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

Nick raised his eyebrows. Blackdown, Ohio. Hilarious. He wondered which dark, Satanic box stores were built, in the twenty-first century, on his tenants’ pleasant pastures. “So who is left?”

“Some twelve men who can work hard. And of course there are the old men, and the women work in the fields when they must, although they don’t like it.”

“You have been carrying this burden all on your own? I don’t suppose Mother has been of any help.”

“No,” she said flatly, and they paused for a moment, thinking of their mother. When Clare spoke again her face seemed to yearn toward him. “Everything has changed, and not just because you are dead. Were dead.” She smiled at her mistake. “It’s as if you left a hundred years ago.”

“Yes,” Nick said. “I know.”

“War kept us rich, Nick. I see that now.” Clare’s voice was low, hesitant, as if she were telling him a shameful secret. “Those men who went to Spain went as sacrifice to Mammon. And the manufactories. They eat people. They eat them up and demand more. They are spinning gold up there on the looms, but there never seems to be enough money, and the people are wretched. And we, we grow gold down here! In 1813 we grew enough corn to feed the world, but the people cannot live.” She looked down at her tightly laced fingers and deliberately untangled them, placing her hands on her thighs and straightening her spine. “At least Napoleon is locked away on Elba and the war is finally done. We may be poorer, but we are at peace.”

Nick swallowed a laugh. For God’s sake, he knew that Napoleon would escape in a few weeks’ time! He knew the name of the battle that was to come, knew its outcome, knew the name of every war that would follow down across two centuries. Wars to make this one look like child’s play. Waterloo! Forty-seven thousand casualties in a few hours. Forty-seven thousand, and for what? So that Sweden could win the Eurovision Song Contest in 1974? Nick bit the inside of his cheek to keep the laugh in. Yes, Clare, look behind you! The past is melting away, and the future is catching you up in its pantomime.

“Are you all right?” She had that wary look in her eye again.

Nick smiled, forcibly packing the Technicolor future back into the recesses of his mind. “Yes. I am merely thinking of Napoleon. Of the war. Now tell me. How does all of this translate into you selling Blackdown?”

Clare reached up and adjusted her cap on her head, then folded her hands in her lap. “When you died,” she said quietly, “it was as if a curtain had been pulled aside from a great truth. In France and in America they know it. Our day has passed.”

“Our day?”

She nodded.

He said nothing.

She continued, her voice a little stronger. “I mourned you; you will never know how I mourned you. But then I thought that if anything good could come of your death, it was this: Blackdown was now . . .”

“Free.” Nick said it roughly.

“I was going to say ‘unencumbered.’”

“Oh, let us speak plainly, Sister. Without me Blackdown is free of almost three centuries of bondage—more if you count the centuries it belonged to the Pope. Visiting the iniquity of the fathers onto the children unto the seventh generation.”

“You put it far more harshly than I ever thought to.”

“But it is what you meant.”

She sucked in her cheeks and regarded him for a long moment. “I thought that there must be a way to bring free men back to free land. Bring them back and not indenture land and men both to the same master. Have you not read of Robert Owen’s manufactories at New Lanark; it is possible to make a profit without sacrificing human dignity. He has proved it up there. Well, farming is not so different from manufacture. Why could we not do something similar at Blackdown? So I thought to invite a group of decommissioned soldiers and sailors—”

“You wanted to found a model community.” The laugh burst out before he even knew it was coming, fast and harsh. “By God, you have become a Benthamite!”

“Have you not seen the returning soldiers and sailors?” Clare leaned across the space between them and clasped his hand. “Nick, they have fought our war, but they have no homes, no work, no food. They have scars, like yours; they have been wounded inside, too. All they know how to do is fight the French. Now they fight themselves, and us—they fight in the streets, over scraps.”

“They are dogs.” Nick withdrew his hand and squeezed his eyes shut against Clare’s shocked silence. “I don’t mean that. There are good men among them.” He thought, for some reason, of Tom Feely and his cheeses, far away and in the future. He opened his eyes. “But they are not little orphan children, Clare. You cannot take them in and mother them.”

“No, of course not, Nick.” Clare leaned back. “And I was not meaning to turn Blackdown into an almshouse. Far from it. I wished to transform it, make it fit the modern age. After Mr. Cooper absconded I engaged a new steward. With his help I devised plans that would put our arable acreage into a trust. For twenty years the men would work the land much as our tenants do now, but the money they pay to me would go toward buying the land, do you see? At the end of twenty years they would own the land in common. The great farm would produce everything the families need to survive, and the extra would turn a profit that would be divided equally among them.”

“Yes, I see,” Nick said. “And after twenty years? Your noble soldiers would be living the high life, to be sure. But where would your money come from? What would happen to Falcott House?”

Clare frowned. “That doesn’t matter now. It isn’t going to happen. You are returned and with