by D. J. Butler
Burton’s head hurt and he badly wanted to stab someone. Anyone.
He’d woken up in discomfort and had immediately been saddened to see Roxie sitting at his cabin’s dresser, fully dressed and finishing up with her coiffure.
“You are one hell of a woman.”
Roxie had stood, smiled, and then stooped to kiss his cheek. “Remember that,” she had said simply, and then she was gone. He was left with the salt-creamy smell of her body and astonishing memories.
He shivered.
At least he had slept soundly—that in itself was a luxury for Burton, who was a terrible insomniac. He had luxuriated in the rest, lying in the little bunk as long as her smell and the warmth of her body lingered, eventually forcing himself to shave, dress, and rejoin human society.
His head-butting with the gypsy circus-man calling himself Archibald on deck had been pointless, the fruit of Burton’s irritability and a further aggravation to it. After the showman had announced his schedule and disappeared below decks, Burton had begged to take leave of Roxie for an hour or two to handle some personal business and had come back to his cabin.
He sat at the tiny wooden table that folded down on a hinge from the wall, a blank page before him and a Robinson’s Patent Metal Self-Inking Stylus clutched in his fist like a spear. You’re a man of letters, damn you, he told himself, you can write this.
Dear Isabel, he scratched out at the top of the sheet, and then ran out of words.
A drink would fortify him. His glass and Roxie’s from the night before still sat on the dresser. He could tell which was which because hers was marked at the lip with smudges of lipstick, and he instinctively reached for the smudged one—but he stopped himself.
He must be fair to Isabel. He, Dick Burton, had made a mistake. Men made mistakes, but this one, he resolved, was a mistake that needn’t affect his engagement in any way, that Isabel needn’t ever know of. He could carry this guilty cross alone, but he must break off his fling with Roxie before it went any further. Certainly before Isabel learned of it.
He took the other tumbler, his glass from the night before, and the square bottle of gin. About to pour the liquor, however, he paused. There were crystals in the bottom of his glass, fine and few, like a little crusted sugar or salt, maybe, but nothing that the gin could have left behind.
He sniffed the glass—the crystals were odorless. He looked at Roxie’s glass; no crystals.
Hmmn.
He pushed away the glass with crystals, poured half a shot of gin into Roxie’s tumbler and took a sip.
I am well into the Rockies and the American West is everything I expected it to be, he continued, the Stylus pouring its black ink out smoothly as he wrote. I have seen mountain men, red Indians, and wild animals, not to mention vistas to match or exceed anything I ever witnessed in Goa or the Horn. Still, he lied, without you I find it sterile, uninviting and dead. I wish you were here, my darling.
He looked at what he had written and snorted in disgust. “Dick Burton, you faithless worm,” he rebuked himself, and he crumpled the sheet into a ball and threw it into the corner of the room.
He looked at his glass again.
What were those crystals? He didn’t remember adding anything to his drink, though, frankly, his memory of the night before had become a little hazy. He must not have slept well, he thought, but he didn’t remember waking during the night.
He finished the drink, and on a hunch he pulled out his attaché case.
The case was where he kept the three documents that were at the core of his mission: his own commission letter from Her Majesty (personal to him and making no mention of Fearnley-Standish), the letter credentialing him as an Ambassador from the Court of St. James (not a word in that letter, either, of Fearnley-Standish or what his role might be) and a sealed letter, addressed to President Young. Burton had not read the letter to Young, but he thought he knew its contents—Her Britannic Majesty expressed a willingness to negotiate with the President towards ceding certain assets to the Kingdom of Deseret in exchange for an appropriate posture vis-à-vis the emerging American conflict and the government of the Confederate States-to-be.
The assets, which Burton was instructed to identify only verbally, were large stretches of Alberta and British Columbia, all the territory bordering the northern edge of the Kingdom and running to the Pacific Ocean. Brigham Young would gain wheat fields, coal mines, and a major port—Burton didn’t see how Deseret could turn the offer down, as it needed to feed its people and power its machines just like any other nation did, and he expected his mission to be over within forty-eight hours. Upon boarding the Liahona he had hidden the slim black case underneath his bunk, locked its combination, and, as an alarm to warn him of tampering, he had closed the case with one of his own hairs pinched in it.
