Two weeks passed.
Burton worked on an expanded edition of his book The Lake Regions of Central Africa.
He slowly regained his strength. His long-suffering housekeeper, Mrs. Iris Angell, cooked him magnificent meals and despaired when he sent them back barely touched. His appetite had always been slight, but now-as she told him every single morning and every single evening-he needed sustenance.
She underestimated his iron constitution.
Little by little, the gaunt hollows beneath his scarred cheekbones filled out; the dark shadows around his eyes faded; his hands steadied.
Algernon Swinburne, now living back in his own apartment on Grafton Street, Fitzroy Square, was a frequent visitor and observed with satisfaction the normal swarthiness returning to his friend's jaundiced countenance.
Burton eventually got around to writing a report detailing his confrontation with Sir Charles Babbage. He held nothing back.
Rolling the document, he placed it in a canister, which he slotted into an odd-looking copper and glass contraption on his desk. He dialed the number 222 and pressed a button. There came a gasp, a plume of steam, a rattle, and the canister shot away down a tube, en route to the prime minister's office.
He was just settling in his armchair and reaching for a cigar when there came a knock and Mrs. Angell entered.
“There's a Countess Sabina to see you, sir.”
“Is there, by James!? Send her up, please!”
“Should I chaperone?”
“There's no need, Mrs. Angell. The countess and I are acquainted.”
Moments later, a woman stepped into the study. She was tall and may once have possessed an angular beauty, but now looked careworn; her face was lined, her chestnut hair shot through with grey, her fingernails bitten and unpainted. Her eyes, though, were extraordinary-large, slightly slanted, and of the darkest brown.
She was London's foremost cheiromantist and prognosticator, and had given Burton much to think about during the Spring Heeled Jack case.
“Countess!” he exclaimed. “This is an unexpected pleasure! Please sit down. Can I get you anything?”
“Just water, please, Captain Burton,” she answered, in a musical, slightly accented voice.
He crossed to the bureau and poured her a glass while she sat and patted down her black crinoline skirt and straightened her bonnet.
“I'm sorry to intrude,” she said as he handed her the drink and sat opposite. “My goodness, you look ill!”
“Recovering, Countess, and I assure you, your visit is very welcome and no intrusion at all. Can I be of some service?”
“Yes-no-yes-I don't know-maybe the other way around. I-I have been having visions, Captain.”
“And they concern me in some way?”
She nodded and took a sip of water. “When you came to me last year,” she continued, “I saw that you had embarked upon a course never meant for you, yet one that would lead to greater contentment.”
“I remember. You said that for me the wrong path is the right path.”
“Yes. But in recent days, I have been increasingly aware of the alternative, Captain, by which I mean the original path. Not just yours, but that which we were all destined to tread until the stilt-man drove us from it.”
“Edward Oxford. He was a meddler with time.”
“With time,” she echoed, softly. Her eyes seemed to be focused on the far distance. “I'm sorry,” she whispered. “I had intended to talk to you first but it is overwhelming me. I cannot stop it. I have to-I have to-”
Burton lunged forward and caught the glass as it dropped from her loose fingers. Her eyes rolled up into her head and she began to rock slightly in her chair. She started to speak in a voice that sounded weirdly different from her own, as if she was far away and talking to him through a length of pipe.
“I will speak. I will speak. It is all wrong. No one is as they should be. Nothing is as intended. The storm will break early and you shall witness the end of a great cycle and the horrifying birth pains of another; the past and the future locked together in a terrible conflict.”
A coldness gripped Burton.
“Beware, Captain, for a finger of the storm reaches back to touch you. There are layers upon layers, one deception concealing another-and that one but a veil over yet another. Do not believe what you see. The little ones are not as they appear. The puppeteer is herself a puppet and the sorcerer is not yet born. The dead shall believe themselves living.”
Her head fell back and a horribly tormented groan escaped her.
“No,” she whispered. “No. No. No. I can hear the song but it should not be sung! It should not be sung! The stilt-man broke the silence of the ages and the sorcerer hears; and the puppeteer hears; and the dead hear; and, oh, God help me-” her voice suddenly rose to a shriek “-I hear, too! I hear, too!”
She clapped her hands to her ears, arched her back, thrashed in her seat, and slumped into a dead faint.
“My God!” Burton gasped. He took her by the shoulders and straightened her; pushed his handkerchief into the glass of water and folded it over her brow; went to a drawer and retrieved a bottle of smelling salts. Moments later she was blinking and coughing.
He poured her a small brandy. “Here, take this.”
She gulped it, spluttered, breathed heavily, and slowly calmed.
“My apologies. Did I fall into a trance?”
“You did.”
“I suspected something of the sort might happen, though I hoped I might have more control over it. For two weeks I've felt the urge to see you, to transmit a message to you, but I did not know what it was, so I didn't come.”
Burton repeated what she had told him.
“Do you know what it means?” he asked.
“I never know. When I'm spellbound, I'm unaware of what I say, and it seldom makes sense to me afterward.”
Burton gazed at her thoughtfully. “Is there something else, Countess? Even though the message has been delivered, you seem uneasy.”
The prognosticator suddenly stood and paced back and forth, wringing her gloved hands.
“It's-it's-it's that I can't trust that the message is valid, Captain.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because-I know it sounds strange-but this, what I do, my ability to glimpse not only the future, but futures -plural-should not be possible!”
“I'm not sure I understand what you mean. You have a reputation for accuracy and I've seen it demonstrated. Plainly, it is not only possible but also actual.”
“Yes, and that's the problem! Prognostication, cheiromancy, spiritualism-these things are spoken of in the other history, but they do not work there, and those who claim such powers are regarded as nothing but charlatans and swindlers.”
Burton got to his feet, took his visitor by the upper arms, and turned her to face him.
“Countess, you and I are privy to a fact that very, very few people know: namely, that the natural course of time has been interfered with. The history we are living is different from what would otherwise have been. People are being exposed to opportunities and challenges they perhaps should not experience, and it is changing them entirely. Future mechanisms, hinted at in conversations between Edward Oxford's companion, Henry Beresford, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, are being developed according to current knowledge, giving us a glut of contraptions that, in all probability, should never have existed at all. Yet, amid all this chaos and confusion, there is one thing we can be certain of: changing time cannot possibly alter natural laws. I don't know whether spiritualist powers belong to the science of physics or to the science of biology; I know only that they are real. You are the living evidence.”
Countess Sabina's eyes met his, and in them he saw utter conviction as she said: “And yet, in the world that should have been, they are not real. They are not real. Somehow, Captain Burton, I feel this is the key!”
“The key to what?”