Anno Dracula (9 page)

He bade the detective a good-night and walked off to find a cab. A vampire whore in Flower & Dean Street offered to make him immortal for an ounce or two of his blood. He flipped her a copper coin and went on his way. How long would he have the strength to resist? At thirty-five, he was already aware that he was slowing. In
the cold, he felt his wounds. At fifty, at sixty, would his resolve to stay warm to the grave seem ridiculous, perverse? Sinful, even? Was refusing vampirism the moral equivalent of suicide? His father had died at fifty-eight.

Vampires needed the warm to feed and succour them, to keep the city running through the days. There were already un-dead – here in the East End, if not in the salons of Mayfair – starving as the poor had always starved. How soon would it be before the ‘desperate measures’ Sir Danvers Carew advocated in Parliament were seriously considered? Carew favoured the penning-up of still more warm, not only criminals but any simply healthy specimens, to serve as cattle for the vampires of breeding essential to the governance of the country. Stories crept back from Devil’s Dyke that made ice of Beauregard’s heart. Already the definition of criminality extended to include too many good men and women who were simply unable to come to an accommodation with the new regime.

At length, he found a hansom and offered the cabby two florins to take him back to Cheyne Walk. The driver touched his whip to the brim of his topper. Beauregard settled down behind the folding half-doors. With an interior upholstered in red like the plush coffins displayed in the shops along Oxford Street, the hansom was altogether too luxurious a conveyance for this quarter. He wondered whether it had carried a distinguished visitor in search of amorous adventures. Houses all over the district catered to every taste. Women and boys, warm and vampire, were freely available for a few shillings. Drabs like Polly Nichols and Lulu Schön could be had for coppers or a squirt of blood. It was possible the murderer was not from the area, that he was just another toff pursuing peculiar pleasures. You could get anything in Whitechapel, either by paying for it or taking it.

His duties had taken him to worse places. He had spent weeks as a one-eyed beggar in Afghanistan, dogging the movements of a Russian envoy suspected of stirring up the hill-tribes. During the Boer Rebellion, he had negotiated a treaty with the Amahagger, whose idea of an evening’s entertainment was baking the heads of captives in pots. However it had been something of a surprise to return, after a spell abroad in the discreet service of Her Majesty, to find London itself transformed into a city more strange, dangerous and bizarre than any in his experience. No longer the heart of Empire, it was a sponge absorbing the blood of the realm until it burst.

The cab’s wheels rattled on the road, lulling him like the soft crash of waves under a ship. Beauregard thought again of his possible secret society; the Hermetic Order of the Stake perhaps, or the Friends of Van Helsing. In one feature, the crimes were unlike ritual murders: in such cases it was important there be an unmistakable signature, like the five orange pips sent by the Ku Klux Klan to a traitor or the cold fish left beside a Sicilian who defied the mafia. Here the only signature was a kind of directed frenzy. This was the doing of a madman not an insurrectionist. That would not prevent street-corner ranters like those who had interrupted the inquest from claiming these pathetic eviscerations as victories for the warm. It would not be beyond the capabilities of many a secret society to take advantage of a hapless lunatic, systematically to drive a man mad in a certain direction as if he were a weapon being aimed, then discharging him into the streets to do his bloody business.

He might have drifted into sleep, to be awakened outside his own front door by the cabby’s rap, but something irritated him. He had grown used to trusting his occasional feelings of irritation. On several occasions, they had been the saving of his life.

The cab was in the Commercial Road, heading east, not west. Towards Limehouse. Beauregard could smell the docks. He resolved to see this out. It was an intriguing development. He had hopes that the cabby did not merely intend to murder and rob him.

He eased aside the catch in the head of his cane and slid a few inches of shining steel out of the body of the stick. The sword would draw freely if he needed it. Still, it was only steel.

