Echo Van Helsing sat at the writing desk in her room at the Sturtevant and scribbled in her diary. The silver mechanical pencil she used had been her father’s, and the diary itself, a beautiful thing with a picture of the Taj Mahal on the cover, inset with small chips of mother-of-pearl, had been a Christmas gift from him. The writing of a journal had also been his suggestion, not so much for what was written but as an aid to focusing one’s thoughts and giving direction to considered action. To make a plan was to write it down, and to write it down was the best way to observe its strengths and weaknesses.
She put down her pencil for a moment and stared at the vase of wildflowers Matthew had collected for her from a nearby vacant lot. They were nothing spectacular, just trout lily, wild daffodil, sweet white violet, greater celandine and periwinkle, but together they were an impressive bouquet, all the more so for coming from the heart of an enormous city where one really didn’t expect to find growing things at all.
But what of Draculiya? Like the wildflowers, his physical aspects were nothing to single him out in a population as large as New York’s. He had enormous presence certainly, but you couldn’t go about the city in your hired carriage saying “Have you seen a man of great presence anywhere?” He could be described, yes; in fact she even had a sketch of him she’d made from memory, but what was that except a rough portrait of a man with high cheekbones, a pale complexion and the deepest, darkest, most sinister and seductive eyes she’d ever seen?
It was at once the face of Saint Augustine, of Hamlet and Lothario, all combined, and she knew what anyone would say if she showed it: this is a portrait of her phantom lover, the man she seeks but has never had. She veered away from that thought quickly and picked up the silver pencil again. Her father had found Draculiya once by following what he referred to as “the Logician’s Path”: observe, hypothesize, predict, and finally, prove.
What then had she observed about Draculiya? He was a secretive man and not particularly sociable. In London he had attended only affairs where it would have been more suspicious if he did not attend. He lived well, if discreetly. Carfax Abbey had been a grange house in Purfleet, a suburb, not a house in Cheyne Walk or Mayfair. He had few friends, if any, other than Renfield, who had gone mad and was now in an asylum. The only other person regularly in his company was that quiet little Oriental who was his batman and butler in one. Chin? Chung? No, it had been Chang. Chang Fu Sheng.
What had Draculiya been beyond a prince? What did a prince do? She tapped the silver pencil against her upper lip and pondered. She had no idea what a prince did, or a count. Did royalty actually work at all in any proper sense, or did they just sit about looking at the family jewels and running their fingers through great cauldrons filled with gold coins?
The family jewels. That sparked a thought. She made a little lozenge-shaped drawing on her diary page, then filled it with triangular facets. The first place her father had gone in London had been the pawnbroker’s in Drury Lane, looking for anyone who’d recently sold a store of gemstones, both set and loose.
In the notes he’d left behind it was clear that this was how Draculiya financed himself, transporting his wealth in the form of gems, then liquidating them for cash. When leaving a place he would do the reverse, spending cash to buy gems. She knew little about gems, and diamonds in particular, but two things she did know: the people who traded in diamonds were generally Jews, and furthermore they were Dutch or Belgian, coming from Amsterdam or Antwerp.
Born in Leiden, Echo obviously spoke Dutch, learned Flemish and simply enjoyed French. Traveling for so many years had added English, German and a smattering of Russian. She would have no difficulty communicating with the Jews of New York. Find the Jewish ghetto in any city and inevitably you would find the jewelry traders. She turned back to the diary briefly and jotted down that fact below the little drawing of the diamond.
So, following her father’s scientific method, what could she hypothesize from what she knew? Draculiya, undoubtedly traveling under another name by now, would be living quietly, but in good fashion, somewhere not in the social whirl, but perhaps not far from it. He would have recently traded jewels for cash, and he might well still employ a Chinese manservant named Chang.
She wrote all this down, then added a few notations somewhat outside her father’s method: she’d noted herself that Draculiya had dressed extremely well, his bespoke suits from Saville Row or Bond Street, as were his shirts and boots; none of this would have been noticed by her father, who preferred tweeds and wooly German vests and whom she had once seen give a lecture at the university in his carpet slippers.
