PUSH NOT THE RIVER preview at The Romance Club http://www.theromanceclub.com

February 1st - 14th
Lots to read and lots or prizes!

A panoramic and epic novel in the grand romantic style, Push Not the River is the rich story of Poland in the late 1700s—a time of heartache and turmoil as the country’s once peaceful people are being torn apart by neighboring countries and divided loyalties. It is then, at the young and vulnerable age of seventeen, when Lady Anna Maria Berezowska loses both of her parents and must leave the only home she has ever known.

With Empress Catherine’s Russian armies streaming in to take their spoils, Anna is quickly thrust into a world of love and hate, loyalty and deceit, patriotism and treason, life and death. Even kind Aunt Stella, Anna’s new guardian who soon comes to personify Poland’s courage and spirit, can’t protect Anna from the unseeming future of the country.

Anna, a child no longer, turns to love and comfort in the form of Jan, a brave patriot and architect of democracy, unaware that her beautiful and enigmatic cousin Zofia has already set her sights on the handsome young fighter. Thus Anna walks unwittingly into Zofia’s jealous wrath and darkly sinister intentions.

Forced to survive several tragic events, many of them orchestrated by the crafty Zofia, a strengthened Anna begins to learn to place herself in the way of destiny—for love and for country. Heeding the proud spirit of her late father, Anna becomes a major player in the fight against the countries who come to partion her beloved Poland.

Push Not the River is based on the true eighteenth century diary of Anna Maria Berezowska, a Polish countess who lived through the rise and fall of the historic Third of May Constitution. Vivid, romantic, and thrillingly paced, it paints the emotional and unforgettable story of the metamorphosis of a nation—and of a proud and resilient young woman.

“Push Not the River contains all the sweep and romance of the classic romantic epics such as Gone with the Wind and Doctor Zhivago, with a heroine who remains strong in the face of both personal and political tragedy. An enthralling tale of courage, survival, and hope, Anna Maria’s story is at once timeless and timely.” –India Edghill, author of Queenmaker

“Enthralling. Push Not the River is a wonderful epic historical saga in the grand romantic style. The plot never lets up; it gallops at break-neck speed through a vividly portrayed historical landscape, against which we see the triumphant transformation of Anna from a rather milky adolescent into a strong and powerful woman.” –Jane Feather, bestselling author of Kissed by Shadows

“James Conroyd Martin’s vivid historical novel captivates the reader with its sweeping depiction of a bygone society on the cusp of violent change. Combining politics with intrigue and romance, Push Not the River gives us a glimpse into the turbulent era of late 18^th century Poland and its people. Aristocrats and peasants, patriots and traitors come alive in this story, and the Polish soul is beautifully illuminated through ancient myths, folkways, and wisdoms. With his juxtaposition of the personal and political, Martin weaves a compelling tale of transformation—both of a remarkable young woman and her remarkable nation.” –Jennifer Donnelly, author of The Tea Rose

“Martin’s novel transports the reader two hundred years into Poland’s glorious past, a world of castles and manor houses. One woman’s life provides a metaphor for a country which—with the Third of May Constitution—was the first to attempt democratic reform in modern Europe. While the attempt failed, Push Not the River sings of a people’s pride and indomitable hope.” –Jan Lorys, director of the Polish Museum of America

“Holds readers because of the cast of well-developed characters and the need to see how Anna and her young son will survive.” –Library Journal

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She stood motionless now, in a painter’s tableau of flowers and grasses, a long distance from home, alone. It was only recent events—not the intervening years—that made Anna question her childhood attachment to the mythical. Today, in fact, the young girl who stood poised on the threshold of womanhood questioned the very world around her.

The afternoon was idyllic, the meadow at midday a canvas of color and warmth. A breeze stirred the wheat and barley fields nearby, coercing the spikes into graceful, rippling waves. Next year the meadow in which she stood would be made to produce also, but for now it was thickly green with overgrown grasses and rampant with late-summer wildflowers, birds, and butterflies.

To all of this Anna was coolly indifferent. She stood there, her black dress billowing in the breeze, vaguely aware of a bee that buzzed nearby. In time, though, her eyes found focus as she observed a few fallen leaves hurl themselves at the trunk of the solitary oak, whirl away, and come back again. In them—their detachment and their restless movement—she somehow felt a comradeship. She was as mindlessly driven as they. And from somewhere deep at her core, a keening rose up, piercing her, like a mournful siren from some unseen island.

