Karen Essex

by Karen Essex

  Jonathan and I had spent endless hours picturing the children we would have together, their names and characteristics, and the details of their early years.

  “But little Maggie may arrive first. We will have to ask her if she would mind a baby brother invading her nursery.”

  “Maggie is a very generous child,” Jonathan said, breaking into a broad smile at the thought of his future daughter. “She will be delighted to share her quarters with her brother, provided he respects the dollies that Father has given her. Do you know, Mina, that I have already bought her one.”

  “You bought Maggie a doll?” I asked.

  Jonathan was blushing. “I went to the shops yesterday and found an entire department devoted to children’s toys! Imagine! I bought a dolly for Maggie and a little wooden train for Quentin.”

  I squealed, wrapping my arms around myself at the thought of Jonathan’s love for our future children. “I hope you don’t think me foolish,” he said.

  “I think you are the most wonderful man I have ever met!” I said, and I leaned forward and kissed him delicately on his lips. He reached into his pocket and brought out a small jewelry box, handing it to me. I had been given so few gifts in my life that I was not sure how long I should wait to open it. “Well, go on,” he said, smiling. “The box is not the gift, Mina.”

  I opened it slowly. Inside, resting on alpine green velvet, sat a gold filigree heart on a chain, with a small gold key attached as an amulet. Both the heart and the key were dotted with little amethysts. I took it out of the box and let it hang in the air. To me, the little stones were as dazzling as diamonds.

  “It’s the key to my heart, Mina, which you already possess.” He took the necklace from me and fastened it around my neck.

  “It is beautiful, Jonathan. I shall treasure it,” I said. I pressed the necklace into my breastbone.

  “I have wanted to give you something for a long time, but I did not know if it would be appropriate. Today, I could not help myself. I was carried away with buying gifts for my family.” Jonathan reached into another pocket and retrieved a small leather-bound notebook. “I also purchased one of these for you and one for myself. I leave tomorrow on my journey, but let us record our every thought and experience so that when I return, reading the diaries will compensate for the time we spent apart.”

  “What a lovely idea,” I said, running my hand over the smooth brown leather.

  “There must be no secrets between a man and his wife. We must share our innermost thoughts. That is the way to keep a marriage vital and fresh.” Jonathan had been reading marriage manuals since we announced our engagement.

  Every woman intuitively knows to censor her thoughts when expressing them to a man, husband or otherwise. Undoubtedly men go through a similar process when speaking to women. But the sincerity of Jonathan’s words touched me, so I thought I would try to confide at least a small part of my recent experience.

  “Does sharing innermost thoughts also apply to one’s dreams?” I asked.

  He blushed. “Dreams are out of our control, Mina.”

  “I have had disturbing dreams of late,” I said. “Frightening dreams, in which people are doing bad things to me, hurting me.”

  Again, he took my hand. “Dear Mina, who could possibly want to harm you, even in a dream?”

  “I dreamt that I was being attacked by a man.”

  He waited, and then he dropped my hand. He took a sip of his tea. “I was afraid of this very sort of thing. Did you not tell me that Kate Reed took you into those terrible tenement houses in the worst part of the city, and then dragged you to the offices of the very men who built them, where she confronted them?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Do you not think it dangerous for a woman to be running around the filthiest part of London, and then confronting the men who developed it?”

  “Yes, of course I do, but it is Kate who confronts. I am as quiet as a mouse.”

  “But that neighborhood is rife with criminals. You might have been hurt. Don’t you see, Mina? Venturing into these seedy worlds with Kate is giving you nightmares. The mind doctors now say that dreams are reflections of one’s own fears. If you are exposed to frightening places and frightening men, then it follows logically that you will dream of being attacked.” Jonathan considered himself a thoroughly modern man, following all the new trends in science, medicine, and industry and especially the explanations of Mr. Darwin about human evolution.

  “But the dreams are upsetting,” I said. “The actual experiences were not.”

