The River of No Return

wrong . . .”
    “Oh, it will pass,” Clare said. “No doubt about it.”
    Jemison glanced up. “What is ironic is that if we still had an estate to work with, the Corn Bill would have helped our little dream, Clare.”
    Ah. So he called her Clare when his guard was down. “What dream?” Julia asked it softly.
    Clare shrugged. “A small-scale one. Jemison and I were going to turn Blackdown into a model farm. Soldiers and sailors returning from the war with nowhere to go—a new system of cooperative farm management that would slowly do away with tenancy and put the land in the hands of those who work it. But it was just wishes and horses. And who knows? The Corn Bill might have helped, Jem, but it also might well have squashed our plan. So many things might have squashed it.” She reached out and touched the round haunch of an apple in the bowl. “So many things did squash it. Best perhaps that it didn’t happen.”
    “And now here we are in London,” Jemison said brightly. “Where those same soldiers and sailors will be smashing windows and dragging fat lords into the streets and dancing the hornpipe on them in a few days’ time.”
    Julia raised her eyebrows. “Surely not!”
    “Oh, you don’t know our London mob,” Jemison said. “A venerable creature, the mob. And it won’t be the lords’ houses, alone. Whole parishes will feel their wrath. Three London parishes have refused to organize against the Corn Bill, and can you guess which ones they are? St. Mary-le-Bone, Hanover Square, and St. James. Tomorrow Westminster is delivering forty-two thousand, four hundred and seventy-three signatures against the bill. But the great men of Mayfair? Who get their money from rents, rents they can keep high if the price of corn is fixed? Not a single name. Not one.”
    Julia said nothing. What could she say? She felt like a milk pumpkin, raised all alone under a protective cloth, fed rich, unnatural food, and grown pale and strange as a result.
    Jemison seemed to understand. He put a thin hand on her shoulder in a brotherly gesture. “All this talk, this heightened feeling, it’s about more than the Corn Bill,” he said gently. “It’s important because it’s about the future, Miss Julia, when we shall have fellowship among men, and common property, and fair wages. But before all that, we must have a cheap loaf. Grub first, then ethics! That’s why we fight the Corn Bill so fiercely.” He gestured to the papers. “That’s a few weeks’ outpourings only. This bill, you see, it’s turning the tide of feeling. It’s so bloody cynical that everyone can see it, pardon my language. When the lords pass the bill, it will be like they are saying to their tenants, ‘Yes, Joe, I’d rather see you starve than make a living. Now pull that forelock and bend that knee.’” He squeezed Julia’s shoulder. “You will see the future when they pass that bill, Miss Julia, if you are still in London. You will see the future begin.”
    “Maybe,” Clare said. “The future has begun many times before and hasn’t come to much.”
    “Doubter.” Jemison shook his head. “Why are women such doubters? It really brings a man down.” He took a broadside and struck a pose, one hand uplifted with the paper so he could read it, the other, with the apple core, balanced on his hip. “‘UP, man of reason! Rouse thee UP! AROUSE thee for the strife!’” He waved his apple core suggestively in front of his trouser flap, grinning at Clare. “‘Be UP and doing—for the world with mighty change is rife!’”
    “Enough!” Clare laughed and snatched the broadside from Jemison’s hand. “I’m sorry, Julia. Mr. Jemison is . . . well, words fail me.”
    He turned that happy grin on them both, then brought the apple stem-end toward his mouth and began eating the core. Julia stared. “Learned to do that in Spain,” he said, mouth full. “Not enough to eat.” He stuffed the last of the core in his mouth.
    “He’s just trying to shock,” Clare said, looking bored. “It means he likes you, believe it or not.”
    “I suppose I’m flattered.”
    “He can behave like a gentleman when he must.”
    Jemison swallowed. “Can’t. Tallow chandler’s son.” He licked his fingers.
    “Rich as Croesus,” Clare said. “Just playing at being a workingman.”
    Jemison reached for another apple from the bowl on the table. “Sticks and stones, my lady. Sticks and stones. So. Tell me. What did your brother have to