The River of No Return Bee Ridgway (best free ebook reader .TXT) 📖

all their food and drink and clothing. Nick had disappeared in 1812, but was traveling back only as far as 1815 because, Arkady said with maddening reserve, 1815 was when the Guild needed Nick’s services, and no sooner. But those three missing years were a problem. His excuse was to be a bump on the head and a spell of amnesia. Whatever he didn’t remember he could blame on his injury. The trouble was more likely to be what he remembered rather than what he forgot: the twenty-first-century phrases and habits that had become second nature. So Arkady drilled him. History, politics, manners. How to signal disapproval and approval. How to stand and how to sit. Boxing, fencing, taking snuff. Almost every muscle must relearn the more arrogant tension of the Regency. Much of it felt effeminate to Nick now, and what didn’t felt so aggressive as to border on the criminal. It was a strange mix, to be sure, but Nick found that it was all coming back very quickly.

“I’ll remember this man’s world stuff on my own,” Nick had said after only two days of it. They were finally collapsed in the leather chairs at the end of a dreary afternoon spent playing hazard and gossiping about political and sexual scandals two centuries old. “It’s the women I’m afraid of.” Nick worked on untying his cravat. “I need to remember dance steps and the language of flowers and the names of all of Lady Corinna Alistair’s grandchildren.”

“Bah,” Arkady said, flinging his own cravat aside and beginning to tug at one stiff boot. “I cannot pretend to be a woman and prance about with you.”

“Why not? For God’s sake, we look a pair of fools already. Allow me.” Nick reached for Arkady’s leg. Arkady extended it, and Nick pulled his boot off for him. “Holy shit, Arkady—your feet stink.”

“Language!”

“Bloody hell, your feet stink,” Nick said. “Though for your information, shit is one of the oldest words in the English language and was in full circulation—”

“Just get this second shitting boot off,” Arkady interrupted, shoving his other leg forward.

Nick laughed as he tugged. “Cursing correctly is the highest test of fluency, Arkady. I’d advise you to stick to polite language.”

“Shitting boot, it isn’t right? But I can say fucking boot, yes?”

The boot came off and Nick stumbled backward. “Yes,” he said, recovering his balance and tossing the boot away. “That’s right. Who knows why.”

Arkady pursed his lips, committing the information to memory. Then he smiled. “But women,” he said. “I can talk about women in any language. And I do not want you, my priest, to worry about the women. It is like, how do you say it? Like riding a bicycle.”

Nick was fairly certain that it was nothing like riding a bicycle. He struggled to extricate himself from his incredibly tight jacket. Arkady smirked at him, offering no help, his arms behind his head, his stockinged feet stretched out to the fire.

Ever since that drink in the Lamb, Nick had played nice and kept his own counsel about most things, including how he intended to behave once he was back in his own time and his old persona. He had no intention of blindly following Guild orders, or slaughtering Ofan just because the Guild pointed and said kill. But in spite of his reservations, he was eager to return, and the two weeks of practice had opened the floodgates of his memory. He hadn’t even wanted to go out into contemporary London again, and not because he was afraid of Mr. Mibbs, who, according to Alice, had disappeared into the river, leaving no trail for the Guild to follow. No, the next time Nick walked down Pall Mall, he wanted to see Carlton House ablaze with lights.

Carlton House and the Royal Mews and Hungerford Street, all restored. The pomp and the squalor, the shine and the stench. Now that he could without choking on grief, Nick let himself long for it, let himself drift through the days leading up to his return on a warm current of homesickness.

And now, finally, they were on their way. Hurtling toward his past in a sports car. Practice was over and the game was about to begin. Soon enough they would be pulling in at Falcott House. Visitors could rent holiday apartments there, and Arkady had chosen one that had been converted from the old kitchens. The plan was to spend a couple of days on the property to accustom Nick to the surroundings, then make the jump back to 1815 when Arkady felt Nick was ready.

Arkady’s song ended on a long, warbling high note. He glanced at Nick for approval, but Nick sat thin lipped, staring straight ahead. The warm current ran suddenly cold . . . what the hell was he doing? There is no return . . . there is no return . . . and yet that was the curve of Stoke Hill, and it was rushing toward them fast, far too fast . . .

“Do you recognize anything?” Arkady spoke loudly, over the well-oiled roar of the little car’s big engine.

“Yes. Everything.” Nick gritted his teeth against the feeling that the car was hurtling out of control—though the speedometer read only thirty miles per hour.

“I know what you feel, my friend. It is strange. But never mind. Soon you will be home again and all of this”—he waved at the motorway and the cars—“will seem like a dream.”

“I don’t want it to seem like a dream. I like the twenty-first century.”

“You like ten years at the beginning of that century,” Arkady said. “Do you like the other nine decades?”

“I don’t know about anything except the first decade,” Nick said.

Arkady only grunted, and Nick gazed to his left, at Exeter’s suburbs giving way to winter fields. It was all entirely familiar, even now that most of the hedgerows had fallen to agribusiness and the villages had all swelled to five times their nineteenth-century size.

Around this next bend and he should be able to see Castle Dar, the Earl of Darchester’s estate.