The River of No Return

the day came that he was looming over her with a knife, she would spend her last moments smirking in his face and treasuring the memory of him like this. His mouth was gaping open, his long limbs were splayed and slack, and best of all, his snore was high and piercing, something like the choking gobble of a tom turkey. She closed the door silently and headed up to her room. She had a Minerva novel and was well launched into its third, splenetic volume. If she didn’t finish it now, perhaps it would at least send her to sleep.
    But an hour had passed and the trials of the perpetually fainting Matilda Weimar had neither come to an end nor dispatched Julia into the arms of Lethe. She found herself staring out of the window at the rain, her mind going in circles. The rain made her remember the kiss. The kiss made her think about Blackdown, and thinking about Blackdown made her wonder what bound him to the horrible snoring Russian downstairs. Debt? Honor? Friendship? Or was Blackdown some sort of slave to Lebedev’s time manipulations?
    Julia repressed the thought. Thank heaven she had witnessed that scene at Castle Dar, for now she knew that if she so much as imagined playing with time, the Russian might sense it. And if he sensed it, he would think she was one of those he was hunting. Would he skewer her on a sword, or shoot her? Or he might choose more subtle methods. Her saddle girth might be cut or a finial might be knocked from the roof of the house just when she was walking below—did this house even have finials?
    Finials! For God’s sake. Julia clenched her fists and tried to stop thinking at all, which made her hear the rain against the window. And the rain made her remember the kiss.
    “Botheration!” She threw her book across the room and felt a fierce sort of pleasure when a badly stitched parcel of pages broke free and fell out. She hoped it was the part where the Countess of Wolfenbach is locked in a closet giving birth as the corpse of her lover bleeds all over her gown.
    Julia jumped from the bed. She should have chosen boredom at Cousin Lydia’s over fretting isolation in this ominously pensive house. It was almost as if the house were haunted, and she could feel the vibrations of a restless spirit. But that restless spirit was her own.
    She needed a more active distraction than the damp sentiments of Matilda and friends. She could not go downstairs where the count was sleeping, and she could not go out. Nowhere to go but up. She would explore the top three stories of the house.
    She slipped out into the hallway. There was Bella’s door, and Clare’s, and in the center, the dowager marchioness’s grand suite. The marquess was, of course, entitled to claim the master suite as his own, but he had refused to displace his mother. There was the count’s bedroom—Julia stepped past quickly, her heart in her throat. Beside that, Blackdown’s. Every impulse urged her to go in and explore. She did put her hand on the cool porcelain knob, and turned it just a little, enough to know that it wasn’t locked. But she didn’t turn it all the way, and with firm steps she went past that last, most fascinating bedchamber.
    The next floor up contained some empty rooms, some locked rooms, and the old nursery. It was bare but for an elegant dapple-gray rocking horse with a mane and tail of real white horsehair. Julia spent a few minutes with him, imagining Clare and Nick and Bella as children, playing on and around him. She had always envied them their siblinghood, their togetherness. Had they shared this beautiful toy, or had there been tussles, tears? Julia stroked the horse’s wooden nose, knowing that had he been hers, she would have had trouble sharing him. She would have ridden him for hours, a bandit queen, her sword—no, her bow and arrow—repelling all attackers. She gazed into his dark eye, enlivened by one painted white dot. He kept his secrets and wouldn’t tell which fairylands he had conquered in his time. So she set him rocking with a tug of his thick tail. “Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steed,” she whispered, and climbed the stairs to the topmost floor.
    Servants’ quarters, which she ignored with the same fastidiousness with which she had marched past the bedrooms two floors down, and attic rooms, which were locked. At the end of the corridor there was a narrow, curving staircase leading still further up. Where did it go? The house on Berkeley Square was only five stories tall, and