Fatal Inheritance (23 page)

Dr Bernstein had only one clear intention in his mind: the search for a coherent, deeper meaning. He rambled on, speaking half to me and half to himself, suddenly holding forth in spurts as an idea struck him, then falling silent. He spoke of historical references, he tried anagrams of certain words and phrases, he tried substituting certain words in a systematic way for others. He took thick books from his shelves and read out to me strange and astonishing accounts of long-past cases of automatic writing and prophetic seizures. I watched him at work, sometimes joyfully influenced by his certainty, at others feeling merely dull and increasingly tired. Sometimes I tried to gently oppose a little simple logic to some of his wilder ideas. Hours passed; it was the middle of the night now, and I was quite exhausted, but I dared not interrupt the flow of his inspired research. Once, I pronounced the name of Dr Richards, only to find myself violently interrupted, in a tone whose indignation seemed proportional to the doctor’s own feelings of frustration.

‘Do not mention his name to me any more! The doctor was a fool – he utterly missed the point! He did not
read
what she wrote! He asked stupid questions, he probed vulgarly and stupidly – but he did not
read
!’

He strode about the room, clutching a paper in his hands, his eyes like glowing coals, reading out snatches, repeating them aloud and under his breath, changing the order of the words as Lydia herself frequently did.

‘The truth will emerge on the day of Judgement!’

‘All truth will emerge and shine on the day of Judgement!’

‘The Truth, that will emerge only on the day of Judgement!’

Periodically he relit the lamp and also one or two candles, whose flicker added an element of peculiar mystery to the whole venture. Midnight passed, one o’clock, two o’clock, then three. Eventually the doctor fell silent, staring moodily at the papers and books piled and scattered over his desk, and I found myself drifting into sleep. To prevent myself from nodding, I rose and wandered over to the window, pushed aside the heavy curtain and leant my forehead against the icy cold glass, peering out into the night, across which light snowflakes were spreading their soft curtain of fairy dust through the glowing light of …

Dozens of lanterns, held in a hundred utterly immobile white-gloved hands!

A voiceless Inquisition? A silent troop of ghosts come to fetch me to the land of mystery into whose secrets I was trying so hard to penetrate?

I jumped backwards, pale with shock and disbelief, closed my eyes for a moment, then carefully advanced and peered once again out of the foggy pane. No, it was not a vision. The unearthly sight was there as before, soundless under the falling snow, hoods, hats and wigs grouped in a frozen pantomime.

‘Dr Bernstein!’ I managed to articulate. ‘What on earth is happening in the street?’

He came to the window, glanced out and smiled. Now I saw that under shocks of yellow and red woolly hair were the most grotesque masks I had ever seen; mad weird distorted faces, some with giant noses, others with fixed wide open mouths or gigantic teeth spilling over the painted lips. All were poised in positions of activity as though caught in a moment of petrified time: some held drumsticks aloft, others fifes and flutes, but of music, motion or sound there was none. On the pavements on either side, a few people in ordinary dress, also clutching lanterns and bundled to the nose in woollen wraps and scarves, stood watching them. The utter silence and immobility of so many people, the monstrous masks illuminated from below by the shafts of eerie light emanating from the many lanterns, came together to form a terrifying and magical vision.

‘Why, tonight is Fasnacht – the beginning of the carnival,’ said the doctor. ‘I had forgotten. Take your coat, and let us go down into the street.’

I wrapped myself up solidly against the cold, imbued with a strong feeling of unreality. The doctor led me down the stairs and outside. Standing with other spectators on the pavement, we now became not just observers, but a very part of the uncanny scene. I stood still, staring about me, having no idea what to expect. I had never seen or heard of any carnival consisting of freakish masks standing utterly still in the pitch darkness in the deepest part of the night.

Then the cathedral bells began to toll, and struck four.

