The River of No Return

It had happened ten years ago. It had also happened two centuries ago, in the hills south of Salamanca. As the Most Honourable 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, sabre lifted high. Jem wasn’t the one in trouble, Nick thought, as the hooves descended.

 

One moment he was staring at his death, 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 towards 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, 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, assured and calm in the face of crisis. ‘They are dead in 2003. But they are not dead in 1812. They need me. You must send me back.’

 

The old man sucked in his cheeks and regarded Nick over the top of his peculiar eyewear. ‘There is no going back.’

 

‘Surely if I came to this time, I can return.’

 

‘There is no returning, I’m afraid. Progress is only for­ward. No one has ever gone back.’

 

‘Then I shall be the first.’

 

‘You cannot.’ The old man spread his hands, like an inn­keeper apologizing for having run out of roast beef. ‘I’m sorry, but no one ever returns. It is impossible.’

 

‘I am not no one.’ Nick made a motion to straighten his

 

cuffs, a gesture that never failed to intimidate, only to dis­cover that he was dressed in almost nothing.

 

‘I’m very much afraid that, in this regard, you are. Even if it were physically possible to go back, which it is not, the Guild has rules and you must abide by them.’

 

‘Guild? What control can a guild have over me? I am Nicholas Falcott, Marquess of Blackdown. I am no artisan.’

 

‘Please, listen to me.’ The man leaned forward and propped his elbows on his thighs, his hands clasped down between his knees. Behind his freakish spectacles, his hazel eyes were huge and earnest, like the eyes of an old plough horse. ‘I know it is hard to understand, but please be attentive.’

 

‘Which monarch now reigns? I must speak to the king immediately –’

 

‘Young man!’ The hazel eyes flared, their fire stirred. ‘You will listen to me!’

 

Nick raised his eyebrows but shut his mouth.

 

The old man subsided into his seat. ‘Thank you.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Now. You are in the year 2003. It has been almost two centuries since you are believed to have perished in Spain. You left no heir. The marquessate of Blackdown died with you.’

 

The marquessate – extinct. It had passed from father to son since Lord Clancy Falcott had routed the nuns and razed the convent that had stood by the River Culm; for his pains he had been made the first Marquess of Blackdown by Henry VIII. Nicholas had never seen a nun until he went to Spain, and then, at Badajoz . . . He shut his eyes. This deathly dream was bad enough. He did not wish to add to its horrors by thinking of Badajoz. Yet how fitting it would have been for the marquessate, born from the destruction of a convent, to expire at Badajoz, in defence of those pitiful women.

 

But that hadn’t happened. Instead, Lord Blackdown and his title had marched away from Badajoz with the rest of Wellington’s infamous army. He and his title had stumbled together across Spain for a few more hot and desolate weeks, only to die together for no cause at all, scrabbling in the dust, watched by the flat black eyes of Jem Jemison . . .

 

The old man cleared his throat, and Nick opened his eyes. ‘I’m dead.’

 

‘You are not dead,’ the man said. ‘Nor do you dream. The marquessate is extinct. Falcott House is now owned by the National Trust. And the king is a queen.’

 

‘The National Trust? What in blazes is that?’

 

‘It means, essentially, that your former estate is well cared for. By a charity.’

 

‘My former estate.’ Nick blew his breath out between pursed lips.

 

‘Yes. I know it is a shock, but I’m afraid I have news you might find even harder to stomach. It is a harsh rule, but the Guild insists that you must leave the country of your birth. Leave and never return. Not ever. Not for as long as you live.’

 

The dream became truly terrible then. Nick’s head seemed to crack open with pain, and his sight darkened and the room filled with people. Nick heard his own voice but wasn’t sure if he was speaking words. Then something sharp pinched his arm, and the dream was washed away into bliss­ful nothingness.When Nick woke again, he was without pain. But he was still in the too-white, too-bright room, and the old man was still beside his bed, though he was wearing a different shirt, a bright orange one which had the word GAP printed across it in bold, black letters. Nick puzzled over that, then looked up into the man’s face. ‘You again? Lord grant me a different dream!’

 

‘Good morning.’

 

‘I suppose it is still the future?’

 

‘I’m afraid so.’

 

Ten minutes later Nick had stormed about, rattled and banged upon the frustratingly locked door, stared mesmer­ized out of the window at the horseless traffic in the street fifteen (fifteen!) storeys beneath him and at the unrecogniz­able sprawl that was, apparently, London, the river nearly devoid of boats and laced across with bridges. He was, he guessed from the position of a shockingly white St Paul’s and a few – a very few – steeples, somewhere in Southwark, of all the godforsaken places.

 

‘Is the abbey gone?’

 

‘Westminster Abbey still stands. You can’t see it for the new buildings.’

 

Nick turned from the window. ‘I’m in London, though. London of the future.’

