by Bee Ridgway
Nick peered up to see if there was a moon now, and indeed, there she was, visible in spite of the bright glow of the city. She showed only the curve of her full cheek to the wintery world. Nick liked the moon best this way—flirtatious. “‘Had we but world enough, and time,’” he said to her, “‘this coyness, Lady, were no crime.’” Quoting poetry to heavenly bodies had once been a fashionable thing for a man to do. Now it was ridiculous . . . but now didn’t really mean anything to Nick anymore. He was locked away in this mansion, like an heirloom. Essentially useless in the present, but strangely valuable to the past and future.
It was only when he pulled back into the bedroom and was shutting the window that the rest of the poem stung him like a wasp. He whispered, his breath clouding the glass: “‘Time’s wingèd chariot . . . deserts of vast eternity . . .’” Then he spoke, loudly: “‘Let us roll all our strength and all our sweetness up into one ball, and tear our pleasures with rough strife through the iron gates of life: thus, though we cannot make our sun stand still, yet we will make him run!’”
Nick stared at the white screen his breath had made. He put his hand on the lean flesh below his ribs; his skin was cold, for the window was still half open, but he could feel the heat beneath. His liver. Once upon a time he had believed that his liver was the origin of his courage and hope and love. All three spreading through him, warm and wet, in his blood. He almost believed it even tonight, as the brave heat in the core of him fought against the freezing night air.
Strength and sweetness. The iron gates of life.
Nick slammed the window shut and turned to grab at his clothes, flung across a chair. Fuck the rules, fuck this inertia. He couldn’t not go down into his city, he couldn’t not see what time had done to it.
Walking out the front door of the mansion set off a braying alarm, but let them send the time police after him. He wagered he could lose them for a few hours, anyway. He trotted down the steps as he had two hundred years ago and headed through the bleak predawn for Pall Mall. He was going, of course, to the river. Pall Mall to Cockspur Street, then down Hungerford Street to the Hungerford Stairs. A matter of a few minutes’ walk.
But first, as he emerged out of the square and onto Pall Mall, he had to confront the fact that Carlton House, the Prince’s palace and the glittering hub of the social universe, was gone. He stared at the white buildings that stood on the old palace’s gardens. They gleamed in the phosphorous glow of the streetlamps like the grin of a skull. This avenue of mausoleums wasn’t living, breathing London anymore. The city had to be alive and changing and vital somewhere else. Nick glanced up at the moon, then thrust his hands into his pockets and turned left. Find the river, find the city.
He walked quickly through the too-grand grandeur, around the engorged curve of Cockspur Street . . . and there weren’t the Royal Mews. Lions, fountains, the towering column—so this was Trafalgar Square. And that grand building, presiding over the square—wasn’t that Carlton House’s portico stuck on its front? That building was sporting Carlton House’s façade like a tattered columbine mask! Nick laughed out loud. And St. Martin’s, which used to thrust its steeple up out of the melee of stables like a drowning arm, now stood exposed, a pretty toy church. In fact, Nick thought, it all looked as if an enormous child had dropped building blocks and stuffed lions and toy buses here.
Walking quickly, he navigated the deserted roundabout at the bottom of the square. A single cab blazoned with an ad for The Book of Mormon spun past him, beeped a question, then whizzed away into the night. Hungerford Street . . . it should be here.
It wasn’t. Hungerford Street no longer existed, far less its noisome stairs down to the river, which had cut between rotting houses swarming with rats. There had been a blacking factory there at the bottom. Well. No more.
Nick set off down Whitehall, assuming he could find the Whitehall Stairs if they still existed, or get down to the water at Westminster Bridge. His steps slowed as he approached the Horse Guards, where he had been transformed into a fighting man. It looked the same. The single guard standing at stiff attention outside the gates was the only other living person in this street studded with monuments. Nick repressed a mad desire to stop and tell the young man his story. But he only nodded as he passed and kept on walking, all the way down to the new Houses of Parliament, which looked, he thought, like the radiators in his SoHo loft. He turned left and headed across the bridge, reasoning that he could find his way down to the river on the other side.
