Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol: A Mystery (24 page)

He could retreat no farther. He was squatting on all fours, squeezed between bags of peat, backed up against a wall of filthy sacking, his head jutting towards me. I reached out to touch his shoulder. ‘Tom,’ I said. His terror was palpable. He flinched as my hand reached towards him and threw up his arm to ward me off. As he did so, he tumbled forward and his cap fell to the ground. It was not Tom. It was the dwarf.

‘It’s you,’ I gasped.

Still he said nothing.

‘Joseph Smith.’ I pulled off my cap. ‘We occupy adjacent cells. I am Oscar Wilde.’

He looked up at me with terror in his eyes, cowering like a cornered animal.

‘I will not harm you, but it’s not safe here. A warder comes to lock the hut at night. They’ll find you. You’ll be beaten.’

‘I have been beaten before,’ he said. He spoke in a husky whisper. His eyes did not leave mine.

‘That was in Warder Braddle’s time,’ I said.

‘He’s dead,’ he rasped.

‘Yes, you are safe from him now.’

‘I would not pleasure him,’ he whispered. ‘I would rather die.’

‘He is dead now,’ I said.

He held me with his haunting, haunted eyes. ‘I know.’

‘Are you on shot-drill?’ I asked. ‘Are you in the next yard breaking stones? You’ve been excused to use the latrines – is that it? Is it?’ He would not answer. ‘You can’t escape,’ I counselled him. ‘You’d best go back.’ He said nothing more, but stared at me, fixedly, silently. I recognised fury as much as fear in his fierce gaze.

I picked up my gloves and trug and left him there. As I reached the corner of the vegetable garden, by the archway leading towards to the main exercise yard, I turned back and saw him running along the path away from me, like a goblin in a fairy tale.

A week later he was taken to the landing on Ward B, strapped to the punishment block, and given a dozen strokes of the cat-o’-nine-tails. It was on the same day that we were told at chapel of the death of Prisoner C.3.1.

The flogging of the dwarf took place before supper, at the end of the working day. From my cell on C Ward I could not hear the crack of the flail, but I did hear the distant sounds of the little man shrieking in agony.

I sat at my table, gazing at my book without taking in a word. I listened out for my neighbour’s return. He did not come. Instead, about half an hour after the beating, I heard brisk footsteps striding along the gantry. My cell door was thrown open – there was a new turnkey on duty determined to do nothing by halves. ‘Stand up, prisoner. Surgeon to see you.’

Dr Maurice stepped into my cell. ‘I have come to syringe your ears,’ he said.

I stood looking at him. His face was flushed. His temples shone with sweat. ‘Are you familiar with Dante’s
Inferno
?’ I asked, turning to him, my book in hand. ‘
Considerate la vostra semenza: fatti non foste a viver come bruti, ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.
’

‘Italian is not my
forte
,’ he said, offering me a smile. He put down his bag on my table.

‘“Consider the seed you spring from: you were not born to live as a brute, but to be a follower of virtue and knowledge.”’

‘What’s this about?’ he asked, widening his eyes.

‘You have just come from the flogging of that wretched dwarf,’ I cried.

‘I attended the punishment, yes. With the governor. I did my duty.’

‘You are a
physician
, Doctor, a
healer
. How can you do your duty here?’

‘You forget yourself, C.3.3.,’ he said quietly.

‘Perhaps I do,’ I said. ‘The present prison system seems almost to have for its aim the wrecking and destruction of the mental faculties. Deprived of human intercourse, isolated from every humane and humanising influence, condemned to eternal silence, robbed of all contact with the outside world, treated like an unintelligent animal, brutalised below the level of any of the brute creation, the man confined in an English prison can hardly escape becoming insane.’

‘If you have finished your tirade, take a seat and let me examine your ear.’ The doctor spoke coolly, but without rancour. ‘You should not say these things. You should remember where you are – and with whom.’

I sat in silence and let my head fall towards my left shoulder. The surgeon produced a small metal dish from his bag. ‘Hold this under your ear,’ he instructed. ‘The tip of the syringe will be cold, I warn you, and you will feel a strange sensation in your middle ear – like rushing water. And there will be some pain, I fear. But to a purpose.’

‘Thank you, Doctor,’ I murmured, doing as I was told. ‘Was the dwarf’s punishment to a purpose, I wonder?’

‘Yes,’ said Dr Maurice, simply. ‘The prisoner had attempted to escape. He had done so before.’

‘To escape from Warder Braddle,’ I said, flinching as the doctor pressed the cold syringe into my ear.

‘Warder Braddle is dead. That’s no excuse. There is no excuse. Last time this happened C.3.4. was given three days in the dark cell on bread and water.’

‘To what effect?’

‘To no effect. So the beating was inevitable. He is a recalcitrant.’

‘He is a dwarf, Doctor.’

‘Indeed. And that is why I brought the beating to a halt. After eight strokes.’

‘What happened?’

‘He became unconscious. They had used the wrong cat-o’-nine-tails on him. They had prepared a four-footer. Strictly correct according to the regulations – the prisoner is over sixteen – but wrong in this instance. C.3.4. is no bigger than a child. He’s in the infirmary now. I trust he will have learnt his lesson.’

‘If he lives.’ I flinched again as the steel point of the syringe penetrated deeper.

‘He’ll live,’ said the surgeon, looking over me.

‘Who administered the punishment?’ I asked.

‘Warder Stokes. It was his first time with the cat.’

‘And he wanted to impress the new governor, no doubt.’

