The River of No Return

faraway look. “Julia,” he said.
    His voice was different. Deeper, a man’s voice. His accent was strange, too. Flattened here and there. Like the accent of someone who has returned home after years abroad. Which was, after all, nothing but the truth. He had gone to Spain. But had he returned from Spain, or the land of the dead? They had mourned him for dead. Now here he stood, fully alive, his recognition of her making his eyes change from rainy blue-gray to a warmer, darker, more disturbing color. A feeling rather than a color. Her horse shifted beneath her. She was holding the reins too tightly as she looked down at the miraculously returned Lord Blackdown. She forced herself to relax. “My lord,” she said, inclining her head. “Welcome home.”
    * * *
    It was Julia Percy. Nick didn’t recognize her for a moment, but then there she was. His heart began pounding. The girl who had seen him through so much. He took a step forward, his mouth opening to say God knows what, when she spoke.
    “Are you not dead?”
    He was stunned for a second, simply by seeing her, and by the shock of her question. Impossible to explain that he was returned from an unimaginable future. So he said her name. “Julia.” It felt wonderful, speaking it out loud after so many years, the way the tip of his tongue only lightly touched his palate, once, in the middle of the word.
    He stepped forward and held both hands up to help her dismount. She put her gloved hands in his and leapt down lightly. She stood just to his shoulder, her hair the color of walnut liqueur.
    “You are grown,” he said, ridiculously.
    “And you have come back from the dead. I believe you have more to explain than I.”
    “You’re right,” he said. “It is a tale. But first please allow me to offer you condolences on the death of your grandfather. He was a good man.”
    “Thank you, my lord. It is a great loss. He mourned your death, you know. We all did.”
    Nick twisted his ring on his finger. “It is rather awkward, to have been mourned, and then to return. Not that I complain. There is a comfort in knowing that people mourned you. But the monument in the churchyard—” He stopped. He was blathering.
    Silence fell, except that the birds were deafening and each shifting move the horses made pointed out that he had no idea what to say to her. What was considered polite conversation between a young woman and a man? His mind was blank. “Boatswain’s still alive, too,” he said, and then wished he could swallow his tongue.
    “So I see.” She turned to her black mare. “This is Marigold.”
    He reached out his hand, and the mare nuzzled his fingers. “She’s beautiful.”
    The animal snorted and stomped her hoof, tossing her head in Boatswain’s direction.
    “She is an incorrigible flirt,” Julia said.
    “I fear Boatswain is not very chivalrous.” Nick felt ashamed for his horse. The old stallion was quietly munching the long grass, twitching his ears at Marigold, but showing no interest.
    Marigold put her nose in the air, whickered, and pawed the ground.
    “Enough,” Julia told her, and reached into her pocket for a carrot. “He doesn’t like you. Sometimes we must face life’s disappointments head-on.”
    “Shall we ride together a while, Miss Percy?” Nick found himself reaching out and taking her gloved hand again. He hadn’t encountered that frustrating but entirely thrilling sensation of holding a woman’s hand through a layer of thin leather in so long, he had forgotten entirely about it. It really was scandalously erotic, the way you could feel the heat of a woman’s hand through her glove.
    “I shall be missed at home.” Julia glanced down at their joined hands. “My cousin, the new earl . . .”
    Her cousin. Julia was still living at Castle Dar.
    Nick went cold.
    So Julia was the mistress. She was the woman the villagers had been talking about. They all thought she was sleeping with her cousin.
    Julia searched his face and understood. “Ah, I see you’ve heard the gossip.” She drew her hand away and took a step back.
    “I have and I don’t believe it. No one who knows you would believe it.”
    She put her chin up. “You know me not at all. And those who are gossiping have known me my entire life.”
    But she had been with him all along, all through the years. “We . . . we were children together!”
    “Hardly, my lord. You avoided Bella and me like the pox.”
    “Be that as it may, I believe I know