Karen Essex

  The three of us looked over her shoulder. On the plate, as if it had come straight out of the ether, a wispy image of a bundle appeared lying in Kate’s lap. The face was indistinguishable, but the image did look like a baby swaddled in a pretty lace blanket.

  Kate looked at the image, and then looked at Jacob.

  Madam Gummler asked Kate if she needed to sit down, or if she thought she might faint, as was usual with women who make communication with their deceased children. Kate answered without emotion. “Will we be able to take a finished photograph with us when we leave?”

  “Why yes,” Godfrey said. “Though I would prefer if you left it with us to dry. We could send it tomorrow.”

  “No, we are set to leave for the country tomorrow to visit our relations. We must take the photograph with us,” Kate said.

  I was surprised at Kate’s restraint in not exposing her true mission, but I supposed that she had to carry the ruse straight through to obtain her evidence. I began to have difficulty breathing, what with the acrid chemical odors and the heat in the tiny, cramped room generated by five bodies and no ventilation. I said as much, and Madam Gummler offered to make tea for us in the parlor while her husband developed the other negative and made prints of the pictures.

  “You must be very excited,” Madam Gummler said to Kate as she poured tea for us.

  “You have no idea how very much,” Kate said.

  “Perhaps your photograph will show you who is trying to contact you, dear,” the woman said to me. “Sometimes the spirits are shy, but this is someone of power. I felt him here,” she said, pointing to her heart.

  Kate snickered, and I was afraid that she was about to give us away, but she busied her mouth with sipping tea. After seeing the image of Kate’s nonexistent dead baby, we all knew that the Gummlers were running a fraudulent operation, but I was still curious about what Madam Gummler was saying. I wanted to question her, but I also did not want to alert Kate as to my recent disturbing incident. Not inquisitive, disparaging Kate.

  Jacob walked over to the fireplace, which was not lit, it being summertime, and stared into it as if flames were there keeping his attention. Madam Gummler took a Spanish shawl from the back of one of her chairs and draped it over Kate’s shoulders. “It’s best to keep the body warm when one goes into shock from having contact with the dead.”

  I wished she would have put the thing around me. I felt a draft sweep through the room and past my face, though no one else seemed to notice it. My body, which had been so hot in the darkroom, now felt as if a piece of ice were slithering down my spine. I wrapped my hands around the warm teacup and brought it to my stomach. It did not help the inexplicable coldness that was sweeping over me, and my hands started to shake. I put the cup down, hoping that no one would notice.

  Madam Gummler was about to offer more tea, when Godfrey entered the room. He spoke to his wife. “Mother, I need your assistance.”

  She excused herself and followed her husband back to the darkroom. Kate looked at me. “Are you well, Mina? You look positively stricken.”

  “I’m just a bit cold,” I said.

  “Do not worry. We will soon be out of here,” she said.

  “Quiet, darling,” Jacob said. “The spirits might be listening.” They both giggled. I did not know if he called her darling because he was pretending to be her husband, or if they were, in fact, lovers and Kate had declined to tell me.

  The Gummlers entered the room slowly, Madam Gummler leading her husband as if the two were in a solemn procession. Each held a still-damp print with two fingers.

  “We have a rather startling surprise,” Madam Gummler said. Godfrey went to give me the photograph, but his wife snapped at him. “One at a time, dear.”

  She gave one of the photographs to Kate. Jacob and I rose to look at it.

  “There he is, little Simon, so lovely in his mother’s arms,” Mrs. Gummler said.

  “What do you think of little Simon, Mr. Reed?” she asked, handing the photograph to him.

  “I think we have everything we require,” Jacob said.

  “Require for what purpose?” Godfrey asked. His eyes, already hooded by heavy lids, narrowed into suspicious little gashes.

  “We are journalists and colleagues, sir. We are not married, and neither of us has a child, either alive or dead.”

  “We told you our story before we arrived,” Kate said in the familiar tone she had used with the tenement landlords. “You tampered with the plate before taking the photograph. You have deceived many people and defrauded them of money, but it won’t continue.”

