Oscar Wilde and the Vatican Murders (35 page)

‘Gloria
Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper,
et in saecula saeculorum. Amen.’

When
Matteo was done, and we had been blessed, the Capuchin friar came down from the
altar steps and walked to the foot of the coffin. Gently he placed his hands on
the nun’s shoulders and raised her up. He turned her towards him and took her
in his arms. She lifted up her tear-stained face and rested it against his
chest. He embraced her and, with great tenderness, he kissed the top of her
coif. As he led her back to her place in the front pew, she whimpered
pitifully. He leant over her for a moment and whispered something to her. When
she had fallen silent and lowered her head once more, Brother Matteo left her
and walked down the nave towards us.

Oscar
got to his feet to greet the friar.
‘De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine,’
he
said distinctly. He was visibly moved.

‘Domine,
exaudi vocem meam,’
responded the Capuchin, taking
Oscar’s hands in his.

“‘Out
of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O Lord,”’ said Oscar. ‘It is my favourite
Psalm.’

Brother
Matteo spoke to Munthe in Italian. Munthe translated: ‘Sister Anna is all the
family Father Bechetti has. She will wait here until the funeral. It will be
tomorrow. Then the village will come.’

‘We
cannot stay,’ said Oscar. ‘We must return to Rome.’ He looked at Munthe. ‘We
must return at once.’

‘That
is the plan,’ said Munthe. ‘We can go now. Our duty here is done.’

‘Will
Brother Matteo come with us?’

‘He will
return tomorrow, after the funeral.’

‘Domani,’
said Matteo,
‘a Dio piacendo.’

‘Indeed,’
muttered Oscar. ‘Who is safe now, I wonder? We must return to Rome.’

‘Come
then,’ said Munthe. ‘We can go.’

As we
moved towards the church door, Oscar pulled away from us, saying, ‘Excuse me
for a moment. I will just speak to the reverend sister.’

‘She
has taken a vow of silence,’ said Munthe. ‘She cannot speak with strangers.’

‘I will
speak to her. Wait here.’

Leaving
us standing in a pool of sunshine by the church door, Oscar walked down the
nave. I stepped out of the light to watch him. When he reached the nun’s pew he
waited a moment, as if in doubt. He took out his wallet and opened it; then,
lightly, he touched the nun on her shoulder. She looked up at him and, not
recognising him, turned away at once. He touched her on the shoulder a second
time and called her name: ‘Anna,’ he said.
‘Il sua anello.’
He stood
looking down at her. From inside his wallet he had taken the little envelope
that contained the rose-gold ring and the lock of lamb’s wool that he had been
carrying with him since we had left Bad Homburg. He gave the envelope to the
reverend sister, bowed and stepped away. The old nun took the envelope,
uncomprehending.

He came
back up the nave towards us.
‘Avanti!’
he called. ‘We must get back to
Rome before it’s too late. I’ll take one of the oars if I must.’

Outside
the church, when we had bade the Capuchin farewell and promised to meet up with
him the moment he returned to Rome —
‘Immancabile,’
said Oscar, earnestly,
‘without ‘fail’ — and were walking down the hill towards the beach, I said to
my friend: ‘Well, what was all that about?’

‘Don’t
you see?’ he cried. ‘You must see, Arthur.’ He stopped in his tracks and looked
at me in amazement.

‘I’m
afraid I don’t see,’ I said.

‘I know
who she is.’

‘Sister
Anna?’

‘Yes.
And I know who Agnes was.’

‘But
the nun did not speak.’

‘There
was no need. Some secrets lie too deep for words.’

20

Duty calls

I
t
should never be forgotten that Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was
essentially a man of the theatre. His very name has a theatrical flourish to
it. His life, by his own admission, was a five-act drama that turned from
comedy to tragedy. His literary reputation rests, not on his poetry or his
prose, but on his
plays.
The men in whose company he felt most easy were
all men of a theatrical disposition; the females he most admired were all
actresses — and Queen Victoria. Oscar was essentially a man of the theatre and
so, to him, the
effect
was everything.

No
doubt, when he declared in the sunlit doorway of the ancient church of St Anna
that he would ‘take one of the oars’ if he must, he meant it. But when we
reached the rowing boat on the shore of Capri, and Munthe and I heaved to,
Oscar did nothing but help settle Catherine English opposite us and discourse
on the beauty of the sunset. He had a playwright’s way with words and a
showman’s instinct for timing. He loved to ‘hold the moment’, as he put it, to
keep the audience ‘in suspense — on the edge of their seats’. He resolutely
refused to share with us what had been revealed to him in the church that afternoon
until he was ready to do so, ‘and that will be,’ he announced, ‘after the
interval, when we are safely on board the train to Rome, beakers of champagne
in hand’.

By the
harbour railway station in Naples he found an inn and from the innkeeper he
purchased three bottles of French champagne, already iced, four glasses and a
basket of local fruit: grapes, peaches and strawberries. But even when we were
ensconced in our compartment — first class now, courtesy of Lady Windermere —
with beakers at the ready and the train at full speed, he seemed reluctant to
speak.

