by Mark Hodder
They imbibed and regarded each other thoughtfully.
“A second chance,” Burton said. “For me to throw off the chains of disappointment; for you, William, to free yourself from a destructive obsession; and for you, Algy, to not let your zeal get the better of you. Are all who make mistakes offered this manner of reprieve? Do they all, at death, return to a key moment in their past? Is that how existence functions?”
A female voice came from beside him. “No, Sir Richard. It is not.”
A REMARKABLE CONTRAPTION OVER RED BLOSSOMS
DO YOU HAVE A CLOCKWORK SERVANT?
THE WONDER OF THE AGE!
Powered by a spring mechanism that requires
winding just once every twenty-four hours!
Stronger than a man!
Self-maintaining!
Obeys every command!
Fitted with a babbage calculator that can:
Predict your requests! Evaluate every option! Make astute choices!
Possessed of such a sophisticated synthetic intelligence,
you’ll swear it’s alive!
EVERY HOUSEHOLD NEEDS ONE!
A woman, almost entirely concealed by a voluminous dark green cloak and hood, had stepped out of the crowd and now stood beside the table. Politely, the three men got to their feet. She had a walking cane in her right hand. With her left, she reached up, slipped back the cowl, and revealed a beautiful face. Her eyes were black and almond-shaped; her lips full with squarish corners; her skin dusky; and her hair, deepest jet, wound about her head and held with pins. She was, Burton guessed, in her mid-twenties. His nostrils detected the scent of jasmine.
“Good day to you, gentlemen. I am Sadhvi Raghavendra. No doubt you all recognise me but can’t think where from. An explanation for that and for everything else you are currently experiencing awaits. I have a landau outside. Will you join me? Our destination lies a little over five miles to the east of here. There, a certain individual will provide you with all the answers you need.” She smiled. “Or shall I leave you here to get pickled?”
“My hat!” Swinburne responded. “You present quite the dilemma, dear lady.”
She held the cane out to Burton. “I expect you’ve missed this, Sir Richard.”
Accepting her familiarity without question, the explorer took the stick and found that it had a silver handle fashioned to resemble a panther’s head—the same cane he thought he’d mislaid during his final evening in Trieste. He pulled the handle up to expose a few inches of concealed blade. Sliding it back, he murmured, “Captain. It is 1864. I was—will be—knighted in 1886. Where did you get this?”
“You gave it to me. And the date your knighthood was, or will be, conferred varies considerably.”
“Varies? How can it vary?”
“I shall tell you a little en route. Will you accompany me?”
“Are you the owner of an impolite parrot?”
She smiled. “No. You are. Parakeet. His name is Pox. He was recently recruited to the group to which I belong.”
Burton hefted the cane, holding its handle in front of his eyes. Without averting his gaze from it, he said, “I think I shall forgo further drinks. Algy? William?”
“I’m with you,” Trounce said. “I don’t mind confessing that I have little inclination to deal with this tomfoolery alone. It’s too much for me. I’m just a policeman.”
“Blast it!” Swinburne muttered. “My ability to taste is restored and already I must deny it its pleasures. Have you nothing at our destination with which we can wet our whistles, Miss—forgive me, what was it? Revenger?”
“Raghavendra. And I daresay we can rustle up a brandy or two.” She smiled at him with an amused twinkle in her eyes.
“Then I bow to the majority. Let’s be off.”
They drained what remained of their beer, and Burton called over the potboy to settled the bill. He handed his old cane to Trounce and kept hold of the new one. The three men followed the young woman through the crowd and exited the Slug and Lettuce. As promised, a landau was waiting for them, its two horses standing patiently.
“Proceed, please,” Raghavendra called up to the driver.
The man, whose face was badly disfigured by a harelip, pulled a clay pipe from his mouth and clicked his tongue. “Cottles Wood, ma’am? Middle o’ nowhere? You’re certain?”
“If you please.”
