Frankenstein and the Vampire Countess Read online

  Frankenstein and the Vampire Countess

  (The Empire of the Necromancers 2)

  by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  Introduction

  In Paul Féval’s John Devil,1 that legendary pseudonym is adopted by Comte Henri de Belcamp in support of his mother’s career as a notorious member of London’s underworld, where she is known by her maiden name, Helen Brown. After attempting unsuccessfully to rescue her from an Australian prison camp, Henri takes news of her death to his long-estranged father, the Marquis de Belcamp, in the small town of Miremont, and is reconciled with him. Meanwhile, he is secretly engaged in financing the construction of an unprecedentedly powerful steamship with which he intends to rescue Napoleon from St. Helena and conquer India; in pursuit of this plan, he takes over a secret Bonapartist organization, the Knights of the Deliverance. Henri is assisted in this project by his long-term companion, Sarah O’Brien, the daughter of a murdered Irish general.

  When a potential traitor to the Deliverance, the opera singer Constance Bartolozzi, is murdered in London, the case is investigated by Gregory Temple, the senior detective at Scotland Yard, assisted by his junior, James Davy. John Devil is identified as the murderer. Temple strongly suspects that the person behind that name is Helen Brown’s son, known to him as Tom Brown, but the accumulated evidence seems to point to Temple’s former assistant, Richard Thompson (who is secretly married to Temple’s daughter, Suzanne). Actually, James Davy–who is another of Henri de Belcamp’s many aliases–has framed his predecessor, exploiting the account of his methods Temple has published in a book on the art of detection. Henri/Davy persuades Thompson to flee to France, where Suzanne is a guest at the Château Belcamp, but he is captured and convicted of the Bartolozzi murder.

  When Henri is reconciled with his father, Sarah rents the so-called “new château” on the Belcamp estate under the name of Lady Frances Elphinstone. Henri commissions the murders of his dead mother’s wealthy brothers but there is one further obstacle to the fortune he intends to collect by this means, in the name of Tom Brown: Constance Bertolozzi’s daughter, Jeanne Herbet, who also lives in Miremont. Jeanne is the designated heir of both brothers, neither of whom knows which of them is her father. Henri falls in love with Jeanne after impulsively saving her life, and decides to marry her fortune rather than murdering her.

  Henri eventually marries Jeanne under the alias of an English entrepreneur, Percy Balcomb, in which guise he slips out of the jail where he is supposedly confined. Henri is in prison because the obsessive Temple, having failed to prove that he murdered General O’Brien or Constance Bartolozzi, found out where the bodies of his hired killers were buried. Temple obtained thus information from the drunken mistress of the vertically-challenged petty criminal Ned Knob, who was a witness to the murders and disposed of the bodies. Ned also schooled the false witnesses at Richard Thompson’s trial, using members of a troupe of vagabond actors.

  On the eve of Thompson’s execution, Henri inveigles his way into Newgate Prison, helping him to escape by taking his place. When Temple tries the same trick, Henri confronts his nemesis in the condemned cell, almost driving him insane by telling him that Tom Brown is not, after all, one of his pseudonyms but an actual half-brother, sired by Temple. After escaping in Temple’s place, however, Henri finds that everything is going awry. The Deliverance is betrayed, his new steamship is destroyed, and his mother has returned from Australia, accusing him of having abandoned her. He finds it politic to commit suicide–or, at least, to appear to do so.

  Part One of The Empire of the Necromancers picks up the story four years later, in November 1821. Ned Knob, now directing the acting troupe, is unexpectedly confronted with his predecessor in that role, “Sawney” Ross, who has been hanged but now appears to be alive again, though somewhat slow-witted. When the reanimated Ross is collected by a diminutive French physician, Germain Patou,2 Ned follows them to a boat where they are met by a man in a Quaker hat like the one Henri wore in his guise as John Devil.

