by Bee Ridgway
“Did she know you had seen it?” Jemison plucked it from Nick’s fingers and looked at it closely. “Might she have dropped it as a sign to you?” He untied the ribbon that secured the square pouch and unfolded it.
“That’s exactly what she must have done,” Alva said. “A way of saying ‘I was here!’”
Jemison pulled out the tangle of red thread that Julia had been working on that glorious morning of the paper airplanes. Then he came up with a small ring stuck on the end of his forefinger like a crown. “Look at this twisty piece of trash. I wonder why she carries it.”
Alva reached out slowly, as if she were pushing her hand through sand. “Please,” she breathed. “Oh, please!” She plucked it from Jemison’s finger and fumbled in her bosom for her glasses. She popped them on her nose and examined the ring as tears slipped unnoticed down her cheeks, like raindrops on a window.
“What is it?” Nick tried to keep the desperation from his voice.
She held the ring out on her open palm, for Nick to see. “Eréndira,” she said. “It is her ring.”
“The Talisman!” Nick snatched it up for a closer look. At first glance it appeared cheap, for it was only copper. But the craftsmanship was flawless. The ring looked as if it were made of several intricately intertwining cords. The motif of the eye within the circle was so abstract as to be almost indiscernable; if Alva hadn’t described it to him in the transporter, he never would have seen it as representational at all. “This looks . . . either very old or very modern,” he said.
“Why is it important?” Jemison reached out for the ring, and Nick handed it over.
“It is a talisman,” Nick said. “Something both the Ofan and the Guild are seeking. We hope it has the power to change the future.”
Jemison frowned and turned the ring over in his hand, then gave it back to Alva. “Are you saying it is magical?” Jemison cast a doubting glance at Nick. “This little thing?”
Alva folded her fingers over the ring. “I don’t know,” she said. “I have never believed in magic; to my mind the things we do with time aren’t supernatural. They don’t rely on incantations or spells or potions; we simply have a talent. But . . .” She looked up at Jemison. “Ignatz Vogelstein, our great teacher and visionary, sent me a letter, Mr. Jemison, with a hint enclosed about the Talisman. The hint was the symbol that is worked into this little ring.” Alva looked from Jemison to Nick, her eyes alight. “Tell me now, Nick. How is Julia connected to Ignatz Vogelstein?”
“She is his granddaughter.”
Alva stared at him. “Oh,” she whispered. “Of course! Why didn’t I realize it when I saw her yesterday? Her eyes reminded me of his; I even told her so. And yet I didn’t put two and two together. Even though she was there with your sister . . . he never let me meet the child, you know—”
Jemison interrupted. “So either the ring is the Talisman, or her grandfather gave her the ring as a sign for her to show others that she can be trusted. She holds the secret.”
Nick shook his head. Something was tickling his memory. “I don’t think she does know,” he said. “I don’t think she has any idea that this ring is important at all. There was something she said . . .” He gestured toward Jemison. “May I have that hussif?”
Jemison handed the pouch over and Nick held it in his hand, remembering Julia talking to him about it. She’d said she didn’t keep sewing notions in it, but rather some keepsakes. . . . He opened it again and found a fossil trilobite. “This is a memento of her grandfather,” he said. “And that . . .” He pointed to the ring in Alva’s hand. “She thinks that is a trinket, the only memento she has of her mother, who died when she was three months old. She called it a ‘fairing.’”
Alva reached for the trilobite and held it in her palm beside the ring. “Ignatz,” she whispered. She sighed. “When I saw Julia’s gestures, and when I saw those dark eyes . . . Ignatz used his hands in just that way when he talked, and he had dark eyes, too. Like good, strong Assam tea. A redder brown than Julia’s. I almost wept right there in my kitchen, surrounded by half-pickled beets. . . .”
“Alva.” Nick touched her shoulder. “Julia is lost. We need to stay focused.”
