“Then, all that time . . . ,” said Mary, not quite knowing what to believe, what was true or not anymore.
“I can tell you that everything I taught you—history, geography, literature—all that was real. My affection for you was real. But on Thursdays, which were my half-days off, I would go down to Burlington House in Piccadilly, where the Royal Society has its offices, and report to Dr. Faraday. There was never much to report. You were a delightful, intelligent child. Perhaps overly conscientious—too calm, controlled, and reasonable for your age. But like Justine, you posed no danger, and Hyde never attempted to contact you. We did not know, then, about Diana, or we would have had an agent inside the Society of St. Mary Magdalen as well. When you had to let me go so you could afford a permanent nurse for your mother, it was with real sorrow that I left. Teaching you was one of the great privileges of my life.”
“Oh,” said Mary. She had no idea what to say, or even think. More than anything, she felt a profound sense of disappointment, and also of displacement. Was any facet of her life not affected by her father’s experiments? Perhaps she would discover that Mrs. Poole was an agent of the Alchemical Society, or that Alice had been created through scientific experimentation! Was nothing in this world stable and ordinary?
MRS. POOLE: I understand your reaction, miss. You must have been in a state of shock. But to think of me as an agent of those evil men! For evil is what I call them, despite their fancy titles—doctors and professors! Evil is as evil does, I say. I’m glad you girls are—well, that you are, however you came to be. But I would not give any of those alchemical johnnies the time of day.
ALICE: The thought of me being created by alchemists! I’m an ordinary girl, like any other.
MARY: Not quite ordinary. An ordinary girl can’t disappear, among other things.
ALICE: But mesmerical powers are entirely natural. Martin has them, and he’s not a monster—just a man who’s different from others. Like Atlas being tall and strong, or the Jellicoe twins being able to tie themselves in knots.
MARY: If you say so, Alice.
“And do you still work for this organization?” asked Justine.
Mina drank the rest of her coffee, then put the cup down on the desk. She’s stalling, thought Mary. What doesn’t she want to say? With obvious reluctance, Mina said, “I am currently employed by the Subcommittee on Bibliographic Citation Format. The position allows me to draw a small salary, and it is of course why I am here in Budapest, with Vlad. After I left Mary’s employ, the subcommittee asked me to teach at Whitby Ladies’ Academy on the Yorkshire coast, so I could keep an eye on a student named Lucy Westenra. Her father, Lord Westenra, had been one of the financial backers of the English chapter of the Alchemical Society. He had recently died, but his wife, Lady Westenra, was continuing his contributions. Haunted by her husband’s death, she was interested in ways of prolonging life. It was she who urged the Purfleet Asylum to hire Seward, so he could learn more about poor Renfield and his experiments with spiders and flies. Dr. Hennessey, the assistant director, who was also a member, had told her about his peculiarities. And it was she who introduced Seward to Van Helsing. You see, the English chapter had been disbanded after the murder of Sir Danvers Carew threatened to expose the Alchemical Society and its activities to the public. But there was a group of younger members who refused to give up: Seward and Arthur Holmwood were its leaders. Holmwood was a young aristocrat with plenty of money—he is now Lord Godalming, and remains involved with the society only indirectly, as one of the trustees of the Purfleet Asylum. Seward and Holmwood were joined by Jonathan Harker, a young solicitor whose firm represented the Holmwoods, and an American named Quincy Morris, an adventurer who was not particularly interested in science. He had hunted grizzly bears and bison in the American west, traveled up to the icy lands of the Arctic, and trekked through South American jungles, so why not search for the secret of eternal life? It was yet another adventure.
“I befriended Lucy. That too was a true friendship, Mary, although you may well doubt my sincerity, after all I have told you.
