Anno Dracula 1918 - The Bloody Red Baron (3 page)

Dracula had left England as he came, as flotsam. When the country turned on him, the Prince Consort surrendered and was put in the Tower of London. It was a ruse: the Tower's spidery master, the Graf von Orlok, loyal to his fellow elder, assisted a daring escape. Floating through Traitors' Gate in a coffin, Dracula gained the Thames, then the open sea.

When Dracula escaped, Genevieve insisted on guarding Beauregard's bed. She feared the Count would take the opportunity to avenge himself on them. They had struck the blow which began the end of the Terror. Evidently. Dracula had had more pressing business; he never bothered to strike them down. Genevieve was slightly peeved by this neglect. They had altered the course of history, after all. Or so they liked to think. Perhaps individuals could do little to change the tides.

The car halted outside Number Ten. A liveried vampire footman darted out of the doorway, an unfolded
Daily Mail
held over his periwig as a shield against the drizzle. Beauregard was ushered up the steps to the Prime Minister's official residence.

In Europe, Dracula drifted Lear-like from court to court, embarrassing and threatening, playing on his hosts' dislike of parliaments that sacked monarchs. His bloodline spread through houses to which he was connected by his marriage to the late Queen Victoria and by his long-diffused mortal get. After centuries, the crowned heads of Europe all counted Vlad Tepes among their noteworthy ancestors.

When giving up his overcoat, Beauregard noticed his boots were still liberally coated with the mud of France. That foreign wars were so close to home was a miracle of the modern era.

Though his old bones resisted, he had men like Ashenden and Edwin Winthrop whisked back and forth by air.

In Russia, Dracula turned thin-blooded Romanovs, whose shapes shifted catastrophically. Rasputin rose to power, claiming sorcery could assuage the raging lycanthropy afflicting the Tsarevich. Now, the holy charlatan was dead, dismembered by a
upyr
prince. The Tsar was imprisoned by the Bolsheviks. The Diogenes Club understood Dracula had personally arranged the smuggling of Lenin back into Russia in his egregious sealed train.

Number Ten had been redecorated again. The reception hall was a gallery of portraits by distinguished hands of the last three decades: Whistler, Hallward, Sickert, Jimson. To the despair of Cabinet colleagues, who viewed as suspect anything other than a nice Constable landscape, Ruthven now declared himself a passionate Vorticist. Beauregard looked in vain for paintings on subjects other than the current Prime Minister. The grey, sardonic face cast cold eyes from a dozen canvases. Ruthven's craze for himself even embraced works which depicted him in a less than idealised manner, like Wyndham Lewis's representation of his visit to the front.

In July of 1905, the Romanov yacht
Stella Polaris
had conveyed Dracula to the Bay of Bjorkoe, off the coast of Finland. He was transferred by rowing boat to the
Hohenzollern,
the elegant white and gold yacht of another of his great-nephews by marriage, Kaiser Wilhelm II. At the time, the Diogenes Club had intercepted communiques between Prince von Bulow, then the Kaiser's Chancellor, and Konstantin Pobedonostev, the Tsar's close adviser, couched in the usual royal European language of mutual distrust coated with cousinly diplomatic smarm. The Kaiser fervently wanted to believe the Dark Kiss would heal his withered arm. The Russians boosted the Dracula bloodline, concealing the state of the barking Tsarevich, to dupe Willi into taking on the burden of the former Prince Consort.

Beauregard signed the visitors' book and hurried through a corridor to the Cabinet Room. Carpathians armed with silver- tipped pikestaffs lined the passage. Kostaki, a rehabilitated elder whose fall in the Terror was now rewarded with a trusted position, touched his helm to Beauregard.

Assuming the title of Graf, Dracula became an ornament to the Imperial Court in Berlin. With all due ceremony, he turned Wilhelm. The Kaiser could at last straighten his hated arm and make a proper fist. The first thing Willi wished to do with his new fingers was sink them into the throats of fellow monarchs, to wrestle away their mastery of the seas, and sundry African, Eastern, Asian and Pacific dominions. Germany, he said, must turn vampire, and find its place in the moonlight.

