He had cause to wonder again whether he had selected a proper path, or even if the decision had been his own to take. He was the victim of a conspiracy to entrap him in the webs of femininity, orchestrated between China tea and lace doilies. The London to which he had returned in May differed vastly from that he had left three years ago. A patriotic painting hung above the manteclass="underline" Victoria, plump and young again, and her fiercely moustachioed, red-eyed consort. The unknown artist posed no threat to Whistler’s pre-eminence. Charles Beauregard served his Queen; he supposed he must also serve her husband.
The doorbell rang just as Whistler made an amusing speculation, perhaps unsuited to predominantly feminine company, regarding the long-ago annulment of his hated enemy’s marriage. Irritated at the interruption, the painter resumed his flow as Florence, herself irritated because Bessie was unavailable for the menial task, hurried off to answer her door.
Beauregard noticed Penelope sitting near the front, laughing prettily as she pretended to understand Whistler’s insinuations. Godalming stood behind her chair, wrists crossed under his evening coat in the small of his back, the sharp points of his fingers dimpling out the cloth. Arthur Holmwood was no longer the man Beauregard had known when he left England. There had been a scandal, shortly before his turning. Like Bram Stoker, Godalming had sided with the wrong lot when the Prince Consort first came to London. Now he had to prove his loyalty to the new regime.
‘Charles,’ Florence said, quietly enough not to interrupt Whistler further. ‘There is a man for you. From your club.’
She gave him a calling card. It bore the name of no individual, just the simple words. THE DIOGENES CLUB.
‘This is in the nature of a summons,’ he explained. ‘Make my apologies to Penelope.’
‘Charles...?’
He was in the hallway, Florence following close behind. He took his own cloak, hat and cane. Bessie would not be up to her duties for a while yet. He hoped, for the sake of Florence’s dignity, the maid would be available to see to the guests when the time came for their departure.
‘I’m sure Art will see Penelope home,’ he said, instantly regretting the suggestion. ‘Or Miss Reed.’
‘Is this serious? I’m sure you don’t have to leave so soon...’
The messenger, a close-mouthed fellow, waited out in the street, a carriage at the kerb beside him.
‘My time is not always my own, Florence.’ He kissed her hand. ‘I thank you for your courtesy and kindness.’
He left the Stoker house, stepped across the pavement, and climbed up into the carriage. The messenger, who had been holding the nearside door open, joined him. The driver knew their intended destination, and immediately set off. Beauregard saw Florence closing her door against the cold. The fog thickened and he looked away from the house, settling in to the steady motion of the carriage. The messenger said nothing. Although a summons from the Diogenes Club could mean no good news, Beauregard was relieved to be out of Florence’s parlour and away from the company.
4
COMMERCIAL STREET BLUES
At Commercial Street Police Station, Lestrade introduced her to Frederick Abberline. At the sufferance of Assistant Commissioner Dr Robert Anderson and Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, Inspector Abberline had charge of the continuing investigation. Having pursued the Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman cases with his customary tenacity but without notable results, the warm detective was now saddled with Lulu Schön, and any yet to come.
‘If I can help in any way,’ Geneviève offered.
‘Listen to her, Fred,’ Lestrade said, ‘she’s wise to the ways.’
Abberline, obviously unimpressed, knew it was politic to be polite. Like Geneviève, he could not see why Lestrade wanted her dogging the case.
‘Think of her as an expert,’ Lestrade said. ‘She knows vampires. And this case comes down to vampires.’
The inspector waved the offer aside, but one of the several sergeants in the room – William Thick, whom they called ‘Johnny Upright’ – nodded agreement. He had interviewed Geneviève after the first murder, and seemed as fair and smart as his reputation would have him, even if his taste in suits did run to lamentable checks.
‘Silver Knife is definitely a vampire-slayer,’ Thick put in. ‘Not some rip-merchant killing to cover theft.’
‘We don’t know that,’ Abberline snapped, ‘and I don’t want to read it in the Police Gazette.’
Thick kept quiet, satisfied that he was right. In their interview, the sergeant admitted his personal belief was that Silver Knife imagined he had been wronged – or, more likely, actually had been wronged – by Vlad Tepes’s get. Geneviève, expert enough to know the capabilities of her kind, agreed, but knew the description fit so many in London that it would be fruitless to extrapolate a list of suspects from the theory.
‘I believe Sergeant Thick is right,’ she told the policemen.
Lestrade assented, but Abberline turned away to give an order to his own pet sergeant, George Godley. Geneviève smiled at Thick and saw him shiver. Like most of the warm, he knew even less about bloodline, about the infinite varieties and gradations of vampire, than the Prince Consort’s glut of new-borns. Thick looked at her and saw a vampire... just like the bloodsucker who had turned his daughter, violated his wife, taken his promotion, killed his friend. She didn’t know his history but supposed his theory formed by personal experience, that he guessed the murderer’s motive because he could understand it.
Abberline had spent the day interrogating the constables who were first at the scene of the murder, then going over the ground himself. He had not immediately discovered anything of any relevance and was even holding off on committing to a statement that Schön was indeed another victim of the so-called Whitechapel Murderer. On the short walk from Toynbee Hall, they had heard newsboys shouting about Silver Knife; but the official flannel was that only Chapman and Nichols were demonstrably dead by the same hand. Various other unsolved cases – Schön now joining Tabram, Smith and sundry others – linked in the press could conceivably be entirely separate crimes. Silver Knife hardly held the patent on homicide, even in the immediate locality.
Lestrade and Abberline went off to have a huddle. Abberline – without realising it? – elaborately came up with other things to do with his hands whenever the possibility of pressing flesh with a vampire was raised. He lit a pipe and listened as Lestrade ticked off points on his fingers. A jurisdictional dispute was in the offing between Abberline, head of H Division CID, and Lestrade. The Scotland Yard interloper was assumed to be one of Dr Anderson’s spies, dispatched by Swanson to check up on the detectives in the field, ready to swoop in whenever glory was to be claimed but anonymous if results were lacking. Anderson, Swanson and Lestrade were the Irishman, the Scotsman and the Englishman of the music hall stories, and had been pictured as such by Weedon Grossmith in Punch, traipsing over a murder site and obliterating clues to the annoyance of a local copper who somewhat resembled Fred Abberline. Geneviève wondered if she, hardly the epitome of the French girl from the same stories, fitted into the scheme. Did Lestrade intend her for a lever?
She looked about the already busy reception room. The doors pushed open constantly, admitting foggy draughts, and banged shut. Outside were several groups of interested parties. A Salvation Army band, flying the Cross of St George, supported a Christian Crusade preacher who called down God’s Justice on vampirekind, upholding Silver Knife as a true instrument of the Will of Christ. The Speakers’ Corner Torquemada was heckled by a few professional insurrectionists, ragged-trousered longhairs of various socialist or Republican stripes, and ridiculed by a knot of painted vampire women, who offered expensive kisses and a quick turning. Many new-borns paid to become some street tart’s get, purchasing immortality for as little as a shilling.