‘No doubt.’ A Niagara of sound suddenly engulfed my head. I cried out more in surprise than pain.

‘Nearly done,’ said the doctor, lightly, ‘and clearly necessary. There may be some bleeding after this, but it will be superficial.’

I closed my eyes, not inclined to see what horrors the surgeon was extracting from my middle ear. ‘Poor Warder Stokes,’ I went on, talking to distract myself. ‘He seems to be losing his charges one by one. C.3.5. is gone, C.3.1. is dead, C.3.4. has been beaten to a pulp. Shall I be next, do you think, Doctor? Or will it be Private Luck, next door?’

‘C.3.4. has not been beaten to a pulp,’ said the surgeon sternly, removing the syringe and emptying its vile contents into the metal tray. ‘He will recover in a day or two.’

‘What killed C.3.1.?’ I asked, my eyes still closed.

‘He died of old age and emphysema. There is no mystery there.’

‘And what killed Warder Braddle?’

‘A broken neck and a broken back. The fall killed him. That’s not in doubt.’

The surgeon took the metal tray from me and went to the corner of the cell to empty its contents into my slop bucket. I opened my eyes. ‘And the blisters on his face?’ I enquired. ‘What do the blisters tell us?’

‘I am not sure,’ he answered. He returned to the table and wrapped his syringe in a flannel cloth. ‘Do you have something with which to mop your ear?’ he asked.

I smiled. ‘We are in Reading Gaol, Doctor. We get our meals served to us in our cells, with a certain style, but we get no linen napkins, alas.’ He took the handkerchief from his breast pocket and gave it to me. ‘Thank you,’ I said. I held the handkerchief to my ear. The surgeon closed his bag. ‘When you are called to give evidence in the trial of Sebastian Atitis-Snake,’ I asked, ‘what will you say, Doctor?’

‘Say?’

‘Say about how Warder Braddle died.’

‘I shall say that it was the fall from the gantry that killed him. That’s the truth, pure and simple.’

‘The truth . . .’ I began, but my ear ached and I had not the spirit to continue.

‘I am done,’ said Dr Maurice.

19
Secrets

F
or the last several months of my time in Reading Gaol, I knew myself to be in contact with a new spirit working in the prison – a spirit that helped me beyond any possibility of expression in words. For the first year of my imprisonment I did nothing but wring my hands in impotent despair, and say, ‘What an ending, what an appalling ending!’ Now, with the death of Warder Braddle and the arrival of Major Nelson, I would try to say to myself and (when not torturing myself, or not being tortured by the taunts of Private Luck) would really and sincerely say, ‘What a beginning, what a wonderful beginning! It may really be so . . . It may become so . . . If it does I shall owe much to this new personality that has altered every man’s life in this place.’

If I had been released when I had first petitioned the Home Secretary, I would have left Reading Gaol loathing it and every official in it with a bitterness of hatred that would have poisoned my life. But I had a year longer of imprisonment to endure and in that year I discovered a new humanity inside the prison alongside us all.

The English prison style is absolutely and entirely wrong. I would give anything to be able to alter it. But there is nothing in the world so wrong but that the spirit of humanity, which is the spirit of love, the spirit of the Christ who is not in churches, may make it, if not right, at least possible to be borne without too much bitterness of heart.

I recall how once, many years ago, as an undergraduate at university, I was required to fill in a census paper. I gave my age as nineteen, my profession as genius and my infirmity as talent. I thought myself vastly amusing. And, no doubt, in my way, I was. But then, at Oxford, so free and young, I knew nothing. It took imprisonment in middle age for me to learn the simple truth that kindness is all.

I shall always remember the individual acts of kindness done to me in Reading Gaol. The afternoon when the prison surgeon gave me his own handkerchief to hold against my ear. The morning when the wardress with the lovely face (whose name I never knew) passed by me in the garden and smiled and went on her way, only to return a moment later to say, simply, ‘My mother has your book of fairy stories. It is her favourite book.’ The evening (it was the night before Christmas) when Warder Stokes brought a bag of toffees to my cell and told me I could have as many of them as I desired! He insisted that I take at least three. These tokens of tenderness were to me like minor miracles. And it was the presence in the prison of Major Nelson that made them possible.

In January 1897, in anticipation of my release in five months’ time, the governor gave me permission to let my hair grow long again. He encouraged me to write every day and gave me writing paper and a manuscript book for the purpose. He allowed me to order more books for the prison library and to be bolder in my choices. When I suggested that some of my fellow prisoners might enjoy
Treasure Island
by Robert Louis Stevenson, he said, ‘A good choice, C.3.3. And I am grateful to you for not proposing
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
by the same author. There I would have had to draw the line.’

He was a man of humanity and humour and imagination. As an experiment, he appointed me ‘book orderly’ and told me that, at a set time each week, under supervision, I might visit certain convicts in their cells to provide them with books from the library and to encourage them to read. I undertook this new duty with enthusiasm, although on the whole, it must be said, my fellow prisoners (even those that could read) were not much interested in what the library or I had to offer.

As ‘book orderly’, I went on my rounds with Warder Stokes, accompanying him as the prisoners’ evening dish of skilly was being served. On my first outing, the first cells I visited were those of my immediate neighbours. It was an inauspicious start. Holding a small clutch of assorted volumes, I made to enter the first cell. The dwarf, squatting like a toad upon his bed, turned his angry mesmeriser’s eyes upon me, and shouted, ‘Get out. Leave me be. Get out!’

‘I have brought you books to read,’ I said. ‘
Oliver Twist
,
Treasure Island . . .
’