Dracula in Love

Chapter Three

1 August 1890

The train to York pulled out of the station on a sluggish summer morning just before dawn. I sat very still as it made its way through London and her outskirts, as if I were anticipating being grabbed by some unknown party and held back from leaving the city’s narrow streets and confines. As soon as the train cleared the city’s smoky skies and morning mist, I felt as if I had been set free. The sun broke through dark clouds, transforming wet fields into endless expanses of shimmering green. Golden bales of hay, rolled up tight into spools, glimmered on the fields looking magical, like Rapunzel’s spun hair. Lazy horses and sheep turned their noses up to the sun to take in its warmth. Farm boys in tall boots trudged through pastures muddy from summer rains, but the same life-giving sun that shone upon them shone through the window and upon my face. As the train creaked along, warm air wafted into the open window, perhaps bringing soot from the engine with it, but I did not care. Other ladies held handkerchiefs to their faces, but the air was fresher than anything I had felt against my skin in a long time.

Many hours later, when we reached York, I transferred to a coach that would take me over miles and miles of moors and into Whitby. The flat landscape now gave way to rolling hills, the coursing over which began to make me feel queasy. The sun, my constant companion on the train, suddenly disappeared behind dark clouds. Flocks of white birds scattered as we rode along, flying away to take cover against whatever the dim skies would spit down upon them. We stopped briefly at Malton to pick up new passengers, and I asked the coachman whether the time on the clock tower was correct. It was not possible that it was just twelve o’clock noon.

“The old clock stopped at midnight years and years ago, but no clock-maker in England has been able to repair it,” he replied, shaking his head.

I refreshed myself with an egg sandwich and a cup of tea purchased at the station, and soon we were back in the coach and climbing into the moors. The gloom became more intense as increasingly dark clouds gathered, bringing with them the sensation of twilight, though it was just four o’clock in the afternoon. I looked out the dusty window to see that the skies behind us remained bright blue, as if the clouds were following the coach into the moors. A silly thought, of course, but I suddenly felt as if the harrowing experiences of the recent past would not be left behind at all but would follow me even on my holiday. I tried to focus on the heather, its lovely deep violet color muted by the gray daylight. But it bloomed only in places; instead of lush blankets of purple, lonely expanses of low vegetation and coarse, dull grass, dominated the scene.

The coach passed a big stone cross at the side of the road upon which hung a dried wreath of ivy, undoubtedly a memorial to a roadside death. A woman sitting opposite me made the sign of the cross and waited for me to follow her example, but I looked away and out the window at the bleak landscape and the ominous horizon. A brewing tempest was hardly unusual for an English summer, but I could not escape the portentous feeling that something was following me from London-something I would prefer to have left behind. The first sight of the sea should have heartened me, but as I watched the tide roll out, it seemed that the receding breakers threatened to suck me with them into the roiling water.

Because of my evening arrival, Lucy’s mother had hired a man to meet me at the station. He had been given a thorough description of me and took my bag from my hand as soon as I stepped out of the carriage. In my fearful state, I wrongly assumed that he was a thief preying upon visitors until he identified himself. Embarrassed, I apologized several times, which he received with a good laugh.

Lucy greeted me in the parlor of the rooms they had taken on the second floor of a huge guesthouse in East Cliff, sitting high above the sea and overlooking the red roofs of the town, the beach, and the double lighthouses that welcomed vessels coming into the harbor. She was thinner than the last time I had seen her, but her golden hair floated like waves around her shoulders. She had tied part of it back with a silky pink ribbon that matched her day dress. Her skin, always pale, had more color, and the light sprinkle of freckles that had covered her nose and upper cheeks since I had met her thirteen years ago were more prominent.

“I have been riding a bicycle,” she said by way of explaining her heightened color. “Mother is furious that I’ve let my skin get dark, but I don’t care a fig.”

“You, riding a bicycle? Like a common woman? Lucy, I am surprised at you!”

But I was not surprised.

At school, Lucy, with her pretty blond hair and innocent blue eyes, looked like the perfect angel but was secretly an unruly child who stole sweets from Miss Hadley’s personal trove of goodies and enacted elaborate schemes for which she never got caught. One morning, however, as Miss Hadley marched us to the park in a weekly outing, Lucy diverted the two of us from the pack of girls and revealed her latest plan. We would approach perfect strangers, explaining that we were collecting money for the blind, but we would use the money to buy candies.

I was petrified, but I went along with her, walking up to ladies in bonnets and men with whiskers freshly groomed by their barbers, allowing Lucy to tell her story and nodding my head in agreement. When we had collected two handfuls of pence, we caught up with Miss Hadley and slipped back into the group. But later, one of the older ladies who had given us money came up to Miss Hadley, congratulating her on the philanthropic nature that she had instilled in young girls. Miss Hadley listened attentively, then with one hand yanking Lucy by the ear and the other pulling my braid, she made us confess our story.

“But we were going to give the money to the blind!” Lucy insisted. She told the story that her mother had taken to doing good deeds for the needy, which so inspired Lucy that she wanted to impress her mother with her own charity.

“Henceforth I suggest you help your mother with her work, rather than do these things on your own.”

Miss Hadley demanded the return of the coins, gave the money to a one-eyed beggar sitting by a park bench, and let the matter drop. Another girl would have been spanked and sent to bed without dinner.

Such was Lucy’s talent for escaping her crimes unscathed.

“Mina, you are the most old-fashioned person I know,” Lucy said, in answer to my qualms over ladies riding bicycles. I supposed that she still got away with doing anything she wanted to do. “My mother would be so very pleased if you were her daughter instead of me.”

“I do not care what you say. I cannot imagine mounting such a thing and still comporting myself with any dignity whatsoever.”

“Perhaps you have not seen the new safety bicycles, but they are very popular in resort towns. A little stand keeps them in place while one mounts and dismounts, with hardly an upset to one’s skirts at all. A little fresh air and exercise is beneficial for females too!” Lucy’s big blue eyes were almost wild with excitement as she expressed this idea.

“Has Mr. Holmwood been taking you on these bicycling adventures?” I asked.

“No, no, not Arthur. Someone else, a friend of his from their Oxford days, an American named Morris Quince. He is occupying my time while Arthur is away on family business,” she said, turning from me. She called for tea and sandwiches, which were served by their locally acquired maid, Hilda, who informed us that Mrs. Westenra had already gone to bed with a headache.

“She is always ill nowadays,” Lucy said. “Her health has never been good, but since Father died, she has deteriorated. The doctor thought that the sea air would invigorate her heart, but I’m afraid the opposite has happened.”

Lucy looked forlorn. She had been close to her father, who had died the year before.

“Nonsense. One more month of sea air and you’ll see improvement,” I said, patting her hand. “Your letter sounded as if you had news to share.” I wanted to distract her from her woes, but Lucy shook her head. “No, dear one, you first. I want to hear all about your Jonathan.”

I took my sketchbook out of my satchel and opened it to the page where I’d sketched a white wedding gown. “It’s taken from designs I saw in The Woman’s World, with a few of my own additions and alterations,” I said. “I am going to have it made in Exeter, where the seamstresses work for a fraction of what is charged in London. Do you like the wreath? It is made of orange blossoms.”

“Why, Mina, it’s a variation on the gown you sketched when you were a girl of thirteen and secretly designing your wedding dress in the evenings before bedtime,” Lucy said. “You even said that you would wear white too like the queen.”

I had not remembered my girlhood vision of a wedding dress, though I did recall hiding the sketches under my bed. “How strange. This design is the very latest fashion. How could I have known what that would be nine years ago?”

“Perhaps you are a visionary! I always thought that, of the three of us friends, you were the most intelligent. Don’t tell Kate I said that.”

“Well, it isn’t true,” I said. “Kate’s intelligence is now a part of the public record. She has been writing long and thoughtful pieces of journalism for all London to consume, while I am still teaching girls how to sit and to pour tea.”

“Tell me everything about your wedding,” Lucy said excitedly. “Will it take place in Exeter?”

“Yes!” I answered, feeling pleasure at being able to share my plans with a friend. “Mr. Hawkins and his sister have offered to host a party after the ceremony.”

Many months prior, chaperoned by Jonathan’s aunt, I had spent a weekend at the Exeter home with Jonathan and his uncle. As soon as I saw the Cathedral Church of St. Peter, I knew that I wanted to be married in it. I was awed by its size, by the immense flying buttresses, and by the fading colors on its once brightly painted façade.

“Will I be invited?” Lucy asked coyly.

“You are my family, Lucy,” I said. “I have none but you and Kate and Headmistress, who is mother and father to me. You will attend me in a silvery gown that will bring out your blue eyes,” I said, producing an article on planning a wedding. Lucy eagerly snatched it from my hand.

“I tore it out of our copy of The Woman’s World before Kate had a chance to read it, and I do not feel the least bit of remorse about it,” I said. “Surely she would not want to defile her sensibilities with these bourgeois ideas.” My imitation of Kate made Lucy squeal with laughter. “But everything in the article is true. Marriage for a woman means that every aspect of her life changes. She enters a new home, takes a new name, and takes on new duties. Marriage means that a man has sought a woman out and placed her above all women, choosing her to cherish and to protect. It is an exalted position.”

“Your wedding day will be glorious,” Lucy said. “You are marrying someone you love. Nothing can harm you now.” She looked away from me as if she heard a noise outside the window, but I could hear nothing but the sea, which crashed loudly against the Whitby cliffs. I recall having heard that no matter where one stood in Whitby, the sea was a constant audible companion.

“And your news? Are there to be two weddings in the near future?”

“I have accepted Mr. Holmwood’s kind offer of marriage,” she said quietly.

“Congratulations, dear friend,” I said, taking both her hands, which were cold, and kissing her cheek, which was hot. “He will make a fine husband, and you will make a lovely bride and mistress of the manor.” Waverley Manor, his family estate in Surrey, was known to be one of the finest homes in southern England.

Lucy’s smile looked like a fresh knife cut across her pretty face. “Oh, yes, the sheer size of it is rather intimidating. But Arthur says that his only desire in life is to make me happy. What more could I ask for?”

I started to give my heartfelt agreement, but she interrupted me. “I think it’s time for bed. We are sharing a room. Won’t that be fun? This is our last opportunity to be together before we are old married ladies.”

The Westenra house in Hampstead was of formidable size and elegance, and whenever I had slept there, I had my own room with an enveloping feather bed. Still, on most nights, Lucy climbed into bed with me, and we talked until dawn. I was disappointed to call our evening to an end so soon, but I voiced no displeasure, washing my face and hands and changing into my nightdress while Lucy did the same.

The bedroom window faced an old churchyard with gravestones that seemed haphazardly placed as if they might topple against one another in a strong gust of wind. Behind it I could see the ruins of Whitby Abbey, stark against the night sky. We were in bed before ten o’clock with the lights out and the window open so that the roar of the sea might lull us to sleep. I could hear the voices of people walking down Henrietta Street to the harbor, but I must have been more tired than I recognized because in a few moments, I slipped into a dreamless sleep. Not long thereafter, though, I was awakened by a noise. I opened my eyes to see Lucy tiptoeing out of the room.

“Lucy? Is anything the matter?” I asked.

“No dear, I just want to peek in on Mother to make sure she has taken all her medicines. I will stay the night with her if she asks me to. Go back to sleep.” She blew me a kiss and walked out the door, and in moments, I fell back asleep.

The next morning at the breakfast table, Lucy received a note from Morris Quince, Arthur Holmwood’s American friend. The note announced that Quince would be away for a few days, and Mrs. Westenra expressed her delight that he would not be gracing her parlor. “The Quince family is absolutely scandalous, Mina, and the scion is no better,” she said. Lucy rolled her eyes.

For as long as I had known her, Mrs. Westenra had always appreciated a good gossip session, and she spared no detail about the infamous Quinces. “Oh, the father is wealthy,” she said, slathering butter on her toast and then covering it with runny blackberry jam. “But he began his career as a circus performer! When the American Civil War broke out, he began to smuggle goods over enemy lines, and, apparently, had no compunction about selling stolen battle plans to either side, or that is the rumor. They also say that the man is actually a Jew, which of course would have abetted his journey into banking and finance. That, dear Mina, is where he made his second fortune.”

Though Mrs. Westenra had looked pale and ill at the start of breakfast, talking of Morris Quince’s unscrupulous father brought a good deal of color to her cheeks. Lucy, on the other hand, looked tired. Little purple veins had crept out beneath her eyes, which were red at the inside corners.

Mrs. Westenra continued, “It is a well-known fact that the senior Quince keeps a showgirl as his mistress, but they say that Mrs. Quince does not mind because-Mina, dear, forgive me for what I am about to say. I pass this along to you because I want you to be armed with the realities of this man’s background, should he try to charm you. As I was saying, Mrs. Quince pays no mind to her husband’s indiscretions because she is reputedly engaged in a sapphic relationship.”

Mrs. Westenra picked up another piece of toast, methodically smearing it with the contents of the condiment tray.

“I am sorry, Mrs. Westenra, I do not follow,” I said. “Is Mrs. Quince a poet?”

“Dear Mina, dear, dear Mina. You must keep up with modern terminology. Dr. Seward-you have not met him, but you will. He was crazy over our Lucy, but, of course, she could not turn down the future Lord Godalming for a poorly paid mad doctor, now could she?”

Lucy had never mentioned a doctor who had been one of her suitors. She merely shrugged, pouring herself more tea.

“At any rate, when I told this very story to Dr. Seward, he informed me that ‘sapphism’ is the medical term for the disease in which women fall in love with other women, transferring to them the same feelings that normal women have for men.”

“Mother, you must stop telling everyone these awful stories,” Lucy said. “You are merely repeating idle gossip. How will Mina be able to look Mr. Quince in the eye when she meets him?”

“He is very handsome, dear. It is quite the pleasure to look him in the eye,” Mrs. Westenra said. “I thought our Mina should be warned about him. He might try to charm her away from Mr. Harker.”

“Mother!” Lucy threw her toast on her plate in exasperation. “Mina is solidly in love with Mr. Harker. No one may taint her character; she would not allow it.”

“You are both naïve young ladies,” said Mrs. Westenra. “It is my duty to prevent you from falling prey to men’s schemes. Mr. Quince has a certain raw American charm but has no solid plans. The man paints! What sort of a man paints? A man who likes to see ladies without their clothing-that is who paints!”

Small beads of sweat appeared above her quivering lip. She patted her mouth dry with a napkin, then picked up her fan and fluttered it rapidly. “Mina does not have a mother’s guidance and welcomes my insights. Is that not correct, Mina?”

Headmistress always stressed the importance of deferring to one’s elders, though Mrs. Westenra’s warning did little but increase my desire to see this terrible man.

“Did you sleep well last night?” I asked her, attempting to change the subject.

“No, Mina, I did not. I tossed about all night.”

“I am so sorry,” I said, “but that explains the pallor in Lucy’s cheeks. I suppose you were kept awake too?” I looked at Lucy, whose face froze, but she put her hand over her mother’s. “I looked in on you at midnight, Mother. I sat in your room for a long time, but I suppose you don’t remember.”

“You must not let my condition ruin your good health,” Mrs. Westenra said. “I will speak to Dr. Seward about giving you medication to help you sleep.”

“I won’t take it,” Lucy said in a very argumentative tone. “Someone in this family must remain alert.”

“That is what servants are for! You vex me, my child. If your father were here, he would tell you to do as I say!” She shook her head furiously, the slack skin on her cheeks vibrating to and fro. “Oh dear, I hope Mina is spared the horrible sight of one of my paroxysms. They come on so suddenly, not like heart palpitations at all. The angina is a separate condition, I have learned. The attack comes on swiftly, beginning with a sharp pain here in the breastbone.”

She pointed to the place with her finger. She began to take quiet, slow breaths, making circular motions in front of her chest. “It is terrifying to feel as if one’s heart were about to collapse, Mina. An indescribable dread comes over me, and my skin becomes like ice, as if the very blood has stopped flowing in my veins. My poor heart gasps for its vital fluid, and I feel as if I am dying. It must be terrible to die! Oh, my poor husband.” The memory of Mr. Westenra overtook her, and she started to cry, dabbing at the corners of her eyes with her napkin.

