Anno Dracula

22

GOOD-BYE, LITTLE YELLOW BIRD

The director had left her in charge of the night shift, which put Montague Druitt in a black mood. When Geneviève wanted to stay by Lily’s bedside, Druitt harrumphed about the inconvenience, unsubtly indicating she should delegate the general authority if she wished to devote herself to this specific case. In the small downstairs room where the child’s cot was, Geneviève dispensed instructions. Druitt stood at his ease, and affected not to notice the sawing of Lily’s lungs. Long, agonising down-cut rasps came with every exhalation. Amworth, the newly-engaged nurse, fussed around the patient, rearranging the blankets.

‘I want you or Morrison in the foyer at all times,’ she told him. ‘The last few nights, there has been a stream of people coming through. I don’t want anyone in who has no business here.’

Druitt’s brow wrinkled. ‘You perplex me. Surely, we are for all...’

‘Of course, Mr Druitt. However there are those who would exploit us. We have medicines, other items of value. Thefts have been heard of. Also, should a tall Chinese gentleman present himself, I would be grateful if you could refuse him admission.’

He did not understand; she hoped he would not be made to. She did not really think the man could keep the hopping creature out when it resumed its persecution of her. The elder was yet another of the problems pressing around her, jostling for solutions.

‘Very well,’ Druitt said, and left. She noticed his one good coat was trailing strands along the bottom, and was almost through at the elbows. With these people, good clothes were armour. They separated the genteel from the abyss. Montague John Druitt, she thought, had more than a passing acquaintance with the depths. He was polite to Geneviève but something behind his reserve worried her. He had been a schoolmaster, then half-heartedly embarked on a law career, before coming to Toynbee Hall. He had achieved no distinction in any of his chosen professions. His special project was the raising of public subscriptions to fund a Whitechapel Cricket Club. He would run the side, recruiting likely players from the street, instilling in them the values and skills of the game he, not alone of his countrymen, regarded as almost a religion.

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 vice dens of the ‘wicked quarter-mile’. She remembered him spluttering red-faced with fury when preaching against the practice of women stripping to the waist to fight each other. Barnett, even without the unreasoning prejudice of Jago, disapproved of Geneviève and was openly suspicious of her motives for joining the East End Settlement Movement. She did not blame the Warriors of God for their distrust of her. Centuries before Huxley coined the term, she had been an agnostic. When Dr Seward had interviewed her for this position, he had asked: ‘you’re not Temperance, you’re not Church, what are you?’ ‘Guilty,’ she had thought.

She sang the songs of her long-ago childhood. She did not know if Lily could hear. The waxy red discharge from her ears suggested she might be deaf as well as blind. Still, the sound – maybe the vibrations in the air, or the scent of her breath – soothed the patient.

‘Toujours gai,’ Geneviève sang, voice breaking, hot bloody tears welling, ‘toujours gai...’

Lily’s throat swelled up like a toad’s and brackish blood, brown streaks in the scarlet, gulped out of her mouth. Geneviève pressed the swelling down, holding breath still in her nostrils to fend off the taste and smell of death. She pressed urgently, song and memory and prayer babbled together in her mind, leaking out of her mouth. Knowing she would lose, she fought. She had defied death for centuries; now the great darkness took its revenge. How many of Lily had died before their time to compensate for the long life of Geneviève Dieudonné?

‘Lily, my love,’ she incanted, ‘my child, Lily, my dearest darling, my Lily, my Lily...’

The child’s boiled eyes burst open. One milky pupil shrunk minutely, reacting to the light. Through the pain, there was something close to a smile.

‘Ma-ma,’ she said, first and last word. ‘Mma...’

Rose Mylett or whoever was the child’s human mother, was not here. The sailor or market porter who spent his fourpence to become her father probably didn’t even know she had lived. And the murgatroyd from the West End – whom Geneviève would track down and hurt – was passed on to other pleasures. Only Geneviève was here.

Lily shook in a fit. Drops of sweated blood stood out all over her face.

