Karen Essex

by Karen Essex

  “How do you know that, sir?” I asked.

  “Because they thank me. The dead speak to us if only we have the patience to listen. The others that were lost to the sea, eaten up by the very fish we catch for our own dinners, they speak too, not in words but in terrible howling cries. And who can blame them? Young men losing their lives in their prime? One day, strong and brave, like young gods, then at the whim of the winds, they become food for the fishes. Strange, if you think on it. They have made cannibals of us, those fish.”

  I did not want to think too long on that gruesome image, nor about communications from the dead. I had come to Whitby to escape that. I gave him my name and inquired of his. He told me that he was known as the whaler. I was about to bid my new acquaintance good day when he invited me to see the very place where he had washed to shore.

  “On some days, you can still hear the cries of the sailors,” he whispered, and something bade me to accompany him back down the steps and toward the shore.

  The day was cloudy and not warm. A few bathers gathered at the shoreline, but none braved the water. Optimists had rented big umbrellas and chairs, sitting under blankets against the wind. The sea was boisterous, crashing relentlessly against the cliffs in the distance, spewing waves onto the beach and forcing the bathers to move their chairs away from the encroaching waters. I hiked up my skirt as far as I dared as we strolled along in the sand. Vendors selling tea, lemonade, and cakes had set up stands along the beach. Suddenly, the old man pulled me aside, guiding me by the arm to hide behind the tea stand.

  A tall man with a large physique and ginger-colored hair sticking out of a cap walked brusquely on the beach, the legs of his pants rolled up to his knees, revealing powerful-looking calves. As he walked, he roared at the sea, as if he were trying to scare it away from the rock-bound shore. “That man appears to be in an oratory competition with the sea,” I said, pulling my shawl close against the wind.

  “Aye, best to avoid him. He’ll nark me till I’m mithered.”

  “Has he tried to harm you?” I asked. The man did, indeed, look insane and somewhat dangerous, either exercising his arms or waving them at some unseen thing as he yelled into the waves.

  The whaler laughed. “Harm me? No, he’ll fill me with pints and make me tell him my stories. He’ll take me off to a place where we cannot take a young lady and pour ale into me until I cannot walk.”

  The old man explained that the fellow was a writer who managed a theater. He had come to Whitby chasing stories of monsters and ghosts, looking for a play to write for a famous London actor. “What is his name?” I asked.

  “The redheaded man?”

  “No, sir, the actor. I enjoy the London theater when I am able to attend.”

  The old man had been told the name as if he should know it as well as he knew his own, but, as he had never heard it before, he had promptly forgotten it. “Along with most of what was in my brain,” he added. “But I remember all the stories of the haunted and the dead, and that is what that fellow likes to hear. Claims my stories are worth sheer gold, but he only offers me the pints. What are my stories worth to you, young lady?”

  I explained that I was but a poor schoolteacher with no money to spare.

  “Then your beauty will be my reward for the tales I tell you,” he said. “I’ll not be fuggled out of what’s due me till I get me eyes full of you and your coal-black hair.”

  With the other man long down the shore, the old whaler and I resumed our walk. He showed me the place where he had swum to shore after the shipwreck, and where the bodies of his shipmates had been found. I did not comment. I did not want to be thought without compassion for the dead, but I did not want to linger. What was once a lovely shoreline now seemed like a massive graveyard, each rock on the beach a headstone.

  He stopped walking, cocking his ear toward the waves. “Can ye hear her?”

  I listened but only heard the sound of the water relentlessly rolling onto the shore. “Hear who?” I asked.

  “Mirabelle! Oh, she was a good girl, but she lost her head to a bad man, as women are wont to do. Some devilish seaman, used the poor girl up and then admitted that he was leaving her to go back to his wife and seven kiddies.”

  I was about to tell him that I did not want to hear two sad stories in one afternoon when I thought I heard a woman’s voice roll onto the shore with one of the waves. I stopped in my tracks.

  “You heard it,” he said, matter-of-factly.

  “I did hear something,” I said. “I cannot be sure what it was.”

  “My lady, it was Mirabelle. Listen to my tale and then judge for yourself. From the day the sailor went away, Mirabelle walked along the sea, longing for him, hoping to see his ship sail back into the harbor. She knew in her heart that he would miss her and come back to her.”

