Authors: Catherine Shaw
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Historical, #Women Sleuths
Fatal Inheritance (22 page)
It was the end of any attempt on the doctor’s part to perform anything like an analysis. Lydia’s treatments now evolved into regular sessions of rather rudimentary physical and medical experiments, training activities, guided movements, sedatives, even a session of hypnosis performed, as little Polly had told me, by a visiting French doctor who specialised in that area of treatment. All these methods and more were applied in the attempt to modify her writing activity directly, without any further examination into its deeper cause, nor for that matter any success whatsoever. The sessions became increasingly rare – no more than one a month in the last year or two – and the doctor’s entries increasingly perfunctory. We were able to read through the later ones far more quickly than the first. The very last consultation marked in the book, as I pointed out to Dr Bernstein, had taken place on the day following Sebastian’s visit to Holloway, and followed the previous one by a mere ten days. Clearly the unusual event had caused a spark of interest in the doctor, but he had fallen too far into Lydia’s disfavour to be able to obtain anything important from her now, no matter how striking the stimulus.
January 1, 1900
I called the patient in for an unscheduled visit today, after learning that yesterday she received an unexpected visit, her first in the twenty-five years that she has spent within the walls of this institution. Although I was not informed of this visit until after it had occurred, and therefore had no chance to see the visitor with my own eyes, the description of the visitor provided me by the accompanying nurse, as a young man of about twenty-five bearing a strong physical resemblance to the patient, convinces me that this person can have been no other than the child she is known to have borne in 1875, about whom she has had no knowledge or information from the time of his birth. If I had been aware that there was any possibility whatsoever of such a visit, I would have left instructions for the visitor to see me before leaving, for much information on the patient’s state of mind might have been had in this way. Furthermore, I was informed by the nurse that at the termination of visiting hours, the young man left carrying a sheaf of papers in his hand which she did not recall him holding upon his arrival, and I conclude from this
that the patient wished to demonstrate to her visitor the reason for which she has spent half her life under psychological treatment, and provided him with several pages of her automatic writing. In general the patient is forbidden access to paper and pencil, but it is to be presumed that if she told him of her abnormality, the visitor procured them for her in order to witness it for himself.I could not possibly have foreseen this event, especially as the patient’s sister had made quite clear that she herself had no intention of visiting at any time, and had mentioned no other possible visitors at all. As for the patient herself, she refused to respond to my probing queries, giving only her usual bland remark that she did not wish to speak of these things. In spite of her stubborn silence, however, it was quite clear that she was very much moved by the unexpected troubling of the peaceful course of her life. She appeared unusually disturbed, and her hand trembled as she allowed herself to be placed at the table for her customary writing. For this session, I allowed her to write in complete freedom without any form of interference, for I wished to see if the emotions produced by yesterday’s visit would have any tangible effect on her writing. In this, though, I was disappointed, for the sample appears identical in spirit to those that I have obtained from her over the past five years.
‘It is a pity that the doctor managed to so completely lose Lydia’s confidence,’ I observed mournfully when Dr Bernstein had finished reading this final entry. ‘If only she had told him all about Sebastian’s visit, and he had written it all down here, we would finally know what it was that Sebastian learnt that day.’
‘No, I do not think that we would,’ replied the doctor. ‘You see, even if we may safely assume that Sebastian learnt for sure on that day that Lydia Krieger was his true mother, you who are seeking the cause of his death must seek deeper than this. What matters here, what Sebastian must have discovered, is the hidden secret, the one that Lydia herself could not express in any other way than through her writing. And this Dr Richards was not capable of understanding that even after studying Lydia for so long.’
‘So you really believe there is such a secret,’ I said, and in spite of my doubts, I prayed that he was right, for otherwise my investigation was at a dead end. ‘You really believe that her writings actually mean something.’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Even that fool of a doctor realised that, with all his talk of repression and trauma, but he did not understand
where
to look for it! Lydia is not mad – her writings are not the products of an insane mind. There is no nonsense in automatic writing; it is like another language, invented by the writer to simultaneously hide things and yet speak them. You know this – you have read my book, and you saw Hélène Smith at work! That imbecile doctor never looked in the right place for what he sought. He should have been examining the writings themselves, not her thoughts and actions while producing them.
These
writings!’ And he slapped his hand down upon the thick sheaf of papers that we had not yet begun to look over together. Lydia’s own productions.
By now the evening was already well advanced, and the doctor, seeming unusually agitated, ran his fingers through his short grey beard several times, took up the pile and put it down again, rose nervously, strode about the room, and finally suggested that we have supper before starting work upon them, as it was likely to take a considerable amount of time. I was more than willing, so we left them on the desk and went into the small dining room, to partake of a light meal consisting of mushroom soup, followed by a cheese omelette, all prepared by the admirable manservant. During this repast, we avoided the subject of Lydia Krieger by common consent; instead, the doctor entertained me with a sketch of the development in methods of psychoanalytical treatment since the ideas of Sigmund Freud had begun to be adopted all over Europe. It was fascinating, but I could not bring myself to believe in it all. My own dreams being often quite nonsensical, I found it difficult to convince myself that they represented anything more than a great collection of visions, observations, hopes and fears, all ephemerally tied together in a random hodgepodge of kaleidoscopic images. Freud’s theory of the interpretation of dreams, published in a book which had appeared but last November and which the doctor could not resist fetching and thrusting under my nose in the middle of the omelette, struck me as most inapplicable to myself. Goodness me, if some of the nocturnal messes in my head really represent desires, whatever am I to think?
