Anno Dracula - Kim Newman [70]
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,