She was of indeterminate age; either elderly but very well preserved or young and terribly worn. Her hair was pure white and pinned back in a bun; her face was angular with large, dark, slightly slanted eyes, which, like the corners of her mouth, were edged by deep lines. She wore a navy blue dress with a white shawl. Her hands were bare, the nails bitten and unpainted.

She looked at him curiously, then gave a slight start of recognition and said, “You are Richard Burton.” Her voice was musical and slightly accented.

“Yes,” he replied. “I apologise that I wasn’t available when you called on me. I’ve been—” He reached into his pocket and pulled out her card, holding it up with the handwritten side facing her. “I’ve been wondering about this.”

“Come in.”

She led him along a short passageway and into a small rectangular parlour that smelled of sandalwood. At her behest, he put his hat on a sideboard, leaned his cane in a corner, and sat at a round table. She settled opposite him. Her eyes never left his.

“You do not believe,” she said softly.

“In a coming storm?”

“In mediumship.”

“I didn’t. Now I don’t know what to think. Since my return from Africa, I’ve experienced one strange circumstance after another, and now nothing feels as it should, and if I find that mediums are not the charlatans I’ve always taken them for—I mean no affront—then I shan’t be at all surprised.” He paused, and added, “Countess, I know all about your role in government and about Abdu El Yezdi.”

Countess Sabina nodded and smiled sadly. “I am not offended by your skepticism. Perhaps I would feel the same way had my life been different. As it is, the responsibility of communicating Abdu El Yezdi’s instructions fell to me, and—” She pressed her lips together and shrugged. “It weighed heavily. To be at the centre of such very rapid changes in the world, and yet to know—” She stopped again and appeared to focus inward, her lips moving silently.

“To know?” Burton prompted.

“To know, as you say, that nothing is as it should be.”

“Due to El Yezdi’s influence?”

“It goes far deeper than that, sir.”

Burton unconsciously ran the fingers of his right hand across his jawline. The sensation he’d experienced in Portman Square was still with him. He felt disjointed, more so even than during the days of malarial fever.

A shaft of light was slanting through the gap in the curtains. Dust motes waltzed slowly through it. Burton’s and the countess’s shadows stretched across the floor and up onto the flock wallpaper. The room felt suspended in limbo.

“Would you explain from the beginning?” His voice was oddly hollow to his own ears. Distant. “Tell me about when Abdu El Yezdi first contacted you.”

The countess took a long, slow breath, exhaled, and said, “It was when the Great Amnesia was first recognised. According to my diary, I arrived in London in 1838 to search for my cousin, who’d come here from our native Balkans the year before and had not been seen since, but that mission meant nothing to me when I read of it. The accounts of my activities during the three years leading up to The Assassination, although set down in my own hand, felt like the recollections of someone else. I was disoriented and lost. It was as if I’d gone to sleep in my own bed in the old country only to awaken in an unfamiliar room in a strange land. To make matters worse, I began to experience vivid dreams, in which another used my own voice to address me. I thought I was going mad.”

She stopped, looked down at her hands, and the muscles at the sides of her jaw pulsed.

She flexed her fingers and went on, “This invisible presence introduced itself as Abdu El Yezdi. I could not converse with him, for as I say, he appropriated my inner voice in order to address me. At first, he spoke only in my dreams, assuring me that he was real, would not harm me, was my friend, but required my assistance in order to achieve a great purpose. He then started to communicate during my waking hours, though when he did so, I would inevitably slip into a trance. He told me that The Assassination of Queen Victoria was never meant to happen; that it had been caused by a man who stepped out of his own position in history and into ours.”

“What?” Burton interrupted. “I don’t understand. What does that mean?”

“Bear with me, Sir Richard; I shall try to explain.” She ruminated for a few seconds before asking, “Will you consider that in every circumstance there is inherent at least one alternate action? For example, one can respond to an opportunity or challenge with acceptance or refusal; one can react to an event aggressively, passively, evasively, or engagingly; one can choose to walk straight on, or turn back, or go to the left, or to the right.”

Burton gave a curt nod of acknowledgement.

“In a coherent world,” she said, “the option selected obliterates the rest; the alternatives may exist for a little while longer, but as the consequences of the decision taken develop, those alternatives become irrelevant and inapplicable.”

She waited for Burton to again indicate that he comprehended. He said, “Very well. Pray, continue.”

“When the most appropriate decisions are taken—that is to say, the most appropriate within the context of the situation—a chain of consequences develops far into the future, knitting together with other chains to form a strong cohesive whole.” Countess Sabina place her right elbow on the table with her forearm pointing straight upward and her hand fisted. “Like the trunk of a tree,” she said, holding the pose, “from which no deviations sprout, for inappropriate decisions are either corrected by subsequent ones or their consequences lead nowhere, while the alternate decisions—the ones not taken—have no consequences at all.” She lifted her arm slightly then banged her elbow back down to emphasise the verticality of her forearm. “This is what we call history.”

Burton thought of Darwin and murmured, “You propose a sort of natural selection, wherein decisions are a response to context, and consequences evolve, and only the fittest of them survive to contribute to the ongoing narrative?”

“Good!” the countess exclaimed. “You have it, sir! You have it! But make no mistake—there are no moralities or ethics involved. An appropriate decision isn’t necessarily a good or right or nice one. It is merely the decision whose consequences will survive for the longest. Time has no virtue.”

“Nothing but blind, pitiless indifference,” Burton quoted.

“Precisely so.” Again, she raised and thudded down her elbow. “This, as I say, is the mechanism of a coherent world.” She suddenly splayed her fingers wide. “But The Assassination caused history to divide into branches. There is no more coherence.”

“Why?”

“Because there was interference from outside the context; from a presence that bore no relation at all to the chains of causes and effects that were active at just after six o’clock on the tenth of June 1840; from a man whose rightful place was in the far, far future.”

Burton momentarily closed his eyes and tried to digest this. When he opened them, Countess Sabina was still fixed in her pose.

“A man from the future,” she repeated, “who somehow travelled backward through time to observe the failure of The Assassination, only to find that his presence changed the outcome. Existence bifurcated. There were now two histories. In one—the original—Edward Oxford failed to shoot the queen. In the other—in our version—he didn’t.”

“Was Abdu El Yezdi the man?” Burton whispered.

“No. The traveller was a descendent of the assassin, Oxford, and was called by the same name.”

“But how could Oxford have descendants? He was killed at the scene. He had no children.”

“In our history, yes. In the original, no.”

Burton gestured weakly for the countess to stop. She waited patiently, holding her pose, while he struggled to process the revelation. When he indicated that he was ready for more, she went on: