The River of No Return

engine.
    “Yes. Everything.” Nick gritted his teeth against the feeling that the car was hurtling out of control—though the speedometer read only thirty miles per hour.
    “I know what you feel, my friend. It is strange. But never mind. Soon you will be home again and all of this”—he waved at the motorway and the cars—“will seem like a dream.”
    “I don’t want it to seem like a dream. I like the twenty-first century.”
    “You like ten years at the beginning of that century,” Arkady said. “Do you like the other nine decades?”
    “I don’t know about anything except the first decade,” Nick said.
    Arkady only grunted, and Nick gazed to his left, at Exeter’s suburbs giving way to winter fields. It was all entirely familiar, even now that most of the hedgerows had fallen to agribusiness and the villages had all swelled to five times their nineteenth-century size.
    Around this next bend and he should be able to see Castle Dar, the Earl of Darchester’s estate. But when the MG eased around the curve, the rambling old pile was gone, as if it had never been there. In its place, a massive shed filled with combine harvesters.
    Nick forced air into his lungs, and out again.
    The girl with the dark eyes had belonged to Castle Dar. She had been walking over from Castle Dar that day. The day his father had died.
    Now Castle Dar was gone. Vanished from the face of the earth.
    Nick closed his eyes and saw, as clearly as if he were looking at a photograph, the body of his father, crumpled on the ground, his head and limbs at crazy angles, like a rag doll tossed aside.
    Nick, on Boatswain, had been in the lead, preparing to take the jump first. But his father had spurred up from behind. No final words, no glance; just his horse leaping, a bark from the dog that lurked behind the hedge, a confused cacophony of sounds as the horse landed wrongly and went down. Then silence.
    The horse and dog were both shot, the first bullet fulfilling the demands of charity toward a dumb, suffering animal, the second fulfilling some notion of justice. The culprit dog had been young, liver-spotted, Nick remembered for some reason—the pet of a tenant’s wife.
    His father’s body was carried back to Falcott House, met halfway by his running, weeping sisters. How had they known? Yet there they were. Nick remembered Bella’s fingers stroking their father’s cold cheek as they walked along, Father’s body tied by his reins to a board that had been leaning up against the hedge. Then all four of them sitting in the drawing room for hours, waiting for the body to be washed and prepared, listening to the vicar read from the Bible: “‘For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though after my skin-worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.’” Nick remembered watching as his mother, her eyes trained blindly on the vicar’s face, scratched at the back of her left hand until it bled.
    Sometime in the afternoon Nick had managed to sneak out. He saddled Boatswain and galloped off, trying to lose himself in fields he had known all his life. Perhaps trying to fall and break his own neck. But he must not have wanted to die, for at the woods that marked the edge of his father’s land—his land—he had dismounted to tighten the saddle girth. That’s when he had found himself sobbing into Boatswain’s neck, clutching the horse’s mane in his fists.
    Nick hadn’t particularly liked his father, a man whose passions were only roused in competition. The fastest horse, the best brandy, the most expensive snuffboxes. Even as Nick pressed his face into Boatswain’s neck he knew he was weeping for himself, rather than for that man, the seventh marquess. He was weeping for his lack of grief. For his guilt and his loneliness. Nick didn’t want his father’s title. He never had. But, in the twinkling of an eye, or rather, in the snapping of a neck, he had become Lord Blackdown nevertheless.
    His tears had subsided. He breathed in Boatswain’s scent. Then he felt it. Someone was close by. He looked up, and there she was. Standing in the shadows of the oak trees, her dark eyes candid. She was watching him, had been watching him cry. But instead of shame, a strange peace washed over him as she smiled. It was a smile that seemed to exist outside of rules, outside of judgment. She reached out to him with it, and his grief and panic receded.
    It wasn’t until she had