Stokers Shadow (10 page)

“I'm sure we can sort something out,” he says softly, already wondering how. Mary manages a weak smile which pleases him. Her trust has not been broken by his juggernaut charge into such forbidden areas as money and status. A thought weaves unbidden into William's brain. How far might this licence go?

William smothers the idea quickly with visions of himself as protector. His father's heroes stir within him as he thinks of Mary's defenselessness; he feels the weight of an imaginary scabbard by his side and the steel of armour on his chest. The demons that wait to devour this young woman, he thinks, are subtler than any vampire or rogue. They cower in the hearts of those who claim to protect.

The gorged maggot ceases to move in the apple flesh. All the wind-fallen cherries, bramble-berries, dewberries, plums and crabapples which lay scattered over the greens and parks of the city are slowly changing from within, fizzling in their own yeast, turning to heady wine within circles of mould and bruising. Twilight creatures scurry amongst the undergrowth, their senses altered by their warming, fermenting diet
.

The night is calm and silent with a distant promise of frost. Stars burn cold through the deepening blue. The breeze stirs from the north, rattling the driest leaves and circling meditatively high above the rooftops from which the first wisps of smoke begin curling
.

William listens to the tick of the mantelpiece clock and hangs onto the ridge of the passing summer. He is aware that a great change is coming within himself, and is half accepting, half frightened of what this might be
.

M
AUD OPENS THE
book and William's resentment of her rises like vinegar in his throat.

“The Thing in the coffin writhed,” she quotes calmly, her delivery purposely neutral and non-sarcastic. The effect of such “fairness,” William knows, will be to sharpen the blade of damnation when it finally falls onto his father's story.

William tries to stay calm. He has a long bridge to build if he wants to turn the unease he feels into a rational objection, and he knows he is unequal to it. So he retreats into passivity as Maud recites the passage. Her measured tones describe the twists and contortions of the vampire; the vampire is Lucy, friend of the novel's main heroine, Mina. But the narrator, either Jonathan Harker or Dr. Seward – William can't remember, they switch so often – no longer refers to her by name, or in any human terms at all, so intent are the vampire hunters upon her destruction.

William feels as though his wife is similarly torturing him. As the stake is plunged and then hammered into her chest, he feels like screaming out that she is defiling his father's memory, trampling over his grave. But he knows his agitation is ludicrous; she is, after all, merely quoting his father's own story. He fixes his gaze on the ducking flame in the newly lit fireplace, feigning tired indifference and superiority of knowledge as Maud goes on to read about the vampire's lips champing together until her “mouth was smeared with crimson foam.” The lurid vulgarity gives him a start which he is at pains to suppress.

At this point Maud coughs a little herself.

When she continues, her voice is hoarse. And new perversity enters the scene. The passage describes the expression of
the impaler, Arthur, who is one of the heroes of the novel. Even though Lucy was his own fiancée before her infection, Arthur is “like the figure of Thor,” with “high duty” shining in his face as he bears down with all his strength on “the mercy bearing stake.” Compounding his weird moral reversal are the prayers of his vampire-hunting circle – four men in all – which begin to ring through the vault, in a ghastly climax of hypocritical piety.

Maud finishes, closing the book slowly and looking at the rug.

She looks up and William looks away.

“Well,” she says conclusively.

“It's just a story,” William sighs.

“Do you find it embarrassing?”

“Why should I?” He gets up and walks over to the fireplace. Then, realizing that to start poking the fire again would be too obvious an obfuscation, he turns and faces his wife with his hands in his waistcoat pockets. “It wasn't supposed to be analyzed, it was supposed to be read.”

“Yet both you and your mother are treating it as though it is a landmine sitting in the mud. At least I can't seem to get you to talk about it.”

“I don't mind talking about it,” William says blushing at the lie, and realizing that he has repeated the exact same behaviour as the day before. He has once again talked almost freely about it with Mary but is clamming up with his wife. “I don't understand what it is that you want from me,” he says rather rudely, and immediately regrets it. “I mean,” he adds softly, “I don't quite see the purpose.”

