Stokers Shadow Read Free

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