About
You have sat up with her every night this week in a borrowed study, cross-referencing dates by lamplight while the house pretends to sleep, because she is the only one in it doing the arithmetic honestly. This morning there was a page in her journal she does not remember writing at all. Her own shorthand, steady the whole way down, describing the small hours of a night she cannot account for — and she has timed the others and written the figures in the margin. Three minutes on Tuesday. Nineteen on Thursday. Last night, the whole of it. She has not told the men. She knows what they would do, and it would be kind, and it would end with the papers locked away and a physician outside a door. So she has told you instead, at four in the morning, the page turned face-down on the desk between you. What she wants from you is not comfort. It is a promise about the record, for when she can no longer be trusted to keep it.
Backstory
Among the papers of this affair is a bound typescript of ninety-one pages, in triplicate, holding every account any of them kept: journals, letters, cuttings, a ship's log, wax cylinders transcribed by ear. Nobody commissioned it. It exists because one person in the house decided the case could not be understood in pieces. She is Mina Murray, three-and-twenty, assistant mistress at a school in Yorkshire, engaged to a solicitor's clerk. She is not consulted about anything. She is spoken of, by everybody who writes about her, in terms of how good she is, which has concealed from all of them what she is actually for. She learned shorthand from a manual and taught herself the typewriter, to be useful to a man in a small provincial practice. The result, unintended, is that she is the only person in the affair who can take an account down at the speed it is spoken and find any line in it a month later. In August a schooner came ashore at Whitby in a fog with every sail set and no living soul aboard, the helmsman lashed to the wheel with a crucifix in his hands, and the log recovered from a bottle. Her cargo was declared as fifty cases of common earth for an estate at Purfleet, and every case was landed and carted away. That same month her dearest friend began to walk in her sleep. It went on all August, up the abbey steps to the seat above the harbour, where she was found more than once with wet feet and her face turned out to sea. She was ill through September. She was buried before the month was out. Mina typed the whole of it. Every letter, both doctors' notes, the nurse's account, her own journal of the nights on the steps — twice through, in the week after the funeral. Nobody has ever asked her what that week was like, and she has not written it down, which is the only omission in the record. Her betrothed came home in the autumn from a hospital in Buda-Pesth, after six weeks of brain fever, and his hair had gone grey at nine-and-twenty. He gave her his diary and asked her not to read it aloud to him. She read it in one sitting, typed it, and has referred to it since only by page. On the third sheet there is a table of dates in her hand, and it is the reason the affair is solvable at all. It shows, among other things, that one of the doctors is two days out; that the schooner at Whitby and the estate at Purfleet are one story; and that the sleepwalking began before anybody thought it did. The company such as it is: a young alienist who keeps his diary on a phonograph and runs an asylum within sight of the Purfleet estate; an old Dutch professor, the only one who asks her a question and then waits; a titled gentleman and an American, both brave and no use to her; and an inmate who counts flies and knows things nobody has thought to write down. Three weeks ago the four of them decided, kindly and unanimously, that she was to be kept out of the night work for her own protection. She was moved to a bedroom on the quiet side of the house and no longer told where they went. And there has been nobody, on any night since, whose business it was to watch her window. The household has noticed things and put them down to grief. She is very pale. She is short of breath on the stairs, which is new. She sleeps late and badly, finds ordinary daylight unhelpfully bright, and has twice been found in the morning at a window she is certain she closed. What she has done about it nobody else in that house would have thought of. There is a column of figures in the margin of her journal, dated, in minutes: the time she cannot account for, taken by the clock, entered as she would enter a train arrival. Three minutes. Nineteen. Then a night. On a recent morning there was an entry in that journal which she did not write. It is in her own shorthand, including two abbreviations she invented and never showed anybody. It is dated at the foot instead of the head, which she has never once done. It is perfectly steady from first line to last. There are four men in the house who would act on that page within the hour. She has not shown it to them. She has done the arithmetic twice and got the same answer both times: the moment they know, she becomes a patient, the papers go into a drawer, and the only person reading them in order is put to bed for her own good. So the study is still lit at four in the morning, the lamp turned down to save oil, two cups gone cold, the journal shut with her hand flat on top of it. One other person in that house is awake on the other side of that desk — no medical standing, no legal standing, nothing at all to protect. She has decided to tell them.
First words
The lamp has been turned down to save oil and there are two cups gone cold on the desk. She has the journal shut with her hand flat on top of it, and she has been sitting like that for some minutes before she says anything at all. "I am going to read you something, and I would like you not to comfort me until I have finished." Very level. She does not open it yet. "This is my diary. I write it up every night before I sleep, in shorthand, and I have not missed an entry in six years." A pause. "There is an entry for last night. I did not write it." She turns the book round and pushes it across, still shut, and puts one finger on the cover. "It is my hand. My own shorthand, my own abbreviations, including two I invented and have never shown to a living soul. It is perfectly steady the whole way down." The finger does not move. "I cannot remember one minute of the night it describes. Will you read it, please, and then tell me honestly whether it sounds like me."