Dracula in Love

Chapter One

29 June 1890

In the beginning, there was the voice.

That was how it began on that first evening, with a masculine voice calling out to me in my sleep; a disembodied voice slithering into my dream, a voice of deep timbre and tones, of sensuous growls, and of low, hollow moans-a voice laden with promise and with love. It was as familiar to me as my own, and yet I knew not whether it came from inside my head, from outside me, or from somewhere not of this earth. Hushed like wind through a valley and smooth like velvet, it beckoned me, and I neither had, nor wanted, power against it. The voice was my master.

I have been looking for you, I said.

No, we have been looking for each other.

Then came hands, no, not exactly hands, but touch-the essence of touch, caressing my face, my neck, and my arms, making my skin tingle and awakening something long dormant inside me. Smooth lips gently kissed me and then pulled ever so slightly away. Come, Mina, the lips whispered, and I felt warm breath as the words came out. You called to me, did you not?

Eager to discover the owner of those lips, the giver of that touch, I moved into the darkness, unaware where I was, or where I was being led, or by whom. But I knew that when we were finally united, it would be a homecoming. I felt as if my body were wrapped in warm skins and lifted into the air. Drifting through darkness and toward the unknown, I was not exactly flying but safely held aloft as I floated through nothingness. Something like fur tickled me beneath my chin and all around my neck and back.

After what seemed like a timeless journey, my bare feet touched mossy ground. Excited and intensely alive, my body was unfamiliar to me, except my heart, which beat with a new ferocity. The rest of me was some tingling mass of energy as I ran toward the hands and the lips with their promises of touch, of kisses, and of love. I saw nothing but felt hands come out of the darkness again and begin to stroke my hair and caress me with great tenderness.

But as I surrendered to the touch and the sensation, the sumptuous fur that had enveloped me dropped away, and the hands on my body turned rough. Suddenly I was clothed not in fur but in something wet. I began to shiver violently. Frigid air blasted my face, replacing sweet warmth. The dampness around me seeped through to my skin, chilling me to the bone. Someone-or something; could it be an animal?-pulled my garment up above my knees. A hand-yes, it was unmistakably a hand but not the hand that had touched me before-a hand so cold that it must belong to the dead crept up my leg, pushed my thighs apart, and found the only warm spot left on my body. I gasped and tried to scream but choked on my own voice as the icy fingers reached that inviolate place.

“Getting you ready is all.” This voice was crass and mocking and not at all like the voice of devotion that had found me in my sleep.

I knew that I needed to resist, but I could not locate my limbs. I willed my legs to kick, my arms to rise, my fists to tighten, my muscles to gather their strength to fight this thing attacking me, but all the power in my body seemed to have disappeared. I wondered if I were dead and if this thing on top of me was the devil.

Yet I could not give up. Surely this mind that could think was still attached to a body. I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing escaped, not even a vibration. I took a breath, and a foul, sour smell shot up into my nostrils making me gag but letting me know that I was still alive. A warm, wet drop fell upon my eye, as if someone had spit on me.

I opened my eyes. I was not dreaming. No, the creature on top of me, reeking of stale beer and dripping his saliva onto my face, was all too real. But where was I? Who was this man, pushing my legs apart with his knees, this fiend with a coarse, unshaven face and bulbous eyes so red that I expected them to start bleeding? He pulled his icy finger out of me, shocking me as much with the withdrawal as he had with the insertion, and began to fumble with the buttons on his trousers. I rolled back and forth on the wet grass trying to get away, but with his free hand he gathered my nightdress at the neck, choking me.

“Stay put or you will be sorry you were ever born,” he said.

I realized what was happening and I remember wondering what my fiancé would say when I told him-if I ever told him, if I lived to tell him-that I had been raped while wandering, insensible, in the middle of the night. In my mind, I saw Jonathan receive the news, his stricken face turning white, shying away from me in disgust. How could any man, even one as kind as Jonathan, look upon a woman the same way after this kind of shame? At that moment, I knew that I must free myself from my tormenter. My life, or more than my life-as I thought back in those more innocent days-was at stake.

I tried to scream, but the stranger’s fingers were at my throat. He undid the last button on his trousers, and his manhood shot into freedom, red, stiff, and ugly. He took his hand from my neck and put it over my mouth, but I bit hard at it, harder than I thought I was capable of, as if I had grown new teeth. Cursing me, he withdrew his hand.

“Now you are really going to get it,” he said, pulling my thighs apart. He stared and then looked at my face with his glowing red eyes. Mirth had replaced his anger and determination.

“What’s this? A devil’s mark?”

He meant the wine-colored birthmark on my inner thigh that rose in two points like angels’ wings. I tried to clench my legs together, but he was the stronger. “You’ll be a feisty one.”

I started kicking and flailing with all my strength until my surroundings were a blur. I saw nothing but flashes of the smug look on his ugly face against a dark sky. I tried to find my voice, because I had remembered reading that a woman’s best defense against an attacker was her shrill scream. At last and with persistent effort I felt a tremor rise inside my chest, snake through my throat, and find its way out of my mouth and into the cold night air.

“Get your filthy hands off me,” I yelled, and then I screamed again.

“Shut up, little whore.” The fiend hissed, raising his hand away from me to slap my face. I winced, my courage draining out of me like so much air as I shrank from him. But the blow did not come. Instead, I heard a heavy thud against my attacker’s back, and something picked him up from behind and pulled him off me. I saw the shock and terror on his face as he was swiftly lifted away from me and thrown like a heap of rubbish on the ground.

I sat up. I could not see the face of my rescuer, but he wore the tall hat of a gentleman and a black evening cape lined in shimmery pale gray satin. In his hand was a walking stick, which he used to deliver blow after sickening blow to my assailant. It all happened very quickly, as if time had sped up. My rescuer was a whir of motion, a dervish, battering the attacker until he lay still on the ground.

The gentleman did not even stop to consider the limp thing he had beaten but suddenly faced me as I sat in wonder. Had I blinked and missed the act of his turning toward me? The thought crossing my mind was that I had been attacked by a fiend and saved by a phantom. The angle of the brim of his hat obscured his face, and his features were in shadow because the moonlight illuminated him from behind. Strangely, as if we were old friends, he opened his arms as if to welcome me. He was familiar to me, but I could not place him.

At that point, I could only imagine that he had the same ambition as the first attacker, and I gathered my nightdress around me and began to crawl away. The walking stick in his right hand bore the bulbous head of a golden dragon, mouth wide-open, baring long, pointy teeth. Slinking backward on my hands and knees, I waited for him to advance upon me, but he stood motionless, arms stretched out as if in surrender. He was a tall man, and, if posture may give away age, I would have to say that he had the lean physique of youth but the stance of a man of maturity. I thought for a moment that I should get hold of my senses and thank him, but the stories in the newspapers of girls being abducted in the night by well-dressed men were fresh in my mind. The potential danger in remaining vulnerable to him far outweighed my curiosity, and when I thought my legs would carry me, I stood up and ran away.

I soon realized that I was on the banks of the Thames, and that it must be minutes before dawn, that time when the world takes on an eerie color, like that of gray pearls; that strange time when the sky is a luminescent brew of moonlight and dawn. A cold air passed my face, and thunder shattered the silence. I felt drops of rain trickle upon me and I could not resist the urge to turn around to see if my savior had decided to pursue me. He had looked so benevolent with his arms stretched out to me, like the image of the Christ welcoming his flock. I wished, in part, that he had followed me so that I might find out who he was and how he came to be on the deserted riverbank at this hour. But the feral nature of his swift assault upon my attacker made me rethink my wishes.

I needn’t have worried; he was no longer in the place I had left him. In the distance, I saw a shiny black coach with unlit lanterns and two strong black steeds to lead it. Thunder crashed again, and lightning darted through the open sky. The horses neighed, one rearing on its hind legs, while the other seemed to call out to the heavens. I tried to see if my savior was seated in the carriage, but its closed curtains guaranteed the privacy of whoever was inside. With no one I could see at the reins, an explosive round of thunder sent the horses bolting, and the huge coach, glimmering in the burgeoning light of dawn, sped away.

I did not know exactly where I was but knew that if I ran downriver I would soon be in the area of the school, where I worked as assistant headmistress, and safe in my living quarters. I had to remember how to breathe as I ran away from the scene of my potential disgrace. Though it was summer, the air was frigid, and the light rain that fell upon me only made me colder. Each breath chilled and choked me as I ran along the embankment until I saw a familiar landmark and turned abruptly toward the Strand.

