There is a lot to be imagined when it comes to the lore of Bloodborne. The purpose of this illustration is to explore Lady Maria’s relationship to Gehrman (The First hunter), begging the question of what revenance she may have still showed him when she left.
On one hand, we see things through the eyes of Maria—someone who admired and looked up to Gehrman as her mentor when she studied under him upon joining the hunt, becoming his favourite and most beloved apprentice (to a point of obsession). At some point, Maria had left Gehrman, resulting in her involvement with the research hall and the “Fishing Hamlet incident” with the scholars of Byrgenwerth, where her morals as a hunter—the things she learned from her admired mentor--became terribly skewed and corrupt.
On another hand, we see the characteristics/actions of the Doll mirrored here in Maria as she kneels to St. Adeline’s chair with Gehrman’s hat, the same way the Doll kneels to the hunter and aids them in making them stronger. After Maria had left, Gehrman, in an attempt to fill the void left by her sudden disappearance, crafted the Doll who looks and sounds exactly like her.
In this illustration, Maria is placed in the research hall—one of the places of her corruption and where the values she learned from Gehrman began to falter. The chair of St. Adeline, while St. Adeline is not there, is representative of the wheelchair Gehrman sits in in the Hunter’s Dream.
The absence of St. Adeline begs the question of when this took place, or whether or not this is a time where The Hunter (you) did not arrive to the nightmare and St. Adeline was murdered by Maria in madness as her values and morals became corrupt.