He had not interrupted me. The correction entered precisely where my voice had paused upon the clause, as if he had foreknown not only the words but the measure of my breath.
I looked up. “The scribe writes vigilias nocturnas. I should say ‘night watchings’ or ‘vigils by night.’”
“In this hand,” said the Count, “the word is not vigilias but excubias altered, perhaps by a later copyist. The sense is military. ‘Night watches.’ It is not that he watched. It is that he kept watch.”
Lord Ashworth leaned over in agitation. “Can that be so? By Jove—”
I bent lower. He was right that the second and third letters had been thickened; there was a scraping in the vellum where one form had suffered correction. “Then the phrase concerns command, not insomnia,” I said. “Though the later glossator perhaps preferred the more moral implication.”
“Glossators often do,” said the Count.
A little movement of approval went round the table. Lord Ashworth was radiant. “Excellent! Proceed, pray proceed.”
I resumed. “—named otherwise. And they said that under his standard the moon itself seemed armed, and the wolves—”
“The verb there is poor,” said Madame Koller. “Videbatur? No. There should be stronger colour.”
“The copy is poor,” said the Count, “because the exemplar was made by one who feared rhetoric more than blood.”
I went on, hearing in my own voice a precision sharpened by resistance. “—and the wolves, hearing the trumpet, drew near not in hunger but in company.”
The bishop exclaimed. “A striking phrase.”
“It is common enough,” I said. “Animal enlistment belongs to the stock of frontier exaggeration.”
“Yet stock phrases survive because men have need of them,” said the Count.
I turned a leaf. There followed a sentence more corrupt than the rest, with an abbreviation over the final word.
“Non mortem—” I began.
“Morti,” said the Count.
I answered before I had weighed whether I ought. “No. The dative mars the construction.”
His face did not change, but the candlelight discovered a minute brightness along one eyelid, as if the eye had narrowed by a hair’s breadth. “Unless,” he said, “you permit an implied adjective from the preceding line.”
“The preceding line,” I replied, “is in another hand.”
There was laughter then, and some surprise. Lord Ashworth looked from one to the other of us with a child’s delight in seeing favourite engines prove their force. “You hear, Lady Ashworth? We have at last a dinner.”
The Count folded his hands. “Mrs Harker is severe with scribes.”
“I am severe,” I said, “with convenience masquerading as grammar.”
Madame Koller put down her glass. “Then we shall make a philologist of you yet.”
“I hope not,” I returned. “A philologist must be patient, and I have had too much cause of late to distrust words that change shape in transit.”
The last phrase had escaped me farther than I intended. I saw Lord Ashworth’s expression alter with immediate tact; he knew enough of Jonathan’s recent illness to regret any allusion that might pain me. Before he could mend the moment, the Count spoke.
“Words may change shape,” he said, his gaze still on me, “without changing obedience.”
“Then they are unlike men,” I said.
This, too, produced a stillness. One does not, at dinner, declare weapons; yet all present knew by instinct that steel had sounded somewhere beneath the cloth and crystal. The Count inclined his head as if acknowledging not offence but form.
Lord Ashworth, brave as all true bores are brave, plunged back into scholarship. “There is a line lower down—about the title itself. Read that one, if you please.”
I obeyed. “Draconis filius vocatus est a suis, sed a monachis et mulieribus regionis alio nomine susurrabatur. He was called son of the Dragon by his own people, but by the monks and women of the region another name was whispered.”
“One sees plainly,” said the bishop, “the moral panic of cloisters and nurseries.”
“Or one sees,” said Madame Koller, “that monks and women are often first to observe what armed men excuse.”
The Count’s hand, still on the table, lay near the stem of his untouched glass. Long fingers, curiously smooth at the joints, rested with such composure that one might have mistaken them for carved ivory but for the faint shadow of veins beneath the skin. “Whispered names travel farther than proclaimed ones,” he said.
“And less accurately,” I answered.
“Accuracy,” he replied, “is not always what men ask of a name.”
I cannot say why this sentence, among many, touched me with a sensation not unlike physical cold. Perhaps because it was spoken without emphasis, and because in the very quietness of it there lurked an extent of meaning no ordinary social reply need contain. I looked down at the manuscript rather than meet his eyes again.
