Anno Dracula - Kim Newman [54]
The address was in D’Arblay Street, an unobtrusive shop-front between a cabinet-maker’s and a jeweller’s. The cabinet-maker’s had a selection of caskets, from plain plank boxes to gorgeously-finished items suitable for a Pharaoh’s sarcophagus. A new-born couple cooed over an especially fine coffin, large enough for a family and ostentatious enough to cow a provincial alderman’s wife into a fit of silent envy. The other premises displayed an array of jewel clusters and rings in the shapes or insignia of bats, skulls, eyes, scarabs, daggers, wolfsheads, or spiders; trinkets favoured by that type of new-born who styled themselves Gothick. Others called them murgatroyds, after the family in Ruddigore, the Savoy Opera of last year that so successfully lampooned the breed.
The denizens of Soho were more eccentric than their desperate cousins in Whitechapel. Murgatroyds concerned themselves mainly with ornament. Many of the women emerging as the sun set were foreign; French or Spanish, even Chinese. They favoured shroud-like dresses, thick cobweb veils, scarlet lips and nails, waist-length coils of glossy black hair. Their beaux followed the fashions set by Lord Ruthven; high-waisted, immodestly tight trews; floppy Georgian cuffs; ruffle-fronted shirts in scarlet or black; ribboned pompadours with artificial white lightning-streaks. Quite a few vampires, especially the elders, regarded those who creep through graveyard shadows in batwing capes and fingerless black gloves as an Edinburgh gentleman might look upon a Yankee with a single Scots grandparent who swathes himself in kilts and tartan sashes, prefaces every remark with quotes from Burns or Scott and affects a fondness for bagpipes and haggis. ‘Basingstoke,’ muttered Beauregard, invoking the Gilbertian magic word supposed to render the most gloom-besotted murgatroyd a meek suburban mediocrity.
He walked to Fox Malleson’s establishment and entered. The shop was empty, all the counters and shelves taken down. The window was painted over green. A vampire tough sat, eternally vigilant, by the door leading to the works. Beauregard presented the new-born with his card. The vampire stood, considered for a moment, and pushed open the door, nodding for him to enter. The room beyond was full of opened tea-chests, in which were packed, amid quantities of straw, an assortment of silverware: tea and coffee pots, dinner services, cricket cups, cream jugs. Heaped on trays were the remains of rings and necklaces, gems prised out and gone. A heavy ring-base caught his attention, the gouged-out hollow at its centre like an empty eye-socket. He wondered if Fox Malleson were in partnership with the jeweller next door.
‘Mr B, welcome,’ said the short, old man who emerged from behind a curtain. Gregory Fox Malleson had so many chins that there seemed to be nothing between his mouth and collar but rolls of jelly. He had a good-humoured, kindly look, and wore a dirty apron, black silk sheaths over his sleeves and green-tinted protective goggles shifted up on to his forehead.
‘It is always a pleasure to see one of the gentlemen from the Diogenes Club.’
He was warm. As a silversmith, he could hardly be anything else. The new-born outside would not dare to venture into the interior of Fox Malleson’s works. The silver particles in the air might get into his lungs and condemn him to lingering death.
‘I think you’ll be pleased with what we’ve done for you. Come, come, this way, this way...’
He drew aside the curtain and admitted Beauregard into the workrooms. A bed of hot coals burned forever in a smithy, pots of dull liquid silver standing over it. A gawky apprentice was melting down a mayoral chain, feeding it link by link into a pot.
‘So hard to get raw materials these days. With all the new rules and regulations. But we muddle through, Mr B, oh yes we do. In our own way.’
Silver bullets cooled on a bench,