important letters before his name, l-o-r-d, meant that no one would question his word against mine. I had to find another tactic.
I let Arthur take me back to the house in Hampstead, which was supposed to be mine but is now his. I begged him to make a settlement with me so that I could live in my father’s house alone and in peace. I told him that he could have the money as long as he paid me a stipend to live on. “I beg of you as a gentleman and a peer. You know that you do not love me and never did. I will be satisfied with a small portion of my inheritance. We need never see each other again. I merely want my freedom.”
He turned to me with a flash of anger such as I have never seen and said, “That is correct: I may do as I please. And it pleases me to tell you that if you do not begin to obey me as a wife should, I will have to resort to less gentle measures.”
I had no idea what he meant by this and I was much too afraid to ask. Behind my back, he immediately sent for John Seward, who arrived with his sinister black bag. He mixed me a sedative, which I at first refused, but I was upset and confused and in shock. Craving some semblance of peace of mind, I swallowed it and I slept.
When I awoke, Seward was still there. He has assumed total authority over me, Mina! And he has done so with a sort of self-satisfaction that I find disconcerting. I attribute it to the fact that he once confessed his feelings to me, and when I told my mother, she insulted him. She asked him how he thought a man with his lack of income and standing might woo and win a girl such as myself. He said to me later, “I am not so poor nor so poorly paid as your mother might think!” She had wounded his pride, but at the same time, she did not want to see me the wife of a man whose residence was a madhouse. I would never have been so unfeeling as she in my treatment of him, though I confess that I never had an ounce of affection for him.
The next morning, my former suitor and now physician announced that I was to have more of the dreaded medicine for my breakfast. They have taken to giving it to me all the day long. I have devised a way to make them think that I am drinking it, but as soon as I am out of their sight, I vomit it into one of the window boxes. Still, some of it gets into my body and I feel quite delirious much of the time. John Seward sits by my bedside, and, under his doctor’s guise, he asks the most intrusive personal questions, Mina, about my monthlies! When I told him, blushing and looking away from his face, that they did not arrive on the same day every month and that oftentimes, I skipped a month altogether, he acted alarmed. “I was afraid of that, Your Ladyship,” which is what he has taken to calling me with the most ironical tone in his voice. I wish I could describe it to you. The undertone is that, though I now have a title, the balance of power between us has shifted, and he has the control over me. He convinced Arthur to hire a nurse to attend me, and she examines my menstrual blood and reports back to him on its characteristics and volume. I do not know what this has to do with making me well. But the more I protest that I am healthy, the more I am told that the protestation of well-being is a symptom of hysteria.
Seward has proposed that I be taken to the asylum, Lindenwood, where I will be observed and treated by his colleague from Germany, a Dr. Von Helsinger. I have made it plain that I do not intend to comply with his wishes, but the more that I assert my will, the more he and Arthur insist that I am suffering from some sort of hysteria and require treatments only available in an asylum. I wonder if it is best to acquiesce to their demands so that I may be proven sane and left alone.
I hate to burden you with these affairs. But, Mina, I am desperate. Perhaps Mr. Harker, as he is a solicitor, will be able to suggest a course of action that will rescue me from my present situation and give me my freedom from Arthur without becoming destitute.
I await your response. Make haste, darling Mina!
Your despondent and unfortunate friend,
– Lucy
What grief settled over me. Here was Lucy, my dearest friend, begging for help from me, and I had been caught up in my own troubles with Jonathan and unaware of her woes. Now she was in her grave and it was too late. I slowly opened the second envelope, hoping it contained better news. But how could it?
4 October 1890
Dear Mina,
I am writing to you from inside Lindenwood, John Seward’s asylum on the river at Purfleet. Hilda has stolen some paper from Seward’s office and a pen. We patients are not supposed to have such instruments in our possession for fear of what dark uses we will make of them. I must confess that if I thought I would be successful, I would stab myself with this pen and end my life.
I must be brief, for if I am caught writing to you, my “treatments” will become ever harsher, and I will be restrained again. Yes, you have read that correctly. Your Lucy, who you know to be of sound mind, has had her wrists and ankles shackled to a bed for having a “disobedient nature.” But I must not dwell on those inconsequential details, though I believe it would give me some comfort to know that someone has knowledge of what I have been subjected to within these walls.
I was examined by Dr. Von Helsinger, who has prescribed a series of treatments that I fear is killing me. He is a most terrifying and bizarre man, though John Seward holds him in the highest esteem and believes that his unorthodox methods carry the seeds of genius and the answers to many perplexing medical problems. Arthur has now joined in this admiration, so there is no one to advocate for me against him. Von Helsinger explained to me that he has been performing experiments on women by transferring the blood of men, who he believes are stronger, more moral, healthier, and more rational, into women. Mina, you should see this man’s eyes as he talks about his work. He has the look of one of the insane who wander the streets, talking to invisible entities! John Seward and Arthur were at his side, listening to his madness as if it were the most brilliant lecture delivered by an Oxford don. They paid no attention to my look of disbelief.
Now I must relate the horrible details of what they are doing to me. Remember, Mina, this is after other treatments that I thought I would not be able to endure-freezing cold baths, force-feeding-oh, it was all too horrendous, but I mustn’t linger on all that. I must get to the point, and my mind wanders these days as a result of the sedation and from the new treatments, which have weakened and sickened me so that I am no longer the Lucy you knew but some shadow self, who only exists in those moments when I conjure up a shred of hope that I will be released from this place.
I know you will think this bizarre, but, believe me, I am not hallucinating. The two younger men take turns emptying their blood into me. I am drugged in advance so that I cannot resist. While he waits for the medicine to take effect, Von Helsinger asks me if the men do not deserve a little affection for their troubles. Too weak to resist, I say nothing. Whichever man is giving the blood-Arthur or John Seward-is encouraged to caress my body and kiss me. “There, little miss, is that not what you like?” Von Helsinger asks. “Oh yes, she likes this. Don’t you, Lucy? You liked it when Morris Quince touched your body, didn’t you?” Arthur taunts me with this, Mina. I never should have confessed my affair.
Von Helsinger watches these acts with great fascination, even directing the men how to touch me, and even though it is plain that it is humiliating and repulsive to me. “If she pines for you, her body will accept the blood!” he says. Mina, the glint in his eyes as he instructs the men to have their way with me is truly frightening. The two younger men are enthralled by his every word. When Arthur isn’t taunting me, they are completely silent as they stroke and kiss me all over my body. I can hear their heavy breaths breaking the awful silence in the room. I cannot tell you the state of self-disgust this invokes in me. When Von Helsinger feels that my body is ready, he takes my naked arm and makes an incision into which he inserts a tube with a central rubber bulb for pumping. Then he rolls up the sleeve of my donor, tying a cord around the upper arm and rubbing the rest of the arm, stroking its muscles, looking for the right vein. After much examination, when he finds his target, he makes a similar incision in the arm of the man and inserts the other side of the tube.
They have performed this operation two times. Each time, I feel weaker. I cannot take food, my sight is blurry, and I have little strength. In fact, I must close soon because this exercise has left me exhausted.
I am trapped here. Arthur is my husband and therefore my guardian, and if he can persuade a doctor that I am mad, I can be committed here indefinitely. Seward and Von Helsinger are free to keep me here as a subject of their laboratory experiments, imprisoning me to aid their strange studies and to accommodate Arthur’s wishes to have me out of the way so that he may do whatever he likes with my father’s fortune. My
