‘Frau Gottewald,’ Lavedrine murmured.
I stared hard at the woman. Her head was tilted far back against the pillow. Through the billowing steam that clouded the atmosphere, I could see only her bare throat, the cusp-line of her jaw, and her distended nostrils.
‘What’s going on?’ I whispered.
‘This is the bath-house. Here they float in magnetic fluid,’ Lavedrine hissed, ‘oscillating between the positive and negative poles, washing away morbid disharmony, inducing a sense of warm well-being. The patient must relax and overcome all fears and anxieties. The conscious mind must surrender to the unconscious.’
A loud, rattling clink of pipes accompanied his voice. Vapour began to spout from the holes in the casket, enveloping the head of the reclining woman in a dense white cloud. The atmosphere inside the room was already hazy. Now, it seemed to swirl like fog. The mist clung to the inside of the window-glass, making it more difficult to see what was going on. I might have been staring into a vast aquarium. The hooded lanterns reflecting on the tiled wall made everything appear green in colour, melancholy in aspect, and I had to strain to see Helena.
She stood up, leaning forward over the metal casket. Her back and shoulders were partly turned towards the doors. I could only see the narrowest sliver of her profile as she bent her head towards the face of the woman in the bath. The bather had not moved an inch since Helena arrived. Her head was still reclining backwards, her lips barely visible, white steam puffing out generously all around her neck. Her disembodied head appeared to be floating on a pillow of rolling clouds.
Helena sat down again. She did not turn towards the door. She did not call to us. Yet she could have had no better view of that woman’s face. I felt a sense of enormous release.
‘Helena has no idea who that woman is,’ I said, facing Lavedrine. ‘She may be Jewish. She may speak German. She may even have murdered her own children, but she is not Sybille Gottewald.’
He laid his hand on my arm. ‘Don’t be so certain. They are conversing!’
I pressed my nose against the glass, struggling to see through the gloom and the steam. The woman in the casket had raised her head a fraction, and turned a little in my wife’s direction. Was that why Helena had shifted? So that we might see the evidence?
‘It is hard to see anything,’ I murmured uncertainly.
‘Now Helena is talking with the woman,’ Lavedrine insisted.
I shifted position, but all I could see was a slender new moon of white forehead. Helena’s cheeks and mouth were concealed by the curtain of her curls, which had fallen loose, probably made heavier by the moist air in that room.
‘She has a generous heart,’ I said. ‘Her first instinct would be to comfort any woman in distress.’
Even so, I had my doubts. I looked once more. Despite what I saw, I felt compelled to deny it.
‘It is a mirage, Lavedrine. You are imagining . . .’
‘Helena would have come away,’ he insisted.
In my heart I knew it, too. What reason could there be to linger so long beside a stranger?
‘There! Did you see?’ he cried again.
Suddenly, Helena stood up, and came towards us.
Lavedrine pulled the door open. He placed his hand on the arm of her saturated cloak as my wife stepped out of the treatment room. Her pale face glowed like a lamp. Her eyes were wide, her lips trembling. She caught her breath and gasped. Moisture ran down her cheeks and nose in streams, her matted hair glistened with liquid pearls. She looked at me. One instant only, then away again, as if she did not know me.
‘Well?’ cried Lavedrine expectantly. ‘What did Frau Gottewald say?’
Helena turned to him. ‘Frau Gottewald?’ she murmured. ‘What fantasy has possessed you, sir? I have never seen that woman in my life before today.’
Lavedrine gasped. His eyes shone with barely contained rage. The muscles in his face were taut, as if he meant to force her to tell him what he wanted to hear. He grasped her by the shoulders. ‘I saw your lips moving, Helena. She spoke to you! In God’s name, what did she tell you?’
I bridled at this harshness, but Helena’s tongue was faster. ‘Your desire to lay your hands on a monster has poisoned your wits, sir,’ she replied sharply. She stared at him in silence, a tight smile tracing itself upon her lips. ‘I did not hear a word. Nor any sound, except hot water bubbling through the pipes of that infernal machine. And the snoring of the matron. They were both in such a state of catalepsy, I doubt either one of them could have pronounced her own name.’
