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

charming.” Eamon got up from the desk and stalked past her until he stood behind her chair. “But I am interested in that hopeless threat you were about to make. If Grandfather were here he would what?”

Julia could smell Eamon’s acrid eagerness. Her stomach clenched.

“What would Grandfather do, Julia?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you do know, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“It had to do with time, didn’t it?”

Julia’s breath caught in her throat. He knew! “I don’t know,” she said again.

“Yes, you do, kitten.” Eamon’s voice surrounded her. “Let me save you the trouble of telling me. The old rogue could pervert the flow of time. He could make it stop. He could do whatever he wanted then. He could quietly rearrange some accounts or some records or some wills to suit himself. Isn’t that so?”

Julia stared straight ahead, her heart pounding. He knew. It was impossible, but yet he knew.

Eamon’s breath tickled her hair; he must be bending over her like a vulture. “Your grandfather could play with time like a child plays with mud, isn’t that right? He was a dirty thief.”

Julia raised her voice before she could stop herself: “Grandfather was not a thief! He only did it when—”

“Aha!” Eamon gripped Julia’s shoulders, pinning her to the chair and pulling the chair up hard against his legs. The breath left her body, and fear stilled her blood. He bent down to breathe in her ear. “He only did it when what?”

Julia held perfectly still for a moment, then burst into frenzied struggle. Eamon held her firmly, pulling her shoulders cruelly back. She kicked and twisted, and his bruising grip on her shoulders released. The chair fell back, and Julia leapt to her feet, whirling to face him. “Do you really want to know, Eamon? Because I will relish the telling of it. He did it when you visited; I saw him do it. He froze you. You couldn’t move, and he tied a housemaid’s apron around your middle. We laughed at you. We laughed in your horrible gaping fish face! We laughed at you for ten minutes at a stretch before he started time up again. Oh!” She pressed her hands to her mouth.

Eamon’s jaw clenched and unclenched. His face changed color, from white to red to white again. Then, with visible effort, he smiled. “So it is true.” He dusted his hands together, then gestured for her to sit again. “Please,” he said. “Please be seated. I am sorry if I scared you. But you see, my tactics take me far in a short span of time. And time is what we are discussing, yes?”

Julia’s heart was pounding. He had tricked her, playing on her temper, which had always been her weakness. She forced herself to calm down. “I will discuss nothing with you.”

“Sit down, Julia. We have begun our discussion and you cannot choose to stop now.”

“I have nothing to say.”

“Sit down.” There was an edge to his voice, and she saw his white hands clench.

“I prefer to stand.”

“As you wish. But I shall sit.” Eamon made a show of walking back around his desk and arranging himself in his chair, enjoying every second of his rudeness in sitting while she remained on her feet. Now Julia stood before him as a servant stands before her master, and she felt the insult in her bones. But if Eamon expected to cow her this way . . . She straightened her back.

“Now,” Eamon said, examining his fingernails. “To our discussion. I have named your grandfather’s little hobby, and you have agreed that he had what you might call a ‘gift,’ yes?” He looked up at her.

Julia said nothing.

“I take your silence for assent. He had a gift, and that gift was nothing more nor less than the ability to manipulate time; to wit, he could stop it for considerable periods, and while it was stopped, he could move about, doing what he wished with aprons and the like, was that not so?”

Julia cursed herself. It had taken Eamon one week of silence and a few insults to break her. He had known it already, but still. She had admitted knowledge of Grandfather’s secret. The deepest, darkest secret in the world. Julia’s earliest memories were of her grandfather drilling her with the necessity to keep quiet about what he could do. On his deathbed Grandfather had told her to pretend. Instead she had given in to her temper and blabbed like a magpie.

Eamon picked up the carved marble head of Mercury that Grandfather had used as a paperweight. “Your grandfather knew how to stop time. A remarkable gift indeed. You and I may disagree on how he used it; you say he larked about humiliating his relatives, and I say he was a thief. He wanted to steal my inheritance from me, and he tried to use time itself to do it.”

“He was not a thief, and you are a blackguard.”

Eamon looked up, hefting the marble head. “Careful, kitten. Claws.” He passed the head from hand to hand. “He wasn’t a thief, you say. Then why did he spend years trying to disinherit me? Me, his last living male relative?”

“Perhaps because he was a good man and you are an excrescence!”

Eamon slammed the two-thousand-year-old marble head down on the table, and its blank eyes glared accusingly at Julia. “Your grandfather a good man? You clearly know nothing of men. He never once brought you to London, my dear. You should have seen him there. No respect for his own rank. Always to be seen in the most disreputable parts of town with his gang of foreign friends. Thieves and drunkards and revolutionaries. And his mistress. Opening her house and her legs to any passing riffraff. Your precious grandfather threw his money away on her, and on his ridiculous coterie. Meanwhile I, his own flesh and blood, was left to suffer in penury.”

“I hear nothing in that to diminish him in my eyes,” Julia said.

“You don’t? Then why did you blush when I spoke