Anno Dracula (43 page)

‘’Ere, where yer goin’?’ Nell protested.

He lurched away from the table, pretending to be drunk.

‘’E’s a rum ’un,’ Nell told Marie Jeanette.

The doors were pulled open just as he reached them and he slipped out into the street, shoving aside a new-comer. Dravot was briskly marching away, towards the Old Jago. He made as if to
follow but a hand was laid on his shoulder.

‘Art?’

... of all the people in the Empire, he had run into Jack Seward! The doctor was much changed. Still warm, he seemed ten years older, face weathered, hair streaked grey, colour bad. His clothes had been good once, but were missing a few buttons and none the better for dusty stains.

‘Good God, Art, what...?’

Dravot stopped to talk with a knife-grinder. Godalming thanked providence, and wondered how he might get rid of his unwanted old friend.

‘You look...’ Unable to complete a sentence, Seward shook his head and grinned. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

Godalming could tell Seward was sick in his head. When last he had seen him – in Purfleet when, as a warm fool, Godalming had dared defy Dracula and wound up fleeing for his life, leaving behind his companions to face the Count – Seward had been nervous but in command of himself. Now he was a broken man. Still ticking but completely broken, like a watch that skips hours and sometimes runs backwards for the odd minute.

Dravot was deep in conversation with the knife-grinder. The man must be one of his confederates.

‘You’re a vampire.’

‘Obviously.’

‘Like
him
. Like Lucy.’

He remembered Lucy, screeching as he pounded the stake into her. The dreadful grinding of the saw against her neckbone as Van Helsing and Seward removed her garlic-stuffed head. The old anger
came back. ‘No, not like Lucy.’

Dravot started walking off again. Godalming stepped around Seward and hesitated. If he broke into a run, the Sergeant would know he was pursued and take steps to evade the huntsman. Coldly ignoring Seward, he began to walk, pretending to amble, but actually moving at a measured pace, fixing Dravot in his eye. The doctor caught up and trotted at his side, giving out little yelps to get his attention like an overly-insistent mendicant. Behind them, someone else had come out of the Ten Bells. She shouted after Seward. It was Marie Jeanette. Seward had certainly changed his habits since Godalming last knew him.

‘Art, why did you turn? After all he did to us, why...?’

Dravot slipped into a side-street. Godalming thought the Sergeant had been alerted by the commotion.

‘Art, why...?’

Seward was near hysteria. Godalming shoved him away, and hissed. He must be rid of this nuisance. The doctor fell back against a lamp-post, appalled and shocked.

‘Leave me be, Jack.’

The doctor shook, old fears returning. Godalming heard the rapid clip of Marie Jeanette’s boots as she ran towards them. Good. The whore would distract Seward. He turned away and followed Dravot. The Sergeant had doubled back away from the Jago, walking around the market towards Aldgate. Damn. It was in the open now. Godalming would have to outpace the new-born and bring him down. He had a revolver loaded with silver. He needed Dravot alive but he was ready to cripple the Sergeant to bring him in. The more he was hurt, the keener he would be to expose his confederates. Dravot was the key. If he could be turned properly, the future was laid out to Godalming’s
advantage. He was sure of his own faculties, of his strength. His curved fangs were comfortable in the grooves they had worked inside his mouth. He no longer chewed himself.

Through the warren-like maze of streets around the market, Godalming hunted Sergeant Danny Dravot. Even when the quarry got out of his sight, he seemed to leave a glowing trail in the fog. Godalming could hear the distinctive quality of his boot-steps streets away. This could be dangerous. The Sergeant had shown consummate cool in his assassination of Inspector Mackenzie. Remembering Kate Reed, he checked his confidence. He would not be brought low by overestimating his own powers.

Cautiously, he followed Dravot. They were past the market now and straggling back towards Commercial Street. Godalming rounded a corner into Dorset Street and could not see the Sergeant. Off this road was a series of tiny residential courts. The fox must have slipped into one of them. The fog eddied by an arched opening. Godalming was sure he had his man cornered. The only other egress from the court would be through one of the dwellings.

Whistling again, light-headed with incipient victory, he strolled towards the court. His step was nimble and he was ready for a great test of his strength. First, he would batter the new-born with his fists, pulling out the revolver only to settle the matter at the end. It was important that he prove his dominance over the lesser vampire.

A couple appeared at the end of Dorset Street, moving towards him. It was Seward and his whore. They did not matter. It would be useful to have witnesses to this business. Jack Seward would serve the cause of Arthur Holmwood after all.

‘Jack,’ he said, ‘I have a criminal trapped. Stay by this court and summon a constable if one happens to pass.’

‘A criminal,’ exclaimed Marie Jeanette. ‘Faith, in Miller’s Court?’

‘A desperate man,’ he told them. ‘I am an agent of the Prime Minister, on urgent official business.’

Seward’s face was dark. Marie Jeanette could not keep up with the developments.

‘I live in Miller’s Court,’ the whore said.

‘Who is the man?’ Seward asked.

Godalming was peering into the fog. He thought he could see the Sergeant, standing in the courtyard, awaiting him.

‘What has he done?’

Godalming knew what would most impress these fools. ‘He’s the Ripper.’

Marie Jeanette gasped and held her hand to her mouth. Seward looked as if he had been stomach-punched.

‘Lucy,’ he said, a hand inside his coat, ‘stand back.’

A chink appeared in Godalming’s confidence. Dravot dared him to enter Miller’s Court. Seward and Marie Jeanette were pestering fleas and should be brushed off. He had a destiny to fulfil. But something tiny was wrong.

