Fatal Inheritance (24 page)

‘But what does it mean?’ I said at length, sitting down weakly. I felt the perspiration break out on my brow and my legs weaken beneath me. I did not understand, but the feeling of the presence of evil was so strong and so convincing that there was no need to know the identities of transgressor and victim to sense the truth at the heart of the list of words.

‘Such words never came from Lydia herself,’ the doctor was saying. ‘These are undoubtedly words and fragments of sentences that were told to her in secret.’

‘You think so? They were words that she heard? You do not think these reflect some experience of her own?’

‘Incest? For that is what is being described here; there is no doubt about it. No, this was not Lydia’s own story. The birth of a child was involved in the story echoed here, and when Lydia came to me she was innocent and without sexual experience. That is certain.’

‘But she did have a child before writing these,’ I said, blushing in the darkness at the awkwardness of thus referring to the doctor’s transgression.

‘Yes, but during the years she spent with me, she wrote the same things, repeatedly. I recognise them all. If only I had understood it then!’

Tears of emotion stood in his eyes. Between the shame of the horror revealed by Lydia’s words and that associated with the doctor’s illicit relationship with his patient, the conversation was fraught with awkwardness and difficulty, but as I have often noted, there is nothing better in such circumstances than to keep as calm as possible, to breathe deeply, and to say what needs to be said. I did so, and felt the wrestling match taking place in my mind between doubt and certainty diminish in intensity and disappear, the former yielding definitively to the latter. In my heart, I knew now that contrarily to what I had believed, the list of words in front of me did carry a meaningful message. My eyes were opened, and I could see it clearly, even if I did not fully understand. I had been blind, stupid and stubborn, that was all. A rather large all.

‘Think,’ the doctor was continuing. ‘Lydia’s father died when she was four. The psychological scars left by incest are strong even when repressed, but she was entirely free of them. Lydia did not suffer an incestuous relationship, but all the signs point to her having heard talk about someone who did.’

‘But why would the talk she overheard not simply have brought the fact to her consciousness?’

‘Either because she was sworn to secrecy, or because she did not understand what she heard. I suspect the latter reason is the right one, for surely she would have chosen to reveal the secret in confidence to a doctor, rather than suffer endless years of incarceration in order to keep it. And then, she did not have the knowledge to understand such things; she had been brought up very protected. I think it far more probable that she did not understand the words she heard, yet she sensed that something was deeply wrong. Remember that I knew Lydia very well. I am certain that she had no conscious memory of these words at any time, and no awareness that the words emerging in her writing had either the meaning or the origin that I see in them now.’

‘But how could she have heard and remembered words unconsciously but not consciously?’

‘It would be possible if, for instance, she was extremely young. A very small child, unable to understand anything other than the seriousness of what she was hearing. Small children often have strong memories of which they are unaware, which can emerge unexpectedly many years later.’

‘But she only began the spontaneous writing at fourteen,’ I said. ‘Why would she have carried the words inside her silently for all those years, and then suddenly begun expressing them?’

‘Do you remember what event triggered the beginning of her writing?’

‘It started when her mother died. Is that it?’

‘Yes. It seems rather as if, at that point, Lydia lost the only person with whom she could share her trouble, even if she was conscious of neither the trouble nor of sharing it.’

‘So you believe the words were spoken by her mother?’

‘I believe so. I think it is possible that the mother held the child close to her for comfort in her pain, and expressed her feelings of horror and despair, perhaps simply murmuring broken words, feeling secure in the knowledge that the child was much too small to understand. The words survived in the unconscious memory of the child, together with the child’s sense that the words corresponded to a dreadful secret that must be repressed at all costs. As long as the mother lived, the unconscious mind of the child would not have to bear the full burden of the secret. But after her death, the weight of bearing it alone must have produced a strong urge to discover another way to both keep the secret and share it, all without any of this ever reaching the conscious mind.’

