The River of No Return by Bee Ridgway (best novels of all time txt) 📕

again and an old earl got up and began to speak in a particularly soporific drone about how the poor like to be hungry.

He had looked away, and then he felt the river rushing all around him, all around them all—rushing at full flood. And he the only living man, afloat on a broken spar, among the drowned.

Nick stood up at the next opportunity, bowed to the men seated near him, and then he left. Arkady was right. This was no place for a man who knew the future.

Kirklaw had leapt to his feet and scurried after him, catching up with him just outside the door. “You didn’t give your speech.”

“No.”

“Will you yet? The vote won’t come for several more days.”

Nick had thrust his hands into the pockets of his greatcoat and found the acorn there. “I don’t think so, Your Grace.”

Kirklaw nodded, once. “Well, then.”

“Indeed.”

They had bowed coldly to each other and gone their separate ways, Nick out into the world, the duke back into the chamber.

Nick had sent the carriage home with his robes, and then he strolled alone up Whitehall in the light of a spectacular sunset, tossing the little acorn from hand to hand. He couldn’t feel the river now. The spring evening was alive with birdsong and breezes, which, for this half hour anyway, blew the scent of meadow grasses in from the surrounding farmland and carried away the stink of human strife and struggle.

Nick tossed the acorn high and caught it low.

* * *

Now he stood beside the decrepit statue of Charles II in the center of Soho Square. Two boys and a dog were driving a lowing herd of cattle along the east side, past what had been, in the eighteenth century, the notorious White House brothel. It was probably still a brothel, Nick thought, then saw a man in fine but decidedly rumpled clothing open the door and slip out into the morning sunlight. He stood on the step yelling at the cows that blocked him from entering the street. So it was a brothel—but the “skeleton room” and sinking sofa and other contraptions for which the White House had been famous in the last century—Nick didn’t think they would be in the style of calm, elegant Alva Blomgren. Nick looked around the square at the other houses. Which was Alva’s? He would simply have to wait and hope that Alva emerged sooner rather than later.

In the meantime, it was a pleasure to stand here beside the slightly bilious-looking marble monarch who presided over Soho Square and watch all of society scampering past. Horses and carriages, men and women, everyone busy, full of life, chattering to one another like magpies. All the different accents, the cant, the half-loving insults flying from everyone’s lips; Nick found himself listening intently to the snatches of conversation that passed him by, his brain spinning with all the old information he had forcefully buried after his jump.

It wasn’t that there weren’t things to worry about. Kirklaw’s insinuations and the marchioness’s unhappiness and how to find a way to be with Julia and who was Mr. Mibbs and whether to betray the Guild and the looming horror of the Pale—still hundreds of years away but coming closer, according to the Guild, every day. But London was big and brassy and noisome and rude—it was full of suffering and vice and folly—and Nick loved it. This—here and now—this was his city. It was going to be hard to leave and go back to cars and high-rise buildings and underground sewers. He cast an ironic glance at Charles II, who was holding his tummy and sneering down at it all from under his monstrous wig. “You loved it, too,” Nick told the statue. “Mr. Twelve Illegitimate Children.”

Here was a sight. Walking toward him along Frith Street, a countrified maiden in an old-fashioned homespun skirt and stiff bodice was carrying a huge basket over her arm. It was bulging with beets. She switched between bending uncomfortably forward to carry it and listing comically off to the right or the left. Beside her, an enormous mongrel dog the size of a Dartmoor pony kept pace with her quick, short steps, but it was whining and hopping along on three feet. As they turned the corner onto the square, Nick could see that the dog was harnessed to a cart; clearly this was the intended beet hauler, but the dog had sustained an injury somewhere along the way. The girl was chattering angrily at it, and it hung its heavy, jowly head in sorrow. Together, girl and dog looked like something out of a fairy tale. Nick was about to step forward and offer his help when she looked up, and he saw that she was Alva. He half raised his hand, but she shook her head ever so slightly. He carried his hand on up to his hair and tried to look as if it were the most natural thing in the world to stand in the street scratching one’s head.

Alva and her dog continued on their mutually uncomfortable journey on around the square, eventually coming to a stop on the corner of Carlisle Street, outside a dapper yellow house with white pilasters. Alva shook her finger at the dog, and it dropped onto its belly and put its head down on its paws. She put the basket of beets into the cart, then went up the steps. The door was opened, before she reached the top, by an old woman dressed in black, and Nick watched in some amusement as Alva harangued her with the tale of the dog’s failings. Every time she pointed down the steps at the dog, it lifted its head, only to drop it again as she continued her tirade. Finally Alva went in, and the old woman came creakily down the steps. She hoisted the basket of beets and led the dog and cart around into Carlisle Street, and presumably thence into the mews.

Nick stood considering