by Mark Hodder
“Bismillah!” Burton cursed. “We're going to have to fight our way to the supplies and get ourselves more guns. Herne, there are spears tied to the tent pole at the back. Get ’em!”
“Yes, sir!” Herne responded. He turned, then cried: “They're breaking through the canvas!”
Burton spat expletives. “If this blasted thing comes down on us we'll be caught up good and proper. Get out! Come on! Now!”
He hurled himself through the tent flaps and into a crowd of twenty or so Somali natives, setting about them with his sabre, slicing right and left, yelling fiercely.
Clubs and spear shafts thudded against his flesh, bruising and cutting him, drawing blood. He glanced to the rear, toward the tent, and saw a thrown stone crack against Speke's knee. The lieutenant stumbled backward.
“Don't step back!” Burton shouted. “They'll think that we're retiring!”
Speke looked at him with an expression of utter dismay.
A club struck Burton on the shoulder. He twisted and swiped his blade at its owner. The crush of men jostled him back and forth. Someone shoved him from behind and he turned angrily, raising his sword, only recognising El Balyuz, the expedition's guide, at the very last moment.
His arm froze in midswing.
White-hot pain tore through his head.
He stumbled and fell onto the sandy earth.
A weight pulled him sideways.
He reached up.
A javelin had pierced his face, in one side of his mouth and out the other, dislodging teeth and cracking his palate.
He fought to stay conscious.
The pain!
Damn it, Speke-help me! Help me!
A damp cloth on his brow.
Dry sheets beneath him.
He opened his eyes.
Algernon Swinburne smiled down at him.
“You were having a nightmare, Richard. The nightmare.”
Burton moved his tongue about in his mouth. It was dry, not bloody.
“Water,” he croaked.
Swinburne reached to the bedside table. “Here you are.”
Burton pushed himself into a sitting position, took the proffered glass, and drank greedily.
His friend plumped the pillows behind him and he leaned back, feeling comfortable, warm, and unbelievably weak. He was in his own bedroom at 14 Montagu Place.
“It was a bad attack,” Swinburne advised. “I refer to the malaria, not to the Berbera incident,” he added, with a grin.
“Always the same bloody dream!” Burton grumbled.
“It's not surprising, really,” the poet noted. “Any man who had a spear shoved through his ugly mug would probably have nightmares about it.”
“How long?”
“The spear?”
“Was I unconscious for, you blessed clown.”
“You were in a high fever for five days then slept almost solidly for three more. Doctor Steinhaueser has been popping in every few hours to keep you dosed up with quinine. We forced chicken broth into you twice daily, though I doubt you remember any of that.”
“I don't. The last thing I recollect is talking with Brunel in the priory. Eight days! What happened? Last time I saw you, you'd just taken a tumble through some trees.”
“Yes, that confounded swan was an unmanageable blighter! I rounded up a little squadron of constables and we drove the pantechnicon to Scotland Yard. Of course, it was an utter waste of time; there were neither fingerprints nor any other admissible evidence to connect it either with the Brundleweed robbery or with Brunel and his clockwork men.
“Anyway, while I was having my cuts and bruises attended to by the Yard physician, William Trounce, Herbert Spencer, and Constable Bhatti all came limping in for the same treatment. We knew you'd get word to us, so after we'd been bandaged, soothed, patted on our heads, and sent on our merry way, we regrouped in Trounce's office, sat steaming by the fire, and waited. When the parakeet arrived and delivered your message, we gathered a force together and raced to Crouch End on velocipedes. You were unconscious inside the priory with the diamonds at your side. There was no sign of Isambard Kingdom Brunel.”
“Did you find one of Babbage's devices? On a plinth?”
“Yes. Trounce took it in as evidence. The diamonds were returned to Brundleweed. He's not happy, though. It turns out that Brunel made off with a select few and left fakes in their place.”
