Moon Rising (38 page)

Amongst the usual court reports on cases of common assault, brawling and drunkenness, I read that Bella had been charged with soliciting in Pier Road, drunk and disorderly conduct, and abusive behaviour towards the arresting officer.

I was appalled. It wasn't headline news; such incidents were common and usually reported with brevity. The case was proved, however, and even though it was her first time before the court, Bella was fined and sentenced to seven days in jail. Her claim that she was unable to pay the fine was met with an alternative – another seven days inside.

Horrified, I tried to work out how long had elapsed since the case had appeared before the magistrates, and whether the sentence was still being served. I wrote at once to Mr Richardson, asking him to check up, and to pay the fine for Bella if she had more than a day left to serve. What he must have thought, I don't know; by way of explanation I said only that she had been good to me once, and I could not bear to think of her being in prison and in need. It was a brief understatement but it was true.

As things turned out it was too late to pay the fine: Bella was being released even as Mr Richardson made his enquiries. Nevertheless, it marked the beginning of another stage in our relationship, one where I started watching Bella from a distance, watching like a mother with a backward child. Watching with arms outstretched, all the time praying for good sense, but worrying just the same. It seemed to me there was no logic to Bella's behaviour. I could understand why a girl who had been so badly used by her father would find it hard to trust men, or to have much faith in the estate of marriage; I could even see that she might prefer the company and love of women. But I was too naive still to understand how someone who hated sex could do it for money. Not when the money could have been earned in other ways.

I would have liked to put the past behind me, cut myself free, live totally in the present with Henry and our brokerage business in London, but Whitby kept intruding on different levels. I found myself involved in more and more business that was Whitby based, and in a sense that was gratifying, but it kept my thoughts focused where I would have preferred them not to be. I came to expect the letters, twice or three times a year, from Isa, but although I expected them they still produced the same sense of revulsion and fury.

And yet I must confess to feeling a certain perverse satisfaction. I don't know why. Perhaps Isa became my hair shirt, part of my penance for that affair with Bram. I suppose that sense of guilt might have lessened over the years, except for my inability to have children; and there again, my guilt and regret were further complicated by the knowledge that I was less stricken by that failure than Henry. He was the one to whom children were important; my only regret was in not being able to provide them.

