The Rise of the Automated Aristocrats (4 page)

Contorting emotions that made no sense at all mauled at him. How could he love and, at the same time, fear her?

“What ails you so, Dick?”

Don't be concerned. It's just a gouty pain in my left foot. The usual thing. When did I have my last attack?

He said, “John has shot himself.”

She fussed but he couldn't bear to be near her. Burton needed to flee; he required space in which to think. He tore himself away, spoke to Sir Roderick, told him he'd address the waiting audience, and watched from within himself as the familiar events unfolded, as the same sentences were uttered and the turning point of his life was played out once again.

Is this my reckoning? Am I being judged?

The outer Burton escaped to a quiet room and there wept for Speke. The inner Burton wept too, the memories and replaying emotions overwhelming him. When both regained control of themselves, the one sat and wrote out a makeshift presentation concerning the valley of the Indus while the other watched through his host's eyes and waited for the astonishing dream to end.

It kept going.

Thirty minutes later, Burton was standing at a podium in front of an audience. He saw eager faces, hungry for sensation and scandal. He began his presentation. Words spilled from his mouth and trailed away until, in the faintest of whispers, he said, “I'm sorry. I can't continue.”

Burton fled from the stage, grabbed his coat, hat, and cane, exited the Assembly Rooms, and stumbled down the steps to the street. There, he paused, breathed deeply, and suddenly had full control of himself. Utterly amazed, he looked down at his strong 43-year-old body and whispered, “I'm alive.” He put a hand to his chest. His heart was racing but not failing. He laughed, moaned, stifled a sob, clapped a palm over his mouth, and clenched his teeth to prevent himself from hollering like a maniac. Pedestrians, dressed in the styles of three decades past, walked by and glanced curiously at him. A horse-drawn hansom clattered over the cobbles.

He looked up. Dark clouds were drifting across a blue sky, threatening to obscure it. He guessed, from the sun's position, that it was half one in the afternoon or thereabouts.

His senses felt amplified. Everything he observed, he saw in exaggerated detail. Every sound possessed startling clarity. Odours filled his nostrils and touched the back of his tongue—burning coal, cooking food, animal waste, vegetation. Each scent brought with it a scintillating memory of days long since passed.

“It can't be real. It can't be!”

Leaning with both hands on his cane, he fought to quell the fit of shaking that suddenly gripped him. Then it occurred to him that the building at his back was filled with newspaper journalists, all clamouring for further news of Speke's death, all eager to question him, all bound to follow when they realised he'd exited the premises.

He hurried away.

Isabel. What about Isabel?

“We were staying at the Royal Hotel,” he mumbled. “I'll meet her there later.”

Shock. She'd burned
The Scented Garden
.

How many betrayals can a man endure?

No, he wouldn't consider that now.

Besides, if this is 1864, then I haven't even written the bloody thing yet.

He passed a street singer who was warbling about a “four pence ha'penny cap,” turned left at a junction, and hastened along with no idea of his destination. It was enough just to walk. His muscles, joints, and bones were entirely free of arthritis, rheumatism, gout, and the myriad of other ailments that had accompanied him for so long. He felt clean and powerful. Temperament, he realised, was as much a function of the body as it was of the mind. This younger physique made him feel like a sharp blade, in contrast to the blunted edge of old age.

He gave a bark of exuberance. Passers-by stepped out of his path.

Oh! The brutal countenance of Sir—no,
Captain!—
Richard Francis Burton in his prime. The blazing eyes! The savage jaw! The swarthy skin and pronounced cheekbones! The scar and long Oriental moustache!

“Hah!” he bellowed at a studs-and-laces vendor.

The man threw up his hands and staggered back.

Bismillah! Control yourself!

“My dear fellow,” Burton said. “I'm so sorry. Forgive me. I'm a little overexcited.”

“Holy Moses! Excited is it? Blimmin' well barmy, more like!” the vendor exclaimed. “Shoutin' at them what's a-mindin' their own blimmin' business. There ain't no call for it.”

