The Bloody Red Baron E-Book

Kim Newman

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 815

Beschreibung

It is 1918 and Graf von Dracula is commander-in-chief of the armies of Germany and Austria-Hungary. The war of the great powers in Europe is also a war between the living and the dead. Caught up in the conflict, Charles Beauregard, an old enemy of Dracula, his protégé Edwin Winthrop, and intrepid vampire reporter Kate Reed go head-to-head with the lethal vampire flying machine that is the Bloody Red Baron... In the brand-new novella Vampire Romance, Genevieve Dieudonne, newly returned to England, infiltrates a singular vampire gathering in the service of the Diogenes Club.

Leseprobe

ALSO AVAILABLE:

ANNO DRACULA

PROFESSOR MORIARTY: THE HOUND OF THE D’URBERVILLES

COMING SOON:

ANNO DRACULA: DRACULA CHA CHA CHA

ANNO DRACULA: JOHNNY ALUCARD

ANNO DRACULA: THE BLOODY RED BARON

Print edition ISBN: 9780857680846

E-book edition ISBN: 9780857685346

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark St,

London

SE1 0UP

First edition: April 2012

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Kim Newman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Copyright © 1995, 2012 Kim Newman

Visit our website:

www.titanbook.com

Did you enjoy this book? We love to hear from our readers. Please email us at [email protected] or write to us at Reader Feedback at the above address.

To receive advance information, news, competitions, and exclusive offers online, please sign up for the Titan newsletter on our website www.titanbooks.com

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the United States.

To Paul McAuley

‘It’ll be over by Christmas.’

‘Mechanical contrivances have been greatly exaggerated in comparison with the value of infantry. There must also be artillery and cavalry as well! ...Each war has certain special conditions so some modification of organisation will be necessary but if our principles are sound, these will be few and unimportant. The longer the War has gone on, the more satisfactory do the principles of our training manuals appear.’

Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, 1918

‘This little book gives one a useful insight into the enemy’s methods, and more than a little respect for at any rate some of those whom we are at present endeavouring to kill.’ C.G. Grey, Preface to the first British edition of Manfred von Richthofen’s The Red Air Fighter, 1918

CONTENTS

PART ONE: ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT

1. Condor Squadron

2. The Old Man

3. Past Midnight

4. Grey Eminences

5. The Prophet of Prague

6. Mata Hari

7. Kate

8. Castle Keep

9. La Morte Parisienne

10. In Lofty Circles

11. What Kate Did Next

12. Bloodlines

13. Dr Moreau and Mr West

14. Kate and Edwin

PART TWO: NO MAN’S LAND

15. The Vile, the Violent and the Vein

16. Twice Bitten

17. A Solitary Cyclist

18. Hell’s Angels

19. Biggles Flies West

20. Foreign Field

21. The Castle

22. Troglodytes

23. Some of Our Aircraft are Missing

24. Hanging on the Old Barbed Wire

25. Dressing Down

26. A Walk in the Sun

PART THREE: MEMOIRS OF A FOX-HUNTING MAN

27. The Red Battle Flier

28. The Moon also Rises

29. Watching the Hawk

30. Returned to Life

31. A Poet’s Warrior

32. A Restorative

33. The Killer

34. An Immelmann Turn

35. Important Visitors

36. Dark-Adapted

37. Master of the World

Interlude: The Private Files of Mycroft Holmes

PART FOUR: JOURNEY’S END

38. Offensive Patrol

39. Up at the Front

40. Kill the Dragon

41. Kaiserschlacht

42. Night of the Generals

43. Attila Falling

44. Kagemusha Monogatari

45. To End that Spree

46. Valhalla

47. Aftermath

48. England Calls

49. Resolutions

ANNO DRACULA 1923: VAMPIRE ROMANCE

1. Geneviève Bobs Her Hair

2. Mildew Manor

3. ‘Tell Tom Tildrum that Tim Toldrum’s dead...’

4. The Threshold

5. On the Road

6. Kedgeree

7. Arrival

8. Nezumi

9. Cat’s Eyes

10. Flashing Green

11. The Crook Strikes!

12. British Bushidõ

13. In the Drawing Room

14. The Intrepid Three

15. The Name Game

16. The Secret Life of Roderick Spode

17. What Happened to Carmilla

18. In the Maze of a Thousand Gods

19. A Crowded Room, With Absences

20. Liam Bites

21. Revelations

22. A Midnight Feast

23. Under the Hogge

24. De Profundis

25. The Midnight Hour

26. Who Mourns for Adonais?

27. Carmilla’s Last Repose

28. Departures

29. Chelsea Morning

Annotations

Author’s Note and Acknowledgements

Red Skies: An Outline by Kim Newman, Based on an Idea by Roger Corman

PART ONE

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT

1

CONDOR SQUADRON

Four miles from the lines, heavy guns sounded as a constant rumble. Cakes of frozen snow gleamed vaguely in the pitted black road. The fall was days old. Bundled in his trench-coat and a useless tartan blanket, Lieutenant Edwin Winthrop was stung in the face by insect hailspits. He wondered if his frozen moustache would snap off. The open-top Daimler was unsuitable for this cruelly cold French winter night. Sergeant Dravot had a dead man’s indifference to climate. The driver’s night eyes were sharp.

At Maranique, there was a delay. Winthrop froze further while a corporal cast a sceptical eye over his papers.

‘We were expecting Captain Spenser, sir,’ explained the guard. He was twice Winthrop’s age.

‘Captain Spenser has been relieved,’ Winthrop said. He did not have to explain himself. The corporal had made the mistake of getting used to Spenser. In this business, a bad habit. ‘There’s a bit of a war on. Maybe you hadn’t noticed.’

Blood-coloured fire-flashes stained low clouds over the near horizon. If a shell caught the wind a certain way, its whistle was distinguishable from the babel of bombardment. In the trenches, they said you only heard that particular shrilling if the shell was the one that would kill you.

The corporal plainly recognised Dravot. The staff car was finally passed through. The aerodrome was a converted farm. Deep cartruts marked the track to the house.

Condor Squadron had been Spenser’s show until this afternoon. After an hour’s cramming, Winthrop was not really au courant with the mysteries. He had been briefed on tonight’s work but given only the barest sketch of the big picture.

‘Do well, young man,’ Beauregard said, ‘and there’s a pip in it.’

He did not see how a civilian, even one attached so firmly and mysteriously to Wing, could promise promotion, but Charles Beauregard inspired confidence. It was an open question, though, whether he had inspired confidence in the lamented Captain Elliott Spenser.

Winthrop had been in France long enough to know how to avoid the shivers by tensing every muscle. The memory of Spenser, smiling through blood trickles, undid the trick. Aching cheek muscles gave way and he chattered like a puppet.

The farmhouse was blacked out, but faint light-ghosts outlined the windows. Dravot held the car door open. Winthrop stepped down, frosted grass crackling under his boots, scarf dampened with huffing steam. Dravot stood to attention, eyes frozen unblinking, tusk-like teeth sticking out of his moustache. The lack of white puffs from mouth and nostrils proved the sergeant did not breathe. He could be trusted to hold the bridge against barbarian hordes. If Dravot had personal feelings and opinions, they were unreachable.

