Anno Dracula

recognised the passenger. It was Beauregard, the man she’d noticed at Lulu Schon’s inquest, the man from the Diogenes Club. According to Lestrade, his presence evidenced an interest from very high places. The Queen, young again, had shown public concern about ‘these ghastly murders’, but nothing had been heard from Prince Dracula, to whom Genevieve assumed the lives of a few streetwalkers, vampire or not, were of as much importance as those of beetles.

The cab trundled into the fog. Again she felt there was something out there, standing in the thick of it, watching her, waiting for a chance to move. The feeling passed.

Gradually, as she came to realise how powerless she was to affect the behaviour of this unknown maniac, she also sensed just how important the case had become. Everyone began their arguments by declaring that it was about more than just three butchered harlots. It was about Disraeli’s ‘two nations’, it was about the regrettable spread of vampirism among the lower classes, it was about the decline of public order, it was about the fragile equilibrium of the transformed kingdom. The murders were mere sparks, but Great Britain was a tinderbox.

She was spending a lot of time with whores – she’d been an outcast long enough to feel a certain kinship with them – and shared their fears. Tonight, nearing dawn, she’d found a girl in Mrs Warren’s house off Raven Row and bled her, out of need not pleasure. Warm Annie held her tenderly and let her suckle from the flesh of her throat as if she were a wet-nurse. Afterwards, Genevieve gave her a half-crown. It was too much, but she had to make the gesture. The only decoration in Warm Annie’s room was a cheap print of Vlad Tepes riding into battle. The only items of furniture were a wash-stand and a large bed, its sheets cleaned so many times they were as thin as paper, the mattress dyed with irregular brown patches. Brothels no longer had ornate mirrors.

After so many years, Genevieve should be used to her predator’s life, but the Prince Consort had turned everything topsy-turvy and she was ashamed again, not of what she must do to prolong her existence, but of the things vampirekind, those of the bloodline of Vlad Tepes, did around her. Warm Annie had been bitten several times. Eventually she would turn. Nobody’s get, she would have to find her own way, and doubtless end up as raddled as Cathy Eddowes, as truly dead as Polly Nichols, as beast-like as Carroty Nell. Her head was fuzzy from the gin her warm girl had drunk. That was why she had hallucinations. The whole city seemed sick.

13

STRANGE FITS OF PASSION

Dr Seward’s Diary (kept in phonograph)

26 SEPTEMBER

In the Hall, the mornings are quiet. Whitechapel slumbers between sunrise and what we used to call lunch- time. The new-borns scurry for their earth-boxes. The warm of the area have never been day people. I leave instructions with Morrison that I am not to be disturbed and seclude myself in this office with my supposed work. Records, I tell him. I am not lying. Keeping records is a habit. It used to be so with us all. Jonathan Harker, Mina Harker, Van Helsing. Even Lucy, with her beautiful hand and horrid spelling, wrote long letters. The Professor was strict about the documents. History is written by the victors; Van Helsing, through his friend Stoker, always intended to publish. Like his foe, he was an empire-builder; an account of his successful treatment of a scientifically- corroborated nineteenth-century case of vampirism would have added lustre to his reputation. As it is, the Prince Consort took care to blot out our history: my diary was destroyed in the fire at Purfleet, and Van Helsing is remembered as a second Judas.

He was not then Prince Consort, just Count Dracula. He deigned to notice our little family; to strike at us again and again until we were smashed and scattered. I have rough notes, cuttings and mementos, kept here under lock and key. I believe it necessary for my eventual justification, to recreate the original records. This is the task I have set myself for the quiet hours.

Who can say where it began? Dracula’s death? His resurrection? The laying of his colossal schemes against Great Britain? Harker’s dreadful experiences in Castle Dracula? The wreck of the Demeter, washed ashore at Whitby with a dead man lashed to the helm? Or, perhaps, the Count’s first sight of Lucy? Miss Lucy Westenra. Westenra. A singular name: it means light of the West. Yes, Lucy. For me, that was where it began. With Lucy Westenra. Lucy. The 24th of May, 1885. I can scarcely believe the Jack Seward of that morning, twenty-nine and newly appointed to the supervision of Purfleet Asylum, ever really existed. The times before are a golden haze, half-remembered scraps from boys’ adventures and medical directories. I had, I am assured, a most brilliant career: I studied and observed; I travelled; I had eminent friends. Then, things changed utterly.