“Lucy was not like you. She did not particularly care for study. She was interested in dresses and parties and flirting with eligible bachelors. And why should she not be? She was young, beautiful, and wealthy, destined to become a society lady, perhaps even a political wife. She was not at all intellectual—she preferred magazines and French novels to history or philosophy. At the same time, she was romantic, idealistic, and generous to a fault—deeply stirred by the suffering of others. I once saw her give her gloves to a girl on the street who was selling roasted chestnuts and burning her fingertips. The travails of a cart-horse could bring her to tears, and cabbies dared not use their whips around her, for fear of a lecture. She had a great deal to learn about the world, but her instincts were sound. In the sphere of life into which she had been born, she could have made a real difference.
“We became friends, and when she left Whitby Academy, she asked me to come with her as a paid companion. So I entered the social world of the Westenras, in their house on Curzon Street. And that was where I met Seward, Holmwood, Morris, and Jonathan Harker, who would become my husband.”
“Your husband!” said Mary.
“Yes. I am married.” Mina looked down at the coffee cup in her hands. Mary noticed that she wore no rings at all. “I am, technically, Mrs. Jonathan Harker. I have asked him for a divorce, but he has refused to grant me one, despite the considerable evidence of my desertion and . . . disloyalty. He believes that someday I will get over this madness, as he calls it, and return to him. Return to being a solicitor’s wife in Exeter. After what I saw—after what they did, those men who wanted to live forever, and who were willing to sacrifice anything, or anyone, to prove their theories.”
The study was so quiet. Sunlight streamed through the windows, shining on motes of dust. Somehow, in that stillness, it felt as though Mary’s ideas about the world, and Mina specifically, were tilting and whirling, like a ride at the country fair.
DIANA: Mary’s never been to a country fair.
CATHERINE: Yes, well, I have. There were often fairs around the circus as we traveled throughout England.
DIANA: I’m just saying, you’re supposed to be in her point of view here.
CATHERINE: Oh, so suddenly you’re a writer!
DIANA: You’re the one who told us about point of view. Why even have writing rules if you’re going to break them all the time?
“But why did you marry Mr. Harker if you knew of his involvement with the Société des Alchimistes?” asked Justine.
“I did not realize at the time how involved he was,” said Mina. “I knew that Lady Westenra had invited Professor Van Helsing to come to England from his native Amsterdam. He stayed at the house on Curzon Street for several days, then joined Dr. Seward in Purfleet. And I knew the men were up to something at the asylum. Mr. Holmwood kept going out there, as did Quincy Morris. I thought Jonathan was just Holmwood’s solicitor. He was so earnest, so determined to do well in his career! When Lucy walked with Arthur Holmwood in Hyde Park, I would walk with Jonathan, ostensibly chaperoning her. He was interested in the political and technological developments of the day. And he too had lost his parents—we had that in common. Slowly, I fell in love with him, and he with me. There was an innocence about him, a loneliness, a need . . . He needed me, I thought, and I needed him as well. I had never been in love before. It was a delightful new sensation—to be loved and to love in return, to believe that I would spend my life with someone. After we were married, I decided, I would no longer work for the Subcommittee on Bibliographic Citation Format. I would concentrate on being a good wife, a helpful partner for a rising young solicitor. I was—younger than I am now, and perhaps naive. I missed the signs that there was something going on.”
“What sort of thing?” asked Justine.
Mina looked up at the Count. “He’ll have to tell you—at least part of it, since I didn’t know at the time. But Seward h
ad found out about Vlad’s experiments with blood transfusion—from Renfield, you know. He had pieced together the madman’s ravings, and Van Helsing had asked around, discreetly, among the membership. Some of the older members of the Société des Alchimistes still remembered a paper Vlad had given forty years before on the possibility of transfusing vampiric blood. He found the paper in the archives of the society, and then . . . he contacted Vlad.” She reached one hand out to the Count, who took it. “You’ll have to tell this part, my dear. You know it better than I do.”
He smiled, but it was a bitter smile. “I do not appear to advantage in it, do I, beloved? Well, we shall not worry about my vanity. Van Helsing contacted me through a mutual acquaintance, the linguist and ethnologist Arminius—or Ármin, in Hungarian—Vámbéry. He asked me to come to England. He thought that with his methods—for he had been researching the transfusion of blood for many years, and was considered an expert on the subject—we could transfer the positive aspects of vampirism without the madness that is its almost inevitable result. I arranged for the purchase of an old manor house behind the Purfleet Asylum—Carfax, it was called. Mr. Harker came out to my castle in Transylvania, to bring me the deed and help me transport some delicate apparatus as well as a number of notebooks.”
