Free Portrait of a Killer by Patricia Cornwell Page A

disturbed, violent, and morbid, a mind that takes delight in conjuring up a cauldron of men being boiled alive and demonic characters with long, pointed faces, tails, and evil smiles. A favorite theme is that of soldiers storming castles and battling one another. A knight abducts a buxom maiden and rides off with her as she pleads not to be raped or murdered or both. Sickert could have been describing his own juvenilia when he described an etching made by Karel du Jardin in 1652: It is, he said, a ghastly scene of a “cavalier” on horseback pausing to look at a “stripped” and “hacked” up “corpse,” while troops “with spears and pennants” ride off in the distance.
    The most violent amateurish drawing in this collection depicts a bosomy woman in a low-cut dress sitting in a chair, her hands bound behind her, her head thrown back as a right-handed man plunges a knife into the center of her chest at the level of her sternum. She has additional wounds on the left side of her chest, a wound on the left side of her neck—where the carotid artery would be—and possibly a wound below her left eye. Her killer’s only facial feature is a slight smile, and he is dressed in a suit. Opposite this sketch, on the same scrap of rectangular paper, there is a crouching, frightening-looking man who is about to spring on a woman dressed in long skirt, shawl, and bonnet.
    While I have found no hint that Oswald Sickert was sexually violent, he could be mean-spirited and stony. His favorite target was his daughter. Helena’s fear of him was so great that she would tremble in his presence. He showed not a whit of sympathy for her while she was bedridden with rheumatic fever for two years. When she recovered at age seven, she was very weak and had poor control of her legs. She dreaded it when her father began forcing her to take walks with him. During these outings, he never spoke. To her, his silence was more frightening than his harsh words.
    When she awkwardly ran to keep up with his relentless pace, or if she clumsily bumped into him, “he would,” Helena wrote, “then silently take me by the shoulder and silently turn me into the opposite direction, where I was apt to run into the wall or gutter.” Her mother never intervened on her behalf. Nelly preferred her “pretty little fellows” with their fair hair and sailor suits to her homely, redheaded daughter.
    Walter was by far the prettiest of the fair little fellows and the “cleverest.” He usually got his way through manipulation, deception, or charm. He was the leader, and other children did what he demanded, even if Walter’s “games” were unfair or unpleasant. When playing chess, he thought nothing of changing the rules as it suited him, such as making it possible to check the king without consequences. When Walter was a bit older, after the family had moved to England in 1868, he began recruiting friends and siblings to play scenes from Shakespeare, and some of his stage direction was nasty and degrading. In an unpublished draft of Helena’s memoirs, she recalled:
    I must have been a child when [Walter] roped us in to rehearse the three witches to his Macbeth in a disused quarry near Newquay, which innocently I thought was really called “The Pit of Achaeron.” Here he drilled us very severely. I was made (being appropriately thin and red-haired) to discard my dress & shoes & stockings, in order to brood over the witches cauldron, or stride around it, regardless of thorns and sharp stones, in my eyes the acrid smoke of scorching seaweed.
    This account as well as other telling ones were softened or deleted by the time Helena’s memoirs were published, and were it not for a six-page handwritten remnant that was donated to the National Art Library of the Victoria and Albert Museum, little would be known about Walter’s youthful tendencies. I suspect that much has been