"Complicity" commentary
May. 20th, 2024 07:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chthonic_cassandraAuthor's commentary for Complicity, part 11 of Compromise. Commentary includes some vague spoilers through the end of the series.
He brought her out to hunt with him, just the two of them. They turned to wolves together and ran through the forest purely for the pleasure of it, though all the hunters they might have caught there were gone by the late hour. It had been a long time since Ileana had been outside the castle walls at all, let alone with only him, and she took pleasure in all of it - the strain of her body at the effort of the transformation, the energy and speed as they ran, the feeling of him beside her. When they returned to their human forms she let herself fall back into the dirt and moss, laughter warm in her chest.
In "Tower" we see Dracula setting an intention to spend time alone with Ileana following her outburst and subsequent punishment, and that's where this story had to start. I wanted to show a moment of connection between the two of them that felt joyful and gratifying, and that could also feel special to their relationship, like something just for Ileana. It occurred to me that I had done absolutely nothing with the animal transformations this whole series, and since I always associate Ileana with the forest it felt like a good fit.
I liked how setting this scene outside of the castle in a natural space immediately differentiates Ileana's PoV from that of the other characters, but I also was careful to use her name in this opening paragraph so that it was clear that this wasn't Mina.
His hand at her shoulder. “You need to fight me,” he said softly, “you may do so now.”
Dracula instructing Ileana to fight should remind us of him giving Mina permission to do so at the end of "Windows," which was also articulated as him perceiving a need and generously allowing her to fulfill it. The relational tenor here is different, though - in "Windows" the framing is that Mina is not yet emotionally ready to give in to Dracula and relinquish her resistance, and here Dracula is treating fighting him as an act that meets a certain psychological need of Ileana's, that she might periodically have to fulfill. In both cases, however, he has positioned himself as the one who can see and understand their needs better than they themselves can.
Relief and terror flashed through her like lightning and she did not wait for further instruction. They grappled together in the dirt, Ileana fighting as hard as if she was still a mortal girl resisting death. But she had strength she had not then had, and nails, and teeth. She grabbed his arm and bit into the scarred flesh of his wrist, letting his blood (his blood which was also her own, theirs, shared in a closed loop, unending) run over her chin, then managing to push him down, his body briefly underneath her own until he wrenched his bleeding wrist away and caught his leg behind hers, twisted her onto her back, nails raking from her sternum down her chest and then working between her legs, his fingers practiced and insistent, and she grabbed at him, torn between pushing him away and pulling him close. His hand inside of her until she thought, as she always did, that she could not bear it, that she would die, now, again, always. The smell of earth was all around her, thick with rot and decay and life.
This is probably as close to a "consensual" sex scene as we get in the series (though what the hell does consent mean between these characters? it's sort of a nonsense determination to try to make). The violence is reciprocal and cathartic and immediate; it's not the more calculated torturous kind of act we see Dracula doing elsewhere. But even in this we don't see the characters forgetting the way their relationship began, as something forced and beyond Ileana's choice or control. The feeling of sexual pleasure for her is still the feeling that she will die. If I did this right, though, this passage should be pretty hot.
The images also echo and invert "Windows" again - for Mina then lying in the dirt of the coffin is horror and confinement, and the smell of earth is the smell of death. For Ileana here it means life, and a very embodied connection with the cycle of growth and decay.
Suddenly, Ileana found that she was sobbing. He held her still against the ground, her body shaking as the emotion, which she did not think she could name, ran through her.
I wanted "he held her still against the ground" to have the ambiguity of being held as comfort and as confinement.
“What you feel is truth,” he told her, his voice steady, “I will not punish you for it.”
As though she could not before have spoken without that permission, the words then came from her, hoarse and choked through the sobs. “I hate you for leaving,” she said, “you make me need you so much, you make us need you and then you go away and you don’t know what it’s like, you don’t know how everyone acts without you here, how Ecaterina almost rips her goddamned skin off -“ She stopped, voice running out, unsure if she was betraying a confidence.
Ah this passage! Such a crux in the story, and in this whole arc of the series. The desperation of being forced into dependence on someone and then having to bear their absence, having no choice in it, Ileana getting to say that to Dracula directly, the fact that their relationship can hold her hatred but her expression of it does not change his actions.
"Ecaterina almost rips her goddamned skin off" was a line that I knew I would include here back when I was writing "Distance". It was refreshing to write Ileana, who in many ways gets to be a lot more direct than the other characters and say things they wouldn't let themselves quite think.
His fingers tightened at the edge of her shoulders where he held her down. “Keep going,” he said, “you have more to say, Ileana. Let it out.”
Notice that, while Dracula is encouraging Ileana to speak honestly to him, it's the process of her saying this that is attending to more than the actual content of what she's telling him.
“Mina.” She had to force the name out between her teeth. “You told me to take care of her.”
“Yes. And I am proud of your efforts to do so. You’ve done very well.”
Ileana thought of the first time they spent in bed together. How Mina had knelt, frozen, waited for their lord to undress her and then kept her eyes down as if trying not to look at Ileana’s body. How she fumbled, even under Vlad’s direction, and apologized to Ileana when she did, as though her awkwardness might be an insult to her. That must have been the first time Mina did anything sexual with a woman, though Ileana hadn’t realized that then, had pictured Mina and the lost, idealized Lucy giggling together in nightgowns of white lace.
The details we get here should place this memory during the time frame of "Collusion", since we know that Ileana learns that Mina and Lucy's relationship wasn't sexual at the beginning of "Adjust." I conjure this scene up very briefly here, but it was painful to write - this kind of sexual education scene is very distressing, as the complexity of Ileana's subject position.
He hadn’t trusted her with that kind of responsibility ever before, telling her that she was too volatile, did not have enough control yet to be close to either Adriana or Jonathan in the early stages of their training. She remembered resenting Adriana at first, if she was truly honest, how much of their lord’s time and attention she took up, how delicately he seemed to treat her. More than once in that time she had lashed out at him, feeling ashamed of her own childishness even as she did but finding herself unable to stop, hungry for his focus to be upon her, even in his rage. Those had been challenging years.
A couple notes on this paragraph. First, there's a version of this dynamic briefly with Ileana and Mina in Minor Initiations which is, as always, like the earlier, clumsier version of what Compromise is exploring. This kind of resentment dynamic between co-victims makes me extremely uncomfortable but I'm also very preoccupied with it; in a way it's also related to what we see emerging between Jonathan and Mina throughout this series, though Jonathan and Mina's relationship is of course way, way more complicated.
We know from "Collusion" that while Dracula was keeping Ileana away from Jonathan he was having Ecaterina spend a lot of time with him, but this did not at all lead to the kind of bonding and connection that developed between Ileana and Mina, which is yet another major strategic error on Dracula's part.
Finally, when Ileana talks about Dracula treating Adriana "delicately" we should remember that everyone's standards with that kind of thing are way far out in another dimension from any normal person's.
It had been a surprise, then, when her lord had taken her aside and told her what he wanted her to do with Mina. She’d been nervous that she would get it wrong somehow, especially during the long stretch when Mina kept rebelling. Vlad laughed when Ileana voiced her fears to him, and reminded her how long Ileana herself had fought, how she once spat in Ecaterina’s face when she tried to give her a bath after their lord first raped her. And, ultimately, he had been right.
One of my favorite (and I think most characteristic) techniques, which is to very casually insert a devastating detail like this memory of Ileana's, which is brought up here only in the context of Dracula's fond amusement.
“I have, I have done well. And so has she. And I didn’t know what that felt like before, I didn’t know how much I would care, and now you want to take her away, for years, maybe. And I can’t, my lord, I can’t -“ She grabbed for him, and, finally, he put his arms around her.
“You must trust me,” he said, “hate me as much as you need to; if you need to fight, if you you need a pathway for your anger, then tell me, and I will give you what you need. But you don’t question my authority.”
He couldn’t give her what she needed if he was thousands of miles away in England, Ileana knew. And while he would certainly give her and her sisters permission to give each other whatever pain and pleasure they needed to endure his absence, it would hardly be enough, for her or for any of them. But he knew that. He knew all of it.
“Please take me here,” she asked him, “make me feel overpowered.”
He nodded. “Keep fighting if you need to,” he instructed, and she did.
Like this is almost negotiated? It's not of course, but almost?
When it was done, both of their bodies were dappled with bruises. He ran his fingers through her hair, tangled with leaves. “Brush it when we get home,” he told her. “Now. Let’s find something to bring back to the others.”
The hair stuff here should remind us of lightly Mina in "Distance".
-
“She’ll need more clothes,” Ecaterina said, the slight lilt in her voice betraying her satisfaction at having been proven right about something.
One of the pleasures of writing this story was getting to write about Ecaterina from the perspective of Ileana, who knows her very, very well, loves her, and also spends a fair amount of time making fun of her.
“I’d thought to buy them when we arrived in London,” Vlad said, “that worked well with Jonathan in Budapest.”
Ecaterina shook her head. “Men’s styles change more slowly than women’s.” She gestured to the dresses laid out on the table in front of her, the scant few that Mina had brought with her to the castle. Light blue, brown, violet. “She’ll be conspicuous in these, if the current patterns you brought me are accurate. Never mind the blood stains.”
