Dracula in Love

looked at Lucy, whose face froze, but she put her hand over her mother’s. “I looked in on you at midnight, Mother. I sat in your room for a long time, but I suppose you don’t remember.”

“You must not let my condition ruin your good health,” Mrs. Westenra said. “I will speak to Dr. Seward about giving you medication to help you sleep.”

“I won’t take it,” Lucy said in a very argumentative tone. “Someone in this family must remain alert.”

“That is what servants are for! You vex me, my child. If your father were here, he would tell you to do as I say!” She shook her head furiously, the slack skin on her cheeks vibrating to and fro. “Oh dear, I hope Mina is spared the horrible sight of one of my paroxysms. They come on so suddenly, not like heart palpitations at all. The angina is a separate condition, I have learned. The attack comes on swiftly, beginning with a sharp pain here in the breastbone.”

She pointed to the place with her finger. She began to take quiet, slow breaths, making circular motions in front of her chest. “It is terrifying to feel as if one’s heart were about to collapse, Mina. An indescribable dread comes over me, and my skin becomes like ice, as if the very blood has stopped flowing in my veins. My poor heart gasps for its vital fluid, and I feel as if I am dying. It must be terrible to die! Oh, my poor husband.” The memory of Mr. Westenra overtook her, and she started to cry, dabbing at the corners of her eyes with her napkin.

Lucy remained indifferent during her mother’s presentation, sipping her tea as if she were the only person in the room. Later, when she and I were alone, I said, “If you did not have a mother, perhaps you would appreciate a mother’s concern.”

She looked at me as if I had betrayed her.

“I only mean to say that I wish I had a mother to help me navigate through life’s passages and into womanhood.”

“Perhaps you are fortunate,” she said. “You are free to navigate for yourself, and in a girl’s life, that is a privilege.”

Lucy decided to nap after breakfast, and I welcomed the time alone. The sun was not exactly shining, but it was apparent beneath a thin film of cloud cover. I wanted to explore and to find a place where I might write in my journal. I had been told that the best view of Whitby was from the old churchyard cemetery that overlooked the village, the harbor, and the sea. I climbed the one hundred ninety-nine steps to St. Mary’s Church, obeying the local superstition that each step must be counted or bad luck would befall the climber. I stopped to admire a large ancient-looking Celtic cross at the entrance to the churchyard, then peeked inside the small church, dark but for the light that shone through the stained-glass triptych behind the altar, illuminating at the center the body of the Christ hanging upon the cross. A few dark-clad women prayed fervently in the shadows. I lit a candle for the dead, dropped a coin in the offerings box, and went outside.

All the benches in the yard were taken, but I did not want to give up my mission. A solitary old man occupied the bench that sat furthest out on the promontory with the best view of the sea. He looked as if he had once been husky, but the decades had shrunken him to the size of an old woman. His clothes probably fit him well some twenty years ago, but hung in folds now on his bony frame. His skin was as brown and shriveled as a roasted peanut and covered with dark spots and moles.

“Would you mind if I joined you?” I asked.

He acquiesced to my request in a thick Yorkshire accent, the sort that we worked hard at Miss Hadley’s to remove.

“I won’t disturb your tranquility,” I said, opening my journal and removing the cap from my pen.

“I’ll have all the tranquility I need soon enough,” he said, swallowing his vowels, as they were wont to do in the area. I was not sure what he meant, until he nodded his head toward the gravestones. I smiled, and then looked out to the sea to collect my thoughts. I started to write in my journal, but the old man, short of company, I suppose, began to talk to me about his life.

He was the last survivor of the men who had once “addled a living” in the whaling industry. “Whitby ships were known to be the strongest vessels in the water,” he said, explaining that all the great sailors of the last century including Captain Cook himself preferred ships made by Whitby shipbuilders.

“The vessels had to be strong to withstand the winds that rise up in these frigid waters, and the men had to be strong to face the sea and the prey and the privateers. I was a young man on one of the last of the great whaling ships, the Esk.”

I knew I was in for a long-winded tale, so I took a deep breath and donned a look of interest.

“We were coming home, were not thirty miles from the harbor, struggling all day against a southerly breeze, when of a sudden, violence in the air like you have never seen came squalling in from the east. Our sails were shortened, so we were not prepared for the likes of that storm, and were caught against the leeward shore.” The more he talked, the more animated and younger he sounded. “I felt the Esk hit the reef and I knew she were grounded. She broke up, she did, spitting out every man on board into the sea, like we were no better than seeds from a piece of fruit. I was near six and twenty, and strong as an ox. I hung on to two men trying to keep them above the water, but in the end, only three of us survived.

“After that, I turned to herring to addle me living. Imagine, one day chasing the biggest fish in the sea and then being reduced to catching the smallest!”

I expressed my condolences for the shipmates he had lost. “They are all here, the ones who were found,” he said, waving his arm around the churchyard. “I visit them every day, keeping them up on the news of the town. They appreciate it, they do.”

“How do you know that, sir?” I asked.

“Because they thank me. The dead speak to us if only we have the patience to listen. The others that were lost to the sea, eaten up by the very fish we catch for our own dinners, they speak too, not in words but in terrible howling cries. And who can blame them? Young men losing their lives in their prime? One day, strong and brave, like young gods, then at the whim of the winds, they become food for the fishes. Strange, if you think on it. They have made cannibals of us, those fish.”

I did not want to think too long on that gruesome image, nor about communications from the dead. I had come to Whitby to escape that. I gave him my name and inquired of his. He told me that he was known as the whaler. I was about to bid my new acquaintance good day when he invited me to see the very place where he had washed to shore.

“On some days, you can still hear the cries of the sailors,” he whispered, and something bade me to accompany him back down the steps and toward the shore.

The day was cloudy and not warm. A few bathers gathered at the shoreline, but none braved the water. Optimists had rented big umbrellas and chairs, sitting under blankets against the wind. The sea was boisterous, crashing relentlessly against the cliffs in the distance, spewing waves onto the beach and forcing the bathers to move their chairs away from the encroaching waters. I hiked up my skirt as far as I dared as we strolled along in the sand. Vendors selling tea, lemonade, and cakes had set up stands along the beach. Suddenly, the old man pulled me aside, guiding me by the arm to hide behind the tea stand.

A tall man with a large physique and ginger-colored hair sticking out of a cap walked brusquely on the beach, the legs of his pants rolled up to his knees, revealing powerful-looking calves. As he walked, he roared at the sea, as if he were trying to scare it away from the rock-bound shore. “That man appears to be in an oratory competition with the sea,” I said, pulling my shawl close against the wind.

“Aye, best to avoid him. He’ll nark me till I’m mithered.”

“Has he tried to harm you?” I asked. The man did, indeed, look insane and somewhat dangerous, either exercising his arms or waving them at some unseen thing as he yelled into the waves.

The whaler laughed. “Harm me? No, he’ll fill me with pints and make me tell him my stories. He’ll take me off to a place where we cannot take a young lady and pour ale into me until I cannot walk.”

The old man explained that the fellow was a writer who managed a theater. He had come to Whitby chasing stories of monsters and ghosts, looking for a play to write for a famous London actor. “What is his name?” I asked.

“The redheaded man?”

“No, sir, the actor. I enjoy the London theater when I am able to attend.”

The old man had been told the name as if he should know it as well as he knew his own, but, as he had never heard it before, he had promptly forgotten it. “Along with most of what was in my brain,” he added. “But I