The Kingdom of Bones

THIRTY-ONE

Bram Stoker sat at a strange desk in an unfamiliar office at London’s Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, writing up the latest set of accounts for Irving’s Dante. Although the Lyceum company was gone and Irving’s tenancy at the Wellington Street theater was no more, Stoker had stayed on as one of the few remaining members of the actor’s personal staff.

He could hear the sound of someone approaching down the corridor. A few moments later, Belmore, the assistant to Irving’s long-serving stage manager, reached in and tapped on the open door to get Stoker’s attention. When Stoker acknowledged him, Belmore came into the room and laid a small envelope on the desk.

“Beg pardon, Mister Stoker,” he said. “Addressed to you and delivered by hand.”

Stoker picked up the envelope. It was, indeed, addressed to him by name. He pinched it between his forefinger and thumb, as if assaying it for density and value.

“Another request for house seats, at a guess,” he said. “Strange how people can be so generous with their praise for the guv’nor while balking at the cost of a ticket.”

“Yes, sir.”

Belmore went off, and Stoker opened the envelope and took out the note inside. It was not a request for free seats. Nor was it an appeal for him to approach Irving to make some public appearance—a common request, whose authors usually presumed that the actor would gratefully bear all expense and inconvenience for the honor of being asked. Instead of either, it was a note from Samuel Liddell Mathers.

Stoker hadn’t seen Mathers in years. They’d met seldom after that night in the basement of the Horniman Museum with Tom Sayers, and not at all recently. He knew that the would-be mystic had landed a fulltime job as assistant librarian at the museum, but he’d argued with the management and the job hadn’t lasted. The last Stoker had heard of him, he was living in Paris. He’d added the name MacGregor to his own and had been seen bicycling through the French capital in full Highland regalia.

The request was for a few minutes of Stoker’s time, at his own convenience. A boy would be waiting to take back his reply. Stoker quickly wrote a response across the bottom of the note, placed it into the neatly slit envelope, and had it taken down to the street.

When he was done with the figures, he locked his notebook away and reached for his hat. He needed to speak to the manager of the Criterion about the arrangements for that evening’s Dante supper. It was an expense that he’d advised against, but Irving had insisted on it. Despite a mixed critical reception, Dante had to be made to succeed.

As usual, Stoker chose to walk rather than take the tram. From Drury Lane he cut through the Covent Garden market, so busy at dawn’s first light, so dead by midafternoon. The gutters were strewn with spoiled fruit and leaves, and a small number of costers threw empty crates around. As Stoker walked down the curving lane of Long Acre past the furniture makers and coach builders that lined it, he reflected that making a success out of Dante would be no easy task. It was an enormous enterprise, with fifty players and more than a hundred nonspeaking spirits to people the circles of hell. It was also a mediocre play in thirteen interminable scenes. It was carried entirely by spectacle and what remained of Irving’s drawing power; but here in the capital, even that power was no longer as great as it once had been.

When Irving had been knighted, some eight years before, the honor had seemed to confer some measure of permanence on that gilded age. In retrospect, it had actually marked the summit from which a descent would soon follow. A disastrous fire had consumed two decades’ worth of scenery and properties in the railway arches at Southwark, wiping out the company’s repertoire of productions and all the future income that would have flowed from them. Uninsured and in debt, Irving had signed control of the Lyceum over to a business syndicate. He was tiring. His health was beginning to fail. And yet, instead of being able to rest on his achievements, he now had to work to survive.

In Piccadilly, amid the white pillars and gilded mirrors of the Criterion’s airy Byzantine dining rooms, Stoker went over the evening’s arrangements with the restaurant manager. A few minor questions arose, and he was able to answer them all. When their business was done, Stoker took out his pocket watch and checked on the time. Then he thanked the manager and left the spacious grill room, descending a short flight of steps to emerge into Piccadilly Circus.

In the middle of the Circus stood the Shaftesbury Memorial, an ornate bronze fountain topped with a winged figure of Christian Charity. On the steps of its dais, with traffic all around him, Samuel Liddell Mathers waited.

He had not yet seen Stoker, and did not know from which direction he’d be approaching. This was as Stoker had intended. He wanted a moment in which to take a look at Mathers and assess the state of him.

He was, Stoker noted with some relief, dressed more or less normally. Too warmly for the weather, perhaps, in a thick coat that looked as heavy as a Persian carpet—and which might even have been cut from one, looking at it again—but nothing too embarrassing to be seen with.

He raised a hand to draw Mathers’ attention, and having caught his eye he waited as the other man crossed through traffic to join him. They exchanged greetings, and then together they began to walk down Coventry Street in the direction of Leicester Square.

Stoker said, “How is Mina?” On closer inspection, Mathers’ coat was almost threadbare. Mathers himself was quite gaunt inside it.

“She is well,” Mathers said. “As am I.”

“I have followed your progress.”

“Then when you saw my note, you probably thought that I had come to visit London to ask you for money or patronage. Let me assure you that I have not.”

“That’s just as well,” Stoker said. “The great days are gone, Mathers. The Lyceum company is no more. It pains me to say it, but the guv’nor is a lion at bay.”

“If only you’d agreed to join us in those early years,” Mathers said. “Then, who knows. The outcome might have been different for both of us.”

