Eight

Imagine that a year has passed since Louise and Mattachich were incarcerated.

How has it passed for them?

Slowly.

How have they been affected by it?

Badly.

Should you speculate about whose misery was the greater during their captivity?

No. You might as well ask whether he or she was the more sensitive to suffering, and which of them had the greater capacity to endure it. Or how to define the relationship between endurance and sensitivity in each case. Such questions merely lead to other questions, none of which can be answered.

What is certain is that the physical conditions Mattachich had to live under in the gloomy, muddy, run-down military prison in Möllersdorf were incomparably harsher than anything Louise had to put up with. But did he suffer more than she did, for that reason or for any other…?

Credit them both with one remarkable achievement. In later years neither ever tried to claim a dismal precedence over the other in that regard.

On his arrival in Möllersdorf Mattachich was put into a dank cell, cold in winter, hot in summer, airless always. Except at mealtimes (twice a day, morning and evening, when he was led into the small eating hall for ex-officers) and during exercise periods (twice a day also, in thirty-minute stretches), and when he was detailed to do secretarial work in the prison offices, he sat in that cell. Coarse brick walls, a small shelf fixed to one of them, an equally small chest beneath the shelf, smooth cement floor, a fixed bunk, bedclothes, a bucket with a wooden lid, a barred window too high and too small to see out of. During the day the cell was half dark; during the night an oil-lamp hanging out of his reach was kept constantly alight. Once a week he was permitted to go to the prison canteen to buy additional food, ink, paper, soap and other such luxuries. On Sundays there were church services in the chapel, which he attended without believing a word of what was said or sung. On Sundays too, when they were on their way to and from the chapel, and most of the guards were off duty, the prisoners were allowed to dawdle about the courtyards into which the prison was divided. The yard that surrounded the chapel, prison offices, eating halls and kitchens was a spacious, paved affair, decorated with a few trees; the others, the one outside Mattachich’s cell included, were rutted, potholed and flanked by wretched buildings that could have been stables or cattle-byres rather than dwellings for humans. Except that the smell that came from the latrine block was darker and more noxious than that of any stable. Only meat-eaters could produce such a stink. Because Mattachich was an ex-officer he was permitted to employ another inmate, a former private soldier, to do his laundry and to scrub out his cell and bucket; this man also did deals on his behalf (cigarettes, illicit drink) among the captive rank and file in their cells in another yard on the far side of the complex.

Visitors were a rarity. His mother came once every three or four months, bringing with her the money he spent in the prison; Ozegovich somewhat less often. The latter’s visits he brazened out; his mother’s reduced him to tears, though he shed them only after she had left. He had no idea – he was never to know, since he never saw any record of how the investigation of his appeals had proceeded – that Ozegovich had given evidence against him during one such appeal. The other variations in his routine were the periodic, extra punishments inflicted on him by the ‘Auditor’ in passing sentence: deprivation of food on the fifteenth day of every month; sleeping on the cell floor with just his straw palliasse beneath him on the twenty-fifth of each month; worst of all, the full month of solitary confinement he had to endure bi-annually. He had been lucky to escape this on the day of his arrival (New Year’s Day) but was compelled to go through it the following July, when he was isolated during meals and took his exercise under a silent guard. During that month the Sunday chapel services were forbidden to him too.

And that was it. In theory anyway. In practice things were looser, or soon became so. His position in the prison was ambiguous from the moment he entered it. His trial may have been held behind closed doors, but it had not been possible for his conviction and sentence, together with the simultaneous dispatch of Louise to a madhouse, to be kept hidden from the press; and the radical and socialist newspapers had made headline news of it. Bachrach’s double-coup in separating a pair of lovers who had overcome everything that should have kept them apart (social class, national origin, marital status) had been turned by these papers into a political ‘issue’: they treated it as a romantic escapade that happened also to illustrate the callousness, cruelty and essential lawlessness of the Hapsburg household, ‘the Coburg clique’ in Vienna, and Louise’s infamous father. About the forgeries the left-wing press cared little. Compared with Leopold’s systematic pillage of the Congo, Louise’s so-called Verschwendungslust (‘spending mania’) was a trifle.