“Rightio, ma’am.”
They boarded the carriage, which rocked and creaked beneath them, and, once they’d settled onto its wooden benches, it moved off. Almost immediately, Burton exclaimed, “Wait! I should leave a message for Isabel. She’ll wonder where I am.”
Swinburne uttered a little sound of disdain.
Raghavendra said, “It will serve her better if you don’t.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“As I said, everything will be explained, your wife’s destiny included.”
Burton sighed. “Destiny? By Allah’s beard, this was a very odd sort of day the first time around. Now it’s considerably odder. Very well. Isabel will have to fret awhile.”
“She must be used to it by now,” Swinburne put in. “Pay, pack, and follow. Do you remember that, Richard?”
“The message I left for her when I was recalled from Damascus.”
“You departed without her. Without even telling her you were going.”
“That was in 1871. We’d been married for ten years by then. She was accustomed to my ways. Here, now, 1864, our marriage is but three years old.”
Raghavendra smiled. “She’s a strong woman. She’ll be all right. Take my word for it. I happen to know a great deal more about her than even you do.”
“I’m inclined to believe you, though that sentiment is baffling since you are a stranger to me.”
“A stranger you feel you know, same as Detective Inspector Trounce, here.” She nodded toward the policeman.
“Sergeant,” Trounce said. “By Jove! Why the devil do you all insist on promoting me?”
“Because it’s your proper title, sir, the one you more usually bear. You are one of Scotland Yard’s finest.”
“Piffle!” Trounce growled. He pushed out his chest a little and smoothed his moustache. “Balderdash, I say!”
“No doubt you think otherwise because your career was blighted by your preoccupation with Spring Heeled Jack. Am I correct?”
The policeman uttered a cry of amazement. “What in blue thunder do you know about that?”
“I know your interest was justified. He is the reason you are all here. Spring Heeled Jack was not a supernatural creature, William, but a man. His name was Edward Oxford.”
“No, that was the name of Victoria’s assassin.”
“And also of the assassin’s great-great—I don’t know how many greats—grandchild.”
“My dear young lady, that is arrant nonsense and you know it. Oxford was killed at the scene. He had no descendants, and, even were I wrong about that, there is no way you could possibly know about them, particularly if they were great-great-whatevers. Really, you cannot pull the wool over my eyes. I’ve spent a lifetime investigating the events of that day, as well as all the individuals involved. I know the history of the assassination back to front and inside out.”
“I don’t doubt it, but the history you refer to is not the one I’m speaking of.”
“Eh?”
“We should return to the pub,” Swinburne suggested. “We’re too sober for this.”
Raghavendra winked at the little poet. “You probably are, and I’m afraid the story only gets more fantastic. Oxford’s descendent—whom, for the sake of clarity, I shall henceforth refer to only by his nickname of Spring Heeled Jack—was a man from the distant future, from the year 2202. He created the means to journey backward through time to 1840, where he intended to watch his ancestor attempt to shoot Queen Victoria. The assassination, you see, should have failed. The history that Jack travelled back through was one in which it had failed, one in wh
ich Victoria had reigned for nearly sixty-four years before dying of old age on the twenty-second of January, 1901.”
“Tripe!” Trounce barked. “Absolute bilge water! And that is today’s date. I mean, not today, but the day I’ve come from. It’s the day I was—I was—”
“Shot dead. I know. Time employs coincidence as a means to emphasise significant moments and events. Occasionally it does so with a rather cruel irony.” She paused for a moment, and Burton saw sadness touch her eyes. “Anyway, as I say, Spring Heeled Jack travelled from the future and interfered with the past. He altered events. He caused the assassination to succeed and accidentally killed his own ancestor. You saw him do it, William.”
Trounce’s eyes widened. “He killed—? You mean he was the ‘mystery hero’?” He shook his head and made a gesture of dismissal. “You are jabbering! How could he be the stilted creature and the mystery hero? They were present at exactly the same moment.”