  After being knocked unconscious, Ned wakes up in Newgate and is interrogated by Gregory Temple, now working for the secret police. Temple is supposed to be investigating a series of body-snatching incidents, but his attention has been caught by a report of the Quaker hat. Following his release, Ned tracks Patou to a house in Purfleet. There he renews his acquaintance with Henri and witnesses the resurrection of a man from the dead using an elaborate electrical technique recently discovered by a Swiss scientist.

  The demonstration is interrupted when Henri’s ship is attacked by a rival group under the command of the only one of the reanimated “Grey Men” to have recovered all his faculties: a person who styles himself “General Mortdieu.” Mortdieu’s hirelings seize the electrical apparatus from the house, taking it to their own ship, the Outremort. Ned is arrested again, but makes a deal with Temple.

  As the Outremort is about to depart from her berth in Greenhithe, a three-cornered battle develops between Mortdieu’s hirelings, Henri’s followers and Temple’s men. The fight eventually arrives at an impasse, but a hastily-contrived treaty permits Mortdieu to sail away, taking Patou with him.

  Later, Gregory Temple is woken one night by Henri, who tells him that they must join forces, at least temporarily. Temple’s grandson has been kidnapped from the Château Belcamp, where Thompson and Suzanne are now resident, along with two younger children of much richer parents; one is the son of Henri and Jeanne, the other the son of the former Sarah O’Brien, now the widow of a German Count.

  Temple and Henri set out to make their separate ways to Miremont, where Temple has to break the news to Jeanne that she is not a widow. Henri is delayed and Temple has to respond to the first ransom note with no one to help him but Ned Knob. He is taken prisoner in his turn. Temple’s captors are members of a long-dormant society of heretic monks known as Civitas Solis, seemingly led by Giuseppe Balsamo, who are more interested in securing the secret of resurrection than in the ransom money that will help finance their exploitation of it.

  Henri’s delay has been caused by his traveling under the name George Palmer, in which guise he was involved with a vehm (a secret society of vigilantes) at the time of General O’Brien’s murder, and in whose eyes he is still a wanted man. Having made his peace with the vehmgerichte, however, Henri is able to attack Civitas Solis and liberate Temple and the captive children before disappearing again, intent on joining forces with Civitas Solis in the expectation of using them as he had formerly used the Deliverance.

  Now read on...

  Bran Stableford

  PART ONE: THE RETURN OF FRANKENSTEIN

  Chapter One

  Sleepless in Spezia

  Having written his report out in longhand on the rickety table in his hotel room, Ned Knob began the tiresome work of translating it into two different ciphers, using two different keywords.

  The clear version of the report read: More laboratory equipment delivered today to house rented by Walton, including Voltaic cells and apothecary’s supplies. His companion remains hidden; will continue attempts to confirm identification. Other spy seen watching house not present today. Have identified visitor previously mentioned as Edward Trelawny, temporary resident at Casa Magni, San Terenzo, present home of Percy Shelley and Edward Williams. Town gossip associates Shelley and Williams with larger group including Lord Byron, Tom Medwin, Capt. John Hay, Leigh Hunt, John Taaffe, rumored to be involved in conspiracy. Agenda of conspiracy unknown, but company apparently has enemies. Several members recently involved in conflict; Shelley and Hay injured, their attacker, Stefano Masi, badly wounded; legal investigation proceeding. Will
travel San Terenzo tomorrow to make further inquiries.

  Having transcribed this screed twice, in the coded versions, Ned immediately put the original to his candle-flame and made sure that it was thoroughly incinerated. Taking great care not to mix them up, he put the two coded versions into envelopes, addressed them differently and applied two different seals to the wax that secured them. Then he took one of them downstairs, where the courier that would initiate its transmission to Gregory Temple of the King George’s Secret Service was waiting to receive it beneath the arch of the coaching entrance.

