Bellefontaine's Return

Demeter Logbook

Night had fallen hours ago in the London borough of Southwark. The intersection of Borough avenue and Newcomen street was crowded with carriages flowing north and south, east and west; drovers pushed their teams to pull wagons often overloaded at risky speeds. The intersection was also a dangerous but necessary crossing point for pedestrians out on nocturnal errands: common menials performing heavy labors, ladies maids procuring whatever their wealthy patrons might need, poorly paid clerks rushing to get home before returning to the counting house by dawn, and everywhere the unwholesome business of crime went on in the shadows.

This and more I saw from my perch four stories above the street on the roof of a building that lay on the southeast corner of the intersection. The building had once been a fashionable brothel in the days of the mad King George, but now it was reduced to serving as a flophouse for those who paid for their lodging by the day. Time had a way of doing that, of degrading what had once been beautiful or elegant and reducing those precious things to junk. It was the same with people, time turned vibrant energetic young women into crones, courageous men into senile gaffers and raised up children to take their place before the cycle began again. I had seen it all several times before and with luck I would see it again in perpetuity.

For the undead it was different, we grew stronger with time, active for decades and then slipping into the false death and rising years or centuries later to do it all again. I had never done that, slept the years away, for me wakefulness was a dutiful vigile in service to something greater than myself - country. Mine was not a blind and obedient patriotism common to the men of the twentieth century, rather it was a habit born of decades in service to kings and queens who were often unworthy of those who died around the world in their service unmourned and unremembered. Except I did mourn and remember them, afterall I had fought by their sides and had somehow grown old before the curse of undeath was laid upon me.

It was this duty that brought me to wait upon the roof of this building in the near freezing rain of a late autumn night. I crouched in the shadow of a soot stained chimney as I watched the street below for a certain man. The man, a Metropolitan inspector, made a nightly pilgrimage to a little shop called Borgans Tea House. The tea house was owned by an corpulent little Arab whose name was Ahmed Al Fumad. Ahmed was a very minor underworld figure in Southwark, but he had made the most of his opportunities when he partnered himself with a bent-copper like Jack Romilly.

Jackson Oliver Romilly was born in 1865 to tenant farmer parents who scratched out a meager existence along the easter border of Hampstead Heath. The boy along with several siblings grew up in poverty and when the boy was old enough he joined the army and spent several years keeping the Queen's peace in Kowloon and Hong Kong.