Fatal Inheritance (19 page)

It was an emergency!

If she were to once put me out of the gate and see it locked behind me, my last chance of learning anything about Lydia Krieger would be definitively lost. I simply could not allow that to happen! Could I dash away suddenly? No, that was impossible. What about fainting? As convincingly as possible, I made a sudden show of terrible weakness, and clutching the nurse’s arm, begged to be allowed to sit down somewhere and have a cup of tea before I should have to shoulder the burden of my disappointment and return home.

Sister Theresa looked annoyed, but she must have been used to women with vapours and did not appear suspicious. Leading me to a small empty sitting room, she rang a bell which brought a little housemaid running in. I smiled inwardly at the sight of her. This was the kind of girl I knew and liked; a rosy country girl with a smile lurking behind her dimpled cheeks. If only I could arrange to spend a few moments with her alone!

‘Bring tea for this lady, Polly, and be quick, please,’ said Sister Theresa. The girl disappeared and I waited silently, fanning myself gently with a handkerchief and wishing that Sister Theresa would leave, but suspecting I would have no such luck. Various plans revolved in my mind, and then, to my delight, the girl returned with the tea and said,

‘There’s a visitor just come, Sister Theresa, and you’re wanted to show him in.’

Sister Theresa rose. ‘I must return to my duties,’ she said to me, then drew young Polly aside and delivered to her a murmured lecture, which I easily guessed to be a strict injunction not to leave my side, and to escort me to the main gate just as soon as I should be pleased to shake off my indisposition.

Sister Theresa left and Polly stayed. Conversation flowed at once with ease and cheer, and within two minutes I had led the conversation around to the topic of Lydia Krieger. I was excited to learn that Polly knew who she was, although with six hundred patients and she nothing but a housemaid, she didn’t have much actual contact with most of them. At first her comments were but simple, essentially summarised by the repetition of the words ‘poor dear lady’. She told me that Miss Krieger was known to most of the staff because she had been at Holloway forever, longer than almost any other patient except the famous Mr Turner who sometimes thought he was Napoleon and sometimes Disraeli, and had already been pronounced cured and released twelve times.

But Miss Krieger had never been released, I persisted, bringing the conversation back in the direction that interested me.

‘No, poor dear lady. She never gets any better, nor any worse.’

‘Is she actually ill?’

‘Not as you can see. A sweet quiet lady and beautiful, too. Tall. She likes to read, to sew, to walk in the garden. She likes animals, too; the patients cannot have animals here, but some of the visitors come with a little dog or such. I’ve seen her holding and petting them. She never has those crises like what the others do, some of them, or believe they’re something else than what they really are. We get all kinds here. But Miss Krieger seems no different from you and me. Just dreamy, like, but then, there’s not much for her to do here.’

A new image of Lydia Krieger arose in my mind, far more vivid than the previous ghostly shadows: the medieval Lady of the Unicorn. Seated in her garden of tapestry flowers, surrounded by dogs and rabbits and an earnest-looking lion, her gentle hand resting on a tame unicorn who smiles at her adoringly. That otherworldly beauty, quiet elegance, infinite gentleness. And with that vision, the very last shred of possibility that Sebastian had discovered something so dreadful he had wanted to end his life faded away. He had come here to see the woman who was his aunt – perhaps, very possibly, his mother – and he had found the Lady of the Unicorn.

‘Do you know why they’ve forbidden me to visit her?’ I asked.

‘Have they really?’ she said with great sympathy. ‘That’s not kind.’

‘It seems that her family sent a letter forbidding visitors after a visit that she had last month, where something bad happened. A young man came to visit her, and then he died.’

‘Oh, of course! I remember that! We were all talking about it last month. That was the young man who killed himself, wasn’t it? Sister Matilda who sits at the front desk saw his name in the paper and realised that she’d written that very name down in the visitor’s book herself; it was still open to the same page, even. He killed himself on the very day that he was here, didn’t he? We all heard about how the young man came here for a visit and then went and killed himself in London. But I didn’t know he had come to see Miss Krieger. Sister Matilda didn’t tell us that. She’s very close; I think she wouldn’t have even told anyone about what she saw in the paper if it hadn’t been such a coincidence. But as she wasn’t alone when she saw the name, she naturally cried out something right then when she recognised it, and it got around. Poor young man, I do wonder why he did it. Some people are madder outside than the ones in here, don’t you think?’

