by Bee Ridgway
“If it’s impossible to change the river, if we can’t turn back time or change history, why send me back to 1815?”
“Ah!” Alice tapped her finger against the end of her nose. “Clever question! But you see, the history of humankind and the history of the Guild—those are two different histories. They are intimately connected, for the Guild has a single purpose, Nick. A single purpose that drives all of our choices, including our decision to keep our members ignorant of their talents. That purpose is the protection of the grand human story. The protection of the past. We know that one person going back cannot change much. But thousands? We do not know, but we are fairly certain: It would mean chaos. Devastation. That is what we fear. That is why we guard the river, and make sure its flow is true and deep and unchanging.”
Alice’s hand was on Arkady’s knee, and his arm was around her shoulder. This couple had jumped, like Nick. Been wrenched from their natural time, torn away from everyone they had ever known. But here they were today, sailing through the streets of London in the wake of the Spirit of Ecstasy on the hood of their Rolls-Royce, and they seemed very much at home in their roles as Mr. and Mrs. Alderwoman. Comfortable, in love, in power. Perhaps they had forgotten the loneliness.
“We all just want to go home again,” Nick said.
Alice chuckled. “Do you think that’s what people want? Do you think that all those Guild members, knowing it is possible to travel through time, would simply settle down back home in the Dark Ages and raise their turnips again, waiting for the plague to get them?”
Nick looked down at his hands, which rested on his thighs. Clean, square nails. The pale half-moons that rose above his cuticles. “I jumped from Salamanca,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “A hell of human invention. A hell I helped to make. I have sliced open the throats of boys who should have been home with their mamas. I have ridden my horse over the shattered corpses of men, men of my own army. I have climbed, hand over hand—” He stopped.
Badajoz. The ramparts, piled high with the dead. The days following . . . he looked up at Arkady and Alice, willing them to understand.
“Today,” he said, trying to keep his tone even, “I was dragged into a more hopeless, more devastating feeling than even the very worst that I experienced in Spain.” He looked blindly out the window for a full minute, then spoke without looking back at Arkady and Alice. “I’m not saying that I have experienced the worst there is. I know I have not. I know others have suffered far more than I. But today I was almost lost in a whirlpool of despair that was wider than my life span, deeper than my admittedly shallow soul. Much larger than the capacity of my heart to beat against it. So.” He turned back to face them. “I am not interested in your fine calibrations of empathy or your great mission to protect the river of history. I just want to live my own life, and I want to spend it having my own private fucked-up little emotions. I have a new home now, and I would like to return to it. Not through time, but across space. In an airplane. Preferably Virgin Atlantic.” He sneered at his own pretension. “Upper class.” He looked down and twisted the ring on his finger, watching it catch the light. “I refuse the Summons Direct.”
“You cannot refuse,” Alice said, gently. “You know that.”
“But I do refuse.”
“You cannot.”
“I will return the money. Somehow. I want out.”
“The money is a token, Nick. Come now. The Guild needs you.”
Nick shook his head. “I do not care about the Guild, Alice. I am to be dragged back to a time I have already grieved, to kill and perhaps die for the Guild, the same Guild that has kept me from my own God-given abilities? I won’t.”
“Why did you kill the French in Spain, Nick?” Alice’s voice became even more quiet. “‘Cry “God for Harry, England, and St. George”’? Is that it?”
“No.” Nick pointed a finger at the two of them together, safe in their blasted Rolls. “Damn you to hell for that.” He saw Arkady’s body tense, ready itself, and his own body shifted in response, his senses sharpening to encompass the man across the car. “I am not that man anymore,” he said, his voice husky. “Not that soldier. Everything changes.”
“Nothing changes,” she said. “Look at you, your fists are clenched. Look at my husband. He is coiled like a spring. You are who you are. The river flows to the sea.”
“I want out.”
“There is no out.”
The car purred to a halt and the chauffeur tapped on the window with his big sovereign ring. They had arrived at the gates.
