Published 2014 by Pyr®, an imprint of Prometheus Books
The Return of the Discontinued Man
. Copyright © 2014 by Mark Hodder. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Cover illustration © Jon Sullivan
Cover design by Jacqueline Nasso Cooke
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Hodder, Mark, 1962–
[Strage affair of Spring Heeled Jack]
The return of the discontinued man : a Burton & Swinburne adventure / by Mark Hodder.
pages cm — (A burton & swinburne adventure)
ISBN 978-1-61614-905-5 (paperback) — ISBN 978-1-61614-906-2 (ebook)
1. Burton, Richard Francis, Sir, 1821–1890—Fiction. 2. Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 1837–1909—Fiction. 3. Spring-heeled Jack (Legendary character)—Fiction. 4. Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, 1819–1901—Assassination attempts—Fiction. 5. Criminal investigation—England—London—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6108.O28S77 2014
823’.92—dc23
2014003743
Printed in the United States of America
The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack
The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man
Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon
The Secret of Abdu El Yezdi
A Red Sun Also Rises
THE FIRST PART: THE VISIONS
CHAPTER 1 AN APPARITION IN LEICESTER SQUARE
CHAPTER 2 AN EXPERIMENT GONE AWRY
CHAPTER 3 AN EVENING WITH ORPHEUS
CHAPTER 4 RECURRENCES
CHAPTER 5 THE JUNGLE
CHAPTER 6 THE SECOND EXPERIMENT
CHAPTER 7 ECHOES OF OXFORD
CHAPTER 8 THE DREAMING ROSE
CHAPTER 9 AN UNLIKELY EXPEDITION
THE SECOND PART: THE VOYAGE
CHAPTER 10 THE APATHY OF 1914
CHAPTER 11 THE SQUARES, CATS AND DEVIANTS OF 1968
CHAPTER 12 THE GROSVENOR SQUARE RIOT OF 1968
CHAPTER 13 AN OLD FRIEND IN 2022
CHAPTER 14 THE ILLUSORY WORLD OF 2130
CHAPTER 15 THE TRUTH OF 2130 REVEALED
THE THIRD PART: THE FUTURE
CHAPTER 16 ARRIVAL 2202
CHAPTER 17 THE UPPERS AND THE LOWLIES
CHAPTER 18 HER MAJESTY QUEEN VICTORIA
CHAPTER 19 A PLEA TO PARLIAMENT
CHAPTER 20 SEVEN BIRTHS AND A DEATH
CHAPTER 21 BODIES
APPENDIX: MEANWHILE, IN THE VICTORIAN AGE AND BEYOND . . .
AFTERWORD
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
“You’re a drooling, bulge-eyed drug addict!”
The accusation, which Algernon Charles Swinburne screeched in his characteristically high-pitched and excitable tones, caused the entire saloon bar to fall momentarily silent.
Sir Richard Francis Burton glowered at his diminutive friend. “A little less volume, if you please.”
“You’re hooked! An addle head! What next for you, hey? The gutters, perhaps? Bedlam lunatic asylum? A Limehouse opium den?”
“Limehouse doesn’t exist. It burned to the ground last year, as you well know.”
“Pah! And I’ll say it again! Pah! In fact, once more for good measure! Pah to you, sir!”
Burton sighed, raised his glass, and took a gulp of ale.
Around them, the Black Toad’s other customers—a slovenly crowd of thieves, dollymops, and chancers—returned their attention to their beers, gins, whiskies, and absinthes.
Burton and Swinburne had occupied a table in a dark corner of the disreputable drinking den, there to wet their whistles for a couple of hours prior to a gathering of the Cannibal Club, during which their whistles would no doubt become thoroughly sodden, as they usually did when the pair joined with their friends ostensibly to discuss issues of anthropological and atheistic interest but, more often than not, to instead carouse a night away.
Of these Cannibals, there was no more dedicated a roisterer than Swinburne. His tiny, slope-shouldered body—with its oversized head made all the bigger by the mop of long carroty-red hair curling almost horizontally from it—could hold astonishing quantities of alcohol. The excess of electric vitality that coursed through the young poet’s system, making him constantly twitch and jerk, endowing him with such a skittish nature that many thought him either possessed or crazed, appeared to burn off the effects of his overindulgences at a prodigious rate, so that one moment he might be a slurring, staggering mess, and the next so perfectly clear-eyed and compos mentis that he could, on the spot, compose a sonnet of astonishing beauty and technical grace.
Swinburne was an eccentric, a drunkard, and an absolute genius.
He was also, at this particular moment, thoroughly peeved.
He slapped a hand down onto the table and squealed, “Three months! For three whole months you’ve been off with the fairies. Have you achieved anything in that time? No! Have you worked on your books? No! Have you planned any new expeditions? No! And look at you. Your eyes are hollow. Your cheeks are sunken. You’ve become a shadow of the man I met last year. It has to stop. No more Saltzmann’s, Richard! No more!”
Burton drew his lips back tightly over his teeth, a snarling expression that exposed his long canines and made him appear so barbaric that most men would have fled from him at once. Not so Swinburne, who was by now accustomed to the famous explorer’s savage countenance and fully cognisant that Burton often took advantage of it to intimidate when challenged.
“It’s not the bloody Saltzmann’s Tincture,” Burton countered. “The stuff is perfectly harmless.”
“Sadhvi Raghavendra doesn’t share your opinion. She says it contains cocaine.”
“She theorises that it does. She doesn’t know it. I think otherwise.”
“Based on what?”
“Based on the fact that I’m thoroughly familiar with the effects of cocaine and Saltzmann’s doesn’t share them.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s not addictive.”
“I repeat: it’s not the Saltzmann’s, Algy.”
Swinburne curled the fingers of his right hand into a fist and considered it, as if deciding whether to swing it into his friend’s nose. He clicked his tongue, picked up his glass, and swallowed the contents in a single gulp. “Then explain your bedraggled mien.”
Burton looked down at the stained tabletop. His mouth moved, trying to frame words that wouldn’t come. His eyes flicked evasively from side to side.
Swinburne watched him. Softly, he said, “Isabel?”
Dumbly, Burton nodded. He rubbed a hand across his forehead, wiping away perspiration that wasn’t there. “I can’t eat, Algy. I can’t sleep. I feel like one of Babbage’s clockwork men, going through the motions, hardly alive. I was never meant to exist without her.”
“I sympathise, Richard. Really, I do. But you’ll not escape your loss by obliterating your senses. Put the Saltzmann’s aside. Get out and confront the world. Allow it to distract you.”
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
“Ha!” Swinburne said. “I’m thankful that you are, too, though getting thoroughly sozzled isn’t quite what I meant.” He grinned mischievously. “Though one must start somewhere, what!” He slapped the table again and yelled, “Pot boy! Another couple of ales over here, lad!”
The beer was duly served, and the poet made a solemn toast:
And grief shall endure not forever, I know.
As things that are not shall these things be;
We shall live through seasons of sun and of snow,
And none be grievous as this to me.
We shall hear, as one in a trance that hears,
The sound of time, the rhyme of the years;
Wrecked hope and passionate pain will grow
As tender things of a spring-tide sea.
The moment of crisis passed. Burton knew his friend wouldn’t challenge him again. In some matters—just some—Swinburne knew where to draw the line. Instead, the poet would put his advice into practice by providing diversions, entertainments, and intellectual stimulation. No doubt, after they’d got sloshed with the Cannibals, he’d suggest a visit to Verbena Lodge, his favourite brothel. At that point, Burton would go home. He didn’t share the poet’s taste for the lash, as distracting as it might be.
They drank and, around them, men and women flirted coarsely and squabbled loudly and cackled obscenely and shouted incoherently. The air was thick with tobacco smoke and heavy with the vinegary odour of cheap wine, souring beer, and unwashed bodies. A startling contrast, then, that amid this unrefined pandemonium, Swinburne talked of his affinity with the Pre-Raphaelite artists and his hopes for the forthcoming publication of his poem, Rosamond; of his summer holidays at his grandfather’s house, Capheaton Hall, in Northumberland; and of his love for that wild and romantic northern county.
Despite his odd sense of detachment, Burton couldn’t help but be fascinated. Swinburne’s ability to hold an audience was astonishing. When performing—and Burton had no doubt that his friend was purposely putting on a performance for him—the tempo and cadence of his voice was spellbinding, his choice of words ingenious, and his gestures extravagantly expressive.
Automatically, Burton found himself responding. He described his childhood, during which he’d been dragged around Europe by his restless father and long-suffering mother; spoke of his subsequent inability to fit in at Oxford University, where he was scorned as a thoroughly un-English ruffian; described his explorations of Arabia; and confessed his ambivalent feelings about his current commission as the king’s agent.
While he spoke, a separate part of him observed Swinburne watching and judging.
He thinks my manner is all wrong. I’m making an unconvincing show of it.
After a while, the poet consulted his pocket watch and declared it to be a minute past nine. “Shall we be off? The Cannibals await, hurrah, hurrah!”
He’s eager to consult with Monckton Milnes. He thinks my oldest friend will know how to bring me out of this confounded funk.
They stood, donned their coats and hats, and took up their walking canes, the contrast between them attracting the amused attention of the saloon’s clientele, for where Swinburne barely scraped five feet, Burton was just an inch below six and looked considerably taller by virtue of his broad shoulders, deep chest, and imposing presence. Were it not for the famous explorer’s infernal physiognomy and challenging gaze, the pair might have invited catcalls as they crossed the room. None were forthcoming. There occurred, instead, a slight hush accompanied by sly grins and exchanged winks. One muscle-bound lout spat into the floor’s sawdust as if to show that were Burton to challenge him there’d be no contest, but he averted his eyes when the king’s agent glanced at him and thus revealed it to be nothing but empty braggadocio.
Perhaps I should pick a fight with him. Perhaps the violence would snap me back into myself.
Swinburne pushed open the door, and they stepped out onto Baker Street.
Frigid air hit them.
They stopped dead.
“My hat!” Swinburne cried out. “The sky is bleeding.”
The atmosphere was thick with falling snow, and it was bright red, a near opaque cloak of vermilion, falling vertically, the variations in its density making the illumination from the street’s gas lamps pulsate, causing the length of the thoroughfare to resemble the interior of a throbbing artery.
Burton scraped his heel across the pavement. “Thin,” he observed. “I’ll wager it just started, but if it keeps going at this rate London will soon be half buried.” Curiously, he held out his right hand then withdrew it and examined his powdered palm. “Remarkable. Can you see? It has seeds mixed in with it, like those from dandelions, but red.”
Swinburne exclaimed, “It’s winter! Quite apart from them falling out of the sky in such profusion and being a startling colour, how can there be seeds floating about at this time of year?”
“Blown across the globe at a high altitude, I suppose,” Burton mused. “I don’t know what species of plant, though. The effect is rather uncanny, don’t you think?”
The poet shivered and turned up his collar. “And rather penetrating, too. I shall require a brandy to warm my cockles.”
They trudged southward for a few yards, the scarlet snow crunching beneath their feet, until they heard the chugging engine of a steam cabriolet. Swinburne put fingers to his lips and emitted a piercing whistle. The vehicle emerged from the cascading curtain and drew to a halt beside them, its furnace hissing like a box of angry serpents.
“Bloomin’ well bonkers, ain’t it?” the driver said, his voice filled with wonder. “I’ve not seen nuffink like it in all me born days. Red snow! Cor blimey! Whatever next? Where to, gents?”
“Leicester Square, please,” Burton directed as they climbed in. They brushed cigar butts from the seat, settled, and the cab jerked into motion.
The king’s agent said, “As it happens, I’ve experienced stranger weather phenomena than this.”
“Last year’s aurora borealis, you mean?” Swinburne said.
“I’m referring to my time in Sindh, when it one day rained fish during the monsoon.”
“Flying fish?”
“Falling fish. They’re lifted from the sea by tornadoes, thrown into the upper atmosphere, and carried over the land, onto which they descend.”
Their carriage rocked and bumped southward, and by the time it reached Leicester Square, the red snow had given way to the normal white which, still falling thickly, was rapidly turning the ground from blood-red to a sickly bright pink.
“Hallo! What’s all that kerfuffle about?” the driver commented as they disembarked and Burton paid him. They followed the man’s gaze and saw, half obscured, a commotion on the western side of the square. A crowd was milling about outside Bartolini’s Dining Rooms, where Burton and Swinburne were due to meet their friends.
“Is that Trounce?” Swinburne asked, pointing.
Burton spotted the burly detective inspector, gave a grunt of confirmation, and set off with his companion in tow. As they traipsed closer to the throng, he saw members of the Cannibal Club among it—Richard Monckton Milnes, Thomas Bendyshe, Henry Murray, Doctor James Hunt, Sir Edward Brabrooke, and Charles Bradlaugh.
The restaurateur, Signor Bartolini, was shouting at William Trounce and gesticulating wildly.
Trounce saw them approaching and bellowed, “By Jove! Thank the almighty you’re here! I can’t get any sense out of this fellow. He’s utterly unhinged.”
“He’s utterly Italian,” Swinburne corrected.
“The same bloody difference, if you ask me.”
“Has something occurred?” Burton asked.
Trounce, thickset and blunt in features, with a wide snow-speckled brown moustache and bright-blue eyes, threw out his hands. “I’ve not been here ten minutes. My mind is still befuddled by this freakish red stuff. Now it appears I have to deal with a costumed intruder playing silly beggars, too.”
Bartolini shook a fist at Burton and cried out, “Hanno esagerato, Signor Burton! I can have no more of this! Your trick, it scare my customers! Your Club Cannibal, it not welcome here no more. Non più! Non più!”
Burton glanced beyond Bartolini and waved for Monckton Milnes to come over. He then held up his palms at the dark and slightly built Italian and said, “Per favore, signore, fidati di me—trust me—whatever has happened, I had nothing to do with it. Tell me. An intruder?”
“Un fantasma! It crash into my ristorante. It call for you! Smash! Smash! Throwing the tables and the chairs, and it shouting all the time, Where is Burton? Where is Burton? Through the sala da pranzo it run, and up the stairs to your friends. Where is Burton? Where is Burton? Then back down again and—meno male!—out and away!”
“Fantasma?”
Monckton Milnes arrived, took Burton by the arm, and said to the others, “Pardon me, gentlemen.” He pulled the king’s agent aside and murmured, “It was Spring Heeled Jack, Richard. No doubt about it. The hellish thing burst in on us and demanded to know where you were, then bounced away on its stilts. It frightened us all witless.”
For a moment, Burton’s mind froze. It wasn’t possible! He coughed to clear his throat. “Just now?”
“About forty minutes ago. We called a constable, and he gathered some of his fellows. They’re scouring the area in search of the monster.”
Burton frowned, took off his top hat, banged snow from its brim, and put it back on. “Spring Heeled Jack? Are you certain? Describe it.”
“It resembled a naked man, tall and rangy in build, but it was entirely white and featureless. No hair, eyes, nose, ears, or mouth. No fingernails. No genitals.”
“Helmet and cloak?”
“Not at all.”
“A disk on its chest?”
“No adornments or clothes to speak of.”
“But it was raised on spring-loaded stilts? So it was wearing boots?”
“No. The stilts appeared to grow straight out its heels, an extension of them.”
Burton raised his fingers to his chin, feeling the tuft of hair that grew in its cleft. “Yet, despite the lack of a mouth, it spoke?”
“Shouted like a madman. Bradlaugh practically fainted with the shock of it.”
“Why did Bartolini think it was me?”
“Tom Bendyshe’s fault. You know how he enjoys a good jape. His first assumption was that you’d decided to put the wind up us, and Bartolini cottoned onto it. He can’t decide whether it was you dressed up or a ghost.”
Burton gazed into the gradually thinning snow, his thoughts turning over, searching for a workable theory to explain the bizarre visitation. He couldn’t find one.
He briefly gripped Monckton Milnes by the elbow before striding back to Bartolini. “Signor, please accept that this was none of my doing nor, I am sure, that of anyone with whom I’m acquainted.”
The Italian gave a wide, exaggerated shrug. “If you say it, I believe it. But what was it? Why have the neve rossa bring it here?”
“The red snow?”
“Sì! It start to fall and, immediatamente, il fantasma come crash crash crash into my ristorante!”
“Wait. What? The snow and the intruder arrived simultaneously?”
“Sì! Sì!”
“I’m at a loss, but I shall endeavour to get to the bottom of it.” Burton touched two fingers to his hat and returned to where Monckton Milnes had joined Swinburne and Trounce. “Both at nine o’clock! Scarlet snow and Spring Heeled Jack.”
The detective inspector cupped his hands and blew into them to warm his fingers. “Lord help me, are we faced with another of your damnable affairs?”
“My affairs, Trounce?”
“More king’s agent ballyhoo.”
“Ah, I see. I don’t know, but if Bartolini’s was really invaded by Spring Heeled Jack, then I fear we might be.”
They joined the other Cannibals.
“The devil himself was among us!” Bendyshe trumpeted. His voice was never less than stentorian. “Gad, what a horror!”
“You should have seen it, Richard,” Henry Murray said. “A ghost? A mechanism? I’m utterly flummoxed.”
“I thought it was a man in a costume,” Sir Charles Bradlaugh added. He put a finger to his right cheek, which was darkly bruised. “But when the thing shoved me aside—the feel of it!”
“What do you mean?” Burton asked.
“Like fish skin but solid and waxy.” Bradlaugh shuddered. “Hard. Not clothing at all.”
And calling for me. Why?
As if reading his thoughts, Bendyshe cried out, “I say, old horse, we all know you’ve been up to your devilish eyebrows in some bizarre business recently, but this takes the biscuit! Care to explain?”
“I can’t, Tom,” Burton responded. “I have no notion what the apparition was or why it was searching for me. Would you excuse me for a moment?” He addressed Trounce. “I need to know where it went.”
Trounce pointed to a constable who was moving among the gathered crowd. “There’s Honesty. He was with the men who chased after it.”
Burton, Swinburne, and Trounce strode over to P. C. Thomas Honesty, a wiry and dapper man with immaculately trimmed eyebrows and an extravagantly curled moustache. Only a few months previously, he’d been the groundsman at New Wardour Castle, the seat of Isabel Arundell’s family. After the events that led to her death, he’d joined the Police Force and, on government orders, had been rushed through training.
Burton hailed him. “Hallo, Tom!”
Honesty saluted. “Sir! Strange night. Snow. Stilt man.”
“Strange is the word. It’s been a while since I saw you, old fellow. Has your wife joined you in London? Are you settled?”
“We are. Nice little place in Hammersmith. Baby on the way.”
“My good man! Congratulations!”
Honesty accepted a handshake then pointed to the side of the square opposite Bartolini’s. “Consensus is, the phantom jumped down from the rooftops over there.”
“Phantom?” Swinburne queried.
“Or whatever it was.”
Burton said, “Judging by the mark on Bradlaugh’s cheek, it was rather too substantial to qualify as a spook.”
As if it had been adjusted via a control, the snowfall suddenly slowed and thinned until only a few stray flakes were left drifting down.
The men surveyed the square.
“Looks like an iced cake,” Trounce murmured.
Honesty nodded his helmeted head in the direction of Charing Cross Road. “Made off in that direction. We chased. Too fast. Lost it.” His eyes widened. He gave out a strangled yelp and pointed. “There! It’s back!”
Burton whirled in time to see a figure apparently falling from the sky. Its stilts hit the ground and slipped from beneath it. The apparition crashed down onto its side, scrabbling wildly in the snow, limbs flailing. It howled—its voice filled with despair.
Someone shouted, “Bloody hell! What is it?”
The creature gained its feet, shrieked wordlessly, then cried out, “Prime Minister, where are you? Please! Where are you? Guide me! Guide me!”
The crowd outside Bartolini’s screamed and scattered.
Shaking its head as if to clear it, the stilted man raised its featureless face to the sky and yelled, “Burton! Burton!”
“Here!” the king’s agent called, striding forward. He drew the rapier from his silver-handled swordstick.
Spring Heeled Jack—Burton couldn’t think of it as anything else—crouched and turned toward him. “Sir Richard Francis bloody Burton.”
“You’ve inserted one name too many, my friend, but I shall overlook that. Now be so kind as to introduce yourself and explain what you want with me.”
