The king's agent didn't reply. He gazed dispassionately at his visitor's face.
Palmerston's most recent treatments had made his nose almost entirely flat. The nostrils were horizontal slits, as wide as the gash-like mouth beneath. A dimple had been added to the centre of his chin. His eyebrows were painted on, high above the oriental-looking eyes.
“You'll be pleased to hear, Captain, that not only do I fully endorse your recommendations, but I have acted upon them even in the face of virulent opposition led by no less than Disraeli himself,” he announced.
Burton looked puzzled. “My recommendations, Prime Minister?”
“Yes. Your reports confirmed my every suspicion concerning Bismarck's intentions. Obviously, we cannot allow him to gain a foothold in East Africa, so British troops have already been conveyed there by rotorship, and I have more on the way. It's by no means a declaration of war on my part, but I do intend that they offer resistance to any efforts made by Prussia to claim territories.”
Burton's fingers dug into the bedsheets beneath him. “My-my reports?” he whispered hoarsely.
“As delivered to us by Commander Krishnamurthy. A very courageous young man, Burton. He will be given due honours, of that you can be certain. And I look forward to receiving the remainder of your observations-those made between Kazeh and the Mountains of the Moon. Do you have them here?”
“N-no,” Burton stammered. “I'll-I'll see that they're delivered to you.” He thought: Bismillah! Krishnamurthy!
“Post-haste, please, Captain.”
Burton struggled for words. “I–I wrote those reports before I had-before I had properly assessed the situation, Prime Minister. You have to-to withdraw our forces at once. Their presence in Africa will escalate hostilities between the British Empire and Prussia to an unprecedented degree.”
“What? Surely you don't expect me to allow Bismarck free rein?”
“You have to, sir.”
“Have to? Why?”
“Your actions will-will precipitate the Great War, the one that Countess Sabina has predicted.”
Palmerston shook his head. “The countess is working with us to prevent exactly that. She and a team of mediums have already employed the Naga diamonds to great effect.” He pointed at Burton's newspaper. “No doubt you've read that a second Schleswig conflict has broken out between Prussia, Austria, and Denmark. We precipitated that, my dear fellow, by means of undetected mediumistic manipulations. I intend to tangle Bismarck up in so many minor difficulties that he'll never have the strength to challenge us in Africa, let alone establish his united Germany!”
Burton squeezed his eyes shut and raised his hands to his head in frustration. It was too late. The circumstances that would lead to all-out war had already been set into motion!
He thought rapidly. Now he understood the 130-year-old Palmerston's claim that he-Burton-had never revealed his visit to the future. The king's agent knew the way the prime minister's mind worked. Having already outmanoeuvred Benjamin Disraeli-a formidable political force-to get his way, Palmerston wouldn't under any circumstances backtrack, not even on his own advice! So what would he do instead? The answer was obvious: the prime minister would attempt to outguess his future self by ordering a preemptive strike; he'd throw every resource he could muster into defeating Bismarck before Prussia could properly mobilise its military might; and in doing that, in Burton's opinion, he was much more likely to incite the war at an earlier date than to prevent it.
Burton felt ensnared by inevitability.
“What's the matter?” Palmerston asked. “Should I call a nurse?”
The explorer took his hands from his head, feeling the ridges of his tattoo sliding beneath his fingertips.
“No, Prime Minister. I have a headache, that's all.”
“Then I won't disturb you any further, Captain.” Palmerston picked up his coat, shrugged it back on, took up his top hat, and said: “We've blown hot and cold, you and I, but I want you to know that I have renewed faith in you. You've done a splendid job. Absolutely splendid! Thanks to your actions, the Empire is secured.”
He turned and departed.
Burton sat and stared into space.
A week later he was released from hospital and returned to his home at 14 Montagu Place.
Mrs. Angell, his housekeeper, was horrified at his appearance. He looked, she said, as if he'd just been dug out of an Egyptian tomb.
“You'll eat, Sir Richard!” she pronounced, and embarked on a culinary mission to restore his health. She also cleaned around him obsessively, as if the slightest speck of dust might cause his final ruination.
He put up with it stoically, too weak to resist, though there was one item he wouldn't allow her-or the maid, Elsie Carpenter-to touch, let alone dust: the rifle that leaned against the fireplace by his saddlebag armchair.
It was an anomaly, that weapon, and the image of it arose again and again in his Sufi meditations, though he couldn't fathom why.
A few days after his homecoming, a parakeet arrived at his study window. “Message from thick-witted Richard Monckton Milnes, otherwise known as Baron hairy-palmed Houghton. Message begins. I will call at three o'clock, bum-slapper. Message ends.”
The new 1st Baron Houghton arrived on time and found Burton wrapped in his jubbahand slumped in his armchair beside the fireplace, with a cheroot in his mouth, a glass of port in his hand, and Fidget the basset hound stretched out at his feet. Whatever greeting Monckton Milnes had planned died on his lips at the sight of the explorer. He stood in the doorway of the study, his mouth hanging open.
Burton removed his Manila, set down his glass, and gave a half-grin. “What you see is the much-recovered model,” he said, rising to his feet. He crossed to his friend and shook his hand. “You should have seen the state of me before! Hang up your coat, old man, and take a seat. Congratulations on your peerage. Would you prefer me to bow or pour you a drink?”
“Hell's bells, Richard! You look twenty years older!”
“I'm four years older. No, five, counting the year since you last saw me, the rest is down to the vicissitudes of Africa.”
His visitor sat down and accepted a glass of port.
“By heavens, it's good to see you again. But five years? What are you talking about?”
“It will require a suspension of disbelief on your part.”
“A little over a year ago you told me that Spring Heeled Jack was a man from the future and that history had been changed. Is what you have to tell me more incredible even that that?”
“As a matter of fact, yes, it is.”
“Ouch! Very well, fire away. You talk and I'll drink.”
Over the course of the next two hours, Burton told his friend everything that had happened in Africa, and he withheld nothing.
A long silence followed as Monckton Milnes digested the tale, along with the copious amount of port he'd gulped.
Burton showed him the rifle and pointed out the inscription on its stock: Lee-Enfield Mk III. Manufactured in Tabora, Africa, 1918.
“You have to change history,” his guest said softly.
“That's the problem,” Burton replied. “To do so I have to outmanoeuvre myself, as well as Palmerston.”
“And if you succeed,” Monckton Milnes interjected, “if you create yet another branch of history, you'll just be adding to the chaos poor Algernon warned of.”
Burton sucked at his cigar. “Not so much poorAlgernon. He seemed very content with his new form. But yes, you're correct. He told me to put an end to all the divergences, despite that doing so would wipe out the history in which he currently resides. How, though, am I to do that?”
He looked down at the rifle that lay across his legs. “How am I to do that?”
Quite without warning or obvious reason, the last words Burton had ever heard Detective Inspector Honesty speak leaped into his mind with such clarity they might have been muttered into his ear: “Needs pruning, hard against the stem.”
Monckton Milnes, as Burton had requested, had spent the past year surreptitiously monitoring the prime minister. He reported that Palmerston had secretly quadrupled military spending, had reshuffled his cabinet so that it contained the most martial of his party's ministers, and was steadfastly refusing to make a decision regarding British America's slave population.