AND THE STAR IT DOTH SWING LOW

"IN THIS ENLIGHTENED AGE"

-0-

PROLOGUE:
MY LORD DID NOT DELIVER DANIEL

The letter was unexpected, but not unwanted.

After supper she had retired to the back porch, with its old Dutch rocker and its view out over the low-slung track that wound over and off towards the setting sun, and had read for awhile, quietly, before drifting into a deep and dreamful sleep.

Afternoon turned to evening before her shut eyes, sky shifting pink, clouds tightening to thin wisps of purple stretched low. The only noise was the creak of the rocker under her weight as it trembled a little, forwards then backwards - totally unconscious and unknown to her -, and the sounds of life on the breeze. The clank of metal on metal. The sound of a mechanical picker out in the fields; engine chugging. A brief snatch of song here and there.

On her lap, Simm's classic Woodcraft rested (one of her favourites - one of her father's favourites in fact, which along with his cigars, had been bequeathed upon her unofficially. She would have preferred if those had been left to her in his will, rather than the collection of freakshow pornography, which although worth more, had proved somewhat more embarrassing in the long run). She twitched, and the book slipped to her knees. A rustle of paper on fabric.

For the uninitiated, the sleeping girl might well have come across as another old-fashioned girl, of old-fashioned birth and old-fashioned standing. To the rest, they might have thought this rakish young woman, with her highfalutin new-Southern look and her fancy clothes, all bows and Belle, was one of these new-fangled Modern girls. The latter were closer, we can attest and do well know, dear reader, but still they were a good shot off nonetheless.

Underneath that tanned exterior, underneath the sun and the damp-heat and the moist evening air, underneath it all, the heart of Mistress Integra Hellsing beat with all the emotional intensity of ice, and with half the warmth.

She was neither Belle nor old-stock, but she was both and she was one-and-the-same. She was Integra Wingates Hellsing: the Iron Bitch, the Bloody Virgin, the veritable La AnteBelleUm Dame Sans Merci. The butcher of a thousand corpses, the CSA's strong-arm harlot, the Mistress of Misery.

And right now she was sleeping out back of her plantation, under a Saturday evening twilight, after a particularly large meal and three glasses too many of liquor. It was the same every year, every time the calendar fell on today, with its repetitive chronological swing, and every time that day moved round, Integra ate up and drank up and smoked a good, thick Cuban from the special stock and she read the first dozen chapters of Woodcraft, much like her father had done all those years ago, when he sat beside her bed with suitable patronomy and read it aloud to her in his soft, gentlemanly accent.

But those days were long past.

She twitched again, this time a sigh slipping past her lips, and the book slid a little further. It teetered on the angle of her knees for a moment, its bookmark - that single, folded piece of paper - fell from its place. It drifted, fleetingly, caught on a tuft of wind, to drop to the carefully swept stoop.

Ruffling gently, the wind catching and pulling it, the paper unfolded a little, so that its neat inked interior flashed for a brief second, then another, then flapped open fully.

The letter fluttered in the wind by Integra's foot.

Finally, the figure in red picked it up and with a derisive glance tossed it to the wind. It circled the dirt-road, further and further. Vanished. Dissolved into the half-light.

"Damn the English," said the figure with a tinge of bile, then walked back into the house.

His boots made no sound on the wood.

There was no need to wake her just yet. She needed her sleep for tonight's games.

He could taste that on the air.

-0-

Honor the flag; I pledge allegiance to thee, to the Confederacy for which it stands: fourteen states, with Equality and Fraternity for all, by favor and guidance of Almighty God.

A frog croaked lethargically, hidden in the field's grass. The knee-high blades would have shimmered beautiful under the full moon's glare if it weren't for the flashing blue and red lights of the state police's assortment of cruisers and tactical trucks.

The frog, however, didn't seem too bothered by this, and went on doing as it wanted. Which, in the simple life of your average frog, was make deep, drawn-out noises.

Croak, went the frog. Croaaaak.