B
efore returning to the Hall, Geneviève slipped into the pub opposite Spitalfields Market. She was well-known there, and in every other rowdy house within the so-called Terrible Quarter-Mile. As Angela Burdett-Coutts had shown, it was not sufficient to sit surrounded by improving tracts and soap in a comfortable church hall, waiting for the fallen to come and be improved. A reformer had to be familiar with the vilest sink-holes of drink and depravity. Of course, the Ten Bells on a week-night in 1888 was like one of the Aerated Bread Company’s tea-rooms set beside a Marseilles brothel in 1786, a St Petersburg palace in the days of Great Catherine, or the château of Gilles de Rais in 1437. If her unfortunates could have seen their Miss Dee in earlier years, when the vicissitudes of a long life brought her to low circumstances, they might have been shocked. At times, she would have looked up to Polly Nichols or Lulu Schön as a scullery maid looks up to a Duchess.

The atmosphere of the Ten Bells was steam-hot; thick with tobacco, beer and spilled blood. As she stepped through the doorway, her eye-teeth slid from their gumsheaths. She pinched shut her mouth, breathing through her nostrils. Animals trussed behind the
bar squealed and fought their leather straps. Woodbridge, the barrel-bellied potman, took a sow by the ear and yanked her head around: the spigot-mouth of the tap driven into her neck was clotted. He gouged out the coagulated gore and turned the handle, disgorging a gushing dribble into a glass tankard. Pulling the pint, he joked in a rich Devon dialect with a new-born market porter. Geneviève knew too well the gamey taste of pig’s blood. It could keep the red thirst at bay, but never slake it. She swallowed her spittle. These nights, she did not have the opportunity to form attachments. Her work occupied so much time that she fed only rarely and then not well. Although strong with the strength of centuries, she could not push herself beyond certain limits. She needed a willing partner and the tang of blood in her mouth.

She knew most of the regulars, at least by sight. Rose Mylett, a warm prostitute Geneviève thought was Lily’s mother, was cutting her finger with a penknife and bleeding into tiny glasses of gin which she sold for a penny. Woodbridge’s slightly hare-lipped son, Georgie, a soft-faced youth in an apron, darted between the tables, collecting the empties and wiping away glass-rings. Johnny Thain, a constable who had been putting in a deal of extra hours since he got a look at what Silver Knife left of Polly Nichols, was at a corner table with a couple of detectives, a tweed coat over his uniform. The casual trade fell into obvious groups: itinerant workmen hoping for a shift at the market, soldiers and sailors looking for a girl or two, new-borns thirsty for more than liquid pork.

By the bar, Cathy Eddowes was simpering up at a big man, stroking the tangle of his hair, pressing her cheek to a blocky shoulder. She turned from her potential client and waved at Geneviève. Her hand was wrapped in cloth, fingers sticking stiffly
out of the bundle. If there were more time, she’d have been concerned. Mick Ripper, a knife-sharpener reputed to be the best three-fingered pickpocket in London, closed on Cathy’s beau. He got near enough to see the man’s face and backed off, plunging his hands deep into his pockets.

‘Evenin’, Miss Dee,’ said Georgie. ‘Rushed off ’em tonight, we are.’

‘So I see,’ she said. ‘I hope we shall see you at the Hall for the new course of lectures.’

Georgie looked doubtful but smiled. ‘If ’n Dad lets me off of an evenin’. An’ if ’n it’s safe to go out by night.’

‘Mr Druitt will be taking a class in the mornings in the new year, Georgie,’ she said. ‘Mathematics. You’re one of our promising young men. Never forget your potential.’

The lad had a gift for figures; he could keep in his head at once the details and totals of three separate rounds of varied drinks. That talent, nurtured in Druitt’s classes, might lead him to a position. Georgie might exceed the high-water-mark of his father, and become a landlord rather than a potman.

She took a small table to herself and did not order a drink. She was stopping here just to put off her return to the Hall. She’d have to give a report on the inquest to Jack Seward, and did not just now want to think too much about the last moments of Lulu Schön’s life. As an accordionist murdered ‘The Little Yellow Bird’, a few maudlin drunks tried, with only marginal success, to remember all the words in the right order.