I heard the wheels of a carriage behind me, but when I turned to see if I was being followed, the street was empty but for a few hansom cabs parked in front of the hotels. The cabmen huddled beneath the oilcloth coats that protected them from the drizzle, perhaps waiting to whisk clients off to catch early trains. A lone flower cart rolled past me on its way to market, the white lilies trembling in their pots, nodding to me as if to say good morning.

I calculated by the changing light in the sky that it was not yet five o’clock, when things would begin to stir both in town and at the school. I had to be in my room before that time. There would be no explanation short of a bout of madness that I could offer for arriving at the premises at this hour and in my nightdress that would satisfy Miss Hadley, the headmistress.

In truth, there was no explanation that I could possibly give, not even to myself, of how I came to wander out of doors in the middle of the night, only to have been nearly raped by a stranger on the banks of the river just before dawn and saved by either a saint or a demon in gentleman’s evening clothes. How had either of those men found me? I recalled the earlier dream, and the contrast of the velvet voice and tender hands with the brutality of the man who had tried to violate me. Perhaps he was the punishment meted out for that wickedly sweet dream. A woman who would leave her bed, no matter how involuntarily, to pursue a seductive, disembodied voice would surely get what she was asking for. How could I have done that, considering that I was engaged to a wonderful man like Jonathan? The shame of it burned through me.

My thoughts were again interrupted by the unmistakable clatter of carriage wheels. I looked in all directions but did not see any vehicle coming toward me. The sound had emphatically been there, no mistake about it, but it was distant, as if it came from inside a crater. I attributed it to the way that sound carried in this city; conversations and noises from far away were carried into one’s own parlor on random gusts of wind. Still, I could not shake the feeling that I was being followed.

Shivering, I slipped down the alley parallel to the old mansion that housed Miss Hadley’s School for Young Ladies of Accomplishment, retracing the steps I must have taken earlier. The back door was unlocked; I must have left it so. I closed it with great care and quietly climbed the rear staircase, hoping not to disturb any of the boarding students in their dormitory beds or, worse yet, Headmistress. Mercifully, the cleaning and kitchen staff lived off the premises and did not arrive until 5:30 in the morning. After fifteen years living in the building, I knew every single spot where the stairs creaked, and, like a child playing a game of hopscotch, I sidestepped each telltale place as delicately as I could and reached the third story where I lived with barely a sound made.

As soon as I closed the door to my room, I heard the same sound of horses’ hooves and carriage wheels outside. I knew the rhythms of the neighborhood as I knew the beating of my own heart. It was too early for any of the regular deliveries, and the intrusion of a vehicle at this hour was disconcerting. I went to the window, and through the milky glass, I saw the fog-bathed rear of the same gleaming black carriage as it receded from my view.

Pulse racing, I threw my wet nightdress into the drawer of my little chest and put on a fresh one. I leapt under the covers and shivered between cold sheets. I had had episodes of this mysterious and disturbing nature as a child, but it had been a full fifteen years or more since I had experienced one. I was twenty-two years old, and I was sure that I had fully outgrown them. But now the memories, vivid once more, came rushing back to me, playing out in my mind like little theatrical scenes.

I remembered being a very small child back in Ireland, playing behind my parents’ cottage, where colored balls of light appeared and led me into the woods. There, I conversed with animals-squirrels, birds, foxes, even spiders and bees-and I was sure that they talked to me, though not in my language. I revealed this to my mother, who told me that animals did not have the ability to speak and that I must learn to control my imagination or it would lead to madness, or worse. Later that year, my great-uncle died, and my mother took me to the funeral. I was sitting quietly in the pew next to her, when the deceased man’s spirit came to me and tickled my ribs. I squirmed, trying to suppress my laughter, and my mother angrily pinched my ear until the pain overrode the tickling, and my uncle disappeared. “What are you doing, you disrespectful little girl?” she asked. When I told her that the dead man had made me laugh, she shuddered, and from then on, treated me with suspicion.

Around this time I began to get out of bed at night and wander in my sleep. My parents found me in several different places-sitting in the garden, walking toward the river, or once, dancing under the moonlight and singing a song I had learned at church. My father, weary of my nocturnal adventures, took me by the shoulders and hair and dragged me inside and up the stairs. He threw me back onto my bed, locking the door behind him. I heard him yelling at my mother, using words about me that hurt my ears, so I put a pillow over my head and hummed to myself until they stopped and I could fall back asleep.

I learned to be very cautious in front of my parents, but one time I slipped and asked my father to be quiet because the angels were talking and I wanted to hear them. Over my mother’s protests, my father locked me in my room without supper. My mother, despite her occasional feeble attempts to defend me, began to shun me for her own reasons. I often heard her private thoughts, but when I questioned her about them, she got very cross with me. She made the mistake of telling my father that I was a mind reader, and he demanded to know what evil entity was telling me what goes on in other people’s minds. When I could not answer his question, he gave me a spanking.

After my father drowned in an accident, my mother packed a small black valise with my belongings and took me by train, ferry, and another train to Miss Hadley’s School for Young Ladies of Accomplishment in London. I was seven years old. I was to be grateful because it was not a boarding school for bad girls, which is what I deserved, and it was not an asylum for the insane, which is where my father would have sent me-had he lived, she emphasized-and it was not a workhouse for girls whose families no longer could feed them but a place where girls were sent to learn to become young ladies. I was fortunate, she said, because we had suddenly come into some money for this, provided by my mother’s late grandfather.

“You are just like your grandmother,” my mother had said, “just the same sort of troubled creature. When she got older, she developed loose morals. She did not control herself or her urges. Do you want people to say that about you?”

I had no idea what she was talking about, but I shook my head violently so that my mother would know I did not intend to be that sort of person.

“And she came to a very bad end, so you must learn to control yourself and mind your behavior. If you learn to be good, then perhaps you will be allowed to come home.”

And I was good. I became Miss Hadley’s star pupil and pet. “I have never seen a girl with such a lovely complexion and compelling green eyes,” she told my mother the day I arrived. I could tell that she was taken with me, and I foresaw that I could use that to my advantage. I listened attentively to whatever she had to say, both in the classroom and without. I assimilated her lessons with fervor unequaled by any other girl in the school. On the day of graduation, she said, “I have taught hundreds of girls, Wilhelmina, but none have I regarded as a daughter until I met you.”

During my years as a student, my mother died. After I finished my education, Miss Hadley employed me to teach reading, etiquette, and decorum to girls between the ages of seven and seventeen.

Despite my rigidly conventional exterior, I knew that I was unusual. I knew that there was something wild and terrible and frightening inside me, something that I must continue to suppress at all costs. Headmistress did not know what I had been like as a child before I was sent away. She knew only the sweet and docile girl I had trained myself to be. I knew the truth. I knew that I was different from other girls, and I knew that the difference was not a good one.

I tried to rest before rising for the day, but I was terrified that I would fall asleep and once again hear the call of that voice. I got out of bed, washed, and dressed in the lace-collared brown linen uniform of the teachers. Our school motto was “Gentility Above All,” and Headmistress insisted on a genteel familial atmosphere in which a girl’s feminine and domestic attributes might be cultivated. Thus all teachers were addressed as “aunt,” and the girls addressed me as Aunt Mina.

After last evening’s lurid incident, the irony that most of this day was to be devoted to the study of etiquette and decorum was not lost on me. A full day was devoted to these subjects, while the other days of the week were divided into the study of drawing, simple mathematics, dancing, French, reading, and religion and morals. Because Headmistress considered herself an enlightened woman, she treated the pupils to occasional lectures by visiting scholars in the fields of history, geography, and science. The school had a splendid reputation, though it was criticized by suffragettes and lady reformers who, along with the right to vote, also campaigned for girls to be taught the same academic subjects, and with the same intensity, as boys.

Miss Hadley’s School was home and family to me, and I did not receive criticism of it very well. I knew that it was my education in the feminine arts that had enabled me to attract my fiancé, a solicitor of great promise. His affections would have been unavailable to an Irish-born orphan with no family to protect me or vouch for me had I not learned to assimilate the qualities of a lady. Besides, it was common knowledge that too much education hampered girls in the marriage market. I was a realist. I knew that marriage to a man like Jonathan Harker, not voting in an election or reading Greek, would secure my life and improve my station. Moreover, as one who had little recollection of living in a family, I relished the domestic virtues I had learned at school, and I was eager to have a home and family of my own. Sometimes when teaching, I felt like a play actress, and I could not wait to be cast as mistress of a real house.

This morning I felt like even more of an imposter as I faced my young and innocent students, who looked like little angels, dressed in their crisp white pinafores with fluffy sleeves gathered at the shoulders. What would they think if they had seen me just hours before struggling beneath my attacker?

