by Mark Hodder
“Agreed. Did you treat Quips to more pie?”
The old dame smiled indulgently. “Yes, and an apple and some butterscotch.”
“Thank you. Now, as you recommend, I think I shall take my devils out of the house.”
“But you’ll not allow them to guide you into trouble, if you please, Sir Richard.”
“I’ll do my best, Mother Angell.”
She bobbed her head and departed.
Burton considered for a moment. It was too late in the evening to visit the hospital; that would have to wait until the morning, and if Speke didn’t survive the night, then so be it. It was, however, never too late to visit the Cannibal Club. A few drinks with his Libertine friends would help to lift his spirits, and maybe Algernon Swinburne would be among them. Burton hadn’t known the promising young poet for long but enjoyed his company immensely.
He made up his mind, changed his clothes, took another swig of brandy, and was just leaving the room when a tapping came at one of the windows. He crossed to it, a little clumsily, and saw a colourful parakeet sitting on the sill.
He pulled up the sash. A cloud of mist rolled in. The parakeet looked at him.
“Message from the stinking prime minister’s office,” it cackled. “You are requested to attend that prattle-brain Lord Palmerston at 10 Downing Street at nine o’clock in the morning. Please confirm, arse-face. Message ends.”
Burton’s brows, which usually arched low over his eyes in what appeared to be a permanent frown, shot upward. The prime minister wanted to meet with him personally? Why?
“Reply. Message begins. Appointment confirmed. I will be there. Message ends. Go.”
“Bugger off!” squawked the parakeet, and launched itself from the sill.
Burton closed the window.
He was going to meet Lord Palmerston.
Bloody hell.
The Cannibal Club was located in rooms above Bartoloni’s Italian Restaurant in Leicester Square.
Burton found the enigmatic and rather saturnine Richard Monckton Milnes there, in company with the diminutive Algernon Swinburne and Captain Henry Murray, Doctor James Hunt, Sir Edward Brabrooke, Thomas Bendyshe, and Charles Bradlaugh—hellraisers all.
“Burton!” cried Milnes as the explorer entered. “Congratulations!”
“On what?”
“On shooting that bounder Speke! Surely it was you who pulled the trigger? Please say it was so!”
Burton threw himself into a chair and lit a cigar.
“It was not.”
“Ah, what a shame!” exclaimed Milnes. “I was so hoping you could tell us what it feels like to murder a man. A white man, I mean!”
“Why, yes, of course!” put in Bradlaugh. “You killed that little Arab boy on the road to Mecca, didn’t you?”
Burton accepted a drink from Henry Murray.
“You know damned well I didn’t!” he growled. “That bastard Stanley writes nothing but scurrilous nonsense!”
“Come now, Richard!” trilled Swinburne, in his excitable, high-pitched voice. “Don’t object so! Do you not agree that murder is one of the great boundaries we must cross in order to know that we, ourselves, are truly alive?”
The famous explorer sighed and shook his head. Swinburne was young—just twenty-four—and possessed an intuitive intelligence that appealed to the older man; but he was gullible.
“Nonsense, Algy! Don’t let these Libertines mesmerise you with their misguided ideas and appallingly bad logic. They are incorrigibly perverse, especially Milnes here.”
“Hah!” yelled Bendyshe from across the room. “Swinburne’s as perverse as they come! He has a taste for pain, don’t you know! Likes the kiss of a whip, what!”
Swinburne giggled, twitched, and snapped his fingers. As always, his movements were fast, jerky, and eccentric, as if he suffered from Saint Vitus’s dance.
“It’s true. I’m a follower of de Sade.”
“It’s a common affliction,” noted Burton. “Why, I once visited a brothel in Karachi—on a research mission for Napier, you understand—”
Snorts and howls of derision came from the gathering.
“—and there witnessed a man flagellated to the point of unconsciousness. He enjoyed it!”
“Delicious!” Swinburne shuddered.
“Maybe so, if your tastes run to it,” agreed Burton. “However, flagellation is one thing, murder is quite another!”