“I don’t know.”
Burton stopped in front of the creature and examined it. The description given by Monckton Milnes was accurate; it was totally lacking in any human detail.
“You don’t know?”
“Perhaps—”
“Perhaps what?”
“Perhaps I have to—”
Without warning, it pounced.
“Kill you!”
A swinging fist knocked the point of Burton’s blade aside. He felt himself grabbed by the upper arms, solid fingers gouging into his biceps, and was lifted high into the air as if he weighed nothing at all. With tremendous strength, Spring Heeled Jack dashed him viciously to the ground. Even through the padding of snow, Burton’s head cracked with such force against the paving that his senses reeled.
“Got you!” his assailant shouted. “Stop interfering! Leave me alone! Tell me why I’m here!”
A shrill scream of outrage echoed through the square, and Swinburne came racing to his fallen friend’s assistance. The poet swiped at Spring Heeled Jack with his cane. It impacted against a broad shoulder and snapped in half, its lower end spinning away. “Get off him, you brute! Scat! Scat!”
The stilted figure turned and swatted the poet. Swinburne cartwheeled and landed in a tangled heap.
Tom Honesty put his whistle to his mouth and blew.
Jack squatted over Burton. “What am I supposed to do? Where is the prime minister? What is your significance? What happened at nine o’clock?”
Flat on his back, the king’s agent looked up at the blank countenance.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
His attacker reached down, clasped the front of his coat, yanked him upright, and threw him. Burton saw the black night sky and the pink ground of Leicester Square alternating around him as—with shock slowing everything to a crawl and causing him to feel like a dispassionate observer—he pirouetted through the air. He passed over Trounce and the members of the Cannibal Club and glimpsed them looking up at him with expressions of sheer horror. Then he impacted against a plate glass window. Fragments exploded around him. They glinted and flashed. They rained like a thousand jewels.
This surely hurts, yet I don’t feel a thing.
He crashed down onto a table. It collapsed beneath him. Cutlery and broken crockery danced up, colliding with the showering glass. A symphony of clatters and smashes and bangs and clangs sounded from afar. Distant voices ululated. Everything was dreamlike.
Of its own accord, his right hand rose into his line of sight, and he was fascinated to find that it still held his rapier. He watched as the weapon’s point lowered toward his feet until it was directed at the jagged rectangular hole where the window had been.
Poor Bartolini. He’s having a bad evening. His restaurant is wrecked.
Spring Heeled Jack bounded in and dived forward. Burton’s sword adjusted itself and struck the apparition in the middle of its chest. The blade bent, scraped across to the left, gouged a scratch in the hard white skin, but didn’t penetrate it.
Jack snatched the weapon, wrenched it from Burton’s hand, and cast it aside. Planting a stilt to either side of the fallen man, it looked down and gave vent to an agonised whine.
Burton whispered, “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“I must serve Queen Victoria,” it responded. “But I’ve forgotten how.”
Trounce came pounding into the restaurant. Bellowing, he thudded into the creature, wrapped his arms around it, and declared, “You’re bloody well nicked, old son!”
Jack staggered. Burton quickly pushed himself out from between its legs and dragged himself backward through splintered wood and glass.
Trounce’s grip broke as his captive flung out its arms. A solid elbow smacked into the detective’s face, sending him tottering backward with blood spurting from his nose. His legs hit the ledge of the window, and he toppled out into the snow.
Burton heaved himself to his feet. He lunged at his opponent. They locked arms and grappled, twisting this way and that, thudding into tables, knocking them flying.
The king’s agent was no match for the other. Sent reeling, he plummeted out through the doorway and went slipping and sliding outside, somehow maintaining his footing, though he possessed hardly any sense of what he was doing.
Spring Heeled Jack followed and laid into him with its fists. It wailed, “Where am I? What must I do, Prime Minister? I’m alone! I’m alone!”
Blood spattered the snow. Burton fell and was hauled up again. He became vaguely aware that constables were running toward him.
“Please!” his opponent screamed. “Help me!”
Swinburne suddenly came cannoning from one side and dived at its ankles, locking his arms around them. Caught off balance, Spring Heeled Jack pitched face-first into the snow. Immediately, Burton delivered a vicious kick to the side of its head before he, too, lost his footing and fell.
Trounce blundered back into the melee. He stepped over the king’s agent and thudded down knees first onto Jack’s back. Honesty and three other constables swooped in and grabbed at the creature’s arms. The detective inspector had a pistol in his hand. He raised it and cracked it down onto Jack’s head. The white cranium split, and a bolt of blue electrical energy sizzled across its surface. A transparent skin detached itself from the prone figure and began to expand outward.
Burton knew what would happen next. “Get away from it!” he roared, as the world snapped back to normal speed. “Move! Move!”
He scrambled across the ground on all fours, grabbed Trounce by the back of his coat and heaved him aside, then gripped Swinburne’s ankle and, dragging the poet with him, slithered backward. The constables rolled aside just as the transparency swelled into a bubble and popped with a thunderously echoing retort.
Spring Heeled Jack vanished, taking with it a bowl-shaped section of Leicester Square’s paving.
Trounce sat up, fished a handkerchief from his pocket, and applied it to his bleeding nose. “By Jobe! Whad a monstrosidy!”
Flat on his back, with cold moisture soaking into his clothes, Burton lay panting, his mind awhirl, his body finally starting to register the pain.
Beside him, Swinburne said, “Is it as bad as it looks?”
Burton moved his tongue around, feeling his teeth to check they were all present. They were. After a few moments’ preparation, he managed to croak, “What?”
“Your condition.”
As reality continued to reestablish itself, the king’s agent struggled to his feet and stood swaying. His clothes were hanging in tatters. Blood dribbled inside his ragged sleeves and slowly dripped from his fingertips.
After a little exploration, he discovered that the left side of his chin bore the most serious of his many lacerations—it was small but through to the bone—and there was another, longer and more painful cut at the side of his left elbow. None were incapacitating.
“I’m an atheist, Algy,” he murmured, “but I must confess, the fact that I went through a window and can still stand strikes me as somewhat miraculous.”
“You must have hit it head first. Broke it with solid bone before the rest of you passed through.”
The poet rose from the ground and helped Trounce up. The detective inspector drew a second handkerchief—clean—from his pocket and passed it to Burton, who uttered a grunt of thanks, wiped his hands on it, then pressed it to his chin.
The king’s agent said, “For certain, that was not a man in a suit.”
“A clockwork device, then?” Trounce asked.
“More sophisticated.”
Thomas Honesty and his fellow constables had risen and brushed themselves down. Honesty looked at Burton, who, seeing that Monckton Milnes and the Cannibals were poised to rush over, said to him, “Would you hold everyone back for a minute, Tom? Just while I gather my wits.”
Honesty nodded and got to work.
Burton put his left hand to the back of his head. His scalp was ridged with scars—gained last year when he’d narrowly missed being killed by an explosion—and had now acquired an egg-sized bump.
Pain was beginning to overtake him. His legs were shaking.
The snow all around was gouged with broad furrows, cutting through to the bright red beneath. Leicester Square—flesh-coloured and mutilated—appeared to reflect his own injuries, as if he and the world he perceived were a single, wounded being.
He shivered, fumbled for—and failed to locate—a cigar, and said, “I want to find my topper and swordstick, Algy. We should then make our way to Battersea Power Station. We need to consult with Brunel and Babbage. They know all there is to know about mechanical men.”
Swinburne gave a small and reluctant grunt of agreement.
Burton’s fingers, still absently in search of a cheroot, encountered a solid object and withdrew it from his coat pocket. It was a small, ornately labelled bottle. Saltzmann’s Tincture. Incredulous, he whispered, “Good Lord! It didn’t break.”
“I wish it had,” Swinburne grumbled. “Put it away.”
“My head is thumping. It’ll help.”
“So will Sadhvi Raghavendra. We’ll send a lad to summon her to the station. She’ll treat your wounds better than that stuff can.”
Burton hesitated, nodded, and slipped the bottle back into his pocket.
“Humph!” Trounce muttered. “I’d better get to work. There’s a crowd that requires dispersing. I’ll post a guard outside the restaurant. See you later. Keep me informed, will you?”
He stamped away.
Limping slightly, Burton started off toward the Cannibals. They hurried forward to meet him.
“God in Heaven!” Monckton Milnes exclaimed. “Are you all right? I’ve never seen such a scrap! How can you even walk?”
“I hurt all over,” Burton said. “But I’ll survive.”
“He wants to gulp down a bottle of Saltzmann’s,” Swinburne revealed. “So obviously his brain has been bruised, despite its small size and the thick layers that surround it.”
For an instant, Monckton Milnes locked eyes with the king’s agent. Both men knew that Swinburne operated in a very peculiar manner, often experiencing and expressing the opposite of what would be expected from any normal individual. When the poet felt pain, he considered it pleasure. When he was deeply concerned, he most often articulated it as humour or sarcasm.
“Lay off the confounded mixture, Richard,” Monckton Milnes advised. “I’ve told you before.”
“Enough! Enough!” Burton protested. “Will you both please give it a rest? I shan’t touch the stuff, I give you my word.”
Monckton Milnes responded with a brusque nod. He stepped aside as the other Cannibals crowded forward to voice their consternation and amazement. Burton endured their attentions. He was aware that Monckton Milnes and Swinburne were both watching and assessing him, and it irritated him that they considered themselves better judges of his condition than he. At the same time, he was touched, and cursed himself for a fool that he harboured such an idiotic spark of resentment.
Too much self-sufficiency. Why be so contained? Few men have such loyal friends. Swinburne, Monckton Milnes, Bendyshe, Bradlaugh—all of them. They are not attached to you. They are integral.
He felt the void that marked Isabel’s absence.
Bendyshe was hollering, “Bartolini will never forgive you, old thing! You went straight through his bloomin’ window! The restaurant is wrecked! Why aren’t you dead?”
Burton thought, I might as well be.
Swinburne grabbed at a hand strap as the landau in which he and Burton were riding bounced over the kerb while rounding a corner. He coughed and muttered, “Drat the thing!” He was referring to the carriage’s side window, which was jammed half open, allowing smoke from the vehicle’s steam engine to coil in to assault their eyes and noses.
“Spring Heeled Jack!” he exclaimed. “How is it possible? I thought Edward Oxford was dead.”
Burton, grimacing with the pain caused by the jolt, had finally located a Manila cheroot in his waistcoat pocket, and now shakily held a lucifer to it. He set about adding to the abrasive atmosphere. Blood was congealing on his chin and neck, and his tattered left sleeve was wet with it.
He gathered his thoughts for a moment then said, “Let’s consider what we already know. Oxford was from the future. In the year 2202—”
“Inconceivably distant!”
“—he created a wearable machine, comprised of a one-piece skintight suit with a flat disk on its chest, a black helmet that encased his head fully but for the face, a cloak, and boots to which powerfully sprung stilts were attached. These latter were necessary to propel him into the air, so that nothing touched him, there to be thrown backward or forward through history by the microscopic components of his device.”
“I can see why you’ve delayed your translating of A Thousand Nights and a Night,” Swinburne said. “You must find its tales positively pedestrian.” He produced a flask from inside his coat and unscrewed its top.
Burton grunted his agreement. “Oxford leaped back to the year 1840 to observe his ancestor’s failed attempt to assassinate Queen Victoria. He intervened, inadvertently caused the assassination to succeed, and accidentally killed his forebear. His suit, badly damaged, then threw him farther back through time to 1837.”
Swinburne took a swig, smacked his lips, and passed the flask to Burton. “He changed history and wiped himself out of the future. What an idiot.”
“Indeed,” Burton agreed. He took a drink and returned the vessel to the poet, wincing as brandy burned the cuts where the insides of his cheeks had been mashed against his teeth. He sucked at his cigar. His ribs creaked. They were badly bruised. Through billowing smoke, he went on, “Oxford had caused time to bifurcate. There was now the original history and, running parallel to it, a new one in which he was trapped. His prolonged exposure to the past caused him to rapidly lose his mind. He embarked upon a desperate hunt for the woman his ancestor would have married.”
“Meaning to impregnate her in order to reestablish the chain of descent that would eventually lead to his own birth,” Swinburne said. He giggled and hiccupped. “Only a lunatic could conceive of such a scheme! Please forgive the rotten pun.”
Burton waited for the landau to pass a loudly clanking pantechnicon. When he could again be heard, he said, “He was repeatedly spotted by the public, who regarded him as something of a bogeyman and named him Spring Heeled Jack. Meanwhile, the man who gave him shelter relayed to Isambard Kingdom Brunel some of Oxford’s hints about the machineries of 2202. Employing the materials and knowledge of our age, the great engineer acted upon this information, and, over the course of two decades, the British Empire quickly filled with his diverse and ever more eccentric inventions.”
Swinburne gestured at the interior of the landau. “Behold! A horseless carriage! The great age of steam!”
The vehicle’s motor produced a horrible grinding noise followed by a thunderous belch. They heard their driver swearing at it.
“Yes, but our history is not the one we’re discussing. For us, now, it is 1860. Where Oxford was trapped, the next significant event takes place a year hence, when a version of me—who, to avoid confusion, we shall refer to by the name he’ll later adopt, Abdu El Yezdi—will learn the truth about Oxford. He’ll also discover that a cabal of scientists intends to seize the time suit, repair it, and use it to create multiple histories in which to experiment with evolution and eugenic manipulation. To prevent this, and hoping to forestall any further interference with the flow of time, he’ll break Oxford’s neck and will take possession of the suit.”
“What a brute!” Swinburne muttered.
“He is—or was—or will be—me.”
“As I said.”
“Oaf.”
“I hope they have some brandy at the power station. My supply is dwindling fast. Are we nearly there?”
Burton peered out of the window. “We’re on Piccadilly. Just passing Green Park.”
“How very germane. That’s where Victoria was gunned down.”
“It’s snowing again.”
“Red?”
“White.” Burton considered his cigar and calculated how many more puffs he could drag out of it. It was, he concluded, good for another four or five. He moved his wounded arm and winced, tried and failed to position it in a manner that hurt less. The pain of his wounds was intensifying. It caused him to lose track of his thoughts. He furrowed his brow, gritted his teeth, and tried to battle through the discomfort.
“1862,” Swinburne prompted.
“Ah yes, a year after Oxford’s death. El Yezdi will discover that parts of the suit contain tiny shards taken from one of the three mythical “Eyes of Nāga,” rare black diamonds, each a fragment of a fallen aerolite. Remarkably, they’re able to store and maintain subtle electrical fields, such as those generated by the human brain. My doppelgänger, setting out to find all three stones, will learn that in every existing variation of history, a devastating world war is coming. During that conflict, the diamonds will be used to psychically enhance three great dictators: Britain’s Aleister Crowley, Prussia’s Friedrich Nietzsche, and Russia’s Grigori Rasputin. One of those men, Rasputin, will send his mind back through time from the year 1914 in order to alter the course of the war.”
“My head hurts,” Swinburne complained.
“My everything hurts,” Burton responded. His hand drifted to a pocket. He felt the outline of the Saltzmann’s bottle.
Don’t. You gave your word.
Swinburne said, “Your counterpart will defeat the Russian and cause him to die in 1914, two years earlier than he would otherwise have done.”
“Resulting in yet another split in history. El Yezdi will become aware that such bifurcations can’t be controlled and are occurring in profusion.”
A flurry of snow blew in through the jammed window. Swinburne lifted his top hat from his knees, upended it, and tapped it with his knuckles. Snowflakes rained onto his boots. “Really,” he muttered. “We might just as well sit on the roof.”
“So,” Burton said, “having gained through his battle with Rasputin two of the Eyes of Nāga, El Yezdi will organise an expedition to recover the third, which is located in the Mountains of the Moon close to the source of the Nile. He’ll be challenged by a rival group financed by Prussia, and the two safaris will fight their way across Africa, unaware that they’re both being manipulated by the Nāga, a prehistoric race of intelligent reptiles whose consciousness has been trapped in the stones for millennia.”
“As if all the rest wasn’t sufficiently fantastic,” Swinburne said, “now we have lizard men. Shall we get drunk and forget all this nonsense, Richard? We could live out our remaining days in a pleasant haze, oblivious to all absurdities bar our own.”
Burton dropped his cigar stub and crushed it beneath his heel. “Pass that flask.”
“Hurrah! He toasts the motion!”
The king’s agent imbibed and returned the near-empty container. “I might be tempted, but I fear the absurd has a tendency to seek us out wherever we might be, as the events of this evening have demonstrated.”
The landau lurched to a halt, there came a knock on the roof, a hatch lifted, and the driver looked down at them. “’Scuse us, gents. Won’t be two shakes of a lamb’s tail. Got to shovel more coal into the furnace. Just a tick. Half a minute. Quick as a flash, like. I shan’t keep you. It won’t take long.”
The hatch slammed shut.
“He certainly took his time telling us how fast he’s going to be,” Swinburne observed. “Where were we? Ah, yes, Abdu El Yezdi is going to realise that the Nāga arranged his experiences from the start. That’s when his trials will really begin.”
“Quite so. The reptiles will tattoo black diamond dust into his scalp, it being required for a technique they’ll then employ to send him forward through time to 1914, where for five years he’ll endure the terrible global conflict and witness its devastating effect on Africa. Traumatised, with his memory in pieces, he’ll evade the British psychic Aleister Crowley and make his way back to the Mountains of the Moon, there to return to 1863. The Nāga will inform him that the experience was a parting gift, intended to give him a better understanding of the nature of time. They’ll then be liberated from the diamond, which El Yezdi will take back with him to England.”
“As gifts go, that one was lousy.”
“I can’t disagree. It certainly influences his subsequent determination to restore history to its original single stream. Emulating the Nāga’s method, and taking the diamonds and damaged time suit with him, he’ll travel back to Green Park in 1840.”
“Hooray! We can return to the past tense. It feels so much more normal.”
“I quite agree.”
The carriage rocked as the driver climbed back up to his seat. The engine gave a roar, settled into a more subdued chugging, and the vehicle jerked back into motion. Burton hissed and clutched at his arm.
“All right?” Swinburne murmured.
“Yes. So my counterpart waited for history to repeat itself, which it did: Edward Oxford arrived in 1840, having jumped from 2202. My other self immediately killed him and took possession of his undamaged suit. Thus Oxford couldn’t be thrown to 1837, history wouldn’t be altered, and everything would be back as it should be.”
“Except it wasn’t. Somehow, he failed to prevent Victoria’s assassination.” Swinburne shook the now empty flask and heaved a forlorn sigh.
“Correct. El Yezdi had created yet another strand of history, this one that you and I inhabit, and he was trapped in it, knowing that a younger version of himself, the nineteen-year-old me, was already here.”
“Two Burtons,” Swinburne mused. “How perfectly dreadful.”
The one at his side gave a wry smile. “I’m glad I was oblivious to the fact until last year.”
The poet held up the empty brandy flask. “I wish I was a little more oblivious. All this is giving me a terrible thirst. I also feel obliged to remind you that our current conversation was begun with the intention of perhaps shedding light on what or who it was that wrecked Bartolini’s and beat you black and blue. We appear to be no closer to any insight.”
“I want to outline events in their proper order that we may think clearly.”
“Where hopping through time is concerned, I’m not sure there’s any such thing as a proper order. And do you really think clarity of thought is possible after going through a window headfirst? You’re ambitious, I’ll give you that. Well, carry on. You have my undivided attention.”
“Now that the brandy is gone.”
“Precisely. What happened next, oh Scheherazade?”
“With the Eyes of Nāga and the two time suits—one damaged, one not—in his possession, Abdu El Yezdi—he now took that name—went into hiding, aided by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Charles Babbage, and over the next two decades influenced them, along with our key thinkers and politicians, to shape our world into one that, he hoped, would avoid the terrible war he’d witnessed.”
“The scene: 1859. Enter Richard Francis Burton, stage left, El Yezdi’s younger self, native to the history he’d created. You.”
“And, unfortunately, enter Aleister Crowley, who sent his spirit not only backward through time but also sideways, crossing from the future where El Yezdi had encountered him into this, our history. He hunted me and—and—”
Killed the only woman I have ever loved.
