by Mark Hodder
The three men were silent for a moment, then Swinburne said quietly: “And now I hate that Prussian swine even more.”
They made a final search of the house in case they'd missed anything then turned off the lights, stepped out, and closed the front door behind them.
“I'll report to the Yard and will have a couple of constables sent over to keep watch on the place,” Trounce said as they proceeded down the path.
“We have no choice but to leave the investigation in the hands of your colleagues now,” Burton said, “which means even if they catch the wretch, we won't hear about it for some considerable time. There is, however, one last thing I can do.”
“What?”
The king's agent pulled open the gate and they crossed to where their velocipedes were parked.
“I can visit the Beetle. He may know something about the injured sweep.”
They started the penny-farthings' engines, mounted, and set off. As they turned back into Cranbrook Road and began to chug down the hill, Burton called, “We'll split up when we get to Mile End. I'll head off to Limehouse. Algy, you go home, get packed, and have a good night's sleep. Stay off the alcohol. Trounce, do what you have to do at the Yard then get yourself home to your wife. We'll reconvene at the Orpheus tomorrow morning.”
This arrangement was followed, and just under an hour later, Burton was striding through the stifling fog along the banks of Limehouse Cut canal. The factories that lined it had finished production for the day, and the thousands of workers who toiled within them had dispersed, returning to their lodgings in the loathsome slum that was London's East End-or “the Cauldron” as it was more commonly known.
Burton had left his velocipede in the charge of a constable back on the High Road. It wouldn't do to bring such an expensive vehicle into this district. He'd left his top hat with the policeman, too. The men in this area were most often bare-headed or wore flat caps. Best not to stand out.
The king's agent did, however, carry his sword cane-with its silver panther-head handle-held in such a manner so as to be able to quickly unsheathe the blade should it become necessary.
He arrived at a towering factory that, unlike the others, stood derelict. Nearly every one of its windows was cracked or broken, and its doors were boarded up. He circled around it until he came to a narrow dock at the side of the canal. In a niche in the building's wall, he found iron rungs set into the brickwork. He climbed them.
The edifice was seven storeys high, and by the time Burton reached the roof, he was breathing heavily. Hauling himself over the parapet, he sat and rested a moment.
There were two skylights set into the flat roof with eight chimneys rising around them. The third one from the eastern edge had rungs set into its side, and, after the king's agent had got his breath back, he began to ascend it. Halfway up, he stopped to rest again, then pressed on until he came to the top of the structure. He swung himself onto the lip of the chimney and sat with one leg to either side of it. He'd picked up a number of stones on his way here, and now he retrieved three of them from his pocket and dropped them one by one into the flue. This signal would summon the Beetle.
Burton had never actually seen the strange leader of the League of Chimney Sweeps. All he knew about him was that he was a boy, he lived in this chimney, and he had a voracious appetite for books. The Beetle had been of significant help during the strange affair of Spring Heeled Jack, when he'd arranged for Swinburne to pose as a sweep-a move that led directly to the exposure of Darwin and his cronies-and since then Burton had visited regularly, always bringing with him a supply of literature and poetry. The Beetle was especially desirous of anything written by Swinburne, whose talent he practically worshipped.
Burton wrapped his scarf around the lower half of his face and waited.
From this height there was usually a stunning view across London but today the king's agent could barely see his own hand in front of his face. The fog was dense and cold, and the “blacks” were falling-coal dust that coalesced with ice at a higher altitude and drifted down like dark snow.
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 whinnying and shying away from the insects, the insects were getting tangled up in each other's legs and mounting the pavements in an attempt to pass one another, and among them all, cloaked in fog and steam, crowds of people were shouting and cursing and shaking their fists in fury.
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 penny-farthing, Burton cursed vehemently, then reached down and turned off his engine. The other man, who'd fallen onto the cobbles, picked himself up and kicked his machine. “Stupid bloody thing!” he cried out, then looked up at the king's agent. “Bless me, sir, you almost came a cropper! Pray forgive me!”
“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 scanned the milling crowd, then reached for his hat and snatched it up from the road. There was a hole in its front, near the top edge. At the back, an exit hole was set a bit lower.
“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 p
enny-farthing upright, and wheeled it away while crouching behind it, as if it might shelter him from further bullets. As he disappeared into the noisy throng, Burton also moved, sliding along the edge of the barrier with his eyes flicking left and right, trying to pierce the fog.
“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 penny-farthing behind but he couldn't risk climbing up onto its saddle again-that would make him far too visible.
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 manner of inconveniences; you didn't even complain when the Tichborne Claimant practically demolished the house. You are one of the world's wonders, and I'd be honoured to dine with you tonight.”
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.”
“Fuddle-witted ninny,” murmured Pox, his messenger parakeet. The colourful bird was sleeping on a perch near a bookcase. Like all of her kind, she delivered insults even while unconscious.
