The Rise of the Automated Aristocrats (5 page)

A GATHERING OF THE INEXPLICABLY RESURRECTED

If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.

—Charles Darwin

“What?” Swinburne shrieked. “What? What?”

Burton stammered, “You're—you're young.”

Of course he's young, you dolt! It's 1864! But what's he doing here?

Swinburne leaped to his feet, his chair falling backward. “You know? You know that I—that I—but look at you! You're alive!” The poet slapped a hand to his forehead. “My hat! Why didn't I realise it? I knew there was something about this date. It's the day Speke shot himself, isn't it? I should have remembered you'd be in Bath.”

Burton put his glass on the table, dropped his topper and cane, and pounced on his friend. They gripped each other by the elbows and laughed hysterically, heedless of the people around them. Tears streamed down their cheeks.

“I don't—I can't—it isn't—how can it—?” Words tumbled from Burton's mouth. He was again stricken by an ungovernable trembling and had no idea what he was saying. Yet, even as he struggled to control himself, he was aware that Swinburne's reaction to his arrival, which was equally unrestrained, had greater emotion behind it than was warranted from a man who, in 1864, had seen him fairly frequently.

“It makes no—are we—gah!” the master poet cried out. “Surely it's—gah!—but—gah! Eek!”

Burton stood panting, his thoughts disarranged. The last time he'd met with Swinburne, his friend had been a little old man, bald, grey-bearded, bent-backed, and subdued—the excessive energies of his youth long faded. Now, here he was in all his diminutive slope-shouldered glory. His thick, wavy, red hair was sticking out almost horizontally from his over-large head, his bright green eyes were wide, and his surplus of electric vitality had been restored causing him to twitch, hop, and dance just as it had done so many years ago in the early days of their friendship.

It was miraculous.

“Algy, stop. Calm down. We're making a scene. Let us sit and talk quietly.”

“Poo-poo to all that! This is beyond the bounds!”

“Yes, I know. But let's do it anyway.”

Burton pulled out the poet's chair and pushed his friend down into it. He ordered beers and more brandies from a potboy and settled at the table.

They stared in wonder at each other, and a curious silence descended upon them. The hustle and bustle of the Slug and Lettuce continued unabated, but it was as if an invisible screen had suddenly separated the two men from it. Burton contemplated the possibility that he might be slipping into some form of shock and remembered how he'd been enveloped by a similar quietude after the spear had been thrust through his face at Berbera.

Snap out of it. Don't allow the world to become dreamlike. You might wake up.

He opened his mouth to speak but hesitated. As Swinburne did the same, Burton stopped him with a raised hand and slight shake of his head.

“Wait a moment.”

Think it through. Why is—Ah. Yes. This day.

He jabbed a finger toward the other. “You, my friend, should not be here.”

Swinburne threw out his hands as if Burton had stated the perfectly obvious. “You're telling me! I should be dead! You'll think me mad, and I very well might be, but the Swinburne who sits before you is not the one you know. That is to say, he's—I'm—I was—I should be forty-five years older. I've been restored to youth and sent back to—” He made an all-encompassing gesture, “to here, from the future, from my deathbed. It's perfectly incredible. Perfectly ridiculous. Perfectly true!”

In his mind's eye, Burton saw again a scarab beetle pushing a ball of dung.

Not just the sun but the whole of existence, created and manipulated by Life itself. Sentience. The source of All.

His mind was wandering. With an effort, he reined it in.

“I believe you, for less than an hour ago, I was also breathing my last. I was in Trieste. It was 1890.”

“Nineteen years ago,” Swinburne whispered incredulously. “I remember.”

“Nineteen years?”

“I mean to say, you died nineteen years before me.”

It took Burton a moment to absorb that information.

“So you've come from—?”

“1909. The last of it I remember, it was evening, and I was suffering from pneumonia. Everything turned white, and suddenly I found myself clinging to Culver Cliff. Do you recall me once telling you about how I climbed it in my youth to prove to myself that I possessed courage?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Well, there I was, inexplicably back at the scene, with seagulls screaming at me and the wind ruffling my hair. Of course, I considered it a dream. But nevertheless, rather than falling, I climbed, though I hardly knew what I was doing. I made it to the top, collapsed onto the sward at the edge of the precipice, and there fancied I heard somebody address me. Before I could turn my head to see whom it might be, I fainted. When I regained my senses, I was aboard a train. Now I had time to think, and when I realised that I'd somehow become young again—and that this was something more than the idle imaginings of a slumbering mind—I have to confess, I became somewhat hysterical.”

“Understandably,” Burton murmured. He felt distracted by the increasingly thick veil that appeared to surround them both. The babble of voices and sharp clink of glasses had reduced to an indistinct hum. He could only focus on his companion. Everything else was obscured and blurred. Desperately, he clung to Swinburne's words, praying they'd keep him tethered and prevent him from slipping away, back to Trieste, back to pain and decrepitude, back into Death's embrace.

Swinburne continued, “The guards objected to my behaviour and threw me off at the next stop, which proved to be Salisbury. There, I saw a newspaper, noted the date and—after checking my ticket and the labels on my luggage—came to the conclusion that I'd been travelling to Cornwall for a holiday. I vaguely recalled the occasion. Now, though, I hadn't a clue what to do. I was all set to catch a train back to London when—” He stopped, giggled, and waggled his right forefinger around his temple to suggest insanity. “Out of the blue, a parakeet landed on my shoulder, insulted me, and told me to immediately board the express to Bath and come here to the Slug and Lettuce to meet the ‘reborn.' I suppose, now, that it was referring to you.”

“I received a similar directive, also from a bird.” Burton said. “What is it, thirty, forty miles or so between here and Salisbury? Not far for a bird to fly. I daresay it could have been the same one.”

