Anno Dracula (12 page)

‘You can be sure that any matters which detain Charles are of the utmost importance. His name may never appear in the lists, but he is well known in Whitehall, if only to the best of the best, and rated highly.’

‘Surely, Art, you are important too.’

Art shrugged, his curls shaking. ‘I’m simply a messenger boy with a title and good manners.’

‘But the
Prime Minister
...’

‘I’m Ruthven’s pet this month, but that means little.’

Florence returned, bearing an official verdict on the piece. It had been something called
Clarimonde’s Coming-Out
, by the famous author of
The Silver King
and
Saints and Sinners
, Henry A. Jones.

‘Mr Sala says “there is a rift in the clouds, a break of blue in the dramatic heavens, and seems as if we are fairly at the end of the unlovely”.’

The play had been a specimen of the ‘rattling farce’ for which the Criterion was known. The new-born leading lady had a past and her supposed father but actual husband, a cynical Queen’s Counsel, was given to addressing sarcasms directly to the dress circle, affording the actor-manager Charles Wyndham opportunities to demonstrate his aptitude for aphorism. Frequent changes of costume and backdrop took the characters from London to the country to Italy to a haunted castle and back again. By the final curtain, lovers were reconciled, cads were ruined, fortunes inherited justly and secrets exposed without harm. Barely an hour after the last act, Penelope could accurately describe to the smallest detail each of the heroine’s gowns but could not recall the name of the actress who took her part.

‘Penny, darling,’ came a tiny, grating voice. ‘Florence, and Lord Godalming. Hail and well-met.’

It was Kate Reed, in a drab little dress, trailing a jowly new-born Penelope knew to be her Uncle Diarmid. A senior staffer at the Central News Agency, he was sponsor to the poor girl’s so-called career in cheap journalism. He had a reputation as one of the grubbiest of the Grub Street grubs. Everyone except Penelope found him amusing, and so he was mostly tolerated.

Art wasted his time kissing Kate’s knuckly hand and she turned
red as a beetroot. Diarmid Reed greeted Florence with a beery burp and enquired after her health, never a sound tactic in the case of Mrs Stoker, who was quite capable of describing extensive infirmities. Mercifully, she took another tack and asked why Mr Reed had lately not been attending the after-darks.

‘We quite miss you in Cheyne Walk, Mr Reed. You always have such stories of the highs and lows of life.’

‘I regret that I’ve been trawling the lows of late, Mrs Stoker. These Silver Knife murders in Whitechapel.’

‘Dreadful business,’ spluttered Art.

‘Indeed. But deuced good for the circulation. The
Star
and the
Gazette
and all the other dogs are in it to the death. The Agency can’t keep them fed. They’ll take almost anything.’

Penelope did not care for talk of murder and vileness. She did not take the newspapers, and indeed read nothing but improving books.

‘Miss Churchward,’ Mr Reed addressed himself to her, ‘I understand congratulations are the order of the day.’

She smiled at him in such a way as not to line her face.

‘Where’s Charles?’ asked Kate, blundering as usual. Some girls should be beaten regularly, Penelope thought, like carpets.

‘Charles has let us down,’ Art said. ‘Most unwisely, in my opinion.’

Penelope burned inside, but hoped it did not show on her face.

‘Charles Beauregard, eh?’ said Mr Reed. ‘Good man in a pinch, I understand. You know, I could swear I saw the fellow in Whitechapel only the other night. With some of the detectives on the Silver Knife case.’

‘That is highly unlikely,’ Penelope said. She had never been to Whitechapel, a district where people were often murdered. ‘I cannot imagine what would take Charles to such a quarter.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Art. ‘The Diogenes Club has queer interests, in all manner of queer quarters.’

Penelope wished Art had not mentioned that institution. Mr Reed’s ears pricked up and he was about to quiz Art further when they were all saved from embarrassment by another arrival.

‘Look,’ squealed Florence with delight, ‘at who has come again to plague us with his incorrigibility. It’s Oscar.’

