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“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 ni
“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 ma
“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.