Anno Dracula (30 page)

There was blood in the street. Pushed down to his knees, he knew that if he fell underfoot he would be trampled. To have survived so much in so many quarters of the globe only to be killed by an anonymous London crowd...

A strong hand took his arm and hauled him upright. His saviour was Dravot, the vampire from the Diogenes Club. He said nothing.

‘Here’s one of them,’ shouted a red-haired man. Dravot’s hand shot out and smashed his teeth, whirling Beauregard away into the mass of people. As he punched, Dravot’s jacket fell open. Beauregard saw a pistol slung in a holster underneath his arm.

He tried to thank the sergeant. But his voice was lost in the shouting. And Dravot was gone. He took a knock on the chin from someone’s elbow. He resisted the temptation to strike out with his cane. It was important to keep his cool. He did not want more people hurt.

The crowds parted and a screaming figure, blood in his hair and on his face, burst through, tripping and falling to his knees. The murgatroyd’s coat was ripped apart. His mouth split open, teeth coming through in irregular lumps. It was the murgatroyd who had pelted Jago. Crusaders held the vampire’s shoulders and someone thrust a broken pole-end into his throat, jamming it down through his ribcage. Everyone fell back as soon as the spear was through him. From the pole fluttered half a banner: ‘Death to...’ The wooden spar missed the murgatroyd’s heart. Although hurt, he was not killed. He got a grip on the pole, and started to draw it out of himself, snarling and spitting blood.

Beauregard could see St James’s Palace across the road. People clung to the railings, climbing high to get a view. Straddling the top was Dravot, looking purposeful. Someone grabbed at his leg, but he kicked them off the perch.

The wounded murgatroyd ran through the crowd, screeching like a banshee, tossing people about like dressmaker’s dummies. Beauregard was thankful he was not in the former fop’s way. Jago shouted now, howling for blood. He sounded more like a vampire than the creatures he condemned. The preacher’s arm went up in the air, fist raised against the Palace and the white-faced creatures behind the railings. In the hub-bub, Beauregard heard the unmistakable crack of a gun going off. A red carnation appeared high up in Jago’s lapel. He fell from his carriage, caught by the crowds.

Someone had shot Jago. Looking again at the railings, Beauregard
saw Dravot was gone. Jago had blood all down his front. His supporters pressed rags to the wounds in his front and back. The bullet must have passed clean through, without doing much damage.

‘I am the voice that will not be silenced,’ Jago yelled. ‘I am the cause which will not die.’

Then the crowds burst into the park and scattered, spreading out like spilled liquid towards Horse Guards Parade and Birdcage Walk. Beauregard could breathe again. Shots were fired into the air. Scuffles were all around. The sun was going down.

He did not understand what he had seen. He thought Dravot had shot Jago but he could not be sure. If the sergeant had meant to kill the crusader, Beauregard assumed John Jago would be dead, brains spilled rather than blood. The Diogenes Club did not employ butter-fingered dead-eye marksmen.

There were more vampires around. The murgatroyds had fled, replaced by hard-faced new-borns in police uniforms. A Carpathian officer charged through the rabble on a huge black horse, waving a blooded sabre. A warm woman, shoulder slashed open, ran past, holding her baby to her, head down. The crusaders were losing their momentary advantage, and would soon be routed.

He had lost sight of Jago, and of Dravot. A horse sweeping past knocked him down. When he regained his feet, he found his watch smashed. It hardly mattered. The afternoon was over, and Penelope would be waiting no longer.

‘Death to the Dead,’ someone cried.

W
hen the streets were cleared, there were surprisingly few bleeding bodies dotted about. Compared to Bloody Sunday it had been a minor skirmish. Godalming, dragged along by Sir Charles, could scarcely tell there had been a riot in St James’s Park. Inspector Mackenzie, a dour Scot, was with them, trying to keep out of the Commissioner’s way. During the hour of excitement just after nightfall, Sir Charles had been a changed person. The ground-down, persecuted bureaucrat whose foolish subordinates could not catch Jack the Ripper disappeared; he was again the military commander with lightning judgement under fire. ‘These are Englishmen and women,’ Mackenzie had muttered, ‘not bloody Hottentots.’