Lucy remained indifferent during her mother’s presentation, sipping her tea as if she were the only person in the room. Later, when she and I were alone, I said, “If you did not have a mother, perhaps you would appreciate a mother’s concern.”

She looked at me as if I had betrayed her.

“I only mean to say that I wish I had a mother to help me navigate through life’s passages and into womanhood.”

“Perhaps you are fortunate,” she said. “You are free to navigate for yourself, and in a girl’s life, that is a privilege.”

Lucy decided to nap after breakfast, and I welcomed the time alone. The sun was not exactly shining, but it was apparent beneath a thin film of cloud cover. I wanted to explore and to find a place where I might write in my journal. I had been told that the best view of Whitby was from the old churchyard cemetery that overlooked the village, the harbor, and the sea. I climbed the one hundred ninety-nine steps to St. Mary’s Church, obeying the local superstition that each step must be counted or bad luck would befall the climber. I stopped to admire a large ancient-looking Celtic cross at the entrance to the churchyard, then peeked inside the small church, dark but for the light that shone through the stained-glass triptych behind the altar, illuminating at the center the body of the Christ hanging upon the cross. A few dark-clad women prayed fervently in the shadows. I lit a candle for the dead, dropped a coin in the offerings box, and went outside.

All the benches in the yard were taken, but I did not want to give up my mission. A solitary old man occupied the bench that sat furthest out on the promontory with the best view of the sea. He looked as if he had once been husky, but the decades had shrunken him to the size of an old woman. His clothes probably fit him well some twenty years ago, but hung in folds now on his bony frame. His skin was as brown and shriveled as a roasted peanut and covered with dark spots and moles.

“Would you mind if I joined you?” I asked.

He acquiesced to my request in a thick Yorkshire accent, the sort that we worked hard at Miss Hadley’s to remove.

“I won’t disturb your tranquility,” I said, opening my journal and removing the cap from my pen.

“I’ll have all the tranquility I need soon enough,” he said, swallowing his vowels, as they were wont to do in the area. I was not sure what he meant, until he nodded his head toward the gravestones. I smiled, and then looked out to the sea to collect my thoughts. I started to write in my journal, but the old man, short of company, I suppose, began to talk to me about his life.

He was the last survivor of the men who had once “addled a living” in the whaling industry. “Whitby ships were known to be the strongest vessels in the water,” he said, explaining that all the great sailors of the last century including Captain Cook himself preferred ships made by Whitby shipbuilders.

“The vessels had to be strong to withstand the winds that rise up in these frigid waters, and the men had to be strong to face the sea and the prey and the privateers. I was a young man on one of the last of the great whaling ships, the Esk.”

I knew I was in for a long-winded tale, so I took a deep breath and donned a look of interest.

“We were coming home, were not thirty miles from the harbor, struggling all day against a southerly breeze, when of a sudden, violence in the air like you have never seen came squalling in from the east. Our sails were shortened, so we were not prepared for the likes of that storm, and were caught against the leeward shore.” The more he talked, the more animated and younger he sounded. “I felt the Esk hit the reef and I knew she were grounded. She broke up, she did, spitting out every man on board into the sea, like we were no better than seeds from a piece of fruit. I was near six and twenty, and strong as an ox. I hung on to two men trying to keep them above the water, but in the end, only three of us survived.

“After that, I turned to herring to addle me living. Imagine, one day chasing the biggest fish in the sea and then being reduced to catching the smallest!”

I expressed my condolences for the shipmates he had lost. “They are all here, the ones who were found,” he said, waving his arm around the churchyard. “I visit them every day, keeping them up on the news of the town. They appreciate it, they do.”

“How do you know that, sir?” I asked.

“Because they thank me. The dead speak to us if only we have the patience to listen. The others that were lost to the sea, eaten up by the very fish we catch for our own dinners, they speak too, not in words but in terrible howling cries. And who can blame them? Young men losing their lives in their prime? One day, strong and brave, like young gods, then at the whim of the winds, they become food for the fishes. Strange, if you think on it. They have made cannibals of us, those fish.”

I did not want to think too long on that gruesome image, nor about communications from the dead. I had come to Whitby to escape that. I gave him my name and inquired of his. He told me that he was known as the whaler. I was about to bid my new acquaintance good day when he invited me to see the very place where he had washed to shore.

“On some days, you can still hear the cries of the sailors,” he whispered, and something bade me to accompany him back down the steps and toward the shore.

The day was cloudy and not warm. A few bathers gathered at the shoreline, but none braved the water. Optimists had rented big umbrellas and chairs, sitting under blankets against the wind. The sea was boisterous, crashing relentlessly against the cliffs in the distance, spewing waves onto the beach and forcing the bathers to move their chairs away from the encroaching waters. I hiked up my skirt as far as I dared as we strolled along in the sand. Vendors selling tea, lemonade, and cakes had set up stands along the beach. Suddenly, the old man pulled me aside, guiding me by the arm to hide behind the tea stand.

A tall man with a large physique and ginger-colored hair sticking out of a cap walked brusquely on the beach, the legs of his pants rolled up to his knees, revealing powerful-looking calves. As he walked, he roared at the sea, as if he were trying to scare it away from the rock-bound shore. “That man appears to be in an oratory competition with the sea,” I said, pulling my shawl close against the wind.

“Aye, best to avoid him. He’ll nark me till I’m mithered.”

“Has he tried to harm you?” I asked. The man did, indeed, look insane and somewhat dangerous, either exercising his arms or waving them at some unseen thing as he yelled into the waves.

The whaler laughed. “Harm me? No, he’ll fill me with pints and make me tell him my stories. He’ll take me off to a place where we cannot take a young lady and pour ale into me until I cannot walk.”

The old man explained that the fellow was a writer who managed a theater. He had come to Whitby chasing stories of monsters and ghosts, looking for a play to write for a famous London actor. “What is his name?” I asked.

“The redheaded man?”

“No, sir, the actor. I enjoy the London theater when I am able to attend.”

The old man had been told the name as if he should know it as well as he knew his own, but, as he had never heard it before, he had promptly forgotten it. “Along with most of what was in my brain,” he added. “But I remember all the stories of the haunted and the dead, and that is what that fellow likes to hear. Claims my stories are worth sheer gold, but he only offers me the pints. What are my stories worth to you, young lady?”

I explained that I was but a poor schoolteacher with no money to spare.

“Then your beauty will be my reward for the tales I tell you,” he said. “I’ll not be fuggled out of what’s due me till I get me eyes full of you and your coal-black hair.”

With the other man long down the shore, the old whaler and I resumed our walk. He showed me the place where he had swum to shore after the shipwreck, and where the bodies of his shipmates had been found. I did not comment. I did not want to be thought without compassion for the dead, but I did not want to linger. What was once a lovely shoreline now seemed like a massive graveyard, each rock on the beach a headstone.

He stopped walking, cocking his ear toward the waves. “Can ye hear her?”

I listened but only heard the sound of the water relentlessly rolling onto the shore. “Hear who?” I asked.

“Mirabelle! Oh, she was a good girl, but she lost her head to a bad man, as women are wont to do. Some devilish seaman, used the poor girl up and then admitted that he was leaving her to go back to his wife and seven kiddies.”

I was about to tell him that I did not want to hear two sad stories in one afternoon when I thought I heard a woman’s voice roll onto the shore with one of the waves. I stopped in my tracks.

“You heard it,” he said, matter-of-factly.

“I did hear something,” I said. “I cannot be sure what it was.”

“My lady, it was Mirabelle. Listen to my tale and then judge for yourself. From the day the sailor went away, Mirabelle walked along the sea, longing for him, hoping to see his ship sail back into the harbor. She knew in her heart that he would miss her and come back to her.”

“And did he?” I asked, anxious to hear a happy ending.

“Of course not. And the poor girl, by calling out to him, was playing a dangerous game. Too many sailors have lost their lives to these waters over the many years, and being young and virile men, they did not want to die. No, miss, they resented God for taking their lives and so they make bargains with the devil.

“The spirits know that by stealing the blood of a young woman, they can bring themselves back to life! That is the truth of it. The spirit of a handsome young man came to Mirabelle at twilight and kept her in his company until dawn. He made love to her and at the same time drained her of as much blood as he could take from her, and from that blood, he made himself stronger. She could not resist him, for such passion makes an addict of a young woman. He had a strange power over her, and his kisses that were killing her also made her swoon with pleasure!

“The girl’s parents were innkeepers who expected her to put in an honest day’s work, but soon she had no life in her to hold a broom, and she fell asleep as she tried to do her chores. The parents thought she was sick and called for a doctor, but he was helpless to name the disease that was wasting her away. Every night, she sneaked out of the inn and met her lover, who was getting more powerful with each meeting, while Mirabelle, once a beauty like you, became so pale and thin that she was almost invisible. She refused food and could never sleep. Then, one morning, she was found dead at the hearth, a broom in her hand. Her poor body had given out. And just as her mother found her daughter’s body crumpled at the hearth, she heard the father welcoming in a loud and happy voice a guest at the inn. He was a young sailor who had been given up for drowned some ten years before, and there he was, looking no older than the day that he had disappeared.

“You see, Miss Mina, the air is thick with the spirits of the young sailors and fishermen who died in the sea. They still yearn for the love and touch of beautiful women, young men that they were when they were forced to leave their bodies and earthly pleasure behind. I tell you this to warn you, beauty that you are with your jet-colored hair and your lovely skin more pure and delicious than the top of the cream, and those eyes of yours that stole their green from a sultan’s emerald. Beware when you walk this shore. Pay no heed to the blether of the boggarts. In death, they possess silvery tongues that can charm a maiden. If the spirits of the dead call out to you, swaddle yourself tight with your shawl, make the sign of the cross for protection, and walk away.”

Chapter Four

Whitby, 14 August 1890

The Austrian count has a beautiful daughter with a spectacular inheritance and renowned social standing, and Jonathan has fallen madly in love with her.” I looked into the mirror, noting that a deep crevice had snaked its way between my eyebrows, bifurcating my forehead and making me look older than my years.

“What an imagination, Mina,” Lucy said. “Jonathan loves only you.”

I had not heard a word from my fiancé in the five weeks since he had left London. At first, I feared for his safety, but bad news travels quicker than the good, so if something had befallen him, I would have already received word of it. Now I worried that he had met someone better suited to be his wife. The miracle of his love had always seemed like a fairy-tale gift to me, an orphan with nothing but good skin and nice eyes to recommend herself. Perhaps he was more ambitious than I had judged, and he had found someone whose connections could abet those ambitions.

“It is possible to love one person until a truer love comes along,” I said. “That is what the novels tell us. That is what history tells us. Guinevere loved Arthur until she met Lancelot. Do you not agree that it is possible to love one person but encounter another whose very soul speaks to you?”

Lucy picked up a fan from the dressing table, waving it in front of her face, though it was not warm in the bedroom. She had become thinner in the last two weeks. Her peach-colored moiré dress threatened to slip from her shoulders, but she still had good color in her cheeks, and her spirits were generally high.

“You are not answering me because you know that I am correct,” I said. “It is entirely possible that Jonathan has either met someone he considers more appropriate to be his wife, or that he has reconsidered his feelings for me.”

“Don’t be a goose, Mina,” she said, making light of my fears. “Now put on your pretty smile and help me receive Mr. Holmwood and his friends.”

Holmwood and his school friends, the infamous Morris Quince and Dr. John Seward, were waiting in the parlor when Lucy and I entered the room, but Mrs. Westenra shuttled us to the dining room so quickly that I barely had time to put a face to each name. When we sat down, she apologized ad nauseam for the humbleness of the table and of the fare, regretting that she had not brought the proper china from Hampstead and that she had allowed the cook to go visit her family rather than accompany the Westenras to Whitby. “But my health is to blame. I just do not think of things as I did when I was well.”

She dominated the conversation with this topic all the way through the soup course, when Holmwood, who was seated next to her, finally put an end to it. “I will send my man to fetch everything from your Hampstead pantry and kidnap the cook from her mother’s cottage if it will make you feel more at ease, madam.”

I found Holmwood to be charming in a dutiful way. His sharp nose was just the right size for his face, which was long and angular, and the right proportion to sit above his lips, which were not full, but neither were they thin and reptilian, as with so many unfortunate men. He had a gangly masculinity, and it was easy to envision him succeeding at the leisure activities for which he was known to have passion-riding, hunting, and sailing. Despite these sports, his hands were slender and effeminate. His coloring matched Lucy’s, but his hair was slightly darker and thinner. I suspected that the few curls that dangled about his scalp would soon desert him.

He paid lavish attention to Mrs. Westenra, whose health once again bloomed under his gaze. She did her best to ignore the much-discussed Morris Quince, who sat next to me, whereas I was the unrelenting object of the eyes of Dr. John Seward, who sat opposite me. The three men had planned to set off on a pleasure sail in the morning to Scarborough, but Quince had arrived with his right arm in a sling, owing to falling off his horse in an early morning canter along the shore.

“The animal stumbled over a rock and tossed me off his back,” he said in an accent I’d never before heard. It was not the flat American accent I was accustomed to. When I had asked him where in America he resided, he cocked his head and answered, “New York,” as if there were no alternative locations in his country. He pronounced certain words as if he were English, and I wondered if he had picked up an accent at Oxford, or if this was a peculiar way that wealthy people in America spoke. Quince said that he would not be joining his friends for the sail because his arm would render him useless. “I would be a liability,” he said. “Dead weight.”

I suppose that he could be described as dashing. One could see him galloping along the violent Yorkshire coast, pushing his steed through the crashing waves. What one could not envision was him losing control of a horse and falling off. He was Arthur’s height but had a more substantial frame. His neck did not want to be contained by his collar. His hands, which were large, with long elegant fingers and nails cut razor straight, fascinated me. Though they were perhaps the most manicured male hands I had ever seen, they seemed to have great power. The wineglass almost disappeared in his palm as he picked it up. While Arthur’s hair hung about his face like curled fringe on a shawl, Quince’s was of a single unit, a great, beautiful flow of thick walnut that operated as one organism.

He had big gleaming teeth and an easy smile, though he did not smile often. By Mrs. Westenra’s cautious description, I had expected someone entirely different, some American rogue whose character was easy to read. Morris Quince was not that man. With a painter’s intense gaze, he stared at everything through large, brown, guileless eyes. It didn’t seem to matter whether he was looking at his roast beef; at the color of the wine as it was poured; or at Lucy, whose face he studied as she answered a question posed by Dr. Seward. All the while, he-Quince, that is-was carrying on a conversation with Arthur, predicting the velocity of the morning winds. Mrs. Westenra pretended to listen to that conversation, but she too was fixated on Lucy and on the plates of her guests, gauging, I thought, whether our hearty consumption indicated approval of the food.

Dr. Seward, on the other hand, had finished his supper and was staring at me. He had tried to make conversation with me several times, though I did not know what to say to him. When we were introduced, he had taken my hand and looked me over hungrily as if I were his dinner, and he, a starving man. Though he was the only one of the three friends who was not wealthy-he was a doctor at a private asylum-he had a regal brow, as if the cliché of the intelligent having larger brains were true.

For one brief moment, all casual chatter subsided, and Mrs. Westenra filled the space. “Dr. Seward, I must ask your opinion on the subject of angina.”

Arthur turned all his attention to this conversation, leaving Morris Quince and Lucy to sit in uncomfortable silence next to each other. Lucy pushed her peas to and fro as if watching their journey from one side of the plate to the next was interesting, but she did not eat. Perhaps she could not imagine what to say to Quince, but she was usually at ease in any conversation, particularly with men. Yet she sat there as if he did not exist. I was yanked out of my reverie by the sound of Quince’s voice directed toward me. “Miss Lucy tells us that you are affianced, Miss Mina, but your gentleman is not present. Does that mean that the good doctor might have a chance at your affection?”

