by Bee Ridgway
“Maybe,” Clare said. “The future has begun many times before and hasn’t come to much.”
“Doubter.” Jemison shook his head. “Why are women such doubters? It really brings a man down.” He took a broadside and struck a pose, one hand uplifted with the paper so he could read it, the other, with the apple core, balanced on his hip. “‘UP, man of reason! Rouse thee UP! AROUSE thee for the strife!’” He waved his apple core suggestively in front of his trouser flap, grinning at Clare. “‘Be UP and doing—for the world with mighty change is rife!’”
“Enough!” Clare laughed and snatched the broadside from Jemison’s hand. “I’m sorry, Julia. Mr. Jemison is . . . well, words fail me.”
He turned that happy grin on them both, then brought the apple stem-end toward his mouth and began eating the core. Julia stared. “Learned to do that in Spain,” he said, mouth full. “Not enough to eat.” He stuffed the last of the core in his mouth.
“He’s just trying to shock,” Clare said, looking bored. “It means he likes you, believe it or not.”
“I suppose I’m flattered.”
“He can behave like a gentleman when he must.”
Jemison swallowed. “Can’t. Tallow chandler’s son.” He licked his fingers.
“Rich as Croesus,” Clare said. “Just playing at being a workingman.”
Jemison reached for another apple from the bowl on the table. “Sticks and stones, my lady. Sticks and stones. So. Tell me. What did your brother have to say about the bill?”
Clare sighed. “He was all in a twist about it. I honestly don’t know what his opinion is. I don’t know what to make of him in general.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s changed. I don’t know how he thinks anymore.”
Jemison polished his second apple on his breast. “War changes a man,” he said carefully. “He was at Badajoz. No man who lived through those days will ever be the same again.”
“What happened?” Clare’s voice was soft, pleading.
But Jemison only glanced at her with those dark eyes. “No, my lady. That’s between a man and his God.” He put the fruit between his lips, and the bright, jolly sound of a crisp apple yielding to the teeth filled the room.
“You probably know Nick better than I do, having served with him.”
“I’m sure I do,” Jemison said. “But I don’t love him, and you do, and that’s a different kind of knowledge. So tell me.”
“It’s like he’s two different men. I wish you could have heard the conversation when I told him about almost selling Blackdown. At first I thought he was more excited by it even than I. But by conversation’s end, it was as if he were the oldest, goutiest, most backward old duke in the Upper House. Ranting at me!”
“That doesn’t surprise me. He’s a brave man, but I suspect he always felt guilty about leaving Blackdown. Now that he’s back he’ll dig right in like a tick.”
“Don’t talk like that about him. He’s my brother. I know you hate him and are sorry he’s returned—”
Jemison’s eyes flew wide. “Is that what you think?” He laughed. “Good God, woman, I almost wept, I was so glad to see him, landlord scum that he is!” He put his apple to his mouth for a bite but lowered it again, and spoke softly. “If I could tell you what I’ve lived through, side by side with your brother. What our eyes have seen. And then at the last, when he . . .” Jemison was holding the apple in front of his heart; Julia could see the red of it between his fingers. “And not to know where he had gone, or how . . .” His eyes were focused on a distant horror.
“Jem?” Clare touched his knee.
“Yes. Enough of that. I’m sorry. Tell me more. So half of him is the great lord, storming around his estate. And the other half?”
“The marquess seems to think that women should be the equals of men. He claims to be a follower of Mary Wollstonecraft.” Clare crossed her arms over her chest. “What do you make of that, Mr. Glorious Future of the Workingman?”
Jemison took a big bite and chewed, his eyes merry. “I think he’s mad,” he said with his mouth full.
“Yes, or maybe you still have some thinking to do.”
“‘UP, man of reason! Rouse thee UP!’ . . . mercy, mercy!” Jemison cowered, laughing, beneath Clare’s brandished papers.
“But how will Blackdown vote?” Julia asked.
“He won’t,” Clare said. “He won’t take up his seat.”
“No, no, Clare! You have heard the truth, and out of the mouths of babes!” Jemison waved his apple at Julia. “Which of the two marquesses will vote on the Corn Bill? My Lord Backward Looking, or My Lord Forward Looking? He’s taking the oath of allegiance tomorrow, so he’s planning to have a voice.”
“He’s taking the oath?” Clare looked astounded.
“Yes, indeed. Prinny sent him a Writ of Summons and by God he’s answering it. Word is, he’s supposed to give his maiden speech on the Corn Bill. Nobody knows which side he’s on.”
“Well!” Clare propped her own behind on the table beside Jemison’s. “I never.”
Julia looked at them both in some confusion. “What’s so strange about Blackdown’s voting?”
“It’s like I said.” Clare leaned back on her hands. “He’s changed. He left Spain a scapegrace. I would have laid money on his never entering the House of Lords. Now he’s so much more serious in his demeanor. And his face! Maybe it’s that scar, but he looks older than he should. As if he’s seen something terrible . . .”
“He has,” Jemison said. “Believe me. He has. And when he disappeared—”
“What do you mean?” Clare turned to him, eager.
