A Christmas Homecoming

by Anne Perry

  The scene with Van Helsing acting as Renfield worked superbly. Vincent was excellent. He would not have admitted it, but he copied almost exactly what Ballin had done, although his own sense of timing also asserted itself. The result was both chilling and pathetic, and very real.

  By the time they came to Lucy’s death scene, they were all caught up in the story. Even James, as Jonathan Harker, displayed a sensitivity Caroline had never seen in him before. Mercy’s grief as Mina reduced the audience to a throat-aching silence, and Eliza, who had also returned to watch, quickly dabbed at her eyes to hide her tears.

  They took a break only for luncheon: cold meat sandwiches, pickles, and hot apple pie with cream, all served in the theater.

  “I think we should see more of Harker and less of Van Helsing in the tomb scene,” Mercy said suddenly. She had just finished the last of her pie and was reaching for the excellent white wine that had been served with it. “It would improve the pace. Van Helsing is the intellect; Harker is the heart and the courage of the pursuit. Apart from Mina, of course.”

  “Of course,” Lydia answered. “But actually the core of the scene is Lucy. She is the one who has become a vampire. And we still don’t know what we are going to do about the children.” She looked at Joshua, then turned to Ballin. “Perhaps Mr. Ballin, who seems to have been sent here by the storm to solve all our problems, will be able to answer that for us?”

  “We are reduced to illusion,” he said thoughtfully. “We have no way of physically representing a child. Alice could—” It was the first time he had used her given name.

  “That’s stupid!” Douglas cut across him at once. “She is nothing like a child; she couldn’t play one. She’s a full-grown woman, at least in appearance.”

  Ballin’s face tightened with anger, whether for himself or for Alice it was impossible to tell. “She is also quite a passable actress, Mr. Paterson,” he said very softly, very precisely. His voice was oddly cold, as if there was some threat in it. “We can make a dummy, something of pillows, with the appearance of arms and a head. I’m sure Mrs. Netheridge’s maid can give us a dress that will do. The minds of the audience will create for them what they expect to see.”

  Joshua gave a sigh of relief.

  Douglas snorted with what seemed to be contempt, although Caroline was certain that it was actually frustration.

  “The master of delusion and deceit, aren’t you!” Douglas spat the words.

  It was Alice who sprang to Ballin’s defense. “Stagecraft, Douglas. I’m sorry you don’t know the difference. It is causing you to be unnecessarily rude to our guest.”

  “He is not our guest,” Douglas insisted. “He is a stranger who landed on the doorstep out of the storm, melodramatically, asking for help, and he has been aping Dracula ever since.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” Alice said angrily. “He told us what happened. His carriage overturned and broke a wheel in the snow. He won’t be the only person stranded in this weather. What on earth would anyone do except invite him in, especially at Christmas? What would you have done? Tell him there is no room?”

  “Invite the vampire into your house,” Douglas answered, his own voice louder and more strident. “He told you himself: Evil can come in only if you invite it.”

  Alice paled a little. “No one can come in unless they are invited,” she said, glaring at him. “Don’t tell me we’ve done this so well you actually believe in this vampire stuff?” She tried to laugh, and failed. It came out as a gasp of breath, with no humor and no conviction.

  “I believe in evil. And in stupidity,” he said bitterly.

  Her eyes raked him up and down. Her lip curled a little. “Don’t we all?”

  “Of course we do.” Lydia moved closer to Douglas’s side. “If we didn’t before, we should now.” She faced Alice. “You are fortunate to have the love of so fine a man, Miss Netheridge. I think he is something like Jonathan Harker, brave and modest, not knowing how to fight evil because he has none within himself, to be able to understand it.”

  Alice went even paler. She started to say something, then changed her mind and walked away.

  “Perhaps you’d like to attack the children again after we’ve finished lunch?” Joshua suggested to Lydia with an edge of sarcasm that was breathtaking. “Just pretend you have the dummy in your arms. Leave it in the shadows. Drop it, if it seems right to you, and then come forward to Harker and Van Helsing.”

