It was a surprise to me that Holmes allowed us some scant hours’ sleep before embarking once more on the trail of our villains. Holmes himself appeared none the worse for yet another long night of toil, while I was beginning to feel like the Un-Dead myself. It was well after midday when we finally struck out, engaging a hansom to ferry us around for most of the afternoon, making enquiries about town.
The objects of our search were the former servants of the Westenra family at Hillingham. Holmes and I concurred that their role in Lucy Westenra’s final days was one of the strangest and most inexplicable details in the whole narrative.
The version of events that the Dracula Papers gave was as follows:
A few days before the death of Lucy Westenra, on the night that her mother died, Lucy was left alone. Despite all of her ills, and the belief that Dracula was attacking her, Van Helsing was called away on some other business abroad. He sent a letter to Dr Seward, summoning him to Hillingham to look after Lucy, but incorrectly addressed the envelope, so that the letter was a day late in reaching the doctor. Meanwhile, in a conveniently timed assault, Dracula supposedly entered Hillingham by impelling a wolf—stolen from London Zoo—to smash through a bedroom window, thus destroying the safeguards placed upon the entry points of the house by Van Helsing. That would have been curious enough, but for the strange detail that followed.
The shock of the attack caused Lucy’s mother to die of a sudden heart attack. Lucy was able to tend to the body with the help of her four maids, but then instructed them all to go to the dining room and take a glass of sherry from the decanter to calm their nerves. When later Dracula attempted to gain access to the house, Lucy called upon the maids, but found that they were all asleep—the wine had been drugged with laudanum.
The question Holmes posed was a simple one: who drugged the sherry? Van Helsing and Seward were not in the house. The implication was that Dracula was responsible, but why, given his great powers of hypnotic suggestion, would he even bother to steal into the house, drug the wine, and then return later in such theatrical fashion? The only way to answer the question conclusively would be to question the maids, but their names and eventual fates were not recorded in the Dracula Papers. Only Frank Cotford was likely to still have the maids’ names in his personal library of notebooks, and Bradstreet had gone to call on him, as advised by Holmes in his letter of the previous night.
Holmes and I wondered if the inspector’s house call would prove fruitless, but some hours later a telegram had arrived for us, providing the name of one of the maids, and her last known employer.
In the months following her dismissal, the maid had changed situations several times, and our wending route through London, which had begun in the leafy suburbs around Hampstead, took us to gradually poorer territory. Now, after three stops, we found ourselves back in the East End, looking out at a dark, squat building, which loomed out of the fog.
“You are awake at last,” Holmes said. “Good; we are here.”
“Where?”
“A poor laundry, where our former lady’s maid now works for two shillings a day.”
“So she has fallen on hard times?”
“Of course. Van Helsing had her dismissed and she received no reference. A girl with no reference will always struggle to find work in a respectable house, and if she manages it she will find herself out on her ear at the first sign of a mistake. I have spoken with two of her subsequent employers while you slept, Watson, and although they did not accuse her of any great fault, neither did they think her services remarkable enough to retain. And so here we are.”
“If you think the young woman is innocent of any wrongdoing, then this is a terrible thing to befall her.”
“I doubt Van Helsing has ever given those four maids a passing thought. They are merely collateral damage in the workings of his devious machinations. Come, let us interview the girl, and hope that she can shed some light on events.”
* * *
Betty Hobbs was a meek woman of few words, whose lined face and rough hands made her look considerably older than her probable true age. I had seen her like many times—the product of a hard life, with sunken, dark eyes and a hacking cough brought on by poor working conditions. Persuading the manageress of the cramped workshop to let us speak with Miss Hobbs had been no easy task, and had required the production of enough coin to constitute her girl’s entire day’s wages, let alone the few minutes that we required. Persuading Miss Hobbs herself to speak with us privately was equally tricky; it took some cajoling for Holmes to win the woman’s trust enough to question her, and even then he had to disavow Van Helsing several times before she would talk.
“Now, Miss Hobbs,” Holmes said gently, “I have given you what assurances I can. All I require from you is that you tell us, in your own words, what really happened on the night of 17 September last year.”
“It was more or less like people been sayin’,” she replied.
“More or less?”
