Dracula in Love by Karen Essex (1)

In the beginning, there was the voice.

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

I have been looking for you, I said.

No, we have been looking for each other.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s this? A devil’s mark?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you mean?” I asked defensively.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Of course, Mina. Everyone has nightmares.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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