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

“Ah, Penture, you old undertaker.” Arkady pushed in between them, his voice booming out over the crowd. “Wonderful news about the shipping venture. I was afraid I would lose my trousers.”

Nick raised an eyebrow. “The count is afraid to lose his trousers, but he is always happy to trick his friends into losing theirs. You must be careful, Penture. Before you know it this Russian will have you dancing the cancan on a tabletop.”

Arkady barked, but Penture’s expression did not change. “I am not given to making or enjoying jokes, my lord,” he said. “Especially not jokes made at the expense of people for whom your English is not a mother tongue. Besides.” He lowered his voice. “The cancan is a dance not yet invented. You are clearly an ass, but please try not to be a fool.”

So this was the Alderman of the Guild in 1815, a few months before the battle of Waterloo: a humorless, supercilious Frenchman. For a second Nick forgot that, back in the good old twenty-first century, he liked the French. Something deadly must have flared in Nick’s face, for Penture, without taking those strange eyes from him, spoke softly, for Nick’s ears alone. “Watch yourself, Mr. Davenant.”

“I am in perfect control,” Nick said in a normal tone of voice. “In spite of the greatest possible provocation.”

Penture’s nostrils flared. But when he opened his mouth again, he spoke as the host welcoming important guests. “Please enjoy yourselves in my home, my lords. I hope I have time to speak to you later.” He bowed and turned to greet his next guest.

“Well,” Nick said as they descended the steps. “He’s a prick.”

“He put you in your place,” Arkady said. “But I am glad you have rediscovered your sense of humor. I introduce you to the woman now, yes?”

Nick turned to the Russian with a public smile, but with private venom in his voice. “Do not speak to me. In fact, do not even come near me. You may find your own way home tonight. Good-bye.” Without a backward glance he slipped sideways into the crowd.

“She has the yellow hair and tonight she wears a blue gown,” Arkady called over the heads of several partiers. “You cannot miss her.”

Nick did not reply. He headed straight for the tables where drinks were being served.

Fifteen minutes later he had relaxed, and could even admit to himself that the ball was agreeable. It was easy enough to avoid speaking more than a few words to women. No one admitted belonging to the Guild, of course, although everyone here was clearly fabulously wealthy. The clothes and jewelry were at the teetering pinnacle of fashion. The women were far more elegantly dressed, in fact, than many members of the ton. It was a grand spectacle. And they all talked of the glorious shipping venture as if it were real—as perhaps it was.

Nick scanned the crowd. His eyes caught on a face. A woman at the center of the crowd. And another face, a man’s. Dark faces. Nick felt some distant part of himself pricked by what he hadn’t even noticed a moment before; that not everyone at this party shared his skin color. Of course they didn’t; this was a Guild party. And yet now that Nick had noticed it, he found that part of him—perhaps it was the marquess—could see nothing else. He leaned back against the table and tried to forget it, tried to watch, as he had a moment before, people laughing, dancing, bowing and curtseying, the silks and satins worn by the women shifting beneath the glittering chandeliers, the more sober colors of the men’s clothing punctuating the scene, like rocks in the midst of a swirling, sunset-drenched sea of sumptuous cloth. But as he sipped his champagne he let his eyes rest on a handsome dark-skinned man, who was bowing, and signing the dance card of a white woman, the man’s hand on the woman’s elbow . . .

Suddenly that distant part of Nick was very near, nearer than breathing; the river was pouring through him, crashing like a flood, sweeping him away. Tom Molineaux was fighting Tom Cribb at Shenington Hollow, and Nick was in the crowd, with ten thousand other men, his voice hoarse after hours of yelling. It was the thirty-fourth round, and Molineaux’s hand had been broken for the last fifteen. But now Cribb was going to win. Both boxers were drenched, their bare hands wet and red, their battered bodies running with sweat, their feet caked with blood-churned mud. Molineaux was weaving, swaying into unconsciousness, and the crowd was howling for Cribbs’s imminent victory, howling for Molineaux’s defeat. Nick’s betting slip was clutched in his hand; he was set to win big on Cribb but he didn’t want the show to end—no one wanted the show to end. Nick and the crowd howled with one voice as Tom Molineaux crashed to the ground and Tom Cribb raised his battered face and open, streaming hands to the sky . . .

“Do you dance, my lord?” The words were soft in his ear.

The river retreated, like a fast-ebbing wave, sucking him back with it then beaching him in the ballroom. He gasped for breath, and stared wildly at the woman who was there beside him, her hands reaching for his.

“My lord, you must breathe. Yes, that’s it. Breathe and look at me.”

The orchestra was tuning up—the dancing was about to begin. A thousand candles caught the facets of a thousand jewels scattered in the hair, and on the hands, and around the throats of the women below. His own diamond tiepin winked, answering the general sparkle.

“Holy shit,” he whispered. He gripped the woman’s hands. “I was fine, and then . . .” He found he didn’t know how to explain what had happened. “The river swept me away . . . not in time, but in myself. To someone I used to be . . . a fight . . .”

“Ah,” she said. “Yes.”

Nick held on to her hands as if they were