by James Reese
I stood staring. It was rather like watching a ship putting out to sea.
The lady clung, then, to the better side of sixty. Only in late years has Lady Wilde consented to the crawl of the calendar, though she long ago succeeded in confusing it.46 Such was the impression Speranza made upon me that evening that these long years later I cannot recall the Swedish Ambassador at all—though he did indeed arrive to dine at No.
1 that night—yet I recall our hostess in all her many particulars; so:
She wore a gown of crimson silk, its volume as indebted to the lady herself as to the several crinolines she wore beneath it. Here and there, atop the silk, there’d been sewn dew-like patches of Limerick lace, and round what had once been a waist there was wrapped a golden scarf of Oriental origin. Her face was full-fleshed, and of an uncommon length, and her hands I must describe similarly. She appeared rather more handsome than pretty: her face was plastered with white powder, and her black eyes smouldered like coals above an avian nose; dark, too, was her plaited and piled hair, which she had seen fit to top with a crown of gilded laurel. Supernumerary to this last, most classical touch, her broad bosom bore a collection of brooches, making her seem a sort of mobile mausoleum.
When finally Lady Wilde berthed at the bottom of the banister, she put forth her other, fanless hand. In it she held a handkerchief reeking, not redolent but reeking, of rose-essence. I held my breath, took her hand, and came up from my kiss saying, “You will forgive me, madam, I am sure; for I would very much like to be the Swedish Ambassador. Alas, fate is sometimes unkind.”
At this the lady let go a slow smile. “Well said, Mr. Bram Stoker. Dare I deem my entrance not wasted after all?” Whereupon she whispered, “A fearful bother, it all is sometimes. I was very much enjoying a reworking of Prometheus Vinctus up in my boudoir, and would have preferred to—”
“Aeschylus, then?”
At this she dipped her topmost chin and batted her lashes. “Indeed,” said she.
My knowledge of Greek tragedy having won her to my side, Lady Wilde laid her hand on mine and asked that I lead her into the parlour. Finding that room yet free of the expected company, the hostess bade me sit beside her. This I did, delighting as she deigned to apprise me of the three rules requisite to success at her table. In this she showed me a most uncommon courtesy, for the larger lot of her guests were left to fend for themselves and, failing, as often they did, waited a long while for their second invitation to dine chez Wilde. The rules, then, were these:
Epigrams are much preferable to argument, ever and always;
Paradox is the essence of wit; and,
Insignificant people should avoid anecdotes.
“Are you, Mr. Stoker, insignificant?”
“Only as compared to present company, ma’am.”
“Oh, yes,” said she appraisingly, “Willie has done well to-night. Typically it is As-car who delivers me social treats such as yourself.” Her younger son has always been As-car to his mother.
Later, the bell having rung, Lady Wilde invited me, not Willie—Oscar was “elsewhere” that evening, as often he is nowadays as well—to escort her “à table.” This I did clumsily, catching myself up in her skirts and causing her to list towards starboard. Righting herself, she said, as if to excuse us both, “One atones for being occasionally somewhat over-dressed by being always and absolutely over-educated.”47
Lady Wilde sat me at her right. The Swedish Ambassador was at her left. When he failed to stimulate Speranza in her native tongue—which he spoke bouncingly—she resorted to his.48 Left, as it were, in the dust of Swedish discourse, I turned my attention to the table’s far end, and there I found the second life-friend I would make that night: Sir William Wilde; who, though we were eight at table, with the Ambassadress at his right, sat reading a book between courses.
I liked him of an instant. And though our close acquaintance would be cut short by his death, I have never yet, in all the years since, met a wiser man. I shall, however, allow that his reputation as the least likely of libertines was not unearned; for he was indeed rather slovenly of habit, rather simian of aspect.
It was some ten years prior to my meeting the Wildes—1864, then—that Dr. William Wilde both segued to Sir William and saw his new title sullied by his being made party to a most unfortunate, well nigh ruinous, court case. At question were charges of heinous conduct brought against him by a former patient, one Miss Mary Travers. As that case is yet widely spoken of—and the particulars are surely known to you, Caine—I shan’t offer details here.49
Though acquitted of all charges in the Travers affair, it was yet a much-reduced Sir William whom I met that first night at No. 1. Infamy and the habit of over-work had taken their toll on him. Indeed, he seemed reduced in every way; for, after dinner, when our party repaired to a secondary parlour, I saw that Sir William, in addition to being much older than his wife, was much shorter, nay altogether smaller as well.