“The black ones? Francois Garnier's Choir Stones?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“I'll tell you later, Algy. But you're wrong. It wasn't Brunel who took the originals. I need to sleep now. I'll write up a full report when my strength is back. Oh, by the way, what became of Herbert Spencer?”
“He got a little reward from Scotland Yard for helping us out. Miss Mayson has given him an occasional job, too. He cleans out the parakeet cages at the automated animal academy.”
“He must have a thick skin!”
“He doesn't need one. Apparently the birds have taken a shine to him and barrage him with compliments!” Swinburne stood. “I'm staying in the spare bedroom. Just ring if you need anything.”
“Thank you,” Burton replied sleepily as his friend departed.
He lay back with his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling.
Two weeks passed.
Burton worked on an expanded edition of his book The Lake Regions of Central Africa.
He slowly regained his strength. His long-suffering housekeeper, Mrs. Iris Angell, cooked him magnificent meals and despaired when he sent them back barely touched. His appetite had always been slight, but now-as she told him every single morning and every single evening-he needed sustenance.
She underestimated his iron constitution.
Little by little, the gaunt hollows beneath his scarred cheekbones filled out; the dark shadows around his eyes faded; his hands steadied.
Algernon Swinburne, now living back in his own apartment on Grafton Street, Fitzroy Square, was a frequent visitor and observed with satisfaction the normal swarthiness returning to his friend's jaundiced countenance.
Burton eventually got around to writing a report detailing his confrontation with Sir Charles Babbage. He held nothing back.
Rolling the document, he placed it in a canister, which he slotted into an odd-looking copper and glass contraption on his desk. He dialed the number 222 and pressed a button. There came a gasp, a plume of steam, a rattle, and the canister shot away down a tube, en route to the prime minister's office.
He was just settling in his armchair and reaching for a cigar when there came a knock and Mrs. Angell entered.
“There's a Countess Sabina to see you, sir.”
“Is there, by James!? Send her up, please!”
“Should I chaperone?”
“There's no need, Mrs. Angell. The countess and I are acquainted.”
Moments later, a woman stepped into the study. She was tall and may once have possessed an angular beauty, but now looked careworn; her face was lined, her chestnut hair shot through with grey, her fingernails bitten and unpainted. Her eyes, though, were extraordinary-large, slightly slanted, and of the darkest brown.
She was London's foremost cheiromantist and prognosticator, and had given Burton much to think about during the Spring Heeled Jack case.
“Countess!” he exclaimed. “This is an unexpected pleasure! Please sit down. Can I get you anything?”
“Just water, please, Captain Burton,” she answered, in a musical, slightly accented voice.
He crossed to the bureau and poured her a glass while she sat and patted down her black crinoline skirt and straightened her bonnet.
“I'm sorry to intrude,” she said as he handed her the drink and sat opposite. “My goodness, you look ill!”
“Recovering, Countess, and I assure you, your visit is very welcome and no intrusion at all. Can I be of some service?”
“Yes-no-yes-I don't know-maybe the other way around. I-I have been having visions, Captain.”
“And they concern me in some way?”
She nodded and took a sip of water. “When you came to me last year,” she continued, “I saw that you had embarked upon a course never meant for you, yet one that would lead to greater contentment.”
“I remember. You said that for me the wrong path is the right path.”
“Yes. But in recent days, I have been increasingly aware of the alternative, Captain, by which I mean the original path. Not just yours, but that which we were all destined to tread until the stilt-man drove us from it.”
“Edward Oxford. He was a meddler with time.”
“With time,” she echoed, softly. Her eyes seemed to be focused on the far distance. “I'm sorry,” she whispered. “I had intended to talk to you first but it is overwhelming me. I cannot stop it. I have to-I have to-”
Burton lunged forward and caught the glass as it dropped from her loose fingers. Her eyes rolled up into her head and she began to rock slightly in her chair. She started to speak in a voice that sounded weirdly different from her own, as if she was far away and talking to him through a length of pipe.