* * *
Half an hour later they were tucked behind a snob screen in the Lamb, a pub at the top of Lamb’s Conduit Street that had been there in Nick’s time—though it looked different now, with its cubbyholed Victorian interior.
“It isn’t a scar,” Arkady said. His eyes were red. He had stood in front of the gates with his arms spread, looking like a saint, tears spilling down his cheeks. Alice had ignored the passersby who stared and allowed her husband his time. After a few minutes he had stepped away and then stood with Nick across the street in the shadow of the statue of the woman with the urn. They had watched as Alice padded back and forth in front of the gates like a bloodhound, nose twitching, as if she could smell the past.
“It’s something, though,” Alice countered.
“Yes,” Arkady said. “But there are too many feelings, and a lot of them reach outward to the future. Misery. Excitement. Longing. Crashing over one another.”
“I couldn’t tune in to the mystical vibrations,” Nick said. “But I was there once, in the late eighteenth century—”
“Hush!” Alice looked around, but the snob screen shielded her view. “For God’s sake, Nick.”
“Sorry.” He dropped his voice. “I was there with my mother when I was a kid. And if it helps, I know we were feeling smug.”
Alice smiled at Nick and sipped her half of bitter. “Smug, huh? I bet you were a cute little lordling.”
“If you say so.”
She pushed her beer away. “So it isn’t a scar. But what does that mean about today? Arkady, were you overwhelmed with despair when you stood there? Because I wasn’t, not at all.”
“No.” Arkady shrugged. “But all those babies. It made me weep.”
“Yes,” Alice said gently. “Yes, my tea cake.” She put her hand on his.
Nick put his pint to his lips and let the good, bitter beer wash down his throat. Arkady was really just a big baby himself, he thought, watching as Alice comforted him. “Why did you cry?”
“My tears were old tears. Tears I have cried before and will cry again.” Arkady freed his hand from Alice’s and steepled his fingers under his chin, his ruby ring glowing like an ember. “I do not believe that the emotions Nick felt at those gates today were the emotions of the Foundling Hospital,” he said to Alice. “I think they were the emotions of Mr. Mibbs himself.”
“Yes,” Nick said. “That makes sense. And he put fear into me earlier, at Euston Road. That wasn’t some deep historical fear I felt. Unless you can tell me that there was a hangman’s tree at the corner of Judd Street and Euston Road at some point.”
Alice glanced at him. “There might well have been. There is a scar at Marble Arch for that very reason.”
“Tyburn.”
“Yes.”
Arkady spread his hands. “But Nick said it earlier. The man controlled him with emotions, not thoughts. It is only by accident that this happened near the Foundling Hospital.”
“That’s an interesting possibility,” Alice said. “It could be a new development. A new way to use the river. They’ve discovered it, and they are testing it out on Guild members.”
“They?” Nick raised his eyebrows.
Alice and Arkady regarded him soberly for a moment. Then Alice took a deep breath and let it out through her nose. “The reason we need you, Nick . . . the reason we are taking you back to your natural time, is that a war is about to begin in that era. It will
be a war over the fate of the past, over history itself.”
And so here was the other shoe, dropping at last. He had been right all along. He was here to kill.
Alice continued. “I told you there were others. People who aren’t in the Guild. They don’t agree with the Guild’s principles. They think we should intervene in history. Try to change it. They are experimenting with the talent, working to learn more about it. Some of the things they have discovered recently in . . .” Alice glanced at Arkady. He nodded. She continued. “The things they have discovered in Brazil are alarming.”
Brazil! So Meg had heard Alice talking that day in the bathroom. She had been telling the truth. And Nick was, after all, an asshole who deserved to have his friends desert him. But Nick’s heart lifted. Maybe Meg and Leo were alive, in Brazil. Maybe they had made it.
Alice was looking at Arkady, and Nick followed her eyes. The Russian was staring into some grim distance that only he could see. “Arkady, my darling. Come back to us.”
The Russian focused again on the little table. Then he wiped his eyes with the back of a hand. “Yes, yes. Brazil. Beautiful Brazil.”