And when Sir William approached me where I stood at Speranza’s side, it was only to look up into his wife’s face in search of the sign—yea or nay—telling him whether she deemed me worthy of his time. Evidently, an answer was given in the affirmative, for soon I was invited into Sir William’s sanctum sanctorum, that library-cum-study off the foyer, where, behind closed doors, we proceeded unto cigars and the discovery of a shared interest: Egypt.
Sir William had toured that Land of Mysteries for the first time in 1838. It was he, in fact, who, having seen Cleopatra’s Needle lying as it had for centuries beside Pompey’s Pillar, began the campaign to bring the monolith to its present placement on the Thames Embankment.50 That night, as we sat in Sir William’s library surrounded by more volumes than I had ever seen in private possession, no few of their spines showing the name Wilde—his as Author, hers as Authoress—my host told me the story of his having discovered a mummy in shallow sands near Saqqara.51
I sat listening, raptly, for the gifts of the storyteller run amongst the Wildes. And a lie it would be were I to say that the hairs upon the backs of my hands did not rise up when, at story’s end, and after a most effective pause, Sir William nodded towards a sarcophagus lying upon an iron stand in the library’s far corner.
“It isn’t,” said I. “It cannot be!”
“It is,” said a smiling Sir William; “…and it can.”
I was up and at it in a trice. “But however did you…?”
“It was no matter at all, really.” Sir William caught up to me and now busied himself with the re-stacking of books which had been stacked, discreetly, upon this centuries-old sarcophagus, making it seem but a roughly hewn, gaudily painted table. “The laws of export are rather more lax than they ought to be, and coin accomplishes the rest. I had only to pay taxes comparable to those that would have been levied were I importing a comparable weight of salted fish.”
“Indeed?”
“Very.” Sir William went on to assure me that he’d spared the mummy a worse fate at the hands of smugglers less well intentioned than himself. “I suppose I could have left him in Cairo, true. But I have promised young Budge that I shall bequeath it to him, or rather to the British Museum…in the end.”52
Before lifting the lid of the sarcophagus, Sir William scurried about the library locking its doors and turning low its lights. “It would not do to let the servants know,” he explained. “Doubtless they’d league up to demand more wages, what with there being another member of the household to attend.”
As a child confined by illness to my bed, I developed the habit of dreaming whilst awake. I conjured caves near Clontarf full of whisky oared in by smugglers. I conjured pirates aplenty. Then, too, began my fascination with secret languages, with ciphers. It was this last that led me to the legended hieroglyphs of Egypt, whence I travelled in many a waking dream. But never, never had I dared imagine the moment now come—here, at hand, was an actual mummy!
At hand indeed. The mummy had been partially unwrapped, and as I aided Sir William in rai
sing the lid of the sarcophagus, the first thing I saw within was a golden, glinting finger stall capping the third digit, the flesh of which was black and desiccate and put me in mind of a child’s licorice stick. “Young Budge and I began the unwrapping some months back,” whispered Sir William, as if the mummy were a child asleep in its crib, “but, our friend here being rather bitumous and brittle—a bad job by the embalmers, I should say, done on the cheap—we thought it wise to desist. We made it no further than the hand, the bones of which—”
“Bones?” I asked. Somehow I’d not considered there’d be bones.
“Yes, of course,” said Sir William. “The bones pop! when touched, rather like glass tubing. It gave me quite a start when first I heard the sound.”
His pop! had startled me such that I had fallen back from the sarcophagus, leaving Sir William to struggle with the weight of the lid. “I say, Stoker, if you wouldn’t mind…”
I re-took my share of the weight at once, with apologies. “It’s just that—”
“Yes, yes, I know. Rare it is to meet a mummy, wondrous rare…. Touch it.”
“No, no,” said I, sniffing the spiced air of the Ages as it rose. “I’d not care to bother…him or…her?”
