The River of No Return

his face, her eyes lingering again on his scar.
    He reached up and touched it, and her eyes shifted away. “It’s just a scar,” he said. “It matters not how or why or when.”
    “The war—”
    “Was terrible. The land is underworked, then?” He turned the subject firmly around, like a plow at a furrow’s end.
    “Yes.” She followed his lead. “We lost more men to the manufactories than we lost to the war; they came one by one to say they were going. It wasn’t that they weren’t well treated here. It was that you were dead, or rather, that the marquessate was dissolved. Suddenly Blackdown was only acreage. The men felt free to put off their fathers’ shoes and strike out on their own. Off they went, filled with hope. But then there were the riots, and one of our men who had left to work in the north was killed. Executed actually.” She drew a shuddering breath. “John Stock.”
    “Good God!” John’s face flashed before Nick’s eyes.
    “Yes. He was executed with sixteen other men in York a little over a year ago. For machine breaking. His brother Asa was transported. Their wives and children came back to us here.”
    “Are there no men left at all?”
    “There should have been, but the year before last there was the magnificent harvest, so by the time of John’s execution the tenants were in such low spirits, eight families left en masse for America.”
    Nick had to search his brain for why a magnificent harvest would crush morale. The answer came slowly. “Rents,” he finally said.
    “The corn, Nick, I wish you could have seen it. By July the stalks were bent with the weight of the seed. It was as if England was Eden, with the fruit of the earth bursting forth in praise of creation. But the more enchanting the countryside, the more fecund and rich, the more the tenants fell into despair. They harvested that magnificent crop in fear. It was the same all over England and it was as clear as day: The price of corn must fall. In June it was at a hundred and seventeen shillings a quarter. A year later, Nick, imagine; it had fallen to just sixty-nine, and it remains so! The tenants could not make their rents, so of course I dropped them, but with John executed, the war over, and all of Russia poised to drown us in corn, everyone knew the prices would not rise again soon. And Blackdown cannot survive on low rents, at least not if it is to remain what it is.”
    “So the men left.”
    “Yes. The strongest and best farmers, of course. They pooled their resources and bought land in America, in a place called Ohio, and they left with hardly a fare-thee-well. They have named their new town ‘Blackdown,’ but they own it, Nick.”
    Nick raised his eyebrows. Blackdown, Ohio. Hilarious. He wondered which dark, Satanic box stores were built, in the twenty-first century, on his tenants’ pleasant pastures. “So who is left?”
    “Some twelve men who can work hard. And of course there are the old men, and the women work in the fields when they must, although they don’t like it.”
    “You have been carrying this burden all on your own? I don’t suppose Mother has been of any help.”
    “No,” she said flatly, and they paused for a moment, thinking of their mother. When Clare spoke again her face seemed to yearn toward him. “Everything has changed, and not just because you are dead. Were dead.” She smiled at her mistake. “It’s as if you left a hundred years ago.”
    “Yes,” Nick said. “I know.”
    “War kept us rich, Nick. I see that now.” Clare’s voice was low, hesitant, as if she were telling him a shameful secret. “Those men who went to Spain went as sacrifice to Mammon. And the manufactories. They eat people. They eat them up and demand more. They are spinning gold up there on the looms, but there never seems to be enough money, and the people are wretched. And we, we grow gold down here! In 1813 we grew enough corn to feed the world, but the people cannot live.” She looked down at her tightly laced fingers and deliberately untangled them, placing her hands on her thighs and straightening her spine. “At least Napoleon is locked away on Elba and the war is finally done. We may be poorer, but we are at peace.”
    Nick swallowed a laugh. For God’s sake, he knew that Napoleon would escape in a few weeks’ time! He knew the name of the battle that was to come, knew its outcome, knew the name of every war that would follow down across two centuries. Wars to make this