“Mr. Quince!” Mrs. Westenra affected a face of great mortification, but not so genuine as that of Dr. Seward, who blushed purple.

“I know I should apologize, but I am not sorry,” Quince said, his toothy grin in full form splashed across his face like a half moon risen in the night sky. “I am a brash son of a brash denizen of a brash city. John is my great friend, and I just want to know if this Mr. Harker is good enough for you, Miss Mina.”

Arthur stood up. “Dear God, Quince, have you learned nothing in my company?” He turned to me. “Miss Murray, he’s an insensitive and ill-bred American oaf upon whom I have taken pity and befriended. Can you forgive him?”

No one seemed more entertained than Lucy, who showed the first sign of life this evening. “Mina is not so delicate as she seems. She manages classrooms filled with little girls who are more unruly than you men.”

I mustered my courage and turned to Quince. “I must inform you that Mr. Harker exceeds all expectations.” I cast my eyes downward as Headmistress taught me to do when in the company of men.

Soon thereafter, Arthur gathered his friends to leave, allowing that they were to set sail very early in the morning. “Sure you won’t change your mind?” he asked Quince, who lifted his injured arm up as an answer.

“Best that I stay dry.”

John Seward took my elbow and moved me aside. He looked at me with watery eyes that had seemed to go very dark. “I am pained to have been the cause of your embarrassment, Miss Mina,” he said. “How can I make amends?”

He was handsome in his way. His voice was both authoritative and soothing, which I imagined made his patients feel at ease. Its low register imbued him with more masculinity than his thin frame suggested. And there was a bright intelligence in his gray eyes, which were trying to understand me, or read my thoughts. Or perhaps diagnose me.

“There is nothing to apologize for, Dr. Seward. Your friend is prankish. It’s rather charming,” I said, casting my eyes downward again, hoping that the conversation would end.

“I shall have to be satisfied with that,” he said. He dropped my hand, but not until he held it for longer than was comfortable to me.

With that they began to take their leave, and I noticed that the final and most heartfelt good-byes of the evening were between Arthur and Mrs. Westenra.

After everyone left, Mrs. Westenra said, “Why, Mina, you seemed to have captured our Dr. Seward. He was crazy about Lucy, but of course he did not really expect to conquer a girl with her fortune. On the other hand, were you not affianced to Mr. Harker, he might have made a fine match for you.”

I did not take her words as an insult because they merely bespoke the truth. In fact, I went to bed thinking of Dr. Seward’s attention. If Jonathan abandoned me, could I learn to love the doctor?

After we changed into our nightclothes and climbed into bed, I tried to make conversation with Lucy, but she pleaded exhaustion and shut her eyes tight against my words. Disappointed, I rolled over on my side and soon slipped into a dream.

I lay on a divan in an unfamiliar parlor. Morris Quince, Arthur Holmwood, and Mrs. Westenra were standing above me with grave faces, watching as Dr. Seward’s hands pressed firmly into my stomach. He closed his eyes, feeling his way along the crevice below my ribs. I was without a corset, wearing a thin dressing gown. The tips of his fingers worked their way downward and along my pelvic bone, igniting all my nerves. Blood rose to my face, and I shut my eyes, turning away from the others’ gazes. Seward and I breathed in unison, our heavy inhalations the only sound in the room. I wanted him to continue to move his hands lower to where my body was stirring. I started to move my hips involuntarily, aware that I was being watched but unable to control my movements. I fought with my own desires, trying to steel my legs against parting, but my body would not cooperate with me. Horrified, I began to sweat and wriggle as the doctor’s hands massaged the soft part of my belly, thrilling me, only now they were not Seward’s hands but the big, beautiful, powerful hands of Morris Quince. I arched my back, so that the palms pressed into me, and I started to murmur, no longer caring what the spectators thought of me, only desiring the man’s touch.

I moaned so loudly that I woke myself up and found that I was alone in Lucy’s bed. The linens on her side were cold. She’d apparently been gone for some time, and I was relieved, knowing that she had not witnessed the writhing and moaning I’d been doing in my dream. I assumed that she had spent the night once more in her mother’s room. I tiptoed across the room and stepped into the hall to see the time on the clock-three thirty in the morning. I heard the front door creak and then close, followed by light footsteps that seemed to be coming toward me. Could it be an intruder? Tourists visiting the area were warned to lock their doors against thieves who were ready to take advantage of the relaxed mood of those on holiday. I slipped back into the bedroom, getting ready to scream loud enough to alert our neighbors. I held my breath and then peeked down the hall.

What came toward me, one hand holding her shoes, the other hiking up her skirt, was Lucy. Her hair was bedraggled-ripped from its pins and ornaments, and frizzed by the damp sea air. I left the door ajar and jumped into bed, trying to pretend that I was asleep, but she was in the room before I could settle myself. When she realized I was awake, her eyes darted around the room as if she thought someone else might be there. She stared at me, looking like some wild-eyed Medusa.

“Why are you spying on me? Did my mother put you up to this?”

“I would think that you should be explaining, not asking questions. I had a bad dream and woke a few moments ago to find you gone.”

Lucy collapsed on the bed. Her collarbones jutted out, emphasizing her thinness. She looked strange and stark but somehow also luminous.

“Can you not guess? I would think it as plain as the nose on my face. Oh, it is so difficult to hide being in love. Mina, I am bursting with it. My love for him is in every pore of my skin, trying to express itself to the world. I can no longer hide it from my best girlfriend.”

“In love?” I had seen no evidence of this great passion at dinner. “You have been with Mr. Holmwood?”

“Dear God, no, not him! I despise him, except that he brought my true love to me, and for that I love him. But for that alone. How marvelous that we have deceived you! That should mean that my mother and the rest do not know either.”

“Oh, Lucy, no.” In my mind’s eye, I saw those powerful hands and knew that they were the ones that had removed the pins from Lucy’s hair and tousled her golden mane.

“Mina, do you know what love is? How it feels? Do you know what it is like to be in the arms of a man of passion?” Lucy sat up and put her face uncomfortably close to mine. “I went to his studio. He has been making a secret portrait of me in the nude! Can you believe that I have agreed to this? It is a measure of my love for him. I was to sit for him tonight, but he took off my clothes and lay me on a table and tickled every inch of my body with his softest paintbrush until I begged for mercy.”

I thought she must be mad, saying these things. I recalled how Lucy and Morris seemed to have nothing to say to each other at dinner and now realized that they were acting out a performance of indifference to hide their secret.

“How can he paint with his injured arm?” I asked.

“Oh, that is but a brilliant ruse so that Arthur would go sailing without him!”

“Lucy!” I was mortified at the way the two of them so casually deceived others.

Lucy took me by the shoulders. “Mina, if you do not feel this exquisite way about Jonathan, you should not marry him. Everything we are told is a lie-that the love between two people should be some polite arrangement when in truth it is…” Lucy paused to find the right words. “It is an opera!”

“The ladies come to a bad end in operas,” I said quietly.

“I should have known better than to tell you. You are the voice of reason, whereas I am speaking from the depths of my soul,” she said far too loudly.

“Please be quieter,” I said. “You will wake your mother.”

“No, I won’t. I mixed her sleeping draft myself.”

“Lucy! You are not a doctor. You might have harmed her!”

Lucy settled on the bed. “I forgive you, Mina. If someone had tried to explain these feelings to me before I experienced them, I would have had the same response. But you are engaged to a man. Have you never felt thrilled by his proximity or by his touch? Are you so very cold, Mina?”

Lucy’s face contorted into a frown. “Perhaps good women like you do not experience these sorts of feelings. What is it like, Mina, to never have committed a transgression?”

“I am not without sin,” I said.

I let the words slide out of my mouth and into the world. I too had kept in my secrets and longed to confess to someone. Lucy’s features lifted again. She sat up straight.

“I have dreams,” I began. “Dreams in which strangers visit me. But the experiences are too vivid to be mere dreams.” I told her about hearing voices in my sleep and being lured out of doors and about the night I awoke to find myself being attacked by a madman with red eyes and a hideous odor, and of the elegant stranger who both saved me and terrified me. I told her about the dreams that followed in which I had done terrible things-lurid things that no woman should do. I did not tell her of tonight’s dream in which Dr. Seward was caressing me with Morris Quince’s hands. In that dream, I could put a name to my delicious tormentors, and that made it impossible for me to confess.

“I know that there is something dark and inexplicable in my character that is causing these episodes, but it is beyond my control to stop it,” I said.

Lucy patted my hand as if I were a child. “Mina, you are one who walks in her sleep. My father suffered the same affliction, and you must be careful, because it led to his demise. He walked out of doors in the middle of a damp and frigid winter night and caught pneumonia. As you recall, he never recovered.” Lucy spoke tenderly as she always did when she talked about her father.

I had not known the circumstances under which he had contracted the lung disease that had killed him. I started to tremble.

“Mina, darling, you are not wicked. You had the misfortune to be a beautiful girl walking alone in London. The man who attacked you probably thought you were one of the ladies of the night. You were defenseless. The mysterious one who stopped the attack was probably just a man about town who had spent the evening with friends at his club and was doing a good deed.”

Could it be that simple? I wanted to accept Lucy’s rational explanation. Though she was swept up in her own passion, she seemed sure that what was happening to me was not out of the ordinary.

“Jonathan says that according to the mind doctors, dreams are reflections of one’s own fears. He believes that my adventures into London’s dark byways with Kate are responsible for these nightmares,” I said.

“We could inquire of Dr. Seward,” Lucy suggested. “I am sure that he would enjoy interpreting your dreams.” Her eyes shone with mischief.

“I could not speak of these things to him,” I said. “It would not be proper.”

“That is my Mina, always concerned with propriety. What must you think of your Lucy now?”

“I fear for you,” I said. “What will become of you, Lucy? You are engaged to another man.”

“Morris has a plan. He says he will lay down his life before he allows me to marry Arthur, or any man other than himself.”

“What is stopping you from marrying him now? This is not the fifteenth century. The unification of kingdoms is not at stake. Why did you accept Arthur’s proposal when you love someone else?”

“I would marry Morris Quince tomorrow if he would allow it. His father has cut him off because he refused to enter the family business, choosing to paint instead. My mother controls my fortune and she despises him and loves Arthur. I have told Morris that I would run away with him, that I don’t need money as long as I have his love, but he won’t have it. He insists that I deserve better than poverty.”

“At least he is correct about that!” I said. “You are not a girl accustomed to hardship. A woman has to be smart, Lucy. Are you not afraid that Mr. Quince is toying with you?”

Lucy struck back quickly. “No! No, he is not toying with me. I hoped you would understand. Now I am sorry that I told you at all. You’ll probably go running to my mother and spill out everything and make her have one of her angina attacks.”

I assured Lucy that her secret was safe with me, and asked for her assurance that what I had told her would remain between us. “Of course I will respect your wishes,” she said, “but I hardly see how some bad dreams compare with a passionate love affair that is happening in our real lives.”

I helped Lucy with her clothes and her corset, noticing that above the slash marks of the stays, other marks had appeared on her back and chest-red and blue, like bruised roses. I did not mention them. We kissed each other good night, but I was left with the feeling that Lucy wanted to retain some sort of superiority over me, not a moral superiority but rather its opposite-descent into passion-which for her transcended every good thing we had been taught to believe.

Though Whitby Abbey was just steps from the churchyard, which I visited daily while Lucy napped, I had studiously avoided its grounds. While I actually enjoyed whiling away hours in the churchyard cemetery, staring at ancient tombstones and reading the maudlin inscriptions, there was something about the old ruin that depressed my spirit. In those days, with no word from Jonathan, the deteriorated majesty of Whitby Abbey, surrounded by mist and fog, stood like a monument to my own loneliness.

Today, however, the sun shone brightly, turning the abbey’s bleak walls into gleaming white bones upon which a vivid imagination might reconstruct the building at its highest glory. I sat on my usual bench in the churchyard and took out the little leather-bound journal. I had started to write down some of the old whaler’s ghoulish stories, thinking that upon Jonathan’s return, they might amuse him. I had been learning about the abbey’s history, so I began to jot down some of the facts:

Whitby Abbey, an immense roofless ruin that had once been home to prosperous Benedictine monks, was abandoned when Henry VIII decided to rid the nation of Catholics and their monasteries. Now it is a pile of rubble and stone, with only its magnificent bones still standing, stubbornly resisting time and weather. It is the centerpiece of the headland, and its property must have been vast hundreds of years ago when it was built in the days of knights and Crusaders. But they say that years of bashing by the sea have considerably diminished the size of the promontory. I wonder if, in the future, the sea will gobble up the ruin, with its walls of tiered Gothic arches that diminish in size as they ascend toward the sky.

“Well, well, miss, if you’re not the busy blue fly.”

I looked up to see my elderly friend smiling at me with his eyes, which were sometimes the only part of him that still seemed alive. His cheeks looked like Whitby’s big, pockmarked, wave-battered cliffs and his arms, gnarled and twisted driftwood, but his eyes were sea blue and watery. It was as if he had assumed the characteristics of the topography he had observed over a long lifetime. He was nearly ninety years old, he claimed, though the record of his birth had been lost in a fire, and no one who had witnessed it was still alive. He had long ago forgotten his birthday, and so had his daughter, now a woman of seventy years old. “We’ve a half memory between us,” he had said. “I only remember the stories I have told and retold.”

Still, he got along well on his severely bowed and crooked legs, and seemed livelier to me than the two napping women with whom I was presently staying.

“Do you never take a nap in the daytime, sir?” I asked.

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” he said, sitting down. “I’ll enjoy the company of a pretty girl with warm hands and pink cheeks while I may.”

I told him that I was writing down some of Whitby’s history for my fiancé to enjoy, and that I intended to include the stories he had been telling me.

“Surely you have heard the legend of St. Hild?” he asked.

It was impossible to spend any time at all in Whitby without learning St. Hild’s story. I told him what I knew-that she had been the abbess of the monastery in the very old days, when Oswy of Northumbria was king, and that she had presided over a community of men and women who devoted their lives to praising God and meditating upon His Word. He suggested that we take a walk around the abbey’s grounds so that he could tell me more of the story, “but not at the crackin’ pace you would take with a younger fellow.”

We strolled across the field, where others, taking advantage of a rare cloudless sky and warmth, had spread colorful quilts and were picnicking on lunches of sliced chicken, bread, fruit, cheese, homemade pies, bottles of wine, and pints of beer.

He saw me looking at the food. “Listen, miss, for this may be the last time I ever tell the tale, so I am going to tell it long and true.”

He took a wheezy breath to gather his energy. “Hild was a royal woman, a princess, and might have been a queen, what with her beauty and her lands. She was a relation to the good king, who vowed that if he was victorious in defeating the pagans, he would give up his newborn daughter to the church. Now, at this very time, Hild was bearing witness to the wickedness of the pagans who would not surrender to the One True God, and she made a promise to devote her life to changing this. After the king won his battle, Hild gave up her worldly possessions, took charge of the king’s infant daughter, and founded this monastery. It was said that men and women alike bowed to her wisdom and her powers. The bishops of England were so enchanted by her that they chose this spot for their meeting place.”

The old man’s eyes turned rheumy as he squinted against the sun. He was looking up at the façade of the abbey. “Though she died many hundreds of years ago, she is still here.” With some effort, he raised his arms high in the air to show her omnipotence.

“I see the look of wonder on your face,” he said. “You should have more respect than to doubt the words of an old man who is to meet his Maker soon enough to make a truth teller of him. On these very grounds where we stand, Lucifer sent a plague of vipers-horrible creatures full of poisonous venom-to defeat St. Hild and to destroy her good works. The devil did not want to give up the Yorkshire coast to God,” he said. “And look about you at the beauty. No one could blame him.

“But St. Hild was not one to give in to the devil. Nothing scared her because she had the Lord on her side. She drove the snakes to the edge of the cliffs, cracking a long whip to drive them over the side and into the sea. But some of those creatures of Satan refused to jump, and those she killed by snapping off their heads with a lash of the whip. Others, she turned to stone.”