The debate continued. Lord Ashworth had us compare draco, dracul, and a Slavic by-form found in a margin. The bishop cited Church Latin. Madame Koller objected from vernacular ballads. The Count offered, when appealed to, a correction here, an etymology there; never too much, never volunteering knowledge in the gross, but placing each remark with that infallible economy which at once assists and dominates. More than once he finished the clause I had begun—not by haste, not with any incivility of interruption, but by entering exactly at the point where my voice met hesitation over a damaged word or uncertain abbreviation. If this had occurred once only, it might have flattered my vanity as evidence of intellectual sympathy. Repeated, it produced in me a sensation of encroachment, as though the private corridor between thought and speech had been found by another foot.
At one point he said sanguinem with the broad Continental quantity.
I answered, “In the English schools, Count, we should shorten the first vowel.”
He looked at me then with a stiller attention than before. “Would you?” he said.
“In prosody, yes.”
A faint smile—not warmth, but recognition of a move met by another—touched his mouth and was gone. “Then the English schools and I must differ.”
“On many things, no doubt.”
“Undoubtedly.”
Lord Ashworth laughed, uncertainly this time.
It was at the height of this contention, when dessert had long stood neglected and the servants had withdrawn to permit free discussion, that the door opened and a footman crossed to Lady Ashworth with a salver. Upon it lay a single letter.
She looked at the direction, then toward me. “Mrs Harker, I believe this is for you. It bears your own servant’s note and has come by special messenger.”
I took it. Even before I saw the hand, I knew it. There is no discipline by which the eye fails to recognise a beloved script, however altered by haste or weakness.
“If you would excuse me—” I said.
“No, no, pray,” murmured Lady Ashworth. “We are all concern.”
The seal had been broken by no one. I slipped my finger beneath the flap. The paper within was folded once only and blotted as if before drying. My hand, to my shame, was not entirely steady.
The letter contained three lines.
Mina, I cannot —
Below this the ink was drawn and smeared violently downward, as by a hand dragged across the page or a wetness fallen on it before the words had set. There were traces of further strokes, no more recoverable than footprints on thawing frost.
I read it once. Then again, as if repetition might restore what no eye could recover. The room had become so silent that I heard the slight tick in the ormolu clock upon the mantel and, from some depth of the house, the muffled shutting of a distant door.
Lord Ashworth said, very gently, “Is Mr Harker unwell?”
I folded the letter. “I do not know.”
The Count had not moved. He sat with one hand on the arm of his chair, his face turned toward me, and in all that stillness there was one thing only I could not bear: the complete absence of haste in his regard. Another person would have looked away in delicacy, or spoken, or shown concern, or busied himself with glass and fruit while privacy was afforded. He did none of these. He watched me, and did not blink.
Madame Koller reached for the manuscript and deliberately began discussing with the bishop a phrase in the margin. It was an act of kindness finer than questions. Conversation resumed by degrees, weakly at first, then with increased application, everyone labouring toward the fiction that nothing had occurred beyond a domestic interruption. I was grateful and not grateful. Jonathan’s three unfinished words lay in my lap through all the rest like a live thing gone cold.
Soon after, the ladies rose. In the drawing-room coffee was served. Lady Ashworth would have had me sit near her, but seeing perhaps that I desired no immediate comfort she occupied others and left me a chair by the farther window. The curtains were not fully drawn. Between their edges I saw the square outside whitened by fog and traversed at intervals by lamps moving like imprisoned stars.
After some minutes there was a disturbance in the hall below—not a noise, exactly, but a rearrangement of silence one feels in houses when a person of marked effect passes through them. A man’s voice, low and formal. The outer door. Then stillness again.
Lady Ashworth came near. “The Count has taken his leave. Foreign gentlemen keep odd hours in our climate.”
I murmured something suitable. She touched my shoulder and went away to receive the gentlemen, now coming up from the dining-room.
I remained where I was until custom required me to depart without singularity. My farewell to our hosts was brief. Lord Ashworth, all concern subdued by breeding, hoped anxiously for better news from Mr Harker. Lady Ashworth pressed my hand. “Write if there is any service,” she said.
A servant brought my cloak. In the hall the great mirror gave back the lamps, the stair, the footman at attention, and the black-and-white geometry of the marble floor. I fastened one glove with my eyes upon the glass. Two other guests descended behind me talking in undertones. Their figures approached within the frame before their actual steps reached the last stair. No one else appeared.
On the chair where I had sat while drawing on my cloak lay a white rose.
