Carroty Nell licked shallow scratches on her customer’s neck. She saw Geneviève but showed no sign of recognition, baring a row of fence-post fangs at the interloper, red-rimmed eyes weeping blood. Quietly, Geneviève backed out of the alley. The new-born was coaxing the soldier with abuse, trying to get him to spend his fourpence. ‘Come on you bastard,’ she said, ‘finish it, finish it...’ Her client’s hand came up and grabbed her hair, and he thrust harder and harder, gasping.
Back on the street, Geneviève stood still as her eye-teeth receded. She had been too ready to fight. The murderer was making her as jumpy as the vigilantes.
Geneviève heard Silver Knife was a leather-aproned shoemaker, a Polish Jew carrying out ritual killings, a Malay sailor, a degenerate from the West End, a Portuguese cattleman, the ghost of Van Helsing or Charley Peace. He was a doctor, a black magician, a midwife, a priest. With each rumour, more innocents were thrown to the mob. Sergeant Thick locked up a warm bootmaker named Pizer for his own protection when someone took it into his head to write ‘Silver Nyfe’ on his shopfront. After Jago, the Christian Crusader, argued that the killer could walk unhindered about the area killing at will because he was a policeman, a vampire constable called Jonas Mizen was dragged into a yard off Coke Street and impaled on a length of kindling. Jago was in jail himself but Lestrade said they’d have to let him out soon, since he had a convenient alibi for the time of Mizen’s death. The Reverend John Jago, it seemed, had alibis to spare.
She passed the doorway where Lily slept. The new-born child was curled up for the day with some scraps of blanket given her at the Hall. She had wound herself up against the sun, making an Egyptian mummy of her tiny form. The girl’s half-changed arm was worse, the useless wing sprouting from hip to armpit. Lily had a cat nestled against her face, its neck in her mouth. The animal was still barely alive.
Abberline and Lestrade had questioned dozens but made no useful arrests. There were always rival protesters outside the police stations. Mediums like Lees and Carnacki had been called for. A number of consulting detectives – Martin Hewitt, Max Carrados, August Van Dusen – had prowled Whitechapel, hoping to turn up something. Even the venerable Hawkshaw had emerged from retirement. But with their acknowledged master in Devil’s Dyke, the enthusiasm of the detective community ebbed considerably, and no solutions were forthcoming. A lunatic named Cotford was apprehended creeping about in minstrel’s blackface, claiming to be a detective ‘in disguise’. He had been removed to Colney Hatch for examination. Insanity, Jack Seward said, could be an epidemic disease.
Geneviève found a shilling in her purse and slipped it into Lily’s blanket. The new-born murmured in her drowsiness but didn’t wake. As a hansom rumbled past, she glimpsed the profile of a dozing man inside, his hat swaying with the movements of the cab. Someone going home after a night in the fleshpots, she guessed. Then she recognised the passenger. It was Beauregard, the man she’d noticed at Lulu Schön’s inquest, the man from the Diogenes Club. According to Lestrade, his presence evidenced an interest from very high places. The Queen, young again, had shown public concern about ‘these ghastly murders’, but nothing had been heard from Prince Dracula, to whom Geneviève assumed the lives of a few streetwalkers, vampire or not, were of as much importance as those of beetles.
The cab trundled into the fog. Again she felt there was something out there, standing in the thick of it, watching her, waiting for a chance to move. The feeling passed.
Gradually, as she came to realise how powerless she was to affect the behaviour of this unknown maniac, she also sensed just how important the case had become. Everyone began their arguments by declaring that it was about more than just three butchered harlots. It was about Disraeli’s ‘two nations’, it was about the regrettable spread of vampirism among the lower classes, it was about the decline of public order, it was about the fragile equilibrium of the transformed kingdom. The murders were mere sparks, but Great Britain was a tinderbox.
She was spending a lot of time with whores – she’d been an outcast long enough to feel a certain kinship with them – and shared their fears. Tonight, nearing dawn, she’d found a girl in Mrs Warren’s house off Raven Row and bled her, out of need not pleasure. Warm Annie held her tenderly and let her suckle from the flesh of her throat as if she were a wet-nurse. Afterwards, Geneviève gave her a half-crown. It was too much, but she had to make the gesture. The only decoration in Warm Annie’s room was a cheap print of Vlad Tepes riding into battle. The only items of furniture were a wash-stand and a large bed, its sheets cleaned so many times they were as thin as paper, the mattress dyed with irregular brown patches. Brothels no longer had ornate mirrors.
After so many years, Geneviève should be used to her predator’s life, but the Prince Consort had turned everything topsy-turvy and she was ashamed again, not of what she must do to prolong her existence, but of the things vampirekind, those of the bloodline of Vlad Tepes, did around her. Warm Annie had been bitten several times. Eventually she would turn. Nobody’s get, she would have to find her own way, and doubtless end up as raddled as Cathy Eddowes, as truly dead as Polly Nichols, as beast-like as Carroty Nell. Her head was fuzzy from the gin her warm girl had drunk. That was why she had hallucinations. The whole city seemed sick.
13
STRANGE FITS OF PASSION
Dr Seward’s Diary (kept in phonograph)
26 SEPTEMBER
In the Hall, the mornings are quiet. Whitechapel slumbers between sunrise and what we used to call lunch-time. The new-borns scurry for their earth-boxes. The warm of the area have never been day people. I leave instructions with Morrison that I am not to be disturbed and seclude myself in this office with my supposed work. Records, I tell him. I am not lying. Keeping records is a habit. It used to be so with us all. Jonathan Harker, Mina Harker, Van Helsing. Even Lucy, with her beautiful hand and horrid spelling, wrote long letters. The Professor was strict about the documents. History is written by the victors; Van Helsing, through his friend Stoker, always intended to publish. Like his foe, he was an empire-builder; an account of his successful treatment of a scientifically-corroborated nineteenth-century case of vampirism would have added lustre to his reputation. As it is, the Prince Consort took care to blot out our history: my diary was destroyed in the fire at Purfleet, and Van Helsing is remembered as a second Judas.
He was not then Prince Consort, just Count Dracula. He deigned to notice our little family; to strike at us again and again until we were smashed and scattered. I have rough notes, cuttings and mementos, kept here under lock and key. I believe it necessary for my eventual justification, to recreate the original records. This is the task I have set myself for the quiet hours.
Who can say where it began? Dracula’s death? His resurrection? The laying of his colossal schemes against Great Britain? Harker’s dreadful experiences in Castle Dracula? The wreck of the Demeter, washed ashore at Whitby with a dead man lashed to the helm? Or, perhaps, the Count’s first sight of Lucy? Miss Lucy Westenra. Westenra. A singular name: it means light of the West. Yes, Lucy. For me, that was where it began. With Lucy Westenra. Lucy. The 24th of May, 1885. I can scarcely believe the Jack Seward of that morning, twenty-nine and newly appointed to the supervision of Purfleet Asylum, ever really existed. The times before are a golden haze, half-remembered scraps from boys’ adventures and medical directories. I had, I am assured, a most brilliant career: I studied and observed; I travelled; I had eminent friends. Then, things changed utterly.