Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol: A Mystery (18 page)

‘T
his is madness.’

‘This is business, Mr Wilde. I do not think one hundred pounds is too much to be asking. You are a rich man.’

‘I am a ruined man,’ I protested, pressing my head against my cell door in desperation and disbelief. ‘I am a bankrupt. Did you not know that?’

‘You have a rich wife, I know. She came to see you yesterday. She will pay. It is not for a year.’

‘I cannot pay you.’

‘You must, Mr Wilde. It is a debt of honour.’

‘How could you do this terrible thing?’

‘With courage and skill, Mr Wilde, although I say so as shouldn’t. Braddle was drunk and the coast was clear. I seized the moment. I ran out of my cell and I pushed him over the fence. A nice clean killing, Sir Richard Burton would have said.’

‘This is very terrible.’ I said it again and again, as the bell for chapel began to toll. ‘Terrible and wrong.’

‘It is what you wanted. It is our secret. You will pay me one hundred pounds and everything will be hunky-dory.’

In the days and weeks that followed, I kept Luck’s secret. What else could I do? With whom could I share it? And to what purpose? And each morning when we spoke, as we continued to do, while Private Luck sometimes referred to the IOU that he was expecting from me, discussing the ways and means that I might deliver it to him, rarely, if ever, did either of us mention Warder Braddle by name. We talked, instead, of our lives before and beyond Reading Gaol: principally we talked of Luck’s adventures in the service of Richard Burton in Trieste, Damascus and Brazil.

Luck diverted me with recitations from Burton’s notorious translation of the
Kama Sutra
and with tales of his former master’s researches in the farther-flung fields of human sexuality. With much giggling, my Indian neighbour told me that it had been his particular duty to measure the reproductive organs of the male inhabitants of the regions of West Africa and South America they had explored. He told me, too, of Burton’s discovery of what he termed ‘the Sotadic zone’, named in honour of the Greek poet, Sotades, a vast region of the earth, encompassing pockets of southern Europe, Morocco and Egypt, swathes of Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, the Punjab and Kashmir, and the South Sea islands and much of the New World, where men mate with men and it is considered neither vice nor taboo.

When I told Private Luck that he should follow his late master’s example and write a travel book of his own, and that it would make him a fortune to rival Conan Doyle’s, he answered quite seriously, ‘Writing takes time and is very difficult. Killing is much simpler and more profitable, I have found.’

On the morning of Luck’s confession, when in chapel, as usual, Luck and I sat side by side, as the governor addressed the assembled company and announced the untimely death of Warder Braddle, Luck pushed his right foot beyond the confines of his stall and pressed his boot against the edge of mine. While the governor spoke, a curious hissing sound emanated from Luck’s stall, as though the Indian were trying to suppress a fit of hysterical giggling.

Colonel Isaacson’s statement was brief and received in silence and without emotion – as though what he had to say was already old news: ‘Yesterday afternoon one of our senior warders was killed in a tragic accident on C Ward. Warder Braddle had served Her Majesty and her prison service faithfully for many years, as had his brother, father and grandfather. His funeral will take place on Monday next but will not disrupt the business of the gaol, which will be as usual. Warder Braddle will be buried, as was his wish, in the remembrance garden within the prison walls. May his soul rest in peace.’

I said, ‘Amen.’

The weeks passed and in Reading Gaol the very existence of Warder Braddle seemed soon forgotten.

In the days immediately following the announcement of his death, the prison’s customary silence seemed to me particularly profound and our gaolers more than usually officious in the imposition of the ‘separate system’. No one spoke out of turn; no one stepped out of line. On the evening of the day appointed for Braddle’s obsequies, when Warder Stokes came to my cell to collect my day’s oakum pickings, I asked him if he had attended the warder’s funeral. He answered that he had, but had I not pressed him I know that he would have added nothing more.

‘How was it?’ I asked.

‘Didn’t last long,’ he said.

‘Who was there?’

