by Kim Newman
In Whitby, Lucy was taken sick. We did not know it, but Art had in his turn been cut out. In this world of titles, a Wallachian Prince trumps an English Lord. The Count, having come ashore from the Demeter, fixed his sights on Lucy and began to make a vampire of her. No doubt the fickle girl welcomed his advances. In the course of an examination, when she was brought to London and Art called me in, I ascertained that her hymen had been ruptured. I deemed Art a swine of the first water to so pre-empt his marriage vows. Having kicked about the world with the future Lord Godalming, I’d no illusions as to his respect for the sanctity of maidenhood. Now I can find it in myself to feel sorry for the Art of those days, worried sick over his worthless girl, made as big a fool as I by the Light of the West, who would submit by night to the Beast of the East.
It is possible that Lucy truly believed that she loved Art. However, it must have been a very surface love even before the arrival of the Count. Among the letters Van Helsing compiled was Lucy’s account, gushed to Mina – who obligingly corrected the spelling in green ink – of the day upon which she supposedly received three proposals. The third was from Quincey, whom I suspect of sloshing a chaw of tobacco from side to side in his mouth in the Westenra drawing room, embarrassed by the absence of a spittoon, giving the impression of a longhorn idiot. Lucy expends much wordage crowing to Mina and, compressing the events of a week into a single day, considerably exaggerates the eventfulness of her work-free life. In fact, she is so intent upon celebrating the feat of the three proposals that she barely has space to mention, in a hurried post-script, which of her suitors she bothered to accept.
Lucy’s symptoms, now so familiar, were a complete puzzlement. The pernicious anaemia and the physical changes attendant upon her turning suggested a dozen different diseases. Her throat wounds were put down to everything from a brooch-pin to a bee-sting. I sent for my old teacher, Van Helsing of Amsterdam; he promptly hustled over to England and made a diagnosis which he proceeded to withhold. In that, he did much harm, although I concede that, a scant three years ago, we’d hardly have credited nonsense about vampires. His grave error, I now recognise, was an outmoded, almost alchemical, faith in folklore; scattering about him garlic flowers, communion wafers, crucifixes and holy water. If I had known then that vampirism was primarily a physical rather than a spiritual condition, Lucy might be un-dead still. The Count himself shared, and probably still does share, many of the Professor’s misconceptions.
Despite Van Helsing, despite blood transfusions, despite religious impedimenta, Lucy died. Everyone was dying. Art’s reprobate father finally succumbed, making his son a Lord, leaving unsquandered a surprising portion of his fortune. Lucy’s mother, shocked by a wolf in her bedroom, was carried off violet-faced by a coronary. She also, having beaten the gun in altering her will, left her property to Art; which might have proved severely embarrassing if, offended by her intercourse with the Count, he had called off the engagement.
Quite clearly, Lucy was – for a short time, at least – truly dead. Van Helsing and I both confirmed the condition. Now, much as it pains me, I have to allow it possible her death, which seems to have addled her mind more than her turning, was due not to the Count but to Van Helsing’s transfusions. The procedure is notoriously dangerous. The Lancet has run a series of articles last year about blood, a subject now of overpowering interest to the medical profession. A young specialist suggests there might be sub-categories of blood, conventional transfusion being possible only between those with similar types. It is possible that my own blood was the poison that killed her. Of course, there are among us many who can transfuse blood into themselves without thought of sub-category.
For whatever reason – and the repeated attentions of the Count can hardly have contributed to her well-being – Lucy died, and was interred in the Westenra vault in Kingstead Cemetery, near Hampstead Heath. There, she awoke in her coffin and rose as a new-born, emerging by night like a Drury Lane ghost, to seek out children to slake her newfound appetites. I understand from Geneviève that it is possible to pass from warmth to the un-dead state without an intervening period of true death. In her case, apparently, the turning was gradual. Vlad Tepes was killed, buried and – they say – beheaded, but transformed after death. Those of his bloodline tend to die before the change, although this is not true in every case. Art, for instance, has never died that I know of. It is possible the fact of death is vital in shaping the type of vampire one becomes. Everyone changes, but some change more than others. The Lucy who came back was much different from the Lucy who went away.
A week after Lucy’s death, we visited the tomb by day and examined her. She seemed asleep; I confess to thinking her more beautiful than ever. The triviality was gone; replaced by a certain cruelty of aspect, the effect was disturbingly sensual. Later, we spied, on the day she was to have been married, the new-born returning to her vault. She made advances to Art and may have bitten him slightly. I recall the red of her lips and the white of her teeth, and the strength of her slim body in its frail shroud. I remember the vampire Lucy, rather than the warm girl. She was the first such creature I had seen. Traits that are now commonplaces – the juxtaposition of apparent langour with bursts of snake-speed, the sudden elongation of teeth and nails, the characteristic hiss of the red thirst – were, taken all at once, overwhelming. Sometimes I see Lucy in Geneviève, with her quick smile and sharp eye-teeth.
