So I am reduced to accomplishing what I can, with what I have. You know that I would do, quite literally, anything, in order to assure your safety; that there are no lengths to which I would not go to protect our beautiful daughter from harm.
Your loving husband, forever,
R. M. R.
R. M. R.’s notes
3 July
10 fies, 2 spiders, 1 sparrow
-7 fliesspiders
-5 spiderssparrow
6 July
9 flies, 2 spiders, 1 sparrow
-6 fliesspiders
-4 spiderssparrows
Seward in Town again today. Hennessey admitted a pair of young gentlemen who wanted to “observe” the lunatics, in particular, they said, the women, and did any of them rip off their clothing in their fits? I thought Langmore would object, but he said nothing. I have noted that Langmore frequently seems the worse for opium, whose symptoms became tediously familiar to me in my years of dealing, not only with the native Indians and coolie Chinese, but with the colonial clerks and wives as well. I have also frequently overheard Hardy and Simmons speak of Langmore’s abstractions of chloral hydrate from the dispensary. If they know of this, Hennessey certainly must.
Oh, to be attempting such a work as mine, and to be surrounded by such human detritus!
9 July
8 flies, 3 spiders, 1 sparrow
-9 fliesspiders
-12 spiderssparrows
10 July
10 flies, 6 spiders, 2 sparrows
-9 fliesspiders
-6 spiderssparrows
Letter, R. M. Renfield to his wife
11 July
My dearest Catherine,
A line in haste. This afternoon from my window I observed the execrable Hennessey walking along the tree-lined avenue that leads to the high road, a most unaccustomed exercise for a man who raises sloth to an art form. Following him with my gaze, I saw him stand talking by the high-road gate to a short, stout gentleman in a green coat, who even at that distance was clearly recognizable as Lady Brough’s solicitor Wormidge. Though the trees on the avenue prevented my seeing clearly, I thought they talked for some little time, and that something—papers? money? letters?—was passed from hand to hand.
The sight filled me with rage and despair. Not so much that I fear your discovery—indeed, the fact that your mother seeks to trace you through me here reassures me that she has no clue concerning the false identities and alternate bank accounts we established for your concealment—but because I understand that it will be that much more difficult for you to contact me, much less see me.
Still I remain, as Shakespeare says, “rich in hope.” Watch and wait, my darling—my darlings—and all things will be made well.
Forever your loving husband,
R. M. R.
Dr. Seward’s diary (phonograph)*
19 July
We are progressing. My friend has now a whole colony of sparrows, and his flies and spiders are almost obliterated. When I came in, he ran to me and said he wanted to ask me a great favor…“A kitten, a nice little, sleek playful kitten, that I can play with and teach, and feed—and feed—and feed!” I was not unprepared for this request, for I had noticed how his pets went on increasing in size and vivacity, but I did not care that his pretty family of tame sparrows should be wiped out in the same manner as the flies and the spiders…
10 p.m.—I have visited him again today and found him sitting in a corner brooding. When I came in, he threw himself on his knees before me and implored me to let him have a cat; that his salvation depended upon it. I was firm, however, and told him he could not have it.
20 July
Visited Renfield very early, before the attendant went his rounds. Found him up and humming a tune. He was spreading out his sugar, which he had saved, in the window, and was manifestly beginning his fly-catching again…I looked around for his birds, and not seeing them, asked him where they were. He replied, without turning round, that they had all flown away. There were a few feathers about the room and on his pillow a drop of blood.
11 a.m.—The attendant has just been to me to say that Renfield has been very sick and has disgorged a whole lot of feathers. “My belief is, Doctor,” he said, “that he has eaten his birds, and that he just took and ate them raw!”
11 p.m.—I gave Renfield a strong opiate tonight, enough to make even him sleep…
R. M. R.’s notes
21 July
HE IS COMING!!!
Letter, R. M. Renfield to his wife
21 July
My darling Catherine,
Something has happened which alters everything! How well I remember when you used to chide me for my attitude of materialism—so strange in one who espouses the romantic ideals of Wagner, you said. And I, in my blind superiority, would reply that romanticism, while all very well to inspire the heart and the spirit, cannot put bread and butter on the table. Blind, blind, foolish and blind, to say those very words!
Yet the gods hear even the maunderings of fools. And sometimes, their eternal hearts are moved to compassion by the very blind stubbornness of those who deny them.
Oh, my beloved, forgive me for the blindness that continued my work, my mission, in the selfsame narrow crevice of scientific methodology for which I so scorned my poor benighted colleagues here! That I continued it stubbornly, seeing nothing beyond what I thought was “truth,” while all the while a greater truth was approaching, like the inexorable descent of thunderclouds from the Simla hills to the plain!
He is coming, and we all of us—you, me, Vixie—will be saved!
Dreams of blood. Dreams of life, like specks of flame, coursing and sparkling through his veins. Deep in opiated sleep, it seemed to Renfield that he was yet awake, aware of each separate life in the world, like individuated atoms of searing light.
