The River of No Return

by Bee Ridgway

  Nick was fairly certain that it was nothing like riding a bicycle. He struggled to extricate himself from his incredibly tight jacket. Arkady smirked at him, offering no help, his arms behind his head, his stockinged feet stretched out to the fire.

  Ever since that drink in the Lamb, Nick had played nice and kept his own counsel about most things, including how he intended to behave once he was back in his own time and his old persona. He had no intention of blindly following Guild orders, or slaughtering Ofan just because the Guild pointed and said kill. But in spite of his reservations, he was eager to return, and the two weeks of practice had opened the floodgates of his memory. He hadn’t even wanted to go out into contemporary London again, and not because he was afraid of Mr. Mibbs, who, according to Alice, had disappeared into the river, leaving no trail for the Guild to follow. No, the next time Nick walked down Pall Mall, he wanted to see Carlton House ablaze with lights.

  Carlton House and the Royal Mews and Hungerford Street, all restored. The pomp and the squalor, the shine and the stench. Now that he could without choking on grief, Nick let himself long for it, let himself drift through the days leading up to his return on a warm current of homesickness.

  And now, finally, they were on their way. Hurtling toward his past in a sports car. Practice was over and the game was about to begin. Soon enough they would be pulling in at Falcott House. Visitors could rent holiday apartments there, and Arkady had chosen one that had been converted from the old kitchens. The plan was to spend a couple of days on the property to accustom Nick to the surroundings, then make the jump back to 1815 when Arkady felt Nick was ready.

  Arkady’s song ended on a long, warbling high note. He glanced at Nick for approval, but Nick sat thin lipped, staring straight ahead. The warm current ran suddenly cold . . . what the hell was he doing? There is no return . . . there is no return . . . and yet that was the curve of Stoke Hill, and it was rushing toward them fast, far too fast . . .

  “Do you recognize anything?” Arkady spoke loudly, over the well-oiled roar of the little car’s big engine.

  “Yes. Everything.” Nick gritted his teeth against the feeling that the car was hurtling out of control—though the speedometer read only thirty miles per hour.

  “I know what you feel, my friend. It is strange. But never mind. Soon you will be home again and all of this”—he waved at the motorway and the cars—“will seem like a dream.”

  “I don’t want it to seem like a dream. I like the twenty-first century.”

  “You like ten years at the beginning of that century,” Arkady said. “Do you like the other nine decades?”

  “I don’t know about anything except the first decade,” Nick said.

  Arkady only grunted, and Nick gazed to his left, at Exeter’s suburbs giving way to winter fields. It was all entirely familiar, even now that most of the hedgerows had fallen to agribusiness and the villages had all swelled to five times their nineteenth-century size.

  Around this next bend and he should be able to see Castle Dar, the Earl of Darchester’s estate. But when the MG eased around the curve, the rambling old pile was gone, as if it had never been there. In its place, a massive shed filled with combine harvesters.

  Nick forced air into his lungs, and out again.

  The girl with the dark eyes had belonged to Castle Dar. She had been walking over from Castle Dar that day. The day his father had died.

  Now Castle Dar was gone. Vanished from the face of the earth.

  Nick closed his eyes and saw, as clearly as if he were looking at a photograph, the body of his father, crumpled on the ground, his head and limbs at crazy angles, like a rag doll tossed aside.

  Nick, on Boatswain, had been in the lead, preparing to take the jump first. But his father had spurred up from behind. No final words, no glance; just his horse leaping, a bark from the dog that lurked behind the hedge, a confused cacophony of sounds as the horse landed wrongly and went down. Then silence.

  The horse and dog were both shot, the first bullet fulfilling the demands of charity toward a dumb, suffering animal, the second fulfilling some notion of justice. The culprit dog had been young, liver-spotted, Nick remembered for some reason—the pet of a tenant’s wife.