How had it come to this? Only months before, upon the passing of the Constitution in May, Anna’s universe had been complete and happy. The reform seemed to place her father in a good disposition. The Third of May Constitution did not threaten him, as it did some of the nobility. Count Samuel Berezowski was of the minor nobility, the szlachta, his great-great grandfather having been conferred the title of count when in 1683 he aided the legendary King Jan Sobieski and much of Christian Europe in keeping Vienna—and therefore Eastern Europe—from the Turks. The count managed his single estate himself and he already allowed his village of twelve peasant families liberal freedoms of thought and action. As was the custom, the peasants addressed him as Lord Berezowski.

It was a happy time for Anna’s mother, too, because she was eight months with child. As a young girl, Countess Teresa Berezowska had gone against her parents’ wishes, forgoing marriage into a magnate family for the dictates of the heart. This did not preclude, however, her own ambition to bring into the world children who would go on to make matches that would distinguish the family. Though her heart had been set on a first-born boy, she rejoiced with Samuel in the birth of their healthy, green-eyed girl, Anna Maria. She was confident that many childbearing years were left to her and that there would be a troop of boys to fill up the house. Instead, a succession of miscarriages ensued and her health grew frail, her beauty fragile. Still, the countess persisted against doctors’ advice, until at last—nearly seventeen years after the birth of Anna—it seemed certain that she was to bring another child full term.

Anna’s relationship with her mother improved after the incident with the crystal dove, but a certain distance between mother and daughter remained. Anna came to realize that while she was loved by both parents, her mother was much concerned with bringing boys into the world. While Anna’s father gave his love freely, her mother inculcated in her—through the spoken and the unspoken—a sense of inadequacy that sent her into herself, into her own realm of imagination.

Alone in her books of fable and fairy tales and the myriad places they took her, Anna longed for a brother or sister to anchor her to the real world.

Feliks Paduch, one of Count Berezowski’s peasants, had always been trouble. Since adolescence he had been involved in numerous thefts and brawls. At thirty, he was lazy, alcoholic, and spiteful, a man who questioned and resented his lot in life. Some peasants whispered, too, that he had been involved in the murder of a traveling Frenchman, but no one dared accuse him.

Countess Berezowska had encouraged her husband to evict Paduch, and he had nearly done so twice, but each time relented. A few days after the passing of the Third of May Constitution, Count Berezowski set out for the Paduch cottage in response to a local noble’s complaint that Feliks had stolen several bags of grain. The starosta should settle the matter, the countess insisted, but the count, claiming he was ultimately responsible for his peasants, would not leave the matter to a magistrate.

It was on that day that life changed forever for the happy family. Anna was sitting in the window seat of her second-floor bedroom reading a French translation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream when she heard the commotion below. She looked down to see eight or ten peasants accompanying a tumbril in which her father’s body lay on a matting of straw.

Because of the sincere mutual respect between the count and his peasants, this time they seemed unafraid to name Feliks Paduch the murderer. It was Anna who had to tell her mother, and who—in her own bereavement—had to listen to the countess mourn her husband while in the same breath rail against him for playing estate manager and attending to most ignoble business well beneath his station, business like Feliks Paduch.

Countess Berezowska was devastated. Anna believed that it was the traumatic effects of her father’s murder that precipitated the premature birth of the baby. The boy lived only two days. The countess never recovered from her husband’s murder and the difficult birth—thirteen hours it had taken. After the baby’s death, the countess stopped taking nourishment. A week later, in a delirium of grief, anger, and despair, she died.

And so it was that within a matter of days, Anna had lost everyone. The fabric of her peaceful life at Sochaczew had come undone, never to be made whole again. She stood alone in her garden that day, the day of her mother’s death, somehow unable to cry. How her mother had loved the flowers grown there. In fact, Anna had taken to gardening, initially, to please the countess, who so loved to have flowers in the house. Her father had helped her start the garden that year, the year the five-year-old precocious child had brought home the crystal dove. She had been allowed to keep it and wanted so to please her mother by producing bushels and bushels of flowers.