“When one possesses the ability to move through time, such paradoxes become almost commonplace.”
The Scotland Yard man was silent for a moment. He emitted a groan. He eyed his bowler, which was on his lap, as if contemplating whether to fling it out of the carriage’s window. “Forgive me, but it would be obvious to even a gullible idiot that you are indulging in fantasy, Miss Raghavendra. Why is it then, that despite myself, I’m half convinced?”
“Perhaps because the bizarre claim that a man can project himself through time, while easily dismissed by most, undoubtedly feels a little more credible to a man who is currently sitting in his own past.”
“Humph!”
Trounce looked at Burton for support. The explorer shifted in his seat and ran his fingers over his chin. He opened his mouth to speak, stopped, thought a moment, then said, “Why the stilts and costume?”
“The suit was actually a very sophisticated machine. It was the means by which Edward Oxford—Jack—literally jumped through time.”
“I see. And you expect us to believe that everything which occurred subsequent to the assassination—every circumstance from the tenth of June, 1840, all the way to the future year of 2202—was obliterated and overwritten by new events as a result of his actions?”
“Overwritten, yes, precisely, Sir Richard, and not just once but many times, in the manner of a palimpsest. You see, Spring Heeled Jack had broken the natural mechanism of time, and actions taken subsequent to his meddling caused the new version of history, which he’d created, to split again and again, so that now there are many iterations of the world all existing contemporaneously. What we refer to as the Original History, from the future of which he had come, may still be among them, not obliterated but obscured by a proliferation of alternates. My companions and I have been searching for it. This, your world, is the closest to it we’ve found. Your life—and yours, Algernon, and yours, William—have, as far as we can ascertain, been more or less identical to the ones you lived in Original History. In fact, the assassination and the political ramifications thereof—the empire becoming a republic, for example—are the only aspects of this world that indicate it to be a variation.”
Burton examined the silver handle of his cane. “Let us suppose I give credence to your claim—and I’m hardly in a position to refute it—why is it that the three of us have fallen from our respective deathbeds straight into our own past?”
Raghavendra folded her hands on her lap and looked out at the houses that were slipping past outside. The landau was passing through a residential district on the outskirts of Bath. Without averting her gaze, she answered, “I and the other members of the expedition to which I belong are from a different history than this one. In our history, we departed from the year 1860 and journeyed to 2202, there to confront and kill Spring Heeled Jack, thus preventing him from doing any further mischief. His experiences, you see, had made him insane and very dangerous. During our return journey, our leader has been repairing the processes of time. How, I cannot explain. He will tell you himself. Suffice to say that all the variants are being isolated in such a manner that they will no longer be able to taint or in any way influence the history my fellows and I call our own. And with regard to that, you are invited to join us there, to live again, to have a second chance. We retrieved Pox from one of the alternate time streams, as we call them, and now we have retrieved you.”
“Splendid!” Swinburne announced. “Absolutely smashing! Why?”
“That will become clear within the hour.”
The poet gave a spasmodic kick and glowered at the young woman. She laughed at his expression, leaned forward, and patted his knee. “If you refuse the offer, I will miss you terribly, Algy. I really will.”
“What? What? What?”
She laughed again and sat back, saying no more.
Burton looked out of the window and watched as the houses thinned in number and gave way to countryside.
This is happening.
His final night of life felt increasingly distant and phantasmagorical. He tried to recall its details and found them to be unfocused. There had been a bird drowning in a water barrel. He’d called Doctor Steinhaueser over to—
No. John Steinhaueser died in ’sixty. It was—it was—Bismillah! What is the name of my doctor? Baker! Yes!
He’d called Baker over to help him rescue it. A starling? A sparrow?
He couldn’t remember, despite that the event had occurred, from a subjective point of view, just a few hours ago.
Minutes passed without a word spoken.
