European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman

by Theodora Goss

  Mary was startled. She had been so absorbed by Carmilla’s story that she had forgotten where she was. Indeed, it was getting dark in the parlor. While Carmilla waited, Laura called for some lamps and lit the fire that was already laid in the fireplace. The housekeeper arrived with two lamps, which she placed where they would shed the most light. A parlormaid followed her with another tray of cakes and a fresh pot of tea. Diana promptly took two of the small cakes, and Mary prevailed on Justine to take one, as well as a glass of sherry that Laura poured out of a cut-glass decanter. She herself accepted another cup of tea, grateful for its warmth and strength.

  “Then what?” asked Diana, her mouth full of cake. “Get on with it already.”

  Mary would have reproved her, but she also wanted Carmilla to get on with it.

  Carmilla ruffled the hair on Persephone’s neck and scratched behind her ears. The wolfdog stretched her neck on Carmilla’s lap and barked just once, as though to indicate that the stroking should continue. “In order for you to understand the rest of my story, and also what has happened to Lucinda, I must tell you a little about the disease of vampirism, which is as terrible in its own way as syphilis or tuberculosis. You see, vampirism makes its sufferers stronger physically, but it destroys the mind. In weeks, perhaps months, the vampire goes mad. It becomes little more than an animal. Although vampires can live for centuries, they seldom survive so long. In their madness, they harm themselves or attack others, often members of their own family or village—then, they are hunted and killed according to ancient custom. My godfather thought I too would go mad—but I did not. There are only a few of us who have contracted the disease and retained our sanity intact. We do not know why. My godfather told me that one other member of the Société des Alchimistes was able to make the transition—an Englishman: John Ruthven, Lord Glenarvon. Ruthven believed it had something to do with the moon. He was convinced that he needed to lie in moonlight on a regular basis.”

  “And was that the reason?” asked Justine. “Did it have something to do with moonlight?”

  “No, nothing whatsoever.” Carmilla sounded disgusted. “The result was not reproducible—we lost several peasants that way. Either Ruthven was a credulous romantic, or he was deliberately misleading us. My godfather thinks the latter, but Ruthven died fighting for Greek independence, so I incline to the former theory!”

  “Wait, do you mean your godfather is a member of the Société des Alchimistes?” asked Mary, astonished.

  “Was at one time,” replied Carmilla. “He was expelled when the current president came into power. She did not approve of his methods, and she was probably right. Even I was appalled by some of his experiments, and my conscience is not stainless—I too pursued some of those avenues of inquiry, before I met Laura. She has made me . . . more compassionate.”

  Diana looked at Carmilla with distrust. “Ágnes said you bathed in the blood of virgins to stay young. Is that true? Also, what’s a metaphor? Justine said a vampire was a metaphor. . . . Is that some kind of monster?”

  Carmilla laughed out loud. “The respectable Mrs. Madár would be quite irate if I filled our bathtub with blood, I assure you! No, that’s another of the ridiculous superstitions concerning the oupire. I bathe in water brought up by Júlia, the chambermaid, with ordinary soap. When I want to be particularly luxurious, I scent my bath with Hungary water. That is all. I do not age because of the disease, and I drink the blood of animals—at least, I do now. As I said, Laura has been a good influence on me.”

  “The president of the Alchemical Society is a woman?” Mary put down her teacup and leaned forward. Perhaps she had heard wrong.

  “Does that surprise you?” asked Carmilla. “Many prominent members of the society have been women, particularly in the last century or so. It is rumored that the first female member of the society was Hypatia of Alexandria, but the records of the society do not go back that far. Of course there were fewer female members when I first contracted the disease of vampirism. At one time, my godfather wanted me to join the society myself, but it seemed to be made up of tiresome old men, seeking wealth and immortality. I might have joined in the early part of the century, when Lord Byron and his circle were livening things up—that is the English phrase, is it not?”

  Laura nodded and smiled, as though amused. “Yes, very English indeed.”