He was also perfectly shaved, which meant a good barber, and he smoked Turkish cigarettes, which meant a tobacconist. All of these were small hints but depended more or less on having Draculiya’s new name. To get it would require a visit to the Jewish ghetto, and to find that she’d need some sort of guide. According to the hotel manager, Mr. Boone, Appleton’s published a more than adequate handbook, which he’d promised to purchase for her.
She laid down her pen as Matthew came into the room, biting on an apple. He’d been down watching the cricketers and there were grass stains on his trousers from sitting on the ground. Such a boy, she thought, half fondly and half with worry at what was going to become of him without a father.
“There’s someone here to see you,” said Matthew, without much interest. “A Mr. Warne, from the Pinkerman Agency.”
“Pinkerton,” corrected Echo.
“Yes, that’s it,” said Matthew.
Echo frowned. She knew that the Pinkertons, with their unsleeping-eye signature, were detectives, but she hadn’t sent them a note or telegram and she didn’t know any Mr. Warne. On the other hand, if it wasn’t too much of a financial strain, perhaps hiring a detective wasn’t such a bad idea at that.
“Send him in,” she said to her brother. Matthew withdrew and didn’t return. A moment later a slim, narrow-faced man in slightly tinted spectacles, boots, a rumpled brown sack suit and a shapeless felt hat of the same color entered the room. His collar was a little grimy and his necktie was poorly adjusted. He held the stub of a narrow cigarillo in his gray-gloved hand. A tradesman without the manners to remove his hat indoors or the good taste to match his gloves to the rest of his dress. Not to mention the foul-smelling cigarillo. It smelled precisely like the nasty things her father had smoked incessantly in his study at home.
“Mr. Warne? I asked for no agent from your company. Why are you here?”
“Mrs. Warne, actually,” the figure said, taking off the ugly brown hat. Removing one glove, the person in the suit reached up and unpinned a long cascade of brown curly hair.
“Krijg het apelazerus!” Echo whispered, using one of her late father’s favorite exclamations. “You’re a woman!”
“Since birth,” said Warne. Her voice was a little rough, the timbre more like a young man’s than a woman’s. She took off the tinted glasses and smiled. She held up the cigar. “Gives me a bit of a rasp, helps with the disguise.”
Echo dropped into her chair and stared at the woman. With the hair under her hat, the effect had been perfect. “How wonderful!” she said at last as the implications sank in. The smile on Kate Warne’s face widened.
“Walking around, playing at being of the masculine gender?” she said. “It has its benefits.” The woman shrugged. “It also has its drawbacks. You have to pay for everything yourself for one, and not to be indiscreet, but there are problems of hygiene to consider.”
Echo blushed. She hadn’t thought about that.
“Still,” she said.
“Still.” Warne grinned. “It does cap the climax! Smoke on the street, spit on the sidewalk and go where you want and as you please without a man on your elbow! Grand fun, Miss Van Helsing!”
“But I’m afraid I still don’t understand,” said Echo. “We have never met and I have made no request to your agency.”
“Allan is friends with Sir Richard Mayne.”
“The Scotland Yard commissioner?”
“That’s him.”
“I see,” said Echo, who didn’t see at all.
“There’s more to it than that, but suffice it to say that I’m supposed to render you any and all assistance in the pursuit of this Count Draculiya fellow. So here I am.”
“And you’re a detective?”
“According to Allan, Mr. Pinkerton, that is, I’m one of the best, in a dress or out, if you know what I mean.” She smiled.
Echo didn’t quite know what she meant, but she had certain ideas. “What do you know of Draculiya?” she said at last.
Kate Warne shrugged. “Just what they told me. A foreigner, Hungarian or Romanian or some such; I can never keep all those countries straight. Came to London about a year ago. Suspicions of him being involved in the death of some girl named Lucy Westenra, but nothing was ever proved. He’s also been implicated in the murder of your father, Abraham Van Helsing.” At this point the female detective gave Echo a curious look. “The weapon used in that murder having been a wooden stake which was plunged through his heart.”
“That’s right,” said Echo, blanching at the description of her father’s death. “Initially Dr. Seward thought it had been Draculiya’s companion Renfield who had escaped from the asylum, but it was later discovered that Renfield was already dead himself, a suicide in his cell.”
“Dr. Seward?”
“An alienist.”
“Who worked at an asylum?”
