The Curious Case Of The Clockwork Man (24 page)

It was not the embrace of a human being. Beneath the thick jellied padding flexed the tremendous muscles of a predatory beast.

Pain exploded in Burton’s back and his lower spine creaked audibly. Blood pounded in his ears as the awful constriction increased. The monotonous tone of the diamond was filling his head. His legs flopped uselessly and, when the Claimant lifted him from the floor, his feet dangled as loosely as a rag doll’s.

Swinburne looked on helplessly as his friend was hoisted up over the creature’s head, ready to be dashed against the wall once again.

“Tell me, Swinburne!” Kenealy said. “You don’t happen to know where Sir Henry concealed that black diamond of his, do you?”

“No,” the poet whimpered. “Except that—”

“Yes?”

The Claimant swung Burton back to fling him into the air. As he did so, a spark of vitality flared in the explorer’s dimming consciousness and, with a desperate effort of will, he put all the strength he could muster into a jab, hooking his stiffly held fingers down into his opponent’s right eye.

The creature let loose a howl and dropped him. Burton hit the ground at the Claimant’s feet.

“Except the poem,” said Swinburne.

“Poem, sir? What poem is that?”

“Algy, don’t,” Burton croaked.

“The tears, that weep within My Lady’s round
,” Swinburne proclaimed. “Do you mind if I sit down? I have the most dreadful headache.”

“Please, be my guest.” Kenealy grinned. His glasses magnified his little red-rimmed eyes.

Jankyn strode over to Burton and looked down at him. “My goodness. He doesn’t look at all well!”

“I bow to your expertise, Doctor,” Kenealy said. “Sir Roger, be careful! Don’t break him! You may be defending yourself against a ruthless intruder but a charge of manslaughter would be most inconvenient at present. Tears, Mr. Swinburne?”

“I can’t help it. It’s the pain. My brain is afire!”

“I was referring to the poem.”

“Oh, that gobbledygook. The diamond’s behind the waterfall, obviously.”

The Claimant bent to pick Burton up. The explorer quickly drew in his legs and kicked his booted feet into the fat man’s face. His left heel caught one of the seven lumps that circled the bloated thing’s skull, ripping open the little line of stitches.

The Claimant’s head snapped back.

“Ouch! Hurt me!” he complained, clutching Burton’s arm and dragging him upright.

The king’s agent caught sight of a black diamond glittering inside his opponent’s wound.

“Choir Stone!” he mumbled.

A massive fist crashed into his face.

He looked up at the off-yellow canvas of his tent.

The exhaustion and fevers and diseases and infections and wounds ate into his body.

There was not a single inch of him that didn’t hurt.

“Bismillah!”

No more Africa. Never again. Nothing is worth this agony. Leave the source of the Nile for younger men to find. I don’t care anymore. All it’s brought me is sickness and treachery.

Damn Speke!

Don’t step back. They’ll think that we’re retiring.

How could he possibly have interpreted that order as a personal slight? How could he have so easily used it as an excuse for betrayal?

“Damn him!”

“Are you awake, Richard?”

“Leave me alone, John. I need to rest. We’ll try for the lake tomorrow.”

“It’s not John. It’s Algernon.”

Algernon.

Algernon Swinburne.

The yellowed canvas was yellowed plaster—a smoke-stained ceiling.

Betrayal. Always betrayal.

“Algy, you told them where to find it.”

“Yes.”

“Was the diamond there?”

“Yes. Kenealy reached through the waterfall. There was a niche behind it. He pulled out the biggest diamond I’ve ever seen, black or otherwise. It was the size of a plum.”

Betrayal.

To hell with you, Speke! We were supposed to be friends.

Is there shooting to be done?

I rather suppose there is.

Voices outside the tent. War cries. Running footsteps, like a sudden wind. Clubs beating against the canvas.

A world conceived in opposites only creates cycles and ceaseless recurrence. Only equivalence can lead to destruction.

“And final transcendence.”

“What? Richard, are you still with me?”

“Be sharp, and arm to defend the camp.”

“Richard. Snap out of it! Wake up!”

“Algy?”

“I’m sorry, Richard. Truly, I am. But I couldn’t help it. Something got inside my head. I can’t explain it. For a few moments, I really believed that monstrosity was Roger Tichborne.”

“Get out, Algy. If this blasted tent comes down on us we’ll be caught up good and proper!”

“Please, Richard. We’re not in Berbera. This is the Dick Whittington Inn. We’re in Alresford, near the Tichborne estate.”

“Ah. Wait. Yes, I remember. I think the malaria has got me again.”

“No, it hasn’t. It was the Claimant. That confounded blackguard beat you half to death. You remember the labyrinth?”

“Yes. Gad! He was strong as an ox! How serious?”

“Bruises. Bad ones. You’re black-and-blue all over. Nothing broken, except your nose. You need to rest, that’s all.”

“Water.”

“Wait a minute.”

The labyrinth. The stream. The Claimant.

The Cambodian Choir Stones!

The Claimant has Brundleweed’s stolen diamonds and the two missing Pelletier gems embedded in his scalp. Why? Why? Why?

“Here, drink this.”

“Thank you.”