It appeared the Christian Crusade had held an unannounced rally, intending to present a petition to Parliament. They demanded that the taking of another’s blood without consent be considered a capital crime. Sundry vampires mixed in with the crusaders, and violence was exchanged. An unknown person had taken a shot at John Jago, who was now recuperating in a prison hospital. Several well-connected new-borns alleged that they had been assaulted by warm
mobs, and a murgatroyd named Lioncourt was put out because a broken flagpole had been shoved through his best suit.

General Iorga, a commander of the Carpathian Guard, had been caught in the fighting. Now he stood with Sir Charles and Godalming, surveying the aftermath. Iorga was an elder, swanning about in his cuirass and long black cloak as if he owned the earth on which he walked. He was attended by Rupert of Hentzau, a young-seeming Ruritanian blood who thought a good deal of his gold-braided uniform and seemed as skilled at toadying as he was reputed to be with his rapier.

Sir Charles smiled grimly to himself as he handed out compliments to the men he thought of as his troops.

‘We have won a significant victory here,’ he told Godalming and Iorga. ‘With no loss of life, we have routed the enemy.’

It had all blown up and dissipated so suddenly there had been no opportunity for the incident to develop. Iorga had ridden around doing damage but Hentzau and his comrades had not arrived on the scene in time to turn a scuffle into a massacre.

‘The ringleaders must be found and impaled,’ Iorga said. ‘And their families.’

‘That isn’t how we do things in England,’ Sir Charles said, without thinking.

The Carpathian’s eyes blazed with hypnotic fury. According to General Iorga, this was no longer England, this was some Balkan pocket kingdom.

‘Jago will be charged with unlawful assembly and sedition,’ Sir Charles said. ‘And his thugs will find themselves breaking rocks on Dartmoor for some years.’

‘Jago should get Devil’s Dyke,’ Godalming put in.

‘Of course.’

Devil’s Dyke was partially Sir Charles’s invention, an adaptation of a system devised for making use of native prisoners-of-war, for concentrating civilian populations to prevent them from giving succour to their soldiery. Godalming understood the conditions in the camps made what was usually understood by penal servitude seem a breeze on the Brighton promenade.

‘What about the fellow who started it?’ asked Mackenzie.

‘Jago? I’ve just said.’

‘No, sir. I mean the bloody fool with the pistol.’

‘Give him a medal,’ Hentzau said, ‘then cut off his ears as punishment for bad marksmanship.’

‘He must be found, of course,’ Sir Charles said. ‘We can’t have Christian martyrs hanging around our necks.’

‘Our honour has been challenged,’ said Iorga. ‘We must exact reprisals.’

Even Sir Charles was less a hothead than the General. Godalming was surprised by the elder’s dimwittedness. Long life did not mean a continual growth of intelligence. He understood why Ruthven spoke of the Prince Consort’s entourage in such contemptuous terms. Iorga was tubby around the middle and his face was painted. Once, for a moment only, Godalming had seen the rage-filled face of the Prince himself. Ever since, he had held the Carpathians in undue reverence, imposing the ferocity and stature of their leader on to the image of each of them. That was ridiculous. No matter how brutes like Iorga or blades like Hentzau might try to imitate Dracula, they were never more than feeble copies of the great original, essentially as trifling as the floppiest murgatroyd in Soho.

He pardoned himself and left the Commissioner and the
General to continue mopping-up. Both intended to stand around giving Mackenzie contradictory orders. As he passed Buckingham Palace, he tipped his hat to the Carpathians at the gates. The flag flew, indicating that Her Majesty and His Royal Highness were in residence. Godalming wondered if the Prince Consort ever thought of Lucy Westenra.

At the Victoria Station boundary of the park were several horse-drawn wagons, penned full of sorry-looking crusaders. Godalming understood that as riots went, tonight’s affair had been strictly third-class.