Eventually, past the enormous wheel and the concrete theater complex, he found a broad staircase that led him down to where he wanted to be, among the pipe stems and twisted net, the bits of rope and the shattered bricks that made up the river’s rough bed. Nick took a deep, happy breath as his feet found their level in the debris. He stood by the Thames for a long time, watching its waters glide at their own sweet will through the mighty heart of London.
It was maybe a half hour or more later when he finally came out of his reverie to find the sun well risen. He bent, stiff with cold, to pick up the perfect bowl of a pipe that his foot had uncovered. As his fingers closed around the smooth clay form, the hair lifted at the back of his neck. He was being watched.
Nick took his time. He straightened up with the pipe in hand—it was more intact than he had at first seen; only the end of the stem was broken off. He turned it over in his fingers, this little relic of his own era, then let it fall. He turned and scanned the embankment with a casual air. Men and women were beginning to hurry by on their way to work. A few people were leaning against the railing, looking across the river at the city. Was one of them the Guild’s spy? He passed his eyes across two young Asian tourists, the woman looking out toward St. Paul’s, the man with his iPhone lifted. A jogger taking a rest and swigging from a red bottle. A trio of teenagers in school uniform, smoking cigarettes.
Then he saw him. Not on the embankment, but standing halfway down the steps to the river. The thick brown hair was the same, and the big, meaty body. This time the suit was an absurd three-piece concoction of pale green tweed. The trousers were plus fours, of all the unbelievable things. Mustard-colored socks, brown brogues . . . and big, mirrored aviator glasses.
Mr. Mibbs.
How he thought he could blend in, Nick didn’t know. Or perhaps he wasn’t trying to, for when Nick caught sight of him he made no motion to pretend he wasn’t staring. Nick almost raised a hand and waved, but that blank, mirrored stare reminded him of how he had felt the first time he had seen the man, all those years ago in Chile. And the way that Leo had warned him away when Nick started to approach. And what Leo had said about Mibbs and stolen babies later on.
Nick turned back to the river. So Leo was right. Mibbs was some kind of Guild official. Probably police, or a spy, though you could hardly describe him as “plainclothes.” His taste was atrocious.
Well, let him follow. Nick had no intention of going back to St. James’s Square any time soon. He was playing truant today, and Mibbs was welcome to watch.
* * *
That night Julia exulted in her ability. Locked in her bedchamber long after the household was asleep, she lit five candles around her room so that she could measure the strength of her ability to freeze time. She stood on the bed, holding another candle. For a moment she watched their flames tremble. Then she willed them to stop.
And stop they did.
Excitement bubbled up in her and spilled over, like boiling milk. She gave in to joy, dancing on her bed in the midst of the stalled moment, twirling with her candle held high, its flame still as a painting, her loose hair spinning around her face and shoulders.
“‘I drink the air before me!’”
She pointed her finger dramatically and started time again in a wave, beginning with the candle by the door and bringing each flame back to life one by one.
A moment later she lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling, time moving sedately about her. Her soul was rigid with fear. This was rough magic.
* * *
At first it was mildly amusing, leading Mibbs around the city. The man was nothing if not persistent, plodding along a block behind as Nick wandered through the streets, getting reacquainted with London. Nick would catch sight of him now and then in a shop window, his hands always flat at his sides, his mirrored glasses glinting in the sun. Then Nick would forget about him for ten or fifteen minutes at a time. After all, he was in London and there was so much more to pay attention to than one badly dressed Guild thug.
But Nick quickly realized that London wasn’t his city anymore. Many Georgian houses remained and many were missing, knocked out like teeth by bombs or Victorians. Those that did remain weren’t being used as houses; nobody seemed to live in the center of town, though the place was teeming with humanity. Nick cut up through Seven Dials and knew for certain: This new city had long forgotten Nicholas Falcott, Marquess of Blackdown, and Nick Davenant was a tourist here, among thousands of other tourists. He stepped into a thronged coffee shop and elbowed his way toward an organic sausage roll and something called a “flat white.” He paid with his Amtrak Guest Rewards card, and wondered, as the espresso machine shrieked, if he would ever board the Vermonter at Penn Station and rattle over the river and through the woods to his little house again.