“I should have seen it then,” said Mina. “I was so stupid! Everything seemed normal. Lucy was preparing for her wedding day, as I was preparing for mine while Jonathan was away. Hers would be a grand affair—half the fashionable people in London were invited, it seemed. I still remember her dress of Carrickmacross lace over white silk—the Westenras traced their ancestry to that area of Ireland. It was dreadfully impractical—when could she wear it again? But all the society girls were marrying in white, as the Queen had done. My much more modest brown silk would serve me well on the honeymoon we were planning to take in Cornwall. There was a great deal for me to do in anticipation of Lucy’s wedding—I was needed to address invitations, help her select the flowers and music, pacify six bridesmaids, each of whom wanted to dress in a style that was flattering to her individually. And then of course there was her mother—Lady Westenra was an impulsive, impractical woman who loved her daughter, but was completely under the influence of Van Helsing. Her husband had believed in him, so she did as well—unfortunately. Dr. Faraday had warned me about Van Helsing, but at that time we knew very little about his activities, apart from the papers he had published—as far as we knew, they were relatively orthodox, dealing with the uncertainty of blood transfusion in medical situations. Why did it sometimes work and sometimes not? Van Helsing thought there might be factors in the blood that had not yet been discovered. . . . If only I had known his real interest! I might have averted the eventual disaster.
“When Jonathan returned, we were married in a quiet ceremony, with Lucy as my sole bridesmaid. I handed in my final report to Dr. Faraday, who urged me to continue monitoring the situation. But no, I told him. I wanted to be a wife, and someday a mother. He would have to find someone else to spy for him. That night, Lady Westenra held a small party for us—just Holmwood, Seward, Morris, Van Helsing, and a friend of his who had recently moved to England—a Count Dracula.”
“That was the first time I saw you,” said the Count.
“You frowned at me the entire evening,” said Mina. “I remember looking up several times—I was seated next to Mr. Morris, who kept going on and on about a hunting trip to the Brazilian Republic. I was bored by his exploits, which consisted of shooting a great many things along the banks of the Amazon—monkeys and pumas and snakes. Each time I looked up, you were staring at me from under those dark eyebrows, as disapprovingly as possible!”
“But I was disapproving!” said the Count. “Here was a beautiful, intelligent woman, who had just that day married Harker, a man I had already classified as a harmless idiot! Oh, he was a gentleman—he could talk well enough about points of law or what he had read in Punch. He had been informative about British politics and customs on our trip from Transylvania to London. But within a year or two, he would begin to bore you. You would see his intellectual narrowness, his provincialism. Additionally, I had already decided that you and I were destined for each other. Your marriage to him was an unfortunate, but hopefully temporary, obstacle.”
“Destined!” said Mina. She laughed, as though despite herself. “There speaks the romantic Hungarian! And also the arrogant Count, who thinks he can simply take whatever he pleases. Did you think I would have no say in the matter?”
He answered mildly, “I recognized that if we were indeed destined, you must accept that for yourself. You would come to me in your own time, and not before. I had only to wait. And in any event, I had other worries to consider. Van Helsing had been conducting tests on my blood. Soon, he would begin transfusing it into Lucy. She said she was willing—but she was so young, and it was obvious to me that she was influenced in her decision by her fiancé. Her mother, who might have counseled her otherwise, was unaware of what we were doing. Lady Westenra did not understand the details of Van Helsing’s research—she merely wanted to continue what her husband had started, and indeed Van Helsing himself concealed information from her. She had a heart condition—he said our methods might shock her, even if she agreed with our aims.”