“And kidnapped scientists and surgeons,” Swinburne interjected, “forcing them to construct a body for his disembodied spirit to inhabit.”
“I defeated him,” Burton said flatly.
“You met Abdu El Yezdi.”
“My other self succumbed to old age.”
“His allies—Brunel, Babbage, and the Department of Guided Science—are now your allies, and his reports, in which all the aforementioned is explained, and which are filled with the wealth of his experience, are at your disposal.”
Burton was silent for a moment. The stench of the River Thames wafted in through the window. They were close to their destination.
Three steam spheres passed the landau, their drive bands humming.
“What’s your opinion of them, Algy—of the reports, I mean? Specifically, the manner in which the material is presented.”
Swinburne chuckled. “I think his propensity for inflicting them with penny dreadful titles proves conclusively that he was you. The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack. The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man. Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon. They sound like the tales that young valet of yours reads in his—what’s the name of the story paper little Bram’s so addicted to?”
“The Baker Street Detective, featuring Mr. Macallister Fogg.”
“Sheer hokum, and I’d say the same of the reports had I not met El Yezdi in person. I must say, though, for all their outlandishness, I’m just as fascinated by what he omitted from them than by what he included, especially where the third is concerned. Was he protecting himself, do you think?”
Burton shook his head. “I’ve been in many positions where concealing information would have been the wisest course. The report I made, at Sir Charles Napier’s behest, into male brothels in Karachi ruined my military career and my reputation because it was, quite simply, too complete. That was in 1845, when I was twenty-four years old. El Yezdi had been with us for five years by then. We know from the first of his accounts that, in his native history, he’d presented the very same report when he was twenty-four and suffered the identical consequences, yet he made no move to prevent me from repeating the mistake. It appears that he and I, being one and the same, have shared an utter lack of caution where personal reputation is concerned.”
“So maybe the omissions were to protect others.”
“That’s my suspicion. Perhaps there are some matters his associates are simply better off not knowing.”
“Myself among them.”
“Most assuredly,” Burton agreed. “He never revealed the fate of the Swinburne who, in his own variant of time, accompanied him to Africa. Exactly what happened to you amid the Mountains of the Moon?”
“And why didn’t I return from them?”
With a jerk and a loud detonation from its engine, the landau came to a stop. The driver shouted, “Battersea Power Station, gents!” He saluted down to his passengers as they disembarked. Burton stepped out of the cabin stiffly and with a groan.
Snow fell around them. The cabbie waved a hand at it. “At least it’s turned the right bloomin’ colour, hey? White, just as snow aught to bloomin’ well be!”
“A shilling, I take it?” Swinburne asked.
“Beg pardon?”
“The fare.”
Burton pushed his friend aside and handed up the correct coinage and a little extra. “My companion is convinced that every cab ride, no matter the destination, costs a shilling,” he explained.
“They do!” Swinburne protested. His left leg twitched, causing him to hop up and down.
“Funny in the head, is he?” the man asked.
“Extremely. He’s a poet.”
“Oh dear!”
“An unmitigated loony,” Burton clarified.
“I say!” Swinburne screeched.
The driver clicked his tongue sympathetically. “Got you into a scrap, did he? Caused a rumpus? You look proper done over, you do, if yer don’t mind me a-sayin’ so.”
“He did, I am, and I don’t. Good evening.”
“Night, sir.”
The landau departed.
Battersea Power Station stood tall before them, its four copper rods rising high, like chimneys, scraping the underside of the blanketing cloud. Both men knew the rods extended even farther below the edifice, penetrating deep into the Earth’s crust. Brunel had designed the station to render geothermal energy into electricity. It was one of his few failures, and generated only sufficient power to light itself.
They started across the broad patch of wasteland that separated the station from Queenstown Road. Burton limped, pain stabbing through him with every step. Their feet sank into the snow, which was already lying a foot deep, startlingly pink beneath the illuminations of Brunel’s creation.
“Red snow,” Swinburne muttered. “Spring Heeled Jack. Men from the future. Multiple Burtons. And he calls me a loony!”
Off to their right, a gargantuan rotorship rose from the nearby Royal Navy Air Service Station. Light glowed from the many portholes along its sides, and its spinning wings sent a deep throbbing through the atmosphere. It powered into the sky on an expanding cone of starkly white steam until it was swallowed by the cloud. A lozenge of fuzzy luminescence marked its position as it slid southward.
“The Sagittarius,” Burton noted. “According to the Daily Bugle, it’s off to China today.”
“To bomb the Qing Dynasty into submission at the behest of Lord Elgin,” Swinburne added. “That man is the consummate politician. He possesses not one jot of conscience. Can we return to the matter at hand? Edward Oxford? Did we encounter him tonight?”
“The problem is that the apparition resembled Oxford’s time suit only in that it was mounted on stilts,” Burton responded. “It was a mechanism, not a man.”
“So if not him, what?”
“In design it appeared more advanced than Oxford’s invention. I wonder, then, whether its origins lie even farther into the future than 2202. Conversely, it said it served Queen Victoria, meaning it must have come from some point during her reign, between 1837 and 1840.”
“Which makes no sense at all.”
“As you say. And why was it hunting for me? And why didn’t it know what to do with me when it found me? And why did it—did it—wait. Stop.” Burton gasped, stumbled to a halt, and leaned heavily on his cane. “I just need a moment.”
“Not far to go,” Swinburne said. “Then warmth, brandy, and a chair to sit in. Sadhvi shouldn’t take too long to get here, either. She’ll soon have you as right as rain.”
“I share your—your faith in her abilities,” Burton mumbled. “Nevertheless—”
He fished the bottle of Saltzmann’s Tincture from his pocket.
“Please,” Swinburne pleaded. “You promised.”
“I have to break my word, Algy. I’m sorry, but my legs are folding beneath me. I can barely function.”
“Just hold on a little longer.”
“I can’t.” Burton sucked in a juddering breath, uncorked the bottled, raised it to his lips, and downed the contents.
“All of it?” Swinburne shrieked. “You’re only meant to take a teaspoonful!”
“Nonsense.”
“You’re out of your bloody mind!”
Burton felt honey-like warmth oozing through arteries and spreading into capillaries. His aches immediately shifted to one side, as if vacating his wounds. He felt the odd sensation that countless possibilities stretched away from him into an infinitude of futures.
The tincture had never acted with such rapidity.
He was thankful for it.
“Better,” he said after a minute had passed. “Let’s get out of this snow.”
They trudged onward, Swinburne glaring angrily at the explorer, and came to the power station’s big double gate, in which was set a smaller door. Burton rapped his stick against it and, within a minute, it swung inward and one of Brunel’s engineers greeted them. “You got here quickly!”
“What do you mean?” Burton asked, stepping through into the courtyard.
“Weren’t you called for?”
“No. Why? Has something happened?”
“I’ll say! You’d better go straight through to the central work area. Mr. Babbage will explain. Or more likely Mr. Gooch. Babbage—Mr. Babbage—is rather—um—upset.”
Puzzled, Burton and Swinburne crossed to the tall inner doors, which were standing slightly open, and entered the station’s vast cathedral-like interior. It was filled with machines whose function could only be guessed at. They pumped and hammered and sizzled and buzzed while, overhead, in glass spheres suspended from the distant ceiling, lightning flashed without surcease, casting a harsh light over the scene.
The two men followed a passage through the various contraptions until they came to an area that was filled with workbenches. Normally, this part of the station was crowded with engineers and scientists, all labouring night and day over their creations, but now it was empty but for a small group of men and women among whom Burton spotted Babbage, Gooch, and Brunel. The latter was so utterly motionless that he resembled a statue.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel was a remarkable figure. No longer human, he stood there, a hulking man-shaped contraption, comprised of armour-like brass plating, rods, springs, pistons, and cogwheels, and etched all over with intricate decorative designs. He had six arms—one with a big Gatling gun bolted to it—and a mask-like face fashioned into a likeness of the human features he’d possessed until his death last year. The electrical fields of his conscious mind were stored in fragments of a Nāga diamond and were articulated through one of Babbage’s famous probability calculators housed in his metal skull.
As they came closer, Burton saw that one of the great engineer’s hands had been cleanly shorn off at the wrist. He also saw a workbench upon which the pristine time suit—the one Abdu El Yezdi had taken from Edward Oxford in 1840—had been laid out. Beside it, an oblong box-like contraption was hanging by long chains from the ceiling. Constructed from dark wood and polished brass, it somewhat resembled a curve-topped sea chest. Its upper surface was inset with dials, switches, and gauges. On the other side of this box, in an area that looked as if it should have been occupied by another workbench, there was a circular smooth-sided bowl-shaped depression in the floor. Though considerably smaller, it exactly resembled the one left in the paving at Leicester Square after Spring Heeled Jack had vanished.
Burton felt his skin prickling with a disconcerting presentiment.
“By God, what happened to you?” Daniel Gooch exclaimed upon spotting the king’s agent. “You look like you lost an argument with an omnibus.”
“Something like that,” Burton said. He looked at Brunel. “Isambard?”
Gooch, a short, plumpish, sandy-haired man who, as usual, was wearing a harness to which was attached a pair of mechanical arms supplementing his own, extended all four limbs in a wide shrug. “You’ll not get anything out of him, I’m afraid. I think his babbage calculator has been knocked out of whack. He’s completely paralysed. We’ve had an—er—incident.” He turned and called to Charles Babbage. The aged scientist, though stooped and liver spotted, had about him an air of zealous energy that belied his years. That energy was currently being expended in frenetic pacing. He was also tapping the fingers of both hands against his forehead, as if pressing imaginary buttons.
“Charles! Charles!” Gooch repeated. “Sir Richard and Mr. Swinburne are here.”
“Irrelevant!” Babbage snapped.
“I hardly think so, sir. The suit belonged to Sir Richard, after all.”
“Belonged?” Burton queried.
“The damaged one,” Swinburne said. “Where is it?”
“Ah,” Gooch answered. “That’s the question.”
“Not one we should be required to ask,” Babbage shouted in a querulous tone. “It shouldn’t be possible. Even if it had become functional, there was no one inside the blasted thing to command it. What could have instigated it to jump?”
Burton struggled to clarify his thoughts. The Saltzmann’s was sending wave after wave of heat through him, flushing out the pain of his wounds, but also causing his mind to apprehend a plethora of variations, so that when Babbage turned to face him, he was also dimly aware of the old man not turning to face him, and when Babbage raised his right hand with his forefinger pointing upward, Burton imagined or vaguely perceived—he wasn’t certain which—the scientist raising the left instead.
“Nine o’clock on the fifteenth of February, 1860,” Babbage announced. “Does that moment mean anything to you?”
“I’m aware that it is today’s date,” Burton responded. “And the hour of nine has made itself significant.”
“Ah! So you recognise the anniversary?”
Burton removed his top hat, shook snow from it, and placed it on a worktop. He put his cane beside it and started to unbutton his coat. “I don’t, Charles. Enlighten me.”
Babbage slapped his right fist into his left palm. “Edward Oxford! It is at nine o’clock on the fifteenth of February in the year 2202—his fortieth birthday—that he’ll make his first foray into the past; departing his native time period at that precise moment, exactly three hundred and forty-two years from now.”
Stepping to a wooden stool, Burton lowered himself onto it, feeling his injured arm complaining but experiencing the pain as a somehow disassociated flare of light that didn’t properly belong to him.
Swinburne, who’d also divested himself of his outer garments, said, “What of it, Charles?”
“Have you not read the reports Abdu El Yezdi left for us? Did he not always insist that coincidences are of crucial importance? He referred to time as having echoes and rhythms, ripples and interconnected moments. In truth, what he was clumsily expressing are matters of algorithmic probability. They cannot be ignored.”
“An anniversary strikes me as more a matter of sentiment than of mathematics,” Swinburne said.
“You are a poet, sir!” Babbage spat the word as if it were the worst insult in the world.
Burton addressed Gooch. “Have you a cigar, old fellow? I appear to have smoked my last.”
Gooch dug mechanical fingers into his pocket and passed a Flor de Dindigul to the king’s agent.
“Thank you.” After putting a flame to his smoke, Burton returned his attention to Babbage. “I take it you marked the occasion in some manner.” He gestured toward the indentation in the floor. “And perhaps that is the result?”
“It doesn’t make any sense.”
“What doesn’t?”
Babbage started tapping his head again. “Nothing to provide the impulse, you see,” he muttered. “No one in it.”
“I don’t see.” Burton turned to Gooch. “In plain English and to the point, please, Daniel.”
The engineer grunted and said, “I’ll try.” He folded his four arms. “It concerns the multitude of histories. They must all contain Edward Oxford’s burned and malfunctioning time suit because they all originated either from the moment he caused the first division in time or from events that occurred subsequent to it. However, our iteration of history is absolutely unique in that Abdu El Yezdi brought to it a second version of the outfit.” He nodded toward the nearby bench. “The undamaged one. That’s what made Charles’s experiment possible.”
“Two suits. Where is the other?”
“We don’t know. Charles was attempting to repair it.” Gooch strode over to the bench. “The suit is comprised of four principal components.” He put a metal hand against the white fabric. “Its material absorbs light and converts it to power.” He touched the flat disk on the suit’s chest. “The Nimtz generator stores that power and converts it to what we might refer to as chronostatic energy.” He moved to the end of the worktable. “Immediately prior to the suit’s transference from one moment in history to another, the generator extends around it a pocket of the aforesaid energy. Were this to intersect with anything possessing more density than air, the object would be sliced through and part of it carried with the traveller through time. The boots, with their spring-loaded stilts, were therefore designed to thrust Oxford high above the ground so only the atmosphere surrounded him.” He waved a fleshy hand toward the other end of the bench. “Finally, the helmet contains microscopic semi-biological machinery that calculates, initiates, and directs all aspects of the journey. The crucial constituent of this machinery is called a BioProc. One word, capital B, capital P. There are thousands of BioProcs in the helmet, and every one of them contains a granule of powdered black diamond. Larger shards of the stone are also present in the generator. We are all aware of the peculiar qualities of the gem, yes?”
He received sounds of confirmation from Burton and Swinburne.
“The immense calculating power of the helmets,” Gooch went on, “is made possible by an inconceivably complex electromagnetic pattern existing within the diamond dust; a pattern that employed Edward Oxford’s mind as its template. When he was killed by El Yezdi in 1840, his terminal emanation—a powerful burst of energy from the brain—instantly overwrote it, but since this matched what was already there, there was no untoward effect.” He stood back. “The damaged suit didn’t fare so well. Its electrical composition was already badly impaired by prolonged exposure to the madness of the Oxford who’d become known as Spring Heeled Jack, and when he died, whatever vestiges of sanity that remained in it were erased by his last mental gasp.”
Passing back along the side of the bench, Gooch reached out and picked up the helmet. “This is a truly remarkable machine. It can enter a state called ‘self-repair mode,’ which allows its internal components to alter their function in order to carry out whatever maintenance is necessary. Had we, like the other histories, only the one ruined suit, we would have rerouted what power remained in its Nimtz generator to the headpiece, hoping that somehow, in its insanity, there was retained sufficient an instinct for self-preservation to instigate repairs. Perhaps it would have somehow reordered its synthetic intelligence.” He turned the helmet in his hands. “But we were lucky. We had this pristine version, which is why Mr. Babbage created that—” He jerked his chin toward the box-like affair. “A Field Amplifier.”
Burton swayed slightly, in the grip of a synaesthesia that suddenly made the sound of Gooch’s voice a floral scent, turned the scene before him into a symphony of visceral sensations, and transformed the oily odour of the workshop into a melodious purring. He glanced at the glowing tip of his cigar. It was a miniature sun.
“With it,” Gooch went on, “we intended to record the electrical pattern present in this helmet and copy it across to the defective one, replacing the insanity therein.”
“Marvellous!” Swinburne exclaimed. “What went wrong?”
“Charles has a curious sense of occasion. To him, every event is a mathematical formula and its every possible outcome an elaboration of the calculation. Applying this hypothesis to the suits, he proposes that they manipulate a single great equation—a stupendous envisioning of time’s structures and processes—and that by observing coincidences and sequences, he might one day comprehend it. This is why today’s anniversary was significant, and why he initiated the experiment at exactly nine o’clock.”
Charles Babbage suddenly came out of his self-absorption, stepped forward, and slapped a hand down onto the worktop. “The synthetic intelligence is responsive, not active. I could not have issued the command independently.”
A particularly violent bolt of lightning whipped through one of the overhanging globes. The crackling detonations echoed around the massive hall, and the white light momentarily illuminated the normally shadowed sockets of the scientist’s eyes, revealing a fanatical glint within.
Burton felt the inexplicable suspicion that, rather than being present in Battersea Power Station, he was somewhere entirely different.
From afar, he heard Swinburne cry out, “Command? What command? My hat! In all the many histories, is there a single Charles Babbage who can get to the confounded point?”
As the king’s agent splintered into innumerable renditions of himself, Gooch said, “At the exact moment the Field Amplifier accessed the ruined headpiece, a bubble of chronostatic energy formed around the damaged time suit. It sliced through Isambard’s wrist, popped, and the suit, along with our friend’s hand, vanished.”
“It travelled into time,” Babbage snarled. “Of its own accord.”
From amid the complex of jointed metal limbs that hung from the centre of the ceiling like angular jungle lianas, one emerged with a sword clutched in its mechanical digits. Gently, it tapped the blade first against Captain Richard Francis Burton’s right shoulder, then against his left.
The king’s agent stood, now a Knight of the Most Distinguished Order of Saint Michael and Saint George.
Due to the damage done to the monarch’s vocal apparatus during the attack on Buckingham Palace, a white-stockinged royal equerry had spoken the words of the ceremony. Burton felt relieved by this. King Ernest Augustus I was demented at the best of times, and the past three months had been far from the best. Had he been able to express himself, he’d no doubt have ranted endlessly about the violence done to him—for the palace was, in effect, his own body; his limbs were built into every part of it, all controlled from the Crown Room, where his brain floated in a tank of vital fluids. The destruction of the western wing had been the equivalent of having an arm blown off. His Majesty was nettled, to say the least.
Burton took three steps back, bowed, and returned to his seat.
“Did your leg fall asleep?” whispered Monckton Milnes, who was sitting to his left.
“No. Why do you ask?”
“You were limping.”
Burton made a sound of puzzlement. “Was I? By Allah’s beard, I do feel a little strange. My mind was wandering all over the place. I imagined myself to be at Battersea Power Station.”
“Maybe it wasn’t just the leg, then,” his friend suggested, sotto voce. “Perhaps all of you fell asleep. I wouldn’t be at all surprised, despite the occasion. Not after what you’ve been through.”
“I was daydreaming, that’s all. You know I have no patience for these official functions. When can we get out of this asylum?”
“Shhh! The walls have ears.”
Burton mentally kicked himself. “I mean no disrespect to the king, but I was probably thinking of Battersea Power Station because I have to be there by nine o’clock. Babbage is activating Oxford’s suit.”
An abstruse thought intruded. What? Again?
“These ceremonies don’t usually occur so late in the day,” Monckton Milnes observed, “but His Majesty spent all morning with his architects, and the meeting went past its allotted hours. It’s rumoured that he wants the palace rebuilt and made the tallest edifice in the city. I expect he’s eager to get back to his plans and sketches, which is why, believe it or not, formalities are proceeding at such a rapid pace.”
“This is rapid?”
“By comparison to the norm. Be patient, there are only three more to be knighted, then we’ll depart.”
One of the palace footmen gave them an uncompromising glare. They stopped their whispering.
Burton ran his forefinger around his collar. It was too tight. He’d forgotten how uncomfortable a freshly laundered army uniform could be.
Wearily, he endured the pomp and protocols.
Forty minutes later, in the reception hall, the foppishly attired Lord Palmerston approached him and drawled, “My dear Sir Richard, may I be the first to congratulate you.”
“On what, sir?”
“Your title, man! Your title!”
“Ah. Thank you, Prime Minister.”
“I’ve read your report. The Mystery of the Malevolent Mediums. Do you intend to give all your accounts such lurid titles?”
“I felt it appropriate. It was a dramatic affair.”
“I can’t disagree with that. Is it really over?”
