Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol: A Mystery

by Gyles Brandreth

  ‘We will draw the curtain and show you the picture,’ he said, throwing the cap that he was holding onto the bed and tossing his head coquettishly. ‘Look you, sir,’ he giggled, ‘such a one I was this present. Is’t not well done?’

  ‘Excellently done, if God did all,’ I answered.

  ‘’Tis in grain, sir; ’twill endure wind and weather . . .’ He turned his head to one side to show off his profile. He giggled some more. ‘I played Olivia when Sir Richard Burton produced Twelfth Night at the embassy in Trieste,’ he explained in his fluting voice. ‘He played the Count Orsino. He was far too old for the part, but he was still handsome. He was a swordsman to the last. In every sense.’ He stifled more laughter, holding his hands up to his face.

  I stepped towards him. ‘Your hands are brown,’ I said, ‘but your neck is white, your skin is white . . .’

  ‘All our hands are brown here,’ he replied, looking at them in disgust. ‘It is the wind and the rain. And the work they make us do.’ He turned his gaze on me and fluttered his emerald eyelids. ‘But, yes, my skin is white and smooth as alabaster.’ He pulled up the sleeve of his shirt to reveal a slim wrist and a pale forearm. ‘I am only half Indian.’

  ‘Your mother was Indian?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, my lovely mother was Indian. My father was British. Very much so. And a bugger, like you, Mr Oscar Wilde.’ He laughed. I said nothing. What could I say? ‘Warder Stokes told me that you were coming to see me today.’

  ‘Good,’ I answered.

  ‘Have you brought me my IOU? It is one hundred pounds that you owe me – and more if I am to keep all your secrets.’

  ‘I cannot pay you one hundred pounds,’ I said. ‘You must know that.’

  ‘Not now, I know, but in five months – when we are released. We are released at the same time, you know. You will pay me then, Mr Wilde.’

  ‘I cannot.’

  ‘If I am to keep your secrets, then you must. The boy may not talk, but I will. I would have my bond. Have you brought the IOU?’

  ‘I have brought you some books,’ I said, showing him the handful of volumes that I was holding.

  ‘I cannot read,’ he said, petulantly.

  ‘But you told me that you read the Daily Chronicle.’

  ‘Warder Braddle brought me the Daily Chronicle. He read to me from it.’ Luck twisted his head away from me sharply. ‘I cannot read,’ he repeated.

  ‘But you know Shakespeare,’ I protested. ‘And you know the Kama Sutra!’

  He turned back and looked into my eyes. ‘By heart. I learnt what I know by heart. Sir Richard taught me the words. I repeated them for him.’

  I put down my books on his table. ‘I see you what you are,’ I said. ‘I should have guessed at once – when you told me your names.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ He narrowed his eyes, but kept them turned towards me.

  ‘Achindra Acala – they are Sanskrit names, are they not?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And they are unusual because they are names that can be given to girls as well as to boys.’

  ‘Yes.’

  I smiled at Private A. A. Luck, late of the Bombay Grenadiers. ‘You are a hijra, are you not?’

  He returned my smile and brought his hands together in front of his chin. ‘Yes, Mr Wilde, I am a eunuch.’ He bobbed a curtsy.

  ‘I should have guessed before,’ I said.

  ‘My mother had me castrated when I was just a baby. She thought it best.’

  I looked at this absurd figure, with his crudely painted face, posturing before me in his prison garb stamped with black arrows. ‘Was she right?’ I asked.

  ‘She knew what you British men really like.’ He giggled again and clapped his hands together coyly. ‘She gave me a way of life. She gave me a means to earn my living. It was a happy way of life. It was a good living.’

  ‘While it lasted,’ I said.

  ‘It would have lasted longer, much longer. Sir Richard Burton loved me very much.’

  ‘But Lady Burton did not?’

  ‘She did not understand. She was stupid – and vile. When Sir Richard died, she found a Catholic priest to give him the last rites. But Sir Richard was already dead! He died in my arms. And he was not a Catholic. Sir Richard Burton was very much not a Catholic, I promise you.’

  ‘But he was Lady Burton’s husband and she loved him.’

