Anno Dracula (53 page)

An engraved invitation to the Palace had been delivered personally into her hand. As acting director of the Hall, she was busier than ever. A new strain of plague was running through the new-borns of Whitechapel, triggering off their undisciplined shape-shifting powers, creating a horde of short-lived, agonised freaks. But a summons from the Queen and the Prince Consort was not to be ignored.

Presumably, they were to be honoured for their part in ending the career of Jack the Ripper. A private honour, perhaps, but an honour nevertheless.

Genevieve wondered if Beauregard would be proud to meet his sovereign, or if her current state would sadden him. She had heard stories of the situation inside the Palace. And she knew more of Vlad Tepes than most. Among vampires, he had always been the Man Who Would Be King.

The carriage passed through Fleet Street – past the boarded-up and burned-out offices of the nation’s great newspapers – and the Strand. There was no fog tonight, just an icy wind.

It had been generally decided, in the ruling cabal of the Diogenes Club, that the identity of the murderer should be withheld, although it was common knowledge that his crimes had come to an end. Arrangements had been made at Scotland Yard, the Commissioner’s resignation exchanged for an overseas posting, and Lestrade and Abberline were on fresh cases. Nothing much had changed. Whitechapel was hunting a new madman now, a murderer of brutish disposition and appearance named Edward Hyde who had trampled a small child and then raised his ambitions by shoving a broken walking-stick through the heart of a new-born Member of Parliament. Once he was stopped, another murderer would come along, and another, and another...

In Trafalgar Square, there were bonfires. The red light filled the carriage as they passed Nelson’s Column. The police kept dousing the fires, but insurrectionists started them up again. Scraps of wood were smuggled in. Items of clothing even were used to fuel the fires. New-borns were superstitiously afraid of fire, and did not like to get too close.

Beauregard looked out with interest at the blazes, heaped around the stone lions. Originally a memorial to the victims of Bloody Sunday, they had a new meaning now. News had come through from
India, where there had been another mutiny, with many warm British troops and officials throwing in their lot with the natives. Sir Francis Varney, the unpopular vampire Viceroy, had been dragged from his hiding place at the Red Fort in Delhi by a mob and cast into just such a fire, burned down to ash and bones. The colony was in open revolt. And there were stirrings in Africa and Points East.

Crowds were scuffling by the fires, one of the Prince Consort’s Carpathian Guard tossing warm young men about while the Fire Brigade, perhaps half-heartedly, tried to train their hoses. Placards were waved and slogans shouted.

JACK STILL RIPS, a graffito read.

The letters were still coming, the red-inked scrawls signed ‘Jack the Ripper’. Now, they called for the warm to rally against their vampire masters. Whenever a new-born was killed, ‘Jack the Ripper’ took the credit. Beauregard had said nothing, but Genevieve suspected that the letters were issued from the Diogenes Club. She saw that a dangerous game was being played in the halls of secret government, factions conspiring against each other, with the ruination of the Prince Consort as an end. Dr Seward might have been mad, but his work had not been entirely wasteful. Even if a monster became a hero, a new Guy Fawkes, a purpose was being served.

She was a vampire, but she was not of the bloodline of Vlad Tepes. That left her, as ever, on the sidelines of history. She had no real interest either way. It had been refreshing for a while not to have to pretend to be warm, but the Prince Consort’s regime made things uncomfortable for most of the un-dead. For every noble vampire in his town house, with a harem of willing blood-slaves, there were twenty of Mary Kelly, Lily, or Cathy Eddowes, as miserable as they had ever been, their vampire attributes addictions
and handicaps rather than powers and potentials.

The carriage, able to breathe at last, rolled down the Mall towards Buckingham Palace. Insurrectionist leaders hung in chains from cruciform cages lining the road, some still barely alive. Within the last three nights, an open battle had raged in St James’s Park, between the warm and the dead.

‘Look,’ Beauregard said, sadly, ‘there’s Van Helsing’s head.’

Genevieve craned her neck and saw the pathetic lump on the end of its raised pike. The story was that Abraham Van Helsing was still alive, in the Prince Consort’s thrall, raised high so that his eyes might see the reign of Dracula over London. The story was a lie. What was left was a fly-blown skull, hung with ragged strips.

They were at the Palace. Two Carpathians, in midnight black uniforms slashed with crimson, hauled the huge ironwork frames aside as if they were silk curtains.

