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He frowned. The Beetle should have responded by now.
“Hi!” he called into the flue. “Are you there, lad? It's Burton!”
There was no answer. He dropped three more stones into the darkness and sat patiently. The minutes ticked by and there was still no sound of movement, no whispery voice from the shadows.
Burton called again, waited a little longer, then gave up.
Where was the Beetle?
Half an hour later, after retrieving his vehicle and headwear, Burton continued homeward. For a few minutes he thought a hansom was following him, but when he reached the main thoroughfares, he became so ensnarled in traffic that he lost sight of it.
Central London had ground to a complete halt, the streets jammed solid with a bizarre mishmash of technologies. There were horses pulling carts and carriages; prodigious drays harnessed to huge pantechnicons; steam-horse-drawn hansoms and growlers; velocipedes; and adapted arachnids and insects, such as harvestmen and Folks' Wagon Beetles, silverfish racers and omnipedes. Burton even saw a farmer trying to drive a herd of goats through the streets to Covent Garden Market.
It seemed to the king's agent that the past, present, and future had all been compressed into the capital's streets, as if the structure of time itself was deteriorating.
None of the vehicles or pedestrians was making any progress, being more engaged in battling one another than in moving forward. The horses were whi
Slowly, with many a diversion down dark and narrow side streets and alleyways, Burton made his way out of Cheapside, past the Bank of England, and along Holborn Road. Here, at the junction with Red Lion Street, he collided with another velocipede-whose driver had lost control after his vehicle's boiler burst and knocked the gyroscope out of kilter-and was almost forced into an enormously deep and wide hole in the road. Clutching at the barrier around the pit so as not to topple from his pe
“It wasn't your fault,” Burton said, dismounting. “Are you hurt?”
“I've ripped my trouser knee and knocked my elbow but nothing more life-threatening than that. What's this whacking great crater all about?”
“They're building a station here for the new London Underground railway system. The Technologists say it'll make moving around the city a lot easier.”
“Well, it couldn't be any more difficult,” the man answered. “Strike a light! What was that?”
Something had whined past his ear and knocked off Burton's top hat.
“Get down!” the king's agent snapped, pushing the other man to the ground.
“Hey up! What's your game?”
“Someone's shooting!”
“I beg your pardon? Did you say shooting?”
The explorer sca
“The shot was fired from slightly above ground level,” he murmured.
“Shot? Shot?” the man at his side stammered. “Why are we being shot at? I've never done anything! I'm just a bank clerk!”
“Not we- me.”
“But why? Who are you?”
“Nobody. Pick up your boneshaker and get out of here.”
“But-I-um-should I call for a policeman?”
“Just go!”
The man scuttled sideways on his hands and knees, pushed his pe
“Confound it!” he hissed. He had no idea where the shootist might be. In one of the nearby carriages, perhaps? On a velocipede? Not in a building, that much was certain, for the windows along this side of the street were nothing but faint rectangular smudges of light-no one could possibly have identified him through the intervening murk.
He decided to follow Falstaff's dictum that “discretion is the better part of valour,” and, bending low, he retrieved his cane, abandoned his conveyance, and shouldered his way into the crowd. He ducked between the legs of a harvestman, squeezed past a brewery wagon, and hurried away as fast as the many obstructions would allow. It was a shame to leave the pe
It was past eleven o'clock by the time he finally arrived at 14 Montagu Place. As he stepped in, Mrs. Angell greeted him.
“Hallo!” he said, slipping his cane into an elephant's-foot holder by the door. “Good show! You got home! What a state the streets are in!”
“It's pandemonium, Sir Richard,” she agreed. “How are the delivery boys to do their job? We'll starve!”
“I'm halfway there already,” he said, shrugging out of his coat and hanging it on the stand. “I haven't eaten since I don't know when!”
“Then you'll be pleased to hear that a bacon and egg pie has been waiting for you these three hours past. That should fill the hole in your stomach. I don't know what to do about the hole that appears to have found its way into your hat, though.”
Burton took off his topper and eyed it ruefully. “Oh well, I don't suppose I'll need it where I'm going. Perhaps you'd consign it to the dustbin for me?”
“Most certainly not!” the old woman objected. “A fine headpiece like that should be repaired, not abandoned. What happened to it?”
“Someone took a pot-shot at me.”
Mrs. Angell raised her hands to her face. “Oh my goodness! With a gun? Are you hurt?”
Burton placed the hat on the stand, then squatted to untie his bootlaces.
“Not at all. The would-be assassin's aim was off.”
He eased his boots off and stood in his stockinged feet.
“I missed a night's sleep and I'm weary to the bone,” he said. “I'll change into something more comfortable and join you in the kitchen for supper, if you don't mind.”
Mrs. Angell looked surprised. “Eat? In the kitchen? With me?”
Burton took his housekeeper by the shoulders and smiled fondly down at her. “My dear, dear woman,” he said. “I shan't see you again for such a long time. How will I ever do without you? You've fed me and cleaned up after me; you've kept me on the straight and narrow when I would have strayed; you've put up with intruders and all ma
With glistening eyes, Mrs. Angell said, “Then be my guest, Sir Richard. There is, however, a condition.”
“A condition? What?”
“I shall boil plenty of water while we eat and, when we are finished, you'll carry it upstairs and take a bath. You reek of the Thames, sir.”
Burton relaxed in a tin bathtub in front of the fireplace in his study. He'd shaved, clipped his drooping moustache, and scrubbed the soot and toxins from his skin.
He took a final puff at the stub of a pungent cheroot, cast it into the hearth, reached down to the floor and lifted a glass of brandy to his lips, drained it, then set it back down.
“Someone,” he said to the room, “doesn't want me to go to Africa, that much is plain.”