'Nonsense, Algy! Don't let these Libertines mesmerise you with their misguided ideas and appallingly bad logic. They are incorrigibly perverse, especially Milnes here.'
'Hah!' yelled Bendyshe from across the room. 'Swinburne's as perverse as they come! He has a taste for pain, don't you know! Likes the kiss of a whip, what!'
Swinburne giggled, twitched, and snapped his fingers. As always, his movements were fast, jerky, and eccentric, as if he suffered from Saint Vitus's dance.
'It's true. I'm a follower of de Sade.'
'It's a common affliction,' noted Burton. 'Why, I once visited a brothel in Karachi-on a research mission for Napier, you understand-'
Snorts and howls of derision came from the gathering.
– and there witnessed a man flagellated to the point of unconsciousness. He enjoyed it!'
'Delicious!' Swinburne shuddered.
'Maybe so, if your tastes run to it,' agreed Burton. 'However, flagellation is one thing, murder is quite another!'
Milnes sat beside Burton, leaning close.
'But, I say, Richard,' he murmured, 'don't you ever wonder at the sense of freedom one must feel when performing the act of murder? It is, after all, the greatest taboo, is it not? Break that and you are free of the shackles imposed by civilisation!'
'I'm no great enthusiast for the false pleasures and insidious suppressions of civilisation,' said Burton. 'And, in my opinion, Mrs. Grundy-our fictitious personification of all things oh so pure, polite, restrained, and conventional requires a thorough shagging; however, as much as I might rail against the constraints of English society and culture, murder is a more fundamental matter than either.'
Swinburne squealed with delight. 'A thorough shagging! Oh, bravo, Richard!'
Milnes nodded. 'False pleasures and insidious suppressions indeed. Pleasures which enslave, suppressions which pass judgement. Where, I ask, is freedom?'
'I don't know,' answered Burton. 'How can one quantify so indefinite a notion as freedom?'
'By looking to nature, dear boy! Nature red in tooth and claw! One animal kills another animal. Is it found guilty? No! It remains free to do what it will, even-and, in fact, certainly-to kill again! As de Sade himself said: `Nature has not got two voices, you know, one of them condemning all day what the other commands.''
Burton emptied his glass in a single swallow.
'For sure, Darwin has demonstrated that Nature is a brutal and entirely pitiless process, but you seem to forget, Milnes, that the animal which kills is most often, in turn, itself killed by another animal, just as the murderer, in a supposedly civilised country, is hanged for his crime!'
'Then you propose an innate natural law of justice from which we can never break free, a law that transcends culture, whatever its stage of development?'
James Hunt, passing to join a conversation between Bradlaugh and Brabrooke on the other side of the room, stopped long enough to refill Burton's glass.
'Yes, I do believe some such law exists,' said Burton. 'I find the Hindu notion of karma more alluring than the Catholic absurdity of original sin.'
'How is Isabel?' put in Bendyshe, who'd stepped across to join them.
Burton ignored the mischievous question and went on, 'At least karma provides a counterbalance-a penalty or reward, if you like-to acts we actually perform and thoughts we actually think, rather than punishing us for the supposed sin of our actual existence or for a transgression against a wholly artificial dictate of so-called morality. It is a function of Nature rather than a judgement of an unproven God.'
'By Jove! Stanley was correct when he wrote that you're a heathen!' mocked Bendyshe. 'Burton joins with Darwin and says there is no God!'
'Actually, Darwin hasn't suggested any such thing. It is others who have imposed that interpretation upon his Origin of Species.'
'`There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise bath she need of an author,'' quoted Swinburne. 'De Sade again.'
'In many respects I consider him laughable,' commented Burton, 'but in that instance, I wholeheartedly agree. The more I study religions, the more I'm convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.'
He quoted his own poetry: 'Man worships self his God is man; the struggling of the mortal mind to firm its model as 'twould be, the pea fect of itself to find. '
Milnes took a drag from his cigar and blew a smoke ring, which rose lazily into the air. He watched it slowly disperse and said, 'But this karma business, Richard-what you are proposing is that one way or another, through some sort of entirely natural process, a murderer will receive retribution. Do you then count man's judgement-the death penalty-to be natural?'
'We are natural beings, are we not?'
'Well,' interrupted Bendyshe, 'I sometimes wonder about Swinburne.'
It was a fair point, thought Burton, for Swinburne was a very unnaturallooking man. At just five-foot-two, he had a strangely tiny body. His limbs were small and delicate, with sloping shoulders and a very long neck upon which sat a large head made even bigger by a tousled mass of carroty-red hair standing almost at right angles to it. His mouth was weak and effeminate; his eyes huge, pale green, and dreamy.
Few poets looked so much a poet as Algernon Charles Swinburne.
'But that aside,' said Bendyshe, 'what if the murderer avoids the noose?'
'Guilt,' proposed Burton. 'A gradual but inescapable degradation of the character. A degenerative disease of the mind. Maybe a descent into madness and self-destruction.'
'Or perhaps,' offered Swinburne, 'a tendency to mix with criminal types until the murderer is himself, inevitably, murdered.'
'Well put!' agreed the famous adventurer.
'Interesting,' pondered Milnes, 'but, I say, we all know that murders are committed either in the heat of passion, or else with intent by an individual who's already in an advanced-if that's the appropriate word-state of mental decay. What if, though, a murder was calculated and committed by an intelligent man who performs the act only out of scientific curiosity? What if it were done only to transcend the limitations that tell us it shouldn't be done?'
'An idle motive,' suggested Burton.
'Not at all, dear boy!' declared Milnes. 'It's a magnificent motive! Why, the man who would undertake such an act would risk his immortal soul for science!'
'He would undoubtedly see sense and back away from the experiment,' said Burton, his voice slurring slightly, 'for once crossed, that barrier allows no return. However, his decision would be based on self-determined standards of behaviour rather than on any set out by civilisation or on notions of an immortal soul; for as you say, he's an intelligent man.'
'It's strange,' said Henry Murray, who up until now had listened in silence. 'I thought that you, of all of us, would be the one most likely to approve the experiment.'
'You should take my reputation with a pinch of salt.'
'Must we? I rather enjoy having a devil in our midst.' Swinburne grinned.
Sir Richard Francis Burton considered the susceptible young poet and wondered how to keep him out of trouble.
Burton was not a Libertine himself, but they considered him an honorary member of the caste and delighted in his knowledge of exotic cultures, where the stifling laws of civilisation were remarkable only by their seeming absence. He enjoyed drinking and debating with them, especially this evening, for it kept his mind engaged and helped to stave off the despondency that had been creeping over him since he'd returned from Bath.
By one o'clock in the morning, though, it was dragging at him again, made worse by alcohol and exhaustion, so he bid his friends farewell and left the club.
The evening was bitterly cold-unusual for September-and the roads glistened wetly. The thickening pall wrapped each gas lamp in its own golden aureole. Burton held his overcoat tight with one hand and swung his cane with the other. London rustled and murmured around him as he walked unsteadily homewards.
A velocipede chattered past. They had started to appear on the streets two years ago, these steam-driven,