  “And did he?” I asked, anxious to hear a happy ending.

  “Of course not. And the poor girl, by calling out to him, was playing a dangerous game. Too many sailors have lost their lives to these waters over the many years, and being young and virile men, they did not want to die. No, miss, they resented God for taking their lives and so they make bargains with the devil.

  “The spirits know that by stealing the blood of a young woman, they can bring themselves back to life! That is the truth of it. The spirit of a handsome young man came to Mirabelle at twilight and kept her in his company until dawn. He made love to her and at the same time drained her of as much blood as he could take from her, and from that blood, he made himself stronger. She could not resist him, for such passion makes an addict of a young woman. He had a strange power over her, and his kisses that were killing her also made her swoon with pleasure!

  “The girl’s parents were innkeepers who expected her to put in an honest day’s work, but soon she had no life in her to hold a broom, and she fell asleep as she tried to do her chores. The parents thought she was sick and called for a doctor, but he was helpless to name the disease that was wasting her away. Every night, she sneaked out of the inn and met her lover, who was getting more powerful with each meeting, while Mirabelle, once a beauty like you, became so pale and thin that she was almost invisible. She refused food and could never sleep. Then, one morning, she was found dead at the hearth, a broom in her hand. Her poor body had given out. And just as her mother found her daughter’s body crumpled at the hearth, she heard the father welcoming in a loud and happy voice a guest at the inn. He was a young sailor who had been given up for drowned some ten years before, and there he was, looking no older than the day that he had disappeared.

  “You see, Miss Mina, the air is thick with the spirits of the young sailors and fishermen who died in the sea. They still yearn for the love and touch of beautiful women, young men that they were when they were forced to leave their bodies and earthly pleasure behind. I tell you this to warn you, beauty that you are with your jet-colored hair and your lovely skin more pure and delicious than the top of the cream, and those eyes of yours that stole their green from a sultan’s emerald. Beware when you walk this shore. Pay no heed to the blether of the boggarts. In death, they possess silvery tongues that can charm a maiden. If the spirits of the dead call out to you, swaddle yourself tight with your shawl, make the sign of the cross for protection, and walk away.”

  Chapter Four

  Whitby, 14 August 1890

  The Austrian count has a beautiful daughter with a spectacular inheritance and renowned social standing, and Jonathan has fallen madly in love with her.” I looked into the mirror, noting that a deep crevice had snaked its way between my eyebrows, bifurcating my forehead and making me look older than my years.

  “What an imagination, Mina,” Lucy said. “Jonathan loves only you.”

  I had not heard a word from my fiancé in the five weeks since he had left London. At first, I feared for his safety, but bad news travels quicker than the good, so if something had befallen him, I would have already received word of it. Now I worried that he had met someone better
suited to be his wife. The miracle of his love had always seemed like a fairy-tale gift to me, an orphan with nothing but good skin and nice eyes to recommend herself. Perhaps he was more ambitious than I had judged, and he had found someone whose connections could abet those ambitions.

  “It is possible to love one person until a truer love comes along,” I said. “That is what the novels tell us. That is what history tells us. Guinevere loved Arthur until she met Lancelot. Do you not agree that it is possible to love one person but encounter another whose very soul speaks to you?”

  Lucy picked up a fan from the dressing table, waving it in front of her face, though it was not warm in the bedroom. She had become thinner in the last two weeks. Her peach-colored moiré dress threatened to slip from her shoulders, but she still had good color in her cheeks, and her spirits were generally high.

  “You are not answering me because you know that I am correct,” I said. “It is entirely possible that Jonathan has either met someone he considers more appropriate to be his wife, or that he has reconsidered his feelings for me.”

  “Don’t be a goose, Mina,” she said, making light of my fears. “Now put on your pretty smile and help me receive Mr. Holmwood and his friends.”

