‘By the way, who is Penny?’
Beauregard wondered what Penelope was doing exactly now. He had not seen her since their argument of a few days ago.
‘Miss Penelope Churchward, my fiancée.’
He could not read Geneviève’s expression but fancied her eyes narrowed a shade. He tried to think of nothing.
‘Fiancée? It won’t last.’
He was shocked by her effrontery.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Beauregard. But believe me, I know this. Nothing lasts.’
26
MUSINGS AND MUTILATIONS
Dr Seward’s Diary (kept in phonograph)
2 OCTOBER
I feel their hot breath on my neck. Had Beauregard not finished her, Stride would have identified me. Others must have seen me about my nightwork: between Stride and Eddowes, I ran through the streets in a panic, bloodied and with a scalpel in my fist. I came close to being caught. I’d just begun work on Stride, when a cart thundered by. The horse snorted like Hell clearing its throat. I bolted, sure the Carpathian Guards were at my heels. By some miracle, the carter never saw me. According to The Times, my ‘person from Porlock’ was Louis Diemschütz, one of the Jewish-socialist crew who congregate around the International Working Men’s Educational Club. With Eddowes, I was more fortunate. I’d calmed down enough to conduct business with her. She knew and trusted me. That helped greatly. With her, the delivery was successful.
Indeed, I think the Eddowes delivery my greatest achievement to date. At its conclusion, I was calmed. To throw my pursuers off the scent, I left a message on a wall. I walked back to the Hall, changed my clothes in good time, and was ready to meet the police when they arrived. All things considered, I carried off the unpleasantness with Stride well. Beauregard’s steady eye and silver bullet finished my work. I feel better in myself than in some months. The pain in my hand has abated. I wonder if this is not an effect of the bleeding. Since Kelly tapped me, the pain has been receding. I’ve looked Kelly up in our files, and have an address for her off Dorset Street. I must seek her out and again solicit her attentions.
There are so many fabulations about the Ripper, fuelled by silly notes to the press, that I can hide unnoticed among them, even if the occasional rumour strikes uncomfortably close. After all, my name is Jack.
Today, a patient, an uneducated immigrant named David Cohen, confessed to me that he was Jack the Ripper. I turned him over to the police and he has been removed in a strait-waistcoat to Colney Hatch. Lestrade showed me the file of similar confessions. A queue of cranks waits to claim credit for my deliveries. And somewhere out there is the letter-writer, chortling over his silly red ink and arch jokes.
‘Yours truly, Jack the Ripper’? Is the letter-writer someone I know? Does he know anything about me? No, he does not understand my mission. I am not a lunatic practical joker. I am a surgeon, cutting away diseased tissue. There is no ‘jolly wouldn’t you’ to it.
I worry about Geneviève. Other vampires have a kind of red fog in their brains, but she is different. I read a piece by Frederick Treves in The Lancet, speculating on the business of bloodline, as delicately as possible suggesting that there might be something impure about the royal strain the Prince Consort has imported. So many of Dracula’s get are twisted, self-destructing creatures, torn apart by changing bodies and uncontrollable desires. Royal blood, of course, is notoriously thin. Geneviève is sharp as a scalpel. Sometimes she knows what people are thinking. With her, I try to keep my mind on my patients, on schedules and time-tables. There are traps in any train of thought: thinking of the injuries I treat in a new-born who was run down by a carriage reminds me of the injuries I have inflicted on other new-borns. No, not injuries. Cuts. Surgical cuts. There is no malice, no hate, in what I do.
With Lucy, there was love. Here, there is only the cool of medical procedure. Van Helsing would have understood. I think of Kelly, of our bestial moments together. She is so like the Lucy that was. As I remember the feelings in my skin, my mouth dries. I become aroused. The bites Kelly made itch. The itch is pain and pleasure at once. With the itch comes a need, a complicated need. It is unlike the simple craving for morphine I have experienced when the hurt gets too much to bear. It is a need for Kelly’s kisses. But there is so much wrapped up in the need, so many thirsts.
I know what I do is right. I was right to save Lucy by cutting off her head and I have been right to deliver the others. Nichols, Chapman, Schön, Stride, Eddowes. I am right. But I shall stop. I am an alienist, and Kelly has made me turn my gaze back upon myself. Is my behaviour so different from Renfield’s, amassing tiny deaths as a miser hoards pennies? The Count made a freak of him as he has made a monster of me. And I am a monster, Jack the Ripper, Saucy Jack, Red Jack, Bloody Jack. I shall be classed with Sweeney Todd, Sawney Beane, Mrs Manning, the Face at the Window, Jonathan Wild: endlessly served up in Famous Crimes: Past and Present. Already, there are penny dreadfuls; soon, there will be music hall turns, sensational melodramas, a wax likeness in Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors. I meant to destroy a monster, not become one.
27
DR JEKYLL AND DR MOREAU
‘My dear Mlle Dieudonné,’ read the note, delivered by the estimable Ned, ‘I have a call to make in connection with our enquiries, and should like a vampire with me. Could you make yourself available this evening? A cab will be sent to Whitechapel for your use. More later. Beauregard.’
As it eventuated, the cab contained Charles Beauregard himself, freshly shaved and dressed, hat in his lap, cane at his side. He was becoming accustomed to vampire hours, she realised, sleeping by day and thriving by night. He gave the cabby an address across in the city. The hansom shifted pleasantly on its springs as it made its way out of the East End.
‘Nothing is so reassuring as the interior of a hansom cab,’ Charles declared. ‘It is a miniature fortress on wheels, a womb of comfort in the dark.’
Considering her companion’s evident inclination towards poetic thought, Geneviève was thankful she had taken care with her attire. She would not pass at the Palace, but her costume was at least not designed to radiate hostility to the male sex. She had bothered with a velvet cape and matching choker. She had spent some extra time brushing her hair, and now wore it loose about her shoulders. Jack Seward told her the arrangement was pleasing, and, denied the vain pleasures of a looking-glass, she would have to take his word.
‘You seem different this evening?’ Charles noticed.
She smiled, trying to keep her teeth from showing. ‘It’s this dress, I’m afraid. I can hardly breathe.’
‘I thought you didn’t need to breathe.’
‘That’s a common fallacy. Somehow, those who know nothing are able to maintain entirely irreconcilable beliefs. On the one hand, vampires can be detected because they do not breathe. On the other, vampires have the rankest breath imaginable.’
‘You are right, of course. That had never occurred to me.’
‘We are natural beings, like any others,’ she explained. ‘There’s no magic.’
‘What about the business with mirrors?’
That was the thing they always came down to, the business with mirrors. No one had an explanation for that.
‘Maybe a little magic,’ she said, holding her thumb and forefinger nearly together. ‘Just a touch.’
Charles smiled, a thing he did rarely. It improved his looks. There was something closed in the back of Charles Beauregard’s mind. She could not truly read thoughts, but she was sensitive. Charles was intent on keeping his mind private. Not a trick that came naturally; his life in the service of the Diogenes Club must have taught it him. Her impression was that this courteous gentleman was an old hand at keeping secrets.