Burton & Swinburne 1 - The Strange Affair Of Spring Heeled Jack (40 page)

He waited.

Nothing.

He tried the following day, and the next, and the next.

He was exhausted, his nose was running, and his temper had frayed.

Ribbons of energy were crawling over the surface of his suit's control unit. He kept his cloak wrapped around it.

“Fuck this!” he whispered to himself.

At which point fifteen-year-old Edward Oxford sauntered past.

It was half past midnight.

The time traveller recognised the boy immediately; it was like looking at a youthful version of himself.

He bounded over the railings, grabbed the lad by the shoulders, spun him around, and punched him on the point of the jaw.

The Original slumped into his arms.

Oxford hoisted him up and carried him into the gardens.

With the boy in his arms, he leaped three and a half hours ahead. Four o'clock in the morning would be quieter.

Oxford laid his burden on the grass and squatted over him. He slapped his ancestor's face. The Original opened his eyes and screamed. Oxford clamped his hand over the youth's open mouth.

“Shut up! Do you hear me? Shut up!”

He stared into the boy's wide eyes. The Original jerked his head in a spasmodic nod. His body was trembling wildly.

Oxford removed his hand. “Listen to me and remember what I say.”

The boy nodded again. He kept nodding.

Oxford grabbed him by the hair.

“Stop that, you little idiot! I have something to tell you, instructions which you must obey!”

The Original's mouth opened and closed. Foam flecked his lips.

“Three years from now you're going to get it into your head to commit a crime. Don't fucking do it, do you understand?”

The boy made a gurgling noise. His eyes were filled with stark terror.

“If you do as you intend, your name will be remembered through history. You will bring shame on every generation that bears it. You will bring shame on me! Do you understand? On me, Edward Oxford!”

The Original started to jabber senselessly.

“Keep quiet!” snapped Oxford. “Pay attention, you little moron! Stay away from Constitution Hill on June 10, 1840. Remember that date and remember my instructions! June 10, 1840! Do not go to Constitution Hill!”

The boy started to giggle hysterically. He didn't stop.

The time traveller let go of his ancestor, stood up, and looked down in disgust at the pathetic creature.

One thing was obvious: the Original was already insane.

Oxford stepped away from the lad and jumped to Green Park on June 10, 1840, but instead of materialising a few yards from the assassination site and a few minutes before the shots were fired, he found himself way up the slope behind a large tree. Screams sounded from the path below.

Far to his right, a man was running toward a thickly wooded corner of the park. He was being chased by a policeman.

Ahead, down the slope, Prince Albert was kneeling beside his dead wife while four horsemen struggled to hold back a panicking crowd.

On the other side of the royal carriage, a man lay dead, his head impaled on a railing.

“No,” breathed Oxford. "God damn it, no, no, no.,,

He returned to Darkening Towers and the year 1837, landing in the grounds and falling to his knees.

He remembered tackling the Original next to the queen's carriage. They had struggled, and his ancestor had said, “Let go of me! My name must be remembered. I must live through history!”

“This is not possible!” cried Oxford, and, raising his face to the sky, he bellowed, “I can't be causing all of it! It's not possible! It's not possible!”

During the course of the next ten days, Edward Oxford was bedridden, suffering a fever that, for hours on end, caused him to rant incomprehensibly.

Henry de La Poet Beresford nursed his guest assiduously, for he'd become fascinated by this strange man from the future.

“How like gods we can be,” he told Brock one day.

The valet eyed their patient dubiously. There didn't seem much godlike about the hollow-faced wretch he saw laying there, with skin pale as the sheets stretched tautly over sharp cheekbones. Oxford seemed to have aged twenty years since his first appearance at the mansion. Deep lines now scored the flesh to either side of his mouth, around the sunken eyes, and upon the forehead. His nose was thin and prominent.

“Should I send for a doctor, sir?”

“No, Brock,” answered Beresford. “It's a chill, nothing more.”

It was, in fact, a great deal more.

Edward Oxford was disintegrating. Submerged in a world that was alien to him, and with the knowledge that his own time no longer existed, he was disengaging from reality. Psychological bonds had loosened and slipped free; he was floating without any coordinates. He was losing his mind.