“That is a remarkable story,” I said politely.

“’Tis true, girl. Don’t you keep looking at me that way, with the doubting face that young people turn on their elders. Someday, after I’m gone, you’ll be walking these grounds, or on the shore beneath them, and you’ll stumble over a rock with the face of a snake. You will look at his beady eyes and his tongue lying flat against his lips, and you will think of your old friend.”

“I will not require a relic to remember you,” I said, much to his delight. He laughed, and I noticed that, despite a few missing front teeth, all his back teeth were still firmly set in his gums, a rarity for anyone his age.

“If you come here on a moonlit night, and you look into the windows of the abbey, you can see her going about her business. She still presides here, so help me God, she does.”

The sun grew stronger, and I felt perspiration trickle down the front of my corset. My nonagenarian companion seemed less fatigued than I, and, as ashamed as I was by this fact, I did not have a parasol with me, and I was getting overheated in the glaring sun. I apologized to him for taking my leave.

“But I have not yet finished the story,” he said. His voice turned to a whisper. “There is a wicked spirit on this very ground, battling Hild for the abbey. You’ll want to know about her, won’t you?”

Despite the old man’s disappointment, I bid him good afternoon and returned to our rooms, where I found Lucy and her mother still napping. I checked the basket where Hilda-one of the town’s many who had been named after the saint-left any mail that had arrived, but there was no letter from Jonathan. Disappointed, I loosened my stays and slipped into bed next to Lucy, falling into a dreamless sleep.

20 August 1890

The weather turned miserable and stayed so for days, with rain pouring down upon the stacked red roofs of Whitby, sliding into the narrow streets and flooding them, and keeping us indoors. The sea-born tempests swept inland so violently that the rain came sideways, like little knives slashing the air. At night, crashing thunder overwhelmed the ubiquitous roar of the sea that continued to throw itself incessantly against the cliffs. I was not sure which sound was more disquieting, though there was an exquisite excitement in the sky’s rumbles. Sometimes I sat by a lamp, trying to read while imagining that gods and Titans were wrestling in the heavens over one mythical siren or another.

The dramatic weather prevented Lucy from leaving to meet her lover. He managed to have notes delivered to her, sent under fictitious names, which brought fresh color to her face as she read them. The strain of separation was demonstrated by her fidgety demeanor and especially in her dissipating flesh. At meals, she tried to hide one serving of food beneath another to allay her mother’s fears about her obvious weight loss. I too begged her to take a little food, even some fruit or a sandwich at teatime.

“Clearly you have never been passionately in love!” she said to me, watching me eat another pastry doused with cream. “You have not heard from Mr. Harker, and yet you eat like a cormorant! It is unseemly, Mina. It is I who should be criticizing you and not the other way around.”

“I do not see how starving myself will bring word from Jonathan,” I said. “Anyway, I am certain that he did not receive the letter I sent giving him this address. When I return to London, I will have a pile of letters from Austria.” At least I had been comforting myself with that thought.

After days of rain, on Saturday evening, the twenty-third day of August, the sun announced itself just at the time it was meant to be setting, raising the temperature and sweeping a balmy breeze over the town. That bright golden ball sank slowly into the horizon, illuminating the hilly terrain as it fell. We watched twilight’s grand show from the cliffs above the town, so happy to see the sun, as if it were a long lost friend whose homecoming we welcomed, even though its visit was brief. We heard that entertainment was to be had on the pier that evening, and we expressed our desire to attend. Mrs. Westenra surprised us by wanting to join us.

It seemed that the entire town had come out to hear the band, which played popular songs. As we passed the bandstand, a man playing a beautifully curved cornet of brass and silver boldly winked at me, and I could not help but smile at him before I turned my head away. We three ladies bought ice creams and took a small table where we could listen to the music without being trampled by the coarser people who were drinking beer and those couples who wanted to dance.

Lucy was distracted to the point of silence, scanning the crowd for a sign, I supposed, of her beloved, while Mrs. Westenra was content to sit quietly and tap her foot to the music. I occupied myself watching the passersby. Everyone was caught up in the magical combination of the clement weather and the lively rhythm. Men walked spryly, and the women on their arms swayed to the tunes. Some fathers waltzed along to the music with little girls standing on their feet, while one family-a father, mother, brother, and two sisters-held hands doing a kind of group polka, the mother leading the movements. She hopped to one side, and then to the next, with the others trying to keep up with her until the little boy tripped on her skirt and fell to the ground crying. A few of the spectators gave him a rousing hand of applause, which both embarrassed him and made him proud as his father carried him off to the lemonade line. I imagined that in years to come, Jonathan and I would be that family, dancing merrily on our holiday, a family of doting parents and children secure in their love.

It was then that I saw the red-haired writer watching me. He was strolling with a woman I assumed was his wife, a dark-haired, strikingly beautiful woman in the sort of detailed white lace and linen dress that fashionable London women wore to holiday places. A boy with soft blond hair who wore a crisply starched sailor suit, the sort of thematic clothing that a doting grandmother would purchase for a boy’s holiday to a seafaring community, walked between them. The lady was pointing a graceful arm toward the lighthouse, telling the boy something about it, or so it appeared. She looked regal, with her swan neck wrapped in white netting and her back as straight as a queen’s. I remember wishing that I could train my students to carry just a small portion of that gracefulness.

The red-haired man, I now saw, had a huge bump on his forehead that looked like a tumor, which prevented him from being called handsome. He had a closely trimmed beard that was just a shade lighter than his hair, which he wore parted on the side. It was thinning, forming a valley of scalp on the left side of his large brow. He was, however-due to his size, stature, and penetrating gray eyes that were staring directly at me-an imposing figure. I suppose that Lucy and I were worthy of the male gaze, what with her pale blond beauty shown off nicely in a peach summer frock, in contrast to my black hair set against light skin. Tonight I wore my favorite dress of pale green linen, which everyone said complemented my eyes, and a cotton bolero jacket perfect for a summer evening. In retrospect, he might have been staring at us only because we were two pretty young women, and he was taking advantage of his wife’s momentary distraction with their son. The more sinister implications of his engrossment came much later.

The band began to play a French song about cicadas that I knew, and I sang along, if only to have something to do while the man scrutinized me.

“‘Les cigales, les cigalons, chantent mieux que les violons.’”

“What a charming song,” said Mrs. Westenra. “What does it mean?”

I sang the jolly lyrics in English, but the last stanza was not as cheerful as its predecessors. “Now all is dead, nothing sounds anymore but them, the frenzied ones, filling in the spaces between some remote Angelus.”

“What odd lyrics,” she said.

“Mina has to sing all sorts of nonsense to her pupils,” Lucy said, her first words of the evening.

I looked at the man to see if he was still watching me. When he caught my eye, he quickly turned away and became involved in whatever his wife and son were studying in the sea.

Suddenly I felt the temperature drop. The air was no longer balmy, as if the weather had pulled a prank on us while we were distracted by the music. The wind had picked up sharply in a matter of seconds, making the little awnings over the food stalls flap rowdily. Paper food wrappers flew off tables, skittering past our feet. Ladies held their coiffures in place with their hands.

“What a chill!” Mrs. Westenra exclaimed. “When will I learn to take my shawl with me? We should have gone to Italy. That is what Mr. Westenra would have wanted to do. I am lost without him, lost!”

“It is not so cold yet, Mother,” Lucy said. “Mina will give you her little jacket.”

I started to take off my bolero, but Mrs. Westenra stopped me. “I will never fit into that little thing you call a jacket. We must go.”

“No, not yet,” Lucy said. “The band is still playing.”

Thunder crackled in the sky, not once, but twice, and the band stopped in the middle of a song. The musicians looked up before putting their heads together in a forum on whether to continue. People around us slid their chairs back and stood, and parents dragged reluctant children away to try to beat the coming storm.

“No, Papa, no!” a little boy insisted, wriggling in his father’s arms.

Lucy joined the chorus of protesting children. “I believe the sky will clear soon enough. This will pass.” As if to make a liar of her, clouds of white mist drifted in from the sea, settling all around us.

I looked behind us where the red-haired man had been standing with his wife and son, but now a crowd had gathered around them, and I could no longer see them. Everyone was staring out to sea and pointing.

“I am going to see what’s happening,” I said.

“Mina, don’t go. We will all catch our deaths in this weather,” Mrs. Westenra said, looking frantic now. Lucy too darted her wild eyes back and forth. “Let her go, Mother. She won’t be long. We can wait here.”

“Don’t worry over me,” I said. “I will just go see what the fuss is about and I will meet you at home shortly if you decide to leave.”

“Don’t be long, Mina. This isn’t the sort of weather to take lightly,” the older lady warned.

Lucy started a second round of protestation, and I left them to their argument. I ran to where people were gathered, standing on tiptoes to see over one another. Men from the coast guard had joined them, pushing their way to the front of the crowd, where waves thick with foam crashed against the pier. I followed their gaze into the distance. Beyond the harbor, a large sailing ship bobbed up and down in the upsurge. I snaked my way deeper into the crowd so that I could hear what the coastguardsmen were saying.

“She’s going to hit the reef,” said one man to the other.

“Why does the captain not head for the mouth of the harbor?” The red-haired man asked the question in a deep voice tinged with an Irish accent. I recognized it because it sounded like my own when I was lax in my speech-from the west coast of Ireland, but mostly lost after many years in London.

“He’s got his hands full with that crosswind. It came from nowhere,” one of the men answered.

“It came from the bowels of hell,” said another. “Though the captain at the helm is steering like a drunk.”

The wife of the red-haired man had her son by the hand now and was dragging him away, but the father remained engrossed by the vessel bobbing up and down in the brutal waves like a prop in a puppet show. Behind us on the East Cliff, a crew turned on the searchlight, sending a bright, bluish beam out to sea.

“That will guide her safely into the harbor,” a coastguardsman said.

“Only if she avoids the reef,” said another.

The light skimmed over the peaks of water as they convulsed into the sky. I saw a glimpse of the illuminated vessel before a large wave broke over the pier, sending us reeling backward into one another as we tried to avoid it. I fell backward and into strange arms that caught me in a strong, sure grip.

“Miss Mina!”

Morris Quince had me by the arms. He put me upright. “Let’s get you out of this storm.”

I was not surprised to see him; throughout the evening, I had guessed that he was the hoped-for object of Lucy’s searching eyes.

“I want to see what happens,” I said.

I turned back to the sea and the unfolding drama. More people crowded onto the pier despite the crashing waves that threatened our safety. I did not want to leave, though I had always been one to avert my eyes from the sight of a disaster. I would walk out of my way to avoid watching the aftermath of an overturned carriage or a collision of carts. I had no stomach for such things, and yet I wanted to stay on the pier and find out the fate of the crew and passengers of the ship even if it meant being drenched to the bone in my favorite frock.

“Please don’t be stubborn, Miss Mina, or I’ll have to throw you over my shoulder. Americans have no compunction about these things. We are the savages that people claim we are.”

I had no doubt that this outrageous man would do precisely as he threatened, though I could not help but smile at his self-mockery. Still, I had an aversion to him because of what he was doing to jeopardize Lucy’s future. “Have you seen Lucy and Mrs. Westenra?” I asked.

“I paid a man with an umbrella to take them up to the inn at the top of the hill. They’re waiting for us where it’s nice and dry.”

Another wave convulsed out of the sea, crashing over the pier, but we were able to duck the worst of it. Morris laughed, as if he were a boy playing a sport and had just scored a winning point. The searchlight swept over our heads and again found the vessel, which had moved closer to us, two of its sails battered and torn. The yard of one mast dangled in the water, while another fraying sail, puffed and straining, sped the boat along its deadly path. The ship was almost on its side as the waves-great foam beasts climbing their way to shore-navigated what looked like a potentially fatal outcome for the vessel and its crew. The light revealed the name of the vessel, the Valkyrie.

“She’s a charter boat out of Rotterdam, carries cargo for whoever can pay the price. The captain knows his way into this harbor,” said the coastguardsman. “Why does he allow the sea to have its way with the boat?”

The searchlight clearly showed the path into the harbor’s mouth, but the captain ignored it, allowing his boat to continue to list helplessly toward the shore. It appeared that the catastrophic accident of seventy years ago described by the old whaler would be reenacted right before my eyes.

A wave like the gargantuan arm of Poseidon shot up from deep within the sea, slapping the starboard side of the ship.

“Looks like she’s hit the reef,” yelled one of the coastguardsmen.

“Great gods!” Morris said, his attention now fully engaged. Without taking his eyes off the water, he opened his cloak and put it over my shoulders. I could have objected, but I appreciated the protection and warmth it gave my skin, now wet with seawater and cold from the fierce wind. Lightning flashed across the sky with such ferocity it made me cower. Instinctively, I leaned closer to Morris, hating myself for being a skittish woman who so required the protection of a man that she would depend upon a dastardly one such as this. Yet I would not be dragged away from this awful but majestic performance put on by nature.

The wind shifted without warning, enhancing the sheer wild and random power of the sea. As easily as it had slammed the boat against the reef, it rose at an even greater velocity and freed it, throwing the boat helplessly toward the pier. Now the boat and we spectators were entirely at the mercy of the sea. The water made swooping curls, like the snarling lips of a monster, ringing the vessel in a watery prison. At this point, the sea was dictating its path with an encircling chain of turbulent waves.

As if changing its mind and granting a reprieve, the waves tossed the vessel upward again, veritably throwing it into the mouth of the harbor. The crowd let out a little cheer, until we collectively realized that the boat was headed directly toward us and would slam straight into the foundations of the pier.

I thought we should run away, but there were too many people behind us, and most of us were in too much awe of the spectacle to move. Morris must have figured as much because he tightened his grip around me, bracing us for whatever happened. But at the last moment, as if it were actually ruled by tempestuous Neptune, the fickle sea changed the direction of its waves, and the boat slid straight into the sandy pit of soil and gravel that jutted from under the cliffs.

Many of the people on the pier hurried down the steps to the shore to help the rescue party or perhaps to welcome the heroic survivors or maybe just to gawk at the potential dead. The searchlight grazed the ship’s deck, as a rescue crew, all too familiar with the aftermath of a shipwreck, rushed forward with planks to make a gangway for whomever was onboard.

They waited, but no one and nothing stirred from that vessel. The searchlight stopped abruptly, illuminating the sailor at the helm, presumably the vessel’s captain, whose head drooped over the wheel. The grotesque scene came into focus slowly, bringing with it a long moment of eerie silence in which neither thunder nor lightning nor wind disturbed the quiet of the night. No one on the pier, not even the coastguardsmen, spoke a word. It was as if the light had stopped time, freezing both man and nature in that moment.

The men on the shore, who had been poised to rush the ship, stood still, gazing at the macabre sight before them. A sailor’s body slumped over the helm, his hands tied to the wheel’s spokes with figure eight knots, distanced just enough to enable him to handle the big wheel. A dark rivulet of blood streamed from his neck. He looked almost as if he had been crucified.

“Saints preserve us, the captain is lashed to the helm!” The red-haired man cried out to the coastguardsman, who, without looking away from the ship, confirmed what he said with a nod. “Looks to me like it’s a bloody corpse that brought in the vessel.”

“The ship was sailed by a dead man.” As people grasped this reality, they put their hands to their mouths or shouted shrieks of disbelief or raised their palms to the sky as if to ask God how this could have happened.

“Fucking hell,” Morris Quince whispered softly.

A clap of vicious thunder broke our quiet moment of astonishment. As if awakened from a dream, the rescue crew began to move slowly toward the Valkyrie. Suddenly, the men jumped back again as a huge dog, a giant beast of an animal lit up like a streak of silver by the searchlight, leapt from the vessel and onto the shore. Though everyone cowered from it, the dog ignored them, taking its own path up the East Cliff and heading in the direction of the cemetery as if it knew exactly where it was going, and why.

