“Yes,” said Hare. “You must be very, very careful with it. Carry it with you at all times and never allow it into the hands of your enemies.”
“Allow me to demonstrate,” Burke said, picking up the cactus. He held it like a pistol. “Strangely comfortable in the hand,” he noted. “Slightly yielding to the grip yet solid and a good weight. You see this nodule here? Give that a tweak and the cactus immediately goes into a defensive state. Inside, juices are coagulating, forming sharp, venomous spines, and doing so in an instant. Now, I'll just-” He aimed the cactus at the opposite wall and pressed the trigger nodule. There came a sound- phut! -and a number of spines suddenly appeared in the wall, their arrival announced with a soft thud.
“Great heavens!” Burton exclaimed. He crossed the room and counted the projectiles. They had embedded themselves in the wallpaper perilously close to where a treasured framed miniature of his mother and father hung. There were seven, each about three inches long, each gleaming wetly. He reached up to pull one out.
“Don't touch!” Gregory Hare cried. “They're coated with a tremendously potent resin. One drop of it on your skin and you'll fall unconscious in an instant and won't recover your wits for three hours!”
“Bloody hell!”
“The venom will become harmless in five minutes or so.”
“The cactus has reloaded already,” Burke said, waving the pistol. “For as long as it's in a defensive state, it'll produce spines continuously. You could fire this thing for hours on end and never run out of ammunition! However-” he pinched the activation nodule “-There. It's dormant now. No chance of accidentally shooting you in the leg. Not that I would. I'm cautious by nature, aren't I, Mr. Hare?”
“Very cautious, Mr. Burke.”
“Take it, Captain,” Burke said. “It's yours. Be sure to soak this end, with the roots, in water for a couple of hours each week.”
Burton returned to his visitors and took the proffered weapon. It felt strange, alive-which, he reminded himself, it was.
“If you'll pardon me raising what I'm sure is a sensitive subject,” Burke said, “you've been responsible for a few deaths since taking on your current role. We understand why those deaths occurred and we fully support you.”
Gregory Hare nodded his agreement. “Even in the case of Sir Charles Babbage,” he said. “An execution which some might say was unprovoked.”
Burton swallowed. “I must confess,” he said, quietly, “I have asked myself over and over whether my action was justified. Did I commit murder that day?”
“No!” Burke and Hare chorused.
“I was delirious with malaria. I wasn't in a fit state to judge.”
“You judged correctly. We'd been following Babbage and his work for some time. He was what we in our business classify as ‘a developing threat.’”
“This spine-shooter will ease the moral burden of your role, Captain Burton,” Hare added. “You can simply render your opponents insensible, then call us. We will remove them to a place of safekeeping where they'll be interrogated and, ultimately, if possible, rehabilitated.”
“That sounds strangely ominous.”
Neither of his visitors answered.
The clock began to chime eleven.
“Rabbit-ticklers!” Pox murmured.
Burton slipped the cactus gun into his pocket.
“Thank you, gentlemen,” he said. “I daresay this pistol, peculiar as it is, will prove most useful. Now, to business: you have the papers?”
“Yes,” Burke answered.
“They will pass examination?”
“Even the most rigorous,” Hare replied.
“Then if you'd care to step into my dressing room, I'll make you up and fit you out with clothing more suited to asylum inspectors.”
Hare gave an audible gulp and glanced at Burke.
Burke cleared his throat and looked first to the right, then to the left, then at Hare, and finally at Burton.
“I thought-” he mumbled. “I thought we might go like this.”
Burton gave a bark of laughter. “Trust me, chaps, if you step into Bedlam dressed like that, there's every chance that you'll never step out again!”
Bethlem Royal Hospital.
First it was a priory, erected by the sisters and brethren of the Order of the Star of Bethlehem in the year 1247.
Then it became a hospital in 1337.
Twenty years later it started to treat the insane, if “treat” is the appropriate word for what amounted to restraint and torture.
In the 1600s it gained the nickname “Bedlam,” which was soon a part of everyday language, invoked to suggest uproar, confusion, and madness.
The 1700s saw it opening its doors to the public to allow them to point and laugh at the antics of the lunatics.
By the mid-1800s, measures had been taken to improve conditions at the hospital, the principal one being its transference to new premises.
It didn't take long for the huge new edifice to become a larger version of what it had been before: a dark, brutal, malodorous, deafening, perilous, and squalid hellhole.
Sir Richard Francis Burton was standing in the midst of it.
The director of the hospital was a pale-faced man of average height and build. He possessed widely set brown eyes, closely cropped grey hair, and a small clipped mustache. Every few moments, a nervous tic distorted his mouth and pulled his head down to the right, causing him to grunt loudly. His name was Dr. Henry Monroe.
Accompanied by two male assistants, who wore suspiciously stained leather aprons, he'd guided Burton, Burke, and Hare through the north, east, and south wings of the hospital and they were now proceeding through a sequence of locked doors into the west. The inspection had so far taken four hours. Four hours of screaming, wailing, roaring, moaning, babbling, snarling, hissing, sobbing, blaspheming, begging, threatening, despairing, cacophonous insanity.
Burton felt that his own faculties might break down beneath the foul stench and unending barrage of mania, and when he looked at his companions, he saw that the normally phlegmatic Burke and Hare were both showing signs of distress, too.
“Keep a grip,” he whispered into Hare's ear. “The person we're looking for has to be in this wing. We'll not have to endure this pandemonium for too much longer.”
Hare looked at him balefully, leaned close, and said in a low tone: “It's not the noise, Captain. It's this-this suit you've squeezed me into. Most unbecoming! Were it not for the cravat, which thank goodness you allowed me to wear, I would hardly feel myself at all!”
Monroe unlocked the final door in the gloomy passage leading from the south wing to the west. He turned to face his three visitors and, raising his voice above the clamour from beyond the portal, said, for the umpteenth time: “Quite honestly, gentlemen, I don't comprehend why this inspection is- ugh! -necessary. The last was less than a year ago and it found everything to be above board and thoroughly shipshape. In fact, significant improvements in the establishment were noted.”
Burton, who was wearing a brown wig and long false beard, answered: “As I said before, it's simply a formality. Paperwork was lost in a small fire and we are obliged to replace it. To do so we have to repeat the inspection. I grant you it's inconvenient, but it's also unavoidable.”
“Don't misunderstand-I'm not trying to avoid it,” Monroe objected. “There's nothing to hide. As a matter of fact, I'm very proud of the work we do here and am happy to show it off. It's simply that you seem to be rather more needlessly thorough than your predecessors and anything that disturbs the normal routine of the hospital is, well, rather- ugh! -unsettling for the inmates.”
“We're just following governmental regulations, Doctor.”