  Caroline put her hands over her face and pretended she was somewhere else, just to give herself time to re-gather her strength.

  he crypt scene and Lucy’s final scene, as a vampire, went quite smoothly. They moved into the last act: the hunt for Dracula. Vincent was slightly overplaying Van Helsing’s mimicry of Renfield, but he added some details that were very vivid, and truly tragic, evoking Renfield as a man once decent, now a helpless victim of the terrible vampire. Joshua told him very firmly to keep all that he had added in; if the play ran five minutes longer because of it, then so be it.

  “It’s not necessary,” James protested. “We’re ten minutes over time already. We’ll lose the audience.”

  “No, we won’t,” Joshua told him. “It’s a superb piece of acting.”

  “We’re here to entertain, not show off,” Mercy said defensively. “Vincent’s just trying to impress Mr. Netheridge. He’s looking for another lead in the London West End.”

  “On that performance, he deserves it,” Joshua said. “And it’s important to the play. He makes Renfield matter to us.”

  “Renfield’s trivial, a plot device,” James said with disgust.

  “He’s a plot device that works extremely well,” Joshua said gravely. “His degradation from decent man to fly- and rat-eating lunatic shows us more clearly than any words what the power of the vampire is. Through Van Helsing we watch him die, but for an instant return to the man he once was. This is the only time we get to see that, to understand how far he fell. If we’re not frightened of Dracula after that, then we are truly stupid.”

  James drew in his breath to argue, then let it out again. He was actor and dreamer enough to know the truth of what Joshua said.

  They followed the script through to the end. They even tried the effect of the lights to create the illusion of a snowstorm, and cut down the words used to describe the last chase of the coffin carried through the mountain pass as the lights dimmed in imitation of the sun sinking in the west. They killed Dracula in its last rays, and the unearthly scream that rang out as the light faded and the curtain came down drew a moment’s total silence, and then a roar of applause.

  “It will work,” Joshua said simply. “Thank you for your ideas, Mr. Ballin. You have helped us enormously. Without you we might never have succeeded.”

  Ballin bowed, smiling. “It was a great pleasure,” he said. “A very great pleasure. Miss Alice, I think you have a happy future ahead of you.”

  “Thank you,” she whispered, her eyes shining.

  inner was quiet. Everyone was tired and ready to retire early. There were no more problems to solve; all that was left was for the script, much amended, to be learned by heart so there were no mistakes, no hesitations. In fact, several of them would write out a new copy of the script, clean, without the scratchings-out and scribbled margin notes. Many actors found writing out the script was an excellent way to commit the words to memory.

  Caroline wrote out the script as well, not every word, but the key phrases that cued the light changes. The prompting script would be with Alice, though Caroline had often taken on that task. Alice’s parts onstage were only a few words here and there: a servant or a messenger. It would not be difficult to fill all the roles and still act as prompter. The lights were crucial, and Caroline wanted to focus entirely on them.

  Joshua was sitting at the small desk in the bedroom and Caroline was on the bed, reading her cues over again, when she remembered a note she had written hastily about the lighting of Lucy’s death scene. She had left it on the stage.


  “I’ll just go and get it,” she said, slipping her feet off the bed and standing up. “I won’t be long.”

  “Shall I get it for you?” Joshua offered.

  “No, thank you.” She walked over to him and touched his cheek lightly. “You’re busy.” She looked down at his half-written page. “There’s another hour’s work you have to do still. I’m not afraid of vampires in the dark. I’ll be back in ten minutes or so.”

  Joshua smiled and turned back to the desk. She was right; it would take at least another hour or so to complete.

  Caroline went out onto the landing and down the stairs to the main hall. The lights were always left burning low—but quite sufficient for her to move swiftly toward the passage to the theater. The hall seemed even more magnificent in the shadows: the ceilings higher, the checkered marble floor bigger, the stairs sweeping up on either side disappearing dramatically into the dark corners where they turned and curled back to the gallery above.