Chapter Five

Later that same night

Is he not the most handsome, extraordinary man you have ever met, Mina?”

Lucy and I were undressing for bed, or rather I was, and Lucy watched me. She had no interest in discussing the shipwreck or speculating on the mystery of the dead captain but preferred to reminisce about the thrill of seeing Morris. I rinsed my mouth slowly and closed my jar of toothpaste, checking my teeth in the mirror, while I decided whether to challenge Lucy. As her friend, I felt I owed it to her to point out the ramifications of her actions.

“But, Lucy, he is Arthur’s friend. Surely this will not come to a good end.”

“Oh, Arthur is not a true friend. He simply thinks it’s daring to have a friend from a scandalous American family. He speaks badly of Morris behind his back.”

“Perhaps he is speaking the truth,” I said. “Perhaps you should take heed.”

“You are supposed to be my best friend, Mina, and yet you have not tried at all to understand!”

“I only understand what I see. Look at yourself.” I pulled Lucy off the bed and stood her in front of the oval cheval mirror. She crossed her arms in protest, but she did not look away. “You are wasting away to skin and bones. You do not eat. You do not sleep. And all day long, you are as nervous as an alley cat. Your sweet temper has become sharp. When you talk about your love, you look like Lizzie Cornwall, sick and dizzy from smoking opium but craving it nonetheless.”

“I do crave his love. It has replaced every other appetite.” Lucy’s eyes danced in the sockets in the strange way they did when she thought of Morris Quince. She pulled a note out of her bodice. “He slipped this to me when no one was looking. I am going to meet him!”

“Lucy! The weather!”

She went to the window and opened the shutters. “Look. It has cleared. God himself is smiling upon my love.”

The rain had stopped and the mist had lifted. A cool breeze wafted in. I looked out the window and traced the seven brightly burning stars comprising the Starry Plow, so vivid that it looked as if I could reach up and use it to scoop water out of a well. The single good memory I had of my father was when he had me in his arms one night and pointed it out in the sky.

“Morris would not let me come to him in the rain, Mina,” she said, thrusting the note into my hand.

If the weather clears, meet me after midnight. If it is raining, don’t dare risk the health of the one I hold dearer to me than my own life. I am racked with anguish being so near to you and not being able to touch you.

Soon, my love, soon,

M .

“These are just words, Lucy. Any man can write words on a page if it costs him nothing,” I said.

“Apparently not Jonathan Harker. How long has it been since you have had words on a page from him?”

“Lucy, how unkind!” Her words made my own fears come roaring back. Jonathan did not love me. Jonathan had met someone more suitable to be his wife. I was to be a spinster schoolteacher for the rest of my days. These fears had overtaken me a few days prior, and I had written to Mr. Hawkins to ask if he had had word from Jonathan, but I had received no reply.

Lucy took my hands in hers, which were cold. Her skin, once so enviable, looked as thin as tracing paper. A network of blue veins formed a spider’s web on her left shoulder. The tendons at the bottom of her neck stuck out like claws. “Forgive me, Mina. Let us be the good friends we have been to each other since we were girls. We are both in love. One day, you will marry Jonathan, and you will come to visit Morris and me in America.”

“America?”

“He says that he will go to his father and beg forgiveness. Once he is back in the family fold, we will be married and we will live in New York.”

“You are not thinking of Arthur’s feelings at all?”

“No, I am not! He knows I do not love him. He spent one year seducing my mother so that she would insist on the marriage. He knows that she controls my fortune and I must do as she says. That is an underhanded way for a gentleman to behave.”

I wanted to remind her that seducing a friend’s fiancée, such as Morris had done, was also an underhanded way to behave, but it was apparent that my arguments held no sway against her passions.

Lucy waited until she was certain that her mother was asleep. Then, tucking me in as if I were a child, she extracted another promise of discretion, turned out the light, and slipped out to meet her lover, while I fell asleep to disquieting thoughts about the mistake she was making.

I dreamt that I was somewhere warm, safe, and enveloping, like a womb. I was floating, wondering if I were a baby about to be born, when all my senses exploded, throwing my body into chaos. All at once, I was everywhere and nowhere, as if I had burst outside myself. I felt as if my skin were being flayed, making way for something that crawled onto the surface of my flesh. I stuck my neck out long in front of me, and my hind legs pulled in the opposite direction, as if I were elongating my body. Pushed on by a tingling sensation I tumbled and tumbled, and found myself suddenly on grass, where I lunged forward like an animal onto all fours. Crouching, I felt balance and a sense of strength and power. I looked at my hands, which had become something else, some other appendage, covered in pale fur, with five sharp black claws all pointing forward, and black webbing between each toe. I stretched them wide, knowing that I could curl them around an object-the head of a small bird, the soft belly of a mouse-if I wanted to. And I did want this very much. I was ravenous and driven to prowl.

In that same instant, all thoughts disappeared from my mind, lost in an avalanche of sensations that eviscerated things like words and ideas. Out of my mouth came sounds and cries, but I had lost all ability to form words, or even to know the meaning of words. My sight became less and more at the same time. All colors turned to black, brown, and gray, yet images became sharper and more defined. I could see into the shadows, where the very blades of grass and the leaves and buds of plants were sharply defined though it was a dark night. I was acutely aware of my ears, hot, pulsing, and humming. Now fragrance took command, and I was struck with the scents of the evening. Unable to resist, I rolled on the ground, breathing in the wet tang of dewy grass and the musk of the mud in which it grew. I glided my muzzle through the blades, letting each soft edge tickle my nose. When I lifted it, I caught the delicate fragrance of wildflowers and the powdery sweetness of red clover. The aromas permeated my body as if I could smell with my eyes, my toes, and my tail. I detected the essence of living fowl on the feathers of a fallen bird, but was quickly distracted by the blood-warm effluvia of rabbits and voles wafting up from a small hole in the ground.

The air carried the scent of wet leaves after a forest rain. My senses were torn in two, with one thing calling my attention into the air and another, even more compelling, back down to the earth. The miasma of fetid earth, God’s creatures, and the aromatic night air swirled in my head and through my body, competing with a cacophony of noises that grow louder and louder. The muffled sound of my paws as they made contact with the ground resonated in my ears. I felt in my body the vibration of all things touching the earth-animals small and large, as they interacted with the same soil that I was treading. The rustle of leaves in the trees, the screech of the wind blowing the hairs on my face, the fluttering of bees’ wings, the distant cry of an owl-I heard each as a distinct, sharp sound. My senses were in control of my body. I was a living machine that processed sights, smells, and sounds.

Submit.

The command came from nowhere and from nothing but was put forcefully into my head. Confused, I looked around, sticking my muzzle into the air. Something crept up behind me, tackling me, pushing me to the ground. Soon, this creature was on top of me, not hurting me but rubbing its fur against mine and rolling me over on my back. Ah, how I recognized its scent-the salty iron of its blood mixing with the vital juices of its last kill and the pungency of the woods hanging from its slick fur. Its familiarity allayed the fear in me as I was jostled to and fro. A huge, soft tongue licked my belly, paralyzing me with pleasure. I stretched out long and could feel every inch of my spine against the earth, which was cool, compared to the tongue that worked its way up to my neck. The great nose of the beast rubbed and caressed the length of my long wolf neck, imprinting itself on me.

Yes. I am returning to you.

The words broke the spell of night’s aromas and sounds and the pleasures brought by this animal that held me captive on the ground.

Do you remember who you are?

The voice was familiar and male, but the mouth I stared into was not human. The creature bared its teeth. Four sharp fangs, pairs from above and below, jutted toward me, threatening to tear into the my belly-soft flesh, while the little bits and pieces of me would be shredded more slowly by the small, straight teeth between the fangs. The great red tongue that had given me pleasure hung between those feral canines, as if anticipating the savory taste of my muscle and bone. I rolled to my side, trying to escape, but the beast growled at me, threatening me again with its gaping jaws.

I went limp, succumbing to my fate. The world around me turned to black as I anticipated the agony of the canines ripping into my flesh. I waited for a very long time in darkness, all sound, sight, and smell obliterated by fear and anxiety. But nothing happened. It was hard to tell what was more frightening: the fear of being eviscerated by the larger beast or the utter terror of his absence.

Do you remember, Mina? Do you remember?

I woke up surprised to find that I was still Mina, and not a young dog or wolf or fox or whatever form I had taken in my dream. Nothing about my body had been transformed, though my senses remained heightened. Not as acute as in the dream but sharper than they had been before I went to sleep.

But I was not in my bed. I was sitting on the grass in the moonlit shadow of the ruins of Whitby Abbey, and I had a companion. At first I thought I might still be dreaming as I looked into his midnight blue eyes. He stared at me without blinking or making a move toward me. He did not look dangerous, but how could he not be, with his size and the sinister V-shaped mane that began at his muzzle, rising above his eyes and around his taut ears? His coat was silvery gray. His paws had to be six inches wide. He was larger than a wolf, perhaps was a wolf-I did not know. He had frightened every spectator when he had leapt from the ship, but here he seemed to be standing guard over me, letting me take in his features.

But the most disarming thing about the creature was the intelligence in his eyes. There are ways that men look at women-with desire, with hunger, with respect, with disdain, with confusion. This creature looked at me as if he knew me. There was something noble, even regal, about him, as if he was bred to protect a king, or as if he were a king. Yes, I could see him sleeping beside a throne or commanding from one. His coat glittered like armor in the moonlight. I could see why he had looked like a silver streak when he jumped from the vessel. He did not look like an animal that had been long at sea but like a perfectly groomed prize of an indulgent owner or a lordly creature of the forest that presided over lesser beasts. With his gleaming coat and sinewy musculature and poise, he looked well fed, exercised, and cared for by standards that would make most children envious. Perhaps he was the beloved companion of the captain who had arrived inexplicably lashed to the helm. Whoever had done such a horrible thing to the man had clearly not harmed the animal.

But was he the animal from my dream? After witnessing his dramatic disembarkation from the vessel, had I dreamt that I was this creature and now, by coincidence, was encountering him? Would I soon be looking into his gaping jaws but this time not in a dream world, where I could simply open my eyes and find safety?

I was breathless, but the profound serenity of the beast staring at me without malice settled my nerves. The memory of soft fur nuzzling my neck made me want to reach out and stroke his coat. Secure that he would not attack, and bolstered by the crazy idea that he had given me that very promise with his eyes, I sat up straight, ignoring the leaves and grass that clung to my sleeves. I was afraid to move, but he came to me. He stared at me with his intelligent eyes, and I felt all fear and resistance leave me. He sniffed my arm and then nuzzled my chest with his head. I let him rub his warm fur against my neck all the while taking in his familiar scent, the same one from my dream. I was reveling in this exchange when, without warning, the animal turned and ran away. I watched his thick haunches retreat. His legs sprang from the earth with a kind of preternatural buoyancy that I had previously not witnessed in man or beast. It was as if some unseen power were pushing him from below, giving additional spring to his gait. He jumped over a pile of rubble, random stones that had fallen from the abbey’s central tower. Leaping through one of the lower windows, he disappeared into the shell of the abbey.

I tried to get my bearings. I knew exactly where I was-the abbey is a rather conspicuous landmark-but the question of whom and what I was became harder to answer. I shuddered, hugging myself tight. The fog that had disappeared earlier settled once more over the promontory. It seemed darker now as the mist thickened, and I heard a hollow moan sweeping through the interior of the abbey’s shell. It’s only the wind, I told myself. I knew I should get back to the rooms, but without my animal companion watching over me, I was afraid.

I wanted to follow him into the abbey, but even by day, I found the building’s hulk too foreboding. The arched windows stood like dark open mouths waiting to spill secrets, mysteries from a past better left undisturbed. But this had been a holy place, not some medieval torture chamber where dark spirits wandered, seeking revenge for horrific acts committed against them. This had been the home of saints and of the saintly, of God’s chosen. There was nothing to fear. I had had a strange dream. I had walked in my sleep, and I had encountered the animal that had come over on the wrecked vessel. It was a simple story.

Looking up at the abbey wall, I started to rise. I would take one peek inside to see if I could catch a glimpse of the animal. But before I could take a step, a shadow glided across one of the windows-not a dark shadow but something white, something not quite whole-and I dropped back to my knees. As it passed, I heard a whooshing sound, like the winter wind that rushed through Miss Hadley’s halls on the coldest evenings. From somewhere within the abbey, the wolf dog howled, sending great spiraling wails into the night. Had the animal also seen the apparition? I could have sworn that it was the outline of a female form, but I credited the old whaler’s story of the long-dead abbess with that thought. I hoped that my eyes were playing tricks on me as eyes often do in the dark. The fog and the moonlight and my sleepwalking had conspired to make me see strange things. The animal was merely responding to the sound of the wind. Yet the calm I had felt while with the wolf dog was now gone, and I was aware of every nerve in my body.

The night grew colder and darker as the moonlight dissolved into the fog. I knew I had to make a move, though I also felt safe in my inertia. Finally, it was the dampness of the earth seeping through my clothes that forced me to rise. I turned toward the churchyard but was stopped dead by what I saw before me.

I tried to take a breath, but my lungs failed and my knees grew weak. Was he a man or an apparition? He was not dressed in evening clothes, but it was unmistakably my savior from the riverbank, the man who had somehow made his way into the Gummlers’ photograph. How had he found me in the middle of the night on the Yorkshire coast? He looked illuminated, like a figure on stained glass, not by moonlight but by his perfectly ivory skin, which turned the mist surrounding him into a halo. I backed away, stumbling on a rock, but he did not move.

“Whoever you are, please go away,” I said. My voice was full of fear, with nothing in it that might inspire him to obey me. He was not transparent but was solidly before me, wearing a long, tailored waistcoat, the kind a gentleman would wear for a country walk.

“Why are you following me?” I asked, my voice trembling.

You know why.

He did not speak, but I heard his voice in my head and recognized it as the voice from my dream. The accent was vague in origins but aristocratic. The words were pronounced with care to each letter and syllable. The tone was deep, almost bottomless, authoritative. I did not know how to respond, or if I should respond. My heart pounded in my chest. As long as I did not move, and he did not move, I would not be harmed-or that was the flawed logic that guided me at that moment. I put my face in my hands to avoid his stare.

“What do you want with me? Why are you doing this to me?”

You know why.

“I don’t know why! I don’t know anything!” I started sobbing and did not stop until my hands were wet with my own tears. I had no idea how long I stood there crying, but when I looked up, he was not there. I waited, convincing myself that he had been an apparition after all. When I felt safe again, I turned to run away, but he was again in front of me, standing statue still.

“Who are you? What are you?” I screamed the words, angry now that this being was taunting me, following me so that there was no relief and no escape.

Your servant and your master.

“Please leave me alone.” The insistent tone disguised the fact that my words were actually prayers meant to play upon his pity. He had saved me once; perhaps he would not harm me if I begged for my life.

The power is yours, Mina. I come to you when you call to me, when I feel your need or desire.

“Quit following me,” I said, turning and walking away from him. I hugged myself tightly as I walked toward the cemetery. After a few moments, out of curiosity, I turned around. He was no longer there but had disappeared into the fog, leaving me alone and shivering, my hands still wet with tears.

I did not need my eyes to witness the absence; I felt it in my very being. Disappointment washed over me. Where had he gone? I found myself wanting to find him, to track him down as he was tracking me, and to demand an explanation. I was shocked at my own courage in even thinking this way, but something drove me on. I was sick of the weak person I had been. I wanted to yank her out of my body and stamp on her, making myself strong and brave.

“Come back to me,” I demanded, but nothing happened.

My pulse calmed, and I was able to breathe again. The winds seeped through my damp clothes, chilling me clean to the bone. I was so cold and tired that I thought my spine might crack if I did not get to a warm place.

Suddenly something came out of the mist and enveloped me, like the cocoon that had earlier wrapped me and brought me into the night. It was not anything that I could see or feel, but an energy, a vibration, an invisible shell that cosseted me.

You are cold. Come inside.