Then the papers forgot about them. But the immediate result of the kind of publicity given them was that on his arrival Mattachich had been greeted outside the prison by a crowd of curious, sympathetic onlookers. In Möllersdorf of all places! From then on, hagridden by a fear of further scandal, the authorities felt compelled to take special measures to make sure that this prisoner did not embarrass them further by trying to commit suicide. Hence the lamp kept burning all night in his cell; the irregular inspections made of him by day and night through the grating in his cell door; the strip-searches he was put through before and after seeing visitors. Hence also the rough treatment he received from some of the guards who were determined to let him know that they were not impressed by his ‘fame’. But there were others who were gratified to be in charge of such a distinguished prisoner and liked to believe that somehow, somewhere, he or his lady-friend had plenty of hidden money at their disposal. So who could tell what benefits might one day come to those who were obliging and helpful to him now?

Thus his consignment to such a run-down, rarely inspected institution turned out to be both a blessing and a curse for Mattachich. The filth and the forms of ill-discipline manifest everywhere – in a place that purported to be a military establishment – disgusted what he liked to think of as his soldierly soul. But could anything else be expected when prisoners, guards and the epauletted slovens who supposedly commanded them were all rejects, idlers, no-hopers, drunkards, human rubbish, and knew themselves to be so? The one exception was the deputy-head of the prison, a tall, handsome, large-headed Czech captain named Navratil, whose bearing was not like the others’ and who responded to Mattachich’s air of self-regard, his efforts to keep himself trim even in such surroundings. Navratil was always correct in his dealings with this prisoner; he showed none of the curiosity or prurience that Mattachich encountered elsewhere; yet the two men knew they had an understanding with one another. In some of his more vulnerable moments (and there were many of them) it made Mattachich feel breathless, even shaky, to hear the captain address him not by his surname but by the rank he had previously held: Herr Oberleutnant. That they should have been trapped in such a dead-end place, though for such different reasons, was a source of bitterness to them both; they never spoke of it but each showed it to the other through their eyes and the movements of their lips; they heard it in the tone of their exchanges. So Mattachich was grateful but not surprised to find himself, before many months were out, working more or less full time directly under Navratil in the prison office: an act of favouritism that was to have fateful consequences for Mattachich – and unfortunate ones for his benefactor.*

Finally, among everything else that tormented yet perversely helped to keep him going was his obsession with the unfairness of the trial that had condemned him. In his memoirs he presents himself as someone who had made up his mind to endure his imprisonment with a haughty stoicism, tempered only by concern for the welfare of his princess – and who then proceeded to do just that. In fact, from the start he showed up before the prison doctor with such a variety of ailments – head, stomach, heart, joints, eyes, lungs – that the doctor put him down in his notes as a hypochondriac and malingerer, while also remarking that what really ailed him was his ‘continual, sleep-destroying [schlafraubende] preoccupation with his trial and his attempts to overturn its verdict’.* Nor did Mattachich keep his complaints about the trial within the prison walls. Just days after arriving in Möllersdorf he was busy with a preposterous, long-winded statement for the Minister of War in Vienna in which he demanded that Prince Philipp be stripped of his sword and army rank by a ‘military court of honour’. The grounds put forward for this demand were that Philipp had behaved ‘like a blackguard’ (Schuft) towards the Princess Louise. ‘His [Philipp’s] feeling for his wife is that of a filthy animal…He would have done better to have married a cook rather than a king’s daughter…I insist that her royal highness’s companion, the Baroness Fugger, be summoned to give evidence on his scoundrelly behaviour…’†

