Oscar Wilde and the Vatican Murders (12 page)

8

All Saints

W
e
fled the scene at once. ‘This is not what I had expected,’ murmured Oscar, as
we paced across the scrubland, back towards the pyramid.

‘It’s
appalling,’ I said. ‘It’s perverse, unnatural.’

‘Unexpected,
certainly.’ He laughed. ‘Your tweeds, your moustache, your military bearing,
Arthur: they appear to attract a different kind of attention in these southern
climes.’

I
ignored his ribbing. ‘I suppose the sick old man is their beggar-master,’ I
said. ‘The hapless boys are obliged to do his bidding.’

‘The
“hapless boys” looked happy enough to me —willing enough, too.’

‘It’s a
filthy trade.’

‘And
not their only one. Did you see the pile of bones next to the old man?’

‘I did.
To sell old bones for glue-making is one thing. To sell young bodies for base
gratification, quite another. It’s immoral — it’s
sinful.’

‘Is
sinfulness so very dreadful, Arthur?’ he asked, looking back at me over his
shoulder as he clambered gingerly onto the jagged stone steps that jutted from
the city wall. ‘The body sins once and has done with its sin, for action is a
mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure,
or the luxury of a regret.’

‘I
don’t believe you know what you’re saying, Oscar, ‘I replied. On occasion, I
felt my friend’s verbosity overwhelmed his innate good sense.

We
reached the roadway and found our horse and carriage waiting where we had left
them. The driver, wearing a tattered straw hat and sucking on a little clay
pipe, looked down at us with ill-concealed contempt. I sensed a wicked quip
forming itself on Oscar’s lips. I intervened and hushed my friend, urging him
to keep his counsel and climb aboard.

‘The
man won’t speak English, Arthur. Besides, I imagine he knows exactly what goes
on behind the pyramid. He probably brings English milords out here on a
regular basis. I hate to think of the size of tip the wretch will be expecting.’

‘Inversion
is a sickness, Oscar,’ I hissed under my breath. ‘It is not something to make
jokes about.’ I looked at him sternly. ‘This is no laughing matter.’

He
returned my gaze with a smile in his eyes. “‘Our sincerest laughter with some
pain is fraught; our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.”’

‘Keats?’

‘Shelley.
He came here, too — to see the pyramid and to visit Keats’s grave.’ Oscar
called up to the driver, coldly:

‘Cimitero,
avanti!’

‘Shouldn’t
we return to the hotel?’ I asked.

The
heat of the afternoon was dry but nonetheless oppressive. I had no hat and my
clothing was entirely unseasonable. As a consequence of our exertions, I was
soaked in perspiration.

‘We’ll
see the cemetery first. We’re almost there. It’s a beautiful spot. It will
refresh you.’

It was.
And it did. It was an oasis, only a few hundred yards beyond the pyramid,
discreetly tucked beneath the ancient city walls, wonderfully cool, surrounded
by pine trees, shaded by tall cypresses. As Oscar led me in through the wrought-iron
gate he said, ‘When Shelley came to this cemetery for the first time, he wrote,
“It might make one in love with death to think that one should be buried in so
sweet a place.”’

I said
nothing. Did Shelley write those words, I asked myself, or has Oscar just
invented them?

‘Shelley’s
heart is buried here,’ he continued. ‘His body was burnt on the beach at the
mouth of the river Arno, near where he was drowned. His flesh and bones were
cremated there, where he was washed ashore — something to do with the
quarantine laws at the time. But his heart rests here: “the heart of all hearts”.’

As we
stood inspecting the plaque in Shelley’s memory, Oscar turned to me: ‘The bones
we saw behind the pyramid, where the old man lay, were they human bones?’

‘No,’ I
reassured him. ‘Sheep and cattle, I’d say. And mules and donkeys.’ I looked at
him. ‘Yes, I had wondered for a moment, too.’

We paid
our respects to Shelley’s heart — interred at the base of a tower in the
cemetery’s outer wall — and then found the grave of John Keats. I had feared my
friend might prostrate himself on the grass or give way to hysterical sobbing.
In fact, he remained quite calm: more Holmes, less Wilde. As we stood, looking
down at the poet’s simple tombstone, he remarked, ‘Keats marvelled that men
could be martyred for their religion — and then he discovered love and declared
that he, too, could be martyred for his religion. “Love is my religion,” he
said. ,,I could die for that.”’ Oscar put his hand lightly on my shoulder.
‘Love will be at the heart of our murder mystery, Arthur. I think we can be
sure of that.’

‘You
are convinced then that we are dealing with a mystery that involves
murder?’

‘Oh
yes,’ he said, ‘murder most foul. And I am convinced, too, that Dr Munthe’s
patient — the priest, but “no ordinary priest” — holds the key. We shall meet
him soon enough.’

We met him that very
evening.

We did
not linger among the graves and our return to our hotel was uneventful. As we
drove back past the tomb of Cestius, we looked beyond the pyramid to the
scrubland where we had left the wretched street boys. There was no sign of them
and, from the roadway, the view of their hovel at the edge of the wood was
obscured by an elderly shepherd and his unruly flock.

‘Perhaps
our mystery lock of hair comes from one of those sheep?’ mused Oscar.

‘They
are goats, Oscar,’ I said.