  “Your unconscious mind gave you the dream to warn you against doing these things again.” He took both my hands and kissed them. “When we are married, all bad dreams will disappear. I shall banish them from our kingdom, my princess!”

  Jonathan’s concern for my well-being always had the effect of salve on the wounds of my childhood. Had anyone ever cared for me so? Yet I did not want my activities with Kate prematurely curtailed.

  “Let us strike a bargain,” I said. “If I promise not to venture into dangerous situations, will you allow me to assist Kate until we are married? After that, I will be too busy making our home. Besides, I only learned stenography and typing to help you, and that is what I shall do, at least until our first child is born.”

  The tension melted from his jaw and relaxed into a big, boyish grin. “That sounds like my girl,” he said.

  “I love your smile, Mr. Harker, and I will do anything to keep it on your face,” I said, touching his cheek.

  “But no secrets between us, Mina? No matter what misadventures you are led into at the hands of Miss Kate Reed?”

  “No, my darling, I promise,” I said, wondering how I would keep my side of the bargain if I had another strange episode. “No secrets.”

  22 July 1890

  Jonathan had been gone two weeks, and the school term was coming to an end, when Kate invited me to accompany her on an assignment. Godfrey and Louise Gummler, husband and wife spiritualists and photographers, had risen to popularity in recent years in London, thriving in a city where many who had claimed to photograph spirits had already been exposed and driven away. A newspaper photographer that Kate knew had examined their photographs of clients with spirits hovering in the background and had suspected that they used a sophisticated double-exposure technique to achieve the effect. A French spirit photographer using the same technique had just been put on trial and convicted in Paris. The Gummlers charged a good deal of money for their service, and Kate and Jacob, always keen to expose fraudulent activity, were anxious to get to the truth of the situation.

  Kate had convinced her father to give her the money to purchase an elaborate mourning gown to play the part of a bereaved mother. “I suppose you can wear it again after I’m dead,” he had said, handing over the money. “It will please your mother to see you so nicely turned out.”

  This evening, she was somberly beautiful in a swirl of black silk moiré. I suppose that she wanted the Gummlers to see that she was a woman of means, ripe to be swindled out of a goodly sum of money. Either that, or she secretly enjoyed wearing silk finery and could not admit it, considering her ideals. Jacob wore a dark suit, which he had purchased years before to cover funerals of important people for the newspapers. He did not look quite the equal of his “wife,” but men of means often did not pay much attention to their dress. He had, however, found some way of bleaching his fingers clean of their perennial ink stains.

  I came along as godmother of their fictitious deceased child. I did not own a mourning gown, but Kate assured me that the dark-colored dress I wore as a uniform would suffice. I put on a short cotton jacket to improve my style, but Kate said it brightened up the look too much and made me take it off. She threw a coarse black woolen shawl around my shoulders and stood back to look at me. I turned to look in the mirror.

  “I look like your poor relation,” I said.

  “That is the point, Mina. You are to look as miserable as possible, and wit
h your pretty face and perfect ivory skin that glows like a white rose in the moonlight, and the two emeralds that you call eyes, it is rather difficult.”

  The Gummlers’ parlor was a study in fringe. Flowered Spanish shawls draped most of the furnishings. Madam Gummler herself was a middle-aged woman with red streaks of rouge caked on her cheeks and powder in the creases that ran from her nostrils to her mouth. Godfrey Gummler appeared to have taken all the hair from his head and applied it to his face. He was bald as a baby’s behind, but wore the long, furry muttonchops and capacious beard made popular years ago after the Crimean War.

  The centerpiece of the room was a boxlike camera, also draped with a Spanish shawl. Madam Gummler put her arm around Kate as she ushered us inside. “My dear, I was touched by your letter. Tragic! To find one’s little infant dead in the crib! Taken from you without warning, without illness, for no foreseeable reason!” She called Jacob and myself angels of mercy, “flanking this lovely woman in her time of need. How fortunate she is to have two stalwarts such as you by her side.” And then to the three of us: “Do sit down.”