He whistled, red thirst pricking the back of his throat. It was good to be young, rich and a vampire. All London was his, more than it was Dracula’s or Ruthven’s. They might be elders, but as he was realising, that actually put them at a disadvantage. No matter how they tried, they could not be of the age. They were historical characters and he was contemporary.

When he first turned, he had been in a continual funk. He thought the Prince Consort would come for him any night, and serve him as he had served Van Helsing or Jonathan Harker. But he now had to assume he was forgiven. He might have destroyed Lucy Westenra, but Dracula had more important warm wenches to pursue. It was not inconceivable that he was grateful to Godalming for disposing of the get of his first dalliance in England. He would presumably not have wanted an un-dead Lucy for a bridesmaid, looking red daggers at the radiant Victoria as she was led down the aisle of Westminster Abbey by her devoted Prime Minister. That wedding had been the culmination of last year’s Jubilee celebrations. The union of the Widow of Windsor and the Prince of Wallachia bound together a nation which, shaking as it changed, could as easily have flown apart.

He was expected at Downing Street at two o’clock tomorrow morning. Business was conducted through the night now. Then, before dawn, he was to attend a reception at the Café Royal, as Lady Adeline Ducayne welcomed a distinguished visitor, the Countess Elizabeth Bathory. Lady Adeline was taking such care to cosy up to the Countess because the Bathorys were distantly connections of the Draculas. Ruthven described the Countess Elizabeth as ‘an elegantly revolting alley-cat’ and Lady Adeline as ‘a wizened skeleton one generation out of the swamp’, but he insisted Godalming be present at the affair in case matters of importance were discussed.

For the next six hours, he was at liberty. His red thirst grew. It was good to let the need gather, for it gave an edge to feeding. After a brief return to his town house in Cadogan Square to change into evening clothes, Godalming would go out on the razzle. He understood the pleasures of the hunt. He had several possibles picked out and would make one of those ladies his prey this evening.

His fangs were sharp against his lower lip. The prospect of the chase excited familiar changes in his body. His tastes were sharper, his palate more varied. His swollen teeth malformed his whistling. ‘Barbara Allen’ became a queer new tune no one would recognise.

In Cadogan Square, a woman approached him. She had two little girls with her, on leads like dogs. They smelled of warm blood.

‘Kind sir,’ the woman said, hand out, ‘would you care...’

Godalming was disgusted that anyone would stoop to selling the blood of their own children. He had seen the woman before, cadging coins off inexperienced new-borns, offering up the scabby throats of her smelly ragamuffins. It was inconceivable that any vampire past his first week could be interested in their thin blood.

‘Go away, or I shall summon a constable.’

The woman departed, cringing. She dragged her children with her. Both little girls looked back as they were pulled off, hollow eyes round and moist. When they were all used up, would the woman find more children? He thought one of the girls might be new, and considered the possibility that the woman was not their mother but some horrid new species of pimp. He would bring the matter up with Ruthven. The Prime Minister was very perturbed by the exploitation of children.

He was admitted to his house by the manservant he had brought with him from Ring, the Holmwood country seat. His hat and coat were taken.

‘There’s a lady for you in the drawing room, my lord,’ the valet informed him. ‘A Miss Churchward. She has been waiting.’

‘Penny? What on earth could she want?’

‘She didn’t say, my lord.’

‘Very well. Thank you. I shall attend to her.’

He left the man in the hall and entered the drawing room. Penelope Churchward was perched primly on a stiff-backed chair. She had taken a piece of fruit – a dusty old apple, since he only kept food for his infrequent warm guests – and was flaying it with a small paring knife.

‘Penny,’ he said, ‘what a pleasant surprise.’

As he spoke, he nicked his lip with a razor-tooth. When the red thirst was upon him, he had to watch his words. She set aside her apple and knife, and arranged herself to address him.

‘Arthur,’ she said, standing up, and extending her arm.

He carefully kissed her hand. She was different tonight, he knew with an instant intuition. Something in her attitude to him had been budding; now it was in full bloom. The chase had come to him.