“I take it your confronting him had little effect?”

Elgin leaned back and grunted an agreement. “None. He became thoroughly unreliable. In the end, I took over the duties I’d assigned to him, and I’ll confess, it’s been more than I can comfortably cope with. Thus my determination to replace the fellow.”

A few minutes of silence fell between them. Burton finished his coffee. He looked out of the porthole and saw the rooftops of Vienna.

“Would you object to me searching his quarters?”

“Not at all.”

“Thank you, Lord Elgin. You’ve given me much to think about.”

Elgin flapped his hand dismissively.

Twenty minutes later, Burton had retrieved the key to Oliphant’s cabin from the steward and was letting himself in.

The Wisdom of Angels, its leather spine cracked, its pages worn and creased at the corners, was on the bedside table.

“Thomas Lake Harris,” Burton said aloud, reading the author’s name. He flicked through the pages, looking at the chapter titles, digesting random paragraphs, gaining an overall impression of the subject matter. It was just as Elgin had summarised, with the addition that Harris reckoned his non-corporeal beings were influencing human history. Bizarrely, he also claimed to be married to one of them—an angel known as the Lily Queen.

Burton muttered, “Utter claptrap!”

He pushed the book into his jacket pocket and started to search through Oliphant’s belongings. He found a daguerreotype showing the man posing with a white panther—the animal had moved during the exposure and its face was blurred. He opened a chest to reveal a large collection of daggers and flintlock pistols. He lifted three books down from a shelf. Two were travel journals written by Oliphant: A Journey to Katmandu, published in 1852, and The Russian Shores of the Black Sea, from 1853. The third was a thick sketchbook. Three-quarters of its pages were filled with pencilled illustrations of landscapes, buildings, and people—obviously a record of Oliphant’s various travels—but they petered out, leaving a thick section of blank paper before the sketching resumed toward the back of the volume. These pictures, which Burton guessed were more recent, were far less accomplished and appeared to be the unconscious scribblings of a meandering mind. Mostly they took the form of diagrams and sigils, many of which the explorer recognised as occult in nature. There were also rapidly made drawings of a panther and, on the last page, a bizarre self-portrait in which Oliphant had combined his own face with his pet’s, giving himself feline eyes, a projecting muzzle, and a mouth filled with canines. Above the portrait, he’d written the word Predator, and beneath it, the sentence: What better way to transcend human limitations than by quite literally becoming something a little more than human?

Burton shuddered. He closed the book but kept hold of it as he continued his search of the room.

He found a bag of opium and a number of pipes.

There was little else of interest.

He was turning to leave when something glittered and caught his eye. He crossed to an occasional table and looked down at a pair of white gloves folded upon it. A tiepin had been placed on them. He picked it up and examined it. At its top, a small disk of gold bore two symbols, one looking like the letter C but with two small lines extending outward from the left edge of its curve, the other like a mirror-image number seven. Letters, Burton was sure, but—again!—from a language he was unfamiliar with.

He pocketed the pin and sketchbook, left the cabin, and found Sister Raghavendra standing in the corridor.

“Hello, Sadhvi. Have you been waiting for me? Why didn’t you knock?”

“I didn’t want to interrupt. But what are you doing running around? You should be in bed. You’re not well.”

“I’m shaky, I’ll admit. Gad, that potion you gave me certainly brought the fever to crisis! Really, though, I’m thoroughly fed up with my bed. Don’t worry—I won’t overdo it. I want to visit Oliphant, then I’ll settle in the library and I shan’t move until we’re home.”

“You’ve already overdone it, Richard, and there’s no point in seeing Oliphant. The captain called me to attend him an hour ago. The man is a raving lunatic. Apparently he screamed and babbled his way through the early hours then lapsed into a catatonic trance. He’s neither moved nor said a word in the past three hours. Poor William! He was such a good soul. Why in heaven’s name was he killed?”

“That’s exactly what I’m trying to find out.”

Burton looked the Sister up and down and gave a broad smile—not something he did very often, for he knew it looked as if it hurt him, and fully exposed his overly long eye teeth. Indeed, Raghavendra blanched slightly at the sight of it.

“Bound and smothered, I see,” he said.

She glanced down at her voluminous bell-shaped skirts, tightly laced bodice, and frilly fringes, then reached up and patted her pinned hair.

“Woe is me,” she said, “a genteel woman of the British Empire, which spreads its civilised mores across the globe and slaps its shackles on every female it encounters. Are we really so dangerous?”

“None more so than you, Sadhvi,” Burton replied. “Such beauty has, in the past, caused empires to fall.”

“No, no, I’ll not have that. It is men who create and destroy empires. Women are just the explanation they employ to excuse their ill-disciplined passions and subsequent misjudgments. History is proof enough that your so-called superior sex is utterly inferior and wholly lacking in common sense.”

“Thank you kindly, ma’am,” Burton said, with a slight bow, and it struck him that—though it was Isabel Arundell he loved and would marry—he possessed few friends as loyal, true, and forthright as Sadhvi Raghavendra.

“And the reason for this bondage,” the Sister said, gesturing down at her clothes, “is that our passengers are about to board, so I thought it prudent to sacrifice my comfort and liberty, especially after having so shocked Lord Elgin with my thoroughly practical Indian garb. That’s why I’m here, Richard: to fetch you. We’re to greet the newcomers in the ballroom. After that, you can—and you will—take to the library.”

Burton grunted his acquiescence and followed her along the corridor.

“Have they told you who our passengers are?” he asked.

“Lord Stanley,” she replied. “And who? His secretary?”

“Prince Albert.”

“Prince Albert? The Prince Albert? The HRH Prince Albert?”

“That one, yes.”

“Bless me!”

“Indeed. I feel our homecoming has been somewhat overshadowed. We are eclipsed.”

Sister Raghavendra put her hands to her face and exclaimed, “Imagine! I might have met him in my smock! Thank goodness I changed!”

“And there you have it,” Burton said. “The fair sex identifies the crux of the matter.”

They reached the staircase and started up it. Impatiently, and somewhat ungraciously, Burton was forced to accept Raghavendra’s supporting hand on his elbow.

“A bloody invalid!” he grumbled. “Excuse my language.”

She giggled. “I’ve been bloody well excusing it every bloody hour of every bloody day for well over a bloody year. Why must you insist on a display of strength when you know full well you have none?”

“Climbing stairs is hardly a display of strength. And you should wash your mouth out with soap, young lady.”

“Don’t worry. By the time we land in London I’ll be as timid as a mouse, won’t speak unless spoken to, and will allow nothing but meaningless platitudes to escape my lips. I may even indulge in a dramatic swoon or two, providing there’s a dashingly handsome young man standing close enough to catch me. Let’s stop a moment and rest.”

“There’s no need. It’s a small staircase between decks, not the confounded Kilima-Njaro Mountain.”