remember all the stories of the haunted and the dead, and that is what that fellow likes to hear. Claims my stories are worth sheer gold, but he only offers me the pints. What are my stories worth to you, young lady?”
I explained that I was but a poor schoolteacher with no money to spare.
“Then your beauty will be my reward for the tales I tell you,” he said. “I’ll not be fuggled out of what’s due me till I get me eyes full of you and your coal-black hair.”
With the other man long down the shore, the old whaler and I resumed our walk. He showed me the place where he had swum to shore after the shipwreck, and where the bodies of his shipmates had been found. I did not comment. I did not want to be thought without compassion for the dead, but I did not want to linger. What was once a lovely shoreline now seemed like a massive graveyard, each rock on the beach a headstone.
He stopped walking, cocking his ear toward the waves. “Can ye hear her?”
I listened but only heard the sound of the water relentlessly rolling onto the shore. “Hear who?” I asked.
“Mirabelle! Oh, she was a good girl, but she lost her head to a bad man, as women are wont to do. Some devilish seaman, used the poor girl up and then admitted that he was leaving her to go back to his wife and seven kiddies.”
I was about to tell him that I did not want to hear two sad stories in one afternoon when I thought I heard a woman’s voice roll onto the shore with one of the waves. I stopped in my tracks.
“You heard it,” he said, matter-of-factly.
“I did hear something,” I said. “I cannot be sure what it was.”
“My lady, it was Mirabelle. Listen to my tale and then judge for yourself. From the day the sailor went away, Mirabelle walked along the sea, longing for him, hoping to see his ship sail back into the harbor. She knew in her heart that he would miss her and come back to her.”
“And did he?” I asked, anxious to hear a happy ending.
“Of course not. And the poor girl, by calling out to him, was playing a dangerous game. Too many sailors have lost their lives to these waters over the many years, and being young and virile men, they did not want to die. No, miss, they resented God for taking their lives and so they make bargains with the devil.
“The spirits know that by stealing the blood of a young woman, they can bring themselves back to life! That is the truth of it. The spirit of a handsome young man came to Mirabelle at twilight and kept her in his company until dawn. He made love to her and at the same time drained her of as much blood as he could take from her, and from that blood, he made himself stronger. She could not resist him, for such passion makes an addict of a young woman. He had a strange power over her, and his kisses that were killing her also made her swoon with pleasure!
“The girl’s parents were innkeepers who expected her to put in an honest day’s work, but soon she had no life in her to hold a broom, and she fell asleep as she tried to do her chores. The parents thought she was sick and called for a doctor, but he was helpless to name the disease that was wasting her away. Every night, she sneaked out of the inn and met her lover, who was getting more powerful with each meeting, while Mirabelle, once a beauty like you, became so pale and thin that she was almost invisible. She refused food and could never sleep. Then, one morning, she was found dead at the hearth, a broom in her hand. Her poor body had given out. And just as her mother found her daughter’s body crumpled at the hearth, she heard the father welcoming in a loud and happy voice a guest at the inn. He was a young sailor who had been given up for drowned some ten years before, and there he was, looking no older than the day that he had disappeared.
“You see, Miss Mina, the air is thick with the spirits of the young sailors and fishermen who died in the sea. They still yearn for the love and touch of beautiful women, young men that they were when they were forced to leave their bodies and earthly pleasure behind. I tell you this to warn you, beauty that you are with your jet-colored hair and your lovely skin more pure and delicious than the top of the cream, and those eyes of yours that stole their green from a sultan’s emerald. Beware when you walk this shore. Pay no heed to the blether of the boggarts. In death, they possess silvery tongues that can charm a maiden. If the spirits of the dead call out to you, swaddle yourself tight with your shawl, make the sign of the cross for protection, and walk away.”
Chapter Four
“What an imagination, Mina,” Lucy said. “Jonathan loves only you.”
I had not heard a word from my fiance in the five weeks since he had left London. At first, I feared for his safety, but bad news travels quicker than the good, so if something had befallen him, I would have already received word of it. Now I worried that he had met someone better suited to be his wife. The miracle of his love had always seemed like a fairy-tale gift to me, an orphan with nothing but good skin and nice eyes to recommend herself. Perhaps he was more ambitious than I had judged, and he had found someone whose connections could abet those ambitions.
“It is possible to love one person until a truer love comes along,” I said. “That is what the novels tell us. That is what history tells us. Guinevere loved Arthur until she met Lancelot. Do you not agree that it is possible to love one person but encounter another whose very soul speaks to you?”
Lucy picked up a fan from the dressing table, waving it in front of her face, though it was not warm in the bedroom. She had become thinner in the last two weeks. Her peach-colored moire dress threatened to slip from her shoulders, but she still had good color in her cheeks, and her spirits were generally high.
“You are not answering me because you know that I am correct,” I said. “It is entirely possible that Jonathan has either met someone he considers more appropriate to be his wife, or that he has reconsidered his feelings for me.”
“Don’t be a goose, Mina,” she said, making light of my fears. “Now put on your pretty smile and help me receive Mr. Holmwood and his friends.”
Holmwood and his school friends, the infamous Morris Quince and Dr. John Seward, were waiting in the parlor when Lucy and I entered the room, but Mrs. Westenra shuttled us to the dining room so quickly that I barely had time to put a face to each name. When we sat down, she apologized ad nauseam for the humbleness of the table and of the fare, regretting that she had not brought the proper china from Hampstead and that she had allowed the cook to go visit her family rather than accompany the Westenras to Whitby. “But my health is to blame. I just do not think of things as I did when I was well.”
She dominated the conversation with this topic all the way through the soup course, when Holmwood, who was seated next to her, finally put an end to it. “I will send my man to fetch everything from your Hampstead pantry and kidnap the cook from her mother’s cottage if it will make you feel more at ease, madam.”
I found Holmwood to be charming in a dutiful way. His sharp nose was just the right size for his face, which was long and angular, and the right proportion to sit above his lips, which were not full, but neither were they thin and reptilian, as with so many unfortunate men. He had a gangly masculinity, and it was easy to envision him succeeding at the leisure activities for which he was known to have passion-riding, hunting, and sailing. Despite these sports, his hands were slender and effeminate. His coloring matched Lucy’s, but his hair was slightly darker and thinner. I suspected that the few curls that dangled about his scalp would soon desert him.
He paid lavish attention to Mrs. Westenra, whose health once again bloomed under his gaze. She did her best to ignore the much-discussed Morris Quince, who sat next to me, whereas I was the unrelenting object of the eyes of Dr. John Seward, who sat opposite me. The three men had planned to set off on a pleasure sail in the morning to Scarborough, but Quince had arrived with his right arm in a sling, owing to falling off his horse in an early morning canter along the shore.
“The animal stumbled over a rock and tossed me off his back,” he said in an accent I’d never before heard. It was not the flat American accent I was accustomed to. When I had asked him where in America he resided, he cocked his head and answered, “New York,” as if there were no alternative locations in his country. He pronounced certain words as if he were English, and I wondered if he had picked up an accent at Oxford, or if this was a
