Karen Essex

by Karen Essex

  “Clearly you have never been passionately in love!” she said to me, watching me eat another pastry doused with cream. “You have not heard from Mr. Harker, and yet you eat like a cormorant! It is unseemly, Mina. It is I who should be criticizing you and not the other way around.”

  “I do not see how starving myself will bring word from Jonathan,” I said. “Anyway, I am certain that he did not receive the letter I sent giving him this address. When I return to London, I will have a pile of letters from Austria.” At least I had been comforting myself with that thought.

  After days of rain, on Saturday evening, the twenty-third day of August, the sun announced itself just at the time it was meant to be setting, raising the temperature and sweeping a balmy breeze over the town. That bright golden ball sank slowly into the horizon, illuminating the hilly terrain as it fell. We watched twilight’s grand show from the cliffs above the town, so happy to see the sun, as if it were a long lost friend whose homecoming we welcomed, even though its visit was brief. We heard that entertainment was to be had on the pier that evening, and we expressed our desire to attend. Mrs. Westenra surprised us by wanting to join us.

  It seemed that the entire town had come out to hear the band, which played popular songs. As we passed the bandstand, a man playing a beautifully curved cornet of brass and silver boldly winked at me, and I could not help but smile at him before I turned my head away. We three ladies bought ice creams and took a small table where we could listen to the music without being trampled by the coarser people who were drinking beer and those couples who wanted to dance.

  Lucy was distracted to the point of silence, scanning the crowd for a sign, I supposed, of her beloved, while Mrs. Westenra was content to sit quietly and tap her foot to the music. I occupied myself watching the passersby. Everyone was caught up in the magical combination of the clement weather and the lively rhythm. Men walked spryly, and the women on their arms swayed to the tunes. Some fathers waltzed along to the music with little girls standing on their feet, while one family—a father, mother, brother, and two sisters—held hands doing a kind of group polka, the mother leading the movements. She hopped to one side, and then to the next, with the others trying to keep up with her until the little boy tripped on her skirt and fell to the ground crying. A few of the spectators gave him a rousing hand of applause, which both embarrassed him and made him proud as his father carried him off to the lemonade line. I imagined that in years to come, Jonathan and I would be that family, dancing merrily on our holiday, a family of doting parents and children secure in their love.

  It was then that I saw the red-haired writer watching me. He was strolling with a woman I assumed was his wife, a dark-haired, strikingly beautiful woman in the sort of detailed white lace and linen dress that fashionable London women wore to holiday places. A boy with soft blond hair who wore a crisply starched sailor suit, the sort of thematic clothing that a doting grandmother would purchase for a boy’s holiday to a seafaring community, walked between them. The lady was pointing a graceful arm toward the lighthouse, telling the boy something about it, or so it appeared. She looked regal, with her swan neck wrapped in white netting and her back as straight as a queen’s. I remember wishing that I could train my students to carry just a small portion of that gracefulness.

  The red-haired man, I now saw, had a huge bump on his forehead that looked like a tumor, which prevented him from being called handsome. He had a closely trimmed beard that was just a shade lighter than his hair, which he wore parted on the side. It was thinning, forming a valley of scalp on the left side of his large brow. He was, however—due to his size, stature, and penetrating gray eyes that were staring directly at me—an imposing figure. I suppose that Lucy and I were worthy of the male gaze, what with her pale blond beauty shown off nicely in a peach summer frock, in contrast to my black hair set against light skin. Tonight I wore my favorite dress of pale green linen, which everyone said complemented my eyes, and a cotton bolero jacket perfect for a summer evening. In retrospect, he might have been staring at us only because we were two pretty young women, and he was taking advantage of his wife’s momentary distraction with their son. The more sinister implications of his engrossment came much later.

  The band began to play a French song about cicadas that I knew, and I sang along, if only to have something to do while the man scrutinized me.

  “‘Les cigales, les cigalons, chantent mieux que les violons.’”

