The Count's dark clothing and formal bearing seemed incongruous in the delicacy of the parlor. It was as though in his shadow it changed and twisted, this room that Jonathan and Mina had furnished together, making strange and sinister what had been their choice and comfort. Jonathan found himself watching the Count's pale hands resting upon the arms of the chair, alert for any sudden movement.
"I intend to propose a compromise, of sorts," the Count said, calm, smiling, "no one here, I believe, wishes to spend the span of their life engaged in this ludicrous battle."
Jonathan thought that perhaps it could seem ludicrous to the Count, who saw Van Helsing's garlands of garlic flowers and Arthur's genteel burglary, but it could not be so to anyone who heard Mina crying in bed at night. But still, he nodded, listening, careful, face forced into impassivity.
"As should be obvious, my demands upon Mina's time will not occupy her for longer than the space between sunset and sunrise. This seems to offer a possibility which shall resolve the conflict between us. For the night - which we may, for convenience's sake, assume begins at six in the evening - Mina will be mine, to do with as I please. The rest of the time shall be yours and her own, and during such time I shall leave her alone."
Jonathan looked at Mina. Her head was down, and her hands were clasped in her lap. He wondered if the Count had told her of this sulphur-scented bargain already, his words sharp and clear in her mind and veins. "No," he told the Count, trying to sound definite, absolute, "We will not do it." Better to take their chances with that battle he called ludicrous - better to fail, if fail they must, having fought, having done all they could -
But the Count, too, was watching Mina. She looked up, her eyes so blank that Jonathan could not tell whether she was looking at anything at all. "I will, Jonathan. It's all right." Her voice was hollow. The sound of it frightened him.
Jonathan imagined the Count threatening Mina where Jonathan could not hear, cruelly, unhesitating. "You don't need to," he said, fighting to keep his voice steady, fighting not to yell at someone, anyone, "it's too terrible. I couldn't let you."
Whatever Mina was looking at it was not him, of that Jonathan was suddenly certain. "I can manage it," she said, quiet, "I won't let all of you risk your lives for my sake when he offers me a compromise."
"But if it's an unendurable compromise?" Jonathan wished she would look at him. If he could catch her eye, then he was sure that he could talk to her, reassure her, convince her that they could win without resorting to negotiation. He would tell her - he does not deserve a compromise, he does not deserve anything from us - but it was as though a curtain of gauze had fallen between them, turning any attempted communication murky and distorted.
"It's not unendurable." There was something very hard in Mina's voice then, something Jonathan did not recognize. It was as though she was trying to assert something, more even to herself than to him. Jonathan wanted to look at the Count, to see what his expression was, but he refused to take his eyes off of Mina.
"Mina, you can't –"
Before Jonathan could finish, she stood, spine straight with a dignity that made Jonathan ache in sorrow, and nodded to the Count with what could only be termed acquiescence.
The Count too stood, and Jonathan tensed, expecting him to go to Mina, but he only smiled, that same courteous smile that Jonathan had learned so long ago to despise as the Count kissed his hand and locked his bedroom door. "It is decided then," he said, and Jonathan realized that it had never been he whose agreement was being sought. "We shall begin tomorrow night. Mina, you may choose a room of your house from which I shall take you. I will have no tolerance for lateness." Again, Mina nodded, and the Count was gone, dissolved into mist.
Part of Jonathan was angry with Mina, for standing before his eyes making that horrific bargain, but even stronger than that was anger with himself, for the fact that he allowed the agreement to be made, that he, as ever, was so weak and incapable a husband, standing in silence as his wife sacrificed herself to a monster.
He did not act on any of his anger. Instead he stood and went to Mina's side, taking her hands in his own and holding them tightly till she began to look at him again.