‘The governor, the chaplain, some warders, that’s all.’

‘Did Warder Braddle have any family?’

‘I don’t think so. I don’t know.’

‘Did you attend the burial, too?’ I enquired.

‘The funeral was at the graveside,’ he said, adding, with a hint of pride, his awkward smile revealing his crooked teeth, ‘I dug the grave.’

I looked up at the young man. ‘Was Warder Braddle your friend?’

‘No, not specially, but it’s an honour to dig a man’s grave for him, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘it must be.’ He picked up my small sack of oakum and carried it to the cell door. ‘Last week, when Warder Braddle fell to his death,’ I asked, ‘do you know what happened?’

‘He’d been drinking, hadn’t he?’

‘Had he?’

‘We’re not supposed to talk about it.’

‘Who says so?’

‘The governor. He says idle talk is bad for discipline.’

‘He is quite right, though in my experience, it can do wonders for morale.’

What was most strange to me in the aftermath of Warder Braddle’s death was that I had no communication of any kind with the prison surgeon. Twice, at close quarters, albeit wearing my prison cap and veil, I passed Dr Maurice as I filed into chapel. On each occasion I nodded to him, conspicuously, but, as I did so, he turned away. Once I heard his voice immediately outside my cell, but he was on the gantry, I realised, to visit the sick prisoner in cell C.3.1., not me.

Nor, following our interview on the day of Braddle’s death, did I have any further meeting with Colonel Isaacson. Some few weeks later, however, I did receive a most welcome message from him, brought to me one morning by Warder Stokes.

‘The governor presents his compliments,’ he began.

The phrase rang so oddly in my ears that I looked at the youthful warder, half expecting him to touch his russet forelock as he spoke.

‘Presents his compliments?’ I echoed.

‘The governor presents his compliments,’ Warder Stokes repeated. ‘The governor has spoken with the surgeon. From today’s date you are to be spared the picking of oakum out of consideration for your health.’

‘The Lord be praised,’ I cried. ‘For this relief much thanks. What am I to do instead?’

‘You will work in the prison garden.’

‘Do you know what is today’s date, Warder Stokes?’

‘The twenty-first of March.’

‘It is an auspicious day, Warder Stokes.’

‘It is my birthday.’

‘I thought it must be.’

‘You will start work in the garden this morning.’

‘On the bank, I hope, where the wild thyme blows, where cowslips and the nodding violet grows, quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, with sweet musk roses and with eglantine?’ I got to my feet. ‘I am ready to begin my duties,’ I declared. ‘Happy birthday, Warder Stokes.’

The young warder looked at me suspiciously. ‘How did you know it was my birthday?’

‘On the day we first met, Warder Stokes,’ I murmured mysteriously, ‘you asked if I had been a detective in my time. Perhaps I still am. What do you think?’

‘I don’t know what to think,’ he said. ‘The governor said you would be pleased with the news and I see that you are.’

‘Yes, I am,’ I said, gratefully. ‘Please convey my sincere thanks to him.’

‘He said that if you were pleased I was to give you this copy of the prison regulations.’ He took a folded sheet of foolscap from his trouser pocket and held it out towards me.

‘I have them already. They are there.’ I pointed to the sheet of prison regulations pasted to the wall above my bed.

‘The governor said I should give you this.’ I took the folded paper from him and opened it. I glanced down and saw that Rule 11 had been circled in black ink:

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Please present my compliments to the governor and tell him that I understand.’

It was in the garden of Reading Gaol that I discovered that life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple and in life the simple thing is the right thing.

My duties as a garden labourer were not onerous. There were few flowers for me to tend in the garden at Reading Gaol: none that Shakespeare wrote of and only a modest host of Mr Wordsworth’s daffodils. There was gravel to rake and grass to cut; there were hedges to trim and weeds to pull from pathways. The worst of it was digging and turning the heavy soil in the vegetable garden. The best of it was simply pushing a wheelbarrow from here to there.

