“Can you not guess? I would think it as plain as the nose on my face. Oh, it is so difficult to hide being in love. Mina, I am bursting with it. My love for him is in every pore of my skin, trying to express itself to the world. I can no longer hide it from my best girlfriend.”
“In love?” I had seen no evidence of this great passion at dinner. “You have been with Mr. Holmwood?”
“Dear God, no, not him! I despise him, except that he brought my true love to me, and for that I love him. But for that alone. How marvelous that we have deceived you! That should mean that my mother and the rest do not know either.”
“Oh, Lucy, no.” In my mind’s eye, I saw those powerful hands and knew that they were the ones that had removed the pins from Lucy’s hair and tousled her golden mane.
“Mina, do you know what love is? How it feels? Do you know what it is like to be in the arms of a man of passion?” Lucy sat up and put her face uncomfortably close to mine. “I went to his studio. He has been making a secret portrait of me in the nude! Can you believe that I have agreed to this? It is a measure of my love for him. I was to sit for him tonight, but he took off my clothes and lay me on a table and tickled every inch of my body with his softest paintbrush until I begged for mercy.”
I thought she must be mad, saying these things. I recalled how Lucy and Morris seemed to have nothing to say to each other at dinner and now realized that they were acting out a performance of indifference to hide their secret.
“How can he paint with his injured arm?” I asked.
“Oh, that is but a brilliant ruse so that Arthur would go sailing without him!”
“Lucy!” I was mortified at the way the two of them so casually deceived others.
Lucy took me by the shoulders. “Mina, if you do not feel this exquisite way about Jonathan, you should not marry him. Everything we are told is a lie-that the love between two people should be some polite arrangement when in truth it is…” Lucy paused to find the right words. “It is an opera!”
“The ladies come to a bad end in operas,” I said quietly.
“I should have known better than to tell you. You are the voice of reason, whereas I am speaking from the depths of my soul,” she said far too loudly.
“Please be quieter,” I said. “You will wake your mother.”
“No, I won’t. I mixed her sleeping draft myself.”
“Lucy! You are not a doctor. You might have harmed her!”
Lucy settled on the bed. “I forgive you, Mina. If someone had tried to explain these feelings to me before I experienced them, I would have had the same response. But you are engaged to a man. Have you never felt thrilled by his proximity or by his touch? Are you so very cold, Mina?”
Lucy’s face contorted into a frown. “Perhaps good women like you do not experience these sorts of feelings. What is it like, Mina, to never have committed a transgression?”
“I am not without sin,” I said.
I let the words slide out of my mouth and into the world. I too had kept in my secrets and longed to confess to someone. Lucy’s features lifted again. She sat up straight.
“I have dreams,” I began. “Dreams in which strangers visit me. But the experiences are too vivid to be mere dreams.” I told her about hearing voices in my sleep and being lured out of doors and about the night I awoke to find myself being attacked by a madman with red eyes and a hideous odor, and of the elegant stranger who both saved me and terrified me. I told her about the dreams that followed in which I had done terrible things-lurid things that no woman should do. I did not tell her of tonight’s dream in which Dr. Seward was caressing me with Morris Quince’s hands. In that dream, I could put a name to my delicious tormentors, and that made it impossible for me to confess.
“I know that there is something dark and inexplicable in my character that is causing these episodes, but it is beyond my control to stop it,” I said.
Lucy patted my hand as if I were a child. “Mina, you are one who walks in her sleep. My father suffered the same affliction, and you must be careful, because it led to his demise. He walked out of doors in the middle of a damp and frigid winter night and caught pneumonia. As you recall, he never recovered.” Lucy spoke tenderly as she always did when she talked about her father.
I had not known the circumstances under which he had contracted the lung disease that had killed him. I started to tremble.
“Mina, darling, you are not wicked. You had the misfortune to be a beautiful girl walking alone in London. The man who attacked you probably thought you were one of the ladies of the night. You were defenseless. The mysterious one who stopped the attack was probably just a man about town who had spent the evening with friends at his club and was doing a good deed.”
Could it be that simple? I wanted to accept Lucy’s rational explanation. Though she was swept up in her own passion, she seemed sure that what was happening to me was not out of the ordinary.
“Jonathan says that according to the mind doctors, dreams are reflections of one’s own fears. He believes that my adventures into London’s dark byways with Kate are responsible for these nightmares,” I said.
“We could inquire of Dr. Seward,” Lucy suggested. “I am sure that he would enjoy interpreting your dreams.” Her eyes shone with mischief.
“I could not speak of these things to him,” I said. “It would not be proper.”
“That is my Mina, always concerned with propriety. What must you think of your Lucy now?”
“I fear for you,” I said. “What will become of you, Lucy? You are engaged to another man.”
“Morris has a plan. He says he will lay down his life before he allows me to marry Arthur, or any man other than himself.”
“What is stopping you from marrying him now? This is not the fifteenth century. The unification of kingdoms is not at stake. Why did you accept Arthur’s proposal when you love someone else?”
“I would marry Morris Quince tomorrow if he would allow it. His father has cut him off because he refused to enter the family business, choosing to paint instead. My mother controls my fortune and she despises him and loves Arthur. I have told Morris that I would run away with him, that I don’t need money as long as I have his love, but he won’t have it. He insists that I deserve better than poverty.”
“At least he is correct about that!” I said. “You are not a girl accustomed to hardship. A woman has to be smart, Lucy. Are you not afraid that Mr. Quince is toying with you?”
Lucy struck back quickly. “No! No, he is not toying with me. I hoped you would understand. Now I am sorry that I told you at all. You’ll probably go running to my mother and spill out everything and make her have one of her angina attacks.”
I assured Lucy that her secret was safe with me, and asked for her assurance that what I had told her would remain between us. “Of course I will respect your wishes,” she said, “but I hardly see how some bad dreams compare with a passionate love affair that is happening in our real lives.”
I helped Lucy with her clothes and her corset, noticing that above the slash marks of the stays, other marks had appeared on her back and chest-red and blue, like bruised roses. I did not mention them. We kissed each other good night, but I was left with the feeling that Lucy wanted to retain some sort of superiority over me, not a moral superiority but rather its opposite-descent into passion-which for her transcended every good thing we had been taught to believe.
Though Whitby Abbey was just steps from the churchyard, which I visited daily while Lucy napped, I had studiously avoided its grounds. While I actually enjoyed whiling away hours in the churchyard cemetery, staring at ancient tombstones and reading the maudlin inscriptions, there was something about the old ruin that depressed my spirit. In those days, with no word from Jonathan, the deteriorated majesty of Whitby Abbey, surrounded by mist and fog, stood like a monument to my own loneliness.
Today, however, the sun shone brightly, turning the abbey’s bleak walls into gleaming white bones upon which a vivid imagination might reconstruct the building at its highest glory. I sat on my usual bench in the churchyard and took out the little leather-bound journal. I had started to write down some of the old whaler’s ghoulish stories, thinking that upon Jonathan’s return, they might amuse him. I had been learning about the abbey’s history, so I began to jot down some of the facts:
Whitby Abbey, an immense roofless ruin that had once been home to prosperous Benedictine monks, was abandoned when Henry VIII decided to rid the nation of Catholics and their monasteries. Now it is a pile of rubble