There was a tension around. That special kind of tension that comes when some form of officialdom swoops in on a place otherwise not used to officialdom in any such capacity - especially when officialdom was suited up with armoured vests and a collection of impressively dangerous looking firearms. Time crept by, moved on by the night's orchestra of noises. A clamour of half-static, half-garbled chatter over radios. The click of semi-automatics being toyed with by itchy-fingered cops. A late-comer drove up slowly, gave a whoop of siren, then parked. The frog croaaaaked in welcome.

Lieutenant Lagrasse chewed his tobacco reproachfully, sucked on it long and hard, then spat a great thick lance of brown sputum out of the corner of his mouth, which hit the unseen frog full in the face and shut it up for the rest of the night.

"Well, piss-shit-and-Hellfire, son," he said to his subordinate. "You're telling me I've gotta turn this over to some goddamn Richmond department?" He spat the word 'Richmond' like his tobacco: pretty much as far as he could.

"That's what they said, Lieutenant," replied the officer, who jutted his jaw out as far as he could, in an attempt to emulate his superior's disrespect for greater authority. It didn't impress Legrasse any, but then again very little impressed Lieutenant Legrasse. As if to demonstrate this he hawked another gob of ochre out of his thin-lipped mouth, right on to the officer's boot.

"You know what really pisses me off?" Legrasse asked rhetorically. "We've already got the CBI down here" - he hiked his thumb at a couple of blacked-out sedans - "and they want to send down more 'Federate deparments! Tax-payers' money, I tell ya, tax money."

"Oh yeah, Lieutenant. Definitely. Yeah. No doubtin' that."

"Why, if I had my way, I'd tell 'em all to get packing. 'Get outta here' I'd say. Just like that. Show 'em how we handle things; folk who know the place. Know the people. Don't need a badge, just a kind word and a friendly face."

"Oh yeah. Yeah. Sounds mighty fine." The officer bent down as surreptitiously as possible and wiped the slowly drying juice off his boot with a crusted kerchief.

From the opposite end of the field there was the roar of a big engine. A big, expensive engine. In fact, the term roar wasn't a metaphor. It did roar, like the proverbial lion. From the belly, as they say. Everyone turned to watch as the Cadillac ploughed a furrow through the scrub. Big. Black. Vaguely Freudian. It pulled to a stop just by the command truck, which Legrasse, as commander, happened to be nowhere near, and there was a long, pregnant pause only allowed by the absence of talkative frogs.

Finally the officer broke it. "Well, Lieutenant, maybe now you can tell 'em to get packing an' all?"

Lieutenant Legrasse stared at the exceptionally outside-his-bank-balance Cadillac, with its big throbbing engine and its scary paint-scheme, and then he stared at his subordinate - who put on as innocent face as was possible.

"Well..." started Legrasse. He looked at the Cadillac again. "Well..." He looked back at the officer. Oh well; he'd dug himself one now. Better just go with the flow. "Yeah, well, okay then. Y'all wait here." Best foot forward, tucking his thumbs into his waistband, the Lieutenant swaggered his way towards the 'Feddy boys and their fancy car.

As he neared the driver got out and opened the door for the passenger, who remained seated.

"Goddamn," Legrasse yelled, more for his own pride than anything else, "ya'll came down here just for this? Don't ya got better things to do?" With a great spread of his arms he attempted to encompass the entire breadth of his emotion. "Well, it's all straightened out now, so maybe you guys would care to turn back now."

"Maybe we wouldn't."

Legrasse stopped. The voice, which had cut through the air sharper than a rodeo bullwhip, had been decidedly unexpected out here in the slightly muggy air of a field just south of Vradenburgh, one of the largest plantations in Monroe County. For one, it had the unmistakeable twang of the educated, genteel intellectualist - as compared to the general thick-set gutteral smack of the average Confederate Bureau man. For second, it wasn't a Bureau man - it was a Bureau woman. And for third, it was sexy as all get out. The figure extricated itself from the passenger's seat of the car, and Legrasse felt his legs turn to something that could have been stirred with a spoon (meanwhile, it might well be admitted, his groin just stirred).

"Holy shit!" cried Inspector Legrasse, forgetting his place. "You're a woman!"

