Anno Dracula (8 page)

Godalming believed Ruthven had sought him out and made a vampire of him solely because of his involvement in what was now regarded as an underhanded conspiracy against the Royal Person. When warm, Godalming had personally destroyed the first of Dracula’s British get. That made him a likely candidate for the pike between Van Helsing and that solicitor fellow Harker. He remembered with a shudder the Thor-like blows that drove the stake through his then-beloved Lucy, and felt a poisonous hate for the Dutchman who had persuaded him to such an extreme. He had been criminally foolish and was now eager to compensate. His turning, and Ruthven’s adoption of him as protégé, had saved his heart for the moment, but he was too well aware of the Prince Consort’s capriciousness and capacity for vengeance. And, of course, his father-in-darkness was hardly known for his own constancy or evenness of temperament. If he was to find a secure place in the changed world, he would have to be careful.

‘His ideas were formed in his lifetime,’ Ruthven continued, ‘when you could rule a country with the sword and stake. He missed the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the rise of the Americas, the fall of the Ottoman. He wishes to avenge the death of our gallant General Gordon by dispatching a force of ferocious vampire idiots to ravage the Sudan and impale all who owe allegiance to the Mahdi. I should let him do
it. We could well live without his Carpathian cronies draining the public purse. Let a hundred or so of the clods get cut down by canny Mussulmen and left to rot in the sun and we’d have all the barmaids in Piccadilly and Soho flying the Crescent in gratitude.’

Ruthven swept his hand through another pile of letters, and sent up a flurry which descended around him. The Prime Minister seemed barely out of his teens, with cold grey eyes and a dead white face. He betrayed no ruddy flush even when he had just fed. A connoisseur of delicate young girls, he nevertheless chose for his get able young men of position. He distributed his new-born children-in-darkness to government offices, even encouraging competition between them. Godalming, unsuited by his title to menial duties and yet hardly qualified for a cabinet post, was currently the most favoured of Ruthven’s get, serving unofficially as a private messenger and secretary. He had always had a practical streak, a flair for working out the details of complicated plans. Even Van Helsing had trusted him to handle much of the spade-work of his campaign.

‘And have you heard of his latest edict?’ Ruthven held up a scroll of official parchment, bound in scarlet tape. It unravelled, and Godalming saw the copperplate of a palace secretary. ‘He wants to crack the whip on what he refers to as “unnatural vice”, and has decreed that the punishment for sodomy shall henceforth be by summary execution. The method will, of course, be his old reliable, the stake.’

Godalming glanced over the paper. ‘Sodomy? Why should that so offend the Prince Consort?’

‘You forget, Godalming. Dracula has not the Englishman’s tolerance. He spent some years of his youth as a hostage to the Turks, and we must assume his captors made use of him from time to time. Indeed, his brother Radu, significantly known as “the
Handsome”, developed a taste for masculine attentions. Since Radu betrayed him in one of his family’s innumerable internal intrigues, the Prince Consort has chosen to take an extreme position in regard to matters homosexual.’

‘This seems a very minor business.’

Ruthven flared his nostrils. ‘Your understanding is limited, Godalming. Just consider: there is hardly an upstanding member of either house who has
not
, at one time or another, buggered a telegraph boy. Come December, Dracula will have some very prominent fairies slowly sinking on to the Christmas trees they are surmounting.’

‘A curious image, my Lord.’

The Prime Minister waved away the remark, diamond-shaped nails catching the light.

‘Tchah, Godalming, tchah! Of course, in that canny brain, our Wallachian Prince may have many purposes to one action.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning that there is in this city a certain new-born poet, an Irishman, as known for his amatory preferences as for his unwise association with a countryman whose memory is much out of favour. And, dare I say it, better known for either attribute than for his verse.’

‘You mean Oscar Wilde?’

‘Of course I mean Wilde.’

‘He is not much at Mrs Stoker’s lately.’

‘Neither should you be, if you value your heart. My protection can only cloak so much.’

