Anne Perry - A Christmas Homecoming

Ballin ignored him. “Van Helsing could arrange mirrors that reflect from each other, magnifying light and sending it around corners. Vampires are creatures of the shadows. At least to begin with, Dracula does not wish to be exposed.”

“Brilliant,” Vincent said sarcastically. “Then we lose all the tension because we defeat the poor devil right at the beginning. So how is it then that we let anyone fall victim to him? Are we all just blazingly incompetent?”

Ballin was unperturbed. “We do not succeed because Lucy is bitten outside, in the night, before Dracula ever enters the house. Van Helsing doesn’t know that. Nor, at the beginning, does he know the depth of the vampire’s seduction. Lucy moves the mirrors, just as later Mina will lie, and even become violent, when Dracula calls her.”

Joshua was smiling slowly.

Ballin continued. “Later Van Helsing could suggest an alarm to warn them all if anyone enters Mina’s room through the window. A chemical device, of magnesium dislodged by the movement of the window so that it lands in water. It would give off a brilliant white light, which could be seen by anyone watching the window from another part of the house.”

“And they don’t come running to the rescue because …?” Vincent asked, but his voice was now interested rather than dismissive.

Ballin smiled very slightly. “Because Mina has drugged their wine. That is already in the story. Again, clever as we are, we have underestimated the strength of the vampire’s hold over our minds.”

This time, Vincent agreed, but reluctantly.

“Good,” Joshua said firmly. “Now there is the problem of lighting the scene where we peer into Lucy’s tomb in the crypt. I haven’t worked out yet how we can do that so the audience can see. The sense of shock and dawning horror is crucial there.”

“Any ideas for that?” Vincent asked Ballin.

“Do not show the audience,” Ballin answered.

“Oh, superb!” Vincent jeered again. “What shall we do? Recite it to them in the rash of words you are so much against? I’m sure that will frighten them out of their wits! Very dramatic.”

Ballin kept his patience. He smiled, as if amused at Vincent’s contempt. “Most emotions are the more powerful for being shown through the characters we identify with,” he said calmly. “Open the tomb with a creak, a sigh of hinges, and let us see the horror dawn on the faces of Van Helsing and Mr. Harker, even Mina, whom we admire so much. Let us see her grief for her friend Lucy. Perhaps you need an additional scene earlier on so we may observe how fond they are of each other? We will know that something is terribly, hideously wrong, but for a space of seconds time will stand still and we will not know what it is. Our imaginations will fill it in with a score of different abominations. Then one of you may say that the tomb is empty.” Ballin spread his hands in an elegant gesture, his pale fingers catching the light.

They went on discussing, adding to and taking out, and by the end of the afternoon they were exhausted. Caroline and Joshua went up to their room, Caroline grateful for an hour’s respite from the subject before they all met again for dinner.

But when they were in the bedroom and the door closed, she could see that Joshua was still worried. He certainly would not rest as she had hoped.

“It’s not working,” he said bleakly, standing at the window and staring out at the light catching on the pale blur of snowflakes in the darkness beyond. “Not yet.”

She bit back her impatience. The disappointment in his voice was enough to pull at her emotions, crushing the irritation she had felt mounting inside her.

“I thought Mr. Ballin’s suggestions were very good,” she said, knowing she risked making him feel as if he should have thought of them himself. Just now she believed the rescue was more important than its source.

He turned to face the room, the lines around his mouth deeply etched, his eyes pink-rimmed. “They are,” he agreed. “But they are only cosmetic. There is still a lack of cutting edge to it. Dracula isn’t … isn’t terrifying. We can feel the horror, but not the evil.”

She wanted to be helpful but nothing came to her mind that was honest, and he did not deserve to be patronized with false comfort. “I’m not certain if I know what evil is, onstage,” she said unhappily.

He pushed his hands into his pockets. “Ballin is right: It will only become real to us, and to the audience, when we see the effects of such evil in others. I wish I could think how to show that.”

“Who is Mr. Ballin, I wonder?” she asked curiously. “He seems to know a lot about vampires, and about acting. How can he? Dracula was only published this year.”

“I’ve no idea who he is,” he replied, walking toward the bed and lying down, hands behind his head. “I could sleep until tomorrow,” he said. “Except that I can’t afford to.”

“Mina,” Caroline said suddenly, with certainty.

“What about her?” Joshua was confused.

She turned toward him. “Jonathan Harker is a usual sort of hero, but he’s … I don’t know … a bit cardboard, terribly predictable. He isn’t like any real person I know, because he has no faults, no vulnerabilities—unless being a crashing bore is a vulnerability? It isn’t, is it?”

He smiled. “Not onstage. Bores don’t feel hurt, they just drive everyone else to drink. What are you getting at?”

“We don’t really care about Harker,” she explained. “We know he’s good, but we don’t care. And Van Helsing is a ‘know-it-all.’ We need him to defeat Dracula, and we believe he’s going to. In fact, I suppose we take it for granted. But Mina is good, really good—but vulnerable, too. She cares about other people. She’s brave but she has enough sense to be frightened as well, and later on when the holy wafer burns her, we know that Dracula has finally gotten to her. She is the one we need to care about, to see slowly pulled further and further down into the darkness, despite everything. I would mind terribly if anything happened to her, anything that Van Helsing couldn’t save her from.”

He sat up. “Would you?”

“Yes. Yes I would.”

He leaned forward and kissed her, gently and for a long time.

“Then we shall let them think Mina will not survive,” he said at last. “Thank you!”

allin attended the morning rehearsal the following day. Now he was quite open about his suggestions, and Alice was eager to adapt them. Douglas seemed less displeased, and Caroline noticed that when Lydia was not onstage playing the character of Lucy, they quite often stood together. They did so awkwardly at first, but then with increasing ease. They might have simply been commenting on the play and its progress—Caroline was not close enough to hear—but the unspoken communication between them told quite a different story. She had learned from Joshua the difference between text—the words on the page that actors spoke—and subtext—the emotional meaning that they conveyed and (if the acting was any good) that the audience understood. For Douglas and Lydia, the subtext was that they were increasingly drawn to each other. Alice either had not noticed, or else she had, and was not as disturbed by it.

Did Alice believe she could undo any damage as soon as Lydia left? Was she so confident of herself, or of Douglas’s love for her? Or had it perhaps to do with her father’s wealth and the opportunities that it would offer Douglas in the future? Was she really so shallow? So vain?

Caroline found herself hoping very much that the latter was not so. She liked Alice. She was highly individual, and perhaps she reminded Caroline rather a lot of her own daughter Charlotte, another young woman full of impractical dreams.