In some strange way, although I hated it, paying Isa made me feel better. Just as keeping an eye on Bella relieved a different sense of guilt. I saw them as two sides of a coin, facing in opposite directions, hardly aware of each other as separate entities. If they'd become friendlier for a time after Magnus's death, it was clear that all pretence had evaporated with Bella's first conviction for soliciting. Isa was sly and secretive, and so disapproving she could have put a Puritan to shame – which made me wonder whether Bella's behavior was deliberate.

~~~

Aside from my concerns in Whitby, life with Henry was both challenging and fulfilling. Whatever regrets we harboured were mostly buried in the business, which, as the ‘90s wore on, continued to do well. After the first few years we didn't talk about having children, and he seemed to accept that my chief interests were always going to be outside the home, in the movement of shipping and trade. Living in Hampstead, working in the City, I longed for fresh sea breezes and even the hustle and bustle of the docks. Since Henry refused to move house, I took every opportunity to travel, whether by train to Hull, or by ship across the North Sea. Sometimes he came with me, but more often I travelled alone.

From time to time I thought of Bram, and envied that house he'd talked about, overlooking the river. But to have lived in Chelsea would have put us too close for comfort. And with regard to entertainment it was fortunate that my husband's taste ran more to operetta and light comedy than the type of high drama presented by Irving at the Lyceum. Whenever we ventured into theatre-land I was very much aware that this was Bram's world, a world of fame and first nights, of champagne suppers and titled friends. It made Whitby, and all we'd shared ten years ago, seem very small beer indeed.

In the summer of '95 Bram and his friends were rarely out of the news. Oscar Wilde, who had once been in love with Florence, was convicted on charges of gross indecency and sent to jail, while in the same week Irving's brand of high drama – not to mention his largess – paid off in the form of a knighthood. He was the first actor ever to be honoured in that way, but I could not be pleased. Indeed I felt contemptuous of Irving and sorry for Wilde, which was perhaps contrary of me, so I kept my opinions to myself. Nevertheless, I did wonder how Bram felt about the situation. It seemed to me that one had been elevated by reverence and an over-emphasis on dignity and drama, while the other had been trampled underfoot for daring to mock current morals and manners.

And what about Florence, and Wilde's poor wife? How did
they
feel about it?

Their world was a long way from the one I inhabited with Henry, and their concerns were not mine. Bram faded from my mind for a while, until just after my thirtieth birthday, when he made himself felt once more.

Ironically, it was a time when I was feeling pleasantly mature and in control. Business was improving noticeably, and I knew it was more than just a trend; much of it was to do with my efforts, and the pursuit of instincts which rarely seemed to let me down. I was pleased with myself, perhaps even a little smug; if I'd had detractors, I knew I had admirers too, and not all were based on business. There were plenty of lingering glances to tell me I was still a desirable woman, despite the severely tailored outfits I wore to the office.

Henry often smiled at my weekday clothes, saying I looked like a redoubtable schoolmarm in my greys and browns, but in fact I liked them: not only did they suit my face and figure, I felt they were a good foil for the flamboyance of my hair. But for Henry's sake, when we were at home, I wore my hair loose and the softly coloured silks he preferred. I wore them mainly to please him, and if they didn't always have the desired effect, I told myself it was because he was working too hard. In fact we both were; we needed a holiday.

That Saturday morning, in the early summer of ‘97, was the sort to put holidays in mind: bright and sunny, with the promise of more to come. I walked into my favourite bookshop on Heath Street, and noticed the assistant unwrapping a parcel. The yellow-bound books attracted my attention. I was about to ask what they were, when I saw the author's name in red on the spine:
Bram Stoker.

It was a shock. Invariably, whenever I saw his name in a journal or newspaper, it was like being thrust straight into his presence. That day, with trembling fingers I reached out for his book and turning it over, read the title:
Dracula.

Even before I knew what it was about, the title chilled me.

~~~

I had the book wrapped and sealed and stowed away at home until I knew Henry would be away for a few days. When I settled down to read that book, I wanted to be alone.

At last my opportunity arose. It was the beginning of June, just eleven years since that summer in Whitby, and the weather in London was just as hot. When I got home from the office that evening, I peeled off my clothes and took a bath, and then, wearing a light robe, I ordered my dinner on a tray upstairs. It was something I did when Henry was away. I liked my time alone, and the large well-proportioned room at the rear of the house was a place where I'd been able to express my own taste. There were long windows and a balcony overlooking a walled garden with trees and an orchard, and muslin curtains which drifted slightly on the evening breeze.

On opening the book I was bewitched from the very beginning, travelling across Europe with the young solicitor, Jonathan Harker. Imagination supplied Jonathan Markway's face, and soon I was eating strange food with him, hearing strange voices, seeing the fortified medieval towns and the vast, oppressive landscape.

When he took the carriage from Bistritz I was there too, lurching over mountain passes, hearing the wind and the wolves and the music of the night. My heart leapt in my breast: I knew what it was like. But the author took me further than that, I could hear his voice as he whispered in my ear –
my
ear, no one else's – drawing word-pictures against the darkness, making me fear the advent of Jonathan's host and what strangeness he might find when he arrived at his destination. He put ice in my veins and a chill down my spine as he brought me to the threshold of the castle, and face to face with the mysterious Count Dracula.

Despite the chill there was a strange attraction. The Count was proud of an aristocratic past, yet so attentive and solicitous, so childishly innocent in his eagerness to learn how things were done in England, that one felt drawn to him even while wondering at his purpose. But then, as Jonathan's lonely imprisonment in the castle became clearer and the Count's nocturnal existence ever more sinister, unease deepened to flesh-crawling fear. There was a nightmarish quality about him, a more-than-real horror in the way he cloaked himself to crawl like a lizard,
face down,
down the massive castle wall, leaving his young guest in a terror of speculation as to what manner of creature detained him.