After dinner, we returned to the study, the manservant brought coffee and was given his well-deserved dismissal for the night, and the doctor, who did not seem to know weariness, eagerly snatched up the first page of Lydia’s writings, radiating a tense and silent expectation which I observed with mixed feelings. Fascination at seeing the man at work, flushed with the conviction of his beliefs and irrepressible hope that complete understanding was finally at hand were tempered by doubts and fears. Quelling all expression of these conflicting emotions, I joined the doctor at his desk and we began to read.
The writings in the file began from the time of Dr Richards’ arrival at Holloway; her earlier work must have been archived somewhere along with the medical observations of the preceding psychiatrists. Dr Richards had taken up his post at Holloway in September of 1895, and the first sample dated from that month. There were at least a hundred of them collected through the years, the last one dating from the day following Sebastian’s visit to Holloway. They were piled in inverse order, with the latest one on top, and quite naturally, just as I had, Dr Bernstein began to read them as they appeared, from the last one to the first. In a style reminiscent of Sebastian’s suicide note, Lydia’s large, flowing handwriting dominated the space on the paper, covering an entire page with just a few sentences.
In the final sample, from the day after she saw Sebastian, Lydia had written:
The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, redeem our sins and our transgressions. The transgressors of long ago give birth to the sinners of today, the transgressions of long ago give birth to the sins of today. The Son will redeem the transgressors, the Son will redeem the sinners. On the Day of Judgement the truth will
emerge and the sinner and the Son will be reunited. Unnatural no longer, sinful but natural, pure love, sin redeemed, abomination redeemed by lesser sin and lesser sin redeemed by the Son, all truth will emerge and shine on the Day of Judgement.
On December 20th, she had written:
Child of the Father, look to the Father, look to Heaven for salvation, there is no evil but abomination, there is no abomination but denial of the Father, there is no denial but the unnatural. Unnatural is the ripping of the veil, when the child of God rips the veil of God then is Evil done, all natural sin is not evil for man does not decide, all comes from God, yet Evil exists, but then how could he do this? How could he do this?
Back we travelled through the months and years of Lydia’s incarceration, and though I could make out nothing more than a prophetic ring to her outpourings, I could not but be impressed by the power of the inner, unconscious force that had compelled her to continue producing them so unchangingly for so long, resisting all efforts and all pressures.
April 18, 1899:
Birth from sin, birth from abomination, pain of the abomination, joy of the birth, right and wrong, good and evil, mingled in a birth of joy and abomination. On the day of judgement will emerge the truth. Suffer
the little children to come unto me. Children of God born of sin and abomination, children of the Father, it is his will though the fabric of the universe was rent as the veil of the Temple was rent, from top to bottom.
January 7, 1899:
The meaning is hidden it is God’s will, it is God’s will for all is God’s will, but the unnatural is Evil and how can Evil be God’s will? All that exists is God’s will and Abomination exists and so it is God’s will but it is God’s will that abomination should exist, then how could he do this? The world is full of sinners, sin is natural and God will forgive. There is no sin, there is no right and wrong for all can be forgiven. Sin is not evil, evil is not sin, all comes from God and the heavens above and the earth below glow with beauty and God’s gift to us is this beauty and so he cannot be angry with our sin. But abomination is not sin: is abomination evil sent by the Father to his Child? Should not the Father love his Child and does he not, for we are surrounded by beauty. But then how?
July 15, 1898:
God sees below with the eye that sees all and the acts of his children are all visible to Him. All are equal, the acts of the children of God, all are equal in the eye of God because they are sent by Him. Sin is not evil in the eye of God because sin is natural and natural is the harmony of the universe sent by God to his child. What looks like sin may be Good and what
looks like Good may be evil for we have not the eye of God. The truth will emerge on the day of Judgement and then and only then may we know that all is right in the eye of God for all comes from Him. The truth cannot now be known because the sinners are aware of their sin and not aware that in Heaven sin is no sin and all sin is forgiven and right and wrong are not. Only Abomination is not forgiven.
Dr Bernstein read each passage slowly several times, sometimes murmuring the words aloud, and examining them with a detailed thoughtfulness that seemed to take forever. By the time we reached the bottom of the pile, I was possessed by alternating feelings of dreadful boredom and acute despair, with little room left for optimism. I felt more than ever as though I could easily write such stuff myself, given a quiet hour and a sufficient heap of paper, and were Dr Bernstein to seek a deeper meaning within it, he should be wasting his time. It was with a sense of relief that I saw that we had reached the very last page, which was really the earliest one, from the day of Lydia’s first encounter with Dr Richards.
September 11, 1895:
Madness in the red sky, mad red storm in the swirling sky, madness of abomination and evil in the mad spinning red clouds, clouds of our confusion and our sin. The eye of the storm is the eye of God, centre of all things, seer of all things, the mad confusion of the wild red churning sky, tumult of sin we are blind here below. All that comes from God is given
by the Father to his child, but the mad storms hide the Truth from us, that will emerge only on the day of Judgement.
I pushed the papers aside, and leant back for a moment’s repose, but Dr Bernstein was far from finished. He looked through them all again, concentrating with fevered intensity, driven by a will to understand which could only be explained by a more powerful passion than the purely intellectual desire to know. He bent his eyes close to the pages, he read and reread the same sentences again and again as though they did not occur in a hundred other places, he murmured words aloud – he even wrote things down. Some of the passages he read out to me, and doing my best to encourage him, I sought inside myself some observations of my own, so as to stimulate at least some kind of a discussion.