  ‘That woman is the devil. She does not know what love means. She burnt all his papers – his journal, his beautiful book all about me, his new translation of The Perfumed Garden . . . She was offered six thousand guineas for his manuscripts – six thousand guineas! And she burnt them all. She said it was his spirit that had instructed her. She was a mad woman. I am glad she is dead.’

  ‘She is dead? When did she die?’

  ‘A year ago. Warder Braddle brought me the good news. It was in all the papers.’ Private Luck suddenly raised his arms above his head as if adopting the pose of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth in Sargent’s celebrated portrait. ‘If she had not died, I vow I would have killed her.’

  I did not laugh: the man seemed so much in earnest. ‘It is because of Lady Burton that you are here?’ I asked.

  He lowered his arms and looked at me intently. ‘Yes, Mr Oscar Wilde. I am like you – in prison for what I am. I helped Lady Burton bring Sir Richard’s body back to England from Trieste. I organised it – coffin and all. Very complicated. And then, as soon as we had arrived in London, she threw me out of the house and betrayed me to the police.’

  ‘Why? What provoked her?’

  ‘She did not want me at his funeral.’

  ‘But why did she go to the police?’

  ‘Revenge!’ he cried dramatically, adopting his Lady Macbeth pose once more.

  ‘I understand,’ I said gently. ‘But what was the precise nature of your alleged offence?’

  ‘I loved her husband and he loved me.’

  ‘Is that what Lady Burton told the police?’

  Private Luck put his hands on his hips and laughed. ‘No, no. Of course not. She never mentioned her husband to the police. She did not need to. She simply told the police that I am hijra.’

  ‘And that is a crime?’

  ‘Yes, according to the the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. Did you not know?’

  ‘I fear that the Criminal Tribes Act is a piece of legislation that passed me by. I was only seventeen in 1871 and politics was never my forte.’

  ‘This is no laughing matter, Mr Oscar Wilde,’ said Luck reprovingly. ‘According to this Act of Parliament, we are outlaws.’

  ‘I did not know that.’

  ‘Oh yes, because we hijra dress as ladies it is a breach of public decency. The Governor-General of India wanted to stop the rot. He called us “the third sex” and accused us of corrupting every Englishman in India with our filthy habits. He insisted on this law.’

  ‘Ah.’ I smiled. ‘You were bringing the British Empire to its knees.’

  Private Luck clapped his hands delightedly ‘That is exactly Sir Richard Burton’s joke. That is exactly the words he used. You are very like him, Mr Wilde. And you have a wife, too.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I have a wife.’

  ‘And she will pay me to keep your secrets. I know she will.’

  ‘Did you ask Lady Burton for money?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said defiantly, ‘I must be paid. When Sir Richard was alive, he paid me. He looked after me. He protected me. He would have wanted Lady Burton to look after me when he died, but she would not do so. I asked her for a proper pension. She said no. She threw me out and she sent all my beautiful saris to the police – and photographs.’

  ‘Photographs?’

  ‘Lovely photographs of me that Sir Richard had taken with his camera.’

  ‘And the police arrested you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And you were sent for trial – accused of a breach of public decency under this Criminal Tribes Act?’

  ‘Yes
.’

  ‘And blackmail? Were you also charged with attempted blackmail?’

  Private Luck waved his hands about in the air. ‘They said all sorts of things – I do not remember.’ He paused and looked directly at me. His eyelids were green and gay, yet his eyes were brown and mournful. ‘But is it a crime to give pleasure, Mr Wilde? Is it a crime, if you are poor, to want to be paid for it?’

  ‘Is that what you told the court?’ I asked.

  ‘I told the court the truth.’

  I smiled. ‘They must have found that quite disconcerting.’

  ‘They did not want to hear it. My barrister told me to plead guilty. He said that is what Sir Richard would have wanted. He said it would save everybody a lot of time.’

  ‘Given my own experience,’ I said, ‘I think perhaps your barrister was right. When the world is against you, it is sometimes best not to argue.’