 

‘Yes.’

 

‘Why? Why am I here?’

 

‘I am glad to finally hear a rational question from you. You are in London because this is the Guild’s European hospital. You will stay here until your concussion is healed. But then you must leave. For ever.’ He looked at Nick a little warily.

 

‘So when I am healed you will put me on a ship and send me off? Wherever the winds take me? An exile?’

 

‘Oh, no.’ The old man smiled. ‘The Guild will choose your new country for you, and prepare you in every way to live in it. The Guild will care for you. First you will spend a year at one of our compounds, getting ready to enter modern life. Most people remember their year in the compound as one of the happiest they have known.’

 

Nick wondered if that was the light of fanaticism behind the old man’s eyes. ‘And then?’

 

‘At the end of the year you will move to your new home. The Guild will provide you with wealth, property, whatever you need to start anew. The rest is up to you. You can take a job if you like. Many of us end up working for the Guild. Like me.’ He straightened his shoulders. ‘I am a greeter.’

 

Nick leaned back against the window ledge and looked the man up and down. His mysteriously declarative shirt had short, cuffless sleeves. His hairy forearms were on show, like a labourer’s. GAP. Was that some sort of code? Or was he branded, like a criminal?

 

‘It’s a shock, isn’t it?’ the old man said gently. ‘This city, my clothes, everything. I assure you, you’d think I was exactly as funny looking if you saw me in the clothes I wore in my old life.’

 

‘Who were you?’

 

‘I am – was . . .’ He hesitated. ‘I still have trouble keeping my tenses straight, and it has been so many years since I jumped. I was a Frank. A butcher by trade. I jumped from Aachen in 810 and landed in 1965. An unusually long leap.’ There was a note of pride in his voice. ‘I was sent to London and I have never returned to Austrasia. Or even to what is now known as Germany. It is forbidden.’

 

‘And you abide by these rules?’

 

‘Yes. You will, too.’

 

Nick thought he would keep his own counsel on that. ‘How did you know who I am?’

 

‘We keep a log of people who vanish, and of people who appear.’

 

‘Surely people get lost every day.’ Nick turned and looked down again at the teeming city. His eyes followed a tiny person as he – she! The person was wearing trousers, but Nick saw now that it was a woman – strode to a street corner. She stepped with confidence into the path of an enormously tall, perfectly rectangular red carriage that was bearing down on her without any visible means of locomotion. Nick gasped, but somehow the ghastly machine came to a stop mere inches from her. She seemed not to notice it at all, but sauntered boyishly on her way and disappeared behind the blank glass wall of another building. Nick turned slowly to face the white room and the little man who was his only anchor in this strange dream world. ‘Please tell me that I am dreaming, or dead. And this is either heaven or hell.’

 

‘No.’ The butcher shook his head. ‘I will not tell you that, for it isn’t true. This is the same world you left, only it is a little bit older, and a little bit greyer.’

 

Nick looked at the rectangles on the ceiling emanating light. They were miraculous, but they were neither beautiful nor comforting. Was he in hell? ‘That dragoon was about to skewer me.’

 

‘You could see you were about to die, and so you jumped. It is the most common prompt. I jumped right before a burning beam crushed me; I was trying to save my donkey from a fire.’ The butcher sighed. ‘I am sure she burned, poor Albia.’

 

‘Do you mean to tell me that what happened to me is commonplace?’

 

‘No. Not at all. But it does happen, and when it does, the Guild tries to be ready. We have a global network of research­ers who document such cases. There is an enormous library in Milton Keynes and another in Chongqing. Our records go back many hundreds of years. Your disappearance was wit­nessed on the battlefield and one of your comrades gained a reputation for being insane by telling everyone about it for years afterwards. Your mother was informed that you were dead, but the Guild listened to the rumour that you had van­ished into thin air. Sure enough, you appeared again, last week. Quite dramatically – you were mown down by a car.’

 

Nick frowned. He had been in the maelstrom of battle. Nothing could be more all-consuming, more purely sensual, than the experience of fighting for your life and against the lives of others in a mass of men and horses, choked and blinded by smoke, deafened by gunfire and screaming . . . there was no disappearing in that moment, none whatso­ever . . . except into death.

 

After a moment the butcher spoke again, softly. ‘You jumped from the Battle of Salamanca. It was the twenty-second of July, 1812.’

 

‘The Battle of Salamanca.’ Nick repeated the words slowly. So it had a name. It had already happened. It was over. ‘Did we . . . ?’ Nick stopped. It felt gauche to ask how the day went. The battle had only just begun when he was unhorsed. Many men were still to fight and die or survive.

 

‘It was a glorious triumph. And in 1815, your armies won not only the battle, but the war.’

