#WHERE IS THE CZARINA CATHERINE

[vickyvicarious]

I love the paper and scribbly noises again...! Also Jack's frustration is so good.

[wheresjonno]

Well we know where is Jonno (Hotel room w/ a vamp, Varna) but we do not know HOW is Jonno because he is being funny and laconic.

I think probably he's doing Bad

[demonrubberduck]

MinaxJonathan, knife, waiting for the Czarina Catherine while Mina is gradually changing more and more

His and Hers Knives

(Summary: PG-13 for mentions of suicide and a swear

Jonathan has knives for Dracula, or for anyone else who might try to separate him from Mina, and Mina has a knife of her own.)

The gentle scrape of blade upon whetstone did not awaken Mina. It was a quiet, soothing sound, though Jonathan doubted even the passing by of a circus could rouse her from her slumber before she was ready. Regardless, he tried to keep quiet while she slept, and he doubted this sound would have even bothered her before she’d been bitten.

Not that he was the sort to sharpen knives in the wee hours, before. Much had changed in the past few months. He wasn’t the same man who had set out on a train to Buda-Pesth and beyond for an ailing Mr. Hawkins.

A few more strokes had his kukri knife razor sharp. He set it aside and drew another knife, a Bowie, from a sheath within his waistcoat. He wet the stone, then began sharpening its blade. 

He kept four knives on his person, these days. The kukri was the most obvious. It was the statement, and the other concealed blades whatever punctuation it required. Let it not be said that Jonathan Harker wasn’t communicative.

He sharpened the Bowie, then his boot knife, and finally the curved karambit. This had become his nightly ritual, almost a knightly ritual, as he watched over Mina’s unnatural slumber. Dracula had come upon her in their bedchamber. Never again. Though Dracula was far away, concealed in the bowels of the Czarina Catherine, Jonathan still kept his vigil.

It wasn’t only for Dracula that he sharpened his blades. Van Helsing and Seward’s eyes were ever on Mina, assessing her sluggish pulse and her sharpening teeth and that terrible burned mark upon his pale forehead. If they could not hunt down and destroy Dracula to free Mina’s soul, they would come for her.

And if they did, they would find Jonathan. 

There would have to be a strategy to the order in which he addressed them, he knew. If they brought Godalming and Morris along, they would have to be dealt with first, though he’d have to be wary of Seward’s right hook if his phonograph entries were to be believed. Van Helsing would be last. Though his brain was the biggest threat to Mina’s continued existence, his body was slow and frail with age, and with the others gone, he would be easy to dispatch.

“Jonathan.”

If the two doctors came alone, that would be better. They might, if they underestimated Jonathan’s devotion to Mina. Then he could silence them, and catch Morris and Godalming unawares. 

“Jonathan.”

It wouldn’t be easy to take a life, but he could steel himself for Mina’s sake. A man had to protect his wife. ‘Til death do us part,’ what weak resolve was that? He would be hers beyond death, beyond ‘un-death’.

“Jonathan!” Chill hands and an insistent voice drew him from his dark thoughts, and he finally blinked and saw that Mina had awoken and taken his hands in her own around the hilt of his kukri, which he must have picked back up at some point of his musings. Mina’s hands looked ethereally pale against his.

“My love, where were you?” she asked. Here she was, so sickly pale, yet worried about him. He shook his head.

“Lost in thought.” He put the knife down so he could take her hands properly. “I’m sorry.”

She kissed him, just a chaste press of lip to lip. They had not known each other as husband and wife since she’d been bitten. Mina felt herself unclean, and though Jonathan thought her still as pure and holy as an angel, he would not press her into couplings she did not enthusiastically welcome. These light touches would suffice him. 

“I fear I’ll be asleep again soon. Come lie by me, while we still have time.”

Jonathan sat his kukri on the bedside table and joined Mina in bed. She pulled something from beneath her pillow and pressed it into his hands.

