Karen Essex: Dracula in Love

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 with 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.”