THE PRIME MINISTER

'Were you aware,' began Lord Ruthven, 'that there are people in these isles whose sole objection to the marriage of our dear Queen  -  Victoria Regina, Empress of India, et cetera  -  to Vlad Dracula  -  known as Tepes, quondam Prince of Wallachia  -  is that the happy bridegroom happened once to be, in a fashion I shan't pretend to understand, a Roman Catholic?'

The Prime Minister waved a letter selected apparently at random from the piles of ignored correspondence littering the several desks in his Downing Street receiving room. Godalming knew better than to interrupt one of Ruthven's fits of loquacity. For a new-born eager to be initiated into the secrets of the elders, close attention to the centuries-old peer was a valuable, indeed indispensable, instrument of learning. When Ruthven talked a streak, volumes of ancient truth disclosed long-forgotten spells of power. It was hard not to be caught up in the force of his personality, to be transported on wings of rant.

'I have here,' Ruthven continued, 'a missive from a miserable society devoted to the thin memory of that constitutionalist bore Walter Bagehot. They tactfully complain that the Prince accepted the embrace of the Anglican Church an indecently short time before he accepted the embrace of the Queen. Our correspondent even goes so far as to suggest Vlad might conceivably not be sincere in his abjuration of the Pope of Rome, and that, with Cardinal Newman as his secret confessor, he has imported the perfidious taint of Leo the Thirteenth into the Royal Household. My curly-haired friend, some dunderheads find it easier to forgive a taste for virgin blood than the drinking of communion wine.'

Ruthven shredded the letter. Its confetti joined that of many other derided documents on the carpet. He grinned and breathed heavily, but there was no trace of his apparent excitement in his milk-white cheeks. It struck Godalming that the Prime Minister's rages were counterfeit, the impostures of a man more used to simulating than experiencing passion. He strode across the room, making and unmaking fists behind his back, grey eyes like fine-lashed marbles.

'Our Prince changed his faith before, you know,' Ruthven observed, 'and for the same reason. In 1473, he abandoned Orthodoxy and became Catholic so he could marry the sister of the King of Hungary. The manoeuvre won him freedom after twelve years as a hostage at Mathias's court, and a clear shot at regaining the Wallachian throne his bloody foolishness had lost him. That he stuck by Rome for four centuries afterwards tells you not a little about the man's innate dullness. If you wish to examine the true soul of conservatism, you should look no further than Buckingham Palace.'

By now the Prime Minister was addressing himself not to Godalming but to a portrait. Its beak-nosed profile was turned towards a balancing picture of the Queen that ornamented the same wall. Godalming had only met Dracula once; the Prince Consort and Lord Protector, then a mere Count going by the name of de Ville, had not much resembled the proud creature captured in paint by Mr G.F. Watts.

'Imagine the brute, Godalming. Brooding for four hundred years in his stinking wreck of a castle. Plotting and scheming and swearing and gnashing his teeth. Festering in medieval superstition. Bleeding dry uncouth peasants. Running and rutting and raping and rending with the mountain beasts. Taking his coarse pleasure with those un-dead animals he calls wives. Shifting his shape like some were-wolf mountebank...'

Though the Prince Consort had personally sponsored the Prime Minister's appointment, relations between the vampire elders, formed over the course of centuries, were hardly congenial. In public, Ruthven displayed the expected fealty to the elder who had been King of the Vampires long before he was ruler of Great Britain. The un-dead had been an invisible kingdom for thousands of years; the Prince Consort had, at a stroke, wiped clean that slate and started anew, lording over warm and vampire alike. Ruthven, who had passed his centuries in travel and dalliance, was dragged out of the shadows with the other elders. Some might say that a chronically impoverished nobleman  -  who once remarked that his title and barren acres in Scotland could buy him a halfpenny bun if he had the ha'pence to go with them  -  had done well out of the changes. But His Lordship, a man whose title could hardly compare with Godalming's own, was a complainer.