Jemison’s face closed in and he stood away from the table, walked away a few steps, and turned back. “You know as well as I. He was lost in Spain for years on end. . . .”
“Yes. And he’s told me nothing about that, either.”
Why had Jemison closed in like that? There was something he knew about Blackdown that he wasn’t telling. Julia stared at him, willing him to tell. Infusing him with her own powerful desire to know everything about Nicholas Falcott.
Jemison turned his head slowly toward her. When he met her eyes, she extended herself fully to him, flooding him with her need, her passionate curiosity. She pictured him opening his mouth and speaking. . . .
“Young lady,” he said. His voice was quiet but firm. “Pray, what are you doing to me?”
Julia drew back, blinking. “I beg your pardon?”
“I think you know.” He laid his apple core on the table, uneaten, and walked toward her, his eyes very intent. “I want you to stop.” He took her hand, and she felt his resistance to her will in his very fingertips. “I am a free man, my dear. And I do not choose to tell you anything about Lord Blackdown.”
Clare looked quizzically at Jemison and then at Julia. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“It’s nothing.” Jemison came back to his position beside Clare, but his eyes were still on Julia. “Miss Percy was just looking at me so appealingly. I had to explain to her that Lord Nick’s secrets and mine are our own. To share when and with whom we choose.”
Julia stood rigid. Had she really just penetrated Jemison’s mind with her own emotions? That wasn’t a normal thing to do. Normal people couldn’t do that. And yet . . .
She had done it once already today. She had done it at dinner, and she hadn’t even realized it until just now. She had done it when she had extended herself to the Russian and made him trust her. She had put her trust in herself into his head, and he had accepted it as his own emotion. Believed it. He had even sung her praises at the end of the evening.
And now she had tried to make Jemison talk to her, tried to make him tell her his secrets. She had done it thoughtlessly. But he was right. She’d intruded on him. Put her own feelings into him and tried to make him act on them.
It was a terrifying power. No, it was another terrifying power. She cowered in her own skin, yearning for Grandfather,
yearning for a friend.
Some time later, Clare touched her arm.
Julia came back to herself. “I’m all right,” she said. “I was just woolgathering.”
“Woolgathering! How could you, while we were talking about the possible destruction of this house by a mob of angry Londoners!” Clare laughed, but Jemison was concerned for her, she could tell. His dark eyes seemed to see right through her.
“Let’s go back to bed, my dear,” Clare said. “It is very late, and who knows when Nick will return. He mustn’t find us consorting in the basement with a radical tallow chandler, dressed only in our nightclothes.”
Julia picked up her burned-out candle. She wished Nick would find her tonight. Even his disappointment or his anger would feel like human contact. Even the fact that she couldn’t tell him about her talent, even the terrible fact that she must hide it from him at all costs . . . being with him and keeping secrets from him felt better than this loneliness.
Jemison levered himself back into his coat and tucked a third apple into its pocket. “Good night then, and Godspeed.” He sketched them both a bow. “Let’s hope the marquess votes against the bill and makes himself a hero. There are some lords’ houses in Berkeley Square that will certainly draw the ire of the crowd after the bill passes. I won’t be able to protect this one if they turn their rage in its direction.”
Clare nodded. “I shall do my best to convince him, but the choice must be his.”
“Yes.” Jemison picked up his lantern. For the first time his voice was cold. “The precious marquess must make his own choice.” But the sparkle returned immediately, and his grin flashed in the glow of his lantern. “‘UP, men of reason . . . !’”
He opened the kitchen door with a flourish and was gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
From some hidden pocket, Ahn produced what looked like a silver card case. He placed it on the table in front of him and said, “First image.” A three-dimensional, fully colored moving image appeared, hovering over the length and breadth of the table. It showed a city in flames, and the sky boiling with red and black clouds. A great ruined dome rose in the center. With a start, Nick recognized St. Paul’s Cathedral, half blasted away. “London, 2145,” Ahn said. “In my time, Nick, the world is in crisis. The Guild is in disarray. The Ofan have taken advantage of the confusion and are gaining in power.”
Nick whistled. “Did they cause this destruction?”
“Second image.” A new picture replaced the specter of London. This time it was the Guild compound near Santiago, also entirely in ruins. “No,” Ahn said. “The Ofan didn’t cause it. Humankind has reached this state unaided.”
“I suppose I’m not terribly surprised,” Nick said, and no one contradicted him.
“Close image,” Ahn said, and the picture of the Santiago compound winked out. Ahn put the card case back in his pocket. “As perhaps you know, the Guild tries not to interfere with the vast movements of human history. The opposite, in fact. But the Ofan have their beautiful dreams.” Ahn steepled his fingers. “In my time, ecological devastation and a world war have made it impossible for the Guild to maintain its operations on a global scale. The Ofan find it easier to gain members among those few who are unfortunate enough to jump into our desolate world. Using their knowledge of the future, they are traveling back and trying to establish powerful cells in earlier eras. This era, and this city—Georgian London—is just such a stronghold. They are doing their best to dig in deep here and now, because they believe they can influence some things in the early nineteenth century that will pan out much later on. Their goal is to intervene in human history, keep the earth clean, and safe; to prevant that ecological devastation, that terrible war . . .”