The only structure I could see was the hollow shell of Whitby Abbey.

Will you come with me?

I did not have to say anything. My body submitted for me. I felt myself moving through space, though I did not know where I was going. Either my eyes were closed or I was in total darkness. I felt like some winged creature soaring over unknown territory, being steered by something outside myself, but knowing that I was not lost. Lights like stars whirled past me from out of the darkness, and when I opened my eyes, I was lying on a bed covered in rich tapestry and piled high with pillows. The room was lit by candles in colossal iron holders that flickered on the walls. A great fire was ablaze in the hearth. I recognized the triptych of slender, arched windows, though I was seeing them for the first time from the inside. No longer empty, they were fitted with glass through which I could make out some of the stars that hovered over Whitby on a clear night.

We were inside the abbey, though apparently outside time. The room was warm and the roof intact, and he was lying beside me.

Every moment that has ever existed in time is still here, Mina-every thought, every memory, and every experience.

Now that I saw him in the candlelight, he was more beautiful than I had imagined. Skin marble white, paler than mine and glowing, and hair like the night sea’s glossy waves. His face was long and angular with a strong brow, like the artists’ renderings I had of the Arthurian knights. With his midnight blue wolf eyes, he stared at me, taking me in.

“Who are you?” I asked, my voice timid and feeble.

You and I have gone by many names. It does not matter what we call each other. What matters is that you remember. Do you remember, Mina?

His lips did not move, and yet I heard every word that he said. I wanted to ask a thousand questions, but one long and slender finger reached out and touched my lips. Locking eyes with me, he slid my nightdress from my shoulder. Shock waves rippled through my body as his finger followed the curve under my neck, dusting my chin, and slowly sliding to the other ear. Surely just one finger could not create this bedlam inside me.

Ah, so you do remember.

My heart palpitated wildly, but I was not afraid. Something familiar about him prevented me from fearing him, though I had witnessed how dangerous he could be on the banks of the Thames when he had thrashed my attacker.

“Yes, yes, I remember,” I said. I would have said anything to keep his hand on me, to wallow in the wild energy he brought to my body, and to stare into the infinite violet blue of his eyes. Though I said nothing else, every nerve in my body begged him to keep touching me.

What is your desire?

I did not have the audacity to say the words aloud, but this being knew me and knew my thoughts. Our eyes were locked, and our minds were linked. I felt connected to him in a way that I had not known with another person. We were not one, but we were in harmony, as if we were both parts of the same symphony. With eerie slowness, his finger moved down my neck to the breastbone and across my chest until it reached my nipple. Then something extraordinary happened. He held it there, barely moving but sending a wild sensation through my breast that resonated in every curve and turn of me. My body was like a musical instrument that only he knew how to play. I tried to breathe while he moved at the same deliberate pace to the other breast, all the while staring into my eyes. I was electrified, fierce currents dancing through my veins. I gasped for breath, which only heightened my arousal. I had no idea how long I lingered in this blissful place. It might have been minutes or hours, but I rode the wave of it, letting it wash me through with excitement.

You are mine again, Mina. I have waited for you and watched over you since you were a little girl. Do you remember those times?

He stopped touching me. He looked into my eyes, waiting for me to answer. But my thoughts took another direction. Here was the phantom that had been luring me out into the night since I was a child. Could it be that he was responsible for my father’s disdain and my mother’s rejection? Excitement slowly turned to anger. As much as I did not want to leave the blissful place, I could not help myself, and he read my thoughts.

I came to you to help you, Mina. You were in danger. You needed me.

I began shrieking at him. “Yes, I remember everything. I am Mina Murray, whose parents sent her away from home because she was a strange and frightening child. I have made my own way to a good life, a respectable life, and a life over which I have control. I am a teacher at a school for girls, and I am engaged to be married to a man who loves me.”

I knew that I was sabotaging my own pleasure and perhaps so much more by rebelling against him and whatever memories he wanted me to have. I knew I was fighting against the very ecstasy he evoked from my body. But just as I could not earlier resist submitting to him, I could not combat the hostility I felt now. He was asking me to remember the very things I had spent my life trying to forget.

Do you want me to go, Mina?

“Yes, go!” I cried aloud. “Leave me in peace before you wreck my life again.” I curled up like a fetus and began to cry. Soon, my body was racked with sobs and grief. I cried for a long time, until every tear was wrung from my eyes. Cold began to seep in again through my clothes. I uncurled myself and opened my eyes. My mysterious stranger was gone, and I was lying on the grass inside the stark ruin of the abbey in my nightdress, looking up at the stars.

I climbed through the empty window of the abbey and walked to the churchyard, where low lamplight flickered on the headstones. A cemetery at night may frighten some, but after my experience this evening, the familiarity of the place comforted me. I paused at the grave of a child, resting my hand on the wing of an angel so that I could wipe off the grit that was irritating the bottoms of my feet, when I saw two figures on the bench where the old whaler and I sat by day looking out over the sea. An unmistakably familiar wavy blond mane cascaded over the back of the bench, while a man’s form loomed over her, his face buried in her neck.

I had wandered into this scene involuntarily and should have run away as quickly as possible, but I was riveted by the sight of his mouth consuming her neck, her cheeks, her shoulders, sliding luxuriously back up to her ear and lingering there. He opened her shirt, exposing her bosom, and lifted one breast out of her corset. Then he picked her up and put her on his lap so that she straddled him, and I watched them in profile as he took her breast into his mouth, licking and biting her nipple. I was close enough to see his slick tongue lapping at her, and my own lust, so recently aroused, began to stir. The feeling was so vivid that I could imagine that it was not Lucy on that bench but me, with Morris Quince’s well-formed lips on my nipple and his huge powerful hands all over me. I stood still, relishing the feeling, when he looked up and saw me. His shoulders dropped, and he said something to Lucy, whose head jerked around.

“Mina!” Her voice was full of admonition. She jumped off Morris’s lap and stood up, taking big strides over to me. Her hands made two fists, which swung back and forth like a toy soldier’s. “Why are you following me?”

Her blouse was open, and I stared at the white skin of her breasts, which were still of considerable size considering her weight loss. The bruiselike marks I had seen earlier were more plentiful now and deeper in color.

“I am n-not following you,” I stammered. The cold night air, the strange events, and the shock of seeing Lucy, caught up with me. “I-I don’t know how I got here. I was walking in my sleep again.”

“Mina?” Morris was taking off his linen jacket and putting it over my shoulders. I am sure he was embarrassed to see me in my transparent nightdress. “You are all wet and you have no shoes! We must get you indoors.”

Everyone looked at my bare feet, which were stark white. My toes grabbed at the ground as if I were trying to hold myself to the earth.

“I cannot allow a lady to walk barefoot,” Morris said, looking around as if a pair of shoes would miraculously pop out from one of the graves. He looked helplessly at Lucy, waiting for her to suggest something. “I will carry her,” he said.

Lucy’s impatient expression said that she did not sanction the idea. “What would happen if we are seen, with you making such a spectacle?”

“I can walk in bare feet. I have done it many times,” I said. I wanted to disappear into the ether just as my phantom had done.

“But you look ill, Miss Mina. Your teeth are chattering. You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.” Morris’s eyebrows were squeezed tightly together, forming one long hedge across his strong brow.

“I-I have bad dreams,” I said, torn between taking comfort in his concern and Lucy’s annoyance at having been interrupted. Morris Quince’s kindness felt like a rope thrown to save me from drowning, but Lucy was not allowing me to hold on to it.

“We had better just go,” Lucy said. She nodded her head at the jacket around my shoulders. “You can’t take that with you.”

“But she is half naked and has had a shock.”

“My mother will see it,” Lucy said with finality, and I took the jacket off and handed it back to Morris. “I’ll give her my shawl.” She untied the shawl, which she’d looped around her waist, and draped it on my shoulders. “We must part ways here,” she said to him, leaving him looking forlorn as he watched us walk away.

Lucy was silent for a while. She put her arm around me and pulled me close to her. “My, you are cold, Mina.” I snuggled closer to her, slipping my arm around her. I could feel the top of her hip bone jutting through her skirt. Despite her thinness, her body gave off immense heat.

“You are playing a very dangerous game, Lucy,” I said. “Half the town is probably still awake, what with the shipwreck.”

“He was walking me home when we decided to go to the churchyard to look out over the view. We had no intention of carrying on like that out in the open, Mina, but we are so much in love.”

The sky was mottled with shifting gray clouds that parted, revealing one bright, shining star. We walked for a few blocks, and when we turned the corner, Lucy stopped dead, her hand tightening around my shoulder, holding me back.

“I’m freezing-” I said, but Lucy interrupted me, pointing up the hill to the rooms. Fiery yellow light blazed in the bank of windows lining the two parlors, as if Mrs. Westenra was hosting a party in the middle of the night.

“She’s found me out!” Lucy wrapped her arms around her stomach as if her entrails were about to fall out. She bent over, gasping for air. I thought she might vomit on the pavement. “I cannot go in there,” she said.

“The lights may be on because your mother took ill,” I offered. That was the first thought that came to my mind. “Someone may have called for a doctor. Hilda, or a neighbor.”

“Yes. That is undoubtedly what has happened,” Lucy said, running her fingers through her snarly hair. “Oh dear, poor mother!”

Then her face took on the wild-eyed look that had become familiar to me. She took my hands in hers. “Oh, I am a terrible person. I am more worried that my affair has been found out than I am about my mother’s health; more concerned with it than with my poor friend, awakening alone in a strange place!”

Lucy’s eyes were wide and glassy, floating in the sockets above her gaunt cheeks. I was very cold and I knew by the burning lights above that the evening’s drama was not over. “We had better see what the trouble is inside.”

Lucy smoothed her clothes and checked her buttons. She brushed her skirt with quick little gestures, her hands like feathers. “Do I look composed?”

“More than I,” I said. “At least you are clothed. But you had better hide those marks on your neck and chest. I am assuming that Mr. Quince put them there?”

Lucy took the shawl from me and wrapped it around herself. “No matter what is said, or what questions are asked, leave the talking to me,” she said in a tone that was a far cry from the impassioned love victim of moments ago.

I had no choice but to believe in her. At school, while Kate liked to think of herself as the rebel, Lucy was the one whose quick tongue and blithe way of doing whatever she wanted put her above the rules. Kate was defiant, always making a spectacle of her disobedience, whereas Lucy felt entitled to do as she pleased and never expected anyone to stop her. I hoped she was still the girl who could get away with collecting money for candy and saying it was for the blind.

We walked up the stairs to the rooms and opened the door. The parlor was lit for company. A tea service sat on a pedestal table but the chairs flanking it were empty, as were the two divans that faced each other over a small, low table. The room looked like a theatrical set before the actors had arrived to begin the play. We ventured deeper into the parlor, where we heard voices from the hall. Mrs. Westenra appeared, a pink-and-white striped nightcap framing her face. She was followed by a night watchman in uniform.

“Merciful heavens,” she cried. “They are safe!”

“As I assured you, madam,” the policeman said. “During the summer months, young ladies like to stroll at night. No harm done, eh?”

“No harm? I nearly died from fright! What can you girls have meant by disappearing in the middle of the night? Lucy, are you trying to murder your poor mother? And Mina?”

The policeman stood behind the lady, his eyes averted. I suppose he was trying not to look at me in my nightdress.

Mrs. Westenra took a lap robe from the back of a chair and put it around me. “What is the meaning of wandering about in this unseemly condition?”

Lucy did not wait for me to answer but struck out on a defensive attack. “Mother, please calm yourself. Mina and I have been through our own nightmares this evening. Why is there a police officer here?”

“Why?” The lady looked in disbelief at the officer. Upon closer inspection, I saw that he was very young. His swallow-tailed coat with gleaming silver buttons, wide leather belt, and polished boots endowed him with authority that he did not yet own. I felt sorry for him having to deal with a distraught middle-aged woman prone to histrionics.

“Why?” Mrs. Westenra continued. “Because I woke in the middle of the night feeling poorly. I went into the bedroom to ask you to attend to me, Lucy, and I discovered an empty bed. At two o’clock in the morning! I did not know what to do. Hilda is spending the night at home, I was alone, and my heart-well, my poor heart. I thought I would die, it was pounding so loudly in my chest. I went to the window and screamed for help. I was shrieking like a madwoman. A kind gentleman sent word to the chief constable, who sent out a watchman-this delightful young man here-who has comforted a frightened woman. I might have succumbed to a full attack of angina had it not been for him. Why, he even mixed my medication for me. And perfectly so, I might add.” She smiled at him.

“You have been very brave, madam,” he said, adjusting the chin strap of his police helmet under his strong, square jaw.

Lucy stood tall, taking over the situation. “I cannot thank you enough, sir, for attending to my mother. Her condition causes her to become overemotional.”

Mrs. Westenra started to protest, but Lucy interrupted her. “It is all very simply explained. Mina suffers from the same sleepwalking malady as Father did. She has had some dreadful incidents recently in London, which she told me about the evening she arrived here. Isn’t that right, Mina?”

True to my promise, I nodded but kept silent, letting Lucy tell her story.

“I woke up and saw that she was not in the bed. From what she told me of her previous episodes, I knew that she could venture quite far, so I rushed outside. I should have left a note for you, Mother. I am very sorry, indeed. But I was desperate to find Mina before she came to any harm.”

“And are you quite all right now, miss?” the officer asked me. “Had you wandered very far?”

“Yes, to the churchyard,” I answered. “I go there every day because the view is so lovely. I suppose that my body simply led me there out of habit.”

“All the while in your sleep?” He looked suspicious now.

“Oh yes,” Mrs. Westenra said. “My late husband suffered the same illness. We used to discover him in the most unusual places. Sometimes he did not return at all but was found wandering the heath near our home in London.”

“Strange, indeed, madam. But I have heard of such things. My gran says that the spirits like to call out to us when we are asleep.” He smiled weakly, as if he did not know whether to believe his grandmother’s superstitions or not.

“Your gran must come for tea sometime when our friend Dr. Seward is here. He will set her straight on these matters,” said Mrs. Westenra, assuming the learned air I’d seen before when she had mentioned her discussions of medical affairs with John Seward. “It is the mind that imagines such things, the unconscious mind, which is a very different organ from the conscious mind. If you read up on the latest findings of medical doctors, you will see that I am correct.”

“I shall do that, madam,” he said politely, but smiling at Lucy. Because of his young age, I suspected that he wanted to win her good opinion, not her mother’s.

“Might we let this good man leave now so that we all can get some sleep?” Lucy’s technique for getting herself out of trouble had not diminished. She had lied to her mother and to the night watchman and was getting away with it. The officer was already taking steps toward the door.

“Lucy, dear, take the lamp to the top of the stairs so that our guest will have some light,” said the mother.

“Not necessary,” said the officer. But Lucy already had the lamp in her hand. When she turned around, her shawl fell from her shoulders, and the light illuminated the pattern of purple bruises and wound marks stippled against the cream white of her neck and chest. Against the bright lamplight, they were like roses flowering in the sun. Rings of tooth marks sat at the base of her neck, like red-rimmed eyes staring out at the world.

The officer squinted his eyes at Lucy’s neck. “Miss, were you attacked by someone?”

Lucy put the lamp down, but her mother picked it up, holding it up to her daughter’s face. The marks were even more awful in the brighter light offered by the proximity of the lamp.

Lucy put her hand to her throat. “What? No, of course not.”

Mrs. Westenra said nothing, but stared at her daughter’s neck. Rather roughly, she took Lucy to the mirror on the wall and turned her toward it, holding the lamp so close to Lucy’s neck that she jerked her face aside to avoid the heat of it. Lucy looked at her own reflection, and then shied away from it.

“You certainly look as if you have been attacked,” Mrs. Westenra said.

“Miss, if someone has hurt you, it will do you no good to protect him.” The officer now assumed the authority he had earlier lacked. “This is a peaceful place, and we do not take kindly to the sort of violence committed in London. If a lady is harmed in these parts, we find the culprit right away. We do not let him haunt our streets to commit more mayhem. You can be sure of that.”

