The River of No Return by Bee Ridgway (mobi ebook reader .txt) 📗

like a rational man. If she would please fold along the dotted lines and follow the agreed-upon procedure he would sign himself sick with longing for the way the curtain of her hair fell around his face when she kissed him: Nick. But, if she felt she could not follow those instructions, then he must sign himself regretfully—and then an absurdly flourishing signature: Blackdown.

There were tiny dots in pale, watery ink beneath his black script, showing her how to fold the sheet of paper into a glider. She considered what to do. This was her first love letter, but only if she burned it. If she didn’t burn it, it wasn’t a love letter.

She shook her head and started folding.

* * *

The day passed slowly. Clare fretted about the possibility of a riot but wouldn’t say that out loud in the presence of the dowager marchioness or Bella, both of whom she considered too volatile to handle the greater knowledge she had of what might occur. Bella could tell Clare was withholding something, and that talk of the riot annoyed her sister, so she mentioned it at every turn. The servants were also worried. They clattered the china and dropped the silverware, thus sending the dowager marchioness into a pet. Wasn’t it always the way that on a clear, lovely day one’s griefs and trials seemed too much to bear? The marchioness took to her bed.

It was, indeed, a lovely day, but no one suggested going out, and no one came to call. Berkeley Square itself was strangely deserted. Gunter’s was shut up tight; no ices today. No carriages dashed by, no ladies from either half of the world paraded their fashions beneath the trees.

At around four in the afternoon, Clare and Julia stood by a drawing room window and watched as the butler of a house across the square from them slipped out and carefully removed the knocker from the door. “Cowards,” Clare muttered. “They are not leaving town. I know for a fact that they are holding a ball in four days’ time.” She turned on her heel. “It would serve us right if we were all burned to cinders tonight.” At that moment Bella burst into the room, announcing that it was teatime, and that if Clare was going to insist on pretending that no riot was looming, then she must carry the pretense to its logical conclusion and have tea, as usual. Clare folded her lips tightly on her feelings.

* * *

After dinner Julia escaped to the upstairs drawing room, where she spent a half hour writing to Pringle. It was a jolly letter about London fashions as observed by a young lady in deep mourning who rarely left the house, but Julia knew that poor Pringle was starving for details. As she finished the last sentences, she became aware that the quiet square outside her window was not so quiet anymore. She could hear voices. She got to her feet and crossed to the window.

Berkeley Square was filling up with people. Men and women were streaming in from the north and the east. They talked quietly, but their faces were intent, serious, like the faces of people who watch a fire consume a building. They passed the Falcott mansion, pressing toward some destination on the other side of Berkeley Square. Julia watched them from above, her brow to the glass; she could not cast more than a glance upon each impassioned visage. Still it seemed that she could frequently read, even in that brief interval, the history of long years in the passing faces.

She heard the door open and she turned. It was Bella and Clare. They greeted Julia quietly, but they were there to look out of the windows, which had the best view down onto the square. Clare and Julia stood at one casement, Bella at the other. “Soho is flowing into Mayfair,” Clare said. “They are getting ready.” Apparently she and Bella were on speaking terms again.

“What will they do?” Bella did not turn from the window to ask her question.

“I do not know. Make their displeasure known. Attack the homes of politicians known to have supported the Corn Bill.”

“This house?”

“I do not know.” Clare glanced at Julia. “Do you know how Nick was planning to vote?”

“Yes,” Julia said, amazed at the power of sisterly discernment; apparently they simply understood that Julia knew the secrets of Nick’s soul. “He stands against the bill.”

“Thank God! I knew he could not be so blind.” Clare grasped Julia’s hand and held it tightly.

“I wonder whose house it is that they are all pressing toward,” Bella said.

At that moment, Julia sensed it. A rushing of blood at the back of her head. A shuddering in the air around her.

Someone in the house was shifting time.

Someone was slowing time down, freezing it.

Whoever it was, they were coming closer. She could feel time coming to a standstill not so very far away. She could feel it like an aching in her bones.

She had successfully feigned immobility, yesterday. But that had been in Miss Blomgren’s dark basement kitchen, when Miss Blomgren was distracted by Peter—and when the last thing Miss Blomgren would have expected would be to find that Bella’s lovelorn little friend could control time. That trick wouldn’t work up here in the bedroom, which was aglow with evening light. If whoever it was were to enter this room, he would see two women turned apparently to stone, and one who was only holding very still, her breast rising and falling as she breathed. He would see her fingers twitch in Clare’s stiff grasp. Then he would know about her. He would know she was the Talisman.

The aura reached them. Julia glanced at Bella. Her eyes were fixed.

Julia spun away from the gruesome vision and ran to the door. She wrenched it open and looked into the hall. It was empty, but she could hear footsteps coming up from the floor below.

The door at the hallway’s end, the