  The long passage to the theater was even darker, leaving the distance between the niched candles heavily shadowed, the outlines of pictures barely visible. She walked briskly. Luckily there were no chairs or jutting tables to bump into. Not even the vase of bamboo was there now, she remembered, with a small smile.

  She turned the first corner, then the second, her eyes on the wall ahead, searching for the next candle along the corridor. Then she tripped over something and pitched forward, landing hard on the floor on her hands and knees. She got up slowly, shaken and bruised. How could she have been so clumsy? She turned to see what she had fallen over, and at first did not understand what it was. She was in the shadow between the lights, and the object looked like a pile of curtains dropped on the ground.

  Then as she stood dazed, her heart pounding, her eyes became more accustomed to the darkness, and the form came into focus. It was a man lying crumpled on his side, his legs half-folded under him. Was it a drunken footman? What on earth was the stupid man doing here?

  She bent to shake him, and only then did she see the long handle of the broom slanting upward. Except it was only half of the handle. The brush was missing, and the shaft ended abruptly in the man’s back. She felt the shadows blur and swim as if she were going to faint. She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again. It was not a footman, it was Ballin. His eyes were open and his mouth was open, as if he had screamed when the makeshift spear had struck him. She had no doubt whatsoever that he was dead.

  Should she yell for help? It seemed ridiculous to scream now, deliberately. Added to that, her mouth was as dry as if she had been eating cotton. She should stand up, control herself, make her legs walk back up the stairs to Joshua. Please heaven no one come along this corridor in the meantime.

  Her legs were wobbling. It was all she could do not to fall again. What had happened? Was there any imaginable way it could have been an accident?

  Don’t be absurd, she told herself, crossing the hall as silently as she had the first time, a world and an age ago. Nobody takes the head off a broom and spears themselves with the handle by accident. In fact, it must have been sharpened into a purposeful weapon, or it wouldn’t have even penetrated the skin anyway.

  She reached the stairs and clung to the newel post, climbing up hand over hand, pulling and balancing. She had seen murder before. One of her sons-in-law was a policeman.

  She was at the top of the stairs. She reached her own bedroom door and opened it. She saw the light on Joshua’s brown hair, the fair streaks in it shining.

  “Joshua …”

  He turned around slowly, smiling, the pen still in his hand. Then he saw her face.

  “What is it?” he asked huskily, starting up from the desk. “Caroline!”

  “Someone has killed Mr. Ballin.” She gulped, struggling now not to sob, not to let her knees buckle. He was beside her, arms holding her.

  “I tripped over his body in a dark stretch of the corridor to the theater,” she went on. “Before you ask, yes, I am sure he was killed … murdered. He has been stabbed through the chest with the broken-off handle of a broom. You could say …” She gulped again and the room swam and blurred in the corners. “You could say down through the heart with a stake.” She wanted to laugh but it ended in a sob.

  He was guiding her to the bed, still holding her.

  “Have you told anyone else?” he asked, his voice unsteady.

  “No. I … I thought of screaming, but it seemed so stupid. We must tell Mr. Netheridge. Do you know which is their bedroom?”

  “No. I shall call one of the servants to wake him.” He glanced at the window, then back at Caroline. She was sitting on the bed now, and he still held both her hands. “We will have to deal with it ourselves … without the police.”

  “Joshua, it’s murder!” she protested. “We can’t just … just deal with it, as if it were some kind of domestic accident!”

  “Caroline. Who’s going to walk through that snow to fetch the police?” he asked very gently.

  “Oh … oh.” She took a deep breath. “Yes … I see. How stupid of me. We’ll have to … Oh, heaven!” Now she leaned against him as her body began to shake. “That means one of us must have done it.”

  He touched her hair gently, pushing the long strands away from her face.

  “I’m afraid it does. There won’t be any more strangers out in the night coming here, or anywhere else.” He let out a long, shaky breath. “I’ll go and get one of the servants. Butler, I suppose. He’ll call Mr. Netheridge. At least we must provide a little decency for the body, for the time being.” He took a step.

  “Joshua!”

  He turned. “You stay here,” he told her. “Perhaps you had better not let anyone else in.”