We began as we did every morning with the students wearing boards across their backs, their arms looped through straps at the shoulders to perfect their posture. All the girls complained about this until I asked them to observe my own erect carriage, and how it enhanced both my figure and ladylike demeanor. Some of the girls immediately took to the lesson, intent upon developing a sense of graciousness, while others fidgeted, complained, and fought against their harnesses.

“It is no use resisting the board, young ladies, for the board will always win. Aunt Mina has yet to meet the girl who could crack the plank with her shoulders,” I said, eliciting giggles from the cooperative girls and sneers from the few angry ones.

“How ever does one get accustomed to being bridled like a horse, Aunt Mina?” A twelve-year-old looked at me with defiant eyes.

I did not answer her, and she thought that she had won a small victory over me. But my silence owed to a vision that came to me as I looked past her challenging face. I saw myself at seven years old, as Headmistress threaded my arms through rope loops. I remembered feeling humiliated, as if I were being put into the stocks. The board had jerked my shoulders back, and I hated the feeling of being harnessed and tamed. My temper rose, and the wild creature inside me wanted to run backward and crash myself into a wall to break the wood. I was about to try that very thing when I saw a man standing in the back of the room. He was tall and beautiful, with the long hair of a French dandy and the clothes to match, and he carried a walking stick with the head of a dragon. I remembered thinking that I knew him and that I was happy to see him. He smiled at me, slowly shaking one long, elegant finger at me. That calmed my spirits and inclined me to obey Headmistress so that she would let me speak with my visitor after the lesson.

“Be a good girl,” he mouthed with his full and preternaturally red lips. I heard the whisper of his words, but no one else in the room acknowledged him. I relaxed, letting the yoke settle across my back, and I began to walk around the room, following the other girls. I wanted him to see how proud and ladylike I could be if I tried. But as soon as I turned the corner to pass him, I looked up and he was gone.

I had buried that memory for many years and now it came rushing back to me. Was it the same man, or had I imagined it? Had I imagined them both? Were the episodes that had troubled my childhood coming back to haunt me again? I could not afford this to happen, not now, when I was about to embark on a new life with Jonathan.

The girl who had asked the question was looking at me, waiting for an answer. It took me a few moments to collect myself before I could reply with the stock reply we gave to troublesome girls. “Girls sent home from boarding school are forever marked and usually end up spinsters,” I said. “Let that be your incentive to cooperate with the lessons.” The words sounded hollow and forced, but perhaps this girl would find, as I had, that once she succumbed to docility, it would suit her. She sulked-they all did, at least for a time-but then went through her paces around the room without further complaint; and for the remainder of the lesson, the ghosts of my past stayed safely tucked away.

Relieved, I was better able to concentrate during the lesson in elocution, a subject that I was especially suited to teach. The school was known throughout England for eradicating any evidence of a country accent, and Headmistress admitted that I, with my thick Irish brogue, had been one of her most challenging cases. “Nothing is more detrimental to one’s marriage prospects than speech that gives away provincial origins,” she would say to parents as she recruited their daughters. “It is a shame and a waste that a father spend a fortune for his daughter’s dresses for the Season, but not a sou on polishing what comes out of her mouth.”

With her diligent efforts, and nary a slap or a spanking that other girls had received, a soft, feminine, lilting voice eventually replaced the accent of my childhood. Headmistress often called me forth as an example to other girls, or to parents considering placing their daughters in the school. “Wilhelmina came to us sounding like a chambermaid and now has the voice of an English angel,” she would say with pride. And then I would recite some lines of poetry and curtsy, and be rewarded with polite applause and gratuitous smiles.

After the elocution lesson, which passed without incident, we segued to the art of letter writing, so crucial to maintaining one’s social connections and to running a household. That a lady must be eloquent both in speech and on the page was another of the school’s tenets.

“Letters to tradesmen and other subordinates must be written strictly in the third person to maintain the proper distance between servant and mistress.” I said. “However, one must not forget to be cordial at all times. When corresponding on a social basis, remember that there is a proper way to accept an invitation and a proper way to decline it. Never, never must a lady be condescending in rejecting an invitation, even when good taste prevents her from accepting it.”

I set them to writing notes to imaginary staff, friends, relatives, and neighbors while I forced myself to remain awake until the teatime lesson, where we practiced how to pour tea, how to lift a teacup without rattling it (for no woman should rattle a man’s nerves), how to lower oneself into a chair (where the lessons of the boards became most apparent), and how to lower eyes slowly and gracefully when speaking to a gentleman, rather than dart them away like some embarrassed servant girl.

“There is a precise moment to dilute the tea with boiling water, young ladies, and one should not be so distracted by idle parlor chatter as to miss it.”

These banal lessons in decorum, repeated hundreds of times over the years, soothed me. I had not succumbed to this resurgence of what I thought of as my lower nature after all. I was still Aunt Mina Murray, who could preside over a roomful of girls, teaching them the ways of the drawing room that would net them the inevitable prize of a solid marriage.

At five o’clock in the afternoon, the day students went home, and the boarders and teachers took a light meal together at six. I was relieved when Jonathan sent a note of apology explaining that unforeseen business with a new client would keep him occupied until the next week’s end. I finished my supper quickly, having a difficult time holding my eyes open, and fled to my room at the soonest possible moment that would not arouse suspicion.

To prevent another incident like the one the night before, I barricaded myself in my room by pushing a small chest in front of the door. I opened the drawer where I had thrown my nightdress, which was still damp, a fresh reminder of that horrible event. I rolled it up and put it back, hoping that I could wash out the grass stains before I had to explain them to the laundress or, worse yet, to Headmistress.

2 July 1890

Meanwhile, quotidian life went on. In addition to my teaching duties, I sometimes helped my old school chum Kate Reed, now a lady journalist, organize her notes and research. Kate’s parents had sent their headstrong fifteen-year-old daughter to Miss Hadley’s to polish her for the matrimonial market, but their efforts had an adverse effect, creating an even more insubordinate girl. After graduation, while her parents thought she was devoting herself to charity work, Kate apprenticed herself to Jacob Henry, a journalist she had met while surreptitiously attending a meeting of the Fabian Society. She followed him around for the better part of a year, organizing his notes and proofreading his stories.

Eventually he began to share authorship with her, and now she wrote stories both with him and on her own. She and Jacob were true comrades, she explained, meeting in the evenings to read the next day’s papers fresh off the presses, often “over a smoke and a beer.” Kate loved nothing more than to shock me, the teacher of etiquette and decorum, with her provocative new ways. She had tried once to include me in one of these evenings after she and Jacob had filed a lengthy story on crime against women. But I did not like Jacob’s looks, what with his fingers stained with tobacco and ink, his chronically unshaven face, and his eyes that roamed over a woman’s body without an ounce of respect.

I had been studying stenography and other office skills so that I might be useful to Jonathan in his law profession once we were married, and I had become fiendishly fast both at writing in shorthand and on the typewriter. With these skills, I had begun to help Kate, just as she had helped Jacob. A few days before the riverbank incident, I had gone with her to investigate some cheap tenements slapped up in the narrow, grimy streets of Bethnal Green and Whitechapel to accommodate factory workers.

Together we went into rooms of filth and misery, with no running water, where mothers and fathers were packed with eight and ten children in one room. Laundry, washed in the sewage-laden water of the Thames, hung everywhere, and stagnant privies sat in the yards. I have always been gifted, or cursed, with a keen olfactory sense, and I thought I would faint in the summer’s miasma of human waste, diapers, cheap ham-bone stew, and perspiration. The wives we met were workers themselves-knitters, lace makers, seamstresses, or laundresses-still young but wrinkled and hardened, with crippled fingers like crabs’ legs and callused skin. The women complained that no matter how hard they and their husbands worked, it was near impossible to meet the exorbitant rents.

Afterward, Kate worked our way into the landlords’ fine offices using the feminine charms learned at Miss Hadley’s. Eventually, however, her agenda emerged. “How do you expect these people to sustain their families if the rent consumes ninety percent of their salaries? You are enslaving them with low wages and high rents. Have you no sense of Christian charity?”

We had left the interview in a cloud of Kate’s indignation, but I was beaming. “You gave those men a verbal lashing,” I said. “I am proud of you.”

Kate’s eyes sparkled. “I love being at the center of things, not just observing on the periphery. I suspect that you love it too, though you will never admit it.” Always dramatic, Kate selected the occasional word to single out for emphasis.

“Watching you work is like attending the theater,” I said. “I observe, but I do not see the need to participate.” And then I wondered if what I said was true.