Now the hair was gone.
Burton stared at the case.
He checked the combination lock, finding it locked and the dials in the 0-0-0, 0-0-0 position he’d left them in. But the hair was gone.
Roxie. His mind rebelled at the accusation, but it must be her.
No, you idiot, he thought. You feel guilty because you have broken your troth, but that is no reason to suppose that Roxie is a thief or a spy. She’s only a woman, after all, beautiful and clever, and oh so dangerous and sweet in the way she moves, beneath that red crinoline or without its veiling—he cut off that train of thought.
No, it could have been anyone. The cabin had been locked, but Captain Jones or someone in his crew must have another copy of the key, and someone could have stolen it. Or simply picked the lock.
It could have been Fearnley-Standish, the little weasel. He was the reason Burton had put a hair in the attaché case in the first place—he hadn’t wanted his ostensible colleague to steal the letter to Brigham Young and cut Burton out of the mission, as he seemed constantly to be trying to do with his bizarre pretensions to authority.
That must be it; Fearnley-Standish had bribed a truck-man to give him the key, he had let himself in at some moment while Burton had been away, and he had opened the case.
Though whoever had done it had also been able to open the combination locks on the attaché case. That was no mean feat; Burton was certain his combination was a safe secret, not a birthday or some obvious number, but 8-5-3, 0-9-1, which, reordered into 09/1853, made September 1853, the month Burton had entered the Kaaba, the first kaffir, he believed, ever to have done so, and almost the first European. No one would think to try those digits as a combination, surely, so whoever had opened the case had done so by some other means—had picked the lock.
Was Fearnley-Standish capable of such a thing?
Burton’s eyes flickered to the crystals in his tumbler. He stifled the doubts in his heart as he choked back the memory of white ankles. No, he told himself again. Not Roxie.
He opened the case. Inside, everything looked all in order. The three letters were there, inside a large, flat, leather wallet, and nothing unexpected had been added.
Or had it? He picked up the sealed envelope addressed to Mr. Brigham Young, President of the Kingdom of Deseret and hefted it. It looked like the same envelope, but whoever had opened the case might have switched envelopes or might have steamed the envelope open and switched out its contents. Might have, he considered, but to what end?
He might be played like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, from Shakespeare’s play. Hamlet had swapped their sealed letter for another, hadn’t he? And where the original letter instructed the king to kill Hamlet, the substitute instructed him instead to kill Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Bad way to go, that. Embarrassing.
“Bhishma’s buttocks!” Burton cursed darkly. He was going to have to open the letter. It wasn’t contrary to any explicit direction he had received, but it definitely went beyond his affirmative instructions and it smacked of underhandedness and shady ethics. Burton had no qualms about raiding the enemy by stealth, but sneaking about to get around his allies, or worse, his
superiors, was unmanly and dishonorable.
On the other hand, he could not risk the possibility that the Yankee Clemens was somehow responsible and was sending Burton in to meet Brigham Young bearing a letter that read Dear Sir, please commence aerial raids on Richmond and Savannah at your earliest convenience. Sincerely, Victoria. P.S., have the bearer of this letter staked to the ground in front of the nearest coyote den.
The tools that he and Fearnley-Standish had removed (that he had removed, he corrected himself with a rueful grin, Fearnley-Standish hadn’t done a damned thing) from the Jim Smiley the previous night and stowed in the hold of the Liahona hadn’t been here this morning, when Burton had made a point of checking. If Clemens hadn’t got his tools back, then someone else had got them.
Burton sighed. There was no good way around it; he would have to look.
