Anno Dracula - Kim Newman [66]
Lily began coughing up a red-black substance. The new nurse – a vampire with some experience – wiped clean the child’s mouth, and pressed on her chest, trying to get the blockage cleared.
‘Mrs Amworth? What is it?’
The nurse shook her head. ‘The bloodline, ma’m,’ she said. ‘Nothing much we can do about it.’
Lily was dying. One of the warm nurses had given a little blood but it was no use. The animal she had tried to become was taking over, and that animal was dead. Living tissue was transforming inch by inch into leathery dead flesh.
‘It’s a trick of the mind,’ Amworth said. ‘Shape-shifting. To become another thing you must be able to imagine that other thing down to the smallest detail. It’s like making a drawing: you have to get every little working thing right. The raw ability is in the bloodline, but the knack doesn’t come easy.’
Geneviève was glad that those of the bloodline of Chandagnac could not shape-shift. Amworth smoothed Lily’s wing like a blanket. Geneviève saw the disproportionate growth as a child’s crayon drawing, bending the wrong way, not fitting together. Lily yelled, a stabbing pain inside her. She had gone blind on the streets, the sun burning out her new-born’s eyes. The dead wing was leeching substance out of the bones of her legs, which crumbled and cracked in their sheaths of muscle. Amworth had put on splints, but that was just a delaying action.
‘It would be a mercy,’ Amworth said, ‘to ease her passing.’
Sighing, Geneviève agreed. ‘We should have a Silver Knife of our own.’
‘Silver Knife?’
‘Like the murderer, Mrs Amworth.’
‘I heard this evening from one of the reporters that he has sent a letter to the newspapers. He wants to be called Jack the Ripper, he says.’
‘Jack the Ripper?’
‘Yes.’
‘Silly name. No one will ever remember it. Silver Knife he was, and Silver Knife he’ll always be.’
Amworth stood up and brushed off the knees of her long apron. The floor in the room was unswept. It was a constant struggle to keep dirt out of the Hall. It had not been meant for a hospital.
‘There’s nothing more to be done, ma’m. I must see to the others. I think we can save the Chelvedale boy’s eye.’
‘You go, I’ll stay with her. Someone has to.’
‘Yes ma’m.’
The nurse left and Geneviève took her place, kneeling by the cot. She took Lily’s human hand and gripped tight. There was still un-dead strength in the child’s fingers, and she responded. Geneviève talked to the girl softly, reverting to languages Lily could not possibly understand. Nestling in the back of her skull was a Medieval French mind that broke through sometimes.
Trailing around with her true father, she had learned, even in her short lifetime, to attend the dying. Her father, the physician, tried to save men their commanders would as soon have buried half-alive to get out of the way. The battlefield stink was in this room now, flesh gone rotten. She remembered the Latin droning of the priests and wondered whether Lily had any religion. She had not thought to call a pastor to the deathbed.
The nearest clergyman must be John Jago and the Christian Crusader would not consent to attend a vampire of any stripe. There was Reverend Samuel Barnett, Rector of St Jude’s and founder-patron of Toynbee Hall, a tireless committee-member and social reformer, agitating for the cleaning-out of the