Spending this amount of time with the dresses was a very pointed way of turning readers' minds back to the first few episodes of the series, since we're going to go very full circle in the next story, which works better if people have the specific events of "Compromise" already on their minds. During "Compromise" and "Windows" we didn't see quite how messed up these dresses got because Mina had other things to worry about, but I wanted to remind people of that here to bring home the brutality of that journey.
Mina stood unenviably at the center of the argument, looking absurd to Ileana’s eyes in the corset and petticoats she had long since abandoned for regular wear. They were discussing her travel wardrobe, and Ileana was bored out of her mind. Mina looked too nervous, though, for Ileana to want to abandon her.
In my original outline this story, or a version of it, was from Mina's PoV, but it became clear pretty quickly that would raise the emotional pitch too high, and not give us the right kind of alternating distance from and investment in the events.
Thinking about PoV in general I try to ask myself - what will telling this story from this particular character's perspective reveal, and what will it conceal? For this series I was specifically asking myself - whose PoV will show us something new? If this story had been from Mina's perspective, we might have been impacted by her feelings, but none of those would really be things that we didn't get already in "Distance," were going to get in "Intransigence," or could infer from Dracula's PoV in "Tower." Ileana notices different things than Mina does, has different concerns, and was the one we needed to see react to the events of this story.
“Who cares if she’s conspicuous,” Ileana said, mostly to needle Ecaterina, “it’s not like Jonathan won’t be, with the white hair. No one’s going to care about dresses that are ten years out of date.”
Also writing Ileana is fun.
“More like fifteen,” Mina said, “it’s not like I was keeping up with the fashions much after -“ She stopped, like a phonograph with its needle lifted.
I was a little vague about the amount of time elapsed in the episodes before this (though I left some clues that can place us pretty exactly if you catch them), but I thought here that it was time to let the game be up and lose the ambiguity.
The "after," in case it wasn't obvious, is Dracula's turning of Jonathan.
Vlad touched her back, perhaps reassuringly, though his eyes were on the dresses. “It may be true that the stains will be a problem,” he acknowledged, “I want her respected as my social equal through the course of the journey.” He looked at Ecaterina. “Can you and Adria make her things that will do?”
Gods Dracula is sort of a mess here.
Ecaterina spread open the fashion periodical Vlad had brought her. “Probably. I’m not familiar with these styles, but the skirts would be simple enough. These drawings don’t make the cut of the blouses particularly clear, but we should be able to create something passable with the fabric you brought.”
“Let me see her in one of the dresses,” Vlad said, “I want to use them if we can.”
Adriana picked up the blue dress and brought it to Mina, helping her into it. Ileana watched her fingers worrying the pleated skirt as Adria did up the buttons. Ecaterina stepped back and looked at her, appraising, then reached for the collar. “See,” she pointed the bloodstains out to Vlad, “not everyone will notice, but enough might to cause concern. And the seams have pulled, though we could fix that.”
Mina had turned her head aside as Ecaterina reached for her, almost as though she was baring her neck. “I died in this dress,” she said softly.
“You did,” their lord’s tone was stern. “but you will wear whatever I tell you to wear.”
I was worried that this exchange would be too much, but people seemed to find it effective, which I am glad of.
Mina nodded.
“That’s enough; take it off now.”
Mina did, and handed the dress back to Adriana, who laid it out beside the others. Ileana had nothing like Ecaterina’s eye for clothing, but as Mina removed the blue dress she realized that she did remember Mina wearing it when Ileana first met her, lying in bed near death. Ileana thought of Mina’s body then, warm and frail, remembered sinking her teeth into the strong vein in her thigh, Mina’s cries as plangent as any mortal’s though Ileana had known then that the woman was soon to be her sister.
Vlad turned back to Ecaterina. “Make a few pieces for her, as much as you reasonably can manage in the time we have. We’ll only need to get through the journey.”
Ecaterina tilted her head at him. “As you wish, my lord.” Ileana only barely kept from rolling her eyes. She tried to catch Mina’s glance, but her eyes remained downcast.
-
The next night, their lord was with Adriana and Jonathan. Ileana found Mina, as usual, in the library. She was writing, and only briefly looked up to smile when Ileana entered. Ileana came to her and perched at the side of her chair, looking over at her work. She was writing in a script that Ileana couldn’t understand.
The parallel this time is to the scenes of Mina walking in on Dracula writing (sometimes also in a script she couldn't understand).
Also we don't know it yet, but this is likely happening simultaneously to the Dracula-Adriana-Jonathan hypnotism scene in "Concession."
“Come to the courtyard with me,” Ileana told her.
Mina stopped writing, but didn’t put her pen down, only held it suspended between her fingers so that the ink didn’t drip. “Is that an order? Because I do need to finish this.”
Light reminder here of the hierarchy between the women, that Ecaterina articulated to Mina in "Acculturation." Ileana outranks Mina, and in Dracula and Ecaterina's absence, she would have the authority to give Mina orders, though it's not clear how often she makes use of it.
“Is that your diary again? I don’t understand what you have to write in it every night.” She reached for Mina’s hair and played with it, half-hoping to distract her.
“Well, you know. I write about what happens to us, how I feel about it. What I’m reading, what I observe. Over time I think it will be exciting to have created such a comprehensive record.”
I'm not sure this line is quite right for Mina's voice, though the idea of it certainly is. I thought of going more explicitly Victorian with her dialogue in this scene, but I thought it would be too obtrusive by contrast with the style of the rest of the series.
Ileana laughed. “Exciting is not the word I would use to describe that, Mina.”
“For me it is. And he likes that I do it.” There was something in Mina’s tone that felt childlike to Ileana, as if she was trying to justify something about which she was embarrassed.
“So he can read what you write about him. Just like when he looks inside our minds to see how we remember something he did.”
At that, Mina did put down the pen. “He does that to you too.”
“He does that to all of us. If we didn’t love him so much, the arrogance would be quite difficult to tolerate.”
It's a consistent character note for Ileana that she is both comfortable talking bout loving Dracula and also willing to (lightly at least) make fun of him, which isn't a combination that we see so much in the other characters.
“But you never thought of keeping a diary. And he never suggested it.”
Ileana shrugged, feeling annoyed at the turn the conversation had taken. “I couldn’t read or write before he took me. I’m glad he taught me, I’m glad to know now, but I would never think of writing everything that happened down in a book; it would get tedious, over the centuries. Not to mention repetitive. I’ll remember anything important myself.”
Emphasizing here not only the difference in era between Mina and Ileana, but also a difference in class between her and the rest of the wives (there's also an Ecaterina & Adriana vs Ileana & Mina [& Jonathan] split, since E & A are both nobility, but it can fall out a few different ways). I wanted to also emphasize a little the ways that Dracula connects with each of them over different things, and the record-keeping is specific to his relationship with Mina, just as perhaps transforming into wolves in the woods is more specific to Ileana.
Do we want to think about what Dracula teaching Ileana to read looked like? Maybe we do. Or maybe not.
“Everything here does repeat, I suppose.” Mina was looking at her seriously, her brow furrowed over her brown eyes. “Ileana. Was there anyone else here, before Jonathan and I? Has he had…consorts other than the five of us?”
I think this transition is a little clumsy, but it's okay. Mina using the word consorts here cracks me up a little bit, though it's also the word I use in a bunch of these commentaries because brides and wives are not gender neutral; it occurred to me that the group of them probably don't often need a word to refer to what they are in relation to Dracula. Fledglings, commonly accepted vampire literature terminology of the post-Anne Rice age, is not something that it would occur to any of them to come up with, despite Dracula's falcon imagery.
Ileana felt caught off guard. “Why are you asking this now?”
“I’ve been thinking about something that was said in front of me, once. A long time ago.” A beat. “I’m worried about London.”
Everyone is worried about Mina in London, but are they worried about the same things? Probably not.
Mina is of course thinking about the argument between Dracula and Jonathan during "Adjust" during which Jonathan accused Dracula of murdering the previous men he turned and Dracula neither confirmed nor denied it. Mina chose to drop that line of inquiry at the time, but that doesn't mean that she forgot any of it.
Ileana didn’t say that everyone else was worried about her in London too; Mina could tell that, to the extent she needed to. And she certainly didn’t need to see the depth of Ileana’s own fear. “There were people he thought of turning, brought here to test out, but he decided they weren’t suitable and killed them first. I’ve seen that happen.” She paused, considering whether to go on. “And Ecaterina mentions things, sometimes, when she’s truly upset. You’ve never seen her like that - I mean after a major punishment, when she’s all disoriented. A man, who he did turn. He died.”
“You mean that he killed him.”
Pointing out here that Mina is making an assumption, and neither she nor Ileana actually have direct knowledge about what happened to this man.
Ileana stood, uneasy suddenly where she had positioned herself on the armrest of Mina’s chair. “I don’t know. But whatever happens in London, he’s not going to kill you. He wouldn’t kill any of us.”
“He might kill Jonathan.”
“So what if he does?” Ileana felt frustrated with Mina, felt the urge to scratch and bite at her as she had with Vlad in the woods, “Jonathan hasn’t done a thing to help you for the past decade. We’re the ones who help you through the training, who clean the blood off when he’s been with you, who’ve taught you to be what you are.” She saw Mina flinch and knew that she was hurting her. She tried to slow down her voice. “I don’t question why our lord wants him; that isn’t my place. But I remember how you were at the beginning and I do know that separating you from Jonathan was one of the most important things he did to help you adjust to this. You should worry about yourself in London, not him.”