 

The whole war. Over. Folded away into history books like bridal linens into an attic trunk. Salamanca a glorious tri­umph . . . but what did they say of the siege of Badajoz and its aftermath? Everything? Nothing? Nick shook his head. ‘This is madness,’ he said.

 

‘I’m sorry.’

 

‘Sorry?’ Nick scrubbed at his face with the palms of his hands, then ran his fingers up into his hair. Rage boiled up in him. ‘What am I meant to say to that? “No matter, my dear Sir Butcher”? “That’s quite all right”? Good God, man, you have told me how my mother came to learn of my own death. Except that I am not dead and my mother is. Two centuries dead.’

 

The butcher leaned back in his chair and appraised Nick for a moment, much as he might have assessed a leg of pork before chining it. Then he turned to the bedside table and picked up a large, pale envelope filled with papers. He reached in and found a smaller envelope. ‘The Guild wishes you to have this,’ he said. ‘The location of your jump and your uni­form strongly supported the thesis that you were the long-lost Lord Blackdown, but we knew for certain when we saw this.’ He dipped his fingers into the envelope and extracted Nick’s signet ring.

 

Seeing it there in the butcher’s hand made Nick feel for it, irrationally, on his own finger. His finger was bare. Bare of the ring he had worn since the day his father died. Nick looked and saw that his hand was sun-bronzed except where the ring had been.

 

His finger was real. His ring was real. Why wasn’t his ring on his finger? How had the butcher come to have it? Nick groped his way back to the bed and sat down. ‘You are . . . telling me the truth,’ he whispered. As he said it, he knew, for the first time he really knew, that it was true.

 

‘Yes.’

 

‘This is the year 2003.’

 

‘Yes.’

 

Nick closed his eyes for a long moment, then opened them again. ‘May I have my ring?’ he said quietly.

 

The butcher handed it to him, and Nick held it in his palm for a moment. It felt heavy, just as it had the day his mother removed it from his dead father’s hand. She had turned from the body where it lay, broken by a fall from a horse, and looked into Nick’s eyes for a moment. She wore a riding habit, and the train was swept over her arm. She curtseyed almost to the ground, the train rising to her wrist like a wing. Then she held out the ring for him to take. Nick, fifteen years old, had pushed the still-warm metal down over his knuckle as he stared at the top of his mother’s bent head.

 

Now he slipped the ring onto his finger again. This was the sign of his privilege, his belonging. And yet no one living had ever known him.

 

‘I’m afraid that is the only trinket you will be able to keep from your former life,’ the butcher said. ‘Most of us aren’t lucky enough to have anything at all, but instructions from the Guild headquarters here in London are clear – you will be allowed to keep the ring.’

 

The butcher sounded faintly jealous, and a ripple of pride washed over Nick. ‘I’d like to see them try to take it from me,’ he said, and was mortified to hear how childish he sounded.

 

Those hazel eyes regarded him levelly for a moment, then dropped to his hand. ‘You must be careful with that. No one must guess its meaning. Or perhaps I should say, its former meaning.’

 

Nick rubbed his ring with the thumb of his other hand and vowed that no one would ever take it off him again. ‘What is your name, butcher?’

 

The man gave him a wan smile. ‘Thank you for your inter­est,’ he said. ‘But it is rude to ask a Guild member his or her real name. Never do it; no one would tell you anyway. My Guild name, and the name I go by now, is Ricchar Hartmut. Your Guild name is up to you. It can contain only one of your original names. I chose to give them all up. It was easier that way.’

 

Nick’s thumb stilled on the broad, flat surface of his ring. The man before him had jumped more than a thousand years forward in time. His face was patient, but his eyes were bleak. ‘Gracious God,’ Nick muttered under his breath.

 

‘Yes.’ Ricchar nodded. ‘Now you begin to have the feel­ings. It is a hard road.’ He stood, suddenly all business. ‘But you have no worries. The Guild will take care of you, educate you, give you all the money you need to build a comfortable new life. We want you to be happy.’

 

Happiness was a feeling Nick couldn’t imagine experienc­ing ever again. Already he could tell he was trembling on the edge of an abyss of grief so deep he might never reach its bottom. He said nothing.

 

Ricchar continued. ‘Once you choose your Guild name, which you must do before you leave this room, no one will ever call you by the name you were born to, or by your title, again.’ He paused, then said, as if the words left a bad taste in his mouth, ‘My lord.’

 

So he was to be nameless and nationless. He considered for a few seconds, then chose. ‘Nicholas Davenant.’ His own first name and his paternal grandmother’s maiden name.

 

‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Davenant,’ Ricchar said, and held out his hand.

 

‘Call me Nick,’ Nick said, shaking the hand, and he felt the change begin to happen. I am shaking hands with a Frankish butcher, he thought. I have just told him to call me Nick. And then: By rights we should both be dust.