Back at
the Hôtel de Russie, we took tea (Ceylon tea with Madeira cake), talked of
Keats and Shelley (Oscar talked: I listened), and retired to our rooms to bathe
and change. Then, while Oscar dozed on his bed, I spent an hour or so working
through my seemingly bottomless portmanteau of letters from the admirers of
Sherlock Holmes. At seven-thirty, Oscar awoke. At eight o’clock we set off
together for the short walk along the Via del Babuino to the newly built
Anglican church. We arrived at All Saints to find Dr Axel Munthe — still
dressed, it seemed, in the exact costume he had worn the night before —
assisting a stout and halting clergyman up the front steps to the church door. As
the doctor and the priest paused in the doorway, we joined them.

Munthe
smiled. ‘This is the reverend gentleman of whom I spoke last night,’ he said.

I
nodded by way of acknowledgement. Oscar bowed low and bent forward to kiss the
clergyman’s ring.

‘I am not
a bishop,’ protested the priest, laughing. His voice was sonorous: rich and
deep. He spoke good English with a pronounced Italian accent.

‘But
you are a magnificent Monsignor,’ breathed Oscar, unctuously.

The
priest, a mountain of a man, was impressively garbed in a black cassock edged
in purple silk, with a broad purple sash swathing his mighty girth. He had a
toad’s face, full and fat, with sensuous lips. His head was bald. His bulging
eyes shone. His jowls shook as he addressed us.

‘I take
it you are Oscar Wilde,’ he rumbled. Moisture spilt onto his lips as he spoke,
but his manner was entirely genial. He turned to me and his bulbous eyes
widened further. ‘And this must be Arthur Conan Doyle. Munthe has just been
telling me all about you — but he did not need to, because I knew all about you
already.’

‘May I
present Monsignor Francesco Felici,’ said Axel Munthe,
‘Maestro delle
Celebrazioni Liturgiche Pontificie.’

‘By all
that’s wonderful,’ cried Oscar, ‘you are Master of Ceremonies to His Holiness.’

The
priest heaved his shoulders and offered a theatrical, self-deprecating shrug.
‘One does one’s humble best.’

‘And
yet you are here among the Anglicans,’ continued Oscar.

‘Missionary
work,’ said the Monsignor, with a throaty chuckle. ‘The Holy Father is on his
summer retreat, so I am permitted to stray from the confines of St Peter’s. I
come here in the hope of converts — and to see my English friends.’

I said,
‘Your English is exceptional, Monsignor. ‘‘I am learning. We have a small
circolo
inglese
at the Vatican. And one of the ways in which we learn your
language, Mr Conan Doyle, is to read your work — out loud to one another, in
the sacristy, behind the Sistine Chapel, after Mass.’

‘Good
Lord,’ I murmured.

‘We all
admire the great Sherlock Holmes.’

‘Dr Conan
Doyle is going to be reading to us tonight,’ said Oscar.

‘A new
Holmes adventure?’ enquired the Monsignor, eagerly.

‘No,’ I
said, a touch too sharply. The portly priest appeared quite startled. I lowered
my eyes. ‘I am sorry to disappoint you.

‘You won’t
disappoint us, Dr Doyle,’ said a gentle voice at my shoulder, ‘I am certain of
that.’

I
turned. It was Catherine English. She looked much younger than she had done the
day before — less travel-stained, I suppose, more rested.

‘Whatever
you have brought to read to us will give huge pleasure, I know,’ she went on.
‘We are simply delighted that you are here. And grateful. Thank you.’ She
looked about our little group gathered on the doorstep. ‘Welcome, gentlemen.
Monsignor, Dr Munthe, Mr Wilde — welcome.’ She bobbed a curtsey to the priest
and shook Oscar and Axel Munthe by the hand. She touched my elbow and led us
into the church. ‘It’s very crowded, I’m afraid. We may run out of refreshments
and everyone has to talk at the top of their voices because the acoustics are
so peculiar.’

‘Are we
late?’ asked Dr Munthe.

‘No,
everybody else is early. The English ladies have been arriving since seven
o’clock.’

We had
passed through a narrow vestibule and now stood on the threshold of the church,
in a side aisle, looking out across a sea of bobbing heads. Some of them were
male (and grey and balding in the main), but most of them were female and
sporting an extraordinary array of head apparel: hats large and small,
feathered and veiled, scarves, toques, bonnets, berets and tam-o’shanters.
There must have been a hundred women, at least, clustered in the echoing nave
of All Saints.

‘It
sounds like the monkey house at the zoo,’ said Catherine English, laughing.

‘Every
Englishwoman in Rome must be here,’ observed Monsignor Felici.

‘Of a
certain age,’ added Axel Munthe.

Head
held high, Oscar was scanning the scene. ‘Never trust a woman who wears mauve,
whatever her age may be, or a woman over thirty-five who is fond of pink
ribbons. She will always have a history.’

‘Very
droll, Mr Wilde,’ said the Monsignor, ‘but I think you’ll find the ladies here
are of a different order. They wear brown and grey when they are not wearing
black and they come with “hope” rather than “history”. They are of riper years,
even the young ones.

‘But
they love a clergyman,’ said Oscar, amused.

‘Even a
Catholic priest,’ said the Monsignor.

‘Especially
a Catholic priest. They know he’s dangerous, yet
they feel quite safe with him.’