A large new-born with plenty of wavy hair and a well-fed look was swanning over to them, green carnation in his lapel, hands in his pockets to bulge out the front of his striped trousers.

‘Evening, Wilde,’ said Art.

The poet sneered a curt ‘Godalming’ of acknowledgement at Art, and then extravagantly paid court to Florence, pouring so much charm over her that a quantity of it naturally splashed over on to Penelope and even Kate. Mr Oscar Wilde had apparently once proposed to Florence, when she was Miss Balcombe of Dublin, but been beaten out by the now-never-mentioned Bram. Penelope found it easy to believe Wilde might have made proposals to a number of persons, simply so the rebuffs would give him something else about which to be wittily unconventional.

Florence asked him his opinion of
Clarimonde’s Coming-Out
, whereupon Wilde remarked that he was thankful for its existence, for it might spur a canny critic, such as he obviously adjudged himself, to erect a true work of genius on its ruins.

‘Why, Mr Wilde,’ Kate said, ‘it sounds as if you place the critic higher than the creator.’

‘Indeed. Criticism is itself an art. And just as artistic creation implies the working of the critical faculty, and, indeed, without it cannot be said to exist at all, so criticism is really creative in the highest sense of
the word. Criticism is, in fact, both creative and independent.’

‘Independent?’ Kate queried, surely aware she invited a lecture.

‘Yes, independent. Just as out of the sordid and sentimental
amours
of the silly wife of a small country doctor in the squalid village of Yonville-l’Abbaye, near Rouen, Flaubert was able to create a classic, and make a masterpiece of style, so, from subjects of little or no importance, such as the pictures in this year’s Royal Academy, or in any year’s Royal Academy for that matter, Mr Lewis Morris’s poems, or the plays of Mr Henry Arthur Jones, the true critic can, if it be his pleasure so to direct or waste his faculty of contemplation, produce work that will be flawless in beauty and instinct. Dullness is always an irresistible temptation for brilliancy, and stupidity is the permanent
Bestia Trionfans
that calls wisdom from its cave.’

‘But what did you think of the play, Wilde?’ asked Mr Reed.

Wilde waved his hand and made a face, the combination of gesture and expression communicating considerably more than his little speech, which even Penelope found off the point, albeit elegantly so. Relevance, Wilde once explained, was a careless habit that should not be over-indulged.

‘My Lord Ruthven sends his regards,’ Art said.

The poet was almost flattered to be so noticed. As he began to say something marvellously amusing but unnecessary, Art leaned close to him and, in a voice so small only Penelope could make it out apart from Wilde, said, ‘and he would wish that you took great caution in visiting a certain house in Cleveland Street.’

Wilde looked at Art with eyes suddenly shrewd and refused to be drawn further. He escorted Florence off, to talk with Frank Harris of the
Fortnightly Review
. Since turning, Mr Harris sported goat-horns which Penelope found daunting. Kate tripped off in the poet’s wake,
presumably hoping to suck up enough to the editor to place with him an article on women’s suffrage or some such silliness. Even a devoted libertine of Mr Harris’s reputation would presumably think Kate too undernourished a fish to count as worth netting, and cast her back into the seas.

‘What an earth did you say to so upset Wilde?’ Mr Reed asked, scenting a story. His nostrils actually did twitch whenever he thought he was on the track of some scrap that might possibly qualify as news.

‘Just some craze of Ruthven’s,’ Art explained.

The news-gatherer looked at Art, eyes like gimlets. Many vampires had piercing gazes. At social gatherings, they could often be found trying to outstare each other like a pair of horn-locked moose. Mr Reed lost the contest and wandered off himself, searching out his wayward niece.

‘Sharp girl, that,’ Art said, nodding after Kate.

‘Pfui,’ said Penelope, shaking her head. ‘Careers are for girls who can’t get themselves husbands.’

‘Meow.’

‘Sometimes I think everything is going completely above me,’ she complained.

‘Nothing to worry your pretty little head about,’ he said, turning back to her.