  “Put a blanket over the body, if you like,” she told him. “But you’d better not move it until someone has looked at it. We have to find out who killed him.” She smiled bleakly and it felt like a grimace. “I’ve been around rather a lot of crime scenes, one way and another. Thomas is a policeman, if you remember.”

  “We can’t leave it there until the thaw,” he protested. “We’ll have to find a better place for it, somewhere cold. But yes, perhaps we should take a very careful look at it first. I don’t know who, Netheridge himself, I suppose. It’s his house. You know, I have the odd feeling that Ballin would have been the best person to take charge in a situation like this.”

  He looked very pale. For a ridiculous moment she thought, what a disappointment it was that they would hardly be able to put on the play now. It really had become very good.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “He was very able. I’m … sorry he’s gone.” It sounded so inadequate, and yet it was all she could think to say.

  “Stay here,” he repeated, then he went out the door.

  t was nearly half an hour later when Joshua returned. Caroline insisted on going down with him to the withdrawing room, where the rest of the company was gathered. All had dressed again, but hastily, and none of the women had bothered to pin up their hair. Everyone was clearly shocked and frightened. James and Mercy sat together on the couch, holding hands. Douglas stood behind the big armchair in which Alice was hunched up. Her face was white, and she was clearly distressed. Lydia sat alone, as did Vincent.

  Eliza sat close to where her husband stood with his back to the fire, which had been stoked up again. The huge stained-glass window made the room look like a church.

  Joshua and Caroline took places on the other sofa.

  Netheridge cleared his throat. “It seems we have a very ugly tragedy in the house,” he said with deep unhappiness. “No doubt you all know by now that the stranger, Mr. Ballin, has met with a very sudden death.” He glared at Vincent, who had seemed about to interrupt him. “We don’t yet know what happened, whether it was some sort of accident, or worse. If anybody has anything they can tell us about it, now would be the time to do so. Obviously we can’t call a doctor, or the police. We have no way of getting out to do it, and they have no way of
coming to us until the weather improves. No doubt they will clear the roads as soon as they can.” He looked around the group.

  No one said anything.

  “Come now. Who was Ballin?” he demanded. “He appeared out of the night and asked for shelter. We gave it to him, as we would. Who knew where he came from? Did he talk to any of you? Did he say who he was going to visit here in Whitby? Why? What does he do? Where does he live? We don’t know anything about him!” His glance embraced Eliza, Alice, and Douglas.

  “For heaven’s sake, we don’t know him, either,” James said heatedly. “We don’t even know anyone else in Whitby.”

  “Well, why would anybody kill him, then?” Netheridge asked.

  “He was an objectionable, interfering, and arrogant man.” Douglas pulled his mouth into a thin, hard line. “He was not difficult to dislike.”

  Caroline lost her temper, which happened very rarely indeed, largely because she had been brought up to believe that ladies never did such a thing.

  “Mr. Paterson, this man has been run through the chest with a broom handle. The fact that you did not care for him is irrelevant. Unless you are saying that your dislike was sufficiently intense for you to have murdered him? And I do not think that is what you mean. Somebody here obviously had a far deeper hatred or fear of him, beyond simple dislike. One does not take another human being’s life violently, in the middle of the night, without a passion that has slipped out of all control. Your resentment of his generosity in working with Alice, and his assistance in helping her believe in her ability, is surely not of that order, is it?”

  There was a stunned silence.

  Douglas was white to the lips. “Of course it isn’t!” he said savagely. “How dare you say such a thing? The man was arrogant, and probably a charlatan, but I didn’t do anything to him at all. Look at your fellow players. It has to be one of you.”

  It was Vincent who answered, his eyes wide in disbelief. “One of us? Why, for God’s sake? It was this house he came to. It is entirely conceivable that he had actually heard that Mr. Netheridge was entertaining his friends with a group of professional actors in his daughter’s drama, even though he claimed he had no idea. Maybe that was why he showed up. Even if it were not, how would Ballin know specifically who we were? One has to assume it was someone here he came for, someone he expected to find.”