Bookman's promise

Again I felt her chemistry. She felt mine too, and suddenly she trembled. “You’re a formidable man,” she said; then, in a much smaller voice, “Aren’t you, Mr. Janeway?”

For once I was flabbergasted into near-speechlessness. She repeated it, more certain now—“You are a formidable man”—as if she half expected me to haul back without warning and knock her off the chair. Softly I said, “Ma’am, I am no threat to ladies.” After an awkward pause I went on in a silly vein, trying my best to lighten her up. “I haven’t robbed a bank all week. I don’t do drugs. Don’t kick dogs…well, maybe little ones, but I never eat small children. That’s one good thing I can say for myself.”

She stared. I said, “Honest.” She lifted a shaky hand to her eyes and I gave up with a soggy punch line. “Those are all rumors that got started by an angry bookscout.”

I had a flashing moment of insanity when I almost told her the actual truth. By nature I am a cavalier with women, but I was afraid if I said that I’d have her for life.

Then she spoke. “When I called you on the telephone that day you were busy. I should have considered that. I only realized later that I must have sounded like a fool.”

“I think it was just that business about not letting them hear you.”

I felt a hot flush of shame but my cutting remark didn’t seem to offend her.

“I live in an old folks’ home in Baltimore. I’m on Medicaid and I’m not supposed to have unreported money of my own. That’s why I didn’t want them to hear what I was saying. It took everything I had hidden away to get here.”

This was not going well. Her answer for them had been annoy-ingly believable, so I threw her another one. “I was also a little puzzled when you said Burton had started our civil war.”

“You thought I was crazy.”

I shrugged. “No offense, ma’am. I was getting a lot of crazy calls then.”

“Well, of course he didn’t start that war. If I said that I didn’t mean it literally.” She was agitated now, whether at me or herself I couldn’t tell, but the trembling in her hands had spread to her face. For a moment I thought she was going to faint.

“Are you okay, ma’am? I’ve got a cot in the back if you’d like to lie down.”

She took a deep, shivery breath. “No, I’m fine.” She didn’t look fine: she looked like a specter of death. She said, “I know I’m not going to make any headway trying to convince you about what Burton did or didn’t do,” then almost in the same breath she said, “How much do you know about his time in America?”

“I know he went to Utah in 1860 to meet Brigham Young. He was interested in polygamy and he wanted to see for himself how a polygamous society functioned.”

“That’s only what the textbooks tell you.”

It was what Burton himself had said in his books, but I nodded. “He had to get away from England for a while. He had been double-crossed by Speke, who took all the glory of discovering the African lakes for himself. I don’t know, maybe there was some truth to the story that he just wanted to come here and fight some Indians.”

“You know of course that he was a master spy.”

“I know when he was in India he often spied for the Crown.”

“And when he came to America, he disappeared for three months. What do you think he was doing here then?”

“Nobody knows. It’s always been assumed that he was on a drinking spree in the American South with an old friend from his days in India. But there’s no documentation for that time: the only evidence is Burton’s comment that they intended to do this. All Burton said was that he had traveled through every state before suddenly arriving at St. Joseph for his long stagecoach trip to Utah.”

“That’s not entirely true anymore. I heard that some pages from a journal have been found in England, supporting the view that Burton and his old friend Steinhauser were together after all. According to this account, they spent more time in Canada than in the Southern United States.”

“Well, there you are.”

“What if I told you there was another journal of that missing period, one that tells a far different story?”

“I’d have to be skeptical. A dozen biographers never uncovered it.”

“Maybe they didn’t know where to look.”

This again was possible. A man travels many roads—even a diligent biographer like Fawn Brodie never finds everything—but I still didn’t believe it. “I thought Mrs. Burton destroyed his journals.”

She simmered behind her old-lady face. “Well, this would be one she never got her bloody little hands on.”

“If such a book exists, I’d love to see it.”

“It exists, all right. Don’t worry about that.”