The garden venture took no time at all to instill in Anna a passion for growing things. Her father gave her an array of bulbs, imports from Holland. She dutifully planted them in the fall, wondering to herself how such funny-looking things could ever produce something delicate and pretty. But in the spring the green feelers peeked out of the brown earth, and amid fine rains, reached brave, thickening arms upward. Anna had arranged them in neat rows, like soldiers, so that when the heads burst open with hues of reds, purples, oranges, and yellows she could scarcely contain her delight. It seemed a miracle. That first bouquet to her astonished mother was her proudest moment. In time she came to see in the flowers an almost symbolic difference between her parents: while her father loved the living, growing flowers still rooted to the earth and warmed by the sun, her mother preferred them cut, placed in cool water, and set out in shaded rooms to be admired.

Anna’s lesson with the crystal dove so many years before had provided a defining moment for her relationship with her mother. Anna persisted in her love for her mother, but its foundation seemed to be one of fractures and fissures which, while they never fully broke away, seemed always to hold the threat of doing so. The difficult truth was that she questioned her mother’s love for her. The countess’ love was a cool kind of love, taking the form of a nod or a light pat on the head, a love given out sparingly, like formal candies in tiny wrappings, and on occasions few enough for Anna to store away in a half-filled memory box. Anna, in turn, grew up confident only in her father’s unconditional love, a love that radiated like sunshine. She came to place herself fully in his guardianship, so much so that at his death she found that her reservoir of trust had been emptied. Even he, in dying, had failed her. If what he had done was place himself in the way of destiny, no good had come of it.

The Countess Berezowska’s older sister, Countess Stella Gronska, arrived with her husband and daughter Zofia for one funeral and stayed for three. When they left Sochaczew to return home to Halicz in southern Poland, they insisted on taking Anna with them. The count and countess would provide guardianship for her until she reached eighteen.

At first, Anna was grateful. Her world shattered, she was happy to have someone deciding and doing for her. And her aunt and uncle were warm and loving people. Zofia, too, was welcoming. Anna found her cousin very different from herself, so outgoing and worldly-wise.

The Gronskis tried their best to be a family to her. But as the days at Halicz wore on, Anna came to miss her home and its familiar surroundings more and more. Sleep brought with it dark dreams of abandonment and isolation. At night she sometimes awoke to her own voice calling out for her father. Her aunt and uncle responded to her melancholy with genuine concern, but she would only pretend to be comforted. What she longed for was the cocoon of her father’s library, where she had spent countless hours of her childhood transported to other times and places by the stories on the darkly varnished shelves. And, most of all, she missed the opportunity to mourn at her family’s graves, to touch the earth that held them, when she could not.

Anna often wondered why it was that she survived. Had she done something to lose her whole world? Sometimes she found herself wishing she could join her family in the earth on that little hill where they and three other generations rested amid daisies, cornflowers, and poppies. What did living have to offer now?

Her life had taken on a tragic dimension that reminded her of the many tales and legends she knew. So often they, too, ended tragically. Why? In growing up, she would often read a tale only to the point when things went wrong. Then she would stop in order to provide her own, happier, ending. Her favorite story was of Jurata, Queen of the Baltic. If Anna could not quite identify with the mythical beauty of Jurata, she did acknowledge that they had in common their green eyes. What she admired most about the goddess was her passion. Oh, Anna wished for such passion in her own life.

Jurata lived in a palace of amber under the sea. One day a young fisherman broke one of her laws, but the kind Jurata forgave him. Falling in love with the fisherman, the goddess courageously defied custom and law, swimming to shore to meet him every evening. Anna thought the myth very romantic. It was at this point that she chose to amend the story. She had no taste for the unhappy ending that went on to depict the god of lightning and thunder, Percun—who loved Jurata—flying into a rage because Jurata, too, broke a law: that magical beings marry only among themselves. Percun destroyed the palace with his thunderbolts and Jurata was never seen again. The pieces of the broken palace, then, accounted for the bits of amber found in the Baltic area.

In Anna’s ending, Jurata chipped away at her amber palace, breaking it down bit by bit, a mythical feat in itself. She then cleverly created among the gods and goddesses a great desire for the yellow stones. At last, she was able to assuage Percun’s anger by presenting him with the largest cache of amber in the world, thus making him more respected and powerful. Jurata’s passion was so great that she assumed a human form, giving up her immortality for the love of her fisherman.

