“How is your dear mother getting on?  I wish I could run up to town for a day or two to see you, dear, but I dare not go yet, with so much on my shoulders, and Jonathan wants looking after still.  He is beginning to put some flesh on his bones again, but he was terribly weakened by the long illness.  Even now he sometimes starts out of his sleep in a sudden way and awakes all trembling until I can coax him back to his usual placidity.  However, thank God, these occasions grow less frequent as the days go on, and they will in time pass away altogether, I trust.  And now I have told you my news, let me ask yours.  When are you to be married, and where, and who is to perform the ceremony, and what are you to wear, and is it to be a public or private wedding?  Tell me all about it, dear, tell me all about everything, for there is nothing which interests you which will not be dear to me.  Jonathan asks me to send his ’respectful duty’, but I do not think that is good enough from the junior partner of the important firm Hawkins & Harker.  And so, as you love me, and he loves me, and I love you with all the moods and tenses of the verb, I send you simply his ‘love’ instead.  Goodbye, my dearest Lucy, and blessings on you.

“Yours,

“Mina Harker”

REPORT FROM PATRICK HENNESSEY, MD, MRCSLK, QCPI, ETC, ETC, TO JOHN SEWARD, MD

20 September

My dear Sir: 

“In accordance with your wishes, I enclose report of the conditions of everything left in my charge.  With regard to patient, Renfield, there is more to say.  He has had another outbreak, which might have had a dreadful ending, but which, as it fortunately happened, was unattended with any unhappy results.  This afternoon a carrier’s cart with two men made a call at the empty house whose grounds abut on ours, the house to which, you will remember, the patient twice ran away.  The men stopped at our gate to ask the porter their way, as they were strangers.

“I was myself looking out of the study window, having a smoke after dinner, and saw one of them come up to the house.  As he passed the window of Renfield’s room, the patient began to rate him from within, and called him all the foul names he could lay his tongue to.  The man, who seemed a decent fellow enough, contented himself by telling him to ‘shut up for a foul-mouthed beggar’, whereon our man accused him of robbing him and wanting to murder him and said that he would hinder him if he were to swing for it.  I opened the window and signed to the man not to notice, so he contented himself after looking the place over and making up his mind as to what kind of place he had got to by saying, ‘Lor’ bless yer, sir, I wouldn’t mind what was said to me in a bloomin’ madhouse.  I pity ye and the guv’nor for havin’ to live in the house with a wild beast like that.’