‘A striking man.’
‘If you say so, mademoiselle.’
The coroner had restored order again. A clerk had nipped out of the room and returned with six more constables, all new-borns. They lined the walls like an honour guard. The anarchists were brooding again, their purpose obviously to cause enough trouble to be an irritant but not enough to get their names noted.
‘If I might be permitted to address the implied question raised by the gentleman,’ Dr Jekyll asked, eliciting a nod from Baxter, ‘a knowledge of the position of the major organs does not necessarily betoken a medical education. If you are disinterested in preserving life, a butcher can have out a pair of kidneys as neatly as a surgeon. You need only a steady hand and a sharp knife, and there are plenty of both in Whitechapel.’
‘Do you have an opinion as to the instrument used by the murderer?’
‘A blade of some sort, obviously. Silvered.’
The word brought a collective gasp.
‘Steel or iron would not have done such damage,’ Dr Jekyll continued. ‘Vampire physiology is such that wounds inflicted with ordinary weapons heal almost immediately. Tissue and bone regenerate, just as a lizard may grow a new tail. Silver has a counteractive effect on this process. Only silver could do such permanent, fatal harm to a vampire. In this instance, the popular imagination, which has tagged the murderer as “Silver Knife”, has almost certainly got its facts straight.’
‘You are familiar with the cases of Mary Ann Nichols and Eliza Anne Chapman?’ asked Baxter.
Dr Jekyll nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘Have you drawn any conclusions from a comparison of these incidents?’
‘Indeed. These three killings are indubitably the work of the same individual. A left-handed man of above average height, with more than normal physical strength...’
‘Mr Holmes would’ve been able to tell his mother’s maiden name from a fleck of cigar ash,’ Lestrade muttered.
‘... I would add that, considering the case from an alienist’s point of view, it is my belief that the murderer is not himself a vampire.’
The anarchist was on his feet but the coroner’s extra constables were around him before he could even shout. Smiling to himself at his subjugation of the court, Baxter made a note of the last point and thanked Dr Jekyll.
Genevieve noticed that the man she had asked Lestrade about was gone. She wondered if Beauregard noticed her as she had noticed him. From her side, a connection had been made. She was either having one of her ‘insights’ or had gone too long without feeding. No, she was certain. The man from the Diogenes Club – whatever that really was – was materially involved in the affairs of the Whitechapel Murderer, but she could not guess in what capacity.
The coroner began his elaborate summing-up, delivering the verdict of ‘wilful murder by person or persons unknown’, adding that the killer of Lulu Schon was judged to be the same man who had murdered, on 31st of August, Mary Ann Nichols, and, on 8th of September, Eliza Anne Chapman.
7
THE PRIME MINISTER
‘Were you aware,’ began Lord Ruthven, ‘that there are people in these isles whose sole objection to the marriage of our dear Queen – Victoria Regina, Empress of India,
The Prime Minister waved a letter selected apparently at random from the piles of ignored correspondence littering the several desks in his Downing Street receiving room. Godalming knew better than to interrupt one of Ruthven’s fits of loquacity. For a new-born eager to be initiated into the secrets of the elders, close attention to the centuries-old peer was a valuable, indeed indispensable, instrument of learning. When Ruthven talked a streak, volumes of ancient truth disclosed long-forgotten spells of power. It was hard not to be caught up in the force of his personality, to be transported on wings of rant.
‘I have here,’ Ruthven continued, ‘a missive from a miserable society devoted to the thin memory of that constitutionalist bore Walter Bagehot. They tactfully complain that the Prince accepted the embrace of the Anglican Church an indecently short time before he accepted the embrace of the Queen. Our correspondent even goes so far as to suggest Vlad might conceivably not be sincere in his abjuration of the Pope of Rome, and that, with Cardinal Newman as his secret confessor, he has imported the perfidious taint of Leo the Thirteenth into the Royal Household. My curly-haired friend, some dunderheads find it easier to forgive a taste for virgin blood than the drinking of communion wine.’
Ruthven shredded the letter. Its confetti joined that of many other derided documents on the carpet. He grinned and breathed heavily, but there was no trace of his apparent excitement in his milk-white cheeks. It struck Godalming that the Prime Minister’s rages were counterfeit, the impostures of a man more used to simulating than experiencing passion. He strode across the room, making and unmaking fists behind his back, grey eyes like fine- lashed marbles.
‘Our Prince changed his faith before, you know,’ Ruthven observed, ‘and for the same reason. In 1473, he abandoned Orthodoxy and became Catholic so he could marry the sister of the King of Hungary. The manoeuvre won him freedom after twelve years as a hostage at Mathias’s court, and a clear shot at regaining the Wallachian throne his bloody foolishness had lost him. That he stuck by Rome for four centuries afterwards tells you not a little about the man’s innate dullness. If you wish to examine the true soul of conservatism, you should look no further than Buckingham Palace.’
By now the Prime Minister was addressing himself not to Godalming but to a portrait. Its beak-nosed profile was turned towards a balancing picture of the Queen that ornamented the same wall. Godalming had only met Dracula once; the Prince Consort and Lord Protector, then a mere Count going by the name of de Ville, had not much resembled the proud creature captured in paint by Mr G.F. Watts.
‘Imagine the brute, Godalming. Brooding for four hundred years in his stinking wreck of a castle. Plotting and scheming and swearing and gnashing his teeth. Festering in medieval superstition. Bleeding dry uncouth peasants. Running and rutting and raping and rending with the mountain beasts. Taking his coarse pleasure with those un- dead animals he calls wives. Shifting his shape like some were-wolf mountebank...’
Though the Prince Consort had personally sponsored the Prime Minister’s appointment, relations between the vampire elders, formed over the course of centuries, were hardly congenial. In public, Ruthven displayed the expected fealty to the elder who had been King of the Vampires long before he was ruler of Great Britain. The un- dead had been an invisible kingdom for thousands of years; the Prince Consort had, at a stroke, wiped clean that slate and started anew, lording over warm and vampire alike. Ruthven, who had passed his centuries in travel and dalliance, was dragged out of the shadows with the other elders. Some might say that a chronically impoverished nobleman – who once remarked that his title and barren acres in Scotland could buy him a halfpenny bun if he had the ha’pence to go with them – had done well out of the changes. But His Lordship, a man whose title could hardly compare with Godalming’s own, was a complainer.
‘Now this Dracula has his
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