  Having watched the courier ride off into the night on a coal black mare, Ned left the hotel and hurried down the steep hill to the shore, where a second courier was waiting discreetly on the approach to the quays. Ned gave him the second envelope, and watched him hurry away. There was a yacht waiting in the harbor that would bear the courier and the letter away in the direction of Marseilles; thereafter, it would eventually make its way into the safe hands of Henri de Belcamp, wherever he might be and whatever alias he was presently using.

  Fortunately for Ned, Henri paid a good deal better for the information he received than the King of England’s Secret Service, which expected its operatives to be primarily motivated by patriotism. Ned was not devoid of patriotism, but he was proud to maintain an authentic radical conscience beneath his carefully-turned coat. He had no qualms about accepting the King’s secret shilling, but he had no qualms either about accepting Henri de Belcamp’s secret half-crown. He did not think of his double-dealing as a mere matter of trade; he obtained a whimsical delight from the knowledge that he was working for two mortal enemies at the same time, owing no particular loyalty to either, but he was also glad to be involved in a sequence of events that had the potential to change the world. His gladness had been redoubled by the discovery, earlier that day, that there was a direct and immediate link between the house he had been set to watch and one of the men he admired most in all the world.

  However comical or despicable he might appear to the world, by virtue of his dwarfish stature and his criminal tendencies, Ned Knob saw himself as a giant of sorts, and a Romantic above all else. He thought that working as an agent for Gregory Temple’s branch of the secret police was Romantic in itself, and that his casual betrayal of the secrets he collected on Temple’s behalf to Henri de Belcamp was more Romantic still, but the fact that his labors in that regard now promised to bring him into contact with Percy Bysshe Shelley, the author of the recent Prometheus Unbound and Other Poems, was definitely the icing on his own Romantic cake. Ordinarily, given that Ned’s short legs were naturally ill-equipped for such work, the trek back up the hill to the establishment that was known throughout Spezia as “the English hotel” would have been a tedious one, but there as a spring in his step tonight.

  When he arrived back at the hotel, Ned ate a little late supper in the hotel’s meager dining-room. A party of young Englishmen from Sussex, sent away by their parents to improve themselves by taking the Grand Tour, was drinking wine a little too abundantly, as was their habit. They invited him to join them, partly because of the democratic spirit that comes upon young men in a foreign land, when even the humblest of their countrymen seems nearer in station than a disapproving native, and partly because they found Ned almost as innately amusing as an authentic dwarf, but Ned declined. He had already sucked all the information from them that they had; it was their propensity for eager rumor that had given him the names of Shelley’s local acquaintances, although none knew the name of Robert Walton’s mysterious companion.

  They did not take his refusal gracefully. One of the young aristocrats grabbed his arm as he attempted to leave. “Don’t go, Master Knob,” he said. “We’re going whoring later–I’m sure that we can find you a midget, or a little girl, to suit your stature.”

  “That’s very kind of you, milord,” Ned said, speaking with conspicuous mildness, although he met the young man’s bleary gaze with a basilisk stare. “But I’ve been down to the lower town already this evening, and I’m tired.”

  The fool was too drunk to take the hint provided by Ned’s expression. “Hear that, fellows!” he said. “The little chap’s already been a-whoring, and he’s tired.” The young man tightened his grip on Ned’s right wrist.

  Ned used his left hand to pluck the drunkard’s hand away, squeezing the fingers so hard that the man’s drink-flushed face turned ghastly white–but Ned smiled at the other members of the party as he said, with exaggerated softness: “I hope you have a good time, gentlemen.”

  He went directly to his bed, intending to be up early to make the trek to San Terenzo, to see what he could discover for himself about the group of like-minded men that seemed to be forming around the two English poets. Despite the remarks about consorting with Carbonari and fomenting revolution that the young gentlemen from Sussex had bandied about while laughing sardonically, Ned thought it perfectly possible that at least some of the men he had named in his report had come to Italy with none but literary interests in mind, and quite probable that all of them had far more interest in a potential scientific revolution than any petty political upheaval, but he knew that Gregory Temple would expect more details in any case. Indeed, he felt sure that Temple and his superiors would be very grateful for any information he could provide on the potentially seditious activities of “Jacobin exiles,” because it would soothe the suspicions of his Parliamentary masters that his and Ned’s present endeavors might be entirely futile. He frowned as he wondered exactly how he could fabricate some such details without causing any difficulties for Byron and Shelley additional to those that already haunted them.