"Ah'm Miss Hellsing," said Integra Hellsing, with that melodic accent. "Of the Hellsing Bureau. Your problems have just ended."

"Pardon my language, ma'am - but we don't have any problems."

Integra's baby-blue eyes pouted. "No?"

"Nope."

"I just guess we're early then." She reached up and tugged at her cravate, a seemingly annoyed gesture. "Walter, would you be so kind?"

The elderly looking negro standing politely by the car door reached into one of his vest's pockets and retrieved a tin of tight-roll Cuban cigars. Wordlessly, he popped them open.

"Early?" Legrasse grinned the tight little grin he reserved for idiots, women and slaves. "Ma'am, I don't know if you've seen a slave-rebellion afore, but I'll tell ya this: I've seen a few in my time, and this ain't hardly the biggest either. Just a few damn niggers - pardon my French -, I mean to say, just a few niggers running around doing what niggers do best. I've sent in two teams and we've got CBI support. It's nothing we can't handle."

"Lieutenant, this isn't a regular slave-uprising," Integra whateverhername's pretty little mouth formed. "Those things out there are ghouls. The result of when a vampire drinks the blood of an unchaste soul. Zombies - controlled by their master. You're up against a vampire and its minions." She took a cigar from the proffered tin. The way she held it made a number of policemen feel faint.

"Ghouls? Vampires?" Legrasse's grin cracked into the grin he reserved for officials, uppity slaves and the mentally retarded. "If I'm a little too bold, Miss Hellsing, what kind of crazy talk is this? I've seen some mighty outta-whack voodoo during Mardi Gras down in N'Orleans, but I can't say I saw any zombies. I definitely mighta noticed."

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the negro's mouth twitch. Still without a word, it drew a cigarette lighter and lit his mistress' smoke. She inhaled deeply.

"It's the truth," she said. And those baby-blues burned like her cigar. "But it doesn't really matter if you don't believe. Your work here's done."

The sudden intensity of her words, her personality, reverberated in Legrasse's rather shallow soul. "But-" he started. She cut him off.

"I doubt a low-level policeman like yourself would've been told about this. Not that you even needed to know. We, the Hellsing Bureau, have been consigning these freaks, that would try to violate our pure Southern heritage, to oblivion for more'n a century. There's a vampire in that plantation manipulating those ghouls, Lieutenant. You're up against a monstrosity. And no matter how many normal troops or police you send in there, all you're doing is giving them a meal."

Legrasse swallowed, which was unfortunate because his chewing tobacco went down with it and he ended up coughing and hacking till a couple of nearby officers came over and slapped him on the back. Ignomiously he started again. "Ma'am, I'm gonna have to thank ya for your time, but this is plain lunacy."

Then every radio in the clearing went crazy.

From up north, towards the plantation, there was the snap-crack of gunfire, the chatter of submachine guns, and rhythmic thud of shotguns. Everyone turned toward the noise, ears pricking at the stabs of noise that carried to them. Everyone, that is, except Integra Hellsing, who smiled coldly and looked at her cigar, and her retainer, who stood in gentlemanly and apathetic indifference.

There was a lot of shouting on the radio, which quickly became a lot of swearing, then more shouting, which was overtaken by screaming. Swearing and shouting attempted to catch up for a while, then seeing screaming was probably going to win out, decided to give up and go home and left the screaming to fade into a panicked wail and final static.

"Er... Lieutenant," shouted one of the radio-operators from the command truck. "I can't get any of the assault teams."

When Legrasse looked back at Integra her smile made his stomach hurt.

"Don't you worry a thing, Lieutenant," she said. "Ya'll just sit tight. I've got a specialist in there. He'll know just what to do."

-0-

The vampire known as Alucard had never been a big fan of the hot humid weather Dixie boasted. Good weather for tourists and insects - and that was about all. Even England, for the short while he'd enjoyed its hedonistic, hypocritical and coal-choked delights, had proved to be somewhat more enjoyable. Then again, he found Southern blood to be a little less homogenous and bland than the UK sort, so it was a mixed blessing.

