Burton the observer and Burton the observed.
Burton the living and Burton the dying.
No! No! Allah! Allah! He’s killing me! Oxford is breaking my back!
To hell with it.
Defiance.
He and Isabel eloped.
He prepared a devastating critique of John Speke’s claims.
Torture. His nerves afire, his vertebrae cracking, and Oxford’s clanging voice like the chimes of passing time, the tolling bell of implacable history, of relentless fate: “Thou shalt be reduced by flame to nothing.”
Burton watched as Grindlays Warehouse, where he stored his every memento, his every page of research, his journals and his notes, was consumed by fire. He was forty years old, and every recorded moment of his life prior to his marriage was turned to ash.
Now he had nothing but Isabel.
They were separated. He was made consul of Fernando Po, a tiny island off the west coast of Africa, and couldn’t take her with him. He spent the first year of his marriage alone.
I’m going to die.
It was a white man’s graveyard. No European could survive its rancid atmosphere, its infested water, or its torpid humidity. No European but Burton.
A further setback. In accepting the post, he’d inadvertently resigned from the Army and lost his pension.
Loss, loss, nothing but loss.
Anger. Isolation. Despair.
During his forays into the hotly dripping jungles of the mainland, he lashed out at everything he perceived as rotten and despicable in the human race. He railed at the natives, but really it was his own people who disgusted and disappointed him.
He returned to London, to Isabel, and to a final showdown with Speke.
Speke killed himself the day before the confrontation. Victory denied. Justice denied. Absolution denied. Satisfaction denied.
Is this how I die? Being dismantled piece by piece? Save me! Oh God, save me!
He was given the consulship at Santos, Brazil. Isabel joined him there. He could find no more mysteries to solve or secrets to penetrate, so wandered aimlessly, prospecting for gold, as if searching for something to value.
Patiently, Isabel waited.
A new post. Damascus. Allah be praised! How they both loved Damascus!
However, misjudgements, plots, accusations and threats soon soured their taste for the city and blackened even further Burton’s already bad reputation. He was recalled by the government and given, instead, the consulship of Trieste. It sidelined him, kept him out of the way, and in effect castrated him.
Bad health slowed him down. He threw himself into his writing, became ever more dependent on Isabel, and finally realised the depth of his love for her. They did everything together.
At last, she had him.
He found a new way to expose the hidden. He translated the forbidden: the Ananga Ranga; The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana; The Perfumed Garden of the Cheikh Nefzaoui; and, his triumph, an unexpurgated edition of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night. The books shocked his contemporaries with their explicitness but brought him further fame, notoriety, and finally, a grudging respect.
He was awarded a knighthood.
I’m already knighted.
He was content.
He wrote and wrote, and with every word he inscribed, he felt himself age, as if the ink that flowed from his pen was vitality draining from his body. His legs weakened. His hips hurt. His skin grew grey and wrinkled. His teeth fell out. His eyesight began to fail. His hair whitened. His heart struggled. His back creaked as the bones of his spine crumbled.
He began work on The Scented Garden, a book he hoped would shake the constrained and stifling morals of the British Empire to its roots; a book that would offer incontrovertible evidence that all cultures were an artifice that overlaid and suppressed the true nature of humanity.
It was his magnum opus.
At the age of sixty-nine, the day after finishing the manuscript, his heart failed. He cried out to Isabel, “Chloroform—ether—or I am a dead man!” The tinkle of camel bells filled his ears. The white sky of the desert spread over him like a shroud.
No! No! I cannot die! I cannot die!
White. White.
“Bismillah!” he shrieked. “Please! It’s all wrong! All wrong!”
Oxford’s metal hands were unremitting, the pressure on Burton’s spine tremendous, the pain far beyond the explorer’s comprehension. Chronostatic energy burned through his skull.
Now he was outside himself, watching as the remnants of his presence faded from existence like a dying echo.
Fire.
Grindlays Warehouse all over again, except this time it was Isabel, burning his every paper, his every journal, The Scented Garden.
The only thing he’d been proud to leave behind; the only thing that, after his demise, would have declared in uncompromising terms, “This is who I was. This is the essence of Sir Richard Francis Burton. By means of this, I will live through history.” That thing, Isabel turned to ash.
It was the ultimate betrayal.
No. No. No. Isabel! Why? Why?
He howled his anguish.
I cannot die! I cannot die!
Oxford’s insane laughter echoed through the domed chamber.
Swinburne screeched his terror.
Burton’s spine snapped.
Oxford stood, lifting the king’s agent like a limp rag doll, holding him face to face.
Through a fog of unutterable torment, through tunnelled vision, Burton saw himself reflected in Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s death mask. He saw that his hair was sparse and white, his fractured face was sagging and lined, his life force was spent. He had become a broken old man. Oxford had sucked the life history out of him.
With his five hands, Oxford turned him so that he hung before Swinburne. The brass man hugged Burton close to himself and stalked forward, his feet thumping on the tiled floor. With one hand, he pressed Burton’s head close to his own.
“See us together, little poet,” he chimed. “The one has made the other. Death has danced around us while we’ve duelled upon the battlefield of history. I am victorious. Death is Time’s tool, but I rule Time. I have snatched the scythe from his grisly hands. Now I apply its blade to your friend. Look upon my unchanging face and see beside it the decrepit features of he who was Burton. One gains all. The other loses everything.”
Swinburne moaned despairingly. With a shaking hand, he aimed his pistol. Tears flooded down his cheeks.
“Before I kill you,” Oxford said to him, “look into this old man’s eyes. Watch the life leave him. Know that what is lost can never return.” He crushed Burton’s broken cheek into his own, a grotesque mockery of affection. “But know, too, that I can revisit any moment of his short span and there torture him. The one life he has to live can be made ever more dreadful, in every history, until he shall scream without surcease from the moment of his birth to the moment of his demise.”
From the chest down, Burton was paralysed. Blood oozed from his face and stained his clothes.
Isabel. You betrayed me.
Weakly, he held out an aged, gnarled hand and examined in wonder its raised veins and transparent, liver-spotted skin. The targeting light from Swinburne’s pistol skittered across it.
Old. Dead. Forgotten.
He felt the cool of Oxford’s face upon his right cheek, the pressure of the brass man’s hand upon the left.
The world started to slip away.
With his last vestiges of life, Burton looked straight at Swinburne, dropped his hand to his chest, and placed his forefinger over his heart. He silently mouthed his final words. “The diamonds, Algy.”