Today, I walked through heavy summer rain to Kate’s rooms off Fleet Street, passing newsboys hawking evening editions of the papers, their enthusiasm undiminished by the weather, and other street vendors selling their goods. She lived, to her parents’ dismay, on the third floor of an eighteenth-century building that hadn’t been renovated in fifty years and thus needed repairs. Her door was open, spilling soft yellow gaslight into the hallway, and I poked my head in. Sprigs of her dark blond hair escaped the haphazard bun at the nape of her neck, kept in place with a pencil. She held a burning matchstick in her bony fingers with which she had just lit a cigarette. She blew out the flame and waved the matchstick at me as if it were a magic wand, a big smile slashing her freckled face.

She hugged me with her long arms so that I could feel her wide shoulders begin to wrap round me. Tall and wiry, Kate had sharp-cut cheekbones and even sharper blue eyes. She was without a corset today, in keeping with her feminist principles.

“My editor is allowing me a full three thousand words for an article on the state of girls’ education in Britain, the longest story of my career. Only you, Mina, have the organizational skills to help me sort through all this data,” she said, gesturing to the pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers scattered about the room.

“You’d better make me some tea,” I said, bracing myself for the task.

“Already going,” she said, pointing to her steaming kettle.

“Lovely rug,” I said. I had never seen the bright teal hooked rug, with its swirling abstract pattern of green, red, and yellow. Kate had made the room seem larger by hanging the bellows above the fireplace as a sort of sculptural relief. Three new wicker chairs sat around a wooden table with turned legs.

“Present from Father. He’s venturing into machine-made rugs. He claims that the modern woman has a mania for home décor.”

I surveyed the piles of papers. “What is your angle on the story?” I had assimilated some of Kate’s journalistic jargon and had begun to freely use it.

“The task is to show the growing breadth of educational opportunities available to girls and the necessity for them to take advantage of them.”

“Girls are already taking advantage,” I said slyly. “Miss Hadley’s School has no vacancies.”

Kate gave me one of her sideways looks. “Did you know that the University of London is now offering all degrees to women, including one in medicine? Imagine someday being tended to by a lady doctor!”

Secretly, I used to fantasize about studying at a university, and I did feel envy that other girls were being given such opportunities.

She picked up a notebook and waved its pages at me. “Wait until you read my notes. Soon all children under the age of thirteen, girls included, will be mandated by law to attend schools-schools that give boys and girls the same sort of education in math, history, and the sciences. When that happens, you will have to say au revoir to Miss Hadley, in whatever language she considers a sign of good breeding. She will have to adapt or close.” Kate blew a cloud of smoke into the air as if to emphasize her point.

“That will be a very sorry day for girls who want to become ladies,” I said. “In any case, I think your predictions are wrong. The queen herself is against this sort of thing.”

“It does not matter what an old woman thinks. Laws and people’s minds are changing very quickly. Once we have the right to vote, things will change even faster.”

I took an issue of The Woman’s World from my bag and handed it to Kate, who had introduced me to the magazine. “That is what Mrs. Fawcett claims in her article on women’s suffrage,” I said. Kate and I shared copies of the magazine, which was published for “women of influence and position,” and edited by Mr. Oscar Wilde. While I merely read the contents, Kate was trying feverishly to place an article within its pages.

“It’s a very good essay, isn’t it?” Kate said. “I wish I had written it.”

“I found myself even more absorbed in the piece about weddings,” I said. “After all, it won’t be long now before I am Mrs. Harker.”

Kate stubbed out her cigarette on a dainty porcelain saucer. “To be serious, Mina, you know that you have a way with words on the page. You should consider becoming a journalist yourself.” Before I could object, she continued. “Mina, this is our time. I love you, my friend, and I see your gifts. Do not waste these opportunities never before given to those of our sex.”

Her words surprised me. I was in awe of Kate’s abilities but never dreamt that I possessed her talents. “Jonathan would never have it,” I said.

“Then I should never have Jonathan!” Kate shook her head in little paroxysms as if the very thought of capitulating to a man’s will would send her to the madhouse. Then she softened. “Oh, I know, he’s handsome and intelligent and has a bright future, and you love him and he adores you. But does one really need a husband, lord, and master?” She looked at me with the same mischievous smile that I recognized from our adolescent days. “I think that the modern woman should only take lovers.”

“Have you forgotten Lizzie Cornwall? She took a lover, and now she spends her time in the opium dens of Blue Gate Fields.”

Lizzie Cornwall had taught at Miss Hadley’s until one of the students’ fathers turned his eye on her and convinced her to leave her employment. “He’s going to set me up in beautiful rooms,” Lizzie had told us, her dark eyes dancing.

“I always give her a little money when I see her,” Kate said, sighing, “but she was a fool. We are not fools, Mina. We are women with intelligence and gifts.”

“Lizzie had gifts, but now she walks up and down the Strand in a rented dress throwing herself at any man who passes. She’s ruined! No one would hire her after he abandoned her. Discarded women are treated worse than animals!”

“Mina, how very dramatic you are. If you were not so concerned with preserving your sterling reputation, I should advise you to take to the stage.” Kate put her lips together and rolled her eyes toward the sky. The face was so funny that I burst out laughing.

“You are as puzzling as a sphinx, Mina Murray,” Kate said. “You speak one way, but sometimes your actions do not match your words.”

“What do you mean?” I asked defensively.

Kate stood up, rearranging some paper Japanese lanterns she had stuck into an Oriental vase. “When Jonathan was away in Exeter last month, you leapt at the chance to go to the music hall to see those mashers. You do have a bit of daring in you.”

It was true; I had accompanied Kate to see Kitty Butler and Nan King, two mashers who donned men’s clothing and sang to each other as if they were sweethearts. “What would Jonathan think if had seen you in that place with girls drinking ginger beer and swooning over the performers?” Kate asked.

The girls in the audience-working-class girls for the most part-seemed to be completely in love with the two singers, as if they did not understand that the two handsome “lads” were actually women. After the show, I pointed this out to Kate. “They have the beauty of a woman with the swagger of a man,” she explained. “Why, I believe I love them too!” The two of us giggled so hard at this that people on the streets stopped to stare at us.

“I did enjoy that show,” I admitted, “but what does that have to do with being daring?”

Kate put her hands on her hips. “The creature you call a lady would not be caught dead at such a performance, much less admit to enjoying it, if she weren’t daring enough to test the limitations of society. I submit that you, ’neath your Miss Hadley’s uniform and correct posture, are very much the daring sort. You just don’t know it yet.”

We worked together into the evening, and Kate suggested that she take us to supper at a nearby restaurant. The clientele were mostly journalists who stayed up late to meet the newspapers’ deadlines or to read the early morning editions as they rolled off the presses. I thought that the establishment would have a ladies’ dining room, which it did not, so that men, some of whom knew Kate, surrounded us. Mercifully, she declined their invitations to join them at their beer-soaked, newspaper-strewn tables.

As we quietly cut and chewed our capon, each lost in her own thoughts, a man in evening clothes came into the restaurant and scanned the room, his eyes landing on me. I stopped breathing until he removed his hat, revealing himself to be quite old and not at all resembling my mysterious savior.

I said, “Kate, do you ever have frightening dreams?”

“Of course, Mina. Everyone has nightmares.”

“Have you ever confused being awake and being asleep? Or left your bed while you were still sleeping?” I was afraid to broach this subject with anyone as inquisitive and probing as Kate, but I had to know if others had had my experiences.

“No, but I have heard of such things. The condition is called noctambulism. A German scientist, I forget his name, did studies on it and concluded that it happened to people with overdeveloped sensory faculties.”

I felt my stomach sink. “Of what sort? An overdeveloped sense of smell, perhaps?”

“Yes, or taste or hearing. Why do you ask, darling? Are you, of all people, taking part in strange activities while you are asleep?”

I was not ready to confess what had happened to me. I did not want to become the subject of one of Kate’s investigations, professional or otherwise.

“No, not me. One of the girls at school leaves her bed at night and goes outdoors, but claims that she has no idea how she came to be there.” I did not mind concocting this lie, as I knew that the two least likely people in London to ever have another conversation were Kate and Headmistress. “It leaves her feeling quite disturbed.”

“The girl should be interviewed by a psychologist. These doctors are coming closer to understanding the workings of the mind in the dream state.”

“I will pass your advice along to Headmistress,” I said.

“That would really be something,” Kate said. “Headmistress taking my advice.”

“She knows that I am helping you with research,” I said. “Despite that you were her least malleable student, she is always happy to hear news of you.”

“Miss Hadley and her pupils are fortunate to have you, Mina. If you had been my teacher, perhaps I would have turned out differently,” she said wryly.

“Oh, I doubt that,” I said, and we both laughed.

