“Oh, sir!” Prim widened her eyes, pulling his attention back. She wobbled her lower lip. “Tragical accident.”

“I’ll get you there as quickly as possible, miss.” Suddenly converted into a white knight, the driver whipped his horse to a trot.

Rue’s adopted father was a rove vampire of considerable style and vast means. He operated outside hive sanctions and fashionable restrictions – always claiming that the latter was the reason he left. He controlled a gossip network of dozens of fashionable young dandies, several exotic trade concerns, the political position of potentate advisor to Her Majesty Queen Victoria and, perhaps most importantly, had been the dominant influence on male evening dress in London since the death of Beau Brummell half a century earlier.

He received the two young ladies in his drawing room with both arms extended and his new favourite toy, a large multiphase appearance reparation kit, strapped to one arm. “My darlings, my darling girls. My Puggle! My little rosehip! How lovely. How very lovely to see you both.” Dama always behaved as if he hadn’t seen an acquaintance in years. “Time between visits,” he usually said, “is irrelevant to vampires. We are old and often forgotten – people know we will always be there, thus we vampires very much like to be remembered.” He wielded verbal italics as if they were capable of actual bodily harm. Not as unlikely as one might think since, with him, word emphasis sometimes did cause incalculable pain.

Primrose ran into the vampire’s arms with alacrity, hugging him in an excess of emotion for a young lady of quality. She was rather too fond of the rove for her hive-bound mother’s comfort, and thus did not get to visit him as frequently as she liked.

Rue, although equally pleased to see him, was confined to clutching his gloved hands and exchanging air kisses in the French manner, a technique they had adopted to prevent her skin from touching his inadvertently. Tonight, caution was required in spades as she wore nothing more protective over her ruined bloomers than a Chinese silk dressing-gown she’d grabbed on her way in.

Dama would comment on her improper state of dress. “Puggle, lovest, must you appear in such a very Grecian manner?” He winced as if ruminating on an overabundance of chitons with which he had once had personal affiliation. Which he might have. Rumour had it that Dama was very old indeed. Rue never asked; it was considered beyond the pale to ask a vampire his age – literally. But she paid attention to the precise way he executed certain vowels when speaking. If anyone consulted her – which no one ever had – she would have said Greek in origin.