The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack

by Mark Hodder

  “He said, ‘Not you’—which suggests he was looking for a specific girl and got the wrong one. I have to return to London. Can I take one of the rotorchairs?”

  “Help yourself. Park it outside your house and I’ll send a constable along for it later. What’s your next move?”

  “Sleep. I’m exhausted and my malaria is threatening to take hold. And you?”

  “I’m going to talk some more with the Tew family. I’m looking for a link between his victims.”

  “Good man. We’ll talk again soon, Trounce.”

  “I’m certain of it—our spring-heeled friend will be back, you can be sure of that. Where will he appear, though? That’s the question. Where?”

  “One more thing, Inspector,” said Burton. “Pay close attention to the mother, Tilly. There was something about her expression when we left that leads me to suspect she knows more than she’s letting on!”

  THE BATTERSEA BRIGADE

  Conquer thyself, till thou has done this, thou art but a slave; for it is almost as well to be subjected to another’s appetite as to thine own.

  —SIR RICHARD FRANCIS BURTON

  y two o’clock that afternoon, Burton was back at work. He’d slept for a couple of hours, washed, dressed, and eaten lunch, and had then sent two messages: one by runner to the prime minister requesting an audience; the other by parakeet to Swinburne asking him to call early that evening.

  An hour later, a reply from 10 Downing Street landed on his windowsill.

  “Message from that degenerate idle-headed lout Lord Palmerston. Come at once. Message ends.”

  “No reply,” said Burton.

  “Up your spout!” screeched the parakeet as it flew off.

  Forty minutes later, having walked briskly through the thinning fog that was still clinging to central London, Burton was once again sitting opposite Lord Palmerston, who, while hurriedly scribbling notes in the margins of a document, spoke without looking up.

  “What is it, Burton? I’m busy and I don’t require progress reports. Just write up the case when it’s done and send it to me.”

  “A man died.”

  “Who? How?”

  “A cab driver named Montague Penniforth. He accompanied me to the East End and was there killed by a werewolf.”

  Palmerston looked up for the first time. “A werewolf? You saw it?”

  “I saw four. Penniforth was torn apart. I had no way to take care of his body without placing myself in jeopardy. He was a good man and didn’t deserve an East End funeral.”

  “The Thames, you mean?”

  “Yes.” Burton clenched his fists. “I was a damned fool. I shouldn’t have got him involved.”

  The prime minister laid his pen to one side and rested his hands in front of him with fingers entwined. He spoke in a slow and level tone.

  “The commission you have received from the king is a unique one. You must regard yourself as a commander in the field of battle and, on occasion, His Majesty’s servants will be required to serve. It’s highly likely, given the nature of your missions, that some of those servants will be killed or injured. They fall for the Empire.”

  “Penniforth was a cabbie, not a soldier!” objected Burton.

  “He was the king’s servant, as are we all.”

  “And are all who fall while in his service to be dumped unceremoniously into the river like discarded slops?”

  Palmerston pulled a sheet of paper from his desk drawer and wrote upon it. He slid it across to Burton.

  “Wherever possible in such circumstances, get a message to this address. My team will come and clean up the mess. The fallen will be treated with respect. Funerals will be arranged and paid for. Widows will be granted a state pension.”

  The king’s agent looked at the names written above the address.

  “Burke and Hare!” he exclaimed. “Code names?”

  “Actually, no-coincidence! The resurrectionist Burke was hanged in ‘29 and his partner, Hare, died a blind beggar ten years ago. My two agents, Damien Burke and Gregory Hare, are cut from entirely different cloth. Good men, if a little gloomy in outlook.”

  “Montague Penniforth had a wife named Daisy and lived in Cheapside. That’s all I know about him.”

  “I’ll put Burke and Hare onto it. They’ll soon find the woman and I’ll see to it that she’s provided for. I have a lot to do, Captain Burton. Are we finished?”

  Burton stood. “Yes, sir.”

  “Then let us both get back to work.”

  Palmerston returned to his scribbling and Burton turned to leave. As he reached the door, the prime minister spoke again.

  “You might consider taking an assistant.”

