Mackenzie drew in air for a breath, then held it. He was on his knees, mouth open, eyes rolled up. The Jack the Ripper letter, caught by a gust, whirled off a few yards, then stuck flat as a poster to a wet wall, written-side in. Mackenzie gasped and blood came from his mouth. The Carpathian was trying to help him stand. He took his hand away from the Scotsman’s back and it was bloody.
Someone kicked Godalming in the head. Police whistles shrilled. Sir Charles, thinking himself in the thick of an African battle, was in charge again, dispensing orders, having constables snap to attention, gesturing with his pistol.
Reinforcements poured out of the Yard, summoned by the disturbance. Many brandished guns: Sir Charles liked his men to go armed, no matter what regulations specified. The Commissioner directed them to put down the mob. With truncheons out, a platoon of policemen battered the few remaining loiterers, driving them towards the Embankment. Godalming saw the new-born who had stabbed Mackenzie with this group, applying his stick to the head of a clergyman. The constables drove the rabble into the fog. The assassin would not return.
Mackenzie was face-down on the cobbles, unmoving. The dark patch on the back of his coat showed he had been neatly skewered through the heart. The Carpathian stood over him, blood-dipped knife in his hand and no expression on his dead face.
‘Arrest this murderer,’ Sir Charles ordered.
The three new-born constables around them hesitated. Godalming wondered if they could subdue the elder. The Carpathian contemptuously cast away the knife and held out his hands. One of the coppers obliged, fastening purely formal handcuffs around the elder’s wrists. He could have broken them with a flex but let himself be taken.
‘We shall have an explanation of you,’ Sir Charles said, holding up a finger as if daring the vampire to bite it off.
The constables hauled the Carpathian away.
‘That’s better,’ the Commissioner said, surveying the calm. The streets had been cleared. Paint dripped on the walls. The cobbles were littered with still-rolling missiles and the odd constable’s helmet, but peace had been enforced. ‘That’s much more like it. Order and discipline, Godalming. That’s the stuff we need. Mustn’t slacken.’
Sir Charles returned to the building, striding purposefully, followed by several of his men. The natives had been momentarily repulsed but Godalming heard the jungle drums summoning more cannibals. He remained in the fog for a moment, head racing. Of all who had been there, only he – and the assassin – really knew what had happened. He was coming into his full powers, acquiring the insights and sensitivities if not of an elder then of a vampire who could no longer be described as a new-born. He could survey calm and see the chaos beneath. Lord Ruthven had told him to look for an advantage, then to pursue it ruthlessly. This knowledge could be turned to his supreme advantage.
47
LOVE AND MR BEAUREGARD
He stood in front of his open fireplace, hands behind him, feeling the heat. Even the short stroll from Caversham Street to Cheyne Walk had chilled him to the bone. Bairstow had set the fire earlier and the room was warm and welcoming.
Genevieve wandered around the room like a cat getting acquainted with a new home, alighting on this and that and examining, almost tasting, an object, before replacing it, sometimes making a slight adjustment to a position.
‘This was Pamela?’ she said, holding up the last photograph. ‘She was beautiful.’
Beauregard agreed.
‘Many women wouldn’t care to be photographed when they were with child,’ Genevieve said. ‘It might seem indecent.’
‘Pamela was not like many women.’
‘I don’t doubt it, to judge by her influence on her survivors.’
Beauregard remembered.
‘She didn’t wish you to give up the rest of your life, though,’ she said, setting the picture down. ‘And she certainly did not want her cousin to reshape herself in her image.’
Beauregard had no answer. Genevieve made him see his late engagement in an unhealthy light. Neither Penelope nor he had been honest with themselves or each other. But he could not blame Penelope, or Mrs Churchward, or Florence Stoker. It had all been his own fault.
‘What’s gone is gone,’ Genevieve continued. ‘I should know. I’ve buried centuries.’
For a moment she bent over and did a comic impersonation of a shaking dowager. Then she straightened and brushed a wave of hair away from her forehead.
‘What will happen to Penelope?’ he asked.
She shrugged. ‘There are no guarantees. I believe she will survive, and I think she will be herself again. Maybe she will be herself for the first time.’
‘You don’t like her, do you?’
She stopped her wandering and cocked her head in thought. ‘Perhaps I’m jealous.’ Her tongue passed over her bright teeth and he realised she was closer to him than modesty recommended. ‘Then again, perhaps she isn’t very nice. That night in Whitechapel, after I had been hurt, she didn’t strike me as entirely sympathetic. Lips too thin, eyes too sharp.’
‘Do you realise how great a thing it was for her to come to such a quarter? To seek me out. It ran against everything she had been taught, everything she believed about herself.’
He still found it hard to credit that the old Penelope had ventured out by herself, let alone travelled to a place she must have viewed as in the neighbourhood of the pits of Abaddon.
‘She doesn’t want you any more,’ she said, bluntly.
‘I know.’
‘She’ll be incapable of being a good little wife now she’s new-born. She’ll have to find her own way in the night. She might have the makings of a very fine vampire, for what that’s worth.’ Her hand was on his lapel, sharp nails resting against the material. The heat from the fire made him almost uncomfortable. ‘Come on and kiss me, Charles.’
He hesitated.
She smiled, her even teeth almost normal. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I won’t bite.’
‘Liar.’
She giggled and he touched his mouth to hers. Her arms slipped tight around him. Her tongue ran over his lips. They moved away from the fire, and, not without some awkwardness, settled on a divan. His hand slid into her hair.
‘Are you seducing me, or am I seducing you?’ she said. ‘I forget which.’
She was amusing at the strangest times, he noticed. His thumb felt the nap of her cheek. She kissed his wrist, touching her tongue to the healed-over bites. A jolt ran through him. He felt it most in the soles of his feet.
‘Does it matter?’
She pressed his head down into a cushion, so he could see the ceiling, and kissed his neck.
‘This may not be the love-making you are used to,’ she said. Her teeth were sharper now, and longer.
Her chemise was free of her skirt and undone. She had a pretty, slim shape. His clothes were loose, too.
‘I could say as much to you.’
She laughed, a full-throated man’s laugh, and nipped his neck, hair falling in front of her face, wisping over his mouth and nose, tickling. His hands worked under her chemise, up and down her back and shoulders. He felt the vampire strength of the muscles sliding under her skin. She picked the studs out of his collar and shirtfront with her teeth and spat them away. He imagined Bairstow finding them one by one over the next month and laughed.
‘What’s funny?’
He shook his head and she kissed him again, on the mouth, eyes and neck. He was aware of the pulsing of