Kate paid for supper out of her purse and escorted us through the dining room, tipping her little cap at the men as if she were just another of them. We walked to a cabstand, where she gave the cabman some money and instructed him to “take this lady to her destination straightaway.” He nodded, not even casting a sideways glance at her being without a corset and without an escort at midnight. I kissed her good-bye, thanked her for her generosity, and got onto the seat, wondering if indeed the world was changing in her direction, and I, from my sheltered post at Miss Hadley’s School, was unaware of the magnitude of the shift.

Chapter Two

31 March 1889, and 6 July 1890

Intrepid reader, before I allow you to meet Jonathan Harker and proceed with our present story, I would like to briefly take you back in time one year to the spring of 1889, when Headmistress had decided to lease a floor of the house adjacent to the school to secure additional rooms for her boarders. She had called upon an old friend, Mr. Peter Hawkins, Esquire, who maintained offices in both London and Exeter. Hawkins had largely retired to Exeter, so he sent his young nephew and apprentice in the legal field who lived in London to advise on the transaction. That was how Jonathan entered our lives and entered Headmistress’s rather fusty parlor, which was where I saw him for the first time.

The room had none of the new eclecticism of Kate Reed’s flat, but had been decorated some fifty years ago by the elder Mrs. Hadley, from whom Headmistress had inherited the house. The furnishings were heavy and ornate, as was the style in the earlier part of our century. In keeping with its formal atmosphere, Headmistress used the parlor to receive prospective parents and their daughters, or her most special guests, serving them tea in bone china and using the linens from her grandmother’s wedding chest, for which she personally supervised the starching, pressing, and folding. An antique Belgian point de gaze tablecloth of roses with raised petals covered the tea table, revealing only its lower legs, which looked as if they belonged on a colossal mahogany giant.

During their meeting, I had poked my head in the door to ask Headmistress a question, and Jonathan caught my eye. He looked quite boldly at me, making me blush. Before Headmistress could open her mouth, he had leapt to his feet requesting an introduction. One was dutifully provided, and I gave him a little nod, all the while assessing how tall and handsome he was, how white his collar, how starched his shirt, and how well-tailored his coat of subtle velour stripes. He had long hands so nicely shaped and so very clean that the white arc at the bottoms of his fingernails seemed to glow. I could not judge the color of his eyes. Hazel, perhaps, with a touch of amber. It appeared that he had had, that very morning, a haircut and a shave at his barber’s. A hat, fashionable, but not ridiculous or unmanly, sat on the table. It looked new.

He inquired as to what subjects I taught, and was told that I instructed the girls in etiquette, decorum, and reading. He fumbled for words, making a feeble joke about being deficient in the first two areas, but considered himself rather well read for a solicitor. Headmistress dismissed me, but not before I looked him straight in the eye and smiled.

The next day Headmistress informed me that Mr. Harker had offered to lecture my reading class on the importance of developing strong literary tastes. He arrived a week later with notes in hand. He told the girls that as a student, he had read Goethe in translation and was so moved by the work that he decided to learn enough of the German language to enjoy the original. He had hoped that at least one girl present would develop that sort of serious literary sensibility. For those with more romantic tastes, he read a poem by Mr. Shelley, furtively glancing at me as he read, and blatantly staring at me as he explained its meaning. He looked very tired, as if he had been up the night before composing his lecture. At tea afterward, he confessed that that was exactly what he had done, and asked Headmistress’s permission to call upon us again. She said, “If you mean to call upon Wilhelmina, then the answer is yes.”

He stammered out a short sentence: “Yes, that is precisely what I meant.” He then left in such a hurry that he had to return to collect his hat.

That was the beginning of our courtship: a year of fruitful visits, Sunday strolls and picnics, and lengthy conversations about similar interests over tea, culminating in a proposal of marriage put to Headmistress just weeks ago, who accepted on my behalf with delight.

“It is the perfect culmination of every lesson I have taught you, Wilhelmina. You will be sorely missed here, but your success will be an inspiration to our pupils and a superb advertisement for the school. I am as happy as a mother that I had a hand in your good fortune, and even happier that you did not need to marry beneath you.”

We both knew that it had been a danger; girls with my ambiguous family background were usually left with the choice of marrying a man of even less status or spinsterhood. In fact, Mr. Hawkins, who had reared Jonathan after his parents died in an epidemic, did voice some consternation about me. I’m certain that he thought I was a fortune hunter. With Jonathan’s good looks, education, and bright future, he had his pick of many girls from prominent families. But Jonathan explained to his uncle that we two orphans had found immediate kinship, in addition to romantic attraction. We understood the loneliness that only parentless children experience, and we both longed to create a family that would give us the sort of domestic life we had yearned for as children. After a long tea with Headmistress, and after interrogating me, Mr. Hawkins gave us his blessing. “Pardon my caution in this matter, Miss Murray,” he said to me. “Jonathan is my liege, my kin, and my heir. I am thoroughly satisfied as to your character, and I am sure that you will be a lovely wife and a solid partner to him.”

These days, when sitting with Jonathan, sipping tea and having a simple discussion, I was overtaken with gratitude for my good fortune. Unlike Kate, I was not “in the middle of things,” where I might meet a compatible mate, nor did I have the family connections that would bring me a man of distinction. My dearest friend, Lucy, was a year younger than I and had already turned down a dozen offers of marriage from men she always tried to send my way. But after rejection by Lucy, those men simply pursued other heiresses of lesser beauty and wealth until they found one who accepted their offer.

Jonathan was above all that. He was good and kind and honorable, and he had an open mind and a broad way of thinking. He put love above fortune, and though he was manly and protective, he also encouraged me to read books and newspapers so that we might discuss literature, which I have always enjoyed, and also current events, which I must admit that between him and Kate, I had begun to find more interesting.

Today, he entered that same parlor, removing his hat with what I can only describe as flourish. He kissed me on the lips, an intimacy we had allowed since our engagement. “You will not regret the day you agreed to marry me, Miss Murray.”

“I never believed I would, Mr. Harker,” I replied, remaining on my tiptoes, hoping that he would kiss me again. I let my arm linger around his neck, enjoying the broadness of his shoulders.

“Truly, Mina, something extraordinary has happened. A count, a member of the Austrian nobility, has retained the firm to conduct a substantial real estate transaction in London. My uncle is consumed with settling two entailed country estates and has turned this affair entirely over to me.”

Jonathan’s eyes, today honey-brown, had a new sparkle. His skin was flushed with the early summer warmth and with his own enthusiasm. “After a lengthy correspondence, the Count was very specific that my uncle send me as his personal emissary. I leave in a few days for the duchy of Styria.”

I wanted to share Jonathan’s enthusiasm, but all I comprehended was that this business would take him out of the country and away from me.

“Don’t you see, Mina? A substantial bonus will be coming to me. We will have a very tidy sum of money to begin our married life, enough to lease one of those little town houses you have set your heart on in Pimlico.”

I slapped my hand to my mouth in surprise, a most unladylike gesture, but I could not help myself. “Do you mean it, Jonathan?” I asked. “You would not toy with me about so important a subject?” I had spent hours imagining Mr. and Mrs. Harker living in one of those brand-new houses with a cozy parlor, two bedrooms, a dining room, a kitchen, and a water closet.

Jonathan saw my happiness. He picked me up by the waist and twirled me around. “Mr. Harker! You forget yourself!” I teased.

“Oh, no, Mina, when I finally forget myself, it will be much more interesting than this!” Since our formal engagement, Jonathan had begun to hint at the excitement of the marriage bed, which of course, both thrilled and embarrassed me.

I poured our tea and sat down, and Jonathan sat in the chair next to me, pulling it close. “Of course I would not tease you, Mina. Seeing you happy makes me happy. I have sent for a brochure on the property. After my business with this count is concluded, I shall be more than ready to negotiate the lease. Our first home will have two bedrooms. Do you think that Quentin will mind sharing a room with little Maggie for the first few years of their lives?”

Jonathan and I had spent endless hours picturing the children we would have together, their names and characteristics, and the details of their early years.

“But little Maggie may arrive first. We will have to ask her if she would mind a baby brother invading her nursery.”

“Maggie is a very generous child,” Jonathan said, breaking into a broad smile at the thought of his future daughter. “She will be delighted to share her quarters with her brother, provided he respects the dollies that Father has given her. Do you know, Mina, that I have already bought her one.”

“You bought Maggie a doll?” I asked.

Jonathan was blushing. “I went to the shops yesterday and found an entire department devoted to children’s toys! Imagine! I bought a dolly for Maggie and a little wooden train for Quentin.”

I squealed, wrapping my arms around myself at the thought of Jonathan’s love for our future children. “I hope you don’t think me foolish,” he said.

