Liahona (11 page)

His head-butting with the gypsy circus-man calling himself
Archibald
on deck had been pointless, the fruit of Burton’s irritability
and a further aggravation to it.
 
After the showman had announced his schedule and disappeared below
decks, Burton had begged to take leave of Roxie for an hour or two to handle
some personal business and had come back to his cabin.

He sat at the tiny wooden table that folded down on a hinge
from the wall, a blank page before him and a Robinson’s Patent Metal
Self-Inking Stylus clutched in his fist like a spear.
 
You’re a man of letters, damn you, he told himself, you can
write this.

Dear Isabel
, he
scratched out at the top of the sheet, and then ran out of words.

A drink would fortify him.
 
His glass and Roxie’s from the night before still sat on the
dresser.
 
He could tell which was
which because hers was marked at the lip with smudges of lipstick, and he
instinctively reached for the smudged one—

but he stopped himself.
 

He must be fair to Isabel.
 
He, Dick Burton, had made a mistake.
 
Men made mistakes, but this one, he
resolved, was a mistake that needn’t affect his engagement in any way, that
Isabel needn’t ever know of.
 
He
could carry this guilty cross alone, but he must break off his fling with Roxie
before it went any further.
 
Certainly before Isabel learned of it.

He took the other tumbler, his glass from the night before,
and the square bottle of gin.
 
About to pour the liquor, however, he paused.
 
There were crystals in the bottom of his glass, fine and
few, like a little crusted sugar or salt, maybe, but nothing that the gin could
have left behind.

He sniffed the glass—the crystals were odorless.
 
He looked at Roxie’s glass; no
crystals.

Hmmn.
 

He pushed away the glass with crystals, poured half a shot
of gin into Roxie’s tumbler and took a sip.
 

I am well into the Rockies, and the American West is
everything I expected it to be
, he
continued, the Stylus pouring its black ink out smoothly as he wrote.
 
I have seen mountain men, red
Indians and wild animals, not to mention vistas to match or exceed anything I
ever witnessed in Goa or the Horn
.
 
Still
, he lied,
without you I find it sterile,
uninviting and dead.
 
I wish you
were here, my darling
.

He looked at what he had written and snorted in
disgust.
 
“Dick Burton, you
faithless worm,” he rebuked himself, and he crumpled the sheet into a ball and
threw it into the corner of the room.

He looked at his glass again.
 

What were those crystals?
 
He didn’t remember adding anything to his drink, though,
frankly, his memory of the night before had become a little hazy.
 
He must not have slept well, he
thought, but he didn’t remember waking during the night.

He finished the drink, and on a hunch he pulled out his
attaché case.
 
The case was where
he kept the three documents that were at the core of his mission: his own
commission letter from Her Majesty (personal to him and making no mention of
Fearnley-Standish), the letter credentialing him as an Ambassador from the
Court of St. James (not a word in that letter, either, of Fearnley-Standish or
what his role might be) and a sealed letter, addressed to President Young.
 
Burton had not read the letter to
Young, but he thought he knew its contents—Her Britannic Majesty
expressed a willingness to negotiate with the President towards ceding certain
assets to the Kingdom of Deseret in exchange for an appropriate posture
vis-à-vis the emerging American conflict and the government of the Confederate
States-to-be.
 
The assets, which
Burton was instructed to identify only verbally, were large stretches of
Alberta and British Columbia, all the territory bordering the northern edge of
the Kingdom and running to the Pacific Ocean.
 
Brigham Young would gain wheat fields, coal mines and a
major port—Burton didn’t see how Deseret could turn the offer down, as it
needed to feed its people and power its machines just like any other nation
did, and he expected his mission to be over within forty-eight hours.
 
Upon boarding the
Liahona
he had hidden the slim black case underneath his
bunk, locked its combination and, as an alarm to warn him of tampering, he had
closed the case with one of his own hairs pinched in it.

Now the hair was gone.

Burton stared at the case.
 

He checked the combination lock, finding it locked and the
dials in the 0-0-0, 0-0-0 position he’d left them in.
 
But the hair was gone.

Roxie.
 
His mind
rebelled at the accusation, but it must be her.

No, you idiot, he thought.
 
You feel guilty because you have broken your troth, but that
is no reason to suppose that Roxie is a thief or a spy.
 
She’s only a woman, after all,
beautiful and clever and oh so dangerous and sweet in the way she moves,
beneath that red crinoline or without its veiling—

he cut off that train of thought.

No, it could have been anyone.
 
The cabin had been locked, but Captain Jones or someone in
his crew must have another copy of the key, and someone could have stolen
it.
 
Or simply picked the lock.

It could have been Fearnley-Standish, the little
weasel.
 
He was the reason Burton
had put a hair in the attaché case in the first place—he hadn’t wanted
his ostensible colleague to steal the letter to Brigham Young and cut Burton
out of the mission, as he seemed constantly to be trying to do with his bizarre
pretensions to authority.
 
That
must be it; Fearnley-Standish had bribed a truck-man to give him the key, he
had let himself in at some moment while Burton had been away, and he had opened
the case.

Though whoever had done it had also been able to open the
combination locks on the attaché case.
 
That was no mean feat; Burton was certain his combination was a safe
secret, not a birthday or some obvious number, but 8-5-3, 0-9-1, which, reordered
into 09/1853, made September, 1853, the month Burton had entered the Kaaba, the
first kaffir, he believed, ever to have done so, and almost the first
European.
 
No one would think to
try those digits as a combination, surely, so whoever had opened the case had
done so by some other means—had picked the lock.

