Anno Dracula (49 page)

‘Shush,’ she said, guiding him onwards. ‘We must hurry.’

... people, warm and un-dead, streamed around from all sides. The Palace was being attacked and reinforced at once. In the park, a choir of demonstrators sang hymns, blocking the path of a fire engine. In the grounds, loose horses ran, kicking up scuds of gravel.

He needed to draw breath. Geneviève, her grip on his arm fierce,
let him pause. The instant he stopped running, he was aware of the mauling he had sustained. He supported himself with his naked sword and gulped cold air into his lungs. His mind and body shook. It was as if he had died back in the throne-room and was now an ectoplasmic form liberated from earthly flesh.

Ahead, people swarmed over the Palace gates. The weight of numbers made them swing inwards, knocking over a couple of Guardsmen. This riot came at a most convenient time. The Diogenes Club took care of its own. Or his other friends, the Limehouse Ring, were intervening on his behalf. Or he was lost in the tides of history, and this was simply a fortunate occurrence.

Holding aloft torches and wooden crucifixes, a crowd of roughs, faces streaked with burnt cork, shoved into the courtyard. Their leader was a nun, her wimple disclosing a Chinese cameo of a face. Tiny and lithe, she summoned her followers, and pointed up at the skies.

A deeper darkness than night fell. A great shadow was all around, thrown over the crowds. Twin red moons looked down. Slow-flapping winds knocked people off their feet. The bat-shape filled the sky over the Palace.

For a moment, the crowds fell silent. Then a voice was raised against the shape. More voices joined. Torches were tossed into the air, but fell short. Stones pulled from the drive were hurled. Shots were fired. The huge shadow soared higher.

Iorga’s men, regathered after their undignified tumble, charged the crowds, laying about themselves with sabres. The mob was easily beaten back through the main gates. Beauregard and Geneviève were sucked out of the courtyard with the retreat. A lot of noise had been made, but little damage was done. The Chinese nun was the first to
disappear into the night, her followers scattering after her.

Well away from the gates, he allowed himself to look back. The shadow had alighted on the roof of Buckingham Palace. A gargoyle-shape looked down, wings settling like a cloak. Beauregard wondered how long the Prince could cling to his perch.

In the night, fires burned high. The news would soon spread, a match touched to the powder-keg. In Chelsea and Whitechapel and Kingstead; in Exeter and Purfleet and Whitby; in Paris and Moscow and New York: there would be repercussions, rippling out to change the world. The park was full of shouting. Dark figures danced and fought...

... she felt a twinge of regret for her lost position. She would not return to Toynbee Hall and her work would pass to others. With or without Charles, in this country or abroad, in the open or in hiding, she would start anew, building another life. All she took with her was her father’s crucifix. And a good dress, somewhat spotted.

She was sure the creature on the roof of the Palace, even with his night-eyes and lofty vantage point, could not see them. The further away they walked, the smaller he became. After they were past the piked skull of Abraham Van Helsing, Geneviève looked back and saw only darkness.

Over the years since
Anno Dracula
first appeared, some readers have made their own lists of the ‘borrowed’ (frankly, misappropriated) fictional or historical characters who appear in it. Especially those who go unnamed or disguised. A few have posted these online. To keep the game alive, I’ve opted not to spell out the origins of every walk-on character or checked name (at this date, I doubt I even could). This is literally a vampire novel, in that it battens onto other works of fiction (primarily, Bram Stoker’s
Dracula)
and draws life from them, so I am happy to acknowledge victims. Where appropriate, further reading or viewing is listed. Since I’m wary of explaining away too much, some mysteries remain...

E
PIGRAPH

Bram Stoker hyphenated ‘were-wolves’, so – for consistency – it remains in that archaic form throughout the novel. The hyphen disappears from the series thereafter. Stoker was probably thinking of the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould’s
The Book of Were-Wolves
(1865). ‘Un-dead’ is a Stoker convention, too.

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O
NE
: I
N THE
F
OG

The
chapter title
comes from Richard Harding Davis’s novel
In the Fog
(1901). The first fragment (now lost) of what would become
Anno Dracula –
which didn’t even feature vampires – was called ‘Beauregard in the Fog’. It did have footnotes, as I recall.

The second paragraph has, in all previous editions, included the jumbled phrase ‘setting down the human thought mind’.

‘
Brevis esse laboro
, as Horace would have it.’ The sprinkling of Latin and Biblical saws in
Anno Dracula
was suggested by Eugene Byrne, who pointed out that Victorians in conversation and letters habitually quoted classics the way we quote pop song lyrics or lines from
The Terminator
. Horace, incidentally, meant the opposite of what Seward is saying. The full quote is
Brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio
(‘When I labour to be brief, I become obscure’).

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WO
: G
ENEVIÈVE

Several different versions of the vampire Geneviève Dieudonné exist in my bibliography, distinguishable by their middle names. Her lives are so complicated I’m having to look up her wikipedia entry to write this note (and that’s not 100% accurate).

First to appear was Genevieve Sandrine du Pointe du Lac Dieudonné, in
Drachenfels
, a novel set in Games Workshop’s Warhammer Fantasy world which I wrote under the name Jack Yeovil. All the Yeovil/Warhammer novels and stories are collected in
The Vampire Genevieve
(Black Library).

Geneviève Sandrine de l’Isle Dieudonné is the character in the
Anno Dracula
series.

