Minutes later—while we were still standing in a circle by the fireplace, beaming blithely and singing her praises—she returned. She was carrying a large butler’s tray, with, on it, three champagne saucers, one wineglass, one sherry glass, and, in a silver ice bucket filled to the brim with fresh ice, a magnum of Perrier Jouet. “Aidan has a cellar in the basement and an ice house in his garden,” she said by way of explanation. “The cellar is almost empty and the ice house he never uses. It is probably the only ice house in Chelsea and I doubt that he’s been into it once. Has he shown you round the house and garden? He has ten rooms here; he uses three. The kitchen is a disgrace. Do not go. Even the mice find it inhospitable. He’s been in residence a year and still there is no furniture to speak of. Have you seen his bedroom? There’s an iron bedstead in one corner and a cheval looking-glass in the other—and that’s that. There isn’t a hook on the back of the door, let alone a wardrobe. He’s living out of a suitcase. What am I to do with him?”
Conan Doyle laughed. “Marry him!”
“If I must,” she replied, laughing, too. “Open the wine, Aidan. I want to toast your friends. I want to drink to Sophie Gray.” She looked at me and widened her eyes.
“I want Mr Wilde to recite one of his poems for us,” she said turning to Oscar, “or tell us one of his ghost stories,” adding, “you see, Mr Wilde, I do know who you are really…Aidan has told me all about this mysterious murder that you are intent on investigating. Dr Doyle believes you, even if Aidan still has his doubts.” Her candour was disarming. She turned to Conan Doyle and raised her glass to him. “I am so happy to see you, Dr Doyle. We can talk of my hero once more, can we not?”
“Are you, too, an admirer of Sherlock Holmes?” I asked.
“No,” she answered. “I do admire Dr Doyle’s writings, of course, but I did not mean Sherlock Holmes.”
“I believe Miss Sutherland is speaking of Dr Joseph Bell,” said Oscar.
“Indeed,” she said, acknowledging Oscar with a pretty tilt of her head. “How did you know?”
“I saw the book—his book—the one you were reading on the underground train on your way here,” said Oscar, indicating the red-bound volume that she had thrown down on the side table before fetching our champagne.
“How did you know she travelled here by train?” asked Fraser.
Conan Doyle picked up the book and brandished it before us. “Here is Miss Sutherland’s twopenny tube ticket used as a bookmark. Oscar misses nothing.”
“Who is Dr Bell?” I asked.
“A great man,” said Conan Doyle, examining the spine of the volume. “Not only the author of this definitive text—A Manual of the Operations of Surgery —but my mentor. He taught me at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh. As a surgeon, he was meticulous. As a lecturer, he had the quality of a mesmerist. As a master diagnostician, I do not know his equal. If anyone is the model for Sherlock Holmes, it is he. Dr Bell instilled in his students the critical importance of the powers of observation. He would have been proud of you, Oscar.”
Oscar smiled contentedly. Oscar was not averse to flattery.
Conan Doyle put down the book and continued: “Dr Bell made an extraordinary impression upon us at our very first lecture. Almost as he began, he produced a glass vial containing a noxious amber liquid and held it aloft before us.” Conan Doyle picked up his glass of champagne as if it had been Bell’s vial. “‘Gentlemen,’ he announced, in his rich Edinburgh burr, “this vial contains a most potent drug. It is extremely bitter to the taste—aye. But I want you to taste it! What, gentlemen? You shrink back?” Bell swirled the amber liquid with a finger, like so.” Conan Doyle, with his champagne, suited the action to the word. “‘Naturally,’ said Dr Bell, ‘I do not ask anything of my students that I would not undertake myself. I will taste the liquid before passing it around.’ The great man brought his hand to his mouth and sucked his finger. As he did so his features contorted as though he had sampled poison.”
As he told the tale, Conan Doyle re-enacted the drama before us.
“After a moment, Bell recovered himself and handed the vial to a student in the front row. ‘Now,’ he instructed, ‘you do likewise.’ Each of us in turn dipped a finger into the amber fluid and tasted it. It was indeed an awful brew, repellent to the taste. But when the vial had completed its rounds, Bell looked out over the rows of students spread before him and sighed. ‘Gentlemen,—’ he said, ‘I am deeply grieved to find that not one of you has developed his power of perception, the faculty for observation that I speak so much of, for if you had truly observed me, what would you have seen?’”
Oscar had the answer. “That while you placed your index finger into the amber liquid, it was your middle finger that found its way into your mouth!”
“Correct!” cried Conan Doyle, clinking the side of his glass against Oscar’s. “You do not miss a trick, my friend. You observe everything! I have decided that I am going to give Mr Sherlock Holmes an even more brilliant older brother and, with your permission, he shall be modelled on you! Holmes is based mostly on Dr Bell, but he has something of Fraser about him also. Holmes’s brother will be entirely you, Oscar—”
“But I am not like Holmes,” Oscar protested. “I am not a man of action. I am indolent.”
“Holmes’s brother shall be indolent then,” replied Conan Doyle. “Do not argue with me. I have decided. It is settled.”