“Nietzsche is dead, sir—in our time, in his own, and across all the other versions of history.”
Burton couldn’t shake a curious sensation of unfamiliarity. The environment felt unutterably askew. Even the words that came out of his mouth felt wrong.
“And the future war?” Palmerston asked.
“That rests with you. Now we know it’s coming, you have the opportunity to develop policies that will steer us along another course. There’s no need for the conflict to erupt in 1914. We have fifty-four years in which to prevent it.”
Palmerston rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Hmm. Or fifty-four years in which to prepare. Perhaps it would be better to spend that time undermining Prussia and the Germanic states rather than indulging them.”
“That might send us into battle earlier.”
“Nietzsche told you the conflict is inevitable. If that’s the case, better we strike hard and when least expected than not at all.”
Burton shrugged and murmured, “As the premier, it’s your choice to make. I don’t envy you.”
Palmerston hemmed and hawed.
“I have to go,” Burton said. “There’s business to take care of at the Department of Guided Science.”
“The what?”
“The—the—I’m sorry, I meant to say, at the Federation of Mechanics.”
“A rather unusual slip of the tongue.”
“It’s this uniform. It’s too tight. I’m hot and uncomfortable. Can’t think straight.”
“Hmm. So what are the Empire’s boffins up to? Anything I should be aware of?”
“No, sir, I don’t think so.”
The prime minister nodded distractedly and waved him away.
Burton returned to Monckton Milnes, who was flirting—fruitlessly, as usual—with Nurse Florence Nightingale.
“I’ll see you at Bartolini’s at eleven.”
“The Cannibal Club convenes,” Monckton Milnes confirmed. “I’ll be there.”
Burton made for the exit but was intercepted by Detective Inspector Krishnamurthy, a handsome young Scotland Yard man of Indian extraction who was sporting a shiny new medal on his jacket.
“It’s done, sir.”
“All of them?” Burton asked.
“Yes. Countess Sabina and Isabella Mayson killed the last at two o’clock this morning. It was hunting Sergeant Honesty through the British Museum.”
“Bismillah! Is he all right?”
“Unharmed. The countess has confirmed that not a single berserker remains.”
“Good show. What of Trounce?”
“His eye can’t be saved, but he’ll pull through.”
“Thank you, Maneesh. I’m sorry about Shyamji. Your cousin was a good man.”
“Yes, sir, he was. A brave one, too.”
Burton left the chamber and stepped out of the palace into thick London fog. He stopped, frowned, and tried to identify whatever it was he appeared to have forgotten. Nothing occurred to him, but the sense that something vital had been misplaced didn’t go away. He snapped his fingers irritably and walked on, passing along the edge of the parade ground to the Royal Mews.
He came to the stables. His mechanical horse raised its head as he approached. It whirred, “You need to wind me up. My spring is slack.”
“Hello, Orpheus. Slack? Have you been gallivanting? I told you to stay still.”
“I know, but I felt restless. You’ve been in there for ages. I needed to stretch my legs.”
Pulling the key from its housing in the horse’s side, Burton inserted it into the hole beneath the steed’s decorative tail and began to rotate it. Speaking over the loud ratcheting, he said, “Your legs are metal. They can’t be stretched.”
“I was speaking metaphorically.”
“I shall have words with Babbage. I’m not sure a mechanical horse should know how to employ metaphors.”
“While you’re at it, you could ask Isambard Kingdom Brunel to completely redesign me.”
“You say that every single time I wind you up.”
“Because it’s humiliating.”
“You don’t possess emotions.”
“Having a key shoved up my arse on a regular basis appears to have instilled them in me.”
“And you become ever more bothersome each time your spring is tightened.”
“If you want a dumb steed, buy a fleshy one. You’ll find its maintenance a far less convenient affair. Hay must be shoved into one end, and it emerges rather messily from the other. I assure you, in our relationship, I’m the one that suffers.”
“You never stop reminding me.”
Having fully rewound the horse, Burton clicked the key back into its bracket and hoisted himself up onto the saddle. “Take me to Battersea Power Station.”
“Walk, trot, or gallop?”
“A brisk walk, please.”
Orpheus headed toward the palace gates. “I didn’t include a brisk walk among the options. In my book, it qualifies as a trot.”
“Just be quiet and try not to get lost.”
“I can’t get lost. The route is engraved into my memory. I could navigate it blindfolded.”
“How about gagged?”
“Well! Really!”
They left the palace and proceeded along Buckingham Palace Road in the direction of Chelsea Bridge. The fog was so thick that when Burton extended an arm his fingertips disappeared into it. Sounds were muffled and darkness hung over the city, penetrated here and there by nebulous balls of orange light that may have been street lamps, windows, or distant suns; it was impossible to tell.
There were very few people out and about. The weather wasn’t solely to blame; the recent invasion of berserkers had terrified the entire city. People weren’t yet convinced the danger had passed.
The stench of the Thames assaulted his nostrils. Bazalgette’s new sewer system promised to solve the problem, but the tunnels had only been in operation for a few days, and it would take many months before the river’s water ran clear. The fog always made the stink worse, too.
Five minutes later, Orpheus clip-clopped over the bridge, passed a patch of wasteland, turned onto a path that skirted the edge of the Royal Battle Fleet Airfield, and arrived at the gates of the power station. The many windows of the Mechanics’ headquarters lit up the vapour, making of the illumination a physical mass that swirled around Burton as he dismounted.
“Wait here,” he ordered.
“In the cold?” Orpheus complained. “It’s bloody freezing.”
“You can’t feel cold.”
“I’ll get bored again.”
“You’ll wind down before that happens.”
“Ugh. I hate entering the void. Even worse, I hate waking from it with that bloomin’ key stuck up my whatsit. You’re very mean to me.”
“I might swap you for a velocipede.”
Burton knocked on the door set into the massive station gates.
“Wheels!” Orpheus exclaimed. “Unstable. You’ll fall off and crack your head. Deservedly so.”
The door opened, and an oil-stained engineer ushered Burton in. “Hello, sir,” she said. “They’re waiting for you in the workshop. Follow me, please.”
The woman led the king’s agent across the courtyard to the tall inner gates, which, after manipulating a complex combination lock, she pushed open. They entered and crossed the vast floor space to the central area of workbenches.
Sir Charles Babbage looked up as the king’s agent arrived. “About time!”
“Good evening,” Burton responded. He acknowledged Daniel Gooch, at the scientist’s side. “I apologise if I’m a little late. I was being knighted at the palace. You know from personal experience how such things drag on.”
Babbage grunted disdainfully. “Well, if you must involve yourself with trivialities.”
“I wasn’t given any more choice in the matter than you were. Incidentally, the probability calculator you put in my mount—it’s one of the new models, yes?”
“A Mark Three. My best design yet. It has personality enhancements.”
“So I’ve noticed. Is there any way to diminish them? The confounded thing keeps answering back.”
“Tut-tut!” Babbage barked. “Tut-tut! Always complaints. You’re nothing but a Luddite, sir!”
From behind a nearby apparatus, a badly dented silver ball, twelve feet in diameter, appeared and rolled unsteadily to join them. It stopped and wobbled in front of Burton. A panel on its surface slid aside. A multi-jointed arm unfolded from inside, and the pincer-like hand at its end reached to a second panel, which opened with a click. Reaching in, the pincer extracted a long, thick cigar—already lit and glowing at one end—and inserted it into a small hole at the top of the globe. The tip of the cigar burned brightly, and smoke plumed from another orifice.
The king’s agent said, “Hello, Isambard.”
Isambard Kingdom Brunel clanged, “Sir Richard. Congratulations. Are you recovered?” His voice sounded like handbells being spilled onto a church organ.
“From the ceremony or from my injuries?”
“Heh! Your injuries, of course.”
“My bruises pain me, but for the most part, yes, I’m fine, thank you.”
He put his right hand to his left elbow and felt for a wound that wasn’t there.
Why did I do that? My arm received no injury.
He turned his attention back to Brunel and, as he always did, wondered how much of the famous engineer still existed inside his life-maintaining machine. Brunel had suffered a serious stroke last year and would have died had Gooch not quickly designed and constructed the globe in which he was now preserved.
“You summoned me, Isambard?”
“I did. Sir Charles is about to perform an experiment that, as the guardian of the time suit, you should witness.”
Burton looked at the workbench around which they were gathered. Edward Oxford’s burned and blistered outfit had been laid out on it.
A powerful sense of déjà vu blossomed from the pit of his stomach. Its heat filled him, made his senses reel, and caused him to lean unsteadily on his walking cane.
Why am I here again?
It was a thought that made no sense.
Burton suddenly had no control over himself. Everything appeared unfamiliar. The inside of the station was crammed with contraptions, but they weren’t the ones he knew. Babbage and Gooch were dressed in oddly tailored clothes. And Brunel—
A battered sphere? Shouldn’t he be a man of brass?
He struggled to piece together recent events and glanced at the next workbench along, wondering why it was there and puzzled by the expectation that there should be a dent in the floor instead.
Memories welled up. Red snow. Leicester Square. Spring Heeled Jack.
“What experiment?” he asked, his voice hoarse.
It went wrong. The suit vanished of its own accord. Yet here it is.
Babbage pointed at the dented and blistered helmet. “As you are aware, this contains a synthetic intelligence, though its thought processes have been crippled by Edward Oxford’s lunacy. During the course of the past three months, I have asked it questions, and it has replied to them with—”
“You’ve been wearing it?” Burton interrupted. “I thought Abdu El Yezdi left strict instructions that you should never—” He stopped.
Babbage and Gooch peered at him curiously.
Brunel chimed, “Who is Abdu El Yezdi?”
“No one. Nothing. My apologies. I’m—I’m tired. My mind is wandering.”
“Rein it in!” Babbage snapped. “Pay attention! This is important! As I was saying, the headpiece has never responded to my queries with anything other than garbled nonsense. I’ve had to sort through all manner of irrelevancies to locate the merest crumbs of pertinent information. It has not been sufficient. I’ve gained little understanding of how the machinery of the suit functions, and now the power held in the helmet is almost drained.” He leaned over the workbench and tapped a finger on the device attached to the suit’s chest. “However, all is not lost. This is called a Nimtz generator. It holds a reserve of energy. Considerably more, in fact, than was ever in the headpiece. I’ve learned how to connect them together. It is done. I’m ready to issue the command that will cause the helmet to be reenergised. I believe it will then be able to repair itself.” Babbage wriggled his fingers, said—“Hmm!”—and pulled a chronometer from his waistcoat pocket. “So, let us record that the procedure commences at nine o’clock on the evening of Wednesday the fifteenth of February, 1860. You understand the significance of the time?”
“I do,” Burton murmured.
Nine o’clock! How can it be nine o’clock again?
The scientist reached down and traced a shape on the side of the Nimtz generator. The disk began to glow. It crackled. Suddenly, a shower of sparks erupted from it. Babbage flinched and cried out in alarm.
“What happened?” Gooch asked.
“I’m not sure. Perhaps the power has been routed to the wrong—”
The scientist stopped as a transparent bubble materialised around the helmet, suit, and boots. It rapidly expanded. The men quickly backed away from it, but Brunel didn’t roll fast enough; the edge of the bubble touched him just before, with a deafening bang, it popped. The suit, the workbench, and a small section of the famous engineer vanished into thin air.
Gooch placed a hand on the sphere. “Are you all right, Isambard?”
The silver globe didn’t respond. It was silent and still.
“What’s wrong with him?” Burton asked. He looked down at the floor and saw a familiar smooth round indentation where the floor had been scooped out by the edge of the chronostatic energy field.
“It’s hard to say,” Gooch replied. “Maybe his probability calculator has been damaged.”
“Pah!” Babbage put in. “A trifling matter. The suit has gone. Gone!”
“Into time, Sir Charles?” Gooch asked.
“Obviously! Hell and damnation! What have we lost? The knowledge! The knowledge!” The scientist lowered his face into his hands and moaned. “Go away, all of you. I have to think. You’re distracting me. Leave me alone.”
Burton cocked an eyebrow at the eccentric old man, glanced at Gooch, then looked down and was surprised to see that his hands, apparently of their own volition, were buttoning his coat over Army reds. Puzzled by the uniform, he retrieved its cap from a table, took up his silver-handled swordstick, and heard himself say, “I’ll leave you to it. There are matters I need to attend to.”
“Is the Nietzsche affair not done with?” Gooch asked.
“It’s over,” Burton answered, not really knowing what the Nietzsche affair was. He bid Gooch farewell, eyed Babbage and Brunel for a moment, then turned and left the station. As he stepped into the courtyard, he expected to see snow falling. It wasn’t. There was just a solid wall of bitterly cold fog.
Crossing to the main gates, he exited through them and was greeted by a whirring voice. “That was quick.”
Startled, Burton took a pace backward. A large horse-shaped contraption of brass loomed in the murk, regarding him with big, round, glowing eyes.
“What—what are you?” the king’s agent stammered.
What is wrong with me? Have I amnesia?
“Orpheus, your trusty steed, of course. Have you come to test my knowledge of things you already know or are we going somewhere? I need to get moving. I haven’t much enjoyed standing here with this damp air seeping into my joints.”
“Orpheus,” Burton mumbled. It was the name of the airship—captained by Nathaniel Lawless—that had flown him into central Africa last year, enabling his discovery of the source of the River Nile.
The contraption said, “Are you going to climb aboard or stand there with your jaw dangling?”
Hesitantly, Burton moved to the horse’s side and mounted it.
“Where do you want to go?” it asked.
“Um. Home.”
“Walk, trot, or gallop?”
“Can you trot in this fog?”
“Of course. I can’t guarantee I won’t collide with anything, though.”
“That’s not very encouraging. Proceed at the safest pace.”
Orpheus set off, heading for Nine Elms Lane. The vehicle’s eyes projected twin beams of light into the darkness. It picked up speed and traversed the thoroughfare to Vauxhall Bridge. Burton paid the toll. They crossed the river then travelled on up to Victoria, past Green Park and Hyde Park, and along Baker Street. For the duration, Burton’s mind was practically frozen with bewilderment.
The city was quieter than he’d ever heard it. There were no steam horse–drawn cabs, no pantechnicons, no steam spheres, no velocipedes, and no rotorchairs—just a few riders on mechanical horses. Disconcertingly, the steeds greeted one another as they passed:
“Evening, Orpheus.”
“How’re you doing, Flash?”
“Hallo, Orpheus.”
“What ho, Blackie.”
“All right, Orpheus?”
“Fine, thank you, Heracles.”
“Will you please stop that,” Burton complained.
“Can’t,” his horse replied. “You know full well the exchanges are necessary.”
“Necessary for what?”
“For passing route and traffic information.”
“All I’m hearing are variations of hello.”
“That’s because those pathetic biological ears of yours have limited sensitivity. You’re not hearing the coded tones beneath the words.”
Burton ground his teeth. He was frustrated that the dense pall blocked his view of the city. His explorer’s instinct was stimulated by what was—as his mind cleared he was becoming convinced of it—a variant London. He had no idea how he’d got here and wasn’t entirely certain where he’d come from, but he desperately wanted to observe the metropolis. Unfortunate, then, that all he could see were vague smudges of light!
How was it possible that the weather was different? It had been snowing where he came from, he was sure. Wasn’t history a matter of human affairs, rather than natural? Then he noticed soot and ash suspended in the fog, and he realised that this capital must be even more industrialised than his own, and the snow was perhaps held in abeyance by the blanket of fumes. The work of man affecting the climate! What an extraordinary thought!
At the corner of Gloucester Place and Montagu Place, a familiar voice hailed him through the gloom.
“What ho, Cap’n!”
“Is that you, Mr. Grub?” Burton called, for the greeting had come from the corner where Grub the street vendor always had his brazier or barrow.
“Aye, an’ no one else,” came the answer. “Fair solid, ain’t it?”
“The fog? It is. I can’t see you. How did you know it was me?”
“Recognised yer nag’s footsteps.”
“They are distinctive,” Orpheus murmured.
“One o’ the back feet drags a little. Needs—what’s the word?”
“Recalibrating?” Burton offered automatically.
How did I know that?
“Rather an impertinent suggestion,” Orpheus complained.
“Aye! Recalcifyin’!”
“What on earth are you doing out in this weather?” Burton asked.
“Toastin’ corn on the cob fer ’em what wants it.”
“Well, you’re a braver man than I. I’d rather be toasting my toes by the fire.”
“Aye, there ain’t nuffink like the comforts of ’ome.”
“Do you actually have one, Mr. Grub? I don’t think I’ve ever passed this corner without seeing you on it.”
Not that you can see him now. And be careful. What is true of your world may not be true of this. Watch what you say.
“We all ’ave our place, don’t we, Cap’n? This ’ere is my patch.”
“I suppose we do. Good afternoon to you, sir.”
Though his words and thoughts had come without volition, Burton’s mind was clearing. “My world” was starting to mean something to him—and it was most certainly something different to “this world.”
A few minutes later, he stabled Orpheus in the mews behind his house—“I’ll wait here and wind down,” the horse said grumpily—and entered Number 14 by the back door. He strode to the foot of the stairs where he found his young valet, Bram Stoker, polishing shoes and boots.
“Hello, Bram. You’re up late. Off to bed with you.”
The boy looked up. It wasn’t Stoker at all, but Oscar Wilde, who’d been Captain Lawless’s cabin boy during the African adventure and who’d recently been accepted by the flight officer’s training school.
“Bram, guv’nor?” the youngster asked.
“Sorry, I was thinking out loud.”
“How were the toffs?”
“Toffs?”
“At the palace.”
Burton struggled with confused memories. Had he been to Buckingham Palace?
He gave a safe answer, “Tedious, as usual.”
The Irish boy grinned. “Ye should never speak disrespectfully of Society, sir. Only people who can’t get into it do that.”
“Then I feel at liberty. The high and the mighty don’t make me welcome at their clubs and dinner tables.”
“It’s ’cos ye have a brain in your head, so it is. What a danger for ’em! Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.”
Burton chuckled. He placed his cap on the stand, hung up his coat, and put his cane into its elephant foot holder. He glanced around the hallway. It was as it should be, except the pictures on the wall were arranged a little differently, and the grandfather clock at the far end was a different model.
He said to Wilde, “When you’ve finished those boots, and before you go to bed, come up to my room and put this uniform away, would you?”
“Right you are, sir. Shan’t be long.”
Burton went up to his bedroom on the third floor. There, he divested himself of the scratchy and constricting regimentals, threw them onto the bed, and donned shirt and trousers.
He checked his pocket watch. It was a quarter to eleven.
His reflection watched him from the wall mirror. He gave a start, crossed to the glass, and discovered that his hair was a little shorter, a devilishly forked beard adorned his jaw, and the scar on his left cheek had become longer and was angled a little more toward the horizontal. There were marks on his skin—cuts and bruises—but they were healing, not the fresh and painful wounds he knew he’d suffered a couple of hours ago. Or was it three hours? Four? A day?
Squaring his shoulders, he addressed his opposite. “I trust you have a good supply of brandy and cigars, Captain Burton. This is a three-Manila problem.”
The king’s agent went down to his study. Upon entering it, he was insulted by a colourful parakeet.
“Stench pool! Lard belly! Dribblesome jelly head!”
He looked in surprise at the perched bird, shook his head in wonder, and began to slowly move around the room, examining every detail of it. At a glance, it looked unchanged, but on closer inspection he found his paperwork had been reorganised and items moved, including his collection of swords, which though still affixed to the chimneybreast were displayed in a different arrangement.
He investigated his principal work desk and found that he was apparently authoring a book entitled A Complete System of Bayonet Exercise. After reading the first few paragraphs, he muttered, “A truly excellent idea. I shall write it myself.”
He went to the bureau, poured a drink, and crossed to the old saddlebag armchair by the fireplace. When he sat, he found it as familiar and as comfortable as his own.
“It is your own,” he said and, reaching down to a box on the hearth, took a cheroot from it, poked its end into the fire, and started to smoke.
“Let me see now. I met Algy for a drink. Where? The Hog in the Pound? No. The Black Toad. After which we went to meet with the Cannibals at Bartolini’s. Ah! Spring Heeled Jack. That explains this wound to my arm.” He flexed his left elbow. “Except it’s not there. But anyway, one hell of a scrap, I’m certain of that. Then young Swinburne and I headed off to consult with Babbage. Am I still at Battersea?”