Milnes sat beside Burton, leaning close.
“But, I say, Richard,” he murmured, “don’t you ever wonder at the sense of freedom one must feel when performing the act of murder? It is, after all, the greatest taboo, is it not? Break that and you are free of the shackles imposed by civilisation!”
“I’m no great enthusiast for the false pleasures and insidious suppressions of civilisation,” said Burton. “And, in my opinion, Mrs. Grundy—our fictitious personification of all things oh so pure, polite, restrained, and conventional requires a thorough shagging; however, as much as I might rail against the constraints of English society and culture, murder is a more fundamental matter than either.”
Swinburne squealed with delight. “A thorough shagging! Oh, bravo, Richard!”
Milnes nodded. “False pleasures and insidious suppressions indeed. Pleasures which enslave, suppressions which pass judgement. Where, I ask, is freedom?”
“I don’t know,” answered Burton. “How can one quantify so indefinite a notion as freedom?”
“By looking to nature, dear boy! Nature red in tooth and claw! One animal kills another animal. Is it found guilty? No! It remains free to do what it will, even—and, in fact, certainly—to kill again! As de Sade himself said: ‘Nature has not got two voices, you know, one of them condemning all day what the other commands.”’
Burton emptied his glass in a single swallow.
“For sure, Darwin has demonstrated that Nature is a brutal and entirely pitiless process, but you seem to forget, Milnes, that the animal which kills is most often, in turn, itself killed by another animal, just as the murderer, in a supposedly civilised country, is hanged for his crime!”
“Then you propose an innate natural law of justice from which we can never break free, a law that transcends culture, whatever its stage of development?”
James Hunt, passing to join a conversation between Bradlaugh and Brabrooke on the other side of the room, stopped long enough to refill Burton’s glass.
“Yes, I do believe some such law exists,” said Burton. “I find the Hindu notion of karma more alluring than the Catholic absurdity of original sin.”
“How is Isabel?” put in Bendyshe, who’d stepped across to join them.
Burton ignored the mischievous question and went on, “At least karma provides a counterbalance—a penalty or reward, if you like—to acts we actually perform and thoughts we actually think, rather than punishing us for the supposed sin of our actual existence or for a transgression against a wholly artificial dictate of so-called morality. It is a function of Nature rather than a judgement of an unproven God.”
“By Jove! Stanley was correct when he wrote that you’re a heathen!” mocked Bendyshe. “Burton joins with Darwin and says there is no God!”
“Actually, Darwin hasn’t suggested any such thing. It is others who have imposed that interpretation upon his Origin of Species.”
“‘There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise bath she need of an author,”’ quoted Swinburne. “De Sade again.”
“In many respects I consider him laughable,” commented Burton, “but in that instance, I wholeheartedly agree. The more I study religions, the more I’m convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.”
He quoted his own poetry:
“Man worships self: his God is man; the struggling of the mortal mind to firm its model as ‘twould be, the perfect of itself to find.”
Milnes took a drag from his cigar and blew a smoke ring, which rose lazily into the air. He watched it slowly disperse
and said, “But this karma business, Richard—what you are proposing is that one way or another, through some sort of entirely natural process, a murderer will receive retribution. Do you then count man’s judgement—the death penalty—to be natural?”
“We are natural beings, are we not?”
“Well,” interrupted Bendyshe, “I sometimes wonder about Swinburne.”
It was a fair point, thought Burton, for Swinburne was a very unnaturallooking man. At just five-foot-two, he had a strangely tiny body. His limbs were small and delicate, with sloping shoulders and a very long neck upon which sat a large head made even bigger by a tousled mass of carroty-red hair standing almost at right angles to it. His mouth was weak and effeminate; his eyes huge, pale green, and dreamy.
Few poets looked so much a poet as Algernon Charles Swinburne.
“But that aside,” said Bendyshe, “what if the murderer avoids the noose?”
“Guilt,” proposed Burton. “A gradual but inescapable degradation of the character. A degenerative disease of the mind. Maybe a descent into madness and self-destruction.”
“Or perhaps,” offered Swinburne, “a tendency to mix with criminal types until the murderer is himself, inevitably, murdered.”
“Well put!” agreed the famous adventurer.
“Interesting,” pondered Milnes, “but, I say, we all know that murders are committed either in the heat of passion, or else with intent by an individual who’s already in an advanced—if that’s the appropriate word—state of mental decay. What if, though, a murder was calculated and committed by an intelligent man who performs the act only out of scientific curiosity? What if it were done only to transcend the limitations that tell us it shouldn’t be done?”
“An idle motive,” suggested Burton.
“Not at all, dear boy!” declared Milnes. “It’s a magnificent motive! Why, the man who would undertake such an act would risk his immortal soul for science!”
“He would undoubtedly see sense and back away from the experiment,” said Burton, his voice slurring slightly, “for once crossed, that barrier allows no return. However, his decision would be based on self-determined standards of behaviour rather than on any set out by civilisation or on notions of an immortal soul; for as you say, he’s an intelligent man.”
“It’s strange,” said Henry Murray, who up until now had listened in silence. “I thought that you, of all of us, would be the one most likely to approve the experiment.”
“You should take my reputation with a pinch of salt.”
“Must we? I rather enjoy having a devil in our midst.” Swinburne grinned.
Sir Richard Francis Burton considered the susceptible young poet and wondered how to keep him out of trouble.
Burton was not a Libertine himself, but they considered him an honorary member of the caste and delighted in his knowledge of exotic cultures, where the stifling laws of civilisation were remarkable only by their seeming absence. He enjoyed drinking and debating with them, especially this evening, for it kept his mind engaged and helped to stave off the despondency that had been creeping over him since he’d returned from Bath.
By one o’clock in the morning, though, it was dragging at him again, made worse by alcohol and exhaustion, so he bid his friends farewell and left the club.
The evening was bitterly cold—unusual for September—and the roads glistened wetly. The thickening pall wrapped each gas lamp in its own golden aureole. Burton held his overcoat tight with one hand and swung his cane with the other. London rustled and murmured around him as he walked unsteadily homewards.
A velocipede chattered past. They had started to appear on the streets two years ago, these steam-driven, one-man vehicles, and were popularly known as “penny-farthings” due to their odd design, for the front wheel was nearly as tall as a man, while the back wheel was just eighteen inches in diameter.
The rider was seated high on a leather saddle, situated slightly behind the crown of the front wheel, with his feet resting in stirrups to either side, his legs held away from the piston arm and crank which pumped and spun to the left of the axle. The tiny, boxlike engine was attached to the frame behind and below the saddle; the small boiler, with its furnace, was under this, and the coal scuttle under that; the three elements arranged in a segmented arc over the top-rear section of the main wheel. As well as providing the motive power, they were also the machine’s centre of gravity and, together with the engine’s internal gyroscope, made the vehicle almost impossible to knock over, despite its ungainly appearance.
By far the most remarkable feature of the penny-farthing was its extraordinary efficiency. It could complete a twenty-mile journey in about an hour on just one fist-sized lump of coal. With the furnace able to hold up to four pieces and with the same number stored in the scuttle, it had a maximum range of 160 miles and could operate for about twenty hours before needing to refuel. The vehicle’s main flaw, aside from the thorough shaking it meted out to the driver, was that the two slim funnels, which rose up behind the saddle, belched smoke into the miasmal atmosphere of England’s capital, adding to an already bad situation. Nevertheless, the vehicles were currently all the rage and had done much to restore the public’s faith in the Engineering faction of the Technologist caste, a group that had been much maligned of late after the disastrous flooding of the undersea town of Hydroham off the Norfolk coast, and a number of fatal crashes during the attempted—and ultimately abandoned—development of gas-filled airships.
Burton watched the contraption disappear into the mist.