The fever broke on Tuesday, July 6. It happened during the night, when Oxford was awoken by screams.

For a while he lay still, not knowing where he was, then, slowly, his ragged memory returned and he groaned in despair.

The screams continued.

They echoed through the manor: a woman in terrible distress, her cries punctuated by an angry male voice.

Oxford pushed himself out of bed and rose weakly to his feet. He tottered to a chair, retrieved a gown from its back, pulled it on, and shuffled to the door.

Passing through, he entered the hall beyond and stood for a moment, supporting himself against the wall.

“Please!” came a woman's cry. “Don't do it! I can't stand any more! God have mercy!”

The commotion emanated from the marquess's room, some way along the corridor.

Oxford took a couple of steps toward it, but suddenly the door ahead of him flew open and a naked woman crashed out of it to the floor. She scrambled to her hands and knees and started to crawl in his direction. He saw that her back was crisscrossed with red welts, some of which had cut the skin and were leaking blood.

“No more, I beg you! I beg you, my lord!” she howled.

Beresford reeled into the passage, dressed only in breeches, a whip in his right hand, a bottle in the left. He laughed demoniacally, raised his arm, and sent the whip lashing down across her rump.

“Stop it!” cried Oxford.

The woman fell on her face and lay whimpering.

“By God!” exclaimed the marquess, looking up. “You're conscious, are you?”

“What-what's happening here?” mumbled the time traveller.

“Ha!” roared Beresford. “I'm giving this trollop all she deserves, man! And it's costing me but a few shillings! The cheap whore!”

His whip cracked down again. He laughed.

Oxford tried to say something, failed, and watched the floor swing toward him. He felt his forehead impact against it.

He knew no more.

By Wednesday afternoon, he was sitting up in bed sipping tentatively at a bowl of chicken broth. The events of the night before seemed like a vague dream.

His host entered the room dressed in his riding clothes. The marquess had just returned from a hunt and was, once again, uproariously drunk-a not infrequent occurrence. He stumbled as he crossed to a chair and hurled himself into it.

“Back from the brink, I see! How the devil do you feel?”

“Weak,” replied Oxford. “Henry, I'm sorry about the way I spoke to you.”

“Fetch the damned bootjack, Brock,” ordered Beresford. He grinned at his guest. “I can never get the bally things off without the old codger's help.”

“What I said to you was unforgivable,” continued Oxford. “I shouldn't have called you an ape.”

“Pah! Forget it! Water under the bridge, what! So the Original wasn't having any of it, hey? You couldn't dissuade him? You've been babbling about it in your fever.”

“Rather than talk him out of it, I think I talked him into it,” admitted Oxford.

“Hah! So Victoria is fated to die, it seems! Ha ha!”

Oxford slopped soup onto his bedsheets and, with a shaking hand, placed the bowl onto the bedside table.

“I seem to have said rather too much,” he croaked.

“Not at all, old man. I have no love for our little prim and proper bitch queen, and I feel I have a better grip on the affair now that I know the full story. I take it, then, that Her Majesty becomes a figure of some importance in your history?”

“She oversaw the expansion of the British Empire and a period of remarkable technological advancement.”

“Brock!” yelled Beresford. “Where are you, man? These blasted boots are killing me!” He shook his head at Oxford. “We're well on our way to such circumstances anyway, Edward; I don't see how the snooty tart can possibly influence the country's advancement one way or the other.”

“She's a figurehead.”

“Figurehead be damned! Disposable, Edward! Disposable! Bollocks to the queen, that's what I say! Ah, Brock, at last! Get these blessed things off me, would you, you doddering old goat!”

The stony-faced valet pulled over a small three-legged stool, sat on it, lifted Beresford's right leg, placed it on his knee, and began unbuttoning the long riding boot.

“No, Edward,” continued the marquess, “if you ask me, you've been placing too much emphasis on the events of that day in 1840. We should concentrate our efforts elsewhere.”

Brock inserted the jack into Beresford's boot and began to lever it off.

“There's little choice,” replied Oxford. “I'm at the event in triplicate now, and on each occasion I seem a little more displaced; pushed away both geographically and chronologically, as the suit prevents me from meeting myself.”