The next day, he told the others that he and Mina were renouncing their part in the struggle against the Count, that they did not wish to put themselves in further danger and he though it better to protect Mina on his own. They asked questions of course, probing, suspicious, but he did not tell them of Mina's bargain. He knew that, if he did so, the Professor would never respect it as a decision on Mina's part – no doubt he would barge into her room and lock her door and windows with crucifixes, treating her as an irrational child until her choices more closely aligned themselves with the Professor's own. Jonathan had more faith in his wife than that and did not wish the Professor's scorn to fall upon him as a man seduced by his wife's charms into handing her over to the devil.
So he lied, at least by omission. He resolved then, as much as it pained him to do so, that he would have no more contact with the Professor or any of Lucy's former suitors. It would be all too easy to slip in the carefully negotiated lies that surely would build and build as time went own, becoming ever more intricate and difficult to maintain. And so he returned home in the early evening giving only the faintest smiles to his former companions.
When he returned, Mina sat alone in the parlor. He saw her from behind as he entered, her shoulders rigid and still. He glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was already half past five.
He spoke her name, quietly, hearing the sound fall against the soft surfaces of the room – the cushioned chairs, the carpet on the floor, the drapes on the windows. For a moment, he was satisfied that his voice had been gentle enough, in that soft room, never to startle her.
She stood at the sound, and turned to look at him. There was something careful, cautious about her appearance and the calm impenetrability of her expression. Her brown hair was tidily pulled away from her face, and her grey dress was neatly arranged. Jonathan noticed, in a sharp flash, that she had dressed in such a way as to leave her neck bare.
"I'll need to leave soon," she said. He could hear the apology in her voice.
"I know," he told her. Neither of them made any movement to come closer to one another. "I'll wait up for you."
She smiled, and Jonathan saw that her eyes were red. "Thank you," she said, "but you don't need to do that."
He went to her then, willed himself to do so though his instincts told him to remain in stillness, "I don't mind." He took her hands. His wife, still, whatever she owed to the Count. He would hold her in his arms when she returned that morning at dawn.
But still, she was not looking at him. "I wanted to make you supper," she began, her voice thin, "but I didn't –"
"It doesn't matter."
She nodded, her eyes shuttering closed for a moment. She glanced at the clock, and he followed her gaze. A quarter to six. "I should go."
"All right," he said, though in many ways it was not. She turned away, and he felt her small, gentle hands slip from his. He wanted, for a moment, to tell her that he loved her, but seeing her walk away from him towards the small, unused room that she and the Count had agreed upon as a meeting place, her soft grey skirts in her hands, he felt unable to speak.
He tried assiduously to stay awake that night, drinking strong coffee and weak tea till both drinks tasted identical. Useless to stay up at all, perhaps, pointless, but it felt only appropriate, to keep vigil and imagine. He could not manage it, to his unerring shame. Despite the tea and coffee his eyes closed as he sat in a hard, uncomfortable chair in the bedroom, waiting in restless solitude. He was hardly aware that he had fallen asleep at all till he was woken by the soft creak of the door. The clock showed five minutes after six.
Mina walked softly, as though scared of waking him. She was barefoot, and her hair was down, but the drape of her skirt remained as neatly arranged as it had been when she left. Something in that comforted him.
She glanced at him. As she turned her head he saw, in the moonlight's glimmer, the bite marks on her neck. He almost flinched, but, with a great effort of will, he forced his face to stillness, certain that his own reactions would only hurt her further.
She didn't speak. Instead, she went immediately to her wardrobe and began to undress, pushing her hair to the side and reaching to her back to unlace her dress. Then, suddenly, some thought overcame her and she laid her elbows upon the dresser and began to cry, so quietly that Jonathan almost could not hear her.
"Mina?" he said, his voice gentle, hoping that if he broke the delicate silence then the barrier which separated the two of them also would fall.
She met his eyes, with what seemed an immense effort. "Yes," she said, as though that one word was all the answer of which she was capable.
He stood and went to her, wanting to lay his hands on her shoulders, hold her in his arms and wind her neck with crucifixes. "You need to sleep," he said, and he did not reach his arms out to her.