  “Wait, I’m lost,” said Diana, frowning. “You were in the carriage with your godfather, the Count. What did you do then? No one wants to hear about the history of the Alchemical Society.”

  “Actually, I would like to,” said Mary. She would like to very much indeed. If they were going up against the society, they would need to know as much about it as possible.

  But Carmilla was already continuing her story. “Well then, we were in the carriage. My godfather was certain I would go mad. But he fed me with his own blood, as I have fed Lucinda. A week later, we reached his castle in Transylvania. There, I stayed with him for many years. I had nowhere else to go; my home and fortune were gone. My godfather helped me adjust to the disease. Vampirism is not easy for its sufferers. At first, I was always starved for blood, like an anemic. But his tenants knew, when they slaughtered an animal for their own food, that they should collect the blood and bring it to the boyar—for that is what they call the nobility in that region. They knew what he was, but they were proud to serve under such a man. Their parents, and their parents’ parents, could remember the boyar in the castle. He had already lived for centuries. In his human lifetime, he had been one of those who had beaten back the Turks and defended the border for Christendom. They thought of him as a war hero.

  “We waited for the symptoms of madness, but they did not come. How was it that I had survived the onset of the disease with my sanity intact? My godfather had been infected with vampirism in the dungeons of the Turks—it had been a common form of torture in those days, both among the Turks and the defenders of the Holy Roman Empire. A soldier would be infected, then released to find his way back to his own men and spread the infection. In the early days of his condition, he had attempted to infect his soldiers, to make them stronger, harder to kill. But almost immediately, their minds would begin to deteriorate. In a few weeks, they would be no better than animals. He found that he could prolong their period of usefulness through mesmerism, but a mesmerized soldier obeys orders, nothing more. He cannot think for himself.

  “I was interested in this phenomenon, as I had been interested in medicines and diseases before my transformation. Together, we began a period of experimentation, using subjects who were on the verge of death. The plagues that swept through the countryside in those years provided us with many such subjects. And we experimented directly upon the blood. Was there some factor we did not yet know about that would ensure success in one case but not another, as in a blood transfusion, which in more cases than not kills the recipient, but sometimes saves a life? He wanted to understand the blood itself. During periods of relative peace with the Turks, he communicated with their scientists, who were so far ahead of Europeans in their understanding of human physiology. He still remembered his encounters with Turkish physicians while he was a prisoner of the Sultan. The Turks were our enemies, but one of them, a physician named Mustafa Ahmet bin Abdullah, had become a particular friend, and had nursed him tenderly through the onset of his illness. He had originally wondered if he had survived with his mind intact because of their greater knowledge of the disease, but when he saw that I was spared at well, he realized there must be some other cause. He wrote to the physician of the Grand Vizier in Constantinople, hoping for but not expecting a reply, because war had broken out once again. But he did get a reply—the Turks had also attempted to create invincible warriors, with no greater success. The Grand Vizier’s physician did not know why the two of us had been spared madness.”

  “How did these soldiers, and the peasants dying from plague, feel about being infected with the disease?” asked Justine. Her mouth was set in a thin, disapprov
ing line.

  “That is exactly the question I asked her,” said Laura. She nodded at Justine, as though to signal her agreement and sympathy.

  “Yes, Laura has explained to me at length why what we did was improper and immoral, and why you must always ask permission of your experimental subjects,” said Carmilla. She did not appear particularly contrite. “But this was the eighteenth century, a time of almost continual warfare, when diseases ran rampant over the countryside. You inhabitants of the modern age cannot imagine what it was like. Even Justine is a child of the Enlightenment. Do not judge me by the standards of a different era. I did what I thought was most appropriate under the circumstances. Can you say that you would have done any differently?”

  Justine continued to look disapproving, but did not reply.

  “And did any of these experiments work?” asked Mary. Of course Justine was right—what Carmilla and her godfather had done was unconscionable. Nevertheless, if it had yielded any information that would help Lucinda, they should know.