“Yes, sir. We was all woke up by a scream—Mrs Westenra had taken a funny turn, and was havin’ a heart attack.”
“A scream? Whose?”
“Miss Lucy’s, I think.”
“And no other noise woke you? It was definitely the scream?”
“I know what you’re going to ask, sir, and I swear it now as I swore it to that copper at the time—I didn’t hear no dogs, an’ certainly no wolf.”
Holmes exchanged a severe glance with me. I recalled that a note in the Dracula Papers for the evening in question had recorded that the entire household had been woken by the howling of the neighbourhood dogs, agitated by the appearance in the vicinity of a large wolf, named “Berserker”, that had escaped from London Zoo that night.
“Which policeman did you speak to?”
“Dunno. Some fancy inspector.”
I guessed she was referring to Cotford, whose subsequent disgrace would have seen to it that the maid’s statement was never heard.
“Did you speak to any policemen at the scene?”
“The scene? The house, you mean? No, sir, that Dutchman arrived and dismissed us, just like that, after two years’ service.”
“Hmm. We shall come to him in good time. Think back again to the moments leading up to Mrs Westenra’s tragic death. Were you the first to wake?”
“I think Mary was first… I can’t be sure. I remember waking Wendy and Alice, so I was one of the first up.”
“I am sorry to repeat myself, but the official record states very clearly that there was a broken window, followed by the howling of many dogs, and that is what woke the household. Are you saying this was not the case?”
“That did not happen, sir, I swear on my life.”
“That won’t be necessary, Miss Hobbs; I believe you.” Holmes attempted a charming smile. “What happened when you found Mrs Westenra?”
“We ran into the bedroom, and found Mrs Westenra dead, but in her last moments she had fallen upon poor Miss Lucy, and we had to lift her off, with Miss Lucy being so frail and all. Miss Lucy was beside ’erself, as you’d imagine. When we’d laid the body out, like, and Miss Lucy had calmed down, she sent us off to get the sherry, and told us all to have a glass first to steady our nerves. That’s what we did, but it’s the last thing we remembered before we woke up and the Dutch doctor was there.”
“There was laudanum in the sherry.”
“So they say.”
“Yet you did not smell it at the time?”
“’Course not, sir, we were all at sixes and sevens. Besides, I for one wouldn’t recognise the smell o’ the stuff. Mrs Westenra used it sometimes, but I never saw to any of that.”
“The official account states that the bottle of laudanum was on the sideboard, open and empty.”
“It was not, sir. If it had a’ been, we’d have seen it and not touched the stuff.”
“Quite. Was the elder Mrs Westenra in the habit of putting her laudanum in her drink?”
“Oh no, sir, she drank it neat when she needed it.”
“And no one else was in the house?”
“No.” There was something curious about the woman’s manner when she answered, and Holmes evidently saw it too, for his questioning became leading.
“Someone was expected, however?”
“I… I don’t know what you mean, sir.”
“Miss Lucy was expecting a visitor. Someone for whom you would all have to make yourselves scarce. A gentleman caller, perhaps?”
“Miss Lucy was engaged to be married… to Mr Holmwood.”
“Now Lord Godalming, of course,” Holmes said. “But that is not why she sent you from the room. That is not why she drugged the sherry and ordered you to drink it.”
The girl’s eyes darted about as she tried to piece together the puzzle.
“I offer you a chance to set the record straight,” Holmes said. “If you are completely honest with me, I shall see to it your good name is restored, and the other three maids, too, if they can be found. I may even be able to find you a situation more… suitable.” Holmes looked about the filthy room we had been shown to with a small measure of distaste.
“Wh—what is it you need to know?”
“I shall speak plainly with you, Miss Hobbs, as I hope you will with me. The only person who could have drugged you on that night was the person who instructed you to drink—Miss Lucy Westenra herself.”
The woman gasped.
“I do not believe for one moment that she meant you any harm,” Holmes said. “The arrangement had been made solely to get you out of the way, so that she could have some privacy. To go to such lengths, however, would mean that she intended to do something illegal, dangerous, or scandalous. As a lady’s maid in a relatively small staff, I am certain you would have overheard something, or perhaps even been taken into the confidence of your young lady. So, which was it? Illegal, dangerous, or scandalous?”