When he had taken opium in India, he had had such a vision. He had felt himself separately conscious of every beetle, every monstrous roach, every solitary white ant in the swarms that dwelt beneath his bungalow, every bird in the trees and every snake in the weeds, all of them: a seething mass of life soul-shaking and wonderful in its hugeness.
Even in this thin chilly climate, he was aware. Flies, spiders, sparrows…the brilliant dots of their individual lives glittered and danced in his veins. The kitchen cat he’d seen through the window the other day, who had fired him with such wild hopes, so cruelly and unnecessarily dashed. Fools, all of them…! From the window he’d seen her looking at him, gazing across the space between them with round golden eyes.
In his dream those eyes returned to him, drawing him to them through darkness. But he saw now that they were a man’s eyes.
Cold gripped him, the damp cold to which even eighteen years back in his native country had not accustomed him. Cold, and the smell of the ocean. In his dream he was standing, and underfoot the rough boards of a ship’s hold rocked. He heard the slosh of waves against the hull, smelled the familiar stinks of a cargo-hold, rats and bilge-water and dirty leather and rope, and above all else the thick, mouldy smell of earth. The ship was transporting boxes of dirt—Renfield mentally calculated the cost per pound of shipping, and concluded that someone must be both rich and mad. In Rome he had visited a monastery whose chapels had been floored with earth brought from Jerusalem, that the monks who died might be buried in the holiest ground in Christendom without the inconvenience of making an actual pilgrimage. Was there, he wondered sardonically, some equally pious coward still at large in England?
How did he know the ship was bound for England?
Then he saw the eyes. Not gold now, but red, gleaming from a dark shape which rose up from among the earth-boxes. A cloaked form, hiding power in the folds of its garments, like the Pilgrim God in Wagner’s Siegfried: the Wanderer stepping from the shadows, concealing yet unable to conceal all of what he is.
Renfield sank to his knees. “Who are you?” he whispered, and to his lips came the words in German of Mime the Dwarf
from that opera. “‘Who has tracked me to this retreat?’”
A voice which seemed to emanate less from the column of darkness before him, as from the dark at the back of his mind, whispered, echoing the words of Wagner, “‘Wanderer’ the world calls me: wide are my wanderings; I roam at my will all the earth around.”
A vast shudder shook Renfield’s bones. He managed to breathe the name “Wotan…” but could make no other sound.
The dark shape continued: “I’ve mastered much and treasured much; I’ve told wondrous tales to men. Men have believed their wisdom great, but it is not brains that they should treasure.”
“‘I have wit enough,’” Renfield gasped—Mime gasped. “‘I want no more…’” Yet in his mind, in his heart, he saw the dozens of glass tumblers begged singly from Langmore and Hardy, with his painstakingly collected flies buzzing beneath them. Saw the crumpled sorry boxes of spiders, the hard-won fragments of his great work kicked aside by fools and Fate, as in the opera the sword Nothung had been shattered, beyond his poor power to re-forge.
“‘What was good, straightway I gave them,’” murmured that deep, harsh voice from out of the shadows. “‘Spoke, and strengthened their minds.’”
Renfield whimpered, “Lord…”
His head bowed into his hands, he only heard the sough of the great cloak as that column of darkness stepped forward—as Wotan the Wanderer, lord of the gods, stepped forward—and smelled the rank, intoxicating stench of graveyard earth and decaying blood. The hand that rested on his head was heavy, cold as the hand of a corpse.
“‘Behold, the bridegroom cometh,’” said Wotan’s voice, in the dark at the back of Renfield’s mind. All around them the waters surged against the boat’s wooden hold, but though the lightless space stank of rats, not a single whisper of their skittering did Renfield hear. “‘And ye know not the day or the hour.’ But I come. Then those who are known to me shall have their reward.”
It seemed to Renfield then that he was back in his bed in Rushbrook House, back in his opiated sleep. But his mind was awake and aware, aware of everything: of the voices of Langmore and Simmons as they played their endless, stupid games of cribbage at the little deal table at the far end of the hall; of the kitchen-cat hunting in the long grass and poor old Lord Alyn in the next room crying and mumbling over and over to himself how he did not deserve to live, how great his sins were and how powerless he was to stop himself…Of the soft deadly clinking in the study directly below him, as Dr. Seward made up for himself his now-nightly injection of chloral hydrate, so that he could enjoy the sleep he so blithely handed out to his patients. He was aware of the fog that lay on the marshes, of the boats moving down the broad estuary to the sea.
He was aware of the sea. Of a small ship with tattered sails, driven on by storm-winds that moaned in its rigging, of the pounding of waves on distant rocks. It seemed to him that he could rise from his bed and fly on the wings of that storm—on the crest of that darkness.
Fly to the ship, where Wotan waited…where the Wanderer God sat in darkness, with all his power and wisdom gathered into his strong hands, to help those who did as he willed.
Fly to Catherine…
He saw her, auburn hair half-untangled from its nightly braid, face peaceful in sleep. Like the Prince in a fairy-tale, he thought he stood over her, her beauty breaking his heart as it always did, always had, since first she’d stood up at that theosophical lecture and questioned the lecturer about the astral plane. So many nights when she would turn over and sleep, after their final good-night kiss, he had simply sat awake, looking at her slumbering face by the glow of his little reading-lamp, relaxed and so young with all its small daily worries sponged away. Joy beyond joy.