That was his opening shot. Subsequently one elaborate appeal after another, addressed to a variety of destinations, emerged from the demi-darkness of Mattachich’s cell and was duly sent on its way. He wrote to the military court that had originally tried him in Agram; to a superior division of that court which also sat in Agram; to the civil judiciary in Vienna responsible for gathering the evidence that had been used against him in the trial; to the central appeal court of the imperial army; and to the Lord Marshal in the Hofburg – of whose part in the plotting of his arrest and trial he had no inkling. With the exception of the statement addressed to the War Minister, his appeals were not dismissed out of hand. Mindful of the prisoner’s special circumstances, the officials on whose desks they appeared gave them special attention. Evidence collected during the trial and subsequently was re-examined several times and a handful of further witnesses were called on different occasions to give their testimony. However, no lawyer was allowed to plead on the prisoner’s behalf (though one of Mattachich’s appeals had been devoted to that point alone), nor was he ever invited to put questions in any form to new or old witnesses. Ultimately all his labours led to nothing more than the discovery of yet more material unfavourable to his cause. Some of it was on paper (for example, various manifestly untruthful letters and telegrams he had sent at the height of the crisis to Stephanie, Leopold and Dora); some of it was given orally by people who took the opportunity to speak ill of him behind his back.*

After a year and more of this ‘sleep-robbing’ activity – which went on in silent or whispered fashion not just when he should have been asleep but while he was exercising, eating, excreting, sitting on his bunk, lying during punishment periods on his palliasse on the floor, and which was translated into the pencilled scribblings made in the darkness of his cell or unobserved at his desk in the prison office – Mattachich had exhausted all possible avenues of appeal. He had also exhausted himself. He had no notion that the harder he worked on his documents, the more hopeless the judges found them to be. To a lawyer’s eye nothing is less persuasive than frenzy mixed with an amateur’s notions of legal exactitude – and that was exactly the effect Mattachich achieved. In his case there was the additional element of the writer’s (apparently) paranoid conviction that he was the victim of a conspiracy that had involved the organs and office-holders of the state, from the lowest to the very highest, the king-emperor himself not excluded. Plainly, the man must be mad. So the officials did what they believed to be their duty by the case and turned with relief to other matters.

Rebuff, contempt, failure, frustration, exhaustion, a renewed sense of his helplessness before an unassailable bureaucracy, which was deaf and blind by nature to the pleas of a man trapped inside the battered walls of Möllersdorf prison: that was all the return Mattachich appeared to get from his efforts. Yet those same efforts also helped to make his captivity in some sense more tolerable to him than it might otherwise have been. How could this be? Well, try to imagine how he would have survived without his obsession! Yes, it robbed him of his sleep; cleaved his aching head into two halves with a space for vertigo between them; made his heart thrash in his breast, his stomach vomit back the food he ate. But it also gave him an occupation. It was his cause. Something to live for. It was a shield between himself and the people who surrounded him, in all their misery, imbecility and sudden outbursts of violence or hysteria. Compared with the intensity of what was going on in his mind, his fellow prisoners and their guards often seemed wraith-like to him, inconsequential, existing for no better reason than to babble and gesticulate and distract him from his task.

(Though in later years he would be surprised by how vividly he remembered some of them: the clothes they wore, the things they said, the inane grin of that one, the hobble-shuffle of this one in boots too big for him, the extraordinary habit another had of spitting not in gobs, as everyone else did, but in long jets like a cobra shooting out its venom, so that the front of each expectoration hit the ground before the last of it had left his lips. A thin man he was, with a thin moustache and something both pale and swarthy about his complexion, like a Sicilian or Maltese, thought Mattachich, who had never been to either island. And his fellow ex-officers! Kotze who had embezzled mess funds; Helfrich who had hauled shivering boy-recruits into his bed; Wahl who had sold army equipment on the side; the silent von Baalen who had discovered God in his second year of service and thereafter neither gave orders to anyone nor obeyed those given to him…)

No, better any distraction than allowing people like these to take over his consciousness. Nor was that all his persistence in fighting this hopeless campaign did for him. It produced changes deeper yet. The more elaborately he developed his arguments, the more anxiously he drafted and redrafted them, the further he looked about for authorities to appeal to and studied the law books that, as a great favour, were passed on to him at rare intervals, so the more blurred and uncertain became his memory of what had actually happened, of what he had done, of the crime – if it was a crime – he had committed so long ago. As days, weeks, months and years went by, his idées fixes erased whatever guilt or remorse he might have felt for the rashness that had actually landed him in this place and Louise in that place, for his memory of things as they had been was overtaken and eventually effaced by a fanatical logic that he could not have worked out beforehand and would never be able to undo subsequently.

