Anno Dracula Dracula Cha Cha Cha (39 page)

The Mother of Tears evidently had a killing pack to spare in case her chief puppet failed.

Geneviève laid her hands on Kate and Penelope’s shoulders. She gently pushed them aside like doors, and stepped forward.

‘I’ll stay,’ she said, croaking. ‘But my friends will go. Unharmed.’

Santona’s gnarled face wrestled with a puzzle.

If Geneviève was willing to die for her friends, then she could love and hate and feel. And
Mater Lachrymarum
was wrong about elder vampires.

Santona considered Geneviève.

Kate realised they were saved. Not just for tonight, but for all time. If Geneviève was genuine, then it was possible to become an elder and remain a real live girl. Kate did not have to yield to that gradual withdrawal from the world she’d begun to think the inevitable lot of her kind.

Dawn was breaking. Pink light rose in the sky.

Geneviève, though torn, was not broken. Her hair caught the dawnlight and shone. Her face reformed, perfectly. Her fangs receded. Her hands lay on Kate and Penny’s shoulders, like a real mother’s, a firm grip that said you were protected, that no harm could come.

Mamma Roma was with them now, bedraggled and weary after a night servicing the lusty men of the city. She was disgusted by what she was learning.

‘You are gambling, elder,’ she said. ‘You are faking emotion you do not feel. You cannot love.’

There was contempt in the whore’s accusation, but it made Kate’s heart burst with joy

‘You’re lying,’ Kate said, exultant. ‘You always lie.’

At the last, there was only the little girl, nameless, silent, cruel, lost. For the first time in millennia, the Mother of Tears had been forced to change her mind. She wasn’t happy about it but that didn’t stop them from leaving the Colosseum. This was only a temporary thing. The little girl was as half-blind as a one-eyed jack, as capable of taking one side of an argument as the other. Another night,
Mater Lachrymarum
might decide the other way and they’d all be cut to pieces by silver blades.

Kate and Penelope supported Geneviève between them. They left the arena.

35

LYING IN STATE

B
ells tolled and crows circled in the night. The funeral party clung to the cliffs of Fregene, negotiating a narrow path that led from the Palazzo Otranto down to the beach. The coffin went first, carried by the faithful Klove and the top-hatted, long-nailed Zé do Caixão, undertaker to the wealthy and notorious.

Geneviève fell in with the procession. Kate and Penelope were a little in front. This would be her last appearance in Italy, she decided. The warning issued at the Colosseum had taken and she would quit Rome, never to return. She still didn’t entirely understand the personage who’d nearly killed but finally spared her. Her throat wasn’t quite healed and she spoke with a froggy rasp.

Attendants held flaming torches to light the path.

If it hadn’t been for the Crimson Executioner, all vampire society would have been here. As far as the world knew, he was still active, set on exterminating any elders who trespassed in his city. An actor named Travis Anderson, who had mysteriously disappeared a few years ago, had been found dead in the Colosseum but no official connection was made with the Executioner.

On the beach was a bier of driftwood. The coffin was laid on it and Klove lifted off the lid. Geneviève looked at the corpse. It was indeed Dracula, head resting on a pillow placed above his body. He still resisted corruption.

Princess Asa wailed her grief. Penelope comforted the elder.

They would wait till dawn, then fire the bier. Cremation had the advantage of demonstrating that Dracula was indeed definitively dead.

The vigil shouldn’t last more than two hours.

Geneviève looked at the faces of the few mourners. Most were members of the soon-to-be-dispersed household. Kate’s Italian reporter was here; she was pointedly not speaking with him.

‘It must have been Commander Bond’s hand,’ Geneviève said. ‘Guided by the Mother of Tears. He killed Dracula.’

Kate nodded. ‘I don’t care, as long as it wasn’t me.’

Bond had survived the night of the games, but Geneviève thought he’d never be the same man again. He was on his way back to the Diogenes Club.

The Princess knelt at the foot of the bier and shrieked at the dying night. She was quite unhinged.

‘Princess Asa is an elder,’ Kate said.

Geneviève didn’t follow.

‘The Mother of Tears said only one elder remained in Rome,’ Kate continued. ‘You, Gené. Why didn’t the Princess count?’

Geneviève looked out at the sea. ‘Fregene is outside the city proper,’ she said. ‘Beyond the Realm of Tears?’

‘In that case, why kill Dracula? He never left the palazzo, never went into the city.’

Geneviève had no answer.

‘She was here, though. I saw her.’

Kate was thinking something through. She was like Charles, sparking swiftly from one thing to another, piling up evidence, filling in gaps with deductions.

Suddenly, she climbed up on the bier, exciting another wail from Asa, and pulled Dracula’s right hand out of the coffin. She showed Geneviève the thickly-haired palm. A weal was scorched across it.

‘Remember the silver scalpel with vampire skin burned on it?’ said Kate. ‘The proof that a vampire struck the killing blow with a bare hand? What happened was that Dracula was stabbed and took hold of the knife-handle himself, trying to pull it out. He couldn’t keep the grip and let go, his hand falling by his side. Nobody looked at his hairy palms.’

‘Kate, what do you think you’re doing?’ Penelope demanded.

Kate hopped down onto the sand.

‘I’m catching you out, Penelope.’

Geneviève saw at once that Kate had guessed right.

Kate took Penelope’s hand.

‘You wore gloves, Penny,’ she said. ‘You’re careful.’

Penelope did not deny the accusation.

