‘That will be all,’ Godalming told the guard as he stepped into the cell. ‘I’ll call out when I’m finished.’
In the gloom, Godalming saw burning red eyes. Neither the prisoner nor he needed a lantern.
Kostaki looked up at his visitor. It was impossible to perceive an expression on his ragged face. It was not rotten, but hung on his skull like old linen, stiff and musty. Only his eyes betokened life. The Carpathian, who lay on a straw-stuffed cot, was chained. A silver band, padded with leather, circled his good ankle, and stout silver-and-iron links fixed him to a ring that was set into the stone. One of the elder’s legs lay useless, a wadding of soiled bandage about the smashed knee. The stench of spoiled meat filled the cell. Kostaki had been shot with a silver ball. The elder coughed. The poison was in his veins, spreading. He would not last.
‘I was there,’ Godalming announced. ‘I saw the supposed policeman murder Inspector Mackenzie.’
Kostaki’s red eyes did not move.
‘I know you are falsely accused. Your enemies have brought you to this filth.’ He gestured around the low-ceilinged, windowless cell. It might as well be a tomb.
‘I passed six decades in the Château d’If,’ Kostaki announced. His voice was still strong, surprisingly loud in the confined space. ‘These are by comparison quite comfortable quarters.’
‘You’ll talk to me?’
‘I have done so.’
‘Who was he? The policeman?’
Kostaki fell silent.
‘You must understand, I can help you. I have the ear of the Prime Minister.’
‘I am beyond help.’
Water seeped up between the cracks of the flagstones. Patches of green-white moss grew on the floor. There were spots of similar mould on Kostaki’s bandages.
‘No,’ Godalming told the elder, ‘the situation is very grave, but it can be reversed. If those who scheme against us can be thwarted, then there are many advantages to be won.’
‘Advantages? With you English, there are always advantages.’
Godalming was stronger than this foreign brute, sharper in his head. He could turn the situation so he emerged as sole victor. ‘If I find the policeman, I can uncover a conspiracy against the Prince Consort.’
‘The Scotsman said the same thing.’
‘Is the Diogenes Club mixed up in this?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Mackenzie mentioned them. Just before he was killed.’
‘The Scotsman kept much to himself.’
Kostaki would tell what he knew. Godalming was certain of it. He could see the gears turning in the elder’s head. He knew which levers to depress.
‘Mackenzie would wish this cleared up.’
Kostaki’s great head nodded. ‘The Scotsman led me to a house in Whitechapel. His quarry was a new-born, known as “the Sergeant” or “Danny”. At the last, his fox turned on him.’
‘This was the man who killed Mackenzie?’
Kostaki nodded, indicating his wound. ‘Aye, and the man who did this to me.’
‘Where in Whitechapel?’
‘They call the place the Old Jago.’
He had heard of it. This business kept running back to Whitechapeclass="underline" where Jack the Ripper murdered, where John Jago preached, where agents of the Diogenes Club were often seen. Tomorrow night, Godalming would venture out into Darkest London. He was confident this Sergeant was no match for the vampire Arthur Holmwood had become.
‘Keep up your pluck, old man,’ Godalming told the elder. ‘We’ll have you out of here directly.’
He withdrew from the cell and summoned the Yeoman Warder, who refastened the thick door. Through the bars, Kostaki’s red eyes winked out as he lay back on his cot.
At the end of the corridor, framed by an arch, stood a tall, hunched nosferatu in a long, shabby frock coat. His head was swollen and rodentlike with huge pointed ears and prominent front fangs. His eyes, set in black caverns that obscured his cheeks, were constantly liquid, darting here and there. Even his fellow elders found Graf Orlok, a distant family connection of the Prince Consort’s, a disquieting presence. He was a crawling reminder of how remote they all were from the warm.
Orlok scuttled down the passageway. Only his feet seemed to move. The rest of him was stiff as a waxwork. When he was close, his flamboyant eyebrows bristled like rat’s whiskers. His smell was not as strong as that in Kostaki’s cell, but it was fouler.
Godalming greeted the Governor but did not shake Orlok’s withered claw. Orlok peered into Kostaki’s cell, pressing his face close to the grille, hands against the cold stone either side of the door. The Yeoman Warder tried to edge away from his commanding officer. Orlok rarely asked questions but had a reputation for gaining answers. He turned away from the cell and looked at Godalming with active eyes.
‘He still won’t talk,’ Godalming told the nosferatu. ‘Stubborn fellow. He’ll rot here, I suppose.’
Orlok’s rat-shark-rabbit teeth scraped his lower lip, the nearest he could manage to a smile. Godalming did not envy any prisoner entrusted to the care of this creature.
The Yeoman Warder escorted him up to the main gate. The skies above the Tower were lightening. Godalming still trembled with the sustenance he had taken from Helena. He had the urge to run home, or to dive under Traitor’s Gate and swim.
‘Where are the ravens?’ he asked.
The Yeoman Warder shrugged. ‘Gone, sir. So they say.’
49
MATING HABITS OF THE COMMON VAMPIRE
His house was interesting, his books and pictures confirming her intuitions. In his library, she found a reading desk piled with volumes, many with places marked. His interests were eclectic; currently, he was absorbed by A Modern Apostle, and Other Poems by Constance Naden, After London by Richard Jefferies, The True History of the World by Lucian de Terre, Essays on the Endowment of Education by Mark Pattison, Science of Ethics by Leslie Stephen and The Unseen Universe by Peter Guthrie Tait. Among his books, Geneviève found framed photographs of Pamela, a strong-faced woman with a pre-Raphaelite cloud of hair. In pictures, Charles’s wife was always frozen in sunlight, at ease in her stillness while others in her group posed stiffly.
She found pen and ink on a stand and considered leaving a note. With the pen in her hand, she could not think of anything she needed to say. Charles would wake up and find her gone but she had no excuses to make. He knew about being bound by duty. Finally she just wrote that she would be at the Hall this evening. She assumed he’d return to Whitechapel and that he would look in on her. Then they might have to talk. After a moment, she signed the note, ‘love, Geneviève’, the accent a tiny flick above her flowing signature. Love was all very well; it was the talking about it that enervated her.
On the third attempt, Geneviève found a cabman willing to take an unescorted vampire girl from Chelsea to Whitechapel. Her destination might not be outside the Four-Mile Radius, that arbitrary circle beyond which hansom cabs were not obliged to venture, but cabbies often had to be overpaid to discharge duties which lay in that Easterly direction.
En route, lulled by the gentle trundle of the wheels and her sense of satisfied repletion, she tried not to think about Charles and the future. By now she had suffered enough involvements to guess accurately what they could expect of life together. Charles was in his middle thirties. She would stay sixteen, unchanged. In five or ten years, she would seem his daughter. In thirty or forty, he would be dead; especially if she continued to feed off him. Like many vampires, she had, with the insistent complicity of her victims, destroyed those about whom she cared deeply. An alternative would be to turn him; as his mother-in-darkness, she would nurture him into a new life, finally losing him to the wider world as all parents must lose their children.