Burton didn’t reply.
Oliphant. He had to see Oliphant.
“To secure Damascus for us, I have to first undertake a task for the government. It is a highly confidential matter—I cannot tell even you what it involves, Isabel—and I’m afraid I must ask you to refrain from visiting. I may not be able to see you again until the first of November.”
Burton, Isabel, and Blanche were in the St. James Hotel tea room for Saturday afternoon refreshments. They’d secured an isolated corner table, but, even so, Isabel’s reaction—a quavering cry of, “Seven weeks, Dick?”—drew disapproving stares and a tut or two from the other patrons. Heedlessly, she continued, “After being parted for so long, we must be separated again? This is unendurable!”
He placed his hand over hers. “Lower your voice. The king himself has promised the consulship on this one condition. I’m confident I can complete the assignment by November, if not before. We’ve waited for so long, we can manage another few weeks, can’t we?”
“But what is the nature of this business? Why must it prevent me from visiting?”
Burton hesitated. He wasn’t certain why he was warning his fiancée away. Perhaps the suspicion that Montague Penniforth was keeping an eye on him? Or the feeling that, somehow, inexplicably, he was at the centre of the curious events that had occurred since his return?
He gave her hand a gentle squeeze.
“I once told you how I was employed by Sir Charles Napier in India—”
Blanche interrupted with a gasp and exclaimed, “How exciting! You’re a secret agent again, Richard!”
“Well, I wouldn’t go as far as to say—”
“No!” Isabel snapped. “I’ll not have that! Last time, it ruined your reputation. You’ll not risk everything you’ve achieved since.”
Burton shook his head placatingly. “This is not at all the same sort of thing.”
“Then what?”
Blanche gave a huff of disapproval. “Really, sister! If Richard has been ordered to keep his lips sealed by the king himself then you have no right to subject him to an inquisition.”
“I have every right! I’m to be his wife!”
Burton’s eyes hardened. “In all truthfulness,” he said, “if I tell you more, I will be committing treason. Where then my reputation?”
A tear trickled down Isabel’s cheek. She pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve, covered her eyes, and emitted a quiet sob.
“Please,” Burton said. “Don’t take on so. Consider that, with this one thing, Damascus is assured, and once we have that, we shall never be parted again.”
Blanche added, “Remember how much we have to organise, Isabel. Why, we’ll be so occupied, the days will fly by.”
Burton gave her a small nod of gratitude.
Isabel dried her face. With downcast eyes, she said, in a hoarse whisper, “We should go up to our room now, Blanche. We have to pack our things.”
“You’re leaving in the morning?” Burton asked.
“Yes.”
He stood and moved her chair out of the way as she rose and arranged her crinolines.
She raised her watery eyes to his.
“This commission you’ve been given—is there any danger associated with it?”
“Not as far as I can see,” he answered. “It’s a complex matter and I don’t currently know how I should proceed with it, but one way or the other I’ll get the thing done, and will do so as quickly as possible.” He leaned forward and pecked her cheek. “We are nearly there, darling.”
She smiled, though the tears were still welling. “I have waited, Dick, and I shall continue to wait. I have faith in God that He will make things right.”
“Have faith in God, by all means, but have faith in me, too.”
“I do.”
With that, the Arundell sisters took their leave of him, carefully steered their wide skirts past the tables, and disappeared into the hotel. He watched them go and his heart sank. It dawned on him that everything he’d intended had skewed off-course and plunged into an impenetrable fog.
“O, that a man might know,” he muttered, “the end of this day’s business ere it come!”
It took until Monday to get the authorization for entry into Bedlam. Saturday and Sunday paralysed him with interminable emptiness. He found himself unable to work, research, or do anything else useful.
“Rest!” Mrs. Angell insisted. “Eat! Get some colour back into your cheeks. I don’t know what you’re up to, but you’re driving yourself too hard, that much is plain to see.”
He didn’t rest. He paced. One thousand, nine hundred, ten, and eight were etched into the front of his mind. He couldn’t stop fretting over them. He scribbled them down again and again.
One thousand. Nine hundred. Ten. Eight.
One thousand, nine hundred, and eighteen.
They connected Stroyan’s murder with The Assassination. They cut a swathe through time and unfathomable events to tie Queen Victoria’s death, the recognition of the Great Amnesia, the advent of Abdu El Yezdi, and the beginning of the New Renaissance to what he himself had witnessed on the Orpheus; him, Burton, who two people claimed—impossibly!—to have seen on that terrible day in 1840.
But how were the numbers connected—if they were at all—to the abductions? Was Burton looking at a jumble of disparate events or was there a pattern in there somewhere?
He didn’t know—and if there was one thing he despised, it was not knowing.
The governmental papers arrived in the week’s first post. Sir Richard Francis Burton was now, officially, a medical inspector named Gilbert Cribbins, with a specialism in institutions for the insane.
He disguised himself with a brown wig, false beard, and cosmetic paint to conceal his facial scar, and by means of two omnibuses and a hansom cab travelled southeastward through the city, crossing Waterloo Bridge into Southwark. The district was crowded with tanneries, and in the hot weather the reek was so intense that it was all he could do to keep his breakfast down. By the time he arrived at Bethlem Royal Hospital, his eyes were stinging and his nose felt clogged.
He knocked on the front gate—an imposing edifice of solid wood into which a smaller door was set—and jumped slightly when a letterbox-sized hatch slid open with a bang and a voice snapped, “What?”
“Inspection.” He held his papers up to the small slot. “Government Medical Board. Let me in.”
“Pass that to me.”
Burton folded the papers in half and pushed them through to the guard. He waited, heard a muted expletive, then bolts scraped and clunked and the door swung a little way open.
“Step in. Be quick about it.”
Burton passed into the grounds of the asylum. He faced the guard. “My good man, as one of His Majesty’s medical inspectors, I require a little more respect, if you please.”
The guard touched the peak of his cap. “Sorry, sir. Just bein’ thorough. The escape has us all on edge.”
“Escape?”
“That’s why you’ve come, isn’t it?”
Burton lied. “Of course it is.”
“If you’ll follow me, there’s a horse and trap by the guardhouse. I’ll take you to the warden.”
The man guided Burton to a nearby outbuilding, gave him a hand up into a small carriage, then took the driver’s seat and set the vehicle moving. The hospital grounds were extensive and well tended, and as they passed along a winding gravel path toward the imposing asylum, Burton mused that, under normal circumstances, the wide lawns would probably be dotted with patients. Now, they were empty, the inmates confined to their cells.
The trap ground to a halt in front of the entrance steps and Burton alighted. Without a word, the guard put his switch to the horse and set off back the way he’d come.
The explorer checked that his beard was properly affixed, then climbed the steps, entered through the doors, and stopped a male attendant who was hurrying through the vestibule. The man stared at him in surprise and said, “I’m sorry, sir, you should have been turned away at the gate. We aren’t allowing visitors today.”