A week after Lucy’s death, we visited the tomb by day and examined her. She seemed asleep; I confess to thinking her more beautiful than ever. The triviality was gone; replaced by a certain cruelty of aspect, the effect was disturbingly sensual. Later, we spied, on the day she was to have been married, the new-born returning to her vault. She made advances to Art and may have bitten him slightly. I recall the red of her lips and the white of her teeth, and the strength of her slim body in its frail shroud. I remember the vampire Lucy, rather than the warm girl. She was the first such creature I had seen. Traits that are now commonplaces – the juxtaposition of apparent langour with bursts of snake-speed, the sudden elongation of teeth and nails, the characteristic hiss of the red thirst – were, taken all at once, overwhelming. Sometimes I see Lucy in Geneviève, with her quick smile and sharp eye-teeth.
On the morning of the 29th, we trapped and destroyed her. We found her in the deathlike trance that comes upon new-borns in the hours of daylight, her mouth and chin still stained. Art did the deed, driving home the stake. I surgically removed her head. Van Helsing filled the mouth with garlic. After sawing off the top of the stake, we soldered shut her lead inner-coffin and screwed fast the wooden lid. The Prince Consort had her remains exhumed and reburied in Westminster Abbey. A plaque above her grave damns Van Helsing for a murderer and, presumably thanks to Art, naming only Quincey and Harker, both safely dead, as accomplices. Van Helsing told us, ‘Now, my friends, one step of our work is done, one the most harrowing to ourselves. But there remains a greater task: to find out the author of all this our sorrow and to stamp him out.’
14
PENNY STAMPS
He awoke early in the afternoon, and went down to breakfast – kedgeree and coffee – and the day’s telegrams, which Bairstow, his man, had laid out on the parlour table. The only item of interest was an unsigned two-word telegram, ‘IGNORE PIZER’. He assumed this to mean the Limehouse Ring had good cause to believe the recently arrested shoemaker unconnected with Silver Knife. Copied police reports and personal depositions had also been delivered, by hand from the Diogenes Club. Beauregard glanced through it all, and found nothing much new.
The Gazette reported ‘the murder and mutilation of a vampire woman near Gateshead yesterday’, predicting this fresh atrocity would ‘revive in the provinces the horror which was beginning to die out in London.’ The rest was puff – reading between the lines, Beauregard suspected the new-born had been destroyed by her husband, who resisted her attempt to make vampires of their children – although the paper made the sound point that rather than believing ‘the murderous maniac of Whitechapel’ to have made his way to the North, it was more likely that ‘the Bitley murder is not a repetition, but a reflex, of the Whitechapel ones. It is one of the inevitable results of publicity to spread an epidemic. Just as the news of one suicide often leads to another, so the publication of the details of one murder often leads to their repetition in another murder. Reading of means to do ill makes ill deeds done.’ One effect of the Silver Knife scare was a definitive refutation of the popular belief that vampires could not be killed. Silver might be hard to come by, but anyone could sharpen a table-leg or walking stick and shove it through a new-born’s heart. The woman in Bitley was destroyed with a broken broom-handle.
Elsewhere in the papers there were editorials in support of the Prince Consort’s newly-published edict against ‘unnatural vice’. While the rest of the world advanced towards the twentieth century, Britain reverted to a medieval legal system. When warm, Vlad Tepes had so vigorously persecuted common thieves that it was reputedly possible for townships to leave gold drinking cups at public wells. His other current passion was that railways should run in accordance with their time-tables; there was a notice in The Times of the appointment of an American new-born named Jones to oversee a commission for the extensive improvement of the service. The Prince Consort had his own private engine, the Flying Carpathian, and was often depicted at the throttle in Punch, an oversize cap on his head, toot-tooting the whistle and choo-chooing the boiler.
There were rumblings of anti-vampire riots in India, and the harsh methods Sir Francis Varney was employing against the insurrectionists. While the Prince Consort still favoured the stake, Varney’s preferred method of execution was to cast offenders, warm and un-dead alike, into pits of fire. Native vampires among the mutineers were bound over the mouths of artillery pieces and had silver-seamed rockshards blown through their chests.
Thought of India prompted him to look up from the paper, to the black-rimmed photograph of Pamela on the mantel. She was smiling in the Indian sun in her white muslin dress, belly full of baby, a moment snatched from passing time.
‘Miss Penelope,’ Bairstow announced.
Beauregard stood up and greeted his fiancée. Penelope swept into the parlour, detaching her hat from her curls, carefully flicking some invisible speck from the stuffed bird perched on the brim. She wore something with ballooning sleeves and a tight shirtwaist.
‘Charles, you’re still in your dressing gown, and it is practically three o’clock in the afternoon.’
She kissed his cheek, tutting that his face couldn’t have felt a razor in recent hours. He called for more coffee. Penelope sat beside him at the table, and set her hat like an offering on the papers, absent-mindedly trimming them into an orderly pile. The stuffed bird looked startled to find itself wired in such a position.
‘I’m not even sure it’s proper for you to receive me in such a state,’ she said. ‘We’re not married yet.’
‘My dear, you gave me little time to consider propriety.’
She humphed in the back of her mouth, but did not endeavour to move her face. Sometimes, she affected expressionlessness.
‘How was the Criterion?’
‘Delightful,’ she said, obviously not meaning it. The Churchward mouth turned down at the corners, a smile becoming a threat in an instant.
‘You are angry with me?’
‘I think I have a right to be, dear-heart,’ she said, with a moue of reasonableness. ‘Last night was fixed some weeks ahead. You knew it was to be important.’
‘My duties...’
‘I wished to show you off before our friends, before society. Instead, I was humiliated.’
‘I hardly think Florence or Art would allow that.’
Bairstow returned and left the coffee things – a ceramic pot rather than silver – on the table. Penelope poured herself a cupful, then tipped in milk and sugar, not pausing in her critique of his behaviour.
‘Lord Godalming was charming, as usual. No, the humiliation to which I refer was inflicted by Kate’s dreadful uncle.’
‘Diarmid Reed? The newspaperman?’
Penelope nodded sharply. ‘The villain exactly. He had the nerve – in public, mind you – to suggest that you’d been seen in the company of policemen in some horrid, sordid nether region of the city.’
‘Whitechapel?’
She gulped hot coffee. ‘That’s the very place. How absurd, how cruel, how...’
‘True, I’m afraid. I thought I saw Reed. I must ask him if he has any thoughts.’