The River of No Return

gestures—Nick felt a little dizzy.
    “I say so. I know it. You will have to struggle against how much you are happy to be the marquess. In fact, he will try to eat you up, this marquess who waits for you in the past. You will have to fight him. I will help you in that struggle.” Arkady spread his hands. “I am coming with you. Back to 1815.”
    “You’re coming too?”
    “Yes.” Arkady leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. “Does that please you?”
    “I’m not exactly pleased with anything having to do with this mess.”
    “Such friendliness. But you will be glad, I assure you. In the meantime, Nicholas Falcott, Marquess of Blackdown, we must accustom you again to your old names and your old personality.”
    Arkady had said those names—names that had once been his—three times in a minute. In this room, no less; the same room where Nick had spent his last night in London before leaving for Spain. Before breaking his mother’s heart. Before destroying his patrimony. Before ruining his sisters’ lives. Before damning his own sorry soul to hell at Badajoz.
    Arkady’s voice was tender when he spoke again. “Shall we return to the more pleasant topic of the lovely dairymaid?”
    “The dairymaid. Yes.” Nick took a deep breath, let it out, and packed his bad feelings away for another day. “She was lovely. Buxom. She came in, set the pails down, and drew the scarf from her bosom. Her bodice was low-cut, but the scarf hid everything, you understand.”
    “Yes, I do understand.”
    “She took it off, and her breasts rose up plump. One nipple peeked over the edge of her bodice. She used her scarf to wipe her face and stood fanning herself with her hand for a moment in the cool of the creamery. Her cheeks were flushed, and then as she bent to scratch her ankle, her breasts simply seemed to spill out. I was only about a foot away, crouched at that level. The world turned upside down. I was flooded with sensation. It seemed mostly to be in my head, a rushing of blood, or something like that.”
    “Did you do anything?” Arkady puffed his cigar.
    “No. Of course not. I was ten.”
    “But I, I would have taken the opportunity. I would have said, ‘Now is my chance to become more educated.’”
    Nick took a sip of his brandy and eyed the lanky Russian. His head was thrown back and he was blowing smoke rings again, clearly lost in his own fantasy. “Remind me why we are even discussing this?”
    Arkady rolled his head to one side to look dreamily at Nick. “I am trying to describe to you the feeling. You do not know what it is. Like a little boy who does not know what it is to desire a woman. Then suddenly you do know what it is. Forever afterward you know. At first you cannot control this feeling; it is—how do you say it nowadays—the boss of you. It arrives when it arrives. But soon you learn how to control it. You can make the feeling come and you can make it go. You are the boss of it. Do you see?”
    “So it feels like desire? Someone near me is shifting time and I think, ‘That’s lovely. I want to have sex.’”
    “No. Deliberately you misunderstand me. It feels like . . . like you almost trip and think, ‘Oh! I am falling.’ But then you do not fall. Or you are drinking and you think, ‘Oh! If I drink more the room will spin.’ But you do not drink more and then it does not spin. Do you see?”
    Nick drew on his cigar and didn’t answer. Sex, drinking, falling. He was beginning to suspect that this old Russian had led a far more interesting life than he had.
    Arkady tried again. “Do you remember the feeling the moment you jumped in time?”
    “Yes.” Nick recalled Jem Jemison fighting near him. Catching his glance. The bloody gravel under his fingers as he scrabbled for purchase. He recalled the cold intent in the Frenchman’s eyes, and then the terrifying, blind sensation of being yanked forward, as if by a team of wild horses. “It was like I was being pulled forward uncontrollably, and at great speed.”
    “Yes. This is the feeling I describe, only much, much smaller. Softer, this feeling. Someone near you is playing with time. You feel it; it is like a little pull in your belly. A little rushing in your ears. That time you jumped, it was a big pull, a big rush. You were saving your own life. You think it was an accident, a strange trick that takes you from the battlefield to the future. No, it was you. It was your gift, something inside you that was