After breakfast he stopped counting the things that weren’t there, stopped even noticing what remained. He allowed himself to be entirely in the twenty-first-century present, appreciating London for what it now was, not what it had once been. Sometimes a proud blue plaque informed him of where an important person of his generation had lived, but the news of their sober achievements didn’t tend to match up with Nick’s personal library of information. Nick smiled to himself, reading that William Lamb, that cuckold and spanker of chambermaids, had apparently gone on to become prime minister in 1834. For a giddy moment Nick imagined himself texting Lamb across the ages: “omg! u r pm!” And receiving one back: “1834 rocks!”
He wandered northward, pleased with himself and with the world. The London of his time had petered out just about here, into open fields and pretty villages. How delightful to have missed the decades across which the countryside was desecrated by adipose Victorian sprawl. Now all that smug, ruddy architecture was venerably antique and crumbling. Nick thought with wicked pleasure of the two or three British generations that had followed his own, and for whom he had developed an antipathy since jumping to the future. They were all pushing up daisies in Highgate Cemetery now. Nick straightened his cuffs and lengthened his stride. He was in the mood for a long walk; maybe he’d go and visit them. Then have a pint in a pub somewhere, and totter home to Alice and Arkady in time for tea. He began to sing under his breath: “‘Here I am one and still will be, who spends his days in pleasure! My tailor’s bill is seldom filled; he’s never took my measure!’”
But when he reached Euston Road, he hit a wall.
It was a wall of fear, and it strangled Nick’s little song in his throat. He could look across the streaming traffic to the pagoda roofs of the British Library easily enough. But his heart was slamming against his ribs, and panic seized his limbs. He gasped for air and stumbled backward. As he did so, the fear dissipated, like mist.
He looked over his shoulder and there was Mibbs, a few yards back, standing in the middle of the sidewalk. He looked as gormless as a Belisha beacon.
But he didn’t have his glasses on.
Nick twisted abruptly to face Euston again. He breathed in and out, forcing himself to a sort of electrified calm. As the light changed, he stepped forward.
And was slammed with terror, exactly like before.
Staggering back, he watched as a few pedestrians crossed over to the library, leaving him behind. They looked happy enough, with their computer bags slung over their arms. Academics, off to spend the day nose-deep in books about the past.
It was Mibbs, of course, holding him back with those terrible eyes. Nick wasn’t leading him a merry chase through London. This wasn’t A Hard Day’s Night. Mibbs was the master here. Nick simply hadn’t realized that he was the one on a leash.
He rubbed the back of his neck and glanced casually over his shoulder. No glasses. Right. Nick turned smartly, following Euston Road instead of crossing it. He kept his gait the same, looked around him with the same interest as before, but every sense was focused now on the man behind him.
So. The Guild could control him through thought manipulation. Leo had described it all those years ago in Chile. Nick felt as if the back of his head had been taken off and a probe stuck into his gray matter.
Nick tested his theory of the invisible cage by trying to cross Euston Road again at the next light. St. Pancras Station was right there, like a gothic House Beautiful. If Nick could only get to it, he might climb on a train to France. Run away. He nursed that feeling, feeding it images of good wine and cheese, beautiful French women . . . and tried to propel himself into the street when the light changed. But no. A chasm seemed to yawn over the edge of the sidewalk. So he stepped away, smiling lightly in Mibbs’s direction. The man might be able to control Nick’s movements, but he wouldn’t get the satisfaction of seeing him sweat.
Nick let the crowds surge past him and across the street, then turned back south, down Judd Street, watching out of the corner of his eye as Mibbs put his shades back on and stepped after him.
Interesting. Glasses back on. So was Mibbs’s naked gaze driving him somewhere in particular or only keeping him within the fucking Congestion Charge Zone?