  “What a charming song,” said Mrs. Westenra. “What does it mean?”

  I sang the jolly lyrics in English, but the last stanza was not as cheerful as its predecessors. “Now all is dead, nothing sounds anymore but them, the frenzied ones, filling in the spaces between some remote Angelus.”

  “What odd lyrics,” she said.

  “Mina has to sing all sorts of nonsense to her pupils,” Lucy said, her first words of the evening.

  I looked at the man to see if he was still watching me. When he caught my eye, he quickly turned away and became involved in whatever his wife and son were studying in the sea.

  Suddenly I felt the temperature drop. The air was no longer balmy, as if the weather had pulled a prank on us while we were distracted by the music. The wind had picked up sharply in a matter of seconds, making the little awnings over the food stalls flap rowdily. Paper food wrappers flew off tables, skittering past our feet. Ladies held their coiffures in place with their hands.

  “What a chill!” Mrs. Westenra exclaimed. “When will I learn to take my shawl with me? We should have gone to Italy. That is what Mr. Westenra would have wanted to do. I am lost without him, lost!”

  “It is not so cold yet, Mother,” Lucy said. “Mina will give you her little jacket.”

  I started to take off my bolero, but Mrs. Westenra stopped me. “I will never fit into that little thing you call a jacket. We must go.”

  “No, not yet,” Lucy said. “The band is still playing.”

  Thunder crackled in the sky, not once, but twice, and the band stopped in the middle of a song. The musicians looked up before putting their heads together in a forum on whether to continue. People around us slid their chairs back and stood, and parents dragged reluctant children away to try to beat the coming storm.

  “No, Papa, no!” a little boy insisted, wriggling in his father’s arms.

  Lucy joined the chorus of protesting children. “I believe the sky will clear soon enough. This will pass.” As if to make a liar of her, clouds of white mist drifted in from the sea, settling all around us.

  I looked behind us where the red-haired man had been standing with his wife and son, but now a crowd had gathered around them, and I could no longer see them. Everyone was staring out to sea and pointing.

  “I am going to see what’s happening,” I said.

  “Mina, don’t go. We will all catch our deaths in this weather,” Mrs. Westenra said, looking frantic now. Lucy too darted her wild eyes back and forth. “Let her go, Mother. She won’t be long. We can wait here.”

  “Don’t worry over me,” I said. “I will just go see what the fuss is about and I will meet you at home shortly if you decide to leave.”

  “Don’t be long, Mina. This isn’t the sort of weather to take lightly,” the older lady warned.

  Lucy started a second round of protestation, and I left them to their argument. I ran to where people were gathered, standing on tiptoes to see over one another. Men from the coast guard had joined them, pushing their way to the front of the crowd, where waves thick with foam crashed against the pier. I followed their gaze into the distance. Beyond the harbor, a large sailing ship bobbed up and down in the upsurge. I snaked my way deeper into the crowd so that I could hear what the coastguardsmen were saying.

  “She’s going to hit the reef,” said one man to the other.

  “Why does the captain not head for the mouth of the harbor?” The red-haired man asked the question in a deep voice tinged with an Irish accent. I recognized it because it sounded like my own
when I was lax in my speech—from the west coast of Ireland, but mostly lost after many years in London.

  “He’s got his hands full with that crosswind. It came from nowhere,” one of the men answered.

  “It came from the bowels of hell,” said another. “Though the captain at the helm is steering like a drunk.”

  The wife of the red-haired man had her son by the hand now and was dragging him away, but the father remained engrossed by the vessel bobbing up and down in the brutal waves like a prop in a puppet show. Behind us on the East Cliff, a crew turned on the searchlight, sending a bright, bluish beam out to sea.

  “That will guide her safely into the harbor,” a coastguardsman said.

  “Only if she avoids the reef,” said another.

  The light skimmed over the peaks of water as they convulsed into the sky. I saw a glimpse of the illuminated vessel before a large wave broke over the pier, sending us reeling backward into one another as we tried to avoid it. I fell backward and into strange arms that caught me in a strong, sure grip.