As though on an instantaneous cue, the masked figures came alive together and began to play music, strange, ancient, gay little marching tunes, while stepping forward at a regular pace. We followed them up the street and around the corner; at each crossroads we saw other groups in ever more outlandish and wild dress, proceeding up and down the cobbled streets, some, like ours, with fife and drum, others with blaring of trumpets, still others with violins. The masks were enormous, twice the size of a normal head; a group of twenty shocking Mozart-faces with mouths open in fixed toothy grins, bird-heads with bodies covered in multi-coloured feathers, stiff golden-faced Napoleons in clown suits with giant buttons and tri-cornered hats, and the weirdest figures of all, with grins stretching from one eye to the other, mops of blue or yellow hair, noses reaching up to their foreheads, teeth nearly down to their chins, and a general air of insane glee.

I asked no questions, for the whole appearance of the carnival was itself a conundrum of cosmic dimensions, and I did not want to spoil my profound intuition that it was all somehow closely connected with the object of our research by the acquisition of any dry factual information. I continued to look about me, trying to absorb impressions, to observe only, and not to think. A shower of tiny paper confetti rained over our heads and shoulders, drenching us both in bits of red, whilst crazy laughter echoed behind and around us.

‘What do I want? What am I seeking here?’ I asked myself, as we wandered on through the icy cold amongst the crazy masks and falling snowflakes. ‘Something here is trying to speak to me. There is a message for me somewhere in all this. There is something that I have to realise, or to do.’ And all at once, I knew what it was; something very simple, something that I should have sought already, inside myself, but that I had not sought because I was inhibited. In such surroundings, inhibition seemed to belong to another world, a world of normality that was shut into the tight walls of the warm, protected houses, shut away from the wild streets that were the scene of wild freedom from normal behaviour.

I myself was free now, and the fact that had slipped through my mind without leaving a trace strong enough to rise to the surface came easily to my tongue. A group of harlequins in white satin with giant black buttons, playing a wistful and yearning tune on tiny flutes, passed us and disappeared around a corner, and I found myself with the doctor, momentarily isolated in a little island of quiet. I could hear another group approaching from a distance.

‘I think Lydia conceived her child whilst she was living in Basel,’ I said, wondering incongruously why I had not seen this before, why I had allowed my mind to assume that it was while under her sister’s uncaring protection that Lydia had been led astray. ‘She first came to Holloway in April 1875, and the child was already born. In early January, she said that he had just passed his birthday.’

The doctor did not reply, and I went on.

‘The child was Sebastian. I am certain of it, and so was Dr Richards. Lydia’s sister had been married for five years already when Lydia’s baby was born, and she must have feared, or perhaps even known for certain, that she herself would never bear a child, so she adopted her sister’s. He must have been a beautiful baby.’

Still no response.

‘Lydia must have been already expecting her child when she left Basel in June for her holiday that summer.’

Nothing. But in my new, wild state, I did not feel inclined to let the matter rest. If Lydia had fallen pregnant while living in the doctor’s house, then chances were that he knew or could guess who the father was. A vague vision of Herr Ratner floated through my mind. He had been a younger man then, and a friend of the doctor’s.

‘Did you know anything about it?’ I asked relentlessly.

‘I must have been blind,’ he replied finally, with an effort. ‘No, I did not know. I am a doctor, yet I did not see.’

‘It was very early days, of course,’ I said.

‘But I should have guessed! I should never have let her go! I should have told the family that she was unwell and could not travel. I should have kept her near me forever!’ He was not looking at me, but into space, into the darkness, or perhaps simply into the past.

‘If you think back now,’ I said, ‘can you guess who fathered the child? I have been wondering – is it not possible that while he was in Zürich Sebastian guessed the identity of his true father as well as that of his mother?’

‘No. That is impossible,’ he replied, and now his eyes came to rest on mine with defiant certainty.

‘How can you be sure? The father could have been there, at the concert, and at the party that evening. He could have noticed Sebastian’s resemblance to Lydia just as you did. He could have realised the truth, and told Sebastian about it.’

‘You are not guessing right,’ said the doctor into the feathery snowflakes that floated between our faces. ‘Yes, the father of Lydia’s child was there that evening, and he saw what you say that he saw. But he was not certain of what it meant. He could not be certain, for he had never known of the existence of a child, and could not quite convince himself of something so momentous, not when it might be nothing but an error, and when the young man himself seemed so perfectly convinced of having his own quite different parents. His mind was in a turmoil, and in the end he did not utter a single word on the subject of paternity.’