London had transformed while he’d been in Africa. It had filled with new machines and new breeds of animal. The Engineers and Eugenicists—the main branches of the Technologist caste—seemed unstoppable, despite protests from the Libertines, who felt that art, beauty, and nobility of spirit were more essential than material progress.
The problem was that the Libertines, despite producing reams of anti Technologist propaganda, were unclear in their message. On the one hand, there were the “True Libertines,” such as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, who were basically Luddites; while on the other, there were the increasingly powerful “Rakes,” whose interests ran to black magic, anarchy, sexual depravity, drug taking, meddling, and general bad behaviour, which they justified as an attempt to “transcend the limitations of the human condition.” Most Libertines, Richard Monckton Milnes being a prime example, fell somewhere between the two camps, being neither as dreamily idealistic as the one faction nor as scandalously self-indulgent as the other.
As for Sir Richard Francis Burton, he wasn’t sure where he fitted. Although it was the country of his birth, England had never felt like home, probably because he’d spent most of his childhood being dragged around Europe by his restless parents. He was therefore rather surprised when he returned from the Nile expedition and found that the country’s current state of social instability somewhat suited him. The rapid changes, more intensely felt in the capital than elsewhere, might be confusing to the majority of the populace but he’d always regarded his own identity as rather a transient and changeable thing, so now he felt an odd sort of empathy with the fluctuating nature of British culture.
As he walked, he slowly became aware of a tapping noise from somewhere above and realised that he’d been hearing it on and off since leaving the club. He peered up and around but saw nothing.
He continued his trek home, listening, and, yes, there it was again. Was he being followed? He looked back, but there was no suggestion of anyone on his heels until a policeman started to trail along behind him, his attention attracted by the lone, obviously rather drunk man’s brutal features. After five minutes or so, the constable drew closer, saw that Burton wore the clothes of a gentleman, hesitated, then abandoned the chase.
The explorer crossed Charing Cross Road and entered a long, badly lit side street. His foot hit a discarded bottle that spun into the gutter with a musical tinkle. Something large flapped overhead and he looked up in time to see a
huge Eugenicist-bred swan pass by, dragging a box kite behind it through the mist. A man’s white face—an indistinct blur—looked down from the kite before it vanished over the rooftops. A faint voice reached Burton’s ears but whatever it was the man had shouted was muffled by the water-laden air.
Last year, Speke and Grant had used the same form of transportation to make their way to the Nyanza, following the old route. It had taken a fraction of the time required by Burton’s expedition. They’d set up camp in Kazeh, a small town some hundred and fifty miles south of the great lake, and here John Speke had made one of his characteristic errors of judgement by failing to properly guard his birds. They’d been eaten by lions. Without them he couldn’t circumnavigate the lake, couldn’t ascertain whether it was the source of the great river, and couldn’t prove Burton wrong.
A few yards farther down the road, a man shuffled from the shadows of a doorway. He was a coarse-featured individual clad in canvas trousers and shirt with a rust-coloured waistcoat and a cloth cap. There were fire marks—red welts—on his face and thick forearms caused by hours spent stoking a forge.
“Can I ‘elp you, mate?” he growled. “Maybe relieve you of wha’ever loose change is weighin’ down yer pockits?”
Burton looked at him.
The man backed away so suddenly that his heels struck the doorstep and he sat down heavily.
“Sorry, fella!” he mumbled. “Mistook you fer somebody else, I did!”
The explorer snorted scornfully and moved on. He entered a network of narrow alleys—dark, dangerous, and sordid—a dismal tentacle of poverty reaching far out of the East End into the centre of the city. Mournful windows gaped from the sides of squalid houses. Inarticulate shouts came from some of them—occasionally the sound of blows, screams, and weeping—but hopeless silence came from most.
It occurred to him that the depths of London felt remarkably similar to the remotest regions of Africa.
He came to a junction, turned left, tripped, and stumbled; his shin banging against a discarded crate and his trouser leg catching on a protruding nail and tearing. He spat out an oath and kicked the crate away. A rat scuttled along the side of the pavement.