PENNY STAMPS

He awoke early in the afternoon, and went down to breakfast  -  kedgeree and coffee  -  and the day's telegrams, which Bairstow, his man, had laid out on the parlour table. The only item of interest was an unsigned two-word telegram, 'IGNORE PIZER'. He assumed this to mean the Limehouse Ring had good cause to believe the recently arrested shoemaker unconnected with Silver Knife. Copied police reports and personal depositions had also been delivered, by hand from the Diogenes Club. Beauregard glanced through it all, and found nothing much new.

The Gazette reported 'the murder and mutilation of a vampire woman near Gateshead yesterday', predicting this fresh atrocity would 'revive in the provinces the horror which was beginning to die out in London.' The rest was puff  -  reading between the lines, Beauregard suspected the new-born had been destroyed by her husband, who resisted her attempt to make vampires of their children  -  although the paper made the sound point that rather than believing 'the murderous maniac of Whitechapel' to have made his way to the North, it was more likely that 'the Bitley murder is not a repetition, but a reflex, of the Whitechapel ones. It is one of the inevitable results of publicity to spread an epidemic. Just as the news of one suicide often leads to another, so the publication of the details of one murder often leads to their repetition in another murder. Reading of means to do ill makes ill deeds done.' One effect of the Silver Knife scare was a definitive refutation of the popular belief that vampires could not be killed. Silver might be hard to come by, but anyone could sharpen a table-leg or walking stick and shove it through a new-born's heart. The woman in Bitley was destroyed with a broken broom-handle.

Elsewhere in the papers there were editorials in support of the Prince Consort's newly-published edict against 'unnatural vice'. While the rest of the world advanced towards the twentieth century, Britain reverted to a medieval legal system. When warm, Vlad Tepes had so vigorously persecuted common thieves that it was reputedly possible for townships to leave gold drinking cups at public wells. His other current passion was that railways should run in accordance with their time-tables; there was a notice in The Times of the appointment of an American new-born named Jones to oversee a commission for the extensive improvement of the service. The Prince Consort had his own private engine, the Flying Carpathian, and was often depicted at the throttle in Punch, an oversize cap on his head, toot-tooting the whistle and choo-chooing the boiler.

There were rumblings of anti-vampire riots in India, and the harsh methods Sir Francis Varney was employing against the insurrectionists. While the Prince Consort still favoured the stake, Varney's preferred method of execution was to cast offenders, warm and un-dead alike, into pits of fire. Native vampires among the mutineers were bound over the mouths of artillery pieces and had silver-seamed rockshards blown through their chests.

Thought of India prompted him to look up from the paper, to the black-rimmed photograph of Pamela on the mantel. She was smiling in the Indian sun in her white muslin dress, belly full of baby, a moment snatched from passing time.

'Miss Penelope,' Bairstow announced.

Beauregard stood up and greeted his fiancee. Penelope swept into the parlour, detaching her hat from her curls, carefully flicking some invisible speck from the stuffed bird perched on the brim. She wore something with ballooning sleeves and a tight shirtwaist.

'Charles, you're still in your dressing gown, and it is practically three o'clock in the afternoon.'

She kissed his cheek, tutting that his face couldn't have felt a razor in recent hours. He called for more coffee. Penelope sat beside him at the table, and set her hat like an offering on the papers, absent-mindedly trimming them into an orderly pile. The stuffed bird looked startled to find itself wired in such a position.

'I'm not even sure it's proper for you to receive me in such a state,' she said. 'We're not married yet.'

'My dear, you gave me little time to consider propriety.'

She humphed in the back of her mouth, but did not endeavour to move her face. Sometimes, she affected expressionlessness.

'How was the Criterion?'

'Delightful,' she said, obviously not meaning it. The Churchward mouth turned down at the corners, a smile becoming a threat in an instant.

'You are angry with me?'

'I think I have a right to be, dear-heart,' she said, with a moue of reasonableness. 'Last night was fixed some weeks ahead. You knew it was to be important.'

'My duties...'

'I wished to show you off before our friends, before society. Instead, I was humiliated.'

'I hardly think Florence or Art would allow that.'

Bairstow returned and left the coffee things  -  a ceramic pot rather than silver  -  on the table. Penelope poured herself a cupful, then tipped in milk and sugar, not pausing in her critique of his behaviour.

'Lord Godalming was charming, as usual. No, the humiliation to which I refer was inflicted by Kate's dreadful uncle.'

'Diarmid Reed? The newspaperman?'

Penelope nodded sharply. 'The villain exactly. He had the nerve  -  in public, mind you  -  to suggest that you'd been seen in the company of policemen in some horrid, sordid nether region of the city.'

'Whitechapel?'

