The Secret of Abdu El Yezdi (9 page)

Blanche giggled and reddened.

“I'll ask Monckton Milnes, too,” he added.

Isabel fetched the third cup and sat down. “But none of your wretched Cannibal Club, if you please. They are far too louche.”

“Agreed.”

A short silence fell over them as they sipped their tea. Blanche stared at her sister and wrinkled her forehead meaningfully. Isabel put her cup down and frowned at her sibling.

“What is it?” Burton asked. “Why are you two looking daggers at each other?”

“My sister has something to tell you,” Blanche said.

“Blanche!” Isabel hissed.

“Well?” Burton asked.

Isabel fiddled with the edge of her shawl, examined her fingernails, brushed her hands over her skirts, and said, “I met Hagar Burton again.”

“Hagar Burton?”

“You remember? The Gypsy who used to camp on the family estate when I was a girl.”

“Ah, yes.”

Burton recalled that his fiancée, when fifteen years old, had befriended the Gypsy woman, who'd predicted that she'd one day fall in love with a man who bore the Burton surname.

Isabel continued, “Last June, Blanche and I went to Ascot. She was there.”

“And?”

“And she read my palm.”

“What did she say?”

“She asked if I'd married a Burton yet. I said no, not yet. She said,
Don't
.”

“Don't?”

“She predicted that, if I put on a wedding dress for a Burton, he would—would—”

“He would what?”

“He would kill me while I was still wearing it.”

THE BAKER STREET DETECTIVE
Macallister Fogg's Own Paper!
Issue 245. Every Thursday. Consolidated Press.
One Penny.
This Week: Macallister Fogg and his
lady assistant, Mrs. Boswell, investigate:
THE HORRIBLE HAUNTING OF HOWLING HOUSE!
Plus the latest installments of:
DOCTOR TZU VERSUS THE BRAIN REMOVERS
by Cecil Barry
FATTY CAKEHOLE AND THE PHANTOM PIE-MAKER
by Norman Pounder

Friday didn't dawn but merely replaced the shifting colours of the aurora with the pale yellow of a late-summer's day. Unaccustomed to his own bed, Burton awoke early and lay staring at the rectangle of his curtained window. His room was at the back of the house, overlooking the yard and mews, but the rumble of early-morning traffic—mostly delivery wagons—was noisy enough to reach him. It sounded alien and strange. No more waking to coughing lions and rumbling elephants. No quiet thrum of the
Orpheus
's engines.

He was in London now.

But not for long, he hoped.

The Empire's capital made him uneasy. Few of the people who dwelt in its club rooms and debating chambers approved of him. He'd spent his childhood being hauled around Europe by a restless father and long-suffering mother and had, in consequence, acquired “foreign ways.” He'd little patience with the complex and subtle rituals of English society, and was, in consequence, looked upon as too blunt, too challenging, too aggressive, and far too interested in matters that were better left unacknowledged.

Blackguard Burton. Ruffian Dick.

So, Damascus.

He would endure London until he was married, then he and Isabel would flee to the wide-open spaces and rather more transparent etiquettes of Arabia.

Burton pushed himself upright, let loose a deep, shuddering sigh, and reached up to touch his right eye. It was swollen and sore. What in God's name had that business in the alley been about? The Assassination of Victoria? It was two decades ago!

Giving up on further sleep, he left his bed, shaved, washed, dressed, and went down to his study. For two hours, he made inroads into his backlog of newspapers, then—when he heard Mrs. Angell moving about downstairs—rang for breakfast. By nine o'clock, he'd caught up on much of the past year's news and had consumed two kippers, two boiled eggs, four rashers of bacon, a chunk of cold ham, three slices of toast with marmalade, and two cups of coffee.

He left the house, hailed a cab, and went to Scotland Yard.

Pushing through the crowded and noisy lobby, Burton stepped up to a desk upon which a small plaque bore the name
J. D. Pepperwick
. The individual sitting behind it was the same he'd chatted with last night.

“Is Mr. Macallister Fogg available?”

“Hello there!” Pepperwick enthused. “Good morning! I hardly recognised you. What happened to the beard?”

Burton touched his drooping moustache and the small tuft of hair he'd left in the cleft of his chin. “It had to go. There were things living in it.”

The clerk chuckled. “It looks like they fought to stay. That's quite a shiner you've got, Mr. Living—er—”

“Captain.”

“Pardon me. Captain. Who?”

“Burton.”

“No, Captain Burton, I meant, who was it you said you wanted to see?”

“Macallister Fogg.”

Pepperwick removed his spectacles and blew dust from the lenses. “Hmm! Macallister Fogg. Macallister Fogg. Macallister Fogg. No, sir, I'm quite certain there's no one here by that name.”

“He was standing among your people last night, watching the aurora. A shortish and bulky fellow with a large moustache.”

Pepperwick replaced his eyewear and scratched his right ear. “There are plenty working here who match such a description, Captain, but no Foggs. Perhaps he was just passing by and got mixed up with us.”

“Yes,” Burton replied. “I suppose so. Well, it was worth a try.”

“Would you like to speak with a detective?”

“About what?”

“About whatever it is you wanted to discuss with this Fogg chap.”

“I didn't want to discuss anything with him. I wanted to punch him in the eye.”

Pepperwick blinked rapidly. “Oh. Ha ha! Tit for tat, is it? Not quite the thing to do in Scotland Yard, sir.”

“No,” Burton agreed. “I expect not. Much obliged, Mr. Pepperwick. Good day to you.”