She was still. "So do you," she said, "you shouldn't have waited for me."
He couldn't help it; he embraced her. She curled her shoulders in, flinched as though trying to let as little of him touch her as possible. "Go to bed," she told him, "I'll be right there."
He realized with a jolt that she didn't want to undress in front of him. Were there bruises beneath her dress' neat folds? He could not bear to imagine it. But he let go of her, whispering, "Of course," because he didn't trust his voice if he spoke louder. Perhaps he would have screamed. On another night he might have kissed her cheek, but that seemed a terrible idea as she shivered, fearful of things he wished he could forget. After a moment of hesitation he took her hand in his and lightly kissed it. "Good night," he murmured to her.
In bed he closed his eyes and listened to the rustling of her skirts as she undressed in the moonlight.
He made tea for her the next morning, though he was tired himself, exhaustion drawing his attention through the stiffness of his neck, the weight in his eyelids. She was still asleep when he brought the tea to her, and he could only barely bring himself to touch her shoulder and wake her. When he did, she opened her eyes quickly, suddenly.
"I have to go to work," he told her, "I'll see you this evening. You should go back to sleep."
She looked around the room, her eyes falling upon the tray beside the bed. "Thank you for the tea," she said quietly. He saw her venture a smile and he wanted, suddenly, to cry.
"Of course," he said, and left before his emotions overcame him.
By the time he was home that evening, it was half past six and she was gone. There was a note left for him, in her neat shorthand, detailing what she had left for supper, but the note was not the same as her thoughtful conversation or her laughter. He found himself barely capable of eating that evening. Instead, he went to sleep early, and slept for long hours undisturbed by nightmares.
When he awoke that morning the room was flooded with sunlight and Mina was already awake. He went into the dining room to find her laying the table with toast and tea, moving in a flurry of activity.
"How much did you sleep?" he asked her. It was only half past eight.
She was placing down a bowl of jam and did not look up at him. "Enough," she answered, and only with careful attention could Jonathan discern the trembling in her wrists.
"You can sleep later this morning, if you need to," he told her, trying to say so in such a way that her mind could not transform it to an accusation of weakness (he remembered her, scant weeks ago, turning up at the breakfast table the morning after that dreadful night, a smile upon her lips and the paper in her typewriter refilled).
"I shall manage," she said, and in the formality of her phrasing, in the absence of a contraction, Jonathan thought he heard another voice behind hers. It made anger burn in his throat, made him want to reach into her mind and tear out all the words the Count had said to her, crush them between his palms or burn them to ash.
Instead, he took her in his arms and kissed her, but when she flinched, he regretted the callousness of his own desires, which forgot the rawness in her nerves. "I'll try to come home early today," he told her, "will you have supper with me?"
She nodded and said "Of course," as though he needn't have asked, but he noted how her eyes cast down at the question and remembered it as hesitation.
Jonathan left work an hour early that day and returned home to Mina sitting still and silent at a table set already with food. For a moment after he'd entered the room, she didn't move, as though she had not heard him come in. It was only when he spoke that she turned to look at him, and even then, for a moment the movement was almost mechanical.
She barely spoke during the meal, saying only the barest formalities. In response, he spoke to excess, telling her of everything that came to his mind, speaking till, in the moments of silence, he was ashamed at his own garrulity.
When he had finished eating, Mina stood promptly to take his plate. As she did, he noticed that her own food was barely touched.
"I have to leave now, dear," she said when the table was clear, and, without waiting for a response she turned and left the room, almost running. It was only then that Jonathan looked at the clock and saw that it was nearly seven.
The next morning, he could barely wake her.
That evening, she was there still when he got home. She was in the nightgown she had worn when he left that morning, and she was sitting on the bedroom floor, knees curled into her chest. She held out her hands to him when she saw him. It was a quarter past six.