Art tickled her under the chin, and angled her head up to look into her eyes. She thought he might plan to kiss her – here, in public, with all of theatre London about – but he did not. He laughed and let her go after a moment.

‘Charles had better realise soon it is not safe to leave you lying around. Or else someone will steal you away and make of you a maiden tribute of modern Babylon.’

She giggled as she had been taught to do when anyone said anything she did not entirely understand. In the darks of Lord Godalming’s eyes, something glinted. Penelope felt a tiny warmth growing in her breast, and wondered where such might lead.

D
awn shot the fog full of blood. As the sun rose, new-borns scurried to coffins and corners. Geneviève trailed alone back to Toynbee Hall, never thinking to be afraid of the shrinking shadows. Like Vlad Tepes, she was old enough not to shrivel in the sun as did the more sensitive new-borns, but the vigour that had come with the blood of the warm girl ebbed as the light filtered through. She passed a warm policeman on the Commercial Road, and nodded a greeting to him. He turned away and kept on his beat. The feeling she’d had earlier, that someone was just out of sight dogging her footsteps, returned; she supposed it more or less a permanent delusion in the district.

In the last four nights, she’d spent more time on Silver Knife than her work. Druitt and Morrison undertook double shifts, juggling the limited number of places at the Hall to deal first with the most needy. Primarily an educational institute, the hall was coming to resemble a field hospital. Seconded to a Vigilance Committee, she had been to so many noisy meetings that even now words persisted in her ears as music rings in the ears of those who sit too near the orchestra.

She stopped walking and stood, listening. Again, she felt followed.
Her vampire sensitivities tingled and she had an impression of something in yellow silk, progressing with strange silent hops, long arms out like a somnambulist. She looked into the fog, but nothing emerged. Perhaps she’d absorbed one of the warm girl’s memories or fancies and would be stuck with it until her blood was out of her system. That had happened before.

George Bernard Shaw and Beatrice Potter were making speeches all over the city, using the murders to call attention to conditions in the East End. Neither socialist was
nosferatu
; and Shaw at least had been linked, Geneviève understood, with a Republican faction. In the
Pall Mall Gazette
, W. T. Stead was running a Silver Knife campaign, comparable to his earlier crusades against white slavery and child vampirism. In the absence of an actual culprit, the conclusion seemed to be that society at large was to blame. Toynbee Hall was momentarily the recipient of enough charitable donations to make Druitt propose that it would be a good idea to sponsor the murderer’s activities as a means of raising funds. The suggestion did not amuse the serious-minded Jack Seward.

A poster on the wall of an ostler’s yard promised the latest reward for information leading to the capture of Silver Knife. Rival groups of warm and new-born vigilantes roamed with billy-clubs and razors, scrapping with each other and setting upon dubiously innocent passersby. The street girls were now complaining less about the danger of the murderer and more about the lack of custom noticeable since the vigilantes started harassing anyone who came to Whitechapel looking for a woman. The whores of Soho and Covent Garden were doing boom business. And boom gloating.

She heard a moan from an alleyway. Her canines shot out like flickknives, startling her. She stepped into the shadowed recess, and saw
a man pressing a red-headed woman against a wall. Geneviève was half-way to them, prepared to apprehend the murderer, when she saw the man was a soldier in a long coat. His trousers around his ankles, he thrust hard against the woman with his pelvis, not a knife. He moved with desperate speed but wasn’t getting anywhere. The woman, skirts bunched around her waist like a lifebelt, was braced in a corner, holding him up by his head, pressing his face to her feathered shoulder.

The whore was a good-looking new-born they called ‘Carroty Nell’. During her turning, she’d called at the Hall, and Geneviève had helped her through, holding her down as she ran cold then hot and new teeth budded in her jaws. Her real name, Geneviève thought, was Frances Coles or Coleman. Her hair had grown much thicker, an arrow-shaped peak almost to the bridge of her nose. Stiff red vixen-bristles grew on her bare arms and the backs of her hands.