Stokers Shadow (2 page)

“It's a lovely feeling, when things are new,” he says, smiling. “I hope you make the most of it.”

William gazes at the girl's face for another second, her pale skin with hints of pink and gold freckles; again he feels an Eden-like closeness without sin or shame. He smiles at her warmly, then leaves.

O
N THE WAY
home, William takes a detour. He finds himself by the Embankment gazing at the opaque waters of the Thames. Only the shrill hoot of an omnibus penetrates the relative quiet here. But all sounds are receding. The river holds
William in a spell, the sinking sun glittering on its dark surface. He thinks of his mother's demands. It is as though she is tying knots for him to unpick, drawing him in by using her declining powers as a magnet. William remembers how his father had once jumped into the river in an attempt to save a man. It made the papers at the time. He had risked his own life, the article said. William was an infant then but he had later read the accounts.

William stops walking, turns and gazes towards a small wooden pier jutting out. The sun passes under a cloud. The gold disappears, leaving only ripples of green and black upon the river surface. William can conceive of one reason only why a man would jump into the Thames.

W
ILLIAM WATCHES THE
rhythmic, burrowing motion of Maud's needlepoint. The clock ticks, regulating his thoughts into a more tranquil version of his earlier gloom. Maud looks up at him unexpectedly. He feels caught, as though she can dip into his thoughts.

“Every time you go to see your mother you come home looking absolutely drained,” she says.

William shifts in his chair. Maud continues working, her brow furrowed.

“What is it exactly that she wants from you this time?”

“I'm really not at all sure what she wants,” he says, then pauses. “What I agreed to was to go to the Society of Authors on her behalf to see what can be done.”

“Why?” Maud doesn't look up and continues work.

“Why what?” William asks.

“Why did you agree to something that makes you so uncomfortable?”

William is silent for a long time, feeling the squeeze of wife and mother like shifting mountains, one on either side.

“Because she's my mother,” he says after too long a pause.

“Don't you think she is more than capable of looking after herself?” Maud asks quietly, unpicking a mistake.

“No, I don't.”

“Oh?”

William gets up with an effort and walks towards the fire. He picks up a poker and begins to jab at the coals. He continues with his back to his wife.

“She's losing something, a sense of judgment. She has someone new, the girl I told you about; neither maid, nor companion, a mixture of both. Sweet girl, but my mother doesn't know what she's doing with her.”

William looks around. He can feel his face burning; he supposes it's because of the fire.

A breeze whispers hushed-voiced through the white cotton. Mary turns her head from her tiny dressing table, too excited to write any more letters. Instead, she stands, walks towards the window, and tugs the little curtains apart on their brass rollers. She gazes into the star-pinned night and its cobalt sky which falls beyond like a silken cloak. The curtains continue rippling against her fingers like butterfly wings as she draws in the London air. The tingle of the whole Empire dances on her tongue; the perfumes ministered to Scheherazade in her Arabian jail are interlaced with the petal-tongued blooms and burning spices of India
.

Her eyes close involuntarily; she can hear the faraway squeal of a tram and the faint whoosh of a motor car. A smile comes to her face unbidden. She feels that she is everywhere and nowhere all at once: she is in the heart of the mightiest city on earth with its proud landscape of stone; she is on the rolling shores of her home in Galway Bay with the rush and
sizzle of the tide beneath her feet; she is in an imaginary world of howling wolves and castles, and carriages that hurtle like bullets through the darkness
.

S
HE KNOWS
it is the novel which lies face down on her dressing table that has excited her, colouring everything with joyful adventure.

She thinks of the letter she has just written, the inadequacy of words. She thinks of her sister, Anne, back in Galway town. She wonders how married life is treating her. Anne will have servants of her own, Mary thinks, now she is part of a merchant family. Her sister's marriage has had a profound effect on them all. Her mother now lives in comfort with her daughter's family. Her young brother, Patrick, will be the first one to go to a proper school, with uniforms and dormitories, receiving systematically the learning for which her family has always had to scavenge, devouring whatever time-yellowed pages they could find.