Their drinks arrived. When the potboy set down the tray, the clatter possessed greater volume than it should, and in an instant the crisis passed. The world snapped back into focus. Burton's senses were assaulted, and he accepted the battering with immense relief. Everything was real. Sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch; vivid, solid, and marvellously present. He was alive. Algy was here. None of it could be doubted.

They raised their glasses and took a deep draught. Then they regarded each other, recognised a shared appreciation of their reinvigorated senses, and burst into such uproarious laughter that tears again spilled down their cheeks.

Burton felt the hinges of his jaw aching and revelled in the mild discomfort. He heard a nearby patron say to another, “They've started early, ain't they? They'll be in the gutter afore too long,” and it made him laugh all the more.

They regained control of themselves, swallowed their beers, shifted attention to their brandies, and sat quietly for a few moments.

Burton patted his pockets until, with an exclamation of pleasure, he located a Manila cheroot, which he immediately lit and drew on, grunting with the sheer luxury of it.

Everything felt like new.

“To see you again!” Swinburne exclaimed. “It's marvellous. How I mourned your passing. I wrote you an elegy.” Tipping back his head and closing his eyes, he declaimed:

“Night or light is it now, wherein

Sleeps, shut out from the wild world's din,

Wakes, alive with a life more clear,

One who found not on earth his kin?

Sleep were sweet for a while—”

His right elbow suddenly spasmed upward. He squeaked and used his left hand to slap down the wayward limb. “Oof! My twitches have returned with a vengeance. I was far more sedate in my dotage. I don't know whether to resent them or be delighted.” He grinned. “Actually, that's a lie. I'm cock-a-hoop!”

“It interrupted your recital, at least,” Burton said. “I'll have no more of that, if you please.” He shivered. “Death! By God, these past few years I've felt it at my shoulder every minute of every bloody day. I saw it in the mirror—my own skull pushing through the skin of my face. I watched my wife being slowly consumed—” He noticed a shadow pass across his companion's features at the mention of Isabel, “and now, by some mysterious means, I've shaken it loose. Life, Algy! Life!”

Swinburne gave a jerky half shrug, half twitch. “Yes, you're right. Life. No more of the other stuff. No more debilitation and decay.”

They drank a toast to that.

“So,” Burton said. “Isabel. Tell me.”

Swinburne grimaced and shook his head.

“Come on, old friend. I couldn't miss the expression on your face. Out with it.”

“Ugh! And pah!

“I beg your pardon?”

“Pah! I say!”

“By which you mean?”

“Pah to Isabel, Richard. Pah to her, and pah to her again! And that's all I have to say on the matter.”

“I see. And such unpoetic sentiment is prompted by—?”

Swinburne crossed his arms, uncrossed them, crossed them again, then frowned and compressed his lips.

Burton rapped his knuckles on the table top. “Come on! Come on! I'm filled to the brim with conundrums. I lack capacity for another.”

The poet loosed an inarticulate cry. “Confound it! She burned
The Scented Garden
! Burned it! That and all of your diaries and notes!”

“I know.”

“I never spoke to her again. I couldn't stand the thought that—Hallo? What? Pardon? How can you possibly know? You were dead.”

“Before I found myself here, when my heart was failing, there were hallucinations. At least, that's what I thought they were. Like your Culver Cliff episode.” Burton touched the long scar on his face. “I experienced again the disaster at Berbera. You recall, when my camp was attacked? And I saw her at a bonfire, throwing my work into its flames.”

A confusion of emotions welled up in Burton—rage, sadness, loss, love, despair, resignation—then were gone, leaving nothing but a strange and aching absence, as if he'd had a tooth removed. Isabel was nearby, restored to her prime, lovely and alluring, yet he suddenly knew he'd never see her again. The notion didn't disturb him as much as it should have.

Abandon her? You can't. Not even you are that ruthless.

Swinburne shook his head sadly. “A terrible and stupid thing to do. It utterly ruined her reputation. She was roundly condemned by the press and lost most of her friends just when she needed them the most. Is—is she here, in Bath?”

“Yes.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I can't think about it right now. I can hardly think about anything.”

“I know exactly what you mean. My head is crammed with visions that make no sense. I'm remembering things that never even happened.”

Burton raised an inquisitive eyebrow. Swinburne shrugged. “Fantasies.
Alice in Wonderland
nonsense.” He paused. “Hmm. A case in point. I feel that I've met Charles Dodgson—you know, Lewis Carroll, the author of that book—yet I'm equally convinced that I haven't.”

“Yes,” Burton responded. “Yes. Was I with you? There was—a storm? You were swimming in the sea. Then—” He squeezed his eyes shut and clutched at fleeting impressions. “A carriage ride. Dodgson saying something about literature and travel.”

“Steam transportation making the world smaller,” Swinburne muttered. “The booklets sold at stations—the little thrilling romances where the murder comes at page fifteen and the wedding, at page forty—surely they are due to steam.”

“Yes. He said that, I remember. But when? When were we with him? I can think of no such occasion.”

“Nor I. And the carriage—not a horse-drawn affair but a queer sort of contraption more akin to a locomotive. I can picture all sorts of such machines. I see myself in a flying chair and on a penny-farthing that has a little engine. I recall big spidery contrivances. Animal monstrosities, too. Giant swans and colossal horses. I even imagine myself to be a vermillion-coloured jungle. If I allow my mind to roam freely, I instantly slip into an opium-like reverie.”

“I've been pushing it aside but—if I let it—the same happens to me. Much of what I think and feel is blatantly nonsensical. But—” Burton drew his brows together. “Another mutual illusion. This jungle of yours. I've seen plenty, but never a vermillion-coloured one. Except, somehow, I feel I have, and I am possessed of the notion that I've been in it, too.”