It went like this. The trial that had found him guilty had been a mockery of how justice should be dispensed. That was indisputable. Therefore he was innocent.

It was as simple as that. It had to be so.

Convinced of his own innocence, he was now free to idolize Louise in an asexual, quasi-religious, Mary-like manner. Mother, virgin, princess, blameless woman, she had given up everything for him. She was suffering for him just as he suffered for her. But it tantalized him that he could not summon up her full presence before him; he could remember her in nothing more than snatches, glances, turns of the body, single features. Only in occasional dreams, and even then for instants only, did she become immediate to him, the weight and warmth of her, the sound of her voice uttering a single word, her stockinged instep in the palm of his hand.

When he was driven out of need and despair to coax pleasure out of himself, he made it a matter of honour to try to banish from his mind all images of Louise. For that abject necessity, other women would do; he could call on other half-remembered shadows. If only they were here, any of them!

Imagine lying awake in pain and discomfort, in the darkness, wondering how it is possible for a single night, a single hour, a single minute, to stretch itself out further and further while you are trying to live through it, as if it exists for one purpose only: to drain from you your understanding of what past, present and future mean. Imagine longing for day to break while knowing that it will bring nothing that is not already as familiar and exhausting to you as your own action in pulling up your blankets and throwing them off, again and again, in search of an unconsciousness that departs the moment it arrives. Or it seems to do so. Imagine dawn coming at last to reveal to you that the night filled with motionless time has already fallen into a black void, leaving nothing behind it, no memory of itself, nothing to mark it off from all the other nights exactly like those that preceded it and those still to come.

Nothing has changed. Time does not pass in this place. It cannot pass for it has nowhere to go. It exists only to prolong itself. It makes itself known on these terms only to prisoners – mad or sane, guilty or innocent – and the very ill.

In one asylum after another Louise found herself living in small, holiday-like villas (‘station-masters’ houses’ she called them) with steep, slate-tiled roofs, little gables, wooden eaves and shutters, a kitchen at the back and a garden of some kind in front. Set among trees and overlooking an unpaved roadway, each offered glimpses of the institution’s main building, the smaller structures surrounding it, and high, encircling walls of stone or brick, usually with a triangular coping running along their top.

Louise’s household consisted of herself, a lady-companion, Maria von Gebauer, and Olga Börner, her live-in maidservant. A female cook came in daily and a male servant worked on alternate days about the house and garden. Philipp never visited her at any of these places, but he met all the costs of her residence, and paid for whatever special treatments were administered to the patient. These varied according to the beliefs of those appointed to look after her: hydrotherapy in one; electric shocks (milder than those administered to patients twenty years later) in another; cranial massage here; a diet consisting mostly of milk and finely milled raw root vegetables there. To people tactless enough to ask Philipp about Louise’s welfare he invariably pointed out – his voice rising in pitch, his eyes shining with injury behind his glasses – that he was doing far more for her than that miserable, miserly father of hers, who took care never to go near her and did not contribute a penny towards her upkeep. Her mother, Marie Henriette, kept away too, but whether by her own choice or because she was compelled to by her husband, Philipp did not know. Princess Stephanie was another who had made no move in her direction. And Dora? Ditto.

In short, doctors and officials aside, no one ever called on Louise. No one wrote to her; or if they did she never received their letters. So what did she do with herself? Daydreams. Indolence. Bouts of frenzy. She returned to the habit, which had partly slipped away from her while she had wandered about Europe with Mattachich, of holding long conversations with herself: extensive re-enactments and revisions of scenes that had taken place with others, or that she wished had taken place, or wished to believe would yet take place. New scenes from a week ago, old scenes from her childhood, scenes magically opening with someone familiar walking through the trees to meet her: in all of them she took the leading part and emerged triumphant, sometimes pityingly or forgivingly so, more often scornful and vindicated, her rights as daughter or wife, princess or lover, fully acknowledged at last. Her rights as a patient too, often enough.

