LOVE AND MR BEAUREGARD

He stood in front of his open fireplace, hands behind him, feeling the heat. Even the short stroll from Caversham Street to Cheyne Walk had chilled him to the bone. Bairstow had set the fire earlier and the room was warm and welcoming.

Genevieve wandered around the room like a cat getting acquainted with a new home, alighting on this and that and examining, almost tasting, an object, before replacing it, sometimes making a slight adjustment to a position.

'This was Pamela?' she said, holding up the last photograph. 'She was beautiful.'

Beauregard agreed.

'Many women wouldn't care to be photographed when they were with child,' Genevieve said. 'It might seem indecent.'

'Pamela was not like many women.'

'I don't doubt it, to judge by her influence on her survivors.'

Beauregard remembered.

'She didn't wish you to give up the rest of your life, though,' she said, setting the picture down. 'And she certainly did not want her cousin to reshape herself in her image.'

Beauregard had no answer. Genevieve made him see his late engagement in an unhealthy light. Neither Penelope nor he had been honest with themselves or each other. But he could not blame Penelope, or Mrs Churchward, or Florence Stoker. It had all been his own fault.

'What's gone is gone,' Genevieve continued. 'I should know. I've buried centuries.'

For a moment she bent over and did a comic impersonation of a shaking dowager. Then she straightened and brushed a wave of hair away from her forehead.

'What will happen to Penelope?' he asked.

She shrugged. 'There are no guarantees. I believe she will survive, and I think she will be herself again. Maybe she will be herself for the first time.'

'You don't like her, do you?'

She stopped her wandering and cocked her head in thought. 'Perhaps I'm jealous.' Her tongue passed over her bright teeth and he realised she was closer to him than modesty recommended. 'Then again, perhaps she isn't very nice. That night in Whitechapel, after I had been hurt, she didn't strike me as entirely sympathetic. Lips too thin, eyes too sharp.'

'Do you realise how great a thing it was for her to come to such a quarter? To seek me out. It ran against everything she had been taught, everything she believed about herself.'

He still found it hard to credit that the old Penelope had ventured out by herself, let alone travelled to a place she must have viewed as in the neighbourhood of the pits of Abaddon.

'She doesn't want you any more,' she said, bluntly.

'I know.'

'She'll be incapable of being a good little wife now she's new-born. She'll have to find her own way in the night. She might have the makings of a very fine vampire, for what that's worth.' Her hand was on his lapel, sharp nails resting against the material. The heat from the fire made him almost uncomfortable. 'Come on and kiss me, Charles.'

He hesitated.

She smiled, her even teeth almost normal. 'Don't worry,' she said. 'I won't bite.'

'Liar.'

She giggled and he touched his mouth to hers. Her arms slipped tight around him. Her tongue ran over his lips. They moved away from the fire, and, not without some awkwardness, settled on a divan. His hand slid into her hair.

'Are you seducing me, or am I seducing you?' she said. 'I forget which.'

She was amusing at the strangest times, he noticed. His thumb felt the nap of her cheek. She kissed his wrist, touching her tongue to the healed-over bites. A jolt ran through him. He felt it most in the soles of his feet.

'Does it matter?'

She pressed his head down into a cushion, so he could see the ceiling, and kissed his neck.

'This may not be the love-making you are used to,' she said. Her teeth were sharper now, and longer.

Her chemise was free of her skirt and undone. She had a pretty, slim shape. His clothes were loose, too.

'I could say as much to you.'

She laughed, a full-throated man's laugh, and nipped his neck, hair falling in front of her face, wisping over his mouth and nose, tickling. His hands worked under her chemise, up and down her back and shoulders. He felt the vampire strength of the muscles sliding under her skin. She picked the studs out of his collar and shirtfront with her teeth and spat them away. He imagined Bairstow finding them one by one over the next month and laughed.

'What's funny?'

He shook his head and she kissed him again, on the mouth, eyes and neck. He was aware of the pulsing of his blood. Gradually, between caresses, they divested each other of the four or five layers of clothing deemed proper.

'If you think this a Herculean labour,' she said as he discovered yet another set of hooks on the thigh of her skirt, 'you should have tried to court a high-born lady in the late fifteenth century. It is a miracle my generation have any descendants at all.'

'Things are easier in hotter climates.'

'Easier does not always mean more pleasant.'

They lay together, warmed by their bodies.

'You have scars,' she said, following the slice-mark under his ribs with a fingernail.

'The service of the Queen.'

She found the two bullet-wounds in his right shoulder, entry and exit, and tongued the long-healed pockmark under his collarbone.

'What exactly is it that you do for Her Majesty?'

'Somewhere between diplomacy and war there is the Diogenes Club.'

He kissed her breasts, his own teeth pressing delicately into her skin.

'You have no scars at all. Not so much as a birthmark.'

'For me, everything heals on the outside.'

Her skin was pale and clear, almost but not quite hairless. She adjusted her position to make it easier for him. She bit her full underlip as he gently settled his weight on to her.

'There now,' she said. 'At last.'

He sighed slowly as they slipped together. She held him tight with her legs and arms and reached up with her head, attaching her mouth to his neck.

Icy needles shocked him and, for a moment, he was in her body in her mind. The extent of her was astonishing. Her memory receded into the dim distance like the course of a star in a far galaxy. He felt himself moving inside her, tasted his own blood on her tongue. Then he was himself again, shuddering.

'Stop me, Charles,' she said, red drops between her teeth. 'Stop me if it hurts.'

He shook his head.