But Alva held the ring up and contemplated it with that same misty expression. “It is beautiful, isn’t it,” she mused. “Crafted before the fall of Mesoamerica by a P’urhépecha metallurgist—did you know that their work was even finer than the Mexicas’? It is priceless.”
Nick pushed his fingers into his hair and sighed. “I beg of you, Alva—”
“No—follow me, Nick. Something doesn’t make sense here. The ring is a treasure in two ways. The Spanish melted down every piece of metal they could lay their hands on, so almost no pre-Conquest jewelry remains, and yet here is this ring. Second, this ring was Eréndira’s inheritance from her mother, but Arkady doesn’t have it—Julia does. And Julia thinks it is a trinket of no value except a sentimental connection to her own dead mother. Why?”
“It must have been Ignatz’s way of making the ring significant to her,” Nick said. “He passed the ring off as her dead mother’s so that she would carry it around with her all the time. But why would he make her the keeper of the Talisman, and yet not tell her what it was? We’re back where we started.”
Alva shook her head. “No, we’re not back where we started. It’s clear! The ring itself isn’t the Talisman, it marks the Talisman. It is a sign.” She turned those eyes, glowing like a bluebell wood at dusk, on Jemison and then on Nick. “Ignatz told Julia the ring was her mother’s so that she would always have it near her, but he didn’t want Julia to protect the ring. He wanted the ring to reveal the truth about Julia. Julia Percy is the Talisman.”
“That’s mad,” Nick whispered.
“Why else would she carry that ring of Eréndira’s close to her all the time and yet not know what it is?”
“From what I’m beginning to understand about your boyfriend,” Nick said, “he kept Julia in the dark about everything. His lies don’t prove anything about either the ring or Julia. They only prove that he was a pig-headed old man—”
But Alva wasn’t listening. She was staring at the ring, and she looked as if she might faint.
“What? What is it?”
“Oh, dear God,” Alva said, and raised her still, shocked face to Nick’s.
“Tell me!”
“It was not Ignatz Vogelstein’s eyes I recognized in Julia’s,” Alva said, her voice a trembling thread. “I was led astray by the brown color of them and the familiarity of her gestures. The ring did belong to her mother, Nick. Julia is not Ignatz’s granddaughter. She is Arkady’s.”
* * *
The marquess rose up like a wall of fire at Alva’s words, enraged by the suggestion that the woman he intended to marry was not legitimate, was not English. But Nick met that rage with his own, and he simply reached inside and pinched the marquess out like a puny candle flame.
He knew in his bones that it was true. Julia was Eréndira’s daughter.
It made Julia’s isolation, her danger, and his own fear for her more tangible. She was alone, and she had no idea who she was. The man she had loved as a grandfather had tried to protect her by wrapping her up in a tissue of lies, and her blood grandfather, Arkady, was hell-bent on . . . Nick swallowed. He was hell-bent on harming her, perhaps even killing her.
“All right then,” Nick said, taking a deep breath. “Julia is Eréndira’s daughter. She is the Talisman. Can that new information shed any light on what might have happened to her?”
But Alva was frantically trying to make sense of the new revelation. “Eréndira had no children when I knew her,” Alva said. “She was young. She took on lovers like she took on ideas: fully, passionately—and then she moved on. But when she returned to us, dying of wounds I could not see? She had aged in her time across the Pale. She must have had a child and given it to Ignatz. And he must have hidden it. An hour after her death Ignatz disappeared to Devon, only to return to Lond
on now and then, and only as the Earl of Darchester. It wasn’t long after he left that we heard he was raising an orphaned granddaughter.”
“But how does it follow that Julia is a human talisman? What does that even mean?”
“It means Peter was right.” Alva scowled. “Which she usually is, damn it. She told me that the Talisman would have a jagged edge, that it was broken. That it was one half of a desperate promise with the unknown.”
“There is nothing broken about Miss Percy,” Jemison said.