A door opened. Smoky light and brittle hubbub spilled out.

‘Hullo, Spenser,’ someone shouted, ‘come in and have a tot.’

Winthrop stepped into the billet and talk ended. A gramophone wound down, drawing out the agony of ‘Poor Butterfly’. The low-ceilinged room was a makeshift mess. Pilots sat about playing cards, writing letters, reading.

He was uncomfortable. Red eyes fixed on him. All these men were vampires.

‘I’m Lieutenant Winthrop. I’ve replaced Captain Spenser.’

‘Have you now,’ a gloomy-looking soul said from a far nook, ‘have you indeed?’

This man held the rank. Major Tom Cundall. At first, Winthrop could not tell whether the flight commander was warm or not. After nightfall, almost everyone in the war had the predatory, haunted cast of expression associated with the undead.

‘A warm fellow,’ Cundall commented, vampire mouth curving. You could always see it in their smiles. ‘Diogenes sticks to its old ways.’

Spenser was a living man. At least, he had been the last Winthrop saw him. So was Beauregard. It was not consistent policy, just the way things worked out. There was no preference for the warm. Quite the reverse.

‘Has some sneak bombed Diogenes?’ asked a pilot, smiling savagely.

‘Steady on, Courtney,’ said another man.

Huns who attacked rear positions were almost heroes to frontline men. A staff officer’s red pips were a mark of Cain. The scarlet blots on his insignia invited scorn. Winthrop had not asked for a safe posting, any more than he had asked to be roped into the Diogenes Club. Again, it was just the way things worked out.

‘Captain Spenser has had a nervous collapse,’ Winthrop said, affecting cool. ‘He has suffered self-inflicted wounds.’

‘Good Lord,’ said a man with red hair.

‘Careless with a jolly revolver,’ sneered Courtney. He had burning daredevil eyes, an Antipodean twang and a razored double dash of moustache. ‘For shame.’

‘Captain Spenser drove four three-inch nails into his skull,’ Winthrop said. ‘He is on indefinite leave.’

‘I knew something was not right with the man,’ said a hollow-voiced American, looking up from a Paris paper.

‘If a chap’s caught trying to give himself a Blighty one, it’s usually the firing squad,’ said Courtney.

‘Captain Spenser was under a great deal of strain.’

‘Lot of that about,’ commented the American. A black hat shaded his gaunt face, but his eyes burned in the dark.

‘Leave Winthrop be, Allard,’ Cundall insisted. ‘Don’t kill the messenger.’

Allard pointed his prominent nose back at the newspaper. He was following the exploits of Judex, the vigilante. According to the press, Judex was a vampire too.

The vampire with red hair wanted more news of Spenser but Winthrop had nothing further to report. He had only glimpsed the officer as he was taken to the ambulance. He was being despatched to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh, commonly known as ‘Dottyville’.

There was discussion about the singular method Spenser had chosen to make an invalid of himself. Allard said that in the old days it was the practice in parts of the Russias for vampire killers to favour iron spikes in the skull over wooden stakes through the heart.

‘Where do you get all this grue?’ Courtney asked.

‘I make it my business to know evil things,’ said Allard, eyes like coals. Suddenly, for no reason, the American laughed. His throat-deep black chuckle grew into a resonant, mirthless explosion. Winthrop was not the only one to cringe.

‘I wish you wouldn’t do that, Allard,’ Cundall said. ‘It sets the dogs to howling.’

Even for vampires, the pilots were unnerving. Like the French Groupe des Cigognes, Condor was a squadron of survivors, almost a squadron of sole survivors. To win a place, a man had to outlive his fellows many times over. Some were famous, among the highest-scoring Allied aces. Winthrop wondered if any resented assignment to duties which offered fewer opportunities for individual victories. At Wing, some disparaged Cundall’s Condors as glory-hounds and medalled murderers. Beauregard warned him not to let the pilots rag him too much.

With a deal of clumping, a young vampire dragged himself down a twisted staircase. His limbs were bent out of true but he got around capably. He wiped his red mouth with a white scarf. From his flush, Winthrop knew he had just fed. Away from the lines, there were usually grateful, if pricey, French girls. If not, there was livestock.

‘Spenser’s tried a Moldavian headache remedy, Ball,’ Courtney told the crooked man. ‘Nails in the brain.’

Ball pulled himself across the room, making monkey-use of hand-holds on the beams. He settled comfortably into a chair by the gramophone, eyes swimming in blood. Some vampires lulled in repletion, like snakes. In the old days, when nosferatu were hunted like plague rats, they were at their weakest after feeding and hid in coffins or graves. Ball slumped, mouth slightly open, a smudge of red on his chin.

‘I need a pilot,’ Winthrop said, more quietly than he had intended.

‘You’ve come to the right shop,’ Cundall commented.

Nobody stepped forwards to volunteer.

‘Take Bigglesworth,’ Courtney said. ‘The Daily Mail calls him “a knight of the air”.’

A young flight lieutenant coloured slightly, cherry spots appearing on his bone-white cheeks. Courtney clearly understudied Cundall for the role of resident cynic.

‘Give it a rest, old son.’

The flight lieutenant was backed up by cronies who rumbled disapproval. Courtney did not seem bothered by the schoolboy clique.

Major Cundall considered and said, ‘Bit thick up there to make a trip worthwhile, surely?’

Remembering Beauregard’s briefing, Winthrop explained, ‘Diogenes wants to snatch a look at something special. A lone spotter can get over the lines above cloud, then dip down to take photographs.’

‘Sounds a doddle,’ Cundall said. ‘Probably win the war, this show.’

Winthrop was a little put out by the flight commander. Ragging was all well and good, but formalities should be observed. Diogenes was not in the habit of wasting its time on fools’ errands.

He commandeered a card table and unrolled the map on the green baize.

‘Here’s the site Diogenes wants to know about,’ he said, pointing. ‘We’ve heard strange whispers.’

Some pilots were intrigued enough to crowd around. Ball crab-walked out of his chair and hobbled over. He put a cold hand on Winthrop’s shoulder to balance himself. A complete cripple on the ground, Albert Ball was magically agile in the air, reckoned the Allies’ ace of aces.

‘The Chateau de Malinbois,’ said the blushing lieutenant. ‘That’s a Hun field.’

‘Jagdgeschwader Eins,’ put in one of his pals, whose hair was almost as red as Albright’s.

‘Quite right, Ginger. Dear old JG1. We’re fast friends.’

‘That’s the Richthofen Circus,’ Allard intoned, ominously.

At the mention of the famous name, Ball spat. A thinly blooded streak missed the map and soaked into the baize.

‘Don’t mind Ball,’ Ginger told Winthrop. ‘He was shot down by the Bloody Red Baron’s fiendish brother, Lethal Lothar, and has a feud on. Family honour and all that.’

‘Our intelligence is that the chateau is more than a billet for Boche fliers,’ Winthrop said. ‘There’s odd nocturnal activity. Comings and goings of, um, unusual personages.’