  His father’s body was carried back to Falcott House, met halfway by his running, weeping sisters. How had they known? Yet there they were. Nick remembered Bella’s fingers stroking their father’s cold cheek as they walked along, Father’s body tied by his reins to a board that had been leaning up against the hedge. Then all four of them sitting in the drawing room for hours, waiting for the body to be washed and prepared, listening to the vicar read from the Bible: “‘For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though after my skin-worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.’” Nick remembered watching as his mother, her eyes trained blindly on the vicar’s face, scratched at the back of her left hand until it bled.

  Sometime in the afternoon Nick had managed to sneak out. He saddled Boatswain and galloped off, trying to lose himself in fields he had known all his life. Perhaps trying to fall and break his own neck. But he must not have wanted to die, for at the woods that marked the edge of his father’s land—his land—he had dismounted to tighten the saddle girth. That’s when he had found himself sobbing into Boatswain’s neck, clutching the horse’s mane in his fists.

  Nick hadn’t particularly liked his father, a man whose passions were only roused in competition. The fastest horse, the best brandy, the most expensive snuffboxes. Even as Nick pressed his face into Boatswain’s neck he knew he was weeping for himself, rather than for that man, the seventh marquess. He was weeping for his lack of grief. For his guilt and his loneliness. Nick didn’t want his father’s title. He never had. But, in the twinkling of an eye, or rather, in the snapping of a neck, he had become Lord Blackdown nevertheless.

  His tears had subsided. He breathed in Boatswain’s scent. Then he felt it. Someone was close by. He looked up, and there she was. Standing in the shadows of the oak trees, her dark eyes candid. She was watching him, had been watching him cry. But instead of shame, a strange peace washed over him as she smiled. It was a smile that seemed to exist outside of rules, outside of judgment. She reached out to him with it, and his grief and panic receded.

  It wasn’t until she had stepped into the sunlight that he recognized her as Julia Percy, his sister Arabella’s best friend. She lived at Castle Dar with her old grandfather, the earl.

  Nick could never remember what they’d said then, to each other. They must have spoken, but his memory was only of the smile, and of her stepping out of the shadow and into the light, coming toward him and pushing all the bad feeling away, before he even realized who she was. He must have seen her again, after that day, but he couldn’t remember. He had left Falcott House at age fifteen for Oxford, and he had avoided returning. After Oxford he had gone to London and then to Spain. And then to the future.

  Her calm, and that feeling that had come over him when her eyes and mouth had smiled together . . . her eyes and smile had followed him down two hundred years.

  Nick wondered if she was buried in the churchyard in Stoke Canon. Most probably she was not buried there. She had been a pretty girl, and he was sure she had grown into a lovely woman. Old Lord Percy probably shot her off at seventeen or eighteen, married her to some baron or earl halfway across the country. She would be buried under that man’s name, in his churchyard, in his county. The green lichen on her tombstone would have filled in even that name long ago. I hope you were happy, Julia of the dark eyes, he thought to himself. I hope your husband loved you and I hope your children were healthy and that you lived to see them flourish.

  “You are sighing like a furnace, my friend.” Arkady spoke, but Nick kept his eyes closed. “It is sad to see that Castle Dar is gone?”

  “I suppose I’m sad it’s gone, yes. But I was thinking more of the people who lived there.”

  “Castle D
ar,” Arkady said. “A good name. Almost it could be Russian. I am very eager to visit this castle. We will see it soon, in 1815. Yes, and enter it too, I hope. Will you be happy to see the people there again?”

  Nick had no desire to see Castle Dar again, for that would mean seeing it in the nineteenth century, and Nick was still unable to grasp the reality of the return that he was about to make. He hadn’t cared much for the blustery old earl, and Julia, at twenty-two, would certainly be married and gone. But still. It was easier to think of visiting Castle Dar than Falcott House. Which did still exist, and which he would soon be facing. The thought made him feel slightly sick.

  “We are here,” Arkady said, slowing and turning the car. Nick kept his eyes closed, feeling the tarmac unroll beneath the car wheels. This must be the long drive up to the house. He pictured it in his mind, the beeches his grandfather had planted, the sweeping lawn dotted with sheep, the windows reflecting back the afternoon sun. . . .

  “Stop it.” Arkady slapped Nick’s thigh. “Do you want to pull us back out of a moving car?”