Godalming nodded, gravely. He had his reasons for continuing to attend Florence Stoker’s after-darks.

‘I have a report on the doings of Mr Oscar Wilde somewhere,’ Ruthven said, indicating another pyramid of papers. ‘Commissioned
in my private capacity as a gentleman of letters, with an interest in the continuing health of our finest creative minds. Wilde has embraced the vampire state with enthusiasm, you’ll be pleased to know. Currently, sampling the blood of young men is his favoured pursuit, somewhat eclipsing his aesthetic fervour, and completely obliterating the flirtation with Fabian socialism that regrettably preoccupied him at the beginning of the year.’

‘You’ve obviously taken an interest in the fellow. For myself, I always find him tiresome, tittering behind his hand to hide his bad teeth.’

Ruthven threw himself into a chair and ran a hand through his longish hair. The Prime Minister was something of a dandy, given to an extravagance of cuffs and cravats.
Punch
called him ‘the compleat murgatroyd’.

‘We contemplate the dread possibility that Alfred, Lord Tennyson, will hold the post of poet laureate for dreary centuries. Egads, imagine
Locksley Hall Six Hundred Years After
? I would rather drink vinegar than live in an England that would allow such a horror, and so I have been casting around for a merciful alternative. If things had been otherwise, Godalming, I should have chosen to be a poet, and yet tyrannous fate, with the invaluable assistance of the Prince Consort, has bound me to the rock of bureaucracy, the eagle of politics pecking at my liver.’

Now Ruthven stood up and wandered to his book-cases, where he remained, contemplating his beloved volumes. The Prime Minister had lengthy passages of Shelley, Byron, Keats and Coleridge by heart, and could disgorge chunks from Goethe and Schiller in the original. His current enthusiasms were French, and decadent. Beaudelaire, de Nerval, Rimbaud, Rachilde, Verlaine, Mallarmé; most, if not all, of whom the Prince Consort would have gleefully
impaled. Godalming had heard Ruthven declare that a purportedly scandalous novel,
A Rebours
by J.K. Huysmans, should be placed before every schoolboy, and that he would, in a utopia, make vampires only of poets and painters. It was said, however, that one symptom of the un-dead state was a withering of the creative abilities. A proud philistine who would rather have hunt scenes on his walls than William Morris paper, Godalming never had anything that might be considered an artistic inclination, and so could not bear witness to the phenomenon.

‘But,’ the Prime Minister said, turning, ‘of us elders, who else has the wit to mediate between Prince Dracula and his subjects, to hold together this new empire of living and dead? That lunatic Sir Francis Varney, whom we have packed off to India? I think not. None of our Carpathian worthies will serve, either: not Iorga, not Von Krolock, not Meinster, not Tesla, not Brastov, not Mitterhouse, not Vulkan. And what of the hand-kissing Saint-Germain, the meddling Villanueva, the upstart Collins, the impenetrable Weyland, the buffoon Barlow, the oily Duval. I “hai me doots”, as the Scotsman says, I “hai me doots” indeed. Who then does that leave? The pale and uninteresting Karnstein, still mourning for his silly skewered girl? Come to that, what of the women? God, the vampire women! What a pack of foaming she-cats! Lady Ducayne and Countess Sarah Kenyon are at least English, even if they’ve not an ounce of brain between them. But Countess Zaleska of Roumania, Ethelind Fionguala of Ireland, Countess Dolingen of Graz, Princess Asa Vajda of Moldavia, Elizabeth Bathory of Hungary? None of these titled tarts would be acceptable, I think, either to the Prince Consort or to the peoples of Britain. You might as well give the job to one of those mindless woman-things
Dracula set aside to marry plump Vicky. No. Of the elders, there is only me. Here I am: Lord Ruthven, wanderer and wit. A land-poor Englishman, long absent from his homeland, recalled to be of service to his country. Who would have thought I would ever occupy the office of Pitt and Palmerston and Gladstone and Disraeli? And who could succeed me?
Apres moi, le déluge
, Godalming. After me, the shower.’