  Holmwood and his school friends, the infamous Morris Quince and Dr. John Seward, were waiting in the parlor when Lucy and I entered the room, but Mrs. Westenra shuttled us to the dining room so quickly that I barely had time to put a face to each name. When we sat down, she apologized ad nauseam for the humbleness of the table and of the fare, regretting that she had not brought the proper china from Hampstead and that she had allowed the cook to go visit her family rather than accompany the Westenras to Whitby. “But my health is to blame. I just do not think of things as I did when I was well.”

  She dominated the conversation with this topic all the way through the soup course, when Holmwood, who was seated next to her, finally put an end to it. “I will send my man to fetch everything from your Hampstead pantry and kidnap the cook from her mother’s cottage if it will make you feel more at ease, madam.”

  I found Holmwood to be charming in a dutiful way. His sharp nose was just the right size for his face, which was long and angular, and the right proportion to sit above his lips, which were not full, but neither were they thin and reptilian, as with so many unfortunate men. He had a gangly masculinity, and it was easy to envision him succeeding at the leisure activities for which he was known to have passion—riding, hunting, and sailing. Despite these sports, his hands were slender and effeminate. His coloring matched Lucy’s, but his hair was slightly darker and thinner. I suspected that the few curls that dangled about his scalp would soon desert him.

  He paid lavish attention to Mrs. Westenra, whose health once again bloomed under his gaze. She did her best to ignore the much-discussed Morris Quince, who sat next to me, whereas I was the unrelenting object of the eyes of Dr. John Seward, who sat opposite me. The three men had planned to set off on a pleasure sail in the morning to Scarborough, but Quince had arrived with his right arm in a sling, owing to falling off his horse in an early morning canter along the shore.

  “The animal stumbled over a rock and tossed me off his back,” he said in an accent I’d never before heard. It was not the flat American accent I was accustomed to. When I had asked him where in America he resided, he cocked his head and answered, “New York,” as if there were no alternative locations in his country. He pronounced certain words as if he were English, and I wondered if he had picked up an accent at Oxford, or if this was a peculiar way that wealthy people in America spoke. Quince said that he would not be joining his friends for the sail because his arm would render him useless. “I would be a liability,” he said. “Dead weight.”

  I suppose that he could be described as dashing. One could see him galloping along the violent Yorkshire coast, pushing his steed through the crashing waves. What one could not envision was him losing control of a horse and falling off. He was Arthur’s height but had a more substantial frame. His neck did not want to be contained by his collar. His hands, which were large, with long elegant fingers and nails cut razor straight, fascinated me. Though they were perhaps the most manicured male hands I had ever seen, they seemed to have great power. The wineglass almost disappeared in his palm as he picked it up. While Arthur’s hair hung about his face like curled fringe on a shawl, Quince’s was of a single unit, a great, beautiful flow of thick walnut that operated as one organism.

  He had big gleaming teeth and an easy smile, though he did not smile often. By Mrs. Westenra’s cautious description, I had expected someone entirely different, some American rogue whose character was easy to read. Morris Quince was not that man. With a painter’s intense gaze, he stared at everything through large, brown, guileless eyes. It didn’t seem to matter whether he was looking at his roast beef; at the color of the wine as it was poured; or at Lucy, whose face he studied as she answered a question posed by Dr. Seward. All the while, he—Quince, that is—was carrying on a conversation with Arthur, predicting the velocity of the morning winds. Mrs. Westenra pretended to listen to that conversation, but she too was fixated on Lucy and on the plates of her guests, gauging, I thought, whether our hearty consumption indicated approval of the food.

  Dr. Seward, on the other hand, had finished his supper and was staring at me. He had tried to make conversation with me several times, though I did not know what to say to him. When we were introduced, he had taken my hand and looked me over hungrily as if I were his dinner, and he, a starving man. Though he was the only one of the three friends who was not wealthy—he was a doctor at a private asylum—he had a regal brow, as if the cliché of the intelligent having larger brains were true.

  For one brief moment, all casual chatter subsided, and Mrs. Westenra filled the space. “Dr. Seward, I must ask your opinion on the subject of angina.”

