Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol: A Mystery

by Gyles Brandreth

  For seventy-two hours no one spoke to me and I spoke to no one. The duty warder, when he unlocked the hatch in the cell door to pass me my bread and water, said nothing. In the morning I knew when it was the hour for slopping out only because I heard the same warder unlock my cell door and bang his fist against it. He spoke not a word.

  Lying in the darkness, I thought of what Private Luck had told me: ‘You must learn to let your ears be your eyes while you are here.’ I thought of my friend Conan Doyle – and smiled – and tried to listen with Holmesian perception. There was much to hear – a distant bell; distant cries; footsteps on the stone stairs (some heavy, some light – were those the boots of Warder Stokes?); muffled conversations in the corridor (was that the voice of Warder Braddle?); laughter; a cough; a turnkey pissing in the sluice; the locking and unlocking of gates; the heavy breathing of a turnkey sleeping at his post . . . I listened to it all, by night and day.

  The chief effect of the darkness and the silence was that I lost track of time. On the final morning of my punishment I woke I know not when. I suppose it was the warder’s banging on my cell door that roused me, but I do not recollect hearing either the banging or the turning of the key in the lock. That it was the hour for slopping out was clear: my door was ajar, the gloom of the corridor filtered into my cell. I got to my feet, pulled on my boots and took my pot of slops out into the corridor.

  As, blearily, I carried my mess towards the sluice I heard voices at the end of the corridor. There was laughter and whispering – and the voice of a girl. I peered along the passageway and saw a cluster of figures gathered by the gate to the stairway. The turnkey’s alcove was deserted: the fire in the grate was dead. I turned into the recess that led to the sluice and emptied my slops in the usual way. As I retraced my steps I looked back towards the stairway. There was only one figure standing there now.

  ‘Where’s your cap? Get your cap or there’ll be trouble.’

  The figure came along the corridor towards me.

  ‘It’s Braddle’s watch,’ he said. ‘Take care.’

  As the figure reached me, I realised that he was not a warder, but a fellow convict.

  ‘C.4.8.?’ I said.

  ‘No, he’s gone. He went last night.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘It’s Braddle’s watch. Braddle does as Braddle pleases.’

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked, peering down at the man’s uniform to find his number.

  ‘C.3.5.,’ he replied, extending a hand to shake mine. He had the voice and manner of a gentleman.

  I felt the grotesque absurdity of the moment. I stood, in a burrow in the ground, dressed in convict’s clothes, with a chamber-pot beneath my arm, greeting a man I did not know whose face I could not see. I put out my hand. ‘I am Osc—’ I began.

  He laughed. ‘I can see who you are. You should wear your cap. Braddle will have you beaten if you don’t. He’s wanting an excuse.’

  ‘Where is he?’ I asked, looking over the prisoner’s shoulder towards the stairs.

  ‘He’ll be back.’

  ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘I am doing Braddle’s bidding. I am a “favourite”.’ He laughed again. ‘At least, I have been. I am Sebastian Atitis-Snake.’

  ‘What a wonderful name,’ I cried.

  ‘I hoped you might recognise it. We were sentenced on the same day. Our cases were reported in the newspapers at the same time.’

  ‘I recollect,’ I said. ‘You claimed to be the Emperor Napoleon. That was your defence.’

  ‘And you claimed to be Oscar Wilde,’ he said. ‘That was yours.’

  It was my turn to laugh. I knew at once I liked this man. I was about to tell him so when we heard footfall on the stairs. ‘It’s Braddle,’ whispered my new friend. ‘Get back to your cell.’

  10

  ‘It brings bad luck to kill a spider’

  What do I remember of my time at Reading Gaol? The answer is simple: almost nothing, beyond the greyness of the place, and the unremitting dreariness of each day and the sense of desolation that accompanied each night. As I look back now, one month of my incarceration merges into the next, one season is interchangeable with another. From ten thousand hours of imprisonment all I can recall with any precision are a dozen or so individual moments. One or two are moments of unexpected delight (that curious first encounter with Sebastian Atitis-Snake was one such), but rather more are moments of black despair – and most of those connect in some way with Warder Braddle. Braddle was a monster.

  It was Braddle who escorted me back to C Ward following my three days’ confinement in the punishment block. As I followed him up the narrow stone steps that led from the subterranean dungeon to the prison courtyard above, I lost my footing and fell forward on the stairs. At once, Braddle turned, stepped back and crushed my hand beneath his boot. I felt his full weight press down onto my spread fingers. I sensed him hold his breath as he stood waiting for my cry. I made no sound, but, beneath my veil, salt tears trickled down my cheeks.

  As we crossed the inner courtyard, we passed the file of female prisoners returning to their ward from chapel. For the first time, I noticed the face of the wardress who accompanied them. Because her uniform was drab I suppose I had assumed that her face would be equally so. But it was not. I passed within a yard of her and looked into her eyes. They were blue and beautiful. Her eyebrows were unplucked, but her brow was clear and her skin was fresh. Her cheekbones were high and her lips were even. She was not Helen of Troy, but she had about her a touch of Joan of Arc. And, as we marched by, I watched her glance at Warder Braddle and smile at the man.

  Was this, then, the woman whose voice I had heard in the corridor outside my punishment cell? Could it be? How was it possible that so odious a creature as Warder Braddle could hold such sway?

  ‘How long have you known him?’ I asked Private Luck on the morning after my return to my cell on C Ward.

  ‘Five years,’ said my neighbour, lightly, ‘since I was sent here.’

  ‘And you like the man?’

  He gave his girlish laugh. ‘I understand him. I know his kind – very well.’

  ‘Why is he so powerful? He is a brute.’

  ‘He is not gentle, but he is our prince.’

  ‘Our prince?’ I stood in my cell, my ear held to the locked hatch in my cell door, bemused.

  ‘Only a nine-gun prince, to be sure – but we bow to his authority all the same.’

  ‘I do not understand you,’ I answered.

  ‘This is good,’ giggled Achindra Acala. ‘Oscar Wilde is calling to me from his cell and he is saying he does not understand what I am saying. Oscar Wilde, who has so much education, and I, who have none.’

  ‘If we bow to anyone’s authority here,’ I persisted, ‘it must be to the prison governor. He is our prince. This prison is his castle.’

  ‘No, the governor is our Queen Victoria. She is Empress of India – she merits the one-hundred-and-one-gun salute. But she lives on the Isle of Wight, a long way from Mysore. She never comes to see us in our cells. The governor is Kaiser-i-Hind, but the local princes are still the ones who collect the revenues and administer justice. The governor is the power overseas. Warder Braddle is the power in the land.’

  ‘I wish he was dead,’ I said flatly.

  Private Luck clapped his hands. ‘That can be arranged, I am sure. This is the place for it, by jingo. Reading Gaol must be jam-packed with assassins. The man who tried to shoot Queen Victoria was here on C Ward.’

  ‘He is here no longer?’

  ‘They sent him to Bedlam. They said he was mad.’

  ‘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.’

  ‘A
re 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

  The 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.’