The strange affair of Spring-heeled Jack bas-1

by Mark Hodder

  She never went into Battersea Fields again.

  She gave up botany and began to hunt for a husband.

  February 19, 1838

  The Alsop family had recently left Battersea, moving to the little village of Old Ford, near Hertford, so that David Alsop could take over a vacant blacksmith's on the outskirts of the little community. Being new to the neighbourhood, they hadn't yet settled in and made friends, so spent most evenings in their home.

  The time traveller popped into existence above Bearbinder Lane, landed on the ground, and bounced on his stilts.

  It was a quarter to nine.

  The lane ran along a shallow valley. There were dark fields sloping up on one side, while the village high street ran uphill to the main settlement from a junction on the other. The Alsop cottage was on the corner, secluded and a considerable distance from the other dwellings.

  In the distance, Oxford could see a man on a ladder fiddling with a dysfunctional gas lamp. He was the only person in sight.

  Walking to the cottage's front gate, the time traveller yanked at the bellpull and heard a jangle from inside the premises. He lifted the side of his cloak and draped it over his head like a hood, hiding the helmet. He bent his knees to bring his height down. He was standing in shadow.

  The front door opened and a girl walked out. As she came down the path, Oxford saw that she had a mole on her right cheek, near the corner of her mouth. He'd been lucky this time. This was Jane Alsop.

  She arrived at the gate.

  "Can I help you, sir?"

  "I'm a policeman," he said. "There have been reports of somebody loitering along this road. Have you a candle I can borrow? I can't see anything."

  "Most assuredly, sir. Please wait here while I fetch one for you."

  Good, he thought. When she comes back out, she'll have to step through the gate to give it to me.

  A minute later, she reappeared, came down the path, opened the gate, stepped out onto the road, and held the light out to him.

  He threw back his cloak and grabbed her by the hair, pulling her into the darkness. The candle dropped from her hand.

  "Don't!" she cried.

  He didn't bother to ask the question but simply clutched at her dress and tore it down to her waist.

  Before he could examine her chest, though, she twisted out of his grasp, leaving him holding a clump of hair, and raced back to the cottage.

  He sprang after her, slipped and staggered at the gate, regained his balance, hurled himself over it, and caught her at the threshold of the front door.

  "Show me!" he hissed, pulling her around, ripping her garments away.

  A piercing scream came from inside the Alsop home.

  He looked up and saw a young girl standing in the hallway. She screamed again.

  Oxford returned his attention to Jane Alsop, bending her backward. He stared at her naked upper torso. Her skin was white and unmarked.

  Another girl suddenly rushed from a room, grabbed Jane, and wrenched her out of his grip. The door slammed in his face.

  "No birthmark!" he muttered.

  August 22, 1839

  There was only one girl left to examine: Sarah Lovitt, who worked on a flower stall in the Lower Marsh Street Market, Lambeth.

  Her excessively long walk between home and the stall took her through many of the winding bystreets alongside the Thames, so she always carried with her a posy of scented blooms which she held close to her face to ward off the river's noxious fumes.

  It made her easy to identify.

  Edward Oxford pounced on her in Nine Elms Lane and pulled her into a secluded walled courtyard at the side of an empty carriage house.

  Sarah knew that things like this happened. Girls were forced to do things they didn't want to do and men got away with it.

  Don't fight, she told herself. It will be over more quickly.

  Then her assailant turned her and she saw him.

  She fought.

  Fingernails raked the side of Oxford's helmet, slipped off it and onto his cheek, and gouged into the skin. Teeth bit into his wrist. He lost his grip on her, regained it, was overbalanced, and fell, pulling her down with him. They rolled on the dusty ground, thrashing about, her cries echoing from the walls.

  "Get off me! Leave me alone! Help! Police!"

  Her elbow rammed into his chin and his head snapped back.

  He flew into a wild rage and pressed his whole weight onto her, forcing her down, his crazed eyes inches from hers.

  She spat in his face. He banged the front of his helmet into her forehead. She went limp.

  Oxford lifted himself from her and stood.