  Rather than succumb to humiliation or back down, Madam Gummler replied calmly. “Journalists, you say? Who came here with a lie? I ask you, who are the real frauds here? I submit it is the two of you.”

  Godfrey looked at me. “The real question is, who is this woman?”

  “Me?” I put my hand to my chest. What did I have to do with anything?

  “She is our apprentice,” Kate said.

  “I suspect she is more than that,” Madam Gummler said. “I think she must be a sorcerer’s apprentice.” She held the photograph out to me. “Do you know this person?”

  I looked at the image of myself sitting in the chair looking placid, uninterested, and a little bit afraid. Behind me, however, stood a man in elegant evening clothes. He wore a tall hat and a cape and carried a walking stick, which he held beneath the knob, exposing the golden dragon’s head atop it. Unlike the picture of the swaddled babe in the first photograph, his body was not a swirling and indistinguishable mass of ghostly light but nearly as fully formed as my own. His deep-set, haunted eyes stared directly at me. Long hair flowed about his shoulders. I did not have time to scrutinize the image because I recognized him instantly. As soon as I did, the icy feeling again crawled up my spine, all the way through my head and into my eyes. Blackness welled up, obscuring my vision, and I felt my body go weak. Before I could break my fall, I hit the floor and lost consciousness.

  When I came to, Kate was insisting that Madam Gummler call a physician, whereas Jacob was insisting that they take me away from the place as soon as possible. I sided with Jacob, who went outside and found us a hansom cab. Madam Gummler handed me the photograph of—what could I call him?—the spirit of my mysterious savior—but her husband wanted to keep it to study.

  “It belongs to us,” Kate said, grabbing it from them. I suppose she wanted to have it as evidence. I did not argue with her, nor did the Gummlers, and with photographs in hand, we left their parlor. On the way home, Jacob asked what had caused me to faint so suddenly, and I made an excuse that I had been feeling ill all day and probably should not have attended such a sensational event.

  “Clearly, they tamper with every negative plate. I’ll wager that fifty women in England are in possession of a photograph with that handsome ghost standing behind them.” Kate turned to Jacob. “I wish you had waited to disclose our identities. They would have spun a fabulous tale about Mina’s ghost that we might have used in our story.”

  “I was bored,” he answered. “We knew they were frauds, and we exposed them as such. Not exactly a challenge. Besides, why should some bereaved mother not believe that her child is hovering about in heaven?”

  Kate had initiated the investigation into the Gummlers, and I could see that she was taking Jacob’s lack of enthusiasm as a personal attack. Fortunately, this took the emphasis off what had happened to me, and all the way home, they argued over the merits of publishing the article.

  I left the photograph in their possession. I was terrified of certainty; if I never looked at it again, I would not have to confirm what I saw. I would be able to tell myself that the ghostly image was a photographer’s trick. As Jonathan had explained, it was a manifestation of my fears. In time, I would realize that my mind, upset by recent events, had attributed the features of my savior to this figure, and I could eventually put the incident to rest. Once safely married to Jonathan, these strange occurrences would dis
sipate into thin air. I would be so busy keeping our house and preparing to start our family that I would not have time for mysterious forays into the unknown. Just as enrollment in Miss Hadley’s school had made my early experiences with the supernatural disappear, so marriage to Jonathan would force normalcy upon me and once again obliterate these inexplicable elements.

  But that very night, something happened in my dream that I could not put off to a rational explanation, an experience thrust upon me on some astral plane where I was not in control but subject to the specters that prowl the ethers. In this dream—though it felt more vivid than an ordinary dream—a man was on top of me and inside me, and I wanted him to be there. I held him in place, digging my fingernails deep into his back, clutching him to me, urging him to move deeper and deeper into me. Wicked and desperate, my desire was unbounded. I was frantically reaching for something, but what it was I did not know. My lust was like a ladder that must be climbed one rung at a time, but I could never reach the top.