The explorer recrossed the lobby and stepped out into the morning haze. The pall was much less dense today and the streets were seething with people, animals, and traffic. He hailed another cab and headed home, stopping briefly at Brundleweed's, which he again found closed.

As the carriage bumped and swayed along, Burton dozed. His bones felt cold and his flesh too warm. The crisis might have passed but he was by no means fully recovered.

A knock on the roof jerked him back to alertness. A small hatch hinged upward and the cabbie looked down at him.

“Montagu Place, boss.”

“Already?”

“Yup. You've been catching forty winks. I could hear yer snoring.”

Burton pushed the door open and stepped down onto the road. He passed the fare up to the man and said, “There's a little extra, for the damage to your ears.”

The cabbie grinned. “Much obliged!”

He drove off.

Burton took a couple of steps then stopped. A street Arab was hawking newspapers outside his door.

“Read all about it! Sky lit up around the world! Read all about it!”

The explorer had an idea. He approached the youngster.

“I say, nipper, are you a Whisperer?”

The boy—he was no more than twelve years old, dressed in rags with a battered stovepipe hat on his tousle-haired head—pushed his chest out, stood proudly, and in a soft Irish accent declared, “Aye, sir, that I am. Any message you want to send or information you want to find, I can do it—for a small fee.”

Burton fished a shilling from his pocket. “Then I have a job for you. I need to trace the whereabouts of a man named Macallister Fogg. I want to know who he is and what he does.”

The boy received the coin with a broad grin and said, “Go on with ye! Macallister Fogg, is it? Are ye certain about that? You'll not be pullin' me leg?”

“I'm certain.”

The boy slapped his thigh, rocked back on his heels, and roared with laughter.

“'Tis the easiest shillin' I've ever earned, so it is!”

“How so?” Burton asked.

“Would ye be willin' to invest a further penny? If ye do, I'll place Macallister Fogg in your hands in less than a minute.”

The penny was brought forth, and the boy said, “Wait here a moment, will ye now?”

He left his bundle of newspapers at the explorer's feet, scampered off, and disappeared into Gloucester Place.

Burton knew how it worked. The many orphans and dispossessed youngsters who roamed the streets of the Empire had formed what amounted to a secret “communications web” through which information could pass from mouth to mouth at an astonishing speed. These “Whisperers” functioned mainly as an alternative to the post office, delivering spoken messages rather than letters—confidentiality assured—but were also what Richard Monckton Milnes called “an organic encyclopaedia” in that, where information was available, they could almost always find it. The only drawback to the system was the phenomenon of cumulative errors, or “Chinese whispers,” which meant the information passed or requested needed to be as simple as possible or it would become corrupted as it travelled from child to child.

The urchin returned.

He handed Burton a periodical of cheap paper, about twenty pages in thickness, which bore the title
The Baker Street Detective
.

“What's this?” the explorer asked.

“A story paper, sir. From the newsagent's.”

“A penny blood?”

“Aye, an' me very favourite one, too. I'm fair hooked on it! Fair hooked! Most o' the boys are.”

Burton examined the lurid cover illustration, which showed a muscular and mustachioed man being chased through a cavern by demonic creatures. He read:
The Kingdom Beneath the Basement! Macallister Fogg at the Centre of the World!

“I don't understand.”

“Macallister Fogg is a consulting detective, sir. He works out of Baker Street, not five minutes' walk from here, though which house I don't know.”

“Consulting detective?”

“Aye. Private, like. Unofficial. Not one of 'em what works at Scotland Yard.”

“But . . . this?” Burton held up the penny dreadful.

The newsboy giggled. “Well, he ain't real, is he? Ha ha! He's just in story books!”

Burton clacked his teeth together in irritation. “The man I want said his name was Macallister Fogg.”

“I think he was havin' ye on, sir, though there's 'em what hold that Fogg is real. If that be true and ye find 'im, can I ask ye to introduce me? I'll offer to be his assistant, so I will. Perhaps he'll take me on one of his grand adventures!”

The explorer thanked the boy, entered number 14, settled in his study, and read the periodical. It was ill-written nonsense. Plainly, whoever his assailant was, he'd called himself Fogg just to throw Burton off the scent.

He shook his head in bemusement. Laurence Oliphant, the aurora borealis, Macallister Fogg, and Hagar Burton's warning; could he really be certain he'd recovered from the hallucinatory fevers?

He went to one of his desks, picked up his notepad, and opened it. Yes, Oliphant's diagrams were real enough—those strange number-filled squares. They, at least, were something he could investigate, and of all the people he knew, Richard Monckton Milnes was the most likely to understand what they signified.

He sat, opened a bottle of ink, took up a pen, and wrote six letters. He then descended the stairs, stepped outside, and whistled at the newsboy, who came running over.

“Somethin' else, sir?”

“Thruppence for you,” Burton said, “if you'll post these letters for me.”

“Ah. A thruppenny bit, is it? Well now, old Stride has his sweet shop right next to the post office, so he does, and I'll not pass up the opportunity to pay him a visit. Hand over the letters, sir, an' I'll have 'em posted in a jiffy.”

The money and missives exchanged hands and the boy dashed off.

Burton gave a satisfied clap of his hands, went back up to his study, and eased himself into his saddlebag armchair. He lit a cheroot.

The members of the Cannibal Club would soon convene.

He spent the rest of the day reading. By ten o'clock, his bed beckoned. He looked at his study windows and uttered a small exclamation. It was still light. Moving over to them, he pulled up a sash, leaned out, and looked up.

For the third night in a row, a coruscating radiance filled the sky.