Now, transfixed in the meadow, Anna was aware of the sights and sounds about her only in a peculiar and distant way, as though she stood—an intruder—in some French bucolic painting. She wondered if this panorama were even real. Perhaps her very life was no more than a dream. Might she be dreaming her life? Strange as it was, the notion caught hold in her imagination. Was such a thing possible? Somehow, at that moment, it made sense. If only recent events were illusions, she thought. . . . If only—

The deep voice jarred her into consciousness, and an instinctive, fearful cry escaped her lips before her mind could work. She wheeled about, shielding her face against the western sun, her eyes raised to take in the mounted rider.

Her skin felt the full heat of the afternoon sun. His visage was at first little more than a silhouette cut against the sunlight, like a black-on-yellow paper cutting. Still, she knew he was not from the Gronski estate.

“It is a fine day, is it not?” He was smiling at her, a smile she could not interpret.

“Who are you?” She hardly recognized the voice as her own. It sounded distant and tiny. Her heart beat rapidly against her chest, and for a moment she thought of running.

“I’m sorry if I startled you.” The smile was fading. “I assumed you would have heard my horse.”

“You did—and I had not.” Anna swallowed hard. She fought for composure. She would not run. “You might have called out from a distance.”

She mustered decorum now. “Lady Anna Maria. My parents didn’t use their titles.”

“Forgive me.” He was maneuvering his horse around her now. “Around here you’ll find that some of the szlachta do.”

“Do you often go about sneaking up on people?” She lifted her head to him, feigning boldness. She found herself turning, too, in a half circle until it was no longer necessary for her to shade her eyes against the sun. She was certain that he had initiated that little dance for just that end.

Anna conjured up one of her mother’s smiles that wasn’t a smile. “I might ask you the same question.”

“Fair enough.” It was he who was shading his eyes now, but he took his hand away long enough to point. “Your uncle’s land ends there to the west with that wheat field. This meadow is mine.”

“Oh.” Anna felt her confidence go cold and drop within her, draining away like a mountain stream. How neatly he had put her in her place. “I am nothing more than an interloper then, is that it? I’ll go back immediately.”

He smiled. “You need do nothing of the kind, Lady Anna. There’s no key to the woods and fields.”

It was a saying she had heard her father use, one she had thought was his alone. Her gaze was held by the stranger. She answered: “It’s just that I found the meadow so very peaceful, so conducive to thinking.”

“Are they qualities so incompatible with each other?” The man was impossible, she decided, her spine stiffening.

“No, of course not. It was a stupid comment.” The cobalt eyes flashed as he stared down at her.

She smiled now, her head lifting to meet his gaze. “At last we agree on something.”

Anna sensed her little victory a hollow one. Was he laughing at her? She turned away. “It’s well past time for me to return to the house, so if you’ll excuse me—”

“Oh, but we haven’t met yet,” he was saying. “Allow me to detain you but a moment longer. I am Jan Stelnicki of U«scie Zielone.” He bowed, stood erect, gazed down at Anna. The dark gray trousers tucked into high black boots, white silk shirt, and red sash around the waist made for an impeccable appearance. His costume was a mix of Western and Polish influence, but that he wore no hat was neither Western nor Polish.

Anna nodded, lifting her eyes to take in his considerable height. “Well, since you seem to already know my identity, there’s little else to say.” She persisted in her petulant tone even while her mind was seeking its own course. Despite the missing hat and familiar manner, his nobility was evident in his speech and bearing. Once he stood in the shade of the great oak, she took in the aristocratic and masculine features chiseled under a mane of wavy yellow-gold, the laughing smile above a dimpled chin, and those dark blue eyes. Some current at her core stirred: something profound and alien. No man should be so beautiful.

“Lady Anna,” he was saying in a voice almost intimate, “may I offer my sincerest condolences? I was saddened to hear of your parents’ deaths.”

The mourning which for months had consumed her life took on a strangely distant quality now. Her impatience with the stranger was giving way involuntarily to a dichotomous mix of caution and attraction. She watched the motion of his mouth, the porcelain flash of teeth. He wore no moustache. This, too, ran against the Polish mode of the day. There was a mesmerizing presence about him and a strength, not merely physical strength—though he possessed that, too—but a force that came from deep within and resonated in his gaze, in his voice.

