Frankenstein in London Read online

  Frankenstein in London

  (The Empire of the Necromancers 3)

  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 to rescue her from an Australian prison camp, Henri takes news of his mother’s death to his long-estranged father, the Marquis de Belcamp, in the small town of Miremont, and is reconciled with him. Meanwhile, Henri 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 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 Henri 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 Henri 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 has obtained this 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 had 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, The Shadow of Frakenstein,2 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,3 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, who are even 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.

  Part Two, Frankenstein and the Vampre Countess,4 opens in the vicinity of Spezia in Northern Italy in the summer of 1822. Ned Knob has been commissioned by Gregory Temple to keep watch on a villa rented by Victor Frankenstein, the original inventor of the technology of resurrection carried forward by Germain Patou, and his friend Robert Walton. Frankenstein is about to resume his own experiments, aided by a group of Englishmen headed by Lord Byron and Percy Shelley. Ned is also reporting his findings to Henri de Belcamp.

  Ned is not the only spy interested in Frankenstein’s work. He is approached with an offer of cooperation by a man who calls himself Guido, who eventually turns out to be a Magyar working for a reputed vampire—one of “nature’s Grey Men” rather than a legendary bloodsucker. He also meets a burly but uncommonly articulate Grey Man who is somewhat resentful of being portrayed as a murderous “daemon” in the sensationalized version of Frankenstein’s story that Robert Walton issued by way of Mary Shelley; Frankenstein’s first creation prefers to think of himself as the Adam of a new race and is attempting to negotiate a reconciliation with his creator. Ned has a less amicable encounter with a fanatical warrior monk named Malo de Treguern,5 who appears to be working for a more orthodox and
more inquisitorially-inclined arm of the Roman Church than Civitas Solis.

  Owing to the interaction of these various interested parties and Percy Shelley’s collapse as a result of a wound inflicted by a member of the local militia, Frankenstein’s villa is besieged and his attempts to renew his experiments are thwarted. Frankenstein and most of his associates escape, but will have to find a more hospitable spot to resume work. Ned hears of Shelley’s death by drowning a few days later, but does not believe the rumor.

  Later, Gregory Temple visits the aged Jean-Paul Sévérin,6 who was once one of the best swordsmen in France, in quest of information regarding Germain Patou, offering to trade information regarding an alleged vampire that Sévérin, his son-in-law, René de Kervoz, and Patou once encountered—an encounter that was responsible for Patou’s initial interest in the biology of resurrection.

  The female vampire in question, known as Comtesse Marcian Gregoryi,7 has returned to France, seemingly no older although two decades have passed; she has hired Robert Surrisy as her lawyer with a view to buying the new château at Miremont. Coco-Lacour of the Sûreté, Malo de Treguern and Lord Byron also take an interest in the matter. Temple and Sévérin are attacked by hirelings of the Comtesse’s associate, Guido, who is similarly intent on finding Patou and who attempts to kidnap Sévérin’s grand-daughter in order to force information out of the old man. The attempt is thwarted by Frankenstein’s first creation, who is now going by the name of Lazarus.

  With Lazarus’ aid, Temple tracks the master vampire who employs the Comtesse as his cat’s-paw to Miremont, but is outmaneuvered by him and tricked into introducing him into a party held in the new château; he and the other guests—who include Byron and the enigmatic Colonel Bozzo-Corona 8—are saved in the nick of time by Sévérin and Malo de Treguern, whose timely intervention puts the vampire to flight. Temple and Byron make a brief but friendly contact, and admit to one another that they both have agents on a ship named the Belleville, bound for the Caribbean…

  Now read on...

  Bran Stableford

  PART ONE:

  WHERE ZOMBIES ARMIES CLASH BY NIGHT

  Chapter One

  Trial by Ordeal

  Ned Knob had woken up on many an occasion with a thumping headache occasioned by being hit over the head with a blunt instrument, but he had never learned to like the experience. Indeed, it never seemed to become any more tolerable. He always took care to thank Providence for giving him such a hard head—which had so far proved resistant to everything cruel Fate could throw at him—but, like the good Radical he was, he thought of Providence in terms of heredity and education rather than whimsical deity, so he always tempered his gratitude with regret for the fact that such an evolution had been necessary.

  Ned had never known his father, but he had always admired the fortitude and discipline of his mother, who had never allowed him to touch a drop of gin, lest it deplete her own ration, and had sent him to the best school she knew: the academy of thievery operated in Will Sharper’s Spirit Shop by the legendary Thomas Paddock, alias John Devil—from which he had eventually passed on, not without difficulty, to the university run by Paddock’s mercurial successor, Tom Brown, alias John Devil the Quaker, also known as Comte Henri de Belcamp, late of the Knights of Deliverance and currently active in Civitas Solis. That admiration had, however, been similarly tempered with regret for the fact that his dear mother had required such fortitude and discipline in order to maintain her composure.

  Having made his list of all the things for which he was required by his continued consciousness to be thankful, and added in the required leavening of regret, Ned tried to remember who had hit him, and under what circumstances. Unfortunately, his memory was reluctant to provide him with that information, at least for the moment.