“Nose-picking, mould muggling arse pot!” the parakeet cackled.
“You may be right, my brightly feathered friend,” he agreed. “But that doesn’t explain how I’ve somehow slipped into the body of a different Burton. Have you any insight into that?”
“Buttocks!” the bird responded.
There came a tap at the door.
“Enter!”
Mrs. Iris Angell, his housekeeper, stepped in. A basset hound padded beside her.
“Will you require any supper before I go to bed?” She hesitated then gave an awkward bob. “Should I address you as Sir Richard, now?”
“No, Mother Angell, no formalities and no supper. I haven’t any appetite.”
He looked down at the dog as it walked across to the hearthrug, sat, and gazed back at him with an eager thump of its tail on the floor.
“Fidget wants a walk,” Mrs. Angell observed. “The greedy little mite. He doesn’t care about the hour, nor that he’s already been exercised twice today by Quips.”
“Quips?”
“Master Wilde. Are you all right? You look a little flustered, if you’ll forgive me a-sayin’ so.”
“It’s been an odd sort of day. The dog will have to wait. I have to go out again in a moment.”
“So late? I do wish you’d take a rest for once in your life.”
Burton watched his housekeeper depart. He smiled. There was a peculiar sort of satisfaction in knowing his other self enjoyed the same comforts of home.
He took a gulp of brandy and noticed a puckered scar across the back of his left hand. He recognised it at once. It was common in men who favoured the blade as a weapon—a mark of their earliest days of training when in attempting to sheathe their weapon they missed the scabbard and sliced the flesh, cutting it to the bone. A painful mistake, but one that Burton had never made. This was not his scar.
“And this is not my place,” he said decisively.
He stood, put his drink aside, lifted a jacket from the back of a chair, and slipped it on.
“Crapulous ninny!” the parakeet squawked.
“And up your pipe,” he replied.
He left the study and descended the stairs.
“I’m all done here,” Oscar Wilde said. “I’ll go and fold your uniform, guv’nor.”
“Thank you, lad.”
After shrugging into his coat and taking up his top hat and cane, Burton passed through the house, went out into the yard, and crossed to the mews. He entered them with the instinctive expectation that he’d see his two rotorchairs, two velocipedes, and single steam sphere, even though he knew they weren’t there.
“Again?” Orpheus said. “Can’t I enjoy a moment’s peace?”
“Earlier you complained you’d wind down,” Burton noted.
“Where do you want to go?” the contraption asked.
“To visit my brother.”
“I didn’t know you had one. You never tell me anything. Where does he live?”
“At the Royal Venetia Hotel on the Strand. He’s the minister of chronological affairs.”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“You’re a horse.”
The contraption jerked its head toward the street-facing doors. “Stop dithering and open up.”
Burton crossed to the portal and slid it open. He waited while Orpheus walked out, then secured the stable, mounted the vehicle, and said, “Trot, please.”
They set off.
Again, Burton was surprised by how subdued the city felt. There was none of the hustle and bustle he was accustomed to. Vague memories—not his own—nudged at the periphery of his conscious mind. Nietzsche. Berserkers. Death. Destruction.
Please, no! I lost Isabel in this life, too! Isabel! Isabel!
Forty minutes later, Orpheus stopped outside the hotel.
Burton jumped to the pavement and crossed it. People moved past him like wraiths, quickly and silently, as if in the grip of some nameless dread.
He tipped his hat to the doorman, entered, walked across the opulent black-and-white chequer-floored reception area toward the staircase, then suddenly hesitated and changed course. He approached the front desk.
“I’m here to see Mr. Edward Burton,” he said. “The minister. Suite five, fifth floor.”
The night clerk pursed his lips, causing the ends of his waxed moustache to stick out like little horns, checked the guest register, and shook his head. “We don’t have anyone by that name, sir.”
“He’s a permanent resident.”
“I’m afraid not. Suite five, you say? Those rooms have been empty for the past three days. The last occupant was the Spanish ambassador, Signor Delgado. He was killed during the troubles. Perhaps you have the wrong hotel.”
Burton said thank you and departed. He remounted his steed. “Take me to Cheyne Walk.”
“Mr. Swinburne’s?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to get drunk?”
“Mind your own damned business.”
Orpheus trotted westward following the Thames upstream back toward Chelsea Bridge. Foghorns sent their mournful blasts into the pall. Big Ben chimed midnight.
“By God! Where am I?” Burton cried out, for St. Stephen’s Tower had been blown to smithereens last November, and, even before that, its bell had cracked and stopped working. Suddenly, he felt horribly lost, terribly alone.
A sense of urgency—near panic—overtook him. Why was he in this familiar yet alien London? What had thrown him here? How could he return to his own world?
“Go as fast as you can,” he commanded.
“Hold on tight,” the clockwork horse advised. “I might have to stop abruptly.”
With metal hooves clacking, the steed set off at a gallop.
A breeze had got up, and the blanket of fog was shredding. It parted just ahead, revealing the back of a slow-moving hansom cab. Burton had to quickly jerk the reins to steer his armadillidium around it.
He looked down.
Armadillidium?
“From what yer might call a filler-soffickle standpoint,” Herbert Spencer declared, “I ain’t averse to the idea what that time can divide into separate ’istories. An’ I must admit, I quite likes the possibility that there’s more ’n one o’ me, an’ that some o’ the others might ’ave ’ad better hopportunities than what I’ve ’ad. It’s a rum do—hey?—to fink there might be an ’Erbert Spencer somewhere what’s a bloomin’ toff with an heducation n’ all!”
Spencer was sitting behind Lieutenant Richard Francis Burton on a saddle-like seat mounted on the back of a massive woodlouse—of the genus armadillidium giganticus. Burton was steering the crustacean along Nine Elms Lane toward Battersea Castle. There were many more of the creatures on the road, some with as many as five passengers upon their plated backs.
“In your case, Herbert,” the explorer responded, “I suspect the profundity of your intelligence is probably the same in every version of the world. If, in a parallel existence, you are better educated, then perhaps it allows you to express yourself in a rather more erudite manner, with the consequence of greater attention and respect from the intelligentsia, but you’ve never struck me as a man who particularly desires to be feted.”
“Nah,” Spencer agreed. “All that attention? It ain’t fer the likes o’ me. The appeal of bein’ a toff is a full stomach, that’s all.”
Burton was suddenly hit by a vertiginous sense of falling. He tugged at the armadillidium’s reins, as if trying to avoid something that wasn’t there, and gave a cry of alarm. From behind him a voice said, “Cor blimey! Steady on! You nearly ’ad us off the bloomin’ road!”
Twisting around, he saw a bearded vagabond sitting behind him.
“Watch out!” the man said, pointing ahead.
Burton returned his attention to the woodlouse and steered it back onto the left side of the thoroughfare.
He gasped. Though low snow-bearing clouds obscured the night sky, the cold air was so incredibly crisp and clear that every street lamp blazed like a star, and, to his right, the River Thames glittered as if filled with phosphorescence. He looked down again at the thing beneath him.
“Um.”
“Somethin’ wrong, Boss?”
“No,” Burton lied.
He struggled to recall the man’s name. Wells? No. Speke? Spencer. Yes. Herbert Spencer. How did he know that?
The accounts left by Abdu El Yezdi. Herbert Spencer was a vagrant philosopher. He was killed while holding shards of one of the Nāga diamonds. Due to his proximity to them, the dying emanation of his brain was imprinted into the gems. They were later transferred into a clockwork man’s babbage device, giving Spencer’s still-conscious mind a means through which to express itself and, after a fashion, live again.
This memory suddenly felt profoundly significant to Burton, though he couldn’t fathom why.
A huge dragonfly hummed by overhead, with a man saddled upon its thorax and glowing paper lanterns trailing on ribbons behind it.
Burton watched it pass and was startled when a lock of hair fell over his eyes. He reached up and found himself possessed of a shoulder-length mane. For some strange reason, he imagined he’d always worn it short. He pushed his fingertips into its roots and along his scalp. No scars.
What is wrong with me?
He must have been daydreaming. He’d imagined something about a mechanical horse. His thoughts were jumbled and erratic. Fantasies were intruding into them. Berserkers. Spring Heeled Jack. Lord Palmerston.
He muttered, “I must be going barmy.”
The four copper towers of Battersea Castle were just ahead. He felt it to be his destination, so guided the woodlouse off the road and into the edifice’s decorative gardens. Frost had whitened the grass, hedgerows, and skeletal trees. The flowerbeds to either side of the path were barren.
“Pull yourself together,” he whispered as he drew his steed to a halt outside the castle’s gates.
“Beg pardon?” Spencer asked.
“Sorry. Nothing.”
As they climbed to the ground, Burton reeled to one side and would have fallen had Spencer not caught him by the wrist.
“Flamin’ heck, Boss! What’s got into yer?”
“Too many late nights.” Burton steadied himself. He put a hand to his ribs, to his left arm, to his chin. Ghostly pain inhabited them but didn’t hurt him.
Spencer said to the armadillidium, “Wait.”
It rolled itself into a ball. The king’s agent marvelled at the way the creature made of itself such a perfect sphere, completely protected by its armour, with the saddle balanced on top. It was astonishing. The achievements of the geneticists never ceased to amaze him. Sir Francis Galton certainly deserved all the honours he’d received.
Geneticists? Galton? Galton the lunatic? The father of that illegal science?
“Why are we riskin’ this visit?” Spencer asked. “The Master Guild of Engineers is defeated, an’ if Gladstone finds out we’re consortin’ wiv the enemy, ’e’ll likely ’ave us ’ung, drawn an’ quartered.”
“Gladstone is an ass,” Burton replied involuntarily. He looked up at the building, noting that, in contrast to its well-tended gardens, it appeared shabby and neglected. Many of its windowpanes were cracked. It didn’t feel right. Not at all.
He knocked on the door. A motor-driven mechanical guard opened it and ushered them through. Like so many of the devices created by the Master Guild, it was a rickety thing that wobbled on its wheels and coughed black smoke from a clanking oil-powered engine. It led the king’s agent and his companion to the tall inner gates and opened them. Burton and Spencer entered.
Wending their way past the machinery, they arrived at the central work area, where they found Algernon Swinburne waiting with Charlie Babbage.
“Hey ho, fellow rabble-rousers!” the diminutive poet cried out. “Welcome to the dark heart of the insurgency. My hat, it’s like the jolly old Gunpowder Plot. What! What! What!”
Babbage said, “We’ve been waiting. Why are you late?”
“I don’t know,” Burton replied truthfully.
“We was at the Penfold Private Sanatorium,” Spencer put in. “Sister Raghavendra says they can’t save Monty Penniforth’s arm an’ will ’ave to remove it an’ grow ’im a new ’un.”
Babbage waved a hand dismissively. “Immaterial. Immaterial.”
“Not to Monty,” Swinburne observed. “That’s his drinking arm.” He quivered and spasmed in his usual over-excitable manner.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel trundled into view. One of his wheels squeaked annoyingly. His brain was plainly visible, floating in a dome-shaped glass container, and his many thin metal tentacles were in constant motion, writhing and curling restlessly.
“Hello, Lieutenant Burton,” he said. His voice sounded like bubbling liquid. “Mr. Spencer.”
Burton nodded a greeting then looked at the ruined attire spread out on one of the workbenches.
“Edward Oxford’s time suit,” he observed.
A recurrent dream. Or nightmare.
“Yes,” Brunel replied. “Charlie will explain. He feels he might have a solution to our problem.”
Babbage hissed impatiently. “Feels? Feels? Don’t impose the imprecision of emotions upon me, Brunel. My theories, premises, hypotheses—call them what you will—originate in logical thought. There is no room for doubt in science. Either something is, or it isn’t, or it’s unknown. If I say I have a solution, it’s because I do. My feelings don’t enter into it.”
“The terminology I employ has no influence upon the facts,” Brunel countered.
Babbage rasped, “Just the attitude that has weakened the Master Guild of Engineers to the point of extinction. Accuracy! Accuracy! I’ll have exactitude, if you please!”
“Must I stand here listening to you two squabbling?” Burton asked. “What is your proposition, Charlie?”
“That we give up the fight.”
Before Burton could respond, Swinburne screeched, “That’s it? That’s your idea? Gladstone’s dictatorship continues unabated, he’s taken Isabella Mayson as his unwilling mistress, Prince Albert is incarcerated in the Tower of London and due to be executed next week, the Libertines are employing their mediumistic powers to incite a war with Prussia, most of our allies are dead, and your great plan is to give up? By my Aunt Carlotta’s cruelly constraining corsets! Why would you propose such a thing? It’s perfectly monstrous!”
“I suggest it,” Babbage said, “so that we might start the rebellion from scratch.”
Burton looked from Babbage to Swinburne to Brunel and back at Babbage. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
The scientist placed his right hand on the time suit’s headpiece. “This,” he said, “contains what amounts to a synthetic intelligence, though one virtually incapacitated by the ravings of a madman. Nevertheless, by putting carefully considered questions to it, I have managed to ascertain that the suit transcends the natural flow of time by employing an extraordinarily sophisticated mathematical equation. What fragments of it I’ve had access to leave me convinced that, were I to extract it in full, I’d be able to construct a machine to emulate the function of the garment.”
Herbert Spencer said, “Yer mean t’ say, you could build another of the bloomin’ things?”
“If that is what I meant to say, I’d have said it,” Babbage responded. “No. The techniques available in the year 2202 are beyond even my understanding. Without them, we cannot create microscopic systems. I might, however, be capable of constructing a macroscopic equivalent. It would perhaps, be the size of a room or, more significantly, of a large vehicle.” He looked meaningfully at Burton. “One that might carry the core of our rebel group three years back through history.”
Swinburne squawked, swiped a fist through the air, and hollered, “By crikey! We’ll be able to go back and nip that blighter Gladstone in the bud!”
Burton shook his head and muttered, “There’s a problem.”
He knew the plan wouldn’t work. In travelling back to alter the past, the rebels would simply create a new strand of history. This one, in which he now found himself, would remain unchanged.
Babbage misinterpreted the comment as a question. “There is. The helmet is almost drained of power. If you give me permission, I can transfer energy to it from the Nimtz generator. The process might possibly allow the intelligence to regain some measure of sanity, enabling it to repair itself and provide me with further information.”
“Permission?”
“The suit is yours.”
Burton sighed. He indicated his consent.
Babbage consulted his pocket watch and declared it to be nine o’clock on the fifteenth of February.
The king’s agent suddenly knew exactly who, where, and when he was.
The wrong Burton.
In the wrong place.
On the wrong day.
Another repeat performance. Why?
Babbage ran his finger around the side of the Nimtz generator. The disk crackled and threw out a fountain of sparks. The old man recoiled with a cry of alarm.
Burton reached to either side, took Swinburne and Spencer by their arms, and started to pull them away from the bench.
Babbage stepped backward. “I hadn’t anticipated—”
A bubble formed around the helmet, suit and boots. With a thunderous bang, it popped, and the time suit, most of the workbench, and a large chunk of Isambard Kingdom Brunel vanished. The engineer slumped and became motionless.
Spencer cried out, “Blimey! Where’s it gone?”
“No! No! No!” Babbage wailed. “This is a disaster! We can’t have lost it! It’s impossible!” He stamped his feet and clapped his hands to his face. “How? How?”
Burton closed his eyes and massaged the sides of his head. “I’ve had enough of mysteries, and the light in this place always gives me a headache. I’m leaving.”
Swinburne and Spencer joined him. They walked back across the workshop and out through its doors. Snow was falling from a pitch-black sky. It was white. The courtyard, swathed in it, glared brilliantly under the spotlights.
The men left the power station and approached the armadillidium. Burton ordered, “Open.” It unrolled its considerable bulk. He climbed aboard, and his companions followed him up.
“The chaps are waiting for us at the Hog in the Pound,” Swinburne said. “Let’s see what plan Trounce and Slaughter have come up with. A means to rescue Miss Mayson from Gladstone’s lustful groping, I hope.”
Taking hold of the reins, Burton guided the woodlouse back through the gardens and out onto Nine Elms Lane.
He looked down at his hands. The scar on the left was no longer there. Brightness swept in from the corners of his eyes. He saw his fingers curled around the reins of his armadillidium; around the reins of a clockwork horse; around the handlebars of a velocipede.
In an instant, the snow stopped falling and it was daylight.
He lost control of his vehicle, hit the back of a hansom cab, careened into the kerb, and crashed to the ground. The penny-farthing’s crankshaft snapped and went spinning high into the branches of the trees lining the riverside.
He lay sprawled on the ground.
The cab driver yelled, “You blithering idiot!” but didn’t stop his vehicle.
A raggedly dressed match seller—a woman who lacked teeth but possessed an overabundance of facial hair—shuffled over and squinted down at the king’s agent. “Is ye hurt, ducky?”
For a moment, he couldn’t reply, then he managed to croak, “No. I’m all right.”
“You look all battered. Better get yerself up off the pavemint afore the snow soaks into ’em smart togs o’ yourn. Stain ’em scarlit, so it will. Would ye like t’ buy a box o’ lucifers?”
Burton pushed himself up. He thanked the woman for her concern and exchanged a few coins for a matchbook.
After dragging his broken velocipede out of the road, picking up his hat, and brushing himself down, he stood for a minute, utterly perplexed. He touched his head and found that his hair was short. There were scars on his scalp, a painful lump at the back of his skull, and a scabby cut on his chin. His left elbow hurt. In fact, all of him hurt.
Gradually, it dawned on him that he was on Cheyne Walk. He could see Battersea Power Station on the other side of the river. Fumbling for his chronometer, he flipped its lid. It was three o’clock in the afternoon.
Of what day?
He retrieved a cheroot from his pocket and smoked it while watching a creaking and clanking litter crab lumber past. The humped contraption was dragging itself along, its eight thick mechanical legs thumping against the impacted pink slush that covered the road, the twenty-four thin arms on its belly snatching this way and that, digging rubbish out of the mushy layer and throwing it through the machine’s maw into the furnace.
Burton’s hands were shaking.
He scraped at the ground with his heel and revealed a layer of bright red beneath. It appeared oddly fibrous, and he vaguely registered that the seeds had extended long hair-like roots.
Home?
The carriages and wagons that passed him were drawn either by real horses or by their steam-powered equivalents—small wheel-mounted engines that somewhat resembled the famous Stephenson’s Rocket. People crowded the thoroughfare just as they always did, a mélange of the well-to-do and poverty-stricken, of the mannered and the uncouth.
A rotorchair chopped through the leaden sky. A hawker sang, “Hot chestnuts, hot chestnuts, penny a bag!” Three urchins raced past laughing and shouting and flinging snowballs at each other.
The final vestigial glow of Saltzmann’s Tincture faded.
He looked back the way he’d come. The distant, blackened and ragged stump of Parliament’s clock tower was visible over the rooftops.
All was as it should be, but he could sense on the inside of his legs, just above the knees, where the woodlouse’s saddle had pressed against his legs, and when he closed his eyes he could hear the resentful tones of the mechanical horse.
Those experiences had been real.
He finished his cigar, flicked it away, and wheeled his clanking penny-farthing along the thoroughfare to Number 16. Just as he reached the house, its front door opened and Algernon Swinburne stepped out, dressed in a wide-brimmed floppy hat, overcoat, and an absurdly long striped scarf.
“What ho! What ho! What ho!” the poet shrilled. “Fancy finding you on my doorstep. I thought you’d be out for the count. Did you come to talk me into taking an afternoon tipple? I mustn’t. I mustn’t. Oh all right. Consider me persuaded. Have you slept? I say! Look at the state of your boneshaker. Surely you didn’t ride it in this weather?”
“The crankshaft broke,” Burton replied, “and, in truth, Algy, I have no notion of how or why I ended up here.”
“Are you one over the eight already? Drinking to ease the pain, I suppose, though your wounds appear somewhat less gruesome by the light of day. Not your face. Just your wounds.”
“I haven’t touched a drop, but a drink sounds like a very good idea.” Burton tested his left elbow, bending it cautiously. It hurt, but not as much as he expected. “Sister Raghavendra applied her miraculous salves?”
