The River of No Return

little motherly gesture.
    He let his hand fall from her face. “I had hoped . . .” He sighed. “Well. The angels must watch over you now.”
    “Religion, Grandfather? At the eleventh hour?”
    “Ha!” He flashed her a real grin then, the irrepressible, scapegrace expression that she loved. “It is not the eleventh hour, my dear. It is a minute or two before the twelfth. And those minutes crawl. We must bid them gallop. Come. Let us play, my little foundling. My darling one.”
    Julia’s tears spilled over then, and she didn’t care. “One last time.”
    “Good girl.” His hands fluttered, and she took them both in hers. The sliver of light streamed between them, illuminating their fingers.
    “Watch the dust, there in the light. Watch as I make it dance, my poppet.”
    Together they focused on the dust. Julia felt her grandfather’s great power, felt how he willed the dust to dance. At first it only shivered, then it began to move faster and faster until it seemed to blow like snow in a blizzard. In the light on either side of them, the dust moved as slowly as it ever had. Lord Percy’s eyes blazed, then broke focus. His fingers clasped hers strongly, then released. He fell back with a choked cry.
    The dust slowed immediately, and Julia was left gripping hands that responded not at all to her kisses and tears.
    Eamon Percy, now the sixth Earl of Darchester, threw open the door to find Julia pressing her grandfather’s palm to her wet cheek. The old man’s head was thrown back, his dead face grinning defiance.
    Hartland, Vermont, 2013
    Nick was on his way into town when the text came through from Tom Feely: “get here now cheese inspector.”
    Nick pulled a youie, then made a sharp right onto Densmore Hill Road. It was a cold December and the hill would be hard going, but Nick had chains on his tires. He’d get to the farm in time to charm the inspector.
    The pickup crested the hill with a groan and Nick patted the dashboard. The sky was a thin blue and the bare trees shivered resentfully in the wind. Still, the view out over the snowy valley struck Nick much as it had the first time he’d seen it on a glorious fall day four years ago: This corner of Vermont was a place he could learn to call home. He let the good feeling in and burst into a loud rendition of “The King Shall Enjoy His Own Again.”
    Down below him, Thruppenny Farm hugged the base of the hill like a child trying to hide in its mother’s skirts. Nick could see the red barns with their thick caps of snow, and the barnyards, tramped to mud by the forty Guernsey cows that Tom Feely kept for his artisan cheese business. Nick bellowed as the truck picked up speed: “‘Then let us rejoice, with heart and voice! There doth one Stuart still remain!’”
    Nick downshifted and eased around the last curve. He was happy to play lord of the manor for the elderly cheese inspector, who was a dyed-in-the-wool Anglophile. The visits were always the same. The old man would greet him with shy deference, they would chat for a few minutes about the queen or crumpets, and then they would go into the cheese-making room, and from there into the smaller cheese cave. Immediately on the left were the shelves dedicated to raw-milk Bries and Camemberts, cheeses yielding enough to melt a heart of stone—and entirely against the law. The inspector would pass them right by, saying something like, “English cheese! People go on and on about French-style cheeses but they don’t even exist for me. No, I don’t even see them. Give me a good, firm English cheese every time. Isn’t that right, Mr. Davenant?” His eyes would twinkle at Nick, and Nick would murmur his agreement. Then the inspector would linger over the shelves of stolid Cheddars, aged enough to be lawful—the prize-winning truckles for which Thruppenny Farm was becoming famous.
    Nick didn’t mind indulging the old man with a touch of Merrie Olde. It had been so very long now since Nick had been home that he took a guilty pleasure in following the cheese inspector to his green and pleasant fairyland. And Tom had nothing to complain of. For nigh on four years the inspector had given Thruppenny Farm top marks in every category, signing off on his list of checkboxes even as the seductive funk of bloomy rinds filled his nostrils.
    Nick parked nose to nose with Tom’s Methuselah of an old Farmall tractor, its pigeon-toed front wheels capped with snow. Downgrading his song to a whistle, Nick