The young woman cast her eyes downwards and fumbled with her pinafore. “Scandalous,” she muttered.
“Ah. I was correct then when I mentioned a gentleman caller?”
She nodded.
“His name?”
“I… I don’t know; not his full name. I only know that he was foreign, an’ that Miss Lucy was sure her mother wouldn’t approve.”
“Was the man so disreputable that the knowledge of the liaison might bring on a sudden heart attack in Mrs Westenra?”
“Mrs Westenra had a bad heart, sir. The slightest shock could set her off, the doctors said. That’s why Miss Lucy said her ma couldn’t find out. She swore me—” The girl stopped speaking at once, and looked tremendously guilty.
“We agreed to speak plainly, Miss Hobbs,” Holmes said. “So, Lucy confided in you about her gentleman. You said you did not know his full name, which means you must have known part of it. Correct?”
She nodded again, nervously. “An initial, upon a letter he signed. It was a ‘D’, although I don’t know what it stood for.”
Holmes’s eyes sparkled. When he next spoke, I could tell that his mind was turning over the possibilities of the case even though he was still talking to the maid. “But I am certain you have guessed by now who he was, if you have followed the papers at all.”
“Miss Lucy would never… not with… a vampire.” She crossed herself.
“Count Dracula was no vampire, Miss Hobbs. He was a man, like any other, whose reputation has been besmirched even more than your own, for some transgression that we have not yet ascertained. I put it to you that Lucy Westenra had arranged to meet this man, regardless of what it might look like to the outside world. We cannot be certain that it was a romantic liaison, but let us assume, for now, that it was. She was as secretive as she could be, but somehow her mother suspected something, and forced her to confess the truth. Lucy told her, and Mrs Westenra flew into a rage so violent that she assaulted her own daughter and suffered a massive heart attack. You found her body on top of Lucy—this was no accident, but a product of a physical attack gone horribly wrong. Miss Westenra, devastated at her mother’s reaction, and perhaps feeling less inclined towards the love that binds mother and daughter, dusted herself down and prepared to meet this man anyway. She had already arranged the drugged sherry, probably intended for her mother. However, seeing that you four maids were now awake and distressed at the death of your mistress, Lucy instructed you to partake of the sherry, so that she could still meet the man despite the tragic circumstances.”
“She would not be so cold!”
“If that is so, then I wonder if perhaps the meeting was not a romantic one after all, but something else entirely. Maybe Lucy Westenra’s honour need not yet be questioned.”
“I wish that to be so, sir, more than anything. But…”
“But what? What more do you know that you have not told us?”
“I have a letter.”
I could see from the twitching of Holmes’s lips and the widening of his keen eyes that he had not anticipated this.
“Who is the letter from?”
“It is from this man, this ‘D’ to Miss Lucy.”
“And what does it describe?”
“Not much, but it seems to me to be a note between lovers, sir.”
“How did you come by it?”
“It was given to me with a bundle of others, to destroy. She trusted me, but I—I read it, sir. And what I saw was so shocking that I did not destroy it.”
“It was not your intention to blackmail your mistress?”
“No! What d’you take me for? I was just interested, that’s all, and then it just slipped my mind, until… well, after what happened, I thought I should keep hold of it, in case any of that Dutchman’s friends ever came knocking at my door.”
“We must see this letter.”
“I… no. I cannot. I will not blacken Miss Lucy’s name.”
“I would not have it so either, and if there is any way around it, I give you my solemn promise that I shall avoid such an outcome. But Miss Hobbs, lives have been lost as a result of this tryst, and more lives may yet be lost. Would you have that on your conscience?”
She thought about this, and then exhaled a bitter laugh. “It will cost you, sir, to have that letter.”
Holmes sighed, and I felt something of his frustration. It seemed that remuneration was ever a greater motivator than justice. He delved into his pockets and fetched out some coins.
“There are six shillings here,” he said.
“Begging your pardon, sir, but I’m tryin’ to feed my family on two shillings a day. It’ll cost you six pound, not six shillings.”
“Six pounds!” I interjected. Holmes at once held up a hand to stay me.
“I can have it for you later. When shall we meet?”
“You know the Vine Tavern at Mile End Gate?”
