Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol: A Mystery (14 page)

‘Perhaps a madman is what we need,’ I said. ‘Do you think the Emperor Napoleon would undertake the task?’

Private Luck gave a squeal of delight at the suggestion. ‘Oh no. Warder Braddle would be our Napoleon’s Waterloo. Poor Snake the poisoner could not even kill his own wife remember? No, no, Mr Wilde, you need an experienced assassin for this assignment.’

‘Are you volunteering?’ I asked, laughing.

‘If you would pay me, I would have to consider it most seriously. I shall be needing money when I am released from here. I am not as young as once I was.’ He said these words with a sudden earnestness and then, as the bell for chapel began to toll, started to laugh once more. I sensed that he was dancing in his cell. ‘’Tis a lucky day, boy,’ I heard him cry, ‘and we shall do good deeds on’t.’

My morning
tête-à-têtes
with Private Luck were the only bursts of colour in my day. As the weeks went by, our conversations grew ever more intimate and strange. He had spent twenty years, he said, in the service of Sir Richard Burton – in India, in Brazil, and, latterly, in England and Austria-Hungary. He had been the great explorer’s batman, but, also, he claimed, his ‘cosy friend’. ‘Sir Richard had a wife, the Lady Isabel, but she did not share his secrets as I did. Sir Richard taught me my Shakespeare, but I taught him the special ways of my people. He loved to learn. He was hungry for knowledge, always. When we spoke together we spoke in Hindustani, so that Lady Burton could not understand. But she understood enough. When he died, Lady Isabel burnt the manuscript of the book that Sir Richard had written about me. He had called it
A. A.’s Adventures in the Scented Garden
, after
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
. That is a clever title, is it not? Sir Richard loved to laugh. When once a doctor asked him, “How do you feel when you have killed a man?”, Sir Richard replied, “Quite jolly, what about you?” He taught me how to laugh deeply, with the whole body, as well as how best to kill a man.’

Private Luck surprised me constantly. Warder Braddle never did. Just as generosity is the essence of friendship, so banality is the essence of evil. Braddle’s cruelty was commonplace and predictable. One morning – I can recall the date: 18 February 1896 – Braddle entered my cell and found that I had not yet swept it.

‘It’s filthy,’ he barked.

‘I mind my own dust,’ I replied.

‘It’s verminous in here,’ he said, looking down at the floor.

My eye followed his and, together, we watched as a large spider scuttled out from under my bed. The creature darted forward and then, suddenly, stopped, stranded in the no man’s land between the warder’s boots and my own. Braddle stepped on the spider and crushed it, turning the toe of his boot with a schoolboy bully’s bravado as he did so.

‘It brings bad luck to kill a spider,’ I cried, appalled.

The warder said nothing, but raised his head and looked at me contemptuously.

‘I shall hear worse news than any I have yet heard,’ I murmured.

‘Is that so?’ he answered. ‘Clean your cell, or you’ll hear that the governor has ordered you a beating.’

That night, as I lay awake in the black of my cell, I heard the cry of the Banshee beyond the prison walls. And I had a vision – it was a vision, not a dream – of my dear mother standing by my bed with her right hand resting on the back of my wooden upright chair. She was dressed for out of doors. I looked up at her and asked her to take off her hat and her cloak and to sit down beside me. She shook her head sadly and vanished from my sight.

It was on the following morning that I learnt that my mother had died. She was seventy-four. No one knew how deeply I loved and honoured her. Her death was terrible to me; but I, once a lord of language (as Private Luck would have it), had no words in which to express my anguish and my shame. My mother was an Irish patriot, a scholar and a poetess. She and my father had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured, not merely in literature, art, archaeology and science, but in the public history of my own country, in its evolution as a nation. I had disgraced that name eternally. I had made it a low byword among low people. I had dragged it through the very mire. I had given it to brutes, like Warder Braddle, that they might make it brutal, and to fools, like the Reverend Friend, that they might turn it into a synonym for folly. What I suffered then, and still suffer, is not for pen to write or paper to record.

My mother had died at the beginning of February. My wife, my Constance, always kind and gentle to me, rather than that I should hear the news from indifferent lips, had travelled, ill as she was, all the way from Genoa to England to break to me herself the tidings of so irreparable, so irremediable, a loss. Because of the nature of our interview we were permitted to meet in one of the prison offices, an upstairs room, with windows – not in a barred and divided cell as we had done at Wandsworth, when Braddle’s brother had kept watch and walked between us. This was a room I had not visited before, along the corridor from the governor’s own office. Naturally, we were not alone, but our guard was Warder Stokes, who that morning proved a perfect gentleman. As Constance and I sat together at a table in the centre of the room, isolated in a pale pool of February sunlight, Stokes sat apart, as far from us as possible, on a stool by the door, with his arms folded and his eyes cast down.

Constance took my hands in hers and told me what I already knew. I told her of the spider and of the haunting cry of the Banshee and of my vision of my mother at my bedside. She smiled at my story and wept at the same time. She leant towards me and caressed my face and gently swept back and smoothed my unkempt hair. ‘You are so thin,’ she murmured. ‘And your hair is turning grey.’ I bowed my head. ‘And Oscar, I do believe you are beginning to go a little bald.’

‘When your heart breaks, your hair falls out,’ I said. ‘It is well known.’

She laughed. ‘I miss you, husband,’ she said.

‘I miss you, wife. How are our boys?’

‘They are well. They are strong and brave. They are your mother’s grandsons.’

‘And do they miss me, too?’

‘I think Vyvyan has all but forgotten you,’ she said teasingly. ‘But Cyril speaks of you. He has discovered where you are. He read about it in a newspaper.’