“Lucy?” Mrs. Westenra seemed to be challenging her daughter. I was grateful that Lucy had made me promise to keep quiet. I was fearful for her, but at the same time I was curious to see how she would get out of this predicament.

She did not disappoint. Rather than turn red with shame, as she should have done, Lucy stood as defiant as a war goddess, her bruised neck held high. She asked her mother to sit down. “I wanted to spare you the details of the horror that befell me,” she said, putting a hand on her mother’s shoulder. “I was afraid that the shock would bring on an attack, and then, what would I do? I did not want to be responsible for causing that, Mother.”

I stepped into the shadows to hide my astonished face as Lucy unfurled an amazing story. I soon realized that she was purloining my own experience on the banks of the Thames and placing herself in the roll of victim. She illustrated in detail the madman I had described, using my own words and images. “Red eyes like a monster!” she said, explaining how she had been in the churchyard looking for me when a man jumped out of nowhere-“was he man or fiend?”-and fell upon her, biting her and sucking at her neck and throat and bosom while he held her hands and legs down with his limbs.

The watchman took a small pad from his pocket and began to scribble furiously as Lucy spoke, occasionally stopping her to clarify a detail. “And you say he smelled of drink?”

“I suppose so. Though it was so acrid and horrible that I wondered if he was a corpse escaped from the grave!” Her eyes were huge now and gleaming in the lamplight. The watchman sat on the divan next to Mrs. Westenra so that he could put his pad on the little table and write faster. I could see little prickly light-colored hairs sprouting above his pouty crimson lips, not thick enough to grow a proper mustache. His acorn-brown eyes were fixed alternately upon Lucy and his notes, his head bobbing up and down trying to keep up with her words. The deeper Lucy got into her story, the more convincing she sounded, her confidence and dramatic inflection rising parallel to the interest of the watchman.

Mrs. Westenra sat terribly calm through all this. I would have thought that any mother, let alone one with a nervous condition, would have shown more emotion listening to the details of an attack on her daughter, but Mrs. Westenra took in the story with uncharacteristic serenity. “However did you evade this monster, Lucy?” she asked.

“It was Mina who saved me,” Lucy said, gesturing to me with her arm as if I were being presented onstage like a performer.

All eyes turned upon me, leaning against the fireplace mantel, hugging the lap robe tight around my shoulders, thankful to have been forgotten until this moment. I knew that Lucy wanted me to play a part, but I was frozen.

Lucy rescued me from responding. “Before the madman could do any, well, any irrevocable harm, Mina wandered into the cemetery and saw us. Her screams frightened him, and he ran away like a coward!”

The night watchman pressed Lucy for more details, but she claimed that shock prevented her from getting a good look at the attacker. He explained that he might have to return with further questions if the chief constable was not satisfied with his report. “We will do everything possible to find this vermin and bring him to justice,” he assured us.

When he left, Mrs. Westenra ordered me to wash my face and my feet and go to bed. I was surprised at the commanding tone in her voice. “Lucy will be along shortly, Mina.”

I did as she said, pulling the curtains tight against the breaking dawn, and climbed into the bed, stretching out on the cool linens, eager for sleep, but I heard Lucy and her mother arguing.

“I have told the truth,” Lucy said, to which I heard Mrs. Westenra groan.

“I was a married woman!” she said. “Why does every generation believe it is the discoverer of pleasure? Your father was a spectacular lover.” Even through the wall, I could hear the triumph in her voice.

From Lucy’s mouth came a groan that matched her mother’s. “I am going to bed,” she said as if it were a proclamation. When I heard her footsteps approach, I turned my back toward the door so that when she entered the room, she would think I was already asleep.

Chapter Six

25 and 26 August 1890

M onster, Murderer, or Madman in Whitby?’”

Lucy flashed the Whitby Gazette at me and then continued to read from it. “‘Miss Lucy Westenra of London was the victim of a mysterious attacker so horrible in appearance and odor that the terrified young lady mistook him for a corpse risen from his grave in St. Mary’s Church cemetery, a popular setting of many of Whitby’s infamous ghost stories. The monster left the young lady bruised about the neck and shoulders. Fortunately, the brutal attack was interrupted when Miss Mina Murray, a schoolteacher, also of London, wandered into St. Mary’s churchyard.’”

The article went on to caution ladies to refrain from venturing out of doors unescorted. “‘We who wish for the continuation of the peaceful and secure atmosphere of our idyllic seaside community must remind our readers that the Whitechapel butcher who so terrified the capital city was never apprehended. If he has come to our locale, he will have found the sort of female of ill repute upon whom he preys in short supply in Whitby, and may be casting his evil intent toward genteel ladies such as Miss Westenra. We urge an attitude of vigilance and prudence from residents and visitors.’”

“Who reported this to the papers?” Lucy asked, looking at me as if I had committed the deed.

“Kate says that reporters get most of their leads from the police,” I said.

“This is sure to bring Arthur Holmwood here! I don’t want to see him!” Lucy said when her mother was out of earshot.

We passed the rest of Monday without incident, but on Tuesday morning, we heard a rap at the door. Lucy jumped out of her seat.

Hilda answered the door, and Dr. John Seward walked in with his medical bag. He tipped his hat to both of us before removing it. Mrs. Westenra rushed into the parlor.

“I came as quickly as I could,” he said to Mrs. Westenra, who greeted him extravagantly. She was not surprised to see him.

“Look at our girl, Dr. Seward,” she said to him, taking Lucy by the arm and presenting her. “Pallid and thinner than ever before! And look at these bruises. I daresay they have faded since the attack, but they are ugly reminders of her ordeal.”

Seward lifted Lucy’s chin so that he could examine her neck. “I imagine that her psyche is more bruised than her body. That is what happens in cases of violation.”

“I was not violated!” Lucy protested.

“When a lady is physically accosted, she feels mentally violated. Your sense of safety has been shattered. But do not worry; I am here to treat you. Your good mother sent a telegram to Arthur in Scarborough, and he insisted we come immediately. He is finding us rooms and will be arriving soon.” He gave her a broad smile. “See there? All shall be well. Now, if you don’t mind, would you please lie down, either on the divan or on a bed, so that I can examine you?”

Lucy looked irritated. “I am not ill. I am as well as I have ever been. John Seward, you are wasting your time. Surely there are lunatics in London who need you.”

“Lucy! The doctor has inconvenienced himself for your sake!” Mrs. Westenra was outraged. “You are insulting not only Dr. Seward but Arthur as well!”

Dr. Seward put a hand up to Mrs. Westenra, politely silencing her. He spoke patiently to Lucy. “Dear Miss Lucy, this sort of hysteria is a common response to what you have endured. The first thing we must do is to settle those nerves.”

He opened his satchel, releasing a whiff of something bitter, some chemical odor that I had to turn away from, as he sorted through bottles of medication.

“My nerves are settled!” Lucy said in a shrill voice that contradicted her words. Seward ignored her and asked Hilda to bring him a spoon and glass.

He poured two spoonfuls of liquid from a bottle into the glass and filled it with water from a pitcher, making a cloudy potion. He handed it to Lucy. “Now be a good girl and take your medicine. Then I will examine you so that I might fully assess the state of your health.”

Lucy looked exasperated. “But I am not nervous. I do not have a condition! I merely wish to be left alone. Tell them that I am well, Mina!”

I remembered what Mrs. Westenra had said about Seward’s infatuation with Lucy. It did not seem appropriate to have such a man as one’s doctor. “I think Lucy is mending,” I said. “She was very calm yesterday and she slept well last night.”

“Mina, are you trained in the medical arts?” Mrs. Westenra asked, barking her words at me. She looked quite hostile. “If you are not a doctor, then you must leave the medical decisions to Dr. Seward.” She turned to Seward. “Perhaps you should have a look at Mina as well, John. These incidents of noctambulism can be very dangerous. One such incident was the death of my dear late husband.”

My body went cold thinking of submitting to an examination by John Seward. But seeing how Lucy’s defiance was not helping her situation, I remained calm.

“I appreciate your concern, Mrs. Westenra, but I have had only two episodes. When I return to London, I will see Dr. Farmer, Miss Hadley’s physician, who has cared for me since I was a child.” I was not sure that Dr. Farmer was still alive, but hoped that the mention of another physician would divert the attention from me.

“Both you and Miss Lucy have the constitution of a lady, Miss Mina, and therefore are more susceptible to nervous conditions,” Dr. Seward said. “A strapping girl from the working classes may survive the sort of attack made on Miss Lucy, or may wander about in the night air half asleep and remain unscathed. But ladies like the two of you with refined sensibilities must but be looked after carefully,” he said.

“Lucinda, I am your mother and guardian, and I am morally and legally responsible for you. If you are as well as you claim to be, I suggest you do what the doctor says and allow him to confirm it,” said Mrs. Westenra.

“You must do it for your mother, Miss Lucy,” Seward said. “You don’t want her worries over you to provoke another attack of angina.”

“Well, then, I will cooperate, if only so that you may discover for all your troubles that I am in perfect health!” Lucy said. She picked up the glass containing the concoction Seward had mixed and swallowed it down theatrically, arching her back and raising the glass high into the air so that her neck was long and her curls dipped down the length of her backbone. She reminded me of a poster I had once seen of an actress playing Lady Macbeth. Then she turned to me and spoke in a perfectly controlled voice. “Mina, will you help me undress and get into a dressing gown?”

I followed her into the bedroom, whereupon she closed the door and sprang on the bed like a panther. “You must go to Morris and tell him what is happening,” she said, hushed and hissing. “Tell him that I will meet him at some arranged place tonight, and we will go off together where no one will find us.”

“Lucy, be rational.” I sat with her on the bed and stroked her arm. “Do you really want to give Morris Quince control over your life? You will be at the mercy of his feelings, and men’s feelings are not to be trusted.”

“This is no time to remind me of your old-fashioned doctrine of love, Mina.”

Before I could put reply, we heard men’s voices outside. Lucy jumped up and looked out the window, and I followed, looking over her shoulder. Standing on the pavement below, Seward was conversing with the red-haired man, whom we had seen on the night of the shipwreck. He was holding a copy of the Whitby Gazette and demanding an audience with Lucy.

“It’s that theater manager from London,” I said.

“Why does he want to see me?” Lucy asked.

I put my finger up to silence her so that we could hear their conversation.

“No, you may not see her. I am a doctor, she is my patient, and she has suffered a trauma. She is in no condition to answer your questions.” Seward spoke not harshly but in no uncertain terms.

From our vantage point above, the man’s hair was like a thicket of ginger-colored hen’s feathers. He spoke softly, and his back was to us so that we could not hear what he was saying. But we could hear Seward’s reply. “Yes, I am familiar with the good reputation of your theater, but that does not alter my patient’s condition. She is sedated, and I will not allow her to receive company.”

“How dare John Seward decide who I can and cannot speak with!” Lucy was indignant. “I shall give him a piece of my mind,” she said, turning toward the door. But I grabbed her arm.

“Do you really want to tell your tale to a stranger, Lucy? The man is a writer looking for ghoulish stories to put on the stage. He might make any use of whatever you tell him.”

The red-haired man spoke again, but his words were carried away from us on the wind, whereas Seward’s rose into the window.

“The lady is in a state of hysteria, sir. Do you actually believe that a corpse broke through its coffin and attacked her? I might add that there is no reason to believe that her attacker should be identified with Jack the Ripper. That is a newspaper’s way of selling copies. I am sure you are aware of their tactics.”

The red-haired man shrugged his broad shoulders and said something else, and Dr. Seward took a card from his pocket. “I would be delighted to help you in your research,” he said, extending his hand to the other fellow, who shook it firmly. “Send me a note with an appointed time, and I will see you at the asylum in Purfleet.”

Distraught, Lucy turned away from the window. “That man outside-I do not trust him. What if he is a reporter? What if he starts investigating and finds out that I am a liar?”

Lucy leaned against the bedpost, taking little bird breaths through her mouth. It seemed that the medication was taking effect.

“I know someone who is acquainted with him. I will get more information about him to put your mind at ease. Now you must rest, Lucy. Let me help you out of your clothes. After John Seward takes a look at you, you can go to sleep.”

“Please, Mina, go to Morris. Tell him that we must leave tonight. Tell him what they are saying about me. I am not hysterical! I am a woman in love, and I cannot have my love, and that is what makes me act this way.”

I helped Lucy into a satin gown the color of pink champagne, with a wide collar of white lace and tiny pearl buttons. She had worn it a year ago when I visited her, and I remembered how the pink blush reflected the color of her cheeks and made her skin, already radiant, rich with rosy hues. Now it had the opposite effect and seemed to drain what vestige of color was left in her pallor and highlighted the marks on her neck. Her eyes were heavy with the medication. She placed one hand upon her chest as if she wanted evidence of her continuing heartbeat. I did not want to leave her looking so helpless, but she would be under the care of her mother and a doctor. Who was I to interfere with their authority?

“Rest well, my darling Lucy. Things will look better when you wake up.”

He lived in precisely the sort of dwelling one would have expected, a weatherworn stone cottage by the sea built for a fisherman and repaired haphazardly by his own hand through the many decades of his occupancy. It was protected from the inhospitable rock-strewn beach by a roughly built low wall that looked as if the stones had leapt from the shore and tossed themselves one atop the other. I rapped on the door and, receiving no response, knocked on a window, noticing the few flecks of paint that remained on the otherwise worm-eaten wood of the windowsill.

An old woman came to the door. More stooped than her father, her spine bent sharply like the tip of a crochet hook. She stuck her head out and up like a tortoise stretching from its shell. I told her that I was an acquaintance of her father’s and that I had missed him today at the churchyard.

“Oh, he is there,” she said. I saw by the little random pickets that stuck out of her mouth that she had retained the same amount of teeth in the same pattern of loss as her father. “He won’t be leaving the churchyard again. There is no stone up as yet, but we put him in the ground yesterday.”

“I am so sorry,” I said while she looked me up and down “How did he die?”

“Don’t be joking with me, young lady. How did he die? He was a few years shy of the century mark. The good Lord got tired of turning him away. He left us on the night of the shipwreck, as was fitting, him being an old man of the sea.”

She beckoned me inside, and it took a while for my eyes to adjust to the dark room from the stark light of the afternoon. She bade me sit on a rickety chair pulled up to a solid pine table.

“That was his chair,” she said. She poured me a cup of lukewarm tea and gave me a piece of cold toast slathered with honey. “He would be pleased to see you sitting in it. He talked of you, miss, of your green eyes and hair like jet. He said that had you known him as a young man you would have fancied him.”

I smiled at the thought.

“Though seeing you now, I don’t agree. You are a fine lady from the city, and, even in his youth, he carried the stench of the fishing boats.” She did not sit but leaned on the other chair while she talked.

I saw his pipe resting on the mantel and my eyes started to well up, knowing that I would not see him again. “I hope he did not suffer,” I said.

“That day, he took to his bed after his breakfast and would not get out of it, even to sup, but once the storm started, I heard him go outside. I found him facing the sea, screaming into the waves. I tried to coax him back into the house, but he said that his friends who had died at sea had come for him. They were standing on the shore talking to him, and he was calling them by name.”

“Yes, he told me that he imagined that sort of thing,” I said.

“Imagined? There is no imagining, miss, when voices call to you from the sea. If you heard them just one time, you know that they are as real as this table.” She thumped her fist on it to make her point, rattling my teacup in its saucer. “Did I imagine it when, as a little girl, Pap and me walked to the abbey at night, much against the wishes of my mother-God rest her soul-and we listened to the cries of Constance.”

“Constance? He only told me of St. Hild.” I remembered that sunny day when I was too hot to let him finish his tale.

The whaler’s daughter sat down on the chair opposite me, wrapping her teacup in her bony hands. She had short fingers with prominent joints that reminded me of the talons of birds of prey. “Constance of Beverley was a wicked nun who forsook her vows to take up with a lover, a French knight with a bad reputation. As penance, she was buried alive in the walls of the convent. Some nights, you can still hear her scream for release. But St. Hild keeps her there as a warning to women who might succumb to temptation.”

