‘Is such a thing possible?’ I asked.
‘Oh, yes,’ murmured Oscar. ‘It happens all the time.’
Nicholas Breakspear looked at me and smiled. ‘Agnes loved Pio Nono as I did. As we all did. But she loved him more. She had no father, no grandfather, no brothers, no uncles — but she had Pio Nono. And she was just a child, so her love for him was simple and selfless in a way that our love was not. And Pio Nono loved her deeply. He was fond of children. He was always easy with babies. He would make jokes with the altar boys, play little games with them, but Agnes was the only child he ever really knew. She was more than a daughter to him. She was his delight — the personification of innocence. She brought pure joy to his declining years. She was his little lamb of God.’ Breakspear’s eyes turned back to Oscar. ‘You ask me what I thought as I knelt by the seat of tears next to the lifeless body of this beautiful child? I thought, Pio Nono is dead and Agnes has gone with him to heaven. It is what they would both have wanted.’
‘Pio Nono was eighty-five when he died,’ said Oscar quietly. ‘Agnes was twelve or thirteen?’
‘Thirteen or fourteen,’ said Breakspear, ‘something like that.’
‘A difficult age,’ said Oscar.
‘So I have heard,’ said Breakspear. ‘But I have no sisters.’
‘What happened then?’ asked Oscar.
‘I left her where I found her. I got to my feet. I made the sign of the cross. I left the sacristy. I left the gas lamps high. I left the candles lit. I left the door unlocked. The outer door is always unlocked. I went to compline. And during the service I had darker thoughts. As I knelt, I began to think that Agnes had taken her own life. As I prayed, I became convinced of it. In the face of Pio Nono’s death, in her grief, in her despair, the poor child had gone to the seat of tears and killed herself.’
‘How?’
‘I had no idea, but I was certain of it.’
‘And when the service ended …?’
‘And when the service ended, all the others returned to the Holy Father’s deathbed to watch over his body through the night.’
‘And you?’
‘I did nothing. I said nothing.’
‘Except to me,’ said Cesare Verdi, standing in the doorway.
‘Yes,’ said Breakspear. ‘I found Verdi in the corridor that runs between the Sistine Chapel and the papal apartments. He was returning to the sacristy, so I knew I had no choice. I had to tell him. I swore him to secrecy and together, in silence, we came here together.’
‘And what did you find?’
‘Nothing,’ said Breakspear. ‘The seat of tears was empty. She’d gone. There was no sign of her. None at all.’
‘If she was ever there, she’d vanished,’ said Cesare Verdi, ‘— into thin air.’
16
Lobsters and lemon mayonnaise
I have heard it said, and seen it written, that the character of my creation ‘Sherlock Holmes’ is, in part, at least, modelled on the personality of my friend, Oscar Wilde. Not so. I will concede this much — that both Holmes and Wilde were men of peculiar genius and eccentricity: intellectually brilliant, intuitive and observant, gifted as linguists, unique in their way of personal expression. Neither was much taken with the frou-frou of skirts, but both were true to themselves — and to their friends. They shared many qualities, and had flaws in common, also. Each, at his worst, was self-regarding, self-indulgent, selfish and self-absorbed, to a degree, I fear, that would be categorised in the modern psychoanalytical parlance as ‘narcissistic’ and ‘egotistical’. And each, too, had a strain in his nature that put him beyond the accepted mores of his times. In Holmes‘s case, this led to an unfortunate dependency on the use of the drug cocaine. In Wilde’s case, it led to the gates of Reading Gaol. But these two remarkable contemporaries, so similar in so many ways, were nonetheless very different human beings. Holmes at heart was a man of science, a man of action and a pragmatist. Oscar was a poet, a man of inaction and a romantic. Besides, the one could not have been modelled on the other because I conjured up Mr Sherlock Holmes some years before I met Mr Oscar Wilde.
The character of Mycroft Holmes, on the other hand, is certainly indebted to my close acquaintance with Oscar Wilde. It was during our stay in Rome in July 1892, and on this particular Saturday night, I recall, that I decided to endow ‘the great Sherlock Holmes’ with an older, taller, broader, stouter brother and make him yet more brilliant than his sibling. The moment the notion came into my head, I saw the figure fully formed. At once, without hesitation, I gave Holmes’s brother Oscar’s genius, his appearance, his indolence — and his appetite.
