Burton shook his head. “He referred to someone he called his ‘master.’ As for the lights, perhaps Oliphant somehow knew they were coming and timed his ritual to coincide with them.”
Lawless ran his fingernails through his beard. Over the course of the past year, he and Burton had become firm friends, but the airship captain still observed the proprieties and nearly always called the explorer by his rank. Now, though, he let that formality slip.
“Damnation, Richard! After all we’ve been through, I wanted to get us home quick sharp! Instead, we had to lay over in Zanzibar until Herne’s position was confirmed, wait in Aden for Elgin, and now bloody Oliphant goes batty just as we’re about to land in Vienna. I swear, if our new passengers demand yet another delay because of this, I’ll get off the confounded ship and walk home.”
“Passengers?” Burton asked. “Who’s with Lord Stanley?”
“Only His Royal bloody Highness Prince Albert.”
Burton’s eyebrows went up.
“I know,” Lawless said. “Quite a surprise, eh? I was informed less than an hour ago. Disraeli obviously considers the Orpheus—as the flagship of the fleet—the most suitable vessel to escort the prince home, no matter that we’ve been in Africa for over a year and are all sick and exhausted.” He pulled out his chronometer and clicked open its lid. “We’ll be landing in fifty minutes but our precious cargo won’t come aboard until daylight, so I suggest you get some more sleep. You look done in.”
Burton nodded. “I am. But when Elgin shows his face in the morning, send someone to wake me.”
“Righto.” Lawless glanced around at the floor and walls then out at the rainbow colours that shimmered from horizon to horizon. “Hell and damnation!”
ETERNAL REST
IN LOWER NORWOOD CEMETERY
Home to the Finest Sepulchral
Mausoleums and Monuments in London.
Privately Landscaped Memorial Gardens.
Rural Setting. Protected from Resurrectionists.
Uninterrupted Interment Assured.
Episcopal and Dissenters’ Churches.
Extensive Vaults and Catacombs
for Added Peace and Security.
Consecrated by the Bishop of Winchester
West Norwood Cemetery, Norwood Road, Lambeth.
Sir James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin and 12th Earl of Kincardine, was a short and stout man, whose hair, despite his being just forty-eight years old, was as white as snow. He was bright-eyed and clean-shaven, though thick muttonchop whiskers framed his deceptively good-natured countenance.
“I suspected something had gone wrong with the lad,” he said, “but to such an extreme? By heavens!”
“In what way wrong, sir?” Burton asked. They were seated in armchairs in the airship’s plush smoking lounge. Elgin was puffing on an after-breakfast hookah. Burton had opted for a Manila cheroot. They each had a cup of coffee on the table between them.
“He was appointed my secretary two years ago and accompanied me to China, where we’ve been overseeing the Arrow War. For the first few months, he was perfectly efficient in his work and perfectly innocuous in his private life. He had, however, brought with him a book entitled The Wisdom of Angels, with which he became increasingly obsessed. He read it over and over. When I asked him about it, he became oddly reticent and refused to discuss it.”
“The author?”
“I don’t recall. Thomas something. I’m not sure why, but I associate that volume with his subsequent behaviour, which, I’m bound to observe, left a lot to be desired. In fact, I was set to dismiss him upon our return to London.”
Burton ground the stub of his cheroot into an ashtray and immediately lit another one. After five hours of sleep and a hearty breakfast—it was now nine o’clock in the morning—he was feeling a little stronger. The laceration across his ribs was stinging but it wasn’t a serious wound and hadn’t required stitching.
“On what grounds?” he asked. “What did he do?”
Lord Elgin breathed out a plume of blue smoke and watched it curl toward the ceiling.
“There are a great many complications in our dealings with the Qing Dynasty,” he said. “I’m returning to London to brief the prime minister and our Navy—and to request military support from the French. We must quell those Chinese forces that oppose the opening of the country to improved trade, and I fear there’s no choice but to negotiate not with a handshake but with a fist. The Sagittarius will be a fist like no other.”
“The Sagittarius?”
“A rotorship, Burton; a war machine of fearsome power. Its construction is almost completed, and it will be sent to China before the year is out.”
“Very well, but how does this involve Oliphant?”
“China will only accept payment for tea in silver. This has caused a serious trade deficit, which we have countered by exporting opium there from India.”
Burton threw his hands out in a gesture that made it clear he didn’t get the point and was confused by Elgin’s obfuscation.
“Opium, Captain!” Elgin barked. “Highly addictive! We exported it as a medicinal ingredient but the Chinese immediately started puffing on the stuff like it was cheap tobacco. Now half the damned country is enslaved by it. The Qing Dynasty isn’t happy. Not at all.”
“So?”
“So to hell with them! We’ll pump enough opium into China to make addicts of the entire nation, if necessary. We’ll even force them to legalise the trade so our private companies can profit from the poppy industry, too. By God, we’ll bring the bloody dynasty to its knees unless they give us a better deal on the export of tea.”
“Dirty politics, Lord Elgin.”
“All politics is dirty. It has to be. Trade is warfare and warfare is trade. That’s the way of the world.”
“You still haven’t told me how Oliphant fits into this distasteful picture.”
Elgin pushed his hookah aside and reached for his coffee. As he sipped it, his eyes met Burton’s above the brim of the cup and the explorer saw amusement in them. He realised that Elgin was purposely provoking and prevaricating—that it was the man’s technique in negotiations and he’d employed it so frequently, it was now habitual.
Elgin leaned forward, placed his emptied cup onto its saucer, and jabbed a finger at Burton.
“The opium trade is but one factor among a great many in our dispute with China, but it’s the one Oliphant was responsible for. I relied on him to assess the situation as it developed, to communicate British demands to the emperor, and to summarise and bring to me the Chinese counter-demands—all of which would have been well and good were it not for one thing.”
“It being?”
“That the bloody fool himself became an addict.”
“Ah.”
“It came to my attention at the start of April this year. We had briefly returned to London during the latter half of March, and while there, Oliphant joined some sort of gentlemen’s club. He was rather secretive about it—never told me its name—but I gather its members share his fascination with that damned book. A mere week after we returned to China, I went to his rooms to collect some papers and found him in an opium-induced stupor.”
Burton pursed his lips and thought for a moment. “You associate his taking of the drug with the club?”
“I do. A week or so later, I demanded an explanation for his behaviour. He babbled a great deal of nonsense, but from what of it I understood, I gather The Wisdom of Angels hypothesises multiple levels of existence—beyond even the Afterlife—and the club encourages the exploration of these through the use of mind-altering drugs. Oliphant told me, in all seriousness, that he’d established communication with a being from one of these other worlds. Absolute rot, of course.”