“So, as I say, perhaps you should abandon that side of it,” suggested Beresford. He gave a sigh as his boot came off and Brock got to work on the other one.

“What do you suggest?”

“Leave history to run its course. Perhaps what matters is not the shape and order of events, but that you, ultimately, are in them. If you can ensure that the right girl has a child with an Oxford, you'll reestablish your ancestry. Who gives a damn that, without Victoria, history might unwind a little differently? At least there'll be a 2202 with an Edward Oxford in it! You'll be able to go home, man!”

The time traveller stared at his hands thoughtfully.

“It's true,” he muttered, “the Original did-I mean, does have brothers. Even if I can identify the girl, though, which won't be easy, I don't see how I can force them together.”

The marquess gave a roar of laughter and, as his second boot came off, waved Brock away. The valet bowed and left the room with the footgear in his hand.

“By heavens, for a man from the future you can be mighty slow-witted!” Beresford cried drunkenly. “You bloody well do it, man!” He slapped his knee mirthfully. “You do it! Find the little trollop and have her!”

Oxford looked at his host in shock. “You surely aren't suggesting that I rape my own ancestor!” he said, slowly.

“Of course! Exactly that! Fuck yourself into existence, Oxford! What other option have you?”

It's all fate and chance.

-ARAB PROVERB

Three days later, the idea didn't seem quite so disturbing. This wasn't because it was making more sense; it was because Oxford was making less. He felt horribly detached from his environment and, whenever Beresford or Brock spoke to him, it seemed extremely well acted, but not real. It simply wasn't real.

On Saturday evening, as they ate dinner, he raised what had now become his main problem with the scheme. It wasn't the crime of rape, it was how to find the victim.

“I know barely a thing about her,” he told the marquess.

“You know she had a birthmark on her chest.”

“Yes.”

“And you know that she was considerably younger than the Original.”

“Yes.”

“And you know that he was acquainted with her parents and grandparents before he went to Australia.”

“Yes.”

“And you know that he was incarcerated in Bedlam and Broadmoor from mid-1840 until he sailed, which means he must have known them before the time of the assassination.”

“Attempted assassination,” corrected Oxford.

“Quite so. And you know that he worked first in the Hat and Feathers, then in the Hog in the Pound.”

“That's correct.”

“So there you have your starting points.”

“You can't expect me to go strolling into public houses, Beresford! I can barely stand even the seclusion of Darkening Towers with just you and your staff for company!”

“No offence taken, old chap,” countered the marquess, with a wry smile. “And I'm suggesting nothing of the sort.”

“Then what?”

“Simply this: I will hunt down your young lady during the course of the next two and a half years, and I will meet you back here every six months to report on my progress.”

“Every six months?”

“Yes! Finish your dinner, drink up, leap ahead! I'll meet you here on January 1, 1838!”

Six months later, Henry de La Poet Beresford, 3rd Marquess of Waterford, looked shabbier; his mansion more decrepit.

As usual, he was in his cups.

“By James, I was beginning to think you were some sort of delusion,” he slurred after Oxford appeared outside the veranda doors. “Come in out of the rain, my friend.”

They walked into the ballroom, through it, and on to the morning room.

Oxford took off his helmet and boots. The helmet felt too hot and he had to smother a flame that burned around the dent made by the sentry's bullet in 1877.

“What news?” he asked.

"Will you take wine with me?

“I had some at dinner. You forget, just minutes have passed for me since we last spoke. Have you found the girl?”

“No. The yammering idiot is still living with his mother and sister. Last June he was thrown out of the Red Lion after having some sort of fit. I suppose it was after you pounced on him. Anyway, he was off work for two months then started at the Ratcatcher. I've been drinking there, in a wig and beard, calling myself Mr. A. W. Smith. It's a squalid little hole and I'm the most regular of its regulars. I can assure you that the rest are an unprepossessing lot, just a gaggle of toothless old bastards and a smattering of poxy dollymops. I doubt our girl will spring from the loins of any of 'em. As for the Original, he's a friendless, cretinous dolt. Good behind the bar, though. Efficient. I'll keep my eye on him, of course.”