He did not ask questions, but knelt down next to her and held her hands, silently noticing the crucifix around her neck. She was trembling. "Would you stay with me, please?" she asked him, and he thought that her voice was more like a child's than he had ever heard it before. He stayed with her, held her hands upon the bare wood of the bedroom floor till his legs grew numb.
As the hours drew on she trembled more, shivered so much that it became a violence. He wanted to grasp her shoulders in his hands, still the frantic shaking, but he did no such thing. Neither did he speak, remembering how crass and ugly his words had seemed the night before, even though there, as the clock struck hour after hour and the sky darkened, the silence echoed around them like a threat.
Jonathan had not known that he could ever stay so still, but it was ten o'clock when Mina stood, suddenly, pulling her hands away from Jonathan's as though she could not recall why she might have held them. She unfastened the crucifix from her neck, laid it down upon the dresser without looking at it. Her eyes were red and glistering.
He did not ask her questions and she did not give him answers as she walked out the bedroom door and he watched her, her dark, unbrushed hair the only thing of which he could be certain.
He expected that he would not sleep that night, but as soon as he had quieted his stomach with food scavenged from the pantry, he slept as though he had that day walked for miles.
He woke, and Mina was not in bed beside him. They had not been married so long that this fact alone could make his heart pound; instead he sat up, half awake, and saw, upon the floor a few feet from the bed, a woman lying face down, naked, her back a mess of patterns in red.
The fear paralyzed him, and he went to her in halting movements, wishing to be dreaming, but she was alive. Her pulse was erratic but present when he held her wrist. The cuts on her back, he saw, were clean and straight, in intricate geometric patterns like some occult code, blurred only by the dripping of her blood.
She would not wake up.
He barely dressed to rush down the street to the telegraph office, addressing a message to Jack Seward in the presence of bleary-eyed, baffled telegraph operators. MEDICAL EMERGENCY, the message said, COME IMMEDIATELY. TELL NO ONE.
(It was all too sudden, too strange and frightening for him to at the moment reconsider the secrecy into which he and Mina had plunged when she made her bargain with the Count.)
He held Mina's hand till Jack came, whispering nonsense words to her, meaningless endearments. He considered nothing, not practicality or even the thought that she might die. He only thought of her, closed his eyes and remembered a meaningless winter afternoon when she came for tea in the flat he had rented as a student. He conjured up the image of her nose, red from the cold, and her gloved hands in that cluttered room. This ugliness could be no realer than that day.
Jack arrived, with uncombed hair and a black medical bag, and Jonathan led him to the bedroom, his mind empty of explanations. When Jonathan opened the door Jack stopped for an instant, frozen. "My god," he whispered, "my god."
And then he rushed to Mina, checking her pulse, her breathing, opening his bag and looking through it.
"Is there anything you need?" Jonathan asked, hearing his own voice as though it came from another world.
"Alcohol, the clearest kind you have," Jack said, and Jonathan noted that his voice, too, sounded hoarse and strange. Jonathan brought it, a bottle of something pungent-smelling that he had never tasted. Jack began to pour it onto wads of gauze, his hands unsteady. "I won't ask you now what's happened," he said, his eyes not upon Jonathan, "but later I intend to, and I will want an answer." Furiously and methodically he began to dab the alcohol onto the cuts.
Mina stirred, as if in pain, but didn't make a sound.
"Help me with the bandages," Jack ordered, and Jonathan did, noting as they wrapped them around her torso that his hands were steadier than Jack's. Jack noticed the bite marks midway through the bandaging, biting his lower lip and giving Jonathan a look of accusation that Jonathan could not then worry about.
"She'll need a transfusion," Jack said when they finished, and Jonathan rolled up his sleeve without question or surprise, only a feeling of inevitability.
She woke before the transfusion was over. Her first action to pull away the elbow where Jack had set the transfusion, almost dislodging the equipment. Jack held her arm still, gentle but firm. "If you could stay still, please, Mrs. Harker," he asked, and in the request Jonathan heard a professionalism, a distance.
