Anno Dracula - Kim Newman [92]
The band rounded the corner and marched down Pall Mall, towards Marlborough Street. Beauregard assumed they were zigzagging through the streets, picking up followers, aiming to congregate in St James’s Park. The uniformed bandmaster marching at the head of the parade held up a giant flag of St George, the standard of the Christian Crusade. The thin red cross on a white background billowed as the band advanced.
After the band came a choir, mainly of middle-aged women. They all wore long white dresses with red crosses on their fronts. They were singing some version of the song that had been ‘John Brown’s Body’ and evolved into ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’.
‘In the beauty of the lillies, Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on...’
The crowds now pressed around on all sides. Most of the onlookers, and all of the marchers, were warm, but there were a few jeering murgatroyds on the pavement, brought out by the gloom of the late afternoon, flapping their batwing cloaks and hissing through red lips. They were outnumbered and ignored. Beauregard thought their mocking attitude unwise. Potential immortality was not actual invincibility.
After the choir came an open carriage drawn by six horses. Standing on a platform, surrounded by worshipful acolytes, was John Jago. Behind him came an orderly rabble with banners bearing holy pronouncements, ‘Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Vampire to Live’ and ‘Holy Blood, Holy Crusade’. Amid these marchers struggled a couple of hefty crusaders who carried between them a twenty-foot pole, upon which was impaled a papier-mâché figure, a vampire Guy Fawkes. The pole pierced its breast, and there was red paint splashed around the wound. It had red eyes, exaggerated fang-teeth, and was dressed in tatty black.
The murgatroyds fell silent for a moment. Beauregard knew there would be trouble. There were two mounted policemen in the street, but no one else with any authority. Warm people had flooded from somewhere. He could not move of his own accord, but found himself swept along with the march. Jago preached his usual hate and hellfire and Beauregard was pushed along beside his carriage. They swept down Marlborough Street towards the park. Once in the open, he could escape the crusaders.
One of the murgatroyds, a pale adonis with black ribbons in his golden hair, picked a handful of horse-dung from the gutter and flung it, with a degree of accuracy that betokened no little skill as a bowler, at the preacher. The ball exploded against Jago’s face, browning him like a fakir. For an instant, between the notes of the marching hymn, the crowd was as frozen as a photograph. Beauregard saw burning fury in Jago’s eyes, a mixture of triumph and dawning fear in the face of the murgatroyd.
With a cry as loud as the last trump, the marchers fell upon the murgatroyds. There were four or five of the new-borns. Dandified in their dress, effete in their gesture, spinelessly vicious, cold-hearted poseurs: they encapsulated every fault commonly considered to epitomise the vampire. Beauregard felt himself thumped in the back by people struggling towards the scrum. Jago still preached, inciting the wrath of the righteous.
There was blood in the street. Pushed down to his knees, he knew that if he fell underfoot he would be trampled. To have survived so much in so many quarters of the globe only to be killed by an anonymous London crowd...
A strong hand took his arm and hauled him upright. His saviour was Dravot, the vampire from the Diogenes Club. He said nothing.
‘Here’s one of them,’ shouted a red-haired man. Dravot’s hand shot out