These reconstructions of her own history as she wished it to have been or of a future she hoped to see alternated with spells of vacancy and inertia or sudden enthusiasms. She took up learning languages, painting and drawing, botanizing among the plants and trees that grew in the grounds around her, singing lessons, cutting pictures from those newspapers she was allowed to see and pasting them into albums. Each fad was abandoned as abruptly as it was begun, though some would return later. She wrote long letters to members of her family, friends and servants from the old days, as well as to the editors of newspapers. In these she always demanded justice for herself and the imprisoned count. She gave them to her companions to post when they left the asylum grounds; they turned them over instead to the management, which made sure that not one of them ever reached its destination. She read novels and some poetry, and tried to write poetry of her own in both French and German, but was never satisfied with the results.

Fortunately for her, and for them, she had usually managed to get on well with the women who had attended to her from childhood on, and this knack did not leave her now. They talked together, knitted, did bits of embroidery and tapestry; when the impulse took her she told them about her childhood and her children, divulged intimate details of her married life and her adventures outside marriage (Mattachich’s wonderful qualities of mind and soul being a favourite topic). She came out with memories of her horses, dogs, the underside of life in the Hofburg. She did not care what she revealed at these times and what kind of language she used.* In return she expected an equal degree of candour from her interlocutors, and believed she got it. Which was seldom the case.

Not that either of her confidantes had much to confess. Each was of different social background from the other: von Gebauer being obviously of aristocratic descent, which Börner was not, yet they were also alike in many ways: plain, raw-boned, devout, unmarried, almost conventual in manner. They learned to cope with her outbursts of anger and malice, and her collapses into a surly apathy – though never with the refusal to wash that she would periodically announce and then adhere to for days on end: until she stank, simply. Then professionals from the medical staff would come to narcotize her and wash her down limb by limb, crevice by crevice, from her scurfy scalp to the grubby soles of her feet. Other spells of non-cooperation, some of them taking madder forms than others, gave them almost as much difficulty. Overeating. Not eating. Cutting the buttons off the many dresses she kept in suitcases (and never wore) and storing them inside the many shoes she also never wore. Concealing (after use) the sanitary cloths she needed only at irregular intervals now. Swallowing sand or coal-ash or leaves she plucked at random from whatever plants she could get her hands on. Sucking paint from her brushes.

She was crazy, you see. Her first admission to the asylum may have been ‘voluntary’, but her confinement had been made official since then, and she knew it. Therefore she was licensed to behave as extravagantly as she pleased whenever she felt like it. Overwhelmed by boredom, claustrophobia and the need to strike back at her gaolers, she would let them know from time to time just how mad she could be.

The definitive and final declaration that Louise was insane – for which Bachrach and Philipp had been impatiently waiting – came from Baron Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902), head of the department of psychiatry at the University of Vienna. Thick-set, with a heavy beard, strong shoulders and a firm line in high-buttoned waistcoats, the professor had the direct, unsmiling gaze of a man who had heard everything and whom nothing, therefore, would ever surprise. He had the voice to go with this degree of confidence too: not the booming baritone that a less self-assured and successful medicine man might adopt but its direct opposite – something soft and husky, a voice you had to attend to if you wanted to hear what was being communicated to you.

He knew, you see, how much you would lose if you didn’t attend to him. Was he not the world’s greatest authority on the twin subjects of madness and sexuality? The propagator if not the inventor of terms like ‘sadism’, ‘masochism’, ‘fetishism’, ‘the twilight state’ and various others that he had seen pass into common speech? Was not his Psychopathia Sexualis: A Forensic-Clinical Study – an immense compilation of case histories that had gone through edition after edition in the twelve years since it had first appeared – consulted and referred to in clinics and courtrooms all over the world? Had he not developed a theory of ‘moral degeneration’ that explained the aetiology of almost all nervous diseases and sexual compulsions? Was it not clear now to every worker in the field that these were the consequences of a ‘degeneration’ which some victims of hereditary weakness could not resist and which others, who were merely ‘perverse’, could have resisted, had they so chosen?