‘And Diogenes want photos? We did a batch on this site last week.’

‘By day, sir.’

Winthrop took his hands off the map, which curled into a tube. He laid out photographs of the Chateau de Malinbois. Black bursts of anti-aircraft fire, known to one and all as Archie, were frozen between castle and camera.

Winthrop tapped areas of the picture. ‘These towers have netting draped around them. As if the Boche doesn’t want us to know what he’s up to. Camouflage, as our French allies would say.’

‘The sort of thing that makes a fellow inquisitive,’ Ginger commented.

Cundall was doubtful. ‘Be a bit bloody dark for photography tonight. I doubt if any of ’em would come out well.’

‘You’d be surprised what we can read from a dark picture, sir.’

‘I’m sure I would.’

Cundall looked closely at the photographs. He laid his hand on the table and drummed thick, pointed nails.

‘The pilot will have a Verey gun. He can pop off a flare to throw some light on the subject.’

‘“Pop off a flare?” Very likely,’ Cundall said. ‘Verey likely. That’s almost a joke, isn’t it?’

‘I’ll wager JG1 will be delighted at our company,’ Courtney said. ‘Probably lay out a red carpet.’

In the pictures, the Archie was uncomfortably close to the visible struts of the photographer’s aeroplane.

‘The Circus will be busy toasting each other in Rhine wine and virgin blood,’ said Cundall, ‘lying about the number of Britishers they’ve downed. Only we are dolts enough to send people aloft in this mucky weather.’

‘Very unsporting of the Hun,’ Ginger commented. ‘Not coming out to play.’

‘The flare’ll prod him,’ Albright said. ‘There’ll be Archie. Maybe an Albatros will make it into the air.’

‘Inferior bird, the Albatros,’ Courtney said.

Cundall seemed hypnotised by the photographs. The castle was bashed a bit about the battlements but still far more imposing (and, presumably, comfortable) than the farmhouse. Like every other breed of fighting man, the Royal Flying Corps were convinced the enemy had it cushier.

‘Very well, Winthrop,’ Cundall said. ‘Pick your man.’

This was not what he expected. He looked at the pilots. One or two turned away. Cundall smiled nastily, showing sharp tips of teeth.

Winthrop felt like a live mouse in a cattery. He remembered the bloody nailheads in Spenser’s scalp.

‘The best qualified would be the man who took these.’

Cundall examined a serial number scrawled on the edge of a photograph.

‘Rhys-Davids. Not a good choice. Went west two nights gone.’

‘He isn’t confirmed,’ Bigglesworth said. ‘He may be a prisoner.’

‘He’s lost to us.’

Winthrop looked around again. No one stepped forwards. Though well aware of the crucial differences between war as waged in the jingo press and war waged in France, he somehow expected a dignified competition of volunteers.

‘Here’s a list. Pick a name.’

Cundall handed over a clipboard. Winthrop looked at Condor Squadron’s roster. He couldn’t help but notice names with lines drawn through them, including ‘Rhys-Davids, A.’.

‘Albright, J.,’ he said, taking the first name.

‘Fair enough,’ said the red-headed captain. Though in RFC uniform, he was another American. Cundall’s catch-all squadron had more than its share of foreigners.

‘How’s your crate, Red?’ Cundall asked.

Albright shrugged. ‘Better than she was. The camera’s still slung.’

‘Highly convenient.’

Albright seemed a steady man. Though a vampire, he was sturdily built, square-faced, firm-jawed. He seemed made entirely of solid blocks. The wind would not blow him away.

‘Ball, you’ll have to make a fourth,’ Courtney said. ‘Red promised to partner Brown in bridge against me and Williamson.’

Albright shrugged a can’t-be-helped as Ball shifted himself to the cards group.

‘I’ll be back by midnight,’ Albright said.

Everyone groaned, in on a private joke.

Winthrop felt obliged to shine a lantern under the lower wings of the Royal Aircraft Factory SE5a to inspect the cameras rigged up in place of Cooper bomb racks. They were operated like bombs, by pulling a lanyard in the cockpit. The plates were fitted properly. One of Dravot’s responsibilities.

Uneasily aware he was the only man on the field who could not see in the dark, Winthrop shut off the light.

Albright hauled himself into the cockpit and checked his guns, a fixed Vickers which fired through the propellor and a swivel-mounted Lewis attached to the upper wing. On a jaunt like this, he should get back without firing a shot. The idea was to creep in and get photographs before the enemy could muster. That was why this was a one-man job: too many aeroplanes would alert Malinbois that they were coming. As a rule, the Boche didn’t take to the air unless they had to. Allied policy was to mount offensive patrols constantly, to remind the Central Powers who owned the skies.

Cundall and his cronies had ventured out to watch Albright depart. The pilots took a professional look at the SE5a, examining the fuselage where bullet-holes had been darned. They agreed the aeroplane, a relative newcomer, was acceptable. Through Diogenes, Condor could get whatever machines it wanted, but each pilot had preferences.

Stamping to get feeling into dead toes, Winthrop was completely in the dark. The aeroplane was a large shadow skeleton. Vampires were as comfortable in the night as he was on Brighton pier at midday. With their adapted eyes, the undead were suited to night-flying, to night-fighting. Thanks to them, this was the first round-the-clock war in history.

Ginger spun the SE5a’s propellor. The Hispano-Suiza engine did not catch first time.

‘A bit more elbow-grease,’ said one of the cronies, Bertie.

Of course, without vampires (specifically without the brute now calling himself the Graf von Dracula) the war would not have been fought at all. The Graf’s latest attempt at European power had led to a conflict that seemed to involve every nation on the globe. Even the Americans were in now. The Kaiser said modern Germans must embody the spirit of the ancient Hun, but it was Dracula, proud of blood kinship with Attila, who most epitomised twentieth-century barbarism.

Ginger spun the prop again. The engine growled, prompting a ragged cheer. Albright gave a salute and said, ‘See you at midnight.’ The machine taxied along bumpy sod, plunged into the shadow of the trees and soared upwards, wobbling a little as wind caught under its wings.

‘What’s the business about midnight?’ Winthrop asked.

‘Red always gets back by then,’ Bertie said. ‘Does the job quickly and comes home. That’s why we call him Captain Midnight.’

‘Captain Midnight?’

‘Silly, isn’t it?’ the pilot grinned. ‘So far, it’s brought him luck. Red’s a good man. Flew with the Escadrille Lafayette until they disbanded. We got him because the Yanks rejected him for their show as medically unfit. The American Air Corps is exclusive to warm men.’

Albright’s crate rushed up into the underside of a low-lying cloudbank and passed quickly from sight. The engine drone faded into the wind and drifting music from the farmhouse gramophone. ‘Poor Butterfly’ was waiting again. Sergeant Dravot’s eyes were fixed on the night sky.

Major Cundall consulted his watch (one of the new wrist affairs they wore in the trenches) and noted time of departure in a log book. Winthrop checked his own pocket watch. Half-past ten on the evening of February the 14th, 1918. St Valentine’s Day. At home, Catriona would be thinking of him, intelligently worried.