She paused for an instant, then she shook her head.
Like Lavedrine, I was astonished. By what she said, and the way she said it. I, too, had seen them speaking. Yet, she denied it absolutely. Their lips had moved. They had spoken.
Lavedrine was lost. He could do no better than accuse. ‘But I saw you, Helena! We both saw you.’ He spun around, and appealed to me. ‘Hanno?’
The silence was as suffocating as the steam that filled the room beyond the glass.
‘I saw my wife inside that room,’ I said, like a child repeating his catechism. ‘She was leaning over a bathtub. Her shoulders were turned to me. I could not see her face. The air was thick with swirling vapours. Can I honestly say that I saw her speak? Can you? Can you swear that it was not the distorting convex of the glass, or the effect of those vapours in the atmosphere? I cannot, sir.’
I darted a glance at Helena.
Half hidden behind his shoulder, her face was an open book. Her stunned surprise was evident to me alone. That look, and the smile that followed it, might have been ample repayment for the uncertainty I had expressed, but she did not hold my gaze. She turned to Lavedrine, as if to gauge his reaction.
The Frenchman’s hand slipped from her shoulders.
‘As you wish, Helena,’ he murmured. ‘As you think best.’
In that instant, in that place, so far from home and our children, so distant from all that we held dear in life, after all the trials that the investigation of the massacre had heaped upon us, I felt a sense of renewed hope. I was reminded of our unity of spirit after Jena, as we hid out in the woods from the French. It was a magic cloak that wrapped around us both. It had shielded us from all that had happened since the fourteenth of October, 1806. I tried to catch my wife’s eye and share that emotion, but she bowed her head and looked away.
‘The Gottewald case is closed,’ I murmured.
Helena was quiet. Lavedrine seemed quashed.
‘Nothing can keep you here, I suppose,’ he said slowly. ‘And yet, I owe you both the same warm hospitality that you offered me. I have taken a house in Bialystok. If you would care to rest and be my guests . . .’
It was a hollow invitation, and I left Helena to answer it.
‘I would prefer to go home,’ she stated.
‘I must insist, Hanno,’ he said, turning to me. ‘It is getting late. You may have trouble boarding a coach. Better to leave in the morning.’
‘You take too much upon yourself,’ I replied, as one might reassure an old friend who is too insistently kind. ‘My wife has a cousin living in Lomza. We’ll be there before dark. How many years is it since we last saw Franziska?’ I turned to Helena, inviting her to share the little white lie. ‘She’ll put us up for a day or two, don’t you think?’
Helena did not answer me. Her eyes never shifted from Lavedrine’s face.
‘I am sorry to disappoint you, sir,’ she murmured.
He smiled uncertainly.
‘Sorry? Why should you be sorry for me? I’ll find another case to impress the Academy of the Sciences, though it may not be so intriguing as this one.’ Then, some thought wrinkled his brow, and he glanced at me. ‘Hanno is not so stricken, I think. Now, he will not be required to try the woman for the murder of her children. Nor walk beside the hangman to her cell door. It would be hard to live with such a burden.’
He was silent for a moment. ‘I do not blame you, Helena. If I could have you always
at my side, I would consider myself the most fortunate of men.’
She did not respond to this declaration. But I saw signs of agitation lurking in her manner. A dull red patch lit up each cheekbone.
‘What will become of her?’ she asked him.
‘She will remain here,’ he said. ‘They will take good care of her. One day, she may decide to tell her own story. Those images of children may be nothing more than damaged playing cards. Who knows?’
‘Please help her,’ Helena murmured, reaching out, touching his sleeve.
‘I will, I promise you,’ he replied quietly, offering her his arm. ‘But come, madame, unless you wish to miss that coach, you must let me see you to the door.’
Helena took his arm with an acquiescent nod, and they turned towards the door.
I was a yard behind them, still struggling to comprehend precisely what had occurred that afternoon, as they passed out into the corridor, and the door swung closed.
