Karen Essex
I moaned so loudly that I woke myself up and found that I was alone in Lucy’s bed. The linens on her side were cold. She’d apparently been gone for some time, and I was relieved, knowing that she had not witnessed the writhing and moaning I’d been doing in my dream. I assumed that she had spent the night once more in her mother’s room. I tiptoed across the room and stepped into the hall to see the time on the clock—three thirty in the morning. I heard the front door creak and then close, followed by light footsteps that seemed to be coming toward me. Could it be an intruder? Tourists visiting the area were warned to lock their doors against thieves who were ready to take advantage of the relaxed mood of those on holiday. I slipped back into the bedroom, getting ready to scream loud enough to alert our neighbors. I held my breath and then peeked down the hall.
What came toward me, one hand holding her shoes, the other hiking up her skirt, was Lucy. Her hair was bedraggled—ripped from its pins and ornaments, and frizzed by the damp sea air. I left the door ajar and jumped into bed, trying to pretend that I was asleep, but she was in the room before I could settle myself. When she realized I was awake, her eyes darted around the room as if she thought someone else might be there. She stared at me, looking like some wild-eyed Medusa.
“Why are you spying on me? Did my mother put you up to this?”
“I would think that you should be explaining, not asking questions. I had a bad dream and woke a few moments ago to find you gone.”
Lucy collapsed on the bed. Her collarbones jutted out, emphasizing her thinness. She looked strange and stark but somehow also luminous.
“Can you not guess? I would think it as plain as the nose on my face. Oh, it is so difficult to hide being in love. Mina, I am bursting with it. My love for him is in every pore of my skin, trying to express itself to the world. I can no longer hide it from my best girlfriend.”
“In love?” I had seen no evidence of this great passion at dinner. “You have been with Mr. Holmwood?”
“Dear God, no, not him! I despise him, except that he brought my true love to me, and for that I love him. But for that alone. How marvelous that we have deceived you! That should mean that my mother and the rest do not know either.”
“Oh, Lucy, no.” In my mind’s eye, I saw those powerful hands and knew that they were the ones that had removed the pins from Lucy’s hair and tousled her golden mane.
“Mina, do you know what love is? How it feels? Do you know what it is like to be in the arms of a man of passion?” Lucy sat up and put her face uncomfortably close to mine. “I went to his studio. He has been making a secret portrait of me in the nude! Can you believe that I have agreed to this? It is a measure of my love for him. I was to sit for him tonight, but he took off my clothes and lay me on a table and tickled every inch of my body with his softest paintbrush until I begged for mercy.”
I thought she must be mad, saying these things. I recalled how Lucy and Morris seemed to have nothing to say to each other at dinner and now realized that they were acting out a performance of indifference to hide their secret.
“How can he paint with his injured arm?” I asked.
“Oh, that is but a brilliant ruse so that Arthur would go sailing without him!”
“Lucy!” I was mortified at the way the two of them so casually deceived others.
Lucy took me by the shoulders. “Mina, if you do not feel this exquisite way about Jonathan, you should not marry him. Everything we are told is a lie—that the love between two people should be some polite arrangement when in truth it is …” Lucy paused to find the right words. “It is an opera!”
“The ladies come to a bad end in operas,” I said quietly.
“I should have known better than to tell you. You are the voice of reason, whereas I am speaking from the depths of my soul,” she said far too loudly.
“Please be quieter,” I said. “You will wake your mother.”
“No, I won’t. I mixed her sleeping draft myself.”
“Lucy! You are not a doctor. You might have harmed her!”
Lucy settled on the bed. “I forgive you, Mina. If someone had tried to explain these feelings to me before I experienced them, I would have had the same response. But you are engaged to a man. Have you never felt thrilled by his proximity or by his touch? Are you so very cold, Mina?”
Lucy’s face contorted into a frown. “Perhaps good women like you do not experience these sorts of feelings. What is it like, Mina, to never have committed a transgression?”
“I am not without sin,” I said.
I let the words slide out of my mouth and into the world. I too had kept in my secrets and longed to confess to someone. Lucy’s features lifted again. She sat up straight.
“I have dreams,” I began. “Dreams in which strangers visit me. But the experiences are too vivid to be mere dreams.” I told her about hearing voices in my sleep and being lured out of doors and about the night I awoke to find myself being attacked by a madman with red eyes and a hideous odor, and of the elegant stranger who both saved me and terrified me. I told her about the dreams that followed in which I had done terrible things—lurid things that no woman should do. I did not tell her of tonight’s dream in which Dr. Seward was caressing me with Morris Quince’s hands. In that dream, I could put a name to my delicious tormentors, and that made it impossible for me to confess.
“I know that there is something dark and inexplicable in my character that is causing these episodes, but it is beyond my control to stop it,” I said.
Lucy patted my hand as if I were a child. “Mina, you are one who walks in her sleep. My father suffered the same affliction, and you must be careful, because it led to his demise. He walked out of doors in the middle of a damp and frigid winter night and caught pneumonia. As you recall, he never recovered.” Lucy spoke tenderly as she always did when she talked about her father.
