'Right with you, sir.'
'You're more than welcome to join us, Doyle.'
'A bit of exercise in the fresh air would do me well,' said Doyle.
Doyle followed them out the door, traversed the agitated coupling, and climbed onto the tender. Sparks gave a wave to Barry, hand on the throttle, bundled up ahead of them in the engine cab. Each man grabbed a shovel and went to work pouring fuel into the scuttle. The cold and whipping wind sent up motes of coal that bit into their skin; driven snow-flakes exploded on contact with their clothes, crystals melting in the wooden threads, dissolving into the black of the scattering dust.
'Where are we?' shouted Doyle.
'An hour from York,' Sparks yelled back. 'Three hours to Whitby, if the weather holds.'
The cold inspired them to great exertions, the quicker to remove themselves from its glare. Soon the fire in the engine burned hotter than a sinner's conscience.
Whitby began as a sixth-century fishing village, grown over the years to a minor port, a seaside resort in the short summer of Northumbria, but in the depths of winter a forbidding destination to any but those required to seek it out by either trade or custom. The river Esk had carved a deep rift between two summits as it made its way to the sea where it formed a natural, deep harbor, and in that narrow valley the village first found life. Over the years, the community sprawled to incorporate both hillsides. Some combination of mood and the harsh landscape had down the centuries created a fertile haven for stern religious feeling, ofttimes fervor. The crumbling Celtic abbey of St. Hilda dominated the high headland south of the village proper, as it had on that site since before England had known kings. The ruins of the ancient abbey cast a long shadow over its less austere successor, Goresthorpe Abbey, which shared the southern hill, halfway
between its forerunner and the town. Its spire was the first landmark Doyle noticed as the train pulled into the station. The hour was not quite noon, but few people were about; those that were moved in halting submission to the bitter cold of the deepening storm and lowering sky. The town seemed mired in a gray and fog-bound hibernation. Barry saw to the disposition of the train, while Larry took charge of their bags, settling them at a nearby inn recommended by the station-master. Sparks immediately recruited Doyle for a visit to Bishop Pillphrock's abbey.
No carriages were available at the station, every shop and service battening down in anticipation of the storm's worsening, so they crossed the bridge and walked a mile to the southern slope. A dense sea fog rolled in from the harbor and together with the falling snow reduced visibility to zero. Bent against the wind, they ascended the steep and winding stairway up the hill, mufflers protecting their faces from the growing gale, which howled more fiercely the farther up they climbed.
Arriving at Goresthorpe Abbey, the more contemporary parish church, they found snow accumulating in blowing drifts and the doors to both church and rectory secured tight. No lights burned in the windows; no signs of life inside. Sparks raised the thick iron ring on the rectory's massive wooden door and slammed it three times against its plate, the sound quickly smothered by the rising blanket of snow. Sparks knocked again. Doyle, his mind benumbed by the cold, tried in vain to remember which day of the week this was: a day of rest for the clergy? Where else would they be?
'There's no one here,' said a deep and resonant voice behind them.
They turned; a giant of a man stood before them, six-and-a-half feet tall if he was an inch, cloaked against the cold as they were, but he wore no hat; a leonine shock of red hair crowned his massive head, and his face was framed by a thick red beard encrusted with icicles.
'We're looking for the Bishop Pillphrock,' said Sparks.
'You won't find him here, friends. The diocese is deserted,' the stranger said, advancing. The musical lilt of Erin ianced in his voice. His face was broad and welcoming; his great size suggested power but no menace. 'They've all gone, at least three days now.'
'Would they be at the other abbey then?' asked Doyle.
'You mean in the ruins?' said the man, turning in the direction of the ancient abbey and pointing with a silver-tipped walking stick of black zebra wood. 'There's been no shelter within those walls for near to five hundred years.'
'This is Bishop Pillphrock's diocese?' asked Sparks.
'That is my understanding. I don't know the man. I'm a stranger to Whitby myself, a condition I assume you share, or do I assume too much?'
'Not at all. But I must say you look familiar to me, sir,' said Sparks. 'Do we know one another?'
'Are you gentlemen up from London?'
'We are.'
'Have you a passing familiarity with the theatrical scene there?'
'More than passing,' said Sparks.
'Perhaps that explains it,' said the man, extending his hand. 'Abraham Stoker, manager to Henry Irving and his theatrical production company. Bram to my friends.'
Henry Irving! My God, thought Doyle; how many times had he stood for hours to watch the legendary Irving on the stage? Lear, Othello, Benedick to Ellen Terry's Beatrice, the greatest actor of his generation and perhaps the age. Such was the magnitude of his fame that Doyle felt dumbstruck by proximity to someone even remotely connected to the man.
'Of course that's it then,' said Sparks companionably. 'I have seen you on many occasions, first nights and the like.'
Sparks and Doyle completed their side of the introductions.
'And may I ask what brings you gentlemen to this hibernal corner of the earth on the deadest night of winter?' Some note of cautious reserve in Stoker's voice rendered the query as a good deal more than idle curiosity.
Sparks and Doyle looked at each other. 'We might do well to ask you the selfsame question,' said Sparks evenly.
There followed a short silence in which each sized up the other, during which whatever Stoker sought in Sparks he apparently found.
'I know a pub,' he said, 'where we might sit by the fire and more congenially satisfy each other's interest.'
Half an hour's trudge through the thickening tempest brought them to the Rose and Thistle, a post-and-beam establishment in the center of town overlooking the banks of the Esk. The snow now fell so rapidly it formed connective bowers between rocks in the channel below. Hot mugs of coffee laced with Irish whiskey warmed their hands as the three men shook off the cold in the embers of the dying afternoon. Idle chat about the couplings and customs of various well-known or otherwise notorious theatrical types—and what outrageously melodramatic personal lives they all seemed to lead, thought Doyle—had occupied their journey and the early minutes after their arrival at the public house. In the void of the first conversational lapse, with a marked change in tone toward the hushed, anxious, and mesmeric, Stoker, unsolicited, began his tale.
'As you well know, Mr. Sparks, the world of the theater is a terrifically small community—a stone doesn't enter that pond without the far end receiving immediate word of the ripples—and whereas most of the talk-of-the- town is as perishable as a bucket of prawns in the noonday sun—as there's always some sensational, up-to-the- minute chat coming along as grist for the rumor mills—it takes a good deal more than the usual fare to capture one's interest for the turn of a single evening, let alone shock one into a state of more or less sustained agitation. Theatrical types love their gossip, and it usually goes down easier with a generous dusting of salt.'
Stoker had not spent his years around the stage in vain, his delivery practiced to wring maximum dramatic effect from every pause or inflection, but the result was so spontaneous and virtually laden with import to come that the listener was effortlessly persuaded to deliver himself into this storyteller's crafty hands. Doyle found himself aching to provoke the man forward with questions, but he took his cue from Sparks, held his peace, and sat forward on the edge of his chair in restive anticipation.
'A strange story began making the rounds of my little vorld about a month ago and reached my ears one night in the green room of the Lyceum Theatre not long after. Even allowing for the distortions and inevitable embellishments common to any well-traveled trifle, there was at its center such a persistent, original kernel of collusion and intrigue that it took absolute command of my attentions.'
