It was a grey, gloomy, windy day in May when we were met at Cleopatra's Needle by a pale gentleman, all dressed in black in the fashion of past times, with long, black hair curling down his back and an intent gaze, leaning on a fine cane with a silver knob. Thus the London Adventure continued, the Thames leaping at our feet as we set off from that symbol of Britain's colonial might piercing the leaden sky.
This time, our walk was meant to lead us through Dracula's London, the great Victorian capital that lured to its heart the living as much as the un-dead. But our guide, Gwilym Games, showed us a place far broader than the scenery for Dracula, as he led us through an entangled maze where the lives of the vampire, Bram Stoker and actor Henry Irving were inextricably meshed.
To better understand Stoker's complex personality, we first imagined him jumping into the Thames just beneath Waterloo Bridge, as he attempts to save a drowning man. Stoker, the former sickly, nearly invalid child, became by force of will power a sportsman, a man of action, and our guide helped us remember with what ferocity this sturdy Irish man must have overcome his weakness and melancholy and turned it into resilience, as he was engulfed by those very London streets that so fascinated his literally immortal creation.
As we approached the Lyceum Theatre, its doors as crowded before a show as they must have been in Stoker's times -even if only the façade survives from the 1830's construction-, we revived the breathtaking encounter (if we are to believe Stoker's own account, and there's no reason why should anyone doubt it) between the charismatic actor and his future secretary and Stage Manager for the Lyceum. We envisaged the famous gatherings at the Beefsteak Room, attended by such celebrities as Oscar Wilde, the Prince of Wales and Sarah Bernhardt, and could see Stoker and Irving entering the theatre through their private entrance on Burleigh Street.
We wouldn't understand Dracula's London without Bram Stoker's London, and so we tried to imagine how his rooms at Southampton Street might have looked like before a huge Sainsburys was built at the same site; then we took some rest at the quiet garden by St Paul's ("the Actors Church"), while we were reminded of Jonathan Harker's perilous pursuit of Dracula's boxes and their contents of loathsome earth. After that, we visited The Duke of York's theatre on St Martins Lane, where a Dracula play was once performed. An expressly hired nurse was rather busy, with dozens of the enthralled audience appropriately fainting.
Our walk led us then to gaze respectfully at Sir Henry Irving's statue by the National Portrait Gallery, and I couldn't help wondering what mixed feelings might Bram Stoker have had, had he known that, on a walk aimed at honouring Dracula more than a hundred years after he wrote the novel, Irving's would be such an inevitable presence, his shadow following us up and down the busy London streets.
But the bustle of the city doesn't encourage such musings, and off we went to Piccadilly Circus, still to many the heart of London, and managed to have a brief glimpse of Jonathan Harker as he gets off a cab and continues his desperate attempt at making sense of Count Dracula's intricate web of shelters across the vast Victorian capital. Harker feels he is running out of time, and to us, following his steps, anticipation proves to have an equally restless quality. The tension builds up. We know we are approaching Dracula's House in Piccadilly.
However, before we get there, we will draw a much richer overview of London and its endless elements relevant to our pursuit from Gwilym's scrupulous research. We passed the huge Waterstones, formerly a department store where Christopher Lee himself had to make his living before turning to blood-sucking; then we found the building on Sackville Street where Mitchell Sons and Candy, estate agents, refused to tell Harker who owned the recently purchased house in Piccadilly, until the mention of Lord Godalming's name opened the doors to secrecy, only to find ourselves minutes later passing by the Albany building, home to such illustrious characters as Matthew Gregory Lewis, Lord Byron (who could forget he inspired the first vampire novel ever?) and Lord Lytton. We saw the Albemarle Hotel, where Lord Godalming took rooms, and Doctor Van Helsing's own hotel at Berkeley Street, just to find the next moment William Beckford's dwelling place in Dover Street, near Browns Hotel where Kipling used to stop, as well as a good friend of Stoker's, Mark Twain. It was disturbing to feel how these extraordinary persons, the real and the imagined, were intermingled in the same subdued atmosphere. We sensed their shadows encircling us with far more accuracy than we sensed the cars that threatened to run us over as we stood silently in the narrow streets. Particularly moving, and uncannily real, was the vision of Oscar Wilde -another friend of Stoker's- at the Albemarle Club, soon to be snatched away from the London streets and thrown into Reading's gaol.
To pass then Half Moon Street, portrayed in a 1940's movie where a mad scientist seeks to prolong his life fooling around with red, vital fluids, was just a bloody coincidence.
By the time we stood in front of the Park Lane Hotel, tension was nearly unbearable, because in fact there was no such hotel: we were at Guillano's, the fashionable jewellers establishment, and, along with Mina Harker, we sensed Jonathan's horror as he recognized Dracula, his lustful eyes dreadfully fixed on a beautiful girl waiting outside. Next moment we could all picture ourselves in Green Park, trying to keep calm as we expected the Count's arrival at the still elusive Dracula's House on Piccadilly.
It was not, thank God (or whoever we might invoke who saved us from such embarrassment) the Hard Rock Café. Gwilym's more accurate guess led us to 138 Piccadilly (on this subject he agrees with Bernard Davies), a grand building with finely railed balconies, neighbour to a similar construction where Lord Byron suffered the bleakness of an unhappy marriage.
We held our breath as we recalled Dracula's arrival at his new home, paralysing his fascinated hunters with his feline movements, his contempt, his tragic fragility, and his might.
We remained silent, spellbound for a while, trying to tell apart fiction from reality, the 19th Century from the 21st, the lust for life from sad, eternal death.
Afterwards, drained either by the three-hour, maybe longer walk, or by Dracula's very thirst, we ended up this second episode of our London Adventure inspecting two rather handy pubs at Shepherd Market.
Adriana Díaz Enciso