He said, “This is how things are. If I had returned a hero, many things might have been different. But getting back to the prime minister.”
“Yes.”
“Lord Palmerston was not unkind to me, as some were. I was invited to his home. We had several confidential chats. It was he, in fact, who suggested that I come here.”
I felt suddenly alarmed: we had moved perilously close to that point of leeway Richard had given me. But he said, “There was no intrigue about it. Palmerston simply said that in my shoes, under the circumstances, he would undertake a new journey, something completely unexpected. To the States, for instance.”
He lit another smoke. “That was the first thought I had of it. But I warmed to the idea at once. Suddenly it felt very right. I couldn’t bear London any longer.”
“And that’s all there was to it?”
“Almost all. The prime minister summoned me to his home again, just before I left, to say he’d be anxious to hear my impressions of America when I returned.”
“But no specific expectations—no
He laughed softly. “No assignments, Charlie. I do have a list of people he wants me to see. To convey his respects.”
“Southern people, you mean. Charleston people.”
“And others. I am going on to the frontier. Your secretary of war was very helpful to me in that regard. He also gave me a letter to the commander at Fort Moultrie.”
I let that pass. There was no use telling Burton of my own personal disdain toward Mr. Floyd. What difference did it make what I suspected or thought?
“But in the main this journey is for my own self-renewal,” Richard said. “Something I needed badly. And am finding, by the way.”
Pointedly he said, “I hope that satisfies you.”
“Of course.”
It had damned better, I thought.
With that we dropped it. But it never really went away.
Richard.
His eyes were so full of mystery, his presence so quietly formidable. He was nothing like I had imagined him to be. With me he was always gentle and respectful, and I found it difficult to imagine him as the intimidating and often feared presence that others saw in him. The pictures drawn by his biographers, by accounts in the press before and after his death, and even in the writings of his widow more than thirty years past the events I am describing, miss much of the Burton I knew. I cannot challenge them: Who am I to challenge anyone? What was I compared with Isabel, or with men who spent years studying his life? I was at best a shirtsleeve authority. Our time together was so brief, and all I can ever be is the authority on those few weeks. Today I see how random it all was: how easily we might have failed to meet and never known what each of us would bring to the other. But we did meet, and I know I had at least a small effect on Richard’s life, and it would be impossible to overstate the vast effect he has had on mine. There has never been a day in forty years that I have not thought of him, written to him, reread favorite passages from his work.
It was only by chance, browsing through a dusty used bookstore in New York, that I first became aware of his name. There I saw in a bargain bin a small volume bound in red cloth: his 1853 book on bayonet exercise. Today it is a rare piece, but then it looked like just another book of narrow interest, to be thrown down among the sales items. What was it about this little book that drew me to him and ultimately led me to this marvelous journey? Was some hand of Providence at work? I remember thumbing through it, ambivalent, waiting for my companion to finish her Christmas buying from a shelf of leather-bound items behind the counter. I looked at the plates and, caring nothing about the subject, tossed it back in its place. I walked away and browsed the shelves, but eventually some compelling force—how else can I put this?—drew me back to the sales bin. I could see from the title page that the author was then a lieutenant in the Bombay army, that he had written of his travels in the Scinde, in Goa and the Blue Mountains. None of that had interested me then, but Burton had also written a book on falconry, and I was a birdman, so that did have some appeal. I bought the bayonet book on a whim, and as we left the bookshop my soon-to-be-wife looked at my purchase and said, “What on earth are you doing with that awful thing?” I joined her in a laugh at Burton’s expense, saying, “It’s no great loss, it only put me half a dime down.” What I could never make her understand was how quickly and deeply my involvement with Burton grew. Even when she knew how and why, years later, she had no idea. Some things, like Burton making his notes under impossible conditions in India, simply can’t be shared. A friend can be told, as I was told, of the table and the rain and the paper shredding as he wrote on it, but no one can ever truly know the experience of another. In the beginning I made light of it, but almost at once I searched out and read his falconry book, then his works on Goa and the Scinde. There was something bigger than life in his words, some mysterious sense of things, an attitude that drew me from one book to another. I sent away to his publisher, John Van Voorst in England, and obtained my own copies of the falconry title. But it was the monumental achievement of his travels to Mecca and Medina that captured my mind and thrilled my imagination. That’s when I became a serious Burton collector.
The hand of Providence guided me to him, then him to me. Call me a self-serving sentimentalist, call me a fool, but that’s what I believe.
We stayed in Charleston a week. On the third day Richard disappeared and was gone almost thirty-six hours.