Ahh. I am sort of obsessed with Ileana's anger at Jonathan here, and the ferocity of her pride in the ways that she supports Mina, which I find both fascinating and startlingly moving.
“He’ll want to see us together,” Mina said, her voice shaky, “there will be no way out of that, and none of you will be there -“
Ileana reached for her, took her hands in her own. “We’ll be with you, Mina. Even when we’re thousands of miles away, it won’t matter. We’re always together. And you’ll come back.” She tried not to think about how much the last felt like a wish to her, or a prayer.
Ileana's promise here rhymes with her concerns about Dracula not being able to give her what she needs from England, and also with Dracula's conversation with Ecaterina in "Tower."
Mina nodded. “I will,” she said, “I will come back.”
I am so curious where readers that the arc of the series was going at this particular moment. Did they think this was dramatic irony because Mina wasn't going to come back? I certainly lay enough groundwork for that.
Ileana pulled Mina to her feet. “Come outside to the courtyard, then, please. You spend far too much time indoors, and in London you probably won’t be able to see the stars the way you can here.”
“That’s right,” Mina said, relenting, smiling as Ileana pulled her to the door, “you can’t.”
-
Mina was in the corset and petticoats again, but this time Ecaterina and Adriana were fitting the clothes they were making onto her while she stood in the center of the room, still as a doll. Their lord and Jonathan were out hunting. Ileana was watching again, still bored.
“The drape of the skirt looks right,” Adria said, stepping back to regard Mina, “but I don’t think it’s even at her waist.”
Ecaterina nodded from where she crouched down at Mina’s side, and readjusted something at the waistband of the skirt.
A pin went into a spot at the curve of Mina’s hip which all of them had seen injured not long ago. Mina flinched out of Ecaterina’s grip, letting the circle of gray fabric fall into a pile at her feet. “I’m sorry,” Mina muttered quickly, leaning down to grab the fabric, but Ecaterina twisted her wrist back and pushed her to her knees. Ileana found herself on her feet, startled by the sudden turn.
This story as a whole was definitely one of the easiest to write in the series, but within it, this scene was most definitely the most difficult. Part of it was keeping both the physical and the emotional choreography clear for each of the four of them all the way through. Part of it was the delicacy of the tone. And part of it was getting the surprise of this moment and the totally weird way Ecaterina chooses to engineer it.
“You should have better self control than that,” Ecaterina told her, voice harsh, pushing Mina’s head down until she was prostrate, “you can take a moment of discomfort without disrespecting me and ruining our work.”
Ecaterina is imitating Dracula, basically.
Mina was breathing rapidly. Ileana looked at Adriana, who appeared just as confused as she felt. Then, as quickly as she had pushed Mina down, Ecaterina let her go. She settled on her own knees beside Mina, smoothing the fabric of her skirt out around her. She looked at Adriana, and then Ileana, and finally at Mina.
The confusion here should be that Ecaterina very abruptly switches into this anger/punishment mode and then very abruptly switches out of it, which makes it clear that it is a very strange and strategic act.
“I am going to say something now,” she said, “and whenever after this you recall that thing, or any conversation we may have subsequently, I want you to instead remember the moment of what I just did to Mina, to let that memory be the metonym for what follows.” She rested a hand on Mina’s spine, which was still curved.“I’m afraid I am going to have to ask him to punish you for that flinch, for the sake of continuity. I’m sorry, my dear.”
I am not sure that it is believable for Ecaterina to use the word "metonym," but I checked when I was writing this and its usage dates back to the 17th century in English, so theoretically it's possible. And it was just too perfect a description of what she's doing for me to be willing to give it, especially as it was sort of important that readers understand the idea behind her weird technique to get around telepathy.
Previously in the series we saw Mina very messily trying to conceal her escape plans by not thinking about them in "Jackal," and Jonathan doing a more sophisticated version (though we don't know we saw this yet) in "Appraisal" and "Tower." Ecaterina's technique here, of creating an alarming memory that will both serve as cover in the moment for all of their emotional distress and also to basically encrypt the memory of the conversation, is significantly more worked out and developed. There are probably some other stories to be told of how she came up with it.
The "I am going to have to ask him to punish you for that flinch" makes me shiver a little every time.
No one spoke.
Ecaterina’s voice was calm and even. “We cannot let him stay in London.”
Adriana looked at her, confused. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s too risky,” Ecaterina continued, her voice still eerily even, hand still upon Mina's back, “he almost died last time. He might not be so lucky during this trip. We have to force him to come home, before it gets to that point.”
It's "we cannot let him stay" and not "we cannot let him go" partly for plot convenience reasons, partly because Ecaterina's actual objection is not the journey itself but the unboundaried nature of it, and partly because stopping him from leaving would entail actually trying to keep Dracula captive in his own castle which a) probably feels totally unfeasible to Ecaterina and b) is an emotionally distressing idea for a whole host of reasons and not what she actually wants. She does not actually want to Marya Morevna him (though a Marya Morevna Dracula story is indeed something I'd like to write); she doesn't want to reverse the roles of their power relation. What she's trying for is something rather more subtle and stranger.
A flare of panic rose in Ileana’s chest; she tried to bring herself back to the calm of Ecaterina’s tone. He could feel when they were in distress, but if none of their feelings went beyond an expected reaction to Ecaterina unexpectedly punishing Mina, then perhaps it would not catch his attention. Ileana watched the curve of Mina’s corseted spine as she spoke. “It’s not possible to overpower him, you know that.”
“Not possible for any one of us,” Ecaterina said, “but for the four of us together it might be.”
When I was writing this I was like, fuck, it's too simplistic and obvious and also people are going to think it's like Dowry of Blood (even though I had this plotted out well before Dowry of Blood came out!). People did indeed think it was like Dowry of Blood. But that's okay.
“He’d kill us,” Ileana found herself saying, even though she had told Mina just the opposite so recently.
Ecaterina almost smiled. “No, my beloved sister. He won’t.”
We should ask: why is Ecaterina so confident about this, when we've just learned that she also rambles about their dead vampire brother when she's delirious?
“What you’re describing is betrayal,” Adriana said, her voice a sharp whisper, “we owe him our loyalty, our unquestioning obedience no matter what he commands. We have sworn it. Each of us. I cannot believe you would suggest this.”
Adriana is the most mild-mannered vampire imaginable, but you want to see her get angry? Suggest that she should break an oath. (Because, as we'll discuss in another commentary, if Dracula has a true soulmate it's probably actually her.)
“I am not suggesting harming him,” Ecaterina said, and Ileana could hear an edge of heat in her voice, “I never would, never. You know that. But we have an obligation to protect him, and if he is making decisions that could lead to -“
Adriana knelt down in front of Ecaterina, looking at her intently, “It was not our oath to protect him; that was his. Our roles here are not parallel. Katya, you have to let him make the decisions, and not anticipate what is to follow.”
I don't know quite what to say about this exchange except that I have a lot of feelings for both of them and rereading it makes everything in spark in my head like it did when I was writing it. But I think these two are just saying quite directly everything that I would say about this conflict. I find both Ecaterina and Adriana's positions here extremely sympathetic.
Ecaterina pulled away, drawing her hand from Mina’s back as she did. “I will not allow him to destroy himself.”
Where have we heard this one before? In "Adjust," Dracula to Mina:
“And yet you still have Ileana watching me every waking minute, yet you will not let me so much as keep a journal -”
He put a hand over her lips. “Caring for you is not the same as trusting you. And I will not allow you to destroy yourself.”
She did not push his hand away from her mouth; instead she took a greater chance, and sent the question to his mind, Has that happened before?
I hoped that people would get this one, or at least feel the weight of the echo, because the parallel is quite important.
Mina shifted out of where she knelt, sitting with her legs curled together at her side; she was shaking. Ileana went to her, for her sake and because it felt right to be close to the rest of them on the floor. One arm around Mina’s shoulders, she said, “None of us want that. But that doesn’t mean we have the power to change it.”
Ileana hasn't participated in the argument until this point, and I struggled a little to bring her in (four person scenes where each of them has their own distinct perspective and priorities are challenging!). But what I realized was that Ileana's concerns here would be more practical than ideological.
“We all know what he does for us,” Ecaterina said, “how he protects us, how he gives us what we need. He has never had anyone to do that for him.” She looked at Adriana. “It isn’t betrayal, what I propose, even if he would see it that way at first. But you know, you all know how it works, how sometimes he does things to us that we don’t believe we want, that we resist with everything in us because we are scared of how much we need them. We owe him the same.”
This is a crazy argument. Crazy! It's also an argument that takes Dracula's ideology, his system, seriously on its own merits, as something that should apply to him as equally as it does to them.
It was very, very important to me that this scene not read as "we're all going to band together to fight back against our abuser!" scene. It is manifestly not that. It is "we love this person and he is making choices that harm himself and us, and within the framework in which we're all living the only way to address that is though force."
Ileana’s mind was spinning. She asked, finally, “How do you know that this is what he needs?”