She gulped hot coffee. 'That's the very place. How absurd, how cruel, how...'

'True, I'm afraid. I thought I saw Reed. I must ask him if he has any thoughts.'

'Charles!' A tiny muscle in Penelope's throat pulsed. She set down her cup, but left her little finger crooked.

'There is no accusation, Penelope. I have been in Whitechapel on the business of the Diogenes Club.'

'Oh, them.'

'Indeed, and their business is also, as you know, that of the Queen and her ministers.'

'I doubt that the safety of the realm or the well-being of the Queen is one whit advanced by having you trail around with the lower orders, sniffing out the sites of sensational atrocities.'

'I can't discuss my work, even with you. You know that.'

'Indeed,' she sighed. 'Charles, I'm sorry. It's just that... well, that I'm proud of you, and I thought I deserved the opportunity to display you a little, to let the envious look at my ring, to draw their own conclusions.'

Her anger melted away, and she became again the fond girl he had courted. Pamela had been possessed of a temper, as well. He remembered Pam horse-whipping a blackguard of a corporal who was found to have interfered with the bhisti's sister. The quality of her anger had been different, though; spurred by actual wrongs done to another, rather than imagined slights against herself.

'I have been talking with Art.'

Penelope was working up to something, Beauregard realised. He knew the symptoms. One of them was a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach.

'It's about Florence,' she said. 'Mrs Stoker. We must drop her.'

Beauregard was astounded.

'I beg your pardon? She's a bit of a bore at times, but she means well. We've known her for years.'

He had thought Florence to be Penelope's closest ally. Indeed, Mrs Stoker had been highly instrumental in contriving occasions on which the couple were left alone together so that a proposal might be elicited. When Penelope's mother had been sick with a fever, Florence had insisted on taking charge.

'It is all the more important that we should openly distance ourselves from her. Art says...'

'Is this Godalming's idea?'

'No, it's mine,' she said, deliberately. 'I can have ideas of my own, you know. Art has told me something of Mr Stoker's affairs...'

'Poor Bram.'

'Poor Bram! The man is a traitor to the Queen you profess to serve. He has been hauled off to a work camp for his own good and may be executed at any moment.'

Beauregard had supposed as much. 'Does Art know where Bram is being held? What is his situation?'

Penelope waved the enquiry aside as irrelevant. 'Sooner or later, Florence must fall too. If only by association.'

'I hardly see Florence Stoker as an insurrectionist. What could she do, organise tea-parties for bands of ferocious vampire-killers? Distract politicians by simpering at them while assassins creep out of the bushes?'

Penelope tried to look patient. 'We must not be seen to be with the wrong people, Charles. If we are to have a future. I am only a woman, but even I can understand that.'

'Penelope, what has brought all this on?'

'You think me incapable of serious thought?'

'No...'

'You never considered Pamela to be such an empty-head.'

'Ah...'

She held his hand, and squeezed. 'I'm sorry. I did not mean to say that. Pam is out of this.'

He looked at his fiancee and wondered if he truly knew her. She was a long way from the pinafore and the sailor's cap.

'Charles, there is another prospect we must consider. After our marriage, we must turn.'

'Turn?'

'Art will do it, if we ask. Bloodline is important, and his is of the best. He's Ruthven's get, not the Prince Consort's. That could be to our advantage. Art says the Prince Consort's bloodline is dreadfully polluted, while Ruthven's is simon-pure.'

In her face, Beauregard could see the vampire Penelope might become. Her features seemed to push forwards as she leaned to him. She kissed him on the lips, warmly.

'You are no longer entirely young. And I shall be twenty soon. We have the chance to stop the clock.'

'Penelope, this is not a decision to be taken lightly.'

'Only vampires get anywhere, Charles. And among vampires, new-borns are less favoured. If we do not turn now, there will be a glut ahead of us, experienced un-dead looking down on us as those Carpathians look down on them, as the new-borns look down upon the warm.'

'It is not so simple.'

'Nonsense. Art has told me how it is accomplished. It seems a remarkably straightforward process. An exchange of fluids. There need be no actual contact. Blood can be decanted into tumblers. Think of it as a wedding toast.'

'No, there are other considerations.'

'Such as...?'

'Nobody knows enough about turning, Penelope. Have you not noticed how many new-borns are twisted out of true? Something beastly takes over, and shapes them.'

Penelope laughed scornfully. 'Those are very common vampires. We shan't be common.'

'Penelope, we may not have the choice.'

She withdrew and stood up. Incipient tears rimmed her eyes. 'Charles, this means a lot to me.'

He had nothing to say. She smiled, and looked at him at an angle, pouting slightly. 'Charles?'

'Yes.'

She hugged him, pressing his head to her chest.

'Charles, please. Please, please, please...'