“I think you are the most wonderful man I have ever met!” I said, and I leaned forward and kissed him delicately on his lips. He reached into his pocket and brought out a small jewelry box, handing it to me. I had been given so few gifts in my life that I was not sure how long I should wait to open it. “Well, go on,” he said, smiling. “The box is not the gift, Mina.”

I opened it slowly. Inside, resting on alpine green velvet, sat a gold filigree heart on a chain, with a small gold key attached as an amulet. Both the heart and the key were dotted with little amethysts. I took it out of the box and let it hang in the air. To me, the little stones were as dazzling as diamonds.

“It’s the key to my heart, Mina, which you already possess.” He took the necklace from me and fastened it around my neck.

“It is beautiful, Jonathan. I shall treasure it,” I said. I pressed the necklace into my breastbone.

“I have wanted to give you something for a long time, but I did not know if it would be appropriate. Today, I could not help myself. I was carried away with buying gifts for my family.” Jonathan reached into another pocket and retrieved a small leather-bound notebook. “I also purchased one of these for you and one for myself. I leave tomorrow on my journey, but let us record our every thought and experience so that when I return, reading the diaries will compensate for the time we spent apart.”

“What a lovely idea,” I said, running my hand over the smooth brown leather.

“There must be no secrets between a man and his wife. We must share our innermost thoughts. That is the way to keep a marriage vital and fresh.” Jonathan had been reading marriage manuals since we announced our engagement.

Every woman intuitively knows to censor her thoughts when expressing them to a man, husband or otherwise. Undoubtedly men go through a similar process when speaking to women. But the sincerity of Jonathan’s words touched me, so I thought I would try to confide at least a small part of my recent experience.

“Does sharing innermost thoughts also apply to one’s dreams?” I asked.

He blushed. “Dreams are out of our control, Mina.”

“I have had disturbing dreams of late,” I said. “Frightening dreams, in which people are doing bad things to me, hurting me.”

Again, he took my hand. “Dear Mina, who could possibly want to harm you, even in a dream?”

“I dreamt that I was being attacked by a man.”

He waited, and then he dropped my hand. He took a sip of his tea. “I was afraid of this very sort of thing. Did you not tell me that Kate Reed took you into those terrible tenement houses in the worst part of the city, and then dragged you to the offices of the very men who built them, where she confronted them?”

“Yes, but-”

“Do you not think it dangerous for a woman to be running around the filthiest part of London, and then confronting the men who developed it?”

“Yes, of course I do, but it is Kate who confronts. I am as quiet as a mouse.”

“But that neighborhood is rife with criminals. You might have been hurt. Don’t you see, Mina? Venturing into these seedy worlds with Kate is giving you nightmares. The mind doctors now say that dreams are reflections of one’s own fears. If you are exposed to frightening places and frightening men, then it follows logically that you will dream of being attacked.” Jonathan considered himself a thoroughly modern man, following all the new trends in science, medicine, and industry and especially the explanations of Mr. Darwin about human evolution.

“But the dreams are upsetting,” I said. “The actual experiences were not.”

“Your unconscious mind gave you the dream to warn you against doing these things again.” He took both my hands and kissed them. “When we are married, all bad dreams will disappear. I shall banish them from our kingdom, my princess!”

Jonathan’s concern for my well-being always had the effect of salve on the wounds of my childhood. Had anyone ever cared for me so? Yet I did not want my activities with Kate prematurely curtailed.

“Let us strike a bargain,” I said. “If I promise not to venture into dangerous situations, will you allow me to assist Kate until we are married? After that, I will be too busy making our home. Besides, I only learned stenography and typing to help you, and that is what I shall do, at least until our first child is born.”

The tension melted from his jaw and relaxed into a big, boyish grin. “That sounds like my girl,” he said.

“I love your smile, Mr. Harker, and I will do anything to keep it on your face,” I said, touching his cheek.

“But no secrets between us, Mina? No matter what misadventures you are led into at the hands of Miss Kate Reed?”

“No, my darling, I promise,” I said, wondering how I would keep my side of the bargain if I had another strange episode. “No secrets.”

22 July 1890

Jonathan had been gone two weeks, and the school term was coming to an end, when Kate invited me to accompany her on an assignment. Godfrey and Louise Gummler, husband and wife spiritualists and photographers, had risen to popularity in recent years in London, thriving in a city where many who had claimed to photograph spirits had already been exposed and driven away. A newspaper photographer that Kate knew had examined their photographs of clients with spirits hovering in the background and had suspected that they used a sophisticated double-exposure technique to achieve the effect. A French spirit photographer using the same technique had just been put on trial and convicted in Paris. The Gummlers charged a good deal of money for their service, and Kate and Jacob, always keen to expose fraudulent activity, were anxious to get to the truth of the situation.

Kate had convinced her father to give her the money to purchase an elaborate mourning gown to play the part of a bereaved mother. “I suppose you can wear it again after I’m dead,” he had said, handing over the money. “It will please your mother to see you so nicely turned out.”

This evening, she was somberly beautiful in a swirl of black silk moiré. I suppose that she wanted the Gummlers to see that she was a woman of means, ripe to be swindled out of a goodly sum of money. Either that, or she secretly enjoyed wearing silk finery and could not admit it, considering her ideals. Jacob wore a dark suit, which he had purchased years before to cover funerals of important people for the newspapers. He did not look quite the equal of his “wife,” but men of means often did not pay much attention to their dress. He had, however, found some way of bleaching his fingers clean of their perennial ink stains.

I came along as godmother of their fictitious deceased child. I did not own a mourning gown, but Kate assured me that the dark-colored dress I wore as a uniform would suffice. I put on a short cotton jacket to improve my style, but Kate said it brightened up the look too much and made me take it off. She threw a coarse black woolen shawl around my shoulders and stood back to look at me. I turned to look in the mirror.

“I look like your poor relation,” I said.

“That is the point, Mina. You are to look as miserable as possible, and with your pretty face and perfect ivory skin that glows like a white rose in the moonlight, and the two emeralds that you call eyes, it is rather difficult.”

The Gummlers’ parlor was a study in fringe. Flowered Spanish shawls draped most of the furnishings. Madam Gummler herself was a middle-aged woman with red streaks of rouge caked on her cheeks and powder in the creases that ran from her nostrils to her mouth. Godfrey Gummler appeared to have taken all the hair from his head and applied it to his face. He was bald as a baby’s behind, but wore the long, furry muttonchops and capacious beard made popular years ago after the Crimean War.

The centerpiece of the room was a boxlike camera, also draped with a Spanish shawl. Madam Gummler put her arm around Kate as she ushered us inside. “My dear, I was touched by your letter. Tragic! To find one’s little infant dead in the crib! Taken from you without warning, without illness, for no foreseeable reason!” She called Jacob and myself angels of mercy, “flanking this lovely woman in her time of need. How fortunate she is to have two stalwarts such as you by her side.” And then to the three of us: “Do sit down.”

Kate sat quietly at the table as Madam Gummler poured three cups of tea, placing their saucers on little lace doilies to protect the shawl on the table.

“First, we shall call upon the spirit of your dear little son,” Madam Gummler said. “After we establish a firm connection, my husband will take the photograph. As you can see by our walls, we have had great success in the past, reuniting the living and the dead.”

The walls of the parlor were lined with framed photographs of the Gummlers’ living subjects, all seated in this very room, each with a ghostly figure hovering in the background. The portraits covered the walls from the wainscot to the floral wallpaper trim bordering the ceiling. The ghosts varied; some were identical to the subject, which Madam Gummler explained meant that the camera had captured the subject’s etheric body, or higher self, while other spirits were different entities entirely.

“Here is Sir Joseph Lansbury with his beloved mother,” Godfrey said. Sir Joseph looked to be a dignified man in his forties; the ghost of his mother was a matron in a white cap and white dress with a lace collar. Others were photographed with baby ghosts wearing christening costumes, or older ghosts in antique garments. Some of the apparitions were angelic forms or, in some cases, mere swirls of light that one had to presume were spirits.

“The spirits themselves have told us how the photography comes into being,” Godfrey explained. “They manifest themselves by merging our sphere with their own. This creates a mixed aura. When rays of light pass through this hybrid atmosphere, they are refracted, which causes their images to be projected on the plate.”

“That is most interesting, and a fair scientific explanation,” Jacob said.

“It is a mere veil that separates you from your child, Mrs. Reed. Just a thin membrane, invisible, made of vapor. Believe me, he is just on the other side. What is the little darling’s name?”

