Renfield

by Barbara Hambly

Spiders harder to catch in padding.

  27 August

  10 flies. Prune macedoine.

  28 August

  9 flies.

  His voice is silent. Even when I sleep, as I did in today’s deep heat, nothing. He is sated.

  Every night I see him, standing on the air outside her window, first a small darkness, like a bat, red eyes burning, burning. She comes to the window, sleep-walking in her night-dress, blonde hair streaming down her back and lifted by the breath of the night. Dear God, how thin she looks! Her face is drawn and gaunt, her eyes sunk in shadows. He walks to her across the air and the face she raises to him is like an exhausted child’s, uncomprehending. His cloak covers her; he steps down, and into the dark of her room.

  Treacle pudding at dinner. Won Langmore’s from him at cribbage. Hardy cheats.

  29 August

  12 flies, 1 spider

  Was it Dante who said that the true pain of Hell is exclusion from the beatific vision of God? All the refinements of torment, the rain of fire and the pits of ice, the buffeting winds of the Circle of the Passionate, all are only reflections of that fact: that those souls have forgotten God, and are forgotten by Him.

  Wotan the Traveler has forgotten me.

  Oh, Catherine, forgive me my failure! I am utterly on my own.

  30 August

  Will he never make an end to her?

  “John.” Lucy rose from the wicker chair among the ferns of the Hillingham conservatory, held out her hand. “It’s good to see you.”

  In the act of surrendering his hat to the maid, Seward froze. His heart seemed to stall in his chest. Art had warned him that Lucy looked bad. But nothing could have prepared him for the ghastly whiteness of her face, the way her stylish pink gown hung now from her attenuated shoulders, the transparent look to her hands, and the faint blueness that lay like a ghost on her lips. Dear God!

  He forced himself to say, “And it’s always good to see you, Miss Westenra,” hoping his voice would not betray his shock.

  He thanked God—and his long-dead nanny—from the bottom of his heart for the existence of good manners and small talk, that allowed one to go on as if nothing unthinkable were happening.

  “We’ll be having lunch out here, if you don’t mind.” Lucy smiled, gesturing through the conservatory’s glass doors to the white-clothed table, the cheerful blue-and-yellow china set out among the tubbed feather-palms, the dark-leaved aspidistras. “It’s so muggy today.” With its long windows open onto the walled garden, even the conservatory was warm, but Lucy kept a shawl draped over her shoulders, as if her own flesh no longer sufficed to protect her bones from chill. From the other white wicker chair, Mrs. Westenra half-rose with a friendly nod—friendly, reflected Seward, now that there was no danger of Lucy giving her hand to one so unworthy as a mad-doctor who had no better social manners than to go off in pursuit of one of his patients between the fish course and the entrée.

  “And how are you, Madame?” he asked, holding out his hand to her. Lucy’s appearance shocked him, but her mother’s sallow skin and puffy hands only filled him with deepest pity. Even had Arthur not warned him about that, too, he would have seen the death-warrant written in her face.

  In the awful days following that disastrous dinner, Seward had frequently wished Mrs. Westenra ill. Though he had no superstitious belief that mere sour wishes could bring ill to pass, the recollection of them twisted within him, not out of guilt, but sorrow at how hastily a disappointed lover could hope for fate’s vengeance, little realizing that far worse was already in store.

  “I’m quite well, thank you, Dr. Seward.” Her own nanny’s strictly taught good manners allowed her to smile as she lied. “I’m sorry Mr. Holmwood will not be able to join us.”

  “His father was taken ill, at their ancestral home in Ring.” The telegram had reached him that morning, as he’d been writing up instructions for Hennessey to look after various of the more difficult patients. “Have you been there? It’s in the Lake District, probably one of the most beautiful old houses I’ve ever seen.” He helped Mrs. Westenra to the little table, just as if she hadn’t made sniffy remarks about his quarters in Rushbrook House; held her chair for her and handed her her napkin before seating Lucy, then himself. “I had occasion to spend a few weeks there, when I was first hired to escort Uncle Harry Holmwood round the world and make sure he didn’t kill himself or anyone else in the process.”

