“Gone. They’ve taken her.”
Oxford bellowed a deafening cry of rage. The barrels of his Gatling gun whirled and spat flame. Beresford was thrown back into the doors and out into the corridor, leaving a smear of blood on the tiles.
Burton looked down at himself and saw a red dot of light crawling over his torso, passing over Oxford’s brass plating—Swinburne, circling, trying to find a target, knowing only an exploding bullet would have any effect, knowing it would kill Burton, too.
The crushing arms closed like a vice. Fingers dug into the flesh of Burton’s limbs, turning him until he faced Brunel’s dispassionate mask.
“I’ll break you,” Oxford said.
The king’s agent screamed in agony as his right arm was forced back and his elbow snapped with an audible crunch.
“Where is she?” Oxford demanded. “What have you done with her?”
Blinded by the pain, Burton hissed, “She’s—she’s safe. Gone. You’ll never see her again, you insane bastard.”
Oxford emitted a clangour of rage. He dropped to one knee and forced his captive backward over his thigh, bending Burton’s spine to its limit. The torment was beyond anything the king’s agent had ever experienced. It obliterated every other sense.
White.
Excruciating white.
A transcendental anguish.
From far away, a voice: “You object to the history I’ve created? Let’s see how you feel about your history. Let’s see what it would have been had I changed nothing.”
He slammed a hand into Burton’s face and closed his fingers hard. Cheekbones fractured, the jaw dislocated, teeth broke. Blue fire erupted from Oxford’s digits and drilled into Burton’s skull.
White. White. White.
Fragmentation.
Pain.
Decisions unmade.
Pain.
Successes and failures dismantled.
Pain.
Characteristics disengaged.
Pain.
Cohesion lost.
Pain.
Something of Burton observed and wailed and grieved as it watched itself forcibly shredded into ever-smaller components.
Reconstitution.
Pain.
Boulogne seafront emerged from unendurable torment. Two young women came walking and giggling along it, arm in arm, moving toward him. He recognised the scene at once. This was the moment he’d first met Isabel Arundell and her sister, Blanche.
He tried to call out to them but had no control over himself. His body did what it had done that day back in the summer of 1851. It even thought the same thoughts. He was nothing but a passenger.
As they passed him, Isabel—tall and golden-haired—glanced over. Burton felt a thrill run through him. He gave a small smile. She blushed and looked away.
He walked to a wall, took a stub of chalk from his pocket, and wrote upon the brickwork, May I speak to you?
He waited for her to look back and, when she did, tapped his fingers on the message before strolling away along the promenade.
The whiteness returned.
My back is breaking. My back is breaking.
Suddenly it was the next day, and beneath his words, others had been added. No. Mother will be angry.
Time always finds a way.
Instances of overwhelming suffering separated disjointed scenes as Burton encountered Isabel again and again among Boulogne’s socialites. Then she was suddenly left behind, and he was no longer Richard Francis Burton. He was Abdullah, a darwaysh, embarking on a gruelling hajj to Mecca. A whole year as another man, subsumed into a character so convincing that it fooled even the pilgrims who travelled at his side.
The master of disguise felt the hot shamal blowing on his face. The desert stretched from horizon to horizon. Space. Freedom. He looked down at the sand and saw a scarab beetle rolling a ball of dung.
The beetle. That is the answer to it all. Life creates reality and rotates it through cycle after cycle.
He turned his sun-baked face to the sky and was blinded by its white glare.
White.
What is happening to me? Why am I back in Arabia?
He blinked his watering eyes and saw the low hills of Berbera, on the coast of Africa, east of forbidden Harar.
The Royal Geographical Society had given him its backing. He’d organised an expedition, recruiting William Stroyan of the Indian Navy, Lieutenant George Herne of the 1st Bombay European Regiment of Fusiliers, and Lieutenant John Hanning Speke of the 46th Regiment of Bengal Native Infantry.
The mania for discovery was upon him.
All that is hidden, I shall expose.
They’d landed at Berbera and set up camp.
They were attacked.
Burton watched and waited for Speke to die.
“Arm to defend the camp!” he yelled, as tribesmen descended upon them.
Spears flew. Scimitars slashed. Men screamed.
He looked over his shoulder just as Speke, emerging from a tent, was hit in the knee by a thrown rock. The lieutenant flinched. Burton heard himself shout, “Don’t step back! They’ll think that we’re retiring!”
This is the moment Speke propels himself in front of Stroyan and takes a spear to the heart. The moment he dies a hero’s death.
It didn’t happen.
Confused, he realised that Stroyan was on the ground behind the tents, dead.
No! It was Speke! It was Speke! He died just before—
A javelin slid through one side of his face and out the other, splitting his pallet and knocking out three of his molars. Suffering enveloped him. He felt his back breaking, his skin burning, his skull cracking.
Pain.
He had no idea why, but he thought, I’ll not be stopped.
The Crimean War. He was there, but it was over before he saw any action. Disappointed, he sailed for London and upon arrival mingled with men of influence: Sir Roderick Murchison, Francis Galton—but Galton is a madman!—Laurence Oliphant—Murderer! Stroyan didn’t die in Africa. You killed him, Oliphant! You!
Nothing felt right.
He met Isabel again. Secretly, they got engaged. Almost immediately, he left her and, with John Speke, set sail for Africa.
No! I flew to Africa aboard the Orpheus. Stroyan, Herne, Sadhvi and I discovered the source of the Nile. Speke is dead. Speke is dead.
He felt terror. He didn’t want to see this Burton’s life. He could sense horror lurking at its end.
He was helpless, forced along an unfamiliar path, spending two exhausting, disease-ridden years with a man who, increasingly, came to resent him.
“Don’t step back! They’ll think that we’re retiring!”
Those words, taken by Speke as a slight, as an accusation of cowardice, fuelled a seething hatred.
The two explorers located and mapped Lake Tanganyika. Burton was immobilised by fever. Speke left him and discovered another lake—one so large it might almost be considered an inland sea. Upon his return, he claimed it to be, for certain, the source of the Nile.
“Show me your evidence,” Burton said.
Speke had none.
Their relationship broke down. During the return journey to Zanzibar, barely a word was exchanged between them. Speke departed immediately for London. En route, he was persuaded by Oliphant to claim full credit for the expedition’s achievements. Burton, after recovering from malaria, followed, only to find himself sidelined.
He turned to Isabel for comfort.
Her parents forbid their marriage. Burton was neither Catholic nor respectable.
Everything was going wrong.
It is wrong! It didn’t happen this way!
Bitterly disappointed, angry and depressed, he embarked on a drunken tour of America with his friend John Steinhaueser. He lost track of himself; hardly knew who he was anymore. Ever since the fevers of Africa, he’d felt himself divided, two Burtons, forever disagreeing.