  I woke in the middle of this experience, body quivering, drenched in my own sweat, and still frantic to reach the unknown destination to which only the lover could deliver me. I was alone in the room, but the presence was still deep inside me, filling that dark cavity. I lay quietly for a long time, taking in my surroundings and reassuring myself with the familiar details of the room—the little chest of drawers, the single straight-backed chair, the washstand with a bowl and pitcher on top and the small wood-framed oval mirror above it. I named the furnishings out loud, hoping that the addressed items would somehow acknowledge me too and let me know that I was indeed in my room and not still dreaming. But was I? I was alone and yet I could still feel the man, or some presence, inside me.

  The naming did not make the sensation go away. I had never touched myself in that place, so I did not know what it should feel like inside. I slid my nightdress up and my hand down. Cautiously, as if I were touching someone other than myself, I let my fingers slide past my navel; down my stomach; through the hair; and to the moist, hidden part of me. What a mystery it was, this part of my body, more secretive than a heart or lung, for I had seen pictures of those organs. I heard a noise outside my door and retracted my hand, but soon realized it was only the wind coming through the hall and rattling the doors. I wanted to go back to sleep again and forget all this, but I could not ignore the full feeling inside me. Something was literally filling me up. Had some ghost come in the night and violated me? If so, I had been his desperate and willing victim. I reached again between my legs, spreading them wider. Using my middle finger, I located the small entrance, and carefully slid my finger inside. It felt like nothing I had ever felt before, soft and smooth, and empty and full at the same time, a moist cushion of a cave. Something inside me contracted around my finger, resurrecting the familiar throb of my dream. Where had my lover come from, and where had he gone? I felt nothing but the wet, creamy, hot walls of my own body. Something made me want to linger and to explore, but the more I enjoyed the sensations, the more I knew that I should stop the journey along this dark path. I retracted my finger slowly and brought it into the cool, night air, and it carried with it the heavy, salty scent of the inside of that secretive grotto. Once I pulled my finger out, the full feeling subsided, as if no one had ever been inside me.

  The next morning, I received a letter from Lucy Westenra, my dearest friend from school days, who was on summer holiday with her mother at the seaside resort of Whitby. “I am lonely for a female companion with whom to share the contents of my heart and mind, not to mention some interesting news on a subject dear to us both,” she wrote, enclosing a train ticket. Lucy knew that Jonathan was away and that Miss Hadley’s closed every August. The students and staff went to their families, and Headmistress traveled to see her sister in Derbyshire, so that I, with no relatives to visit, would spend a solitary month reading books, walking about London, and supervising the maintenance of the school property. I went through the daily mechanics of living, but with the abject loneliness of one who has no familial destination such as one was supposed to have in the summertime.

  I had not received a letter from Jonathan in the weeks that he had been away, which also set my nerves on edge. Was he safe? Was he thinking about me? I attributed the lack of correspondence to the inefficiency of the post, so I sent him a letter with Lucy’s address in Whitby, asking him to write to me there.

  In truth, I was anxious to have this interval with Lucy who, unlike Kate, would delight in the details of my impending wedding plans. Lucy had an ardent admirer in Arthur Holmwood, the future Lord Godalming, whom I had yet to meet. If Lucy had news to share, it must be that Arthur had asked the question he had been wanting to pose to her, and that she, who never seemed to be in love with him but had accepted that it was her fate to marry a member of the peerage, had answered in the affirmative. Lucy would not trouble me with Kate’s questioning of what the trajectory of female life should, or could, be in some utopian world that would never exist. It would be a relief to spend time in Lucy’s exuberant company, where we might share excitement about our destinies as brides.