  “Miss Mina!”

  Morris Quince had me by the arms. He put me upright. “Let’s get you out of this storm.”

  I was not surprised to see him; throughout the evening, I had guessed that he was the hoped-for object of Lucy’s searching eyes.

  “I want to see what happens,” I said.

  I turned back to the sea and the unfolding drama. More people crowded onto the pier despite the crashing waves that threatened our safety. I did not want to leave, though I had always been one to avert my eyes from the sight of a disaster. I would walk out of my way to avoid watching the aftermath of an overturned carriage or a collision of carts. I had no stomach for such things, and yet I wanted to stay on the pier and find out the fate of the crew and passengers of the ship even if it meant being drenched to the bone in my favorite frock.

  “Please don’t be stubborn, Miss Mina, or I’ll have to throw you over my shoulder. Americans have no compunction about these things. We are the savages that people claim we are.”

  I had no doubt that this outrageous man would do precisely as he threatened, though I could not help but smile at his self-mockery. Still, I had an aversion to him because of what he was doing to jeopardize Lucy’s future. “Have you seen Lucy and Mrs. Westenra?” I asked.

  “I paid a man with an umbrella to take them up to the inn at the top of the hill. They’re waiting for us where it’s nice and dry.”

  Another wave convulsed out of the sea, crashing over the pier, but we were able to duck the worst of it. Morris laughed, as if he were a boy playing a sport and had just scored a winning point. The searchlight swept over our heads and again found the vessel, which had moved closer to us, two of its sails battered and torn. The yard of one mast dangled in the water, while another fraying sail, puffed and straining, sped the boat along its deadly path. The ship was almost on its side as the waves—great foam beasts climbing their way to shore—navigated what looked like a potentially fatal outcome for the vessel and its crew. The light revealed the name of the vessel, the Valkyrie.

  “She’s a charter boat out of Rotterdam, carries cargo for whoever can pay the price. The captain knows his way into this harbor,” said the coastguardsman. “Why does he allow the sea to have its way with the boat?”

  The searchlight clearly showed the path into the harbor’s mouth, but the captain ignored it, allowing his boat to continue to list helplessly toward the shore. It appeared that the catastrophic accident of seventy years ago described by the old whaler would be reenacted right before my eyes.

  A wave like the gargantuan arm of Poseidon shot up from deep within the sea, slapping the starboard side of the ship.

  “Looks like she’s hit the reef,” yelled one of the coastguardsmen.

  “Great gods!” Morris said, his attention now fully engaged. Without taking his eyes off the water, he opened his cloak and put it over my shoulders. I could have objected, but I appreciated the protection and warmth it gave my skin, now wet with seawater and cold from the fierce wind. Lightning flashed across the sky with such ferocity it made me cower. Instinctively, I leaned closer to Morris, hating myself for being a skittish woman who so required the protection of a man that she would depend upon a dastardly one such as this. Yet I would not be dragged away from this awful but majestic performance put on by nature.

  The wind shifted without warning, enhancing the sheer wild and random power of the sea. As easily as it had slammed the boat against the reef, it rose at an even greater velocity and freed it, throwing the boat helplessly toward the pier. Now the boat and we spectators were entirely at the mercy of the sea. The water made swooping curls, like the snarling lips of a monster, ringing the vessel in a watery prison. At this point, the sea was dictating its path with an encircling chain of turbulent waves.

  As if changing its mind and granting a reprieve, the waves tossed the vessel upward again, veritably throwing it into the mouth of the harbor. The crowd let out a little cheer, until we collectively realized that the boat was headed directly toward us and would slam straight into the foundations of the pier.

  I thought we should run away, but there were too many people behind us, and most of us were in too much awe of the spectacle to move. Morris must have figured as much because he tightened his grip around me, bracing us for whatever happened. But at the last moment, as if it were actually ruled by tempestuous Neptune, the fickle sea changed the direction of its waves, and the boat slid straight into the sandy pit of soil and gravel that jutted from under the cliffs.

