The murgatroyds fell silent for a moment. Beauregard knew there would be trouble. There were two mounted policemen in the street, but no one else with any authority. Warm people had flooded from somewhere. He could not move of his own accord, but found himself swept along with the march. Jago preached his usual hate and hellfire and Beauregard was pushed along beside his carriage. They swept down Marlborough Street towards the park. Once in the open, he could escape the crusaders.
One of the murgatroyds, a pale adonis with black ribbons in his golden hair, picked a handful of horse-dung from the gutter and flung it, with a degree of accuracy that betokened no little skill as a bowler, at the preacher. The ball exploded against Jago’s face, browning him like a fakir. For an instant, between the notes of the marching hymn, the crowd was as frozen as a photograph. Beauregard saw burning fury in Jago’s eyes, a mixture of triumph and dawning fear in the face of the murgatroyd.
With a cry as loud as the last trump, the marchers fell upon the murgatroyds. There were four or five of the new-borns. Dandified in their dress, effete in their gesture, spinelessly vicious, cold-hearted poseurs: they encapsulated every fault commonly considered to epitomise the vampire. Beauregard felt himself thumped in the back by people struggling towards the scrum. Jago still preached, inciting the wrath of the righteous.
There was blood in the street. Pushed down to his knees, he knew that if he fell underfoot he would be trampled. To have survived so much in so many quarters of the globe only to be killed by an anonymous London crowd...
A strong hand took his arm and hauled him upright. His saviour was Dravot, the vampire from the Diogenes Club. He said nothing.
‘Here’s one of them,’ shouted a red-haired man. Dravot’s hand shot out and smashed his teeth, whirling Beauregard away into the mass of people. As he punched, Dravot’s jacket fell open. Beauregard saw a pistol slung in a holster underneath his arm.
He tried to thank the sergeant. But his voice was lost in the shouting. And Dravot was gone. He took a knock on the chin from someone’s elbow. He resisted the temptation to strike out with his cane. It was important to keep his cool. He did not want more people hurt.
The crowds parted and a screaming figure, blood in his hair and on his face, burst through, tripping and falling to his knees. The murgatroyd’s coat was ripped apart. His mouth split open, teeth coming through in irregular lumps. It was the murgatroyd who had pelted Jago. Crusaders held the vampire’s shoulders and someone thrust a broken pole-end into his throat, jamming it down through his ribcage. Everyone fell back as soon as the spear was through him. From the pole fluttered half a banner: ‘Death to...’ The wooden spar missed the murgatroyd’s heart. Although hurt, he was not killed. He got a grip on the pole, and started to draw it out of himself, snarling and spitting blood.
Beauregard could see St James’s Palace across the road. People clung to the railings, climbing high to get a view. Straddling the top was Dravot, looking purposeful. Someone grabbed at his leg, but he kicked them off the perch.
The wounded murgatroyd ran through the crowd, screeching like a banshee, tossing people about like dressmaker’s dummies. Beauregard was thankful he was not in the former fop’s way. Jago shouted now, howling for blood. He sounded more like a vampire than the creatures he condemned. The preacher’s arm went up in the air, fist raised against the Palace and the white-faced creatures behind the railings. In the hub-bub, Beauregard heard the unmistakable crack of a gun going off. A red carnation appeared high up in Jago’s lapel. He fell from his carriage, caught by the crowds.
Someone had shot Jago. Looking again at the railings, Beauregard saw Dravot was gone. Jago had blood all down his front. His supporters pressed rags to the wounds in his front and back. The bullet must have passed clean through, without doing much damage.
‘I am the voice that will not be silenced,’ Jago yelled. ‘I am the cause which will not die.’
Then the crowds burst into the park and scattered, spreading out like spilled liquid towards Horse Guards Parade and Birdcage Walk. Beauregard could breathe again. Shots were fired into the air. Scuffles were all around. The sun was going down.
He did not understand what he had seen. He thought Dravot had shot Jago but he could not be sure. If the sergeant had meant to kill the crusader, Beauregard assumed John Jago would be dead, brains spilled rather than blood. The Diogenes Club did not employ butter-fingered dead-eye marksmen.
There were more vampires around. The murgatroyds had fled, replaced by hard-faced new-borns in police uniforms. A Carpathian officer charged through the rabble on a huge black horse, waving a blooded sabre. A warm woman, shoulder slashed open, ran past, holding her baby to her, head down. The crusaders were losing their momentary advantage, and would soon be routed.
He had lost sight of Jago, and of Dravot. A horse sweeping past knocked him down. When he regained his feet, he found his watch smashed. It hardly mattered. The afternoon was over, and Penelope would be waiting no longer.
‘Death to the Dead,’ someone cried.
33
THE DARK KISS
When the streets were cleared, there were surprisingly few bleeding bodies dotted about. Compared to Bloody Sunday it had been a minor skirmish. Godalming, dragged along by Sir Charles, could scarcely tell there had been a riot in St James’s Park. Inspector Mackenzie, a dour Scot, was with them, trying to keep out of the Commissioner’s way. During the hour of excitement just after nightfall, Sir Charles had been a changed person. The ground-down, persecuted bureaucrat whose foolish subordinates could not catch Jack the Ripper disappeared; he was again the military commander with lightning judgement under fire. ‘These are Englishmen and women,’ Mackenzie had muttered, ‘not bloody Hottentots.’
It appeared the Christian Crusade had held an unannounced rally, intending to present a petition to Parliament. They demanded that the taking of another’s blood without consent be considered a capital crime. Sundry vampires mixed in with the crusaders, and violence was exchanged. An unknown person had taken a shot at John Jago, who was now recuperating in a prison hospital. Several well-connected new-borns alleged that they had been assaulted by warm mobs, and a murgatroyd named Lioncourt was put out because a broken flagpole had been shoved through his best suit.
General Iorga, a commander of the Carpathian Guard, had been caught in the fighting. Now he stood with Sir Charles and Godalming, surveying the aftermath. Iorga was an elder, swanning about in his cuirass and long black cloak as if he owned the earth on which he walked. He was attended by Rupert of Hentzau, a young-seeming Ruritanian blood who thought a good deal of his gold-braided uniform and seemed as skilled at toadying as he was reputed to be with his rapier.
Sir Charles smiled grimly to himself as he handed out compliments to the men he thought of as his troops.
‘We have won a significant victory here,’ he told Godalming and Iorga. ‘With no loss of life, we have routed the enemy.’
It had all blown up and dissipated so suddenly there had been no opportunity for the incident to develop. Iorga had ridden around doing damage but Hentzau and his comrades had not arrived on the scene in time to turn a scuffle into a massacre.
‘The ringleaders must be found and impaled,’ Iorga said. ‘And their families.’
‘That isn’t how we do things in England,’ Sir Charles said, without thinking.