  Kate sat quietly at the table as Madam Gummler poured three cups of tea, placing their saucers on little lace doilies to protect the shawl on the table.

  “First, we shall call upon the spirit of your dear little son,” Madam Gummler said. “After we establish a firm connection, my husband will take the photograph. As you can see by our walls, we have had great success in the past, reuniting the living and the dead.”

  The walls of the parlor were lined with framed photographs of the Gummlers’ living subjects, all seated in this very room, each with a ghostly figure hovering in the background. The portraits covered the walls from the wainscot to the floral wallpaper trim bordering the ceiling. The ghosts varied; some were identical to the subject, which Madam Gummler explained meant that the camera had captured the subject’s etheric body, or higher self, while other spirits were different entities entirely.

  “Here is Sir Joseph Lansbury with his beloved mother,” Godfrey said. Sir Joseph looked to be a dignified man in his forties; the ghost of his mother was a matron in a white cap and white dress with a lace collar. Others were photographed with baby ghosts wearing christening costumes, or older ghosts in antique garments. Some of the apparitions were angelic forms or, in some cases, mere swirls of light that one had to presume were spirits.

  “The spirits themselves have told us how the photography comes into being,” Godfrey explained. “They manifest themselves by merging our sphere with their own. This creates a mixed aura. When rays of light pass through this hybrid atmosphere, they are refracted, which causes their images to be projected on the plate.”

  “That is most interesting, and a fair scientific explanation,” Jacob said.

  “It is a mere veil that separates you from your child, Mrs. Reed. Just a thin membrane, invisible, made of vapor. Believe me, he is just on the other side. What is the little darling’s name?”

  Kate, who apparently should have had a life on the stage, produced a single teardrop and said, “Simon. After his grandfather.” Jacob reached out and touched her hand. What players they were! For my part, I sat quietly sipping tea and trying to look as lugubrious as possible. Godfrey went about the room lighting candles. He lowered the gas lamps on either side of the fireplace.

  “Simon. Lovely. Now we begin,” Madam Gummler said.

  “Should we all hold hands?” Jacob asked.

  “No, none of that nonsense is necessary,” she replied. She raised her hands to the ceiling and with eyes turned upward, she called out in a voice from deep within—octaves lower than her speaking voice. “I call upon the heavenly bodies and angels of high rank to deliver the spirit of the child Simon Reed! Simon Reed, your mother is calling to you! If little Simon has already made his transition and is sitting in heaven with God, then ask the Lord to allow us to borrow his spirit for a brief moment to comfort his bereaved mother. Let us borrow him from eternity! O Holy Ones—Michael; Jophiel; Uriel; Gabriel; and Afriel, protector of babies and children—hear my pleas and answer me!”

  Her eyes were closed, and she swayed gently as she waited for a reply from the heavens. I looked about the room. Everyone’s eyes were shut tight. Candles flickered, making the photographs on the walls doubly eerie. But nothing happened.

  “Simon Reed, your mother, father, and godmother are calling out to you. O Spirit Mothers, free the infant to come to us, and we shall return him to you, where he may rest in your holy bosom for eternity.”

  Suddenly, the medium’s breathing pattern changed, and she started to take short breaths, as if she was about to have an asthmatic attack. She threw herself back in her chair as if something had knocked the wind out of her.

  “Another presence has entered the room,” said Madam Gummler, opening her eyes and looking directly at me. “Is there anyone near and dear to you who might inhabit the spirit world?”

  She looked convincingly afraid but excited at the same time. Either she was an actress with the skills of Ellen Terry, or she had genuinely felt something happen that had gone undetected by the rest of us.

  I looked at her blankly.

  “Anyone close to you who is deceased?” she asked.

  “Why, everyone,” I said. Jacob laughed. Kate opened her eyes and looked at me angrily. “Surely we are not dead, Wilhelmina.”

  “N-no, of course not,” I stammered. “Perhaps my mother may be trying to contact me.”

  “No, it is emphatically a male who is attempting contact.”

