Karen Essex

by Karen Essex

  I thought of Morris, of what true love had felt like, and that I would never again have that feeling. My husband had married me for my money, had successfully gotten control of it, and now may do with me as he pleased. I saw the obsequious manner with which Mr. Lymon treated Arthur, and I realized that those four all-important letters before his name, l-o-r-d, meant that no one would question his word against mine. I had to find another tactic.

  I let Arthur take me back to the house in Hampstead, which was supposed to be mine but is now his. I begged him to make a settlement with me so that I could live in my father’s house alone and in peace. I told him that he could have the money as long as he paid me a stipend to live on. “I beg of you as a gentleman and a peer. You know that you do not love me and never did. I will be satisfied with a small portion of my inheritance. We need never see each other again. I merely want my freedom.”

  He turned to me with a flash of anger such as I have never seen and said, “That is correct: I may do as I please. And it pleases me to tell you that if you do not begin to obey me as a wife should, I will have to resort to less gentle measures.”

  I had no idea what he meant by this and I was much too afraid to ask. Behind my back, he immediately sent for John Seward, who arrived with his sinister black bag. He mixed me a sedative, which I at first refused, but I was upset and confused and in shock. Craving some semblance of peace of mind, I swallowed it and I slept.

  When I awoke, Seward was still there. He has assumed total authority over me, Mina! And he has done so with a sort of self-satisfaction that I find disconcerting. I attribute it to the fact that he once confessed his feelings to me, and when I told my mother, she insulted him. She asked him how he thought a man with his lack of income and standing might woo and win a girl such as myself. He said to me later, “I am not so poor nor so poorly paid as your mother might think!” She had wounded his pride, but at the same time, she did not want to see me the wife of a man whose residence was a madhouse. I would never have been so unfeeling as she in my treatment of him, though I confess that I never had an ounce of affection for him.

  The next morning, my former suitor and now physician announced that I was to have more of the dreaded medicine for my breakfast. They have taken to giving it to me all the day long. I have devised a way to make them think that I am drinking it, but as soon as I am out of their sight, I vomit it into one of the window boxes. Still, some of it gets into my body and I feel quite delirious much of the time. John Seward sits by my bedside, and, under his doctor’s guise, he asks the most intrusive personal questions, Mina, about my monthlies! When I told him, blushing and looking away from his face, that they did not arrive on the same day every month and that oftentimes, I skipped a month altogether, he acted alarmed. “I was afraid of that, Your Ladyship,” which is what he has taken to calling me with the most ironical tone in his voice. I wish I could describe it to you. The undertone is that, though I now have a title, the balance of power between us has shifted, and he has the control over me. He convinced Arthur to hire a nurse to attend me, and she examines my menstrual blood and reports back to him on its characteristics and volume. I do not know what this has to do with making me well. But the more I protest that I am healthy, the more I am told that the protestation of well-being is a symptom of hysteria.

  Seward has proposed that I be taken to the asylum, Lindenwood, where I will be observed and treated by his colleague from Germany, a Dr. Von Helsinger. I have made it plain that I do not intend to comply with his wishes, but the more that I assert my will, the more he and Arthur insist that I am suffering from some sort of hysteria and require treatments only available in an asylum. I wonder if it is best to acquiesce to their demands so that I may be proven sane and left alone.

  I hate to burden you with these affairs. But, Mina, I am desperate. Perhaps Mr. Harker, as he is a solicitor, will be able to suggest a course of action that will rescue me from my present situation and give me my freedom from Arthur without becoming destitute.

  I await your response. Make haste, darling Mina!

  Your despondent and unfortunate friend,

  —Lucy

  What grief settled over me. Here was Lucy, my dearest friend, begging for help from me, and I had been caught up in my own troubles with Jonathan and unaware of her woes. Now she was in her grave and it was too late. I slowly opened the second envelope, hoping it contained better news. But how could it?

  4 October 1890

  Dear Mina,

  I am writing to you from inside Lindenwood, John Seward’s asylum on the river at Purfleet. Hilda has stolen some paper from Seward’s office and a pen. We patients are not supposed to have such instruments in our possession for fear of what dark uses we will make of them. I must confess that if I thought I would be successful, I would stab myself with this pen and end my life.

  I must be brief, for if I am caught writing to you, my “treatments” will become ever harsher, and I will be restrained again. Yes, you have read that correctly. Your Lucy, who you know to be of sound mind, has had her wrists and ankles shackled to a bed for having a “disobedient nature.” But I must not dwell on those inconsequential details, though I believe it would give me some comfort to know that someone has knowledge of what I have been subjected to within these walls.

  I was examined by Dr. Von Helsinger, who has prescribed a series of treatments that I fear is killing me. He is a most terrifying and bizarre man, though John Seward holds him in the highest esteem and believes that his unorthodox methods carry the seeds of genius and the answers to many perplexing medical problems. Arthur has now joined in this admiration, so there is no one to advocate for me against him. Von Helsinger explained to me that he has been performing experiments on women by transferring the blood of men, who he believes are stronger, more moral, healthier, and more rational, into women. Mina, you should see this man’s eyes as he talks about his work. He has the look of one of the insane who wander the streets, talking to invisible entities! John Seward and Arthur were at his side, listening to his madness as if it were the most brilliant lecture delivered by an Oxford don. They paid no attention to my look of disbelief.