‘But now he knows?’ I asked carefully, feeling my way into the intricacies of this discourse.

‘Yes. Now he knows for certain. Sebastian was his child.’

‘He told you?’ Like the flame of the candles in the lanterns, the truth flickered in my mind.

‘Have you not understood?’ he responded, and turning, he moved out of the square, away from the direction from which the newest group of masked revellers was now nearly upon us.

‘It was you?’

‘It was I.’

Without quite knowing this, somehow I must have known it, for I was not really surprised. The doctor began to speak, rebelliously, quickly, loudly into the darkness, flinging the weight of his guilt at me as though I should be able to catch it and take some of its burden from him.

‘Yes, it was I. Yes, I betrayed the marriage bond and I betrayed the doctor’s oath: a double infidelity. That is exactly what I did. In moral terms, there could hardly be a more heinous sin. But it was a sin of love such as is beyond expression and beyond morality. Her family took her away from me. They spirited her away and I could not find her although I searched for months and years. My letters remained unanswered, her guardian died, I could not find her trace! I lost her suddenly and without knowing why. And the passion I felt for her has continued petrified, unchanged and undiminished in my heart since that day. It was that passion that made me speak, the evening I saw Sebastian. I did not speak of my love, of course – I did not say much, yet I said too much, for what I told him drove him to the search for Lydia that ended with his death! I did not understand then that it was the death of my own son. That knowledge only came to me from you.’ He had been shouting almost convulsively, but the last words came out in a whisper, and I understood with a kind of shock why he had remained silent, pressing his lips together, about precisely the points on which I most wanted his opinion, those concerning Lydia’s motherhood, and what it was that he had come to understand over the course of the evening that had driven him into such a frenzy.

I did not know what to say to one who has discovered the existence of his child only after that child is dead. But the doctor clutched my arm, and I realised that there was someone even more important to him than the son whom, after all, he had never known.

‘Thanks to you, though, I have found the treasure that I lost. Our son died because he found her, but I shall not die, because I am stronger than my enemies, who are
her
enemies. Twenty-five years too late, I will find her and free her, and, if she will, I will marry her.’

‘What enemies? Who are they?’ I said in confusion, staring in surprise at his transformed face.

‘Her words tell the story of what happened,’ he said. ‘Now I see it plainly! It is all in the words themselves, just as I told you! Do you not remember what she wrote on the day after Sebastian came?
The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost?’

‘Yes, I remember that,’ I said.

‘The Son! Do you not see?’

‘Yes.’ I paused. ‘The Son’, indeed; she had written that word directly after Sebastian’s visit. But her writings were all full of religious phrases. What was the doctor so certain that he saw? Was there really a meaning to it all?

‘I described that,’ he exclaimed, and now he was walking quickly, almost running towards his home, dragging me along by the sleeve. ‘In my book, I told how the words of a secret shared with Lydia would emerge in an unrecognisable context the next time she wrote!’

‘Yes, I remember,’ I said, hurrying and slipping on the slushy cobbles. ‘But was that really the first time that she ever used the word “Son”?’

‘You tell me. Do you remember any other instances through all the pages that we read?’

I tried to recall another, but failed.

‘There are none!’ he exclaimed in confirmation. ‘Look again, and you will see that she never used the word “Son” before that day. It is the words, the words we must consider! We must find out which are the true ones. Come, hurry, hurry! We have work to do!’

The dawn was leaking palely through the window by the time we had finished the task upon which Dr Bernstein insisted: counting the number of times each word and phrase appeared in the hundred samples of Lydia’s writing, and setting them down one by one in order of frequency. But all desire to sleep had fled. So clear, so unexpected and so diabolical were the conclusions necessarily provoked by the list finally tabulated and thrust under my nose by the trembling hand of the overexcited doctor, that I pushed it away with a spontaneous cry.

‘Impossible!’

Yet I took it back and stared at it, horrified and mesmerised. It read: