The Rise of the Automated Aristocrats

  Swinburne grimaced and shook his head.

  “Come on, old friend. I couldn’t miss the expression on your face. Out with it.”

  “Ugh! And pah!

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Pah! I say!”

  “By which you mean?”

  “Pah to Isabel, Richard. Pah to her, and pah to her again! And that’s all I have to say on the matter.”

  “I see. And such unpoetic sentiment is prompted by—?”

  Swinburne crossed his arms, uncrossed them, crossed them again, then frowned and compressed his lips.

  Burton rapped his knuckles on the table top. “Come on! Come on! I’m filled to the brim with conundrums. I lack capacity for another.”

  The poet loosed an inarticulate cry. “Confound it! She burned The Scented Garden! Burned it! That and all of your diaries and notes!”

  “I know.”

  “I never spoke to her again. I couldn’t stand the thought that—Hallo? What? Pardon? How can you possibly know? You were dead.”

  “Before I found myself here, when my heart was failing, there were hallucinations. At least, that’s what I thought they were. Like your Culver Cliff episode.” Burton touched the long scar on his face. “I experienced again the disaster at Berbera. You recall, when my camp was attacked? And I saw her at a bonfire, throwing my work into its flames.”

  A confusion of emotions welled up in Burton—rage, sadness, loss, love, despair, resignation—then were gone, leaving nothing but a strange and aching absence, as if he’d had a tooth removed. Isabel was nearby, restored to her prime, lovely and alluring, yet he suddenly knew he’d never see her again. The notion didn’t disturb him as much as it should have.

  Abandon her? You can’t. Not even you are that ruthless.

  Swinburne shook his head sadly. “A terrible and stupid thing to do. It utterly ruined her reputation. She was roundly condemned by the press and lost most of her friends just when she needed them the most. Is—is she here, in Bath?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I can’t think about it right now. I can hardly think about anything.”

  “I know exactly what you mean. My head is crammed with visions that make no sense. I’m remembering things that never even happened.”

  Burton raised an inquisitive eyebrow. Swinburne shrugged. “Fantasies. Alice in Wonderland nonsense.” He paused. “Hmm. A case in point. I feel that I’ve met Charles Dodgson—you know, Lewis Carroll, the author of that book—yet I’m equally convinced that I haven’t.”

  “Yes,” Burton responded. “Yes. Was I with you? There was—a storm? You were swimming in the sea. Then—” He squeezed his eyes shut and clutched at fleeting impressions. “A carriage ride. Dodgson saying something about literature and travel.”

  “Steam transportation making the world smaller,” Swinburne muttered. “The booklets sold at stations—the little thrilling romances where the murder comes at page fifteen and the wedding, at page forty—surely they are due to steam.”

  “Yes. He said that, I remember. But when? When were we with him? I can think of no such occasion.”

  “Nor I. And the carriage—not a horse-drawn affair but a queer sort of contraption more akin to a locomotive. I can picture all sorts of such machines. I see myself in a flying chair and on a penny-farthing that has a little engine. I recall big spidery contrivances. Animal monstrosities, too. Giant swans and colossal horses. I even imagine myself to be a vermillion-coloured jungle. If I allow my mind to roam freely, I instantly slip into an opium-like reverie.”

  “I’ve been pushing it aside but—if I let it—the same happens to me. Much of what I think and feel is blatantly nonsensical. But—” Burton drew his brows together. “Another mutual illusion. This jungle of yours. I’ve seen plenty, but never a vermillion-coloured one. Except, somehow, I feel I have, and I am possessed of the notion that I’ve been in it, too.”

  “I didn’t say I imagined myself in it. I said I was it, which is utterly ridiculous.” Swinburne looked at Burton with uncertainty. “It’s as if—I have the idea—I feel almost as if I’ve lived many lives over and am recalling them all at once. Are my eyes bulging? Am I foaming at the mouth?”

  “No,” Burton answered. “And I share the identical sensation.”