Swinburne looked surprised. “She was stitching and smearing for some considerable time. Have you forgotten?”
“After a fashion. Let’s cross to Battersea. I’d like to take a look at the station. I’ll explain on the way.”
“We were there just yesterday. Explain what?”
“Yesterday? Is it Thursday?”
“The sixteenth, of course. Did that knock to your head scramble your wits?”
“A very good question.”
Burton searched his memories and found them to be a confusing tangle, some fading quickly, while others suddenly emerged like the sun breaking through clouds. Experiences overlaid one another in palimpsestic contradictions.
He’d been at Battersea Power Station, where Raghavendra had treated his wounds. The recollection was clear. He could see her bending over him, her long black hair hanging down, her skin dark, and her eyes big, brown and beautiful.
“The ointment smells rather bad,” she’d said, “but it will accelerate the healing provided you can avoid being hit again, which, knowing you, is very doubtful. I’m tempted to thump you myself.”
As vivid as that scene was in his mind’s eye, he knew that at exactly the moment it occurred he was also riding a clockwork horse from Buckingham Palace to the headquarters of the Department of Guided Science. Similarly, he’d watched Charles Babbage’s experiment go awry at nine o’clock last night while he was, at the same time, sitting at his desk this morning writing up a report of Spring Heeled Jack’s attack. He’d snatched three hours of sleep at exactly the moment he’d witnessed Babbage’s actions repeated.
I left the station with Algy and Sadhvi. The cabriolet dropped him home first, then her, and took me to Montagu Place. I slept fitfully, woke early, wrote the report. I dozed. I ate lunch. I rode here.
As they pushed the penny-farthing through the narrow alleyway beside Swinburne’s residence and into the back yard, he began to tell the poet about his lost, replaced, extended, repeated—he couldn’t settle on an accurate description—hours.
He slid his cane from the velocipede’s holder, and they returned to the pavement and started eastward toward Chelsea Bridge. Burton limped, feeling again the damage done to him by his assailant in Leicester Square.
“I can only conclude,” he said, “that I somehow slipped into alternate Burtons in alternate histories and was, for some reason, twice drawn to Babbage’s attempt to revive the damaged time suit.”
“You went sideways, if I might put it like that? And a little back through time? How, Richard? Why?”
“I’m at a loss. Right now, I can hardly think straight.”
They walked on in silence for a few minutes, crossing the Thames, wrinkling their noses.
“Are you sure you’re not becoming malarial again?” Swinburne asked.
“No, Algy. It was all as real as—” Burton gestured at their bright-pink surroundings. “As this.”
The perturbing thought occurred to him that this outlandish vista, too, was not the one to which Sir Richard Francis Burton properly belonged.
They reached the south bank of the river and continued on until they were at the edge of the land bordering the power station.
“I require but a moment,” Burton said, drawing to a halt.
He spent two minutes gazing at the edifice; at its four copper towers, which vanished into the low cloud; at its many high-set windows; and its entrance gates and red brick walls. He could see in the snow the marks made by his, Swinburne’s and Raghavendra’s feet as they’d arrived and departed last night. Physical evidence of a certain truth.
“All as it should be,” he murmured. “Let’s find a watering hole.”
He set off, with Swinburne scampering beside him. They strolled past Battersea Fields until they came to Dock Leaf Lane. The poet pointed his cane at a small half-timbered public house. “How about there?”
“The Tremors,” Burton said. “Very apt.”
“Indeed so,” Swinburne enthused. “It’s the place El Yezdi investigated in his own history when he was hunting for Spring Heeled Jack.”
They crossed the road and entered the premises. Just as El Yezdi had described in his reports, it had smoke-blackened oak roof beams pitted with the fissures and cracks of age, tilting floors, and crazily slanted walls. There were two rooms, both warmed by log fires. Passing through to the smaller of them, they settled on stools at the bar.
An ancient, bald and stooped man with a grey-bearded gnome-like face rounded a corner, wiping his hands on a cloth. A high collar encased his neck, and he wore an unfashionably long jacket.
“Evening gents,” he said in a creaky but jovial voice. His eyes widened when he saw Burton’s battered face. “Ow! Looks like you were on the wrong end of a bunch o’ fives!”
“London,” the king’s agent said ruefully. “It’s the most civilised city in the world.”
“Aye. It’s given me my fair share of punch-ups, that’s for sure. Deerstalker, sirs? Finest beer south of the river. Or would you prefer Alton Ale? I’ve a few bottles left. It’ll be hard to come by until they rebuild the warehouse. You know it burned down?”
“Yes, we’re aware of that,” Burton said. “I’ve developed an aversion to Alton. A pint of Deerstalker will do just fine, thank you.”
“For me, too,” Swinburne added. “What a splendid old pub. Are you Joseph Robinson, sir?”
The publican took an empty tankard from a shelf, held it to a barrel, and twisted the tap. As the beer flowed, he said, “Aye, for me sins, though folks always calls me Bob. Dunno why.” He placed a beer in front of the poet then took down a second glass and filled it for Burton. “You’ve heard of me, have you?”
“Yes,” Swinburne answered. “From the Hog in the Pound.”
Robinson looked surprised. “That old place! But I owned it well afore your time, youngster.”
“My father had occasion to take a beverage there,” Swinburne lied.
“Oh, I see. Lots did. It was popular in its day.”
Burton searched himself for any sense of déjà vu. He found none, felt relieved, then was suddenly disoriented by the arrival of an elderly man who stood beside Swinburne and greeted the landlord. “All right, Bob?”
“Hallo, Ted,” Robinson replied. “I’ll be right with you just as soon as I’ve finished servin’ these fine gents.”
“I kin wait, so long as it ain’t ’til the beer’s run out.”
The newcomer possessed weather-beaten skin and a bald pate, a huge beak-like nose and a long pointed chin. He resembled Punchinello, and when he spoke sounded like him, too—his tone sharp and snappy.
The king’s agent paled. The coincidence was profound. The man was Ted Toppletree, who was described in El Yezdi’s The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack, and at his feet, eagerly sniffing at Swinburne’s ankles, was the very same basset hound Burton had seen in his “other” study.
Toppletree noticed that his pet had attracted attention.
History began to repeat itself.
“Arternoon, sir,” Punchinello said to Burton. “Ain’t seen you around this way before. I reckon I’d remember a mug—er, I mean a face—like yours, if you don’t mind me a-sayin’ so. You looks like a regular fighter. A pugilist. No offence meant. The name is Toppletree, Ted Toppletree, an’ the dog here is Fidget. He’s the best tracker you’ll ever find; can sniff out anything. He’s fer sale if’n you’re interested.” He addressed Swinburne, “Blimey! He’s taken a right shine to you, ain’t he!”
The poet, whose trouser leg was now being pulled at by the hound, emitted an agonised groan. He’d also recognised the developing scene. Glaring at Burton, he hissed, “Don’t you dare!”
Burton ignored him, cleared his throat, and stuttered, “May—may I offer you a drink, Mr.—Mr.—Mr. Toppletree?”
“Very good of you, sir. Very good indeed. Most generous. Deerstalker. Best ale south of the river.”
Robinson, responding to a nod from Burton, poured the third pint.
Swinburne jerked his ankle away from Fidget only to have the dog lunge forward and bite his shoe.
“Ouch! I say!” he objected. “Confound it! Why won’t he leave me alone?”
“Here, Fidget! Sit still!” Toppletree pulled the hound away. The animal settled, gazing longingly at the little poet’s ankles. “You sure you wouldn’t like to snap ’im up, sir?”
“I’ve never been surer of anything,” Swinburne responded. He took a long gulp of ale. “I do believe you may be right about this beer, though. Very tasty! Perhaps little Fidget will calm down if we offer him a bowl?”
“How—how much?” Burton croaked.
“A pint should be enough to send him into a profound sleep,” Swinburne said.
“I was addressing Mr. Toppletree. How much for the dog?”
“You surely can’t mean to purchase the beast again,” the poet groaned.
“Again?” Toppletree asked. “Wotcha mean again?”
“He doesn’t mean anything,” Burton said. “Two pounds?”
“Daylight robbery!” Swinburne objected.
“Two pounds,” Toppletree quickly agreed, obviously surprised at the phenomenally high offer.
Swinburne moaned and said to Joseph Robinson, “I think I require a stiff brandy.”
The landlord obliged and was paid by Burton, who then slid a couple of pound notes across the bar to Toppletree.
“Much obliged, sir,” the man said. “You won’t regret it. He’s a fine animal.”
“Then why have you sold him?” Swinburne asked.
“He’s rather too fond of nipping me wife, sir. Doesn’t like her, an’ she can’t stand the sight of ’im, the poor little fella.”
“She’s very discerning.”
Toppletree bent and tickled Fidget under the chin. “Bye bye, old son. Suppose now I’ll have to find another way to annoy the bloomin’ missus!” He passed the animal’s lead to Burton. “I’m off to join me mates in a game of dominoes, sirs. Been a pleasure meetin’ yer both. All the best to yer.”
He departed, taking his pint with him.
Robinson moved away to serve another customer.
Burton pulled the basset hound around so his stool blocked its route to Swinburne’s ankles. He winced as his damaged elbow gave a pang.
“The dog again, Richard? Why?”
“You know how useful Fidget was to El Yezdi. The hound saved your life.”
“A different history, a different beast, and a different Swinburne.”
“Quite so, and during my visions—or whatever they were—I saw this very animal in a different Burton’s home. Perhaps we belong together.”
“You patently do. In an asylum.”
“Maybe so. The intricacies of time are enough to send any man loopy. Don’t you find it significant, though, that we just experienced an event that will be repeated, in another version of history, one year from now? Remember, El Yezdi purchased Fidget in 1861.”
“Significant how?”
“Because it has demonstrated that, as my counterpart insisted, time has echoes and patterns. A great many events are common to a great many of the histories, though they don’t always transpire in exactly the same manner or at exactly the same moment.”
Swinburne shrugged. “What of it?”
“It occurs to me that what I have witnessed—to wit, Babbage’s experiment in multiplicity—might be a rather unusual circumstance, for, in every case, it happened at precisely nine o’clock on Wednesday the fifteenth of February; a moment which, I remind you, the scientist himself emphasised.”
Swinburne swigged back his brandy and followed it with a mouthful of beer. “An unusual circumstance,” he echoed. “Heaven forbid we should encounter one of those.”
They ordered a second pint each, and Burton went through his experiences again, this time describing as many details as he could remember.
Later, after they’d indulged in a third drink, he said, “By God, I’m wearied to the bone and hurt all over. I require the healing arms of Morpheus.”
“But I’ve hardly touched a drop!”
Burton gave Fidget’s lead a little more slack, and the dog edged closer to the poet’s feet.
“Very well! Very well!” his friend cried out. “I concede!”
They bid Joseph Robinson farewell, nodded to Ted Toppletree, stepped out of the public house, and both immediately voiced cries of astonishment.
Initially, it appeared that a fresh layer of red snow had fallen, but they quickly recognised that, in fact, the vivid colour belonged to a dense mass of tiny shoots that had emerged from the icy layer. The little plants had taken root in every available space.
“This is beyond the bounds!” Burton exclaimed.
“You’re not wrong. They are growing impossibly fast,” Swinburne observed. “We were only in the pub for a couple of hours!”
They slowly followed the road back toward the river, observing the scene with awe. As they came abreast Battersea Fields, Swinburne said, “Is it my imagination or can I actually see them growing?”
He crouched and gently touched a tiny, tightly bunched, and as yet unfurled bloom. “I can. Look at this. It’s visibly in motion!”
Burton squatted—with a slight groan as his bruised body objected—and gazed intently at the tiny blossom.
“Uncanny,” he muttered.
“Tempus flores.”
Burton raised a questioning eyebrow. “Time flowers?”
“They appear to be transcending its limitations, and given the moment of their arrival, and the events you’ve experienced within the past twenty-four hours, I think the designation is suitable.” Swinburne closed his eyes and declaimed:
One, who is not, we see: but one, whom we see not, is:
Surely this is not that: but that is assuredly this.
“The significance?” Burton asked.
Swinburne shrugged. “I don’t know. The words came to me out of the blue.”
“In connection with these flowers?”
“Yes.”
Again, the diminutive poet closed his eyes and, after a long pause, continued:
What, and wherefore, and whence? for under is over and under:
If thunder could be without lightning, lightning could be without thunder.
Doubt is faith in the main: but faith, on the whole, is doubt:
We cannot believe by proof: but could we believe without?
Burton stood and tightened his coat around himself. “It sounds like an objection to religion.”
Swinburne also straightened. “To monotheism, perhaps. A yearning for the advent of a new paganism. How I rue the One who casts his veil of grey over us, Richard; who bids us contemplate death when all around us are the bright colours and vibrancies of glorious life. We have allowed ourselves to be crushed by a despotic deity who demands of us a lifetime of toil and service and promises in return a harsh judgement for most, and ambiguous rewards only for those who enforce His rule. I place all my hopes in Darwin. His wonderful insight can teach a far greater satisfaction and reassurance than blind faith can offer—a simple pleasure gained from the sheer exuberance and tenacity of existence. The human species should revel in a permanent state of delighted astonishment at this world, but instead we allow ourselves to be yoked to a tiresome and unyielding fear of it.”
Fidget lunged forward and sank his teeth into Swinburne’s ankle. The poet squawked and hopped away, arms flapping wildly. His long scarf became entangled around his ankles. He tripped and fell into the snow, rolling and squealing. Burton watched him but without amusement. Though he’d become familiar with his friend’s propensity to go off at a tangent, Swinburne’s words had been peculiarly out of context, and while he’d been speaking, Burton had noticed a glazed quality to the other’s eyes, as if the poet had slipped into a trance.
The king’s agent bent, plucked the flower out of the ground, and cautiously held it to his nose. It was discharging a pleasant but rather cloying perfume.
“Algy,” he said. “How do you feel?”
Swinburne leaped to his feet and shook a fist. “Furious! I shall purchase a muzzle for that little devil.”
They trudged on. When they reached Chelsea Bridge, the poet opted to cross it on foot and walk the short distance back to his digs. Promising to deliver Burton’s penny-farthing back to Montagu Place on the morrow, he set off.
Burton hailed a hansom and was soon rattling northward with Fidget sitting between his feet. He felt as if he’d been awake more hours than his pocket watch could attest to, and his thought processes were becoming increasingly sluggish. His friend’s odd outburst, the bizarre flowers, Spring Heeled Jack, the vanishing time suit, the other histories—they all blurred into a jumble of mismatched events. He could make no sense of them, and the more he tried, the more confused he felt.
He tried to quieten his restless thoughts by looking out of the window. It didn’t help. He found himself anxiously scrutinising the city in case it had suddenly transformed into a near but not quite accurate copy of itself.
When he arrived home, he found Mrs. Angell dusting the bannisters. She gawped as he stumbled in and cried out, “Great heavens! You went out again! You’ve hardly slept! Look at the state of you! Your clothes are ruined! And—and you have a dog!”
“I fell off my velocipede. This is Fidget, a new addition to our household. You don’t mind, Mother?”
The old dame clapped her hands together and beamed down at the basset hound. “Ooh no! I ain’t had a dog since I were a little girl. He’s a beauty! Just look at them big brown eyes o’ his. An’ you know how I hate wastin’ scraps, sir. I’m sure he’ll be more ‘n’ happy to swallow ’em up.”
“Good show. Perhaps you’d put that to the test? I wouldn’t mind a little something myself. I’m famished. An early supper would be much appreciated.”
“There’s a pot of lamb curry on the stove,” she said, taking Fidget’s lead. “It’ll be ready in half an hour.”
“Just the ticket.”
His housekeeper gave his clothes a further disapproving inspection then, with the hound waddling behind her, descended to the kitchen.
A few minutes later, Burton was slouching in his armchair. He’d wrapped himself in his jubbah—the loose outer garment he’d worn during his pilgrimage to Mecca—and had wound a colourful turban around his head. A cheroot dangled from his lips. He glanced cautiously around the room.
There was no parakeet. Everything was in its proper place.
He moved his feet closer to the fire, feeling its heat penetrate the soles of his pointed Arabian slippers, and thought first of Abdu El Yezdi, then of the Burton who’d ridden the clockwork horse, and finally of the one who’d steered a giant woodlouse.
Multiple Richard Francis Burtons.
“There is no other me but I!” he told the room, though he knew the statement was erroneous.
At half seven, Mrs. Angell sent Bram Stoker up to summon him to the dining room. She’d cooked with her usual expertise, but as hungry as he was, the king’s agent ate slowly and dazedly, hardly tasting the food. His muscles had stiffened so much that every movement pained him.
After the meal, he returned to the study for a postprandial drink. He stood before a small wall mirror. He saw two stitches in the gash in his chin. His old scars, on his cheek and scalp, were where they should be.
He stared into his own dark eyes.
The room was quiet but for the steady and persistent ticking of the mantel clock.
Traffic chugged past outside. Footsteps. Muffled snippets of conversation. A newsboy hawking the evening edition: “Terror in Leicester Square! Read all about it! Stilted ghost haunts the city!” Very faintly, Mr. Grub’s singsong cry countered the headlines with: “Roasted corn! Come an’ get it! On the cob! Nice ’n ’ot!”
In the hallway, the grandfather clock wheezed and chimed nine.
Time.
It flowed through Sir Richard Francis Burton and around him.
It emanated from him and was infused into him.
He saw its presence in the depth of his eyes, the past mocking, the present conspiring, and the inexorable future waiting with an icy and pitiless patience.
Burton awoke in his bed, though he couldn’t remember having moved to it.
Daylight slanted through the crack in his curtains. He pushed back the sheets and swung his feet to the floor, crossed to the window, and yanked the drapes open. Outside, the yard and the mews beyond it were thick with vermillion flowers.
He turned back to the room and went to the washbasin to shave and sponge himself down. He was still sore all over, but his remarkable constitution had responded well to Sadhvi Raghavendra’s ointments. His cuts were hard with puckering scabs, his bruises were already yellowed, and the swelling on the back of his skull had gone.
He wrapped his jubbah about himself with some difficulty—his left elbow, in particular, was very tight—and was descending the stairs when the doorbell jangled. Bram Stoker answered the summons just as Burton reached the landing outside his study. Maneesh Krishnamurthy and Shyamji Bhatti greeted the lad from the doorstep.
“Come on up, fellows,” Burton called, and to Bram, “Would you bring us a pot of coffee, young ’un?”
The boy offered a snappy salute and scurried off as Krishnamurthy and Bhatti entered. Assistants to the minister of chronological affairs, they were both handsome young men, though currently grim-faced. Burton said no further word until he’d ushered them into chairs in his study.
“From your expressions, I fear you bring bad tidings.”
Krishnamurthy nodded. “We do. Between nine and eleven last night, Spring Heeled Jacks caused havoc around the city.”
“Jacks?”
“Four simultaneous manifestations—at the Royal Geographical Society, at the Athenaeum Club, at Oxford University, and again in Leicester Square.”
“All places I frequent.”
“Yes. And he was shouting for you at every location.”
“Yet when he found me on Wednesday, he had nothing coherent to say.” Burton frowned, and added, “We’re referring to it as he now, Maneesh?”
“The Jacks were disoriented, disturbed, panicked and violent, as was Edward Oxford shortly before Abdu El Yezdi killed him. This, together with their repeated references to Queen Victoria and obvious obsession with you, has led the minister to suggest that the insane intelligence Babbage attempted to drive out of the damaged suit has somehow found its way into these stilted mechanisms.”
“Which in form clearly resemble it,” Bhatti added.
“So yes, Sir Richard,” Krishnamurthy continued. “We think they are he, as in Oxford.”
Burton rubbed his chin thoughtfully, feeling the roughness of the stitched laceration beneath his fingertips. “Hmm. One might advance the theory that Babbage’s experiment somehow enabled the insane intelligence to flee back to the future it came from, there to advance and automate the time suit and send it to torment me. However, the proposition stumbles on the fact that the intelligence in the suit is synthetic and could not have instigated any such action. As Babbage observed, it has no capacity for independence. It can only respond to instructions.”