The problem with the heat was how clammy it got. For one of the undead it was even more a nuisance, considering their natural ability to, say, rot, degenerate and fall apart with little of the circumstances necessary for such occurance in the common-or-garden ye liveliest normalus. For ye liveliest horribulus a certain amount of effort needed to be spent keeping one's limbs and other bodily parts from dropping off at inopportune times. Vampires, being filled with the limitless power of dark and unGodly force of will - amongst other things, generally found this more of a chore than a burden. Alucard could only remember a couple of times in the last couple of decades where a finger or nose (or, in one notorious case, spinal cord) had disengaged from his aquiline features, proving more of an embarrassing nuisance than life-threatening disaster. Ghouls, however, who were at the best of times rather prone to the sort of grotesqueries one expects from the pseudo-living-cadaverous, had an inclination to decay with the speed of a NASCAR race, and almost as spectacularly when it went badly.

They also happened to smell rather nasty.

So Alucard stood facing the reeking remnants of the plantation. They were white, they were black (but they were mostly black). They were puffed-up, oozing, gelatinous, slightly wobbly, teeth bared from drawn-back lips, groaning, shuffling, moaning, sticky, moist, buzzing with the first nightcrawlers to have got to them, eyes dull and glazed in inhuman stupor. In fact, to Alucard, they were rather indeterminable from the average Southerner. It wasn't deliberate on his part, to be fair, it was just that the dead - when looking on the living - had it the same way as the white man in Shanghai.

"They just all looked the same, y'know?"

He stood there, his cravat fluttering in the wind. As an epitome of sartorial elegance, gangly and severe-looking, he embodied a certain culture and absolute fucking fancy imbecility that rubbed Nicklas the wrong way.

Nicklas Coats had been one of the smarter slaves at Vradenburgh. Of the 200-odd thralls who worked the cotton-fields under the overseers of Henry White, that entrepreneur of modern-cotton-picking methods, descendant of the purchaser of the entire Vradenburgh village back in the late-1870s to form the first of the super-demesnes which formed those great walled blotches across the relief maps of Dixie, he'd been the sharpest. A real go-getting, no-holds-barred know-it-all; not that the whites knew it. He was White's personal favourite nigger, for reasons that Nicklas wasn't too sure, and he'd yessir'd and nossir'd and three-bags-fullsir'd since he could talk. And he'd hated them for it, hated them to the degree that he'd burned with a fire in his head so bad that some days he thought he'd go blind from the heat. And then he'd been given that chance in a life-time : the chance to do what he'd dreamt of. To quench that fire in his head. Dull it, cast it out, temper that flame – with blood.

And all he needed to do, for this once in a life-time chance, was to give up his life-time.

Nicklas was a vampire. Alucard knew this, but unfortunately Nicklas did not know that Alucard was as well, otherwise he would have skipped the unfortunate openings and got straight down to the dying in a relatively painless fashion, rather than lingering in abject, untold, unliving agony for a while at the Hellsing operative's amusement.

Nicklas was also rather full of himself, having just built up a rather impressive collection of ghouls, which had been following him on what was going to be a long walk towards the next plantation, and so when the cracker in the funny britches and John Lennon glasses (every slave - as you well know dear reader, I'm sure - can sing "Born In A Prison" at the drop of a cat-o'-nine) turned up and asked if he was finished, he was somewhat less than impressed.

"Youngsters today," continued Alucard. "You disgust me. Every time I step outside I have to put up with more and more worthless trash cluttering up the place. And half the time it's Moors."

The vampire which had formally been Nicklas was unfazed. His back didn't look like a road-map because he'd run away at the first sign of a problem. "Who are you meant to be, funny-man?"

"The name's Alucard. The Hellsing Bureau uses me for cleaning up rabble like you." The older vampire stepped forward and looked the younger up and down.

"You? Gonna clean me up? I don't think so. If you're from the government, you can go tell them that I'm setting up my own free state. The Free Colored Communist Coalition. So you'd better run along, funny-man, because the only reason I'm letting you live is because I like your specs." He thought about this. "Actually, no. I'm just gonna kill you."