  She groaned and sat up, blinked, and looked at him.

  "Are you from a carnival?" she asked.

  "No. Get up."

  She clambered to her feet.

  "Just answer a question and you can go," he said.

  "You won't hurt me?"

  "No."

  A bolt of energy suddenly snapped from his control unit and hit her in the chest. She flew backward into a wall and slumped to the ground.

  Oxford yelled in pain and stumbled.

  "Christ!" he gasped.

  Another shock jolted through him. He toppled over and passed out.

  He came to his senses moments later.

  "Home in time for supper," he mumbled, not knowing what he was saying.

  Sarah Lovitt was either dead or out cold. He giggled manically at the thought that she might be a corpse with a rainbow on her chest.

  A minute later he discovered that he was wrong on both counts. She had a pulse but no birthmark.

  It was June 20, 1840. Ten days had passed since the brutal assassination of Her Majesty Queen Victoria.

  "Tallyho, Edward! Bon voyage!" said Henry de La Poet Beresford in the grounds of Darkening Towers. He watched Oxford blink out of existence in midair, then turned and walked toward the veranda doors. Before reaching them, he heard a thud behind him.

  He looked back and saw the time traveller lying in a heap on the lawn.

  "That was fast!" he cried, running over to his friend. "Are you all right?"

  Oxford turned over and looked up at him. Beresford stepped back in shock. The man from the future seemed to have aged twenty years.

  "What the devil happened, Edward? You look terrible!"

  "None of them!" rasped the stilt-man. "No birthmarks! I've spent God knows how many hours exposed to your stinking damned past and all for nothing!"

  Beresford dropped to his haunches, unbuckled Oxford's boots, and pulled them off.

  "Come on," he said. "Let's get you inside."

  Two hours later, despite the removal of his malfunctioning suit, a hearty meal, and a glass of brandy, Oxford had fallen into a virtually catatonic state. His eyes, the whites visible all the way around the irises, stared fixedly at the wall. The muscles to either side of his jaw clenched spasmodically. He had told Beresford very little, just that none of the Battersea Brigade girls bore the crescent-shaped mark.

  The marquess was, nevertheless, as sure as he could be that one of them would, in the not too distant future, become mother to a girl with such a mark.

  Now the search must switch to that descendant.

  THE BATTLE OF OLD FOLD AND ITS AFTERMATH

  All NO is false, all NO is true:

  Truth is the shattered mirror strown

  In myriad bits; while each believes

  His little bit the whole to own.

  - Sir Richard Francis Burton

  CORD BYRON

  It took him nearly three months to recover his wits," said Henry de la Poet Beresford. "Though `recover' may be too optimistic a word, for I assure you that, by this point, the time traveller was quite demented."

  Supporting himself on his knuckles, he lurched around the banqueting table as he continued his tale; and every word he uttered, in that thick, guttural voice of his, was heard by Sir Richard Francis Burton, who lay hidden overhead.

  "We arranged to me
et again on September 28, 1843. He did his vanishing trick, and, over the course of the next three years, I monitored the Battersea girls, their marriages, and their subsequent children. By this time, of course, my reputation was such as to make it impossible to get close to the families, and I was unable to establish which of the daughters bore the Oxford birthmark.

  "I reported this to Oxford three years after he'd departed, and he flew into such a fit of temper that, had he dropped dead from apoplexy, I would not have been surprised. For an entire night, he ranted and raged. Then he demanded that I keep track of the children, and informed me that he'd not be back until eighteen years had passed; that is to say, not until September 28 of this year, when the Battersea children would be of age; old enough for him to sire an ancestor by!"

  "Yesterday was the twenty-eighth!" exclaimed Nurse Nightingale.

  "Yes," confirmed Beresford. "His decision was a blow to me, for by now I was plotting to get rid of the insane fool and claim his suit for my own. I tried to persuade him to visit sooner-damn it, I almost begged!-but he steadfastly refused, maintaining that it would be a pointless waste of his suit's dwindling resources.