'Now this Dracula has his Bradshaw by heart and calls himself a "modern". He can tell you all the times of trains from St Pancras to Norwich on bank holidays. But he can't believe the world has revolved since he got himself killed. Do you know how he died? He disguised himself as a Turk to spy on the enemy, then his own men broke his neck when he tried to come back to camp. The seed was already in him, put there by some fool of a nosferatu, and he crawled out of the earth. He is nobody's get. How he loves his native soil, to sleep in it at every opportunity. There's grave-mould in his bloodline, Godalming. That's the sickness he spreads. Think yourself lucky that you are of my bloodline. It's pure. We may not turn into bats and wolves, my son-in-darkness, but we don't rot on the bone either, or lose our minds in a homicidal frenzy.'

Godalming believed Ruthven had sought him out and made a vampire of him solely because of his involvement in what was now regarded as an underhanded conspiracy against the Royal Person. When warm, Godalming had personally destroyed the first of Dracula's British get. That made him a likely candidate for the pike between Van Helsing and that solicitor fellow Harker. He remembered with a shudder the Thor-like blows that drove the stake through his then-beloved Lucy, and felt a poisonous hate for the Dutchman who had persuaded him to such an extreme. He had been criminally foolish and was now eager to compensate. His turning, and Ruthven's adoption of him as protege, had saved his heart for the moment, but he was too well aware of the Prince Consort's capriciousness and capacity for vengeance. And, of course, his father-in-darkness was hardly known for his own constancy or evenness of temperament. If he was to find a secure place in the changed world, he would have to be careful.

'His ideas were formed in his lifetime,' Ruthven continued, 'when you could rule a country with the sword and stake. He missed the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the rise of the Americas, the fall of the Ottoman. He wishes to avenge the death of our gallant General Gordon by dispatching a force of ferocious vampire idiots to ravage the Sudan and impale all who owe allegiance to the Mahdi. I should let him do it. We could well live without his Carpathian cronies draining the public purse. Let a hundred or so of the clods get cut down by canny Mussulmen and left to rot in the sun and we'd have all the barmaids in Piccadilly and Soho flying the Crescent in gratitude.'

Ruthven swept his hand through another pile of letters, and sent up a flurry which descended around him. The Prime Minister seemed barely out of his teens, with cold grey eyes and a dead white face. He betrayed no ruddy flush even when he had just fed. A connoisseur of delicate young girls, he nevertheless chose for his get able young men of position. He distributed his new-born children-in-darkness to government offices, even encouraging competition between them. Godalming, unsuited by his title to menial duties and yet hardly qualified for a cabinet post, was currently the most favoured of Ruthven's get, serving unofficially as a private messenger and secretary. He had always had a practical streak, a flair for working out the details of complicated plans. Even Van Helsing had trusted him to handle much of the spade-work of his campaign.

'And have you heard of his latest edict?' Ruthven held up a scroll of official parchment, bound in scarlet tape. It unravelled, and Godalming saw the copperplate of a palace secretary. 'He wants to crack the whip on what he refers to as "unnatural vice", and has decreed that the punishment for sodomy shall henceforth be by summary execution. The method will, of course, be his old reliable, the stake.'

Godalming glanced over the paper. 'Sodomy? Why should that so offend the Prince Consort?'

'You forget, Godalming. Dracula has not the Englishman's tolerance. He spent some years of his youth as a hostage to the Turks, and we must assume his captors made use of him from time to time. Indeed, his brother Radu, significantly known as "the Handsome", developed a taste for masculine attentions. Since Radu betrayed him in one of his family's innumerable internal intrigues, the Prince Consort has chosen to take an extreme position in regard to matters homosexual.'

'This seems a very minor business.'

Ruthven flared his nostrils. 'Your understanding is limited, Godalming. Just consider: there is hardly an upstanding member of either house who has not, at one time or another, buggered a telegraph boy. Come December, Dracula will have some very prominent fairies slowly sinking on to the Christmas trees they are surmounting.'

'A curious image, my Lord.'

The Prime Minister waved away the remark, diamond-shaped nails catching the light.

'Tchah, Godalming, tchah! Of course, in that canny brain, our Wallachian Prince may have many purposes to one action.'

'Meaning?'

'Meaning that there is in this city a certain new-born poet, an Irishman, as known for his amatory preferences as for his unwise association with a countryman whose memory is much out of favour. And, dare I say it, better known for either attribute than for his verse.'