Burton leaned back, rested his head on the lip of the tub, and turned it so that he might gaze into the flickering flames of the fire.
His eyelids felt heavy.
He closed them.
His breathing slowed and deepened.
His thoughts meandered.
In his mind's eye, faces formed and faded: Lieutenant William Stroyan, Sir Roderick Murchison, Ebenezer Smike, Thomas Honesty, Edwin Brundleweed. They shifted and blended. They congealed into a single countenance, gaunt and lined, with a blade-like nose, tight lips, and insane, pain-filled eyes.
Spring Heeled Jack.
Gradually, the features grew smoother. The eyes became calmer. A younger man emerged from the terrible face.
“Oxford,” Burton muttered in his sleep. “His name is Edward Oxford.”
His name is Edward Oxford.
He is twenty-five years old and he's a genius-a physician, an engineer, a historian, and a philosopher.
He sits at a desk constructed from glass but, rather than being clear, it is somehow filled with writing and diagrams and pictures that move and wink and come and go. The surface of the desk is flat and thin, yet the information dancing within it-and Burton instinctively knows that it is information-appears to be three-dimensional. It's disconcerting, as if something impossibly big has been stored in something very small-like a djan in a lamp-but this doesn't appear to bother Oxford. In fact, the young man has some sort of control over the material, for occasionally he touches a finger to the glass or he murmurs something and the writing and outlines and images respond by folding or flipping or metamorphosing.
A large black diamond has been placed on the desk.
Burton recognises it as the South American Eye of Naga, which he'd discovered last year beneath the Tichborne family's estate. The dream disagrees with him. The stone was not found in 1862, it says. It was found in 2068.
Original history!
Oxford is fascinated by it. The structure of the stone is unique. He whispers, “Even more sensitive than a CellComp. More efficient than a ClusterComp. More capacity than GenMem.”
What is he talking about? Burton wonders.
The dream twists away and repositions itself inside a day a few weeks later.
The diamond is filled with the remnant intelligences of a prehistoric race. They have inveigled their way into Oxford's mind.
He starts to think about time.
He becomes obsessed.
He becomes paranoid.
It happens that he shares his name with a distant ancestor who, in a fit of insanity, had attempted to assassinate Queen Victoria. A voice, from somewhere behind his conscious mind, insists: “That man besmirched your family's reputation. Change it. Correct it.”
Why does this obscure fact suddenly matter? Why should he care about a forgotten incident that occurred near three hundred and fifty years ago?
It matters.
He cares.
He can think about little else.
The reptilian intelligence plants another seed.
Slowly, in Oxford's mind, a theory concerning the nature of time blossoms like a pervasively scented exotic flower. Its roots dig deeper. Its lianas entangle him. It consumes him.
He works tirelessly.
The dream convulses and fifteen years have passed.
Oxford has cut shards from the diamond and connected them to a chain of DNA-StringComps and BioProcs. They form the heart of what he calls a Nimtz Generator. It is a flat circular device. It will enable him to move through time.
To power it, he's invented the fish-scale battery, and has fashioned thousands of these tiny solar-energy collectors into a one-piece tight-fitting suit. He's also embedded an AugCom into a round black helmet. It will act as an interface between his brain and the generator. It will also protect him from the deep psychological shock that he somehow knows will
afflict anyone who steps too far out of their native time period.
The boots of the costume are fitted with two-foot-high spring-loaded stilts. They appear wildly eccentric but they offer a simple solution to a complex problem, for when the bubble of energy generated by the Nimtz forms around the suit, it must touch nothing but air.
Oxford will literally jump through time.
It is the evening of 15th February, 2202. Nine o'clock. A Monday. His fortieth birthday.
Oxford dresses in attire suitable for the 1840s. He pulls his time suit on over the top of it and clips on his stilts. He attaches the Nimtz Generator to his chest and puts the helmet on his head. He picks up a top hat and strides out of his workshop and into the long garden beyond.
His wife comes out of the house, wiping her hands on a towel.
“You're going now?” she asks. “Supper is almost ready!”
“I am,” he replies, “but don't worry-even if I'm gone for years, I'll be back in five minutes!”
“You won't return an old man, I hope!” she grumbles, and runs a hand over her distended belly. “This one will need an energetic young father.”
He laughs. “Don't be silly. It won't take long.”
Bending, he kisses her on the nose.
He instructs the suit to take him to five-thirty on the afternoon of 10th June, 1840. Location: the upper corner of Green Park, London.
He looks at the sky.
“Am I really going to do this?” he asks himself.
“Do it!” a voice whispers in his head, and before he can consciously make a decision, he takes three long strides, jumps, hits the ground with knees bent, and leaps high into the air. A bubble forms around him and he vanishes with a small detonation, like a little clap of thunder.
Pop!
Sir Richard Francis Burton jerked awake and tepid water slopped over the edge of his bath.