  “I cannot think who it may be,” I said, hoping that it was not my father. The last time I remembered seeing him, he beat me and yelled horrible things at me. I did not want him manifesting here in this parlor, intruding upon the new life I had created and saying things that would disturb Kate’s opinion of me.

  “Perhaps it is Simon,” Kate offered.

  “Yes, oh yes, I do feel little Simon as well. Yes, I do. Oh, what a sweet little darling. He has a message for you, Mrs. Reed.” Madam Gummler closed her eyes tighter as if she were straining to hear someone. Then she spoke in a high, delicate voice, imitating a small child. “‘I am here, Mama. I did not leave you. It’s just that God wanted me by his side.’”

  “Oh!” Kate exclaimed.

  “Let us take the photograph while the child is with us,” Godfrey said, rising from the table. He lit the two lamps on either side of the mantel, drowning out the softer light of the candles. “We must have enough light to take the photograph but not enough to frighten away the spirit,” he said. “These are delicate balances that must be maintained.” He placed a high-backed Jacobean-style chair in front of the fireplace and asked Kate to sit in it. “Now, Madam Gummler, if you please.”

  Madam Gummler rose from her chair, tossing the corner of her shawl that had drooped off her shoulder back around her neck. She walked to the camera and placed her hand above it. “This encourages the process,” she said, swirling her hand over the camera.

  “How should I pose?” Kate asked.

  “Hold out your hands as if to receive your little boy,” Godfrey said.

  Kate did as she was told, sitting very still while Godfrey took the picture.

  Madam Gummler put her hand over her chest and took a deep breath, looking as if she were about to swoon. She turned to me. “Someone is trying to contact you, and he is being most persistent. Would you like a photograph, dear?”

  I shook my head violently.

  “Please do not reject the spirits who have come to see you. It insults them,” she said. “I work to keep my parlor a hospitable environment for those on the other side. Do not destroy my efforts with your skepticism.”

  “I am not skeptical,” I replied, trying to keep my voice calm. “I simply cannot afford your fee.”

  “Why, Wilhelmina, we will pay for the photograph,” Kate said magnanimously. “Perhaps little Simon wants a picture with his Aunt Mina,” she said, taunting me with the moniker my students used for me.
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br />   “Yes, Wilhelmina, please allow us to get this for you,” Jacob said. I supposed that he and Kate wanted to gather more evidence for their story.

  “But Mr. Gummler has already taken the camera away,” I said. He had indeed left the room with the camera immediately after Kate had been photographed.

  “Ah, but I have returned.” For how long he had been standing at the parlor door I did not know. “I unloaded the exposed plate in the darkroom, and I have placed a fresh plate in the camera,” he said, attaching the instrument to its tripod. “If you please,” he said to me, pointing to the antique chair, which suddenly looked to my mind like it had been used in the Inquisition.

  I did not see how I could refuse. I took Kate’s place in the chair and, sitting very still and very glum, allowed myself to be photographed.

  “I understand from other clients of yours that you allowed them to witness the development process,” Jacob said. “May we be afforded that privilege?”

  “My pleasure,” Godfrey said, “if you can spare the time.”

  We entered a small darkroom, foul with the odor of the chemicals of Godfrey’s trade. The room was stuffy and lit with a single lantern, its glass darkened with red-black paint. “It only takes a minute or two to develop the negative plates,” Godfrey said as he brushed both sides of the plate with a little camel-haired brush to remove the dust. “High-contrast pictures must be developed quickly, and in these cases, the contrast between the living subject and the spirit provides a veritable chiaroscuro of dark and light.” He placed the first negative in a pan and mixed a solution that smelled like ammonia in a large cup. After stirring it like a sorcerer with a glass rod, Godfrey poured the solution over the negative and swished the dish from side to side.

  “Remarkable!” he said. “Mother, come look at this.”

  Madam Gummler lowered her head over the dish. “Why look, there is the little babe,” she exclaimed. “There is your Simon, come to see his dear mother.”