“Aren't you curious?” asks Maud.

“About what?”

“About what your father thought of women,” she pursues quietly. She watches him closely as he leans against the mantelpiece with an elbow.

“He loved women. He adored them.”

“He appears to adore Lucy too, until about halfway through this novel of his.”

“She turns into a vampire,” he says emphatically.

“Very convenient.” But she smiles in tired defeat, takes the novel from her lap and places it on the little coffee table in front of her. She takes up her needlepoint.

William returns to his seat. He finds his wife's intrusions unsettling. What right has she, after all, to trespass into his father's mind? He realizes that there is more at stake than this. Her exploration agitates him because, by unpicking the privacy of his memory, she is weaving her way through his own mind as well, not just that of his father. His father is within him, William realizes. He is merely another chapter in the same book.

With heated discomfort, William becomes aware also that his growing infatuation with his mother's new girl is woven into the same secrecy. They are part of the same great vine, protecting the same dark desires. He has not mentioned his tea at the Ritz with Mary, and he is steering away from any talk about his afternoon that could force him to lie. He wishes to delay the moment of confirmation, but he knows the direction in which he is heading. He knows he has already passed the sign marked Danger. And now, as his wife's fingers start their rhythmic movements with the needle, he thinks of the tangle he has created for himself. He
has pledged himself to help Mary and the mission now burns urgently in his heart – this is a monster obligation he has been feeding with the abandonment of despair. How, he wonders, can he elevate Mary's position without raising suspicions as to his motivations?

Both mother and wife, it seems, stand in his way. As he already helps his mother with a small allowance, the only way he can lobby in Mary's favour would be to increase that monthly payment. Such an initiative on his part would raise his mother's suspicions. Given her contrary nature, he might not even get her to agree. And it would also involve an open conversation with Maud. Most crucially of all, he knows himself to be quite unpracticed at this kind of subterfuge. He knows the walls he has erected are far too fragile not to be swept away instantly by minds as penetrating as those of Maud and his mother.

William stares at the fire listening to the hollow tick of the mantelpiece clock. Maud, oblivious to him, works dexterously at the needle.

Urgency presses upon William's spirit; this mission to help Mary, dark and imperfect as it is, is part of the great redemption that has been filling his dreams of late, part of the golden chivalry he has been seeking to claim. Even through his wife's reading of Lucy's impalement, another vision ran like a loose thread – that of his mother with the stake and Mary in the coffin. It was upon Mary's breast that he saw the white dint of flesh stand out as the stake point descended. It was Mary's white face that came alive in screaming pain as the blood spurted out through the silver shroud. And in the background,
he glimpsed his own form, lost in the shadows behind his father's heroes with their Latin prayer.

The flames die down and the coals begin to glow. William wonders why his urge to save Mary should have to be so utterly soiled. Separate from desire and romantic secrecy there is, after all, an important mission to achieve. Thoughts of self-chastisement begin to deflate William. If only Mary's saviour were a worthier knight, one capable of more selfless dedication. He thinks of his father. And now he remembers an important distinction. It was Lucy's soul the men in Dracula were saving, not her life. If he could recall the conversation with his wife, this is the true argument he would pursue. Their standards were so lofty, the codes of chivalry so perfect in their total dedication to the adored one, that they would not allow Lucy to shame herself in death; they would save her from the degradation of the vampire existence that chained her and threatened to mock the purity they knew.

William thinks of his father, and of his absolute dedication to Irving. This was a type of chivalry too. He remembers how his once robust, striding parent was reduced to a bearlike creature bending over his study desk, collating his life's work before that life dripped entirely out of his weary spirit. He remembers how his father's decline could be measured to a point in time as precise as the pivot, and how that point in time matched perfectly with Irving's death in 1905.

And what did his father choose as his great task once the black clouds of mortality began rolling toward him? What great work did he feel compelled to complete? William remembers how the answer had confounded and frustrated the young
man he was at the time. Now his father was free to live for himself and spend his time writing novels. But the letters, scraps and old photographs that started to litter his desk were not research for an original story. They were not the cumulation of frustrated dreams now released in a torrent of creative energy. These were the raw materials for another kind of great enterprise. And this all-absorbing task was simply to mirror everything that went before. The turmoil of preparation in his father's study was for a book to be entitled,
Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving
.