I have also heard it said that I modelled Dr John H. Watson on one Dr Arthur Conan Doyle. Again, I deny it absolutely but I will grant you this: that Holmes’s friend and chronicler and I do have one characteristic in common. We are regular in our habits. For example, I like to breakfast at eight, to take luncheon at one and to dine no later than at half past eight in the evening. Oscar, on the other hand, did not mind when he feasted, so long as it was frequently and well.
That evening we dined at midnight — in Axel Munthe’s rooms in Keats’s former lodgings — on cold lobster and lemon mayonnaise, fresh strawberries and French champagne. Oscar picked up these supplies from the kitchens of the Hôtel de Russie at gone eleven o’clock, as we passed along the Via del Babuino on our way from the Vatican to the Piazza di Spagna. He brought them to Munthe’s apartment in a picnic basket and laid them out before us on a low table in front of the fireplace. Having served the repast, he stood back to admire it.
‘Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,’ he declared, with one hand resting decorously on the mantelpiece and the other waving a lobster claw aloft, ‘and many goodly states and kingdoms seen, but I don’t believe I have laid eyes upon a midnight feast to rival this, gentlemen. Do you agree?’
I mumbled my assent, while thinking my friend’s exuberance somewhat tiresome and wondering how long it would be before I could slip once more between the Hôtel de Russie’s crisp white sheets. (I like to be in bed by midnight.) Munthe was more forthcoming. ‘This is indeed a treat, Oscar. Thank you. Our English tea notwithstanding, I’m surprisingly peckish.’
‘Of course you are,’ cried Oscar, dipping his lobster claw into the bowl of mayonnaise, ‘you were denied your cucumber sandwiches.’
‘No cucumbers in the market,’ chuckled Munthe, leaning forward from his armchair and, with his fingers, scooping out a morsel of lobster flesh from its shell.
‘Not even for ready money!’ hooted Oscar, happily.
‘You are both in remarkably good humour,’ I said a touch sourly, ‘given the lateness of the hour.’
‘Are you surprised? Munthe has tucked up two of his patients and left them sleeping like babies, and you and I, Arthur, have at last made real progress in unravelling the mystery of the beautiful child Agnes.’
‘Have we?’ I enquired, incredulous. I sat back in the armchair facing Munthe’s and folded my arms.
‘You believe the girl was murdered?’ asked Munthe.
‘Well, I don’t believe she was assumed into heaven on the wings of angels,’ answered Oscar. ‘Nor do I believe that she took her own life.’
My friend stood posing by the fireplace. I watched him turn to the mantelpiece and notice the mummified hand of the unfortunate workman who had fallen to his death from the rafters of All Saints church.
He dropped the remains of his lobster claw into the open paw and continued: ‘Agnes was a waif and stray, an abandoned child taken in by the reverend sisters of the Holy See when she was just an infant. She was a happy little girl. Beautiful, wholesome, healthy. I know. I stood at her side at that audience with Pio Nono just ten months before his death, remember. She was loved — and then she was lost. One day she was there, the next she was not. How come? What happened? Did she disappear down a rabbit-hole? No. Did she vanish into thin air? No. She was either kidnapped or murdered or both.’
‘Co
uldn’t she have run away?’ suggested Munthe.
‘She was thirteen or fourteen. It’s possible, I suppose, but unlikely. Why run away? The Vatican laundry was her home and had been since she was a little girl. The nuns who worked there were her family. And the death of Pio Nono, though distressing, was not unexpected. He was an old man, and sick. The news of his demise will have upset the child, no doubt — it might even have “broken her heart”, as Breakspear put it— but why should it have prompted her to run away? “Running away” makes no sense.’
‘But does “murder” make any more sense?’ I asked, dryly. ‘Couldn’t Breakspear be right? Couldn’t the girl have taken her own life?’
‘From everything we know of her, it is clear that Agnes was a devout child. She was devoted to the Holy Father. I saw them together: I can vouch for that. The girl’s faith was evident — simple, perhaps, but sincere. She will have known the Ten Commandments. “Thou shalt not commit murder.” Self-murder is a mortal sin. Faithful Agnes would not have taken her own life.’
