Her tongue felt sleep-filmed teeth. The aftertang of her own blood was in her mouth, disgusting and mildly exciting.
In her dreams, the pounding was a mallet striking the end of a snapped-in-half quarterstaff. The English captain finished her father-in-darkness like a butterfly, pinning Chandagnac to the bloodied earth. One of the less memorable skirmishes of the Hundred Years’ War. Barbarous times she had hoped deservedly dead.
The hammering continued. She opened her eyes and tried to focus on the grubby glass of the skylight. The sun was not yet quite down. Dreams washed away in an instant and she was awake, as if a gallon of icy water were dashed into her face.
The hammering paused. ‘Mademoiselle Dieudonné,’ someone shouted. It was not the director – usually responsible for urgent calls that dragged her from sleep – but she recognised the voice. ‘Open up. Scotland Yard.’
She sat, sheet falling away. She slept on the floor in her underclothes, on a blanket laid over the rough planks.
‘There’s been another Silver Knife murder.’
She had been resting in her tiny office at Toynbee Hall. It was as safe a place as any to pass the few days each month when lassitude overcame her and she shared the sleep of the dead. Up high in the building, the room had only a tiny skylight and the door could be secured from the inside. It served, as coffins and crypts served for those of the Prince Consort’s bloodline.
She gave a placatory grunt and the hammering was not resumed. She cleared her throat. Her body, unused for days, creaked as she stretched. A cloud obscured the sun and the pain momentarily eased. She stood up in the dark and ran her hands over her hair. The cloud passed and her strength ebbed.
‘Mademoiselle?’
The hammering started again. The young were always impatient. She had once been the same.
She took a Chinese silk robe from a hook and drew it about herself. Not the dress etiquette recommended to entertain a gentleman caller, but it would have to do. Etiquette, so important a few short years ago, meant less and less. They were sleeping in earth-lined coffins in Mayfair, and hunting in packs on Pall Mall. This season, the correct form of address for an archbishop was hardly of major concern to anyone.
As she slid back the bolt, traces of her sleep-fog persisted. Outside the afternoon was dying; she would not be at her best until night was about her again. She pulled open her door. A stocky new-born stood in the corridor, long coat around him like a cloak, bowler hat shifting from hand to hand.
‘Surely, Lestrade, you are not of the kind that needs to be invited into any new dwelling?’ Geneviève enquired. ‘That would be very inconvenient for a man in your profession. Well, come in, come in...’
She admitted the Scotland Yard man. Jagged teeth stuck from his mouth, unconcealed by a half-grown moustache. When warm, he had been rat-faced; the sparse whiskers completed the resemblance. His ears were shifting, becoming high and pointed. Like most new-borns of the bloodline of the Prince Consort, he had not yet found his final form. He wore smoked glasses but crimson points behind the lenses suggested active eyes.
He set his hat down upon her desk.
‘Last night,’ he began, hurriedly, ‘in Chicksand Street. It was butchery.’
‘Last night?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he drew breath, making an allowance for her spell of rest. ‘It’s the seventeenth now. Of September.’
‘I’ve been asleep three days.’
Geneviève opened her wardrobe and considered the few clothes hanging inside. She hardly had costume for every occasion. It was unlikely, all considered, that she would in the near future be invited to a reception at the Palace. Her only remaining jewellery was her father’s tiny crucifix, and she rarely wore that for fear of upsetting some sensitive new-born with silly ideas.
‘I deemed it best to rouse you. Everyone is jittery. Feelings are running high.’
‘You were quite right,’ she said. She rubbed sleep-gum from her eyes. Even the last shards of sunlight, filtered through a grimy square of glass, were icicles jammed into her forehead.
‘When the sun is down,’ Lestrade was saying, ‘there’ll be pandemonium. It could be another Bloody Sunday. Some say Van Helsing has returned.’
‘The Prince Consort would love that.’
Lestrade shook his head. ‘It’s merely a rumour. Van Helsing is dead. His head remains on its spike.’
‘You’ve checked?’
‘The Palace is always under guard. The Prince Consort has his Carpathians about him. Our kind cannot be too careful. We have many enemies.’
‘Our kind?’
‘The un-dead.’
Geneviève almost laughed. ‘I am not your kind, Inspector. You are of the bloodline of Vlad Tepes, I am of the bloodline of Chandagnac. We are at best cousins.’
The detective shrugged and snorted at the same time. Bloodline meant little to the vampires of London, Geneviève knew. Even at a third, a tenth or a twentieth remove, they all had Vlad Tepes as father-in-darkness.
‘Who?’ she asked.
‘A new-born named Schön. Lulu. Common prostitute, like the others.’
‘This is... what, the fourth?’
‘No one is sure. The sensation press have exhumed every unsolved East End killing of the past thirty years to lay at the door of the Whitechapel Murderer.’
‘How many are the police certain of?’
Lestrade snorted. ‘We’ll not even be certain of Schön until the inquest, although I’ll stake my pension on her. I’ve come direct from the mortuary. The trade marks are unmistakable. Otherwise, Annie Chapman last week and Polly Nichols the week before. Opinions differ on a couple of others. Emma Smith, Martha Tabram.’
‘What do you think?’
Lestrade nibbled his lip. ‘Just the three. At least, the three we know of. Smith was set upon, robbed and impaled by roughs from the Jago. Violated, too. Typical rip-mob assault, nothing like our man’s work. And Tabram was warm. Silver Knife is only interested in us. In vampires.’
Geneviève understood.
‘This man hates,’ Lestrade continued, ‘hates with a passion. The murders must be committed in a frenzy, yet there’s a coolness to them. He kills out on the street in broad darkness. He doesn’t just butcher, he dissects. And vampires aren’t easy to kill. Our man is not a simple lunatic. He has a reason.’
Lestrade took the crimes personally. The Whitechapel Murderer cut deep. New-borns were jerked this way and that by misunderstanding, cringing from the crucifix because of a folk tale they half-knew.
‘Has the news travelled?’
‘Fast,’ the detective told her. ‘The evening editions carry the story. It’ll be all over London by now. There are those among the warm who do not love us, Mademoiselle. They’re rejoicing. When the new-borns come out, there could be a panic. I’ve suggested troops, but Warren is leery. After that business last year...’
She remembered. Alarmed in the aftermath of the Royal Wedding by increased public disorder, Sir Charles Warren, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, had issued an edict against political meetings in Trafalgar Square. In defiance, warm insurrectionists, preaching against the Crown and the new government, gathered one November afternoon. William Morris and H.M. Hyndman of the Socialist Democratic Federation, with the support of Robert Cunningham-Grahame, the radical Member of Parliament, and Annie Besant, of the National Secular Society, argued for the declaration of a Republic. There was fierce, indeed violent, debate. Geneviève observed from the steps of the National Gallery. She was not the only vampire to consider aligning with the putative Republic. You did not have to be warm to take Vlad Tepes for a monster. Eleanor Marx, herself a new-born, and authoress with Dr Edward Aveling of The Vampire Question, made an impassioned speech calling for the abdication of Queen Victoria and the expulsion of the Prince Consort.