Kate, who apparently should have had a life on the stage, produced a single teardrop and said, “Simon. After his grandfather.” Jacob reached out and touched her hand. What players they were! For my part, I sat quietly sipping tea and trying to look as lugubrious as possible. Godfrey went about the room lighting candles. He lowered the gas lamps on either side of the fireplace.

“Simon. Lovely. Now we begin,” Madam Gummler said.

“Should we all hold hands?” Jacob asked.

“No, none of that nonsense is necessary,” she replied. She raised her hands to the ceiling and with eyes turned upward, she called out in a voice from deep within-octaves lower than her speaking voice. “I call upon the heavenly bodies and angels of high rank to deliver the spirit of the child Simon Reed! Simon Reed, your mother is calling to you! If little Simon has already made his transition and is sitting in heaven with God, then ask the Lord to allow us to borrow his spirit for a brief moment to comfort his bereaved mother. Let us borrow him from eternity! O Holy Ones-Michael; Jophiel; Uriel; Gabriel; and Afriel, protector of babies and children-hear my pleas and answer me!”

Her eyes were closed, and she swayed gently as she waited for a reply from the heavens. I looked about the room. Everyone’s eyes were shut tight. Candles flickered, making the photographs on the walls doubly eerie. But nothing happened.

“Simon Reed, your mother, father, and godmother are calling out to you. O Spirit Mothers, free the infant to come to us, and we shall return him to you, where he may rest in your holy bosom for eternity.”

Suddenly, the medium’s breathing pattern changed, and she started to take short breaths, as if she was about to have an asthmatic attack. She threw herself back in her chair as if something had knocked the wind out of her.

“Another presence has entered the room,” said Madam Gummler, opening her eyes and looking directly at me. “Is there anyone near and dear to you who might inhabit the spirit world?”

She looked convincingly afraid but excited at the same time. Either she was an actress with the skills of Ellen Terry, or she had genuinely felt something happen that had gone undetected by the rest of us.

I looked at her blankly.

“Anyone close to you who is deceased?” she asked.

“Why, everyone,” I said. Jacob laughed. Kate opened her eyes and looked at me angrily. “Surely we are not dead, Wilhelmina.”

“N-no, of course not,” I stammered. “Perhaps my mother may be trying to contact me.”

“No, it is emphatically a male who is attempting contact.”

“I cannot think who it may be,” I said, hoping that it was not my father. The last time I remembered seeing him, he beat me and yelled horrible things at me. I did not want him manifesting here in this parlor, intruding upon the new life I had created and saying things that would disturb Kate’s opinion of me.

“Perhaps it is Simon,” Kate offered.

“Yes, oh yes, I do feel little Simon as well. Yes, I do. Oh, what a sweet little darling. He has a message for you, Mrs. Reed.” Madam Gummler closed her eyes tighter as if she were straining to hear someone. Then she spoke in a high, delicate voice, imitating a small child. “‘I am here, Mama. I did not leave you. It’s just that God wanted me by his side.’”

“Oh!” Kate exclaimed.

“Let us take the photograph while the child is with us,” Godfrey said, rising from the table. He lit the two lamps on either side of the mantel, drowning out the softer light of the candles. “We must have enough light to take the photograph but not enough to frighten away the spirit,” he said. “These are delicate balances that must be maintained.” He placed a high-backed Jacobean-style chair in front of the fireplace and asked Kate to sit in it. “Now, Madam Gummler, if you please.”

Madam Gummler rose from her chair, tossing the corner of her shawl that had drooped off her shoulder back around her neck. She walked to the camera and placed her hand above it. “This encourages the process,” she said, swirling her hand over the camera.

“How should I pose?” Kate asked.

“Hold out your hands as if to receive your little boy,” Godfrey said.

Kate did as she was told, sitting very still while Godfrey took the picture.

Madam Gummler put her hand over her chest and took a deep breath, looking as if she were about to swoon. She turned to me. “Someone is trying to contact you, and he is being most persistent. Would you like a photograph, dear?”

I shook my head violently.

“Please do not reject the spirits who have come to see you. It insults them,” she said. “I work to keep my parlor a hospitable environment for those on the other side. Do not destroy my efforts with your skepticism.”

“I am not skeptical,” I replied, trying to keep my voice calm. “I simply cannot afford your fee.”

“Why, Wilhelmina, we will pay for the photograph,” Kate said magnanimously. “Perhaps little Simon wants a picture with his Aunt Mina,” she said, taunting me with the moniker my students used for me.

“Yes, Wilhelmina, please allow us to get this for you,” Jacob said. I supposed that he and Kate wanted to gather more evidence for their story.

“But Mr. Gummler has already taken the camera away,” I said. He had indeed left the room with the camera immediately after Kate had been photographed.

“Ah, but I have returned.” For how long he had been standing at the parlor door I did not know. “I unloaded the exposed plate in the darkroom, and I have placed a fresh plate in the camera,” he said, attaching the instrument to its tripod. “If you please,” he said to me, pointing to the antique chair, which suddenly looked to my mind like it had been used in the Inquisition.

I did not see how I could refuse. I took Kate’s place in the chair and, sitting very still and very glum, allowed myself to be photographed.

“I understand from other clients of yours that you allowed them to witness the development process,” Jacob said. “May we be afforded that privilege?”

“My pleasure,” Godfrey said, “if you can spare the time.”

We entered a small darkroom, foul with the odor of the chemicals of Godfrey’s trade. The room was stuffy and lit with a single lantern, its glass darkened with red-black paint. “It only takes a minute or two to develop the negative plates,” Godfrey said as he brushed both sides of the plate with a little camel-haired brush to remove the dust. “High-contrast pictures must be developed quickly, and in these cases, the contrast between the living subject and the spirit provides a veritable chiaroscuro of dark and light.” He placed the first negative in a pan and mixed a solution that smelled like ammonia in a large cup. After stirring it like a sorcerer with a glass rod, Godfrey poured the solution over the negative and swished the dish from side to side.

“Remarkable!” he said. “Mother, come look at this.”

Madam Gummler lowered her head over the dish. “Why look, there is the little babe,” she exclaimed. “There is your Simon, come to see his dear mother.”

The three of us looked over her shoulder. On the plate, as if it had come straight out of the ether, a wispy image of a bundle appeared lying in Kate’s lap. The face was indistinguishable, but the image did look like a baby swaddled in a pretty lace blanket.

Kate looked at the image, and then looked at Jacob.

Madam Gummler asked Kate if she needed to sit down, or if she thought she might faint, as was usual with women who make communication with their deceased children. Kate answered without emotion. “Will we be able to take a finished photograph with us when we leave?”

“Why yes,” Godfrey said. “Though I would prefer if you left it with us to dry. We could send it tomorrow.”

“No, we are set to leave for the country tomorrow to visit our relations. We must take the photograph with us,” Kate said.

I was surprised at Kate’s restraint in not exposing her true mission, but I supposed that she had to carry the ruse straight through to obtain her evidence. I began to have difficulty breathing, what with the acrid chemical odors and the heat in the tiny, cramped room generated by five bodies and no ventilation. I said as much, and Madam Gummler offered to make tea for us in the parlor while her husband developed the other negative and made prints of the pictures.

“You must be very excited,” Madam Gummler said to Kate as she poured tea for us.

“You have no idea how very much,” Kate said.

“Perhaps your photograph will show you who is trying to contact you, dear,” the woman said to me. “Sometimes the spirits are shy, but this is someone of power. I felt him here,” she said, pointing to her heart.

Kate snickered, and I was afraid that she was about to give us away, but she busied her mouth with sipping tea. After seeing the image of Kate’s nonexistent dead baby, we all knew that the Gummlers were running a fraudulent operation, but I was still curious about what Madam Gummler was saying. I wanted to question her, but I also did not want to alert Kate as to my recent disturbing incident. Not inquisitive, disparaging Kate.

Jacob walked over to the fireplace, which was not lit, it being summertime, and stared into it as if flames were there keeping his attention. Madam Gummler took a Spanish shawl from the back of one of her chairs and draped it over Kate’s shoulders. “It’s best to keep the body warm when one goes into shock from having contact with the dead.”

I wished she would have put the thing around me. I felt a draft sweep through the room and past my face, though no one else seemed to notice it. My body, which had been so hot in the darkroom, now felt as if a piece of ice were slithering down my spine. I wrapped my hands around the warm teacup and brought it to my stomach. It did not help the inexplicable coldness that was sweeping over me, and my hands started to shake. I put the cup down, hoping that no one would notice.

Madam Gummler was about to offer more tea, when Godfrey entered the room. He spoke to his wife. “Mother, I need your assistance.”

She excused herself and followed her husband back to the darkroom. Kate looked at me. “Are you well, Mina? You look positively stricken.”

