‘Yes, of course,’ said Geneviève. The young man looked down.
‘I think we’ve had her here,’ he said. ‘One of Booth’s cast-offs.’
Morrison’s face screwed up as he mentioned the General’s name. The Salvation Army deemed the un-dead beyond redemption, worse than other drunkards. Although warm, Morrison did not share the prejudice.
The director’s fingers drummed his desk. He looked, as usual, as if the weight of the world had just unexpectedly settled on his shoulders.
‘Can you spare me?’
‘Druitt can take your rounds if he’s back from his cricketing jaunt. And Arthur can fill in once we’ve got the lecture schedules arranged. We weren’t, ah, expecting you for a night or two yet anyway.’
‘Thank you.’
‘That’s quite all right. Keep me informed. This is a dreadful business.’
Geneviève agreed. ‘I’ll see what I can do to pacify the natives. Lestrade is expecting an uprising.’
The policeman looked shifty and embarrassed. For a moment, Geneviève felt small, teasing the new-born. She was being unfair.
‘There may be something I can actually do. Talk to some of the new-born girls. Get them to take care, see if anyone knows anything.’
‘Very well, Geneviève. Good luck. Lestrade, good evening.’
‘Dr Seward,’ said the detective, putting on his hat, ‘good night.’
3
THE AFTER-DARK
Florence Stoker daintily tinkled her little bell, not to summon the maid but to call her parlour to attention. The ornament was aluminium, not silver. The clatter of tea-taking and conversation died. The company turned to play audience to their hostess.
‘An announcement is imminent,’ Florence declared, so delighted that the lilt of Clontarf, usually rigorously suppressed, insinuated itself into her tone.
Beauregard was suddenly a prisoner in himself. With Penelope on his arm he could hardly refuse the fence, but the situation was instantly different. For some months, he had teetered on the brink of a chasm. Now, screaming inside, he plunged towards the doubtless jagged rocks.
‘Penelope, Miss Churchward,’ Beauregard began, pausing then to clear his throat, ‘has done me the honour...’
Everyone in the parlour understood at once, but he still had to get the words out. He wished for another gulp of the pale tea Florence served in exquisite bowls, in the Chinese fashion.
Penelope, impatient, finished for him. ‘We’re to be married. In the Spring, next year.’
She slipped her slim hand about his own, gripping tight. When a child, her favourite expression had been ‘but I want it now.’ His face must be flushed scarlet. This was absurd. He hardly qualified as a swooning youth. He had been married before... Before Penelope, Pamela. The other Miss Churchward, the elder. That must cause remark.
‘Charles,’ said Arthur Holmwood, Lord Godalming, ‘congratulations.’
The vampire, smiling sharply, pumped his free hand. Beauregard assumed Godalming knew how bone-crushing was his un-dead grip.
His fiancée was detached from him and surrounded by ladies. Kate Reed, by virtue of her spectacles and unruly hair the perfect Penelope’s favourite confidante, helped her sit and fanned her with admiration. She chided her friend for keeping the secret from her. Penelope, honey over salt, told Kate not to be such a drip. Kate, one of those new women, wrote articles about bicycling for Tit-Bits, being currently much excited by something called a ‘pneumatic tyre’.
Penelope was fussed over as if she had announced an illness, or an expected baby. Pamela, never far from mind when Penelope was present, had died in childbirth, her huge eyes screwed tight with pain. In Jagadhri, seven years ago. The child, a boy, had not survived his mother by a week. Beauregard did not care to remember that he had had to be dissuaded from shooting dead the fool of a station doctor.
Florence was conferring with Bessie, her one remaining maid. Mrs Stoker dispatched the dark-eyed girl on a private mission.
Whistler, the grinning American painter, elbowed aside Godalming, and playfully thumped Beauregard’s arm.
‘There’s no hope for you, Charlie,’ he said, stabbing the air in front of Beauregard’s face with a fat cigar. ‘Another good man fallen to the enemy.’
Beauregard successfully sustained a smile. He had not intended to announce his engagement to Mrs Stoker’s after-dark gathering. Since his return to London, he had been less frequently a guest at the get-togethers. Florence’s position as a hostess to the fashionable and noted remained secure, though the question of her vanished husband hovered about always. No one had the courage or the cruelty to enquire after Bram, who was rumoured to have been removed to Devil’s Dyke after an altercation with the Lord Chamberlain on a point of official censorship. Only the distinguished intervention of Henry Irving, Stoker’s employer, prevented Bram’s head from joining that of his friend Van Helsing outside the Palace. Lured by Penelope to this much-reduced gathering, Beauregard noted other absences. No vampires were present, aside from Godalming. Many of Florence’s former guests – notably Irving and his leading lady, the incomparable Ellen Terry – had turned. Presumably others did not wish to associate even with the rumour of Republican sentiments, though the hostess, who encouraged debate at her after-darks, often made mention of her lack of interest in politics. Florence – whose tireless struggle to surround herself with men far more brilliant and women marginally less pretty than herself Beauregard had to admit he found faintly irritating – entertained no question about the right of the Queen to rule, no more than she would query the right of the earth to revolve around the sun.
Bessie returned with a dusty bottle of champagne. Everyone discreetly set down their tea-bowls and saucers. Florence gave the maid a tiny key and the girl opened a cabinet, disclosing a small forest of glasses.
‘There must be a toast,’ Florence insisted, ‘to Charles and Penelope.’
Penelope was by his side again, holding fast his hand, showing him off.
The bottle was passed to Florence. She regarded it as if uncertain which end could be opened. She would normally have a butler to perform uncorking duties. Momentarily, she was lost. Godalming stepped in, moving with a quicksilver grace combining speed with apparent languor, and took the bottle. He was not the first vampire Beauregard had seen, but he was the most perceptibly changed since his turn. Most new-borns fumbled with their limitations and capabilities, but His Lordship, with the poise of generations of breeding, had adapted perfectly.
‘Allow me,’ he said, draping a napkin over his arm like a waiter.
‘Thank you, Art,’ Florence babbled, ‘I’m so feeble...’
He flashed a one-sided smile, baring a long eye-tooth, and dug a fingernail into the cork, then flipped it out of the bottleneck as if tossing a coin. Champagne gushed and Godalming filled the glasses Florence held beneath the bottle. His Lordship accepted mild applause with a handsome grin. For a dead man, Godalming practically burst with life. Every woman in the room was fixated upon the vampire. Not entirely excluding Penelope, he could not help but notice.
His fiancée did not much resemble her cousin. Except sometimes, when, catching him unaware, she would produce some phrase of Pamela’s or make a trivial gesture that exactly duplicated a mannerism of his late wife’s. Of course, there were also the Churchward mouth and those eyes. When he first married, eleven years previously, Penelope had been nine. He recollected a somewhat nasty child in a pinafore and sailor hat, deftly manipulating her family so the household revolved around her axis. He remembered sitting on the terrace with Pamela, and watching little Penny taunt the gardener’s boy to tears. His bride-to-be still had a sharp tongue sheathed in her velvet mouth.