‘Did you see him when he came?’

‘Not I, ma’am, but the ones who did said he was lovely.’

I leant forward, enjoying myself, but worried lest Sister Theresa should find a spare moment to come back and check upon our whereabouts, and lowered my voice to a conspiratorial whisper.

‘Polly, can you tell me anything about Miss Krieger’s writing?’

Her eyes grew round.

‘We’re not allowed to talk about the patients, ma’am,’ she said.

I smiled kindly.

‘There’s no harm in talking with me,’ I said. ‘In fact, you could help me. You see, I’m trying to find out why the poor young man who came here went and killed himself. I’m trying to understand the reason.’

‘Surely it had nothing to do with his visit here, did it?’ she said.

‘Well, I think that it did. Because if not, why would her family suddenly write to the sanatorium forbidding her to receive any more visitors?’

‘Why, I don’t know. It’s strange. Miss Krieger never had any other visitors anyway. That was the only one. That’s why it caused such a to-do. She never had any other. That’s what they all say, at least.’

‘Do you know if Miss Krieger spoke about the visit after it happened?’

‘No, I wouldn’t know that, I don’t talk to the patients myself,’ she replied. ‘She might have done, to her doctor, but then again she might not. She doesn’t say much as a rule. There’s not much to say, really, in here, it’s so shut away. If I didn’t get out to see my family on my half-days, I sometimes think I’d go all strange myself.’

‘What do the doctors do here, to cure the patients?’ I asked. ‘Do you know anything about that?’

‘They’ve all kinds of machines,’ she said. ‘They have the patients spinning round or taking cold baths; ever so many things. A French doctor came here once and he put some of the patients into funny trances, so they’d do anything he said. But with Miss Krieger, they say the doctor only gets her to write. She’s not allowed to write any other time, you see. We’ve been told to keep papers and pens away from her, and she mayn’t go into the writing room. She may only write for Dr Richards. But she doesn’t need the cold baths and other things, because she’s always calm.’

The idea that had sprung up in my mind in the doctor’s waiting-room was fast becoming an absolute determination. Time was short and no elaborate planning would be possible. But simplicity is often the best way, in any case. The vastness of the building and its long empty corridors could be turned to my advantage.

‘Polly,’ I said, rising and gathering my things, ‘I need to find out why Miss Krieger’s visitor killed himself, and I know it has something to do with what she writes. I want you to help me.’

‘Oh, ma’am, I can’t,’ she said, turning pale. ‘It’s as much as my place is worth. Why, if I don’t take you straight down to the gatehouse in a minute, I’ll be in trouble already.’

‘I won’t ask you to anything forbidden,’ I promised. ‘In fact, I’m asking you almost nothing at all. Do take me to the gatehouse. Let’s go there now.’ I rose, and something passed from my purse to my hand, and from my hand to Polly’s. She uttered a little cry and it disappeared into her apron pocket.

‘When the porter opens the gate to let me out, you turn back to go up the path,’ I said. ‘Then you trip and fall down and cry out. He’ll come to you and help you get up. Cry out that it hurts and get him to look at your knee, so he doesn’t look at me for a few moments. That’s all I want you to do. Don’t even think about me after that. Don’t pay attention to anything. Just go back to the house, and go about your duties.’

She looked at me with great curiosity.

‘Oh – I think I can do that!’ she said. ‘But are you not going to go out at all?’

‘You don’t need to know anything about that,’ I replied firmly.

‘It’ll be the porter’s fault, not mine, if they do find you back inside,’ she said, and burst into a merry laugh. Out we went, along the corridors into the grand main foyer, out the front door, and straight down the path to the gatehouse, Polly wearing a great air of doing her duty. The porter stood up and unlocked the gate, pulling it inwards to let me out. I took a step to the side, and Polly turned away. I held my breath. A shriek from behind me made the porter whirl around, and in the flash of a second, I was hiding in the thick shrubbery next to the gate, peering through the prickly leaves to see how he raised Polly from the ground as she bent over, and clutching her knee and howling, ‘Oh, it’s broken, it’s broken; oh please look at it, do; oh, is it bleeding?’ like a five-year-old child. If he was a little surprised by my total disappearance during the short time it took him to pull her upright and utter something between a consolation and a remonstrance, he did not show it, but contented himself with locking the gate as she followed him, limping, whimpering realistically and demanding attention.