Was Fearnley-Standish capable of such a thing?

Burton’s eyes flickered to the crystals in his tumbler.
 
He stifled the doubts in his heart as
he choked back the memory of white ankles.
 
No, he told himself again.
 
Not Roxie.

He opened the case.
 
Inside, everything looked all in order.
 
The three letters were there, inside a large, flat, leather
wallet, and nothing unexpected had been added.

Or had it?
 
He
picked up the sealed envelope addressed to
Mr. Brigham Young, President of
the Kingdom of Deseret
and hefted it.
 
It looked like the same envelope, but
whoever had opened the case might have switched envelopes, or might have
steamed the envelope open and switched out its contents.
 
Might have, he considered, but to what
end?

He might be played like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, from
Shakespeare’s play.
 
Hamlet had
swapped their sealed letter for another, hadn’t he?
 
And where the original letter instructed the king to kill
Hamlet, the substitute instructed him instead to kill Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern.
 

Bad way to go, that.
 
Embarrassing.

“Bhishma’s buttocks!” Burton cursed darkly.
 
He was going to have to open the
letter.
 
It wasn’t contrary to any
explicit direction he had received, but it definitely went beyond his
affirmative instructions, and it smacked of underhandedness and shady
ethics.
 
Burton had no qualms about
raiding the enemy by stealth, but sneaking about to get around his allies, or worse,
his superiors, was unmanly and dishonorable.
 

On the other hand, he could not risk the possibility that
the Yankee Clemens was somehow responsible, and was sending Burton in to meet
Brigham Young bearing a letter that read
Dear Sir, please commence aerial
raids on Richmond and Savannah at your earliest convenience.
 
Sincerely, Victoria.
 
P.S., have the bearer of this letter
staked to the ground in front of the nearest coyote den
.
 
The
tools that he and Fearnley-Standish had removed (that
he
had removed, he corrected himself with a rueful
grin, Fearnley-Standish hadn’t done a damned thing) from the
Jim
Smiley
the previous night and stowed in the
hold of the
Liahona
hadn’t been
here this morning, when Burton had made a point of checking.
 
If Clemens hadn’t got his tools back,
then someone else had got them.

Burton sighed.
 
There was no good way around it; he would have to look.
 

It was easy to steam the letter open, using a jet from the
convenience steam hose (usually used to make scalding hot tea or iron clothes
or clean filthy boots) below the hot spigot in the cabin’s little brass
sink.
 
Burton unfolded the letter
inside with trepidation, sitting again at the table to read it.
 
He knew that he was doing what he had
to do, for the sake of the mission, but he still felt like a thief, a
trespasser, a blasphemer.

It didn’t look as official as he had expected, nothing like
the credentials—no seal, no formalities, just a simple note on the
Palace’s headed paper with a signature—but then, Burton reflected, it
wouldn’t.
 
The official mission was
his; the note was a personal communication, an assurance of personal interest
and sincerity from one head of state to another.
 
He read the note with fear in his heart and a mounting
paranoia in his aching brain.

Dear President Young,

To the formal documents credentialing my envoy, I wish to
add my personal statement of confidence. Captain Burton is a man of proven
merit in many extraordinary circumstances, and I trust you will find him as
capable, as bold and as interesting as I do.

I trust also that we will be able to reach
agreement.
 
All parties declare
themselves to be against the outbreak of hostilities, but you and I mean it
sincerely, and I believe that between us your Kingdom and mine can ensure that
the American squabbles regarding membership and secession are resolved in a way
that does not compromise our nations’ prosperity.
 
Captain Burton is authorised to make certain promises to you
in order to clarify that our interests are aligned; I will honour those promises.

Cordially Yours, VRI

Post-Script. Captain Burton is a man of action.
 
If you have need of him in that
capacity, please show him this letter as my instruction to him that he is to
cooperate fully with your requests.

Ha! Burton thought.
 
Again no mention of the tiresome little Foreign Office man, and the
Queen’s note was all about
Captain Burton
and his mission.
 
So
Fearnley-Standish was a liar, just as he’d thought.
 

But what in blazes did that post-script mean?

He closely scanned the letter again, not for meaning this
time, but to look at the letters and the paper for any sign of
inauthenticity.
 
Forgery and its
detection were not his métier, but he thought of himself as an astute and
perceptive man, and the letter passed his smell test.
 
The sheet’s heading and watermark looked official, and the
handwriting throughout looked consistent.
 
Before the gum on the flap could dry, he refolded the note, replaced it,
and re-sealed the envelope.
 

He held it in his hands and considered what to do.
 
Someone, he thought, had likely read
the letter, and he couldn’t know who.
 
Possibly, though he thought it unlikely, someone had
tampered
with the letter.

Still, its contents were consistent with what Burton knew of
his own mission, although he wondered what Her Majesty could mean, suggesting
that Brigham Young call upon his services as a
man of action
.
 
Well,
he harrumphed to an imaginary audience, he
was
a man of action, after all, and if President Young
needed to call on his assistance in some matter, Burton would do what was
necessary, for Queen and country.

On reflection, Burton decided that this episode had given
him a salutary warning.
 
It seemed
likely that some rival, some enemy even, had looked into the official
correspondence of which he was the appointed bearer, but there was nothing
compromising in those letters, nothing that would give away Burton’s bargaining
position or weaken him or make him vulnerable in any other way.
 
The true core of Burton’s mission was
locked away in his own memory, unassailable.
 
And because it could have been worse, Burton was now duly
warned that his attaché case, even locked in his cabin and sealed behind a
combination lock, was not a sufficiently safe place for the letters.