At the end of Hunter Street he stood still for a moment, waiting to see if Mibbs was going to direct him again. But he felt nothing. All right; he was clearly free to roam, within certain boundaries. Arkady and Alice were probably waiting in St. James’s Square and Mibbs was their equivalent of an electric fence, making sure Nick didn’t go far. That was humiliating, to be sure, but it wasn’t life-threatening. Nick’s battle-readiness faded, and he turned and held up his hands to show that he surrendered. Mibbs was eight feet away. Nick could see himself in those mirrored shades, small and belligerent. He wheeled around again.
Which way? He was facing Guilford Street . . . Guilford Street . . . he searched his memory.
Guilford Street! The Foundling Hospital. It should be right there.
But when he looked to the left he could see that the great curving walls that used to enclose the grounds were gone. Nick crossed the street, staring. Not only the walls, but the imposing dormitories themselves, and the grand central hall that had joined them—all gone. Nick walked slowly along the iron fence that now enclosed a large park until he reached the entrance. Here was the marble centerpiece to the grand double gateway that had once stood here. One lonely little relic of the single most imposing monument erected by eighteenth-century benevolence.
The Foundling Hospital had been a favorite charity of his mother’s, and Nick well remembered being seven or eight years old and going on visitor’s day in the grand Blackdown carriage, his mother glorious in her enormous wig, to look at the children all scrubbed and regimented for presentation. At the end of their visit, they had seen a few women bringing infants to this gateway. Back then the marble had been decorated with a compass rose, and a man stood before it, receiving the little ones. The mothers had to put their hand into a bag and draw out a colored ball. Two women drew out black balls; they had to take their babies away. The third drew out a white ball, and the man reached out and took the little baby from her with a tenderness that fascinated Nick. The mother left a jet button with her newborn, as identification in case she ever had the means to come back and claim him.
Nicholas’s mother stepped forward after the woman turned away and asked the man at the gate if the baby had a name. He explained that all babies were named anew upon being accepted, and Nick’s mother said that the child must be named Nicholas, “for my son, who will be a marquess one day.” She tugged Nick forward: “Come and see your namesake.” The baby’s white-blond hair stood up all around his head
in a frothy cloud, exactly like Nick’s mother’s wig. Nick laughed when he saw it. His mother asked why he laughed, and when he told her, she laughed, too. Then they watched as the man entered the new name in a big book: Nicholas Marquess—black button.
Now Nick stood again on the spot where Nicholas Marquess had lost his mother and gained his name, and where Nicholas Falcott had laughed with his mother, the only time he could remember sharing a joke with her. A heartless joke—and yet they had felt so good about themselves, going to see the foundlings. He read the sign adorning the simple iron gate that now opened into the park: CORAM’S FIELDS: NO ADULTS UNLESS ACCOMPANIED BY A CHILD.
Nick put his hand to the gate, wanting to feel the cold of it against his fingers. He peered in at the empty football pitches, the bare trees. Blinking, he realized that tears were in his eyes. Then he felt a pressure on his arm and his feelings lost their footing: He hung over an abyss of fathomless despair, and he felt it sucking him downward . . . he cried out as every joy was lifted from him as gently and as easily . . .
Nick clung now to the iron gates with both hands, his vision narrowing, darkening, a terrible vertigo rushing in his ears. From far away somewhere, chattering, like the sound of children’s voices, a fading echo of pleasure . . . if he could just tear through these iron bars, just him . . .
With a last effort he summoned up those calm dark eyes . . . calm dark eyes . . . and he forced his own vision to focus. There, just beside him, Mibbs’s face. Mibbs’s breath on his face. Mibbs’s hand on his arm. Mibbs was holding him poised above the pit, as easily as he might hold a spider over a flame, and his eyes burned toward Nick. In a moment the fire would singe the thread, burn it asunder. . . .
And then Nick was gasping and cursing before he even registered that someone had tossed cold water in his face. He twisted, breaking Mibbs’s hold: “Shit!” He blinked water away from his eyes. “What was that?” He meant the crushing grief. He meant Mibbs’s touch.