Anno Dracula - Kim Newman [43]
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 the 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