‘Mma...’

‘It’s mother, child,’ Geneviève said. She had no children and no get. A virgin when turned, she had never passed on the Dark Kiss. But she was more this child’s mother than warm Rosie, more her parent-in-darkness than the murgatroyd...

‘It’s mama, Lily. Mama loves you. You’re safe and warm...’

She took Lily from her cot, and hugged her close, hugged her tight. Bones moved inside the girl’s thin chest. Geneviève held Lily’s tiny, fragile head against her bosom.

‘Here...’

Pulling her chemise apart, Geneviève thumbnail-sliced a thin cut on her breast, wincing as her blood seeped.

‘Drink, my child, drink...’

Geneviève’s blood, of the pure bloodline of Chandagnac, might heal Lily, might wash out the taint of Dracula’s grave-mould, might make her whole again...

Might, might, might.

She held Lily’s head to her breast, guiding the girl’s mouth to the wound. It hurt as if her heart were pierced by a silver ice needle. To love was to hurt. Her blood, bright scarlet, was on Lily’s lips.

‘I love you, little yellow bird...’ Geneviève sang.

In the back of her throat, Lily made a throttling sound.

‘Goodbye, little yellow bird, I’d rather brave the cold...’

Lily’s head fell away from Geneviève’s breast. Her face was smeared with blood.

‘... on a leafless tree...’

The child’s wing flapped once, a convulsive jerking-out that unbalanced Geneviève.

‘... than a prisoner be...’

She could see the gaslight glowing like a blue moon through the thin membrane of the wing, outlining a tracery of disconnected veins.

‘... in a cage... of... gold.’

Lily was dead. With a spasm of heart-sickness, Geneviève dropped the bundled corpse on the cot and howled. Her front was soaked with her own useless blood. Her damp hair was stuck to her face, her eyes gummed with clotted blood-tears. She wished she did believe in God, so she could curse Him.

Suddenly cold, she stood away. She rubbed the obstruction from her eyes and wiped back her hair. There was a basin of water on a stand. She washed her face clean, looking at the clean grain of the wooden frame which had once held a looking-glass. Turning from the basin, she realised there were people in the room. She must have made enough commotion to excite considerable alarm.

Arthur Morrison stood by the open door with Amworth behind him. There were others outside in the hall. People from outside, from the streets, nosferatu and warm alike. Morrison’s face was dumbstruck. She knew she must be hideous. In anger, her face changed.

‘We thought you should know, Geneviève,’ Morrison said. ‘There’s been another murder. Another new-born.’

‘In Dutfield’s Yard,’ said someone with the hot news, ‘off Berner Street.’

‘Lizzie Stride, ’er as only turned last week. Teeth not yet through. Tall gel, rorty-like.’

‘Cut ’er froat, didn’t ’e?’

‘Long Liz.’

‘Stride. Gustafsdotter. Elizabeth.’

‘Ear to ear. Thwick!’

‘She put up a barney, though. Sloshed ’im one.’

‘Ripper was disturbed ’fore ’e could finish ’is job.’

‘Some bloke with an ’orse.’

‘Ripper?’

‘Louis Diemschütz, one o’ them socialisticals...’

‘Jack the Ripper.’

‘Louis was passin’ by. Must of been the moment Jack was a-rippin’ Lizzie’s throat. Must of seen ’is rotten face. Must of.’

‘Calls ’isself Jack the Ripper now. Silver Knife is gone and done.’

‘Where’s Druitt?’

‘Damn bleedin’ busybodies, them socialisticals. Always pokin’ into a bloke’s business.’

‘Haven’t seen the blighter all evening, miss.’

‘Speakin’ agin the Queen. And them’s all Jews, y’know. Can’t trust an Ikey.’

‘Bet ’e’s an ’ook-nose. Jus’ bet ’e is.’

‘Ripper’s still on the streets, ’e is. The coppers is givin’ chase. By sun-up, they’ll have ’is carcass.’

‘If ’e’s ’uman.’