“Barmy? Yes, perhaps so, perhaps so. My sincere apologies. Is this 1864?”

“Is it 1864, he asks now! Of course it blimmin' well is! What are you, escaped from the loony bin or summick?”

“In a manner of speaking, my man, that might well be the case. Good day to you.”

Burton moved on. His eyes flicked back and forth, eating up every inch of the environment. Worn paving. An overgrown hollyhock. A cracked windowpane. A fat pigeon. A blind beggar. A discarded beer bottle. The flaking paint on the side of a passing carriage.

The world felt astonishingly lucid and profoundly tangible, more so than Trieste had ever done.

An urge to run gripped him, to escape, to plunge out into the world and lose himself before Death realised its oversight and reclaimed him. He removed his top hat and held it by its brim, flung up his stick and caught it by its middle, and set off. Pedestrians scattered. Men protested, “I say! Steady on!” Women gave little squeals of alarm. His legs pumped. The air streamed across his face. His lungs embraced the exercise without complaint.

Down the road, around a corner into a less populated one, past houses and stores and workshops.

“Free!” he yelled. “Free! Free!”

Finally, he stopped, bent with his shoulder against a wall, roared with laughter, whimpered in shock, and panted until his respiration settled. When he straightened, he saw a policeman glaring at him. Burton replaced his hat and gave a sheepish smile. He nodded an apology, knuckled his brim, and moved on.

A few minutes later, as he was passing a carpenter's yard, a weight dropped onto his right shoulder. He yelped, jerked up his hands, and swatted at it. There was a flash of bright colour and an indignant squawk. Burton stumbled to one side and instinctively fell into a fencing pose, stretching out his cane like an épée.

Its end was pointed at a parakeet.

The bird had jumped from his shoulder onto the railing in front of the yard. It peered at him side-on, head cocked, and gave a click of its beak and a little cackle.

Burton lowered his stick. “Just an escaped pet.”

“Bollocks and filthy gut stench,” the bird responded.

“Good Lord! A fugitive from a foul-mouthed owner, it appears.”

“Message for Sir Richard Francis fornicating flop-bellied Burton.”

He gawped. He'd encountered taking birds of course—as a matter of fact, Isabel kept a rather-too-vocal mynah—but he'd never heard of one that could do more than mimic. And
Sir
? He'd not been knighted until 1886. If this was really 'sixty-four, how did it know to call him Sir?

“You are invited to meet the reborn,” the parakeet continued, “at the stinking Slug and Lettuce. Message bloody well ends, and up your claggy tubes, toilet breath.”

The feathered herald poked its tongue out of its beak, blew a raspberry, and took wing. Burton watched as it fluttered away over the rooftops. He opened his mouth as if to speak, closed it, checked again that his hat was straight, turned, took two steps, stopped, and muttered, “Ah. Now I have it. It's the only explanation.”

Plainly, he was still on his deathbed in Trieste. His heart was on the outs, and his brain, starved of oxygen, was, in its distress, generating this deeply compelling hallucination.

He sighed, disappointed, and looked around. “It feels so completely real. What an incredible organ the human brain is. How marvellous that it should ease my passing with this simulacrum of youth.”

Burton walked on and frowned. “But why reconstruct this day of all days? Surely a happier one would have been more appropriate. Unless—”

Might it be that a man is defined by the incidents in his life that he can't let go of, the ones that haunt him into his dotage? Are they experienced again at the moment of death in order to be cleansed from the soul, so each individual is purified before passing through the gates of paradise?

Was he here that he might forgive himself?

Except, of course, he didn't believe in sin or the soul or the afterlife.

Did I get it all wrong? Was my atheism a mistake?

Rounding another corner, he found himself back on the busy thoroughfare, though farther along it. Market stalls lined either side of the street and a flock of sheep was being driven between them, causing much chaos. From amid the shouted objections, good-natured insults, and shrill bleating, the voice of a newsboy hollered, “Read the latest! War in America! Come buy, come buy, come buy a paper! Latest from America!”

Burton picked out the source of the declamation, a tiny ragamuffin, and walked toward him.