“He hasn’t been thinking clearly,” Ecaterina said flatly, “not about Jonathan and Mina, and not about London. He’s too enthralled, by modernity or whatever it is that’s pulling him. He’s made too many mistakes.”
Such a delight to get to write this, after spending years subtly weaving in Dracula's mistakes and having no one be willing to call him out on them.
“I know you don’t like being without him,” Adriana said gently, “none of us do, but it’s a trial we must endure on his behalf, and when he returns it proves our devotion more fully -“
“You’re not listening, Adria,” Ecaterina responded. Ileana listened to the tightness in her Romanian, her accent starting to show through. “I have been here centuries longer than any of you, I know him better than anyone in this world or the next and I am telling you that this time is different. I could list out all the reasons, but I know you’ve been seeing them too.”
Adriana shook her head. “It’s still betrayal.”
Ecaterina put a hand on Adriana’s throat, traced her fingers across the scars he had left there before she was turned. “I want to give him what he gives us. Only enough containment, only enough force to quell whatever this madness inside him is. I know that won’t be easy for you, or for any of us, but it would be selfish to refrain purely because it causes us discomfort.”
Ah, Ileana thought, in the part of her not too overwhelmed to watch Ecaterina’s tactics critically, accusing Adriana of selfishness certainly was an effective way to persuade her. She watched her sisters looking at one another, and thought she could see Adriana shift the angle at which she held her neck, as though the muscles were softening. Mina, still close by Ileana, remained silent.
The most difficult part of this most difficult to write scene was coming up with a plausible way for Ecaterina to convince Adriana, and this still doesn't feel like enough to me; imagining it from Adriana's perspective I am not totally convinced. But, as I have Ileana point out here, framing the betrayal as itself a sacrifice on Dracula's belief is extremely canny and plays to all of Adriana's ascetic, sacrificial maiden impulses. It's not enough, but it plants a seed for her.
Slowly, Ecaterina drew her hand back from Adriana’s throat. “I can’t do this without all of you,” she said, “I won’t try. If you truly believe that I’m wrong, you can tell him of all this. I will take my punishment, and I won’t blame any of you.”
Ileana thought of Ecaterina chained to the stone table at the foot of tower, cut open and pulled apart in ways a mortal could not survive. She would heal; perhaps it was even what she needed, to exorcise whatever it was that brought her to a plan like this.
Without Mina's intervention here, this is how this scene would have ended; Ecaterina didn't get Adriana and Ileana all the way there on her plan yet.
“We’ll need to find his records,” Mina’s voice was soft but clear.
All of them turned to look at her, for the first time in the conversation, their surprise clear.
“We need to know where he’s going in London, what he’s planning to do there, if we hope to interrupt those plans. He won’t tell me in advance. But I know he keeps records. I don’t know what language he keeps them in, but between the four of us I’m sure we can manage the translation.”
The records thing is so self-indulgent, both for me as a writer and also very, very much for Mina. Mina also feels unconsciously (she would never admit to it) the current of Bluebeard-like invitation in her conversation with Dracula about his records in "Tower." They feel emotionally like keystone of this plan to her, and so she makes a case for them to be so pragmatically as well.
Ecaterina looked at her as if pleasantly surprised. “We can’t meet regularly to plot behind his back; that’s not how this is going to work.”
“I understand that. And none of us should know all the pieces. I less even than the rest of you, since I’m younger and have less control. Not to mention that he’s going to be looking closely in my mind before and during this journey.”
Ileana pulled away from Mina. “Where are you coming up with all this?”
Mina smiled bitterly. “I’ve done this before. Or something rather like to it.”
She most definitely knows what this is like! It felt good to circle back to the novel here, and to also give everyone a hint of these qualities and skills of Mina's that haven't been so visible in the recent episodes of the series.
Ecaterina turned to each of them. “Ileana. Adriana. Will you do this with me?”
Ileana thought of Vlad in the woods with her, letting her fight him. How unendurable it felt to think about having a secret from him. But then she thought of what had almost happened last time, his body staked to dust in the snow. Mina’s too; even Jonathan’s, for all that Ileana disliked him. How much more vulnerable they all were, in having new brethren to care for. “I will,” she said finally.
Ileana's reasons for agreeing are, again, not at all ideological; they are about protecting the people she cares for.
Ecaterina was looking at Adriana, and for a moment that felt unending all of them were still. Then, Adriana nodded.
Ecaterina had been too long what they were to exhale in relief, but Ileana saw her open her shoulders, shift the muscles in her back. “Thank you. I’ll tell you now, what I need you to know. Adria, can you help all of us, when we’re done, to keep this at the bottom of our minds? You’ve always been the best at hypnosis. Then I can do the same to you.”
-
He had her come to the bedroom with him and Jonathan. Ileana had fed from Jonathan before, but never otherwise been intimate with him, probably because her lord knew how his presence rankled at her, and wanted Jonathan to be more stable in his own place there before subjecting him to Ileana’s hostility. And then, of course, he had kept Jonathan so separate from all of them for all of the past several years.
Ileana knew why she was there this time, and it wasn’t because her lord wanted to help her get over her antipathy. What she was there for, Ileana thought as she undressed and watched Jonathan do the same, was to help Jonathan prepare for what he would have to do with Mina. There were many physical differences between them but Ileana knew that with her build and height and heavy brown hair, she resembled Mina more closely than any of the others.
I called this the second "threesome from hell" (following the one in "Jackal") and I stand by that. One of the grim satisfactions of this story is creating this tremendously wide range of disturbing sex scenes with all sorts of emotional variants of horror and coercion.
“Kiss her, Jonathan,” Vlad said. He hadn’t undressed, just sat at the foot of the bed to watch them. Ileana opened her mouth obediently when she felt Jonathan’s lips against hers, and then snapped her teeth down upon his bottom lip, hard enough to draw blood. Jonathan tensed but didn’t try to pull away.
“Ileana,” her lord said warningly, “do you need to be restrained for this?”
Ileana opened her teeth and released Jonathan’s lip, though she flicked her tongue out for a drop of blood. “I do not, my lord,” she said, as sweetly as she could manage. It crossed her mind that if she made him angry enough perhaps he would torture her himself instead of making her do this. But he always knew when she was trying to provoke him. She felt him in her mind, cold and reassuring. My dear, he said, I know how little you want this tonight. Take it as another opportunity to more fully submit to my will.
Not much to say except that this remains painful to read, so I think I did pretty well with this one.
“I want to see you pleasure her,” he told Jonathan out loud. For a moment, she saw the muscles around Jonathan’s mouth tighten, and then his face returned to blankness as he laid Ileana down on her back. She remembered, suddenly, the time he had walked in on her and Mina together and then sat sullenly reading Wordsworth for the next hour. Perhaps she could have enjoyed this if Vlad had let her be in charge, let her push Jonathan down and ruin his polite composure, but that wasn’t what he wanted. Probably, Jonathan hadn’t been with a woman for years; Ileana hadn’t been with a man other than Vlad for centuries.
Yet again we see Jonathan's tendency towards dissociation.
She felt his mouth against her body. She grabbed the sheets in her fists and stared up the ceiling, thinking that perhaps she should have asked her lord to restrain her after all.
-
They’d finished the first set of clothes for Mina and she stood wearing them for all of them to see - a long skirt of gray wool, a high-necked blouse with long sleeves that gathered at the wrists. Ileana thought that she had never seen Mina with so much of her body covered up and hidden, even her hair pulled up and forward over her face rather than falling visibly down her back. She looked foreign like this, almost as though she did not belong.
I enjoy writing the brides doing this kind of light eroticization of Victorian clothing. In particular I was interested in and pleased with the image here of Mina's hair being put up as something being concealed, and the unfamiliarity to Ileana of Mina dressed in a way that that is much closer to her canon persona.
Their lord was looking at her with amusement. “You look perfect,” he said, with a nod of appreciation to Ecaterina. “Like this, you could walk under London’s streetlights and none would know what you have become.”
Mina was twining her hands together, her face still. She looked, Ileana thought suddenly, almost like Jonathan.
“One more thing,” their lord said and extended his hand. He held in his palm a golden ring, with a modest stone.
“Oh.” Mina was looking at him with such fragility in her open face. “I didn’t realize that you’d kept it for me.”
I wanted to do more with the wedding ring in the final two episodes, but I couldn't make it work. Nonetheless, I am pleased with how I used it here, the layers it evokes - concretizing Dracula's fetishizing of Mina and Jonathan's relationship; forcing Mina to remember her human life in a way that she finds intolerable; at once, tempting her with the possibly that parts of the human life could be hers again; a symbol that marks her out as different from the other wives; Dracula playing with the facsimile of human marriage; I could go on.
“Of course,” he said, and she took the ring from it and placed it on the fourth finger of her left hand. He stepped towards her, kissed her forehead. “You’ll be ready,” he said, more an instruction than a question. Mina nodded.
I am pretty happy with this one! It doesn't have as much flashy prose as some of the other stories in the series, or as many showy setpiece scenes, but largely because there wasn't room for them. I had a lot of fun writing from Ileana's perspective, and it was immensely satisfying to get these parts of the plot moving as I do here.
The brides really get to be at the center in this story, and I was proud to get to a place in developing them as characters through the series that I could trust that readers would go with me there and be (nearly?) as invested in the three of them as they were in Jonathan and Mina. Getting other people to love the brides as I've written them has been one of the greatest joys in writing this series.