It was another knife, in a leather sheath, its handle wrapped in a black ribbon tied securely in a knot.

“I asked Mr. Morris to get me a blade. It’s a fine one, isn’t it?” Mina motioned for Jonathan to unsheath it.

He drew it out. It was a simple boning blade, thin and straight, almost delicate, especially when compared to his kukri. Jonathan ran his finger along the flat of the blade, then against the silk ribbon-wrapped hilt.

“I see you decorated it.” 

Mina smiled at him. “Yes, it’s silly, but I wanted to make it my own. Will you show me how to sharpen it?”

Jonathan nodded. There was nothing he could deny her, except… except that which she’d asked at her ‘funeral’. 

“In the daylight hours, when you’re more awake,” he promised. He slid it back into its sheath and handed it back to her.

“Good. I need it to be sharp.”

“God be willing, you’ll never get close enough to Dracula or any other enemy to need a sharp knife,” he said. He reached over and picked up the kukri. “That’s what this is for.”

She smiled again, lips closed. All of her smiles were like that, these days. Hiding her teeth, fearing the day they became fangs. 

“I know it is. Each thing has its purpose, Jonathan. This knife is not for him. It’s for… it’s for me.”

Her voice caught, and Jonathan looked up at her sharply.

“No,” he said. He reached over to take the knife from her, but she drew it away and cradled it to her breast. He could have wrested it away from her, but he couldn’t bear to handle her so harshly, so he drew back, letting her keep the little blade.

“Listen to me, husband,” she pleaded. “I can feel myself changing. I am clinging to the same hope we all are, but… but we must be ready, in case that hope fails.”

“That is what the kukri is for,” he said again. “If we cannot be together as man and wife, then I will serve you as your protector and thrall, and keep away any who would harm you. You can have my blood, my body, my life. As long as we’re together, I don’t care about anything else!”

“But I do!” Mina’s voice rose to match his own in volume and passion. “Perhaps you could find it in your heart to love me as a vampire, but I could not love myself. I must be human, or else I must be a corpse. If you love me, listen to me.”

Jonathan loved her, and so he listened. He forced his hand to release the white-knuckled grip on the kukri’s handle.

“Go on, then,” he whispered.

She nodded, and her eyes shone with tears as she continued.

“I borrowed a book on anatomy from Dr. Seward to be sure. This little blade should be long enough to pierce a heart. If Dracula escapes us and the transformation is upon me, I want you to…”

A sob interrupted her, and she swallowed hard. “I want you to use it on me. I’m very afraid, but I think if it’s such a thin blade, and if it’s plenty sharp and in the hands of someone I love… I think, then, that I could bear it.”

Jonathan couldn’t hold back his tears at the thought of that, and both of them took each other by the hand, crying. 

“A-and I would w-want you to go on with your life, and find happiness, but…”

“Without you? There could never be such a thing,” Jonathan interrupted. 

Mina nodded, and wiped a hand at her eyes. “I know, my love. And if that be the case, then, this knife can be for you as well.”

Jonathan drew her into his arms. “Thank you, my dearest. Thank you.” Her words delivered to him such profound relief that he hasn’t known since she’d arrived by his side at the Hospital of Saint Joseph and Saint Mary in Budapesh to marry him. He could face whatever peril, so long as at the end of it, he ended up where she was, be it heaven, hell, or their home in Exeter.

“It’ll be romantic, in a way,” Mina said, head nestled into his shoulder, her tears beginning to soak through his nightshirt. “Our hearts’ blood, mingled together on one blade. Together to the end.”

Jonathan nodded. “I c-can draw up our wills, that we will be buried together, in the same coffin, with this knife laid beside us if you’d like.”

He felt her nod against his neck. His wonderful, perfect bride and her obsession with the macabre. How he adored her.

They held each other until their tears had all been shed, and then Jonathan wiped first her eyes, then his own with his handkerchief. 