“A him, assuredly,” said Sir William. “We found a mummified frog upon his privates, representing rebirth, yes, but seeming also a nod to Osiris, who—”
“Who, when he was dismembered by his brother, Set, had his penis thrown into the Nile. To be devoured by frogs.”
“Well done, Stoker. Well done indeed. Yes, our friend here is a male of the Late Period, or so says Budge. Six hundred B.C. or thereabouts…. Go ahead, then.”
Indeed, I had begun to reach my hand toward the mummy’s, but just as I touched my fingertip to his, there came a sharp rap at the library door, and:
“Darling? Open up, darling.” And once she’d pushed wider the door Sir William had unlocked, Speranza swept in, chiding her husband; so:-
“Horrid, horrid of you, sir, to hog the most handsome and least Swedish of our guests.” Sidling up beside me, Lady Wilde laced her arm through mine. “Why, oh, why, husband,” said she with a sigh, “could you not have been accorded honors by a country more accustomed to converse? France, for example, would have suited. Or Italy. The Italians seem an amenable, amiable lot.”
“I shall look into it, my dear,” said Sir William with a wink. The oculist’s standard line.
The Wildes then let go of the game, for Lady Wilde had fast taken the lay of the library. With a nod towards the opened sarcophagus, she said, in tones only slightly less sardonic, “So, Mr. Stoker, I see that my husband has introduced you to the eldest of our three sons. He is not the most amusing, mind you, but he is certainly the best behaved.”
“He has, ma’am, yes. Most extraordinary.”
“On successive visits,” said Speranza, grandly, “you will note, Mr. Stoker, that the doors of our home are barred to the merely ordinary.”
As indeed they were. True it was, too, that there would be many more visits succeeding that first. I dined with the Wildes often in those years, the last of Sir William’s life, and at their table I saw shine the leading lights of Dublin life. Often I would go round to No. 1 from the rooms I shared in nearby Harcourt Street with my brother, Thornley,53 and I would enter unannounced; for, as we hovered over his mummy in the half-light, Sir William had said that I should consider his library as my own. “On one condition.”
“Sir?” Of course I’d have agreed to any number of conditions, as already I’d espied the first volumes I’d borrow: Sir William’s own Superstitions and his Lady’s Collected Poems.54
“What do you carry upon your person,” asked Sir William, “that is of most value to you?”
“Why, this, I suppose,” said I, proffering the pocket watch that had been given to my father upon his retirement. It had passed to me upon my father’s recent decease, and it served me as rather more than a time-piece: it was an object lesson in How Not to Live; that said, I loved my father very much and would have been loath to part with his watch, which now I held up by its fob chain, as a mesmerist might have done.
“Upon the desk, just there,” said Sir William over his shoulder, for he was halfway up a ladder and trying to reach down a hollowed-out volume of Herodotus, “there is a box of smallish proportions. Do you see it?” I did. It was of hammered gold, and filigreed. “The key to that box I keep in this book. If, sir, I find your watch within that box, I shall know that one or more of my books has left this room with you, and that it or they are in your good care. I seek no other assurance, nor stipulate any other conditions.” Whereupon Lady Wilde, standing solemnly by all the while, cleared her throat, rather pointedly.
“Oh yes, yes,” continued Sir William, taking the cue. “And if, Mr. Stoker, you enter this room to find me at my work, bent over a book or a blank page, pen at the ready, I beg of you, please, do not speak until spoken to. My train of thought rides lightly upon its rails these days, I’m afraid, and I suffer derailments not well, not well at all.”
“Not a word,” said Speranza, forefinger raised to her lips. And with a tilt of her head towards the mummy, she added, “And hush-hush, too, about you-know-who.”
