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 penny-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.