Part 1-9: Julian and Charles Darwin.

PART ONE: Erasmus Darwin Asks For Julian's Help.

In human society, vampires are a like a seam of gold running through coal, they are there, but you have to look to see them.

This is a NINE PART short story that takes Julian, the principal of the vampire council, and a main character in my vampire novel “Fire and Ice”, back to 1828, and the irony of Darwin’s theory of “natural selection”.

Cambridge University: 1828
Julian’s deliberate footfalls echoed through the arched stone passages of the covered walkway. Cambridge University had a smell all its own, and the damp flagstones in the courtyard added to the pungent cocktail of aged stone, parchment, and human endeavor.

Students who brushed past Julian rubbed flesh which would be bruised tomorrow by the ricochet off his unforgiving frame. The flapping fabric of their black robes wafted the musk of stale sweat. Some had not washed this morning, some had been drenched in sweat when pinned under the stern gaze of their professors, and some were just so enthusiastic that their flushed faces were shiny with the exertion of hurrying on to their next lecture as quickly as humanly possible.

Julian had the opposite concern of trying to arrive at lectures as slowly as “vampirely” possible. Even after eighteen years he still had to remind himself every time his hand folded on to the brass doorknob when exiting his modest rooms... today, you are a tortoise not a hare.

His nose wrinkled in anticipated disgust. “The things I do,” he mumbled. He headed, slowly, down the covered walkway around the periphery of the ancient, history soaked building and, arriving at Cambridge’s Christ’s College, he slipped inside.

For obvious reasons, Julian enjoyed the autumn semester most of all as it eased his anxiety for the next five months, although, the weak sunshine of an English spring he could also manage well within these hallowed walls. Ducking hastily inside the old cloistered halls never appeared furtive, not in a world where students were constantly diving out of the sight of professors demanding outstanding papers, or hiding from students that had paid for the essay they had yet to pen.

Today was a big day, he would meet Charles Darwin. But the mechanics of the meeting were a definite cause for revolted contemplation, for he would have to eat.

“How do I get myself into these things?”

To get close to the young man, without ringing alarm bells that he had been sent to spoil Charles’ fun, Julian had joined the Gluttons’ Club. Ridiculous notion. I can eat of course, just as a child can eat dirt in the garden. It is not good for me but won’t kill me either. As long as we are sampling, and not feasting. Please God, let that be so.

Charles Darwin, the object of his mission, was a founding member, and being interested in the natural world had led him on to sampling the bizarre. The Gluttons ate the unusual and outlandish. Today’s menu was bittern and hawk...nice.

Erasmus, Charles’ father, had charged him with...how did he put it? “Find out what the devil he’s up to”. Julian had achieved that already, and now, intrigue had kicked in. Charles Darwin had an aura, an enticing fragrance, the smell of raw enthusiasm seasoned with hunger for knowledge, for experience, for life. Hence the Gluttons’ Club, and the countless insects, beetles, and birds, that were neatly impaled and laid open to inspection, contained within his rooms.

Julian had visited those rooms. Not Charles, of course, just his rooms. The solid wooden doors were easy to manipulate in a vampire’s hand. A twist of the wrist to flex the wooden fibers a little until the tongue slipped out of the lock with no harm done. Knowledge is power, and Julian had wanted to know what motivated this gentle, but driven, young man.

And he was young, only about to turn twenty. Erasmus was irritated beyond words that Charles had dropped out of medical college in their hometown of Shrewsbury. In disgust, Erasmus had shipped him off to Cambridge to study, with the ultimate aim being to join the clergy. But, Julian thought wryly, there was little evidence of Charles doing much clergy-ing. But, he was gun-shooting, drinking, and gaming, and was about to put Julian through a baptism by fire. Eating was not the only test. Not washing the meal down with the tide of warm blood that rushed as nectar under their skin, resisting the half dozen eager young hearts racing with excitement, there in lay the biggest challenge for Julian.

Julian swept silently over the darkly stained flagstones, sure footed despite the greasy surface. Sunlight rarely warmed the stone floors enough to dry out the residue of rotting grass and leaves carried in on the wet soles of shoes as students flouted the rules in scuttling across the handkerchief-square of lawn that graced the courtyard.

Erasmus had said, “Julian, I know you are barely two years older than Charles, but I feel I can trust you. I feel you have understanding beyond your years.”

Julian grinned. Eighteen years beyond my mortal age of twenty two, to be precise.

To Be Continued...