Oscar Wilde and the Ring of Death (29 page)

‘“Where
this brook abuts this field …”’ repeated Oscar. ‘Do you choose your words
with care, Madam?’

‘I hope
so,’ replied the lady, ‘but I work more with pictures than with words. The
lines of your hand form shapes. I see the landscape of your life, but I see
also pictures of many of God’s creatures hidden there. And each picture tells
its story. Look at the base of Mr Sherard’s ring finger and what do you see?’

I
peered closely at my own hand. ‘A triangle?’ I suggested.

‘Yes,’
she said.

‘And
another triangle set across it?’ I ventured.

‘I see
a starfish, Mr Sherard,’ she said.

‘And
what does a starfish signify?’

‘An
island, usually.’

‘Well,’
I said, ‘I was brought up on the island of Guernsey …

‘Yes,’
jeered Oscar, ‘and I was brought up on the island of Ireland, but I see no
starfish at the base of my ring finger.’

‘No,’
said Mrs Robinson, lifting Oscar’s palm close to her eyes, ‘but there’s a
creature drawn there nonetheless—a bird.’ She held Oscar’s hand towards me.
‘It’s as clear as day, is it not?’

‘A
bird?’ exclaimed Oscar. ‘A bird, you say? Is it a parrot?’

Mrs
Robinson laughed and pushed Oscar’s hand back towards him. ‘Don’t be absurd, Mr
Wilde. It looks nothing like a parrot. Look at the long legs, look at the
elongated bill … a heron, perhaps?’

Alphonse
Byrd and David McMuirtree brushed past, carrying their stage properties. Edward
Heron-Allen followed them, with Cyril on his shoulders. Little Lord Fauntleroy
was still clutching his half-cabbage to his chest. ‘We’re on our way, Mr
Wilde,’ said Byrd. ‘Apparently you ordered a four-wheeler for us—much obliged.’

‘Excuse
me, dear lady,’ said Oscar, extricating his hand from Mrs Robinson’s. ‘I must
just see these gentlemen to their carriage.’

We
followed them to the landing where Constance was standing talking with Conan
Doyle and young Willie Hornung. ‘Thank you for a quite wonderful entertainment,
gentlemen,’ she said.

Alphonse
Byrd simply nodded his skull-like head and said, ‘Good day, Mrs Wilde,’ but
David McMuirtree put down his cases and prepared to take his hostess’s hand. As
he did so, as he was bending forward towards Constance, quite suddenly, he
clutched desperately at his own chest, turned away from her and fell headlong
down the stairs.

We
stood transfixed. Cyril, on Heron-Allen’s shoulders, cried out in alarm and let
go of the cabbage, which tumbled down the stairs in McMuirtree’s wake. As it
reached the foot of the stairs and rolled towards the boxer’s body, Oscar,
peering over the banister, laughed and began to clap his hands. He looked back
towards his son. ‘Don’t worry, my boy,’ he said. ‘It’s only a game.’

CHAPTER NINETEEN

THE VIRGIN OF GUADALUPE

‘But how on earth did you
know that he was playing a game, Mr Wilde?’

‘Are we
to be friends, Mr Hornung? We have only been acquainted for a week and a day, I
know, but already we are lunching together on a Monday. And, Mr Hornung, just
as a lady never wear diamonds in the country and a gentlemen never wears brown
shoes in town, so it is that two gentlemen never take luncheon together on a
Monday unless they see true friendship in prospect.’ Oscar raised his glass of
Le Montrachet 1865 in Willie Hornung’s direction. ‘If we are to be friends,
Willie, and I think that we are, my name to you is Oscar …’

Oscar
was at his most mellow. It was the next day—Monday 9 May 1892—and my friend and
I were lunching with Willie Hornung and Arthur Conan Doyle in the oak-panelled
dining room of the Cadogan Hotel. Hornung, Conan Doyle’s shrinking violet,
gently watered by Oscar, was developing into an altogether more robust bloom.
The young man raised his glass to our host, pushed his
pince-nez
up his
nose and repeated his question: ‘How did you know that it was a game, Oscar?’

Oscar
smiled and contemplated his plate. He had ordered what he called ‘a light
lunch—a Monday lunch’: cold lobster and fresh mayonnaise, with cucumber salad,
tomato jelly and new potatoes.

Hornung
persisted: ‘We all thought that he was dead. And then, when you laughed and he
got up and took a bow, we didn’t know what to think … Had he told you that’s
what he was planning to do?’