He brought her out to hunt with him, just the two of them. They turned to wolves together and ran through the forest purely for the pleasure of it, though all the hunters they might have caught there were gone by the late hour. It had been a long time since Ileana had been outside the castle walls at all, let alone with only him, and she took pleasure in all of it - the strain of her body at the effort of the transformation, the energy and speed as they ran, the feeling of him beside her. When they returned to their human forms she let herself fall back into the dirt and moss, laughter warm in her chest.
In "Tower" we see Dracula setting an intention to spend time alone with Ileana following her outburst and subsequent punishment, and that's where this story had to start. I wanted to show a moment of connection between the two of them that felt joyful and gratifying, and that could also feel special to their relationship, like something just for Ileana. It occurred to me that I had done absolutely nothing with the animal transformations this whole series, and since I always associate Ileana with the forest it felt like a good fit.
I liked how setting this scene outside of the castle in a natural space immediately differentiates Ileana's PoV from that of the other characters, but I also was careful to use her name in this opening paragraph so that it was clear that this wasn't Mina.
His hand at her shoulder. “You need to fight me,” he said softly, “you may do so now.”
Dracula instructing Ileana to fight should remind us of him giving Mina permission to do so at the end of "Windows," which was also articulated as him perceiving a need and generously allowing her to fulfill it. The relational tenor here is different, though - in "Windows" the framing is that Mina is not yet emotionally ready to give in to Dracula and relinquish her resistance, and here Dracula is treating fighting him as an act that meets a certain psychological need of Ileana's, that she might periodically have to fulfill. In both cases, however, he has positioned himself as the one who can see and understand their needs better than they themselves can.
Relief and terror flashed through her like lightning and she did not wait for further instruction. They grappled together in the dirt, Ileana fighting as hard as if she was still a mortal girl resisting death. But she had strength she had not then had, and nails, and teeth. She grabbed his arm and bit into the scarred flesh of his wrist, letting his blood (his blood which was also her own, theirs, shared in a closed loop, unending) run over her chin, then managing to push him down, his body briefly underneath her own until he wrenched his bleeding wrist away and caught his leg behind hers, twisted her onto her back, nails raking from her sternum down her chest and then working between her legs, his fingers practiced and insistent, and she grabbed at him, torn between pushing him away and pulling him close. His hand inside of her until she thought, as she always did, that she could not bear it, that she would die, now, again, always. The smell of earth was all around her, thick with rot and decay and life.
This is probably as close to a "consensual" sex scene as we get in the series (though what the hell does consent mean between these characters? it's sort of a nonsense determination to try to make). The violence is reciprocal and cathartic and immediate; it's not the more calculated torturous kind of act we see Dracula doing elsewhere. But even in this we don't see the characters forgetting the way their relationship began, as something forced and beyond Ileana's choice or control. The feeling of sexual pleasure for her is still the feeling that she will die. If I did this right, though, this passage should be pretty hot.
The images also echo and invert "Windows" again - for Mina then lying in the dirt of the coffin is horror and confinement, and the smell of earth is the smell of death. For Ileana here it means life, and a very embodied connection with the cycle of growth and decay.
Suddenly, Ileana found that she was sobbing. He held her still against the ground, her body shaking as the emotion, which she did not think she could name, ran through her.
I wanted "he held her still against the ground" to have the ambiguity of being held as comfort and as confinement.
“What you feel is truth,” he told her, his voice steady, “I will not punish you for it.”
As though she could not before have spoken without that permission, the words then came from her, hoarse and choked through the sobs. “I hate you for leaving,” she said, “you make me need you so much, you make us need you and then you go away and you don’t know what it’s like, you don’t know how everyone acts without you here, how Ecaterina almost rips her goddamned skin off -“ She stopped, voice running out, unsure if she was betraying a confidence.
Ah this passage! Such a crux in the story, and in this whole arc of the series. The desperation of being forced into dependence on someone and then having to bear their absence, having no choice in it, Ileana getting to say that to Dracula directly, the fact that their relationship can hold her hatred but her expression of it does not change his actions.
"Ecaterina almost rips her goddamned skin off" was a line that I knew I would include here back when I was writing "Distance". It was refreshing to write Ileana, who in many ways gets to be a lot more direct than the other characters and say things they wouldn't let themselves quite think.
His fingers tightened at the edge of her shoulders where he held her down. “Keep going,” he said, “you have more to say, Ileana. Let it out.”
Notice that, while Dracula is encouraging Ileana to speak honestly to him, it's the process of her saying this that is attending to more than the actual content of what she's telling him.
“Mina.” She had to force the name out between her teeth. “You told me to take care of her.”
“Yes. And I am proud of your efforts to do so. You’ve done very well.”
Ileana thought of the first time they spent in bed together. How Mina had knelt, frozen, waited for their lord to undress her and then kept her eyes down as if trying not to look at Ileana’s body. How she fumbled, even under Vlad’s direction, and apologized to Ileana when she did, as though her awkwardness might be an insult to her. That must have been the first time Mina did anything sexual with a woman, though Ileana hadn’t realized that then, had pictured Mina and the lost, idealized Lucy giggling together in nightgowns of white lace.
The details we get here should place this memory during the time frame of "Collusion", since we know that Ileana learns that Mina and Lucy's relationship wasn't sexual at the beginning of "Adjust." I conjure this scene up very briefly here, but it was painful to write - this kind of sexual education scene is very distressing, as the complexity of Ileana's subject position.
He hadn’t trusted her with that kind of responsibility ever before, telling her that she was too volatile, did not have enough control yet to be close to either Adriana or Jonathan in the early stages of their training. She remembered resenting Adriana at first, if she was truly honest, how much of their lord’s time and attention she took up, how delicately he seemed to treat her. More than once in that time she had lashed out at him, feeling ashamed of her own childishness even as she did but finding herself unable to stop, hungry for his focus to be upon her, even in his rage. Those had been challenging years.
A couple notes on this paragraph. First, there's a version of this dynamic briefly with Ileana and Mina in Minor Initiations which is, as always, like the earlier, clumsier version of what Compromise is exploring. This kind of resentment dynamic between co-victims makes me extremely uncomfortable but I'm also very preoccupied with it; in a way it's also related to what we see emerging between Jonathan and Mina throughout this series, though Jonathan and Mina's relationship is of course way, way more complicated.
We know from "Collusion" that while Dracula was keeping Ileana away from Jonathan he was having Ecaterina spend a lot of time with him, but this did not at all lead to the kind of bonding and connection that developed between Ileana and Mina, which is yet another major strategic error on Dracula's part.
Finally, when Ileana talks about Dracula treating Adriana "delicately" we should remember that everyone's standards with that kind of thing are way far out in another dimension from any normal person's.
It had been a surprise, then, when her lord had taken her aside and told her what he wanted her to do with Mina. She’d been nervous that she would get it wrong somehow, especially during the long stretch when Mina kept rebelling. Vlad laughed when Ileana voiced her fears to him, and reminded her how long Ileana herself had fought, how she once spat in Ecaterina’s face when she tried to give her a bath after their lord first raped her. And, ultimately, he had been right.
One of my favorite (and I think most characteristic) techniques, which is to very casually insert a devastating detail like this memory of Ileana's, which is brought up here only in the context of Dracula's fond amusement.
“I have, I have done well. And so has she. And I didn’t know what that felt like before, I didn’t know how much I would care, and now you want to take her away, for years, maybe. And I can’t, my lord, I can’t -“ She grabbed for him, and, finally, he put his arms around her.
“You must trust me,” he said, “hate me as much as you need to; if you need to fight, if you you need a pathway for your anger, then tell me, and I will give you what you need. But you don’t question my authority.”
He couldn’t give her what she needed if he was thousands of miles away in England, Ileana knew. And while he would certainly give her and her sisters permission to give each other whatever pain and pleasure they needed to endure his absence, it would hardly be enough, for her or for any of them. But he knew that. He knew all of it.
“Please take me here,” she asked him, “make me feel overpowered.”
He nodded. “Keep fighting if you need to,” he instructed, and she did.
Like this is almost negotiated? It's not of course, but almost?
When it was done, both of their bodies were dappled with bruises. He ran his fingers through her hair, tangled with leaves. “Brush it when we get home,” he told her. “Now. Let’s find something to bring back to the others.”
The hair stuff here should remind us of lightly Mina in "Distance".
-
“She’ll need more clothes,” Ecaterina said, the slight lilt in her voice betraying her satisfaction at having been proven right about something.
One of the pleasures of writing this story was getting to write about Ecaterina from the perspective of Ileana, who knows her very, very well, loves her, and also spends a fair amount of time making fun of her.
“I’d thought to buy them when we arrived in London,” Vlad said, “that worked well with Jonathan in Budapest.”
Ecaterina shook her head. “Men’s styles change more slowly than women’s.” She gestured to the dresses laid out on the table in front of her, the scant few that Mina had brought with her to the castle. Light blue, brown, violet. “She’ll be conspicuous in these, if the current patterns you brought me are accurate. Never mind the blood stains.”
