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THE PRIME MINISTER

&039;Were you aware,&039; began Lord Ruthven, &039;that there are people in these isles whose sole objection to the e 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&039;t pretend to understand, a Roman Catholic?&039;

The Prime Minister waved a letter selected apparently at rando the several desks in his Downing Street receiving roo knew better than to interrupt one of Ruthven&039;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, instru When Ruthven talked a streak, voluotten spells of power It was hard not to be caught up in the force of his personality, to be transported on wings of rant

&039;I have here,&039; Ruthven continued, &039;a missive from a miserable society devoted to the thin ehot They tactfully colican Church an indecently short time before he accepted the eoes so far as to suggest Vlad ht 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, soin blood than the drinking of communion wine&039;

Ruthven shredded the letter Its confetti joined that of rinned and breathed heavily, but there was no trace of his apparent excite that the Pries were counterfeit, the i passion He strode across the roorey eyes like fine-lashed ed his faith before, you know,&039; Ruthven observed, &039;and for the same reason In 1473, he abandoned Orthodoxy and becaary The e at Mathias&039;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&039;s innate dullness If you wish to examine the true soul of conservatisha hi but to a portrait Its beak-nosed profile was turned towards a balancing picture of the Queen that orna had only met Dracula once; the Prince Consort and Lord Protector, then aby the name of de Ville, had not much resembled the proud creature captured in paint by Mr GF Watts

&039;I for four hundred years in his stinking wreck of a castle Plotting and sche inand rutting and raping and rending with thehis coarse pleasure with those un-dead ani his shape like soh the Prince Consort had personally sponsored the Prime Minister&039;s appointment, relations between the vampire elders, forenial In public, Ruthven displayed the expected fealty to the elder who had been King of the Va 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 shadoith the other elders Soht say that a chronically impoverished nobleman - who once remarked that his title and barren acres in Scotland could buy hio with thees But His Lordship, a &039;s oas a complainer

&039;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&039;t believe the world has revolved since he got hiuised 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&039;s get How he loves his native soil, to sleep in it at every opportunity There&039;s grave- That&039;s the sickness he spreads Think yourself lucky that you are of my bloodline It&039;s pure We may not turn into bats and wolves, my son-in-darkness, but we don&039;t rot on the bone either, or lose ourbelieved Ruthven had sought him out and made a vampire of hiarded as an underhanded conspiracy against the Royal Person When war had personally destroyed the first of Dracula&039;s British get Thatand 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 extreer to co, and Ruthven&039;s adoption of hie, had saved his heart for the moment, but he was too well aware of the Prince Consort&039;s capriciousness and capacity for vengeance And, of course, his father-in-darkness was hardly known for his own constancy or evenness of teed world, he would have to be careful

&039;His ideas were formed in his lifetime,&039; Ruthven continued, &039;when you could rule a country with the sword and stake He htenment, the French Revolution, the rise of the Ae the death of our gallant General Gordon by dispatching a force of ferocious vaiance 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&039;d have all the barratitude&039;

Ruthven swept his hand through another pile of letters, and sent up a flurry which descended around him The Prirey 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 govern co, unsuited by his title to menial duties and yet hardly qualified for a cabinet post, was currently theunofficially as a private er and secretary He had always had a practical streak, a flair for working out the details of co had trusted hin

&039;And have you heard of his latest edict?&039; Ruthven held up a scroll of official parch saw the copperplate of a palace secretary &039;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&039;

Godallanced over the paper &039;Sodomy? Why should that so offend the Prince Consort?&039;

&039;You forget, Godallishman&039;s tolerance He spent soe to the Turks, and we must assume his captors made use of hinificantly known as "the Handsome", developed a taste for masculine attentions Since Radu betrayed hiues, the Prince Consort has chosen to take an extreard to matters homosexual&039;

&039;This seems a very minor business&039;