  He knew that he had been traveling on the French merchant ship Belleville, bound for Port-au-Prince in the Republic of Haiti, and that he had been so sick for the first week of the journey—his first ever crossing of any stretch of water broader than the English Channel—that he had been unable to keep his food down until the ship’s supplies had deteriorated to standard naval fare. He also knew that he had contrived to forge a temporary alliance of sorts with Edward Trelawny, Lord Byron’s emissary to the Republic, even though that worthy gentleman liked and trusted him far less than the not-so-late Percy Shelley, whom he had met in Spezia not so long ago. Alas, the trauma of being hit had robbed him of access to any shorter-term memories. He had one other avenue of information open to him, though, and he tried to engage it by opening his eyes.

  The sky was a remarkably bright shade of blue and the tropical Sun must have been blazing with its most fervent ardor, but the direct light of the fiery orb could not reach him, by virtue of an expansive green parasol held by the exceedingly pretty young woman at whose feet he lay. She appeared to be in her mid-20s, and her skin was very dark, although the cast of her features was not entirely Negroid. He assumed that she was a mongrel of some kind—although she was evidently no mere cur, as he had been before transforming himself into “Gentleman Ned.” She was, in every possible respect, a lady.

  Ned remembered having seen the young woman once or twice on the deck of the Belleville, but she too had spent by far the greater part of her time in one of the glorified coffins that the Belleville’s captain—a Corsican who had once served Napoleon as a privateer, by the name of Argile—called “first class cabins.” Ned had never been introduced to her, and had not dared to approach her without an introduction, partly because she had been accompanied on the occasions when he had seen her by an enormous bodyguard. He did not know the woman’s name, but he had observed, with some interest, that at least some of Captain Argile’s multicolored crew had treated her with an exaggerated respect mingled with fear, and that the few God-fearing individuals among them had crossed themselves defensively on catching sight of her.

  The young woman was looking at him now, studying him carefully, but not contemptuously. Ned realized that he had not been laid at her feet in order to signify his relatively lowly status, but in order that his battered head might share the protection of the parasol. It was not until he sat up that he realized that the two of them were adrift in a small dinghy, which had a short mast but no sail, and rowlocks but no oars. The sea surrounding them was calm, and its deep blue would have seemed infinitely peaceful had it not been for the fins of two large sharks, which occasionally broke through the quiet waves as the predators circled the boat. Sharks had often followed the Belleville, from whose high deck they had seemed quite ineffectual, but at closer range their presence was considerably more disturbing.

  Ned scanned the interior of the dinghy for a second time, making perfectly certain that it had nothing at all by the way of equipment or supplies, save for a small leather bottle that the unknown woman was cradling in her bosom, as if it were extremely precious. Ned deduced that the bottle contained water. He understood that, given the circumstances, his companion would be every bit as reluctant to share its contents with him as his mother would once have been to offer him a sip of gin—but when he raised his hand, tentatively, she handed it over without hesitation. She was obviously a very exceptional person. He responded to her generosity by sipping very carefully, taking the minimum that he needed.

  He knew, as he did thus, that he was literally prolonging the torture to which they had been condemned. To be set adrift in a small boat in the Atlantic Ocean—for the Caribbean Sea, properly speaking, lay to the south of the line of islands that stretched from the Leewards through Puerto Rico and Hispaniola to Cuba—was, in essence, a form of execution, favored by mutineers, pirates and other agents of injustice who liked to pretend that they were better than mere murderers, or had some other reason for adopting a policy of cruel diplomacy. Notionally, castaways were delivered into the custody of God, who had the prerogative of treating them mercifully, should they be deemed deserving—except that God obviously had a blind spot when it came to victims of that sort,
even when they were afforded the mocking grace of a bottle of water and a parasol. Despite the lesson preached by the heroic tale of Robinson Crusoe, Ned knew, even castaways fortunate enough to reach “desert islands” almost always perished, slain by thirst, heat and disease.

  On the other hand, Ned reminded himself, determinedly, the real man on whose adventure Defoe had based his legend, Alexander Selkirk, really had survived for years on such an island, sustained by a population of goats and the company of his cats. “Pirates,” he contrived to say, hoarsely, as memory began to filter back. “The Belleville was attacked by night—by pirates.”

  “It was,” the mysterious woman confirmed.

  “But the English and French navies suppressed piracy in these seas 100 years ago, and put an end to it forever,” Ned remarked, nursing a sense of grievance that even the little history he knew should have misled him so treacherously.

  “The English and French navies have been busy fighting one another for the greater part of the last thirty years,” she told him. “When cats are away, it’s not merely mice that come out to play—and piracy will endure forever, no matter what navies might claim.” Her English seemed very fluent, although she spoke with a marked French accent. After a pause, she added: “These were privateers, though, rather than mere sea-wolves, for all that they’re based in La Tortue. They were sent after the Belleville as mercenaries.”

  “By whom?” Ned asked, in bewilderment.

  “Don’t you know?” she countered. “You are, after all, a secret agent of His Britannic Majesty, King George.”

  Ned’s hand moved reflexively toward the breast of his jacket. His second set of identification papers had not, of course, been carried in the inner pocket of the garment, but sewn into the lining, so subtly as to be hardly tangible—but someone had obviously found them. He only had to twitch the jacket to know that the lining had been slit and the papers removed. He looked into the woman’s lovely dark eyes, suspiciously.