Burton sat back. “Do you remember once recommending to me the cheiromantist Countess Sabina?”
Monckton Milnes grunted an affirmation.
“These past weeks, she's been employing her talent as a seer for Palmerston. Her abilities are prodigious. She's able to catch astoundingly clear glimpses of the future—but not our future.”
His friend frowned, took a swallow from his glass then laid it aside and rubbed a hand across his cheek, accidentally smudging the red harlequin makeup that surrounded his left eye.
“Whose, then?”
“No, you misunderstand. I mean, not the future you and I and everyone else in the world will experience.”
“What other future is there?” Monckton Milnes asked in bewilderment.
Burton held his gaze, then said quietly, “This world, this time we live in, it is not as it should be.”
“Not as—You're speaking in blessed riddles, Richard!”
“Do you recall all the hysteria eighteen months or so ago when people started to see Spring Heeled Jack left, right, and centre?”
“Yes, of course.”
“It wasn't newspaper sensationalism. He was real.”
“A prankster?”
“Far from it. He was a man from the future. He travelled back from the year 2202 to 1840 to prevent his ancestor, with whom he shared the name of Edward Oxford, from shooting at Queen Victoria. His mission went terribly wrong. What should have been a botched assassination attempt succeeded thanks to his interference. It altered everything his history had recorded and, what's more, it wiped him out of his own time.”
Monckton Milnes sat motionless, his eyes widening.
“While he was trying to escape from the scene of the assassination,” Burton continued, “Oxford's strange costume, which contained the machinery that enabled him to move through time, was damaged by a young constable with whom we are both acquainted. In fact, he's here tonight.”
“Wh—who?”
“William Trounce. He was just eighteen years old. His intervention caused Oxford to be thrown back to the year 1837, where he was taken in and looked after by Henry de La Poer Beresford.”
“The Mad Marquess?”
“Yes. While in his care, Oxford dropped vague hints about the shape and nature of the future. Those hints led directly to the establishment of the Technologist and Libertine castes and their offshoots, and sent us down a road entirely divorced from that which we were meant to tread. History altered dramatically, and so did people, for they were now offered opportunities and challenges they would not have otherwise encountered.”
Monckton Milnes shook his head wonderingly. “Are—are—are you spinning one of your Arabian Night yarns?” he asked. “You're not in earnest, surely?”
“Entirely. I'm telling you the absolute truth.”
“Very well. I shall—I shall attempt to suspend my incredulity and hear you out. Pray continue.”
“Trapped in what, for him, was the distant past, Oxford began to lose his mind. He and the marquess, who himself was a near lunatic, cooked up a scheme by which Oxford might be able to reestablish his future existence by restoring his family lineage. This involved making short hops into the future to locate one of his ancestors, which he managed to do despite that his suit's mechanism was rapidly failing. One of those hops brought him to 1861. Beresford had, by this time, formed an alliance with Charles Darwin and Francis Galton. They intended to trap Oxford, steal his suit, and use it to create separate histories, moulding each one as they saw fit, manipulating us all. I had to kill them, and Oxford, to protect the world from their insane plans.”
Monckton Milnes stared at Burton in shock. His mouth worked silently, then he managed to splutter: “This—this is beyond the realms of fantasy, Richard. Everyone knows that Darwin was murdered by religious extremists!”
“False information issued by the government. You'd better take another swallow of this fine port. There's a great deal more to the tale.”
Monckton Milnes, forgetting his earlier directive to Burton, downed his drink in a single swig. He looked at the empty glass, stood up, paced over to the cabinet, and returned with the bottle.
“Go on,” he said, pouring refills.
“Countess Sabina can see far more clearly into the other history—the original one—than she can into ours, perhaps because none of the decisions we make here can have an effect there. The histories are quite different, but there is one thing common to both. There is a war coming. A terrible war that will encompass the world and decimate an entire generation of men. That is why the prime minister wants the African diamond.”
“War? My God. So what is it, this diamond? Why is it so important? What's it got to do with Spring Heeled Jack?”
“Are you familiar with the fabled Nāga?” Burton asked.
Monckton Milnes furrowed his brow. “I—yes—I believe—I believe I've come across references to them in various occult texts. Weren't they some sort of pre-human race?”
“Yes. There are carvings of them at Angkor Wat. They are portrayed as seven- or five-headed reptiles.”
“So?”
“When this planet was young, an aerolite—a huge black diamond—broke into three pieces in its atmosphere. One piece fell to Earth in what became South America, another in Africa, and the last in the Far East. The Nāga built civilisations around the impact sites. They discovered that the diamonds possessed a very special property: they could store and maintain even the most subtle of electrical fields, such as those generated by a living brain. The Nāga used them to fuse their minds, to form a sort of unified intelligence.”
“If any of that is true, how can you possibly know it?”
“That will become apparent,” Burton responded. He went on speaking in a low and urgent tone: “The human race waged war on the Nāga, and the reptiles became extinct. The diamonds were lost until, in 1796, Sir Henry Tichborne discovered one—the South American stone.”
“Tichborne!”
“Indeed. He brought it home and hid it beneath his estate. In the history that was meant to be, it remained there until just prior to the future Edward Oxford's time, when it was discovered after Tichborne House was demolished. Oxford cut small shards from it and used them in the machinery of his time suit. When he arrived in the past, those shards suddenly existed in two places at once. They were in his suit and they were also still a part of the diamond under the estate. This paradox caused a strange resonance between them, which extended even to the two as yet undiscovered Nāga diamonds. It caused them all to emit a low, almost inaudible musical drone. This led to the recovery of the Far Eastern stone, in Cambodia, which had been shattered into seven pieces when the humans conquered the Nāga many millennia ago.”
“My head is spinning,” Monckton Milnes murmured.
“Not just yours,” Burton said. “The resonance also awoke a hitherto dormant part of the human mind. It made mediumistic abilities possible. Thus Countess Sabina, and thus a Russian named Helena Blavatsky.”
“The woman they say destroyed the Rakes last year?”
“Quite so. She stole two of the Cambodian stones and used them to peer into the future.”
“Which future—ours or the other one?”
“Ours. And in that future, in the year 1914, another Russian, a clairvoyant named Grigori Rasputin, was gazing back at us.”
“Why?”
“Because he foresaw that the Great War, which was in his time raging, would lead to his assassination and the decimation of his beloved Russia. He came looking for the events that sparked off the conflict, and he found them here, in the 1860s.”
Monckton Milnes regarded his friend through slitted eyes. “Are you referring to our role in the American hostilities?”
“No. The world war will pitch us against united German states, so I'm of the opinion that the recent Eugenicist exodus to Prussia, which was led by the botanist Richard Spruce and my former partner John Speke, might be the spark that lights the flame.”