Trailing around with her true father, she had learned, even in her short lifetime, to attend the dying. Her father, the physician, tried to save men their commanders would as soon have buried half-alive to get out of the way. The battlefield stink was in this room now, flesh gone rotten. She remembered the Latin droning of the priests and wondered whether Lily had any religion. She had not thought to call a pastor to the deathbed.
The nearest clergyman must be John Jago and the Christian Crusader would not consent to attend a vampire of any stripe. There was Reverend Samuel Barnett, Rector of St Jude’s and founder-patron of Toynbee Hall, a tireless committee-member and social reformer, agitating for the cleaning-out of the vice dens of the ‘wicked quarter-mile’. She remembered him spluttering red-faced with fury when preaching against the practice of women stripping to the waist to fight each other. Barnett, even without the unreasoning prejudice of Jago, disapproved of Geneviève and was openly suspicious of her motives for joining the East End Settlement Movement. She did not blame the Warriors of God for their distrust of her. Centuries before Huxley coined the term, she had been an agnostic. When Dr Seward had interviewed her for this position, he had asked: ‘you’re not Temperance, you’re not Church, what are you?’ ‘Guilty,’ she had thought.
She sang the songs of her long-ago childhood. She did not know if Lily could hear. The waxy red discharge from her ears suggested she might be deaf as well as blind. Still, the sound – maybe the vibrations in the air, or the scent of her breath – soothed the patient.
‘Toujours gai,’ Geneviève sang, voice breaking, hot bloody tears welling, ‘toujours gai...’
Lily’s throat swelled up like a toad’s and brackish blood, brown streaks in the scarlet, gulped out of her mouth. Geneviève pressed the swelling down, holding breath still in her nostrils to fend off the taste and smell of death. She pressed urgently, song and memory and prayer babbled together in her mind, leaking out of her mouth. Knowing she would lose, she fought. She had defied death for centuries; now the great darkness took its revenge. How many of Lily had died before their time to compensate for the long life of Geneviève Dieudonné?
‘Lily, my love,’ she incanted, ‘my child, Lily, my dearest darling, my Lily, my Lily...’
The child’s boiled eyes burst open. One milky pupil shrunk minutely, reacting to the light. Through the pain, there was something close to a smile.
‘Ma-ma,’ she said, first and last word. ‘Mma...’
Rose Mylett or whoever was the child’s human mother, was not here. The sailor or market porter who spent his fourpence to become her father probably didn’t even know she had lived. And the murgatroyd from the West End – whom Geneviève would track down and hurt – was passed on to other pleasures. Only Geneviève was here.
Lily shook in a fit. Drops of sweated blood stood out all over her face.
‘Mma...’
‘It’s mother, child,’ Geneviève said. She had no children and no get. A virgin when turned, she had never passed on the Dark Kiss. But she was more this child’s mother than warm Rosie, more her parent-in-darkness than the murgatroyd...
‘It’s mama, Lily. Mama loves you. You’re safe and warm...’
She took Lily from her cot, and hugged her close, hugged her tight. Bones moved inside the girl’s thin chest. Geneviève held Lily’s tiny, fragile head against her bosom.
‘Here...’
Pulling her chemise apart, Geneviève thumbnail-sliced a thin cut on her breast, wincing as her blood seeped.
‘Drink, my child, drink...’
Geneviève’s blood, of the pure bloodline of Chandagnac, might heal Lily, might wash out the taint of Dracula’s grave-mould, might make her whole again...
Might, might, might.
She held Lily’s head to her breast, guiding the girl’s mouth to the wound. It hurt as if her heart were pierced by a silver ice needle. To love was to hurt. Her blood, bright scarlet, was on Lily’s lips.
‘I love you, little yellow bird...’ Geneviève sang.
In the back of her throat, Lily made a throttling sound.
‘Goodbye, little yellow bird, I’d rather brave the cold...’
Lily’s head fell away from Geneviève’s breast. Her face was smeared with blood.
‘... on a leafless tree...’
The child’s wing flapped once, a convulsive jerking-out that unbalanced Geneviève.
‘... than a prisoner be...’
She could see the gaslight glowing like a blue moon through the thin membrane of the wing, outlining a tracery of disconnected veins.
‘... in a cage... of... gold.’
Lily was dead. With a spasm of heart-sickness, Geneviève dropped the bundled corpse on the cot and howled. Her front was soaked with her own useless blood. Her damp hair was stuck to her face, her eyes gummed with clotted blood-tears. She wished she did believe in God, so she could curse Him.
Suddenly cold, she stood away. She rubbed the obstruction from her eyes and wiped back her hair. There was a basin of water on a stand. She washed her face clean, looking at the clean grain of the wooden frame which had once held a looking-glass. Turning from the basin, she realised there were people in the room. She must have made enough commotion to excite considerable alarm.
Arthur Morrison stood by the open door with Amworth behind him. There were others outside in the hall. People from outside, from the streets, nosferatu and warm alike. Morrison’s face was dumbstruck. She knew she must be hideous. In anger, her face changed.
‘We thought you should know, Geneviève,’ Morrison said. ‘There’s been another murder. Another new-born.’
‘In Dutfield’s Yard,’ said someone with the hot news, ‘off Berner Street.’
‘Lizzie Stride, ’er as only turned last week. Teeth not yet through. Tall gel, rorty-like.’
‘Cut ’er froat, didn’t ’e?’
‘Long Liz.’
‘Stride. Gustafsdotter. Elizabeth.’
‘Ear to ear. Thwick!’
‘She put up a barney, though. Sloshed ’im one.’
‘Ripper was disturbed ’fore ’e could finish ’is job.’
‘Some bloke with an ’orse.’
‘Ripper?’
‘Louis Diemschütz, one o’ them socialisticals...’
‘Jack the Ripper.’
‘Louis was passin’ by. Must of been the moment Jack was a-rippin’ Lizzie’s throat. Must of seen ’is rotten face. Must of.’
‘Calls ’isself Jack the Ripper now. Silver Knife is gone and done.’
‘Where’s Druitt?’
‘Damn bleedin’ busybodies, them socialisticals. Always pokin’ into a bloke’s business.’
‘Haven’t seen the blighter all evening, miss.’
‘Speakin’ agin the Queen. And them’s all Jews, y’know. Can’t trust an Ikey.’
‘Bet ’e’s an ’ook-nose. Jus’ bet ’e is.’
‘Ripper’s still on the streets, ’e is. The coppers is givin’ chase. By sun-up, they’ll have ’is carcass.’
‘If ’e’s ’uman.’
23
HEADLESS CHICKENS
It was as if the city were on fire!
Beauregard was at the Café de Paris when the cry went up. With Kate Reed and several other reporters, he ran to the police station. The street was full of people running and shouting. A masked lout, a dozen assorted crucifixes strung about his neck, drunkenly smashed windows, yelling that the Judgement of God was at hand, that vampires were Demons of the Pit.