Books and – at their mother's insistence – books in English had always been their gold. And how right her mother had been! Anne has slipped into a family of standing in Galway because of her well-read English tongue. Indeed, the Callahans see Anne as a rare prize, or as Anne's new father-in-law, puts it “a pearl in the darkest and most unpromising of waters.”

The Callahans eased the whole family from the cracked wharves of Spiddal to Galway town itself, the very heart of the Bay. And, for Mary, they went further, arranging with friends for her to find service at the very heart of it all – London.

Now gold was almost free for them all. The Callahans have shelves upon shelves of books and London has a thousand libraries. And more wonderful than that, the lady to whom she is companion is the widow of a famous author. It is too incredible, she thinks, that London could be so rich with literary figures.

Mary closes her eyes again and pictures an invisible conduit between herself and Anne, a magic thread woven from starlight, which might carry her thoughts in more texture and detail than by ink and paper. She replays a scene she enacted earlier in the day. Mr. Stoker's face is again looking at hers, not at a servant's face; at her face; like she was a person with intelligence and feeling; like they were connected. “The son of a famous author” she had called him in her letter to Anne. Yet it was not living vicariously at all, though this was how it sounded on paper. Those were just the words, and words could reduce magic to the dullest, leaden tones.

Electricity cannot be explained in words, she thinks. The substance of her heart and soul cannot be reduced to facts and times, especially when that substance touches another. She feels through the scene again slowly. His scent wafts upon her again, a gorgeous sweet smell of tobacco. She captures the good-natured nervousness, not just hers, but his too. She sees his face, rather a kind face, not old but a little careworn with his soft grey eyes. But of all things, it was in the silence that the connection was made, in the absence of bustle – no coughs; no sighs. Stillness and silence; a pool of connectedness.

And then she thinks of her treasure: the book Dracula that has been weaving a spell in her; absorbing her old world;
merging it with the new; teasing her inside out with its adventures parallel to her own.

She thinks of the young hero, Jonathan Harker, and of his journey into the towering mountains of Transylvania to meet the Count. Was her own voyage to London not a parallel to that of the English solicitor, albeit in an inverted form? Was she not also a foreigner in a strange land, engulfed by a towering maze of spires and domes – as much of a wilderness to her as the cliffs and peaks surrounding the young Englishman? Was she not surrounded by queer customs and manners, by nobility and titles which she cannot begin to organize?

When she reads of Harker's carriage snaking along the winding road towards the Borgo Pass, the description, for Mary, is interspersed with the black prison-like walls of London hurtling ceaselessly beyond the dusty shield of her train window. As Harker arrives at the black, forbidding castle – a figure alone in a land of the imagination – Mary again beholds the vast, engulfing station with its cathedral ceiling and swooping pigeons. As superstitious villagers cross themselves and exclaim in foreign tongues, Mary's ears are again assaulted by the garbled words of porters and cab drivers.

This city is the wilderness, she thinks; a thrilling, fascinating jungle of stone.

Mary thinks of Mr. William Stoker again. She realizes that, while she was reading and picturing Jonathan Harker's mannerisms and facial expressions, she was in fact seeing him. More impertinent still, the feelings of the hero mirror her own
so closely, she feels it has been her adventure all along as well. She wonders at the fusion between herself and Mr. William Stoker brought about by imagination and a story. She wonders at the strange new empathy she is feeling.

She turns back towards her small dressing table, suddenly dissatisfied with the layout of her room. Thoughts quicken like electricity. She realizes what is wrong. That dressing table and chair should be placed in front of the window so she can overlook the night and breathe in the last blossoms of the season.

F
LORENCE
S
TOKER GAZES
at the framed pencil portrait of the beautiful young woman which stands on her dressing table – a simple drawing of herself done in profile thirty years ago. She sees the white pool in the eye, the light that represents her soul. She scans over the knowing upward curl of the lip, a humourous, optimistic half-smile; a Mona Lisa touch most impressive in such a limiting format, she thinks. Did she really seem so intriguing to an artist?