‘But what
was
the secret? Lydia’s mother was a married woman, and Lydia and Tanis were adopted children. What experience of incest could she have been alluding to? Do you think it was something from the mother’s own childhood?’

‘It might have been that,’ he said. ‘But time and changes in life tend to soothe and relieve ancient pains if they are consciously expressed, as Lydia’s mother appeared to have been doing. It seems to me more likely that she was describing something which was causing her great pain at the time she spoke of it.’

I thought over all that I had heard of Joseph Krieger and his family, and remembered the words of Prosper Sainton.

‘There was a daughter who died …’

‘A daughter? Whose daughter?’

‘A daughter of Joseph Krieger and his wife, who died before Lydia and Tanis were adopted.’

‘Died? How did she die?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t even know exactly when she died. But wait – there is something.’ I tried to recall exactly what I had read in the old diaries of the French violin professor. I cast my mind back … I could see myself sitting in Professor Wessely’s office … I could almost see the notebook in my hands. ‘Her name was Xanthe. A friend of the Kriegers wrote about her in the winter of 1848. He had met Mrs Krieger somewhere, and she had mentioned this girl who had died, who had been sent to the country for her health, and who had died there. And then later I found out that Mrs Krieger refused to be buried at Highgate, where her husband had purchased a family tomb. She asked to be buried with her daughter instead.’

‘In the country. The girl was sent to the country for her health,’ the doctor repeated attentively. ‘It is a phrase which so often indicates pregnancy. Does it not?’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘I suppose it sometimes does. But I was imagining that Xanthe was a child. Prosper Sainton wrote … well, I guess he wrote nothing indicating whether she had died recently, or many years before they spoke, or how old she was when she died. But Mrs Krieger cried, and said she wished she had children to take care of, and Sainton wrote that she was too old to have any more.’

‘So, she may have been in her late forties or even fifty or more at that time. This would indicate that the girl who died may not have been so very little.’

‘Yes.’

‘She might have been fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, and still been referred to as a child who died.’

I digested this idea.

‘So you think that Xanthe Krieger might have died in childbirth?’

‘Childbirth itself, perhaps, or else the consequences of giving birth at too young an age. Twice. Is it not possible?’

‘Oh, my God. Yes, it is. And the little girls—’

‘The little adopted girls—’

‘From the countryside—’

‘Were Xanthe’s children. Fathered by her father.’

‘Oh, my God.’

‘Years of incest. Under the mother’s eyes.’

‘Perhaps she did not understand at first.’

‘But she must have realised when the first child came. She must have tried desperately to put a stop to it.’

‘Maybe she believed that she had.’

‘But then, a second child came.’

‘When Xanthe died, the mother must have seen her husband as a murderer.’

‘Yet at the same time, the horror of it all would finally cease …’

‘And she would have insisted on adopting the babies.’

‘And he could not refuse.’

‘And then he died himself, and the whole thing was buried in a grave of total silence.’

‘How did he die?’

Until this point, my remarks and the doctor’s had fused together as if produced by a single mind. But this last question of his started me.

‘I don’t know. Why do you ask?’

‘Don’t you see?’

‘No! What do you mean? Can you believe—’

‘Yes. He would not have been able to stop. The
pulsion
of paedophilia and incest is a disease.’

‘You think – he turned his attention to Lydia?’

‘I think it is certain that he did, or began to.’

‘Horrible, for his wife!’

‘And then he suddenly died.’

‘He suddenly died,’ I repeated as his meaning sank in. ‘I see what you mean. She couldn’t bear it any more.’

‘What would you have done?’

‘I think – I think I would have taken the children and gone off somewhere, far away.’

‘But she was not the same type of woman as you are. She was probably a dependent, submissive character, who had been made more so by the domination of such a husband. It would be easier for such a person to take control within her domestic sphere than to flee. And then, she was motivated by something more than merely saving the remaining children. There may have been a desire for revenge.’

‘Revenge?’

‘For the sacrifice of the daughter by the father.’

We spoke simultaneously.

‘Agamemnon.’

