting the marble head. “Careful, kitten. Claws.” He passed the head from hand to hand. “He wasn’t a thief, you say. Then why did he spend years trying to disinherit me? Me, his last living male relative?”

  “Perhaps because he was a good man and you are an excrescence!”

  Eamon slammed the two-thousand-year-old marble head down on the table, and its blank eyes glared accusingly at Julia. “Your grandfather a good man? You clearly know nothing of men. He never once brought you to London, my dear. You should have seen him there. No respect for his own rank. Always to be seen in the most disreputable parts of town with his gang of foreign friends. Thieves and drunkards and revolutionaries. And his mistress. Opening her house and her legs to any passing riffraff. Your precious grandfather threw his money away on her, and on his ridiculous coterie. Meanwhile I, his own flesh and blood, was left to suffer in penury.”

  “I hear nothing in that to diminish him in my eyes,” Julia said.

  “You don’t? Then why did you blush when I spoke of his mistress?”

  “If my face is flushed, Cousin, it is because I am angry.”

  Eamon leaned over the desk. “Are you so hardened that talk of mistresses—of the women with whom men lie for pleasure alone—falls on your ears as easily as talk of the weather? I wonder why that is? Perhaps you are already fallen, kitten. Tell me, was it that little footman who ran off with the prize? Or old Pringle?”

  Julia was not to be tricked twice in the same way. She sneered down her nose, her temper perfectly in control. “If it amuses you to ride roughshod over my reputation, think again before dragging the servants into it. They are hardworking, honorable men.”

  Eamon’s fishy eyes glimmered, and he leaned back. “Ah, self-righteousness. The spinster’s weapon. How well you wield it already, kitten.”

  Julia went cold all over. Spinsters’ weapons were no weapons at all. She was defenseless. She and Grandfather had been living in a fools’ paradise. Julia could see that now. Grandfather thought they could always go on just the same, a little girl and her hearty grandfather, with no more need to think about tomorrow than a pair of pigeons. Teaching her to be a lady, finding her a husband . . . those were problems he had always put off. His life had been an endless stream of todays, until suddenly it was over.

  “Poor little kitten.” Eamon’s voice sounded almost tender. “You were a pretty child, you know. Who ever would have thought you’d end up a spinster?” He put his hands behind his head and leaned the chair back onto its hind legs. “Nothing to play with but bits of old rock. Do you know I never once saw you with a doll?” He bumped the chair back down and picked up a rock from the desk. It had been the greatest prize in Grandfather’s collection. On one flat surface was the skeleton of a small bird, as if in flight, the faint impress of its wing feathers still to be seen. Grandfather had taken a magnifying glass and shown her the incredible detail in the impression, how each feather was composed of smaller feathers—and yet the beautiful, delicate things were gone, leaving only their perfect trace in the hard rock. Eamon held the stone up and looked from it to Julia and back again. “You had a queer childhood, Julia, and it’s made you into a strange woman. Unmarketable. But I am glad of it, for if you were married and gone, I would not be able to learn from you. I must know everything about your grandfather’s talent, and you will be the one to tell me.”

  “I know nothing more.”

  Eamon smirked and set the stone down. “It is ironic, these noble efforts you are making to protect him. Do you know how I first discovered that your grandfather could stop time, Julia? It was you. You were the one who revealed his secret.”

  “I never would have!”

  “Yet you did. When you were four years old. You were a stormy little thing, all curls and eyes. You ran everywhere, at top speed, and your nurse could hardly keep up with you. One day I was driving my team up the lane behind the stables, the narrow one with tall hedges on either side. I rounded a corner, and there you were in the lane, all alone, turning in a circle with your head up, playing at making yourself dizzy. I thought it would be good sport to drive you before my team. I drove the horses right up to you and you started to run. Your skirts caught up in your little fists, running for your life.” Eamon chuckled. “Oh, it amuses me even now.”

  Julia searched her memory but found nothing. How could she forget being driven before a team of horses? Perhaps it was simply too awful to remember. But it must have been the origin of her lifelong hatred of Eamon. Now, watching him laugh, she realized w
ith calm certitude that he was more than simply cruel and selfish; he was a madman, and must have been back then, to be so vicious to a four-year-old child.

  Eamon sobered. “Then, suddenly, in an instant, everything was different. You turned your head as you ran. You caught my eye, and a split second later I was on the ground in the lane, some distance back, along the way that I had come. Your grandfather was standing over me with my whip in his hand. I’m telling you, one minute I was driving along having a bit of fun, and the very next second I was on the ground being whipped by your grandfather like some dog.” He pushed his cuff back and held out his wrist, white as a bone and sprinkled with black hairs. It was laced across with an ugly, ropy scar. “I bear this scar to show for that day, and he would have cut my face if I hadn’t buried it in the dust. He branded me, like a damned convict. And you, you stood beside him, and when it was all over you said, clear as a bell, ‘You be good, Cousin Eamon, or Grandfather will freeze you in time again.’ The old man tried to hush you but it was too late. The secret was out, and I could see in his face, even as I groveled there in the dust, that you had spoken an incredible truth.”

  Julia closed her eyes. It was her fault. No wonder Grandfather had drilled her in secrecy after that. She sighed and opened her eyes again. “Be that as it may, Cousin, Grandfather is dead now. His talent died with him.”

  Eamon traced his finger along the edge of the desk. “Ah, but did it?”

  “Of course it did.”

  Eamon traced his finger back. “I’m not so sure, kitten. After that interesting afternoon I demanded that he tell me how he stopped time. He must have felt shame at his treatment of me, I think, for he revealed it was a power he gained from an instrument of some kind. He called it a talisman.” Eamon spoke dreamily, watching his finger as it stroked the desk. He looked up at Julia. “What is the talisman, Julia?”