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“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 i
“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.