  Many of the people on the pier hurried down the steps to the shore to help the rescue party or perhaps to welcome the heroic survivors or maybe just to gawk at the potential dead. The searchlight grazed the ship’s deck, as a rescue crew, all too familiar with the aftermath of a shipwreck, rushed forward with planks to make a gangway for whomever was onboard.

  They waited, but no one and nothing stirred from that vessel. The searchlight stopped abruptly, illuminating the sailor at the helm, presumably the vessel’s captain, whose head drooped over the wheel. The grotesque scene came into focus slowly, bringing with it a long moment of eerie silence in which neither thunder nor lightning nor wind disturbed the quiet of the night. No one on the pier, not even the coastguardsmen, spoke a word. It was as if the light had stopped time, freezing both man and nature in that moment.

  The men on the shore, who had been poised to rush the ship, stood still, gazing at the macabre sight before them. A sailor’s body slumped over the helm, his hands tied to the wheel’s spokes with figure eight knots, distanced just enough to enable him to handle the big wheel. A dark rivulet of blood streamed from his neck. He looked almost as if he had been crucified.

  “Saints preserve us, the captain is lashed to the helm!” The red-haired man cried out to the coastguardsman, who, without looking away from the ship, confirmed what he said with a nod. “Looks to me like it’s a bloody corpse that brought in the vessel.”

  “The ship was sailed by a dead man.” As people grasped this reality, they put their hands to their mouths or shouted shrieks of disbelief or raised their palms to the sky as if to ask God how this could have happened.

  “Fucking hell,” Morris Quince whispered softly.

  A clap of vicious thunder broke our quiet moment of astonishment. As if awakened from a dream, the rescue crew began to move slowly toward the Valkyrie. Suddenly, the men jumped back again as a huge dog, a giant beast of an animal lit up like a streak of silver by the searchlight, leapt from the vessel and onto the shore. Though everyone cowered from it, the dog ignored them, taking its own path up the East Cliff and heading in the direction of the cemetery as if it knew exactly where it was going, and why.

  Chapter Five

  Later that same night

  Is he not the most handsome, extraordinary man you have ever met, Mina?”

  Lucy and I were undressing for bed, or rather I was, and Lucy watched me. She had no interest in discussing the shipwreck
or speculating on the mystery of the dead captain but preferred to reminisce about the thrill of seeing Morris. I rinsed my mouth slowly and closed my jar of toothpaste, checking my teeth in the mirror, while I decided whether to challenge Lucy. As her friend, I felt I owed it to her to point out the ramifications of her actions.

  “But, Lucy, he is Arthur’s friend. Surely this will not come to a good end.”

  “Oh, Arthur is not a true friend. He simply thinks it’s daring to have a friend from a scandalous American family. He speaks badly of Morris behind his back.”

  “Perhaps he is speaking the truth,” I said. “Perhaps you should take heed.”

  “You are supposed to be my best friend, Mina, and yet you have not tried at all to understand!”

  “I only understand what I see. Look at yourself.” I pulled Lucy off the bed and stood her in front of the oval cheval mirror. She crossed her arms in protest, but she did not look away. “You are wasting away to skin and bones. You do not eat. You do not sleep. And all day long, you are as nervous as an alley cat. Your sweet temper has become sharp. When you talk about your love, you look like Lizzie Cornwall, sick and dizzy from smoking opium but craving it nonetheless.”

  “I do crave his love. It has replaced every other appetite.” Lucy’s eyes danced in the sockets in the strange way they did when she thought of Morris Quince. She pulled a note out of her bodice. “He slipped this to me when no one was looking. I am going to meet him!”

  “Lucy! The weather!”

  She went to the window and opened the shutters. “Look. It has cleared. God himself is smiling upon my love.”