  Once he was in his bed, Ned found that he could not sleep, and not because his encounter with the young men from Sussex had been slightly discomfiting. His sense of anticipation was too teasing. This was not merely because he expected that his spying mission–which he so far proved rather dull–might suddenly become more thrilling, or even because the prospect of “renewing his acquaintance” with one of the great minds of his generation was so delicious, but because certain implications were beginning to sink in of what it might signify if Byron and Shelley really were intimately involved in the project that seemed to be taking shape in Robert Walton’s rented house.

  Like every other man in England who considered himself a connoisseur of Gothic fiction, Ned had read Frankenstein, which purported to be based on letters sent by one Robert Walton to his sister and a manuscript transmitted with one of those letters. Because “Robert Walton” was such a common name, Ned had at first regarded the fact that he had been sent to watch a man of that name as insignificant, but the sight of the equipment that was being imported into the house, and his awareness of what it might be used for, had quickly convinced him otherwise. He had already guessed that Walton’s mysterious companion must have been Victor Frankenstein–or the individual called by that name in the novel–before he had any inkling of Shelley’s potential involvement, but he had also heard it rumored in London, long before Gregory Temple had sent him to Italy, that Shelley was the author of Frankenstein. He had dismissed the rumor at the time, because he was well used to the tactics employed by unscrupulous publishers to boost the marketability of works they published anonymously, but now he was forced to consider the matter anew.

  Suppose, he thought, that there really as a connection between Shelley and Walton–that they had, in fact, known one another for some time, and that it was Shelley and Byron who had persuaded the inventor of the resurrection process to resume his experiments. His first success had obviously proved traumatic for the Swiss scientist, who, if even part of the manuscript reproduced in the novel was authentic, might well have suffered some kind of delusional breakdown. In the meantime, the exploitation of his discovery had been continued by other hands–but now, it seemed, he was ready to begin again. How secure, though, was his return to sanity and resolution? And what had become of his first experimental subject: the very first “Grey Man?” These were the
thoughts that buzzed in Ned’s head as he twisted and turned on his pillow.

  According to the gossip relayed with such relish by the young gentlemen, the rumors circulating in Pisa regarding the “Byronic conspiracy” were ridiculously wild. Some of the leaning tower’s more credulous neighbors alleged that the recent brawl had been caused by their leading an armed insurrection, presumably on behalf of the Carbonari, against the city gate. That was certainly untrue, in Ned’s judgment, but even the better-informed natives of Pisa seemed unprepared to accept that the gathering of the English company was what its members contended: a mere matter of assembling a company of literary men to found a new literary journal to provide a worthy showcase for their philosophically-inclined works. Given that Trelawny seemed to be an adventurer who had sought his fortune unsuccessfully in India, while Hay was an experienced military man, the explanation that Byron had put about did seem to be a trifle disingenuous.

  Ned’s Italian was still patchy, and he found it far easier to communicate with other English and French visitors than with the local population, so he was by no means ideally equipped to be a spy in these parts. His unsteady command of the tongue had, however, enabled him to understand that the gossips in Spezia devoted the greater part of their consideration to the imagined conspiracies of the Roman Church and the Carbonari, often mingling rumors of either sort with perennial whispers about notorious banditti. Despite San Terenzo’s proximity to Spezia, and Lord Byron’s frequent comings-and-goings in the Bolivar, no one in the immediate vicinity seemed to care a fig about Percy Shelley having taken up residence within comfortable walking distance of Spezia’s harbor, and everyone seemed quite oblivious to the existence of Robert Walton–except for the other spy, who seemed to have been keeping watch on Walton’s house as interestedly as Ned, albeit from the opposite side.