The exterior of the Palace was illuminated. The Union Jack flew, and the Crest of Dracula.

Beauregard’s face was a blank.

The carriage pulled up at the entrance, and a footman opened the door. Genevieve stepped down first, and Beauregard followed.

She had selected a simple dress, having nothing better and knowing finery had never suited her. He wore his usual evening dress, and handed his cape and cane to the servant who took her cloak. A Carpathian, his face a mask of stiff hair, stood by to watch him hand over his cane. He turned over his revolver too. Silver bullets were frowned on at the Court. Smithing with silver was punishable by death.

The Palace’s doors were hauled open in lurches, and a strange creature – a tailored parti-coloured suit emphasising the extensive
and grotesque malformations of his body, growths the size of loaves sprouting from his torso, his huge head a knotted turnip in which human features were barely discernible – admitted them. Genevieve was overwhelmed with pity for the man, perceiving at once that this was a warm human being not the fruit of some catastrophically failed attempt at shape-shifting.

Beauregard nodded to the servant, and said ‘Good evening. Merrick, is it not?’

A smile formed somewhere in the doughy expanses of Merrick’s face, and he returned the greeting, his words slurred by excess slews of flesh around his mouth.

‘And how is the Queen this evening?’

Merrick did not reply, but Genevieve imagined she saw an expression in the unreadable map of his features. There was a sadness in his single exposed eye, and a grim set to his lips.

Beauregard gave Merrick a card, and said ‘compliments of the Diogenes Club.’ Something conspiratorial passed between the perfectly-groomed gentleman-adventurer and the hideously deformed servant.

Merrick led them down the hallway, hunched over like a gorilla, using one long arm to propel his body. He had one normal arm, which stuck uselessly from his body, penned in by lumpy swellings.

Obviously, it amused Vlad Tepes to keep this poor creature as a pet. He had always had a fondness for freaks and sports.

Merrick knocked on a door.

‘Genevieve,’ Beauregard said, voice just above a whisper, ‘if what I do brings harm to you, I am sincerely sorry.’

She did not understand him. As her mind raced to catch up with him, he leaned over and kissed her, on the mouth, the warm way.
She tasted him, and was reminded. The sharing of blood had established a link between them.

The kiss broke, and he stood back, leaving her baffled. Then a door was opened, and they were admitted into the Royal Presences.

Nothing had prepared her for the sty the throne-room had become. Dilapidated beyond belief, its once-fine walls and paintings torn and stained, with the stench of dried blood and human ordure thick in the air, the room was ill-lit by battered chandeliers, and full of people and animals. Laughter and whimpering competed, and the marble floors were thick with filthy discharges. An armadillo rolled by, its rear-parts clogged with its own dirt.

Merrick announced them, his palate suffering as he got their names out. Someone made a crude remark, and gales of laughter cut through the din, then were cut off at a wave of the Prince Consort’s ham-sized hand.

Vlad Tepes sat upon the throne, massive as a commemorative statue, his face enormously bloated, rich red under withered grey. Stinking moustaches hung to his chest, stiff with recent blood, and his black-stubbled chin was dotted with the gravy-stains of his last feeding. An ermine-collared cloak clung to his shoulders like the wings of a giant bat; otherwise, he was naked, his body thickly-coated with matted hair, blood and filth clotting on his chest and limbs. His white manhood, tipped scarlet as an adder’s tongue, lay coiled like a snake in his lap. His body was swollen like a leech’s, his rope-thick veins visibly pulsing.

Beauregard shook in the presence, the smell smiting him like blows. Genevieve held him up, and looked around the room.

‘I never dreamed...’ he muttered, ‘never...’

A warm girl ran across the room, pursued by one of the
Carpathians, his uniform in tatters. He brought her down with a swipe of a bear-paw, and began to tear at her back and sides with triple-jointed jaws, taking meat as well as drink.

The Prince Consort smiled.

The Queen was kneeling by the throne, a silver spiked collar around her neck, a massive chain leading from it to a loose bracelet upon Dracula’s wrist. She was in her shift and stockings, brown hair loose, blood on her face. It was impossible to see the round old woman she had been in this abused girl. Genevieve hoped she was mad, but feared she was only too well aware of what was going on about her. She turned away, not looking at the Carpathian’s meal.