‘
Goodbye little yellow bird
,’ Geneviève hummed to herself,

‘
I’d rather brave the cold, on a leafless tree,

Than a prisoner be, in a cage of gold
.’

A group of noisy newcomers barged through the doors, bringing
a gust of night’s chill with them. The noise of the pub momentarily abated, and was then redoubled.

Cathy’s prospective beau turned away from the bar, roughly pushing the new-born away. She rearranged a shawl around scab-dotted shoulders, and walked off with broken-heeled dignity. The man was Kostaki, the Carpathian who had been at the inquest. The three who had come in were his fellows, grim examples of the barbarian type Vlad Tepes had imported from his mountain homeland and set loose in London. She recognised Ezzelin von Klatka, a grey-faced Austrian with a close-cropped scalp and a moss-thick black beard. He had a reputation as an animal tamer.

Kostaki and von Klatka embraced, breastplates grinding as they grunted greetings in German, the language of preference for the mongrel
Mittel Europäer
who constituted the Carpathian Guard. Kostaki made introductions, and Geneviève gathered the others were Martin Cuda, a relative new-born who had not yet seen out his first century, and Count Vardalek, an effeminate and snake-like Hungarian who had the rank in the group.

Woodbridge offered the Guardsmen a pull of the pig, and von Klatka stared him into silence. The Prince Consort’s Own did not favour animal blood. The group had the collective saunter Geneviève associated with Prussians or Mongols, the universal attitude of officers in an army of occupation. Carpathians marched around in a cloud of their own arrogance, condescending as much to the newborn as the warm.

Von Klatka picked a table in the centre of the room and stared down a couple of sailors until they chose to remove themselves to the bar, leaving their whores behind. The knight dismissed two of the girls, a new-born and a warm tart with no teeth, but let stay
the last, a self-possessed gypsy who bore with pride the scars on her neck.

The Carpathians took chairs and leaned back in them, evidently at ease. They were illegitimate children of Bismarck and Geronimo: all wore highly polished boots and carried heavy swords, but their uniforms were augmented with oddments scavenged through the years. Von Klatka had around his neck a golden lanyard upon which were strung withered lumps of flesh she understood to be human ears. Cuda’s helmet was adorned with a wolf’s skin: head surmounting the crown and ringing the visor with teeth, eye-sockets sewn shut with red thread; thick-furred hide hanging down to the centre of his back, tail dangling almost to the floor.

Vardalek was the most extraordinary figure, his jacket a puffy affair of pleats and flounces, covered with kaleidoscope designs of spangle and sparkle. His face was powdered to conceal suppurating skin. Pantomime circles of rouge covered his cheeks and a scarlet cupid’s-bow was painted over lips constantly distended by the two-inch fangs. His hair was stiff and golden, elaborately done up in bows and curls, twin braids dangling from the nape of his neck like rat’s tails. This was the Count’s party, and he was being escorted by the others on his tour of the fleshpots. Vardalek was one of those vampires who fussed about how close he was to the Prince Consort, claiming a dynastic connection as well as the obvious tie of bloodline. In a minute’s chatter and on the flimsiest of pretexts, he mentioned the Royal Person no fewer than three times, always with mock-casual prefixes like ‘as I was saying to Dracula...’ or ‘as our dear Prince mentioned the other night...’

The Hungarian surveyed the room and burst into high-pitched giggles, hiding his mouth behind a thin, green-nailed hand that
protruded from an explosion of lace at his cuffs. He whispered to von Klatka, who grinned ferally and signalled to Woodbridge.

‘That boy,’ von Klatka said in approximate English, pointing a talon at Georgie. ‘How much for that boy?’

The potman mumbled that Georgie was not for sale.

‘Silly man, you understand not,’ insisted von Klatka. ‘How much?’

‘He’s my son,’ Woodbridge protested.

‘Then you should be honoured indeed,’ shrilled Vardalek. ‘That your plumptious whelp should excite the interest of fine gentlemen.’

‘This is the Count Vardalek,’ explained Cuda, whom Geneviève had marked as the snivelling toady of the group. ‘He is very close to the Prince Consort.’