Harris’s reputation would presumably think Kate too undernourished a fish to count as worth netting, and cast her back into the seas.
‘What an earth did you say to so upset Wilde?’ Mr Reed asked, scenting a story. His nostrils actually did twitch whenever he thought he was on the track of some scrap that might possibly qualify as news.
‘Just some craze of Ruthven’s,’ Art explained.
The news-gatherer looked at Art, eyes like gimlets. Many vampires had piercing gazes. At social gatherings, they could often be found trying to outstare each other like a pair of horn-locked moose. Mr Reed lost the contest and wandered off himself, searching out his wayward niece.
‘Sharp girl, that,’ Art said, nodding after Kate.
‘Pfui,’ said Penelope, shaking her head. ‘Careers are for girls who can’t get themselves husbands.’
‘Meow.’
‘Sometimes I think everything is going completely above me,’ she complained.
‘Nothing to worry your pretty little head about,’ he said, turning back to her.
Art tickled her under the chin, and angled her head up to look into her eyes. She thought he might plan to kiss her – here, in public, with all of theatre London about – but he did not. He laughed and let her go after a moment.
‘Charles had better realise soon it is not safe to leave you lying around. Or else someone will steal you away and make of you a maiden tribute of modern Babylon.’
She giggled as she had been taught to do when anyone said anything she did not entirely understand. In the darks of Lord Godalming’s eyes, something glinted. Penelope felt a tiny warmth growing in her breast, and wondered where such might lead.
12
DAWN OF THE DEAD
Dawn shot the fog full of blood. As the sun rose, new-borns scurried to coffins and corners. Genevieve trailed alone back to Toynbee Hall, never thinking to be afraid of the shrinking shadows. Like Vlad Tepes, she was old enough not to shrivel in the sun as did the more sensitive new-borns, but the vigour that had come with the blood of the warm girl ebbed as the light filtered through. She passed a warm policeman on the Commercial Road, and nodded a greeting to him. He turned away and kept on his beat. The feeling she’d had earlier, that someone was just out of sight dogging her footsteps, returned; she supposed it more or less a permanent delusion in the district.
In the last four nights, she’d spent more time on Silver Knife than her work. Druitt and Morrison undertook double shifts, juggling the limited number of places at the Hall to deal first with the most needy. Primarily an educational institute, the hall was coming to resemble a field hospital. Seconded to a Vigilance Committee, she had been to so many noisy meetings that even now words persisted in her ears as music rings in the ears of those who sit too near the orchestra.
She stopped walking and stood, listening. Again, she felt followed. Her vampire sensitivities tingled and she had an impression of something in yellow silk, progressing with strange silent hops, long arms out like a somnambulist. She looked into the fog, but nothing emerged. Perhaps she’d absorbed one of the warm girl’s memories or fancies and would be stuck with it until her blood was out of her system. That had happened before.
George Bernard Shaw and Beatrice Potter were making speeches all over the city, using the murders to call attention to conditions in the East End. Neither socialist was
A poster on the wall of an ostler’s yard promised the latest reward for information leading to the capture of Silver Knife. Rival groups of warm and new-born vigilantes roamed with billy-clubs and razors, scrapping with each other and setting upon dubiously innocent passersby. The street girls were now complaining less about the danger of the murderer and more about the lack of custom noticeable since the vigilantes started harassing anyone who came to Whitechapel looking for a woman. The whores of Soho and Covent Garden were doing boom business. And boom gloating.
She heard a moan from an alleyway. Her canines shot out like flickknives, startling her. She stepped into the shadowed recess, and saw a man pressing a red-headed woman against a wall. Genevieve was half-way to them, prepared to apprehend the murderer, when she saw the man was a soldier in a long coat. His trousers around his ankles, he thrust hard against the woman with his pelvis, not a knife. He moved with desperate speed but wasn’t getting anywhere. The woman, skirts bunched around her waist like a lifebelt, was braced in a corner, holding him up by his head, pressing his face to her feathered shoulder.
The whore was a good-looking new-born they called ‘Carroty Nell’. During her turning, she’d called at the Hall, and Genevieve had helped her through, holding her down as she ran cold then hot and new teeth budded in her jaws. Her real name, Genevieve thought, was Frances Coles or Coleman. Her hair had grown much thicker, an arrow-shaped peak almost to the bridge of her nose. Stiff red vixen-bristles grew on her bare arms and the backs of her hands.
Carroty Nell licked shallow scratches on her customer’s neck. She saw Genevieve but showed no sign of recognition, baring a row of fence-post fangs at the interloper, red-rimmed eyes weeping blood. Quietly, Genevieve backed out of the alley. The new-born was coaxing the soldier with abuse, trying to get him to spend his fourpence. ‘Come on you bastard,’ she said, ‘finish it, finish it...’ Her client’s hand came up and grabbed her hair, and he thrust harder and harder, gasping.
Back on the street, Genevieve stood still as her eye-teeth receded. She had been too ready to fight. The murderer was making her as jumpy as the vigilantes.
Genevieve heard Silver Knife was a leather-aproned shoemaker, a Polish Jew carrying out ritual killings, a Malay sailor, a degenerate from the West End, a Portuguese cattleman, the ghost of Van Helsing or Charley Peace. He was a doctor, a black magician, a midwife, a priest. With each rumour, more innocents were thrown to the mob. Sergeant Thick locked up a warm bootmaker named Pizer for his own protection when someone took it into his head to write ‘Silver Nyfe’ on his shopfront. After Jago, the Christian Crusader, argued that the killer could walk unhindered about the area killing at will because he was a policeman, a vampire constable called Jonas Mizen was dragged into a yard off Coke Street and impaled on a length of kindling. Jago was in jail himself but Lestrade said they’d have to let him out soon, since he had a convenient alibi for the time of Mizen’s death. The Reverend John Jago, it seemed, had alibis to spare.
She passed the doorway where Lily slept. The new-born child was curled up for the day with some scraps of blanket given her at the Hall. She had wound herself up against the sun, making an Egyptian mummy of her tiny form. The girl’s half-changed arm was worse, the useless wing sprouting from hip to armpit. Lily had a cat nestled against her face, its neck in her mouth. The animal was still barely alive.
Abberline and Lestrade had questioned dozens but made no useful arrests. There were always rival protesters outside the police stations. Mediums like Lees and Carnacki had been called for. A number of consulting detectives – Martin Hewitt, Max Carrados, August Van Dusen – had prowled Whitechapel, hoping to turn up something. Even the venerable Hawkshaw had emerged from retirement. But with their acknowledged master in Devil’s Dyke, the enthusiasm of the detective community ebbed considerably, and no solutions were forthcoming. A lunatic named Cotford was apprehended creeping about in minstrel’s blackface, claiming to be a detective ‘in disguise’. He had been removed to Colney Hatch for examination. Insanity, Jack Seward said, could be an epidemic disease.
Genevieve found a shilling in her purse and slipped it into Lily’s blanket. The new-born murmured in her drowsiness but didn’t wake. As a hansom rumbled past, she glimpsed the profile of a dozing man inside, his hat swaying with the movements of the cab. Someone going home after a night in the fleshpots, she guessed. Then she