B
eauregard strolled in the fog, endeavouring to digest all he had gleaned from the inquest. He would have to make a full report to the cabal; he must have the facts, such as they were, ordered.

His wandering was not random: from the Working Lads’ Institute, he walked down Whitechapel Road, turned right into Great Garden Street, left into Chicksand Street. He allowed himself to be drawn to the site of the recent murder. Even with the churning fog and the Silver Knife panic, the streets were crowded. As midnight approached, the un-dead emerged. Public houses and music halls were illuminated, crammed with laughing and shouting people. Costermongers hawked sheet music, phials of ‘human’ blood, scissors, Royal souvenirs. Chestnuts roasted in a barrel-fire on Old Montague Street were sold to new-born and warm alike. Vampires had no need of solid food, but the habit of eating was hard to leave behind. Boys sold fancifully illustrated broadsheets with gruesome details piping hot from Lulu Schön’s inquest. A good many more uniformed constables were about than was usual, mostly new-borns. Beauregard supposed any suspicious characters loitering around Whitechapel and Spitalfields must come in for close inspection,
presenting the police with a thorny problem, since the district thronged with nothing
but
suspicious characters.

A street organ ground an air: ‘Take a Pair of Crimson Eyes’, from Gilbert and Sullivan’s
The Vampyres of Venice; or: A Maid, a Shade and a Blade
. That seemed apt. The maid – so to speak – and the blade were obviously present in the case. The shade was the murderer, obscured by fog and blood.

Despite Dr Jekyll’s testimony and Baxter’s verdict, he considered the notion that the crimes to date were the work of different hands, ritual killings like thuggee stranglings or Camorra executions. The extent of the mutilation was superfluous to necessity if the murderer’s purpose was simply to end life. The
Pall Mall Gazette
ventured that the savage excess of the crimes were reminiscent of an Aztec rite. Even more, Beauregard was reminded of incidents in China, Egypt and Sicily, in connection with secret societies. The purpose of such atrocities was not merely to eliminate an enemy but also to deliver a message to the victim’s confederates or any who might choose to stand with him. The metropolis was as warm with secret societies and their agents; it was not improbable that there were already Freemasonries sworn to continue Abraham Van Helsing’s crusade against the Prince Consort and his get. In a sense, as an agent of the Diogenes Club, Beauregard was actually a member of such a faction; the ruling cabal was divided in itself, torn between loyalty to the Queen and suspicion of the Lord Protector.

Sharp eyes took note of his good clothes but their owners mainly kept out of his way. Beauregard was conscious of the watch in his waistcoat and the wallet in his inside breast pocket. Nimble fingers were around, and long-nailed claws. Blood was not all the new-borns wanted. He swung his cane purposefully, warding off evil.

A thick-necked vampire with size-twelve boots lounged opposite where Lulu had been killed, trying half-heartedly not to look like a detective constable posted on the off chance that the old saw about the murderer returning to the scene of the crime were true. The area around the Kosminskis’ doorway had been picked clean by the police and souvenir hunters. He tried to imagine the last moments of the vampire girl. The detective, the monotony of his duty broken by the presence of a man in a cloak with morbid interests, lumbered from his spot. Beauregard had his card out ready. The new-born saw the words ‘Diogenes Club’ and did a curious little dance with his hands and face, half-salute and half-snarl. Then he stepped in front of the doorway, shielding Beauregard from sight, like the look-out for a cracksman.

He stood on the spot where the girl had died and felt nothing but the cold. Psychical mediums were reputedly able to track a man by invisible ectoplasmic residue, like a bloodhound following a trail. Any such who had offered assistance to the Metropolitan Police had not achieved notable results. The hollow where Silver Knife had worked was tiny. Lulu Schön, a small woman, had had to be twisted and trampled to be crammed down into it. Scrubbed-clean brickwork blotches, as shocking on the soot-blackened wall as an exposed patch of white bone, showed unmistakably where the blood-stains had been. There was nothing more, Beauregard thought, to be gained by this macabre visit.