It was in that garden, pushing that wheelbarrow, that I began to realise that I must make everything that had happened to me good for me. All the horrors of prison – the plank bed, the loathsome food, the hard ropes shredded into oakum till one’s fingertips grew dull with pain, the menial offices with which each day began and ended, the harsh orders that routine seems to necessitate, the dreadful dress that makes sorrow grotesque to look at, the silence, the solitude, the shame – each and all of these things I knew I must transform somehow into a spiritual experience. There was not a single degradation of the body that I could not take and use to help cleanse the soul.

It was while walking with my wheelbarrow in the garden of Reading Gaol that I came to see that I must reach the point where I might say quite simply, and without affectation, that the two great turning points of my life were when my father sent me to Oxford and when society sent me to prison. I would not say that prison was the best thing that could have happened to me: I would sooner say – or hear it said of me – that I was so typical a child of my age, that in my perversity, and for that perversity’s sake, I turned the good things of my life to evil, and the evil things of my life to good.

In the spring and early summer of 1896, amid the spring showers and in the early summer sunshine, in the wake of my mother’s death and of the murder of Warder Braddle, I knew that I must make good from evil – and that I could.

At the east side of Reading Gaol, behind the boiler house, along the prison perimeter wall, is a strip of ground where those who have been hanged at the prison lie buried. On the west side, close to the vegetable garden and beyond the potting sheds, is the prison’s formal Garden of Remembrance where Warder Braddle had been laid to rest. As, in desultory fashion, I swept the path that passed his grave – and the graves of a dozen other of the gaol’s ‘good and faithful servants’ – I thought of Braddle and of how he, and his father and his grandfather, and Warder Stokes, and Colonel Isaacson and all the rest, were as much imprisoned by Reading Gaol as were we, the convicts. In this life we are all of us confined in different ways. As I stood at Braddle’s graveside, I thought, too, of my mother and of how, curiously, all her life, in Dublin and in London, she had chosen to dwell in curtained rooms, out of the light. I thought of my dear Constance, without a home to call her own, residing now in Genoa, imprisoned by her exile. I thought of my two sons, playing innocently in the Italian sunshine, but living lives of deception, under assumed names, forever locked in the shadow of my shame.

I thought especially of my sons whenever in the garden I caught sight of the boy prisoner, E.1.1. Tom was several years older than my elder son, but he was evidently still a child. He was fourteen years of age, but no larger than a ten-year-old. He was thin and pale, with slender arms and sloping shoulders, and a narrow, fox-like face. His hair was the colour of burnt straw and grew down to his collar – he wore no prison cap. His cheeks were lightly freckled, his eyes were small and his nose was pointed, but he was beautiful because he was young. Youth is the one thing worth having!

One day I found him standing alone by Braddle’s grave. He was holding a bundle of grasses and wild flowers in his hand. I looked along the path and back towards the vegetable garden: there was no sign of a watching turnkey.

‘Do you miss him?’ I asked.

‘Who are you?’ He looked at me suspiciously and answered roughly, though his skin was soft and his voice was that of a child’s.

‘My name is Oscar,’ I said.

‘Is it?’ he said, shrugging his shoulders to affect indifference.

‘You’re Tom, aren’t you?’ I persisted.

‘I might be,’ he said.

‘I know you are.’ I laughed. ‘You are everywhere, Tom, and everyone knows you.’

He softened somewhat, evidently flattered. ‘Do they? Everyone knows the monkey, but the monkey knows no one.’

‘That’s a fine phrase, Tom,’ I said. ‘Who taught you that?’

He said nothing. He gazed steadily down at the mound of earth before him. I pointed to his posy. ‘Are those flowers for Warder Braddle?’ I asked.

This time he laughed. ‘They’re weeds,’ he said. ‘They’re for the bonfire.’

‘Was Warder Braddle your friend?’

He hesitated. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘Did he look after you?’

‘I’ve got others,’ he replied, and walked away.