‘Majesties,’ Beauregard said, bowing his head.

Vlad Tepes laughed, an enormous farting sound exploding from his jaggedly-fanged maw. The stench of his breath filled the room. It was everything dead and rotten.

A fastidiously-dressed vampire youth, an explosion of lace escaping at his collar from the tight black shine of his velvet suit, explained to the Prince Consort who these guests were. Genevieve recognised the Prime Minister, Lord Ruthven.

‘These are the heroes of Whitechapel,’ the English vampire said, a fluttering handkerchief before his mouth and nose.

The Prince Consort grinned ferociously, eyes burning like crimson furnaces, moustaches creaking like leather straps.

‘The lady and I are acquainted,’ he said, in surprisingly perfect and courteous English. ‘We met at the home of the Countess Dolingen of Graz, some hundred years ago.’
*

Genevieve remembered well. The Countess, a snob beyond the grave, had summoned what she referred to as the un-dead aristocracy. The Karnsteins of Styria had been there, pale and uninteresting,
and several of Vlad Tepes’s Transylvanian associates, Princess Vajda, Countess Bathory, Count Iorga, Count Von Krolock. Also Saint-Germain from France, Villanueva from Spain, Duval from Mexico. At that gathering, Vlad Tepes had seemed an ill-mannered upstart, and his proposition of a vampire crusade, to subjugate petty humanity under his standard, had been ignored. Since then, Genevieve had done her best to avoid other vampires.

‘You have served us well, Englishman,’ the Prince Consort said, praise sounding like a threat.

Beauregard stepped forward.

‘I have a gift, majesties,’ he said, ‘a souvenir of our exploit in the East End.’

Vlad Tepes’s eyes gleamed with lust. At heart, he had the philistine avarice of a true barbarian. Despite his lofty titles, he was barely a generation away from the mountain bully-boys his ancestors had been. He liked nothing more than pretty things. Bright, shining toys.

Beauregard took something from his inside pocket, and unwrapped a cloth from it.

Silver shone.

Everyone in the throne room was quieted. Vampires had been feeding in the shadows, noisily suckling the flesh of youths and girls. Carpathians had been grunting their simple language at each other. All went silent.

Fury twisted the Prince Consort’s brow, but then contempt and mirth turned his face into a wide-mouthed mask of obscene enjoyment.

Beauregard held Dr Seward’s silver scalpel. He had taken it from Genevieve that night. As evidence, she thought.

‘You think you can defy me with that tiny needle, Englishman?’

‘It is a gift,’ Beauregard replied. ‘But not for you.’

Genevieve was edging away, uncertain. The Carpathians had detached themselves from their amusements, and were forming a half circle around Beauregard. There was no one between Beauregard and the throne, but, if he made a move towards the Prince Consort, a wall of solid vampireflesh and bone would form.

‘For my Queen,’ Beauregard said, tossing the knife.

Genevieve saw the silver reflect in Vlad Tepes’s eyes, as anger exploded dark in the pupils. Then Victoria snatched the tumbling scalpel from the air...

It had all been for this moment, all to get Beauregard into the Royal Presence, all to serve this one duty. Genevieve, the taste of him in her mouth, understood.

Victoria slipped the blade under her breast, stapling her shift to her ribs, puncturing her heart. For her, it was over quickly.

With a look of triumph and joy, she fell from her dais, blood gouting from her fatal wound, and rolled down the steps, chain clanking with her.

Vlad Tepes – Prince Consort no more – was on his feet, cloak rippling around him like a thundercloud. Tusklike teeth exploded from his face, and his hands became spear-tipped clusters. Beauregard, Genevieve realised, was dead. But the monster’s power was dealt a blow from which it could never recover. The Empire Vlad Tepes had usurped would rise against him. He had grown too arrogant.

The Carpathians were on Beauregard already, talons and mouths red and digging.

Genevieve thought she was to die too. Beauregard had tried to keep her from harm by not involving her in his designs. But she had been too stubborn, had insisted on being here, on seeing Vlad
Tepes in the lair he had made for himself.

He came down from his throne for her, foul steam pouring from his mouth and nostrils.

But she was older than him. Less blinded by the ignorance of his selfish fantasies. For centuries, he had thought himself special, as a higher being apart from humanity, while she knew she was just a tick in the hide of the warm.