  He glanced around at the dingy interior of the Slug and Lettuce, at its low-beamed ceiling and stained walls, at the hustle and bustle within them, at the dirty, pockmarked, and expressive faces of its customers. Many a glance was being cast in his and Swinburne’s direction. Their demeanour and behaviour had attracted considerable curiosity. One man in particular was standing alone, tankard in his right hand, bowler hat in his left, staring at them intently. He possessed a thickset, burly physique, frosty blue eyes, and a wide brown moustache. Upon seeing he was observed, he gave a slight start and shifted awkwardly from foot to foot. He then appeared to reach a decision and moved through the crowd toward them.

  Without taking his eyes from him, Burton said, “That man, as with Dodgson, I think I’ve met before but am also aware that I most certainly I haven’t.”

  Swinburne followed his gaze. “Oh, it’s just my brother.” He emitted a squeak of surprise. “What in blue blazes am I talking about? No it isn’t! I’ve never laid eyes on the fellow!”

  The man arrived at their table, put down his glass, and self-consciously touched his right forefinger to his eyebrow in greeting. “I’m—um—forgive the intrusion, gentlemen, but—er—my name is William Trounce—Police Sergeant William Trounce—and I was wondering—that is to say—oh dash it!—does the word ‘reborn’ happen to mean anything to you?”

  “It certainly does,” Burton said. “You’d better sit down, Detective Inspector.”

  “Sergeant,” Trounce corrected. He put his hat on the table, pulled out a chair, and joined them, fidgeting awkwardly, plainly nervous. “I’m sorry to—the thing of it is, you see—” He put his hands over his face and groaned. “By Jove! What in the name of God is happening?”

  Swinburne said, “Might it be that you died and now find yourself in your own past?”

  “Yes!” Trounce exclaimed. “Yes, I swear to it. But it’s not—how did you—how—?”

  “It has happened to us, as well,” Burton put in. “We were just discussing the fact that we’re also experiencing memories that aren’t our own. For instance, I feel an instantaneous familiarity with you, Mr. Trounce, almost as if we’ve spent considerable time together, which most assuredly is not the case.”

  “I share that sentiment,” Swinburne added. “You feel like family, Pouncer. Sorry. Pouncer? I mean Will—er—Sergeant Trounce.”

  “William, please,” Trounce said huskily. He looked from one to the other then grabbed his tankard and emptied it. Burton, who’d finished his own drinks without even noticing, snapped his fingers to attract the potboy’s attention and ordered another round. If the alcohol he’d so far consumed was having any effect, he was too agitated to notice it.

  “It’s been a very long time since I got sloshed,” Swinburne commented. “I’m strongly inclined to address that grievous negligence. William, my name is Algernon Swinburne—‘Algy’ will do—and this is Sir Richard Burton, the famous explorer.”

  “And the king’s agent,” Trounce said.

  “The what?” Burton asked.

  Trounce moved his lips wordlessly, obviously grappling with a notion that wouldn’t come. His face bore an expression of complete helplessness. “I don’t know why I said that.”

  “There hasn’t been a king since William the Fourth,” Swinburne noted. “And no monarchy at all since Victoria’s assassination.”

  Trounce winced. “I should know that better than anybody. I was there when she was killed. It ruined my life. Even me being here—” He made a gesture that suggested not just the tavern around them but the world—and time—beyond it, “might be traced back to her death, after a fashion.”

  “How so?” Burton aske
d.

  “You’ll have me committed if I tell you.”

  “The madhouse might be the best place for all three of us.”

  “Humph! I can’t argue with that.” Trounce smoothed his moustache with his fingertips and gave a small and decisive nod. “I’m a London City policeman. Have been all my life. I joined the Force when I was barely out of short pants but—well—you mistakenly called me ‘Detective Inspector,’ sir, and I bloody well should be by now, but it all went bad for me right from the start.” He paused and they waited, allowing him to gather his thoughts. “Do either of you recall the old stories about Spring Heeled Jack?”

  A chill skittered up Burton’s spine. His mouth went dry. His hands curled into fists, and his knuckles turned white.

  “Never explained,” Trounce went on. “A phantom that assaulted young women before taking mighty leaps to evade pursuers. Spotted again and again in the late ’thirties.”

  Swinburne said, “I remember the tales.”

