The River of No Return

“Like to come up on the weekends from New York and play with the cows?”
    He’d been surprised at how much that had stung. “I live in New York, yes,” he’d said. Then added defensively, “But I was raised in England.”
    “Well now, England,” she’d said, lingering over the - gland with contempt. She had a southern accent of some sort or another. “I’m guessing you have some rather fine raw-milk Camembert in your fridge on . . .” She looked at her copy of the form where Nick’s info was printed. “Jenneville Road. I’ll follow you home and give it a try. Then I’ll report on this farm.”
    Now Nick looked at the curve of the cheese inspector’s shoulder, barely visible in this light. Thruppenny Farm would be getting its good report, and the cheese inspector would be off after breakfast, in that jalopy of hers. Back to her usual Burlington beat. The old cheese inspector would return to duty next month.
    He sighed and stared out of the window.
    The stars seemed close. It was hard to believe that they were, in fact, very far away, in time as well as space. How many light-years into the past was he looking? Long before his own birth, surely. Each one of those stars was an inferno, a terrible burning hell, spilling its light from endless raging fires out into time and space. But from this distance they were beautiful. Watchful. Like the eyes of animals in a midnight barn, shining in the swinging light of the farmer’s lantern.
    The stars reminded Nick of bivouacking on frosty winter nights in Spain, a rabbit stew warming his belly, the sound of the slumbering army soothing him to sleep. The stars had been bright and close then, too. Now the war was far away and long ago, very long ago. The world had become a different place. Yet the war still shed the light of its conflagration down through his dreams. Nick pressed his palms against his face. The girl with the dark eyes. She was also from that time long ago. Only the thought of her could ever beat the dream back into the past.
    The past.
    Nick Davenant had far too much past.
    He had jumped forward in time. Two hundred years.
    Two hundred years. It had been unbelievable when it had happened and it was still unbelievable, ten years later. Nick laughed out loud, and without humor.
    “Put a sock in it, England.”
    His hard laugh softened into a real smile. He had to hand it to the cheese inspector: She was sure of herself in every way. He was glad she was leaving and never coming back. “Sorry,” he said.
    “Hmpf.” She buried her nose into her pillow and veered sharply back into sleep.
    Two hundred years were hard to hide, even in casual relationships. He realized now that when his lovers accused him of being “uptight” or “emotionally distant,” what they meant was that he was weirder than even an eccentric Englishman should be. American women would overlook a great deal in a passably good-looking British boyfriend. But eventually they began to pry, wanting explanations.
    His terrible scars? A car accident, he said. He had been in a car accident, but the scars were obviously war wounds. Hence his avoidance of women who were doctors or nurses. The scar that cut across one eyebrow was dashing and ambiguous enough, but the jagged saber cut up his left thigh was heavily punctuated where the wound had been tied up with thick catgut. Roping his left shoulder, a scar from a gunshot wound. It was the ugliest scar of all, because of the infection that had set in.
    There were other, more subtle oddities. The flourishes of his signature were neither manly nor timely. Then there were his antiquated tastes in food. This very evening, as she ate the glorious Camembert, the cheese inspector had reminisced about Oreos and milk and then she had gone on to sing a TV jingle about them. Nick had no favorite childhood commercials, and he craved boiled mutton, beef jelly, blancmange, and bits of pig, pickled.
    Sleep was clearly not going to come again tonight. Nick got quietly out of bed and went downstairs, enjoying the bracing cold of the floorboards against the soles of his feet. He loved these floors. The boards were as old as he was. The trees from which the boards had been painstakingly hewn were much older even than that—they must have stood in these hills for hundreds of years before they were felled. This house had been built in the year of his birth—1790—and Nick took comfort from its sturdy construction, the way it had hunkered down