This was the distinguished person whom the Lord Marshal’s office in Vienna called on to draw up the third report it had requested on Louise’s mental condition since she had been transferred from the asylum in Döbling to the one in Purkersdorf. The first of the Purkersdorf reports had given examples of her erratic behaviour and referred to her ‘incapacity for self-criticism’; the second had spoken of her ‘need for the protection of the law…in view of her psychological infirmities’. Neither of these conclusions was decisive enough to satisfy Philipp or the Lord Marshal himself, acting on behalf of the Hofburg, which wanted this case doubly locked and bolted. The Lord Marshal did not exactly say so of course, but his wishes were understood.

So the Baron Dr von Krafft-Ebing obliged. So, in her own way, did Louise. She was used to inspections by visiting doctors and knew the kind of questioning they would subject her to. Far from being intimidated by the arrival of yet another of the breed (his name meant nothing to her), she was offended by his air of command and the display of excessive respect shown by those around him – the institution’s director not least. She was the royal princess; she was entitled to whatever show of deference was going; she was the most important person in any room she would ever share with this man. Also his beard had an unfortunate resemblance to Philipp’s, which confused and angered her. The longer the interview went on the more uncertain she became as to whether or not she was speaking to Philipp, as she so often did in her dramatic monologues. If it was Philipp, why had he taken off his glasses? Was it to fool her? ‘Speak up, man!’ she shouted at him when he asked her one of his particularly husky, intimately self-assured questions, and the others in the room quailed, not because they were afraid of her but because they knew that this was no way to speak to such a distinguished scientist.

Nor was that all. She sulked, she swore, she told Krafft-Ebing several times he would never have dared to ask such questions of her if Count Mattachich had been present. ‘But then he’s an honest man. He would defend me against such infamy. Whereas you – people like you…I know what you’re capable of…’ And she insultingly rubbed her thumb and forefinger together in front of his face, to remind him that he was being paid for his services. If he was really a doctor, that is, and not Philipp in a poor disguise.

Krafft-Ebing refused to allow himself to be disturbed by this behaviour. Why should he, after all his experience with mentally afflicted people? Besides he knew he could – and would – sink her with the report he was going to write.

‘The lady completely lacks insight into the events of the past, has a false apprehension of her present situation and no grasp of the future…She sees herself as a pure and aristocratic woman who could resume her place in Viennese society, were she to resign herself to consorting once again with her husband. Her relationship with Mattachich she regards as noble and beautiful, notwithstanding the efforts of others motivated by envy and spite to drag it into the mud…She dreams of disguising herself in men’s clothing and of raiding his prison and freeing him…Of the ruin she has inflicted on her husband and of the decay in her own social and moral position she has no understanding whatever…The princess suffers from psychological weakness and a striking diminution of the higher mental faculties (logic, willpower, ethical standards)…Scientifically speaking, her condition may be described generally as an acquired feeble-mindedness. Having fallen under the spell of an unworthy man, she has subjected her will entirely to his suggestions, is indifferent to her high social position and to the values of marriage and motherhood, and wanders around the world with her adventurer seeking – by means of moral degeneracy, financial ruin and unworthy company – to destroy her marriage.’

Strong stuff. Just what was wanted. It took no time at all for an official declaration to follow the delivery of the great doctor’s report:

Declaration of Guardianship: The Lord Marshal hereby makes it known that owing to weakness of mind, HRH the Princess Louise of Saxe-Coburg, born as Princess of Belgium, has been placed under the guardianship of Dr Carl Ritter von Feistmantel, advocate and officer of the court.*

And that was it: her permanent ‘incapacitation’, as Philipp described it in a letter to a member of his family, had at last been achieved. Just what he had wanted. No provisional, six-months-at-a-time limitation on Louise’s freedom was in question here. Thank God.

That was Philipp’s first reaction. His second was to try once again to get Leopold to take over responsibility for his daughter. Now that she had officially been declared a half-wit, surely the king of the Belgians and king-emperor of the Congo Free State would feel under an obligation to provide for her upkeep? It wasn’t as though she would ever again be able to run around the world spending his money (or her husband’s) and generally disgracing herself and the families she was connected with.