  Now I must relate the horrible details of what they are doing to me. Remember, Mina, this is after other treatments that I thought I would not be able to endure—freezing cold baths, force-feeding—oh, it was all too horrendous, but I mustn’t linger on all that. I must get to the point, and my mind wanders these days as a result of the sedation and from the new treatments, which have weakened and sickened me so that I am no longer the Lucy you knew but some shadow self, who only exists in those moments when I conjure up a shred of hope that I will be released from this place.

  I know you will think this bizarre, but, believe me, I am not hallucinating. The two younger men take turns emptying their blood into me. I am drugged in advance so that I cannot resist. While he waits for the medicine to take effect, Von Helsinger asks me if the men do not deserve a little affection for their troubles. Too weak to resist, I say nothing. Whichever man is giving the blood—Arthur or John Seward—is encouraged to caress my body and kiss me. “There, little miss, is that not what you like?” Von Helsinger asks. “Oh yes, she likes this. Don’t you, Lucy? You liked it when Morris Quince touched your body, didn’t you?” Arthur taunts me with this, Mina. I never should have confessed my affair.

  Von Helsinger watches these acts with great fascination, even directing the men how to touch me, and even though it is plain that it is humiliating and repulsive to me. “If she pines for you, her body will accept the blood!” he says. Mina, the glint in his eyes as he instructs the men to have their way with me is truly frightening. The two younger men are enthralled by his every word. When Arthur isn’t taunting me, they are completely silent as they stroke and kiss me all over my body. I can hear their heavy breaths breaking the awful silence in the room. I cannot tell you the state of self-disgust this invokes in me. When Von Helsinger feels that my body is ready, he takes my naked arm and m
akes an incision into which he inserts a tube with a central rubber bulb for pumping. Then he rolls up the sleeve of my donor, tying a cord around the upper arm and rubbing the rest of the arm, stroking its muscles, looking for the right vein. After much examination, when he finds his target, he makes a similar incision in the arm of the man and inserts the other side of the tube.

  They have performed this operation two times. Each time, I feel weaker. I cannot take food, my sight is blurry, and I have little strength. In fact, I must close soon because this exercise has left me exhausted.

  I am trapped here. Arthur is my husband and therefore my guardian, and if he can persuade a doctor that I am mad, I can be committed here indefinitely. Seward and Von Helsinger are free to keep me here as a subject of their laboratory experiments, imprisoning me to aid their strange studies and to accommodate Arthur’s wishes to have me out of the way so that he may do whatever he likes with my father’s fortune. My fortune.

  Mina, time is of the essence. How I wish that I could send word to Morris. I know that you hold the lowest opinion of him, but I am also certain that there was some feeling in his heart for me, despite his having abandoned me, and that he would come to my rescue if he knew how desperate and acute my situation. Please present my letters to your dear husband and beg of him to think of a means of getting me released from this place. Oh, this horrible place! I feel it packed with the spirits of those who have died here! Sometimes I think I hear them moaning in the night. Time is crucial. I will not last long if they continue to administer the treatments. I cannot eat and I am shaking with fever.

  Your desperate friend,

  Lucy

  Kate’s ink-stained fingers gripped Lucy’s letters tightly, turning her nails and knuckles white with tension. No longer clad in black, she was back to the loose-fitting clothes she wore when working, but I could still see her chest move as she took short, audible breaths.

  We sat in the Cheshire Cheese off Fleet Street, where Bohemian artists and newspaper people fought over the table at which Doctor Johnson himself had once sat and held court. Kate ate lunch here so often that, without needing to order, a waiter had placed two plates with steaming rump steaks in front of us. They sat untouched.

  “What do you make of this, Kate? Did they kill Lucy? Should we go to the police?” I hadn’t been able to go to sleep after reading Lucy’s letters, and now my eyes were burning, my back ached, and my mind was a jumble of ruminations that had slammed against the walls of my brain all night long.

  “And present the letters of a ‘madwoman’ against the word of Lord Godalming? That would not be wise, Mina. You must try to think like a crime investigator. These letters do not prove a thing. Many doctors are experimenting with the transfusion of blood from one patient to another, sometimes with positive results. Some use the blood of lambs and claim it has revived dying patients entirely. Lucy had a very vivid imagination. You yourself have told me the story of how she imagined that the American was in love with her.”

  “She had quite a bit of help from that gentleman, who told her so.”

  “Nonetheless, she had a vivid and often prurient imagination. She thought all the boys were in love with her.”

  “And they were, if I recall,” I countered. I detected a little strain of the old jealousy that Kate had for the prettier and more flirtatious Lucy. “But those letters, Kate. We cannot just drop the matter. Lucy lost her life! She did not belong in an asylum and she was not sick.”

