The Return of the Discontinued Man (A Burton & Swinburne Adventure) (51 page)

“Thank you, Algy.”

“Don’t thank me, thank Daniel, he’s the one who’ll create it.”

“I mean for what you did.”

Swinburne suddenly giggled. “My pleasure, Richard. Any time you need shooting dead, don’t hesitate to ask.”

Burton whirred upright and held out a hand. Swinburne grasped it and got to his feet. He looked over to his friend’s still-smouldering corpse and emitted a groan. “By God, Oxford aged you thirty years in a matter of minutes. I saw you become an old man.”

“And I witnessed my life as it would have been had Oxford never altered history.”

“And?”

“Let us just say, it had a theme.”

Swinburne gave an inquisitive twitch of his eyebrows.

Burton ignored it and turned toward the doors. “I want to get out of this chamber, never to see it again. Lead me to the lounge, will you?”

They left the domed room, walked to the nearest lift, and entered it, a massive man of brass and cogs and pistons, and a diminutive red-haired poet.

“What a strange insanity,” Swinburne mused as they started down, “to create a future from a jumbled, misunderstood vision of the past.”

“Isn’t that what we all do?” Burton asked.

His companion had no answer to that, and for the rest of the descent they stood in thoughtful silence.

The lift stopped, and they passed from it into a vestibule, and from there the poet led his friend to the grand lounge, which was filled with couches, armchairs, bookcases, tables, cabinets, and statuettes of the erstwhile queen. The walls were hung with portraits, every one of them depicting Jessica Cornish.

Gladys Tweedy, the Marquess of Hammersmith, Minister of Language Revivification and Purification, was the room’s sole occupant. She stood as they entered.

“Prime Minister?” she asked doubtfully.

“Dead,” the king’s agent chimed. “I’m Burton.”

“Really? How thoroughly singular. You’re joking, of course.”

“No.”

Swinburne scampered over to a drinks cabinet and eagerly examined its contents.

“But you look and sound just like the prime minister,” Tweedy protested.

“I know. I’m not particularly thrilled about it. Marquess, what is the situation with regards to the mobilisation of our troops?”

“Our forces are awaiting orders from the Minister of War, Death and Destruction, who, might I remind you, recently experienced a violent demise. You will have to appoint a successor.”

“I’ll do no such thing. The war is cancelled.”

“Hurrah!” Swinburne cheered. “Hooray and yahoo!” He held up a bottle. “Vintage brandy!”

Burton said to the marquess, “Will you convey a message to your fellow ministers?”

“If you wish,” she answered. “Or to those that survived, anyway. Quite a few didn’t get out in time.”

“Tell them that Parliament is suspended and all ministers are relieved of their duties. The people will fashion a new form of government in due course.”

She widened her eyes and put a hand to her mouth. “What people?”

“You call them Lowlies.”

She laughed. “But they’re little more than animals!”

“Do as I say.”

Gladys Tweedy swallowed, stuck out her bottom lip, put her hands on her hips, and stamped out of the room, pushing past William Trounce as he entered.

“By Jove! She looks annoyed! Have you—” He saw Burton and quickly drew his pistol.

“Steady, Pouncer!” Swinburne shrilled. “It’s Richard.”

“Richard?” Uncertainly, Trounce lowered his gun. “You mean—it—he’s in—it worked? By Jove!”

“Why don’t you stop ‘by Joving’ and have a tipple?” the poet suggested. He poured three drinks, met his companions in the middle of the room, handed a glass to Trounce, and held another out to Burton. He blinked and said, “Oops! Oh crikey. You poor thing.”

A wave of grief hit the king’s agent.

I can’t taste. There’s no physical sensation. I’m dead.

He pushed the emotion aside: something else to be dealt with later.

“Oh well,” Swinburne muttered. He looked down at the drinks. “One for each hand.”

Burton noticed, at the other end of the chamber, French doors, and beyond them, a balcony. He strode over, followed by Swinburne and Trounce, and pulled them open. Their handles snapped off in his hands.

“Damn!” he exclaimed. “I have to familiarise myself with this body. It’s fiendishly strong.”