In an attempt to discover more, the young man went exploring, and against the Count's advice was foolish enough to fall asleep on a couch in the moonlight, to be woken a little while later by three voluptuous women, two dark and one fair, who seemed to have designs on him as a lover. They viewed and flirted and laughed coquettishly; one crept up on him while he pretended to be asleep, bent over his recumbent form to look and sigh and lick her glistening red lips in anticipation of the kiss she would bestow...

There was something so disturbingly erotic about the description, I found myself inadvertently warming in response. I was breathless, tantalised, horrified – yet as they crept closer, red mouths agape, I almost wanted the women to succeed. And then, on the brink of fulfilment, the Count's sudden appearance, his banishment of the women, that cry of his –
This man belongs to me!
– was at once a relief and a disappointment. It was as though the ultimate in forbidden pleasure had just been denied.

Dreadful enough, but behind that was something else, something that amounted almost to recognition. In that moment of languorous ecstasy, the young man – Jonathan in the book, Bram in my interpretation – was waiting to be pleasured by a beautiful woman. Ready and willing to give himself up to her, his pleasure stopped on the point of fulfilment, forbidden by the mysterious Count who banished all three women, and claimed the man for his own. Snatching him back to a place of safety, the Count even spoke of love...

I found that disturbing. Nevertheless, I read on through the evening, lost to all else bar a need to light the lamps. As darkness fell I was startled by a shivering of the curtains and the erratic fluttering of a great moth around the room. Terrified for a moment, I thought it was the count himself, come to steal my blood, my life...

Later, my maid's light tapping at the door made me jump again with fright, but I couldn't give up the book. Unlike poor, foolish Lucy – our Lucy of the clifftop grave! – I made sure the doors and windows were securely locked before I climbed into bed, with heavy winter curtains shut close against the moonlight.

The graveyard scenes in Hampstead were extraordinarily vivid, reminiscent of the nights Bram and I had spent together in Whitby, but far more chilling in their depiction of death and decay. I no longer frequented burial grounds, and had never been in the local cemetery, but his setting for Lucy's tomb might have been chosen deliberately, as though he knew I lived close by. I was frightened, as much by the memories his novel evoked as by the subject matter; he brought everything up close, stirred me yet made me shiver at the words he used, the pictures he created.

I winced and squirmed at the staking of poor Lucy, wondering who the life-model could have been for that light, flirtatious girl. Unable to make up her mind which of her many suitors to choose, she paid for it with her life. Was it Florence with all her admirers? Was she the tease, the one who infuriated him, the one Bram really wanted to hammer into the ground?

The other girl, Mina, was a different and far more complex figure. As a representative of New Womanhood, she should, I felt, have had my approval; but she was too good to be entirely true, more like some wished-for mother-sister-wife, pure, sensible and innately good. But distinctly untouchable. The only time I was able to sympathise with Mina, really put myself in her place, was after she married Jonathan Harker – when the Count came and took her while her husband lay sleeping beside them. Not only fed from her, but held her face to his breast and made her feed from him. That was real. That was shocking. That was something I could recognise.

The air in the room was warm, but I shivered under my shawl, and did not put out the lamp until I was certain the sun was up.

~~~

The brilliance of the novel made me want to write to him at once. His depiction of Whitby was so clear I found myself choked with longing, for the place, for the time we'd been happy there – even, painfully, for him. Surely Bram could not have written so well unless his memories were as deeply-etched as mine. Such thoughts were almost my undoing. I had to remind myself that more than a decade had passed since he and I had been in Whitby together, that he had used me, and used me badly, before obeying Irving's command to return to the Lyceum. Since then, we'd become different people leading different lives.