On the morning of the 29th, we trapped and destroyed her. We found her in the deathlike trance that comes upon new-borns in the hours of daylight, her mouth and chin still stained. Art did the deed, driving home the stake. I surgically removed her head. Van Helsing filled the mouth with garlic. After sawing off the top of the stake, we soldered shut her lead inner-coffin and screwed fast the wooden lid. The Prince Consort had her remains exhumed and reburied in Westminster Abbey. A plaque above her grave damns Van Helsing for a murderer and, presumably thanks to Art, naming only Quincey and Harker, both safely dead, as accomplices. Van Helsing told us, ‘Now, my friends, one step of our work is done, one the most harrowing to ourselves. But there remains a greater task: to find out the author of all this our sorrow and to stamp him out.’
14
PENNY STAMPS
He awoke early in the afternoon, and went down to breakfast – kedgeree and coffee – and the day’s telegrams, which Bairstow, his man, had laid out on the parlour table. The only item of interest was an unsigned two-word telegram, ‘IGNORE PIZER’. He assumed this to mean the Limehouse Ring had good cause to believe the recently arrested shoemaker unconnected with Silver Knife. Copied police reports and personal depositions had also been delivered, by hand from the Diogenes Club. Beauregard glanced through it all, and found nothing much new.
The Gazette reported ‘the murder and mutilation of a vampire woman near Gateshead yesterday’, predicting this fresh atrocity would ‘revive in the provinces the horror which was beginning to die out in London.’ The rest was puff – reading between the lines, Beauregard suspected the new-born had been destroyed by her husband, who resisted her attempt to make vampires of their children – although the paper made the sound point that rather than believing ‘the murderous maniac of Whitechapel’ to have made his way to the North, it was more likely that ‘the Bitley murder is not a repetition, but a reflex, of the Whitechapel ones. It is one of the inevitable results of publicity to spread an epidemic. Just as the news of one suicide often leads to another, so the publication of the details of one murder often leads to their repetition in another murder. Reading of means to do ill makes ill deeds done.’ One effect of the Silver Knife scare was a definitive refutation of the popular belief that vampires could not be killed. Silver might be hard to come by, but anyone could sharpen a table-leg or walking stick and shove it through a new-born’s heart. The woman in Bitley was destroyed with a broken broom-handle.
Elsewhere in the papers there were editorials in support of the Prince Consort’s newly-published edict against ‘unnatural vice’. While th
e rest of the world advanced towards the twentieth century, Britain reverted to a medieval legal system. When warm, Vlad Tepes had so vigorously persecuted common thieves that it was reputedly possible for townships to leave gold drinking cups at public wells. His other current passion was that railways should run in accordance with their time-tables; there was a notice in The Times of the appointment of an American new-born named Jones to oversee a commission for the extensive improvement of the service. The Prince Consort had his own private engine, the Flying Carpathian, and was often depicted at the throttle in Punch, an oversize cap on his head, toot-tooting the whistle and choo-chooing the boiler.
There were rumblings of anti-vampire riots in India, and the harsh methods Sir Francis Varney was employing against the insurrectionists. While the Prince Consort still favoured the stake, Varney’s preferred method of execution was to cast offenders, warm and un-dead alike, into pits of fire. Native vampires among the mutineers were bound over the mouths of artillery pieces and had silver-seamed rockshards blown through their chests.
Thought of India prompted him to look up from the paper, to the black-rimmed photograph of Pamela on the mantel. She was smiling in the Indian sun in her white muslin dress, belly full of baby, a moment snatched from passing time.
‘Miss Penelope,’ Bairstow announced.
Beauregard stood up and greeted his fiancée. Penelope swept into the parlour, detaching her hat from her curls, carefully flicking some invisible speck from the stuffed bird perched on the brim. She wore something with ballooning sleeves and a tight shirtwaist.
‘Charles, you’re still in your dressing gown, and it is practically three o’clock in the afternoon.’
She kissed his cheek, tutting that his face couldn’t have felt a razor in recent hours. He called for more coffee. Penelope sat beside him at the table, and set her hat like an offering on the papers, absent-mindedly trimming them into an orderly pile. The stuffed bird looked startled to find itself wired in such a position.
‘I’m not even sure it’s proper for you to receive me in such a state,’ she said. ‘We’re not married yet.’
‘My dear, you gave me little time to consider propriety.’
She humphed in the back of her mouth, but did not endeavour to move her face. Sometimes, she affected expressionlessness.
‘How was the Criterion?’
‘Delightful,’ she said, obviously not meaning it. The Churchward mouth turned down at the corners, a smile becoming a threat in an instant.
‘You are angry with me?’
‘I think I have a right to be, dear-heart,’ she said, with a moue of reasonableness. ‘Last night was fixed some weeks ahead. You knew it was to be important.’
‘My duties...’
‘I wished to show you off before our friends, before society. Instead, I was humiliated.’
‘I hardly think Florence or Art would allow that.’
Bairstow returned and left the coffee things – a ceramic pot rather than silver – on the table. Penelope poured herself a cupful, then tipped in milk and sugar, not pausing in her critique of his behaviour.
‘Lord Godalming was charming, as usual. No, the humiliation to which I refer was inflicted by Kate’s dreadful uncle.’
