The Curious Case Of The Clockwork Man (14 page)

“I do, absolutely!”

“On what grounds?”

“On grounds that the dowager is on death’s doorstep and is desperate for her lost son’s return; on grounds that she’s almost entirely deaf and blind; on grounds that Roger Tichborne always, without exception, wrote to his mother in French, yet the man currently posing as him wrote to her in English—and very, very bad English to boot—and on grounds that his handwriting is entirely different.”

“A man’s handwriting can change over the course of a decade.”

“Can a man forget how to spell?”

“Hmm,” Burton grunted.

The waiter arrived with their food and for a few minutes the men ate in silence.

“So Sir Roger Tichborne—” Burton began.

“The Claimant,” Arundell snapped. “I’ll not honour him with the name Tichborne until he’s demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is who he says he is.”

“Very well then, the Claimant—he’s still in Paris?”

“Yes. Apparently he has a scalp infection and is being treated by a doctor, though he’s expected at Tichborne House during the course of the coming week. I fear he means to eject Colonel Lushington.”

“I would like to be there when he arrives. Could you arrange it?”

Arundell looked Burton in the eye. “If you go as representative of the Arundell and Doughty families, yes. My question is: can I depend on you to act in our interests? You and I don’t have a good history, Burton, and my wife would have a hysterical fit if she found out I’d drawn you into the affair.”

“It was the prime minister who drew me into the affair, sir, and what you can depend on is that I will do my utmost to get to the truth of the matter, whatever it may be.”

Arundell pushed the food on his plate around with his fork, then sighed and said: “Fair enough. I’ll get a message to Lushington. He’s a dependable sort, if a little long-winded in manner, and will give you whatever assistance you need. When do you intend to go?”

“Tomorrow afternoon.”

“Good. You’ll definitely be there before the Claimant arrives. In addition to the colonel and Sir Alfred, there are a couple of other people at the house you should be aware of. The first is Doctor Jankyn, the family physician. He belongs to an unbroken line of medical practitioners who’ve been associated with the Tichbornes since the year dot, and he’s currently nursing Sir Alfred through some sort of nervous complaint.”

“Related to his brother’s return?”

“I don’t know. The second person is Andrew Bogle, an old Jamaican who served as butler to Sir Edward Doughty and who now works in that same capacity for Sir Alfred. Both men knew Roger Tichborne before he left for South America.”

With that, Henry Arundell had little more to tell Burton, so the two men finished their meal and Isabel’s father took his leave.

The king’s agent retired to the smoking room and there fell in with Samuel Baker and John Petherick from the Royal Geographical Society. They were bluff, hearty, bushy-bearded men, whose plan to go in search of Henry Morton Stanley by following the course of the Nile from Cairo to its source struck Burton as naïve and overly ambitious. The warring tribes around the upper reaches of the great river had so far prevented any such penetration into the heart of Africa.

“It can’t be done,” he told them.

“We’ll see, Sir Richard. We’ll see!” Baker replied, with a smile and a slap to Burton’s shoulder.

The three of them discussed the matter for an hour or so before the two would-be rescuers took their leave of the more experienced man. Burton shook his head.

“The bloody fools are going to their deaths,” he muttered.

He swallowed his drink and turned to leave only to find himself facing another member of the
RGS
. It was Richard Spruce, a botanist, author of
The Hepaticae of the Amazon and the Andes of Peru and Ecuador
; a man who knew South America extremely well.

“Ah, Spruce!” the king’s agent enthused. “Just the man! Would you allow me to buy you a tipple? I have an ulterior motive, mind—I want to grill you about Brazil and Chile.”

Spruce acceded, and, for half an hour, Burton questioned him about black diamonds and the mythical
Cherufe.
Spruce just shrugged and declared that there were no diamonds in that part of the world and he’d never heard of any prehistoric reptilian civilisation. He then turned the subject to his ongoing work with the Eugenicists to solve the great Irish famine, and talked with such obsessive zeal that Burton began to feel uncomfortable, sensing that he was in the presence of a fanatic.

“The seeds my fellows and I have developed are already growing!” Spruce raved. “You should see them! They’ve sprouted into massive plants! Huge, Burton, huge! And they’re pollinating far earlier than we’d anticipated!”

He banged a fist onto the bar, causing glasses to rattle along its length.

“It’s just the beginning! Soon we’ll be cultivating plants that’ll perform specific functions in society in much the same way as machines do! Imagine a factory that was actually a plant! Imagine if we could grow our industrial infrastructure from seeds!”

Burton, whose encounters with Charles Darwin and Francis Galton, and, more recently, with Sir Charles Babbage, had made him extremely wary of such propositions, gave an excuse and departed in haste. There was, he reflected, something quite unnerving about Richard Spruce.

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The next morning, Algernon Swinburne called at 14 Montagu Place and was ushered through the house by Mrs. Angell, into the yard, and to the garage beyond. Inside, he found Sir Richard Francis Burton, who was applying oil to his rotorchair’s many moving parts.

“I say! What happened to your beard?” the diminutive poet enquired.

“Vanity happened,” Burton admitted. “I got tired of seeing that forked bird’s nest in the mirror.”

“You look younger, but no less barbaric. Are you feeling better? You’re still skinny and yellowish.”

“I’m through the worst of it, Algy, and feeling stronger by the day. What have you been up to? Here, hold this.”

“What is it?”

“The flywheel. I want to lubricate the bearings.”

“Ah.” Swinburne sighed. “I know a rather fetching young doxy who does something similar. You’d like her.”

Burton clicked his tongue disapprovingly and said: “Then my question is answered. It’s quite apparent what you’ve been up to.”

The poet adopted a wounded expression and objected: “I’ve been writing, too! As a matter of fact, my latest efforts have caused quite a stir.”

