“No, sir, I regret not.”

“He stuffs into them so many appended facts, qualifiers, and opinions that your observation has given me a whole new understanding of the term ‘footnote,’ for if steam shortens a journey to the extent that only a booklet may be read, then Burton’s volumes must require one to forgo the railway and take a very long walk!”

The landau, following the other, turned onto the coast road toward Newcastle upon Tyne. The wind gusted against it, causing it to rock.

“Have you known Swinburne for long, Mr. Dodgson?” Burton asked, grabbing at the edge of the bench to steady himself. He stifled a hiss as his arm gave a pang.

“Not at all, Mr. Burt—Sir Richard. I’ve not—I hadn’t ever encountered him until my arrival at Wallington Hall yesterday. It is Rossetti with whom I am—that is, who I am friends with. He strikes me as—I refer to Mr. Swinburne—as a very eccentric fellow. It’s a quite fantast—an amazing thing, but did you know that he cannot feel pain at all?”

“He can’t feel pain? How is that possible?”

“It seems his brain is arranged—is not put together in the normal manner. Indeed, there are certain forms of pain that he even senses—interprets as—as pleasure. According to Rossetti, it has resulted in him acquiring a rather—um—um—peculiar taste for—for—for—”

“Whippingham, Bendover, and Lashworthy,” Monckton Milnes offered.

“Yes.”

“You mean flagellation?” Burton asked.

Dodgson cleared his throat, went beetroot-red, and nodded.

“The English vice,” Levi declared. “You are a race très drôles!”

Monckton Milnes said, “Must I remind you that the Marquis de Sade was French, Monsieur Levi?”

“A philosopher and Utopian! In transgression, he seek to expand the mind, to allow for the establishment of Socialist thought, but you English—ha!—all you want is the whack, whack, whack of the strap!”

Dodgson crossed his arms and legs and mumbled, “Anyway, the more time I spend with—in Mr. Swinburne’s company, the more I think him curiouser and curiouser.”

By the time the two carriages reached the train station in Newcastle, the clouds had filled the sky from horizon to horizon. They were dark and billowing, suggesting gale-force winds at a high altitude. Even at ground level, the gusts were now whistling and howling with growing ferocity.

“It’s the end of our long, hot summer,” Lady Pauline commented as the party climbed aboard the Glasgow train. “And thank heavens for that. You gentlemen will never understand the infernal combination of heat and corsets. I’m certainly not the fainting type, but I came perilously close to it this season.”

The Glasgow slow train—the express didn’t stop near Wallington—halted at a succession of towns and villages until, at nine o’clock, it reached Kirkwhelpington, which was little more than a hamlet, lacking even a small station. Only the Trevelyan party was getting off here, and the guardsman brought from his van at the back of the three-carriage train a set of wooden steps, which he placed beneath the door to allow the nine passengers to alight.

Swinburne had by now recovered with no ill effects after his lunchtime indulgence. As the locomotive chugged away and heavy drops of rain began to slant down, he laughed, put his face to the sky, and hollered:

Outside the garden

The wet skies harden;

The gates are barred on

The summer side:

“Shut out the flower-time,

Sunbeam and shower-time;

Make way for our time,”

Wild winds have cried.

“You’ll catch your death,” Lady Pauline fussed, grabbing him by the elbow. The rest followed as she hurried the little poet along a path toward a large farmhouse. The wind and rain rapidly increased in fury, soaking them all.

“By God!” Rossetti shouted above the clamour. “Old England is in for a battering!”

Upon reaching the ramshackle building, they were greeted by a burly giant of a man who hustled them into a barn in which was stored one of Wallington Hall’s vehicles: a very large and ornate stagecoach.

Sir Walter said, “Bless my soul, Mr. Scoggins, what weather! Can you drive us home in this downpour?”

“I ’ave no objection,” the farmer replied. He eyed Burton, Monckton Milnes, and Levi. “More o’ ye a-goin’ back than what come out, though. Might be a tight squeeze. Would one o’ the gents be willin’ t’ sit up top wi’ me?”

“I’ll do so,” Burton volunteered.

Scoggins set about fetching four horses and, with Burton’s help, harnessed them to the stage. He then ran to the farmhouse and returned with a set of waterproofs, which Burton donned. The passengers climbed aboard, Scoggins and Burton mounted the driver’s box, and moments later the vehicle was bouncing and swinging eastward, with rain hammering against it and wind slapping at its side. Thunder roared overhead, and the countryside was one second buried in pitch darkness and the next vividly illuminated, until it achieved a vague state of permanency in the form of an after-image etched onto Burton’s retina.

The journey was short—two miles—but tested them all. Those inside the stage were thrown about as it jolted through ruts and potholes, while the two men up top were soaked to the skin, even through their waterproofs.

To Burton’s relief, a flash of lightning finally revealed the huge Palladian-style manor.

They’d arrived at Wallington Hall.

With one foot curled up on the chair beneath him, Algernon Swinburne was declaiming verse, introducing to the gathering his latest—but incomplete—work. His consumption of alcohol—which had resumed as soon as they’d arrived at the Trevelyan residence, changed into dry clothes, and gathered in the large and lavishly appointed sitting room—appeared to have no effect on his performance; his voice was clear, the words enunciated with passion and style. His audience was entranced. They listened in rapt silence, but Wallington Hall itself was not at all quiet, and the recitation was accompanied by ghastly moans, sobs, screams, and howls from the chimney as the wind moved in the flue, sounding like a horde of tormented ghosts.

Swinburne finished:

I shall die as my fathers died, and sleep as they sleep; even so.

For the glass of the years is brittle wherein we gaze for a span;

A little soul for a little bears up this corpse which is man.

So long I endure, no longer; and laugh not again, neither weep.

For there is no God found stronger than death; and death is a sleep.

For a short period afterward, Lady Pauline and her guests spoke not a word.

There came a loud rattle and crash as a slate was dislodged from the roof and fell to the patio outside the French doors.

Burton found himself dwelling on a line from earlier in the poem: Time and the Gods are at strife, ye dwell in the midst thereof.

Charles Dodgson broke the spell. “A lament, Mr. Swinburne? You regret the passing of—the death of paganism and the rise of—of Christianity?”

“When we turned our eyes to the sky,” Swinburne replied, “and placed our faith in the unknowable, we ceased to worship the ground beneath our feet and all that springs from it to sustain us. See how our mighty machines now despoil it! My hat, Dodgson, I rue the day we became blinded by hope and repudiated responsibility for the world in which we live. I would rather we strive to understand what definitely is than place reliance on what probably isn’t.”