The River of No Return

burning beam crushed me; I was trying to save my donkey from a fire.” The butcher sighed. “I am sure she burned, poor Albia.”
    “Do you mean to tell me that what happened to me is commonplace?”
    “No. Not at all. But it does happen, and when it does, the Guild tries to be ready. We have a global network of researchers who document such cases. There is an enormous library in Milton Keynes and another in Chongqing. Our records go back many hundreds of years. Your disappearance was witnessed on the battlefield and one of your comrades gained a reputation for being insane by telling everyone about it for years afterwards. Your mother was informed that you were dead, but the Guild listened to the rumor that you had vanished into thin air. Sure enough, you appeared again, last week. Quite dramatically—you were mown down by a car.”
    Nick frowned. He had been in the maelstrom of battle. Nothing could be more all-consuming, more purely sensual, than the experience of fighting for your life and against the lives of others in a mass of men and horses, choked and blinded by smoke, deafened by gunfire and screaming . . . there was no disappearing in that moment, none whatsoever . . . except into death.
    After a moment the butcher spoke again, softly. “You jumped from the Battle of Salamanca. It was the twenty-second of July, 1812.”
    “The Battle of Salamanca.” Nick repeated the words slowly. So it had a name. It had already happened. It was over. “Did we . . . ?” Nick stopped. It felt gauche to ask how the day went. The battle had only just begun when he was unhorsed. Many men were still to fight and die or survive.
    “It was a glorious triumph. And in 1815, your armies won not only the battle, but the war.”
    The whole war. Over. Folded away into history books like bridal linens into an attic trunk. Salamanca a glorious triumph . . . but what did they say of the siege of Badajoz and its aftermath? Everything? Nothing? Nick shook his head. “This is madness,” he said.
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Sorry?” Nick scrubbed at his face with the palms of his hands, then ran his fingers up into his hair. Rage boiled up in him. “What am I meant to say to that? ‘No matter, my dear Sir Butcher’? ‘That’s quite all right’? Good God, man, you have told me how my mother came to learn of my own death. Except that I am not dead and my mother is. Two centuries dead.”
    The butcher leaned back in his chair and appraised Nick for a moment, much as he might have assessed a leg of pork before chining it. Then he turned to the bedside table and picked up a large, pale envelope filled with papers. He reached in and found a smaller envelope. “The Guild wishes you to have this,” he said. “The location of your jump and your uniform strongly supported the thesis that you were the long-lost Lord Blackdown, but we knew for certain when we saw this.” He dipped his fingers into the envelope and extracted Nick’s signet ring.
    Seeing it there in the butcher’s hand made Nick feel for it, irrationally, on his own finger. His finger was bare. Bare of the ring he had worn since the day his father died. Nick looked and saw that his hand was sun-bronzed except where the ring had been.
    His finger was real. His ring was real. Why wasn’t his ring on his finger? How had the butcher come to have it? Nick groped his way back to the bed and sat down. “You are . . . telling me the truth,” he whispered. As he said it, he knew, for the first time he really knew, that it was true.
    “Yes.”
    “This is the year 2003.”
    “Yes.”
    Nick closed his eyes for a long moment, then opened them again. “May I have my ring?” he said quietly.
    The butcher handed it to him, and Nick held it in his palm for a moment. It felt heavy, just as it had the day his mother removed it from his dead father’s hand. She had turned from the body where it lay, broken by a fall from a horse, and looked into Nick’s eyes for a moment. She wore a riding habit, and the train was swept over her arm. She curtseyed almost to the ground, the train rising to her wrist like a wing. Then she held out the ring for him to take. Nick, fifteen years old, had pushed the still-warm metal down over his knuckle as he stared at the top of his mother’s bent head.
    Now he slipped the ring onto his finger again. This was the sign of his privilege, his belonging. And yet no one living had ever known him.
    “I’m afraid that is the only