by Karen Essex
“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.
Chapter Two
31 March 1889, and 6 July 1890
Intrepid reader, before I allow you to meet Jonathan Harker and proceed with our present story, I would like to briefly take you back in time one year to the spring of 1889, when Headmistress had decided to lease a floor of the house adjacent to the school to secure additional rooms for her boarders. She had called upon an old friend, Mr. Peter Hawkins, Esquire, who maintained offices in both London and Exeter. Hawkins had largely retired to Exeter, so he sent his young nephew and apprentice in the legal field who lived in London to advise on the transaction. That was how Jonathan entered our lives and entered Headmistress’s rather fusty parlor, which was where I saw him for the first time.
The room had none of the new eclecticism of Kate Reed’s flat, but had been decorated some fifty years ago by the elder Mrs. Hadley, from whom Headmistress had inherited the house. The furnishings were heavy and ornate, as was the style in the earlier part of our century. In keeping with its formal atmosphere, Headmistress used the parlor to receive prospective parents and their daughters, or her most special guests, serving them tea in bone china and using the linens from her grandmother’s wedding chest, for which she personally supervised the starching, pressing, and folding. An antique Belgian point de gaze tablecloth of roses with raised petals covered the tea table, revealing only its lower legs, which looked as if they belonged on a colossal mahogany giant.
During their meeting, I had poked my head in the door to ask Headmistress a question, and Jonathan caught my eye. He looked quite boldly at me, making me blush. Before Headmistress could open her mouth, he had leapt to his feet requesting an introduction. One was dutifully provided, and I gave him a little nod, all the while assessing how tall and handsome he was, how white his collar, how starched his shirt, and how well-tailored his coat of subtle velour stripes. He had long hands so nicely shaped and so very clean that the white arc at the bottoms of his fingernails seemed to glow. I could not judge the color of his eyes. Hazel, perhaps, with a touch of amber. It appeared that he had had, that very morning, a haircut and a shave at his barber’s. A hat, fashionable, but not ridiculous or unmanly, sat on the table. It looked new.
He inquired as to what subjects I taught, and was told that I instructed the girls in etiquette, decorum, and reading. He fumbled for words, making a feeble joke about being deficient in the first two areas, but considered himself rather well read for a solicitor. Headmistress dismissed me, but not before I looked him straight in the eye and smiled.
The next day Headmistress informed me that Mr. Harker had offered to lecture my reading class on the importance of developing strong literary tastes. He arrived a week later with notes in hand. He told the girls that as a student, he had read Goethe in translation and was so moved by the work that he decided to learn enough of the German language to enjoy the original. He had hoped that at least one girl present would develop that sort of serious literary sensibility. For those with more romantic tastes, he read a poem by Mr. Shelley, furtively glancing at me as he read, and blatantly staring at me as he explained its meaning. He looked very tired, as if he had been up the night before composing his lecture. At tea afterward, he confessed that that was exactly what he had done, and asked Headmistress’s permission to call upon us again. She said, “If you mean to call upon Wilhelmina, then the answer is yes.”
He stammered out a short sentence: “Yes, that is precisely what I meant.” He then left in such a hurry that he had to return to collect his hat.
That was the beginning of our courtship: a year of fruitful visits, Sunday strolls and picnics, and lengthy conversations about similar interests over tea, culminating in a proposal of marriage put to Headmistress just weeks ago, who accepted on my behalf with delight.
“It is the perfect culmination of every lesson I have taught you, Wilhelmina. You will be sorely missed here, but your success will be an inspiration to our pupils and a superb advertisement for the school. I am as happy as a mother that I had a hand in your good fortune, and even happier that you did not need to marry beneath you.”
We both knew that it had been a danger; girls with my ambiguous family background were usually left with the choice of marrying a man of even less status or spinsterhood. In fact, Mr. Hawkins, who had reared Jonathan after his parents died in an epidemic, did voice some consternation about me. I’m certain that he thought I was a fortune hunter. With Jonathan’s good looks, education, and bright future, he had his pick of many girls from prominent families. But Jonathan explained to his uncle that we two orphans had found immediate kinship, in addition to romantic attraction. We understood the loneliness that only parentless children experience, and we both longed to create a family that would give us the sort of domestic life we had yearned for as children. After a long tea with Headmistress, and after interrogating me, Mr. Hawkins gave us his blessing. “Pardon my caution in this matter, Miss Murray,” he said to me. “Jonathan is my liege, my kin, and my heir. I am thoroughly satisfied as to your character, and I am sure that you will be a lovely wife and a solid partner to him.”
These days, when sitting with Jonathan, sipping tea and having a simple discussion, I was overtaken with gratitude for my good fortune. Unlike Kate, I was not “in the middle of things,” where I might meet a compatible mate, nor did I have the family connections that would bring me a man of distinction. My dearest friend, Lucy, was a year younger than I and had already turned down a dozen offers of marriage from men she always tried to send my way. But after rejection by Lucy, those men simply pursued other heiresses of lesser beauty and wealth until they found one who accepted their offer.
Jonathan was above all that. He was good and kind and honorable, and he had an open mind and a broad way of thinking. He put love above fortune, and though he was manly and protective, he also encouraged me to read books and newspapers so that we might discuss literature, which I have always enjoyed, and also current events, which I must admit that between him and Kate, I had begun to find more interesting.
Today, he entered that same parlor, removing his hat with what I can only describe as flourish. He kissed me on the lips, an intimacy we had allowed since our engagement. “You will not regret the day you agreed to marry me, Miss Murray.”
“I never believed I would, Mr. Harker,” I replied, remaining on my tiptoes, hoping that
he would kiss me again. I let my arm linger around his neck, enjoying the broadness of his shoulders.
“Truly, Mina, something extraordinary has happened. A count, a member of the Austrian nobility, has retained the firm to conduct a substantial real estate transaction in London. My uncle is consumed with settling two entailed country estates and has turned this affair entirely over to me.”
Jonathan’s eyes, today honey-brown, had a new sparkle. His skin was flushed with the early summer warmth and with his own enthusiasm. “After a lengthy correspondence, the Count was very specific that my uncle send me as his personal emissary. I leave in a few days for the duchy of Styria.”
I wanted to share Jonathan’s enthusiasm, but all I comprehended was that this business would take him out of the country and away from me.
“Don’t you see, Mina? A substantial bonus will be coming to me. We will have a very tidy sum of money to begin our married life, enough to lease one of those little town houses you have set your heart on in Pimlico.”
I slapped my hand to my mouth in surprise, a most unladylike gesture, but I could not help myself. “Do you mean it, Jonathan?” I asked. “You would not toy with me about so important a subject?” I had spent hours imagining Mr. and Mrs. Harker living in one of those brand-new houses with a cozy parlor, two bedrooms, a dining room, a kitchen, and a water closet.
Jonathan saw my happiness. He picked me up by the waist and twirled me around. “Mr. Harker! You forget yourself!” I teased.
“Oh, no, Mina, when I finally forget myself, it will be much more interesting than this!” Since our formal engagement, Jonathan had begun to hint at the excitement of the marriage bed, which of course, both thrilled and embarrassed me.
I poured our tea and sat down, and Jonathan sat in the chair next to me, pulling it close. “Of course I would not tease you, Mina. Seeing you happy makes me happy. I have sent for a brochure on the property. After my business with this count is concluded, I shall be more than ready to negotiate the lease. Our first home will have two bedrooms. Do you think that Quentin will mind sharing a room with little Maggie for the first few years of their lives?”