Mina stayed still, but tears dripped out of her eyes even as she kept them closed. The cuts must hurt, more than Jonathan could imagine, as must the transfusion. They had given her nothing to dull the pain.
"I'm cold," she said in a hoarse whisper when the transfusion was finished. Jonathan felt lightheaded from the blood loss.
"Of course," Jack said, somehow kind within his professionalism, "you must be. Let's get you into bed. Jonathan, don't try to help, you've just given blood."
It was not jealousy that he felt as he watched Jack's tenderness with Mina, how carefully he lifted her into the bed; it was only sorrow, both that he was not the one caring for her, and also that, despite Jack's gentleness, Mina still trembled as he touched her.
"We'll get something for you to eat," Jack told Mina, "is it all right if we leave you alone for a few moments?" She nodded.
Jonathan went with Jack, and, as soon as the door closed behind them Jack turned to Jonathan, righteous anger illuminating his face. "What the hell is going on here?"
He did not try to lie. "She made a bargain with the Count. I know - I didn't want her to, but it was her choice, I couldn't - she's been seeing him, every night, and in return he has ceased threatening us."
He did not look at Jack as he spoke, did not want to see the accusation in his face. "If someone had told me they had made such a bargain," Jack said, "I would think they were better off in my asylum than anywhere else. Jonathan, you cannot trust the Count. I haven't even spoken to the man and I know that. Why did you let her do that?"
"It was her choice," Jonathan said, and as he said it her realized that he believed it, "I couldn't make it for her."
(But had she not made her choice? Remember: Mina ashen faced, making all of them promise to kill her before she became a vampire.
Fine, let Jack accuse him of breaking that oath, which had seemed so sacred and solemn and beautiful in their strange, distant time of unity. There would have been nothing beautiful about binding Mina's wrists so that she would not rip the crucifix from her neck, covering her windowpanes with garlic until she vomited. There would have been nothing sacred in feeling her body convulse in his arms as the Count punished her for defying him. Let Jack judge him as he would, but it was true.)
"I'm telegraphing the Professor," Jack said, as though he would accept no excuse from Jonathan.
And, thinking of Mina in the next room, bleeding through her bandages, Jonathan gave him none.
Once Jack had left, Jonathan went back to Mina, bringing her tea and broth, according to Jack's instructions. It occurred to him that Jack had spent weeks on end administering blood transfusions to one of the Count's victims, and the thought made him more forgiving of what had previously sounded almost like callousness. To Jack, certainly it must seem horrific and incomprehensible that Jonathan could watch a woman he loved being hurt and do nothing to save her, while Jack had done all he knew to do and still failed.
"I heard you through the door," Mina said.
"I see." Jonathan did not know what else to say.
"You are aware that he will view this as a breach of our agreement?" She sounded like him: sharp, cold, formal. Jonathan suddenly felt extraordinarily tired.
"Mina, I'm not sure it matters any longer," he told her, as gently as he could manage.
"He'll take me back," she said, her voice, though still faint and wavering, turned high, crystal as prophecy, "and you won't be able to stop him, he'll make me take the crucifixes from my neck and throw away the garlic and open the window and you cannot stop him."
Jonathan could not say 'I won't let him' with the assurance of a hero in a romance. He too had been at the Count's mercy; he too had felt his will pressing at his own, impossible to contravene. "I love you," he told her instead, "please, let me take care of you. Let me try to protect you."
She began to sob, and, wordlessly, held out her arms to him. Slowly, taking care not to touch the bandages on her back, Jonathan came to lie beside her and wrapped his arms around her. "Please," she begged, "don't let the Professor tie me up, even for my own sake. I don't think I could stand that."
"I won't," he told her, "I promise." And, saying no more, they held one another in the uncertain stillness of the morning light.