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

evening, as she ate the glorious Camembert, the cheese inspector had reminisced about Oreos and milk and then she had gone on to sing a TV jingle about them. Nick had no favorite childhood commercials, and he craved boiled mutton, beef jelly, blancmange, and bits of pig, pickled.

Sleep was clearly not going to come again tonight. Nick got quietly out of bed and went downstairs, enjoying the bracing cold of the floorboards against the soles of his feet. He loved these floors. The boards were as old as he was. The trees from which the boards had been painstakingly hewn were much older even than that—they must have stood in these hills for hundreds of years before they were felled. This house had been built in the year of his birth—1790—and Nick took comfort from its sturdy construction, the way it had hunkered down through all the years like a bear in its den. He imagined it being raised, enormous beam by enormous beam, even as he had quickened in his mother’s womb. It was as if the house had been built for him and had simply been waiting across so many winters for him to come home.

The embers were still glowing in the fireplace, and he scrunched up some newspaper, made a pyramid of kindling around it, crouched, and blew the fire back to life. As the kindling crackled into flame, he added two apple logs from the old tree that had fallen in a spring storm. Tending a fire made him feel eternal. It made him feel that he could have been born at any time, in any place. It made him feel that there was nothing so very strange about skipping almost two centuries in one’s twenty-third year, then living out the rest of one’s life in a previously unimaginable future. He wrapped his scarred, naked body in a cashmere throw and watched the flames dance.

But as he followed a spark flying upward into the chimney, his eye was distracted by a white envelope propped up on the mantelpiece.

Shit.

The letter from the Guild.

Nick had successfully avoided thinking about it for several days.

He had run into the mailman at the bottom of the long driveway a few mornings ago. “Looks like an old-fashioned love letter,” the mailman had said, admiring the thick wax seal on the back of the envelope. The wax was stamped with the Guild’s symbol: a blooming tulip, bulb and roots and all. He handed the letter to Nick along with the L.L.Bean catalog that seemed to come every week. “Romantic.”

It was anything but. As soon as he’d glimpsed the seal, Nick had guessed. And when he had turned the letter over in his hand and seen that it was addressed in Alderwoman Gacoki’s spidery hand, he had known. The letter was a Summons. Not just any Summons, but a Summons Direct. A tulip in wax. A tulip, when they were coming for their pound of flesh.

He had propped the letter there on the mantelpiece and then he had forgotten about it, willfully. He was good at that. It was another skill he’d learned during the war. Don’t want to think about it? No problem. Don’t think about it. Think about the girl with the dark eyes instead.

Now, in the flickering firelight, the Alderwoman’s writing seemed to scuttle across the envelope. Nick wanted to rush the letter like it was a living thing and sweep it into the fire. But he couldn’t. He had to read it.

If he didn’t answer the Summons, they would come for him.

CHAPTER ONE

It had happened ten years ago. It had also happened two centuries ago, in the hills south of Salamanca. As the Most Honorable Nicholas Falcott—Lord Nick to his men—led his cavalry division in yet another charge, his horse was shot out from under him. He freed his feet as the horse fell, and he rolled away unharmed, looking up and to his left. There was Jem Jemison, locked in combat with a big French foot soldier. Jemison caught Nick’s eye, and Nick saw that he was in trouble; alarm flickered in those black eyes. As Nick began to raise himself, he saw the horse rearing directly over him, the French dragoon on its back, saber lifted high. Jem wasn’t the one in trouble, Nick thought, as the hooves descended.

One moment he was staring at his death, and the next he was in the path of an impossibly bright light bearing down on him with equally impossible speed. Then he was screaming into the roar of a thousand furnaces as the light crashed over him.

When he opened his eyes, that horrible white light still blinded him. But instead of charging toward him, it was glaring from three big rectangles that seemed to be affixed to the ceiling of a blank white room. The light hurt his eyes—hurt his entire head. He groaned.

So this was death.

“Nicholas Falcott?”

Nick turned his head slowly. There was an old man sitting by his bed.

“Where the devil am I?”

“You are in London.” The man had a faint accent and wore an outlandishly oversized yet strangely delicate species of spectacles. “You are in the care of the Guild. The year is 2003.”

Nick laughed, then winced. Laughing was a bad idea. “That’s a fine jest,” he whispered. “Almost literally side-splitting.”

“I’m afraid it’s not a joke.”

Nick closed his eyes. The light was too brutal. “If it’s really 2003, then what has happened to my mother? My sisters?”

“As you would imagine.”

Nick kept his eyes closed. He was surely dead, but his pain was real enough. Perhaps he was alive, but trapped in some blanched and fevered nightmare. How cruel of his dreams to mock him like this, when the war was grim enough.

When he opened his eyes, the old man was still there, watching him with soft-eyed compassion. Nick had to pull himself together. Even in a dream he wanted no mawkish tenderness. He would play his part. “So.” He tried to sound like a gentleman and a soldier,