‘Clytemnestra.’

Is the capacity to murder a character trait? Or are we all potential murderers within?

No – some faced with the choice of life or death will choose life at all costs, others will choose death. Not all can kill.

Like the capacity to go on a stage and enthrall a crowd, the capacity for murder belongs to only some.

Can it be inherited?

I must ask Carl.

Joseph Krieger died suddenly. Perhaps he was ill. Perhaps he committed suicide. But perhaps not.

He created havoc beyond compare in the heart of his family; he had caused horror and the death of his daughter, and suddenly he stood before a fresh temptation, another child, a little one, a fragile one, the very fruit of his horrendous sin, whose life was in his hand to crush and destroy.

If he were capable of feeling remorse or shame, such a temptation itself could be a motive for suicide. It could, indeed. Yet nothing in the picture of him that had put itself together in my mind from all the pieces I had collected from different sources indicated any sign of a capacity for those emotions.

If Mrs Krieger had put an end to her husband’s life, and abandoned him in death to his lonely tomb, I could not but feel that it was a deserved judgement for his crimes. But that was not the only question. I also had to ask myself whether Tanis Cavendish had played a similar role in the death of her adopted son.

It was not the first time that this thought had assailed me. I had thought of her once before, on perceiving as a possible motive the necessity of preventing it being brought to Lord Warburton’s attention that she had a mad sister interned at Holloway. But my theory had collapsed completely when I discovered that the person who paid the monthly fees for Lydia’s hospitalisation was no other than Lord Warburton himself. The whole cycle of realisation, suspicion and disproval had occurred within a space of less than two hours; I had simply felt like a fool, and not spent any further time on the hypothesis.

Now, unable to find rest even in the rhythmic rumble and chug of the sleeping-car that was carrying me back across France, I could think of nothing else. My theory was alive again, for even if Lord Warburton knew about Lydia, it was clearly out of the question that he could ever be allowed to learn of the events the doctor and I had just realised – the dreadful truth of the parentage of his prospective wife.

Sebastian had understood it all; of that I felt certain. For nearly half a century, Lydia had kept her secret from everyone, including herself. But he had understood what even she had not. He had been imbued with the family atmosphere; he had carried inside himself all the family inheritance of ideas and attitudes; he had been familiar with all the expressions, the tensions, the nuances of mood and the subjects of reserve of the woman who had raised him. Seeing her reactions over the years to the natural questions of a child concerning births, parents, his own origins and hers, he must have gleaned, if not exactly an inkling of the truth, at least something of the sensitive atmosphere surrounding all the words that we had discovered in Lydia’s writings. Perhaps for him, conditioned by living with her as he was, those same words had leapt off the page as they could not have done for anyone else.

Anyone else but Tanis. A mere baby at the time of the facts, she could not even have conserved the unconscious memories that her sister had retained. Yet she had grown up with Lydia, and with Mrs Krieger, the woman who loved her but was not really her mother, who had lost her only child to the evil of the man that she called her husband, and who never planted any other than yellow flowers on his grave;
yellow – Xanthe,
the meaning of the dead child’s name in Greek – as an eternal reminder of his crime. Mrs Krieger, who had brought up the children of that crime by herself, who had visited the grave with them each year, and who had let them see where her grief truly lay – and where it did not. Impossible to guess what Tanis actually, consciously knew. But whatever it was, something of it had been silently transmitted to the boy she had brought up.

He must have had a thousand bits of fragmented knowledge that could have come together as he spoke with Lydia and read what she wrote, forming a sudden, coherent and terrible whole. Now, finally, the mystery of his possessing his grandfather’s famed genius found its natural, if dreadful, explanation. Now he could finally comprehend the meaning of the reticence and seeming indifference of the father who had raised him, but who was, in fact, not his true father; a reticence that extended even beyond death to his very legacy. It must have all made sense to Sebastian on that day.

