“Drowned and blown to pieces,” Burton replied. “I’m sorry about Brunel.”
“Oh, he’ll be fine. We’ll dredge him up and put him back together again. His consciousness will be intact, preserved in the diamonds.”
The king’s agent nodded and turned to Nightingale. “Will you see to Algy? He’s putting a brave face on it, but he’s been pretty badly knocked about.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me,” the poet protested, “that a swig of brandy won’t put to rights.”
Nightingale regarded his tattered form and said, “You need alcohol rubbed into your wounds, not poured down your throat.”
“Will it sting?”
“Yes, a lot.”
“Then I insist on both.”
While the nurse got to work, assisted by Raghavendra, Burton washed, borrowed clean clothes, and departed the station in a rotorchair. He flew across the river and followed it eastward. Ahead, the Cauldron was ablaze and thick plumes of smoke were curling into the air. Just when it was needed most, the rain had stopped, and with nothing to oppose the conflagration, it was spreading with alarming rapidity.
He set down in the yard at the back of the Royal Venetia Hotel and was a few minutes later knocking on the door of Suite Five. Grumbles answered and chimed, “Good morning, sir.”
Burton ignored him, pushed past, and entered his brother’s sitting room. Edward, as ever, was in his red dressing gown and creaking armchair. He looked up from a piece of paper and said, “Ah, it’s you. I’m supposed to be at the ceremony but I’ll be damned if I—Great heavens! What on earth has happened? You look positively ghastly. Grumbles, give my brother some ale.”
Burton suddenly felt so fragile that he barely made it to a chair. He collapsed into it and weakly accepted the glass from the clockwork man. He mumbled, “Unlike Swinburne, I regard it as a little early in the day for alcohol,” before downing the pint in a single, long swig.
“That was my last bottle and I don’t know when I’ll lay my hands on more,” Edward said, somewhat ruefully. He looked his sibling up and down and shook his head despairingly. “Gad! Every time you set foot in this room you look worse than the last. Has your current state anything to do with this?” He held up the note he’d been reading when Burton had entered. “It arrived a couple of minutes before you. Apparently the detonation that shook the city a little while ago was an explosion. A very large one. In the East End.”
Burton rubbed his side and winced as his ribs complained. “Yes, I know,” he said hoarsely. “It marked the end of the case. Abdu El Yezdi is dead, and I was right—you are a secret weapon, Edward, but not for the purpose I envisioned.”
The minister’s face paled. He laced his fingers together, rested his hands on his stomach, and regarded his sibling, waiting silently for further explanation.
Burton told the whole story.
For three days, the conflagration raged through the Cauldron. The bomb had exploded beneath the Alton Ale warehouse and its flames rapidly jumped from dwelling to dwelling, consuming the wooden shacks and slumping tenements, destroying everything between Whitechapel and the Limehouse Cut Canal, Stepney, and Wapping. It was the worst blaze the city had experienced since the Great Fire of 1666, and just as that disaster had rid the city of the plague, so this one cured it of the infestation of strigoi morti. The un-dead burned to ash in their hidden lairs, unable to escape in the daylight. Many innocents also perished, but the death toll was far less than it might have been due to the mass exodus of the previous days.
“I suppose it will work out for the good,” William Trounce mused. He was sharing morning coffee with Burton, Swinburne, Levi, Sister Raghavendra, and Slaughter in the study at 14 Montagu Place. Five days had passed since the death of Crowley. “The district can be rebuilt. Better housing, what!”
“Brunel has an idea for a new class of accommodation,” Burton said. “Something he calls a high-rise.”
“What is it?” Swinburne asked.
“I don’t know, but the name suggests a variation of the old rookeries.”
“Lord help us,” Trounce put in. “Are we going to pile the poor on top of one another again?” He shook his head. “Never let the DOGS run free. They have no self-control.”
“Monsieur Trounce,” Levi said, “have the police discover le cadavre of Perdurabo?”
“No, and we probably won’t. The crater where the Alton Ale warehouse stood is still smouldering—too hot to get anywhere near—and anyway there’ll be nothing left of him, I’m certain.” The detective frowned and sipped his drink. “By Jove, a strange coincidence, though. Do you know who owns the Alton breweries?”
“Non. Who?”
“The Crowley family. Three of them were killed by the blast.”
Burton raised his eyebrows. “Are you suggesting one of them might have been Perdurabo’s ancestor?”
“It’s possible. The surname isn’t particularly common.”
“So Aleister Crowley chose to invade our history because he didn’t exist in its future, and in doing so he became the reason why he didn’t exist.”
“That makes my head hurt,” Trounce groaned.
“A paradox,” Swinburne announced gleefully. “I like it. There’s poetry in it.”
“We must prepare ourselves for further such ironies and enigmas,” Burton said. “The king has approved Edward’s proposition. My brother is now the minister of chronological affairs and we, along with Brunel, Gooch, Krishnamurthy, Penniforth, Bhatti, and Babbage make up his clandestine department.”
“I suggest we add Thomas Honesty to our ranks,” Trounce said. “He’s applied to join the Force and I’ll certainly push for his acceptance. He’s a good chap.”
Sister Sadhvi added, “I suppose the poor fellow finds the prospect of groundskeeping rather tame after what he’s been through.”
Detective Inspector Slaughter gazed into his glass of milk and muttered, “He should be warned that Scotland Yard will play havoc with his innards.”
Despite the presence of the clock on the mantelpiece, the king’s agent reached into his waistcoat pocket and pulled out his chronometer, which had been retrieved from the Norwood catacombs when the police liberated Darwin and Lister. He opened it and looked at the lock of hair in its lid.
In some histories, Isabel was still alive.
Somehow, there was a modicum of comfort in that.
He said, “They’ll be here at any moment.”
No sooner had he spoken than carriages were heard pulling up outside. Eliphas Levi rose and crossed to the window, peered out, and said, “Oui, ils sont arrives.”
The party put on their coats and hats and left the house. Burton carried with him a Gladstone bag. There were three steam-horse-drawn growlers outside, and a hearse. Montague Penniforth was driving the lead vehicle, which held Nurse Nightingale, Daniel Gooch, Shyamji Bhatti, and Maneesh Krishnamurthy.
Burton and his fellows climbed into the empty carriages and the procession set off. It turned into Baker Street and followed the thoroughfare down to Bayswater Road, then proceeded westward all the way to Lime Grove before steering south, crossing the river below Hammersmith, and heading west again toward Mortlake.
The journey began amid the density of the Empire’s capital—the vehicles wending their way slowly through the pandemonium of the packed streets—but ended in a quiet and quaint village on the edge of the metropolis; a place where little had changed over the past two decades.
In Mortlake Cemetery, Burton was pleased to discover that the stonemasons he’d hired had applied themselves to their commission with expertise, though he’d given them precious little time for it and the job wasn’t yet complete. Nevertheless, when finished, it would be the tomb he’d requested: an Arabian tent sculpted from sandstone with such realism that its sides appeared to be rippling in a breeze. Set in a quiet corner of the graveyard, it stood thirteen feet tall on a twelve-by-twelve base, and had a glass window in the rear of its sloping roof so the inside would always be light.