It was easy to steam the letter open using a jet from the convenience steam hose (usually used to make scalding hot tea or iron clothes or clean filthy boots) below the hot spigot in the cabin’s little brass sink. Burton unfolded the letter inside with trepidation, sitting again at the table to read it. He knew that he was doing what he had to do, for the sake of the mission, but he still felt like a thief, a trespasser, a blasphemer.
It didn’t look as official as he had expected, nothing like the credentials—no seal, no formalities, just a simple note on the Palace’s headed paper with a signature—but then, Burton reflected, it wouldn’t. The official mission was his; the note was a personal communication, an assurance of personal interest and sincerity from one head of state to another. He read the note with fear in his heart and a mounting paranoia in his aching brain.
Dear President Young,
To the formal documents credentialing my envoy, I wish to add my personal statement of confidence. Captain Burton is a man of proven merit in many extraordinary circumstances and I trust you will find him as capable, as bold, and as interesting as I do.
I trust also that we will be able to reach agreement. All parties declare themselves to be against the outbreak of hostilities, but you and I mean it sincerely, and I believe that between us, your Kingdom and mine can ensure that the American squabbles regarding membership and secession are resolved in a way that does not compromise our nations’ prosperity. Captain Burton is authorised to make certain promises to you in order to clarify that our interests are aligned; I will honour those promises.
Cordially Yours, VRI
Post-Script. Captain Burton is a man of action. If you have need of him in that capacity, please show him this letter as my instruction to him that he is to cooperate fully with your requests.
Ha! Burton thought. Again no mention of the tiresome little Foreign Office man, and the Queen’s note was all about Captain Burton and his mission. So Fearnley-Standish was a liar, just as he’d thought.
But what in blazes did that post-script mean?
He closely scanned the letter again, not for meaning this time, but to look at the letters and the paper for any sign of inauthenticity. Forgery and its detection were not his métier, but he thought of himself as an astute and perceptive man and the letter passed his smell test. The sheet’s heading and watermark looked official, and the handwriting throughout looked consistent. Before the gum on the flap could dry, he refolded the note, replaced it, and re-sealed the envelope.
He held it in his hands and considered what to do. Someone, he thought, had likely read the letter, and he couldn’t know who. Possibly, though he thought it unlikely, someone had tampered with the letter.
Still, its contents were consistent with what Burton knew of his own mission, although he wondered what Her Majesty could mean, suggesting that Brigham Young call upon his services as a man of action. Well, he harrumphed to an imaginary audience, he was a man of action, after all, and if President Young needed to call on his assistance in some matter, Burton would do what was necessary, for Queen and country.
On reflection, Burton decided that this episode had given him a salutary warning. It seemed likely that some rival, some enemy even, had looked into the official correspondence of which he was the appointed bearer, but there was nothing compromising in those letters, nothing that would give away Burton’s bargaining position or weaken him or make him vulnerable in any other way.
The true core of Burton’s mission was locked away in his own memory, unassailable. And because it could have been worse, Burton was now duly warned that his attaché case, even locked in his cabin and sealed behind a combination lock, was not a sufficiently safe place for the letters.
He’d have to carry them on his person. Burton tested his frock coat and found that, by tearing only a couple of stitches to either side of the mouth of its inside breast pocket, he could make the pocket wide enough to swallow the document wallet. He put all the letters into his coat and was about to put his coat on when his eye caught the loose sheets of paper and the Self-Inking Stylus on the folding table.
He sighed, sat, and took up the Stylus.
My Dearest Isabel, he wrote after dating a clean sheet. I am a terrible correspondent and though I know that you deserve a thousand times better, I find that all I can do is write to say that I think of you daily, that I consider myself pledged to you, and that I shall do my utmost to serve out this commission for Her Majesty in a fashion that will bring honour and respect to you and your family.
Vishnu’s hairy belly, he thought, setting the Stylus down and grinding the heels of his palms into his eyes. Could Roxie have drugged him?
“Behold the hypocephalus!” Poe cried, and Jed Coltrane, leaning against the wall near the rear door of the stateroom, resisted snorting out loud. At least, he thought, the poor bastard isn’t coughing up a lung. He wondered how much time the Richmond doctors had given Poe to live—he didn’t think it could have been very long.