  ‘That is true, Mr Wilde – and all’s well that ends well, as our good friend Shakespeare tells us. Lady Burton threw me out of the house, but a better lady took me in. Now it is Her Majesty the Queen who gives me my board and lodging.’

  He looked around his bare cell with what seemed like unfeigned satisfaction. I glanced down at the cold dish of skilly that sat upon his table. ‘You are content here?’ I asked.

  ‘I have found friends in Reading Gaol,’ he said, lowering his eyelids demurely.

  ‘Warder Braddle was your special friend,’ suggested.

  ‘Yes,’ he said simply.

  ‘You pleased him – in your way. And he looked after you – in his.’

  ‘Until I had to kill him for you, Mr Wilde.’

  I sighed and shook my head. He pushed his painted face towards me and hissed: ‘You must give me my IOU. I will have my money. Or I will tell everybody about you and the boy.’

  ‘I will deny it,’ I protested.

  He stood back and laughed. ‘And who will they believe, Mr Oscar Wilde – you or me?’

  20

  Warder Martin

  Every morning, between breakfast and chapel muster, through the cracks around the hatches in the doors to our cells, I continued to have my daily ‘chinwag’ with Private Achindra Acala Luck, late of the Bombay Grenadiers. I could not break myself of the habit.

  My feelings regarding Private Luck were mixed – decidedly so. He alarmed me: he made his demands for his wretched IOU on an almost daily basis and his accompanying threats became ever less charming and more lurid. I went on speaking with him in the belief that so long as we were in direct contact I could in some way contain him. He intrigued me: his stories of growing up among the hijras of Kakamuchee were fascinating. He had been given to the hijra community by his mother when he was a baby. The other boys had either been stolen from their families or abandoned by them. Luck insisted that his childhood had been a wholly happy one. ‘We were a band of brothers, who became sisters,’ he said. ‘I have always loved the eunuch’s life. I am a man who dresses as a lady, but is neither one nor the other. I like to be different. I like to be special. When I joined the Bombay Grenadiers I was one of a kind, believe you me.’ He amused me: he gave wonderful accounts of the hijra mastery of the mysteries of the arts of love. He told tales deliberately to arouse me. And, in Reading Gaol in the hard spring of 1897, I was grateful for that.

  I did not see him face to face again, but I learnt from our conversations that, beneath his cap, he wore his elaborate ladies’ make-up every day. ‘The cap is like the veil of a sari,’ he explained. ‘Whenever we are outside our cells our faces are hidden, so I can paint mine as I please. I do it from memory because I have no looking glass.’ The make-up sticks he used had been supplied to him by Warder Braddle – as a thank-you present for services rendered. They were sticks of theatrical greasepaint bought by Braddle, specially, from Herr Ludwig Leichner’s shop in Covent Garden. Luck kept them secreted between the plank that was the base of his bed and the metal frame of his bedstead. The other warders knew of his painted face, of course, and mocked it, but so long as Luck did not attempt to flaunt his femininity outside his cell, they let him be. They called him the Indian princess.

  The presence of the painted Private Luck in the cell adjacent to my own brought me moments of distraction and hours of anxiety. I feared what he might say, however unfounded, and to whom he might say it and when. I had nothing left in the world but one thing. Through my own folly and indulgence I had lost my name, my position, my happiness, my freedom, my wealth. I was a prisoner and a pauper. But I still had my children left. I was a good father to my children. I love them dearly and was dearly loved by them. I knew that one further whiff of scandal – let alone a direct charge of unnatural vice – and I should never be permitted to see either of my boys again.

  In February 1897 my wife’s solicitor came to see me in Reading Gaol. He brought with him legal papers that I had no option but to sign. In return for the promise of a modest allowance after my release, I agreed to the handing over of the custody of my children to my wife and a male member of her family. The documents I signed contained a clause to the effect that the promised allowance would be cut off completely should I, after my release, make any attempt to visit my children without their guardians’ permission or should I live in any way ‘notoriously’. That the law could decide that I was one unfit to be with my own children was something quite horrible to me. The disgrace of prison was nothing compared with it. I envied the men who trod the prison yard with me. I was sure that their children waited for them beyond the prison walls. I knew that Private Luck had it within his power to keep my children from me for ever.