Glancing at Swinburne, Burton saw that his old friend had slipped into a daydream. Trounce, too. Again, he wondered whether shock was affecting the three of them.
Raghavendra met his eyes, and, though she said nothing and made no gesture, he sensed that she understood the peculiarly disjointed quality of his current situation. She radiated sympathy, compassion, and reassurance in a manner that struck him as almost supernatural, as if she could somehow feel the imbalance in him and was offering clairvoyant support as he struggled with it.
She is a Sister of Noble Benevolence. They possess that ability.
He averted his eyes.
How do I know that?
The landau passed through a small village signposted Monkton Farleigh, crested the brow of a hill, and proceeded down a long slope into a wide, shallow valley. A patchwork of green fields and woods stretched to the horizon. Burton’s attention was attracted to a broad meadow bisected by a low wall beside which a group of people were standing, two police constables among them. He suddenly felt uneasy.
“I’m sorry, Sir Richard,” Raghavendra murmured. “The significance of where we landed our ship didn’t immediately occur to us. As I said, Time has a tendency toward unfortunate coincidences such as this.”
With a shudder, Burton realised the meaning of the little gathering by the wall. Huskily, he said, “That is where John Speke shot himself yesterday afternoon.”
“Yes, it is.”
He swallowed. His mouth felt dry.
“Ship?” Swinburne asked in a dreamy tone. He cleared his throat and blinked, forcing his attention back outward. “A ship, did you say? I see no water.”
“A rotorship. A flying machine. The Orpheus. She is landed in a clearing in Cottles Wood. We are nearly there.”
“Orpheus. We remembered the name. But how do we know it?”
“Because you each had a counterpart in the history I come from. My expedition’s presence here is causing a resonance through which you are vaguely recollecting aspects of those other lives.”
“Had,” Swinburne responded. “Past tense.”
“Yes.”
“The other Burton, Trounce, and Swinburne—our doppelgängers—are dead?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“Have patience, sir.”
Swinburne rolled his eyes and sighed.
A couple of minutes later, Raghavendra called up to the driver. “Stop here, please.”
The carriage slow
ed to a halt and its passengers climbed out, finding themselves in a country lane at the edge of a wood.
“Here?” the driver asked. “It’s a fair walk to the next house, ma’am. Ain’t nought hereabouts ’ceptin’ rabbits an’ trees. No reason fer anyone to be here, ’less they’re poachin’, which you plainly ain’t.”
“We’re having a picnic,” Raghavendra said, passing the fare up to him. He took the coins.
“Aye, well, the clouds are gatherin’ and I reckons it’s going to rain soon, ma’am, and even if it weren’t, a picnic ain’t no cop without a spot o’ grub to go with it, if you’ll forgive the observation.”
“No need for concern,” she answered. “It’s all arranged. Thank you. Good day.”
He shrugged, saluted her, gave a flick of the reins and a click of his tongue, and steered the landau around and back the way they’d come. They stood and watched it go. It rounded a bend and drove out of sight. The clip-clop of horses’ hooves faded. But for the faint rustle of leaves in the slight breeze, silence surrounded them.
“Follow me, please.” Raghavendra lifted her cloak and skirt a little and stepped off the road onto a dirt path that led into the trees. The light became dappled as they trailed after her and the verdure closed overhead.
Soft soil squelched beneath their feet. Occasionally they pressed themselves against bushes as they skirted the path’s edges to avoid puddles. Though the weather was rapidly deteriorating, they all felt uncomfortably warm.
After they’d traversed a quarter of a mile, Swinburne observed, “There’s rather a preponderance of red flowers, don’t you think?”
Burton, who’d been searching his memory and had found it to be brimming with anomalous oddities, realised that the poet was quite right. The farther into the woods they walked, the more they found themselves surrounded by vermillion blossoms, which grew in patches beneath the trees and, in many instances, on vines that climbed the trunks.
“Out of season,” he said.