I had not known the circumstances under which he had contracted the lung disease that had killed him. I started to tremble.
“Mina, darling, you are not wicked. You had the misfortune to be a beautiful girl walking alone in London. The man who attacked you probably thought you were one of the ladies of the night. You were defenseless. The mysterious one who stopped the attack was probably just a man about town who had spent the evening with friends at his club and was doing a good deed.”
Could it be that simple? I wanted to accept Lucy’s rational explanation. Though she was swept up in her own passion, she seemed sure that what was happening to me was not out of the ordinary.
“Jonathan says that according to the mind doctors, dreams are reflections of one’s own fears. He believes that my adventures into London’s dark byways with Kate are responsible for these nightmares,” I said.
“We could inquire of Dr. Seward,” Lucy suggested. “I am sure that he would enjoy interpreting your dreams.” Her eyes shone with mischief.
“I could not speak of these things to him,” I said. “It would not be proper.”
“That is my Mina, always concerned with propriety. What must you think of your Lucy now?”
“I fear for you,” I said. “What will become of you, Lucy? You are engaged to another man.”
“Morris has a plan. He says he will lay down his life before he allows me to marry Arthur, or any man other than himself.”
“What is stopping you from marrying him now? This is not the fifteenth century. The unification of kingdoms is not at stake. Why did you accept Arthur’s proposal when you love someone else?”
“I would marry Morris Quince tomorrow if he would allow it. His father has cut him off because he refused to enter the family business, choosing to paint instead. My mother controls my fortune and she despises him and loves Arthur. I have told Morris that I would run away with him, that I don’t need money as long as I have his love, but he won’t have it. He insists that I deserve better than poverty.”
“At least he is correct about that!” I said. “You are not a girl accustomed to hardship. A wo
man has to be smart, Lucy. Are you not afraid that Mr. Quince is toying with you?”
Lucy struck back quickly. “No! No, he is not toying with me. I hoped you would understand. Now I am sorry that I told you at all. You’ll probably go running to my mother and spill out everything and make her have one of her angina attacks.”
I assured Lucy that her secret was safe with me, and asked for her assurance that what I had told her would remain between us. “Of course I will respect your wishes,” she said, “but I hardly see how some bad dreams compare with a passionate love affair that is happening in our real lives.”
I helped Lucy with her clothes and her corset, noticing that above the slash marks of the stays, other marks had appeared on her back and chest—red and blue, like bruised roses. I did not mention them. We kissed each other good night, but I was left with the feeling that Lucy wanted to retain some sort of superiority over me, not a moral superiority but rather its opposite—descent into passion—which for her transcended every good thing we had been taught to believe.
Though Whitby Abbey was just steps from the churchyard, which I visited daily while Lucy napped, I had studiously avoided its grounds. While I actually enjoyed whiling away hours in the churchyard cemetery, staring at ancient tombstones and reading the maudlin inscriptions, there was something about the old ruin that depressed my spirit. In those days, with no word from Jonathan, the deteriorated majesty of Whitby Abbey, surrounded by mist and fog, stood like a monument to my own loneliness.
Today, however, the sun shone brightly, turning the abbey’s bleak walls into gleaming white bones upon which a vivid imagination might reconstruct the building at its highest glory. I sat on my usual bench in the churchyard and took out the little leather-bound journal. I had started to write down some of the old whaler’s ghoulish stories, thinking that upon Jonathan’s return, they might amuse him. I had been learning about the abbey’s history, so I began to jot down some of the facts:
Whitby Abbey, an immense roofless ruin that had once been home to prosperous Benedictine monks, was abandoned when Henry VIII decided to rid the nation of Catholics and their monasteries. Now it is a pile of rubble and stone, with only its magnificent bones still standing, stubbornly resisting time and weather. It is the centerpiece of the headland, and its property must have been vast hundreds of years ago when it was built in the days of knights and Crusaders. But they say that years of bashing by the sea have considerably diminished the size of the promontory. I wonder if, in the future, the sea will gobble up the ruin, with its walls of tiered Gothic arches that diminish in size as they ascend toward the sky.
“Well, well, miss, if you’re not the busy blue fly.”
I looked up to see my elderly friend smiling at me with his eyes, which were sometimes the only part of him that still seemed alive. His cheeks looked like Whitby’s big, pockmarked, wave-battered cliffs and his arms, gnarled and twisted driftwood, but his eyes were sea blue and watery. It was as if he had assumed the characteristics of the topography he had observed over a long lifetime. He was nearly ninety years old, he claimed, though the record of his birth had been lost in a fire, and no one who had witnessed it was still alive. He had long ago forgotten his birthday, and so had his daughter, now a woman of seventy years old. “We’ve a half memory between us,” he had said. “I only remember the stories I have told and retold.”
Still, he got along well on his severely bowed and crooked legs, and seemed livelier to me than the two napping women with whom I was presently staying.
“Do you never take a nap in the daytime, sir?” I asked.