I pressed my face to the glass and looked into the bath-house.
The inmate was still imprisoned in the casket. Steam spouted up around her head, then suddenly disappeared as if the vapours had been sucked back down inside the tub. Did she realise, in that instant, that someone was observing her? She raised her head and stared hard at the window. Her eyes were large and brown. Her nose was straight. The chin was delicately pointed. Her hair, soaked by the steam, was a wild tangle of curls. She frowned, and her eyebrows met in a sudden upsweep, like the wings of a gull.
The similarity was stunning.
Helena had brought that woman to life, directing my charcoal point over Aaron Jacob’s rough approximation of a face. The woman that she had met while wandering alone outside Lotingen.
Before her head sank back against the pillow, a smile traced itself on Sybille Gottewald’s lips.
Then the Mesmeric vapours swallowed her up in a cloud.
44
THIRTY MILES FROM Lotingen, that journey became something more than listless staring out of the window at the monotonous white blanket of snow, the boundless dark forests, the frozen lakes of Milicz, huddling against the icy wind that raged and howled outside the carriage. My mind was dull, my sight blurred by the endless succession of peasant villages, each one identical, a church spire sprouting in the midst of miserable roofs of blackened thatch, like rotting hedgehogs. I had long since ceased to wonder what we would find at home, whether the children were well, how Lotte had managed without us.
Helena sat in the corner of the coach and seemed to study my face.
I could make no sense of her sullen, fixed expression. I was waiting for her to speak, waiting for her to tell me what was on her mind. But she did not. The silence was intolerable.
‘We will soon be home,’ I announced.
Perhaps it was the closeness of Lotingen. The end of the voyage was in sight. A line must be drawn, a closure made. If she would not broach the subject, then I must do it.
‘I saw her, Helena. I recognised Sybille Gottewald. As you portrayed her.’
She did not react immediately. She might have been waking up from a deep, dreamless sleep. She stretched her limbs like a cat. Her eyes opened wide and stared.
‘Why did you conceal her identity from Lavedrine? She murdered her children.’
‘Does the name Gubermann mean anything to you?’ she asked.
Mechanically, I began to answer. ‘I read it in . . .’
I stopped, and stared at her.
I knew that name. Lavedrine knew it. Bruno Gottewald had known it. But where had Helena heard it?
‘She told you, didn’t she?’
Helena’s eyes gleamed feverishly. I saw her naked soul reflected in them. I saw uncertainty, fright, the desire to share her knowledge at last.
‘We must talk now,’ she said quietly. ‘Otherwise, the Gottewalds will never let us be. They’ll haunt us like ghosts.’
She shifted from her place, and came to sit beside me on the bench. The coach lurched and she fell heavily against my shoulder. She did not pull away. She raised her hand and rested it lightly on my arm. Leaning closer, her mouth hovered close to my ear.
On the opposite bench, a stout elderly gentleman opened his eyes and nodded approvingly, as if he liked to see two young people, a man and his wife, exchanging tokens of affection. A moment later, he politely closed his eyes again.
‘She was not a figment of my fantasy,’ Helena whispered. ‘You thought that I’d invented her. That is why you never showed the sketch to Lavedrine. You feared that he would think what you had thought. That I had drawn myself, and that the drawing would reveal my own obsessions.’
What could I say? Helena had put into words the battle that had been raging in my breast for many days, and all the more since Bialystok.
‘Tell me what you know of the Gubermanns,’ she said again.
In my turn, I placed my lips close to her ear and began to whisper.
‘Gottewald mentioned the name in his letter. But I have no idea who they were, or what they might have meant to him,’ I admitted. ‘I suspected that there might be a connection between those people and something that had happened in a place called Korbern, when he was stationed in Marienburg. But what link could there possibly be with two Jews who had been murdered . . .’
I did not finish. Helena’s hands grasped mine. ‘You said that fear pushed Sybille Gottewald to do what she did,’ she whispered. ‘It was worse, Hanno. You never really thought that madness could drive a mother to commit such a crime, did you? Not madness alone . . .’
