The River of No Return

about a madman?”
    “It was the strangest thing. It happened just now, as we climbed down from the carriage. A man walked right up to Mother and addressed her. He was very formal, and exceedingly dour. Dressed expensively but in the most outmoded of fashions. At first we thought he must be an old acquaintance of Father’s or something, and Mother greeted him politely enough. But then he began to insist that there was a baby hidden in our house! A baby, can you imagine? He demanded that the baby be given to him. When Mother assured him in the kindest possible way that there was no baby and had been no baby in the house for twenty years, he became quite obstreperous, and demanded to see a man he called Altukhov.”
    “Altukhov? That sounds Russian.”
    “Yes, isn’t it curious?” Bella opened the door to her bedchamber and invited Julia in. “For of course we do have a Russian in the house, and what are the chances of that?”
    “Then what happened?” Julia sat in one of the two little chairs that faced the window looking out onto Berkeley Square.
    “The footman was very firm, and told the man to move along, that he had the wrong house, that he was bothering their ladyships, and all of that footmanish sort of thing that they say.” Bella unpinned her hat, took off her pelisse, and tossed them together with her reticule onto her bed. “It seemed at first to work, for the man appeared to calm down.” Bella checked her hair in the mirror and settled herself in the other chair. “But then”—she turned toward Julia, her eyes alight with humor—“I realized that for the whole time that the footman had been talking, the man had not been listening at all. He had been standing like a moonstruck cow, gaping at Mother as if she were a heavenly apparition. Which you must admit she never is, not even on her best days.”
    “Your mother is a beautiful woman,” Julia said dutifully.
    “Have it your way.” Bella flared her nostrils. “In any case, Mother stared back for a moment, and then—I wish you could have seen it—she clutched her breast and moaned. She stumbled up the stairs to the door, calling back to Coachman to drive the man from the door like a leper! Which Coachman did, by bellowing and flapping his arms at the man until he turned and walked away.” Bella laughed. “She actually said ‘like a leper,’ and her voice turned biblical. And Coachman . . . he looked like an apoplectic rooster!”
    “But that’s all terrifying! Thank goodness Coachman was able to drive the madman off.”
    Bella sighed. “I know, I suppose I ought to have found it frightening. Do you think there’s something wrong with me? But honestly, Julia, at least it was exciting.” She slumped down in her chair just as her brother had done in the library an hour earlier, and stared out of the window. Julia stared, too. Although she wasn’t actually incarcerated in London as she had been at Castle Dar, the effect was the same, for aside from her brief outing to Gunther’s, she had barely left the house. And yet, for all that the minutes moved as slowly as cold treacle, her life was far too exciting. Exciting—or perhaps she was simply insane, and was even now in the grip of a delusion that she could manipulate time, and that two lords were pursuing her with deadly intent. But . . . Julia smiled to herself. One of those lords was—to call a fig a fig—on the high road to becoming her lover, and she knew that he was real, for if she closed her eyes she could still feel that ermine beneath her fingers and taste his kisses on her lips.
    Bella interrupted her reverie. “I think things are drearier now because my value has gone up.”
    Julia opened her eyes. “Whatever do you mean?”
    Bella’s arms hung down over the arms of her chair like a rag doll’s. “Oh, before Nick’s miraculous reappearance I was a wealthy match, but the title was extinct, so I didn’t bring with me a connection to a powerful family. Any man who showed interest in me was either a fortune hunter, which was thrilling in a piratical sort of way, or else he truly admired me, which was flattering and sometimes even slightly tempting. Now that Nick is home, my stock in the marriage market has risen, and suddenly the most dreadfully important and boring men are monopolizing my time.” She sighed. “You see before you a valuable commodity.”
    “Surely you enjoy that. You are in London to catch a husband, remember?”
    “I suppose.”