I do not believe I truly loved Lucy until after her rebuff. I had reached the point in life when a man must consider the making of a match; she was simply the most suitable of my acquaintances. We were introduced by Art. Arthur Holmwood then, not yet Lord Godalming. At first, I thought her frivolous. Silly, even. After days among the screaming insane, sheer silliness was appealing. The convolutions of complex minds – I still believe it gross error to assert that the mad are simple-minded – led me to consider as ideal the prospect of a girl as open and obvious as Lucy. On that day, I laid out my proposal. I had a lancet in my pocket for some reason and I fancy I fiddled with it throughout the preliminaries. Before my prepared speech – about how dear she was to me, though I knew her so little – was delivered, I knew I’d no hopes. She commenced a giggle, then covered her embarrassed amusement with forced tears. I extracted from her the confession that her heart was not her own. I knew at once I’d been cut out by Art. She didn’t name him, but there was no doubt. Later, with Quincey Morris – incredibly, another of the guileless Lucy’s conquests – I endured an evening of Art’s prattling of future happiness. The Texan was all open-hearted decency, clapping Art’s back for being the better man and all that. Fool smile plastered on my face, I downed tumbler after tumbler of Quincey’s whisky, remaining sober as the good fellows joked towards inebriation. Lucy, meanwhile, packed herself off to Whitby, intent on subjecting Mina to an extended gloat. She had netted the future Lord Godalming, while the best her school-teaching friend could manage was a barely qualified Exeter solicitor.

I threw myself into work, the standard cure for a broken heart. I hoped poor Renfield would make my name. To be the discoverer of zoophagous mania would mark me as a coming man. Of course, in considering the merits of prospective fiances, ladies of breeding still unaccountably prefer an inherited title and unearned wealth to the isolation of unheard-of strains of mental disorder. That summer I followed the queer logic of Renfield’s mania as he collected tiny lives. At first he aped the nursery rhyme: feeding flies to spiders, spiders to birds, birds to a cat. He intended to consume the accumulated life energy by eating the cat. When that proved impractical, he ate anything alive that happened by. He nearly choked to death disgorging feathers. My monograph was taking shape when I observed another obsession intermingled with zoophagia, a fixation upon the dilapidated estate neighbouring the grounds of the asylum. As the tourists now queueing for penny tours know, Carfax was the Count’s first home in England. Several times, Renfield made an escape and rushed for the Abbey, babbling of the Coming of His Master and Salvation and the Distribution of Good Things. I assumed, with some disappointment, that he was developing an entirely commonplace religious mania, reinvesting the long-abandoned house with its sacred purpose. I was, for the first fatal time in the case, completely in error. The Count had established dominance over the madman, who was to be his catspaw. If it were not for Renfield, for the cursed clamp of his teeth about my hand, things might have been different. As Franklin has it, ‘for the want of a nail...’

In Whitby, Lucy was taken sick. We did not know it, but Art had in his turn been cut out. In this world of titles, a Wallachian Prince trumps an English Lord. The Count, having come ashore from the Demeter, fixed his sights on Lucy and began to make a vampire of her. No doubt the fickle girl welcomed his advances. In the course of an examination, when she was brought to London and Art called me in, I ascertained that her hymen had been ruptured. I deemed Art a swine of the first water to so pre-empt his marriage vows. Having kicked about the world with the future Lord Godalming, I’d no illusions as to his respect for the sanctity of maidenhood. Now I can find it in myself to feel sorry for the Art of those days, worried sick over his worthless girl, made as big a fool as I by the Light of the West, who would submit by night to the Beast of the East.

It is possible that Lucy truly believed that she loved Art. However, it must have been a very surface love even before the arrival of the Count. Among the letters Van Helsing compiled was Lucy’s account, gushed to Mina – who obligingly corrected the spelling in green ink – of the day upon which she supposedly received three proposals. The third was from Quincey, whom I suspect of sloshing a chaw of tobacco from side to side in his mouth in the