The words that Kant had written in his report about the von Mandel case came back to me. The same words Lavedrine had taken over for his own use. Kant’s conviction that love or affection could be more devastating than hatred. That the impulse to protect her offspring might push a mother to the extreme act. No man before him had ever dared to investigate such a crime.
‘She slit her children’s throats,’ I protested. ‘Was that atrocity less terrible than the punishment that she feared? What could be worse? What nameless fear . . .’
‘I can name that fear,’ she said. ‘It drove that woman out of her mind. Bruno Gottewald was whom she feared. Her own husband.’
I was too stunned to reply.
‘Samuel and Esther Gubermann were Bruno’s parents,’ she rushed on breathlessly. ‘He didn’t know the truth when Katowice ordered him to execute them. He obeyed without question, as he had always done. He was a Prussian soldier. He did what he was told, and he was promoted. But then came Jena. That battle changed the world for all of us, but the consequences were catastrophic in his case. He saw a glimmer of hope. He thought that he could be a soldier and a Jew. But Katowice was furious when he learnt that he had contacted the French. He called it a betrayal, and like a demon god, determined to destroy him. He told Bruno who those Jews in Korbern really were, knowing that the truth would crush him. But the knowledge that he had butchered his own parents was just the start of his punishment.’
I remembered what Katowice had told me.
Before I sent him out to die, before I set the hounds on him, I revealed to him how diabolical a creature he had become. Gottewald’s hell began on earth.
‘But why should Sybille be afraid of her own husband?’ I asked.
‘Just think what he was suggesting to her mind, Hanno! He sent her a letter. It was a warning. General Katowice could order Bruno to do anything. And he would! What greater sacrifice could that monster ask of his poor creature?’
Helena’s insights were so intense, I was blinded by them.
‘Could she believe such a thing? That Bruno would obey an order to murder his own wife and children?’ I protested.
Helena closed her eyes and nodded her head violently. ‘She did. Oh my God, Hanno, she did! He terrified the life out of her. That letter robbed her of her sanity.’
‘But he was dead by the time she read it! Dead!’
I must have shouted, because the stranger opened his eyes and stared at me.
What? An argument after so much tenderness? He closed his eyes again, resting his chin on his waistcoat, though I do not think that he was sleeping.
‘She lied to you,’ I hissed. ‘Her folly is greater than it appears . . .’
‘No one informed her of his death,’ Helena interrupted. ‘No one in Kamenetz bothered. She thought he was still alive. That he was coming for them, and would arrive at any moment.’
Again, the words of General Katowice seemed to deny what she had said.
I did not know that he was married until you came to Kamenetz.
‘But Gottewald was talking of the punishment that he himself would have to undergo.’
‘She didn’t know that,’ Helena insisted. ‘She didn’t know that he was dead until . . .’
‘Until you told her. In the bath-house.’
A deep sigh escaped from her lips. ‘You cannot imagine the relief on her face, Hanno. She need not fear him any more. She understood that he had never meant to sacrifice them. Her soul will never be free of responsibility for what she has done, but I gave her a grain of comfort. I broke a chip off the millstone hanging round her neck.’
I told her everything then. How I had glanced back as she and Lavedrine left the bath-house. I described the woman I had seen beyond the glass. The woman in the portrait. The woman who was so like Helena. Finally, I told her that I had seen that woman smile.
She gripped my arm with both her hands and hugged it.
‘Did you really see it, Hanno? Did you see her smile?’
Her face lit up for the first time since leaving Bialystok.
In that moment, I think, we both felt as though the sharing of that terrible knowledge had drawn us closer together than we had ever been before. It seemed to make us whole again.
The sky over Lotingen appeared brighter as we climbed down from the coach, the wind less piercing. Spring would not be long in coming. Even so, as I picked up the bag and we began to make our way home along the road, I realised how much had changed for ever. The warmth of the days to come, the rolling blue of the sun-blessed Baltic Sea, the shouts of the children as we sat on the sand and watched the boats and sailing ships, the joys of summer on the northernmost shore of Europe: these things would never ever be the same again.
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