The River of No Return

they walked away down Berkeley Street like two alley cats, off for a night of fun.
    Bella was right. It was dreadful to be cooped up. Julia glowered at the men’s receding backs.
    But if the cats were away, Julia thought, the mouse could play. She was determined to practice her time tricks again. She knew, from what she had learned through the peephole, that her skills needed training and honing to become more powerful, but she also knew that she could never practice while there was the faintest chance that either Nick or Lebedev might be home, or might come home.
    Stroking its binding with one finger, Julia examined the book she held. It was smooth and small and filled with some secret that was locked up inside it. If she squeezed it, she might feel a heartbeat. Kisses and caresses. Poetry. Pleasant distractions designed to while away the hours.
    She glanced up at the window. The men were no longer in sight.
    Julia tossed the book onto her bed. What she needed was real knowledge. She had to become a scholar of time, and since she didn’t know whom to trust, she had to tutor herself, devise her own lessons, be an apprentice without a master. Or rather, time itself would have to be her master.
    She picked up a silver penny from her dressing table. “Georgius III Dei Gratia,” she read in the flickering light of the candle by her bed. She could make sense of that. “George the Third Thank God.” She contemplated his squashy profile and the silly wig on his poor, deluded head. The other side, with the crown floating over the number 1, was less legible. It read “MAG BRI FR ET HIB REX 1800.” She didn’t know what that meant, except the date and the rex . She had been seven in the year this coin was struck. Now she was twenty-two, and all alone with a gift as big as a kingdom and as mighty.
    She closed her eyes to clear her thoughts, then opened them again, regarding the penny not as an object but as a flashing moment in time. She tossed it gently into the air. It took no effort at all to freeze it. Julia kept it in her sights and walked around it, reading again the heads and then the tails side. She turned away and heard it clatter to the floor. She bent to pick it up. The count had kept Eamon frozen for a long time while he talked with Blackdown. He’d even turned his back on him. Julia tossed the penny in the air again, and again she froze it. She turned her back. Down it fell. “Blast.”
    An hour later, Julia could keep the penny frozen for a full fifteen minutes while she stared out of the window watching for Blackdown and Lebedev, straightened pillows, counted backward, closed her eyes, and thought of other things. She could freeze time in a circle around her, projecting in a pie shape, or focus the effect on a tiny space, just around the coin itself. Finally, she tried her hand at keeping the coin frozen while reading, but her excitement upon picking up the little book was so great that the penny slipped before she even cracked the cover. Besides, she was exhausted. Controlling time took energy and concentration, and she had achieved a great deal tonight already. Now, she told herself, for lesson number two. Literature. She forgot about the penny, sat down on the bed, and took up the book.
    It looked remarkably like the demure white prayer book that the vicar had given her in celebration of her confirmation. Those weekly visits to the vicarage for three months leading up to confirmation when she was thirteen were the only formal education Julia had ever received—and it had disgusted Grandfather. “Get them young,” he’d said every time he saw her practicing her answers. He’d been even more disgusted by the prim little book. “Pap,” he’d spat. “Sugar water.” The next time he had come home from London he had brought her an old, graphically illustrated edition of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs . “As an antidote,” he’d said. He’d stomped away, leaving her to pore over gory woodcuts of burnings at the stake, disembowelings, the glorious rewards of heaven, and the fiery torments of hell.
    She thought of Grandfather as she read again the golden letters spelling Elegies . It wasn’t that he hadn’t interested himself in her education. It was just that it was haphazard and followed his whims, whatever he was interested in at the moment. She had to read, in order to follow him in his reading, so he taught her how. She had to write, in order to write to him when he was away, so he taught her