Geneviève Sandrine Ysolde Dieudonné appears in a series which has been collected in
The Man From the Diogenes Club
,
Secret Files of the Diogenes Club
and
Mysteries of the Diogenes Club
(MonkeyBrain); this also follows several other characters from the
Anno Dracula
world (including Charles Beauregard and Kate Reed) in a continuum
which more closely resembles the one we live in.

Arthur Morrison. Morrison was the author of the Martin Hewitt stories,
The Dorrington Deed-Box
and
A Child of the Jago
. The Whitechapel of
Anno Dracula
includes several streets from Morrison’s books, including the slum he called the Old Jago.

As one critic pointed out, the reason Holmes is removed to a concentration camp in
Anno Dracula
is to get around a problem I have with many Holmes/Jack the Ripper stories – the great detective would have identified, trapped and convicted the murderer before tea-time. Devil’s Dyke is a real place, on the Sussex Downs.

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FTER
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ARK

The Diogenes Club. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle introduced the Diogenes Club in ‘The Greek Interpreter’, along with its most prominent member, Mycroft Holmes, brother of the more famous Sherlock. Later, in ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans’, we learn that not only does brother Mycroft work for the British government but, under certain circumstances, he
is
the British government. The notion that the Diogenes Club is an ancestor of Ian Fleming’s Universal Export, a covert front for British Intelligence, comes from Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond’s script for
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
.

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HE
D
IOGENES
C
LUB

Ivan Dragomiloff, the ethical assassin, is the lead character of Jack London’s novel
The Assassination Bureau, Ltd.
(unfinished, completed by
Robert L. Fish). Basil Dearden’s 1969 film of the book, with Oliver Reed as Dragomiloff, is one of a knot of overpopulated period-set ‘romps’ which influenced this book. See also:
The Wrong Box
,
The Best House in London
,
Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines
and (especially)
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
.

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HE
P
RIME
M
INISTER

Lord Ruthven is the title character in John Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’, which is based on a fragment by Lord Byron. Ruthven is generally taken to be a caricature of Byron. Before Dracula, Ruthven was the default fatal man vampire, and he appeared in a run of sequels, theatrical adaptations and operas in the nineteenth century.

For Lord Ruthven’s roll-call of vampire elders, thanks to the authors J.M. Rymer, Charles L. Grant, Robert McCammon, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Les Daniels, Suzy McKee Charnas, Stephen King, Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Mary Braddon, F.G. Loring, Julian Hawthorne and Bram Stoker and the actors Robert Quarry, Ferdy Mayne, David Peel, Robert Tayman, Bela Lugosi, Jonathan Frid, German Robles, Gloria Holden, Barbara Steele and Delphine Seyrig.

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YSTERY OF THE
H
ANSOM
C
AB

The
chapter title
comes from an important early detective novel by Fergus Hume.

Red Thirst. I owe George R.R. Martin thanks for this term, which comes from his vampire novel
Fevre Dream
. I also used it as the title of
one of the Jack Yeovil Genevieve stories.

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PIDERS IN
T
HEIR
W
EBS

Of the named and unnamed Victorian-Edwardian master crooks who appear in this chapter, only Guy Boothby’s Dr Nikola – an ambiguous mastermind who made his debut in
A Bid for Fortune
, and continued to search for the elixir of life in later novels – has fallen entirely off the radar.

I’ve used Colonel Sebastian Moran, created by Arthur Conan Doyle in ‘The Empty House’, as the narrator of a series of stories (‘A Shambles in Belgravia’, ‘A Volume in Vermillion’, ‘The Red Planet League’ and others) set in something like the version of the underworld seen here (but without vampires). These should eventually fix up into a book called
The Hound of the D’Urbervilles
.

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ATTERS OF
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O
I
MPORTANCE

In his lecture to the company, Oscar Wilde is, of course, quoting himself. The long sentences on criticism come from his essay ‘The Critic as Artist: With Some Remarks Upon the Importance of Doing Nothing’.

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AWN OF THE
D
EAD

Beatrice Potter. A clarification – this is not the authoress Beatrix Potter (
Peter Rabbit
, etc), but the Fabian socialist better remembered under her married name, Beatrice Webb.

Sir Hugh Greene’s anthology
The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes
(1970), which had several sequels and was adapted as a British TV series, highlighted a number of the Victorian and Edwardian detectives who get a name-check here. The creators of the other sleuths are William Hope Hodgson (Carnacki, the ghost finder), Ernest Bramah (the blind detective Max Carrados), our friend Arthur Morrison (Martin Hewitt) and Jacques Futrelle (Professor Van Dusen). Cotford, like Kate Reed, is a character Bram Stoker intended to fit into
Dracula
, but never found a place for. Hawkshaw, once well-enough-known for the name to be a synonym for detective the way Shylock is a synonym for loan shark, comes from an earlier generation, appearing in Tom Taylor’s 1863 play
The Ticket-of-Leave Man
.

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ITS OF
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ASSION

... like a Drury Lane ghost... The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, built in 1812, was known in the later nineteenth century for melodrama, spectacle and special effects. Seward is referring to the wailing, shroud-dragging ghosts who appeared in the plays rather than any of the several spectres reputed to haunt the building.

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OUSE IN
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LEVELAND
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TREET

Orlando is a character made up from whole cloth. He’s not the sex-changing hero of the Virginia Woolf novel, the marmalade cat, that Sam Kydd TV reprobate or any other Orlando of fiction. I probably should have used a name not already attached to so many people, but didn’t. To make up for it, this Orlando features – in a different alternate world – in my story ‘The Man on the Clapham Omnibus’.