Anno Dracula - Kim Newman [9]
Florence was conferring with Bessie, her one remaining maid. Mrs Stoker dispatched the dark-eyed girl on a private mission.
Whistler, the grinning American painter, elbowed aside Godalming, and playfully thumped Beauregard’s arm.
‘There’s no hope for you, Charlie,’ he said, stabbing the air in front of Beauregard’s face with a fat cigar. ‘Another good man fallen to the enemy.’
Beauregard successfully sustained a smile. He had not intended to announce his engagement to Mrs Stoker’s after-dark gathering. Since his return to London, he had been less frequently a guest at the get-togethers. Florence’s position as a hostess to the fashionable and noted remained secure, though the question of her vanished husband hovered about always. No one had the courage or the cruelty to enquire after Bram, who was rumoured to have been removed to Devil’s Dyke after an altercation with the Lord Chamberlain on a point of official censorship. Only the distinguished intervention of Henry Irving, Stoker’s employer, prevented Bram’s head from joining that of his friend Van Helsing outside the Palace. Lured by Penelope to this much-reduced gathering, Beauregard noted other absences. No vampires were present, aside from Godalming. Many of Florence’s former guests – notably Irving and his leading lady, the incomparable Ellen Terry – had turned. Presumably others did not wish to associate even with the rumour of Republican sentiments, though the hostess, who encouraged debate at her after-darks, often made mention of her lack of interest in politics. Florence – whose tireless struggle to surround herself with men far more brilliant and women marginally less pretty than herself Beauregard had to admit he found faintly irritating – entertained no question about the right of the Queen to rule, no more than she would query the right of the earth to revolve around the sun.
Bessie returned with a dusty bottle of champagne. Everyone discreetly set down their tea-bowls and saucers. Florence gave the maid a tiny key and the girl opened a cabinet, disclosing a small forest of glasses.
‘There must be a toast,’ Florence insisted, ‘to Charles and Penelope.’
Penelope was by his side again, holding fast his hand, showing him off.
The bottle was passed to Florence. She regarded it as if uncertain which end could be opened. She would normally have a butler to perform uncorking duties. Momentarily, she was lost. Godalming stepped in, moving with a quicksilver grace combining speed with apparent languor, and took the bottle. He was not the first vampire Beauregard had seen, but he was the most perceptibly changed since his turn. Most new-borns fumbled with their limitations and capabilities, but His Lordship, with the poise of generations of breeding, had adapted perfectly.
‘Allow me,’ he said, draping a napkin over his arm like a waiter.
‘Thank you, Art,’ Florence babbled, ‘I’m so feeble...’
He flashed a one-sided smile, baring a long eye-tooth, and dug a fingernail into the cork, then flipped it out of the bottleneck as if tossing a coin. Champagne gushed and Godalming filled the glasses Florence held beneath the bottle. His Lordship accepted mild applause with a handsome grin. For a dead man, Godalming practically burst with life. Every woman in the room was fixated upon the vampire. Not entirely excluding Penelope, he could not help but notice.
His fiancée did not much resemble her cousin. Except sometimes, when, catching him unaware, she would produce some phrase of Pamela’s or make a trivial gesture that exactly duplicated a mannerism of his late wife’s. Of course, there were also the Churchward mouth and those eyes. When he first married, eleven years previously, Penelope had been nine. He recollected a somewhat nasty child in a pinafore and sailor hat, deftly manipulating her family so the household revolved around her axis. He remembered sitting