Night falls, and the sun kissed lustre of the Sulian stone fades from shining gold to mellow cream.

Come, let me show you the city.

 

Let us stay to the north of the river; there’s no need to stray across the banks.  The Avon flows through Aquae Sulis like an artery, pumping away the filth and factory run-off that is the inevitable bad blood of technological progress. Periodic flooding shortens the life of many buildings in the lowest part of the city. The river no longer provides meals for Sulis' ichthyophagous poor, for those fish that might survive the awful substances in the water are none that men might safely stomach! A pity, but a small price to be paid for man's advancement.

We have the trains for travel, and Sulis' station already gives access to London; Queen Square station goes to the Midlands or the south coast. We have the fresh pinnacles and flying buttresses of the Abbey, newly carved to draw the eye to the heavens; the carved splendour of the Circus; the towering edifices of culture and learning.

There are those who say that Aquae Sulis is no longer quite as fashionable as she was, that the population has aged as people flock to the seaside, the new destination of choice. Nonsense! We may be past the heyday of Beau Nash but the cricket clubs and the tennis lawns still draw in the leisured classes. And, of course, there is the excitement of the Roman remains, just now being rediscovered!

For those who wish to avoid the bustle of the heart of the city – the music and lights of the theatres, the hospitals, the crowds on the streets – we can travel further north or west, to the sprawling parklands and great estates. Up the slopes to escape the smog and rise above the gas lights, towards the recently completed Lansdown Tower. It crowns the pleasure gardens that sprawl from Lansdown crescent and up towards the farm lands.

To the south, back towards the river? I do not think you will find so much to pique your interest there... It is mainly industrial; wharves, mills, factories and timber yards, with the yield of the local coal mines passing through on boats to and from Bristol, as well as Sulis stone, grains, and exports of the woollen industry. The river brings the necessary flow of trade through the city.

To be true, it's the absolute rabble of the city. Busy, like a warren. Better to avoid such nonsense than be caught up in it, no? That's the wrong sort that you'll find, over there.

You would hear of it? Are you sure? Well... if you insist. South of the river you find the lodging houses, the brothels and the slums mixed in amidst the warehouses, leatherworkers and laundries. Beggars, tramps and ne’er do wells lurk there in what dens they can find, bothering the honest merchants, domestic servants and other working classes who make their homes there.

But let us not linger on such unpleasantness, not when there is so much of this city to discover; so many streets to tread and so many corners hiding their secrets.

Come, come with me, and I will show you the splendour of our beautiful city... North of the river, that is.

The city became a spa with the Latin name Aquae Sulis ("the waters of Sulis") c. AD 60 when the Romans built baths and a temple in the valley of the River Avon although oral tradition suggests that the hot springs were known even before then.

Aquae Sulis is in the Avon Valley near the southern edge of the Cotswolds, a range of limestone hills designated as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The hills that surround and make up the city have a maximum altitude of 781 feet (238 metres) on the Lansdown plateau, and the city herself has an area of 22 square miles.

In the early 18th century, Aquae Sulis acquired her first purpose-built theatre, the Old Orchard Street Theatre. It was rebuilt as the Theatre Royal, along with the Grand Pump Room attached to the Roman Baths and assembly rooms. Royal Victoria Park, a short walk from the city centre, was opened in 1830 by the 11-year-old Princess Victoria, and was the first park to carry her name.

Victoria Art Gallery and Royal Victoria Park are named after Queen Victoria, who wrote in her journal "The people are really too kind to me." This feeling seemed to have been reciprocated by the people of Aquae Sulis: "Lord James O'Brien brought a drawing of the intended pillar which the people of Bath are so kind as to erect in commemoration of my 18th birthday."

Aquae Sulis is a city of constant growth, her population having doubled and more than doubled in the past five decades. She boasts very near 100,000 at the 1801 census, making her one of the largest cities in Britain. So swiftly has the city grown, and in such myriad directions, that she is practically two separate cities, each with its own sort of populace - and its own sort of Kindred.

North of the River

The proper, genteel end of town, Sulis' northern half is the home those Sulians (or, "Bathonians" as you'll have it now) with status, breeding, intelligence and poise. Magnificent cobbled boulevards are lined by scores of gas lamps, illuminating the night so brightly that much of the citizenry feels no need to acknowledge the change from day to night and back again.

The truly affluent dwell in opulent stone manors and sprawling estates, which paradoxically conspire to be both grandiose and yet cramped together, each upon the next. Only if you will purchase outside of the centre itself, will you gain much country and open land for your horses. Others of more modest means house themselves in smaller abodes or within suites of apartments that are still far and away superior to the best dwellings to be found south of the river. Gentlemen with canes and top hats wander the streets, escorting their ladies as they go about their entertainments; or else they travel in luxurious carriages that rattle noisily through the cobbled lanes. Folk of means spend their evenings in salons and parlours with acquaintances, or perhaps, they attend an evening's performance at the theatre - some even deign to dare the scandalmongers by frequenting this new and vulgar form of entertainment called "cinema."

Most Kindred who make their havens north of the river - very nearly all, as best I'm able to determine - are like the mortals around them. They are the wealthiest of the kind, as concerned with matters of decorum and propriety as any upstanding gentleman. Most, if not all, are part of a secret society of Kindred called the Camarilla, which sect maintains a peerless influence over undead society in nearly all of Great Britain.

