“So is laudanum, but there’s no law against selling that. I don’t think I’m in the wrong.”
“Nor am I accusing you. I’m intrigued, that is all.”
“Ah, well then. What can I do?”
“Do you happen to stock extract of anise?”
“Certainly.”
“I’d like to purchase a bottle. Will you then show us the back yard?”
The decoction was handed over, and a minute later, after Burton had secured Fidget’s lead to a chair in the shop, Shudders ushered the two men out of the back door and into a small cobbled area that opened onto an alleyway leading into Poland Street. It had been swept clean of snow, though a very thin layer had formed upon it since. Red flowers crowded around its edges.
“The wagon comes right into the yard?” Burton asked.
He received an affirmation.
“Are you expecting any other deliveries beside the one from Locks?”
Shudders shook his head. “Not until next Tuesday.”
Burton gave a grunt of satisfaction. He stepped across the yard, uncorked the bottle, and started to spill the gooey liquid onto the ground, dribbling it in a wide arc just inside the gate.
Shudders, blowing on his fingertips to warm them, looked on curiously.
When the bottle was empty, Burton returned to the pharmacist. “The moment the delivery is made, will you get word to me? You know my address.”
“Very well, Sir Richard. But what—?”
“I have my methods,” Burton responded.
Shudders swallowed nervously and looked perplexed.
Swinburne grinned.
They bid the pharmacist farewell and left the shop.
Burton turned up his collar and looked at the darkening sky. “These short winter days make me long for Africa, Algy. Do you think this horrible climate is responsible for the British imperative for expansion? Is our empire built upon drizzle and chill?”
“It’s a credible proposition,” the poet replied. “At least, when held against that which suggests a tonic could send a man to witness a specific event in other histories. Great heavens, Richard! Saltzmann’s is a sauce, not a sorcerer!”
“Where that mystery is concerned, I hope we’ve just placed a key in the Lock.”
“Ouch! Balderdash for mains and the worst kind of quippery for afters!” Swinburne complained.
“On which note, I intend to work up an appetite by walking home, where I shall await word from Krishnamurthy and Bhatti. Let us see whether old Babbage has cast any light on our various mysteries.”
“If you ask me, he’s just as likely to conjure up new confusions as he is to provide answers. The man is as mad as a March hare and becoming madder by the moment.” Swinburne jerked the end of his scarf from between Fidget’s teeth and wrapped an extra loop around his neck. “I shall call upon you tomorrow morning.” He took his leave and was quickly lost from view among the milling pedestrians, though Burton could hear him screeching for a cab.
The king’s agent set off toward the end of Baker Street. The freshly lit street lamps were each forming a nimbus in the falling snow, and the hunched metal backs of street-crabs glimmered in the illumination as they clanked along the busy thoroughfare. The gutters, filled with a mulch of trodden and crushed snow and flowers, looked to be running with blood, which, together with the rapidly blackening sky and the uncannily rubicund quality of the light, gave everything a thoroughly infernal appearance.
Through it, Burton strode, his demonic features attracting disapproving and rather fearful glances from the more well-heeled passersby. To them, his gentleman’s clothes were an incongruous affectation, as if a tiger had adorned itself with lace. He glowered back, silently railing against the judgements of so-called civilised society.
His mania for exploration had been steadily increasing these past few days. Restlessness boiled within. London was a confinement, its social rituals a bore. He yearned for the fresh stimuli of exotic lands.
However, he also sensed that events were accumulating around him and fast reaching a tipping point. This unnerved him, yet he also welcomed it. If there was an enemy, he wanted it out in the open. He wanted battle to commence.
“Come on,” he whispered. “Show yourself.”
Unfamiliar horizons or an implacable foe, either would suffice to fill the absence that gnawed at his heart, anything to distract him from the fact of Isabel’s death.
He tipped his hat to Mr. Grub at the corner of Montagu Place and Gloucester Place, and a few paces later arrived home. Bram Stoker greeted him in the hallway. Burton said to him, “I have a job for you, young ’un.”
As member of the Whispering Web—a remarkable communications system comprised of the empire’s millions of orphans, ragamuffins and street Arabs—Stoker was able to send a message that, by word of mouth, would reach its destination with greater rapidity than the post office could offer. He also had access to a repository of practical knowledge that, in its field, was the equivalent to anything held in the British Library or British Museum.
“Sir?”
Burton divested himself of hat and coat.
“I need the location of a company called Locks Limited.”
“Shouldn’t take long,” the youngster said. “I’ll get the boys onto it at once.”
“Good lad.”
While Stoker slipped into his outdoor clothing, Burton went up to his study, lit its lamps, threw himself into his chair in front of the fireplace, rested his feet on the fender, lit a cheroot, and smoked.
He thought about Saltzmann’s Tincture. He’d first used it five years ago during his initial foray into Africa. More recently, it had sustained him throughout his search for the source of the Nile, keeping malaria at bay until the final days of the expedition, when he’d finally succumbed. It was only since last November that his reliance on the potion had spun out of control, with him requiring larger and larger doses to smooth his jagged emotions and blunt the sharp edge of grief. Usage had become a dependency. The dependency had become an addiction.
He sighed and massaged his forehead with his fingertips.
Idiot, Burton. Idiot.
He considered the enhanced awareness the tincture instilled—the almost overwhelming cognisance that countless possible consequences extended outward from every circumstance—and realised the liquid had endowed him with this enriched perception even before he’d been made the king’s agent, before he’d learned of the innumerable contemporaneous histories.
The correlation between the medicine’s effects and his current knowledge couldn’t be ignored.
“Mr. Shudders,” he muttered. “Are you really a straightforward pharmacist, or maybe something more?”
An hour and a half later, there came a light tap at the door and, in response to Burton’s hail, Stoker entered. Fidget padded in beside him, crossed the floor, collapsed onto the hearthrug, and started snoring.
“Hallo, young ’un,” Burton said. “Did you find any answers?”
“To be sure, sir. There’s four companies what is called Locks Limited, an’ it ain’t no surprise that two of ’ em make locks. Of t’other two, one supplies materials to the building trade, an’ one sells pianos.”
“None providing pharmaceuticals as a sideline, then?”
“It’s unlikely, so it is.”
“Thank you, lad.”
Stoker gave a nod and left the room.
Burton spent the next hour meditating. He allowed his thoughts to roam freely, dwelling for a time on this, for a while on that, following paths that trailed into nowhere, and others that led to the peripheries of an idea until, from the meanderings, the vaguest glimmer of a form emerged; the ghost of an incomplete conception.
Multiple Babbages. Multiple time suits. A single moment. A synchronous act.
On this he dwelled, neither judging nor accepting, but simply observing as one notion clicked into place beside another.