‘Nothing for it now but to wait,’ Cundall said. ‘Come in and stay warm.’

Winthrop had not realised how chilled he was. Slipping his watch into its pocket, he followed the pilots back to the farmhouse.

2

THE OLD MAN

Throughout the crossing, Beauregard was uncomfortably aware of the wounded man lying in a corner of the cabin. Given his condition, Captain Spenser was unnaturally quiet.

When an orderly had found him, Spenser was on the point of driving in a fifth nail. It seemed he intended to porcupine his entire skull. The inevitable diagnosis was a failure of nerve, but Beauregard thought it must take a steady hand to perform such an operation upon oneself.

Beauregard reproached himself for his failure to appreciate the strain put on Spenser by the demands of Diogenes. A man may know too many things. Sometimes, Beauregard wished his own skull would open and let his secrets escape. It would be pleasant to be innocent and ignorant.

After years of service to the Diogenes Club, Charles Beauregard sat with the venerable Mycroft and the eccentric Smith-Cumming on the Ruling Cabal, highest echelon of the Secret Service. His whole life had been lived in the dark.

The Channel was gentle. He chatted with the Quaker stretcher-bearer, Godfrey. He had chosen ambulance duty over prison and been decorated for bravery under fire at Vimy Ridge. Beauregard recognised as a better man one who would die for his country but not kill. He regretted each time he had killed; but he also regretted, in a single instance, not killing. At the sacrifice of his own life, he might have put an end to Count Dracula. Often, as he got older, he thought of those seconds.

At Newhaven quay, nurses awaited a small group of maddened officers. As a group, the men were quiet and pliable. They were shepherded with kindly firmness by the nurses. Four years ago, the army had considered shell-shock deplorable cowardice. After seasons of gruelling war, breakdowns were almost de rigueur for the better sort of officer. The second son of the Duke of Denver was among the current crop of Dottyville cases.

No light showed on the dock. German submarines were rumoured to be in the Channel. Beauregard wished the uninterested Spenser good luck and gave Godfrey his card, then crossed the shadowed platform to board the fast train for London.

He was met at Victoria by Ashenden, a youth who had proved himself a cool hand in Switzerland, and driven through the dark city. Despite rain and unlit streets, purposeful night crowds were everywhere. Even in the heart of the Empire, touched only by an odd air raid, it was impossible to forget the war. Theatres, restaurants and pubs (and, doubtless, vice dens and brothels) teemed with soldiers desperate for forgetfulness. Around every group of men in uniform swarmed crowds of hearty fellows eager to stand ‘our boys’ rounds of drinks and hero-worshipping young women intent on bestowing hot favours. Posters blazoned severe penalties for evading the call-up. Fire-eyed vampire girls scoured Piccadilly and Shaftesbury Avenue with white feathers for presentation to any of their undead brothers not in the King’s service. A model trench in Hyde Park impressed an idea of conditions in France upon non-combatants; its cleanliness and home comforts provoked bitter mirth among those on leave from the real thing. At the Queen’s Hall, Thomas Beecham conducted a No German Concert: the selection of pieces from English, French and Belgian composers excluded any note of the diabolical kultur of Beethoven, Bach and Wagner. The Scala Cinema offered reels taken at the front (mostly staged in the shire counties) and Mary Pickford in The Little Bat Girl.

If motion pictures were taken in the streets, a million details would confirm this as a city at war, from women traffic police officers to armed guards in butcher shops. To a man of his advanced years, many specifics reminded him of the Terror, the period thirty years gone when Britain had struggled under the yoke of the then Prince Consort. Commentators like H.G. Wells and Edmund Gosse argued the world war was the consequence of a job left undone. The Revolutionists of the ’90s merely drove Dracula from the country when they should have hoisted the demon prince on one of his own stakes. By the second coronation of King Victor in 1897, there had been enough blood. Another civil war was narrowly averted when Lord Ruthven, the Prime Minister, persuaded Parliament to confirm the succession, cutting off his former patron, Dracula, from any right to rule.

Young Ashenden was patient with the crowds obstructing the car’s way. As they idled, waiting for a Salvation Army band to pass, a rap came at the window. The driver looked out, quietly tense in what Beauregard recognised as a habit of their profession. A white feather puffed through the open crack of window and fluttered down.

‘A penalty of serving in secret,’ Beauregard said.

Ashenden put the feather in a tin box by the gears. Inside were a revolver and three or four more tokens of shame.

‘You’re accumulating plumage.’

‘Not many chaps my age in mufti this year. Sometimes ladies converge on me like a pincer movement, competing to pass on the feathers.’

‘We’ll see what we can do about getting you a medal ribbon.’

‘No need, sir.’

The Terror was the most vivid period of Beauregard’s life. Nights of danger stayed fresh in the memory. His long-healed neck-bites troubled him. He remembered his companion of those nights, the elder Geneviève. These days, he thought more often of his wife Pamela, who had died before Dracula stirred from his Transylvanian fastness. Pamela was of the world of his youth, which now seemed sunlit and charmed. The world without vampires. Geneviève was the fall of twilight, exciting but dangerous. She had left her mark on him. He would have sudden intuitions and know what she was doing, what she was feeling.

Soldiers lifted the barrier to allow the car into Downing Street. The Prime Minister’s guards were elders, Carpathians who had turned against the Impaler during Ruthven’s revolt. They wore quasi-mediaeval cuirasses and helmets but carried carbines as well as swords. If Dracula came for Ruthven, these vampires would stand up to their former commander. They had no choice, for Dracula would try to kill them on sight. He was not a forgiving soul, as this war bore out.

Dracula had left England as he came, as flotsam. When the country turned on him, the Prince Consort surrendered and was put in the Tower of London. It was a ruse: the Tower’s spidery master, the Graf von Orlok, loyal to his fellow elder, assisted a daring escape. Floating through Traitors’ Gate in a coffin, Dracula gained the Thames, then the open sea.

When Dracula escaped, Geneviève insisted on guarding Beauregard’s bed. She feared the Count would take the opportunity to avenge himself on them. They had struck the blow which began the end of the Terror. Evidently, Dracula had had more pressing business; he never bothered to strike them down. Geneviève was slightly peeved by this neglect. They had altered the course of history, after all. Or so they liked to think. Perhaps individuals could do little to change the tides.

The car halted outside Number Ten. A liveried vampire footman darted out of the doorway, an unfolded Daily Mail held over his periwig as a shield against the drizzle. Beauregard was ushered up the steps to the Prime Minister’s official residence.

In Europe, Dracula drifted Lear-like from court to court, embarrassing and threatening, playing on his hosts’ dislike of parliaments that sacked monarchs. His bloodline spread through houses to which he was connected by his marriage to the late Queen Victoria and by his long-diffused mortal get. After centuries, the crowned heads of Europe all counted Vlad Tepes among their noteworthy ancestors.

When giving up his overcoat, Beauregard noticed his boots were still liberally coated with the mud of France. That foreign wars were so close to home was a miracle of the modern era. Though his old bones resisted, he had men like Ashenden and Edwin Winthrop whisked back and forth by air.