Leopold, however, remained unresponsive. He had better things to do with his money than to throw away even a tiny part of it on such a creature – especially now she could no longer do him any harm. So Philipp decided to ship her out of Austria-Hungary to an institution in Coswig, near Dresden, Germany, which would at least put her at a greater distance from himself than before.†

Louise never read that ‘Declaration of Guardianship’. The women in her household, who knew their orders, were careful to keep away from her all books and papers that had not been vetted by the management of the asylum. But one of the brown-smocked attendants who worked in another part of the asylum passed on to her news of the declaration. Toughened by the years he had spent in the company of the lost souls around him, this man did not hide the fact that it was in effect a life-sentence. An edict issued in this manner by the Lord Marshal could be rescinded only by his own office. There was no authority beyond it, in its dealings with those of royal rank, and it was not in the habit of changing its mind.

For Louise the one immediate consequence of the issuing of the declaration was that doctors from outside ceased coming to see her. However, lawyers continued to do so from time to time; and she knew why. On the one hand she was mad; therefore her evidence was worthless and could not be used in court. On the other hand Mattachich’s attempts to reopen his case encouraged the authorities to lead her repeatedly through everything she had said during their earlier inquiries. Their hope was that she would let something slip that would implicate Mattachich in previously undiscovered criminal acts. Then they would be able to lay further charges against him and sentence him to another term in prison. And another one after that, if possible. Their master wanted to see him banished as irrevocably from the world as she herself was. But she was not so mad as to be incapable of smelling the intention on them.

Would she really remain behind walls for the rest of her life? In some of her lowest yet most clear-sighted moments she saw herself joining the walks taken by all the other unfortunates who were led daily, ward by ward, around the asylum. She saw them out of the windows of her house or when she herself went out for a walk with Marie or Olga. She imagined herself as just one more old woman among the rest, in clothes just as old as theirs, making gestures as dislocated as theirs, shouting at the sky or at their brown-jacketed guards, or weeping incessantly, as they did. If she had any hope of escaping this fate it lay solely with Mattachich, whom she thought of in quasi-magical terms: he was her champion, her saviour, her Roland, her Lancelot. And these miserable lawyers expected her to betray him! Sometimes when they came to see her she simply retired to her bedroom and refused to come out of it; at other times, even more disconcertingly for them, she came into the room where they were waiting for her, seized a chair, turned its back towards them, fixed her eyes on the ceiling and remained silent until they surrendered and left.

When she did on rare occasions open up it was only to repeat what she had said many times before. No, she had no idea who had forged her sister’s signature. She could not recall the specific content of the documents issued by Reicher and Spitzer, but was certain that when they had left her hand they had carried one signature only: hers. That’s how it always was. Count Mattachich put papers of all kinds before her, she signed them, he folded them, messengers took them away. She had given him full authority in all matters to do with her business affairs. She had ‘boundless faith’ in his integrity and fidelity. Yes, there could have been someone in her ‘surroundings’ who had been scheming against her and the count and had tried to get them into trouble. Philipp’s agents, perhaps. Or thieves in her own employ. Of such people she could not speak. But for the brave, true Count Mattachich, her sole defender, the only honest man in her service, the last honest man in the empire, she would speak up on oath before any court in the world. But they would never let her do it. They would never give her the chance. Not as long as Philipp and Bachrach and the almighty emperor, a man with a stone for a heart and a stone for a brain, wanted him kept in gaol.

When once or twice it was hinted to her that her ‘circumstances’ might be ‘reconsidered’ if she were to ‘cooperate’ with her visitors, she responded by squaring her shoulders, raising her head and voice, and making a declaration of her own. They could go to hell. She had been betrayed by everyone: her father, her husband, her sister and daughter who never came to see her, even her mother. But never by the count. And now people come creeping around her like rats – like rats! – expecting her to betray him…

So they gave up. The woman was mad. Therefore, best left alone, just where she was.

It was from his mother that Mattachich heard about the ‘guardianship’ imposed on Louise. ‘They want her to die there,’ he said, dry-eyed, and his mother nodded. She had not been to see him for several months. His voice was listless; his face was lined and dry-looking; he had lost weight.