Alice spoke softly, stroking Arkady’s thick white hair. “I was about to tell Nick about the orphan.”
“The orphan! Bah.” Arkady spoke with loathing in his voice.
Alice turned back to Nick. “The orphan are a thorn in our side,” she said. “And they have been, oh, forever. But things are changing. We can’t just continue on, with little skirmishes here and there over nothing. The stakes have become too high. The orphan have found something. A new skill, or maybe even an object of some kind that enhances their power. Whatever it is, we must get it.”
“Wait. You’re going too fast. Who is this orphan? Sounds like Oliver Twist.”
Alice laughed. “Not orphan! Ofan.” She spelled the word. “The name is a contraction of a Hebrew word—Ophanim.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Have you heard of Ezekiel’s vision? Of the angels who transport the throne of God?”
“Ezekiel . . .” Nick cast his mind back.
“Ezekiel had a vision of strange angels. Each angel had four faces and many wings. They saw all, could travel in every direction, and they never slept.” Alice closed her dark eyes and quoted: “‘And when they went, I heard the noise of their wings, like the noise of great waters, as the voice of the Almighty, the voice of speech, as the noise of an host.’”
“Okay,” Nick said. “So these Ofan, these bad guys. They are deformed angel creatures?”
“Of course not. They are humans, like you and me. It’s only a name. It signifies that they are watching, that they can travel the river in whatever direction they like, that they have righteousness and truth on their side. Et cetera, et cetera. Of course we . . .” She smiled. “We think righteousness and truth are on our side.”
“And Mibbs is one of these Ofan?”
Alice glanced at Arkady. “What do you think?”
“Maybe,” the Russian said. “But . . .” He shrugged. “I don’t think so. It doesn’t seem right to me.”
“But he must be,” Alice said. “It’s really the only explanation. Maybe those things he could do with feelings—maybe that’s their new skill. What else would he be? A lone gun?”
Arkady drank deeply from his pint and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I don’t know. The Ofan, they are cowards. But this? This control of feelings? It does not describe what they are like. They are stupid, careless. Smashing what is good for no reason. Always they chase a fantasy. A fantasy that things can change. Idealists.” He scowled into his beer. “They do not have enough of the balls to be like this Mibbs.”
“Wait, your enemy is a bunch of idealists? Time-traveling hippies? That doesn’t sound very scary.”
“Oh, they are scary,” Arkady said. “They steal our children. They teach them unspeakable things. They fill their heads with dreams.”
“Arkady.” Alice shushed him. “Please.” She spoke to Nick. “Arkady really doesn’t like them,” she said with a little smile. “But it is like this. They are a loose affiliation of people who disagree with the Guild and who believe our talents are greater than we know. At various points in time they are very powerful. At other points, they are more disorganized. There are some places in history where we even work in close association with them, where people are both Guild and Ofan at once. But now we have reason to believe that the Ofan have changed, drastically, and are becoming a very real threat. Like I’ve said, they’ve found something. They’ve managed to alter . . . well. You will learn about that from the Alderman—” She lowered her voice. “In 1815. This is more his business than mine.” She looked at Arkady. “I think Mibbs is a clue to what the Ofan can do. Even if he isn’t Ofan himself.”
“They have not changed that much, Alice.” Arkady sneered. “They are still scrambling to find—” He closed his mouth with a snap on whatever he was going to say. Then he drained his glass. “But we!” He held his empty glass aloft. “We are the Guild. We will squash them. We have not worked so hard, for so long, to protect the river, only to have them ruin it!” He slammed his empty glass down on the table.
“Yes, my ructious darling.” Alice stroked her knuckles down her husband’s cheek. “And whether Mibbs is Ofan or not, his days of secrecy are over. The Guild is watching for him. I’ve sent that clip to Chile and soon enough I will send it around the world, and send his description down through time. I’m sure he’s hiding somewhere, but when he turns up again, we’ll find him.”
