“But you look and sound just like the prime minister,” Tweedy protested.
“I know. I’m not particularly thrilled about it. Marquess, what is the situation with regards to the mobilisation of our troops?”
“Our forces are awaiting orders from the Minister of War, Death and Destruction, who, might I remind you, recently experienced a violent demise. You will have to appoint a successor.”
“I’ll do no such thing. The war is cancelled.”
“Hurrah!” Swinburne cheered. “Hooray and yahoo!” He held up a bottle. “Vintage brandy!”
Burton said to the marquess, “Will you convey a message to your fellow ministers?”
“If you wish,” she answered. “Or to those that survived, anyway. Quite a few didn’t get out in time.”
“Tell them that Parliament is suspended and all ministers are relieved of their duties. The people will fashion a new form of government in due course.”
She widened her eyes and put a hand to her mouth. “What people?”
“You call them Lowlies.”
She laughed. “But they’re little more than animals!”
“Do as I say.”
Gladys Tweedy swallowed, stuck out her bottom lip, put her hands on her hips, and stamped out of the room, pushing past William Trounce as he entered.
“By Jove! She looks annoyed! Have you—” He saw Burton and quickly drew his pistol.
“Steady, Pouncer!” Swinburne shrilled. “It’s Richard.”
“Richard?” Uncertainly, Trounce lowered his gun. “You mean—it—he’s in—it worked? By Jove!”
“Why don’t you stop ‘by Joving’ and have a tipple?” the poet suggested. He poured three drinks, met his companions in the middle of the room, handed a glass to Trounce, and held another out to Burton. He blinked and said, “Oops! Oh crikey. You poor thing.”
A wave of grief hit the king’s agent.
I can’t taste. There’s no physical sensation. I’m dead.
He pushed the emotion aside: something else to be dealt with later.
“Oh well,” Swinburne muttered. He looked down at the drinks. “One for each hand.”
Burton noticed, at the other end of the chamber, French doors, and beyond them, a balcony. He strode over, followed by Swinburne and Trounce, and pulled them open. Their handles snapped off in his hands.
“Damn!” he exclaimed. “I have to familiarise myself with this body. It’s fiendishly strong.”
“By my Aunt Penelope’s plentiful petticoats!” Swinburne cried out. “Close the doors. It’s freezing.”
“In a moment,” Burton said. He stepped out onto the balcony, into twelve-inch-deep scarlet snow.
Swinburne gulped one of his brandies, ran to the side of the room, and tore a couple of tapestries down from the wall. He wrapped one around himself and handed the other to Trounce, who did likewise. They joined Burton. The air at this altitude was thin but breathable.
They looked out over London.
Under a clear afternoon sky, the city sprawled, blanketed in red.
“I was born here,” Trounce said. “But it doesn’t feel like home. I miss the hustle and bustle of the nineteenth century. I even miss the smells.”
“It’s all down there,” Burton noted. “Under the ground, waiting to be liberated.”
“Humph! It is, but that hustle and bustle isn’t my hustle and bustle.”
“I miss Verbena Lodge,” Swinburne said. “Twenty-third-century bordellos are absolutely hopeless. They have no understanding of the lash.”
Burton asked, “Will you both come back to 1860?”
The question was met by a prolonged silence.
The poet broke it. “I don’t know whether I can. I feel I have an obligation to fulfill.”
“Likewise,” Trounce said. “There’s much work to be done here, Richard. I fear I may never be reunited with my bowler or with Scotland Yard.” He paused. “You’ll go?”
“I have to. My brother will expect from me a full account of what has occurred here.”
“And after that, what? Will you masquerade as Brunel?”
“I hardly know one end of a spanner from another.” Burton leaned on the balcony’s parapet then suddenly remembered his great weight and stepped back, afraid that it might give way beneath him. “I require time to adapt to this body before I return. Once I’m there—well, I’ll see what happens.”
Swinburne bent and scooped up a handful of snow. He examined it. “The seeds are sending out roots. The jungle is obviously up to something. I wonder what?”
Burton’s neck buzzed as he turned his head to look down at his friend. “It’s you.”
“But I never know what I’m going to do next, even in human form.”
Burton snorted. It sounded like the clash of a cymbal. “I can’t imagine how it feels to know you’re a vegetable.”
“Probably not much different to the awareness that you’re an accumulation of cogwheels and springs. My hat, Richard! Animal, vegetable and mineral. What are we all becoming?”
Burton looked toward the tower-forested horizon.
“Time will tell, Algy. Time will tell.”
ISABEL ARUNDELL (1831–1896)
Isabel and Richard Francis Burton met in 1851 and, after a ten-year courtship, married in 1861. Marriage brought a change of fortune for Burton, seeing him more or less abandon exploration in favour of writing and the translating of forbidden literature of anthropological interest. Notoriously, upon his death in 1890, Isabel burned her husband’s papers, journals and unfinished work. She also consigned to the flames his translation of The Scented Garden, which he considered his magnum opus, and which he’d finished just the day before his demise.
ERNEST AUGUSTUS I (1771–1851)
Ernest Augustus I was the son of George III. When his niece, Victoria, became queen of the United Kingdom in 1837, Ernest was made king of Hanover, which ended the union between Britain and Hanover that had begun in 1714. Had Victoria been assassinated, Ernest would have been a prime candidate to replace her as the United Kingdom’s monarch. With rumours of murder and incest attached to Ernest’s name, this would not have been a popular choice.
CHARLES BABBAGE (1791–1871)
Mathematician, inventor, philosopher and engineer, Charles Babbage is considered the father of modern computers. He created steam-powered devices that were the first to demonstrate that calculations could be mechanised. However, his most complex creations, the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine, were not completed in his lifetime due to funding and personality problems. By 1860, he was becoming increasingly eccentric, obsessive and irascible, directing his ire in particular at street musicians, commoners, and children’s hoops.
BATTERSEA POWER STATION
The station was neither designed nor built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and did not exist during the Victorian Age. Actually comprised of two stations, it was first proposed in 1927 by the London Power Company. Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (who created the iconic red telephone box) designed the building’s exterior. The first station was constructed between 1929 and 1933. The second station, a mirror image of the first, was built between 1953 and 1955. Considered a London landmark, both stations are still standing but are derelict.
JAMES BRUCE, EIGHTH EARL OF ELGIN (1811–1863)
Lord Elgin, orator, humanist, and administrator, was the British governor-general of Canada and later served diplomatic posts in China, Japan, and India. He did not say, “Talk, talk, talk, and while you are talking, the Chinese are exacting yet another tax, . . .”
ISAMBARD KINGDOM BRUNEL (1806–1859)
The British Empire’s most celebrated civil and mechanical engineer, Brunel designed and built dockyards, railway systems, steamships, bridges and tunnels. A very heavy smoker, in 1859 he suffered a stroke and died, at just fifty-nine years old.