Mina’s eyelids began to sink lower, her pulse slowing. She yawned, but made barely a sound. 

“I fear… I cannot stay awake much longer….” 

Jonathan lowered her down onto the bed. “Sleep, love.”

He tucked her in, and took his seat once more. Now he had five knives to sharpen during his vigil. He held the kukri in his right hand, the little boning knife in his left, considering both. Dracula would die, or the Harkers would. 

He raised the kukri up, admiring the deadly sharp edge of the blade. It would be Dracula or the Harkers, and they knew where Dracula fucking slept.

[immediatebreakfast]

Finally we have the news that the Czarina Catherine is near our crew, and with that Jonathan internalizes all of his emotions of rage into killing intent since he is finally getting closer to the goal of slaying the Count.

It's almost there, almost, it's so close yet so far at the same time; the opportunity of making Dracula pay for all of the suffering, and death left in his trail. The prospect of making him feel all of the pain before turning him into dust. For Jonathan, this is the catharsis he craves, and the justice that Mina needs.

On top of all of the emotions brought by Mina's early, and suicidal like burial service, the outright contempt against Dracula is touchable through the whole narration. It's the promised demise that Jonathan couldn't do with the shovel when he was wasting away out of fear, but now he can thanks to his holy and volcanic love for Mina.

There is this point of gothic macabre reading how Jonathan mocks Dracula at the very start of the entry. A way to tell how this undead man was foolish enough to think he could escape to the very land that now Jonathan has walked with bare, bloody feet.

Within the lawyer style explanation of this plan, there is that same emotion that made Jonathan reject god for Mina. That self aware perspective where he knows the consequences of his decisions, but could care less about them if the outcome is Mina's safety in body, mind, and soul.

[somnesca]

Thinking about that trope where if the audience hears about the main characters' Big Plan in great detail, it's most certainly all going to get fucked up.

But if we're kept out of the loop then sometimes it means the characters have some cool tricks up their sleeves that they'll pull out when it seems everything's gone wrong.

Now imagining a confrontation on the Czarina Catherine where Dracula's thrown everyone around and either knocked them out or got everyone under sexy hypnosis, when Arthur weakly manages to lift his trusty whistle to his lips...

...and running down from the deck above, it's Bersicker, back for his own revenge, leaping at the Count before he can react!

And we get an Ocean's-11-style flashback to England, where we see Arthur paying Thomas Bilder to take a vacation to Varna, and oh bring that good boy wolf of yours, he could get some fresh sea air...

[see-arcane]

Remember when Jonathan in October, while waiting for the Czarina Catherine, wrote that he'll stand guard so the doctors can stake the vampire… and to accomplish it he will stand or fall, and that he's ready to face the gallows too? And later, after his and Arthur's boat crashes, he threatens in his final entry that Dracula's men better not want a fight, because he's well-armed?

He was ready to kill or be killed by anyone trying to stop their task, and if caught alive to face trial. There are non-zero scenarios where he's on death row for murder/s.

I don’t doubt it. I also don’t doubt that, being on the lowest social rung of the men, any legal team involved would try to paint him as the sole ‘madman’ responsible in the group. After all, the doctors only have a box of ashes on their hands, not a body. Art and Quincey would have kin and peers and peerage on their side.

Jonathan Harker is just a solicitor who went insane and disappeared on a work trip. For all we know, he even killed his boss to inherit the firm. Now this.

Death row or an asylum would be the only end result.*

(*Give or take the ramifications of the whole ‘I would sell my soul to do it!’ declaration. His soul has been sold, bloodstained and bitterly victorious. In a universe where deals with the infernal obviously bear fruit, I have to wonder what happens next beyond the basic cogs of human law…)

[thegoatsongs]

I think that Mina has been silent from the 25th (when she woke up from her deep sleep at noon when Dracula was reading her memories) until today 28th of October, likely because her brain has been adjusting to this new, shifting feeling of greater freedom after three weeks of getting dulled down. Doesn't make her any less vampiric, after all, despite her being stronger and her color coming back (often a bad lookout, that a full turning is approaching).