‘Are
you playing for time, Oscar?’ I asked, as he poured the sparkling yellow wine
into my glass and it spilt over the rim onto my hand. ‘Have you lost your
nerve, old man? Changed your mind?’

‘I am
playing with ideas still, certainly. As a detective I am an amateur, but I am a
writer by profession, as you are, Arthur. We writers do play with ideas, don’t
we? Is it not our duty to do so — to take them and toss them into the air — to
let them escape, to recapture them, to make them iridescent with fancy and wing
them with paradox? I am not plodding the streets of London in muddied boots
with your Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard; I am barefoot in the hills of
Capri pursuing Truth in her wine-stained robe and wreath of ivy — following her
where she dances like a Bacchante and mocks the slow Silenus for being sober.
Facts spread before her like frightened forest things. Her white feet tread the
huge press at which the wise Omar sits, till the seething grape-juice rises
round her bare limbs in waves of purple bubbles or crawls in red foam over the
vat’s black, dripping, sloping sides.’

‘Oh for
goodness’ sake, Oscar,’ I cried, ‘who is Sister Anna? If you know, tell us!’

Oscar
roared with laughter. ‘I will tell you,’ he said. ‘Sister Anna was the mistress
of Father Bechetti, thirty years ago. In her mind’s eye, she was his bride.
Agnes —Pio Nono’s “little lamb of God” — was the fruit of their illicit union.’

Axel
Munthe nodded and sipped at his champagne. ‘I thought that might be the case,’
he said.

‘Poor
lady,’ murmured Catherine English.

‘It’s
one thing
thinking
something,’ I expostulated. ‘It’s quite another
knowing
it. How do you know this, Oscar,
for a fact?’

‘I
don’t “know this”, Arthur, “for a fact” as you crudely put it. But I believe
it.’

‘You
believe it?
Why
do you believe it?’

‘Because
I am writer and a writer reads. I knew the old story of St Anne and her husband
— of how he was turned away from the temple because he had no child, and how
Anna prayed to God and made sacrifices until an angel came to her and told her
that God would grant her and her husband the baby that they longed for — and that
the child would be conceived without sin. I knew all that, but until this
afternoon, when I was sitting at the back of the church, leafing through my
copy of Butler’s
Lives of the Saints,
I had forgotten that St Anne’s
husband was called St Joachim.’

‘This
is an ancient legend, Oscar,’ I protested, ‘about mythical saints.’

‘Yes,
and Sister Anna of Capri and Father Joachim Bechetti were flesh and blood — and
all too human. When they met, thirty years ago or more, and fell in love she
was already a nun and he was already a priest. They could not marry, for a
fact, but neither could they deny their love. They conceived a child, and in
their hearts they knew — and in the eyes of God they prayed — that it was a
child conceived without sin.’

I shook
my head. ‘It’s just a coincidence of names.’

‘Indeed,’
said Oscar, ‘but
nomen est omen.
It gave them their excuse, their
justification.’

Catherine
English, seated next to me, pressed her hand on mine. ‘Love and religious
fervour will make men and women do strange things, Dr Conan Doyle,’ she said
softly. ‘I know.’

Oscar
reached for his cigarettes and lit one. ‘Agnes, their little lamb of God, was
their secret and their problem: a problem and a secret shared at first, I
imagine, with Anna’s band of sisters in the monastery on the island — and then
a problem solved when Agnes was old enough to be sent to Rome to be brought up
as a waif and stray by the reverend sisters who work in the Vatican laundry.
The little girl never knew who her parents were. She did not need to know: she
was always surrounded by love. As a baby, she lived among the nuns on Capri,
with her mother keeping a watchful eye over her. As a little girl, she lived
among the nuns at the Vatican, with her father keeping a watchful eye over her
and His Holiness the Pope, no less, as a kind of honorary grandfather. She was
brought up as one conceived in innocence, as a little gift of God. She was
brought up almost as a saint — and it seems that she behaved like one.’

I
smiled as Oscar filled the compartment with a cloud of smoke and poured me more
champagne. ‘It’s a charming story, my friend,’ I said.

‘It
hangs together,’ said Munthe.

‘It has
the ring of truth,’ said Catherine English.

‘But is
it true?’ I asked. ‘Do you have anything for a man of science to work with? Any
evidence?
Anything beyond your imaginative “leap of faith”?’

‘Her
tears were a widow’s tears and not of my imagining. And her ring. As she
prayed, you saw the ring she wore on her wedding finger.’

‘All
nuns wear a wedding band, don’t they, to show that they are brides of Christ?’

‘This
was no ordinary wedding band, Arthur. This was one of the rose-gold rings …

‘It was
the missing ring?’

‘It was
Bechetti’s ring, yes. Sister Anna wore it on her wedding finger.’

‘And
the ring that you gave to her was Pio Nono’s ring?’

‘Yes.’

‘Will
she understand its significance?’

‘She
will see that it matches the ring that Bechetti gave her years before. She may
think that, at the end, her erstwhile lover thought of her and wished her to
have the second ring — as a parting gift.’