I am learning from Kelly. Learning about myself. She tells me sweetly, as we lie on her bed, that she has gone off the game, that she is not seeing other men. I know she lies but do not make an issue of it. I open her pink flesh up and vent myself inside her and she gently taps my blood, her teeth sliding into me. I have scars on my body, scars that itch like the wound Renfield gave me in Purfleet. I am determined not to turn, not to grow weak.
Money is unimportant. Kelly can have whatever I have left from my income. Since I came to Toynbee Hall, I’ve been drawing no salary and heavily subsidising the purchase of medical supplies and other necessaries. There has always been money in my family. No title, but always money.
I have made Kelly tell me about Lucy. The story, I am no longer ashamed to realise, excites me. I cannot care for Kelly as herself, so I must care for her for Lucy’s sake. Kelly’s voice changes, the Irish-Welsh lilt and oddly prissy grammar fade, and Lucy, far more careless about what she said and how she said it than her harlot get, seems to speak. The Lucy I remember is smug and prim and properly flirtatious. Somewhere between that befuddling but enchanting girl and the screaming leech whose head I sawed free was the newborn who turned Kelly. Dracula’s get. With each retelling of the nocturnal encounter on the Heath, Kelly adds new details. She either remembers more or invents them for my sake. I am not sure I care which. Sometimes, Lucy’s advances to Kelly are tender, seductive, mysterious, heated caresses before the Dark Kiss. At others, they are a brutal rape, needle-teeth shredding flesh and muscle. We illustrate with our bodies Kelly’s stories.
I no longer remember the faces of the dead women. There is only Kelly’s face, and that becomes more like Lucy with each passing night. I have bought Kelly clothes similar to those Lucy wore. The nightgown she wears before we couple is very like the shroud in which Lucy was buried. Kelly styles her hair like Lucy’s now. Soon, I hesitate to hope, Kelly will be Lucy.
40
THE RETURN OF THE HANSOM CAB
‘It’s been nearly a month, Charles,’ Geneviève ventured, ‘since the “double event”. Perhaps it’s over?’
Beauregard shook his head. Her comment had jolted him from his thoughts. Penelope was much on his mind.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Good things come to an end, bad things have to be stopped.’
‘You’re right, of course.’
It was after dark and they were in the Ten Bells. He was as familiar with Whitechapel as he had become with the other territories to which the Diogenes Club had dispatched him. He spent his days fitfully asleep in Chelsea; his nights in the East End, with Geneviève, hunting Jack the Ripper. And not catching him.
Everyone was starting to relax. The vigilante groups who roamed the streets two weeks ago, making mischief and abusing innocents, still wore their sashes and carried coshes, but they spent more time in pubs than in the fog. After a month of double- and triple-shifts, policemen were gradually being redistributed back to regular duties. It was not as if the Ripper did anything to reduce crime elsewhere in the city. Indeed, there had practically been open revolt within sight of Buckingham Palace.
Last night someone had dashed a tankard of pig’s blood at the portrait of the Royal Family which hung behind the bar. Woodbridge, the landlord, had tossed the unpatriotic drunk out, but stains remained on the wall and the picture. The Prince Consort’s face was distorted crimson.
There had been more trouble from the Crusade. With Jago in prison and most of his followers either under arrest or driven underground, Scotland Yard had assumed the movement would wither and die, but it was proving as stubborn as the original Christian martyrs. Thin red crosses were painted all over the city, invoking not simply Christ but also England. Beauregard heard whispers that the ravens had left the Tower of London the evening Graf Orlok took office, and the kingdom was considered fallen. If ever the country had an hour of direst need, this might well be considered it. There was a minor Arthurian revival, encouraged rather than suppressed by the Government’s disapproval. The insurrectionists, hitherto exclusively of the socialist, anarchist or protestant persuasions, now numbered sundry British mystics and pagans among their ranks. Lord Ruthven had banned Tennyson, especially the Idylls of the King, and such formerly innocuous items as Bulwer-Lytton’s King Arthur and William Morris’s The Defence of Guenevere also adorned the index of prohibited works. With each proclamation, the nineteenth century edged closer to the fifteenth. Ruthven promised new uniforms for all servants of the Crown; Beauregard suspected the designs would emerge close to livery, with policemen in scuttle-helmets and tights, emblem-bearing tabards worn over leather jerkins.
Neither Geneviève – after all, a fifteenth-century girl – nor Beauregard drank. They just watched the others. Beside the squiffy vigilantes, the pub was full of women, either genuine prostitutes or police agents in disguise. That was one of several daft schemes that had gone from being laughed at to being implemented. If questioned, Abberline or Lestrade would throw up their hands and find something else to talk about. Just now, Scotland Yard’s chief embarrassment was an Inspector Mackenzie, who had been present at and unable to prevent the assassination by dynamite of one of the Carpathian Guard and had subsequently, unsurprisingly, joined the growing list of mysterious disappearances. Disapproval poured from the fountainhead of the Palace and splashed upon the Prime Minister and the Cabinet, and then, with increasing force, down on to the lower levels of society, becoming an absolute torrent on the streets of Whitechapel.
There had been no sign of Geneviève’s Chinese elder, so at least the rattling Beauregard had given the Devil Doctor’s web had yielded a result. His assumption was that anything evil and oriental worked for the Lord of Strange Deaths. That was one of his few successes in this business, but he could scarcely be proud of it. He did not care to owe a favour to the Limehouse Ring above and beyond the connection already made with them.
In the ruling cabal of the Diogenes Club, there was talk of outright rebellion in India and the East. A reporter for the Civil and Military Gazette had tried to assassinate the Governor-General. Varney was as popular as Caligula with the indigenous population and his own troops and civil service. Many in her realm ceased to recognise the Queen as their rightful ruler, if only because they sensed that since her rebirth she had not truly worn the crown. Each week, more ambassadors withdrew from the Court of St James. The Turks, whose memories were longer than anyone had expected, clamoured for reparations from Vlad Tepes, with regard to crimes of war committed in the Prince Consort’s warm life.
Beauregard tried to look at Geneviève without her noticing, without her penetrating his thoughts. In the light, she looked absurdly young. Would Penelope – whose skin was still baked, and who had to be fed like a baby with drips of goat blood – ever again be as fresh? Even if, as Dr Ravna assured him would be the case, she made a complete recovery, would she be her old self? Penelope was a vampire now and he did not recognise the mind that could be glimpsed in her occasional coherent moments. He had to be guarded with Geneviève too. It was hard to keep his thoughts in rein and impossible fully to trust any vampire.
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘He’s still out there. He hasn’t given up.’
‘Perhaps the Ripper’s taken a holiday?’
‘Or been distracted.’