‘No,’
said Oscar, skewering a piece of lobster on his fork and dipping it into the
mayonnaise. ‘But I sensed at once that what we were witnessing was
play-acting—comedy not tragedy.’

‘It
looked real enough to me,’ said Conan Doyle, tucking into the new potatoes.

‘Yes,’
said Oscar. ‘He clutched the left side of his chest as a man might when suffering
a heart attack, but there was something I thought you might have noticed,
Arthur, as a medical man … When confronted with sudden pain, the genuine
patient tenses up, does he not? But McMuirtree, I observed, as he turned away
from Constance at the top of the stairs, far from stiffening his sinews,
appeared deliberately to relax his entire body. He was readying himself for the
fall. He tumbled down that staircase head first, loose-limbed, not like a man
in agony, but like an old trouper on his day off from Astley’s Circus.’

‘But
why did he do it, Mr Wilde—Oscar?’

‘I
imagine, Willie, that he did it on the spur of the moment, because the
opportunity arose.’ Oscar balanced a small dollop of tomato jelly on a slice of
cucumber. ‘I imagine, Willie, that he did it for any number of reasons … to
show off … to amuse himself … to upstage Alphonse Byrd—Byrd had scored
rather well during the entertainment, after all … I imagine, too, that he did
it for the benefit of those of us who were there yesterday afternoon and had
been here at the Cadogan Hotel last Sunday night. Perhaps he wanted to show his
contempt for whomever it was had chosen him as a “victim” last Sunday night. He
was defying them and their idle death threat. He was cocking a snook, as the
saying goes.’

‘He was
certainly running a risk,’ I said. ‘It’s his big fight tonight. He might easily
have broken a limb taking that fall yesterday.’

Oscar
chuckled. ‘A short flight of stairs in Tite Street holds no terrors for “David
and Goliath” McMuirtree, Robert. Besides, risk to a man like that is what a
second bottle of this charming white Burgundy will be to us—part and parcel of
a well-filled day.’ Oscar waved a hopeful hand in the direction of the
sommelier.

‘No
more wine for me, thank you, Oscar,’ decreed Conan Doyle firmly. ‘I’m on my way
to the
Strand
magazine. I have an afternoon of heavy negotiations ahead
of me.’

‘Are
you still planning to murder Sherlock Holmes?’ I asked.

‘In my
head, in my heart, he’s dead already,’ answered Doyle, mopping his walrus
moustache with his napkin. ‘But in my bank book, he quivers and twitches
still.’ He sniffed and shook his shoulders as if he had suddenly been caught in
a draught.

Hornung
leant into the table and whispered conspiratorially: ‘The
Strand
is
offering Arthur a thousand pounds for a dozen stories.’

‘Money
isn’t everything,’ muttered Conan Doyle, embarrassed by his young companion’s
revelation.

‘Oh,
but it is,’ murmured Oscar, almost to himself. I said nothing. (For my short
novel,
Agatha‘s Quest,
I had recently received from Trischler & Co.
the grand sum of fifteen pounds and fifteen shillings.)

‘Money,
of course, is important,’ Hornung added eagerly, ‘but it is genius, surely,
that we should aspire to?’

‘No,
no, no,’ wailed Oscar, at the same time signalling to the sommelier that a
second bottle of Le Montrachet was definitely overdue. ‘Do not aspire to genius,
Willie. The British public is wonderfully tolerant, but it has its limits. It
forgives everything—except genius.’

We all
laughed. Conan Doyle put down his napkin. ‘You and the British seem to rub
along well enough, Oscar. They love your play. They tolerate your
eccentricities.’

‘They
despise my buttonholes,’ said Oscar, with a heavy sigh. ‘As I walk down the
street I see the passers-by glancing at my left lapel and I know what they are
thinking …’

‘All
they are thinking, Oscar, is that their taste is not quite as your taste is,’
said Conan Doyle, sitting back and grinning broadly at his friend. ‘I mean to
say, old man, look at you now. It’s a beautiful May morning out there and
you’re sporting an overblown black tulip on your jacket. It looks like a dead
crow.’

‘It is
in honour of Gustave Flaubert,’ said Oscar, looking mournfully at the tulip.
‘He died twelve years ago yesterday. He was a master. I revere him. And on the
eighth of May every year I buy tulips in his honour. I remember him as he would
wish to be remembered. Flaubert said,
“Il est doux de songer que je servirai
un jour à faire croître des tulipes.”‘
[‘It is sweet to think that one day
I will serve to grow tulips.’]