  “On the tenth of June, 1840, I was pounding my usual beat, which took me along the Mall, onto Constitution Hill and through Green Park. I always timed it so I’d be in the park when the queen and Prince Albert emerged from the palace for their daily ride. Crowds tended to gather for the occasion, and there were often protestors. Poor little Victoria wasn’t as popular before her death as she was after it. However, on this particular day I was late, having been distracted by a notorious pickpocket known as Dennis the Dip. I was nineteen years old and eager to make my first arrest. Stupid! It was just a five-minute delay, but it cost me my reputation. By the time I was entering the park, the assassin, Edward Oxford—”

  Again, Burton shuddered, as a wave of inexplicable fear and sadness ran through him.

  “—had drawn his flintlock. I heard the first shot and broke into a run. Then—”

  Trounce stopped. His face paled. The potboy approached, and even before he’d set down the tray, the policeman had grabbed a tankard from it and taken a long draught.

  Swinburne said to the lad, “Keep ’em coming.”

  Trounce waited until the boy had departed then continued in a hoarse voice. “A freakish apparition raced past and stopped in front of me. A man, on short stilts, in a tight white costume and a black helmet, with blue fire playing all around him. Spring Heeled Jack! I swear by all that’s holy. Spring Heeled Jack! The creature yelled, ‘Stop, Edward!’ then the second shot was fired and Victoria was killed. The phantom leaped right over my head, and when I turned to look for it, it had vanished into thin air. I managed to gather my wits enough to continue on to the scene of the murder. By the time I got there, a man had tackled the assassin and accidentally killed him. He then ran off.”

  “The ‘mystery hero,’ as he became known,” Swinburne put in.

  “Yes. I chased after him, followed him into a thicket of trees, and found there nothing but a top hat lying on the ground. The man, like Spring Heeled Jack, had vanished as if by magic.”

  Pulling a red-and-white polka-dot handkerchief from his pocket, Trounce blew his nose. “No one believed my report,” he went on after a pause. “I became the laughing stock of Scotland Yard. So, while my fellows got their promotions, I didn’t. I stayed a constable until close to retirement when they finally—out of sympathy, I suspect—made me a sergeant.” He heaved a forlorn sigh and took a rather more modest swig of his beer than the previous. “I didn’t help myself by spending time, against the commissioner’s express instructions, investigating the old Spring Heeled Jack sightings. I even carried on after my retirement, which brings me to today—that is to say—to Tuesday the twenty-second of January, 1901—” He cleared his throat and looked at Swinburne. “Which isn’t today at all, is it? This is ’sixty-four?”

  “It is, and I find that as difficult to swallow as you do.”

  “Humph! Well, this morning—that morning—I was on my way to Stratford to meet another witness to the assassination, a former road sweeper known as Old Carter, when I ran into a petty criminal I’d put away in my younger days. Vincent Sneed, his name was. A nasty, vicious piece of work with the biggest nose you could possibly imagine. He recognised me, I recognised him. He had a grudge and a repeater in his pocket, I was unarmed and none too fast on my eighty-year-old feet, and—bang!—next thing I knew I was flat on my back on the pavement and everything turned white. I dreamed. Imagined myself to be flying through a city of towers in some sort of aerial ship. When I woke from it—”

  “Aerial ship?” Burton interrupted. “Like Renard and Krebs’s La France?” He corrected himself. “No. Much larger and considerably more sophisticated.” He gave a grunt of surprise. “How the devil do I know that?”

  “Orpheus,” Swinburne murmured.

  “Yes!” Burton and Trounce chorused.

  The three men looked at each other in astonishment.

  “The word came to me from nowhere,” Swinburne said.

  Flustered, Trounce resorted to his beer again. Burton and Swinburne followed suit.

  They sat in silence for a minute before Burton quietly said, “Continue, please. I feel that your account is drawing us closer to some manner of explanation for our current predicament. If ‘predicament’ is the appropriate word.”

  “It isn’t,” Swinburne interjected. “And I’ll risk my reputation as a poet by stating that no suitable word exists.”