Burton stood, turned away from his visitors, and stepped to one of the two windows. He gazed out at Montagu Place. The rooftops of the buildings on the other side of the road, the windowsills, the inner edge of the pavements, the gutters—every surface that hadn’t been trodden down or driven over—every inch was densely crowded with flowers, all now the size of crocuses.
“But,” he said, “the theory might be valid if we add to it a mind other than Oxford’s, one that ordered the suit to escape our time the moment Babbage activated the Field Preserver.”
“You suggest that someone took control of it?” Bhatti asked.
“And plucked it from right beneath our noses. It leaves us with three questions: who, from when, and why?”
They fell silent as Bram entered and quietly served them coffee. After he’d departed, Bhatti said, “It may be that Babbage holds the key to this mystery. Apparently the electrical pattern held within the damaged suit was imprinted into his Field Preserver at the instant the suit vanished. He’s working on a means to analyse it. If there was some kind of communication from the future—an order—it might have been recorded.”
“The power station is our next stop,” Krishnamurthy said. He gulped his coffee and clattered the cup back onto its saucer. “We’d better push on. Will you accompany us?”
“No. I’m sick of the sight of the place. Besides, I have another line of inquiry to pursue.”
“There’s another?”
“The flora.”
“The flowers? Because they and our hopping maniac arrived in unison?”
“Yes,” Burton replied, “and Swinburne responded oddly to them. You know how I’ve come to trust his instincts.”
“Phew!” Krishnamurthy exclaimed. “What extraordinary times we inhabit!”
Burton saw them out of the house then rang for Stoker. “Will you tell Mrs. Angell I’m ready for breakfast? Then I want you to get a message to Mr. Swinburne. Ask him to get here by noon.”
“Right you are, sir.”
The boy headed down to the kitchen while Burton entered the dining room. After a short wait, his housekeeper entered bearing a tray and served him bacon, sausages, eggs, grilled tomatoes, fried mushrooms, and buttered toast. He ate with uncharacteristic gusto, yelled his thanks from the hallway, and climbed the stairs to his bedroom, there to dress.
He was frustrated by his aches and pains and had to remind himself that only thirty-six hours or so had passed since he’d been thrown through a plate glass window. Sadhvi’s lotions did nothing to soothe his impatience. Tiredness, weakness—there was no place for them in Burton’s philosophy.
With his lip curled in self-disdain, he tugged open a bedside drawer and pulled from it a bottle of Saltzmann’s Tincture.
“Blast you, Algy,” he muttered. “I’ll not spend the day hobbling about like a confounded invalid.”
He twisted out the cork and drank.
“And to hell with all objections!”
He sat on the bed, leaned forward with his head hanging, and waited for the tincture to enter his circulation.
It hit him like an exploding sun.
He gave a quavering cry and toppled to the floor, holding himself up with his hands and knees.
He felt a cold gun barrel press into the back of his neck.
He heard Isabel Arundell’s voice.
“If you move, I swear to God I’ll put a bullet through your brain.”
Dick Burton, spy, traitor to his native country, and Otto von Bismarck’s strongest piece in the deadly chess game currently being played across Europe, was defeated.
He’d come so close. He’d discovered the existence of Spring Heeled Jack. He’d learned the truth about the apparition’s identity and origin. He’d found where the British government’s secretive Society of Science was keeping the time suit. And he’d almost snatched it from them.
The accursed king’s agent! She’d been on his heels ever since he’d killed Krishnamurthy and Bhatti, and now, just as his victory seemed assured, she’d caught up with him.
Still dazed from the knock to his head, on his hands and knees, with pain searing through his skull, he tried desperately to gather his thoughts.
“Stay down,” she advised. “Try anything and I’ll not hesitate.”
“Miss Arundell,” he rasped. “Your sense of timing is immaculate—and exasperating.”
He tried to push himself up, but her weapon jabbed into his neck again.
“Last chance. Believe me, I’m itching to pull this trigger.”
Perhaps his attempt to move so soon after being clouted was a mistake anyway; it sent his senses spinning, and, for a moment, he couldn’t remember where he was. In his bedroom, surely? No, else there’d be a carpet beneath his hands and knees. There was only one place he knew that possessed this harsh, unnatural illumination. Battersea Power Station.
As if to confirm it, he heard Babbage’s characteristic rasp. “Have you quite finished, Madam? Am I to suffer these interruptions every time I’m on the verge of an important experiment?”
“Had I not interrupted, Charles,” Isabel responded, “you’d have nothing to experiment with. He was about to steal the time suit.”
Isabel. Alive. She’s alive.
“Please,” Burton croaked. “Let me stand. Let me look at you.”
“Keep him in your sights, Algernon,” she said.
“Rightie ho.”
Swinburne. So he was here, too.
Burton put a hand to his face. It was clean-shaven.
He had thoughts overlaying thoughts, memories upon memories.
One stratum clarified, the rest blurred.
He recognised himself.
Another side step.
“All right,” Isabel said. “Get to your feet. Slowly. Any sudden movement and I’ll shoot you dead.”
Another voice, male: “Be careful. I know to my cost how dangerous the swine can be.”
Burton raised his head and saw John Hanning Speke. The man had been killed in Berbera four years ago, but here he was, in nearly every respect as Burton remembered him, tall, thin, with a long, mousy brown beard and a weak, indecisive sort of face. The sole difference was that this Speke’s left eye was missing, along with much of the skull above it, and had been replaced with a mechanism of glass and brass. Burton very slowly climbed to his feet, and the man’s artificial eye whirred as the metal rings surrounding the black lens adjusted its focus.
“Run to earth, at last,” Speke said. “You’ll not escape this time, Dick. It’s the noose for you.”
Burton didn’t respond. Very gradually, he turned. He saw Babbage, standing by a workbench with the damaged suit on it. He saw a hulking contraption of jointed legs and tool-bearing limbs, which he guessed was Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He saw Algernon Swinburne, short-haired, scar-faced, and despite his diminutive and somewhat effeminate form, looking surprisingly brutal. And he saw Isabel Arundell.
She was slender, elegant, beautiful, and aiming her pistol straight between his eyes.
“Isabel,” he whispered, hardly able to resist rushing forward to take her into his arms.
“Shut up,” she snapped. “Charles, please proceed. We’ll allow our uninvited guest to witness the activation of the suit. I want him to go to the gallows knowing we have it, knowing it works, and knowing we’ll use it to defeat his master’s filthy empire.” She flicked the end of the gun slightly and said to Burton, “Watch. This marks the end of all Bismarck’s schemes.”
Burton looked back at Babbage. The elderly scientist clapped his hands together. “Have you all quite finished? Interruption after interruption! Unacceptable! This is a place for science and the advancement of understanding, not for your ridiculous games of politics and one-upmanship. Now, be quiet and observe.” He tapped the suit’s helmet. “This, as I have already told you, has the ability to repair itself but currently lacks sufficient energy to do so. By reestablishing its connection to this,” he pointed at the Nimtz generator, “I believe power enough will be transferred.” He took a pocket watch from his waistcoat. “Isambard, please record that the experiment commences at nine o’clock on the evening of the fifteenth of February, 1860.”
He reached down and traced a shape on the side of the generator. It glowed, crackled and let forth a shower of sparks.
“I’d move back if I was you,” Burton advised.
A bubble swelled out of the suit. Babbage and Speke, standing closest to it, retreated hastily.
“And,” Burton said, “hey presto.”
The time suit vanished, taking half the bench and a chunk of Isambard Kingdom Brunel with it.
“How did you do that?” Isabel demanded. “Bring it back at once!”
Burton turned to face her. “Isabel, know this. I loved you from the very first moment I saw you.”
She snarled at him. “You traitorous hound.”
He saw her finger tighten on the trigger.
There was a loud report.
He felt himself explode out of his body.
Dying was like blinking.
He was sucked back into it.
When he opened his eyes, Burton was facing Babbage again, and the bench and the suit were back.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel, in human form except for an accordion-like apparatus creaking in and out on his chest, took a cigar from his mouth and said, in a gravelly voice, “Will it work, Charles?”
“Of course it will.”
Brunel looked to Burton’s right. “Should we do it, sir?”
“Yes.”
Burton turned his head to see the man who’d spoken. It was Lord Elgin’s former secretary, Laurence Oliphant. His skin and hair were alabaster white. His features were distorted, resembling those of a panther.
Babbage announced that it was nine o’clock on the fifteenth of February, 1860. He went through the identical routine with the identical result.
Burton waited silently while Babbage and Oliphant tied a tourniquet around Brunel’s right arm, the engineer’s hand having been taken by the bursting bubble.
Isabel is alive in at least one branch of history. My enemy, but alive. By God! To see her! To see her!
Grief tightened his chest. He closed his eyes, swayed, and thought he might fall.
Babbage said, “Mr. Lister, note that the experiment commences at nine o’clock, fifteenth of February, 1860.”
Burton opened his eyes. The interior of Battersea Power Station had transformed into what appeared to be a nightmarish surgical ward. Vast pulsating monstrosities of flesh and tubes and organs humped up from the floor around him. Tentacled glowing organisms hung from the high ceiling. Cartilage and throbbing arteries stretched from wall to wall. He was standing in the midst of it, facing a workbench. Babbage and the surgeon Joseph Lister were on the opposite side. Charles Darwin and Francis Galton were whispering together to his left. Damien Burke and Gregory Hare—who in El Yezdi’s history had been allies and in his own enemies—were to his right, both dressed, bizarrely, as Harlequin.
“I must confess, this procedure involves an unusual degree of unpredictability,” Babbage said. “For if there’s a time suit here, then there are time suits in the other realities, too, and if every Charles Babbage simultaneously connects every helmet to every Nimtz generator in every history, what then?”
Ah! Burton thought. Is that it?
Babbage reached toward the suit.
“Stop!” Burton shouted.
The scientist glanced up at him. “Don’t interfere, sir! Know your place!”
He touched the generator.
Pause.
Pop.
Gone.
While Babbage and Lister squabbled, Burton walked over to Damien Burke and said, “Where’s Brunel?”
Burke’s lugubrious features creased into a frown. “Dead. Did you forget killing him, Mr. Burton?”
“Ah. And what about Isabel Arundell?”
“She’s still on her honeymoon, isn’t that right, Mr. Hare?”
“It is, Mr. Burke,” Hare agreed.
“To whom is she married?”
“Why, to Mr. Bendyshe, of course.”
“Bendyshe? Thomas Bendyshe?” Burton threw his head back and gave a bark of laughter. When he looked down, he was in front of the bench yet again, and the power station was an intricate structure of wrought iron and stained glass, like a baroque cathedral.
“Mr. Gooch,” Babbage said, “make a note. It is nine o’clock on the fifteenth of February, 1860. We shall begin.”
Burton felt a pistol in his waistband. He yanked it out and pointed it at Babbage.
“No. Step away from the suit. Don’t touch it.”
Babbage glared at him. “There is no time for games, Captain.”
Burton shot him in the head.
As blood sprayed and Babbage fell backward to the floor, Burton yelled, “Everyone remain absolutely still or I swear I’ll kill every one of you.”
“My giddy aunt! Have you lost your mind?” Swinburne screeched from beside him.
“You’ve killed Charles!” Gooch cried out.
Burton heard Richard Monckton Milnes, behind him, say, “You’d better have a damned good explanation for this, Dick.”
The time suit popped out of existence.
Gooch, Swinburne, and Monckton Milnes gaped at the indentation in the floor where the bench had been.
“What happened?” Monckton Milnes muttered.
Gooch said, “Impossible! Charles never touched it.”
Burton lowered his gun. “Now that,” he said, “is very interesting indeed.”
“What is?” Swinburne asked.
Finding himself in mid-stride, the king’s agent stumbled and stopped. There came a tug at his hand. He was holding a lead. Fidget, by his right ankle, looked up.
To his left, Swinburne drew to a halt.
“Algy? I—I—I beg your pardon?”
“I said, what is?” Swinburne replied. “You said something was interesting.”
Burton placed a hand on his friend’s shoulder to steady himself. The world buckled and distorted around him. It shimmered, solidified, and he saw they were in Whitehall Place, close to the Royal Geographical Society. The street’s gutters were piled high with red blossoms, bright beneath an unbroken but thinning grey mantle of cloud.
“Um, the date?”
“The date is interesting?” Swinburne asked. “Why so?”
“No, I mean, what is it?”
The poet stared at him. “The seventeenth, of course. What’s the matter? Surely not another hallucination? When? Just now?”
“It’s Friday?”
“Yes. One o’clock-ish. Good Lord! I didn’t notice a thing!”
“Wait. Tell me, what have we been doing? Where are we going?”
“You summoned me. I pushed your broken velocipede all the way to your place and arrived about an hour ago. You told me about last night’s invasion of Spring Heeled Jacks and your conversation with Krishnamurthy and Bhatti, and then we hopped into a cab. It just dropped us off.”
Burton looked at the RGS building. “We’re here for Richard Spruce.”
“You remember that?”
“No, I presume it. He’s the only botanist we know. I don’t recall a thing since—” He stopped and considered. “Since just after breakfast. The experiment—I keep returning to it. I’ve witnessed so many alternate versions of the bloody event that I’m giddy with it.”
The king’s agent massaged the back of his neck. He could still feel the Saltzmann’s throbbing in his veins, though the sensation was fast fading.
“It was unusually rapid again,” he murmured, referring to the fast onset of the tincture’s effects and their unusual intensity.
Swinburne, mistaking his meaning, said, “Not really, if it lasted from breakfast to lunch. All morning in the grip of a mirage!”
The tincture.
The visions.
Of course!
Burton heaved a sigh. “Come on.”
They strode the short distance to the Royal Geographical Society and went inside. Burton nodded to the portly man at the reception desk, who immediately came out from behind it, hurried over, and said in a hushed voice, “You’ll not cause any bother?”
“Bother, Mr. Harris?” Burton asked.
“Sir Roderick is furious with you. Your monster caused a great deal of damage last night.”
“It’s not my monster,” Burton protested. “I’m not responsible for what happened here.”
“It was screaming your name and Sir Roderick holds you accountable. The Society doesn’t welcome such disruption. You may be disbarred.”
Burton snarled, “If that’s his attitude, Sir Roderick can shove the Society right up his—”
“Harris,” Swinburne interrupted. “We just want a word with Richard Spruce. We’ll be but a moment.”
Harris looked relieved. “He’s not here.”
“Where, then?” the poet asked.
“I don’t know.”
“We’ll find someone who does,” Burton said. He shouldered past Harris, who cried out, “But! But! But! I say! No dogs allowed!” and ascended the wide staircase with Fidget and Swinburne at his heels. To their left, portraits of the Empire’s most celebrated explorers were hanging crookedly. Dr. Livingstone had a hole in his forehead and Mungo Park was upside down.
They passed along a wood-panelled hallway to the clubroom. The normally impressive chamber was in disarray. The mirror behind the bar was broken. The carpet was strewn with fragments of glasses and bottles. Tables and chairs were splintered and overturned.
There were only eight men present, three of them staff, who were assiduously cleaning the mess.
“No Spruce,” Burton murmured, “but I see old Findlay by the window. Perhaps he can point us in the right direction.”
Arthur Findlay, a lean-faced individual, was sitting in an armchair, reading a newspaper through pince-nez spectacles, apparently oblivious to the signs of chaos that surrounded him. He looked up as they approached, sprang to his feet, and clasped Burton’s hand in greeting.
“I say! Beastly Burton! How the deuce are you, old fellow? Been brawling again, I see. Here, last night, was it? I’ve heard rumours of a wild animal on the rampage.”
“Hallo, Arthur. I’ll confess to a slight spat, but it wasn’t here. Have you met Algernon Swinburne?”
“Hallo, lad. You’re the poet, aren’t you? Super! Simply super!”
“What ho! What ho! What ho!” Swinburne returned. He pointed down to the basset hound. “Have you met the mutt? His name is Beelzebub, Savage Fiend of Hell.”
“Fidget,” Burton corrected.
“Lovely breed,” Findlay observed. “Bassett hound, what! Very placid. Wouldn’t say boo to a goose.”
“Ha!” Swinburne exclaimed.
The geographer grinned at him. “I say, your hair is as fiery as our new flora, lad. Baffling, the flowers, hey? Perfectly extraordinary. What the devil? What the very devil?”
Burton said, “On which subject, we’re looking for Richard Spruce. Any idea where he might be?”
“The botanist fellow? In the Cauldron, I believe.”
“The East End? Why?”
“Ashes, Burton! Ashes! A fine growth medium and the area offers no restriction, what!”
It made sense. The terrible slums and tenements of the crime-riddled East End—the Cauldron—had, last November, been destroyed by the city’s worst fire since 1666. Despite a particularly wet winter, the area had smouldered for weeks afterward. It was cool now, but rebuilding hadn’t yet commenced.
“Join me for drinkies?” Findlay suggested.
“Certainly,” Swinburne said.
“No,” Burton countered. “We’re on a mission, Arthur. We’ll go straight to Spruce.”
Minutes later, they were back out in Whitehall Place. Swinburne whistled piercingly for a cab—causing Fidget to bark and Burton to wince—then took off his hat and waved it at a hansom while jumping up and down. “Hey there! Hey! Cab! Over here! I say! Cabbie!”
The vehicle swerved and pulled to a stop beside them.
“No need ter get a bee in yer bonnet,” the driver said. “I saw yer.”
“The Cauldron!” Swinburne cried out. “And don’t spare the blessed horses!”
“I ain’t got no ’orses. It’s a steam engine, see?” The driver jerked his chin at the machine chugging in front of him.
“Well, don’t spare that then!” Swinburne shrilled.
He climbed aboard.
Burton gave the driver an apologetic look, lifted Fidget into the carriage, followed, and sat. As the conveyance jolted into motion, he said, “Why the histrionics, Algy?”
Swinburne clapped his hands in Burton’s face. “To keep you in the here and now. By golly, to think we spent the past hour together and you didn’t even know it. Don’t you even recall my limerick?”
“Limerick?”
“An engineer by the name of John Kent, had a tool most remarkably bent, his wife bore the brunt, when it—”
“Stop! I assure you, I’m entirely in the present.”
“This one?”
“Yes, this one.”
Despite Burton’s protest, Swinburne regaled him with bawdy poems and jokes all the way to Aldgate, where the hansom stopped, the hatch in the roof lifted, and the driver shouted down, “Can’t go any farther, gents.”
His passengers disembarked. Swinburne fished a shilling from his pocket and passed it up, his manner distracted, his eyes not straying from the heaped foliage that surrounded them.
“Two and six,” the driver said.
“Here.” Burton passed up the remainder of the fare. “Thank you, driver.”
The man took the coins and gazed around. “I were here three days ago, an’ all this weren’t. Where’d the blessed things come from? What are they? Roses? Poppies? Gladioli?”
“I haven’t the foggiest idea,” Burton replied.
The carriage departed. Swinburne, throwing out his arms, twirled on the spot and laughed, “A red garden! London has become a red garden! Ouch! I say! Keep that blasted dog away from my feet, will you?”
“Sorry,” Burton said.
They picked their way along the street, stepping through tangled growth, rounded a corner, and passed the fire-damaged skeleton of a tenement building.
They stopped. They stared.
The ruined Cauldron lay ahead.
Burton had expected to see a great plain of ash from which the stumps of burned buildings jutted. Instead, he saw a thick jungle of the brightest reds.
“My hat!” Swinburne whispered. “How has it grown so fast? We’ll never find Spruce among that lot!”
Burton cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “Spruce! I say! Spruce! Are you there?”
After a moment, a faint voice sounded. “Hallo! Who’s that?”
“I’m Burton! Where are you, old chap?”
“Over here!”
“Where?”
“Here!”
“Keep calling, we’ll join you!”
They moved forward with Fidget squeezing through the undergrowth beside them. After a few steps, the plants closed overhead and progress became difficult.
“We?” came a faint cry. “We who?”
“I’m with the poet Algernon Swinburne!” Burton pushed into a tangle of leaves and twisting branches, exotic blooms and weird gourd-like fruits. Swinburne reached out and touched one of the latter. “Fruiting after just a few hours? I feel like I’m dreaming.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” the king’s agent agreed. “Not even in Africa.”