In Russia, Dracula turned thin-blooded Romanovs, whose shapes shifted catastrophically. Rasputin rose to power, claiming sorcery could assuage the raging lycanthropy afflicting the Tsarevich. Now, the holy charlatan was dead, dismembered by a upyr prince. The Tsar was imprisoned by the bolsheviks. The Diogenes Club understood Dracula had personally arranged the smuggling of Lenin back into Russia in his egregious sealed train.

Number Ten had been redecorated again. The reception hall was a gallery of portraits by distinguished hands of the last three decades: Whistler, Hallward, Sickert, Jimson. To the despair of Cabinet colleagues, who viewed as suspect anything other than a nice Constable landscape, Ruthven now declared himself a passionate Vorticist. Beauregard looked in vain for paintings on subjects other than the current Prime Minister. The grey, sardonic face cast cold eyes from a dozen canvases. Ruthven’s craze for himself even embraced works which depicted him in a less than idealised manner, like Wyndham Lewis’s representation of his visit to the front.

In July of 1905, the Romanov yacht Stella Polaris had conveyed Dracula to the Bay of Bjorkoe, off the coast of Finland. He was transferred by rowing boat to the Hohenzollern, the elegant white and gold yacht of another of his great-nephews by marriage, Kaiser Wilhelm II. At the time, the Diogenes Club had intercepted communiqués between Prince von Bülow, then the Kaiser’s Chancellor, and Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the Tsar’s close adviser, couched in the usual royal European language of mutual distrust coated with cousinly diplomatic smarm. The Kaiser fervently wanted to believe the Dark Kiss would heal his withered arm. The Russians boosted the Dracula bloodline, concealing the state of the barking Tsarevich, to dupe Willi into taking on the burden of the former Prince Consort.

Beauregard signed the visitors’ book and hurried through a corridor to the Cabinet Room. Carpathians armed with silver-tipped pikestaffs lined the passage. Kostaki, a rehabilitated elder whose fall in the Terror was now rewarded with a trusted position, touched his helm to Beauregard.

Assuming the title of Graf, Dracula became an ornament to the Imperial Court in Berlin. With all due ceremony, he turned Wilhelm. The Kaiser could at last straighten his hated arm and make a proper fist. The first thing Willi wished to do with his new fingers was sink them into the throats of fellow monarchs, to wrestle away their mastery of the seas, and sundry African, Eastern, Asian and Pacific dominions. Germany, he said, must turn vampire, and find its place in the moonlight.

British and French authors wrote novels in imitation of The Battle of Dorking, prophesying a coming war between Dracula’s Germany and the Civilised World. Viscount Northcliffe serialised such yarns in the Daily Mail, achieving great success with William Le Queux’s The Invasion of 1910. Paid-for strategists suggested the New Huns would favour lightning attacks on isolated outposts. Since there was little likelihood of increased circulation of the Mail in such hamlets, Northcliffe insisted the story feature invasions of every major town in the land. The citizens of Norwich and Manchester relished lurid descriptions of their fates when besieged by undead Uhlans. Beauregard remembered the Mail’s sandwich men strutting about town in German uniforms, a foretaste of the imagined occupation.

The Diogenes Club noted the Kaiser’s programme of industrialisation and naval expansion, though the intelligence little affected Ruthven’s programme of gallery openings and society balls. German rails snaked across the continent, an aid to rapid mobilisation. Britannia’s dreadnoughts ruled the waves, but Willi’s submarines took command of the deeps. When Heath Robinson, England’s engineering genius, took the lead in the development of aircraft, Dracula employed the Dutchman Anthony Fokker to sketch design after design for fighter and bomber aeroplanes.

Vampirism spread through the Central Powers. Elders who had cowered through nomadic centuries returned to live openly on estates in Germany and Austria–Hungary. The condition had run unchecked in Britain, but Dracula now insisted on regulating the turning of newborns. Edicts forbade specified classes and races of men and women to turn. Wilhelm sneered that Britain and France elevated poets and ballerinas to immortality; in his domains, the privilege was reserved to those willing to fight for their country and hunt their own human prey.

In 1914, having occupied a succession of military and political posts, Dracula assumed the twin positions of Chancellor and commander-in-chief of the armies of the Fatherland. Beauregard wondered how the former Vlad Tepes countenanced alliances which ranged him against Romania, the land for which he had fought, and alongside Turkey, the empire he had devoted his warmth to resisting.

Outside the Cabinet Room, Beauregard was greeted by Mansfield Smith-Cumming, the monocled spymaster who served with him on the Ruling Cabal. It was rumoured the vampire had amputated his own leg with a penknife to free himself from the wreckage of a car accident so he could drape his coat over his dying son, who complained of the cold. His leg was regrown past the knee joint; under a bundle of bandages, a new foot was forming.

‘Beauregard,’ Smith-Cumming said, smiling broadly, ‘what do you think of the disguise?’

Smith-Cumming took boyish delight in the element of deception in his profession. He sported a large, patently fake beard. He leered, twitching his horsehair moustache like one of Fred Karno’s comedy troupe.

‘I look a proper Hun, what? Can’t you just see me biting out the throat of a Belgian nun?’

He showed huge false fangs, then spat them out to reveal delicate real ones.

‘Where is Mycroft?’ Beauregard asked.

Smith-Cumming looked as serious as was possible for a man in disguise. ‘Grave news, I’m afraid. Another stroke.’

Mycroft Holmes had been on the Ruling Cabal of the Diogenes Club as long as Beauregard had been a member. His plans had held the nation together throughout the Terror. Subsequently, he had done much to moderate the odd enthusiasms of the new King and his eternal first minister, Ruthven.

‘We’re all under a strain. You’ve heard about Spenser.’

Smith-Cumming nodded, appalled.

‘I’ve had Winthrop step in. He’s coming along fast. I trust he’ll catch up.’

‘Frightening nights, Beauregard,’ Smith-Cumming said.

It had started on Sunday, the 28th of June, 1914, in Sarajevo, far from the borders where European powers snarled like dogs separated by fences.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand, nephew of King-Emperor Franz Joseph, was touring Bosnia with his morganatic wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg. Left to its own devices in 1877 by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Bosnia was hardly the most desirable patch of Europe, but Austria–Hungary saw it as a natural addition to already swollen and ungovernable holdings. Franz Joseph had almost surreptitiously annexed the province in 1908. Serbia, not unfairly deemed a catspaw of Russia, also had designs on Bosnia and its sister province, Hercegovina.

The Archduke was nosferatu, a provocation. The Slavs and Muslims of Bosnia–Hercegovina did not accept vampires, especially as rulers. Serbian irredentists trumpeted the prevalence of the undead at the King-Emperor’s court to stir up those in Bosnia–Hercegovina who wished to be free from bloodsucking Habsburgs. With fine hypocrisy, the Tsar’s undead advisers (notably excluding the fanatically warm Rasputin) sent agents to Sarajevo to agitate torch-bearing mobs of vampire-hating Orthodox Christians, Serbian nationalists and café trouble-makers. Pamphlets appeared giving obscene accounts of the Archduke’s marital relations with the plumply warm Sophie, a Czech caricatured as a bloodmilk cow.