  “No, not one.” Carmilla frowned as though dissatisfied. It was evidently the scientific failure that vexed her, not the moral problem of having experimented on unsuspecting subjects. Mary did not quite know what to think. Carmilla was helping them, and yet—was she any better than Rappaccini or Moreau? “We did have some partial success,” she continued. “Magda is one of them—she was one of the Count’s soldiers, mortally wounded in battle. To save her life, he gave her his own blood. To look at her, you would think she was an ordinary woman in her middle years. And yet, she was born more than a century ago. At first, we thought she might escape the madness of vampirism entirely. Alas, it was not to be. Sometimes, she will wake screaming or believe she is still at war, and must be restrained. Well—all that is in the past. When the region became more stable and the Turks retreated, I returned to my castle. I did not live there often—it held too many memories for me. For the most part, I stayed with my godfather in Budapest. But one summer I came down once again, craving my native countryside—and that is when I met Laura.”

  She smiled at Laura, who could not help smiling back. Mary wondered once again what there was between these women. They seemed more than merely companions.

  “She accepted me for what I was. She did not see me as either a monster or the Countess Karnstein, but simply as Carmilla, which was the name I had adopted—a new name for a new woman. I did not know, at the time, that my godfather had once again taken up experimenting with the transmission of vampirism. He thought the emerging science of blood transfusion would allow him to purify the blood, and therefore control what was being transmitted. You’ve seen one of his failures—the madman Renfield.”

  “Renfield!” said Mary. She remembered that sly, strange little man, sitting in his room at the Purfleet Asylum, ingesting flies in the belief that they would give him eternal life.

  “Yes, Renfield was a fellow member of the Société des Alchimistes. He volunteered for my godfather’s first experiments in transfusing infected blood. You have seen the results—madness, with none of the benefits of the disease. No heightening of the senses, no exceptional strength, no eternal life—only a degeneration of the mind that led to his confinement in a mental asylum. That is why Dr. Seward and Professor Van Helsing contacted the Count. When Seward became the director of the asylum, he read through Renfield’s files. He and Van Helsing were also seeking a means of extending life, and they believed my godfather’s experiments would give them a way forward. At that point, he had already been expelled from the society, but was continuing his research independently at his castle in Transylvania. They asked him to come to England. He helped them—at first. But there was an accident, a terrible accident. A young woman died. He decided that he could no longer support either their methods or their aims, so he refused to work with them any longer. Now, his goal is to undermine them, to have their experiments banned by the society and the both of them expelled.”

  “Is that why he and Mina are working together?” asked Mary. Some things were starting to fit into place.

  “Well, that’s one reason,” said Laura. She seemed amused—Mary was not sure why. “But Mina can tell you all about that herself, tomorrow. I know this isn’t a fashionable hour to go to bed, but we’ve finished the tea and cakes, so I suggest we do exactly that. Carmilla promised to tell you her story, and she has. We need to leave at dawn if we’re going to make it to Budapest by nightfall.”

  “Nightfall!” said Justine. “How is that possible? We are still several days away from Budapest, are we not? By carriage, I mean.”

  “Ah, but you haven’t seen my horses!” said Carmilla. She laughed, as though at an amusing, but evidently private, joke.

  “Just tell them!” said Laura, gathering the teacups and putting them on the tray.

  “Why spoil the surprise?” asked Carmilla. “They will see for themselves tomorrow. I’m going to feed Lucinda. Magda has been sitting with her, but I would like to check on her condition myself. And, of course, she needs blood.”

  “I want to make sure she’s all right too,” said Mary.

  “And I,” said Justine.

  “I’ll meet you up there and show you to your rooms,” said Laura. “Although Diana might prefer the kennel!”

  Mary looked down. There, on the carpet, was Diana, fast asleep with her head on Hades’s flank. The white wolfdog looked up, as though to say, What? Nothing to see here. No wonder Diana had been so quiet for the last few minutes.

  DIANA: I wish we had dogs like that. Cats are boring. All they do is sleep and catch mice.