“I have no memory of how we got here, Richard. The last thing I recall is seeing Kenealy pass the diamond to the Claimant. The creature looked at it, then he looked at me, and suddenly that low hum that comes from it overwhelmed me. I heard a woman’s voice behind me, turned, and saw the ghost of Lady Mabella. I must have passed out. I woke up here a little while ago. The landlord says we were delivered in a state of intoxication by staff from the estate. I found a letter addressed to us on your bed. Listen:

Burton, Swinburne,

Against my client’s express instruction, which was issued through me, his lawyer, in front of witnesses, you chose to trespass on the Tichborne estate and you attempted to steal Tichborne property. Were it not for the fact that we are already preparing a complex legal case against Colonel Lushington, I would not hesitate to prosecute you. As it is, my client has agreed to let this matter drop on the condition that you make absolutely no further attempt to intrude upon Tichborne property. I remind you that the law states that trespassers may be shot on sight. If you set foot on the estate again and somehow manage to avoid such a fate, I assure you that you will not avoid the full force of the law.

Doctor Edward Vaughan Hyde Kenealy

On behalf of

Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne

“It bears Kenealy’s signature and, believe it or not, what looks to be the Claimant’s thumbprint. It’s also witnessed by Jankyn and the butler, Andrew Bogle.”

“That’s that, then.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean there’s nothing more we can do here, Algy. Kenealy and the Tichborne Claimant are obviously in league with the ghost of Lady Mabella, and they are now in possession of the South American Eye and the fragments of the Cambodian Eye. So we’ll pack up and return to London, we’ll investigate the Claimant’s background, and we’ll watch carefully to see what our enemies intend to do with those peculiar stones.”

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Sir Richard Francis Burton had been in South America for three weeks. He was unshaven and his skin was dark and weather-beaten. He looked untamed and dangerous, like a bandit.

“Difficult times, Captain,” said Lord Palmerston softly as the king’s agent sat down.

Burton grunted an agreement and studied the prime minister’s waxy, eugenically enhanced features. He noticed that the man’s mouth seemed to have been stretched a little wider and there were new surgical scars around the angles of his jaw, a couple of inches beneath the ears. They were oddly gill-like.

He looks like a blessed newt!

The two men were in number 10 Downing Street, the headquarters of His Majesty’s government.

“How goes the war, sir?” he asked.

“President Lincoln has formidable strategists directing his army,” Palmerston responded, “but mine are better, and, unlike his, they aren’t defending two fronts. Our Irish troops have already taken Portland and large sections of Maine. In the south, Generals Lee and Jackson have forced the Union out of Virginia. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to receive Lincoln’s surrender by Christmas.”

A great many people, Burton included, held the Eugenicist faction of the Technologist caste responsible for Great Britain’s entry into the American conflict. Had the scientists left Ireland alone, it was argued, there would not have been such an overwhelming refugee problem; and if there had not been an overwhelming refugee problem, then Palmerston may have reacted rather less aggressively to the Trent Affair.

The Eugenicists had started sowing seeds in Ireland last March, around the time of the Brundleweed robbery.

It was an attempt to put an end to the Great Famine, which had been devastating the Emerald Isle since 1845. Nearly two decades of disease had obliterated the potato crop before spreading to other flora, leaving the island a virtual desert. The source of the blight remained a mystery, though its failure to cross to mainland Britain suggested a disease of the soil.

The Eugenicists, working with the botanist Richard Spruce, had planted specially adapted seeds at twelve test sites. These germinated within hours and the plants grew with such unexpected rapidity that they were fully mature within a fortnight. By the end of April, they’d blossomed and pollinated. During May, their seeds and spores spread right across the country, and by early July, from shore to shore, Ireland was a jungle.

Inexplicably, the plants confined themselves to the island; their seeds wouldn’t germinate anywhere else. This was a stroke of luck, for, as with every other Eugenicist experiment, the benefits were accompanied by an unexpected side effect.

The new flora was carnivorous.

The experiment was an unmitigated disaster.

During June and July, more than fifteen thousand people were killed. Venomous spines were fired into them, or tendrils strangled them, or acidic sap burned away their flesh, or flowery scent gassed them, or roots jabbed into their bodies and sucked out their blood.

The scientists were at a loss.

Ireland became uninhabitable.

Its population fled.

During the middle months of summer, mainland Britain struggled with a massive influx of refugees. Wooden shanty towns were set up to house them in South Wales, along the edges of Dartmoor, in the Scottish Highlands, and on the Yorkshire Moors. They quickly deteriorated into disease-ridden slums—scenes of terrible squalor, violence, and poverty.

Lord Palmerston’s solution to the problem was both ingenious and very, very dangerous.

In his mind’s eye, Burton could picture the prime minister contemplating two reports, one entitled
The Irish Crisis
and the other
The Trent Affair
, and could imagine the glint in his eyes as a radical and daring scheme occurred to him.

The Trent Affair had begun the previous December, when two Confederate diplomats, John Slidell of Louisiana and James Mason of Virginia, had been dispatched to London to convince Palmerston that an independent Confederacy would establish a mutually beneficial commercial alliance with Great Britain. They’d been travelling on the British mail packet
Trent
when the Union ship
USS
San Jacinto
intercepted it. The British vessel was boarded, searched—not without some rough handling—and the envoys taken prisoner.

This was viewed, right across Europe, as an outrageous insult and a blatant act of provocation.

Angrily, Palmerston demanded an apology from the Union.

While he awaited President Lincoln’s response, he ordered the army to begin amassing its troops on the Canadian border and the Royal Navy to prepare for attacks on American shipping the world over.

Toward the end of January, Lincoln’s secretary of state responded by setting Slidell and Mason free and by explaining, in a letter, that the interception and searching of the
Trent
, while conducted in an unfortunate manner, had, in fact, been perfectly legal according to maritime law.

Palmerston was in no way mollified. He called an emergency cabinet meeting, stamped into the room, slammed his top hat onto the table, and flew into one of his infamous tantrums. “I don’t know whether you’re going to stand this,” he screamed, “but I’ll be damned if I do!”

The military buildup continued.