Karen Essex - Dracula in Love

“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.

31 March 1889, and 6 July 1890

I ntrepid 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.