It was not from Lady Ashworth’s arrangements; those blooms had been crimson and tea-coloured, not white. This rose was full-open yet unmarred, each petal so fresh it seemed to retain the chill of a garden at dawn. There was upon the outermost edge a single bead of moisture, not yet fallen. In October, in London, after fog.
The footman saw me glance toward it and said, “Shall I dispose of it, ma’am?”
“Who placed it there?”
He looked blank. “I could not say, ma’am.”
No one in the hall had observed. The two guests behind me had passed on. Through the partly open door of the morning-room came the murmur of the gentlemen rejoining the ladies. I could have left the flower where it lay. I could have crushed it under my glove, or called Lord Ashworth back and made of it an inquiry before witnesses.
Instead I said, “No. I will take it.”
The footman handed it to me by the stem. The bloom was cold. Not cool from air or cellar, but cold as if some lesser warmth in the hand recoiled from it. I closed my fingers nonetheless and went out.
In the brougham I laid the rose upon the opposite seat. The interior lamp, swaying, gave it alternately shape and pallor. Once, when the carriage turned sharply, the flower slid across the leather and touched the hem of my gown. I started as though from a living contact and then was ashamed.
At home the house slept save for Mary, who sat up to admit me. Her face sharpened at sight of mine.
“There is no further message, ma’am,” she whispered.
“None?”
“None, ma’am. Mr Harker has not come in. Mr Seward sent word he thought him resting.”
I gave her my cloak. “You may go to bed. If my husband returns, he is not to be disturbed if he prefers his room. I shall be in the study awhile.”
She looked as if she would protest, then did not. When she had gone, I carried the rose and the letter into my room.
The fire had sunk low. I stirred it and lit the lamp upon my writing-table. The familiar objects emerged one by one: blotter, pen-tray, the little bronze Athena from my school prize, Jonathan’s travelling case not yet put wholly away. I set the letter under the paperweight and fetched a glass vase from the mantel. It was plain, cylindrical, with a narrow lip. In the ewer beside the basin there remained fresh water from before dinner. I poured it in and placed the rose there.
My hand rested a moment on the stem before I released it.
To keep it was an action. To destroy it would also have been an action. What I chose was neither refusal nor acceptance, but observation under my own roof and by my own terms. If the thing was meant as insolence, I would not perform alarm for its sender. If it was meant as token, I would not wear it. Let it stand in water where I might examine in daylight whether common hothouse skill or uncommon means had preserved it. Let me see if it faded.
So I told myself; and all this was true, though not all the truth. There was cost in touching the rose again, in admitting it to my room, in granting it a vessel and a place. Cost is not measured only by overt surrender. There are objects which, once housed, alter the air around them.
The flower stood white against the dark of the room, very upright, every petal distinct. I bent nearer. It had no scent that I could detect, unless the absence of scent itself may become a kind of presence when one expects sweetness and receives none.
The vase reflected the lamp.
I was tired, and my eyes had been strained all evening by candlelight, small script, and inward vigilance. I know this. Yet when I looked into the clear side of the vase I saw, curved in the glass, the white rose repeated and the yellow flame behind it and the blurred line of books upon the shelf. Of my own face bending over the water there was no image.
I straightened at once and looked to the mirror above the mantel. There I was plainly enough: pale from the evening, the dark hair loosened somewhat at the temples, the grey silk gone dull in lamplight. I looked back to the vase.
The rose stood in water, and under it the stem was doubled by refraction into a green thread. The lamp was there. The books. The edge of the table. No face.
A drop of water slipped from the rose’s outer petal and struck the surface below with a sound so small it was less heard than known. The reflected flame shivered and righted itself.
I did not ring for Mary. I did not wake the house. Instead I drew my chair to the table and sat before the vase with Jonathan’s broken letter under my hand, and watched the flower as if by watching I might compel one truth or another to emerge from silence. Outside, London breathed in fog against the panes. Within, the fire settled by degrees into a red, secret life. The rose remained fresh. The water did not stir again.
Toward morning, when the lamp had burned low and the first colourless suggestion of dawn had begun to weaken the window, I took up my notebook and on a clean page wrote only this:
*The Count was at Lord Ashworth’s. He ate nothing. He knew the manuscript before seeing it. He left a white rose. I have kept it.*
Then I closed the book and sat with my eyes upon the flower until the room was light enough that no reflection showed at all.
End of Episode 4