But she has also been planning their next move since then.

Mina, after strongly suspecting that Dracula now knows where they are, so he has moved the ship to never reach Varna plus he has now realized that Mina has been using his own mind link against him and hence he's now resisting her... she went "welp, I have to see WHERE he will end up first. So I better study the train schedules for all the port towns."

Which is why she knew offhand when to take the train from Varna to Galatz (which would not have been needed info before) once they were informed where the Czarina Catherine had detoured to.

[muzaplacha]

please explain to me the "with blood" bit?

Whereupon the captain tell him that he had better be quick—with blood—for that his ship will leave the place—of blood—before the turn of the tide—with blood. Then the thin man smile and say that of course he must go when he think fit; but he will be surprise if he go quite so soon. The captain swear again, polyglot, and the thin man make him bow, and thank him, and say that he will so far intrude on his kindness as to come aboard before the sailing. Final the captain, more red than ever, and in more tongues tell him that he doesn't want no Frenchmen—with bloom upon them and also with blood—in his ship—with blood on her also. And so, after asking where there might be close at hand a ship where he might purchase ship forms, he departed. "No one knew where he went 'or bloomin' well cared,' as they said, for they had something else to think of—well with blood again; for it soon became apparent to all that the Czarina Catherine would not sail as was expected. A thin mist began to creep up from the river, and it grew, and grew; till soon a dense fog enveloped the ship and all around her. The captain swore polyglot—very polyglot—polyglot with bloom and blood; but he could do nothing. The water rose and rose; and he began to fear that he would lose the tide altogether. He was in no friendly mood, when just at full tide, the thin man came up the gang-plank again and asked to see where his box had been stowed. Then the captain replied that he wished that he and his box—old and with much bloom and blood—were in hell. But the thin man did not be offend, and went down with the mate and saw where it was place, and came up and stood awhile on deck in fog. He must have come off by himself, for none notice him. Indeed they thought not of him; for soon the fog begin to melt away, and all was clear again. My friends of the thirst and the language that was of bloom and blood laughed, as they told how the captain's swears exceeded even his usual polyglot, and was more than ever full of picturesque, when on questioning other mariners who were on movement up and down on the river that hour, he found that few of them had seen any of fog at all, except where it lay round the wharf. However, the ship went out on the ebb tide; and was doubtless by morning far down the river mouth. She was by then, when they told us, well out to sea.

Literally have no idea what happened here, don't understand one thing, could not google because the keywords are too common. please help????

[gardenofshadcws]

Dracula Daily Day 91

Jonathan Harker’s Journal

Was there… a murder on the Orient Express?

I’ll see myself out

Johnny.  Honey.  I know you weren’t there for Lucy but surely you’ve heard enough by now to know that Mina being well is probably not the good sign it sounds like

The Czarina Catherine is about to go the same way as the Demeter

That’s a speculation, I have read this before but it’s been a long time and I don’t remember

GET BOXED IDIOT

Real talk, the thought of Dracula biding his time in a box is deeply hilarious to me

Time for pirate adventures!

“This is the country where bribery can do anything” w o w.

[no-side-us]

Dracula Daily Liveblog: October 28

Well, that's not too surprising. Galatz, or Galați as it's known today, is a city on the Danube River in eastern Romania. I've cobbled together a quick map to show where it is in relation to Varna:

It's been suggested that the Count has eaten the crew of the Czarina Catherine, but I guess not considering he probably couldn't steer the whole ship by himself. I wonder how the Count was able to convince the ship to change destinations. Did he bribe the crew? Threaten them? Hypnotism? It's interesting to think about.

There's a lot of implications to be made from Seward's little comment here, and I just know people are going to make them.

I'm not going to lie, the image I have in my head of Jonathan in this moment makes him look absolutely deranged. I'm imagining a hunter whose ecstatic there's going to be more to the chase, which is not what is depicted here, but it is what I'm imagining.