“I will speak. I will speak. It is all wrong. No one is as they should be. Nothing is as intended. The storm will break early and you shall witness the end of a great cycle and the horrifying birth pains of another; the past and the future locked together in a terrible conflict.”
A coldness gripped Burton.
“Beware, Captain, for a finger of the storm reaches back to touch you. There are layers upon layers, one deception concealing another-and that one but a veil over yet another. Do not believe what you see. The little ones are not as they appear. The puppeteer is herself a puppet and the sorcerer is not yet born. The dead shall believe themselves living.”
Her head fell back and a horribly tormented groan escaped her.
“No,” she whispered. “No. No. No. I can hear the song but it should not be sung! It should not be sung! The stilt-man broke the silence of the ages and the sorcerer hears; and the puppeteer hears; and the dead hear; and, oh, God help me-” her voice suddenly rose to a shriek “-I hear, too! I hear, too!”
She clapped her hands to her ears, arched her back, thrashed in her seat, and slumped into a dead faint.
“My God!” Burton gasped. He took her by the shoulders and straightened her; pushed his handkerchief into the glass of water and folded it over her brow; went to a drawer and retrieved a bottle of smelling salts. Moments later she was blinking and coughing.
He poured her a small brandy. “Here, take this.”
She gulped it, spluttered, breathed heavily, and slowly calmed.
“My apologies. Did I fall into a trance?”
“You did.”
“I suspected something of the sort might happen, though I hoped I might have more control over it. For two weeks I've felt the urge to see you, to transmit a message to you, but I did not know what it was, so I didn't come.”
Burton repeated what she had told him.
“Do you know what it means?” he asked.
“I never know. When I'm spellbound, I'm unaware of what I say, and it seldom makes sense to me afterward.”
Burton gazed at her thoughtfully. “Is there something else, Countess? Even though the message has been delivered, you seem uneasy.”
The prognosticator suddenly stood and paced back and forth, wringing her gloved hands.
“It's-it's-it's that I can't trust that the message is valid, Captain.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because-I know it sounds strange-but this, what I do, my ability to glimpse not only the future, but futures -plural-should not be possible!”
“I'm not sure I understand what you mean. You have a reputation for accuracy and I've seen it demonstrated. Plainly, it is not only possible but also actual.”
“Yes, and that's the problem! Prognostication, cheiromancy, spiritualism-these things are spoken of in the other history, but they do not work there, and those who claim such powers are regarded as nothing but charlatans and swindlers.”
Burton got to his feet, took his visitor by the upper arms, and turned her to face him.
“Countess, you and I are privy to a fact that very, very few people know: namely, that the natural course of time has been interfered with. The history we are living is different from what would otherwise have been. People are being exposed to opportunities and challenges they perhaps should not experience, and it is changing them entirely. Future mechanisms, hinted at in conversations between Edward Oxford's companion, Henry Beresford, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, are being developed according to current knowledge, giving us a glut of contraptions that, in all probability, should never have existed at all. Yet, amid all this chaos and confusion, there is one thing we can be certain of: changing time cannot possibly alter natural laws. I don't know whether spiritualist powers belong to the science of physics or to the science of biology; I know only that they are real. You are the living evidence.”
Countess Sabina's eyes met his, and in them he saw utter conviction as she said: “And yet, in the world that should have been, they are not real. They are not real. Somehow, Captain Burton, I feel this is the key!”
“The key to what?”
“To-to the survival of the British Empire!”
Later that same day, Burton was standing by one of his study windows smoking a Manila cheroot, filling the room with its pungent scent and staring sightlessly at the street below, when a messenger parakeet landed on the sill. Raising the window, he received: “Message from that dung-squeezer, Detective Inspector Trounce. Message begins. Word has reached me that you're back on your feet, you dirty shunt-knobbler. I'll call round at eight this evening. Message ends.”
Burton chuckled. Dirty shunt-knobbler. He must tell Algy that one.