“No, but I shall find it.”
“Seven o’clock. I’ll meet you outside.”
“You shall have your money. But for that princely sum I must stipulate something else.”
“What?”
“When the time comes, you must testify in a court of law to what you have told me today.”
“No. I ain’t going to no court. I’ve kept my head down, sir, from that day to this, afraid that the Dutchman or one of his cronies would come find me, but they never has. Now you come here and ask me to stick my neck out? Not likely. This Dracula was a powerful fellow and the Dutch professor hunted him to the ends of the earth and killed him dead. I don’t want to end up like that.”
“If you will not testify, then we shall do without the letter. Unless…”
“’Less what?”
“Unless you will sign a sworn statement. It is as good as a testimony, but your whereabouts will remain a secret until Van Helsing is put behind bars for his crimes. I can guarantee you that much.”
She pondered this, weighing up the advantages of six pounds in hand against a frisson of danger. Eventually, we saw from the gleam in her eyes and grudging nod that the scales had tipped in our favour.
“I’ll sign your papers,” she said. “But I trust you to keep your promise, as a gentleman.”
“Depend upon it.”
* * *
“So Dracula and Lucy Westenra were acquainted after all,” I said when we had returned to our cab. “Does this mean Dracula was in Whitby?”
“No, Watson. It is quite possible that he wrote to Miss Westenra previously, and that the letters may have played upon her mind. But I do not believe he ever set foot in Whitby. Miss Westenra’s hastily scribed memorandum, written on the night her mother died, must have been tampered with considerably, and some fantastic elements added after her death. The wolf that crashed through the window—a fiction! And one made all the more feasible by the discrediting of the maids. We must work out what Dracula and Lucy Westenra were about. Whatever it was, it was grave enough for Van Helsing to kill her over it.”
“You sound more certain than ever.”
“I am. Whatever is going on here, there is some great secret that Van Helsing is desperate remains hidden. It seems to me that Lucy found it out, or was on the cusp of doing so. After her death, when Van Helsing seized all of the papers from Hillingham, he was not doing so simply to hide evidence of his gross malpractice. He did it to hide something deeper. When we find out what that secret is, Watson, we shall have him!”
* * *
When we returned to Baker Street, we found a police constable at the front door, as Bradstreet had promised. Mrs Hudson met us on the stair outside our rooms, and handed Holmes a small parcel, and a message from Inspector Bradstreet. The package contained various papers, and Holmes beamed as he leafed through them, handing each of them to me in turn.
“The inspector has been industrious indeed,” said Holmes. “I always thought he lacked imagination, but he has acted upon his initiative to very helpful effect. He has not only had some success with Cotford, but has been to the office of Leverson & Critchley, the undertakers who arranged the offices of Lucy Westenra and her mother. Well, well… it seems that Mrs Critchley, the undertaker’s wife, remembers Van Helsing requisitioning all legal papers from the Westenra estate, and persuading Arthur Holmwood to give up his rights to them. It says here that the police coroner was refused access to Lucy’s body, and that Van Helsing was seen bribing him! The woman has signed this statement and agreed to testify if called. Bradstreet has not yet found the coroner in question, for he appears to be no longer in the employ of the Metropolitan Police. By the looks of things the good inspector has been turning the screws—we can only hope he has not attracted any undue attention in the process, for subtlety is not normally a byword of Scotland Yard. Look here also! What a fine fellow! He has found an original police report regarding the missing wolf from London Zoo. He has circled the date.”
“By Jove, Holmes,” I said. “The Dracula Papers tell us that the wolf went missing on the day of Mrs Westenra’s death. This date would suggest it occurred on the following day.”
“The only report in the Dracula Papers on the matter was a newspaper interview with the wolf-keeper. The erroneous date could easily be put down to an editorial error, but it proved most fortunate for Van Helsing’s version of events. I believe that, once Van Helsing struck upon the queer idea that Dracula could transform himself into a wolf, he went to great lengths to make this fiction appear reality; but these dates do not tally. We shall have to find out more. I want to review our evidence before meeting Miss Hobbs again tonight. Can you feel it, Watson? Those rogues fancied they were dealing us a great blow, but instead they have galvanised us! We shall have them yet.”