  “What?” Nick opened his eyes. There it all was. Falcott House, its Palladian symmetry unmarred, its graceful marble dome glowing almost pink in the afternoon light. The trees much bigger, the lawn sheepless, but otherwise . . . “Stop the car.”

  Arkady pulled over. Nick opened the door, leaned out, and vomited his pub lunch onto his ancestral land.

  “Nice,” Arkady said. “Classy.”

  Nick straightened up and closed the car door, took the handkerchief Arkady held out, and wiped his mouth. He waved his hand in a lordly fashion. “Drive on.”

  * * *

  Arkady parked the MG and together they walked up the broad steps leading to the grand entranceway. A gray-haired woman of about seventy opened the door before they could ring the bell. “You must be Mr. Davenant and Mr. Altukhov. I’m Caroline. I have your keys here, but I’m off duty in half an hour, so if you want a tour of the house you’ll need to come with me now.”

  “We will take tour,” Arkady said, at exactly the same moment that Nick said, “No thank you, we don’t need a tour.”

  Caroline looked back and forth between the two men. “Well, which is it? Tour or no tour?”

  “Tour,” Arkady said, his voice implacable.

  Nick sighed.

  “The tour isn’t so bad,” Caroline said to him. “It will only be the two of you. Interest in the Second World War is declining, I’m afraid.”

  The Second World War? But Nick breathed a sigh of relief when Caroline ushered them into the grand hallway. The graceful staircase remained but thankfully looked unlike itself, since it was flanked by glass cases filled with war memorabilia. Caroline began talking with exaggerated animation about the role the house had played as a nerve center of intelligence during the hostilities, and when she opened the tall doors that led to the formal rooms, Nick relaxed. The walls and moldings were all painted a sickly mint, in the thick, industrial paint common to the 1940s, and the rooms were laid out with a series of exhibits about spy activity, local involvement in the war effort, and the like.

  Arkady and Nick listened politely as Caroline told of Churchill’s visit in 1942, of the time a German parachutist landed nearby and tried to burn the house but was caught and kept prisoner in the cellars, and of the annual reunions of the men and women who had worked there across those years, sadly dwindling in number now. Arkady asked a question or two about the neighboring Castle Dar: Had it been torn down before the war, or had the government used it, too? Nick couldn’t have cared less about the answers, and soon their voices were washing over him like so much meaningless chatter.

  It was the rooms themselves that Nick was listening to now. They were whispering to him. Their proportions, the quality of the light, the intricately carved moldings, still beautiful beneath their layers of nasty paint, all begged him to recognize that he was home. While Caroline talked about how Castle Dar was pulled down for its stone and fittings in 1955, he looked over at the marble mantelpiece. One corner was still ever so slightly chipped from that time he played with his catapult indoors. He closed his eyes and felt the blood rushing to his head. Then a sharp pain as Arkady slowly and deliberately stepped on his foot. His eyes flew open. Caroline was talking about the techniques the government used to recruit spies. Nick stood on one foot and listened intently.

  Caroline told them that, in the upstairs rooms, the National Trust had honored the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history of the house, and even had a few objects that had been in the Falcott family at that time. “I don’t know if I can do this,” Nick whispered as they began to mount the stairs.

  “You can.” Arkady put his hand on Nick’s shoulder. “You must accustom yourself.”

  Nick let his hand trail along the banister as they mounted the stairs. At the top, beneath the dome painted with glowing clouds and pouting cherubim, was a glorious Palladian window, the centerpiece of the house’s whole design. Nick knew it showcased a view of Blackdown’s famous gardens sweeping down to the banks of the river Culm. Except that when he looked out, there were no gardens. The intricate series of interconnected beds had been cleared, and now there was a broad lawn that stretched unbroken right down to the river. In the exact middle of the lawn, his father’s Grecian folly, once overgrown with roses, stood out like a lonely tooth. But it had always stood off to the right. Whoever heard of sticking a folly in the dead center of a view?

  Caroline came up behind him. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “Were . . .” Nick cleared his throat. “Were there gardens?”