Spending this amount of time with the dresses was a very pointed way of turning readers' minds back to the first few episodes of the series, since we're going to go very full circle in the next story, which works better if people have the specific events of "Compromise" already on their minds. During "Compromise" and "Windows" we didn't see quite how messed up these dresses got because Mina had other things to worry about, but I wanted to remind people of that here to bring home the brutality of that journey.
Mina stood unenviably at the center of the argument, looking absurd to Ileana’s eyes in the corset and petticoats she had long since abandoned for regular wear. They were discussing her travel wardrobe, and Ileana was bored out of her mind. Mina looked too nervous, though, for Ileana to want to abandon her.
In my original outline this story, or a version of it, was from Mina's PoV, but it became clear pretty quickly that would raise the emotional pitch too high, and not give us the right kind of alternating distance from and investment in the events.
Thinking about PoV in general I try to ask myself - what will telling this story from this particular character's perspective reveal, and what will it conceal? For this series I was specifically asking myself - whose PoV will show us something new? If this story had been from Mina's perspective, we might have been impacted by her feelings, but none of those would really be things that we didn't get already in "Distance," were going to get in "Intransigence," or could infer from Dracula's PoV in "Tower." Ileana notices different things than Mina does, has different concerns, and was the one we needed to see react to the events of this story.
“Who cares if she’s conspicuous,” Ileana said, mostly to needle Ecaterina, “it’s not like Jonathan won’t be, with the white hair. No one’s going to care about dresses that are ten years out of date.”
Also writing Ileana is fun.
“More like fifteen,” Mina said, “it’s not like I was keeping up with the fashions much after -“ She stopped, like a phonograph with its needle lifted.
I was a little vague about the amount of time elapsed in the episodes before this (though I left some clues that can place us pretty exactly if you catch them), but I thought here that it was time to let the game be up and lose the ambiguity.
The "after," in case it wasn't obvious, is Dracula's turning of Jonathan.
Vlad touched her back, perhaps reassuringly, though his eyes were on the dresses. “It may be true that the stains will be a problem,” he acknowledged, “I want her respected as my social equal through the course of the journey.” He looked at Ecaterina. “Can you and Adria make her things that will do?”
Gods Dracula is sort of a mess here.
Ecaterina spread open the fashion periodical Vlad had brought her. “Probably. I’m not familiar with these styles, but the skirts would be simple enough. These drawings don’t make the cut of the blouses particularly clear, but we should be able to create something passable with the fabric you brought.”
“Let me see her in one of the dresses,” Vlad said, “I want to use them if we can.”
Adriana picked up the blue dress and brought it to Mina, helping her into it. Ileana watched her fingers worrying the pleated skirt as Adria did up the buttons. Ecaterina stepped back and looked at her, appraising, then reached for the collar. “See,” she pointed the bloodstains out to Vlad, “not everyone will notice, but enough might to cause concern. And the seams have pulled, though we could fix that.”
Mina had turned her head aside as Ecaterina reached for her, almost as though she was baring her neck. “I died in this dress,” she said softly.
“You did,” their lord’s tone was stern. “but you will wear whatever I tell you to wear.”
I was worried that this exchange would be too much, but people seemed to find it effective, which I am glad of.
Mina nodded.
“That’s enough; take it off now.”
Mina did, and handed the dress back to Adriana, who laid it out beside the others. Ileana had nothing like Ecaterina’s eye for clothing, but as Mina removed the blue dress she realized that she did remember Mina wearing it when Ileana first met her, lying in bed near death. Ileana thought of Mina’s body then, warm and frail, remembered sinking her teeth into the strong vein in her thigh, Mina’s cries as plangent as any mortal’s though Ileana had known then that the woman was soon to be her sister.
Vlad turned back to Ecaterina. “Make a few pieces for her, as much as you reasonably can manage in the time we have. We’ll only need to get through the journey.”
Ecaterina tilted her head at him. “As you wish, my lord.” Ileana only barely kept from rolling her eyes. She tried to catch Mina’s glance, but her eyes remained downcast.
-
The next night, their lord was with Adriana and Jonathan. Ileana found Mina, as usual, in the library. She was writing, and only briefly looked up to smile when Ileana entered. Ileana came to her and perched at the side of her chair, looking over at her work. She was writing in a script that Ileana couldn’t understand.
The parallel this time is to the scenes of Mina walking in on Dracula writing (sometimes also in a script she couldn't understand).
Also we don't know it yet, but this is likely happening simultaneously to the Dracula-Adriana-Jonathan hypnotism scene in "Concession."
“Come to the courtyard with me,” Ileana told her.
Mina stopped writing, but didn’t put her pen down, only held it suspended between her fingers so that the ink didn’t drip. “Is that an order? Because I do need to finish this.”
Light reminder here of the hierarchy between the women, that Ecaterina articulated to Mina in "Acculturation." Ileana outranks Mina, and in Dracula and Ecaterina's absence, she would have the authority to give Mina orders, though it's not clear how often she makes use of it.
“Is that your diary again? I don’t understand what you have to write in it every night.” She reached for Mina’s hair and played with it, half-hoping to distract her.
“Well, you know. I write about what happens to us, how I feel about it. What I’m reading, what I observe. Over time I think it will be exciting to have created such a comprehensive record.”
I'm not sure this line is quite right for Mina's voice, though the idea of it certainly is. I thought of going more explicitly Victorian with her dialogue in this scene, but I thought it would be too obtrusive by contrast with the style of the rest of the series.
Ileana laughed. “Exciting is not the word I would use to describe that, Mina.”
“For me it is. And he likes that I do it.” There was something in Mina’s tone that felt childlike to Ileana, as if she was trying to justify something about which she was embarrassed.
“So he can read what you write about him. Just like when he looks inside our minds to see how we remember something he did.”
At that, Mina did put down the pen. “He does that to you too.”
“He does that to all of us. If we didn’t love him so much, the arrogance would be quite difficult to tolerate.”
It's a consistent character note for Ileana that she is both comfortable talking bout loving Dracula and also willing to (lightly at least) make fun of him, which isn't a combination that we see so much in the other characters.
“But you never thought of keeping a diary. And he never suggested it.”
Ileana shrugged, feeling annoyed at the turn the conversation had taken. “I couldn’t read or write before he took me. I’m glad he taught me, I’m glad to know now, but I would never think of writing everything that happened down in a book; it would get tedious, over the centuries. Not to mention repetitive. I’ll remember anything important myself.”
Emphasizing here not only the difference in era between Mina and Ileana, but also a difference in class between her and the rest of the wives (there's also an Ecaterina & Adriana vs Ileana & Mina [& Jonathan] split, since E & A are both nobility, but it can fall out a few different ways). I wanted to also emphasize a little the ways that Dracula connects with each of them over different things, and the record-keeping is specific to his relationship with Mina, just as perhaps transforming into wolves in the woods is more specific to Ileana.
Do we want to think about what Dracula teaching Ileana to read looked like? Maybe we do. Or maybe not.
“Everything here does repeat, I suppose.” Mina was looking at her seriously, her brow furrowed over her brown eyes. “Ileana. Was there anyone else here, before Jonathan and I? Has he had…consorts other than the five of us?”
I think this transition is a little clumsy, but it's okay. Mina using the word consorts here cracks me up a little bit, though it's also the word I use in a bunch of these commentaries because brides and wives are not gender neutral; it occurred to me that the group of them probably don't often need a word to refer to what they are in relation to Dracula. Fledglings, commonly accepted vampire literature terminology of the post-Anne Rice age, is not something that it would occur to any of them to come up with, despite Dracula's falcon imagery.
Ileana felt caught off guard. “Why are you asking this now?”
“I’ve been thinking about something that was said in front of me, once. A long time ago.” A beat. “I’m worried about London.”
Everyone is worried about Mina in London, but are they worried about the same things? Probably not.
Mina is of course thinking about the argument between Dracula and Jonathan during "Adjust" during which Jonathan accused Dracula of murdering the previous men he turned and Dracula neither confirmed nor denied it. Mina chose to drop that line of inquiry at the time, but that doesn't mean that she forgot any of it.
Ileana didn’t say that everyone else was worried about her in London too; Mina could tell that, to the extent she needed to. And she certainly didn’t need to see the depth of Ileana’s own fear. “There were people he thought of turning, brought here to test out, but he decided they weren’t suitable and killed them first. I’ve seen that happen.” She paused, considering whether to go on. “And Ecaterina mentions things, sometimes, when she’s truly upset. You’ve never seen her like that - I mean after a major punishment, when she’s all disoriented. A man, who he did turn. He died.”
“You mean that he killed him.”
Pointing out here that Mina is making an assumption, and neither she nor Ileana actually have direct knowledge about what happened to this man.
Ileana stood, uneasy suddenly where she had positioned herself on the armrest of Mina’s chair. “I don’t know. But whatever happens in London, he’s not going to kill you. He wouldn’t kill any of us.”
“He might kill Jonathan.”
“So what if he does?” Ileana felt frustrated with Mina, felt the urge to scratch and bite at her as she had with Vlad in the woods, “Jonathan hasn’t done a thing to help you for the past decade. We’re the ones who help you through the training, who clean the blood off when he’s been with you, who’ve taught you to be what you are.” She saw Mina flinch and knew that she was hurting her. She tried to slow down her voice. “I don’t question why our lord wants him; that isn’t my place. But I remember how you were at the beginning and I do know that separating you from Jonathan was one of the most important things he did to help you adjust to this. You should worry about yourself in London, not him.”