Her immediate response was to tell him that it was of no concern to him, but she took just a moment too long to formulate the reply and her annoyance dissipated. She heard herself telling him that she would be staying with the Gronskis for some time and that, yes, they were treating her very well. While he turned to tether his horse to a wiry branch jutting from the thick tree trunk, he continued his questioning, asking why they had not previously met. Studying him at his task, Anna replied that she had been to visit her aunt and uncle twice several years before. He took studies at the university then, it seemed. When he turned to face her, Anna averted her eyes, politely asking where. In Krak—w, he responded, then two years in Paris.

Anna feigned nonchalance. She had never been to Krak—w, but she had been to Warsaw—not often, even though her home was so near Poland’s capital. Paris, however, seemed worlds away. Paris was the City of Light: the quintessence of European culture. She longed to see it. Now, of course, the unrest there made it quite unsafe. . . . How old is he? she wondered. Twenty-two? Twenty-three?

“I am glad that you will be staying,” he said now. “I trust that I will be allowed to show you the sights here at Halicz. Our Harvest Home will be concluding with much celebration. . . .”

Her mind a blur, Anna watched as the young man went on speaking of the local autumn customs. What emboldened him to speak to her as though he had known her all his life? She absently fingered the dark lace at her throat. The voice was so warm, so musical, the eyes inviting as a lake in August. Still, she wondered at his sincerity. Did sincerity and boldness coexist? “Lord Stelnicki,” she managed when he took a breath, “I am afraid that such festivities are out of the question for me for some little while yet.”

“Of course. Forgive me.” He bowed from the waist. “But once you are out of mourning there will be many winter gatherings to which we shall look forward—parties, sleigh rides, and—”

Anna interrupted, smiling indulgently. “Oh, I’m afraid that in a few weeks my aunt and uncle will shut up the house. We are to winter in Warsaw.”

“Of course. For the moment I forgot the Gronski custom. Why, were you staying, I would personally organize a kulig. Our joyrides are well-known around here and no Halicz manor home turns away a sleigh party!”

“At least,” Anna laughed, “until the master’s vodka reserve has been drained!”

“I expect so.” Lord Stelnicki laughed, too. Then he let out a great sigh and his face fell with an exaggerated disappointment. “Ah, winter will not be such a happy prospect for me.”

He was so glibly forward that Anna could only stare. This comment, certainly, was insincere.

But the mocking attitude vanished suddenly and he brightened. The blue eyes held Anna’s. “Time is the world’s landlord and he may be friend or foe. May he be our friend, Lady Anna Maria.”

Anna had never heard this saying before, but she knew his meaning and she felt her face burn. His forwardness unnerved her. No man, and certainly no stranger, had ever behaved toward her with such familiarity. Her throat, already dry, tightened as she sought a diversionary tactic. “Do you not winter in the city, Lord Stelnicki?”

She longed to extinguish that expectant smile. Did this man ever meet with resistance? Even as she thought this, she found herself nodding in acquiescence. Silently she promised herself to ignore the request.

He was satisfied, nonetheless, and told her that in years past he had spent December and January in Krak—w—where his father lived now—but that he enjoyed the country far more. Yes, he assured her, even in winter, admitting himself to be an odd sort. His mother, it seemed, had died some years before and he assured Anna from experience that Time would help to heal the hurt.

Despite his forwardness and her own awkwardness, Anna was surprised by some interior part of her which sought to prolong the conversation, but having been reminded of her mourning, Duty, not Time, prompted her to insist that she return to the house.

“Very well, then,” he said, “I’ll lead my horse to the Gronski home, if you would care to ride.”

“Of course, but I did come out for the walk, you see. Otherwise, I would have ridden out myself. I look forward to walking back.” The words had spilled out in a rush, but he seemed satisfied with her excuse.

“Well, Lady Anna Maria,” he said, bowing, “I welcome you to Halicz and look forward to our next meeting. I hope that one day soon we will ride together. The countryside is breathtaking. When do you put off your mourning?”

“In three weeks’ time.” His deep voice was no longer alien and startling. It was somehow a lyrical voice she had not known but had held always within her, like some ancestral song, primal yet soothing. Is his interest as keen as it seems, she wondered, or am I too vulnerable in my grief? Or merely too easily snared by my own imagination? What stupid and easily caught bird was it that Polonius had compared Ophelia to? A woodcock, that was it. Is that what I am? Her heart was quickening nonetheless. He wanted to see her again. The thought was at once exciting and unnerving.