  “Oh, yes. Glorious gardens. But after the death of the last marchioness they went to wrack and ruin. When the house was requisitioned during the war, they plowed them under. Too easy a target for bombers, you see. And they painted camouflage on the roof. It’s still a little hard to find the house from the air,” she said proudly.

  “I . . . see. Was the folly always there? I mean, was it always in that spot?”

  “You are a garden buff! No, you are quite right. Drawings of the garden show that the folly stood somewhere over there.” She pointed to the right. “But they disassembled it during the war, because of the bombs. When the National Trust took over care of the property in the 1970s they found the stones over by the edge of the wood and put it back together again. I don’t know why they put it there. Perhaps to keep up the Palladian symmetry?”

  “Mm.”

  Arkady put his hand on Nick’s shoulder again. “Stop bothering Caroline with your hobby,” he said. “Let’s see the rest of the house.”

  Caroline was affronted. “I am happy to answer all questions,” she assured Nick, turning her shoulder to Arkady. “If you are interested, there are drawings of the gardens in the pamphlet about the house. The last marquess’s young sister made watercolors of them sometime in the eighteen hundreds, and they are really quite evocative—though she painted them by moonlight, so they look more ominous than pretty. You can buy the pamphlet in the gift shop.”

  Nick thanked her in a strangled voice.

  “Let’s get on with it,” Arkady growled.

  Caroline looked the Russian up and down with obvious disapproval. “As you wish,” she said stiffly.

  Nick survived the next few minutes by keeping his eyes mostly on the floor and humming a marching tune under his breath. But when Caroline threw open the door to the marquess’s grand suite, announcing proudly that they were about to see Falcott House’s prized possession, his eyes were dragged upward by a force beyond his control. There it was. No bed, no furniture at all, but taking up almost one whole wall was the huge portrait of his family that used to hang in the drawing room in the Falcotts’ house in Berkeley Square. It had been painted soon after his father’s death, yet it included his father. The seventh marquess was in shadow, to symbolize that he was no longer living. He stood behind his wife. Her body was in shadow, too, but her lovely, grieving face emerged into sunlight. Both parents were gazing with sorrowful pride
at Nicholas, Clare, and Arabella, who were shown in full sunlight, lounging smilingly around the Grecian folly, the girls plaiting roses into each other’s hair.

  Nick stood before the picture, caught in the painted glances of his long-dead sisters. He barely heard Caroline as she spoke but tuned in when he heard his own name on her lips.

  “. . . Nicholas, who was the eighth and last marquess, is the young man shown here. It is sad to think that just a few years later he would die in battle, and the title would die with him. You can see his signet ring prominently displayed. The father’s hand is in the same position as the son’s, do you see? But the ring is missing from his father’s hand. That and the red cap trimmed with white fur which Nicholas is holding shows that he is the new marquess—”

  “Excuse me.” Nick heard his own voice as if from a great distance. “Where is the loo?”

  Caroline looked at him with real concern. “Are you all right?”

  “He’s fine,” Arkady said.

  Caroline shot Arkady a look of loathing, which he returned full force.

  “It is downstairs, through the gift shop,” she said to Nick. “We are nearly finished here, so we’ll meet you down there, shall we?”

  “Yes, fine. Thank you.”

  Nick practically ran downstairs, tearing the ring from his finger and stuffing it in his pocket as he went. He charged through the gift shop, which was in what used to be his study, paying no attention to the drab young woman behind the desk. He wrenched open the door to the bathroom and turned on the taps in the sink, splashing his face with cold water; it had worked when Kumiko had done it two weeks ago.

  The assistant looked at him curiously as he walked back through the gift shop and out on to the drive, where Caroline and Arkady were waiting. Caroline put her hand on Nick’s arm, letting Arkady stride ahead toward their holiday flat. “I just wanted to say that it will be all right,” she said. “My husband is just the same as your Mr. Altukhov. A difficult man. But difficult men are sometimes secretly the kindest. Upstairs he told me all about how you lost your family and how you’d always wanted to see the original of that portrait, because the girls look so much like your sisters.” She peered into his face. “Yes, I can see it. I wonder if you are a distant relative.”