Dracula Cha Cha Cha (Anno Dracula #3) 6

GENEVIeVE IN MOURNING

She didn't know how long she should stay on in Rome. There was the business of Charles's things, making sure they were dispersed according to his will. As executrix, she'd have to go to London soon, though she didn't think she would stay there either. Once her duties were discharged, her best bet would be to go to a country she didn't associate with him. There were still a few corners of the world where she had never lived  -  Samoa; Tierra del Fuego; the Pacific NorthWest; Swansea, Wales.

The apartment was empty. There was a silence in her head where there had been a constant whisper. For the first time in years, Genevieve was alone. The crying lasted only a few days. Then came the chill. This time, grief bit like a trap.

Kate was no help. The poor girl had gone completely to pieces, and ran off with a warm Italian body. Surprisingly, Penelope was considerate, making telephone calls that eased the practicalities of interment. She took it upon herself to send telegrams to Charles's surviving nephew, himself too old to travel to the funeral, and his onetime protege Edwin Winthrop, who had made the journey across Europe with his companion, Miss Catriona Kaye.

Winthrop said he thought Charles should have been buried in Westminster Abbey with full state honours. Genevieve was unprepared to find Winthrop turned into a handsome, kindly old man who plainly hero-worshipped his just-dead friend, and was stricken by his not-unexpected passing.

The funeral was a tiny ceremony. Charles had outlived his warm generation. However, telegrams had come from all over the world, including apparently sincere tributes from the Queen's Household  -  which had a very long memory  -  and Sir Winston Churchill. There was even a hand-delivered, black-edged card of conventional condolence signed with a thick-nibbed 'D'.

She sorted the telegrams and cards. They would go into the last of the many packets of papers she was to turn over to Winthrop for the secret archive of the Diogenes Club. Among the documents was a transcript of the phonograph diaries of Dr John Seward, covering the period between 1885 and 1888. She shuddered, remembering the discovery of those wax cylinders, the rush through the fog to a tiny room thick with dead blood. The Seward papers would be sealed for centuries. The open presence of the very long-lived in the world meant that files which would once have been shut up for a scant hundred years were now sub rosa perhaps forever.

Charles had been meticulous. Everything was in order. She didn't really need to go through the papers, but this was the last of him. She wanted to keep something for herself. If only memories.

A few pages, evidently surviving fragments of a book-length manuscript, contained stirring paragraphs on duty and sacrifice, the need to shuck one's individual humanity in the service of humankind. Were it not in German, she'd have thought the manuscript was about Charles. Reading on, finding an account of an aerial battle, she deduced that the pages were from a ghosted autobiography of Manfred, Frieherr von Richthofen, vampire air ace of the First World War. She wondered who'd written them, and how they'd come to be of interest to Charles. Winthrop had been involved in the destruction of the so-called Bloody Red Baron, she knew. Doubtless, the archivists of the Diogenes Club would know in which puzzle to put these odd pieces.

There was much more, including highly sensitive material that revealed a good deal of the secret history of the twentieth century. She found scribbled notes, in Charles's handwriting, for Edward VIII's abdication speech. That had been a major constitutional crisis. Since the death of King Victor in 1922, no vampire had sat on the throne of Great Britain, but Edward's fiancee, Mrs Wallis Simpson, intended that they should both turn and rule the country in perpetuity. Evidently, it was Charles who'd informed the King that if he became a vampire, he would be legally dead, and the rule of succession would be invoked.

It was an important precedent in the United Kingdom. In questions of inherited position, turning vampire was equivalent to death. Lord Ruthven, Prime Minister then as now, was forced to renounce his title and buy it back at great cost from an impoverished collateral descendant. Elders who styled themselves 'Count' or 'Baron' were quietly levelled to 'Mr' at Dover or Heathrow. Edward and Wallis, nosferatu together, ruled over their estates in Bermuda, and a warm woman sat on the throne of Great Britain.

She would have read on, picking through secrets, but her appetite was glutted. Every note she found from Charles, every scrap he had saved, was like a mocking message. It was as if he had escaped from her.

A week ago, she was prepared to kill Penelope to prevent her forcing the Dark Kiss on Charles. Now she wanted to dig out her own heart for failing to turn him herself. She recognised that as a selfish impulse. But was it wrong to want someone you loved to live forever?

Charles hadn't wanted to die. But he had accepted death.

Had she had enough of life? When she was born, few women lived past their twenties. She had lived so far past. How much future could she bear?

Since Sputnik, many children wanted to be spacemen when they grew up. It was likely, if Earth survived the next hundred years without nuclear self-immolation, that humanity would spread to the stars. It might be an option for her, a wonder-journey to Jupiter and beyond. She had read an article by Arthur C. Clarke in Time magazine that suggested vampires like her, elderly enough to be stable, would be ideal for long-haul space flights, more resilient than the norm, long-lived enough to undertake voyages that might last human generations. There were even ways round the problem of feeding.

She was laughing. Her train of thought had started with the question of whether she should leave Rome to escape her memories. Now she was seriously thinking of leaving the Solar System. How would she look in one of those Dale Arden numbers from the funny papers, with a fishbowl helmet and a transparent leotard? Real spacesuits looked less like harem outfits.