“Forgive me for disturbing you today,” Lord Stelnicki was saying. “It was just that from the distance I took you for Zofia and so I rode over. I will make a point of calling on the Gronski family in exactly three weeks. What is it? Why, Lady Anna, I do believe that you’re blushing!”

Anna inwardly cursed him for pointing out her embarrassment. She forced out a little laugh. “It is funny, I should think. I have never been mistaken for my beautiful cousin, I can assure you. I could only wish for such beauty.”

“Why, Anna—it’s only fair now that I address you so—you have little reason for such wishing.” He mounted his black steed. The leather creaked as he settled into the saddle with the grace and ease of one who has ridden all of his life.

“Look!” he said, gesturing in a sweeping motion. “See the two meadow flowers, the yellow and the violet? One is as different from the other as day from night. Yet who will say that one is more beautiful? Oh, a fool might. But only a fool.” The saddle groaned again as he leaned over, motioning her nearer, as if to impart some great secret. “But do you know what may determine the desirability of one over the other?” He spoke with a great earnestness.

The intense eyes held Anna’s, and she could only shake her head in mute response.

The playful, widening smile, set against a complexion colored by the sun, revealed the even white teeth. Suddenly, he drew up on the reins, and as the animal reared, he waved and turned the horse into the wind. Anna stood close enough that she felt the earth tremble when the horse’s forelegs came down. She took a stumbling step backward, feeling a quick breeze made by the swish of the animal’s tail.

Her lips apart as if to speak, she stood and stared until the figure crested the hill and fell from sight.

Anna’s legs quaked. She felt as one abandoned by the enemy on a battlefield. The man was incorrigible: insufferably confident, proud, strutting. He caused defenses within her to rise like drawbridges. And he was toying with her to the last. Yellow and violet flowers, indeed. You are a scoundrel and a rogue, Jan Stelnicki!

And yet she was drawn to him. For a short while, her life had been filled with something other than death and darkness and mourning. Anna sank now to the ground, the stiff satin skirt billowing up around her like a great black cushion.

The world went on as it had before he arrived. The leaves were continuing their circuitous movement. A butterfly fluttered among the meadow flowers. A tiny sparrow sat appraisingly upon a nearby branch.

The meeting with Jan Stelnicki played out again in her mind. She tried to make sense of her feelings. Of course, he is strikingly handsome, she conceded. There was something else about him, too, a special manly grace or energy that accounted for an immediate and deep attraction. A simple meeting, and yet Anna felt that somehow her life had changed. Was this to be the kind of mythical romance of which she read, dreamt, invented?

Doubt ran close behind and she scoffed at the notion: I will not be some easily snared woodcock. I am too old for such a wishful and girlish infatuation.

But her mind grasped and held to one thought, one memory. Anna’s mother often had told her that she herself had known she would marry Anna’s father from the very first meeting. And she had, despite the concerns of her parents and offers from other wealthier and higher-placed nobles.

She had known! It is possible. Anna’s heart surged at the thought. Might it be so with me?

Her mind was not through playing devil’s advocate, however, conjuring up myriad reservations and fears. Maybe Jan Stelnicki is less than sincere, she thought. Maybe he is merely taking advantage of his looks and charm. To what end? Perhaps he has long been skilled in the arts of seduction. Perhaps it is only his ego. . . .

But there was something deeper—some mysterious link—which attracted Anna and gave profound meaning to what seemed a happenstance encounter, a link that the blacksmith of the gods, Hephaestos himself, might have forged.

Anna sat, her eyes alert now, suddenly aware that the meadow about her teemed with color and movement and warmth and life. This experience of intense attraction she savored for the first time in her life. She drank it in like a fine French wine and it lifted both her body and her mind to a strangely ethereal plane.

Rainless clouds came and went. The sun slowly moved over her. Anna stood at last, and the movement stirred the little sparrow from its perch. With purposeful steps she set out in the direction of the Gronski home.

Perhaps she was to have a future, after all. If the endings of myths might be changed, why not the ending to her story?

A gusty wind began to blow, catching the folds of her black skirt as it might a sail, pushing her along.

Anna laughed to herself as she broke into a run. She was thinking about his expression that Time was the world’s landlord. She would conscript Time as friend rather than foe. “After all,” she said aloud, “it will take time to learn how to ride a horse!”

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