The Long Utopia

23

FOR NELSON AZIKIWE, patiently enquiring, the mysteries of the deeper history of Joshua Valienté and his family continued to unravel …

Luis Valienté never forgot his adventure with Abel and Simon, the runaway slaves, back in 1852. It was an incident that had made him proud to be British, and indeed to be a Waltzer, one of Oswald Hackett’s Knights of Discorporea. A validation too, for the first time in his life, of what he was.

But as the years passed, he gradually became less and less entangled in the affairs of the Knights, and his life followed its own distinct path.

That path took a decisive turn thanks to his share in a fictitious Californian gold mine – all Fraser Burdon’s doing, of course – a lode easily extracted thanks to their piggybacking on the results of some poor fellow’s five years of prospecting in the true California. Luis marvelled at Fraser’s ingenious cover-up of their strike’s peculiar provenance. The mine, according to Fraser’s account for the authorities, had supposedly been opened up by a ‘distant cousin’. Its location had been ‘lost’, along with all documentation, in a botched robbery attempt when the ‘cousin’ had come into town and attempted to register his latest ‘strike’ … They got away with it. There were, it seemed, even wilder stories than that circulating in the strange subculture of the Gold Rush.

And suddenly Luis was rich.

Luis invested his gold money in the burgeoning field of steam engines, for, just as the railways were spreading their iron web around the world, so the oceans, the oldest transport highways of all, were being challenged by a new generation of ships driven by coal and steam, ever since the pioneering service of the Great Western from 1838. Unlike his father, Luis managed to invest well and wisely, on the whole – well enough that he could afford to dabble in another nostalgic passion, backing variety shows in the theatres of England.

He did learn that Burdon had sunk much of his money into armaments – a growing industry after decades of relative peace in Europe were ended by the brutal war in the Crimea. After that conflict, during his visits to London, Luis often noticed a veteran who had a pitch at a corner of the New Cut, a one-legged fellow who would ape army routines, marching and standing to attention and shouldering arms with his crutch. He wore a medal of some kind, and Luis wondered if he might have met the Queen herself, who had taken a great interest in the war, and had met the troops and handed out the gongs … Old folk would tell you there had been a flood of such figures a few decades back, after the war against Bonaparte. They had all died off since, but now there was a fresh crop.

Armaments! Burdon, he supposed, had always had an air of brutal realism about him that Luis lacked, for better or worse.

Not long after his American adventure Luis had married. His bride was a young woman who had once been a singer in the variety halls, and had flirted briefly but intensely with the Great Elusivo. ‘Elusivo no more!’ Hackett had joked, when acting as best man at the wedding. ‘Now she’s got you pinned down at last!’

The couple settled in a decent town house in Richmond, and raised a daughter who they christened Elspeth – ‘Ella’ to her father, in a nod to Luis’s own ‘elusive’ past that was a secret even from his wife. Later came a son, Robert. As the children grew Luis kept an eye on them both, but to his relief neither showed signs of being a Waltzer, with none of the joys and complications such a condition might bring. The family lived modestly, quietly and respectably.

Luis noted the death of Prince Albert in 1861 – well, how could he not? The news dominated the nation. The Queen disappeared into mourning black, and all traces of the somewhat pretty if suspicious young woman Luis had once glimpsed in the vaults of Windsor Castle were extinguished. Luis did wonder how the passing of Albert, the great champion of the Knights of Discorporea, would affect their work. But truth be told, once he reached his own fortieth birthday in 1863, Luis heard little of whatever exploits the Knights were getting up to. His own increasing age made him that much less useful as an agent, of course. And Oswald Hackett had always had a secretive streak.

By the turn of the next decade – and while the British watched aghast as a newly unified Germany under its ferocious Chancellor Bismarck tore into France, advancing even to Paris – Luis’s contact with the Knights had dwindled to the occasional, almost nostalgic, letter or visit.

So it was a surprise when Hackett called one day in the spring of 1871 and asked him to go to Berlin. He and Burdon were to make separate trips, he said, with instructions to visit particular locations, including government buildings and royal residences.

Luis was reluctant, but he was wary of angering Oswald Hackett. So he complied. He fulfilled his own mission without incident or alarm.

And it was a still greater surprise, a few weeks later, when he, Hackett and Fraser Burdon were all summoned once more to Windsor.