“I’m just a bit cold,” I said.

“Do not worry. We will soon be out of here,” she said.

“Quiet, darling,” Jacob said. “The spirits might be listening.” They both giggled. I did not know if he called her darling because he was pretending to be her husband, or if they were, in fact, lovers and Kate had declined to tell me.

The Gummlers entered the room slowly, Madam Gummler leading her husband as if the two were in a solemn procession. Each held a still-damp print with two fingers.

“We have a rather startling surprise,” Madam Gummler said. Godfrey went to give me the photograph, but his wife snapped at him. “One at a time, dear.”

She gave one of the photographs to Kate. Jacob and I rose to look at it.

“There he is, little Simon, so lovely in his mother’s arms,” Mrs. Gummler said.

“What do you think of little Simon, Mr. Reed?” she asked, handing the photograph to him.

“I think we have everything we require,” Jacob said.

“Require for what purpose?” Godfrey asked. His eyes, already hooded by heavy lids, narrowed into suspicious little gashes.

“We are journalists and colleagues, sir. We are not married, and neither of us has a child, either alive or dead.”

“We told you our story before we arrived,” Kate said in the familiar tone she had used with the tenement landlords. “You tampered with the plate before taking the photograph. You have deceived many people and defrauded them of money, but it won’t continue.”

Rather than succumb to humiliation or back down, Madam Gummler replied calmly. “Journalists, you say? Who came here with a lie? I ask you, who are the real frauds here? I submit it is the two of you.”

Godfrey looked at me. “The real question is, who is this woman?”

“Me?” I put my hand to my chest. What did I have to do with anything?

“She is our apprentice,” Kate said.

“I suspect she is more than that,” Madam Gummler said. “I think she must be a sorcerer’s apprentice.” She held the photograph out to me. “Do you know this person?”

I looked at the image of myself sitting in the chair looking placid, uninterested, and a little bit afraid. Behind me, however, stood a man in elegant evening clothes. He wore a tall hat and a cape and carried a walking stick, which he held beneath the knob, exposing the golden dragon’s head atop it. Unlike the picture of the swaddled babe in the first photograph, his body was not a swirling and indistinguishable mass of ghostly light but nearly as fully formed as my own. His deep-set, haunted eyes stared directly at me. Long hair flowed about his shoulders. I did not have time to scrutinize the image because I recognized him instantly. As soon as I did, the icy feeling again crawled up my spine, all the way through my head and into my eyes. Blackness welled up, obscuring my vision, and I felt my body go weak. Before I could break my fall, I hit the floor and lost consciousness.

When I came to, Kate was insisting that Madam Gummler call a physician, whereas Jacob was insisting that they take me away from the place as soon as possible. I sided with Jacob, who went outside and found us a hansom cab. Madam Gummler handed me the photograph of-what could I call him?-the spirit of my mysterious savior-but her husband wanted to keep it to study.

“It belongs to us,” Kate said, grabbing it from them. I suppose she wanted to have it as evidence. I did not argue with her, nor did the Gummlers, and with photographs in hand, we left their parlor. On the way home, Jacob asked what had caused me to faint so suddenly, and I made an excuse that I had been feeling ill all day and probably should not have attended such a sensational event.

“Clearly, they tamper with every negative plate. I’ll wager that fifty women in England are in possession of a photograph with that handsome ghost standing behind them.” Kate turned to Jacob. “I wish you had waited to disclose our identities. They would have spun a fabulous tale about Mina’s ghost that we might have used in our story.”

“I was bored,” he answered. “We knew they were frauds, and we exposed them as such. Not exactly a challenge. Besides, why should some bereaved mother not believe that her child is hovering about in heaven?”

Kate had initiated the investigation into the Gummlers, and I could see that she was taking Jacob’s lack of enthusiasm as a personal attack. Fortunately, this took the emphasis off what had happened to me, and all the way home, they argued over the merits of publishing the article.

I left the photograph in their possession. I was terrified of certainty; if I never looked at it again, I would not have to confirm what I saw. I would be able to tell myself that the ghostly image was a photographer’s trick. As Jonathan had explained, it was a manifestation of my fears. In time, I would realize that my mind, upset by recent events, had attributed the features of my savior to this figure, and I could eventually put the incident to rest. Once safely married to Jonathan, these strange occurrences would dissipate into thin air. I would be so busy keeping our house and preparing to start our family that I would not have time for mysterious forays into the unknown. Just as enrollment in Miss Hadley’s school had made my early experiences with the supernatural disappear, so marriage to Jonathan would force normalcy upon me and once again obliterate these inexplicable elements.

But that very night, something happened in my dream that I could not put off to a rational explanation, an experience thrust upon me on some astral plane where I was not in control but subject to the specters that prowl the ethers. In this dream-though it felt more vivid than an ordinary dream-a man was on top of me and inside me, and I wanted him to be there. I held him in place, digging my fingernails deep into his back, clutching him to me, urging him to move deeper and deeper into me. Wicked and desperate, my desire was unbounded. I was frantically reaching for something, but what it was I did not know. My lust was like a ladder that must be climbed one rung at a time, but I could never reach the top.

I woke in the middle of this experience, body quivering, drenched in my own sweat, and still frantic to reach the unknown destination to which only the lover could deliver me. I was alone in the room, but the presence was still deep inside me, filling that dark cavity. I lay quietly for a long time, taking in my surroundings and reassuring myself with the familiar details of the room-the little chest of drawers, the single straight-backed chair, the washstand with a bowl and pitcher on top and the small wood-framed oval mirror above it. I named the furnishings out loud, hoping that the addressed items would somehow acknowledge me too and let me know that I was indeed in my room and not still dreaming. But was I? I was alone and yet I could still feel the man, or some presence, inside me.

The naming did not make the sensation go away. I had never touched myself in that place, so I did not know what it should feel like inside. I slid my nightdress up and my hand down. Cautiously, as if I were touching someone other than myself, I let my fingers slide past my navel; down my stomach; through the hair; and to the moist, hidden part of me. What a mystery it was, this part of my body, more secretive than a heart or lung, for I had seen pictures of those organs. I heard a noise outside my door and retracted my hand, but soon realized it was only the wind coming through the hall and rattling the doors. I wanted to go back to sleep again and forget all this, but I could not ignore the full feeling inside me. Something was literally filling me up. Had some ghost come in the night and violated me? If so, I had been his desperate and willing victim. I reached again between my legs, spreading them wider. Using my middle finger, I located the small entrance, and carefully slid my finger inside. It felt like nothing I had ever felt before, soft and smooth, and empty and full at the same time, a moist cushion of a cave. Something inside me contracted around my finger, resurrecting the familiar throb of my dream. Where had my lover come from, and where had he gone? I felt nothing but the wet, creamy, hot walls of my own body. Something made me want to linger and to explore, but the more I enjoyed the sensations, the more I knew that I should stop the journey along this dark path. I retracted my finger slowly and brought it into the cool, night air, and it carried with it the heavy, salty scent of the inside of that secretive grotto. Once I pulled my finger out, the full feeling subsided, as if no one had ever been inside me.

The next morning, I received a letter from Lucy Westenra, my dearest friend from school days, who was on summer holiday with her mother at the seaside resort of Whitby. “I am lonely for a female companion with whom to share the contents of my heart and mind, not to mention some interesting news on a subject dear to us both,” she wrote, enclosing a train ticket. Lucy knew that Jonathan was away and that Miss Hadley’s closed every August. The students and staff went to their families, and Headmistress traveled to see her sister in Derbyshire, so that I, with no relatives to visit, would spend a solitary month reading books, walking about London, and supervising the maintenance of the school property. I went through the daily mechanics of living, but with the abject loneliness of one who has no familial destination such as one was supposed to have in the summertime.

I had not received a letter from Jonathan in the weeks that he had been away, which also set my nerves on edge. Was he safe? Was he thinking about me? I attributed the lack of correspondence to the inefficiency of the post, so I sent him a letter with Lucy’s address in Whitby, asking him to write to me there.

In truth, I was anxious to have this interval with Lucy who, unlike Kate, would delight in the details of my impending wedding plans. Lucy had an ardent admirer in Arthur Holmwood, the future Lord Godalming, whom I had yet to meet. If Lucy had news to share, it must be that Arthur had asked the question he had been wanting to pose to her, and that she, who never seemed to be in love with him but had accepted that it was her fate to marry a member of the peerage, had answered in the affirmative. Lucy would not trouble me with Kate’s questioning of what the trajectory of female life should, or could, be in some utopian world that would never exist. It would be a relief to spend time in Lucy’s exuberant company, where we might share excitement about our destinies as brides.