Anno Dracula - Kim Newman [6]
She remembered. Alarmed in the aftermath of the Royal Wedding by increased public disorder, Sir Charles Warren, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, had issued an edict against political meetings in Trafalgar Square. In defiance, warm insurrectionists, preaching against the Crown and the new government, gathered one November afternoon. William Morris and H.M. Hyndman of the Socialist Democratic Federation, with the support of Robert Cunningham-Grahame, the radical Member of Parliament, and Annie Besant, of the National Secular Society, argued for the declaration of a Republic. There was fierce, indeed violent, debate. Geneviève observed from the steps of the National Gallery. She was not the only vampire to consider aligning with the putative Republic. You did not have to be warm to take Vlad Tepes for a monster. Eleanor Marx, herself a new-born, and authoress with Dr Edward Aveling of The Vampire Question, made an impassioned speech calling for the abdication of Queen Victoria and the expulsion of the Prince Consort.
‘... I can’t say I blame him. Still, H Division isn’t equipped for riot. The Yard has sent me over to goose the local blokes, but we’ve got enough to do catching the murderer without having to fend off some scythe-and-stake mob.’
Geneviève wondered which way Sir Charles would jump. In November, the Commissioner, a soldier before he was a policeman and now a vampire before he was a soldier, had sent in the army. Even before a flustered magistrate could finish reading the Riot Act, a dragoon officer ordered his men, a mixture of vampires and the warm, to clear the Square. After that charge, the Prince Consort’s Own Carpathian Guards set about the crowd, doing more harm with teeth and claws than the dragoons had with fixed bayonets. There were a few fatalities and many injuries; subsequently, there were a few trials and many ‘disappearances’. November 13th, 1887, was remembered as ‘Bloody Sunday’. Geneviève spent a week in Guy’s Hospital, helping with the less seriously wounded. Many spat on her or refused to be ministered to by one of her kind. Were it not for the intervention of the Queen herself, still a calming influence on her adoring subjects, the Empire could have exploded like a barrel of gunpowder.
‘And what, pray, can I do,’ Geneviève asked, ‘to serve the purpose of the Prince Consort?’
Lestrade chewed his moustache, teeth glistening, flecks of froth on his lips.
‘You may be needed, Mademoiselle. The Hall will be overrun. Some don’t want to be out on the streets with the murderer about. Others are spreading panic and sedition, firing up vigilante mobs.’
‘I’m not Florence Nightingale.’
‘You have influence...’
‘I do, don’t I?’
‘I wish... I would humbly request... you would use your influence to calm the situation. Before disaster occurs. Before more are unnecessarily killed.’
Geneviève was not above enjoying a taste of power. She slipped off her robe, shocking the detective. Death and rebirth had not shaken out of him the prejudices of his time. Lestrade shrank behind his smoked glasses, as she swiftly dressed, fastening the seeming hundreds of small catches and buttons on her bottle-green skirt and jacket with neat movements of sharp-tipped fingers. It was as if the costume of her warm days, as intricate and cumbersome as a full suit of armour, had returned to plague her. As a new-born, she had, with relief, worn the simple tunics and trews made acceptable if not fashionable by the Maid of Orleans, vowing never again to be sewed into breath-stopping formal dress.
The Inspector was too pale to blush properly, but penny-sized patches appeared on his cheeks and he huffed involuntarily. Lestrade, like many new-borns, treated her as if she were the age of her face. She had been sixteen when Chandagnac gave her the Dark Kiss. She was older, by a decade or more, than Vlad Tepes. While he was a warm Christian Prince, nailing Turks’ turbans to their skulls and lowering