Burton & Swinburne 1 - The Strange Affair Of Spring Heeled Jack (43 page)

He beat his fists against his helmeted head, burning his knuckles in the blue flames but feeling nothing.

“Every day at eight o'clock, damn you!” he groaned.

No.

He couldn't do this any more.

“Find her!” he said. Then he looked up at the clouded sky and bellowed: “Find her!”

He hurdled over the wall and ran out of the mews into the main street.

Women screamed. Men uttered exclamations.

Oxford sprang onto the side of a passing brougham. It lurched and veered under his impact. The coachman gave a shout of fright. The horses whinnied and bolted, nearly jerking the stilt-man loose.

“Where is Lizzie?” he screamed.

“Jesus, Joseph, and Mary!” cried the driver.

“Tell me, you damned clown! Where is Lizzie?”

The horses pounded along the street, with people crying out and scattering before them, the carriage swinging and swaying dangerously behind, its wheels thundering over the cobbles.

“Get off? Get off!” yelled the terror-stricken coachman.

Oxford hung on desperately, with one of his stilts dragging along the road.

The horses stampeded headlong into a small street market and their flanks caught the side of a cheese stall, sending it flying, before they then ploughed head on through a poultry stall. Chickens, geese, feathers, and fragments of wood went spinning into the air.

Shouts. Screams. A police whistle.

“Fuck!” said Oxford, and hurled himself from the vehicle. He hit the ground and bounced fifteen feet into the air, landed, and started running.

A scream of dismay came from the coachman but was cut off when, with a terrific crash, the horses and carriage collided with the corner of a shop. The splintering of wood and bone was immediately drowned by the smash of breaking glass and masonry as the side of the building collapsed onto the wrecked vehicle.

Oxford sprang through the panicking crowd and started laughing hysterically as men, women, and children dived out of his way.

“Go away!” he ranted. “You're all history! You're all history! Ha ha ha! Where's my ancestor? Restore! Restore!”

He jumped over a nine-foot wall into a patch of wasteland, stumbled, fell, and rolled.

Lying on his back, he dug his fingers into the grass beneath him.

“Where the hell am I?” he asked.

Shouts came from beyond the wall.

He sat and pushed himself upright, issued instructions to his control panel, took two big strides, and sprang upward.

He landed back behind the wall on Mews Lane on November 28 at a quarter to eight.

Edward Oxford squatted and wept; and he waited.

She walked past half an hour later.

Lizzie Fraser was just fourteen years old.

In the year 1837, she was considered mature enough to work. In Oxford's age, she was just a child.

The tears continued to run down his cheeks as he quietly called: “Lizzie Fraser!”

January 12, 1839

Tilly Adams was seventeen years old. On Saturdays, whatever the weather, she spent the mornings walking in Battersea Fields, picking flowers in the summer and catching insects in the winter. She dreamed of becoming a botanist, though she knew this was an unrealistic ambition.

“You must learn to cook, to sew, and to maintain a household,” her mother insisted. “No man wants a wife who knows the name of every insect but can't grill a lamb chop. Besides, you'll be that much more successful as a mother and wife. What women scientists are there, after all?”

The destiny that her mother recommended-and which society insisted on-was, she knew, her only real option, but while she still could, she was going to walk in the park on Saturday mornings to do the thing she loved best.

“ Lucanus cervus!” she exclaimed, bending to look at a large black insect she'd spotted crawling at the side of the path. A stag beetle.

A long thin shadow fell across it.

“Tilly Adams?”

She looked up.

She fainted.

Later, a young man spotted her, took out his flask, and poured brandy between her lips.

She regained her senses, coughing and spluttering, looked down at herself, and uttered a cry of shame, for the front of her dress had been unbuttoned and her underwear pushed up.

“I didn't do it,” said the young man, reddening. “I found you like that.”

Tilly Adams stood up, put her clothes in order, and ran all the way home.

She never spoke about the stilt-man.

She never went into Battersea Fields again.

She gave up botany and began to hunt for a husband.