He did, later, when Swinburne visited, and the poet roared with laughter, which was cut short when Fidget, Burton's basset hound, bit his ankle.
“Yow! Damn and blast the confounded dog! Why does he always do that?” he screeched.
“It's just his way of showing affection.”
“Can't you train him to be a little less expressive?”
They sat and chatted, relaxing in each other's company, enjoying their easy though unlikely friendship. Perhaps no stranger pair could be found in the whole of London than the brutal-faced, hard-bitten explorer and the delicate, rather effeminate-looking poet. Yet there was an intellectual-and perhaps spiritual-bond between them, which had begun with a shared love for the work of the Portuguese poet Camoens; had been sustained by a mutual need to know where their own limits lay-if, indeed, they had any; and was now strengthened by the challenges and dangers they faced together in the service of the king.
On the dot of eight, there came a hammering at the front door, followed by footsteps on the stairs and a tapping at the study door.
“Come!” Burton called.
The portal swung open and Mrs. Angell crossed the threshold. She stood nervously wrapping her hands in her pinafore.
“Detective Inspector T-Trounce and a young con-constable to see you, sir,” she stammered. “And-and-goodness gracious me!”
“Mrs. Angell? Are you quite all right?”
Trounce stepped into the room behind her. Constable Bhatti followed.
“Hallo, Captain! Hallo, Swinburne!” the Scotland Yard man cried cheerfully. “Mrs. Angell, my dear woman, don't worry yourself! I promise you, it's absolutely harmless!”
“B-but-bless my soul!” the old dame stuttered. She threw up her hands and bustled out of the room.
“What's harmless?” Burton asked.
“You look like your old self again!” Trounce exclaimed, ignoring the question. “But never mind! Worse things happen at sea!”
Swinburne gave a screech of laughter.
“Come in, gentlemen; help yourself to a drink and cigar,” Burton invited, indicating the decanter and the cigar box.
They did so, pulled over a couple of armchairs,
and settled around the fireplace with the king's agent and the poet. Fidget sprawled on the hearthrug at their feet.
“We have a gift for you, Captain,” Trounce declared with a mischievous twinkle.
“Really? Why?”
“Oh, for services rendered and whatnot! Besides, I noticed that your shoes are never polished, your cuffs are frayed, and your collars need starching!”
“Ever the detective. What on earth has my personal grooming got to do with anything?”
“I'm suggesting, Captain Burton, that you're in dire need of a gentleman's gentleman-a valet!”
“I have a housekeeper and a maid. Any more staff and I'll be managing a ‘household!’”
“Only those that need managing,” Trounce said. He winked at Bhatti.
The young constable smiled and called: “Enter!”
A figure of gleaming brass walked in, closed the door, and stood, whirring softly.
Fidget yelped and dived behind a chair.
“My hat!” Swinburne exclaimed. “Is that the clockwork man of Trafalgar Square?”
“The very same!” Trounce answered. “Constable Bhatti has been studying him for the past three weeks.”
“We found a key that fitted him in the priory,” the constable added. “Then it was just a matter of experimentation. As I suspected, the little switches at the front of the babbage dictate his behaviour. He can be rendered more aggressive, subservient, independent; you can set him to respond to any voice, specific voices, or just your own. What do think, Captain Burton?”
Burton looked at each of his guests, then turned his gaze to the brass man.
“Frankly, gentlemen,” he said, “I'm at a complete loss. You mean me to keep this mechanism as a valet?”
“Yes,” Trounce said. “It will do whatever you tell it!”
Bhatti nodded and added: “It has enough independence to perform tasks without needing to be told all the time. For example, if you order it to ensure that your shoes are polished by six o'clock each morning, then it will never need telling again.”
“I wish I could say the same about my missus!” Trounce muttered.
“Wait, Captain!” Bhatti said, jumping up. He strode to the brass man and stood in front of it. “Everybody remain silent, please. Captain Burton, would you say a few words when I nod at you?”