  Tales of Uncle Harry kept both women entertained through luncheon—traveling with Uncle Harry had given Seward a stock of stories that would have lasted him through two months in quarantine, and that was only the repeatable ones. His ill-will against Violet Westenra dissolved as though it had never been, petty in the face of mortality’s shadow, and he exerted himself to entertain her. For her part, she met his efforts with smiling cheer. Sometimes Seward, glancing at Lucy’s face, saw dread and confusion in her eyes as she looked at her mother, but Mrs. Westenra seemed already to be withdrawing from the world of the living. If asked, she would probably agree that Lucy was too thin and did not look well. But she did not seem to see the skull that stared at Seward from beneath Lucy’s fragile skin.

  “If you young people will excuse me, it’s become my custom to lie down for a little after luncheon…”

  And they were alone.

  The last time they had been so was back in May, when Lucy had confessed to him, weeping, that she loved another: that her heart was not free.

  He wondered if his would ever be.

  The memory of the scene was in her eyes as she looked at him, and Seward said, as if speaking to a new patient, “So tell me what’s troubling you…Miss Westenra. Or may I yet call you Lucy, as if you were my sister?”

  Her fleeting smile showed gums nearly white, and sunken back horribly from her teeth. “I should like to have a brother like you, Doctor…Jack. One day…”

  The maid came in to clear up. Lucy glanced sidelong at her, and said, “Would you much mind coming to my boudoir, if you’re going to look in my eyes and at my tongue and all that?” She smiled brightly, but in her eyes Seward saw the same worry that had been there when she’d watched her mother at lunch.

  Wondering how much her mother guessed; how much her mother saw.

  “Of course.” He followed her through the well-remembered front hall, with its Queen Anne chest and the big Chinese porcelain bowl that held visitors’ cards, and up to her room, overlooking the back garden on a little balcony and painted white and violet.

  The moment the door was closed, she sank onto a chair, her hands pressed to her brow to cover her eyes, as if all her strength had deserted her and she had barely made it to refuge. For a moment she said nothing, but Seward could see the tears flowing from beneath her trembling fingers.

  “I can’t tell you how I loathe talking about myself.” Her voice was barely a whisper.

  “I understand,” replied Seward softly. “But even were I personally blackguard enough to speak of what another tells me, a doctor’s confidence is sacred. Arthur is my friend, and grievously anxious about you, but your trouble is no more his business than the sufferings of any of my patients would be.”

  “It isn’t that.” Lucy raised her head then, shook back the tendrils of her hair that had come unpinned around her face. “Tell Arthur everything you choose. It is his business, and no more than I would tell him myself, were he here.

  “As for what’s wrong…I don’t know what’s wrong with me! That’s what frightens me so. I feel so weak, and I have trouble breathing, especially in the morning, as if there isn’t enough air in the world to fill my lungs. And I have dreams, terrible dreams…”

  “About what?” Seward asked, though the matter was clearly physical and not in the province of mental fancies. Lucy ducked her head aside, the faintest flare of pink staining the ghastly white of her cheekbones.

  “I—I don’t recall.” Her breath quickened to a sudden, ragged gasp. She got hastily to her feet and went to the window, the pink cashm
ere shawl sliding from her shoulders in her confusion. Her hands fumbled with the window-catch and the next moment she gave a little cry as the casement jerked up hard. She pulled her hand back, where a corner of the pane cracked at the impact.

  Seward sprang to his feet and went to her. She was crying in earnest now, clutching her cut finger, from weakness, he guessed, rather than genuine pain. Or shame perhaps, he thought, as he took her hand and made sure that the cut was indeed superficial. He found it curious, how frequently young ladies were overcome with shame they could not name, when they were exhausted, or hurt.

  He said nothing, only took a clean handkerchief from his jacket pocket to tie up the cut. He didn’t even think Lucy noticed that he also extracted from the same pocket a small glass pipette, and took in it a few drops of her blood.

  “I wish Mina were with me,” Lucy whispered, as Seward guided her back to her chair. “Mina Murray, who was in the Fourth Form at Mrs. Druggett’s School when I was in the First. Of course I can speak to…to Arthur about anything, but…but sometimes a girl needs another girl to speak to.”