  Burton looked back but Lord Palmerston was bent over his document, writing furiously.

  Propriety demands that young women do not visit the homes of bachelors without a chaperone but Isabel Arundell didn’t give two hoots for propriety. She was well aware that Society was already looking down its ever-so-haughty nose at her because she’d accompanied her fiancé to Bath and stayed in the same hotel as him, though, heaven forbid, not in the same room. Now she was willfully breaking another taboo by visiting him at his home independently—and not for the first time.

  Her willful destruction of her own reputation bothered her not a bit, for she knew that when she and Richard were married they’d leave the country to live abroad. He would work as a government consul and she would gather around herself a new group of friends, preferably non-English, among whom she’d be considered an exotic bloom; a delicate rose among the darker and, she imagined, rather less sophisticated blossoms of Damascus or, perhaps, South America.

  She had it all worked out, and, generally, what Isabel Arundell wanted, Isabel Arundell got.

  When she arrived at 14 Montagu Place that afternoon, she was reluctantly allowed into the house by Mrs. Angell, who had the brazen effrontery, in Isabel’s opinion, to ask whether the “young miss” was sure this visit was entirely wise. The kindly old dame then suggested that if Isabel was determined to go through with it, then perhaps she—Mrs. Angell—should remain at her side throughout, to satisfy social mores.

  Isabel impatiently dismissed the well-meant offer and, without further ado, she marched up the stairs and entered the study.

  Burton was slumped in his saddlebag armchair by the fire, wrapped in his jubbah, smoking one of his disreputable cheroots and staring into the room’s thick blue haze of tobacco smoke. He’d been there since his return from Downing Street an hour ago and had barely moved a muscle. His mind was far away and he was completely unaware that Isabel had entered.

  “For goodness’ sake, Dick,” she chided, “I’ve stepped out of one fog and into another! If you must be—”

  She stopped, gasped, and raised her gloved hands to her mouth, for she’d noticed that a yellowing bruise curved around one of his eyes, a livid and much darker one marked his left temple, there were scratches and grazes all over his face, and he looked somewhat as if the Charge of the Light Brigade had galloped over him.

  “What-what-what—?” she stuttered.

  His eyes turned slowly toward her and she saw his pupils shrink into focus.

  “Ah,” he said, and stood. “Isabel, my apologies—I forgot you were coming.”

  “Your face, Dick!” she exclaimed, and she suddenly flung herself into his arms. “Your face! What on earth has happened!”

  He kissed her forehead and stepped back, holding her at arm’s length.

  “Everything, Isabel. Everything has happened. My life seems to have changed in an instant! I have been commissioned by the king himself!”

  “The king? Commissioned? Dick, I don’t understand. And why are you bruised and cut so?”

  “Sit down. I’ll endeavour to explain. But, Isabel, you must prepare yourself. Remember the Arabic proverb I taught you: In lam yakhun ma tureed, fa’ariid ma yakhoon.”

  She translated: “‘When what you want doesn’t happen, learn to want what does.”’<
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  She sat and frowned and waited while he went to the bureau and poured her a tonic. He returned and handed her the glass but remained standing. His expression was unreadable.

  “The Foreign Office was going to offer me a consulship in Fernando Po—” he began.

  She interrupted, “Yes, I have sent many a letter to Lord Russell recommending you for just such a post. Though I requested Damascus.”

  “You did what?” he muttered in surprise. “You thought it acceptable to write to Lord Russell on my behalf without first consulting with me?”

  “Don’t be bullish, Dick. We’ve spoken about a consulship often. But, pray, tell me what happened to you!”

  “In due course. And I should say there is a great difference between a conversation shared between us and a begging letter sent to a government minister.”

  “It was hardly that!” she cried.

  “Be that as it may, you should neither speak nor write on my behalf unless expressly asked by me to do so.”

  “I was trying to help you!”

  “And in doing so made it appear that I lacked the wherewithal to forward my own career. By myself perhaps I could have secured Damascus. As it is, your intervention earned me an invitation to Fernando Po. They offered me a governmental crumb when I wanted a governmental loaf. Do you know where Fernando Po is?”

