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"My Aunt Bessie's sacred hat!" exclaimed Swinburne. "You knew him? You actually knew the man who killed Queen Victoria?"

"Knew him!" exploded Toppletree. "This silly arse paid him!"

"I didn't pay him to blooming well assassinate the queen!" objected Robinson.

"Might as well have done. 'Twas your money he used to buy the pistols."

Robinson bridled, sticking his chest out over his not inconsiderable paunch and raising his clenched fists. "Watch your mouth, Ted. The bastard earned his money fair and square. What he did with it weren't my responsibility."

Toppletree, or Punchinello, as Burton couldn't help but think of him, grinned and his eyes twinkled mischievously.

"Ruffled feathers!" he exclaimed. "Guilty conscience, Bob?"

"Shut your trap!"

"Heh heh!"

Robinson suddenly relaxed. "You old git!" He chuckled.

"Easy target!"

"Stow it, old man!"

"So what was Oxford like?" interposed Swinburne, eyeing the basset hound, which gazed back with a forlorn expression.

Well done, Algy! thought Burton, pleased that his friend was steering the conversation back in the right direction. He remembered Monty doing the same, under very similar circumstances, not much less than twenty-four hours ago. Repetitive themes, just as Countess Sabina had suggested, as if time were music, presenting the same refrain.

Listen to the echoes, Captain; the points of time's rhythm, for each is a crossroads.

"Blooming heck, you can knock 'em back!" observed Robinson, noting that Swinburne's brandy glass and tankard were both empty again.

"Another round, if you please!" requested the little poet. "Include your good self."

"Ta very much. Edward Oxford? He was barmy. Talked to himself all the time. The customers treated him like the village idiot. Laughed at him. Teased him. Mighty popular with the Brigade, though, he was; always asking after their families, befriending their kids; and he was a blooming good barman, too. Fast on his feet with a good head for figures. Never once gave the wrong change. Kept the taps clean and the ale flowing. I ask you, gentshow was I to know he was a killer?"

Burton said solemnly, "You can never tell what's at the back of a man's mind."

"True!" snapped Punchinello. "If I'd known, I'd have killed the sod."

They all grunted in agreement.

Burton surreptitiously checked his pocket watch. It was twenty minutes past midnight.

"So the Libertines frequented the Hog in the Pound just because Oxford had worked there?" he asked.

"Exactly so," said Robinson, serving the fresh drinks. "And I can tell you, at first it was only the fact that they dressed like gentlemen that stopped me booting them out!"

"That and the money they spent," snorted Punchinello.

Swinburne looked at the oldster at his side. "So you were one of the Battersea Brigade?"

"I was. And I nearly came to blows with that Beresford bastard."

"How come?"

"You've read the evening paper? About the attack? This morning? The girl? Spring Heeled Jack?"

Sir Richard Francis Burton tensed and placed his tankard back on the bar in case they noticed his shaking hand.

"Yes," said Swinburne. "It was fairly vague. The girl hallucinated, surely. Spring Heeled Jack is just a bogeyman."

"Nope. That devil's real, right enough. Ain't that so, Bob?"

The old barman nodded. "Aye. Attacked a couple of our girls, he did."

"Your girls?" asked Burton.

"The Brigade's. Bartholomew Stevens's lass and Dave Alsop's."

Burton's eyebrows rose. Stevens! Alsop!

"The attacks happened around the time Dave moved up to a little place north of the city, on account of getting work as a blacksmith," explained Robinson. "But though he was well away from the power station, he still used to ride down to the Hog occasionally for a drink with the old mob."

"Nice chap, he was," muttered Punchinello.

"Aye, it's true. Then that devil had a go at his daughter right on the doorstep of his blooming house. That was in '38, just a few months after Jumping Jack had attacked Bart Stevens's