‘You called her Lucy,’ he said. ‘Her name isn’t Lucy.’

He turned to Seward, who pressed close against him, arm moving fast. Godalming felt a silver shock in his chest. Something sharp was stuck into him, sliding swiftly and smoothly between his ribs.

‘And that man in there,’ Seward said, nodding into the courtyard...

Great pain spread through Godalming’s chest. He was packed in ice, but a white-hot needle transfixed him. His vision blurred, his hearing was a fuzzy jangle, all senses were stripped from him.

‘... his name isn’t Jack.’

M
idnight was hours past. She sat in Jack’s chair, contemplating the disarray of papers crawling over his desk. On her return, Morrison had recounted five separate crises that had arisen since her departure yesterday afternoon. As tactfully as possible, the young man accused her of neglecting her duties, as of late had the director. The shot had gone home. Something would have to be done soon. Jack was off with his vampire minx, and Geneviève had hardly been any better, with Charles.

The purpose of the Hall was changing. Lecture schedules had fallen into disrepair with Druitt’s death. The institution’s primary educational purpose was collapsing. In the meantime, with the Infirmary worked ragged, the Hall was taking more and more of the medical slack. Lecture halls were becoming wards. Jack, when he could be distracted from his own interests, authorised the engaging of more medical staff. The immediate problem was sparing enough qualified people for a board of interview. And, as ever, money was in short supply. Those who had been generous in the past seemed to be finding other interests. Or turning. Vampires were notoriously uncharitable.

She was torn between the fast-fading elation of her last feeding and the thousand gnat-bite problems of Toynbee Hall. Recently there had been too many strands to her life, too many demands on her time. Important matters were neglected.

She stood up and wandered about the room. One wall was lined with Jack’s medical books and files. In its corner, under a glass case, was his prized phonograph. As Acting Director, this office should be her home. But she had been haring off to the Old Jago, to Chelsea. Now, she wondered whether she had been hunting Jack the Ripper or Charles Beauregard.

She found herself standing by the tiny window that looked out on to Commercial Street. The fog was thick tonight, a street-level sea of churning yellow that lapped at the buildings. For the warm, the November cold would be as sharp as a razor. Or a scalpel.

The Ripper had not murdered since the last weekend of September. She dared hope he had vanished for good. Perhaps Colonel Moran had been right, perhaps Montague Druitt had been the Silver Knife? No. That was impossible. And yet Moran had said something that night which ticked away in the back of her mind.

Opposite the Hall, wrapped in a black cloak, stood a man, fog swirling around and above him. He seemed to be wrestling with some inner question, just as she was. It was Charles.

Moran had said the Hall was in the centre of a pattern, a pattern dotted on to the map by the murders.

Charles crossed the road with a sudden resolve, the fog parting for him.

S
he was who-the-bloody-ever she wanted to be. Whoever
men
wanted her to be. Mary Jane Kelly. Marie Jeanette. Uncle Henry’s niece. Miss Lucy. She’d be Ellen Terry if it helped.

John sat by her bedside. She was telling him again how she’d been turned. Of the night on the heath when his precious Lucy had given the Dark Kiss. Now she told the story as if she were Lucy, and Mary Jane some other person, some worthless whore...

‘I was so cold, John, so hungry, so
new
...’

It was easy to know how Lucy had felt. They had both been gripped by the same soul-deep panic upon awakening from death-sleep. The same desperate, bottomless thirst. Only Lucy awoke in a crypt, respectfully laid out and mourned for. Mary Jane was on a cart, minutes away from a lime pit, jumbled in among other unclaimed bodies.

‘She was just an Irish whore. Of no importance, John. But she was warm, plump, alive. Blood pounding in her sweet neck.’

He was listening, head bobbing. She supposed he was mad. But he was a gentleman. And he was good to her, good for her. Earlier, with the strange toff, he had protected her. That madman, with his talk of
Jack the Ripper, had threatened her, and John Seward fought him off. She’d not expected him to be so valiant in her defence.

‘The children hadn’t been enough, John. My thirst was terrible, eating me inside.’

Mary Jane had been confused by the new desires. It had taken her weeks to adjust. That time was like a dream now. She was losing Mary Jane’s memories. She was Lucy.

With his doctor’s hand, John smoothed her shift over her breast. He was the image of the considerate lover. She’d seen him from another side earlier. When he cut down the toff with a knife. His face had been different when he stabbed. John told her she was avenged, and she knew he meant Lucy. The toff had destroyed Lucy. But with his death, that part of the story was washed from John’s mind. Perhaps it would come to her as she became more Lucy and less Mary Jane. As Lucy’s memories seeped into her mind, Mary Jane slowly sank into a dark sea.

Mary Jane had not mattered at all and she should be glad to see her so drowned. In the cold, dark depths, it would be easy for Mary Jane to fall asleep and wake up entirely as Lucy.

But, her heart caught...

It was hard to keep pace as things changed but it was important to make the effort. John was her best hope for escape from this poor room, from these mean streets. Eventually, she’d have him keep her in a house in the better part of the city. She’d have fine clothes and servants. And well-spoken children with pure, sweet blood.

She was sure the toff deserved to die. He’d been mad. There’d been no one hiding in Miller’s Court, waiting for him. Danny Dravot was not the Ripper. He was just another old soldier, full of lies about heathens he’d slaughtered and brown wenches he’d bedded.