Dracula in Love by Karen Essex (6)

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.