It was a bally, in the end, a free show. At least it was free from Jed’s point of view—the entire price of admission was two cents, and Captain Dan Jones took both of them. But a free show now would mean better word of mouth for the paid show later. Even a carnival without a secret mission put on ballies from time to time.
The hypocephalus, which to the dwarf sounded like the name of a particularly nasty strain of a soldiers’ disease, was pinned against an upright display board. It was a complicated circular diagram, full of little drawings of stick figures, thrones, animal-headed people, stars, and squiggles, all inked onto a tattered piece of yellow cloth that might have been linen, or something really old, anyway.
It looked Egyptian. Like the scarabs, though, it was bunkum, and Jed knew it. Some Richmond clever-dick had painted it. Poe always called it the hypnotic hypocephalus, but Hunley and his boys were geniuses and Jed figured you could probably wear the thing over your face and it would let you breathe underwater or spit flame or deflect bullets. Poe probably knew, but he’d never told Jed. Still, bunkum aside, he did his best to look fascinated and attentive, to encourage the audience be fascinated and attentive, too.
Poe stood to one side of the hypocephalus in his full carnival-gypsy-snake oil-doctor costume on a low platform that looked improvised out of a wooden pallet; for that matter, Jed reflected, he hadn’t seen his boss out of costume since they’d left Richmond. He hadn’t even taken off the fake nose and beard, unless he’d done so out of the dwarf’s sight. To the other side of the hypocephalus stood the Englishman Burton, jaw resolutely clenched and eyes burning like his stare alone could punch through the walls of the steam-truck.
“Behold,” Burton called out his stubborn counter-introduction, “Doctor Archibald’s famous ancient Egyptian pillow!”
The old carny in Jed almost laughed at the big explorer—he’d done such a good job increasing interest, and therefore attendance, Jed doubted any shill could have done any better. The stateroom of the Liahona looked like it might have been built to seat twenty for dinner. Whatever table usually filled its floor was gone, though, and in thirty-odd folding wooden chairs, paying passengers sat and stared. Bu
rton’s associate, the diplomat Absalom Fearnley-Standish, was one of them. He sat beside a pair of empty seats, looking lonely and forlorn as he protected them with a battered top hat that was missing part of its brim.
No sign of the woman Jed was waiting for, though. That was a shame; it wouldn’t hurt to collect a little cash from the evening’s show, but really, of course, it was supposed to be a distraction. Oh, well, maybe he’d have to be satisfied with just dealing with the Englishmen.
Poe smiled at Burton’s jab and continued. Even in the weak electric light of the stateroom (pulsing blue from glass globes pegged in two rows to the room’s ceiling), he wore his smoked spectacles. If pressed, he would claim that his eyes were weak, but of course the glasses were an important component of his disguise.
As was the show.
“My colleague would describe the great pyramids of Giza as mere tombs,” Poe said with a wise and condescending smile. “The sorcerer-priests of Memphis and of Thebes have long had the practice, handed down to them by their forefathers, who learned the dark arts at the feet of Hermes Trismegistos, the great Ibis-headed Thoth himself, of sleeping with their heads upon cloths such as this.”
He locked his eyes upon a pair of spinsterly women in the front row and proceeded to talk to them intimately, as if giving a private lecture, switching his gaze exclusively back and forth between the two.
“You observe the great throne at the center, the rightways upper section and the inverted underworld, the stars and the symbols of the great expanse of earth. The hypocephalus is nothing less than a map of the universe, as known to the ancients, and dreaming Egyptian sorcerers drew from it the power to control their dreams … and the minds of their fellows.”
The two ladies gasped a prim objection and a murmur crept through the audience.
“Rubbish!” roared Burton, his face turning purple. “Poppycock! Nonsense of the highest order, and reeking of base deceit and fraud! This man owes you all a refund! There is no basis for any of this hogwash, these explanations are not scientific! What kind of doctor are you, man?”