  Arthur turned all his attention to this conversation, leaving Morris Quince and Lucy to sit in uncomfortable silence next to each other. Lucy pushed her peas to and fro as if watching their journey from one side of the plate to the next was interesting, but she did not eat. Perhaps she could not imagine what to say to Quince, but she was usually at ease in any conversation, particularly with men. Yet she sat there as if he did not exist. I was yanked out of my reverie by the sound of Quince’s voice directed toward me. “Miss Lucy tells us that you are affianced, Miss Mina, but your gentleman is not present. Does that mean that the good doctor might have a chance at your affection?”

  “Mr. Quince!” Mrs. Westenra affected a face of great mortification, but not so genuine as that of Dr. Seward, who blushed purple.

  “I know I should apologize, but I am not sorry,” Quince said, his toothy grin in full form splashed across his face like a half moon risen in the night sky. “I am a brash son of a brash denizen of a brash city. John is my great friend, and I just want to know if this Mr. Harker is good enough for you, Miss Mina.”

  Arthur stood up. “Dear God, Quince, have you learned nothing in my company?” He turned to me. “Miss Murray, he’s an insensitive and ill-bred American oaf upon whom I have taken pity and befriended. Can you forgive him?”

  No one seemed more entertained than Lucy, who showed the first sign of life this evening. “Mina is not so delicate as she seems. She manages classrooms filled with little girls who are more unruly than you men.”

  I mustered my courage and turned to Quince. “I must inform you that Mr. Harker exceeds all expectations.” I cast my eyes downward as Headmistress taught me to do when in the company of men.

  Soon thereafter, Arthur gathered his friends to leave, allowing that they were to set sail very early in the morning. “Sure you won’t change your mind?” he asked Quince, who lifted his injured arm up as an answer.

  “Best that I stay dry.”

  John Seward took my elbow and moved me aside. He looked at me with watery eyes that had seemed to go very dark. “I am pained to have been the cause of your embarrassment, Miss Mina,” h
e said. “How can I make amends?”

  He was handsome in his way. His voice was both authoritative and soothing, which I imagined made his patients feel at ease. Its low register imbued him with more masculinity than his thin frame suggested. And there was a bright intelligence in his gray eyes, which were trying to understand me, or read my thoughts. Or perhaps diagnose me.

  “There is nothing to apologize for, Dr. Seward. Your friend is prankish. It’s rather charming,” I said, casting my eyes downward again, hoping that the conversation would end.

  “I shall have to be satisfied with that,” he said. He dropped my hand, but not until he held it for longer than was comfortable to me.

  With that they began to take their leave, and I noticed that the final and most heartfelt good-byes of the evening were between Arthur and Mrs. Westenra.

  After everyone left, Mrs. Westenra said, “Why, Mina, you seemed to have captured our Dr. Seward. He was crazy about Lucy, but of course he did not really expect to conquer a girl with her fortune. On the other hand, were you not affianced to Mr. Harker, he might have made a fine match for you.”

  I did not take her words as an insult because they merely bespoke the truth. In fact, I went to bed thinking of Dr. Seward’s attention. If Jonathan abandoned me, could I learn to love the doctor?

  After we changed into our nightclothes and climbed into bed, I tried to make conversation with Lucy, but she pleaded exhaustion and shut her eyes tight against my words. Disappointed, I rolled over on my side and soon slipped into a dream.

  I lay on a divan in an unfamiliar parlor. Morris Quince, Arthur Holmwood, and Mrs. Westenra were standing above me with grave faces, watching as Dr. Seward’s hands pressed firmly into my stomach. He closed his eyes, feeling his way along the crevice below my ribs. I was without a corset, wearing a thin dressing gown. The tips of his fingers worked their way downward and along my pelvic bone, igniting all my nerves. Blood rose to my face, and I shut my eyes, turning away from the others’ gazes. Seward and I breathed in unison, our heavy inhalations the only sound in the room. I wanted him to continue to move his hands lower to where my body was stirring. I started to move my hips involuntarily, aware that I was being watched but unable to control my movements. I fought with my own desires, trying to steel my legs against parting, but my body would not cooperate with me. Horrified, I began to sweat and wriggle as the doctor’s hands massaged the soft part of my belly, thrilling me, only now they were not Seward’s hands but the big, beautiful, powerful hands of Morris Quince. I arched my back, so that the palms pressed into me, and I started to murmur, no longer caring what the spectators thought of me, only desiring the man’s touch.