Why had Lydia been sent to Holloway, to be shut away there forever? She was sweet and gentle; she could easily have lived outside. To be sure, she would not have been the only case in our severe times of a woman sent off to a madhouse on account of an illegitimate birth, but these poor creatures do not generally remain there, forgotten and unvisited, for twenty-five years! There are charitable institutions that concentrate upon the rehabilitation of such unfortunate creatures, and insist upon their release, even seeking gainful employment for them once it is deemed that they have been brought back to a sense of moral responsibility. No, this was something else; this was to be an eternity of enforced silence. Tanis knew something, and she knew that Lydia knew something. But Tanis could control herself and Lydia could not; her writings poured forth unrestrainedly, filled with revelations that, if visible to Tanis, could become visible to anyone sufficiently probing; anyone, for example, who might fall in love with Lydia, and learn to understand her.

No wonder Tanis Cavendish wanted her sister to disappear forever. Between the trances and the pregnancy, she probably had no difficulty convincing her husband that Lydia was quite mad and better shut away. The rigid mentality of society under our dear Queen, in regard to all moral questions, would have made this normal, even seemly, twenty-five years ago, although now we may hope that times are slowly beginning to change widespread attitudes towards such things. But Sebastian must have had understood all this.

And what had happened then?

He had seen Lydia, he had read what she wrote, he had understood more than he had ever expected to, and he had returned home on that fateful 31st of December. So much was certain. No one knew the exact time of his arrival at the flat. Mrs Cavendish claimed that she had already left for the centennial ball; Lord Warburton had confirmed her punctual appearance there, and neither the police nor anyone else had seen any reason to doubt her words. Finding the house empty, then, Sebastian had decided to swallow poison, write to Claire and retire to bed to die alone?

Ludicrous! Absurd! Quite out of the question.

And if Mrs Cavendish had not yet left the house when Sebastian had arrived straight from the train from Virginia Water? If she had been waiting for him, in order to go to the ball together as planned? Then there would have been a violent confrontation; of this I could not have the slightest doubt, for the two would have been at terrible cross-purposes. Sebastian would have bitterly reproached her for her lies and her deeds, and demanded, perhaps even with threats of immediate revelation, the instant release of the woman he had just discovered to be his true mother.

Mrs Cavendish would have remained cool. A long explanation, perhaps, filled with gentle reminders of the necessity of keeping up appearances. A promise to discuss everything in detail, to make amends. And a nice cup of coffee laced with arsenic for an emotionally ravaged boy who would fling himself on his bed in rage and confusion, unable to face the idea of going to a party.

Sebastian was no longer her son; he had never been her son, in truth, but now that both mother and son were aware of that fact all pretence was abolished. Mrs Cavendish would have put on her hat and left the house, promising no doubt to talk everything over in the morning, but actually concerned above all to prevent Sebastian’s knowledge from ever reaching Lord Warburton’s ears. And what would Sebastian have done, alone at home, before the poison drove him into the agony of death?

He would have written to his beloved; to the one person in the world with whom he shared everything. He would have told her that he felt sullied within by the knowledge of his terrifying heritage of lies, cruelty, incest and murder. He feared, perhaps, that such an inheritance lay at the root of the wild forces he sometimes felt within himself – ‘the devil within’, as Rose had described it. He would have cried out in despair that such a person could not marry, could not engender yet more children to carry on the curse! Rose had told me that he was extroverted and generous. He would never have meant Claire to suffer for the rest of her life without understanding why he was doing what he was doing, and what it all meant.

This was not a suicide note, but a confession; an outpouring into another, gentle heart of the horror and disgust that now filled his own; an attempt to purify himself by releasing her from the loathsome attachment.

What would have happened had he lived? She loved him; she would not have accepted release, and perhaps he would have married her anyway. And then what? Perhaps her quiet normality would have tamed him with time, or perhaps he would have ended a slave to his own inherited power, dominating and subjugating the world around him as his grandfather had, carrying on the family burden of evil, and transmitting it onwards to yet another generation.

In any case, that curse was ended now.