Ahh. I am sort of obsessed with Ileana's anger at Jonathan here, and the ferocity of her pride in the ways that she supports Mina, which I find both fascinating and startlingly moving.
“He’ll want to see us together,” Mina said, her voice shaky, “there will be no way out of that, and none of you will be there -“
Ileana reached for her, took her hands in her own. “We’ll be with you, Mina. Even when we’re thousands of miles away, it won’t matter. We’re always together. And you’ll come back.” She tried not to think about how much the last felt like a wish to her, or a prayer.
Ileana's promise here rhymes with her concerns about Dracula not being able to give her what she needs from England, and also with Dracula's conversation with Ecaterina in "Tower."
Mina nodded. “I will,” she said, “I will come back.”
I am so curious where readers that the arc of the series was going at this particular moment. Did they think this was dramatic irony because Mina wasn't going to come back? I certainly lay enough groundwork for that.
Ileana pulled Mina to her feet. “Come outside to the courtyard, then, please. You spend far too much time indoors, and in London you probably won’t be able to see the stars the way you can here.”
“That’s right,” Mina said, relenting, smiling as Ileana pulled her to the door, “you can’t.”
-
Mina was in the corset and petticoats again, but this time Ecaterina and Adriana were fitting the clothes they were making onto her while she stood in the center of the room, still as a doll. Their lord and Jonathan were out hunting. Ileana was watching again, still bored.
“The drape of the skirt looks right,” Adria said, stepping back to regard Mina, “but I don’t think it’s even at her waist.”
Ecaterina nodded from where she crouched down at Mina’s side, and readjusted something at the waistband of the skirt.
A pin went into a spot at the curve of Mina’s hip which all of them had seen injured not long ago. Mina flinched out of Ecaterina’s grip, letting the circle of gray fabric fall into a pile at her feet. “I’m sorry,” Mina muttered quickly, leaning down to grab the fabric, but Ecaterina twisted her wrist back and pushed her to her knees. Ileana found herself on her feet, startled by the sudden turn.
This story as a whole was definitely one of the easiest to write in the series, but within it, this scene was most definitely the most difficult. Part of it was keeping both the physical and the emotional choreography clear for each of the four of them all the way through. Part of it was the delicacy of the tone. And part of it was getting the surprise of this moment and the totally weird way Ecaterina chooses to engineer it.
“You should have better self control than that,” Ecaterina told her, voice harsh, pushing Mina’s head down until she was prostrate, “you can take a moment of discomfort without disrespecting me and ruining our work.”
Ecaterina is imitating Dracula, basically.
Mina was breathing rapidly. Ileana looked at Adriana, who appeared just as confused as she felt. Then, as quickly as she had pushed Mina down, Ecaterina let her go. She settled on her own knees beside Mina, smoothing the fabric of her skirt out around her. She looked at Adriana, and then Ileana, and finally at Mina.
The confusion here should be that Ecaterina very abruptly switches into this anger/punishment mode and then very abruptly switches out of it, which makes it clear that it is a very strange and strategic act.
“I am going to say something now,” she said, “and whenever after this you recall that thing, or any conversation we may have subsequently, I want you to instead remember the moment of what I just did to Mina, to let that memory be the metonym for what follows.” She rested a hand on Mina’s spine, which was still curved.“I’m afraid I am going to have to ask him to punish you for that flinch, for the sake of continuity. I’m sorry, my dear.”
I am not sure that it is believable for Ecaterina to use the word "metonym," but I checked when I was writing this and its usage dates back to the 17th century in English, so theoretically it's possible. And it was just too perfect a description of what she's doing for me to be willing to give it, especially as it was sort of important that readers understand the idea behind her weird technique to get around telepathy.
Previously in the series we saw Mina very messily trying to conceal her escape plans by not thinking about them in "Jackal," and Jonathan doing a more sophisticated version (though we don't know we saw this yet) in "Appraisal" and "Tower." Ecaterina's technique here, of creating an alarming memory that will both serve as cover in the moment for all of their emotional distress and also to basically encrypt the memory of the conversation, is significantly more worked out and developed. There are probably some other stories to be told of how she came up with it.
The "I am going to have to ask him to punish you for that flinch" makes me shiver a little every time.
No one spoke.
Ecaterina’s voice was calm and even. “We cannot let him stay in London.”
Adriana looked at her, confused. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s too risky,” Ecaterina continued, her voice still eerily even, hand still upon Mina's back, “he almost died last time. He might not be so lucky during this trip. We have to force him to come home, before it gets to that point.”
It's "we cannot let him stay" and not "we cannot let him go" partly for plot convenience reasons, partly because Ecaterina's actual objection is not the journey itself but the unboundaried nature of it, and partly because stopping him from leaving would entail actually trying to keep Dracula captive in his own castle which a) probably feels totally unfeasible to Ecaterina and b) is an emotionally distressing idea for a whole host of reasons and not what she actually wants. She does not actually want to Marya Morevna him (though a Marya Morevna Dracula story is indeed something I'd like to write); she doesn't want to reverse the roles of their power relation. What she's trying for is something rather more subtle and stranger.
A flare of panic rose in Ileana’s chest; she tried to bring herself back to the calm of Ecaterina’s tone. He could feel when they were in distress, but if none of their feelings went beyond an expected reaction to Ecaterina unexpectedly punishing Mina, then perhaps it would not catch his attention. Ileana watched the curve of Mina’s corseted spine as she spoke. “It’s not possible to overpower him, you know that.”
“Not possible for any one of us,” Ecaterina said, “but for the four of us together it might be.”
When I was writing this I was like, fuck, it's too simplistic and obvious and also people are going to think it's like Dowry of Blood (even though I had this plotted out well before Dowry of Blood came out!). People did indeed think it was like Dowry of Blood. But that's okay.
“He’d kill us,” Ileana found herself saying, even though she had told Mina just the opposite so recently.
Ecaterina almost smiled. “No, my beloved sister. He won’t.”
We should ask: why is Ecaterina so confident about this, when we've just learned that she also rambles about their dead vampire brother when she's delirious?
“What you’re describing is betrayal,” Adriana said, her voice a sharp whisper, “we owe him our loyalty, our unquestioning obedience no matter what he commands. We have sworn it. Each of us. I cannot believe you would suggest this.”
Adriana is the most mild-mannered vampire imaginable, but you want to see her get angry? Suggest that she should break an oath. (Because, as we'll discuss in another commentary, if Dracula has a true soulmate it's probably actually her.)
“I am not suggesting harming him,” Ecaterina said, and Ileana could hear an edge of heat in her voice, “I never would, never. You know that. But we have an obligation to protect him, and if he is making decisions that could lead to -“
Adriana knelt down in front of Ecaterina, looking at her intently, “It was not our oath to protect him; that was his. Our roles here are not parallel. Katya, you have to let him make the decisions, and not anticipate what is to follow.”
I don't know quite what to say about this exchange except that I have a lot of feelings for both of them and rereading it makes everything in spark in my head like it did when I was writing it. But I think these two are just saying quite directly everything that I would say about this conflict. I find both Ecaterina and Adriana's positions here extremely sympathetic.
Ecaterina pulled away, drawing her hand from Mina’s back as she did. “I will not allow him to destroy himself.”
Where have we heard this one before? In "Adjust," Dracula to Mina:
“And yet you still have Ileana watching me every waking minute, yet you will not let me so much as keep a journal -”
He put a hand over her lips. “Caring for you is not the same as trusting you. And I will not allow you to destroy yourself.”
She did not push his hand away from her mouth; instead she took a greater chance, and sent the question to his mind, Has that happened before?
I hoped that people would get this one, or at least feel the weight of the echo, because the parallel is quite important.
Mina shifted out of where she knelt, sitting with her legs curled together at her side; she was shaking. Ileana went to her, for her sake and because it felt right to be close to the rest of them on the floor. One arm around Mina’s shoulders, she said, “None of us want that. But that doesn’t mean we have the power to change it.”
Ileana hasn't participated in the argument until this point, and I struggled a little to bring her in (four person scenes where each of them has their own distinct perspective and priorities are challenging!). But what I realized was that Ileana's concerns here would be more practical than ideological.
“We all know what he does for us,” Ecaterina said, “how he protects us, how he gives us what we need. He has never had anyone to do that for him.” She looked at Adriana. “It isn’t betrayal, what I propose, even if he would see it that way at first. But you know, you all know how it works, how sometimes he does things to us that we don’t believe we want, that we resist with everything in us because we are scared of how much we need them. We owe him the same.”
This is a crazy argument. Crazy! It's also an argument that takes Dracula's ideology, his system, seriously on its own merits, as something that should apply to him as equally as it does to them.
It was very, very important to me that this scene not read as "we're all going to band together to fight back against our abuser!" scene. It is manifestly not that. It is "we love this person and he is making choices that harm himself and us, and within the framework in which we're all living the only way to address that is though force."
Ileana’s mind was spinning. She asked, finally, “How do you know that this is what he needs?”
“He hasn’t been thinking clearly,” Ecaterina said flatly, “not about Jonathan and Mina, and not about London. He’s too enthralled, by modernity or whatever it is that’s pulling him. He’s made too many mistakes.”