“Her terrible birth—that’s what I’m thinking of,” Alva said. “What if she was born across the Pale? Or born in her mother’s violent transition back? She was torn into this world, don’t you see? Torn from another world. An orphan, a foundling . . . her very brilliance a threat to her life.”
Jemison shrugged. “Sounds like the human condition.”
“If you’re right,” Nick said, “Julia was conceived, or carried, or born in a world where time is moving backward. Perhaps she has some hidden knowledge about the Pale, hidden even from herself? Or some power? Something so powerful that Ignatz decided to bury it away and hope it never surfaced?”
“Yes,” Alva said musingly. “Eréndira brought her back here, back to this forward-moving time—a talismanic connection to that other world, torn from one time and given to another. Eréndira died of the effort it took to return, or of complications from childbirth—and she put little Julia into the arms of her teacher, not her father. Ignatz went to great lengths to hide Julia from Arkady. Which must mean that Eréndira and Ignatz both feared what the Guild would make of Julia.”
“But the Guild wants to turn the Pale back, too,” Nick said. “For all that you hate them, they are more misguided than evil. And how different was Julia’s life with Ignatz from life in the Guild? The Guild relies on ignorance to keep their power. They lie to us and keep us happy with money. Well, isn’t that what Ignatz did to Julia? Raised her as an earl’s granddaughter and told her nothing at all? He might have been a great Ofan teacher, but he used Guild methods to control her. I think . . .” Nick took the copper ring from Alva’s fingers and turned it so that he could see the motif of the eye in the circle. “I think there must be something bigger, something more at stake than just the old feud between the Guild and the Ofan.”
All three were silent then, under the weight of this revelation and the possibility that they might never find Julia.
Nick closed his eyes. He had no idea where to even start. She was lost. Lost, perhaps, because Ignatz had lied to her. Julia was truly orphaned—orphaned even from herself—and Nick was powerless to help. He felt despair well up in him, deep and cold.
Despair . . . a spider held over a flame . . . the Foundling Hospital! “Orphans,” he said, his voice rough. “Stolen children!”
“Yes?” Alva’s voice was threaded with confusion.
Nick turned to her, but it wasn’t her eyes he saw. Flat, blue eyes. Despair. The terrible nothingness sucking at his soul . . .
“Nick? Nick!”
He looked at his palm and found that he was holding the acorn, in addition to the copper ring. “Mibbs,” he said, and closed his fingers around them. “He is here, in London. A man accosted my mother the other day about a baby . . . it must have been him.”
“A baby?” Alva frowned. “The Foundling Hospital . . .” Her eyes flew to Nick’s. “Oh, God, and what he said to Leo!”
“Exactly.” Nick got to his feet. “Everywhere Mibbs has been, and every question he has asked, begins to make sense. He is looking for Julia. He was looking for her in America, among indigenous people, because he must know about her mother’s connection to the P’urhépecha. But now he is also looking for her in Europe. He has been looking up and down the River of Time, always searching for an infant.”
“Yes,” Alva said. “Babies. It is always babies. He’s not thinking that she might be grown!”
“That must be it. And thank God she is grown, in this time, for it might keep her from him. But Mibbs is getting close. He knows now that Julia is connected to Arkady, because he asked for Arkady the other day.”
“What if he is now looking for her as a grown woman?” Alva whispered. “Perhaps he followed her from Berkeley Square today.”
“If that is the case,” Nick said, “then we have lost—”
The sound of running feet and a shout interrupted him. A little old man came careering around the corner of Carlisle Street, a Bow Street Runner in tow.
“It was right here,” he said breathlessly, pointing with his stick. “Right where that great dog is now. It was a grand old traveling coach, sir. As the girl walked past it, a big, pale man got out brandishing a club. She seemed to know him, for she laughed at first and said something. But the man hit her over the head, tossed her into the carriage, and then the coachman whipped up the horses and drove away. I saw the coat of arms on the coach door then, sir. Very simple, sir, a red field with a silver shield, and three weasels on it. I called and tried to run after them but . . .” He broke down in frustrated tears. “Please believe me. A young lady is in grave danger.”
