Geneviève did.
‘Vampires are potentially immortal. But they are fragile immortals. Something inside drives them to self-destruction.’
‘It’s the shape-shifters,’ Moreau said. ‘They are evolution run backwards, an atavism. Mankind stands atop of the parabola of life on earth; the vampire represents the step over the prow, the first footfall on the path of regression to savagery.’
‘Dr Moreau,’ she said, ‘if I understand you, I might be offended.’
Jekyll cut in, ‘ah, but Miss Dieudonné, you should not be. You are the most interesting case imaginable. By your continued existence, you demonstrate that vampires need not be retrograde steps on the evolutionary ladder. I should like to examine you properly. It is conceivable that you could be humanity perfected.’
‘I do not feel like anyone’s ideal.’
‘Nor will you until you have a perfect world about you. If we could determine the factors that differentiate an elder from a new-born, we might eliminate much wastage of life.’
‘New-borns are like young turtles,’ Moreau said. ‘Hundreds hatch, but only a few crawl from sand to sea without being picked off by sea-birds.’
Charles was listening intently, allowing her to quiz the scientists. She wished she knew what he wanted to learn from them.
‘Without wanting to contradict the pleasing suggestion that I might be the culmination of a divine scheme, surely general scientific opinion is that vampires do not constitute a separate species of humanity but rather are a parasitical outgrowth of our family tree, existing only by virtue of sustenance stolen from our warm cousins?’
Jekyll looked almost angry beneath his mildness. ‘I find it disappointing that you entertain such outdated notions.’
‘I merely entertain them, doctor. I should not ask them to move into my house.’
‘She’s just drawing an argument out of you, Harry,’ Moreau explained.
‘Of course, forgive me. To answer simply: vampires are no more parasites for feeding off the blood of human beings than human beings are parasites for feeding off the flesh of beef cattle.’
Geneviève’s red thirst tickled the back of her throat. She had slept the last few days away, and must feed soon or grow weak.
‘Some of us call you “cattle”. This dusty gentleman here was known to employ the term.’
‘It is understandable.’
‘Vardalek was an arrogant Carpathian swine, doctor. I assure you I hold the warm in no such contempt.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ put in Charles.
‘Neither of you have chosen to seek the Dark Kiss?’ she said. ‘Surely, in the name of research, that would be a logical step.’
Jekyll shook his head. ‘We wish to study the phenomenon at greater length. The vampire condition may be a cure for death, but in nine out of ten cases it is also a deadly poison.’
‘Considering the vital import of the field, it has been shockingly neglected,’ Moreau said. ‘Dom Augustin Calmet is still cited as the standard reference...’
Calmet was the author of A Treatise on the Vampires of Hungary and the Surrounding Regions, first published in 1746, a collection of half-confirmed incidents and roughly embroidered folk tales.
‘Even the late and ill-remembered Professor Van Helsing was at bottom a follower of Calmet,’ Jekyll said.
‘You gentlemen wish to be the Galileo and Newton of the study of vampirism?’
‘Reputation is not important,’ Moreau said. ‘Any buffoon can buy one. Look at the Royal Society, and recognise them, warm or un-dead, for a pack of bald-pate baboons. In science, proof is vital. And soon we shall have proof.’
‘Proof of what?’
‘Of the human potential for perfection, Miss Dieudonné,’ said Jekyll. ‘You are well-named. You might indeed be God-given. If we could all be as you...’
‘If we were all vampires, upon whom would vampires feed?’
‘Why, we would import Africans or South Sea Islanders,’ Moreau said, as if pointing out to a dunderhead that the sky was blue. ‘Or raise lesser beasts to human form. If vampires can shift their shapes, so can other creatures.’
‘There are African vampires, Dr Moreau. Prince Mamuwalde is much respected. Even in the South Seas, I have kin and kind...’
Geneviève saw an unhealthy light behind Jekyll’s eyes. Its twin could be observed in the eager look of Moreau: the lust of Prometheus, the desire for a consuming flame of knowledge.
‘What a cold, dark, silence perfection would be,’ Geneviève said. ‘I imagine an ultimate universal improvement would be something very like death.’
28
PAMELA
‘I seem suddenly to have developed a warm, almost affectionate, feeling for Dom Augustin Calmet,’ Geneviève said. Beauregard was amused.
In the cab on the way back to Whitechapel, she was close beside him. Clayton, engaged for the night, knew where they were going. After his unexpected trip to Limehouse, Beauregard was happy to be driven about London by someone he knew to be in the employ of the Diogenes Club.
‘Many brilliant men struck their contemporaries as mad.’
‘I don’t have any contemporaries,’ she said. ‘Except Vlad Tepes, and I’ve never met him.’
‘You follow my reasoning, though?’
Geneviève’s eyes flashed. ‘Of course Charles...’
She had the habit of using his Christian name. In another that might be unseemly, but it was absurd to insist on arbitrary rules of address with a woman old enough to be his ten-times great grandmother.
‘It is possible the murders are experiments,’ she continued. ‘Dr Knox needed dead bodies, and wasn’t too scrupulous where he got them; Dr Jekyll and Dr Moreau need un-dead bodies, and could quite conceivably not be above harvesting them from the streets of Whitechapel.’
‘Moreau was mixed up in a vivisection scandal a few years ago. Something particularly revolting involving a skinned dog.’
‘I can believe it. Inside his white coat, he’s a cave-dweller.’
‘And he is a man of some strength. Expert with the bullwhip, they say. He’s knocked about the world a great deal.’
‘But you don’t think he’s our murderer?’
Beauregard was mildly surprised to be so anticipated. ‘I do not. For one thing, he is reckoned a surgeon of genius.’
‘And Jack the Ripper knows his way about the insides of a body, but trawls through entrails with the finesse of a drunken pork butcher.’
‘Exactly.’
He was used to having to explain his reasoning. It was refreshing, if not a little alarming, to be with someone who could keep up with him.
‘Could he deliberately botch the job to throw off suspicion?’ she asked, then answering herself, ‘No, if Moreau were stark mad enough to murder for an experiment, he wouldn’t jeopardise his findings with intentional carelessness. If he were our Ripper, he’d abduct the victims and remove them to a private place where he could operate at his leisure.’
‘The girls were all killed where they were found.’
‘And swiftly, in a frenzy. No “scientific method”.’
The vampire bit her lip, and was for an instant the image of a serious sixteen-year-old in a dress made for an older and more frivolous sister. Then the ancient mind was back.
‘So Dr Jekyll is your suspect?’
‘He is a biological chemist, not an anatomist. I’m not at all up on the field, but I’ve been wrestling with his articles. He has some odd ideas. “On the Composition of Vampire Tissue” was his last piece.’
Geneviève considered the possibilities. ‘It’s hard to imagine, though. Next to Moreau, he seems so... so harmless. He reminds me of a clergyman. And he is old. I can’t picture him dashing about the streets by night, much less possessing the sheer strength the Ripper must have.’