British and French authors wrote novels in imitation of
The Battle of Dorking,
prophesying a coming war between Dracula's Germany and the Civilised World. Viscount Northcliffe serialised such yarns in the
Daily Mail,
achieving great success with William LeQueux's
The Invasion of 1910.
Paid-for strategists suggested the New Huns would favour lightning attacks on isolated outposts. Since there was little likelihood of increased circulation of the
Mail
in such hamlets, Northcliffe insisted the story feature invasions of every major town in the land. The citizens of Norwich and Manchester relished lurid descriptions of their fates when besieged by undead Uhlans. Beauregard remembered the
Mail's
sandwich men strutting about town in German uniforms, a foretaste of the imagined occupation.

The Diogenes Club noted the Kaiser's programme of industrialisation and naval expansion, though the intelligence little affected Ruthven's programme of gallery openings and society balls. German rails snaked across the continent, an aid to rapid mobilisation. Britannia's dreadnoughts ruled the waves, but Willi's submarines took command of the deeps. When Heath Robinson, England's engineering genius, took the lead in the development of aircraft, Dracula employed the Dutchman Anthony Fokker to sketch design after design for fighter and bomber aeroplanes.

Vampirism spread through the Central Powers. Elders who had cowered through nomadic centuries returned to live openly on estates in Germany and Austria-Hungary. The condition had run unchecked in Britain, but Dracula now insisted on regulating the turning of new-borns. Edicts forbade specified classes and races of men and women to turn. Wilhelm sneered that Britain and France elevated poets and ballerinas to immortality; in his domains, the privilege was reserved to those willing to fight for their country and hunt their own human prey.

In 1914, having occupied a succession of military and political posts, Dracula assumed the twin positions of Chancellor and Commander-in-Chief of the armies of the Fatherland. Beauregard wondered how the former Vlad Tepes countenanced alliances which ranged him against Romania, the land for which he had fought, and alongside Turkey, the empire he had devoted his warmth to resisting.

Outside the Cabinet Room, Beauregard was greeted by Mansfield Smith-Cumming, the monocled spymaster who served with him on the Ruling Cabal. It was rumoured the vampire had amputated his own leg with a penknife to free himself from the wreckage of a car accident so he could drape his coat over his dying son, who complained of the cold. His leg was regrown past the knee joint; under a bundle of bandages, a new foot was forming.

'Beauregard,' Smith-Cumming said, smiling broadly, 'what do you think of the disguise?'

Smith-Cumming took boyish delight in the element of deception in his profession. He sported a large, patently fake beard. He leered, twitching his horsehair moustache like one of Fred Karno's comedy troupe.

'I look a proper Hun, what? Can't you just see me biting out the throat of a Belgian nun?'

He showed huge false fangs, then spat them out to reveal delicate real ones.

'Where is Mycroft?' Beauregard asked.

Smith-Cumming looked as serious as was possible for a man in disguise. 'Grave news, I'm afraid. Another stroke.'

Mycroft Holmes had been on the Ruling Cabal of the Diogenes Club as long as Beauregard had been a member. His plans had held the nation together throughout the Terror.

Subsequently, he had done much to moderate the odd enthusiasms of the new King and his eternal first minister, Ruthven.

'We're all under a strain. You've heard about Spenser.'

Smith-Cumming nodded, appalled.

'I've had Winthrop step in. He's coming along fast. I trust he'll catch up.'

'Frightening nights, Beauregard,' Smith-Cumming said.

It had started on Sunday, the 28th of June, 1914, in Sarajevo, far from the borders where European powers snarled like dogs separated by fences.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand, nephew of King-Emperor Franz Joseph, was touring Bosnia with his morganatic wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg. Left to its own devices in 1877 by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Bosnia was hardly the most desirable patch of Europe, but Austria-Hungary saw it as a natural addition to already swollen and ungovernable holdings. Franz Joseph had almost surreptitiously annexed the province in 1908. Serbia, not unfairly deemed a catspaw of Russia, also had designs on Bosnia and its sister province, Herzegovina.

The Archduke was
nosferatu,
a provocation. The Slavs and Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina did not accept vampires, especially as rulers. Serbian irredentists trumpeted the prevalence of the undead at the King-Emperor's court to stir up those in Bosnia-Herzegovina who wished to be free from bloodsucking Habsburgs. With fine hypocrisy, the Tsar's undead advisers (notably excluding the fanatically warm Rasputin) sent agents to Sarajevo to agitate torch-bearing mobs of vampire-hating Orthodox Christians, Serbian nationalists and café trouble-makers. Pamphlets appeared giving obscene accounts of the Archduke's marital relations with the plumply warm Sophie, a Czech caricatured as a bloodmilk cow.