She holds the frame in her left hand and runs her right palm an inch over the glass surface, as though it is a genie's lamp with the power to turn some, as yet, obscure wish into reality. She feels as though the image of the portrait must have imprisoned her soul.

A noise somewhere above her room distracts her – a scuffing and scraping from the servants' quarters, as though furniture is being moved. Why would Mrs. Davis be shifting things around at this time of night? She places her portrait back on the surface of the dressing table and takes up her hairbrush. The edges of her mouth, she sees, are turned down in
haglike misery. Not a trace of humour or optimism there, she thinks. She knows, in reality, she has not aged badly. She knows she is still admired for her looks. Yet she is unhappy with the image staring back at her tonight.

She thinks over her day, the grey shambling stranger who called claiming to be her son. She remembers how William was as a little child. She sees him standing on tiptoe on the balcony, pointing to the ships' masts and calling out their trades. “Spices, Mama, from India,” the piping voice called; “rugs from Persia, Mama look!” That was the William she had called upon for help, not the morose, middle-aged man who smelled of old tobacco.

She thinks of the German pirates who have taken her husband's novel. She sees that dreadful illustration again. Ghastly thing! She thinks of the Lyceum Theatre and closes her eyes. The fragrance of French perfumes and eau de cologne wafts upon her. She remembers how it felt to be at the centre of it all. She sees herself holding onto Bram's strong arm at a premiere. She sees newspaper men twittering around her husband with their pencils and notebooks, begging for a quote from Sir Henry. No one would have dared to try and cheat them then. A great wave of pride rises and crashes within her, leaving in its wake a thousand conflicting streams of sadness. “Long gone,” the phrase whispers over and over like foam sizzling into nothing.

Florence presses her palm onto the canvas-bound book on the corner of her dressing table. She has not yet started to read The Moonstone, although she had Mary borrow it from the library three days ago. She's not even quite sure why she
wanted it, having read it before. Perhaps she wants to submerge herself in the reliable, happy era it represents, she thinks, now that everything around her is creaking with grey malevolence and comfortless subversion. Florence remembers The Moonstone as an emblem, not a story. She remembers the Lyceum tour of America, the time she accompanied Bram. She recalls the detour to Niagara Falls, the silver, crystal waters and the exhilaration. She remembers the feeling of the moment; that her life was the centre of everything: past, present, future; east, west, north and south. Bram was acting manager of the Lyceum. He was Sir Henry Irving's right-hand man. The Lyceum and Irving were conquering North America as they had already conquered England.

Florence touches the cover of The Moonstone again, as though it were itself a precious gem. Dust from the cover rises with a fragrance she knows but can't place. The room darkens, a murmur of conversation flowing in from some dark nowhere. Stars appear in the shadows of the mirror and just as soon turn into sharp tongues of candle flame. Florence lets herself settle into the recollection as though riding a wave. She sees the Lyceum's leading lady, Ellen Terry, her shining, humourous eyes just above the bobbing yellow flame.

“A Wilkie Collins story!” Ellen exclaims. “That's what the Lyceum needs.”

The soft gold light reflects upon the silken green of the actress's dress. Ellen's expression glistens with good-natured poise. Bram is there also, his romantic grey eyes a well of
mournful energy. Henry Irving seems to hover over them all, hawklike and saturnine, with black hair and dark eyes. Next to him is Thornley, Bram's older brother: solid, mild and respectable with his round face and white hair.

“Oh indeed,” Florence feels herself saying. “Something mysterious but not sinister. Something like The Moonstone or The Woman in White.”

“Unfortunately, Mr. Collins is dead,” snaps Irving, still carrying the intense malevolence of Mephistopheles, his latest triumph. The great actor absorbs his parts until they take him over, Florence thinks – a pity he can't play someone more pleasant for a change.

Irving takes a puff of his cigar which he then holds in front of his face like a shield as the smoke rises.