At length he sent her off, and she went back up the path, still hobbling, and disappeared into the building. I had in the meantime taken advantage of the racket to slip through the shrubbery as far away from the gate as possible, and had by now reached a place where I thought the rustling caused by my movements would not be noticeable. It seemed that I could continue to creep behind the shrubbery around the entire perimeter of the sanatorium’s enormous grounds, which, apart from the bushes along the railings, were green and quite empty even of trees. I continued my thorny trajectory for what seemed an immense distance, until finally the porter’s cabin was out of sight. Then I came out, brushed leaves and twigs from my clothing, and crossed the lawn with what I hoped was a confident step.

I was naturally worried about detection, but not excessively so, for several other people were dotted about the grounds; doctors and nurses, and even a number of normally dressed people quite like myself, going back and forth from the outlying buildings for reasons of their own. They did not appear to be patients, and I soon realised that the patients were not free to wander about the full extent of the grounds, but were confined to a particular, rather large and quite lovely garden of their own, set behind the building and to one side, and surrounded with its own set of iron railings. Here was a much thicker concentration of nurses, together with a number of people, some of whom appeared normal enough, but others who disported themselves strangely, uttered peculiar noises, or were covered in rugs and pushed about in wheeled chairs. There were even a few visitors who actually stood outside the railings, conversing with patients on the inside; an excellent arrangement allowing patients to receive visits while taking the air, and while protecting the more sensitive visitors from sights or sounds that might alarm them when experienced at close quarters.

I joined these people and stood looking in. The weather was unusually bright, but extremely cold, and it was not surprising that of the six hundred patients in the sanatorium, there were no more than forty or fifty in the garden at that particular moment, most of them walking about quite briskly. My heart beat; Polly had said that Lydia Krieger enjoyed walking in the garden. In the strictly regulated life of the sanatorium, this particular moment must correspond to the hour for visits and garden walks and it was perhaps the only chance during the day at which patients were allowed outside. She might well be there.

After some moments, my eyes located a figure that I thought might be Lydia. There was no way to be certain, but the gentle demeanour, the dreamy expression, the greying hair of the rather lovely woman I saw, wearing an elegant fur stole and hat, denoted the right age and style, and it seemed to me that I could detect a faint family resemblance to Tanis Cavendish. Resemblances are infinitely subtle, but my instinct told me that this could well be Lydia Krieger, and my heart beat faster as I tried to imagine a way to attract her attention. Sebastian had come here just a month ago, and he had seen Lydia, just as I believed I was seeing her now. And he had spoken to her – and perhaps she had written for him, as I would wish her to write for me, and some secret had been thence revealed. And Sebastian had died, and Lydia remained a prisoner, and no one but she now knew exactly what had taken place here on that day.

My determination to understand grew and intensified, and plans rushed through my head. But she was at too much of a distance for me to call out to her, and I was afraid of drawing attention to myself; there was nothing to do but wait and hope that she would draw nearer in her circulation. I observed her carefully, I tried to catch her eye, I readied myself – and then suddenly, I saw a young nurse hurry from the building into the garden, straight up to the very woman I was watching so closely, and speak to her urgently, taking her arm to lead her inside. The woman replied, making a gesture indicating the garden and the sky, as though she would wish to remain there, but the young nurse was adamant and drew her indoors as fast as she could, casting a hasty glance about the garden as she did so.

My disappointment was keen, but not as strong as the sudden piercing sensation of fear. What could be the meaning of the little scene I had just witnessed, other than that the alarm had somehow been raised, and the staff informed that I was still within their gates and probably determined to force a meeting with Lydia Krieger? The porter must have been surprised not to see me walking away down the road after the little scene with Polly, suspected that I hadn’t left at all, and decided to alert someone. And not knowing where I might be hiding, the hospital had been very quick to spirit Lydia out of the way of a possible encounter. It might seem like a rather grand reaction to such a little thing, but Lydia’s previous visit had ended with a suicide, and I could imagine how desirous they might be of avoiding any repetition of such a tragedy.