Anno Dracula

24

A PREMATURE POST-MORTEM

Her eyes dry, she wrapped Lily in a sheet. The corpse was already rotting, face withering on to the skull like an orange left too long in the bowl. The girl would have to be removed to quicklime and a pauper’s grave before the smell became too bad to bear. The job of winding done, Geneviève would have to fill out a certificate of death for Jack Seward to sign and draft an account for the Hall’s files. Whenever anyone died about her, another grain of ice clung to her heart. It would be easy to become a monster of callousness. A few more centuries and she could be a match for Vlad Tepes: caring for nothing but power and hot blood in her throat.

An hour before dawn, the news came. One of the ponces, arm carved up by someone’s razor, was brought in; the crowd with him had five different versions of the story. Jack the Ripper was caught, and being held at the police station, identity concealed because he was one of the Royal Family. Jack had gutted a dozen in full view and eluded pursuers by leaping over a twenty-foot wall, springs on his boots. Jack’s face was a silver skull, his arms bloodied scythes, his breath purging fire. A constable told her the bare facts. Jack had killed. Again. First, Elizabeth Stride. And now Catharine Eddowes. Cathy! That shocked her. The other woman, she said she didn’t think she knew.

‘She was in here last month, though,’ Morrison said. ‘Liz Stride. She was turning and wanted blood to keep her going. You’d remember her if you’d met her. She was tall, and kind of foreign, Swedish. Handsome woman, once.’

‘He’s takin’ them two at a time,’ the constable said, ‘you almost have to admire him, the Devil.’

Everybody left again, for the second or third time, the crowd melting away from the Hall. Geneviève was alone in the quiet of the dawn. After a while, each fresh atrocity just added to an awful monotony. Lily had bled her dry. She had nothing more to feel. No grief left for Liz Stride or Cathy Eddowes.

As the sun rose, she fell into a doze in her chair. She was tired of keeping things together. She knew what would happen later. It had been getting worse with each murder. A troupe of whores would call, mainly in hysterical tears, begging for money to escape from the death-trap of Whitechapel. In truth, the district had been a deathtrap long before the Ripper silvered his knives.

In her half-dream, Geneviève was warm again, heart afire with anger and pain, eyes hot with righteous tears. A year before the Dark Kiss, she had cried herself empty at the news from Rouen. The English had burned Jeanne d’Arc, slandering her as a witch. At fourteen, Geneviève swore herself to the cause of the dauphin. It was a war of children, carried to bloody extremes by their guardians. Jeanne never saw her nineteenth birthday, Dauphin Charles was in his teens; even Henry of England was a child. Their quarrels should have been settled with spinning tops, not armies and sieges. Not only were the boy-kings now dead, so were their houses. Today’s France, a country as strange to her as Mongolia, did not even have a monarch. If some of the English blood of Henry IV still flowed in Victoria’s German veins, then it was also liable to have filtered down to most of the world, to Lily Mylett and Cathy Eddowes and John Jago and Arthur Morrison.

There was a commotion – another commotion – in the receiving rooms. Geneviève was expecting more injuries during the day. After the murders, there would be street brawls, vigilante victims, maybe even a lynching in the American style...

Four uniformed policemen were in the hallway, something heavy slung in an oilcloth between them. Lestrade was chewing his whiskers. The coppers had had to fight their way through hostile crowds. ‘It’s as if he’s laughin’ at us,’ one of them said, ‘stirrin’ them all up against us.’

With the police was a new-born girl in smoked glasses and practical clothes, tagging along, looking hungry. Geneviève thought she might be one of the reporters.

‘Mademoiselle Dieudonné, clear a private room.’

‘Inspector...’

‘Don’t argue, just do it. One of them’s still alive.’

She understood at once and checked her charts. She realised immediately that there was an empty room.

They followed her, straining under their awkward burden, and she let them into Lily’s room. She shifted the tiny bundle and the policemen manoeuvred their baggage into its place, pulling away the oilcloth. Skinny legs flopped over the end of the cot, skirt-edge trailing on odd stockings.

‘Mademoiselle Dieudonné, meet Long Liz Stride.’

The new-born was tall and thin, rouge smeared on her cheeks, hair a tatty black. Under an open jacket, she wore a cotton shift, dyed red in a splash from neckline to waist. Her throat was opened to the bone, cut from ear to ear like a clown’s smile. She was gurgling, her cut pipes trying to mesh.

‘Jackie Boy didn’t have enough time with her,’ Lestrade explained. ‘Saved it all up for Cathy Eddowes. Warm bastard.’

Liz Stride tried to yell, but couldn’t call up air from her lungs into her throat. A draught whispered through her wound. Her teeth were gone but for sharp incisors. Her limbs convulsed like galvanised frogs’ legs. Two of the coppers had to hold her down.

‘Hold her, Watkins,’ Lestrade said. ‘Hold her head still.’

One of the constables tried to get a hold on Liz Stride’s head, but she shook it violently, ripping apart her wound even as it tried to mend.

‘She won’t last,’ Geneviève told him. ‘She’s too far gone.’