“By my Aunt Penelope’s plentiful petticoats!” Swinburne cried out. “Close the doors. It’s freezing.”

“In a moment,” Burton said. He stepped out onto the balcony, into twelve-inch-deep scarlet snow.

Swinburne gulped one of his brandies, ran to the side of the room, and tore a couple of tapestries down from the wall. He wrapped one around himself and handed the other to Trounce, who did likewise. They joined Burton. The air at this altitude was thin but breathable.

They looked out over London.

Under a clear afternoon sky, the city sprawled, blanketed in red.

“I was born here,” Trounce said. “But it doesn’t feel like home. I miss the hustle and bustle of the nineteenth century. I even miss the smells.”

“It’s all down there,” Burton noted. “Under the ground, waiting to be liberated.”

“Humph! It is, but that hustle and bustle isn’t
my
hustle and bustle.”

“I miss Verbena Lodge,” Swinburne said. “Twenty-third-century bordellos are absolutely hopeless. They have no understanding of the lash.”

Burton asked, “Will you both come back to 1860?”

The question was met by a prolonged silence.

The poet broke it. “I don’t know whether I can. I feel I have an obligation to fulfill.”

“Likewise,” Trounce said. “There’s much work to be done here, Richard. I fear I may never be reunited with my bowler or with Scotland Yard.” He paused. “You’ll go?”

“I have to. My brother will expect from me a full account of what has occurred here.”

“And after that, what? Will you masquerade as Brunel?”

“I hardly know one end of a spanner from another.” Burton leaned on the balcony’s parapet then suddenly remembered his great weight and stepped back, afraid that it might give way beneath him. “I require time to adapt to this body before I return. Once I’m there—well, I’ll see what happens.”

Swinburne bent and scooped up a handful of snow. He examined it. “The seeds are sending out roots. The jungle is obviously up to something. I wonder what?”

Burton’s neck buzzed as he turned his head to look down at his friend. “It’s you.”

“But I never know what I’m going to do next, even in human form.”

Burton snorted. It sounded like the clash of a cymbal. “I can’t imagine how it feels to know you’re a vegetable.”

“Probably not much different to the awareness that you’re an accumulation of cogwheels and springs. My hat, Richard! Animal, vegetable and mineral. What are we all becoming?”

Burton looked toward the tower-forested horizon.

“Time will tell, Algy. Time will tell.”

ISABEL ARUNDELL (1831–1896)

Isabel and Richard Francis Burton met in 1851 and, after a ten-year courtship, married in 1861. Marriage brought a change of fortune for Burton, seeing him more or less abandon exploration in favour of writing and the translating of forbidden literature of anthropological interest. Notoriously, upon his death in 1890, Isabel burned her husband’s papers, journals and unfinished work. She also consigned to the flames his translation of
The Scented Garden
, which he considered his
magnum opus
, and which he’d finished just the day before his demise.

ERNEST AUGUSTUS I (1771–1851)

Ernest Augustus I was the son of George III. When his niece, Victoria, became queen of the United Kingdom in 1837, Ernest was made king of Hanover, which ended the union between Britain and Hanover that had begun in 1714. Had Victoria been assassinated, Ernest would have been a prime candidate to replace her as the United Kingdom’s monarch. With rumours of murder and incest attached to Ernest’s name, this would not have been a popular choice.

CHARLES BABBAGE (1791–1871)

Mathematician, inventor, philosopher and engineer, Charles Babbage is considered the father of modern computers. He created steam-powered devices that were the first to demonstrate that calculations could be mechanised. However, his most complex creations, the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine, were not completed in his lifetime due to funding and personality problems. By 1860, he was becoming increasingly eccentric, obsessive and irascible, directing his ire in particular at street musicians, commoners, and children’s hoops.

BATTERSEA POWER STATION

The station was neither designed nor built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and did not exist during the Victorian Age. Actually comprised of two stations, it was first proposed in 1927 by the London Power Company. Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (who created the iconic red telephone box) designed the building’s exterior. The first station was constructed between 1929 and 1933. The second station, a mirror image of the first, was built between 1953 and 1955. Considered a London landmark, both stations are still standing but are derelict.