  “Of course,” said Seward. And in a gently rallying tone, added, “That’s a well-known medical fact,” and was rewarded by Lucy’s hesitant smile. “And I’m sorry,” he went on more soberly, “that Arthur could not be here to comfort you. Even were you not affianced, I could name no man better suited to the task.”

  And she sighed and relaxed, relieved that Arthur’s name was not forbidden between them. She turned a little away from him, groping in her pocket for a handkerchief to wipe her eyes.

  “Can your Miss Murray not be sent for?” Seward asked. “She was the friend who went to Whitby with you, was she not?”

  “She was, but she was called away suddenly, just before Mother and I came home. Her fiancé was taken ill with brain-fever somewhere in Europe, and she had to go to him.”

  Speaking of her friend’s concerns seemed to steady her, and she held out her hand, and opened her mouth, for his examination of nails and gums, with the air of an obedient child. The mucous membranes were nearly white, as he had observed before. Chlorosis? he wondered, baffled. It was a form of anaemia that struck girls of her age, but he’d never known it to come on so swiftly. In May she’d been delicate—she was always prone to bronchial complaints—but she’d been pink as a rose and lively as a kitten.

  “When did this start?” he asked, expecting her to say—as so many did—that she didn’t really know, that it had come on her gradually.

  Instead she replied at once, “In Whitby. I used to sleep-walk when I was at school, I think I told you—poor Mina was forever chasing me down the hallways in the middle of the night! In Whitby I started doing so again. One night I went right out of the house where we were staying, and walked clear up to the churchyard that overlooks the town. Mina found me lying on one of the tombstones, like the heroine of a play. We didn’t tell Mama.”

  Again the hesitation, the shadow of fear crossing her eyes—fear of what she half-guessed, fear that she would not even speak of to Seward, and he a doctor. Fear that her fear for her mother was true.

  She went on, “I felt ill right after that. I thought I’d just taken a chill, and that it would pass off, and it did, for a day or two. Then it came back, for three, perhaps four days. I felt better for a day or two just before Mina left for Buda-Pesth, and when Arthur was in Whitby, we rode and walked and went boating, and I thought all was well. But now…”

  She lowered her head to her hands again, and began to cry afresh. “A week ago it began again, the dreams, and the sleep-walking, and this horrible feeling of being in some terrible danger that I cannot see. Last night I woke up lying on the floor between my bed and the window, gasping as if I were drowning and cold…so cold! I’ve tried asking Mother if I may sleep with her and she doesn’t want me to. She says she sleeps so lightly she’s afraid she will disturb me, or I her. I look at myself in the mirror and I look like Death. I see myself in Arthur’s eyes…”

  She broke off, her hands pressed to her mouth, her thin body trembling as if with bitter chill. “What’s wrong with me, Jack?” Her voice thinned to barely a breath. “I know this isn’t right. What’s happening to me?”

  “What’s happening is that you’re ill.” Seward would have given his right arm to cup her thin cheek with his hand; he took her hand instead. Long practice had given him the ability to put into his voice a calm steadiness that he was far from feeling. “All pathologies have an explanation: we simply haven’t found the right one here yet. You show some symptoms of anaemia but the onset is all wrong. Are you able to eat?”

  She shook her head. It was true she’d only toyed with her lunch.

  “The sleep-walking and the dreams may very well have something to do with it, and with your very natural concern over your mother’s health. In my work with the human mind, I’ve observed many cases of some mental stress or upset working its way out in physical symptoms. There’s a great deal of new work being done on this subject and it’s apparently not at all uncommon. Would it be all right if I came back for lunch the day after tomorrow, and brought a friend with me? He’s the doctor I studied with at the University of Leyden, an expert in rare diseases. He may be able to take one look at you and say, ‘Ach, it is polly-diddle-itis! She has only to bathe in goat’s milk and she vill be vell again!’”

  Lucy burst into laughter, her whole emaciated face lightening, and she clasped Seward’s hand in both of hers. “Bring whom you will, dear Jack,” she said. “Mother will be lunching out; we can be alone. And thank you,” she added, as she descended the stairs with him, and walked him to the door. “Thank you more than I can say.”