  CATHERINE: Excuse me? Dogs are well and good in their place, but cats are nature’s perfect predators. A cat has all the weapons it needs at the end of its paws and in its mouth. It takes orders from no man. It is a natural assassin. Cats are not boring.

  DIANA: Except when they go on and on and on about how wonderful they are!

  Lucinda’s condition had not changed: she was still unconscious, although she drank Carmilla’s blood eagerly.

  “Well, she’s not dying,” said Laura, checking her pulse. “That’s a good sign, at least. If we can keep her in this stable state until she has reached the Count, we may be able to save her.”

  Lucinda looked so thin and pale under the covers. Someone, probably Magda, had changed her into a fresh nightgown and brushed her hair, then braided it so it would not tangle.

  “Thank you for taking care of her,” said Mary. If only they had not trusted Miklós Ferenc! Yet how could they have known? And it was Hyde’s fault after all! If only Hyde had not arranged for Miklós Ferenc to kidnap them in the first place. . . . But for that, he would have to be a better man, a better father. If only, if only—you could fill a bucket with “if onlys,” and it would get you nowhere at all. They were like air. If Hyde were a better father, the father she and especially Diana needed, he would be a different man, more like the father she had known as a child. Yet even then, she had barely known him. Whatever he was now had always been there in him, as a potential. The thought made her feel sick and ashamed.

  “Come on,” said Laura, putting a hand on her arm. “Carmilla will stay with her for a while. I’ll show you to your rooms. You really do need to get some sleep.”

  She showed Justine to a somber room paneled in dark wood, with a canopied bed at one end. “This used to be my father’s room,” she said. “Some of his nightclothes might fit you. Look in that chest of drawers. He died several years ago, but I could not bear to throw anything of his away.”

  The room to which she led Mary was considerably more cheerful, papered in a pattern of birds perched among flowering branches. It contained painted furniture and two narrow beds—Diana was already curled up on one of them, sleeping. She was still in her clothes.

  “I asked Mrs. Madár to have her carried up,” said Laura. “There’s a nightgown laid out for you on the pillow—we’re about the same size, I think. I’m sure you’re very tired, but—Mary, would you like a bath? I told J�
�lia to bring up some hot water. I thought you might like to wash off the dust of the journey. I asked Justine earlier if she would like one, but she said she just wanted to sleep.”

  A bath! More than anything else in the world, Mary suddenly realized, she wanted a bath. To wash all the events of the last few days off her . . . to feel fresh and clean for the first time in a week!

  “Oh, yes please!” she said, more fervently than she had intended.

  Suddenly, without warning, Laura gave her a quick, tight hug. “You’re going to be all right, my dear,” she said. “You’ll see, you’re with us now. We’ll get you to Budapest, and the Count will help us—if anyone can save Lucinda, he can. He’s a bit . . . formidable, but you’ll get used to him. He’s rather like a friendly lion—he keeps his claws sheathed around friends. And Mina will be there. I don’t know anyone in the world as reassuring as Mina.”

  Mary wanted to cry, and almost thought she might. It was the nicest thing anyone had said to her in days. She was so tired! Tired of traveling, of trying to take care of them all. It was lovely to be among friends.

  “Thank you,” she said, and would have said more, but Laura was pulling her down the hall toward a bathroom in which the ceramic stove had already been lit. The old-fashioned enameled tub was filled with steaming water, and a scent hung in the air, like a bouquet of herbs and flowers. She could smell lavender, mint, lemon . . .

  “Go on,” said Laura. “There’s a robe on the hook, a toothbrush and tooth powder in the cabinet, cold cream in the drawer. Use whatever you want. If you leave your clothes outside the door, Júlia will take care of them. And there’s more water in the bucket, which you can heat on the stove. We don’t have such luxuries as hot running water here in rural Styria, but we do well enough, as you see! I’ll wake you tomorrow morning, bright and early.” When she had closed the door with a final “Get plenty of sleep!” Mary silently blessed her. Thank goodness there were people in the world who cheered and helped, like Laura Jennings! She would try to be one of them—the women who made others feel comfortable and at home.