“And what were those methods?” asked Justine. There it was again, the anger in her voice, and beneath it, a deep disgust. It startled Mary out of her own sense of loss, her sense that somehow she had lived her entire childhood without understanding anything. First she had heard her father’s confession, and now Mina’s. Had nothing been the way she thought it was? She felt curiously numb, as one does when a wound has gone so deep that one does not feel it, our nerves being on the surface. A surface wound will hurt us more than a deeper blow.
The Count responded to Justine as a surgeon might, when you ask how he performs his surgery—in calm, clinical tones. “He would withdraw my blood, then filter it—he thought the madness of vampirism was caused by certain impurities he had identified. Then, when he was certain the blood was pure, he would inject it into Miss Westenra. Already at that time she was beginning to change—”
“I remember her at that party,” said Mina, once again wrapping both hands around the coffee cup as though they were cold. “She looked almost feverish. I ascribed it to the excitement of the upcoming wedding. I should have known—I should have stayed! I will always blame myself for missing the signs, for not suspecting she might be the subject of some experiment. After all, Dr. Faraday had warned me about Van Helsing. But I did not think Lady Westenra would do anything to hurt Lucy, and at the time, I had never heard of vampirism. The next morning, Jonathan and I left on our honeymoon. A week later, we returned to Exeter, to a new semidetached house Jonathan had rented, for we could not yet afford to purchase. I was ready to furnish and decorate it, to make it a home for us. . . .” She sat silent for a moment, looking down at her coffee cup. “But there were letters waiting for me. Three from Lucy—the first ordinary, if a bit distracted, but what girl would not be distracted before her wedding? The second rambling—she mentioned nightmares in which she swam through rivers of blood. The third—she spoke of being in hell, of burning in hellfire. She said that she was surrounded by demons who wanted to drink her blood and eat her soul. I showed them to Jonathan. He said there was nothing to worry about, since Van Helsing was there—if Lucy was ill, he would surely be treating her. It was not what he said, but the way he said it—I remember we were standing in the kitchen, for I had not yet hired a maid-of-all-work, and he looked away from me, out the window into the back alley. That was when I began to suspect that he knew . . . and had not told me what Van Helsing and Seward were attempting. I sent a telegram to Dr. Faraday and bought a ticket on the next train to London.
“When I arrived at the house on Curzon Street, it was already too late.” She looked up at the Count. “I think you should describe this part. You were there—I came later, too late to save dear Lucy.”
“Al
as, I was there, but still I could not save her,” he said ruefully. “I told them they were going too far, too fast. It was obvious to me that Miss Westenra was slipping into madness. Hennessy, who was assisting, also remonstrated—he was beginning to question their methods and aims. But Seward and Van Helsing refused to halt their experiments, and Holmwood, who believed in Van Helsing, was all for pressing forward. Morris did not care either way so long as it was an adventure. Since they would not listen to me, I told Lady Westenra. Both she and Lucy had come to stay at Carfax, in order to facilitate Van Helsing’s experiments. If she could understand the seriousness of the situation, perhaps she could persuade him to stop. She had, at least, the power to cut his funding. I still remember the day I brought her into the room where they were injecting Lucy with more of my filtered blood. She looked at the chair into which her daughter was strapped—for Lucy became delirious during the transfusions, and she was gaining in strength. Van Helsing was afraid that while in that state, she might try to attack us. Lady Westenra saw the men around her daughter—respectable, scientific men. She saw her daughter open her eyes, look at Van Helsing, and scream. I have mentioned that Lady Westenra had a weak heart. At that moment, she clutched at her chest and collapsed onto the stone floor. She struggled to speak, but could get out nothing. Her hands waved ineffectually in the air. Seward rushed to her, but there was nothing he could do—in a few moments, she was dead. Van Helsing was angry, hysterical. He accused me of interfering with his experiment. Morris pulled the large kukri knife that he always wore out of its leather scabbard and stabbed me in the chest. Such a wound could not kill me, but it could weaken me. They dragged me down to the cellar and locked me there, in what had once been a storage room, without aid or nourishment. Then I believe they returned to the laboratory upstairs. . . . I do not know, but that is what I conjecture. And they found Lucy gone. She had burst her restraints, drained the blood of her dead mother, and departed.
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