With all the vampireness and the gothic romance that's been happening, it's easy to forget that at the end of the day, Mina's just a little nerd. And I mean that affectionately. People imagine the Harkers as vampires being all mysterious and cool, but I like to think they'd spend their eternal lives gushing over the development of train technology and the changes to British law, like the little nerds they are at heart.

Does anyone know what Arthur means by this? Based on context clues, it looks like he's talking about some sort of express train, but I don't know.

In another story, this would be quite a flirtatious line.

I like how either Mina says she doesn't know anything about criminal philosophy or Van Helsing assumes she doesn't, but then a moment later:

She just name drops two authors of criminal works! Max Nordau published Degeneration (1892) which suggested that the "human race was deteriorating." And Cesare Lombroso published Criminal Man (1876), which claimed that "the criminal personality could be identified through physical characteristics."

What does Van Helsing mean by "Seventy-two only?" Is he referring to his own age? I can't imagine it'd be anything else, but it seems like an odd thing to mention.

You know, kudos to Seward for writing all that's happened today. We've all ragged on him for not wanting to record what's happened without his phonograph, but I feel like he did a great job detailing the day's events. He gets a thumbs up from me, and hopefully something more from the Professor.

[my-name-is-not-kimmy]

I'm not posting the map today because spoilers, but if you want to see where the Czarina Catherine is now, check the excellent Dracula Blog linked here. Suffice it to say that a map may be useful to you over the next few days

[another-chaotic-bisexual-vampire]

Where's the Czarina Catherine? It should be here by now, except it's impossible to see with all this fog--

Look! In the sky! A ship flying over the city WITH GIANT BAT WINGS-- sprouting humongous chicken feet and landing in the city square-- hideous tentacles whipping out of every cannon port-- and its hull splitting open with vicious fangs to let loose an ear-splitting roar!

An impossibly long damage counter appears above "The Czarina Catherine???" and our Victorian D&D party of murderhobos rolls for initiative

[ashleybenlove]

“Most strange; no news yet of the ship we wait for.”

Where in the world is the Czarina Catherine?! 

[datasoong47]

They say much of blood and bloom, and of others which I comprehend not Whereupon the captain tell him that he had better be quick—with blood—for that his ship will leave the place—of blood—before the turn of the tide—with blood.

Final the captain, more red than ever, and in more tongues tell him that he doesn't want no Frenchmen—with bloom upon them and also with blood—in his ship—with blood on her also. 

"No one knew where he went 'or bloomin' well cared,' as they said, for they had something else to think of—well with blood again; for it soon became apparent to all that the Czarina Catherine would not sail as was expected. A thin mist began to creep up from the river, and it grew, and grew; till soon a dense fog enveloped the ship and all around her. The captain swore polyglot—very polyglot—polyglot with bloom and blood; but he could do nothing. The water rose and rose; and he began to fear that he would lose the tide altogether. He was in no friendly mood, when just at full tide, the thin man came up the gang-plank again and asked to see where his box had been stowed. Then the captain replied that he wished that he and his box—old and with much bloom and blood—were in hell.

I love this running joke that Van Helsing is confused by the word “bloody”

But the word “polyglot” used here - does this mean literally that the captain is swearing in multiple languages, or does it mean something else, like he’s just using a bunch of curse words?

[abraham-stoker]

MINA HARKER'S JOURNAL

30 October.—Mr. Morris took me to the hotel where our rooms had been ordered by telegraph, he being the one who could best be spared, since he does not speak any foreign language. The forces were distributed much as they had been at Varna, except that Lord Godalming went to the Vice Consul, as his rank might serve as an immediate guarantee of some sort to the official, we being in extreme hurry. Jonathan and the two doctors went to the shipping agent to learn particulars of the arrival of the Czarina Catherine.

Dracula - Bram Stoker