River of the Gods by Candice Millard

Author:Candice Millard [Millard, Candice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2022-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

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Burton’s life had suddenly, inexplicably fallen apart. Everything he had dreamed of, worked for, repeatedly risked his life in the pursuit of, had vanished, leaving him with no idea where to turn next. Even those few parts of his life on which he had always been able to rely had crumbled. Both of his parents were dead, and his younger brother, Edward, who had been a mainstay throughout his life, the best friend of his peripatetic childhood, had changed completely, tragically, and irrevocably. Edward Burton had survived the Indian Mutiny two years earlier, during which Edward Speke had been killed, but had been sent home after suffering severe sunstroke. The sunstroke, it was believed, coupled with an attack three years earlier during which he had been beaten by an angry mob, had led to what could only be described as a complete mental collapse. “His mind slowly gave way,” Georgiana Stisted would later write, “and never recovered.” The brave, handsome young man who had followed his brother in every youthful rebellion, even managing to be expelled from Cambridge after Richard was asked to leave Oxford, was now an inmate in the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum. He had not spoken since being brought home, and but for a single exception, little more than a murmur, would not speak again for the rest of his life, nearly forty years. The severity and mystery of Edward’s illness left him utterly, hopelessly isolated from the world around him, impossible even for his brother to reach.

Eager to forget everything that had happened since his return, Burton left London at the first opportunity. Restlessly moving from place to place, he attempted to both cure his broken body and free his tortured mind. “I was driven out of town by an intense longing for cool air and a weight upon the mind—something like what conscience must be,” he wrote to Monckton Milnes from Dover, where he had gone to take “the water cure.” Milnes then invited him to spend a week at his country manor, Fryston Hall, where he hosted everyone from Henry Adams to Tennyson, who nicknamed the drafty old estate “Freezetown.” Milnes himself lovingly referred to it as Aphrodisiopolis, in reference to his large collection of erotica. From Fryston Hall, Burton traveled to Boulogne, where he had first met Isabel nearly ten years earlier, stopping in Paris to visit Hankey.

Even Milnes and Hankey, however, with their rare collections and outrageous suggestions, could not take Burton’s mind off what he had lost. When he visited his family, his young niece, Georgiana, could not help but see that her once vibrant uncle had changed, and she was not alone. “Everybody remarked he looked ill and depressed,” she wrote. It was not just that he was frail and weak. His heart was broken. “Speke’s strange breach of faith affected him more than he would confess to,” Georgiana later recalled. “So affectionate a nature could not fail to keenly feel the complete severance of a long friendship.”

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