‘Diarmid Reed? The newspaperman?’
Penelope nodded sharply. ‘The villain exactly. He had the nerve – in public, mind you – to suggest that you’d been seen in the company of policemen in some horrid, sordid nether region of the city.’
‘Whitechapel?’
She gulped hot coffee. ‘That’s the very place. How absurd, how cruel, how...’
‘True, I’m afraid. I thought I saw Reed. I must ask him if he has any thoughts.’
‘Charles!’ A tiny muscle in Penelope’s throat pulsed. She set down her cup, but left her little finger crooked.
‘There is no accusation, Penelope. I have been in Whitechapel on the business of the Diogenes Club.’
‘Oh, them.’
‘Indeed, and their business is also, as you know, that of the Queen and her ministers.’
‘I doubt that the safety of the realm or the well-being of the Queen is one whit advanced by having you trail around with the lower orders, sniffing out the sites of sensational atrocities.’
‘I can’t discuss my work, even with you. You know that.’
‘Indeed,’ she sighed. ‘Charles, I’m sorry. It’s just that... well, that I’m proud of you, and I thought I deserved the opportunity to display you a little, to let the envious look at my ring, to draw their own conclusions.’
Her anger melted away, and she became again the fond girl he had courted. Pamela had been possessed of a temper, as well. He remembered Pam horse-whipping a blackguard of a corporal who was found to have interfered with the bhisti’s sister. The quality of her anger had been different, though; spurred by actual wrongs done to another, rather than imagined slights against herself.
‘I have been talking with Art.’
Penelope was working up to something, Beauregard realised. He knew the symptoms. One of them was a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach.
‘It’s about Florence,’ she said. ‘Mrs Stoker. We must drop her.’
Beauregard was astounded.
‘I beg your pardon? She’s a bit of a bore at times, but she means well. We’ve known her for years.’
He had thought Florence to be Penelope’s closest ally. Indeed, Mrs Stoker had been highly instrumental in contriving occasions on which the couple were left alone together so that a proposal might be elicited. When Penelope’s mother had been sick with a fever, Florence had insisted on taking charge.
‘It is all the more important that we should openly distance ourselves from her. Art says...’
‘Is this Godalming’s idea?’
‘No, it’s mine,’ she said, deliberately. ‘I can have ideas of my own, you know. Art has told me something of Mr Stoker’s affairs...’
‘Poor Bram.’
‘Poor Bram! The man is a traitor to the Queen you profess to serve. He has been hauled off to a work camp for his own good and may be executed at any moment.’
Beauregard had supposed as much. ‘Does Art know where Bram is being held? What is his situation?’
Penelope waved the enquiry aside as irrelevant. ‘Sooner or later, Florence must fall too. If only by association.’
‘I hardly see Florence Stoker as an insurrectionist. What could she do, organise tea-parties for bands of ferocious vampire-killers? Distract politicians by simpering at them while assassins creep out of the bushes?’
Penelope tried to look patient. ‘We must not be seen to be with the wrong people, Charles. If we are to have a future. I am only a woman, but even I can understand that.’
‘Penelope, what has brought all this on?’
‘You think me incapable of serious thought?’
‘No...’
‘You never considered Pamela to be such an empty-head.’
‘Ah...’
She held his hand, and squeezed. ‘I’m sorry. I did not mean to say that. Pam is out of this.’
He looked at his fiancée and wondered if he truly knew her. She was a long way from the pinafore and the sailor’s cap.
‘Charles, there is another prospect we must consider. After our marriage, we must turn.’
‘Turn?’
‘Art will do it, if we ask. Bloodline is important, and his is of the best. He’s Ruthven’s get, not the Prince Consort’s. That could be to our advantage. Art says the Prince Consort’s bloodline is dreadfully polluted, while Ruthven’s is simon-pure.’
In her face, Beauregard could see the vampire Penelope might become. Her features seemed to push forwards as she leaned to him. She kissed him on the lips, warmly.
‘You are no longer entirely young. And I shall be twenty soon. We have the chance to stop the clock.’
‘Penelope, this is not a decision to be taken lightly.’
‘Only vampires get anywhere, Charles. And amo
ng vampires, new-borns are less favoured. If we do not turn now, there will be a glut ahead of us, experienced un-dead looking down on us as those Carpathians look down on them, as the new-borns look down upon the warm.’
‘It is not so simple.’
‘Nonsense. Art has told me how it is accomplished. It seems a remarkably straightforward process. An exchange of fluids. There need be no actual contact. Blood can be decanted into tumblers. Think of it as a wedding toast.’
‘No, there are other considerations.’
‘Such as...?’
‘Nobody knows enough about turning, Penelope. Have you not noticed how many new-borns are twisted out of true? Something beastly takes over, and shapes them.’
Penelope laughed scornfully. ‘Those are very common vampires. We shan’t be common.’
‘Penelope, we may not have the choice.’
She withdrew and stood up. Incipient tears rimmed her eyes. ‘Charles, this means a lot to me.’
He had nothing to say. She smiled, and looked at him at an angle, pouting slightly. ‘Charles?’