An older or stronger vampire might have survived – Geneviève had herself lived through worse – but Liz Stride was a new-born and had been turned too late in life. She’d been dying for years, poisoning herself with rough gin.

‘She doesn’t have to last, she just has to give a statement.’

‘Inspector, I don’t know that she can talk. I believe her vocal cords have been severed.’

Lestrade’s rat-eyes glittered. Liz Stride was his first chance at the Ripper, and he did not want to let her go.

‘I think her mind’s lost too, poor thing,’ Geneviève said. There was nothing in the red eyes to suggest intelligence. The human part of the new-born had been burned away.

The door pushed in and people crowded through. Lestrade turned to shout ‘Out!’ at them but swallowed his command.

‘Mr Beauregard, sir,’ he said.

The well-dressed man Geneviève had seen at Lulu Schön’s inquest came into the room, with Dr Seward in his wake. There were more people – nurses, attendants – in the corridor. Amworth slipped in and stood against the wall. Geneviève would want her to look at the new-born.

‘Inspector,’ Beauregard said. ‘May I...’

‘Always a pleasure to help the Diogenes Club,’ said Lestrade, tone suggesting it was rather more of a pleasure to pour caustic soda into one’s own eyes.

Beauregard nodded a greeting to the new-born girl, acknowledging her with her name, ‘Kate’. She stood out of his way, eyes lowered. If she wasn’t in love with Beauregard, Geneviève would be very surprised. He slid between the constables with an elegant movement, polite but forceful. He flicked his cloak over his shoulders, to give his arms freedom of movement.

‘Good God,’ he said. ‘Can nothing be done for this poor wretch?’

Geneviève was strangely impressed. Beauregard was the first person who had said anything to suggest he thought Liz Stride was worth doing something for, rather than a person something ought to be done about.

‘It’s too late,’ Geneviève explained. ‘She’s trying to renew herself, but her injuries are too great, her reserves of strength too meagre...’

The torn flesh around Liz Stride’s open throat swarmed, but failed to knit. Her convulsions were more regular now.

‘Dr Seward?’ Beauregard said, asking for a second opinon.

The director approached the bucking, thrashing woman. Geneviève had not noticed his return, but assumed the news must have dragged him back to the Hall. She saw again that he had a distaste – almost always held tightly in check – for vampires.

‘Geneviève is right, I’m afraid. Poor creature. I have silver salts upstairs. We could ease her passing. It would be the kindest course.’

‘Not until she gives us answers,’ Lestrade interrupted.

‘Heaven’s sake, man,’ Beauregard countered. ‘She’s a human being, not a clue.’

‘The next will be a human being too, sir. Maybe we can save the next. The next ones.’

Seward touched Liz Stride’s forehead and looked into her eyes, which were red marbles. He shook his head. In an instant, the wounded new-born was possessed of a surge of strength. She threw off Constable Watkins and lunged for the director, jaws open wide. Geneviève pushed Seward out of the way and ducked to avoid Liz Stride’s slashing talons.

‘She’s changing,’ Kate shouted.

Liz Stride reared up, backbone curving, limbs drawing in. A wolfish snout grew out of her face, and swathes of hair ran over her exposed skin.

Seward crab-walked backwards to the wall. Lestrade called his men out of danger. Beauregard was reaching under his cloak for something. Kate had a knuckle in her mouth.

Liz Stride was trying to become a wolf or a dog. As Mrs Amworth said, it was a hard trick. It took immense concentration and a strong sense of one’s own self. Not the resources available to a gin-soaked mind, or to a new-born in mortal pain.

‘Hellfire,’ Watkins said.

Liz Stride’s lower jaw stuck out like an alligator’s, too large to fix properly to her skull. Her right leg and arm shrivelled while her left side bloated, slabs of muscle forming around the bone. Her bloody clothes tore. The wound in her throat mended over and reformed, new yellow teeth shining at the edges of the cut. A taloned foot lashed out and tore into Watkins’s uniformed chest. The half-creature yelped screeches out of its neck-hole. She leaped, pushing through policemen, and landed in a clump, scrabbling across the floor, one powerfully-razored hand reaching for Seward.

‘Aside,’ Beauregard ordered.

The man from the Diogenes Club held a revolver. He thumb-cocked and took careful aim. Liz Stride turned, and looked up at the barrel.

‘That’s useless,’ Amworth protested.

Liz Stride sprung into the air. Beauregard pulled the trigger. His shot took her in the heart and slammed her back against the wall. She fell, lifeless, on to Seward, body gradually reverting to what it had been.

Geneviève looked a question at Beauregard.

‘Silver bullet,’ he explained, without pride.

‘Charles,’ Kate breathed, awed. Geneviève thought the girl might faint, but she didn’t.

Seward stood up, wiping the blood from his face. Lips pressed into a white line, he was shaking, barely repressing disgust.

‘Well, you’ve finished the Ripper’s business, and that’s a fact,’ Lestrade muttered.

‘I’m not complainin’,’ said the gash-chested Watkins.

Geneviève bent over the corpse and confirmed Liz Stride’s death. With a last convulsion, an arm – still part-wolfish – leaped out, and claws fastened in Seward’s trousers-cuff.