February 19, 1838

The Alsop family had recently left Battersea, moving to the little village of Old Ford, near Hertford, so that David Alsop could take over a vacant blacksmith's on the outskirts of the little community. Being new to the neighbourhood, they hadn't yet settled in and made friends, so spent most evenings in their home.

The time traveller popped into existence above Bearbinder Lane, landed on the ground, and bounced on his stilts.

It was a quarter to nine.

The lane ran along a shallow valley. There were dark fields sloping up on one side, while the village high street ran uphill to the main settlement from a junction on the other. The Alsop cottage was on the corner, secluded and a considerable distance from the other dwellings.

In the distance, Oxford could see a man on a ladder fiddling with a dysfunctional gas lamp. He was the only person in sight.

Walking to the cottage's front gate, the time traveller yanked at the bellpull and heard a jangle from inside the premises. He lifted the side of his cloak and draped it over his head like a hood, hiding the helmet. He bent his knees to bring his height down. He was standing in shadow.

The front door opened and a girl walked out. As she came down the path, Oxford saw that she had a mole on her right cheek, near the corner of her mouth. He'd been lucky this time. This was Jane Alsop.

She arrived at the gate.

“Can I help you, sir?”

“I'm a policeman,” he said. “There have been reports of somebody loitering along this road. Have you a candle I can borrow? I can't see anything.”

“Most assuredly, sir. Please wait here while I fetch one for you.”

Good, he thought. When she comes back out, she'll have to step through the gate to give it to me.

A minute later, she reappeared, came down the path, opened the gate, stepped out onto the road, and held the light out to him.

He threw back his cloak and grabbed her by the hair, pulling her into the darkness. The candle dropped from her hand.

“Don't!” she cried.

He didn't bother to ask the question but simply clutched at her dress and tore it down to her waist.

Before he could examine her chest, though, she twisted out of his grasp, leaving him holding a clump of hair, and raced back to the cottage.

He sprang after her, slipped and staggered at the gate, regained his balance, hurled himself over it, and caught her at the threshold of the front door.

“Show me!” he hissed, pulling her around, ripping her garments away.

A piercing scream came from inside the Alsop home.

He looked up and saw a young girl standing in the hallway. She screamed again.

Oxford returned his attention to Jane Alsop, bending her backward. He stared at her naked upper torso. Her skin was white and unmarked.

Another girl suddenly rushed from a room, grabbed Jane, and wrenched her out of his grip. The door slammed in his face.

“No birthmark!” he muttered.

August 22, 1839

There was only one girl left to examine: Sarah Lovitt, who worked on a flower stall in the Lower Marsh Street Market, Lambeth.

Her excessively long walk between home and the stall took her through many of the winding bystreets alongside the Thames, so she always carried with her a posy of scented blooms which she held close to her face to ward off the river's noxious fumes.

It made her easy to identify.

Edward Oxford pounced on her in Nine Elms Lane and pulled her into a secluded walled courtyard at the side of an empty carriage house.

Sarah knew that things like this happened. Girls were forced to do things they didn't want to do and men got away with it.

Don't fight, she told herself. It will be over more quickly.

Then her assailant turned her and she saw him.

She fought.

Fingernails raked the side of Oxford's helmet, slipped off it and onto his cheek, and gouged into the skin. Teeth bit into his wrist. He lost his grip on her, regained it, was overbalanced, and fell, pulling her down with him. They rolled on the dusty ground, thrashing about, her cries echoing from the walls.

“Get off me! Leave me alone! Help! Police!”

Her elbow rammed into his chin and his head snapped back.

He flew into a wild rage and pressed his whole weight onto her, forcing her down, his crazed eyes inches from hers.

She spat in his face. He banged the front of his helmet into her forehead. She went limp.

Oxford lifted himself from her and stood.

She groaned and sat up, blinked, and looked at him.

“Are you from a carnival?” she asked.

“No. Get up.”

She clambered to her feet.

“Just answer a question and you can go,” he said.

“You won't hurt me?”

“No.”

A bolt of energy suddenly snapped from his control unit and hit her in the chest. She flew backward into a wall and slumped to the ground.