‘Does he know the truth?’

‘He thinks you are imprisoned for debt.’

I looked away. ‘And so, perhaps, I am,’ I said. ‘The debt I owe to you can never be repaid.’

‘I am proud to be the mother of your children,’ she answered. ‘And they will do you proud.’

‘Do not spoil them, Constance,’ I cried. ‘Bring them up so that if one of them ever should shed innocent blood he will come and tell you – that you might cleanse his hands for him first and then teach him how by penance or expiation he can cleanse his own soul.’

When the allotted hour for our meeting was over, we could not properly see one another as we parted: our eyes were too full of tears.

Warder Stokes escorted us both from the meeting room and left me standing in the vestibule immediately outside the governor’s office while he accompanied my wife to the prison gates. I was not long alone. Moments after Constance’s departure, I heard footsteps on the stairs and familiar voices in the corridor. They spoke urgently, in hushed tones.

‘This
is
madness.’

‘You leave me no choice.’

‘What can I do?’

‘Keep your word. That’s all I ask.’

It was Warder Braddle and a prisoner. The moment Braddle saw me he said, ‘Put on your cap. Where’s Warder Stokes?’

‘He is seeing my wife to the gates. She came to tell me of my mother’s death.’ I looked at my persecutor. ‘It brings bad luck to kill a spider,’ I said.

‘Put on your cap, and face the wall.’ I did as I was told. ‘C.3.5., wait here.’

Braddle knocked on the governor’s door and entered without waiting for an answer.

I did not move. I rested my forehead against the wall and stood in silence.

‘I am sorry to hear of your mother’s death,’ whispered Atitis-Snake.

‘Thank you,’ I murmured. ‘Is your mother living?’ I asked.

‘I do not know. She vanished when I was a little boy.’

‘Just as I have vanished while my sons are little boys,’ I said. ‘Do you have sons?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I have no children. Just a wife.’

‘My wife has changed her name,’ I said. ‘I have brought shame and ruin down upon her. I loved her once – I love her still – and I have done this. Why? How has it happened?’ I turned my head towards Atitis-Snake. ‘Why did you try to kill your wife?’ I asked.

‘It was madness,’ he whispered. ‘I was mad. I am mad. That is why I have come to see the governor. I am a criminal lunatic. I should not be here. I wish to petition the Home Secretary. There needs to be a medical investigation. I will not die in Reading Gaol.’ He raised his voice as he spoke and began to beat his fist against the palm of his open hand.

I turned back to face the wall. ‘Each man kills the thing he loves,’ I said. ‘But why?’

‘I will not die in Reading Gaol,’ cried Atitis-Snake angrily.

The door to the governor’s office opened. ‘Silence, C.3.5.,’ ordered Warder Braddle. ‘Colonel Isaacson will see you now.’

11
Death

T
he first to die was not Atitis-Snake.

That afternoon, as I sat, depressed, slumped in my cell, with useless, bleeding fingers pulling at tarred threads of oakum, I received an unexpected visitor. I had heard his voice on the gantry. I recognised his gentle way of speaking and the Scottish burr. It was the prison surgeon.

‘Medical inspection!’ called Warder Stokes, pacing the gantry, unlocking the cell doors. ‘Stand by your beds.’

Dr Maurice pushed open my door and smiled at me with his owlish walnut-coloured eyes.

‘Do men die at Reading Gaol?’ I asked, not moving from my chair.

‘Men die everywhere,’ he said. ‘From death there’s no escape.’ He came into the cell and closed the door behind him.

‘Death is close at hand,’ I murmured. ‘I know it. I feel it in my bones.’

The doctor looked at me, still smiling. ‘Men do die at Reading Gaol, now and again – mostly of old age, mostly “lifers”.’ He placed his bag on the ground beside my bed. ‘Happily, the prisoner I have just seen is not one of those. He’s in no danger.’ He looked at me appraisingly. ‘And nor, I think, are you.’

‘You have been with the dwarf?’ I asked.

‘With C.3.4., yes.’ He nodded.

‘I am glad. The poor dwarf has been beaten again, hasn’t he?’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘It was last night, wasn’t it? In the middle of the night. I thought it was the cry of the Banshee that I heard, but now I realise that it must have been that poor man, calling out in agony.’

‘What did you hear?’ asked Maurice. He swayed on his long legs, towering above me.

‘It was Braddle who beat him, I suppose. He beats the poor creature for the sake of it.’

‘Be careful what you say. Do not make wild accusations. You believe that Warder Braddle attacked the prisoner – assaulted him?’

‘He has done so before.’

‘Has he?’

‘Braddle likes to pick on the little people. The weaker the vessel the stronger Warder Braddle shows himself.’

‘Do you have proof of this?’

‘It will be my word against his.’

‘Do you have proof?’

I laughed. ‘None whatsoever.’

‘Then watch what you say.’

‘How is poor Tom?’ I asked.

‘The boy is better. Much better.’

‘Is he still passing blood?’ I asked.

Dr Maurice looked at me gravely and scratched his bird’s-nest beard. ‘You know more than is good for you. Take care.’ With the forefingers of each hand he brushed back his mutton-chop whiskers and said briskly, ‘He is much better. His cough has subsided. He’s back at work. I passed him just now. He’s on the ward here, scrubbing the stairs.’

‘Is he one of Warder Braddle’s victims?’ I asked. ‘He’s small enough.’

‘C.3.3.,’ said the doctor sternly.

‘Oh no. Of course not. For some reason, Tom is one of the warder’s favourites. They are a curious crew, these favourites – they come in all shapes and sizes. I wonder what is it, the quality they share?’