“And the parrot,” he said to himself. “Why would I fantasise such a capricious ingredient as that? ‘Meet the reborn,' it said. The reborn.”

Pushing past an old gypsy woman who shoved a sprig of heather into his face and advised him to “be lucky, me deario,” he approached the newsboy.

“Paper, sir?”

“No thank you. Can you direct me to the Stinking Slug and Lettuce, lad? A public house, is it?”

The boy grinned, exposing a mouthful of green and gappy teeth. “Ha ha! It is, sir, but 'tain't so bad as all that.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It's the Cat an' Fiddle what's the stinkiest drinkin' 'stablishment in the city, far as I know. The Slug 'n' Lettuce is perfickly 'spectible. Yus, I can tell you 'ow to find it.” The boy paused and rubbed the grubby fingers of his right hand together.

Taking the hint, Burton fished in his trouser pocket, found a few coins, and dropped them into the waiting palm.

“Crikey!” the urchin exclaimed, and quickly pocketed the payment before the amount could be reconsidered. He pointed along the road. “Thataway 'n' turn left into Quiet Street. You'll see it. 'Tain't far to walk.”

“Much obliged.”

Burton moved forward, navigating the crowd while experiencing an oddly disjointed mix of familiarity and alienation. He felt engulfed by distant memories come alive. After the relative silence of his secluded home in Trieste, the cacophony of this English thoroughfare battered his already overloaded senses. He suddenly found it impossible to string any thoughts together. His eyes were too full, his ears too encumbered, and his olfactory faculties—more chained to memory than any other sense—were working overtime.

He felt his guilt at abandoning Isabel during this moment of crisis jumbling with a multitude of other irreconcilable emotions concerning her. It was as if he'd known her hundreds of times over, each relationship founded on a slightly different basis. He loved her. He hated her. He depended on her. He resented her. He wanted her. He feared her. She was his other half, his wife, his friend, his acquaintance, his supporter, a stranger, his opponent, his enemy, his nemesis.

He shook his head, trying to clear it, then shoved through the crowd, causing indignant oaths to be uttered, and stumbled to the junction with Quiet Street. Mercifully, the road lived up to its name, and he emerged from the throng and entered it, gulping at the air like a drowning man.

He stopped and steadied himself, one hand on his cane, the other on a garden fence.

This is it. My old heart has stopped. I'm about to expire.

His breathing gradually settled. He didn't die. The illusion held.

He saw the Slug and Lettuce just ahead, a small ivy-clad building with walls that bulged outward as if on the point of collapse.

“Brandy. That's what I need. Heaven or hell, if they exist, whichever I enter, I'll arrive there drunk.” He gave a bark of laughter. “Yes, by God, that's the Burton of old!”

A warrior on a mission, he strode toward the drinking den, pushing all other considerations aside and dwelling only on the euphoria of his restored physique.

As he neared the public house, he heard the patrons within talking, shouting, singing, and laughing. When he opened the door, it was to reveal a crowd of lunchtime drinkers, mostly of the working class, all breathing an atmosphere thick with blue tobacco smoke. Entering, he shouldered through to the bar and, being identified as a gentleman by his attire and bearing, was immediately served. The men to his right and left, who'd been waiting before him, made no complaint. They knew their place.

Burton turned and surveyed the mob while his drink was being poured. He smelled sour beer and body odour, bad breath and unwashed clothes, stale urine and rancid lard. He saw good-humoured labourers, clerks, stallholders, and dolly-mops. He heard gossip and jokes and ribaldry. He didn't spot anyone who appeared to be “reborn.”

He swallowed his brandy in a single gulp and marvelled at the taste, which he now realised had been terribly dulled by old age. After requesting and receiving a refill, he slid payment across the bar, turned, and pushed his way through to the ill-lit back of the room. There, he stopped, staring awestruck at a small man seated at a table.

The little fellow looked up, his eyes widening, and gave a piercing shriek of recognition.

A face from the distant past.

An old friend restored to youth.

Algernon Charles Swinburne.