“Not a word,” said I, thereby sealing an oath that both granted me access to the city’s finest private library and occasioned my never knowing the correct time, for my watch was ever in that box. It is not overstatement to say I read, or at least considered, every volume in Sir William Wilde’s possession. (Not so his wife’s: Speranza’s library was upstairs and off-limits to all and everyone, including her much-indulged sons.) And it was some while later, as I sat in Sir William’s chair one day at noontide, considering which of his volumes would return with me to Harcourt Street, that I saw for the first time—and here, Caine, I come to the point I mean to make—…I saw The Woman in Black.55
Having signed out from my desk at the Castle,56 and having traded my half-hour luncheon for a trip to the Wilde library, I’d gone round to No. 1 at noon. I was eager, I recall, for a bit more Euripides and some Shakespeare. I’d not supposed I’d see Speranza, for she rarely dressed or descended before mid-afternoon, loathing daylight as she does. Already a pall had fallen over No. 1, for Sir William had been some weeks in bed, and we had had, of late, an unfavourable prognosis. His end was near.
I entered to find the servants standing about teary-eyed. Oscar was at home, and Willie—whom Oscar said had been away “on alcoholiday”—was due presently. It was as I stood in the foyer talking to Oscar—and asking quite innocently about Florence, to whom he’d introduced me some weeks previously—that I, or rather we, heard the hall door open; for surely Oscar and the servants, despite all evidence to the contrary, saw and heard as I did and were aware of the woman, dressed all in black and closely veiled, who had come into No. 1 wordlessly and now, unmolested, stole through the foyer and up the stairs. Yet no-one looked at her. Extraordinary! Was this an apparition? Could no-one see the woman but me? How else to explain the abject non-occasion of her coming?
I watched the woman’s progress with slackened jaw, and as my thoughts turned from Oscar and the servants to the constabulary—here was an intruder, surely!—I wheeled around only to find myself alone in the foyer. Oscar and the servants had scattered. So, too, had The Woman in Black disappeared into the upper reaches of No. 1. What was I to do? My options were few, for I would never have dared ascend those stairs uninvited or unaccompanied; and further, I was due back at the Castle in—I guessed—a quarter-hour, no more. So it was that, tucking Euripides and the Bard underarm, I took my leave; but when I returned two days hence, again at noonday, again I saw the black-clad visitor. In she came, and upstairs she went, wordlessly, whilst I stared.
My puzzlement was slow in ceding to suspicion, for still I was green in the ways of the world. Indeed, my suspicions would not be confirmed until Oscar and I, some years later, met to mingle our weeps in a common cup and put the business of Florence behind us. Only then
did we speak of The Woman in Black. Doubtless it was I who brought her up. And my relief at learning the truth was greatly tempered by learning, too, what Lady Wilde’s love had cost her.
The Woman in Black was, of course, Sir William’s last and preferred mistress. And every morning of his slow decline unto death, she had come to No. 1, ever in black, always veiled, to sit at her lover’s side. Oscar held that his mother was, nay is, incapable of so vulgar a sentiment as jealousy; but I rather suppose she paid a dear price those dark days. Not one woman in a thousand would have tolerated the presence of a rival at her husband’s deathbed, but Speranza did, and bade her sons and servants do the same, in silence; for she must have known that Sir William loved the woman, and she could not begrudge him the happiness her presence afforded him.
Still, she, Speranza, was Sir William’s lady, and he was her knight. I believe she did right. And I believe, too, in their love, such as it was; for I myself have learned that there is but one vantage point from which to judge a marriage: from the inside looking out.
Would that Oscar had learned from his mother’s lesson in discretion; for, devoid of it himself, I fear he sets himself up for a fall.
Aide-mémoire (continued)
As said, it was indeed Lady Wilde who told me that you, Caine, had come to London as Rossetti’s new “man.”
The month was August, the year 1881; and the occasion of this news was Lady Wilde’s resumption of her Saturday-afternoon at-homes—or conversazioni, as she calls them—that had been so popular in Dublin. Of course, her London salon was slow in attaining a like popularity.57
I arrived to find Lady Wilde’s rooms crowded to less-than-critical mass. The bell being broken, I knocked upon the door at No. 146 Oakley Street. An Irish Betty answered in time, squinting, and taking it upon herself to apologise for the dimness within. “Shure, it’s her Ladyship that likes to turn daylight into candlelight. Follow me, if you’re able,” said she, whereupon I proceeded to the salon proper through low-ceilinged, dark-paneled passageways. Several persons sat upon the stairs. Others milled about. As I stood in the shadows, I heard my name called, and called again, and followed the sound, shouldering my way to where Lady Wilde sat.58