It was the unshakable belief of the Central Powers that Tsar Nicky personally ordered a student Van Helsing named Gavrilo Prinćip to empty a revolver at Franz Ferdinand, putting silver in the Habsburg’s vampire heart and incidentally murdering the scabby-necked Sophie. Equally, any adherent of the Allied cause was required to believe Prinćip a lunatic acting independently of any of the Great Powers, or even a paid agent of a warmongering Kaiser.

Beauregard once asked Mycroft if Russia was involved. The great man conceded no one truly knew. On one hand, the Okhrana certainly dispensed cash (and, probably, silver bullets) to many of Prinćip’s stripe; on the other, even Artamanov, the attaché responsible for handing over funds, was unsure whether the obscure assassin was one of his contacts.

The Kaiser, seeing an opportunity to redraw the map of Europe, egged the ascetic bureaucrat Franz Joseph into issuing a communiqué to Serbia which must be construed as a preparation for war. Russia was pledged to defend Serbia from Austria–Hungary, Germany was required to stand with the King-Emperor in war with Russia, France was bound by treaty to attack any nation that warred with the Romanovs, Germany could strike at France only by invading through Belgium, Great Britain was obliged to preserve Belgian neutrality. Once Prinćip’s silver bullet transfixed the Archduke, the cards fell one by one.

That summer, Beauregard, contemplating his sixtieth year, was considering retirement. As each alliance was invoked, each nation mobilised, he realised he could not leave his post. Reluctantly, he conceded there would be war.

In 1918, the question of who ruled Bosnia was remote. The Romanovs faced death by a hammered stake and beheading sickle. Franz Joseph’s mind was gone, his empire governed by a feuding rabble of Austrian and Magyar elders. The Kaiser had long since ceased to supervise the conduct of the war, which was entirely in the hands of the Graf von Dracula and his new-born clique, von Hindenburg and Lundendorff.

The doors of the reception room opened and the two active members of the Ruling Cabal were ushered in to see the elder who ruled Great Britain under the standard of King Victor.

‘Gentlemen,’ said Lord Ruthven, ‘come in and sit down.’

The Prime Minister was clad entirely in dove grey, from spats and morning coat to ruffled stock and curly-brimmed topper. He was at his bare desk, posed archly beneath another of his own portraits, a martial study by Elizabeth Asquith. The indifferent canvas might have earned a place because the artist’s father was Home Secretary in Ruthven’s Government of National Unity.

Others sat in deep armchairs around the room. Lord Asquith sourly contemplated despatches. Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig was in France, but General Sir William Robertson and General Sir Henry Wilson of His Majesty’s General Staff were present, kitted out in dress uniform. Churchill, the baby-faced Minister for Munitions, wore a smock-like robe which tented over his considerable bulk and an American belt with holstered pistols at his hips. Lloyd George, Minister of War, stood by the window chewing on an unlit pipe. Sitting meekly by the Prime Minister was the little-publicised Caleb Croft of the Home Office, his bloody hands in woolly gloves. Croft’s duties were too frightening to consider.

Beauregard and Smith-Cumming took chairs in the centre of the circle.

‘Tell me,’ Ruthven purred, ‘how goes the secret war?’

3

PAST MIDNIGHT

Courtney kept winding the gramophone and setting the needle back to the beginning. ‘Poor Butterfly’ was the only record in the billet. Winthrop wondered if the choice struck anyone else as unhealthy. Butterfly kept waiting but Pinkerton never came back, the swine. Every three minutes, the unfortunate Cio-Cio-San wasted away, drained cold and abandoned by her vampire lover. The story always upset Winthrop, and this version, distilled to a few verses, was the most concentratedly upsetting.

‘We used to have a rare selection,’ Williamson claimed, when Winthrop voiced a complaint at the limited repertoire. ‘The Bohemian Girl, Chu Chin Chow, “Take a Pair of Crimson Eyes”...’

‘But there was a binge and they all got smashed,’ said Bertie.

‘I miss The Vampyres of Venice,’ said Ginger.

‘Heroic binge, though,’ Courtney said. ‘A veritable binge of binges. The demoiselles can still feel the bites.’

The record finished and the gramophone stuttered, hissing. Courtney lifted the needle. ‘Poor Butterfly’ started again.

The bridge game had evaporated. The pilots lounged in the mess, not talking of Red Albright, regarding Winthrop with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. He fancied some of the vampires looked at him hungrily.

‘Will you be permanent?’ Bigglesworth asked.

‘Nothing’s permanent,’ Courtney got in. ‘Not even immortality.’

‘I’m given to understand that I’m to be your liaison with Diogenes in place of Captain Spenser.’

‘Oh joy,’ said Brown, a sour Canadian.

‘Mind your head then,’ said Williamson.

‘I intend to.’

‘Deuced mysterious, Diogenes,’ Courtney commented. ‘It’s hard to see a pattern in what they ask of us. Photograph a road here, bomb a bridge there, bring down a balloon, convey a silent passenger over the lines...’

‘“Ours not to reason why”,’ Bertie said.

Courtney snarled humorously.

‘I don’t know any more than you do,’ Winthrop felt obliged to say. ‘It’s intelligence. It’s supposed to be mysterious.’

‘Sometimes I think we’re split-arsing around just to confuse the Hun,’ said Courtney. ‘Playing some complicated practical joke.’

‘Then why isn’t it funny?’ asked Williamson.

Winthrop looked at his watch three or four times a minute. Midnight did not seem to get nearer. He overcame an instinct to hold the timepiece to his ear to make sure it still ticked.

The record started again. Lacey returned from a trip upstairs to visit ‘mademoiselle’. The Englishman, one of the Bigglesworth clique, was quickened after feeding, eyes darting, sharp fingers fidgeting.

Allard laughed again, like glass scraping bone.

‘First name on the list,’ he mused. ‘Last week, that would have been me. I’d be flying out to the chateau.’

‘You were right to complain,’ said Cundall.

Allard was silent. He leaned into a nook, disappearing in shadow.

‘They used to misspell Allard’s name,’ Cundall explained. ‘They’d miss an L and he’d be A-L-A-R-D. Put him ahead of Albright on the roster. He threw a squawk and Lieutenant-Colonel Raymond issued a stern notice to the fool typists at Wing. They’ve started spelling it properly.’

‘Perhaps you’ll make it to the top again,’ said Courtney. Nobody laughed.

‘You ought to be a pilot,’ Cundall said to Winthrop. ‘Begins with a W. You’d never have to go up. Williamson would be in the air before you.’

Picking the first name on the list was a fatuous idea. But any other choice would have been as arbitrary. Cundall’s ragging irked Winthrop. It was the flight commander’s responsibility, no matter that he had manipulated someone else into making the decision.

Even the vampires were restless, jittery. Conversation took silly turns. Bertie and Lacey compared eccentric, fearsome aunts.

Winthrop thought of Spenser, wondering what made a man drive nails into his own brain. As he was taken away, Spenser was smiling. He seemed not to be in pain.