I will save her, he thought. Wotan will help me. I will make him help me.
The thought of that terrible ally filled Renfield with dread, for he knew to the marrow of his bones that the thing in the hold of the ship was not to be trusted. I will make him help me, but I cannot, must not, ever, ever let him know where Catherine and Vixie are hidden.
He didn’t know quite why this was so, or what the nature of the danger was. But the column of shadow within shadow, darkness within dark, had glowed with a nimbus of peril.
I will be clever, he vowed. Clever and strong. I can get his help without his knowing. I can keep that secret, buried in my heart. Then no one will put my Catherine or our beautiful Vixie in danger, ever again.
CHAPTER FIVE
Mrs. Violet Westenra
Requests the honour of your presence
At the marriage of her daughter
Lucy Marie
To
The Honorable Arthur Holmwood
Saturday, the 8th of October
At twelve o’clock noon
St. George’s Church, Hanover Square
Breakfast and reception immediately follow
At
Godalming House
Grosvenor Square
Dr. Seward turned the invitation over in his fingers. Even the paper was rich as creamy velvet in the patch of strong August sunlight that lay upon his desk.
It interested him that he felt no pain. Only a kind of dull shock, as if he had taken a mortal hurt but wasn’t yet aware that it would kill him.
A ridiculous conceit, he thought numbly. Of course I’m not going to die of love. I shall recover from this, as I recovered from a rattlesnake bite on the Texas plains and from nearly having my head cut off on the Marquesa Islands.
Oh, Lucy. Was this your idea, or Art’s? Two people he loved equally—of course they’d both want him to be there, when they gave themselves over wholly into one another’s keeping. He recalled how Lucy had wept when he’d asked for her hand, how she’d blushed when he’d asked, Is there someone else? Of course there was. He’d seen how Art watched the fair-haired girl at that ball at Godalming House, how his young friend had maneuvered always to be close at hand when she wanted a cup of punch or a sliver of cake. He’d seen, too, the melting approval in Mrs. Westenra’s chilly eyes, that had turned to daggers whenever Seward had claimed Lucy’s attention.
Get away from my daughter, you…you mad-doctor. Can’t you see she’s fascinating the heir to a Viscount who has twenty thousand a year?
Not for one instant did Seward doubt that young Arthur Holmwood loved Lucy Westenra to distraction. He would make her a fine husband, and knowing the man as he did, Seward would take oath that—pavement-nymphs in Tampico notwithstanding—his friend would never give her the slightest cause for suspicion or tears.
And at nineteen, Lucy was old enough to know her own mind, Seward recognized.
And yet what returned to his thoughts again and again was Mrs. Westenra’s satisfied voice as the carriage pulled away into the rain: I told you how it would be, Lucy.
And the deprecating contempt in her tone as she looked around the tiny drawing-room: What a clever use of space.
What else had she said to her daughter, to steer her thoughts away from a man who had no fortune, to one who had a great one? All for Lucy’s own good, as that harridan Lady Clayburne had spoken of taking Vivienne Renfield from her mother and sending her to a finishing-school in Switzerland, so that she could later make “an eligible parti.”
Growing up as he had, with the standards and position of an old family to maintain though the money to do so was long since gone, Seward had had a front-row seat on how the ladies of Society could damn with faint praise, could manipulate the hearts and thoughts of their daughters with that agonizing amalgam of duty, love, and guilt.
Was that why, after he’d received the small legacy which had raised him from Out of the Question to modest eligibility, he had never trusted those hopeful lures tossed out by the daughters of the lesser social ranks?
Seward sighed, and raised his head, to gaze out the window of his study into the green of the walled park. Through the trees he could see the black roof-slates of Carfax Hall. Last week the FOR SALE sign had been taken down from its rusted
gates, and hired men had gone in yesterday to scythe clear the drive. So the place had found a buyer. Wealthy, one hoped, for it would cost a fortune to put that dilapidated pile back into anything resembling livable condition.
Through the endless months of June and July, while he had buried himself in work to forget the ache of hopes raised only to be dashed, he had written to Lucy in Whitby, where she was staying for the summer with her mother. She had written back once or twice, polite notes about country walks with her school-friend Mina, or descriptions of the old churchyard on the East Cliff, where the headstones would occasionally tumble down to the sea beneath: copybook exercises in friendly correspondence that could have been addressed to anyone.
Yet what did he expect? Declarations of love? He didn’t know whether these cordial letters were worse, or better, than nothing at all.
He turned the invitation over again in his fingers. October eighth. Sixty days away. Time enough to determine whether he could not endure to be there, or could not endure to stay away.
With a sigh he leaned across to the cabinet and wound up his phonograph, set the needle on the wax cylinder, and picked up the small mouthpiece. If nothing else, there was still work. Though everything seemed to taste of ashes these days, at least he could do some good for someone, no matter what he was feeling inside.
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