The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack - Mark Hodder [11]
"It's getting unseasonably cold, sir-shall I light the fire?"
"It's all right, I'll do it. Would you take a letter for me?"
"Certainly."
The housekeeper, who often performed slight secretarial tasks for him, sat at one of the three desks, slid a sheet of blank paper onto the leather writing pad, and picked up a pen. She dipped the nib into the inkwell and wrote, at Burton's dictation:
1 ant at hone in London. Awaiting further instructions. Burton.
"Send it by runner to 10 Downing Street, please."
The old lady looked up in surprise. "To where?"
"10 Downing Street. At once, please."
"Yes, sir."
She departed with the note. A few moments later, he heard her at the front door blowing three blasts on a whistle. Within half a minute, a dogalmost certainly a greyhound-would arrive on the doorstep and, after she'd fed the animal, the housekeeper would place the letter between its teeth and announce the destination. There'd be an acknowledging wag of the tail, and the runner would race away en route for Downing Street.
They were part of a fairly new communications system, these remarkable dogs, the first practical application of eugenics adopted by the British public. Each hound came into the world knowing every address within a fifty-mile radius of its birthplace and with the ability to carry mail between those locations, barking and scratching at a recipient's door until the letter was collected. After each task was completed, the runner would wander the streets until it heard another three-whistle summons.
Messenger parakeets formed the other half of the system. These phenomenal mimics carried spoken communications. A person only had to visit a post office and give one of the birds a message, the name of the recipient, and the address, and the parakeet would fly straight to the appropriate set of ears.
There was one problem, an issue that had troubled the Eugenicist scientists from the start: namely, that whatever modification they made to a species, it always seemed to bring with it an unexpected side effect.
In the case of the parakeets, it was that they swore at, mocked, and offended everyone they encountered. The person on the receiving end of the service would inevitably be given a message liberally peppered with insults not put there by the sender. Nothing, it seemed, could be done to correct this fault. Originally, it had been hoped that every household would have its own parakeet but, as it turned out, no one could bear the constant abuse in their own home. So the Post Office had stepped in and now each branch kept an aviary full of the birds.
In the runners' case, the drawback was nothing more serious than a phenomenal appetite. Though they were whiplash thin, the dogs required a square meal at every address they visited, so despite being a free system, those who used it often found themselves investing a considerable amount of money in dog food.
Burton heard the front door close. His letter was on its way.
He took a swig of brandy and reached for a cheroot; he had a taste for cheap, strong tobacco.
Explore Dahomey? he thought, still dwelling on what he should do now that the Nile question was out of his hands; for though a new expedition was required to settle the matter once and for all, he knew that Murchison would not commission him to lead it. The Royal Geographical Society was already fractured by the verbal duel he and Speke had fought, and the president would doubtlessly offer the expedition to a neutral geographer.
So, Dahomey? Burton had been wanting to mount an expedition into that dark and dangerous region of West Africa for some time but now it was going to be difficult to raise the money.
A private sponsor, perhaps? Maybe a publishing company?
Ah, yes, then there were the books. For a long while he'd wanted to write a definitive translation of The