The card came at half past ten, upon a tray of tarnished silver which Mary bore with the apprehensive care of one carrying medicine to the ill. I had been at my desk since breakfast, and the room still held the stale warmth of a coal fire too long untended, mingled with the dry odour of paper and calfskin. Outside, the fog had not wholly lifted from the square; the rails opposite stood in a blurred procession, each iron spear receiving a small wetness from the air and giving back no light. I had before me three books open at once, and Jonathan’s last coherent letter laid apart from them, as one lays aside a thing too much handled.
Mary said, “A footman brought it himself, ma’am.”
I took the card.
It was thick and cream-coloured, with the Ashworth crest impressed without vulgar display. The hand was Lord Ashworth’s secretary’s, though the last line had been added by another pen, firmer and more inclined to the right.
Lord Ashworth requests the pleasure of Mrs Harker’s company
at dinner on Thursday next, at eight o’clock,
Ashworth House, Grosvenor Square.
A small company only, with certain gentlemen interested in Eastern European antiquities.
Count Dracula of Transylvania has consented to attend.
I read it twice, and then a third time, not because the words were obscure, but because they arranged themselves with too much neatness, as if some hand not visible in the ink had placed them there for my eye alone.
“Shall I say there will be an answer, ma’am?” said Mary.
“Yes.” I kept the card between finger and thumb. “You may tell him I shall write within the hour.”
She withdrew. The door closed softly, and the house resumed that attentive silence proper to middling homes wherein one person thinks with labour and another moves elsewhere under discipline. I sat a little while without motion. The Academy notes before me—extracts from chronicles of Wallachia, references to monastic inventories, dates and disputed titles—lost at once their scholarly aspect and appeared what perhaps all such papers become, in certain lights: pale leaves amassed against a darkness not of their own making.
Jonathan had returned to me in body. This fact, repeated by physician, by friend, by my own hand laid against his sleeve and the pulse beneath, ought to have steadied all others. Yet his return had been like the arrival of a ship through mist whose hull is sound, whose ropes are in order, but whose cargo one may not inspect. There were times he knew me with so tender and reasonable an affection that my heart accused me for every inward fear. There were times his look went past my shoulder, not wandering but fixed, as if another room had opened within the room we occupied. He wrote little now. When he attempted to set down his recollection of the Count, his pen halted after a line or two, and his mouth assumed that weary pressure I had seen in convalescents who hear a sound to which others are deaf.
If I went to Lord Ashworth’s, I should meet the man from Jonathan’s broken account and from my own more ordered researches. If I did not go, I should know only what others chose to repeat.
I rose, crossed to the window, and drew back the curtain by an inch. The fog had thinned into a colourless damp. A woman went by with her shawl gathered high about her throat. A hansom passed, wheels making no proper report in the softened street. London in October seems at times less a city than a breathed-on pane, with movement behind.
At eleven I wrote my acceptance.
It was not in my nature to consult my dress as if it could decide a matter of conscience; yet I confess that at seven on the following Thursday I stood longer than was necessary before the wardrobe. I chose a gown of dark grey silk, plain save for a narrow trimming at the collar and cuffs, and a jet clasp at the throat which had belonged to my mother. If there was armour in sobriety, I would wear it.
Jonathan did not dine at home that evening. Mr Seward had persuaded him into taking the air in Regent’s Park before dark and then supping quietly at his rooms. This arrangement had been made with such tact, and accepted by Jonathan with such gratitude, that I could not suspect collusion in it without doing wrong to both. Yet when I fastened my gloves I wished, with a sharp and foolish violence, that he had been there to see me leave and forbid me, or bless me, or say only my name in the old tone. Instead there was only Mary’s rustle in the passage and the distant rattle of the hired brougham drawn up below.
The journey westward led us through streets alternately clear and obscured, so that each lamp swam into being and was extinguished again as though the city pulsed. At Hyde Park Corner the fog lay lower, a pale exhalation upon the ground, while above it the houses showed blackly precise. The horse steamed. Drops gathered and ran on the glass.
Ashworth House had all that composure by which old money announces itself more effectively than ostentation. The frontage was broad and severe; the lamps at either side of the door shone upon stone darkened by many winters. Within, warmth met me first—warmth and beeswax, and a faint well-bred perfume from cut flowers placed far enough away not to presume. A footman took my cloak. Another relieved me of my card and name. Somewhere overhead there was the subdued concussion of voices in a room both large and fully occupied.
As I ascended the stair I passed a mirror rising nearly from floor to cornice, its gilt frame dim where age had entered the crevices. I had the absurd sensation that the hall behind me was not empty, and turned half expecting to have impeded another guest. There was no one on the stair. Yet in the mirror the footman at the door appeared, and the lamps, and the distant white of lilies on a console table, and my own figure moving upward in grey silk with one gloved hand on the rail. Beyond my shoulder there was a space in the reflection where the hall should have continued, a strip of polished floor and panelled wall from which all light seemed taken out. The impression lasted no longer than a breath. A servant opened the drawing-room doors, and the room itself, with its company and its illumination, dissolved my uncertainty before I could name it.