“And that’s wrong, why?”
Ahn let his steepled fingers interlace. “It would be nice if we could go back and fix our mistakes,” he said carefully. “Apologize and try again. But that isn’t the way it works. This new horror, this turning back of time itself? It must be because the Ofan have meddled with the future. That is the only possible explanation. The Ofan have changed something, who knows what. It could be anything at all. And now the future, as terrible as it was, has turned on us, like a cornered tiger. That is worse, surely, than simply trying to survive the difficult times ahead.”
Nick looked up at the bulbous chandelier glimmering with the light of hidden candles, then back at the Alderman of the future. “If you can’t jump past the Pale, how do you know it stays bad? What if it’s some sort of salvation? ‘The world’s great age begins anew, the golden years return, the earth doth like a snake renew’—that sort of thing.”
“You would not think that if you saw what it is like. If you felt the pressure, the storm of time blowing toward us, catastrophe piling ruin upon ruin . . .”
“My daughter,” Arkady said in a broken voice from across the table, as if he had not been listening to Ahn, “my Eréndira . . .”
Ahn glanced at Arkady, then passed a hand over his face, clearly glad to be interrupted.
“My Eréndira was in Brazil. She was part of a group that were trying to pierce the Pale, to learn what lies beyond it. The Ofan were reaching toward it, pushing, working together. I do not know exactly what happened, but they lost her. She alone had managed to jump beyond the Pale, and then—she could not return. They could sense her trying, trying . . . and then they lost even that faint image of her.” Arkady looked at Nick, and his blue eyes were like two empty holes right through his head, with the sky shining through.
“I’m sorry,” Nick said.
Arkady didn’t reply. He wasn’t listening to Nick. Indeed, he wasn’t really even in the same room. “They simply lost her,” he said again, and his voice quavered like an old man’s. “Then I got a call one day when I was at the Santiago compound. She had reappeared. Not in Brazil but here, in London, in 1793. She was dying. I flew to London. I jumped back. I found her with the Ofan, in a house in Chelsea. They were the followers of that coward Ignatz Vogelstein!” He spat the name. “It was the Ofan who were with her, those riffraff! Not her own papa! But I got there, in time to kiss her, in time to say good-bye.”
Alice put her hand on her husband’s shoulder but he shrugged it off.
“She could not speak. I could only hold her. She died. Her beautiful hair, it had turned white, like mine. Her face was young but her hair was white, and her eyes! Despair like that? I have never seen it. And in the eyes of my own child . . .” He wept, his face uplifted for all to see the tears. His big hands, open on the tabletop, shook helplessly.
There was silence around the table as Arkady wept, and Nick realized that there were tears on his own cheeks, as well, for Eréndira. She had been courageous.
There were other emotions in the room, emotions directed at him, and Nick felt strangely immune to them all. He could feel the power of these men and women’s collective fear and grief, their sense of failure, their rage. Alice, whom he had come to admire and enjoy. Arkady, whose strange definition of friendship maddened and delighted him. And the others, even the cheese inspector. Even Penture. They were all well-intentioned people who loved the Guild and were willing to do anything to save it. They feared the Pale, but more than that they feared the end of their fraternity.
Penture spoke into the thick atmosphere, and his voice was hushed and serious. “Now, Nick Davenant. Now that you have joined us, accepted your duty, and we have told you of the terrible things that will happen downriver, you must be told what we really want you to discover while you are in the arms of Alva Blomgren.”
Everyone around the table went very still.
Ah. Nick tipped his chair back onto its hind legs.
Saatçi reached over and tapped Nick’s shoulder. “The chair!” he whispered in tortured tones.
“Sorry.” Nick righted himself.
Penture waited, with a frown for Saatçi, until all was quiet again. “A story has traveled up and down the river in recent weeks,” he said, “among those few
who have seen the future. The rumor is this. There is something, somewhere—an object, of some description—that can save us from the disaster that is coming toward us, closer with every passing day. Something that magnifies our talent, perhaps, or something that can alter time mechanically. We do not know. Is it big or small? Is it from the future—from beyond the Pale itself? Some advanced technology? Or is it from the past? The more credulous think that it has magical powers. Others believe that it is from outer space, or that a nuclear accident has mutated something already known. Still others are sure that it is God’s work: the salvation of humankind from Armageddon.”
“What do you think it is?”
Penture allowed a small, pinched little smile to touch his lips. “I do not even allow myself to believe that it exists. Our talent has never relied upon objects. It is located in our emotions, in our connection to the feelings of other human beings down through time. But this much is clear. If it exists at all, the recent escalation in Ofan activity suggests that they might have it in their possession, or they know where it is and are working to retrieve it. Perhaps the object is in fact to blame for what has happened to the future. Perhaps it is something terrible, not something good. But if there is such a thing, the Guild must have it. We must not let the Ofan learn its powers. We must either find it before the Ofan do, or if they have it already, we must get it back from them.”
“And you think Alva might have this thing, this . . .”
“People are calling it simply ‘the Talisman.’ And if there is any Ofan up and down the river who knows what and where the Talisman is, that Ofan is Alva Blomgren.”