‘You arrange things,’ Kate said. ‘Receptions, parties, funerals. Other people’s lives. And you arranged a murder, just as you do everything, with a touch of style, but without wanting to take too much credit.’

Geneviève stood by Kate. If Penelope attacked her friend, she was ready — no matter what she owed the Englishwoman — to save her.

Long moments passed.

‘Very well,’ said Penelope, coolly. ‘I’ll tell you what happened. I can’t claim to explain anything, but…’

36

PENELOPE’S SHROUD

I
sought to be what I have become. You both know that. I made a bargain with Arthur, Lord Godalming. He turned me, in exchange for… well, I expect you can imagine. I’m not like you, Katie, or you either, Geneviève. I was taught that life is trade, that favours must be bartered, not given. It’s a very Victorian attitude, one that served to make whores of all girls, panders of all men. We spoke of ‘the marriage market’ and of a girl’s ‘value’.

Can you remember what it was like to turn? From an early age, I knew I had power. Over my parents, over my friends, over men. It wasn’t just being pretty. Katie, you were cleverer than I. And more honest. That’s why Charles preferred you. But you could never have hemmed him in to proposing to you. This, you must remember, was when I was alive and just a girl. Imagine how much stronger I became as a vampire, when I could exert a spell of fascination. At first, I was drunk with the possibilities.

Then, as you know, I became unwell.

Other new-borns drank tainted blood and shrivelled to death. That wouldn’t happen to Penny. But it did. You, Geneviève, saved my life when you stopped that quack Dr Ravna from sticking more of his leeches to me. I still have the scars. I can only wear high-necked blouses.

I may have grown, may have changed, but at bottom I am still Penelope Churchward. Pretty Penny. Bad Penny. It may not be an entirely happy position. I admit that I envy you both. You have freedoms I have never known. Charles favoured you both over me and I do not blame him. Once, in the first throes of life as a vampire, I thought I hated you all. I tried to avenge myself upon you by taking Charles. I could have drained him and turned him and, I thought then, made him my slave.

I did not. I came close, but his blood
changed
me.

That’s something no one told me before I turned. I was given to understand vampirism was just a physical thing, the drinking of blood. From the first, I was shocked by all the other things that came with that hot copper gush. The feelings, the contradictions, the
information.
I didn’t know that turning vampire made Penny Churchward a vessel, and that taking blood could fill me up with other persons. A weak vampire, such as I was, can drink too much of a strong warm person and lose her own self, become a reincarnation of her victim. I didn’t bleed Charles enough for that. If I had, he would have been drained dead. But I took enough to see myself through his eyes, to see Pamela’s face over my vanished reflection, to see the monster I was even before I sought the Dark Kiss.

I fought the blood in me. I struggled to purge myself of Charles. Since then, I have only drunk from the weak, the hollow and the professional. Weak tea, with lots of milk.

I was putting the blame in the wrong quarter. Charles Beauregard did not make me what I was, did not colour my world with blood. Nor, really, did Art. Behind it all, behind the Changes, was Dracula.

He was Prince Consort then. Later, he called himself everything from Graf to Prince, Emperor of the Night to King of the Cats. I always think of him as he first presented himself to Jonathan and Mina Harker, to my poor friend Lucy Westenra, as the Count.

We thought too much of titles then. No, I am being unfair.
I
was the one who thought too much of titles. When Lucy said she was to become Lady Godalming, I was green with envy. I would only be Mrs Charles Beauregard, though I had hopes he would earn and accept a knighthood, perhaps a peerage. Nevertheless, Charles could only be a new-born in society, while Art was an elder.

Dracula. Yes, I shall get to him.

I recovered slowly from my unwise predations, over a decade. I made myself a coven of new-born get. Most of my brood perished in the First World War and the years afterwards. I had chosen only those who wouldn’t put up a fight and would accept me as their mistress. I couldn’t fit them for survival. That was a great sadness. There are remnants of my bloodline, the Godalming line. I boasted of them to you, Katie. That was the old Penny, I’m afraid. They are degraded beyond redemption. Sometimes they turn up, after a handout of money or blood. Most are wraiths, consumed by an appetite larger than their personalities.

England became difficult for me. Women got the vote, you remember. Secretly, I had always thought we should have it though I couldn’t imagine why any woman should waste herself in politics. I knew that voicing suffragist opinions — as you did, Katie, heroine of the age — devalued one’s worth in the arena that really counted. My mother died, my warm friends grew old. Fashions changed, hemlines rose. Everyone talked on the telephone all the time. I was a butterfly with a pin through it, kept under glass, admired sometimes, not really cared for. You, Katie, were always in the thick of things. You didn’t turn into a wax flower. That proved it was not an inevitable part of becoming a vampire. It was something in me, in Penelope. Bad Penny’s Blues. It became of paramount importance that I find some use for myself.

After the Second World War, I sought out the Count.

I secured an introduction through Mina, of all people. She was his get, after all, and had kept in touch with his household. When Dracula was established here, at Palazzo Otranto, I visited, and placed myself at his disposal.

It would be an exaggeration to say he accepted my offer. He did not resist.

Picture the scene. I arrive at the palazzo above this beach. My head is full of the stories. Of Jonathan Harker ascending that mountain in Transylvania, arriving at Castle Dracula to be greeted by the King Vampire and his bloodthirsty harem. And of Charles and you, Geneviève, venturing into Buckingham Palace when the Count held court there, to put an end to his red reign.