Nick leaned back against the carved screen and half closed his eyes, letting the golden glow of the pub’s electric lighting shimmer into a semblance of candlelight. The Ofan. He let that name sink into his head. Not orphan. Ofan. Fearsome, many-faced angels. Beautiful, androgynous bodies, wings of shadow and light, eyes bright with visions. Voices rising together like the rush of waters. Straining up, reaching—but cast down by an implacable hand. Down into eternal flame.
Nick closed his eyes completely.
Badajoz.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Two weeks later Arkady and Nick were in Arkady’s 1972 MG Midget. (Nick had teased him about a Guild car that wasn’t a BMW, but Arkady explained somewhat defensively that MG had been owned by the German manufacturer for a few short years in the 1990s.) Now they were driving through Devon on the A396, and Arkady was bellowing Russian folk songs at the top of his lungs. They had left London at dawn, Alice standing on tiptoe to kiss them both soundly on the cheek, like a fond aunt. “Is that all I get?” Arkady had asked.
“It will have to hold you until you return.” Alice patted her husband’s stomach. “Perhaps it will make you be good.”
“Never.”
Alice turned to Nick. “He’s all talk.”
“That’s not what you said last night.” Arkady twitched his scarf rakishly over his shoulder.
Alice ignored him. “Now, as for you, Lord Blackdown. You are to be very, very good.” She was smiling, but he saw the grave intention in her eyes.
“Yes, my lady,” he said, sketching her a perfect bow.
For two weeks he had been in an immersion course, with Arkady serving as tutor. The task was to suppress everything he’d learned at the Chilean compound and the years following. He had to remember his old self and step back into the Marquess of Blackdown’s shiny black boots. From dawn to dusk in Arkady’s study it had been 1815: every word they said, every gesture they made, all their food and drink and clothing. Nick had disappeared in 1812, but was traveling back only as far as 1815 because, Arkady said with maddening reserve, 1815 was when the Guild needed Nick’s services, and no sooner. But those three missing years were a problem. His excuse was to be a bump on the head and a spell of amnesia. Whatever he didn’t remember he could blame on his injury. The trouble was more likely to be what he remembered rather than what he forgot: the twenty-first-century phrases and habits that had become second nature. So Arkady drilled him.
History, politics, manners. How to signal disapproval and approval. How to stand and how to sit. Boxing, fencing, taking snuff. Almost every muscle must relearn the more arrogant tension of the Regency. Much of it felt effeminate to Nick now, and what didn’t felt so aggressive as to border on the criminal. It was a strange mix, to be sure, but Nick found that it was all coming back very quickly.
“I’ll remember this man’s world stuff on my own,” Nick had said after only two days of it. They were finally collapsed in the leather chairs at the end of a dreary afternoon spent playing hazard and gossiping about political and sexual scandals two centuries old. “It’s the women I’m afraid of.” Nick worked on untying his cravat. “I need to remember dance steps and the language of flowers and the names of all of Lady Corinna Alistair’s grandchildren.”
“Bah,” Arkady said, flinging his own cravat aside and beginning to tug at one stiff boot. “I cannot pretend to be a woman and prance about with you.”
“Why not? For God’s sake, we look a pair of fools already. Allow me.” Nick reached for Arkady’s leg. Arkady extended it, and Nick pulled his boot off for him. “Holy shit, Arkady—your feet stink.”
“Language!”
“Bloody hell, your feet stink,” Nick said. “Though for your information, shit is one of the oldest words in the English language and was in full circulation—”
“Just get this second shitting boot off,” Arkady interrupted, shoving his other leg forward.
Nick laughed as he tugged. “Cursing correctly is the highest test of fluency, Arkady. I’d advise you to stick to polite language.”
“Shitting boot, it isn’t right? But I can say fucking boot, yes?”
The boot came off and Nick stumbled backward. “Yes,” he said, recovering his balance and tossing the boot away. “That’s right. Who knows why.”
Arkady pursed his lips, committing the information to memory. Then he smiled. “But women,” he said. “I can talk about women in any language. And I do not want you, my priest, to worry about the women. It is like, how do you say it? Like riding a bicycle.”