It was the unshakable belief of the Central Powers that Tsar Nicky personally ordered a student Van Helsing named Gavrilo Princip to empty a revolver at Franz Ferdinand, putting silver in the Habsburg's vampire heart and incidentally murdering the scabby-necked Sophie. Equally, any adherent of the Allied cause was required to believe Princip a lunatic acting independently of any of the Great Powers, or even a paid agent of a warmongering Kaiser.

Beauregard once asked Mycroft if Russia was involved. The great man conceded no one truly knew. On one hand, the Okhrana certainly dispensed cash (and, probably, silver bullets) to many of Princip's stripe; on the other, even Artamanov, the attaché responsible for handing over funds, was unsure whether the obscure assassin was one of his contacts.

The Kaiser, seeing an opportunity to redraw the map of Europe, egged the ascetic bureaucrat Franz Josef Ferdinand into issuing a communiqué to Serbia which must be construed as a preparation for war. Russia was pledged to defend Serbia from Austria-Hungary, Germany was required to stand with the King-Emperor in war with Russia, France was bound by treaty to attack any nation that warred with the Romanovs, Germany could strike at France only by invading through Belgium, Great Britain was obliged to preserve Belgian neutrality. Once Princip's silver bullet transfixed the Archduke, the cards fell one by one.

That summer, Beauregard, contemplating his sixtieth year, was considering retirement. As each alliance was invoked, each nation mobilised, he realised he could not leave his post. Reluctantly, he conceded there would be war.

In 1918, the question of who ruled Bosnia was remote. The Romanovs faced death by a hammered stake and beheading sickle. Franz Josef Ferdinand's mind was gone, his empire governed by a feuding rabble of Austrian and Magyar elders. The Kaiser had long since ceased to supervise the conduct of the war, which was entirely in the hands of the Graf von Dracula and his new-born clique, von Hindenburg and Ludendorff.

The doors of the reception room opened and the two active members of the Ruling Cabal were ushered in to see the elder who ruled Great Britain under the standard of King Victor.

'Gentlemen,' said Lord Ruthven, 'come in and sit down.'

The Prime Minister was clad entirely in dove grey, from spats and morning coat to ruffled stock and curly-brimmed topper. He was at his bare desk, posed archly beneath another of his own portraits, a martial study by Elizabeth Asquith. The indifferent canvas might have earned a place because the artist's father was Home Secretary in Ruthven's Government of National Unity.

Others sat in deep armchairs around the room. Lord Asquith sourly contemplated despatches. Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig was in France, but General Sir William Robertson and General Sir Henry Wilson of His Majesty's General Staff were present, kitted out in dress uniform. Churchill, the baby-faced Minister for Munitions, wore a smock-like robe which tented over his considerable bulk and an American belt with holstered pistols at his hips. Lloyd George, Minister of War, stood by the window chewing on an unlit pipe. Sitting meekly by the Prime Minister was the little-publicised Caleb Croft of the Home Office, his bloody hands in woolly gloves. Croft's duties were too frightening to consider.

Beauregard and Smith-Cumming took chairs in the centre of the circle.

'Tell me,' Ruthven purred, 'how goes the secret war?'

Courtney kept winding the gramophone and setting the needle back to the beginning. 'Poor Butterfly' was the only record in the billet. Winthrop wondered if the choice struck anyone else as unhealthy. Butterfly kept waiting but Pinkerton never came back, the swine. Every three minutes, the unfortunate Cio-Cio-San wasted away, drained cold and abandoned by her vampire lover. The story always upset Winthrop, and this version, distilled to a few verses, was the most concentratedly upsetting.

'We used to have a rare selection,' Williamson claimed, when Winthrop voiced a complaint at the limited repertoire. '
The Bohemian Girl, Chu Chin Chow
, "Take a Pair of Crimson Eyes"...'

'But there was a binge and they all got smashed,' said Bertie.

'I miss
The Vampyres of Venice,'
said Ginger.

'Heroic binge, though,' Courtney said. 'A veritable binge of binges. The
demoiselles
can still feel the bites.'

The record finished and the gramophone stuttered, hissing. Courtney lifted the needle. 'Poor Butterfly' started again.