But Stoker was having none of that. “You mean that together we could have magicked away misfortune?” he said. “Be serious, man. I had no inclination to involve myself with the members of any order. Let alone one whose life is a constant squabble over what to call themselves and how to organize. If it’s not money and it’s no other form of support, then what do you need?”

Mathers looked down at the pavement. “Crowley has betrayed me,” he said darkly.

“That’s exactly the kind of behavior I mean,” Stoker said. Alick Crowley, or “Aleister” as he now styled himself, had gained some notoriety in London circles before traveling out to Paris to join Mathers as a pupil.

Mathers said, “I sent an astral vampire to bring him down. He struck back at me with Beelzebub and an army of demons.”

To Stoker, it was as if the traffic around them slowed into silence and all of the color drained out of the world. He stopped, and Mathers stopped with him. Stoker turned to look more closely at the other man.

Mathers was manifestly serious in what he was saying. But his eyes were dark-ringed, small, sunk back in his head as if by madness or malnutrition. They glittered, but not in the manner of a man filled with energy. More in the way of a man adrift. They were the too-bright eyes of a helpless stranger, far out of reach.

“An astral vampire,” Stoker said.

“We battle with magic.”

And he clearly believed it, too. Stoker looked at him. Mathers was not exactly a close friend, but Stoker had known him well and for many years. His manner now was dogged, earnest, entirely sincere. It was a heartbreaking sight to behold.

Stoker said, “How do you imagine I can help you, Mathers?”

“Don’t do this,” Mathers warned. “Don’t pretend you don’t believe. I have read your book.” He reached inside the big coat and, from some capacious inner pocket, half produced a novel in yellow cloth binding so that just its corner showed. “They dismiss it as a shocker,” he said. “But I know how close it is to the truth.”

“Dracula is a fiction,” Stoker said.

“Every fiction has its original,” Mathers said, unwittingly echoing another novelist’s assertion in the British Museum’s reading room all those years before. “You tracked down the Wanderer. You found him. Don’t try to deny it.” He indicated the book. “This adventure you tell…it’s a shadow play of what you really saw. Where is he now?”

“Who?”

“The Wanderer. The real one. I have a proposition for him.”

“Don’t,” Stoker said. “Do not ask me this. Please.”

“I helped you once, Bram. Perhaps I even helped you more than you can know. Did you think your good fortunes were all your own?”

Strange that Mathers should speak of his good fortunes, when in Stoker’s own eyes so many of his hopes had fallen short of the mark. He’d thrown over his life for Irving, and imagined himself to be one of the great man’s closest confidants; and yet when Irving had sold out the Lyceum to the syndicate, he’d told Stoker nothing of it until after the deal was done. And the work in which he’d invested all of his hopes of a serious literary reputation—Mathers was right, they called it a shocker, well done of its kind but with little of lasting merit, while his publishers had given it their shoddiest binding and done almost nothing to promote it to the public.

Even Irving, whose opinion mattered more to him than anyone’s, thought it dreadful. If there was proof that Stoker’s life was not enhanced by any magic, then there it lay.

He said, “Life has treated me well enough. I might have appreciated better. But I’ve never wished for anything more than I’ve deserved.”

“Won’t you help me, Bram?” Mathers pleaded.

Stoker drew in a deep breath, let it out, and looked down.

Then he said, “Call by the stage door at eight, when the curtain’s gone up. I’ll have something for you then.”

He left Mathers in Leicester Square and walked back toward Drury Lane. He was fairly sure that he knew why Mathers wanted confirmation that there was a reality behind the Wanderer, and why he wanted to know where the current bearer of the title might be found. Mathers was a disappointed man, his life all but in ruins. He was unemployed, and probably unemployable. He and his wife had been living in near poverty in Paris. The organization that he’d helped to found had cast him out. His protégé was now his enemy. His reaction was the natural response of a desperate man: Only allow me the opportunity, and I will pay any price for the chance to turn my life around.

Any price. For in a position like his, it must seem that he had nothing at all to lose. What would it cost you to give up your soul, if your soul was a dead thing already?

Now Stoker was on Drury Lane, and across the road stood the Theatre Royal. It was no Lyceum, that was for sure. It had a big stage and good seating capacity, but on the outside its proportions were clumsy and lacking in symmetry or magnificence.

Back in that unfamiliar office, he returned his hat to the hook and settled again behind the desk. He’d have no time at home today. There was still much to do before the evening’s performance. Irving planned to lead with Dante on his eighth American tour, and he had asked Stoker to prepare abstracts from the better notices for cabling ahead.

But first, Stoker drew out a blank sheet of notepaper and took up his pen.

My dear friend, he wrote. If you would place so much faith in my word, be advised by me now. Forget these notions. Nothing you might find would be as you imagine. May your God go with you. Bram.

He put five pounds in with the letter, and sealed both into a new envelope. He wrote Mathers’ name on the front and took it down to the stage door, where he placed it in the care of the doorkeeper to await collection. He left instructions that Mathers was not to be admitted to the building, nor was Stoker to be sent for even if Mathers demanded it. If he should refuse to leave, the police were to be summoned.

It felt like a cowardly act. Whatever human flaws and frailties he might have possessed, cowardice had no part in Stoker’s nature. But he could see no other way. At best he’d have to play the unhelpful brute, the treacherous friend. At worst, he might give in and tell Mathers what he wanted to know.

That would be, in its strongest sense, unforgivable.

He went back to his borrowed office, where he turned his attention to American tour dates.