Zachary Grey, Esmé Scarron and the big
anomaly
These two people are very different when it
comes to attributes such as age, generation, nationality, background and lifestyle yet they both have the power to remotely influence people, they both have a
similar bad effect on the girls they target and they both behave in much the same
way when faced with the loss of the girl. Once again, the similarities are
uncanny.
I described a big anomaly in Zachary Grey’s
life here. Sometimes his glamorous image disappears and he becomes lost
and frightened.
Scarron is much the same. He begins by
appearing mysterious, glamorous and charming, then he is shown to be sinister
and malevolent and finally he is seen as empty and pitiable.
Just as Zachary tells Vicky Austin that she is
all that stands between him and chaos and she is his reason to live, Scarron
begs Meg Lambert to help him and says that she is his only hope.
Describing this anomaly and making
connections is much easier than finding answers to the questions it raises:
If they are so superior and their lives are
so marvellous, why are they so desperate, why do they stake everything on one
outcome and why are they destroyed when they lose?
I have had some ideas about this, which will
appear in the next and final article in this series.
Another common element: symbolic dreams
Meg Lambert has a dream about Scarron similar
to the one that Polly O’Keefe has about Zachary Grey, which has been described in
detail in an earlier article.
Zachary was trapped in a huge spider’s web,
screaming as the spider approached him; Scarron was imprisoned too: he was chained
up in a cell. He was trying to capture a beautiful butterfly that floated just
out of reach.
It is likely that both downloaded a metaphor
for their inner state - their real selves, perhaps their actual souls, were
prisoners - via the psychic link that they had established with their targeted
victims.
Perhaps such transmissions work better at night, when the recipients
are asleep.
More about Scarron’s family’s revenge
Although Meg had said that she would love to
see a Venetian palazzo, Scarron does not repeat his offer to let her see around
his one when she visits Venice. He mentions repairs and water being pumped out
of the cellars.
This may be partly true, but the real reason
is that he is staying behind in Austria and he does not want her to encounter
his ex-wife and daughter, who often stay in Venice and might visit the palazzo.
His scheme fails; the two saboteurs arrive at
the palazzo soon after the Lamberts get there. Maybe the servants talked; maybe
Scarron told his ‘precious pair’ to stay away at a certain time and this gave
them ideas, similar to the way in which Ruth’s attempt to get Meg to forget
Scarron had the opposite effect.
Scarron is delayed; much of the damage has
already been done before he rushes in and he is unable to stop his family
making a few more fatal revelations. He tries to get them to go home, saying
that they must rest as they have been ill. If this is true, his treatment and the
decoctions he forces on them are probably responsible.
Two more crucial interventions
There are two more interventions here, that
of Scarron’s ex-wife and daughter and that of the inconsiderate traveller who
was responsible for Scarron’s late arrival.
The Scarron women are not there because they
want to help Meg. They probably despise the Lamberts for not being part of the
international jet set and for not wearing expensive Italian designer clothes. Their
intentions may have been malicious but the end result was beneficial - for the
Lamberts. This is the converse of Ruth’s intervention.
Scarron probably made the two women pay in
many ways for what they had done: Meg and her mother hear a scream of pain as
they hurry away from the palazzo.
As for the anonymous traveller who was
responsible for Scarron’s lateness, he too played a part in sabotaging
Scarron’s plans.
Scarron deserved all he got
There are many ‘what ifs’ in this case. There
are many possible permutations of the interventions or lack of them. In theory there
just might have been a combination, a magic formula, that would have given
Scarron the answer from Meg that he wanted.
As it was, Scarron’s failure to capture Meg
was the result of a mixture of arrogance, providence and possibly some karmic
retribution. An Austrian man and his wife had suffered terribly as a result of
Scarron’s betrayal, so it was fitting that Scarron should suffer because of
being betrayed by his family.
A slightly re-worded line from Rudyard Kipling’s
poem The Lesson is appropriate here:
“He has had a jolly good lesson and it served
him jolly well right.”
Some ideas still to come
Esmé Scarron’s sufferings and downfall can be
attributed to his bad behaviour, bad decisions, misplaced feelings of
superiority and lack of basic humanity. People with grudges and what seems like
pure chance are also involved.
His occult powers are also a factor; they
have a negative effect on him, his life and the people around him because he abuses
them.
The desperation he feels, the lost and empty
aspects of the above-mentioned big anomaly could well be the price he pays for
practising black magic.
The final article will concentrate on these metaphysical
aspects of the story.