‘Yes,’
chuckled Conan Doyle. ‘He always was one for
le mot juste.’
The
sommelier arrived with our second bottle of Le Montrachet. Doyle glanced at his
pocket watch. ‘Monsieur Flaubert, of course, did not have to contend with the
editor of the
Strand
magazine. I must be on my way in a moment, Oscar.
Might I be allowed a quick cup of coffee first— while you finish your wine and
order your dessert? I must hear about your morning’s endeavours before I take
my leave. You’ve been questioning the staff here at the hotel, have you not?’

Oscar
was tasting the new wine approvingly. He put down his glass and looked steadily
at Conan Doyle. ‘We have,’ he said.

‘And is
there any vital point to which you would wish to draw my attention?’

‘Merely,
Arthur, to the curious incident of the parrot in the morning—in the hours
immediately preceding its unfortunate demise.’

‘From
what I understand, the parrot did nothing in the morning.’

Oscar
smiled his sly smile. ‘That is the curious incident.’

Conan Doyle
shook his head. ‘I’m not sure I follow you.’

‘Robert
and I have been here since ten o’clock this morning,’ explained Oscar. ‘We have
questioned every member of staff who was on duty at the hotel last Tuesday. The
parrot was last seen alive and well, perched in his cage, shortly after
breakfast. Nat, the page-boy and Nellie, one of the maids, will both testify to
that. Thereafter, no one appears to have given poor Captain Flint any thought
of any kind until his devastated body was discovered at three o’clock.’

‘Is
that so surprising?’ asked Conan Doyle, dropping two sugar cubes lightly into
his coffee.

‘Captain
Flint was a talkative creature,’ said Oscar. ‘“Impertinent and garrulous”, according
to Bosie—that’s why the dear boy wanted to murder him. Customarily, the Cadogan
Hotel parrot made his presence felt. That morning, it seems, he did not do so.
Curious, don’t you think?’

‘Not
necessarily,’ said Conan Doyle. ‘An occasional visitor to the hotel, like Lord
Alfred Douglas, would notice the parrot no doubt, but the staff, passing
through the hotel hallway all the time, might very well take his presence for
granted. Was the hotel busy that morning?’

‘Exceptionally
busy—and short-staffed. Both the day manager and the assistant manager were
indisposed, which is why Byrd was still on duty. According to the hotel
register there were seven new arrivals during the course of the morning and, in
the early afternoon, a party of fourteen American females was set to depart.
All day, by all accounts, there was much coming and going through the hallway. The
page-boy and the hall porter recognised a number of the regulars—Bram Stoker
and Charles Brookfield were here for breakfast; Mrs Langtry was at her usual
table, over there, for lunch; as you know, Constance and Edward Heron-Allen
arrived a little before three.’

‘Was
the hallway deserted at any stage—even for a moment?’

‘Oh,
yes,’ said Oscar, who now had a Kentish strawberry skewered on to the end of
his dessert fork and was dipping it happily into his glass of wine. ‘The hall
porter acknowledged that he had frequently to leave his post to help bring down
luggage for the American ladies. And, at regular intervals, Nat, the page-boy,
was similarly engaged. The hallway was often empty. The front door was always
open. The truth is:
anyone
with access to the hotel that morning could
have had access to the parrot’s cage. Anyone might have murdered Captain
Flint.’

‘Anyone
might have done it …’reflected Conan Doyle, turning his coffee spoon round in
his fingers. ‘Yes … anyone might have had the means and the opportunity …
but who had the motive?’ The doctor added another sugar cube to his cup. ‘Who
owned the parrot? Did he belong to the hotel?’

‘No, he
belonged to Alphonse Byrd. He came to the hotel with Byrd when the hotel
opened. According to the hall porter, Byrd and the parrot were inseparable.’

‘I can
believe it,’ said Willie Hornung eagerly. ‘I kept a parrot when I was in
Australia—”Captain Cook” I called him. Parrots are extraordinary creatures they
are like people in many ways. They can converse, you know, and count. Captain
Cook could count to ten. And they form strong attachments. They can be fiercely
jealous.’ Hornung stopped. Evidently he felt he had spoken out of turn. He
gulped at his wine and muttered: ‘Well, anyway, that was my experience in
Australia.’