Anno Dracula

He had heard of it. This business kept running back to Whitechapel: where Jack the Ripper murdered, where John Jago preached, where agents of the Diogenes Club were often seen. Tomorrow night, Godalming would venture out into Darkest London. He was confident this Sergeant was no match for the vampire Arthur Holmwood had become.

‘Keep up your pluck, old man,’ Godalming told the elder. ‘We’ll have you out of here directly.’

He withdrew from the cell and summoned the Yeoman Warder, who refastened the thick door. Through the bars, Kostaki’s red eyes winked out as he lay back on his cot.

At the end of the corridor, framed by an arch, stood a tall, hunched nosferatu in a long, shabby frock coat. His head was swollen and rodentlike with huge pointed ears and prominent front fangs. His eyes, set in black caverns that obscured his cheeks, were constantly liquid, darting here and there. Even his fellow elders found Graf Orlok, a distant family connection of the Prince Consort’s, a disquieting presence. He was a crawling reminder of how remote they all were from the warm.

Orlok scuttled down the passageway. Only his feet seemed to move. The rest of him was stiff as a waxwork. When he was close, his flamboyant eyebrows bristled like rat’s whiskers. His smell was not as strong as that in Kostaki’s cell, but it was fouler.

Godalming greeted the Governor but did not shake Orlok’s withered claw. Orlok peered into Kostaki’s cell, pressing his face close to the grille, hands against the cold stone either side of the door. The Yeoman Warder tried to edge away from his commanding officer. Orlok rarely asked questions but had a reputation for gaining answers. He turned away from the cell and looked at Godalming with active eyes.

‘He still won’t talk,’ Godalming told the nosferatu. ‘Stubborn fellow. He’ll rot here, I suppose.’

Orlok’s rat-shark-rabbit teeth scraped his lower lip, the nearest he could manage to a smile. Godalming did not envy any prisoner entrusted to the care of this creature.

The Yeoman Warder escorted him up to the main gate. The skies above the Tower were lightening. Godalming still trembled with the sustenance he had taken from Helena. He had the urge to run home, or to dive under Traitor’s Gate and swim.

‘Where are the ravens?’ he asked.

The Yeoman Warder shrugged. ‘Gone, sir. So they say.’

49

MATING HABITS OF THE COMMON VAMPIRE

His house was interesting, his books and pictures confirming her intuitions. In his library, she found a reading desk piled with volumes, many with places marked. His interests were eclectic; currently, he was absorbed by A Modern Apostle, and Other Poems by Constance Naden, After London by Richard Jefferies, The True History of the World by Lucian de Terre, Essays on the Endowment of Education by Mark Pattison, Science of Ethics by Leslie Stephen and The Unseen Universe by Peter Guthrie Tait. Among his books, Genevieve found framed photographs of Pamela, a strong-faced woman with a pre-Raphaelite cloud of hair. In pictures, Charles’s wife was always frozen in sunlight, at ease in her stillness while others in her group posed stiffly.

She found pen and ink on a stand and considered leaving a note. With the pen in her hand, she could not think of anything she needed to say. Charles would wake up and find her gone but she had no excuses to make. He knew about being bound by duty. Finally she just wrote that she would be at the Hall this evening. She assumed he’d return to Whitechapel and that he would look in on her. Then they might have to talk. After a moment, she signed the note, ‘love, Genevieve’, the accent a tiny flick above her flowing signature. Love was all very well; it was the talking about it that enervated her.

On the third attempt, Genevieve found a cabman willing to take an unescorted vampire girl from Chelsea to Whitechapel. Her destination might not be outside the Four-Mile Radius, that arbitrary circle beyond which hansom cabs were not obliged to venture, but cabbies often had to be overpaid to discharge duties which lay in that Easterly direction.

En route, lulled by the gentle trundle of the wheels and her sense of satisfied repletion, she tried not to think about Charles and the future. By now she had suffered enough involvements to guess accurately what they could expect of life together. Charles was in his middle thirties. She would stay sixteen, unchanged. In five or ten years, she would seem his daughter. In thirty or forty, he would be dead; especially if she continued to feed off him. Like many vampires, she had, with the insistent complicity of her victims, destroyed those about whom she cared deeply. An alternative would be to turn him; as his mother-in-darkness, she would nurture him into a new life, finally losing him to the wider world as all parents must lose their children.

They crossed the river. And the city became noisier, more cramped, more populated.

There were vampire couples, even vampire families, but she thought them unhealthy. After centuries together, they tended to meld into one creature with two or more bodies, leeching off each other so much that they lost their original individualities. If anything, their reputation for extreme cruelty and ruthlessness was worse than that of the worst of the un-dead outlaws.

It was a cold, drab morning. They were well into November, past Hallowe’en and Guy Fawkes’ Night, neither much celebrated this year. The fog was so thick that the sun did not penetrate down to the streets. The cab made slow progress.

This time, the world was truly different. Vampires were no longer secret things. She and Charles would not be unique, hardly even out of the ordinary. Their little love must be playing out in a thousand variations up and down the country. Vlad Tepes had not bothered to think through the implications of his rise to power. Alexander- like, he cut the knot; loose ends fell where they might, without any guidance or judgement.

Last night, with Charles, it had been more than feeding. Despite her worries, she remained elated by his blood. She could still taste him, still feel him inside.

The cabby opened his trap and told her they were in Commercial Street.

50

VITA BREVIS

He did not intend to roll up in a hansom and saunter about the vilest hole in London as if taking a constitutional in Piccadilly. Not that any driver would dare venture into the Old Jago, for fear his brass would be tarnished, his fare stolen and his horse exsanguinated. The last time Godalming had been in Whitechapel, dogging Sir Charles’s heels, he had gathered how teeming the quarter was. It might take weeks of patient work to find his Sergeant but find the man he would. With Mackenzie dead and Kostaki imprisoned, he had no rivals on this track. Only he knew the face of the quarry.

As he strolled up Commercial Street, Godalming whistled ‘The Ghost’s High Noon’, from Ruddigore. Not politically a sound tune for an intimate of Lord Ruthven, it was hard to work out of the head. Besides, when he had unshakable evidence that the Diogenes Club conspired against the Prince Consort, he would be forgiven anything. His long-ago warm association with Van Helsing would be wiped from the record. He could name his own position. Arthur Holmwood was on his way up.

His nocturnal vision had improved markedly. The entire quality of his perceptions shifted with each night. The fog that shrouded the people on the street was to him merely a faint fuzziness. He could distinguish an infinite variety of tiny sounds, scents and tastes.

Even if Ruthven lived forever, it was unlikely he could keep eternally on the right side of the Prince Consort. He was too temperamental for his position. Eventually, he would fall from grace. When that happened, Godalming would be in a position to dissociate himself from his patron. Perhaps even to replace him.

Some time tonight, he must feed. His appetites grew with the increase of his sensitivities. What was once a fumbling business – wrestling some tart before ripping into her with swollen, painful teeth – became easier as he found himself more able to impose his will upon the warm. He merely had to issue mental orders to his chosen