  In the end, I believe, I bore up against everything by learning to accept everything. I lived in the shadow of Luck’s threats: I had no choice. My ear ached: I endured the discomfort. The Home Secretary ignored my petitions: it was his prerogative to do so.

  And with acceptance came reward. Towards the end of February I made a wonderful new friend in Reading Gaol. His name was Warder Martin and the kindnesses he showed to me, and to other poor, sad creatures in the prison, mark him out as one of the unsung saints of this world. He was young and rough, ill favoured and ill spoken, but he had a heart of gold. Warder Stokes was friendly enough (and his crooked teeth and freckled face were endearing), but he was always careful to keep a proper distance from the prisoners in his charge and he never broke the rules. Warder Martin was less handsome, but, bless him, he broke the rules on my behalf almost every day. When I was hungry he brought me ginger biscuits. When I was poorly he brought me boiling beef-tea – hiding the bottle in which he was carrying it to my cell inside his jacket and scalding his chest in the process. Best of all, whenever he was able, he brought me a copy of the Daily Chronicle.

  As we all know, the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing, and journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands. In centuries before ours the public nailed the ears of journalists to the pump. In this century journalists have nailed their own ears to the keyhole. As a consequence, the newspapers today chronicle with degrading avidity the sins of the second-rate, and with the conscientiousness of the illiterate, give us accurate and prosaic details of the doings of people of absolutely no interest whatever. I despise journalists: they always apologise to one in private for what they have written against one in public. And I am not much more enamoured of leader writers. (After all, what is behind the leading article but prejudice, stupidity, cant and twaddle?) Nevertheless, after twenty months without seeing a newspaper of any kind, whenever Warder Martin brought it to me, I devoured the Daily Chronicle.

  I was relieved to find that Victoria was still Queen and not surprised to discover that Lord Salisbury was still Prime Minister. I was interested to read that there was a new Archbishop of Canterbury (a churchman who gloried in the name of Temple) and happy to learn that my friend Arthur Conan Doyle had published a new novel – featuring, not Sherlock Holmes, but the Prince Regent and Beau Brumm
ell. I also consumed (with a glee bordering on the shaming) accounts of death and divorce and disaster. In London, the dear Duchess of Bolton had succumbed to a fever; in Paris, Marcel Proust was rumoured to have taken part in a duel; in the United States of America, a meteorite had fallen on West Virginia. And at Reading Assizes, I read, one Sebastian Atitis-Snake, 39, was on trial for his life, charged with the murder of a long-serving and much-respected prison warder at Reading Gaol, ‘where the accused had been serving as a prisoner alongside the disgraced poet and playwright Oscar Wilde’.

  According to the newspaper, between his arrest at Reading Gaol and his trial at Reading Assizes, Atitis-Snake had been held at the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum in Crowthorne, Berkshire, where his ‘condition was closely observed over a period of many weeks’ in order to assess both his ‘fitness for trial’ and ‘the state of his mind’.

  Atitis-Snake admitted that he had been responsible for the death of the warder at Reading Gaol, but pleaded ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’. He told the court that as a young man he had developed a fascination with the life and achievements of the Emperor Napoleon of France and that, at certain periods of his life, he had become convinced that he was the reincarnation of the late Emperor. At Reading Gaol, however, associating with criminals for the first time in his life, his fixation with Bonaparte had mutated into a belief that he was not, in fact, the Napoleon of France, but the so-called ‘Napoleon of crime’, Professor Moriarty, the character created by Arthur Conan Doyle as the nemesis of his most celebrated creation, Sherlock Holmes. Atitis-Snake maintained that he had flung the unfortunate prison warder from the gantry outside his cell in a ‘moment of madness’ in which he believed himself to be Moriarty locked in a life-or-death struggle with Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls at Meiringen in Switzerland. Atitis-Snake bore no malice towards the warder. He claimed that he barely knew the man. He had merely been enacting the scene depicted by Dr Conan Doyle in his story, ‘The Final Problem’, which Atitis-Snake had first read in the Strand Magazine on its publication in December 1893.