Charles had been interested, even as a centenarian, in the possibilities of space travel. On his desk when he died was a report from the director of the British Rocket Group, annotated in Charles's hand. They were both struggling to keep the moon project on a scientific rather than military basis. How many other causes would suffer for the lack of Charles's acuity and influence? She made a mental note to send a contribution to CND.

Using Charles's wheelchair seemed indecent  -  she must find a hospital or an old people's home to donate it to  -  which meant she had to perch on a kitchen stool to work at his desk, the only suitable surface for the sorting-through she had to do. Her back and shoulders ached from the long hours.

She had promised Winthrop she'd have the material for the Diogenes Club boxed up by the end of the week, to be shipped to London in the diplomatic bag. The Beauregard Papers warranted a personal escort, though her malicious suggestion that Hamish Bond be given that position had been curtly declined. The spy had appeared at the funeral, but had not met her eyes.

She climbed off the stool and walked across the study, stepping around the carpet on which Charles had died, wandering up to the wall of bookshelves. Charles had been an inveterate annotator, which meant some volumes ought to be included with his papers. His library was a personal bequest to Winthrop, not the Club. She supposed she could trust Winthrop to turn over anything which should be part of the Papers.

A book stood out. She took it down. Dracula, by Bram Stoker. This was the first official publication, of 1912. With a memoir by the author and an Introduction by no less than Miss Katharine Reed. Genevieve had first read the book, which was completed about 1897, in an underground edition, one of the many that circulated during the Terror. The manuscript was smuggled out of the concentration camp in Sussex where Prince Consort Dracula confined his enemies in England, and Kate  -  then a heroine of the underground  -  arranged for broadsheets of the text to be run off on the presses of the Pall Mall Gazette. The novel had been a rallying point of the resistance during the hard years after Queen Victoria's death, when Dracula was trying to cling to the throne of Great Britain with increasing brutality and popular rebellion was spreading.

It was a curious novel, Genevieve had thought then. Stoker had imagined a world in which Dracula did not rise to power in Great Britain but was defeated by the foes he had bested in reality, Professor Van Helsing and his followers. Knowing something of the real histories, she was moved by his portraits of Mina Harker, Dr Seward and Arthur Holmwood as they might have been had they found the strength to resist. Presented as a collection of documents and diaries  -  some authentic, like Jonathan Harker's journal of his trip to Transylvania and Mina Harker's remembrances of Lucy Westenra  -  the book was designed to feel like a work of history, an account of events that had happened rather than events which should have happened.

The conventions of 'imaginary history' in literature dated back at least to Louis Geoffroy's Napoleon et la conquete du monde, a novel she'd read in 1836 that concerned a Buonaparte who triumphed at Waterloo. But Stoker, civil servant turned theatrical fixer turned revolutionary, popularised the 'if things had been otherwise' narrative. Since Dracula, there had been any number of novels on the theme: George Orwell's Big Brother, an account of a grey and grisly Britain in a world where a Communist regime came to power in 1917; Sarban's The Sound of His Horn, about a Nazi victory in the Second World War; and Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, in which Dracula chose to migrate across the Atlantic and invade America, creating a world in which the last warm man was surrounded by an entire population of the undead. Subtlest of these works was Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time novel-sequence. Genevieve had been halfway through the fourth novel, At Lady Molly's, before she realised the change Powell had wrought in his fictional world. He had imagined the history of the twentieth century as it might have been without vampires.

She opened Dracula. It was signed to Charles, by Kate. How was Kate? She had been in a bad way at the funeral, puffed up with too much blood, befuddled by grief.

Stoker was dead by the time his book could be openly published. There was a falling out between Kate and his widow, Florence. This edition, with Kate's never-reprinted Introduction, was a valuable curio, but it also had other significance.

She decided to keep it. She knew Charles wouldn't mind.

The book fell open. An oblong of card and a folded paper had been put between its pages. The card was the invitation to Dracula's Engagement Ball, two nights from now. The paper was a memo, written sometime in Charles's last two days, maybe on the day before his death.

An alliance, cemented by marriage, between the House of Dracula and the House of Vajda will establish, for the first time this century, a standard under which vampire elders can gather, probably in pursuit of temporal political power. Already, many of the great fortunes of Europe are in undead hands. If Dracula returns in triumph to Transylvania, an empire will rise again. Princess Asa Vajda is a tyrant manque, evidently with ambitions to become the nosferatu Eva Peron. The unknown factor in this alliance is, as ever, Dracula himself. From close study, Edwin, I should say that our Count has...

The memo was unfinished. There was nothing in it Winthrop did not know. But since it was obviously intended for him, she would pass it on. He'd returned to London, but Bond was still in Rome and could probably be prevailed upon, out of gratitude for his life, to become a postman.

She wondered what observation Charles had formed but not set down.

She tapped her teeth with the invitation. Should she go? The last time she'd been invited  -  with Charles  -  by Dracula to a palace, an empire had fallen and there'd been a great deal of fire, bloodshed, and kerfuffle. Of course, this was likely to be less interesting.

She had the dress, though. Suitable for funerals and weddings. Only worn once.