  “That is not exactly true.” She picked up her utensils and began to slice the meat. “You said that she had lost weight, and that she seemed quite out of her mind over this Morris Quince, and then even more disturbed over the loss of him. Perhaps she was completely mad by the time she wrote those letters.” Kate waved her fork at no one in particular. “On the other hand, madwomen are subjected to terrible things in the name of curing them. Oh poor Lucy. She should have just married the lord and kept the lover.”

  “I am afraid I may have made a pact with the devil,” I confessed. “I made arrangements with John Seward to take my husband to the asylum.”

  Kate had speared a chunk of steak with her fork but stopped short of putting it in her mouth. “Did you?”

  I explained to Kate that Jonathan had not been himself since he had contracted brain fever in Styria, and that when I told Seward of his condition, he offered to examine and treat him. I did not reveal the extraneous details of Jonathan’s infidelity, nor did I reveal the incidents that were leading me to believe that I too needed a doctor’s care. “Obviously, I would not want Jonathan to have the sort of treatments Lucy described. On the other hand, he does need help, solid medical help.”

  Kate chewed her steak while she pondered this. She held her empty fork in the air as if it were one of the pointing sticks I used in the classroom. “Mina, an exposé on the treatments in some of these asylums would make a gripping newspaper story. Really, the mad doctors do the most barbaric things, from what I have heard. Strange, perverse things—as horrible as what Lucy described and even worse—all in the name of science and medicine. Oh, it would be a gruesome story, but the readership would eat it up, I assure you.”

  “Kate Reed, you have been on Fleet Street too long!” I could not believe what my ears were hearing. Had she gone mad too? “Perhaps you could have yourself committed to do the research,” I said. “It won’t take much to convince John Seward, or any other man, that you are mad.”

  “Mina, it is not like you to be sarcastic,” she said. I believe I had actually hurt her feelings. “I am a journalist. It is my duty to expose practices that may be harmful. And if it is mostly women who are being harmed—as it inevitably is—then I am especially interested and obliged.”

  “I apologize if I insulted you. But we must think about Lucy and Jonathan, not some article that might be written.”

  “You must keep up with me, Mina. We are thinking of them. The mad doctors in private asylums are not supervised and are free to do what they wish. Oh, some of these places are mere resorts for the wealthy who need a rest from society after the Season. That is the sort of place where someone like Mrs. Westenra would go. Remember that ridiculous woman? I know I should be saying ‘God rest her soul,’ but I cannot be a hypocrite.”

  “Kate!”

  “Mina, will you never tire of being nice? I hear that these asylums hold some of their patients for life and turn them into veritable slaves. I have thought to write on this before, but Jacob said that for centuries, the Church tried to stop medical men from dissecting human corpses, which delayed scientific discovery. He thinks that we should not interfere with medical experimentation, even if we find the methods gruesome.”

  “I am not interested in writing a story, Kate. I am only interested in helping my husband and in getting to the bottom of how Lucy died.”

  All around us people were carving, chewing, and swallowing their food while laughing and talking. Some picked up chops by the bone, tearing the meat off with their teeth. For some reason, it reminded me of the way Lucy said that her body had been handled and abused, and I had to turn my eyes away.

  “On the other hand, if something terrible did happen to Lucy within those walls, and you found out about it, your story would be a great tribute to her memory.”

  “You cannot expect me to subject Jonathan to these sorts of vile treatments that Lucy described?”

  “Oh, they will not do those things to a man. Not against his will. And you will be there to supervise.” Kate was smiling now as the idea took hold. As we finished our meals, she continued to talk as if I had already agreed to her plan. “One of the great benefits of being a lady journalist is that no one thinks that you have a brain at all. People will reveal to you the most amazing things. It won’t take long for Dr. Seward to tell all about Lucy’s demise. Especially to you, pretty Mina with your dazzling eyes and ladylike comportment. Society women love to volunteer at the asylums. You might convince Dr. Seward that you are just another do-gooder.”

/>   Each time Kate emphasized a word, she leaned forward with her lips like a woman about to take a bite out of her veil. “Mina, you know you want to do this. Just admit it.”

  In fact, the part of myself that had always been intrigued with Kate’s journalistic activities was quickly being drawn into the plan. “I am interested in learning about the last days of Lucy’s life. I cannot promise that I will gather enough material for a newspaper story,” I said.

  “Oh, but you will, Mina. I have no doubt. You always play the goody-goody with me, but that is only because you want to act as my foil.”

  She wiped her mouth clean with a napkin. “Now listen carefully and I will quickly instruct you in the art of gathering information. You will find that the feminine habit of interrupting silences with meaningless chatter will not serve you. I have discovered that if I sit in silence, the subject will begin to blurt out things that would have gone unspoken if I had started chattering.”

  “I have never seen you silent, Kate. You are a very aggressive interviewer.”

  She considered this. “Normally, I interrogate vigorously. But it is not in your nature to do that, so you must use this other tactic, which I assure you will produce results. Pretend innocence and ignorance. Smile sweetly, as you do anyway, and let them do the talking. If talk ceases, just sit there. Out of the discomfort of silence, the most interesting information is revealed.”