“Poet?” Spruce cried out. He sounded closer.
“Seeking inspiration!” Swinburne called. “I’m writing a verse entitled ‘O Pruning Shears, Wherefore Art Thou When I Need Thee?’”
The chuckled response was plainly audible, and the next moment they broke through into a clearing and saw Spruce standing in its centre. “Hallo, Sir Richard, Mr. Swinburne.”
Spruce was a long-limbed fellow with curly but receding hair and a beard peppered with grey. His manner, as he shook their hands, was friendly but reserved, his eyes evading theirs in a fashion that struck Burton as diffident rather than shifty.
“What do you make of it, old chap?” the king’s agent asked. “Have you seen anything like this before?”
“Not at all. It’s utterly fantastic. The rate of growth is simply staggering, yet the species—whatever it is—appears more suited to the humidity and heat of central Africa than to a cold British winter.”
“Is that where the seeds have come from?”
“I would say so.”
Spruce squatted and gestured for Burton and Swinburne to follow him down. The latter manoeuvred carefully to ensure that his buttocks were facing away from Fidget.
Spruce said, “Look at this.” He used his right hand to scrape away snow until a layer of ash was revealed, then dug a little more, exposing a tangle of thin white roots.
“It has a fibrous and propagative root system with a plenitude of rhizomes, so that while one plant may sprout from the seed, a great many more will then sprout from the expanding roots. But here’s the peculiar thing—” Spruce dug at the ash until he’d made a shallow trench between the trunks of two tall, thick bushes. “Do you see what I mean?”
Burton examined the exposed roots. “As you said, both plants have grown from a single artery.”
“Ah,” Spruce responded. “That’s the thing. These particular ones haven’t. I can see from their stage of development that they were both seedlings.”
Burton used his forefinger to trace the path of one particular root. “But this joins them.”
“Exactly. Every seed-born plant has extended roots to its fellows, and those roots have merged with one another. It’s almost as if all of this—” He stood and held his arms out to encompass all the verdure, “is a single organism.”
Swinburne asked, “And its growth? Have you an explanation? A theory?”
“None. Were I not witnessing it with my own eyes, I should say it’s impossible. All this—in two days!”
Burton turned and gazed at the leaves, flowers and fruits.
Spruce asked, “Did you encounter anything like it during your expedition to the Central Lakes?”
“Nothing close,” Burton answered. “Nothing even with this hue.”
“Then, if you’ll pardon the question, why are you here, Sir Richard? I wasn’t aware that you counted botany among your interests.”
“I’m a hobbyist, nothing more, but this phenomenon is so thoroughly outré that it’s piqued my curiosity.”
“I can certainly understand that.”
“If you find out anything more, would you let me know? I live at fourteen Montagu Place.”
“For sure.”
“Thank you. We’ll not interrupt your research any further.”
After bidding the botanist farewell, Burton, Swinburne and Fidget headed back the way they’d come.
“We didn’t learn much,” Swinburne ruminated. “What now?”
“We’ll drop in on my pharmacist, Mr. Shudders.”
“Why?”
“He supplies me with Saltzmann’s Tincture.”
Swinburne screeched, “What? What? What? The drug Sadhvi Raghavendra has repeatedly warned you against is sold by a man named Shudders—and still you gulp it down? I think you might be the most ridiculous fellow I’ve ever met!”
“That, Algernon, is because, unlike me, you’ve never had the advantage of encountering yourself.”
“But—for crying out loud!—you’re buying more of the foul poison? Your addiction is beyond the bounds! Must I gather the Cannibals and have them help me lock you away until the dependency has passed?”
“I simply want to know where he gets the tincture from.”
“Why?”
“Because I think it’s the cause of my visits to variant histories.”
Burton and Swinburne emerged from the jungle-swathed Cauldron and strode westward along Leadenhall Street toward Cheapside. Fidget jogged along beside them, panting, his tongue flapping and his nose twitching as he detected a myriad of enthralling odours.
Swinburne asked, “Why do you think Saltzmann’s the source of your hallucinations?”
“I’ve told you, Algy, they’re not hallucinations. Initially, I thought the first incident was caused by my run-in with Spring Heeled Jack, but I took the tincture right afterward, and the next time I drank it, the second incident occurred. On that occasion, Jack wasn’t involved.”
At the Bank of England they flagged down a landau.
“Oxford Street,” Burton directed.
They boarded, and the carriage got moving.
In contrast to their journey to the Cauldron, their ride away from it was conducted in silence. Burton was pondering the disparate mysteries, while Swinburne was fuming about his friend’s dangerous addiction.
By the time they disembarked, it was snowing again, albeit lightly.
Swinburne jammed his floppy hat onto his springy hair, wound his long scarf around his neck, and dodged away from Fidget’s eager teeth.
“That’s the place,” Burton said, pointing a little way ahead.
Despite the weather, the famous thoroughfare was crowded, and they had to push through the milling pedestrians, hawkers and ne’er-do-wells to reach the pharmacy. They entered. A bell clanked over the door. In response to it, an individual emerged from a back room and stood behind the counter. He was a lanky, grey haired, gaunt-faced and terribly stooped old man, wrapped in a thick coat and with fingerless woollen gloves on his hands.
“Good afternoon, Sir Richard,” he said in a voice that sounded like creaking wood.
“Hello, Mr. Shudders,” Burton said. “How’s business?”
“Mustn’t grumble. Mustn’t grumble. Can I be of service? Saltzmann’s, is it? My stock is low, but I think I have two or three bottles remaining.”
“No,” Burton replied, “I have sufficient, but could you tell me where it comes from?”
“The supplier? Locks Limited, sir.”
“And where is that located?”
Shudders pushed out his lips, tugged at his right ear, and squinted his eyes. “I don’t rightly know. I started selling the tincture some five years ago after being approached by a company representative. Other than that youth—”
“Youth?” Burton interrupted.
“Why, yes, a very young man. He convinced me of the efficaciousness of the potion and left with me a case of bottles, promising to deliver more if I sold them.”
“Which you did?”
“The very next day. As a matter of fact, it was you who purchased them, and where they are concerned, you’ve been my principal customer.”
“Have I indeed?” Burton tried to remember how he’d become acquainted with Saltzmann’s. His normally excellent memory failed him. That, in itself, filled him with suspicion.
“By what method are the bottles delivered?” he asked.
“Whenever my stock is low, a wagon brings a new box and I pay for it on the spot.”
Swinburne interjected, “But how do you inform them when you’re running out?”
“I never have to. They always turn up at just the right time.”
“And you only have two or three bottles left,” Burton noted. “Which means you’re expecting another delivery soon?”
“Yes. Later today or tomorrow, I should think.”
The king’s agent pondered this for a moment. “Do they stop in the street?”
“No. There’s a delivery yard out back.”
“Mr. Shudders, for reasons I cannot go into, I have to investigate Locks Limited. Can I count on your cooperation?”
The pharmacist looked worried and wrung his hands. “Has there been some problem with the tincture, sir? Should I stop selling it?”
“No problem other than the mystery of its ingredients. Concerns have been raised that it might be extremely addictive.”
“So is laudanum, but there’s no law against selling that. I don’t think I’m in the wrong.”
“Nor am I accusing you. I’m intrigued, that is all.”
“Ah, well then. What can I do?”
“Do you happen to stock extract of anise?”
“Certainly.”
“I’d like to purchase a bottle. Will you then show us the back yard?”
The decoction was handed over, and a minute later, after Burton had secured Fidget’s lead to a chair in the shop, Shudders ushered the two men out of the back door and into a small cobbled area that opened onto an alleyway leading into Poland Street. It had been swept clean of snow, though a very thin layer had formed upon it since. Red flowers crowded around its edges.
“The wagon comes right into the yard?” Burton asked.
He received an affirmation.
“Are you expecting any other deliveries beside the one from Locks?”
Shudders shook his head. “Not until next Tuesday.”
Burton gave a grunt of satisfaction. He stepped across the yard, uncorked the bottle, and started to spill the gooey liquid onto the ground, dribbling it in a wide arc just inside the gate.
Shudders, blowing on his fingertips to warm them, looked on curiously.
When the bottle was empty, Burton returned to the pharmacist. “The moment the delivery is made, will you get word to me? You know my address.”
“Very well, Sir Richard. But what—?”
“I have my methods,” Burton responded.
Shudders swallowed nervously and looked perplexed.
Swinburne grinned.
They bid the pharmacist farewell and left the shop.
Burton turned up his collar and looked at the darkening sky. “These short winter days make me long for Africa, Algy. Do you think this horrible climate is responsible for the British imperative for expansion? Is our empire built upon drizzle and chill?”
“It’s a credible proposition,” the poet replied. “At least, when held against that which suggests a tonic could send a man to witness a specific event in other histories. Great heavens, Richard! Saltzmann’s is a sauce, not a sorcerer!”
“Where that mystery is concerned, I hope we’ve just placed a key in the Lock.”
“Ouch! Balderdash for mains and the worst kind of quippery for afters!” Swinburne complained.
“On which note, I intend to work up an appetite by walking home, where I shall await word from Krishnamurthy and Bhatti. Let us see whether old Babbage has cast any light on our various mysteries.”
“If you ask me, he’s just as likely to conjure up new confusions as he is to provide answers. The man is as mad as a March hare and becoming madder by the moment.” Swinburne jerked the end of his scarf from between Fidget’s teeth and wrapped an extra loop around his neck. “I shall call upon you tomorrow morning.” He took his leave and was quickly lost from view among the milling pedestrians, though Burton could hear him screeching for a cab.
The king’s agent set off toward the end of Baker Street. The freshly lit street lamps were each forming a nimbus in the falling snow, and the hunched metal backs of street-crabs glimmered in the illumination as they clanked along the busy thoroughfare. The gutters, filled with a mulch of trodden and crushed snow and flowers, looked to be running with blood, which, together with the rapidly blackening sky and the uncannily rubicund quality of the light, gave everything a thoroughly infernal appearance.
Through it, Burton strode, his demonic features attracting disapproving and rather fearful glances from the more well-heeled passersby. To them, his gentleman’s clothes were an incongruous affectation, as if a tiger had adorned itself with lace. He glowered back, silently railing against the judgements of so-called civilised society.
His mania for exploration had been steadily increasing these past few days. Restlessness boiled within. London was a confinement, its social rituals a bore. He yearned for the fresh stimuli of exotic lands.
However, he also sensed that events were accumulating around him and fast reaching a tipping point. This unnerved him, yet he also welcomed it. If there was an enemy, he wanted it out in the open. He wanted battle to commence.
“Come on,” he whispered. “Show yourself.”
Unfamiliar horizons or an implacable foe, either would suffice to fill the absence that gnawed at his heart, anything to distract him from the fact of Isabel’s death.
He tipped his hat to Mr. Grub at the corner of Montagu Place and Gloucester Place, and a few paces later arrived home. Bram Stoker greeted him in the hallway. Burton said to him, “I have a job for you, young ’un.”
As member of the Whispering Web—a remarkable communications system comprised of the empire’s millions of orphans, ragamuffins and street Arabs—Stoker was able to send a message that, by word of mouth, would reach its destination with greater rapidity than the post office could offer. He also had access to a repository of practical knowledge that, in its field, was the equivalent to anything held in the British Library or British Museum.
“Sir?”
Burton divested himself of hat and coat.
“I need the location of a company called Locks Limited.”
“Shouldn’t take long,” the youngster said. “I’ll get the boys onto it at once.”
“Good lad.”
While Stoker slipped into his outdoor clothing, Burton went up to his study, lit its lamps, threw himself into his chair in front of the fireplace, rested his feet on the fender, lit a cheroot, and smoked.
He thought about Saltzmann’s Tincture. He’d first used it five years ago during his initial foray into Africa. More recently, it had sustained him throughout his search for the source of the Nile, keeping malaria at bay until the final days of the expedition, when he’d finally succumbed. It was only since last November that his reliance on the potion had spun out of control, with him requiring larger and larger doses to smooth his jagged emotions and blunt the sharp edge of grief. Usage had become a dependency. The dependency had become an addiction.
He sighed and massaged his forehead with his fingertips.
Idiot, Burton. Idiot.
He considered the enhanced awareness the tincture instilled—the almost overwhelming cognisance that countless possible consequences extended outward from every circumstance—and realised the liquid had endowed him with this enriched perception even before he’d been made the king’s agent, before he’d learned of the innumerable contemporaneous histories.
The correlation between the medicine’s effects and his current knowledge couldn’t be ignored.
“Mr. Shudders,” he muttered. “Are you really a straightforward pharmacist, or maybe something more?”
An hour and a half later, there came a light tap at the door and, in response to Burton’s hail, Stoker entered. Fidget padded in beside him, crossed the floor, collapsed onto the hearthrug, and started snoring.
“Hallo, young ’un,” Burton said. “Did you find any answers?”
“To be sure, sir. There’s four companies what is called Locks Limited, an’ it ain’t no surprise that two of ’ em make locks. Of t’other two, one supplies materials to the building trade, an’ one sells pianos.”
“None providing pharmaceuticals as a sideline, then?”
“It’s unlikely, so it is.”
“Thank you, lad.”
Stoker gave a nod and left the room.
Burton spent the next hour meditating. He allowed his thoughts to roam freely, dwelling for a time on this, for a while on that, following paths that trailed into nowhere, and others that led to the peripheries of an idea until, from the meanderings, the vaguest glimmer of a form emerged; the ghost of an incomplete conception.
Multiple Babbages. Multiple time suits. A single moment. A synchronous act.
On this he dwelled, neither judging nor accepting, but simply observing as one notion clicked into place beside another.
The grandfather clock in the hallway below, as if encouraging his nascent revelation, chimed nine.
A detonation rattled the windows.
Startled, Burton jumped to his feet.
There came a loud crash from downstairs.
In the street, people yelled and screamed.
“What now?” he muttered.
He heard Mrs. Angell cry out in alarm. Fidget woke up, dived beneath a table, and started to bark.
A voice roared, “Burton!”
Heavy footsteps thudded up the stairs, and the study door flew open, slamming against the bookshelf behind it, sending books spilling to the floor.
Spring Heeled Jack ducked through the opening and stalked in.
“Burton! Have I found you? Here? In this side note?”
Burton rapidly backed away until his heels bumped against the hearth. He thought fast and said, “Side note? Perhaps in a biography? A book written about me after my death? One that exists in the future? Is that how you know the places I frequent?”
He observed the intruder’s smooth chest. No scratch. A different mechanism. Not the one he’d fought in Leicester Square.
“Why am I here?” the creature demanded. It shoved a desk aside and kicked a chair out of its way. “What have you done?”
“I don’t—”
Before Burton could finish, Jack pounced forward, seized him by the lapels, and shook him until his teeth rattled. “Why are you significant?”
The king’s agent felt his fingertips brush against a poker. He pulled it from its stand, swept it up, and whipped it against the side of his assailant’s head.
“Get the hell off me!”
Spring Heeled Jack dropped him and staggered to the side, putting a hand to its dented cranium. “Where is the prime minister? What am I doing here? I’m lost! I’m lost!”
“Just stop!” Burton commanded. “Calm down. We can talk.”
The figure crouched, and Burton was convinced that, had there been a face, it would be snarling.
“It’s your fault!” Jack said.
Burton brandished the poker like a sword. “Stay back, I say! What is my fault? From where—and when—have you come?”
Disregarding the questions, the intruder took one slow step closer, its head waving from side to side like a cobra’s. A shudder ran through it. “Prime Minister. Guide me. Please!”
“Which prime minister?” Burton asked. “Whom do you serve?”
Raising its blank face to the ceiling, Jack hollered, “I serve Queen Victoria!”
It lunged forward, knocked the poker from Burton’s hand, and slapped the side of his head with such force that the king’s agent was sent spinning across the room into a desk and to the floor.
Please. Not again.
He glimpsed Mrs. Angell standing in the doorway with Bram Stoker. They both had their hands clenched over their mouths. He cried out, “Stay back! Fetch the pol—”
He was grabbed by the neck, hauled upright, and struck again, viciously. His head jerked sideways, and blood sprayed from his mouth.
“Tell me! Tell me!” Jack screamed. “Why do I fear you?”
Burton rasped, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
He saw his housekeeper crossing the room behind his attacker, opened his mouth to warn her away, but hadn’t a chance to utter a sound before a fist impacted against his eye. He clutched at Spring Heeled Jack’s arms. His muscles, already weakened, were no match for the creature. It shoved him hard against the wall.
The wind knocked out of him, Burton slid to his knees and put a hand down to steady himself. A glutinous string of blood oozed from his mouth and nose. He looked up. “You insane bastard.”
Jack loomed over him. “I want to go home.”
There came a loud thunk. The white head fell from the shoulders and bounced onto the floor. The figure folded down on top of Burton. Blue sparks crackled from its severed neck. They sputtered and died.
He struggled from beneath it.
Mrs. Angell, with her hands clutched around the hilt of a scimitar, said, “It’s kneading the bread and tenderising the meat what does it.”
“Does what?” Burton croaked, as he struggled to his feet.
“Puts the strength in me arms, sir. Did I do the right thing? Panicked, I did. Grabbed this here sword off your wall and afore I knew what I was intending I’d chopped the head off the clockwork man. A new type, is it? I hope they haven’t built many of ’em, not if they loses control of ’emselves like what this ’un did!”
“You were splendid, Mother Angell.” Burton took her by the elbow as the weapon dropped from her hand, and she suddenly swayed. “Sit down, dear.”
“My heart’s all a flutter,” she said tremulously. “It’s lucky you keep your blades so sharp. Goodness gracious, but look at your poor face. Thumped again! You don’t ’alf make an ’abit of it.”
The king’s agent pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and applied it to his mouth. His bottom lip was split, and the cut on his chin had reopened.
“Is our front door broken?” His voice sounded unsteady.
“The main lock, but it weren’t bolted.”
“Stay here. I’ll go and make us a little more secure.” He nudged his foot into the prone form of Spring Heeled Jack—it was completely lifeless—then walked to the door, stopped, and looked back. “That was a very brave thing you did.”
“Oof!” she responded. “Oof!”
He lurched down the stairs, his legs almost giving way, went to the front door, and examined its splintered frame. The lock had been knocked out of the wood, but the bolts at the top and bottom of the portal were intact.
Bram Stoker appeared on the doorstep with two constables in tow.
“I fetched the coppers!” the lad exclaimed. “Crikey! What was it?”
Both policemen were familiar to Burton, and they, in turn, knew he was the king’s agent. He greeted them. “Kapoor. Tamworth. I’ve just been assaulted. Can’t go into details. I need you to stand sentry duty until further notice.”
His authority was absolute. They asked no questions, but saluted and immediately positioned themselves at either side of his doorstep.
“Bram, will you get messages to Mr. Krishnamurthy and Mr. Bhatti. They’re probably at Battersea Power Station. I need them to come here immediately with a wagon big enough to cart off our uninvited guest.”
The boy raced away. Burton addressed P. C. Tamworth. “I’m leaving the door ajar. Let my guests through when they arrive, please.”
Hearing the stairs creak, he turned and saw Mrs. Angell descending with Fidget behind her.
“He ain’t much of a guard dog, is he?” she said.
“You should rest.”
“Oh, don’t fuss. I’m all right. I’m a policeman’s widow, ain’t I? Seen some things in my time, I have, though stilted men without faces takes the biscuit. Fair chills the blood. I’ll fetch a raw steak for that eye an’ me broom for your study.”
“I’ll clean the mess.”
Mrs. Angell grumbled, “Well, see that you do. I don’t care ’ow much time you’ve spent among them African head-hunters, I’ll not ’ave stray noggins layin’ around the house.” She headed toward her basement domain, the dog following.
Burton went up to his bedroom, sponged his wounds, then returned to his study and closed the door. After placing the spilled books back onto the shelves, he crossed to Spring Heeled Jack and retrieved the creature’s decapitated head from beneath a chair. He carried it to one of his desks, sat, and started to inspect it. What he saw unnerved him so much that he dropped it and had to pick it up again. The outer skin of the creature was a waxy, cold and pliable material that he couldn’t identify, but inside, amid manufactured parts, there was pink flesh.
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