JAMES BRUCE, EIGHTH EARL OF ELGIN (1811–1863)

Lord Elgin, orator, humanist, and administrator, was the British governor-general of Canada and later served diplomatic posts in China, Japan, and India. He did not say, “Talk, talk, talk, and while you are talking, the Chinese are exacting yet another tax, . . .”

ISAMBARD KINGDOM BRUNEL (1806–1859)

The British Empire’s most celebrated civil and mechanical engineer, Brunel designed and built dockyards, railway systems, steamships, bridges and tunnels. A very heavy smoker, in 1859 he suffered a stroke and died, at just fifty-nine years old.

EDWARD JOSEPH BURTON (1824–1895)

Richard Francis Burton’s younger brother shared his wild youth but later settled into army life. Extremely handsome and a talented violinist, he became an enthusiastic hunter, which proved his undoing—in 1856, his killing of elephants so enraged Singhalese villagers that they beat him senseless. The following year, still not properly recovered, he fought valiantly during the Indian Mutiny but was so severely affected by sunstroke that he suffered a psychotic reaction. He never spoke again. For much of the remaining thirty-seven years of his life, he was a patient in the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum.

THE CANNIBAL CLUB

In 1863, Burton and Dr. James Hunt established the Anthropological Society, through which to publish books concerning ethnological and anthropological matters. As an offshoot of the society, the Cannibal Club was a dining (and drinking) club for Burton and Hunt’s closest cohorts: Richard Monckton Milnes, Algernon Swinburne, Henry Murray, Sir Edward Brabrooke, Thomas Bendyshe, and Charles Bradlaugh.

CAPTAIN SIR RICHARD FRANCIS BURTON (1821–1890)

1860 was one of the darkest periods of Burton’s life. Having returned the previous year from his expedition to locate the source of the Nile, he was engaged in a war of words with Lieutenant John Hanning Speke, who’d accompanied him during the gruelling trek through Africa. Though the expedition was Burton’s from the outset, and Speke was the junior officer, the lieutenant returned to London ahead of Burton and laid claim to having discovered the source independent of him. Feeling sidelined and badly betrayed by a man he’d considered a friend, Burton hoped to find some happiness through marriage to Isabel Arundell. Unfortunately, her parents forbade it. With everything going wrong, Burton escaped to America and embarked on an ill-recorded and extremely drunken tour.

MICK FARREN (1943–2013)

A singer-songwriter, music journalist and science fiction author, Farren fronted the proto-punk band the Deviants. During the late sixties, he was for a brief period at the helm of the underground newspaper
International Times
and also ran a magazine called
Nasty Tales
, which he successfully defended from an obscenity charge. His essay for the
New Musical Express
, entitled “The Titanic Sails at Dawn,” is considered a seminal analysis of the state of the music industry during the mid-seventies and a clarion call for the birth of punk rock. Farren continued to write novels, poetry and songs, and to perform with the Deviants, right up until his death onstage at the Borderline Club in London on July 27, 2013.

GEORGE V (GEORGE FREDERICK ALEXANDER CHARLES ERNEST AUGUSTUS) (1819–1878)

George V, the son of Ernest Augustus I, was the last king of Hanover. His reign ended with the unification of Germany.

SIR DANIEL GOOCH (1816–1889)

Daniel Gooch was a railway engineer who worked with such luminaries as Robert Stephenson and Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He was the first chief mechanical engineer of the Great Western Railway and was later its chairman. Gooch was also involved in the laying of the first successful transatlantic telegraph cable and became the chairman of the Telegraph Construction Company. Later in life he was elected to office as a parliamentary minister. He was knighted in 1866.

THE GROSVENOR SQUARE RIOT OF 1968

On March 17, Grosvenor Square, London, was the scene of an anti–Vietnam War demonstration that quickly turned into a riot due to what many regarded as heavy-handed police tactics. It ended with eighty-six people injured and two hundred demonstrators arrested. Mick Farren was present.