Dracula in Love by Karen Essex (4)

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.

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.