While "Bath's" pre-eminent vampires now all hail from the Ventrue, it appears to me that much authority among the city's Kindred is also held by the artisan Clan Toreador - a situation, I am given to understand, that is not altogether common. As well as I may determine, the Toreador, who surpass the Ventrue in the extent and the degree of their influence with living men, have adapted to our current era with surpassing ease. The Toreador and their high-society social circles have taken to both directing and slavishly following the fashions of the day. I have become aware of contests among these Toreador as to who might attend their fêtes - their "Elysiums" - bearing the most extreme examples of these styles. While I've little concern for the comfort of vampires, I find it particularly despicable that some have begun forcing their mortal servitors, called ghouls, into wearing the same. While beings with no need to breathe and no circulation can tolerate such things, many of these unfortunate women have been driven to unconsciousness, and sometimes even death, by corsets that constrict the lungs and burst the blood vessels and by other equally vile accoutrements.

Perhaps the most popular fad among the gentry and affluent people of Bath is fascination with the occult. From the Freemasons to the street-corner mediums, it seems as though every man and woman on the Avon is suddenly entitled to either speak with the dead or to understand the greatest secrets of the Creator (who, in the minds of these pseudo-occultists, often bears precious little resemblance to the God spoken of in the Holy Bible). Secret societies crop up like mushrooms sprouting in a forest; many are harmless pastimes, whereas others could prove a deadly peril for those involved and possibly any unfortunate enough to come near them.

Most of these groups offer little more than parlour games, seances performed by enthusiastic but ignorant dabblers wth black candles and Ouija boards - though I will attest, first-hand, that the strength of the participants' belief can, on rare occasions, prove sufficient to empower these slapdash rituals with real magic! These events are held in the sitting rooms of ladies of quality, or perhaps the back chambers at a gentleman's club, and tend not to bring the unsuspecting fellows to the Kindred's attention (save for certain unscrupulous vampires who offer far greater secrets to such seekers in exchange for committing acts of loathsome sorts; one particular clan, the Followers of Set, seems especially adept at this sort of debasement, though I'm quite certain they are not the only ones to practice it).

Other such organisations have become truly mammoth endeavours, "secret" only in that they do not reveal their "mystic knowledge" to outsiders. The Freemasons, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and a dozen others like them permeate the urban Bathonian landscape. Several espouse the teachings and magics of John Dee, a 16th-century astrologer, occultist and - some say - wizard. In my wanderings throughout Bath's dark places, I encountered several men (mortal and vampire both) around whom these cults and secret orders have sprung up and claimed that they actually were the ancient magus, either immortal or returned from death. A thorough investigation of their claims, however, undertaken with an unbiased eye like my own rather than the blinded gaze of those who wish to believe, proves all such claims to be patently false.

South of the River

It is hard for one to imagine two places more different from one another than the separate halves of our fair city.  As one proceeds south, as the last echoes of the chimes of the Abbey's bells fade away and are heard no more, it is as though the very world changes.

Here, cobbled streets often given way to lanes paved only in dirt. Brick-walled factories and foundries churn out thick smoke and ashen-faced workers garbed in worn coats and disintegrating shoes. Another hard day's labour completed, they trudge home through the frigid rains to insect-ridden beds, some of which are paid for night to night. Workhouses run well beyond capacity, and though unpleasant and menial in the extreme, I should think the prostitutes and petty criminals prefer such honest labours to their previous livelihoods. Textile factories abound, many run entirely by immigrant Jews. The roads are tightly packed with Bath's indigent masses, so that, at times, it becomes physically impossible to force one's way against the current, and travel by horse-drawn carriage becomes no more feasible here than it might be on the side of a craggy mountain peak. West Country speech is common here - and thick, so that a proper gentleman often has little prayer of understanding even a single word spoken to him by the natives.

It is my firm belief, as it is of every right-thinking Englishman, that these conditions, while deplorable, are an unfortunate aspect of life, to be accepted as one accepts the city's constant rains. Many of those dwelling in the squalor South of the River are obviously lazy, unwilling to put themselves out and do the work necessary to raise their standing in the world. Others are unfortunate; but the dockworkers, the foundry workers, the chimneysweeps and all the rest must know that it is through their labour that Aquae Sulis, Bath, and by extension England, may grow and continue to serve as a beacon of man's achievement. We would not be where we stand without them, and surely, this comforts them even in the midst of their hunger.

South of the River is overcrowded, impoverished, poorly patrolled by the bobbies, rather ostentatiously ignored by those who are better off - can there be any doubt that such a place would attract the Kindred like flies to a dead and bloated horse? Although I have hardly taken an accurate census, and I can't for the life of me imagine anyone else attempting so futile an endeavour, it would not remotely surprise me to learn that the ratio of Kindred to mortals South of the River is nearly twice what one might expect to find in other civilised regions.

Although a part of Bath - and, thus, nominally within the Ventrue's demesne - the prince lacks any true authority over the Kinded here, as he rarely goes there personally, and most native vampires are of the sort who care a little less for political repercussions.

I should also mention, I think, one rumour of particular interest regarding the Kindred South of the River. I have seen no evidence of this myself and would readily have dismissed it as paranoid whispers did I not keep hearing the same tale from multiple sources.

If talk is to be believed, then, an asylum exists somewhere the labyrinthine squalor South of the River. Not unusual in itself, for this would hardly be the first home for the insane in Bath (we have Moorfield House Asylum to the west, after all). But the taletellers would have it that the doctors who run this madhouse know of the Kindred, that they take every opportunity to hunt down younger vampires, to subdue them and to study them in depth. Horror stories of Kindred vivisected alive or deconstructed psychologically, flit from mouth to ear.

I cannot say if this is true or not, and I think it unlikely. A small part of me, however, rejoices in the thought that, at least in some small part, the Kindred may finally find themselves on the receiving end of such violence.