Sitting back, blinking at us through his thick gig-lamps while carefully licking clean the tips of his fingers, Munthe summarised what we had reported to him of Breakspear’s testimony.
‘The Grand Penitentiary claims that he found the girl lying dead on the chaise in the sacristy. This was at ten o’clock. He observed her for a few minutes and then departed, leaving her body where it lay. He went directly from the sacristy to attend compline and, as soon as the service was over, about half an hour later, he returned to the sacristy. On his return, he found the girl was gone.’
‘Exactly so.’
‘Nobody else saw her?’
‘Apparently not. She was last seen by one of the nuns in the laundry at around five o’clock, when Pio Nono was still alive. At the time the sister said that Agnes had seemed in every respect “her usual self”. None of the nuns could understand her disappearance.’
‘And Monsignor Breakspear saw no one coming or going from the sacristy before or after he made his terrible discovery?’
‘No one at all. The other chaplains-in-residence were either at compline or in attendance at the deathbed of the Holy Father.’
‘And at the time Breakspear told no one about what he claims to have seen?’
‘Only the sacristan, whom he encountered by chance returning from compline. And he swore Verdi to secrecy on the night. And, according to both of them, neither has spoken a word of any of this to anyone since it occurred.’
‘Why not? Why the secrecy?’
‘Because Verdi, of course, saw nothing — and Breakspear can’t substantiate what he says he saw. He admits that he cannot even be certain that the girl was dead. He believes she took her own life, but he acknowledges that he has no proof. He maintains that the reason he has said nothing to anyone throughout the intervening years is because he cannot conceive what useful purpose it would serve.’
Oscar paused and bent over the table to inspect the dish of lobsters. Carefully, he selected a second claw, fatter and pinker than the first. Then, from the inside breast pocket of his jacket, he produced a small silver hammer and with it proceeded to beat the shell of the claw until he had cracked it open.
‘Do we believe him?’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, leaning forward to look more closely at the silver hammer. I was sure it was the one we had seen on the sideboard in the sacristy. ‘What do you mean, “Do we believe him?”‘
‘Do we accept Breakspear’s testimony?’ murmured Oscar, wiping the hammer with his handkerchief before slipping it back into his jacket pocket. ‘Did Breakspear really see Agnes lying dead upon the papal seat of tears?’ He half closed his eyes and leant against the mantelpiece once more. ‘It’s a poetic picture, to be sure, but is it too poetic to be true?’
‘Are you suggesting it’s all an elaborate lie, Oscar?’ I asked, still sitting forward but now gazing down at the dish of lobsters, thinking I might have a bite to eat after all.
‘Why should he lie about such a thing?’ asked Munthe, with a puzzled frown.
‘For some men, lying is a way of life,’ answered Oscar. ‘Lying is what they do. It’s how they are.’ My friend opened his eyes wide and looked down at me. ‘Arthur, do you think that Monsignor Breakspear is telling us the truth?’
I pulled a piece of lobster from its shell. ‘Yes,’ I said firmly. ‘I do.’
‘But I thought that you didn’t like the man.’
‘I don’t,’ I said and dipped my lobster into the mayonnaise.
‘I thought you did not trust him.’
‘I didn’t, but I was moved by his account of the death of the pope.’
‘Ah!’ Oscar smiled. ‘The best confidence men are always the most convincing.’ He stood looking down at me, amused at the relish with which I was already dipping a second piece of lobster into the lemon mayonnaise. ‘Breakspear says that he was at school with you.’
‘I don’t remember him,’ I answered, with my mouth now half full. ‘But why should I? When we were at school, he would have been several years my senior.’
‘Do you think that he was at school with you, Arthur?’
‘Why on earth should he lie about such a thing?’
‘Why indeed? But he hadn’t heard of Alexander Pope — and Pope was on the syllabus at Stonyhurst, you say …’ Oscar took a deep breath while his fingers hovered above the bowl of strawberries. ‘There is something about Monsignor Breakspear, gentlemen, that doesn’t add up.’ He picked out a piece of fruit and held it up to the gasolier for closer inspection. ‘Take this business of eating his way through the animal kingdom — dining on weasels and stoats and porcupine. It’s preposterous.’
‘Your friend Dr Buckland did it.’
