Monsieur Levi joined them and Clunk led the guests down to the first floor—where Bram left them to accompany a second footman to the servants’ chambers—and along to the music room, from which the tinkle of a piano could be heard. As they stepped through the double doors, Blanche saw them first, stopped playing, and gave a cry of pleasure. Her audience turned and Isabel jumped up and ran to Burton. With her family watching, she was more restrained than usual in her greeting of him, but the explorer noticed something else, too—she was pale, seemingly tired, and had a faraway look in her eyes, as if daydreaming.
“Are you all right, darling?” he murmured.
“Yes, yes, now that you are here at last!” she replied. “I haven’t been sleeping well the past couple of nights, that is all. Come and say hello to Mama and Papa.”
The Honourable Henry Raymond Arundell—nephew to Lord Gerard, the 10th Baron of Arundell—was a small man with a boyish face supplemented by an oddly square-shaped beard growing from beneath the angle of his jaw; his cheeks, upper lip, and chin were all clean-shaven. His hair showed the same golden blondness his daughter had inherited. Henry Arundell held a grudging respect for Burton—an attitude not shared by his wife—and shook the explorer’s hand with genuine warmth.
Mrs. Eliza Arundell was tall, like Isabel, with a face too masculine and severe to qualify as beautiful, though she was certainly handsome. She greeted Burton and his friends politely but cautiously, and looked down at Swinburne with an expression of bemusement, as if her son-in-law-to-be had ushered Shakespeare’s Puck into her presence.
The rest of the family was introduced; Isabel’s cousins—Rudolph, tall and somewhat bumptious in manner; Jack, short, rotund, and shy; her Uncle Renfric, white-bearded and thoroughly disapproving of, it appeared, just about everything; and Blanche’s wayward husband, John Smythe Piggott, who, though handsome, carried himself with an air of superiority that Burton found thoroughly irritating.
Next, the other guests were presented, starting with Doctor George Bird and his wife, Lallah, both of whom Isabel held in high regard. “Dear George has been teaching me to fence,” she told Burton.
“Indeed!” the explorer exclaimed as he shook the tall physician’s hand. “Have you practised the art for long, Doctor?”
“Not long enough to hold my own against you. You’re reputed one of the best in Europe.”
Burton bowed his head courteously, then said to Isabel, “But why have you taken up the foil, my dear?”
“To defend you should we be attacked in the Arabian wilderness, of course!”
Burton raised an eyebrow and shared a slight smile of amusement with Bird.
Samuel Beeton was next to be introduced. Burton already knew a little about this dark-haired and good-looking man; he was a publisher and had made a fortune from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. His wife, Isabella—heavily pregnant—was one of his authors, very beautiful, with hair thick, black, and long, and dark, soulful eyes. When Burton took her hand, he felt an immediate affinity with her, and remembered that Isabel—who’d met her at a social function five years ago, before she’d become Mrs. Beeton—had reported a similar sensation: I was presented to a fine lady by the name of Isabella Mayson who I took to my heart in an instant, feeling, after our initial exchange of pleasantries, as if I’d known her my entire life.
Sadhvi Raghavendra came forward and met Swinburne and Levi, then Richard Monckton Milnes greeted his friends.
After half an hour of polite chatter with the ladies, the men repaired to the smoking room. For a brief moment, as the gents departed, Isabel was distracted when her uncle’s gout caused him to give a cry of distress, and Sadhvi Raghavendra took the opportunity to lean close to Burton. “What have you been up to, Richard?” she said softly. “I see fresh scars.”
“It’s a long story,” he replied.
“We must talk later. I’m concerned about Isabel.”
His eyes held hers for a moment. “Is there a problem, Sadhvi?”
“Only that she’s running herself into the ground.”
He gave an acknowledging touch to her arm, then joined the men as they passed through the door, walked along the hallway, and entered the smoking room, where the usual ritual of drinks and cigars commenced.
“What is it like to be back in England’s green and pleasant land, Sir Richard?” Sam Beeton asked.
“Stranger every day.”
“Was Africa as savage as the stories have it?”
“Oh, absolutely so.”
Monckton Milnes put in, “Richard already knew what he was letting himself in for when he went after the Nile, Mr. Beeton. He’d taken a spear through the face in a pitched battle at Berbera not four years previously.”
“Ah! Now then, Burton,” Bird interrupted, “tell me how you feel when you have killed a man.”
Burton looked at him slyly and drawled, “Quite jolly, Doctor. How do you?”
Bird threw his head back and gave a great bellow of laughter. “Touché!” he hollered. “Touché!”
“Incidentally,” Monckton Milnes said, “Steinhaueser arrives tomorrow. I daresay he’ll want to give you the once-over, Richard.”
“Are you referring to Doctor John Steinhaueser?” Bird asked.
“Yes—you know him?” Monckton Milnes responded.
“By repute. A very skilled practitioner, I believe.” Bird regarded Burton. “Your personal physician?”
“And friend,” Burton replied. “He has twice put me back together; first, after the spear wound—” he touched the scar on his cheek, “and, more recently, after I was injured when a steam sphere collided with my rotorchair.” He inwardly winced, remembering that Isabel didn’t know about his most recent brush with death.
Loose tongue! Dolt!
“Hah!” Uncle Renfric shouted, as—leaning heavily on his walking stick—he cautiously lowered himself into a chair by the fireplace and rested his gouty foot upon a leather pouffe. “Just as I’ve always said! These damnable machines are a threat to life and limb. Hah, I say! Humbug and hah! Why must everything change? Old England was in perfectly good shape before that hound Disraeli inflicted the Department of Guided Science upon us. Perfectly good! Hah!”
Swinburne, who was loitering near the drinks cabinet, screeched, “My hat, sir! Quite obviously you have never resided in London.”
Uncle Renfric raised a monocle to his eye and squinted through it at the little poet. “I’ve not even visited it, young lady. Den of sin. And I fail to see how my geographical position has any bearing on the matter. Nor do I understand why you are present in a gentlemen’s smoking parlour.”
“I may be young, but I’m no lady,” Swinburne replied. “And if I was, I certainly wouldn’t be.”
“Prattle! Prattle! What are you talking about?”
Swinburne hopped and gesticulated. “Bazalgette, of course!”
“There!” Uncle Renfric announced. “Again! Prattle! Nothing but noise! Take note of the Good Book, little missy, for it sayeth: Even a fool who keeps silent is considered wise; when he closes his lips, he is deemed intelligent. Hah! Yes! Hah!”
“Bazalgette!” Swinburne squealed. “His sewers!”
“A fit of feminine hysteria, is it? Must be the tobacco smoke. I told you, this is no place for a girl. Begone, at once!”
“Gah!” Swinburne cried out. “Don’t you see? Without the DOGS we’d not have him, and without him we’d not have the new sewer system. Old England may have been perfectly good, sir, but its capital stinks something rotten!”
“Ho hah! Sense out of her, at last! Of course it stinks, missy! Of fire and brimstone, no doubt! Fire and brimstone, I say!” The old man turned his monocle, surveying the room until he fixed upon Eliphas Levi. “You, sir! You have the look of a priest about you, and I see the crucifix upon your chest.”