Lord Ashworth came forward with his usual urbanity. He was a man too much occupied with books to be vain of his collection, and too secure in his rank to insist upon it. “Mrs Harker. We are particularly obliged to you. Lady Ashworth has hoped all day the weather would not dissuade you.”
Lady Ashworth, stately and kind, touched my hand. “My lord has threatened us with a monkish feast if his manuscript men were disappointed of one another. You are to save us from parchment entirely.”
I answered as was proper, and was then led within.
The room, though ample, had been arranged for intimacy. Lamps under shaded silk softened the corners; the fire was bright but not extravagant. Paintings in heavy frames looked down through varnished dusk upon clusters of living heads. There were perhaps fourteen guests. Two bishops of learning rather than theology, one military gentleman whose knowledge of maps had outgrown his campaigns, a German orientalist with a beard in which crumbs of conversation seemed to lodge, a lady who translated from the Hungarian, and others whose names I heard and lost.
Near the fire, but not using it, sat Count Dracula.
He had chosen a chair slightly apart from the nearest group, in such a position that he commanded both door and hearth. The red from the coals touched one side of his face and left the other in a pallor more singular for the contrast. His hair was black as wet jet, streaked at the temples with that metallic grey which can increase, rather than diminish, an impression of force. The brows were heavy and met almost over the bridge of the nose. His face was aquiline to the point of severity, yet not emaciated; there was colour in the lips, though not warmth. The hands, lying on the carved arms of the chair, were white and perfectly still.
He did not rise when I entered.
This omission was remarkable enough to draw, in another company, at least the smallest current of attention. Here it was as if some agreement too slight to be conscious had already been formed among the guests to overlook in him what would have been discourtesy in another. A gentleman beside him shifted his position, half making room, then seeming to recollect himself moved instead farther toward the fire. Lady Ashworth presented me. The Count inclined his head with exact formality.
“Mrs Harker.”
His voice was low and level, and if there was an accent in it, it lay not so much in any barbarity of sound as in a curious over-perfection. He pronounced each English word with a care almost judicial, as one handling old coins and placing them one by one upon velvet.
“Count Dracula,” I said.
His eyes rested on me. Jonathan had written, in one of those early letters from Bistritz before terror had disordered his pen, that the Count possessed eyes which appeared in some lights red, though whether by reflection of lamp or by some constitutional peculiarity he could not determine. I observed no redness then. They were dark, deeply set, and singularly unwavering. I cannot say how long our first glance endured. It was enough that before it ended I became aware of an absurd personal act: I had blinked twice from the dryness produced by the fire and the room, while he had not once altered the open fixity of his gaze.
Lord Ashworth, with a scholar’s inability to feel the social weather where books are concerned, drew me toward another guest. Presently I looked back. The Count had not changed his posture.
The announcement of dinner spared us the preliminaries by which strangers generally traverse one another before a meal. I found myself placed three seats from Lord Ashworth’s right hand. Opposite me sat the Hungarian lady, Madame Koller, keen-eyed and narrow-faced. At the farther end, on Lord Ashworth’s left, was the Count.
The dining-room had been made cheerful against the season by every means available to cultivated wealth. Silver glimmered in ordered ranks; candles multiplied under shades and struck points from crystal and porcelain. Hothouse roses and late chrysanthemums stood in low arrangements, so that no bloom obstructed the eye or mingled too heavily with the scent of food. Soup gave place to fish, fish to game. Footmen moved with that grave impersonal exactitude by which service in great houses appears less labour than ritual.
At first the talk flowed in many channels and over harmless ground—Parliament, excavations in Asia Minor, the recent rains, an actress’s retirement, a bishop’s pun repeated with due gratitude by one who had not heard it and due weariness by two who had. I answered where addressed, and listened. Yet through all this civil movement there persisted in me an awareness as physical as the presence of a draught under a door. It attached itself to the place of the Count at table.
He touched nothing.
A servant offered him soup. He bent his head in acknowledgment, and the plate passed on. Fish was presented. Again the same inclination, exact, brief, sufficient. When the game appeared, I saw his hand move—those long white fingers opening and closing by a fraction on the cloth beside his plate—and thought for an instant he had at last meant to dine. But he did no more than reach for the stem of his glass. He raised it to his lips; whether he drank I could not tell. The level of the dark wine within appeared unchanged when he set it down.