“In Purfleet. He was the chief administrator.”
“Where’s this Purfleet place?”
“East London. It’s where Draculiya lived. Carfax Abbey.”
“Your count lived in an abbey?”
“The Abbey Grange. The manor house occupied by the lord who gave the land to the monastic order occupying the abbey,” explained Echo.
“So he had a great deal of money, this count of yours?”
“He wasn’t my count.” Echo bristled. “He’s a fiend.”
“So I hear tell,” said Kate Warne dryly. “A rich foreigner count comes to England, buys a big house next to an old church and starts killing people by sticking wooden stakes through their hearts. Is that about right?”
“Put crudely, yes,” Echo said. “Although Lucy wasn’t killed that way.”
“No?”
“No,” said Echo. “She had her throat torn out.”
“Some kind of animal maybe?” Kate Warne suggested.
“She was found in her bedroom. The sheets were covered in blood; in fact she was bled dry, if you must know.”
“Yes, I must, actually, if we’re going to find this character,” the detective said. “Why does everyone think it’s this Draculiya doing the murders? How is he connected?”
“He made advances to her at a dinner party. She complained of a headache and he cured it through some kind of Bohemian magic. Animal magnetism, he called it.”
“Mesmerism? Hypnosis?” Kate Warne said.
“I suppose you could call it that, although my father always thought Mesmer and Baird were both charlatans.”
“You know much about that kind of thing?”
“I was my father’s assistant. He was a scientist.”
“So Draculiya cures a headache and he’s the killer?”
“There was more. She met him in secret several times after that. She was engaged to Arthur; it was quite scandalous.”
“Arthur?”
“Lord Godalming.”
“Rich?”
“Very.”
“Was Lucy’s family rich?”
“Not especially.”
“So she was going to marry money and Draculiya interfered.”
“It wasn’t like that.” Echo frowned. “The Count seduced her. He seduced everyone. His manners, his wit, his elegance, his aristocracy…”
“Handsome?”
“Some thought so.” Echo shrugged, trying to make her tone cool.
“Handsome foreign royalty sweeps Lord Godalming’s fiancée off her feet and has his way with her. Lord Godalming objects, kills her and blames it on the Count. Your father finds out what Godalming’s been up to, and he kills him. Could it have been that way?”
“No,” Echo said firmly, “it could not.” She heaved a great sigh. “Mrs. Warne, you’d have to have known Arthur. He was devoted to Lucy. He loved her with all his heart.”
“In my experience those are often the most dangerous ones,” said the detective. “Love and jealousy go together likes roses and thorns.”
“Like Draculiya and death,” responded Echo. “There was no problem before he arrived. My father and I were investigating the possibility of blood disease as a cause of madness at Dr. Seward’s asylum, Lucy was engaged to Arthur; even little Mina, Lucy’s companion, was engaged to Arthur’s solicitor, Mr. Harker. And then the Count arrived at that drafty old hall of his and everything was ruined.” She turned and went to her valise, perched on a chest of drawers beside her bed. She withdrew a long dagger, the haft ornately carved silver, the blade made of a black, shining substance, more like polished wood or stone than metal. “When I find him I will kill him with this. I will pierce his heart and then remove his head in the old way. My father thought it the only way.”
Kate stared at the wicked-looking weapon and frowned. “But there’s no real evidence that Count Draculiya was involved, no living witness to any crime?”
“No,” said Echo after a long moment. “No evidence. No witness.”
“Then,” said Kate Warne brightly, “we’ll just have to find some, won’t we?”
“You sound very sure,” said Echo.
“I’m not a great believer in coincidence, Miss Van Helsing. Let me be forthright about my position, which to be completely honest goes well beyond your own concerns. Over the past several weeks in New York there have been reports of a number of murders such as the one you describe…young women, all with their throats savagely torn out, as though by some sort of terrible, savage animal where no such animal could possibly be. Mr. Pinkerton, at the request of President Lincoln himself, has asked me to investigate the matter in as discreet a manner as possible. There’s trouble enough with the war and the draft coming up; we certainly don’t need a panic about some monster roaming the streets of New York murdering young women.”
“You think it’s Count Draculiya?” Echo said.
“Let’s find out,” said the lady Pinkerton agent.