'You mean Oscar Wilde?'

'Of course I mean Wilde.'

'He is not much at Mrs Stoker's lately.'

'Neither should you be, if you value your heart. My protection can only cloak so much.'

Godalming nodded, gravely. He had his reasons for continuing to attend Florence Stoker's after-darks.

'I have a report on the doings of Mr Oscar Wilde somewhere,' Ruthven said, indicating another pyramid of papers. 'Commissioned in my private capacity as a gentleman of letters, with an interest in the continuing health of our finest creative minds. Wilde has embraced the vampire state with enthusiasm, you'll be pleased to know. Currently, sampling the blood of young men is his favoured pursuit, somewhat eclipsing his aesthetic fervour, and completely obliterating the flirtation with Fabian socialism that regrettably preoccupied him at the beginning of the year.'

'You've obviously taken an interest in the fellow. For myself, I always find him tiresome, tittering behind his hand to hide his bad teeth.'

Ruthven threw himself into a chair and ran a hand through his longish hair. The Prime Minister was something of a dandy, given to an extravagance of cuffs and cravats. Punch called him 'the compleat murgatroyd'.

'We contemplate the dread possibility that Alfred, Lord Tennyson, will hold the post of poet laureate for dreary centuries. Egads, imagine Locksley Hall Six Hundred Years After? I would rather drink vinegar than live in an England that would allow such a horror, and so I have been casting around for a merciful alternative. If things had been otherwise, Godalming, I should have chosen to be a poet, and yet tyrannous fate, with the invaluable assistance of the Prince Consort, has bound me to the rock of bureaucracy, the eagle of politics pecking at my liver.'

Now Ruthven stood up and wandered to his book-cases, where he remained, contemplating his beloved volumes. The Prime Minister had lengthy passages of Shelley, Byron, Keats and Coleridge by heart, and could disgorge chunks from Goethe and Schiller in the original. His current enthusiasms were French, and decadent. Beaudelaire, de Nerval, Rimbaud, Rachilde, Verlaine, Mallarme; most, if not all, of whom the Prince Consort would have gleefully impaled. Godalming had heard Ruthven declare that a purportedly scandalous novel, A Rebours by J.K. Huysmans, should be placed before every schoolboy, and that he would, in a utopia, make vampires only of poets and painters. It was said, however, that one symptom of the un-dead state was a withering of the creative abilities. A proud philistine who would rather have hunt scenes on his walls than William Morris paper, Godalming never had anything that might be considered an artistic inclination, and so could not bear witness to the phenomenon.

'But,' the Prime Minister said, turning, 'of us elders, who else has the wit to mediate between Prince Dracula and his subjects, to hold together this new empire of living and dead? That lunatic Sir Francis Varney, whom we have packed off to India? I think not. None of our Carpathian worthies will serve, either: not Iorga, not Von Krolock, not Meinster, not Tesla, not Brastov, not Mitterhouse, not Vulkan. And what of the hand-kissing Saint-Germain, the meddling Villanueva, the upstart Collins, the impenetrable Weyland, the buffoon Barlow, the oily Duval. I "hai me doots", as the Scotsman says, I "hai me doots" indeed. Who then does that leave? The pale and uninteresting Karnstein, still mourning for his silly skewered girl? Come to that, what of the women? God, the vampire women! What a pack of foaming she-cats! Lady Ducayne and Countess Sarah Kenyon are at least English, even if they've not an ounce of brain between them. But Countess Zaleska of Roumania, Ethelind Fionguala of Ireland, Countess Dolingen of Graz, Princess Asa Vajda of Moldavia, Elizabeth Bathory of Hungary? None of these titled tarts would be acceptable, I think, either to the Prince Consort or to the peoples of Britain. You might as well give the job to one of those mindless woman-things Dracula set aside to marry plump Vicky. No. Of the elders, there is only me. Here I am: Lord Ruthven, wanderer and wit. A land-poor Englishman, long absent from his homeland, recalled to be of service to his country. Who would have thought I would ever occupy the office of Pitt and Palmerston and Gladstone and Disraeli? And who could succeed me? Apres moi, le deluge, Godalming. After me, the shower.'