There was a long-case clock in the room, face cracked across, stopped at ten to seven. Winthrop alternated looking at the broken clock and his watch. It was twenty to midnight.

The Chateau de Malinbois was forty miles off. An SE5a could make a hundred-and-twenty miles an hour but flying above the cloud, navigating by the stars, Albright would go slower. It might take several dips to look at the land before he found the objective. Captain Midnight was only human, even if a vampire.

If Albright wasn’t back by twelve, it didn’t mean he wasn’t coming home.

‘Poor Butterfly’ slowed and Courtney wound her up again. After a comically sped-up squeak, she settled into her usual rut.

Waiting, waiting. Wasting, wasting.

Winthrop thought of Catriona. He must write and tell her his duties had changed. He could not mention Diogenes, of course. Also, the censors would blank anything about Spenser. No wonder the army provided form postcards; fill in the gaps, strike out anything that didn’t apply and sign your name. He missed being able to talk things through with Cat. She had a keen intellect and usually found a different way of looking at a thing.

‘Two minutes to,’ Williamson said.

Winthrop checked his watch. Time had lurched forwards. After a moment lasting a quarter of an hour, a quarter of an hour had gone in a moment.

‘I think I hear him,’ Bertie said.

Courtney, swift as a snake, lifted the needle from the record, cutting off ‘Poor Butterfly’ in mid-waste. Winthrop heard noises in his head and the everlasting shelling, but nothing more. Then, perhaps, something.

With exaggeratedly casual gait, Cundall ambled over and opened the door. There was definitely a distant sound, a whine or a rumble.

‘He’ll be on the dot,’ Courtney said. ‘Captain Midnight returns.’

Cundall stepped outside and everyone followed, elated. Light strayed across the field from the open door. A tall figure stared into the sky. Dravot had stayed at his post all the time. Winthrop would not have been surprised if an icicle were hanging from the sergeant’s nose.

Nobody had said they thought Albright would not make it home, so they couldn’t now be relieved when he did.

‘It’s an SE5a all right,’ Williamson said. ‘No mistaking that cough.’

Winthrop saw the black bubble outlines of the clouds. He strained to see more.

‘There, look,’ Ball said, extending an arm that kinked at the elbow and wrist.

Something dipped out of cloud. Winthrop heard the engine clearly. He realised he was holding his breath and exhaled a plume of condensation.

‘Can he see the field?’ he asked.

‘Of course,’ Cundall snapped. ‘Eyes like an owl. But there’s no harm in giving him a flare. Allard, pop one off, would you, there’s a dear.’

The American, wrapped in a cape, produced a Verey pistol and fired upwards. A purple shell burst high, colouring cloud from within, bathing the field in violet.

The SE5a rounded to approach the field. Winthrop had seen pilots stunt to impress fellows on the ground (some who survived dog-fights broke their silly necks trying to look heroes to pretty nurses) but Albright was better than that. Cundall’s Condors probably couldn’t be much impressed by stunting.

Winthrop saw what excited the press about aviators. They were lone eagles, not anonymous masses. The only knightly heroes in the gash of bloody mud that stretched across Europe from Belgium to northern Italy.

Violet light failed as the flare came down. Allard sent up another.

‘What’s that?’ Winthrop asked.

Above the SE5a was a winged shape, indistinct in the purple cloud. He heard only Albright’s engine. The shape swooped down, more like a huge bird than an aircraft. Albright put a burst up into its belly. From the ground, the gunfire was a tiny sparkling. The shape fastened on to the SE5a and hauled it upwards. Entwined, they climbed into cloud. Allard sent up two more flares, one after the other.

Major Cundall’s face, outlined by the violet glow, was hard.

Engine drone continued for seconds, then choked into silence. The cloud seemed to part. Something fell, whining. Albright’s aeroplane spiralled tightly towards the ground, wind screaming in its wires. One set of wings tore loose. The SE5a ploughed nose-down and crumpled like a box-kite. Winthrop waited for an explosion.

People ran towards the wreck. The fizzling purple bonfires of fallen flares lit the mess. The tail was snapped off, the remaining wings shredded. Parallel slashes in the canvas looked like clawmarks.

Winthrop reached the SE5a just after Cundall. They skidded to a halt a few yards away, cautious. The fuel tank might explode. Burning petrol killed vampires as nastily as it did a warm man.

A crowd ringed the crumpled aircraft. The Lewis gun, barrel still smoking, poked out of twisted metal and fabric. Dravot pressed forwards and rooted through the wreck, ripping apart the remains. He found one of the cameras and checked the plate. It was smashed.

‘Where is he?’ Bigglesworth asked.

The cockpit was empty. No one had seen the pilot fall.

Had Albright taken a parachute? If so, it was against regulations. It was thought parachutes encouraged cowardice. They were issued only to balloon observers.

‘Look,’ Allard said.

Winthrop followed the American’s gaze upwards. The last purple faded in the clouds. The flying shape was still faintly visible, weaving this way and that on the currents. It could be some strange sort of batwing kite. Then it was gone.

‘Something’s falling,’ Ginger said.

There was a whistling and everyone scattered. It was just his luck to be under a bomb when he had a promotion in the offing. He flung himself on cold grass, covering his head with his arms, thinking briefly of Catriona.

An object thumped into the field, a dozen yards from the wreck, and did not explode. Winthrop gathered himself and stood up, brushing grass and ice-chips from his coat.

‘Good God,’ Cundall said. ‘It’s Red.’

The vampires stood in a circle around the fallen man. Winthrop was allowed through to look.

The twisted thing wore a midnight black Sidcot, ripped open from neck to crotch. A human face was shrivelled on to the skull, lids shrunk from staring eyes. It was a caricature of Albright’s solid, features, bled white. In the throat was a sucked-dry wound the size of an orange, exposing vertebrae, pale sinew and the underside of the jawbone. The body was insubstantial, a scarecrow of sticks wrapped in thin linen. Albright had been emptied, leeched of all substance.

Cundall and the others looked up at impenetrable skies. Winthrop fumbled his watch out of his pocket. It must have cracked when he threw himself down, for it had stopped at midnight precisely.

4

GREY EMINENCES

‘I would appreciate it if Diogenes could enlighten us about the Chateau de Malinbois,’ said Lord Ruthven, admiring his diamond-shaped fingernails. His expressionless monotone always set Beauregard’s teeth grinding.

Smith-Cumming, who had doffed his disguise, deferred to Beauregard.

He cleared his throat and began, ‘There’s a definite air of mystery, Prime Minister. We have Condor Squadron on the problem just now. You’re familiar with Jagdgeschwader 1, the Richthofen Circus. At first, we assumed the fuss around the castle was what you’d expect of such a valued unit. The Germans are fond of their fliers.’

‘As are we of ours, sir,’ declared Lloyd George. ‘They are the knighthood of this war, without fear and without reproach. They recall the legendary days of chivalry, not merely by the daring of their exploits, but by the nobility of their spirit.’

‘Quite so,’ Beauregard agreed, assuming the Minister was quoting one of his own speeches. ‘But our heroes are, on the whole, modest men. We do not require the battery of press agents and portrait photographers the German Imperial Air Service employs to puff a Max Immelmann, an Oswald Boelcke or a Manfred von Richthofen.’

