Read Online Portrait of a Killer by Patricia Cornwell - Free Book Online Page A

house all day, then he had dinner, and afterward there was music and singing at home until 10:00 P.M. Monday, he walked to Gottorf, then “back across over the property/estates and the peat bog. . . .” Tuesday, he went by horse to Mugner’s, fished until 3:00 P.M. and caught “30 perch.” He visited with acquaintances at a pub. “Ate and drank” lunch. “Return at 11:00 P.M.”
    Oswald’s writings make it clear he hated authority, particularly police, and his angry, mocking words eerily portend Jack the Ripper’s own taunts to the police: “Catch me if you can,” the Ripper repeatedly wrote.
    â€œâ€”Hooray! The watchman is asleep!” wrote Walter Sickert’s father. “When you see him like that, you wouldn’t believe that he is a watchman. Shall I nudge him out of love for humanity and tell him what the bell has tolled [or what trouble he is in for] . . . . O no, let him slumber. Maybe he dreams that he has me, let him hold on to this illusion.”
    Oswald’s sentiments about authority must have been voiced within the walls of his home, and Walter could not have been oblivious to them. Nor could he or his mother have been unaware of Oswald’s frequent visits to beer gardens and pubs—to his being “plied with punch.”
    â€œI have boozed away the money,” Oswald wrote. “I owed that much to my stomach. I sleep during my leisure hours, of which I have plenty.”
    Whatever prompted his obsessive walks, frequent journeys, and regular patronage of pubs and beer gardens, they cost money. And Oswald could not earn a living. Without his wife’s money the family would not have survived. Perhaps it is no coincidence that in a Punch and Judy script Oswald wrote (probably in the early 1860s), the sadistic puppet-husband Punch is spending the family money on booze and cares nothing for his wife and infant son:
    Â 
    PUNCH APPEARS IN THE BOX:
    . . . Ah yes, I believe you don’t know me . . . my name is Punch. This also used to be my father’s name, and my grandfather’s, too.
    . . . I like nice clothes. I am married by the way.
    I have a wife and a child. But that doesn’t mean anything . . .
    WIFE (JUDY):
    No, I can’t stand this anymore! Even this early in the morning, this awful man has drunk brandy!
    . . . Oh, what an unhappy woman I am. All earnings are spent on spirits. I have no bread for the children—
    If Walter Sickert got his carelessness with money and his restlessness from his father, he got his charm and good looks from his mother. He may have been handed a few of her less attractive attributes as well. The story of Mrs. Sickert’s bizarre childhood has an uncanny resemblance to Charles Dickens’s Bleak House —Walter’s favorite novel. In that book, an orphan girl named Esther is mysteriously sent to live in the mansion of the kind and wealthy Mr. Jarndyce, who later wants to marry her.
    Born in 1830, Nelly was the illegitimate daughter of a beautiful Irish dancer who had no interest in being a mother. She neglected Nelly, she was a heavy drinker, and finally she ran off to Australia to get married when Nelly was twelve. It was at this juncture in Nelly’s life that she suddenly found herself in the guardianship of a wealthy anonymous bachelor who sent her to a school in Neuville-les-Dieppe, on the English Channel in northern France. Over the next six years, he wrote her affectionate letters he cryptically signed “R.”
    When Nelly turned eighteen and at last met her guardian, he revealed himself as Richard Sheepshanks, a former ordained priest turned much-acclaimed astronomer. He was witty and dashing—everything a young woman might conjure up in her dreams—and she was intelligent and very pretty. Sheepshanks spoiled Nelly and adored her even more than she adored him. He connected her with the right people and placed her in the proper settings. Soon she