Such a delight to get to write this, after spending years subtly weaving in Dracula's mistakes and having no one be willing to call him out on them.
“I know you don’t like being without him,” Adriana said gently, “none of us do, but it’s a trial we must endure on his behalf, and when he returns it proves our devotion more fully -“
“You’re not listening, Adria,” Ecaterina responded. Ileana listened to the tightness in her Romanian, her accent starting to show through. “I have been here centuries longer than any of you, I know him better than anyone in this world or the next and I am telling you that this time is different. I could list out all the reasons, but I know you’ve been seeing them too.”
Adriana shook her head. “It’s still betrayal.”
Ecaterina put a hand on Adriana’s throat, traced her fingers across the scars he had left there before she was turned. “I want to give him what he gives us. Only enough containment, only enough force to quell whatever this madness inside him is. I know that won’t be easy for you, or for any of us, but it would be selfish to refrain purely because it causes us discomfort.”
Ah, Ileana thought, in the part of her not too overwhelmed to watch Ecaterina’s tactics critically, accusing Adriana of selfishness certainly was an effective way to persuade her. She watched her sisters looking at one another, and thought she could see Adriana shift the angle at which she held her neck, as though the muscles were softening. Mina, still close by Ileana, remained silent.
The most difficult part of this most difficult to write scene was coming up with a plausible way for Ecaterina to convince Adriana, and this still doesn't feel like enough to me; imagining it from Adriana's perspective I am not totally convinced. But, as I have Ileana point out here, framing the betrayal as itself a sacrifice on Dracula's belief is extremely canny and plays to all of Adriana's ascetic, sacrificial maiden impulses. It's not enough, but it plants a seed for her.
Slowly, Ecaterina drew her hand back from Adriana’s throat. “I can’t do this without all of you,” she said, “I won’t try. If you truly believe that I’m wrong, you can tell him of all this. I will take my punishment, and I won’t blame any of you.”
Ileana thought of Ecaterina chained to the stone table at the foot of tower, cut open and pulled apart in ways a mortal could not survive. She would heal; perhaps it was even what she needed, to exorcise whatever it was that brought her to a plan like this.
Without Mina's intervention here, this is how this scene would have ended; Ecaterina didn't get Adriana and Ileana all the way there on her plan yet.
“We’ll need to find his records,” Mina’s voice was soft but clear.
All of them turned to look at her, for the first time in the conversation, their surprise clear.
“We need to know where he’s going in London, what he’s planning to do there, if we hope to interrupt those plans. He won’t tell me in advance. But I know he keeps records. I don’t know what language he keeps them in, but between the four of us I’m sure we can manage the translation.”
The records thing is so self-indulgent, both for me as a writer and also very, very much for Mina. Mina also feels unconsciously (she would never admit to it) the current of Bluebeard-like invitation in her conversation with Dracula about his records in "Tower." They feel emotionally like keystone of this plan to her, and so she makes a case for them to be so pragmatically as well.
Ecaterina looked at her as if pleasantly surprised. “We can’t meet regularly to plot behind his back; that’s not how this is going to work.”
“I understand that. And none of us should know all the pieces. I less even than the rest of you, since I’m younger and have less control. Not to mention that he’s going to be looking closely in my mind before and during this journey.”
Ileana pulled away from Mina. “Where are you coming up with all this?”
Mina smiled bitterly. “I’ve done this before. Or something rather like to it.”
She most definitely knows what this is like! It felt good to circle back to the novel here, and to also give everyone a hint of these qualities and skills of Mina's that haven't been so visible in the recent episodes of the series.
Ecaterina turned to each of them. “Ileana. Adriana. Will you do this with me?”
Ileana thought of Vlad in the woods with her, letting her fight him. How unendurable it felt to think about having a secret from him. But then she thought of what had almost happened last time, his body staked to dust in the snow. Mina’s too; even Jonathan’s, for all that Ileana disliked him. How much more vulnerable they all were, in having new brethren to care for. “I will,” she said finally.
Ileana's reasons for agreeing are, again, not at all ideological; they are about protecting the people she cares for.
Ecaterina was looking at Adriana, and for a moment that felt unending all of them were still. Then, Adriana nodded.
Ecaterina had been too long what they were to exhale in relief, but Ileana saw her open her shoulders, shift the muscles in her back. “Thank you. I’ll tell you now, what I need you to know. Adria, can you help all of us, when we’re done, to keep this at the bottom of our minds? You’ve always been the best at hypnosis. Then I can do the same to you.”
-
He had her come to the bedroom with him and Jonathan. Ileana had fed from Jonathan before, but never otherwise been intimate with him, probably because her lord knew how his presence rankled at her, and wanted Jonathan to be more stable in his own place there before subjecting him to Ileana’s hostility. And then, of course, he had kept Jonathan so separate from all of them for all of the past several years.
Ileana knew why she was there this time, and it wasn’t because her lord wanted to help her get over her antipathy. What she was there for, Ileana thought as she undressed and watched Jonathan do the same, was to help Jonathan prepare for what he would have to do with Mina. There were many physical differences between them but Ileana knew that with her build and height and heavy brown hair, she resembled Mina more closely than any of the others.
I called this the second "threesome from hell" (following the one in "Jackal") and I stand by that. One of the grim satisfactions of this story is creating this tremendously wide range of disturbing sex scenes with all sorts of emotional variants of horror and coercion.
“Kiss her, Jonathan,” Vlad said. He hadn’t undressed, just sat at the foot of the bed to watch them. Ileana opened her mouth obediently when she felt Jonathan’s lips against hers, and then snapped her teeth down upon his bottom lip, hard enough to draw blood. Jonathan tensed but didn’t try to pull away.
“Ileana,” her lord said warningly, “do you need to be restrained for this?”
Ileana opened her teeth and released Jonathan’s lip, though she flicked her tongue out for a drop of blood. “I do not, my lord,” she said, as sweetly as she could manage. It crossed her mind that if she made him angry enough perhaps he would torture her himself instead of making her do this. But he always knew when she was trying to provoke him. She felt him in her mind, cold and reassuring. My dear, he said, I know how little you want this tonight. Take it as another opportunity to more fully submit to my will.
Not much to say except that this remains painful to read, so I think I did pretty well with this one.
“I want to see you pleasure her,” he told Jonathan out loud. For a moment, she saw the muscles around Jonathan’s mouth tighten, and then his face returned to blankness as he laid Ileana down on her back. She remembered, suddenly, the time he had walked in on her and Mina together and then sat sullenly reading Wordsworth for the next hour. Perhaps she could have enjoyed this if Vlad had let her be in charge, let her push Jonathan down and ruin his polite composure, but that wasn’t what he wanted. Probably, Jonathan hadn’t been with a woman for years; Ileana hadn’t been with a man other than Vlad for centuries.
Yet again we see Jonathan's tendency towards dissociation.
She felt his mouth against her body. She grabbed the sheets in her fists and stared up the ceiling, thinking that perhaps she should have asked her lord to restrain her after all.
-
They’d finished the first set of clothes for Mina and she stood wearing them for all of them to see - a long skirt of gray wool, a high-necked blouse with long sleeves that gathered at the wrists. Ileana thought that she had never seen Mina with so much of her body covered up and hidden, even her hair pulled up and forward over her face rather than falling visibly down her back. She looked foreign like this, almost as though she did not belong.
I enjoy writing the brides doing this kind of light eroticization of Victorian clothing. In particular I was interested in and pleased with the image here of Mina's hair being put up as something being concealed, and the unfamiliarity to Ileana of Mina dressed in a way that that is much closer to her canon persona.
Their lord was looking at her with amusement. “You look perfect,” he said, with a nod of appreciation to Ecaterina. “Like this, you could walk under London’s streetlights and none would know what you have become.”
Mina was twining her hands together, her face still. She looked, Ileana thought suddenly, almost like Jonathan.
“One more thing,” their lord said and extended his hand. He held in his palm a golden ring, with a modest stone.
“Oh.” Mina was looking at him with such fragility in her open face. “I didn’t realize that you’d kept it for me.”
I wanted to do more with the wedding ring in the final two episodes, but I couldn't make it work. Nonetheless, I am pleased with how I used it here, the layers it evokes - concretizing Dracula's fetishizing of Mina and Jonathan's relationship; forcing Mina to remember her human life in a way that she finds intolerable; at once, tempting her with the possibly that parts of the human life could be hers again; a symbol that marks her out as different from the other wives; Dracula playing with the facsimile of human marriage; I could go on.
“Of course,” he said, and she took the ring from it and placed it on the fourth finger of her left hand. He stepped towards her, kissed her forehead. “You’ll be ready,” he said, more an instruction than a question. Mina nodded.
I am pretty happy with this one! It doesn't have as much flashy prose as some of the other stories in the series, or as many showy setpiece scenes, but largely because there wasn't room for them. I had a lot of fun writing from Ileana's perspective, and it was immensely satisfying to get these parts of the plot moving as I do here.
The brides really get to be at the center in this story, and I was proud to get to a place in developing them as characters through the series that I could trust that readers would go with me there and be (nearly?) as invested in the three of them as they were in Jonathan and Mina. Getting other people to love the brides as I've written them has been one of the greatest joys in writing this series.
