“Hankey and Ashbee are treading cautiously,” Bradlaugh noted, referring to the two mutual friends who’d thus far published the poet’s works. “I’d advise you to do the same. The authorities may have turned a blind eye to your volumes of erotica, but I doubt they’ll stand for outright subversion. I already fear for Algy. Don’t make me fear for you, too.”
Bendyshe flapped his hand dismissively. “Pshaw! Don’t worry yourself, old fellow. My presses are in Paris. I can’t be arraigned for what’s published there, and I’ll ensure the material is brought to this country by suitably circuitous means.”
He filled and raised his glass and bellowed, “By gad! I propose a toast to Algernon! May his barbs prick Dizzy where it hurts the most!”
The quaffing continued and intensified. Burton listened to conversations as they meandered drunkenly from one subject to another, dwindled, and arose again to follow a new and equally digressive path. He contributed to fewer and fewer of them, becoming ever more withdrawn, his thoughts folding in on themselves.
He tried to envision his future, wondered where he’d go or what he’d write, but his mind persistently skipped past all the possibilities and instead presented him with visions of his dotage. He imagined himself incapacitated, imprisoned in a declining body, the fancy quickly developing with such pitiless clarity that his hands started to shake, a cold ache gnawed at his joints, and gravity tugged at him as if eager to draw him into the grave.
Time is moving too fast, spiralling in on itself. Events are out of control. I am plummeting toward my death.
“I can’t!” he cried out, lurching to his feet and dropping his half-filled glass. “I can’t!”
“Richard?” Monckton Milnes asked, reaching for him.
Burton batted his friend’s hand away. “Not again!”
Again? Again? What am I saying?
He stumbled to the door and snatched his outdoor vestments from a coat rack.
“Can’t what?” Monckton Milnes called after him.
Burton turned unsteadily. The Cannibals were gaping at him, their faces expressing surprise and concern.
“I have—I have to go,” he mumbled, placing his hat upon his head.
Practically falling through the door, he descended the stairs, hearing the muffled voice of Bendyshe behind him. “What the devil has got into him? I swear, the old boy’s not been the same since his confounded expedition!”
Burton barged past a waiter, hurried through the restaurant, and plunged out into Leicester Square.
London was fogbound and insufferably warm. The sulphurous pall had enveloped the city two weeks ago, steadily thickening into a peasouper, a “London particular.” Visibility was so reduced that Burton felt he’d stepped into a limbo inhabited only by vague and silent ghosts.
One of the phantoms detached itself from the wall beside the restaurant door and, before the explorer had taken two paces, swooped upon him. Burton was suddenly wrapped in shadow. A vast hand clapped tightly across his mouth, and a thick limb embraced him from behind, pinning his arms to his sides.
A voice hissed in his ear. “Lord ’elp us, you’ve kept me a-waitin’ for long enough. Shush now! Don’t make a bloomin’ sound, guv’nor. They’re watchin’ out for you.”
“Mmmph,” Burton replied.
“It’s me. Follow. Quiet as you can.”
Montague Penniforth.
Penniforth was a cab driver, a giant of a man, Burton’s friend, and a member of the Ministry of Chronological Affairs.
The hand and arm fell away. Fingers clutched his sleeve. Tripping drunkenly over his own feet, Burton allowed himself to be drawn along close to the sides of the buildings and into a side street. There, he was bundled into a landau. Penniforth whispered, “Someone wants to see you. I’ll take you right there. Here, drink this.”
A flask was thrust into Burton’s hands.
The carriage door closed, and the vehicle rocked as Penniforth heaved his considerable bulk up onto its box seat. There came a mechanical cough, growl, and splutter as the steam-horse started. The wheels began to grind over cobbles.
Bemusedly, Burton lifted the flask, opened its lid and sniffed at the contents. Coffee. He sipped it. Hot. Black. Strong. Well-sugared.
A foghorn sounded from the Thames. The fog muffled all other noises bar those made by the landau.