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” he said, sitting down. “I’ll enjoy the company of a pretty girl with warm hands and pink cheeks while I may.”
I told him that I was writing down some of Whitby’s history for my fiancé to enjoy, and that I intended to include the stories he had been telling me.
“Surely you have heard the legend of St. Hild?” he asked.
It was impossible to spend any time at all in Whitby without learning St. Hild’s story. I told him what I knew—that she had been the abbess of the monastery in the very old days, when Oswy of Northumbria was king, and that she had presided over a community of men and women who devoted their lives to praising God and meditating upon His Word. He suggested that we take a walk around the abbey’s grounds so that he could tell me more of the story, “but not at the crackin’ pace you would take with a younger fellow.”
We strolled across the field, where others, taking advantage of a rare cloudless sky and warmth, had spread colorful quilts and were picnicking on lunches of sliced chicken, bread, fruit, cheese, homemade pies, bottles of wine, and pints of beer.
He saw me looking at the food. “Listen, miss, for this may be the last time I ever tell the tale, so I am going to tell it long and true.”
He took a wheezy breath to gather his energy. “Hild was a royal woman, a princess, and might have been a queen, what with her beauty and her lands. She was a relation to the good king, who vowed that if he was victorious in defeating the pagans, he would give up his newborn daughter to the church. Now, at this very time, Hild was bearing witness to the wickedness of the pagans who would not surrender to the One True God, and she made a promise to devote her life to changing this. After the king won his battle, Hild gave up her worldly possessions, took charge of the king’s infant daughter, and founded this monastery. It was said that men and women alike bowed to her wisdom and her powers. The bishops of England were so enchanted by her that they chose this spot for their meeting place.”
The old man’s eyes turned rheumy as he squinted against the sun. He was looking up at the façade of the abbey. “Though she died many hundreds of years ago, she is still here.” With some effort, he raised his arms high in the air to show her omnipotence.
“I see the look of wonder on your face,” he said. “You should have more respect than to doubt the words of an old man who is to meet his Maker soon enough to make a truth teller of him. On these very grounds where we stand, Lucifer sent a plague of vipers—horrible creatures full of poisonous venom—to defeat St. Hild and to destroy her good works. The devil did not want to give up the Yorkshire coast to God,” he said. “And look about you at the beauty. No one could blame him.
“But St. Hild was not one to give in to the devil. Nothing scared her because she had the Lord on her side. She drove the snakes to the edge of the cliffs, cracking a long whip to drive them over the side and into the sea. But some of those creatures of Satan refused to jump, and those she killed by snapping off their heads with a lash of the whip. Others, she turned to stone.”
“That is a remarkable story,” I said politely.
“’Tis true, girl. Don’t you keep looking at me that way, with the doubting face that young people turn on their elders. Someday, after I’m gone, you’ll be walking these grounds, or on the shore beneath them, and you’ll stumble over a rock with the face of a snake. You will look at his beady eyes and his tongue lying flat against his lips, and you will think of your old friend.”
“I will not require a relic to remember you,” I said, much to his delight. He laughed, and I noticed that, despite a few missing front teeth, all his back teeth were still firmly set in his gums, a rarity for anyone his age.
“If you come here on a moonlit night, and you look into the windows of the abbey, you can see her going about her business. She still presides here, so help me God, she does.”
The sun grew stronger, and I felt perspiration trickle down the front of my corset. My nonagenarian companion seemed less fatigued than I, and, as ashamed as I was by this fact, I did not have a parasol with me, and I was getting overheated in the glaring sun. I apologized to him for taking my leave.
“But I have not yet finished the story,” he said. His voice turned to a whisper. “There is a wicked spirit on this very ground, battling Hild for the abbey. You’ll want to know about her, won’t you?”
Despite the old man’s disappointme
nt, I bid him good afternoon and returned to our rooms, where I found Lucy and her mother still napping. I checked the basket where Hilda—one of the town’s many who had been named after the saint—left any mail that had arrived, but there was no letter from Jonathan. Disappointed, I loosened my stays and slipped into bed next to Lucy, falling into a dreamless sleep.
20 August 1890
The weather turned miserable and stayed so for days, with rain pouring down upon the stacked red roofs of Whitby, sliding into the narrow streets and flooding them, and keeping us indoors. The sea-born tempests swept inland so violently that the rain came sideways, like little knives slashing the air. At night, crashing thunder overwhelmed the ubiquitous roar of the sea that continued to throw itself incessantly against the cliffs. I was not sure which sound was more disquieting, though there was an exquisite excitement in the sky’s rumbles. Sometimes I sat by a lamp, trying to read while imagining that gods and Titans were wrestling in the heavens over one mythical siren or another.
The dramatic weather prevented Lucy from leaving to meet her lover. He managed to have notes delivered to her, sent under fictitious names, which brought fresh color to her face as she read them. The strain of separation was demonstrated by her fidgety demeanor and especially in her dissipating flesh. At meals, she tried to hide one serving of food beneath another to allay her mother’s fears about her obvious weight loss. I too begged her to take a little food, even some fruit or a sandwich at teatime.