  Part Two

  WHITBY, ON THE YORKSHIRE COAST

  Chapter Three

  1 August 1890

  The train to York pulled out of the station on a sluggish summer morning just before dawn. I sat very still as it made its way through London and her outskirts, as if I were anticipating being grabbed by some unknown party and held back from leaving the city’s narrow streets and confines. As soon as the train cleared the city’s smoky skies and morning mist, I felt as if I had been set free. The sun broke through dark clouds, transforming wet fields into endless expanses of shimmering green. Golden bales of hay, rolled up tight into spools, glimmered on the fields looking magical, like Rapunzel’s spun hair. Lazy horses and sheep turned their noses up to the sun to take in its warmth. Farm boys in tall boots trudged through pastures muddy from summer rains, but the same life-giving sun that shone upon them shone through the window and upon my face. As the train creaked along, warm air wafted into the open window, perhaps bringing soot from the engine with it, but I did not care. Other ladies held handkerchiefs to their faces, but the air was fresher than anything I had felt against my skin in a long time.

  Many hours later, when we reached York, I transferred to a coach that would take me over miles and miles of moors and into Whitby. The flat landscape now gave way to rolling hills, the coursing over which began to make me feel queasy. The sun, my constant companion on the train, suddenly disappeared behind dark clouds. Flocks of white birds scattered as we rode along, flying away to take cover against whatever the dim skies would spit down upon them. We stopped briefly at Malton to pick up new passengers, and I asked the coachman whether the time on the clock tower was correct. It was not possible that it was just twelve o’clock noon.

  “The old clock stopped at midnight years and years ago, but no clock-maker in England has been able to repair it,” he replied, shaking his head.

  I refreshed myself with an egg sandwich and a cup of tea purchased at the station, and soon we were back in the coach and climbing into the moors. The gloom became more intense as increasingly dark clouds gathered, bringing with them the sensation of twilight, though it was just four o’clock in the afternoon. I looked out the dusty window to see that the skies behind us remained bright blue, as if the clouds were following the coach into the moors. A silly thought, of course, but I suddenly felt as if the harrowing experiences of the recent past would not be left behind at all but would follow me even on my holiday. I tried to focus on the heather, its lovely deep violet color muted by the gray daylight. But it bloomed only in places; instead of lush blankets of purple, lonely expanses of low vegetation and coarse, dull grass, dominated the scene.

  The coach passed a big stone cross at the side of the road upon which hung a dried wreath of ivy, undoubtedly a memorial to a roadside death. A woman sitting opposite me made the sign of the cross and waited for me to follow her exam
ple, but I looked away and out the window at the bleak landscape and the ominous horizon. A brewing tempest was hardly unusual for an English summer, but I could not escape the portentous feeling that something was following me from London—something I would prefer to have left behind. The first sight of the sea should have heartened me, but as I watched the tide roll out, it seemed that the receding breakers threatened to suck me with them into the roiling water.

  Because of my evening arrival, Lucy’s mother had hired a man to meet me at the station. He had been given a thorough description of me and took my bag from my hand as soon as I stepped out of the carriage. In my fearful state, I wrongly assumed that he was a thief preying upon visitors until he identified himself. Embarrassed, I apologized several times, which he received with a good laugh.

  Lucy greeted me in the parlor of the rooms they had taken on the second floor of a huge guesthouse in East Cliff, sitting high above the sea and overlooking the red roofs of the town, the beach, and the double lighthouses that welcomed vessels coming into the harbor. She was thinner than the last time I had seen her, but her golden hair floated like waves around her shoulders. She had tied part of it back with a silky pink ribbon that matched her day dress. Her skin, always pale, had more color, and the light sprinkle of freckles that had covered her nose and upper cheeks since I had met her thirteen years ago were more prominent.

  “I have been riding a bicycle,” she said by way of explaining her heightened color. “Mother is furious that I’ve let my skin get dark, but I don’t care a fig.”

  “You, riding a bicycle? Like a common woman? Lucy, I am surprised at you!”

  But I was not surprised.

  At school, Lucy, with her pretty blond hair and innocent blue eyes, looked like the perfect angel but was secretly an unruly child who stole sweets from Miss Hadley’s personal trove of goodies and enacted elaborate schemes for which she never got caught. One morning, however, as Miss Hadley marched us to the park in a weekly outing, Lucy diverted the two of us from the pack of girls and revealed her latest plan. We would approach perfect strangers, explaining that we were collecting money for the blind, but we would use the money to buy candies.