upon him and now, just as they had dragged Sir Alfred Tichborne through Tichborne House to his doom, so they began to pull Swinburne to his.
“Get off me! Get off me!”
Orton gave a bloody smile and said: “Come to me. I eat you up!”
Closer and closer Swinburne was drawn, until the gigantic butcher towered over him, dripping blood onto his flame-red hair.
“Yum yum,” Orton drawled, through a mouthful of Herbert Spencer's heart.
He reached out and caught the poet by the lapels. He lifted him into the air. The wraiths floated beside Swinburne, holding his arms, preventing him from using the cactus pistol.
Orton spat the lump of flesh from his mouth. His lips peeled back from the big green incisor teeth. His jaws opened. He leaned forward, his mouth approaching the poet's skinny neck.
Swinburne suddenly felt completely calm.
“Two things,” he said, looking straight into the little piggy eyes. “Firstly, I concede defeat.”
Orton stopped and regarded the small man.
“You've won. So why not rein yourself in a little? After all, London is on its knees. The Houses of Parliament are half destroyed. Buckingham Palace is under siege. The working classes are in control. My friends have been beaten into submission or killed. I mean to say, there's no need to dine on an insignificant little poet like me just to prove a point, is there?”
Orton gave a bubbling chuckle and licked his lips.
“Meat!” he hissed.
“Yes,” the poet continued. “I thought you might say that, which brings me to my second point, which is this: your manners are truly appalling. Have you not read A Manual of Etiquette for Young Ladies?”
Emitting an animal growl, the Claimant opened his mouth wide and placed his teeth against Swinburne's throat.
There was a sound- thunk! -and the poet suddenly fell to the ground, the wraiths swirling away from him.
He looked up.
Arthur Orton's head was transfixed by a huge African spear, which had pierced his skull above the right ear and exited beneath the left. Blood and grey brain matter oozed from its point.
The man who'd called himself Roger Tichborne toppled backward, hit the road with a tremendous thud, and lay still.
Algernon Swinburne sat bemused. Then he looked to his left at number 14 Montagu Place. In the gaping hole where the study window had once been, Sir Richard Francis Burton stood, his Dervish robes fluttering slightly in the breeze.
“M ay Allah bless thee and grant thee peace,” Al-Masloub murmured.
“And peace and blessings upon thee,” Burton replied. “You are certain you do not require an escort?”
“Allah is our escort.”
“Then I am assured of your safety. Until next time, my friend.”
Al-Masloub smiled and bowed and he and his fellow musicians departed, slipping into the thickening atmosphere of Montagu Place.
“You, on the other hand,” Burton said, turning to Mrs. Angell, “most definitely will be escorted.”
“I should stay, Sir Richard,” his housekeeper protested. “Look at the state of the house! It's a terrible mess!”
“And one that I shall see to. Your carriage awaits, Mother Angell. A constable will drive you to the station and stay with you on the train all the way to Herne Bay. A few days in a bed and breakfast enjoying some fresh sea air will work wonders on your nerves.”
“There's nothing wrong with my nerves.”
“Well, there jolly well ought to be after what you've been through today! Now off with you, and I promise to have this place as good as new by the time you get back.”
Reluctantly, the old lady descended the front steps, accepted a helping hand from a policeman, and climbed into the brougham parked just in front of the prime minister's mobile castle. With a quick blast of its steam-horse's whistle, the carriage chugged away, heading to the Queen Victoria Memorial Railway Station.
Detective Inspector Trounce emerged from the mist.
“Your local postmaster is a stubborn ass!” he complained. “He absolutely refused to open up shop. I had to threaten him with arrest.”
“Can you blame him, after this?” Burton responded, indicating the debris-filled road.
“Humph! I suppose not. Anyway, I sent off a parakeet to Scotland Yard. More men will be here in due course.” He hesitated. “And a mortuary van is on its way.”
Burton gave a curt jerk of his head in acknowledgement and the two men entered the house.
The king's agent said: “Pox found Constable Bhatti, who says he's on his way. The bird has since been racing back and forth between here and Battersea Power Station. Brunel has agreed to assist us.”
Trounce reached up and gingerly felt the big bump on his head. “Ouch! So the Steam Man will fight alongside us rather than against us on this occasion?”
“Yes, although not literally. There are a lot of springs in that lumbering life-maintaining contraption of his. If the mechanism ceased to function, he'd die. Best to keep him out of the enemy's range.”
They passed Admiral Lord Nelson, who, rewound, and with the cactus pistol in one hand and a rapier in the other, was standing guard in the hallway.
“Same applies to him, then,” Trounce said, indicating the valet.
“No,” Burton replied.
“No? But he's chock-a-block full of springs!”
“Yes.”
“So our opponent will stop him with ease.”
“I'm counting on it.”
“What? By Jove, what the blazes are you up to?”
“All in due course, Trounce, old man. All in due course.”
Algernon Swinburne came down the stairs. His eyes were hooded and his jaw set hard. Herbert Spencer's death had affected the poet greatly.
“I've locked the Choir Stones in the safe in your library, Richard. They were giving us headaches.”
“Thank you, Algy.”
The three of them entered the seldom-used dining room. Lord Palmerston, Burke and Hare, and the prime minister's driver were seated around the large table.
“Gentlemen, we have very little time to spare,” Burton announced. He, Swinburne, and Trounce sat down. “Our riposte must be immediate and devastating. Before we put the wheels into motion, though, I feel I should apologise to you all. Our enemy incapacitated me. She exploited a certain flaw in my character, causing it to echo back on itself over and over until it became amplified beyond all endurance. Fortunately, I retained enough of my wits to put myself through the Dervish meditation ritual. It enabled me to transfer my mind's focus from guilt, disappointments, and regrets to something I said to Charles Babbage right at the start of this whole affair, to wit: ‘ The mistakes we make give us the impetus to change, to improve, to evolve. ’ I should have been regarding my own errors of judgement in that light all along, but I wasn't. Now I am. It's a statement, I believe, that can be applied not only to individuals but also to wider society, and is the philosophy that must guide us now, for whatever the rights or wrongs of a workers’ revolution, the crisis currently afflicting London does not have its origin in lessons we, as a nation, have learned. Rather, it has been forced upon us by an external agency, and in relation to a mediumistic divination. We cannot allow it. The woman must be stopped.”
“Our enemy is female?” Palmerston asked.
“Yes. Her name is Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. She is a Russian, and she intends nothing less than the wholesale destruction of the British Empire.”
“The devil she does!” the prime minister exclaimed. “What's her motive? What's this about divination?”
“She claims to be clairvoyant. She has seen a future where Britain engages in a great war against a united German Empire allied with Russia.”
