Simon Hawke - The Wizard of Whitechapel

Copyright © 1988 by Simon Hawke All rights reserved.

e-book ver. 1.0

For Adele,

with thanks for a decade of working together. Here's to the next ten.

PROLOGUE

London had changed little in two hundred years. It was hard to believe he'd

been

away so long. The neatly bearded blond man with the gold wire-rimmed glasses

sipped an unblended Scotch as he stared out the window of his suite in the

Dorchester Hotel. He was wearing a white silk shirt with lace trim and an

elegant, high-collared black suit. It was a cool, early-autumn evening, and

through the open window he could hear the orchestra playing in the pavilion

in

Hyde Park. He lit a cigarette and removed his coat, revealing the black 10-mm

semiautomatic he wore in a shoulder holster under his left arm.

People and fashions come and go, he thought, but the city always stays the

same.

Like Rome and Venice, London was a city that stubbornly resisted change.

Londoners took great pride in their city's history. They cherished the

buildings

that dated back hundreds of years. They installed blue plaques on houses

where

famous people had once lived. 48 Doughty Street had been the home of Charles

Dickens; 34 Tite Street boasted Oscar Wilde; Thomas Carlyle had once kept

lodgings in Cheyne Row. Londoners took meticulous care of their ancient

monuments and statues and fastidiously restored their old mansions, mews, and

churches, maintaining a tangible connection with their noble past. But the

artifacts of London, from its Tudor architecture to its Victorian gas lamps

to

the nightmarish Bauhaus office buildings of the Windsor Era, were mere

novelties

to him. He remembered a much older England, when London had been little more

than a thatch-roofed village eclipsed by that great stone monument to the

roaring ego of his father—a castle fortress known as Camelot.

Almost two thousand years had passed since Modred first left England at the

close of the sixth century. Back then, he never thought he would return. They

had all believed him dead, all except Morgana, who had never given up. And

now

she, too, was gone. England held nothing for him anymore, and yet he had come

back once again. It had always been that way. Years would pile up into

decades,

decades into centuries, and he would find himself once more inexorably drawn

back to England, to see what new generations had accomplished and what, if

anything, remained of the England he once knew.

He had known since childhood that he was descended from the Old Ones, but he

had

never truly known just what that meant until his first century had passed and

he

still looked like the wild young boy who had brought down a long. He had aged

since then, although extremely slowly. Now, within two hundred years of his

second millennium, he looked like a man of forty. There were streaks of gray

in

his blond hair and beard. The tinted, gold-rimmed glasses were an eccentric