No one remarked upon this. One does not, at a table, reckon another’s appetite. Yet little signs disclosed themselves. The gentleman at his right, after twice turning with some observation and receiving in reply only a slight bow and one sentence too courteously final to invite continuance, gave his whole attention to Lady Ashworth. Madame Koller, whose seat gave her a profile of the Count, cut her pheasant with an absorption beyond all need. The military gentleman laughed too loudly at his own story when the Count’s gaze fell in his direction, then stopped in the midst and coughed.
When the cloth had been adjusted after the principal course, Lord Ashworth steered the conversation, by no visible violence, toward the matter he had assembled us to enjoy.
“Mrs Harker has had the advantage of our public institutions in a cause from which some of us only borrow for our amusement,” he said. “I am told she has been examining records of the Wallachian princes.”
I answered, “Only as far as the catalogues and copies permit. The materials in London are less rich than one could desire, but enough survives to show how quickly a man’s history enters legend when the frontier is violent.”
“A frontier is always violent,” said the military gentleman.
“Then some frontiers are more candid than others,” returned Lord Ashworth.
Madame Koller smiled thinly. “In my country,” she said, “we have legends enough to bury every chronicle and not satisfy one grandmother.”
“At least legends preserve names,” said one of the bishops.
“Or alter them,” I said. “Which is another mode of preservation.”
The Count, who had sat with one hand upon the table and the other in his lap, now said, “Sometimes the altered name is the truer one.”
There was no need for him to raise his voice. The words reached all. A short stillness followed, less from embarrassment than from the curious effect he produced when speaking—an effect as if a curtain, not visible but felt, had shifted slightly and let in air from a colder place.
Lord Ashworth beamed, delighted. “Precisely, Count. We were but waiting your authority. You know these matters from inheritance where we poor gleaners know them from indexes.”
The Count gave a bow of no greater depth than before. “Inheritance is often a disorderly archive, my lord.”
“I would trust a disorderly archive over a tidy prejudice,” said Madame Koller.
“Especially an Austrian one,” murmured her neighbour, and laughter relieved the table.
Lord Ashworth, whose pleasures were all serious at root, persisted. “There is one title in dispute above all others—the so-called Dragon Prince. Our hostess has heard me inflict this upon every scholar who crosses my threshold. Is the ‘Dracul’ devil, dragon, or merely dynastic corruption? Mrs Harker, what says the Museum?”
“The Museum says many contradictory things with equal confidence,” I replied. “The Latin forms vary. In one source draco appears plainly enough, with heraldic implication; in another, later and more moralizing, there is confusion with diabolus. The vernacular transmission worsens the matter. To translate at once into English is to choose a side before the evidence is heard.”
“Admirable,” said the bishop.
Across the table the Count looked at me. “And what side do you choose, Mrs Harker, when evidence must at last be heard and judged?”
“That one should distinguish between what a name meant to its bearer and what it came to mean to those who feared him.”
A candle near his elbow trembled, though no servant had passed. “You allow fear a philological authority.”
“I allow it power to deform records,” I said.
“And records,” he returned, “power to flatter fear.”
This might still have passed for learned banter only, had Lord Ashworth not then clapped his hands softly in recollection. “By Heaven, I had forgotten the very toy designed for such contention. Sanderson! If Mr Bell has left the packet in the library, be so good as to bring it.”
Lady Ashworth sighed with affectionate resignation. “The ladies are betrayed. We are to have bones with our dessert.”
But she too was curious, and none made objection. While the servants changed plates and fruit was brought, a parcel wrapped in faded blue paper arrived on a salver, and from it Lord Ashworth drew a manuscript volume protected by recent boards. It was not large. The vellum leaves, where visible, had suffered at the edges from damp or rough usage. A smell arose from it unlike the odour of modern bindings—something dustier, sour with age, and faintly sweet, as if from old wax.
“A transcript from an ecclesiastical collection at Klausenburg,” Lord Ashworth said with reverence. “Late fifteenth century copy of an earlier account, if Bell and his German friend are right. Full of saints’ nonsense and soldierly numbers, but there is a passage naming our prince in terms I thought would divert the table.”
He passed the manuscript first to the bishop nearest him, who peered and shook his head at the hand, then to the orientalist, who declared the abbreviations infernal, and finally around until it reached me.
The parchment was cool through my gloves. I removed the right glove finger by finger and touched the margin. The script was monastic, cramped but practised, with red initials now gone to rust. Here and there a later hand had supplied a gloss. Lord Ashworth indicated the page.
“If Mrs Harker will favour us.”
I read first in silence. The passage ran:
Anno Domini MCCCCLXXVI, venit ad fines Transalpinos princeps quidam, ex ordine Draconis dictus, quem vulgus propter saevitiam et vigilias nocturnas aliter nominabat...
I translated aloud. “In the year of Our Lord 1476, there came to the Transalpine borders a certain prince, called from the Order of the Dragon, whom the common people, on account of his cruelty and his watchings by night, named otherwise—”
“Not watchings,” said the Count.