‘The woman doesn’t deserve it,’ his mother said. ‘I thought she was a weak creature, but this – ?’

They remained silent, her eyes searching his, as if hoping to find something in them she had not seen there before. But they were lifeless. The room they were in was chilly and bare: a wooden table, two chairs, grubby walls, a coarse plaster ceiling and a coarse plank floor, a full-bellied guard seated in a corner, enjoying the eavesdropping that was one of his official duties. If their voices dropped too low for him to hear what they were saying he would emit just one word.

‘Louder!’

Mother and son sat with their hands flat on the table, his on top of hers. Both felt that the meeting of their hands created the only warm spot in the room. He had told her about the failure of the last of his appeals. There was nowhere for him to go now. It was all finished.

‘You mustn’t give up,’ the countess said.

He answered after a dead pause: ‘I have.’

He breathed in and out a few times, responding not at all to the protective gesture she made; just readying himself for the effort to say more. ‘We’re in the same position, me and her…She’s there until she dies and so am I – here. I won’t last out three more years of this. I know it. I’ve done everything I could to make them listen…’ One finger lifted from her hand and came down on it again. ‘But nothing works. I’ve failed. Failed. Failed. It’s over.’

There was no anger in his voice; only apathy. He spoke as if at a distance from his own words. They sat in silence, moisture filming her steady blue eyes. His remained expressionless, extinguished.

‘You don’t have to come to see me, Mother. You see what I am. It’s not going to get better. I did what I wanted to do and this is where it’s brought me. There’s nothing more to say.’

She pulled her hands away from his and was suddenly whispering fiercely at him. ‘Yes, there is. Tell them that she’s the one who’s guilty! Tell them she did it! She’s finished. They’ve got her. There’s nothing to lose. Tell them you knew all about it, and couldn’t speak before, to protect her. But now –’

Belly and all, the guard bestirred himself in his corner.

‘Louder!’

‘Do it!’ she said. ‘You can’t make things worse for her than they are now.’

The guard was on his feet.

‘Louder! Louder!’

She turned to look at him, giving him the benefit of her flat, contemptuous gaze. Her voice just a tone louder and looking directly at the guard, as though he were the one she was talking to, even the one she had come to visit, she went on, ‘I’ve always thought she was to blame and you were protecting her, like a brave, stupid man of honour. Well, I’m your mother, and I tell you I’m not interested in my honour or in yours. If you would only blame her and be done with it you might – you might – free yourself from all this…’

Directing her words at him, she had silenced the bewildered, hovering guard. Now she turned her head to look at her son. ‘There’s no point in it for them either. Why should they keep you here? She’s safe from you and you’re safe from her. So do it, Géza! Do it!’

She bent down to pick up her handbag from the floor, opened it, took out a handkerchief and blew her nose. Mattachich watched her pale hands returning the handkerchief to its place and closing the bag.

‘No,’ he said when she sat still again. ‘I won’t shame her. Never. And it won’t work.’

She made a move to get up but subsided. Neither spoke. Minutes passed before he broke the silence. It was the first remark he had volunteered since he had been escorted to the room. He told her that he was still carrying out his clerical work in the administrative offices. It got him out of his cell for a few hours every day. But it would never see him through another three years of this. He also told her, even more distantly than before, but unable to keep from her this new element in his life, that he had discovered a place in one of the yards where the buildings and walls disappeared completely if he put his head back as far as it could go and stared straight upwards. That’s where he now went during exercise periods. That’s what he did. He simply stood there, gazing at the sky. It always looked peaceful, like a dome, even when clouds were chasing one another, or when rain fell from it, or when black flakes of snow wandered about in it until they reached a point where they suddenly turned white. When the sky was all blue there were other squirming, transparent shapes up there to look at. He would try to focus on them, but they would never keep still, they would never let him do it. He knew they were just flaws in his own vision that he would never catch and that would never go away.

Neither he nor Louise nor the Countess Keglevich had any idea that help was at hand. In their most wishful dreams they could not have imagined from what quarter it would come. Or the manner in which it would reveal itself. Or what the consequences would be.