  "As he left this very room through those veranda doors, I ran to the morning room, took a pistol from the cabinet there, and ran back, intending to shoot him dead in the grounds. I was too late; he was gone.

  "Over the ensuing years, I never lost sight of the Battersea families, but I'll admit that after the Libertines split and the newly formed Rake faction grew in influence and demanded more of my attention, the whole Oxford affair became more and more dreamlike. Had I really played host to a man from the future? Might it have been a drunken hallucination?

  "Eighteen years is a long time; memory plays tricks; doubt casts the past in a different light. Frankly, I never expected to see Edward Oxford again, and, after a while, I didn't much care. He became nothing more than a symbol to me, an example of `trans-natural' man, free from the shackles of law and morals and propriety. He was Spring Heeled Jack! A myth! A bogeyman! A fantasy!

  "Then disaster struck. Two years ago, in March of 1859, I broke my neck in a riding accident. I wasn't expected to live. News of this reached you, Isambard, and you sent Miss Nightingale to my assistance. She removed me from the hospital where I lay and took me to her medical laboratories, where, with consummate skill, she managed to preserve my brain by grafting it into the body of one of her experimental animals. The result, you see before you. Ma'am, I have said it before and I'll say it again: I am forever in your debt."

  Nurse Nightingale acknowledged his words with a nod.

  "The accident," continued the ape, "revived my interest in Edward Oxford, for, obviously, I would much prefer life as a man than life as an ape, and with his time suit, I-or someone else-could travel back to prevent the fall that put me in this position.

  "You all know what happened next: I made it known to Isambard that, with his help, I could secure a time-travel device. In the past, I had explained to him certain future technologies-such as geothermal and electrical power, rotor-winged flight, and engine-pulled vehicles-and he had been able to build machines based on these small insights, which Edward Oxford had given me. Isambard therefore had no reason to doubt me and communicated the possibility of time travel to you; you began your experimental programmes in the knowledge that the device will allow you to see the results; and here we are today-all reliant on that bizarre suit to achieve our aims!"

  "And yesterday?" asked Laurence Oliphant. "Did he show up?"

  "Yes. He did not, of course, expect to find me in this condition, but I would be lying if I told you he was shocked. The man is so far gone that everything seems an illusion to him now. Discovering that his friend the marquess had become Mr. Belljar the primate was no stranger to him than the fact that men in this day and age smoke pipes and cigars and are never seen outside without a hat upon their head! He didn't tarry. I handed him the list of girls and he departed."

  "To find the one with the birthmark and rape her," interrupted Florence Nightingale, with distaste.

  "Yes," grunted Beresford. "It's a crazy scheme, I'll admit, though it was I who thought of it. There are six girls. Sarah Shoemaker, daughter of Jennifer Shepherd, is sixteen years old. Unfortunately, her whole family emigrated to South Africa and I've not been able to trace her. The others though are all still in or near London. They are Marian Steephill, aged thirteen, daughter of Lizzie Fraser; Angela Tew, aged fifteen, daughter of Tilly Adams; Lucy Harkness, eighteen, daughter of Sarah Lovitt; Connie Fairweather, seventeen, daughter of Mary Stevens; and Alicia Pipkiss, fifteen, daughter of Jane Alsop.

  "The seventh of the original Battersea girls-by which I mean the mothers-Deborah Goodkind, went insane after Oxford examined her back in 1838. She died childless in Bedlam some years ago."

  "A paradox," observed Darwin, in his weirdly harmonic voice. "For if she, in his history, had mothered his ancestor, then in approaching her he made himself doubly extinct!"

  Oliphant gave a sibilant laugh: "This time-travel business seems excessively complicated!"

  "More so than you imagine, my friend," croaked Beresford, "for when I gave him the list yesterday, I already possessed evidence that he's been acting upon it! Marian Steephill, Lucy Harkness, and Angela Tew had already been checked for the birthmark!"

  "A further paradox," commented Darwin. "We are most intrigued!"

  "My Lord Marquess," said Nightingale, "why did you not simply arrange to capture him here yesterday? You had eighteen years to organise it!"