He drank the coffee and, when he’d finished, concluded that enough time had passed. He lifted his cane and used its end to push open the little trapdoor in the cabin’s roof.
“What’s the story, Monty?”
“Wait,” came the abrupt reply.
Burton waited.
The carriage turned this way and that. Twice, its cabin bumped and scraped against brick walls. The vehicle was obviously navigating the narrow back streets.
After perhaps five minutes, Penniforth called down, “You’ve got hounds on your scent, an’ I daresay we’ve not shaken ’em off, so when I tells you to jump, you ’op out while I keep goin’ an’ lead ’em on a merry chase. You’ll find yerself at the end of an alley. Walk down it—no hangin’ about—an’ enter the establishment what you’ll find ’alfway along.”
“I’m followed? By whom and for what reason? And what establishment?”
“No time to explain, guv’nor. Jump! Now! Off you go!”
Burton opened the door and dropped from the moving carriage. His feet hit the ground, and he staggered and nearly fell. By the time he’d righted himself, Penniforth’s cab had already vanished into the murk.
A denser shadow to his right marked the mouth of an alley. Burton quickly moved into it and, when he heard the chugging of approaching engines, pressed himself against a wall. Three velocipedes passed, rattling along the road he’d just left, obviously chasing the landau. Their riders were unidentifiable, their forms mere smudges in the cloud, but he had the fleeting impression that they were somehow oddly proportioned, and a chill prickled through him.
He didn’t move until the vehicles’ noise had faded to nothing and even then waited for two minutes before turning and feeling his way forward, peering cautiously ahead. His boots encountered litter and filthy puddles. Flecks of ash accumulated on his shoulders and hat. The corrosive fumes assaulted the back of his throat. He battled the impulse to cough.
An orange glow pierced the vaporous curtain a few steps away and to his left. He moved toward it and saw a gas lamp above a dark blue door. A small brass plaque was mounted on the portal. It bore the words Verbena Lodge.
“Ah,” Burton murmured. “Algy.”
His friend’s physiological quirk didn’t only inspire inappropriate outbursts of humour but also caused the poet to experience pain as pleasure. This had given rise to certain unusual tastes. Verbena Lodge was where Swinburne indulged them.
Burton thrice applied the handle of his cane to the wood. Half a minute passed before his knocks were acknowledged. The door, with a slight squeak, swung inward. A seven-foot-tall bald-headed and muscular African, dressed in long white robes, looked down at the visitor.
“I don’t recognise you,” he rumbled, his voice sounding as if it was rising from the depths of the earth.
“Burton. I think my friend Swinburne is here. He sent for me.”
“Swinburne. There’s no Swinburne.”
“I see. Perhaps he goes by another name. He’s a very short and excitable fellow with a taste for the lash and a propensity for versifying.”
The doorman grinned, his teeth startlingly white. “Oh. You mean Mr. Wheldrake.”
Ernest Wheldrake. A pseudonym Algy used when writing humorously negative reviews of his own poetry.
“I believe so.”
“Come in, please.”
Burton entered. The servant closed the door after him, stalked across the small lobby, and poked his head around an arched opening into the room beyond. “Madam, a gentleman is here to see Mr. Wheldrake. Should I—?”
A husky female voice responded, “He’s expected, Malazo. Show him up to the Cri
mson Suite. Remind the girls that it’s off-limits until further notice.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Malazo turned back to Burton and led him to a staircase, up to the second floor, and along a corridor to a chamber on the right. He tapped on the door then opened it. Burton passed through and found himself surrounded by maroon draperies, plush redly upholstered furniture, and rather garish objets d’art.
The door closed behind him.
“Hallo! Hallo! Hallo!” Swinburne screeched, jumping up from a chaise longue. “About time! Are you perfectly squiffy?”
Eying the man who rose from an armchair beside the poet, Burton said, “I’m very rapidly regaining my sobriety, Algy. It’s good to see you again. And how do you do, Mr. Gladstone? I shan’t pretend I’m not taken aback to find you here.”
