"No, Richard! Don't say that!" she wailed.
"It's true. You would have married a broken man-but for one thing."
"What?" she whimpered.
"That evening, I was physically assaulted."
Isabel blinked rapidly. "You were attacked? By whom?"
"By a thing out of myth and folklore; by a seemingly supernatural being; by Spring Heeled Jack."
She stared at him wordlessly.
"It's true, Isabel. Then, on Tuesday morning, I was summoned by Palmerston and he offered me a post on behalf of the king. I have become a-well, there's no real name for it; Palmerston calls me the `king's agent,' though 'investigator' or `researcher' or even `detective' might do just as well. One of my first commissions is to discover more about the very creature that assaulted me."
Isabel Arundell suddenly rose to her feet and crossed the room to one of the windows. She looked out of it as she spoke.
"This is poppycock, Dick," she snapped, decisively. "Has your malaria returned?"
He moved back to the bureau, beside her, and poured himself a glass of port.
"Do you mean to suggest that I might be delusional?"
There was a deep sadness in his voice. She swung around at the sound of it.
"Spring Heeled Jack is a children's story!"
"And if I were also to tell you that I've seen werewolves in London?"
"Werewolves! Richard! Listen to what you are saying!"
"I know how it sounds, Isabel, but I also know what I saw. Furthermore, a man died and it was my fault. It taught me a painful lesson: that this post I now hold brings with it immense danger, not just for me, but for those close to me, too."
"I can't-I can't-" she stammered. "Dear God! You mean to give me up?" She clutched at her chest as if her heart were failing.
"You know what manner of man am I," he replied. "Discovery is my mania. Africa is closed to me now and, anyway, I have little desire for the ill health that expeditions bring with them. The last almost killed me, and I would rather die on my feet than on my back. Besides, geographical exploration is but one form of discovery; there are others, and the king has given me the opportunity to use my mania in a fashion I had hitherto never imagined. I can-"
"Stop!" commanded Isabel. Her chin went up and her eyes flashed dangerously. "And what of me, Richard? Answer me that! What of me?"
Ignoring the great ache that suddenly gripped his heart, Sir Richard Francis Burton answered.
Despite her flaws, Burton loved Isabel, and despite his, she returned that love. She was meant to be his wife, that he could not dispute, yet he had defied Destiny and willfully forced his life down a different path.
He was left empty and emotionless; yet he suddenly acquired a heightened self-awareness, too, and experienced an intensification of the feverish sensation that his personality was split.
As the afternoon gave way to early evening, he fell once again into a deep contemplation-almost a self-induced trance-under the spell of which he explored the presence of the invisible doppelganger that seemed to occupy the same armchair as himself. Oddly, he found that he now associated this second Richard Burton not with the delirium of malaria but with Spring Heeled Jack.
He and his double, he intuitively recognised, existed at a point of divergence. To one of them, a path was open that led to Fernando Po, Brazil, Dam ascus, and "wherever the fuck else they send you. " For the other, the path was that of the king's agent, its destination shrouded.
The stilt-walker, Burton was certain, had somehow foreseen this choice. Jack, whatever he was, was not a spy, as he and Palmerston had initially suspected. Oh no, nothing so pedestrian as that! It wasn't just what the strangely costumed man had said but also the way he'd said it that forced upon Burton the conception that Jack possessed an uncanny knowledge of hisBurton's-future, knowledge that could never be gained from spying, no matter how efficient.
In India, he'd seen much that defied rational thought. Human beings, he was convinced, possessed a "force of will" that could extend their senses beyond the limits of sight, hearing, taste, or touch. Could it, he wondered, even transcend the restrictions of time? Was Spring Heeled Jack a true clairvoyant? If he was, then he obviously spent far too much time dwelling upon the future, for his grasp of the present seemed tenuous at best; he had expressed astonishment when Burton revealed that the Nile debate-and Speke's accident-had already occurred.
"I'm a historian!" he'd claimed. "I know what happened. It was 1864 not 1861."
Happened. Past tense, though he spoke of 1864, which was three years in the future.
Curious.
There was an obvious-though hard to accept-explanation for the discrepancies in Jack's perception of time: he simply wasn't of this world. The creature had, after all, twice vanished before Burton's very eyes and, back in 1840, had done the same in full view of Detective Inspector Trounce. Plainly, this was a feat no mere mortal could achieve.
What's more, everything could be explained Jack's inconsistent character and appearance, his confusion about time, his seeming to be in two places at once, his apparent agelessness-if it were accepted that he was a supernatural being whose habitat lay beyond the realms of normal time and space. Perhaps Burton's first impression had been correct: could he be an uncorked djinni? A demon? A malevolent spirit? Moko, the Congo's god of divination?
The king's agent emerged from his contemplation having come to two conclusions. The first was that, for the time being, the bizarre apparition should be treated as one being rather than as two or more. The second was that Time was a key element in understanding Spring Heeled Jack.
He stood and rubbed a crick out of his neck. As always, focusing his mind on one thing had helped him to forget another, and, though his meeting with Isabel had been painful, he wasn't immobilised by depression, as he'd sometimes been in the past. In fact, he was feeling surprisingly positive.
It was eight o'clock.
Burton crossed to the window and looked down at Montagu Place. The fog had reduced to a watery mist, liberally punctuated with coronas of light from gas lamps and windows. The usual hustle and bustle had returned to the streets of London: the rattling velocipedes, gasping steam-horses, oldfashioned horse-drawn vehicles, pantechnicons, and, above all, the seething mass of humanity.
Usually, when he looked upon such a scene, Burton, ever the outsider, felt a fierce longing for the wide-open spaces of Arabia. This evening, though, there was an unfamiliar cosiness about London, almost a familiarity. He'd never felt this before. England had always felt strange to him, stifling and repressive.
I am changing, he thought. I hardly know myself.
A flash of red caught his attention: Swinburne stepping out of a hansom. The poet's arrival was signalled by shrill screams and cries as he squabbled with the driver over the fare. Swinburne had the fixed idea that the fare from one place in London to any other was a shilling, and would argue hysterically with any cabbie who said otherwise-which they all did. On this occasion, as so often happened, the driver, embarrassed by the histrionics, gave up and accepted the coin.
Swinburne came bobbing across the street with that peculiar dancing gait of his. He jangled the front doorbell.