  “No,” she whispered, a tear rolling down her cheek. This visit wasn’t going at all as she had planned.

  “It’s a Spanish island off the west coast of Africa; an insignificant, disease-ridden fleapit, widely regarded as ‘the white man’s graveyard.’ A man who is made consul of Fernando Po is a man the Foreign Office wants out of the way. The fact that Lord Russell suggested it for me means only one thing: I have irritated him. Except, of course, I haven’t. In fact, I’ve had no contact with him at all.”

  “It was me! It’s my fault! Oh, I’m so sorry, Dick—I wanted only the best for you!”

  “And achieved the worst,” he noted, ruthlessly.

  Isabel hid her face in her hands and wept.

  “Isabel,” said Burton softly, “when the king honoured me with a knighthood, I thought my future was secured—our future. Then came John’s betrayal. Why he did it, I know not. He’d been a younger brother to me, but he was weak and allowed himself to be manipulated by a malignant force. I’d striven like no man to make a name for myself: in India, I had to overcome disappointments and the jealous opposition of officers; in Arabia, I risked execution by taking the pilgrimage to Mecca; in Berbera, I was nearly killed by natives; and in central Africa, I almost died from illness and exhaustion. It all became worthless when he turned against me and tarnished my reputation. The things he suggested! By God! I should have horsewhipped him! But sentiment caused me to stay my hand and in that pause, the harm was done. When he shot himself, it might have been my head he levelled the gun at for all the damage it did me; for now, on top of all the malicious lies he’d told, I am blamed for his attempted suicide. On Monday, when I learned what he’d done, the Richard Burton you met in Boulogne ten years ago—the Burton you fell in love with—that man ceased to exist.”

  “No, Richard! Don’t say that!” she wailed.

  “It’s true. You would have married a broken man—but for one thing.”

  “What?” she whimpered.

  “That evening, I was physically assaulted.”

  Isabel blinked rapidly. “You were attacked? By whom?”

  “By a thing out of myth and folklore; by a seemingly supernatural being; by Spring Heeled Jack.”

  She stared at him wordlessly.

  “It’s true, Isabel. Then, on Tuesday morning, I was summoned by Palmerston and he offered me a post on behalf of the king. I have become a—well, there’s no real name for it; Palmerston calls me the ‘king’s agent,’ though ‘investigator’ or ‘researcher’ or even ‘detective’ might do just as well. One of my first commissions is to discover more about the very creature that assaulted me.”

  Isabel Arundell suddenly rose to her feet and crossed the room to one of the windows. She looked out of it as she spoke.

  “This is poppycock, Dick,” she snapped, decisively. “Has your malaria returned?”

  He moved back to the bureau, beside her, and poured himself a glass of port.

  “Do you mean to suggest that I might be delusional?”

  There was a deep sadness in his voice. She swung around at the sound of it.

  “Spring Heeled Jack is a children’s story!”

  “And if I were also to tell you that I’ve seen werewolves in London?”

  “Werewolves! Richard! Listen to what you are saying!”

  “I know how it sounds, Isabel, but I also know what I saw. Furthermore, a man died and it was my fault. It taught me a painful lesson: that this post I now hold brings with it immense danger, not just for me, but for those close to me, too.”

  “I can’t-I can’t—” she stammered. “Dear God! You mean to give me up?” She clutched at her chest as if her heart were failing.

  “You know what manner of man am I,” he replied. “Discovery is my mania. Africa is closed to me now and, anyway, I have little desire for the ill health that expeditions bring with them. The last almost killed me, and I would rather die on my feet than on my back. Besides, geographical exploration is but one form of discovery; there are others, and the king has given me the opportunity to use my mania in a fashion I had hitherto never imagined. I can—”

  “Stop!” commanded Isabel. Her chin went up and her eyes flashed dangerously. “And what of me, Richard? Answer me that! What of me?”

  Ignoring the great ache that suddenly gripped his heart, Sir Richard Francis Burton answered.

  Despite her flaws, Burton loved Isabel, and despite his, she returned that love. She was meant to be his wife, that he could not dispute, yet he had defied Destiny and willfully forced his life down a different path.