The name of the Bloody Red Baron hung in the air.

‘It would be a good thing if this Richthofen were shot down,’ said Sir William Robertson. The warm general disapproved of new-fangled contraptions like aeroplanes and tanks. ‘It would show there are no short cuts in war. No substitute for a good horse and a better man.’

‘There is indubitably something to be said for the position,’ admitted Beauregard, not stating what precisely could be said for it. ‘But what concerns Diogenes is that the Circus have been unnaturally quiet since they put up tents at Malinbois. They log victories with monotonous regularity but the thrilling details so beloved of the German press and public have grown scarce. And JG1 has seconded unusual personnel.’

‘Unusual?’ Ruthven prompted.

‘The commandant of the chateau is General Karnstein, an Austrian elder known to be close to the councils of Graf von Dracula.’

Ruthven’s cold eyes evinced interest. The Prime Minister kept abreast of the doings of fellow elders. Among his kind, he was an outcast; his attitude to the better-known bloodlines was not untainted by envy.

‘I know the vampire. The head of a blood-clan. Hasn’t been the same since his dreadful daughter was destroyed.’

Almost surreptitiously, the Minister for Munitions pulled a large, insensible rabbit from a satchel. Churchill was overfond of his tipple. His particular quirk was to inject Madeira into the blood of animals. He fixed chubby lips on the rabbit’s throat, sucking discreetly.

‘Drink... good,’ he mumbled. The rest of the room pointedly did not pass comment. Asquith, no mean imbiber himself, looked thirsty.

‘General Karnstein has been arranging conferences and parties near the front,’ Beauregard said. ‘Besides expected names, like Anthony Fokker, we have heard the odd vampire elder has been included. And some unusual new-borns. Gertrud Zelle has been mentioned.’

‘Your temptress, Beauregard,’ Ruthven said. ‘The mysterious and malign Mata Hari.’

‘She is hardly mine.’

‘You are responsible for catching her.’

Beauregard modestly showed open hands. Though she had featured in many newspaper articles, Gertrud Zelle was not the spy she was made out to be. After all, she had been caught and was awaiting execution. Her ‘victims’ were mainly high-ranking French officers, most notably the ill-favoured General Mireau. Pétain insisted on her ceremonial destruction, though Beauregard had asked the Prime Minister to plead for clemency. It was unlikely: as Ruthven reasoned, the Germans had burned Nurse Edith Cavell at the stake, so the Allies had to even things up and shoot Mata Hari.

‘We are all men of the world here,’ said the Prime Minister. ‘I, for one, can think of a reason why the German High Command would see a need for the skills of a Mata Hari at Malinbois. The Graf always likes to reward his valiant warriors.’

Churchill, bloody rabbit back in the game bag, gurgled a laugh. With Madeira in his veins, his eyes pinked at the corners. His great face was otherwise powder-white except for the carmine of his flabby mouth.

‘There is more to it than a debauch, Prime Minister,’ Beauregard said, tactfully. ‘The Germans would not be so secretive about simple hell-raising. Indeed, they take pains to inflate the amorous reputations of air aces, contriving romances with famous beauties which last only as long as a pose for the rotogravure.’

Ruthven looked at his advisers and tapped a foretooth with a fingernail. He made a great show of thinking.

‘Smith-Cumming,’ he said. ‘What of our old friend, the Graf von Dracula?’

The spymaster consulted a notebook, where everything was kept in a cipher of his own devising.

‘He has been seen in Berlin. He is to meet with the Bolsheviki at Brest-Litovsk next month. We assume the Russkies will confirm their withdrawal from the war.’

‘A pity. I’ve always believed we should defend the British Empire to the last drop of Russian blood.’

The generals and ministers attempted laughter at Ruthven’s joke. Even the dead-faced Mr Croft flashed a manufactured smile.

Smith-Cumming flipped a page. ‘There is a suspicious consensus among our Berlin agents that the Graf has no intention of paying a visit next month to the Chateau de Malinbois. If true, it’s curious such a fact should be so consistently available. After all, no one troubles to tell us when the Kaiser does not plan to visit his barber to have his moustache-tips waxed.’

‘Next month?’ Churchill growled.

‘That is when the Graf will not be at Malinbois,’ Smith-Cumming confirmed.

‘Has Dracula ever visited this chateau before?’

‘Not in this last century, Prime Minister.’

‘Do we draw conclusions?’

Smith-Cumming shrugged. ‘Some convoluted scheme is afoot, without doubt. We are matching wits with masters.’

‘With the Russians out of the game, the Huns will launch an all-out attack on the Western Front,’ said Churchill. ‘It’s the juggernaut strategy Count Dragulya has always practised.’ Churchill favoured a curious pronunciation of ‘Dracula’. It was not the least of his eccentricities.

‘Ridiculous notion,’ blustered General Sir Henry Wilson. ‘The Kaiser doesn’t have the men or the means or the guns or the guts. Haig will tell you Germany is an arrant paper tiger. The Huns are beaten badly, their heads are off. They can only flounder in dirt and bleed to death.’

‘It would be pleasant to concur,’ said Ruthven, ‘but we do not just fight Wicked Willi. There are others in this business. Winston is quite right. A concerted attack will come. I know the Transylvanian brute of old. He is a veritable Piltdown Man, an unchecked Eoanthropus. He will not stop until stopped. Even then, he must be destroyed. We made the mistake once before of letting Dracula live.’

‘I agree with the Prime Minister,’ said Lloyd George. ‘Dracula commands the Central Powers. It is his will that must be broken.’

Beauregard, wearily, had to concede he too believed a big push was in the offing. ‘With the cessation of hostilities on the Eastern Front, a million men will be freed to fight in the west. Steel forged in the fire of battle, not green recruits.’

‘And Malinbois?’ Ruthven asked. ‘Might this be his forwards post? He’ll want to be in the field. He has a barbarian vanity about such things. He has not entered the lists, yet he must lust to do so.’

‘The castle would make a suitable HQ,’ Beauregard said. ‘If a ground push is to succeed, he would wish to wrest from us our superiority in the air. Therefore, he would want JG1 with him.’

Ruthven slapped his desk, excited. His monotone became a grating whine.

‘I have it! He wants to spread his black wings and fly. He’ll be up in that dirigible of his, the Attila. He and I, we know this war comes down to the two of us. We face each other over the chessboard of Europe. To him, I am the Britain that humiliated and scorned him. To me, he is the past vampirekind must outlive. It is a philosophical and aesthetic battle...’

Churchill’s belly rumbled and Lloyd George examined the cuffs of his striped trousers. Beauregard wondered if millions of truly dead thought it a war of philosophy and aesthetics.

‘This is our duel. My brain and his. He has cunning, I’ll give him that. And valour, for what it’s worth. And he so loves his toys: his trains, his flying machines, his big guns. He’s like a monstrous child. If he can’t get his way, he will ravage the world.’

Ruthven stood and gestured dramatically, as if posing for a portrait: the Prime Minister in Full Flight.