Oxford yelled in pain and stumbled.

“Christ!” he gasped.

Another shock jolted through him. He toppled over and passed out.

He came to his senses moments later.

“Home in time for supper,” he mumbled, not knowing what he was saying.

Sarah Lovitt was either dead or out cold. He giggled manically at the thought that she might be a corpse with a rainbow on her chest.

A minute later he discovered that he was wrong on both counts. She had a pulse but no birthmark.

It was June 20, 1840. Ten days had passed since the brutal assassination of Her Majesty Queen Victoria.

“Tallyho, Edward! Bon voyage!” said Henry de La Poet Beresford in the grounds of Darkening Towers. He watched Oxford blink out of existence in midair, then turned and walked toward the veranda doors. Before reaching them, he heard a thud behind him.

He looked back and saw the time traveller lying in a heap on the lawn.

“That was fast!” he cried, running over to his friend. “Are you all right?”

Oxford turned over and looked up at him. Beresford stepped back in shock. The man from the future seemed to have aged twenty years.

“What the devil happened, Edward? You look terrible!”

“None of them!” rasped the stilt-man. “No birthmarks! I've spent God knows how many hours exposed to your stinking damned past and all for nothing!”

Beresford dropped to his haunches, unbuckled Oxford's boots, and pulled them off.

“Come on,” he said. “Let's get you inside.”

Two hours later, despite the removal of his malfunctioning suit, a hearty meal, and a glass of brandy, Oxford had fallen into a virtually catatonic state. His eyes, the whites visible all the way around the irises, stared fixedly at the wall. The muscles to either side of his jaw clenched spasmodically. He had told Beresford very little, just that none of the Battersea Brigade girls bore the crescent-shaped mark.

The marquess was, nevertheless, as sure as he could be that one of them would, in the not too distant future, become mother to a girl with such a mark.

Now the search must switch to that descendant.

All NO is false, all NO is true:

Truth is the shattered mirror strown

In myriad bits; while each believes

His little bit the whole to own.

-SIR RICHARD FRANCIS BURTON

Tulle! the corrector when our judgements err.

-CORD BYRON

It took him nearly three months to recover his wits,“ said Henry de la Poet Beresford. ”Though `recover' may be too optimistic a word, for I assure you that, by this point, the time traveller was quite demented."

Supporting himself on his knuckles, he lurched around the banqueting table as he continued his tale; and every word he uttered, in that thick, guttural voice of his, was heard by Sir Richard Francis Burton, who lay hidden overhead.

"We arranged to meet again on September 28, 1843. He did his vanishing trick, and, over the course of the next three years, I monitored the Battersea girls, their marriages, and their subsequent children. By this time, of course, my reputation was such as to make it impossible to get close to the families, and I was unable to establish which of the daughters bore the Oxford birthmark.

“I reported this to Oxford three years after he'd departed, and he flew into such a fit of temper that, had he dropped dead from apoplexy, I would not have been surprised. For an entire night, he ranted and raged. Then he demanded that I keep track of the children, and informed me that he'd not be back until eighteen years had passed; that is to say, not until September 28 of this year, when the Battersea children would be of age; old enough for him to sire an ancestor by!”

“Yesterday was the twenty-eighth!” exclaimed Nurse Nightingale.

“Yes,” confirmed Beresford. "His decision was a blow to me, for by now I was plotting to get rid of the insane fool and claim his suit for my own. I tried to persuade him to visit sooner-damn it, I almost begged!-but he steadfastly refused, maintaining that it would be a pointless waste of his suit's dwindling resources.

"As he left this very room through those veranda doors, I ran to the morning room, took a pistol from the cabinet there, and ran back, intending to shoot him dead in the grounds. I was too late; he was gone.

"Over the ensuing years, I never lost sight of the Battersea families, but I'll admit that after the Libertines split and the newly formed Rake faction grew in influence and demanded more of my attention, the whole Oxford affair became more and more dreamlike. Had I really played host to a man from the future? Might it have been a drunken hallucination?