  Lucy’s laughter, and the brightness that had replaced the frightened lethargy in her eyes, remained with Seward through the long rattling journey back to Purfleet in the two-horse fly he kept—at rather more expense than he liked—for such occasions. Simmons was driving, and came close to tangling axles with half a dozen cabs, drays, and carts on the road.

  At Rushbrook House he took a quick glance at Hennessey’s sloppy notes to make sure nothing untoward had happened in his absence—Emily Strathmore had had to be put in the Swing again, and “Lord Spotty” was up to his old tricks—then settled down to write a letter to Arthur Holmwood, and a telegram to Abraham Van Helsing.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  For nearly three weeks Renfield watched, as if from a barred and distant window, as the thing in the chapel at Carfax continued its attacks on Lucy.

  When the red-eyed bat had flown from the chapel window, leaving him behind in the hands of his foes, he had feared that he must see the kill. He had had no idea, he thought now, of how long that kill would take, of the drawn-out torment of cat-and-mouse that Wotan played, like a malicious child, with the frightened girl. It was one thing, he told himself, cold with anger, to kill in the delirious uncontrollable rush of rage or lust (How do I know that? he wondered: why did the brown face of an Indian girl wink through his consciousness, lying sleeping on the charpoi at his side…sleeping with open eyes…) It was another to kill by inches, to leave Lucy swooning on the floor of her room, to come again another night and draw her once more to the brink of death.

  Yet he could not speak of what he knew. Wotan held the power of life in his hand, life that Renfield desperately needed. Not once in those three weeks did Wotan call upon him or speak his name, but Renfield did not give up the hope—the certainty—that he would.

  “All over, all over, he has deserted me,” he said one warm September afternoon when Seward came to visit him—to visit him in his old room, whose repaired window looked out over the garden and the tree-lined drive from the gates. He’d spread sugar from his tea over the window-sill, and had caught a dozen flies in the final hour of the day. “No hope for me now unless I do it for myself.” Seward, though of too small a mind to comprehend or even guess at Renfield’s mission, sympathized and agreed to provide an extra ration of sugar. It was astonishing, thought Renfield, shaking hi
s head, how easily the man could be manipulated.

  “He’s off to visit that sweetheart of his, that’s bound to marry a lord,” provided Langmore shortly thereafter, coming in with the extra sugar while Renfield sat at the open window watching Seward’s smart black fly rattle off down the drive and through the gates.

  “Is she having second thoughts?” inquired Renfield, and the little keeper hooted with laughter and slapped his thigh.

  “Lord, let’s hope not! That mother of her’n would ass-assinate him if she thought it! What a griffin! No—the poor young lady’s took ill.” Langmore came over to the window, with a glance of wary disgust at the little buzzing cardboard box at Renfield’s elbow, and with his eyes followed the black carriage through the gates, and out onto the London road. By his voice, and the pupils of his eyes, Renfield could see the keeper had had a touch of poppy before coming on duty. Not enough to put him to sleep, but enough to make him talkative.

  “Funny how a man can be cool and smart as a soldier, when the likes of old Emily Strathmore’s tearin’ at him like a wildcat, yet since his Miss Lucy’s been took ill—and her promised to another man, and that other man the Doc’s best friend—it’s like he’s aged ten years.”

  “Miss Lucy?” Renfield stared at him.

  “Miss Lucy Westenra. Pretty as a daffy-down-dilly, I thought, the night she come here to take dinner with him—with that ma of hers standin’ right over her to make sure the pair of ’em didn’t have a moment to theirselves for the Doc to pop the question, as I hear he planned to that night. And him borrowin’ a butler and silverware and what-all else from Sir Ambrose Poole for the h’occasion. Well, ’tis an ill wind that blows no one good.” The grizzled little man cocked an eyebrow at Renfield. “You marry a maid, you marry her ma, and Christ help the man ends up with that old man-trap for a mother-in-law. You know what I mean?”

  “Yes,” said Renfield softly, thinking of cold-eyed Lady Brough…though of course, Catherine was nothing at all like her mother. And that hatchet-faced harridan Georgina Clayburne, who wanted nothing more than to re-claim Catherine’s share of their father’s money for her precious “family.” “Yes, I know what you mean.”