“Old Gladbags is a regular customer,” Swinburne declared airily. “He’s perfectly fascinated by the doxies.”
“My name is not Gladbags,” Gladstone objected. His voice was icy and precise. He stood with his back ramrod straight and extended a hand toward Burton while giving every indication that he’d prefer it not to be taken and shaken.
Burton took it and shook it.
The leader of the opposition and—until his recent and uncharacteristic silence—Disraeli’s fiercest critic, possessed a glowering and entirely unforgiving demeanour. It was so thoroughly puritanical that a brothel was perhaps the very last place on earth in which one could expect to encounter it. Yet, despite the permanently disapproving glare and the puckered lips, the haughty angle of the chin and the nostrils that flared as if permanently assaulted by a foul odour, there were persistent whispers concerning Mr. Gladstone’s nocturnal habits, a certain breed of tittle-tattle that clung to him no matter how censorious his words and deportment.
“And you know full well, Mr. Swinburne,” he said, “that my visits to this establishment have but one object, it being to turn the dox—the young ladies—from their sinful ways.”
Burton removed his hat and put it on a sideboard. He laid aside his cane and unbuttoned his coat. “With what rate of success so far, if I might ask?”
“My labours are ongoing. The eradication of such varieties of wickedness that are found herein cannot be achieved in short order.”
“He’s still in the research phase of the project,” Swinburne said. He gestured for Burton to occupy a vacant chair and, as the explorer settled into it, added, “And there is such a delicious variety of wickedness, Richard. The girls of the lodge are remarkably creative. Especially Madam Betsy, who, I am convinced, possesses the strongest right arm in the city. Why, she recently inflicted upon my buttocks a thrashing of such savagery that I am still hardly able to—”
“That’s quite enough!” Gladstone barked. “We are here to discuss a different order of vice altogether. I refer to the perversion of the law and the ethical degeneracy that is currently sweeping through the government.”
“Do you have the capacity for another drink?” Swinburne asked Burton.
“I’ve had my fill,” he responded. He ran his tongue around his teeth, tasting coffee and traces of brandy, and regarded the leader of the opposition. “Mr. Disraeli’s policies?”
Gladstone resumed his seat, pulled his jacket straight, and gave a curt nod. “Do you divine his intentions, Sir Richard?”
“My friends and I were discussing the matter this very evening.”
Burton returned his attention to Swinburne. “You were missed, Algy. You’ve been making waves. We’re all impressed but concerned. I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“I’m writing poetry,” Swinburne said. “There’s no danger in that. The arts are the one place where truth can be expressed with impunity. If such a circumstance ever changes, the world is finished.” He lifted a glass of red wine from the floor beside the chaise longue, drank from it, then added casually, “Incidentally, I’m being followed.”
Burton’s right eyebrow arched upward. “As am I, according to Montague Penniforth.”
“I suspected as much. That’s why I had him whisk you here under cover of the fog.”
Gladstone snapped his fingers. “I asked a question.”
“You did,” Burton agreed. “Disraeli’s intentions. Well, sir, as far as I can tell, he’s attempting to make the rich richer and the poor poorer while removing what few avenues exist that might allow the latter, in terms of their income and quality of life, to in any way approach the former. He is also stifling the right to protest, which is why I’m anxious about my outspoken friend, here.”
“Pah!” Swinburne interjected dismissively.
Burton locked eyes with Gladstone and adopted a challenging tone. “In the apparent absence of any effective governmental opposition, it appears that the empire must rely on its poets and literati to voice concerns about the prime minister’s unwarranted actions.”
Gladstone responded coolly to the jibe. “We’ll address that observation in a moment. Do you know where your brother is?”
“No. Why do you ask?”
The politician lifted a thick document from a small table beside his chair and, leaning forward, handed it to the explorer. Burton saw, upon the top page, the words The Return of the Discontinued Man. The penmanship was neither his own nor Edward’s. He flipped through the pages.