It didn't really matter that the ghouls weren't really designed for unloading heavy-calibre firearms, because the amount of lead they lobbed at Alucard was enough to have wiped out a small Pacific nation (and considering the fact Henry White had been a major asset in shipping guns out to the boys fighting the Commies in Vietnam, probably had been used for such things anyway).

There was a lingering smell of cordite which hung over the clearing like a fog, and when it finally lifted, the scattered lumps of meat and cloth that made up funny-man were scattered rather nicely across a broad semi-circle of grass. He glistened wetly in the moonlight.

And then, with a laugh, he got back up.

Then he proceeded to kill every goddamn thing again and again, until they actually managed to stay down and remain dead.

It was probably about this time that the thought of the Free Coloured Communist Coalition evaporated from Nicklas Coats' mind and he suddenly realised that the gift of immortal and eternal life didn't mean much when the other guy didn't so much want to kill you as see how long you could keep going as he purposefully and with amused malice, removed your limbs and organs and entrails and threw them about the place in order to make interesting and artistic patterns around your still-screaming and suddenly not so tough body.

He didn't usually enjoy himself like this, but if there was one thing Alucard hated, it was people who didn't know when they had it good. And as far as he was concerned, the Moors of America had it better than most…

And at least they didn't have to do everything their master told them.

When he was finished, and the blood and whorls and loops of intestine and gut were beginning to cool amongst the blades of grass, he let out a long and breathless sigh. It was a sigh borne from the very core of what might have been a soul, but if it was a soul it was a particularly dark one and probably not very nice.

For some reason he couldn't help but get the feeling that something was meant to happen now. Something involving blood-drinking and female police-officers and breasts, but he wasn't too sure why. It was like an itch at the back of his head (although that might've been part of his brain still reattaching), an itch he couldn't reach. It was a feeling like that thing that you can only say in French.

After a bit of waiting, which disproved any such portended things were going to occur, he blinked out of existence.

A few minutes later he came back and collected his glasses.

-0-

Historians, being a fickle lot, have often tried to find a single defining point where the War of Secession swung towards armistice. With the benefit of hindsight, they come to a number of particularly pertinent and necessary points.

None of them, ironically enough, are actually correct, but that's history for you.

January 1st 1863, as any schoolboy knows, the signing of the Declaration of Emancipation for the Confederate States. Maybe it was the Trent Affair and Prince Albert's inability to keep the British from laying down a military threat to the United States, while others look back at Europe's cotton-production slump of the 1850s. Of course, the British never attacked the Americas (although the French did, but that's neither here nor there), and it was Lee who won the land war, but the United Kingdom sat on the negotiating table and took a healthy cut of the proceeds – almost a quarter of New Orleans docks, snapped up overnight, amongst a bit else here and there. But it was the CSA which got its wishes, and there wasn't a word anyone could say about it – now it was recognised.

And that, as they say, is that. Time ticked on steadily – history moved onwards, through war and peace and war again, until one warm and sunny evening at the Hellsing Plantation, nigh to the day one-hundred years after its creator formed it from the liquidated proceeds of his medical profession and bought himself his first half-a-dozen slaves, a car arrived.

It was a sleek Rolls-Royce, a "Chinese-Eye" Silver Cloud III, cream-coloured and purring, and Integra Wingates Hellsing and Walter watched it whisper up the dusty front-drive, past the slaves lined up as guards and past the guards lined up as slaves, like a ghost. It was followed by a rental truck.

The letter Integra received had informed her he would be coming, and she could hardly have turned the gentleman down (even, that is, if she wanted to), but still it was a curious feeling to see it unfolding before her eyes with all that it foretold.

For the first time in America's history,

Britain's Royal Protestant Knights had arrived.

-0-

"With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor,
are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro.
Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan,
is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system."

- Alexander Stephens, Vice-President of CSA (1861-1863)

Nota Bene:

parody (Plural parodies)

1. Show, performance, or other expression making fun of something else. A satire.

I tire of your Americanised AU's. Let me show you how badly it can be done, with much blood and mint julep.

LET IT BE CONTINUED