I shuddered, remembering my own experience at Whitby Abbey.

“You weren’t the only fancy Londoner who enjoyed my father’s tales,” the old lady offered with considerable pride.

“Is that so?” Kate always said that if you allowed someone to talk enough, they would tell you everything you needed to know.

“Another fellow, a very important personage of the theater, sat here in this very room listening to old Father’s stories.”

Pleased that I did not have to find a way to bring up the subject of the red-haired man, I tried to sound as if my interest in him was casual. “Oh, yes, he pointed that fellow out to me once. Do you know his name?”

“I knew it, but, as old Pap used to say, I forgot it as soon as I remembered it.” She laughed at her own construct of words. “But he could not get enough of the old man’s tales. You see, miss, he is a writer come to Whitby for inspiration. For we have here a most interesting population of spirits, ready to show themselves to whoever is looking in their direction. This fellow said that all London was still living under the terrible threat of the Ripper and that he wanted to make up a similar sort of character, but have him be even more atrocious, something more terrifying than a man, something akin to Mr. Spring-Heeled Jack. For, as he said, who is to prove that those Whitechapel women were not murdered by something more monster than human?”

A few times I had caught some of my students reading the outlandish tales of Spring-Heeled Jack, the monster who wore gentleman’s clothes, but had great batlike wings, pointy ears, red eyes, and the ability to leap great lengths. Inevitably, there was one girl in each class who had inherited a copy from an older brother and used it to frighten the smaller girls.

“And such a monster may indeed have come here to plague us, as if we need more unnatural creatures on this shore!” She picked up a copy of the Whitby Gazette and waved it at me. “You have seen this?”

“Yes, I have,” I said, standing up. “You are quite certain that the man with the red hair is an artistic sort of person and not a newspaperman?”

“The fellow said he was here to collect stories to put in books and on the stage. He already wrote two books that no one paid much attention to, poor fellow, but he believed that after all the murders committed by the butcher of London, the town was ripe for the appearance of a fresh monster, and that Whitby was just the place to find such a creature in our store of goblins and ghosts.”

I said good-bye to the whaler’s daughter and left the cottage with mixed emotions. While I realized that Lucy’s future was not mine to decide, I did not want to be the one to deliver her into the hands of Morris Quincel.

I located the building that housed his painting studio and rang the bell. An older woman with gray curls escaping her white house cap opened the door.

“I am looking for Mr. Morris Quince, the American painter?” I said politely. She looked at me with suspicious eyes. Of course, she had seen Lucy at the apartments and must have thought that I was just another of Morris’s conquests.

“Well, you’re too late,” she said with a look of mean satisfaction.

“How is that, madam?” I asked politely.

“He left yesterday. Packed up his things and went back to America. Now I have a vacancy during the high season, and it’s too late to advertise.”

I supposed that the shock registered on my face.

“So, he surprised you too, did he? Well, you are not the only young lady to come round. But you are the prettiest, if that gives you any consolation. The last one was as brittle as a bird and a bit too eager.”

I gathered that she meant Lucy. “Did he leave a forwarding address or a message of any sort for a Miss Westenra?”

“He left nothing behind but soiled sheets, the dirt from his boots, and a couple of empty canvasses,” she said bitterly, closing the door in my face.

A light sprinkle began to fall on me, but I was in no hurry to deliver the grim news to Lucy, who was probably still sleeping off her sedative. The sky was darkening ever quicker as the end of summer approached. The sun had gone into hiding behind an ominous steel-gray cloud that hung above like a big flatiron. The air felt decidedly different from yesterday-cooler, sharper. Autumn was on its way.

With a heavy heart, I walked up the steps to the churchyard. I raised the hood of my cape and opened my umbrella. Headmistress had given it to me for my twenty-first birthday, knowing how fond I was of the purple foxglove that bloomed in the park. When open, the underside revealed in each of the panels a spray of painted stems, lush with lavender bells. “No matter how bad the weather, you will always be able to look up and see something that will cheer you,” she had said, knowing that my quiet moods often concealed an orphan’s melancholy.

Sheltered, I walked the cemetery to look for the old whaler’s grave, but gave up what with the rain pouring down around me. Hot tears began to roll down my cheeks. All good things ended. Lucy had been ecstatic when she was with her lover. She had been so certain of his love, as certain as I had been of Jonathan’s feelings for me and of his intention to marry me. I walked to the bench where the old whaler had told me his stories, trying not to let the actions of Morris Quince bring up my fear that Jonathan had deserted me; tried to push out of my mind the vision of returning to my room at the school and seeing my mail basket empty.

The rain beat down in staccato on my umbrella. I tilted it back to see a large black vulture flying overhead in defiance of the weather. The creature had an immense wingspan, circling and soaring above me. I watched his performance, wondering if he was stalking a small animal in the vicinity-dead or living-upon which he would prey. Finally he flew away, disappearing into the clouds.

I looked out to sea where the ruined vessel, the Valkyrie, its cargo hold emptied and its shredded sails down, sat heavily in the sand. The newspaper reported that the mystery of the captain’s condition had remained unsolved. The members of the coast guard, who disentangled the body, declared that someone had tied the captain to the helm, negating the assumption that he had bound himself to the wheel to prevent storm winds and waves from carrying him into the sea. The seamen stated that it was impossible for a man to have tied such elaborate, expert knots on himself. The county coroner declared that the gash in his throat was a new wound, leading to the logical but implausible theory that someone had tied the captain to the helm, slit his throat, and jumped overboard in the midst of a brutal storm. The locals-and I am sure that the old whaler would have led this chorus-asserted that the deed had been carried out by the sailors who had drowned in the angry waters off Whitby’s shore.

A controversy had arisen over whether to repair the ship or to destroy it. According to the newspapers, an anonymous individual had chartered the boat in Rotterdam. This person was supposed to have been a passenger on the vessel, but neither he nor his body had been found. The entire cargo of fifty large crates was his property and would be shipped to the location determined before the storm. The escaped dog was being sought by members of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

The abandoned boat slumped against the shoreline like some lone convict awaiting sentencing. Abandoned, abandoned. I could not get the word out of my head. I turned to walk back toward the steps that would take me into town and toward my unhappy task of informing Lucy of the betrayal when I stumbled on a rock, losing my balance. I leaned down to see what it was that had caused this mishap and picked up a stone. The markings on it looked like a little girl’s plait wrapped tightly into a bun, or the curled tail of a seahorse. I turned it over, exposing the face of a serpent with an open mouth revealing two tiny fangs and a long flat tongue. The stone fit neatly into the palm of my gloved hand. It was beyond a doubt the coiled body of a snake, or, at the very least, it had once been one.

Chapter Seven

Later that same afternoon

I returned to a quiet house. Lucy was still sleeping in her bed, her blond hair splayed across the pillow. Her mouth was open, and a tiny stream of saliva had dried up into little white flakes in its corner. I was trying to close the bedroom door as quietly as possible when she began to stir. Her eyelids fluttered a few times as she whispered my name.

The room was growing dark so I struck a match and lit a bedside lamp. Lucy squinted against the light, shading her eyes with her hand. I sat on the bed next to her, blocking the light for her while her eyes adjusted.

“Oh, I cannot move,” she said, closing her eyes again. I thought for a moment that she would fall back asleep and that I would have a reprieve. But she opened her eyes again, and this time, with an anxious look.

“Well? Did you speak with him?” Despite the lethargy in her body, her eyes peered at me as if she were the predator and I the prey.

“Lucy, my darling, there is no gentle or nice way to say what I must say.” I put my hand over hers, but she drew it away.

I told her the truth: I had gone to speak with Morris Quince, but he had left to go back to America. She did not react as I anticipated, with tears or self-recrimination. She leapt from the bed and tore off her nightdress. She pulled the dress I had laid on the back of a chair over her head. “I don’t believe you,” she said when her head popped out of the top.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “You are making too much noise. Your mother is asleep. You’ll wake her.”

“I am going to see for myself. Mina, you have been in league with my mother since you have been here in Whitby. I should never have trusted you.”

She slipped her shoes on but did not bother to lace them and raced to the front door, where she was met with a shock. John Seward and Arthur Holmwood were standing there, Holmwood’s hand raised as if to knock.

“There she is,” Arthur said, kissing Lucy’s forehead. The men entered the room, and Seward put down his black bag. “Miss Lucy, you really should not be out of bed, what with all you have been through.”

Hearing the men’s voices, Mrs. Westenra came rushing in. “Ah, our knights have arrived!”

The men came deeper into the parlor, removing their hats. Everyone stood awkwardly until Mrs. Westenra called for Hilda to make tea.

I will never forget the way that Lucy composed herself at that moment to get the information she so desperately sought. She took a breath and broke into a smile. I knew the smile was utterly false, but I think that the men did not see it. She graciously invited them to sit down. “Mr. Holmwood, I hope you did not upset your holiday in Scarborough for my sake, for as you can see, I am very well.”

“You look as lovely as ever, Miss Lucy,” he said formally. “But I think we should let the good doctor here be the judge of your health.”

“Of course,” Lucy said, looking around the room as if something were missing. “But where there are two, there are usually three. Where is Mr. Quince?”

She astonished me with her innocent tone. Her mother stiffened.

“Why, I have no idea,” Holmwood replied. “He was to travel by land and meet me in Scarborough, but the wretch did not.” His voice was inflected with the sort of affection men reserve for their irascible friends. He turned to Seward. “John, have you heard from Quince?”

Seward scrunched his shoulders in a shrug. “He is our friend, but we allow him to be socially unreliable, as Americans tend to be.”

Holmwood spoke slowly, considering his words. “An interesting breed, but they do not have an English gentleman’s sense of honor, or of the sanctity of his word. He is probably off on an adventure, as per usual. Probably involving one young lady or another.” Holmwood winked at Seward.

“Miss Lucy, you look a little peaked. I would like to check your vital signs,” Dr. Seward said.

But Lucy had reached the limit of her acting skills. “I am not ill. I am well!” Lucy stood, raising her hands into the air like a dancer and then letting her fingers glide down the length of her body as if to emphasize its state of well-being. “I am all too well! Now please excuse me.” She threw her head back and walked into her bedroom.

“I apologize on my daughter’s behalf,” Mrs. Westenra said. “She is not herself since the incident.”

“It’s a typical response from a female who has been attacked, Arthur,” Dr. Seward said. “One must not blame the patient.”

Both Seward and Mrs. Westenra searched Holmwood’s face, looking for signals of his mood.

“Why don’t I go check on Lucy?” I said. I started to make my way to Lucy’s room when Holmwood stopped me. He had yet to comment on Lucy’s outburst, but his face was wrenched into an uneasy frown. “Miss Mina, would you please take a message to Miss Lucy?”

Mrs. Westenra put her hand on Holmwood’s sleeve. “Now, Arthur, please do not take any drastic measures. Lucy has had an upset, but she will recover and she will again be the Lucy you proposed to.”

Holmwood look appalled at the lady’s little speech. “Madam, you misinterpret. I would never abandon Lucy in her hour of need.” He looked truly insulted. “Please tell Miss Lucy that whatever unfortunate thing has happened, it will not cause me to love her less. In fact, I-I-” he stammered, looking to Seward as if for inspiration or permission, “In fact, tell her that I wish to expedite the day of our marriage. Tell her that I desire nothing more than to care for her as a husband must care for his wife, and that I shall set an immediate date for our wedding.”

“Mr. Holmwood, I am overwhelmed!” exclaimed Mrs. Westenra, as if it were she who would marry him the sooner.

“That should go a long way to speeding up Lucy’s recovery,” I said politely, though I knew the opposite to be true. I excused myself, with the three of them watching me as I walked away. I found Lucy in the bedroom sitting at the vanity brushing her hair and examining her face in the mirror.

“Mina, I know you think me a fool, but my heart beats with the certainty that Morris would not have abandoned me to Arthur of his own volition.”

“Let us put aside Morris Quince for a moment Lucy-”

She stopped me, holding the hairbrush in front of her like a shield against my words. “I will never put Morris Quince aside. If you knew anything about love, you would not advise me to do so,” Lucy said.

I intended to give an impassioned speech about the wisdom of marrying Arthur Holmwood and becoming mistress of Waverley Manor, when we heard the light rap of Hilda’s knuckles at the door.

“Miss Murray?”

I opened the door, and Hilda handed me a letter. “This just came for you by messenger.”

“Thank you, Hilda,” I said. The envelope of high-quality laid paper with a teardrop flap and a dragon seal was addressed to Miss Mina Murray. The script was extravagant, with large letters finely formed. I tore open the envelope and read the note given in the same penmanship:

You will find Mr. Jonathan Harker in a hospital operated by the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul in the city of Graz. You may trust that this information is true and is brought to you by one who cares only for you. You will be protected on your voyage, should you choose to go to him. I remain-

Your servant and your master

I tucked the note into my pocket and tried to regain my composure. Even in her mad state, Lucy could see that I was in shock. “What’s the matter?”

“Jonathan’s been found,” I said. I could not disclose how I had received the information, and indeed, I did not know how this all-knowing, ubiquitous creature who called himself my servant and my master had found me in Whitby or how he knew Jonathan’s location.

Two days later, in answer to a telegram that John Seward suggested I send to the hospital, a letter came back that Jonathan was indeed on the list of patients. He was recovering from a case of brain fever, and it was advisable for a relation to come to his aid. Seward translated the letter and assured me that Graz was renowned for its hospitals, owing to the excellent medical school in the city.

“My, but it is useful to have one friend from university who did not waste his tenure at drinking and sport,” said Arthur Holmwood. The two men were holding vigil every day at Henrietta Street, pestering Lucy over her condition. She spent most of her time in bed, feigning headaches just to avoid them, all the while certain that word from Morris would arrive at any moment.

Seward smiled at the compliment, but a worried look came over his face. “Brain fever is a blanket diagnosis for a variety of illnesses, Miss Mina,” he said. “When you return to England, if you do not find him fully recovered, I will have Dr. Von Helsinger examine him. He was my mentor in Germany at medical school and, I am happy to say, now my colleague at the asylum. His theories on the interaction of blood, brain, body, and spirit are considered radical, and yet I believe him to be a man decades ahead of his time.”

“Then I am certain that Mr. Harker would like to meet him, for he too is a very modern thinker,” I replied. I wanted to emphasize to Seward that I was engaged to a man of substance.

I sent a telegram to Mr. Hawkins, Jonathan’s uncle, that he was in Graz and that I would go to him immediately. He replied with apologies for the illness that prevented him from taking the trip in my stead but wired ample funds to a bank in Whitby to pay for my journey and any medical costs that Jonathan had incurred.

I had never traveled out of the country, much less traveled alone, and long dialogues were held about my safety and the best and most expedient route I should take. I allowed these matters to be decided for me, as I had no knowledge that might help form a strong opinion one way or another. I sent a note to Headmistress explaining why I would not be present at the start of classes, and allowed John Seward, who knew German and some of the Slavic languages that were also spoken in Styria, to coach me in the pronunciation of a few key words. Arthur Holmwood used his family connections to have a passport issued to me in haste.

At the Whitby station, Seward reviewed my itinerary with me once more. “I envy Mr. Harker his malady if it means that such a beautiful woman is willing to travel so many miles to see to him.” He stole a furtive glance at Lucy, and I had the firm impression that in addition to flattering me, he was trying to make her jealous.

I took Lucy aside to say good-bye. I clutched her hands in mine and kissed both her cheeks. “I beg of you to be wise, Lucy. Your future depends upon it.” I whispered these words into her ear, but when I drew back and looked at her face, I saw that she had no intention of obeying me.

With an uncomfortable feeling in my belly for the welfare of my friend, I thanked the two men for all that they had done for me and I turned my thoughts to the future. Tonight I would be in the city of Hull, where I would catch the boat to Rotterdam, and then travel by train to Vienna, and then on to Graz.