“It’s a copy of the report I gave to him, but this is not his hand. Someone else must have written it out. How did you come by it?”
“It was delivered to my door by a ragamuffin who made off before I was able to question him. The significance is plain, is it not?”
Burton narrowed his eyes. “Significance?”
“As leader of the opposition I should have been granted access to the original. I was not. Someone who does have access to it has defied the prime minister by sending this copy to me.”
“And you think it was Edward?”
“Your brother hasn’t been seen in the prime minister’s company for three months—or anywhere else, for that matter. For a very large man, he’s demonstrated a remarkable ability to disappear. Why has he done so? Because he opposes Young England?”
With a shrug, Burton said, “I don’t know. Edward is a slippery customer at the best of times, which these most certainly are not. If he’s up to something, I haven’t been made privy to it. Perhaps it was he who sent you this. Perhaps it wasn’t. The important thing is that you have it and are now aware of the historical context in relation to which the prime minister enforces his policies.”
Gladstone uttered a sound of agreement. “I stand incredulous that he is pursuing such a misjudged course. Is the empire not being hastened along precisely the path you cautioned against?”
Burton returned the document to Gladstone. “Absolutely. If we continue upon it, I foresee a situation wherein, in years to come, generation after generation will be subjugated by an unassailable, unconscionably affluent, and utterly unprincipled minority that is completely lacking in ethics, vision, and leadership ability. There will be no representation. Only oppression.”
“I am moved to suggest,” Gladstone responded, “that the aristocracy’s response to industrialisation steered us in that direction well before Mr. Disraeli’s ascent to power. In almost every one, if not every one, of the greatest political controversies of the last fifty years, whether they affected the general public, whether they affected religion, whether they affected the bad and abominable institution of slavery—whatever subject they touched—these leisure classes, these educated classes, these titled classes have been in the wrong.”
“Then we must accuse the premier of magnifying and hastening forward an already dangerous state of affairs. What is your point, Mr. Gladstone?”
“That Benjamin Disraeli is an unprincipled bounder but not one jot a fool. He wouldn’t have ignored your warning. There must lay, amid all his unconstitutional measures, some element that we are missing, something within Young England that he intends as a solution to this problem of erosive patronage and nepotism.?
??
Burton felt his pocket for a cheroot but found he’d smoked the last. “Some manner of meritocracy being established within the bounds of the upper classes, you mean?”
Gladstone gave a disdainful snort. “Really, are you so blind to the arrogance of these people? They would never submit to such a scheme.”
“But if there was made a legal requirement for such—”
“Stuff and nonsense! It could never happen. If Mr. Disraeli were to even attempt such a move, the elite who fund his Conservative Party would withdraw their support, and he’d be ousted. Such is the financial stranglehold the gentry has on the political system.”
“What, then, do you suggest? What might this seemingly invisible policy be?”
“That is what I want you to find out.”
Burton recoiled, blinking in surprise. He glanced at Swinburne, who was grinning, then looked back at Gladstone. “Me? I’m no bloody politician.”
“That, I am very well aware of. You rather artlessly indicated, a few minutes ago, that you consider me remiss in my duties as leader of the opposition party. Why am I not waging a campaign against Young England, you wonder? I shall tell you. Due to the prime minister’s declaration of a state of emergency, normal parliamentary legislation is suspended. Laws are being enacted, amended, and repealed without the normal period of consultation. New policies are bypassing the House of Commons entirely and going straight to the House of Lords for approval. I am not even informed of them, let alone given the opportunity to voice my concerns. Thus it is that only the aristocracy is dealing with issues affecting the aristocracy. In the parlance of the street, the lords and ladies of the empire are writing their own ticket.”
“But you have access to Number Ten. Have you not confronted the premier in person?”
“He no longer occupies Number Ten. He and his cohorts are now running the country from a secret location, supposedly for fear that the Chinese might attempt to assassinate him. He has made himself inaccessible.”