As though he had not dedicated enough of himself to the actor! William thought at the time. He remembers the surprise he felt at his mother of all people, never Irving's greatest admirer. Rather than trying to persuade him towards a more selfish path, as William felt sure she would, she spent many hours a week earnestly filing, searching, scanning materials for this same great work. He remembers how tender she was to her husband in those years, indulging him in all the details and fancies that had once been her daily irritations.

William recognizes now what it was that changed her. For the first time in his life he feels something like it himself. She was in awe of her husband's love for Irving. She had seen the inescapable divinity in a devotion so great that even his own obituary should be a tribute to his friend.

F
LORENCE LIES FACING
the dark ceiling. She listens to the groan and creak of the windows under the gusting wind. It is a comforting, eternal sound which exists quite beyond the sordid, troubled present. Her soul drifts effortlessly between
pitch blackness and the shining gold of her memory. The loneliness and terror of her later life tumble away like dark leaves in the wind, turning to joy and sunlight in a second. The darkness returns, but only for a drumbeat before tumbling again into open blue skies. The ever-changing moan of the wind holds her in the season of perpetual alteration. She fears nothing, as nothing lasts beyond the moment.

The warmth of her visit from Mr. Thring established a base of joy that cannot be entirely eroded by the frustrations that followed: her foolish, disobedient maid leaving without a word and returning so late; her own inability to deal with it straightaway; and the constant aching in her arms and legs, a herald of the trying season to come. But the tingle of starlight is there, beyond it all, reminding her that, whatever the drudgery that followed, she had once been on the mountain, surrounded by gods and legends, and that this is her natural home. Endurance is to be expected. Downfall is inevitable. The blight of destruction is already in London, and within the walls of her house in the presumptuous young woman from Galway Bay she had the poor judgment to accept.

But all this does not wash away the glories of the past; glory is transient by its very nature.

Florence's thoughts darken, the leaves turning over into blackness again. She becomes aware of the dim oil portrait of her husband in the shadows overlooking her bed. It's curious that she has grown so used to ignoring it, but that very lately, she has caught Bram's tired and sombre eye while turning toward the wall at dawn, or slipping into bed last thing at night. Bram makes her uneasy. It is as though the ten cold
years that separate their last meeting have done more than time is supposed to do; they have turned them into strangers, perhaps even enemies. That lonely stretch of time has worn away the happy memories. Like wind over sand dunes, each time she has talked over the past with friends, she has unwittingly altered the landscape. She can no longer remember what she actually felt.

And then there is another kind of recollection, the type that remains locked deep in the vaults of her brain, troubling her more with each unwelcome encounter and growing in strength and clarity. These memories are like sea monsters feeding upon silence and fear. And they are pressing upon Florence now, surfacing with a whole range of sensory detail – she can even taste the flavour of the dust – clearly delineating the time, place and mood.

One lasts for just a moment though its sadness and confusion are eternal. She is in the very bed that she now lies upon. But she is gazing off at the window. Her husband's body lowers the bed's opposite side into a valley. But something is wrong. A terrifying noise breaks the silence in staccato rhythm, a kind of gasping, muffled yelping. Jolting movements accompany the sound, shaking the bed and rattling the headboard against the wall. Florence keeps her body stiff, unmoving. The unacceptable horror that her husband should be crying – an action of such unmanly despair from a proud, protective man – is surpassed by the probable cause. She knows that Irving said something cruel about her husband's new novel earlier. A special reading had taken place today and she overheard a remark made by someone who had attended.
Florence listens hard. Could there be any explanation for this dreadful noise? Gripping the pillow with her hand, she tells herself that it is sometimes difficult to tell. In the still of night even snoring can sound like a battalion laying siege with a full arsenal of cannons. She closes her eyes and tries to convince herself her husband might be snoring.