  Trounce wiped froth from his moustache. “As an old man, I’d always expected to die in my bed. Instead, I’d been shot dead. I was certain of it. I considered every thought my last. Memories—some my own, some obvious fantasies in disguise—came and went until one predominated. It was as clear as day, this recollection, of an occasion near enough forty years before when I’d gone to Bristol to interview a woman named Clayton, formerly Hurd. I’d found an old newspaper article in which it was reported that, the same year as the assassination, Spring Heeled Jack had assaulted her. Apparently he’d pounced on her, sliced hair from the back of her head, and made his escape. Except, it gradually dawned on me that this wasn’t a memory at all. I really was in Bristol. It really was 1864. I was in the past, and I was—” he tapped the middle of his chest, “like this. Young!”

  “Your wits returned to you today,” Swinburne said. “I mean today today, not the other today.”

  “Er. Yes. I think.”

  “You’d awoken in your own past,” Burton clarified.

  “I had, and at a particularly inauspicious moment.”

  “Why inauspicious?”

  “Because, on this particular day, I was only free to travel to Bristol on account of having sent a messenger to inform Chief Commissioner Mayne that I was sick and bedridden. It was a falsehood, and not only did the whole endeavour prove fruitless—from the woman’s description it was obvious to me that her attacker was nothing more than a prankster—but my deception was discovered.” Trounce picked up his bowler hat and lightly tapped his fist against it as if considering whether it would withstand a hefty punch. “I’d been seen and recognised at the railway station. My chief tore into me. I was disciplined and marked down as unreliable. From that moment, I knew I’d never amount to anything. I’d succumbed to an unhealthy obsession, and it had ruined my prospects. This day—” He waved his hat around his head. “Friday, the sixteenth of September, ’sixty-four, is the exact day that my life took a turn for the worse, the day I finally realised that I would never make the grade at Scotland Yard.”

  “And your presence here in the Slug and Lettuce?” Burton asked.

  Trounce blinked rapidly and, as if unable to give any credence to the words that came from his own mouth, said, “I was standing outside Mrs. Clayton’s house, wondering what in the name of heaven was happening, when a parrot landed on the gatepost and told me to catch a train to Bath and come here to this place. It called me a—what was it?—a skunk-scented, slack-tongued nitwit.”

  Swinburne gave a snort of merriment.

  The policeman gritted his teeth, and the threatened punch was delivered to hi
s bowler, leaving a dent in its crown. “I don’t like birds, I don’t like being insulted, and I don’t like mysteries, even when they restore me to my prime.”

  “Nor I,” Burton agreed, “and if our particular mystery has a solution, the current date may be a clue toward its discovery, for in common with you, William, I’ve always regarded this day as the occasion of my ruination.”

  “In what—if you don’t mind—I mean—humph!—how so?”

  “A colleague of mine shot himself dead today. It was the culmination of a sequence of events that shook my confidence in myself and damaged both my good name and my self-regard. Though in the case of the former, it wasn’t so good, and in the case of the latter, I’ll confess that a little more humility was probably required anyway. I say that with the benefit of hindsight, of course.”

  Burton looked at Swinburne. “I don’t recall this being a time of any great significance for you, though, Algy, so perhaps I’m barking up the wrong tree.”

  “Are you joking?” Swinburne objected. “Bark away! Perhaps not this specific date but certainly this period. ’Sixty-four is when my reputation as a poet was secured and when my little indulgences grew into such grandiose passions that my ability to write was all but destroyed by them. Eventually I had to be taken in hand by Theo—” He turned to Trounce. “Theodore Watts-Dunton. A friend of mine who, in 1879, when my excesses had caused my health to fail, virtually kidnapped me, kept me in seclusion, and weaned me off the bottle. Were it not for him, I’d have died a great many years earlier than I did. I survived but, according to the critics, the same could not be said of my talent.”

  Trounce glanced at the empty glasses that were fast accumulating on the table. Swinburne, noting the look, grinned. “We are restored. We deserve a little debauchery after suffering our prolonged twilight years, do you not think? Nudging my toe onto the road to ruin is not the same as taking a headlong plunge along it. I shan’t be doing that again, I can assure you. Presuming, that is, that we are here to stay.”

  Trounce gave a slight smile. “You make a good case, lad. By Jove, a few hours ago, these fingers of mine were near enough paralysed by arthritis. To clap ’em around a tankard again, well—” He raised his glass. “I have to drink to that!”