  "A good point, ma'am. As I have said, my belief in him was wavering; I was not convinced that I could trust my own memories, for the whole affair seemed utterly fantastic. Furthermore, the man who left me in 1843 was sick in mind and body, and his suit was failing. I had no guarantee that he would show up at the appointed time and since considerable resources will be required in order to capture him, I felt it best to wait until his presence was assured."

  "Which is when?"

  "Tomorrow evening. One of the girls, Alicia Pipkiss, lives in the family home; the very same cottage where Oxford assaulted Jane Alsop back in 1838. It's on the outskirts of the village of Old Ford, not far from here. I told Oxford that she and her family are due to return there tomorrow evening after some years spent living overseas. This is a total fiction on my part-the girl is in the cottage now and has never travelled. I also told him that, for Miss Pipkiss, this is a fleeting visit to her family, for she will be moving to London the following day, though I don't know exactly where. Thus he has only one opportunity to get at her: after dark on September 30!"

  "Excellent!" exclaimed Darwin. "My forces are at your disposal, Beresford!"

  "As are mine!" chimed Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

  "Thank you, gentlemen," responded the orangutan. "There is, however, a problem. As Oliphant can testify, for some reason that at present eludes me, the explorer and linguist Sir Richard Francis Burton has been taking an interest in the Battersea Brigade and, together with Detective Inspector Trounce, seems to be rather close to discovering the truth.

  "Trounce has posted policemen in the vicinity of the Alsop cottage, so when Oxford appears and we strike, we must expect opposition."

  Oliphant clenched his fists and hissed, "If Burton turns up, leave him to me. I insist upon it!"

  The ape nodded. "One final thing. Isambard and I made a pact that, in return for the information I have given you tonight, I will be presented with a time suit if you manage to replicate the device. Failing that, if you can only repair Oxford's suit, then I will have access to it. Agreed?"

  "Yes," came the answers.

  The marquess bared his teeth, then stood and stretched his long shaggy arms.

  "Then let us organise our resources," he rasped. "I already have Libertines keeping watch on the cottage. Many more will arrive tomorrow. If a single one of them spots Oxford, he will alert me immediately. We will also need as many Technologists and wolf-men as you can muster!"

  Si
r Richard Francis Burton, lying flat on the gallery above the banqueting table, had heard enough. It was time to get out of Darkening Towers while he still could.

  Gingerly, he eased himself backward until he crossed the threshold of the door at the top of the stairs; then, crouching low and treading softly, he descended and entered the cloakroom.

  He rubbed dust from the front of his jacket and turned toward the door.

  "Hello, Dick," said a soft voice.

  John Harming Speke stepped out from the shadows.

  THE GATHERING FORCES

  Lieutenant Barton now said, "Don't step back, or they will think we are retiring." Chagrined by this rebuke at ray management in fighting, and imagining by the remark I was expected to defend the camp, I stepped boldly to the front, and fired at close gaar- ters into the first man before we.

  - John Hanning Speke

  ,

  By heavens! What have they done to you!" gasped Burton, for though Swinburne had told him about Speke's surgery, seeing for himself the brass mechanism that had replaced the upper-left side of his former friend's head and face was quite another thing.

  "Saved me," replied Speke, quietly.

  "Saved you? No, John. They've manipulated you! From the very start, they've manipulated you, made you their puppet! When you sailed from Zanzibar after our expedition, you fell in with Laurence Oliphant aboard ship, didn't you? It wasn't by chance! He was there specifically to cast a spell over you! He's a master mesmerist, John! It was he who turned you against me, he who polarised our associates at the Royal Geographical Society, and he who caused you to turn a gun upon yourself. That wound was purposely inflicted! They wanted to replace half your damned brain!"

  "Why?"

  "I don't know-but one way or the other, I'm going to find out!"

  "If you live."

  "Will your betrayal run that deep? We were friends. We went through hell together. I nursed you through illnesses and injuries and you did the same for me. Are you really going to throw all that away? Think, man! Think about the way things were; the way things can be again. Help me to fight these people, John!"