  He was left empty and emotionless; yet he suddenly acquired a heightened self-awareness, too, and experienced an intensification of the feverish sensation that his personality was split.

  As the afternoon gave way to early evening, he fell once again into a deep contemplation—almost a self-induced trance—under the spell of which he explored the presence of the invisible doppelganger that seemed to occupy the same armchair as himself. Oddly, he found that he now associated this second Richard Burton not with the delirium of malaria but with Spring Heeled Jack.

  He and his double, he intuitively recognised, existed at a point of divergence. To one of them, a path was open that led to Fernando Po, Brazil, Damascus, and “wherever the fuck else they send you. ” For the other, the path was that of the king’s agent, its destination shrouded.

  The stilt-walker, Burton was certain, had somehow foreseen this choice. Jack, whatever he was, was not a spy, as he and Palmerston had initially suspected. Oh no, nothing so pedestrian as that! It wasn’t just what the strangely costumed man had said but also the way he’d said it that forced upon Burton the conception that Jack possessed an uncanny knowledge of his—Burton’s—future, knowledge that could never be gained from spying, no matter how efficient.

  In India, he’d seen much that defied rational thought. Human beings, he was convinced, possessed a “force of will” that could extend their senses beyond the limits of sight, hearing, taste, or touch. Could it, he wondered, even transcend the restrictions of time? Was Spring Heeled Jack a true clairvoyant? If he was, then he obviously spent far too much time dwelling upon the future, for his grasp of the present seemed tenuous at best; he had expressed astonishment when Burton revealed that the Nile debate—and Speke’s accident—had already occurred.

  “I’m a historian!” he’d claimed. “I know what happened. It was 1864 not 1861.”

  Happened. Past tense, though he spoke of 1864, which was three years in the future.

  Curious.

  There was an obvious—though hard to accept—explanation for the discrepancies in Jack’s percep
tion of time: he simply wasn’t of this world. The creature had, after all, twice vanished before Burton’s very eyes and, back in 1840, had done the same in full view of Detective Inspector Trounce. Plainly, this was a feat no mere mortal could achieve.

  What’s more, everything could be explained Jack’s inconsistent character and appearance, his confusion about time, his seeming to be in two places at once, his apparent agelessness—if it were accepted that he was a supernatural being whose habitat lay beyond the realms of normal time and space. Perhaps Burton’s first impression had been correct: could he be an uncorked djinni? A demon? A malevolent spirit? Moko, the Congo’s god of divination?

  The king’s agent emerged from his contemplation having come to two conclusions. The first was that, for the time being, the bizarre apparition should be treated as one being rather than as two or more. The second was that Time was a key element in understanding Spring Heeled Jack.

  He stood and rubbed a crick out of his neck. As always, focusing his mind on one thing had helped him to forget another, and, though his meeting with Isabel had been painful, he wasn’t immobilised by depression, as he’d sometimes been in the past. In fact, he was feeling surprisingly positive.

  It was eight o’clock.

  Burton crossed to the window and looked down at Montagu Place. The fog had reduced to a watery mist, liberally punctuated with coronas of light from gas lamps and windows. The usual hustle and bustle had returned to the streets of London: the rattling velocipedes, gasping steam-horses, oldfashioned horse-drawn vehicles, pantechnicons, and, above all, the seething mass of humanity.

  Usually, when he looked upon such a scene, Burton, ever the outsider, felt a fierce longing for the wide-open spaces of Arabia. This evening, though, there was an unfamiliar cosiness about London, almost a familiarity. He’d never felt this before. England had always felt strange to him, stifling and repressive.

  I am changing, he thought. I hardly know myself.

  A flash of red caught his attention: Swinburne stepping out of a hansom. The poet’s arrival was signalled by shrill screams and cries as he squabbled with the driver over the fare. Swinburne had the fixed idea that the fare from one place in London to any other was a shilling, and would argue hysterically with any cabbie who said otherwise—which they all did. On this occasion, as so often happened, the driver, embarrassed by the histrionics, gave up and accepted the coin.