‘He did. And Breakspear has copied him. Breakspear lacks originality.’
‘Does that make him a murderer?’ asked Munthe.
‘Not necessarily, but it does make him suspect so far as I am concerned.’ Oscar bit into his strawberry and dropped the hull into the dead workman’s upturned hand, mopping his mouth with his handkerchief. ‘And then there’s his name — it’s preposterous, too.’
‘Is it? Breakspear’s an old name.’
‘Historic.’ Oscar felt in his pockets for his cigarette case. ‘Monsignor Nicholas Breakspear, who aspires to be the next English pope, has exactly the same name as the last English pope. It’s absurd.’
‘It’s a coincidence, certainly.’
‘Tomorrow, Arthur, when you send a telegram of reassurance to your wife — as I know you will — I would be obliged if you would also send a telegram to your old school. Make some enquiries about “Nicholas Breakspear”, would you? Was he indeed your school-fellow or is he an impostor?’
‘And if he is an impostor,’ asked Munthe, ‘does that also make him a murderer? Why should Monsignor Breakspear of all people kill an innocent child?’
‘Because he could.’
‘Because he could?’ Axel Munthe shook his head in disbelief.
‘An assertion of “self” is frequently the cause of murder,’ said Oscar, lighting his cigarette from the flame of one the candles on the mantelpiece.
Munthe muttered, ‘I’d be more convinced by a less abstract motive.’
Oscar inspected the burning tip of his cigarette. ‘How does this suit you, then? In his quest for self-realisation, in his desire to taste every experience open to man, Monsignor Breakspear is not only eating his way through the entire animal kingdom, but, one by one, he is breaking each of the Ten Commandments’
‘Now that is preposterous,’ cried Munthe.
Oscar laughed. ‘Implausible, I agree.’
I looked up at my friend and smiled. ‘I think we should stick to the known facts, Oscar, if we can.’
‘Agreed, Arthur. On 7 February 1878, as Pio Nono lay dead, mourned by the whole Catholic world, according to Monsignor Breakspear, someone stole the life of an innocent child. Someone is responsible for a young girl’s disappearance. We shal
l garner all the facts and find out who it was.’ He drew slowly on his-cigarette and blew a thin plume of pale-purple smoke into the air. ‘We must, for Agnes’s sake.’
I was contemplating the strawberries and thinking I might soak a couple in my glass of champagne. I looked up at my friend again. ‘I meant to ask you, Oscar: how the deuce did you discover the girl’s name?’
‘As I am sure you learnt at Stonyhurst, Arthur, agnes is Greek for “pure” or “holy”, and agnus is Latin for “lamb”. Could there be a more fitting name for Pio’s Nono’s little lamb of God? When I saw Father Bechetti’s painting of the girl, I guessed that her name would be Agnes. It was a guess, a leap of faith, albeit an educated one.’
Munthe looked sharply up at Oscar. ‘You said Bechetti told you her name.
‘He did — after a fashion.’
‘He can barely speak,’ said Munthe.
‘He did not speak her name. He threw his glass to the ground and fell to the floor when I mentioned it. You were both there,’ said Oscar, sucking on his cigarette. ‘At the church of All Saints, at the fund-raiser, earlier in the week, when I climbed the steps of the pulpit and announced the poem that I was going to recite: “The Eve of St Agnes”. I think the title caught Father Bechetti’s attention. He understands English. I think it was the reference to “the sweet Virgin’s picture” that tipped him over the edge.’
‘Is this possible?’ murmured Munthe.
‘Good Lord,’ I breathed, swallowing a crushed strawberry.
‘Good God,’ cried Munthe, suddenly getting to his feet. ‘Who’s that?’
From below us we heard the sound of heavy battering on the front door. When the hammering stopped, there were distant cries of ‘Dottore! Dottore! Medico!’
‘You’re wanted, Doctor,’ said Oscar, putting out his cigarette among the lobster claws in the dead workman’s mummified hand. ‘While we’re for our beds, dottore, for you duty calls.’
The battering resumed below. I drank up my champagne and got to my feet. ‘I hope the noise doesn’t wake your companion,’ I said, looking towards the curtained doorway in the corner of the room.
Oscar Wilde and the Vatican Murders Page 17