“So I read. The
Empire
is calling you a genius.”

“Yes, but the
Times
is calling me a deviant.”

“It’s hardly surprising. Your poetry is somewhat—shall we say—
florid?
Here, give me that back.”

Swinburne handed over the flywheel and watched as his friend fitted it into its housing.

“
Filthy
was the word the
Times
used. Are you preparing it for a flight or just tinkering?”

“I’m flying out to Hampshire this afternoon.”

“What’s there?”

“Tichborne House.”

“What! What!” Swinburne cried, twitching and jerking like a maniac. “Surely you haven’t got yourself mixed up in
that
business!”

Burton picked up a cloth and wiped oil from his hands.

“I’m afraid so. There’s a remote possibility that the François Garnier Collection is involved, too.”

“Eh? The Fra—What? How? You mean Brunel—? What?”

“Really, Algy, you’re the most incomprehensible poet I’ve ever met! But to answer the question you haven’t managed to ask: no, I don’t think the Steam Man has anything to do with the Tichborne case. However, I do suspect that whoever stole the diamonds from right under his mechanical nose might have some connection with the returning heir.”

“Ah ha! So there’s a safe cracker among the Tichborne clan!”

“It’s not impossible. All I know thus far is—”

Burton went on to recount the legends concerning the three Eyes of Nāga. He then told the history of the Tichborne family.

“So you see,” he concluded, “I’m working on the premise that perhaps Sir Henry found the South American Eye—even though Henry Arundell pooh-poohs the suggestion—and that someone in or connected in some way with the family might now have possession of the Choir Stones, too.”

“Which just leaves the African diamond,” Swinburne commented.

“Indeed.”

“Which strikes me as peculiar.”

“Peculiar?”

“It gave rise to the Nile.”

“According to myth, yes. What are you getting at?”

“Just that you and Speke went hunting for the source of that river, then Henry Stanley did, and now his expedition has disappeared.”

Burton frowned. “His expedition has disappeared because he was stupid enough to fly over the region in these—” He rapped his knuckles against the side of his rotorchair. “Not a single flying machine that’s entered the region has ever come out again. He knew that, but still he flew.”

“Yes, but that’s not what I meant.”

“What, then?”

“Come into the house with me. Have a cigar. I want you to tell me a story.”

The king’s agent considered his friend for a moment, then shrugged, nodded, put away his tools, and led Swinburne from the garage.

Minutes later, they were relaxing in the study.

Burton took a sip of port and said: “What do you want to know?”

“About your expedition with Speke. If I remember rightly, you reached Lake Tanganyika by March of ’58. What happened next?”

“Illness, mainly. We’d heard there was a port town named Ujiji on the eastern shore of the lake where we could establish a base camp, but when we got there we found that it consisted of nothing but a few decrepit beehive-shaped huts and a pitiful market—”

Captain Richard Francis Burton was blind.

Lieutenant John Hanning Speke’s face had become paralysed down one side.

Both men were too weak to walk more than a few paces.

For two weeks, they rested in a half-derelict domed hut and ate the boiled rice brought to them by their guide, Sidi Bombay. They lay limply on their cots, crushed by the oppressive heat, and suffered and slept and moaned and vomited and lapsed in and out of consciousness.

“Mary, mother of God, is it worth it, Dick?” Speke whispered.

“It has to be. We’re almost there, I’m sure of it. You heard what Bombay told me this morning.”

“No, I didn’t. I was out of my mind with fever.”

“The locals claim a river flows northward out of the lake. If we can get a dhow onto her, I’m certain we’ll find ourselves floating down the Nile, straight past the warring tribes, and all the way to Cairo.”

Burton clung on to that conviction and used it to slowly haul himself out of the pit of ill health. Infuriatingly, Speke, who was far less driven than his commanding officer, nevertheless made a much speedier recovery, and was soon strolling around during the short spells of cool morning and evening air, bathing in the lake, and shopping in the little market, where he would appear with a native holding an umbrella over him, with strings of trading beads slung over his arm, and with smoked-glass spectacles protecting his eyes.

He was a strange, restless, self-conscious man. Tall and thin, long-bearded and watery-eyed, hesitant in manner and stuttering in conversation, he only ever seemed at peace with himself when he was hunting.

Lieutenant Speke shot at everything. He put bullets into hippos and antelope, giraffes and lions, elephants and rhinos. He killed gleefully and indiscriminately, and had left a seven-hundred-mile-long trail of corpses all the way back to Zanzibar.

Even so, as the days dragged on in Ujiji, he became maddened by the shimmering landscape, the unending profusion of dried-out grass and trees, the hard, dusty, cracked earth.

“Brown! Nothing but blasted brown! Not a spot of green anywhere! I can’t bear it. Even hunting is tedious in this damned hellhole. Can’t we move on? I feel like I’m losing my mind!”

“Soon, John, but I need a little more time,” answered Burton, whose sight was still impaired, his legs still paralysed.

Speke groaned. “Will you at least permit me to take a canoe across the lake with Sidi Bombay? We know Sheikh Hamed is over there and he has a dhow. Maybe I can talk him into hiring it out to us? And he might know something about the northern river.”

“It’s too dangerous. The rainy season is due. They say it causes violent storms on the water.”

Speke, though, became fixated upon the idea and eventually persuaded Burton to allow the excursion. He departed on the 3rd of March and was gone almost a month, during which time Burton dosed himself morning, noon, and night with Saltzmann’s Tincture and gave himself up to what he would later describe as “
dreaming of things past, visioning things present.
”

By the time the lieutenant returned, Burton was feeling a little better. His ophthalmia had cleared and he was able to totter around unassisted.