The little old man, the runner, and Solvig now stood together, looking at the blank cobblestones of the street. Nick felt a laugh of relief bubbling up in his throat, and Alva clearly understood, too, for her eyes were sparkling. Mibbs didn’t have Julia. Eamon did.
* * *
“Why can’t you just go back in time and catch Miss Percy as she leaves your house? Why do we have to go chasing after the coach? For that matter, why can’t you go back before Vogelstein’s death and ask him about Julia?”
Alva pressed her seal into the hot wax on the last of three notes she had written. “Because we can’t,” she said simply.
A servant had been dispatched to Berkeley Square and to Jemison’s house in Camden Town for their things, including pistols and horses. Jemison had been peppering them with questions as they waited. Nick was jumping out of his skin with impatience, now that there was something he could actually do. He paced up and down in front of the fire like a caged animal, listening to the conversation with one ear and to the pounding of his heart with the other.
“But why?”
Alva answered patiently. “Because we move back and forth in time on streams of human emotion, Mr. Jemison. Big streams. We have the ability to use those streams of feeling, but we ourselves—we are just bit players, and our own feelings, our own life stories, they plod forward day to day. So if I’m here today and in 2029 tomorrow and in 1580 the next day, I will still tell the story of my life as a story that proceeds forward in time.”
“Your life moves forward day to day, even if those days don’t follow each other on the calendar.”
“Exactly. Which means that I cannot know what is coming for me, and I cannot go back to a day I have already lived through.”
“‘Solomon Grundy,’” Nick said without turning from the window. “‘Born on a Monday, christened on Tuesday, married on Wednesday’ . . . where the bloody hell are the horses?”
“But other time travelers must know your future. They should be able to tell you when you die, for instance!”
Alva caught Nick’s eye. “You see what happens when you invite Naturals into your world? They invariably start telling you that your lifestyle is freakish.” She turned back to Jemison. “Our talent is queer,” she said. “Why do our stories proceed unmolested even as we jump about in the river? If we time travelers know the big shapes of human history, the movements of markets and epochs, you would think we could know what is destined in our own piddling lives. And yet . . . we cannot.”
“That makes no sense,” Jemison said. “Naturals are condemned to a preordained story, we are bound to live lives that you, the time travelers, can know—but that we cannot. While you, the time travelers, don’t know your own futures, even though you can travel forward in time. You have possibility, movement, hope, and from what you have just told me, I can only assume that we Naturals are doomed.”
Jemison’s dark eyes were intent. “So the future of mankind is set in stone, and while individual lives may sparkle and shine, we are little more than spirits, melting into air. You seem to be basing your hopes in fairy dust, Miss Blomgren.” He sounded doubtful in the extreme, almost condescending.
Alva shrugged. “But surely that is what hope is! ‘The tune without the words.’ Maybe not knowing the words means that we can make them up as we go along. And more importantly, it means that we can go back and change them. We can already change the river in tiny ways, you know. Nick did today when he told you about us. But it is only play, the level at which we dabble now. A dip in the river, a splash, a brief obstruction of the flow, and then our individual revels end. But I believe that if we can learn to channel our dreaming, then we can make the fact that we don’t know the little things alter the things we know too well . . .”
Nick was ready to tear his hair out. “Oh, my God, Alva, Arkady told me you Ofan were all a bunch of dangerous dreamers. How can you be whittering on like this when Julia is lost? If you don’t shut up I’m going to kill you. There. How’s that for a hopeless ending to your story?”
“I would simply jump away from you, Nick. You know that.” Alva smiled a little sadly at Jemison. “We are cowards, really, we time travelers. We cheat death over and over. Jumping away from one story and into another. Always pursuing the hope of another day.”
Jemison curled a lip. “That’s a fancy way of saying you are seeking immortality, Miss Blomgren. All dressed up as charity to a benighted humanity.”