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

Nick turned back to the river. So Leo was right. Mibbs was some kind of Guild official. Probably police, or a spy, though you could hardly describe him as “plainclothes.” His taste was atrocious.

Well, let him follow. Nick had no intention of going back to St. James’s Square any time soon. He was playing truant today, and Mibbs was welcome to watch.

* * *

That night Julia exulted in her ability. Locked in her bedchamber long after the household was asleep, she lit five candles around her room so that she could measure the strength of her ability to freeze time. She stood on the bed, holding another candle. For a moment she watched their flames tremble. Then she willed them to stop.

And stop they did.

Excitement bubbled up in her and spilled over, like boiling milk. She gave in to joy, dancing on her bed in the midst of the stalled moment, twirling with her candle held high, its flame still as a painting, her loose hair spinning around her face and shoulders.

“‘I drink the air before me!’”

She pointed her finger dramatically and started time again in a wave, beginning with the candle by the door and bringing each flame back to life one by one.

A moment later she lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling, time moving sedately about her. Her soul was rigid with fear. This was rough magic.

* * *

At first it was mildly amusing, leading Mibbs around the city. The man was nothing if not persistent, plodding along a block behind as Nick wandered through the streets, getting reacquainted with London. Nick would catch sight of him now and then in a shop window, his hands always flat at his sides, his mirrored glasses glinting in the sun. Then Nick would forget about him for ten or fifteen minutes at a time. After all, he was in London and there was so much more to pay attention to than one badly dressed Guild thug.

But Nick quickly realized that London wasn’t his city anymore. Many Georgian houses remained and many were missing, knocked out like teeth by bombs or Victorians. Those that did remain weren’t being used as houses; nobody seemed to live in the center of town, though the place was teeming with humanity. Nick cut up through Seven Dials and knew for certain: This new city had long forgotten Nicholas Falcott, Marquess of Blackdown, and Nick Davenant was a tourist here, among thousands of other tourists. He stepped into a thronged coffee shop and elbowed his way toward an organic sausage roll and something called a “flat white.” He paid with his Amtrak Guest Rewards card, and wondered, as the espresso machine shrieked, if he would ever board the Vermonter at Penn Station and rattle over the river and through the woods to his little house again.

After breakfast he stopped counting the things that weren’t there, stopped even noticing what remained. He allowed himself to be entirely in the twenty-first-century present, appreciating London for what it now was, not what it had once been. Sometimes a proud blue plaque informed him of where an important person of his generation had lived, but the news of their sober achievements didn’t tend to match up with Nick’s personal library of information. Nick smiled to himself, reading that William Lamb, that cuckold and spanker of chambermaids, had apparently gone on to become prime minister in 1834. For a giddy moment Nick imagined himself texting Lamb across the ages: “omg! u r pm!” And receiving one back: “1834 rocks!”

He wandered northward, pleased with himself and with the world. The London of his time had petered out just about here, into open fields and pretty villages. How delightful to have missed the decades across which the countryside was desecrated by adipose Victorian sprawl. Now all that smug, ruddy architecture was venerably antique and crumbling. Nick thought with wicked pleasure of the two or three British generations that had followed his own, and for whom he had developed an antipathy since jumping to the future. They were all pushing up daisies in Highgate Cemetery now. Nick straightened his cuffs and lengthened his stride. He was in the mood for a long walk; maybe he’d go and visit them. Then have a pint in a pub somewhere, and totter home to Alice and Arkady in time for tea. He began to sing under his breath: “‘Here I am one and still will be, who spends his days in pleasure! My tailor’s bill is seldom filled; he’s never took my measure!’”

But when he reached Euston Road, he hit a wall.

It was a wall of fear, and it strangled Nick’s little song in his throat. He could look across the streaming traffic to the pagoda roofs of the British Library easily enough. But his heart was slamming against his ribs, and panic seized his limbs. He gasped for air and stumbled backward. As he did so, the fear dissipated, like mist.

He looked over his shoulder and there was Mibbs, a few yards back, standing in the middle of the sidewalk. He looked as gormless as a Belisha beacon.

But he didn’t have his glasses on.

Nick twisted abruptly to face Euston again. He breathed in and out, forcing himself to a sort of electrified calm. As the light changed, he stepped forward.

And was slammed with terror, exactly like before.

Staggering back, he watched as a few pedestrians crossed over to the library, leaving him behind. They looked happy enough, with their computer bags slung over their arms. Academics, off to spend the day nose-deep in books about the past.

It was Mibbs, of course, holding him back with those terrible eyes. Nick wasn’t leading him a merry chase through London. This wasn’t A Hard Day’s Night. Mibbs was the master here. Nick simply hadn’t realized that he was the one on a leash.

He rubbed the back of his neck and glanced casually over his shoulder. No