As we all laughed and drank our champagne, I noticed that Miss Sutherland was cradling her copy of Dr Bell’s book to her chest. “Why are you reading Dr Bell?” I asked.
“Because it seems that I am never to sit at his feet,” she said.
Conan Doyle explained: “Miss Sutherland entertained hopes of becoming a doctor. She wished to study at Edinburgh University, but it was not to be.”
“You see, I am a woman, Mr Sherard, and women are not fit to be physicians. Women are not fit to be anything!”
“I don’t know about that,” protested Fraser in a jocular fashion.
“I do,” said Miss Sutherland, fiercely. “Aidan, you, and Dr Doyle, and Mr Wilde, and Mr Sherard have all enjoyed the benefits of a university education. Why? Because you are men. I am denied one. Why? Because I am a woman. It is appalling—outrageous. And you do nothing about it—except laugh! The only women allowed within the hallowed walls of our ancient universities are cleaners and concubines. It is scandalous, Aidan, and you know it.”
For a moment, silence fell. Oscar broke it by taking the book that Miss Sutherland was clasping to her bosom and asking her, “So what do you do, Miss Sutherland—by way of occupation?”
“Nothing,” she cried. “I do nothing—except live off my parents and await the day when I marry, when I shall live off poor Aidan here. You are right, Mr Wilde. I am frustrated in my ambitions. I long to make my mark on the world. Perhaps your friend Sir John will paint my portrait and I shall achieve fame that way. I am determined to join the ranks of the immortals somehow.”
“You might try committing a murder,” suggested Oscar, casually, leafing through Bell’s book.
“Come, Oscar,” said Conan Doyle, reprovingly, “do not make light of murder.”
“I am quite serious,” said Oscar. “If Miss Sutherland is bent on immortality and the conventional paths are blocked to her, perhaps she should try murder. After all, a hundred years from now, who will be best remembered? Lord Rosebery? Henry Irving? Sir John Millais? Or Jack the Ripper?”
“Oh, Mr Wilde,” exclaimed Veronica delightedly, “what an amazing man you are! Why are you here? Why are you in mourning? Tell me all about this murder you are investigating. Tell me everything. Do, please.”
Fraser protested, in vain. Conan Doyle mumbled his demurral, to little effect. I stood by, in admiration, sipping my champagne, as Oscar took centre stage and told Miss Sutherland his story—our story: the story of the murder of Billy Wood.
Despite interventions from the detective and the doctor, Oscar omitted none of the salient details. When he
had completed his narrative, Miss Sutherland, who had listened with rapt attention throughout, asked, “This boy, Billy Wood, did you care for him, Mr Wilde? You say he had talent and youth and beauty—”
Oscar interrupted her: “He had genius, Miss Sutherland. Beauty is a form of genius—is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has a divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those that have it. Billy Wood was a prince.”
“But did you care for him, Mr Wilde?” she repeated. “You talk of beauty in the abstract and that perplexes me. For all your protestations, I am not sure how much you really loved the boy.”
Oscar smiled at her and said, “In so vulgar an age as this, Miss Sutherland, it is not wise to show one’s heart to the world. We all need masks, do we not?”
Aidan Fraser broke the mood, with some finality. “At all events,” he said, gathering up the now-empty glasses and returning them to the tray, “Oscar has decided to ignore our advice. He is pursuing the case, willy-nilly. He is determined to solve it, with or without our help.”
“I must,” said Oscar, “and not only for poor Billy’s sake. After all, if the murderer is not apprehended, may he—or she—not strike again?”
12
16 October—5 November 1889
“Do you truly believe that the murderer may strike again?” I asked as I walked my friend home that evening, along the Chelsea Embankment towards his house in Tite Street.
“It is possible,” he said. “Indeed, I think it likely. Few of life’s occurrences turn out to be unique. For most of us, whatever we do, once is not enough. The poet does not pen the perfect sonnet and retire. The drinker is never satisfied by a single glass of wine. Having tasted the forbidden fruit, the sinner, inevitably, is hungry for more.”
“But if the murderer is a man like O’Donnell—” Oscar interrupted me. “The murderer is not a man like O’Donnell, Robert. If I had found Billy beaten to death in one of the backstreets of Broadstairs, I might have believed a brutish drunkard such as O’Donnell capable of the crime. But Billy’s murder was not a random act. It was not a momentary aberration. It was carefully planned and painstakingly executed. I found Billy in an upstairs room, surrounded by candles, lying, as on a catafalque, his arms folded across his chest…There was something formal about the manner of poor Billy’s murder, something ritualistic even.”
“Are you suggesting he was ‘sacrificed’ in some way?” I asked, incredulous.
“And if he was,” said Oscar, “how many other sacrificial lambs have been similarly slaughtered and laid to rest we know not where?”
He paused and stood for a moment looking onto the black surface of the river Thames. The tide was high, but the water was quite still. “Tomorrow,” he announced, “I shall begin a melancholy journey through all the morgues and mortuaries of the metropolis. There are thirty-seven of them in all, I understand. And in one of them, perhaps, among the unclaimed corpses, I shall find the body of Billy Wood. And—who knows?—I may find, too, the cadavers of other young men killed in a similar fashion.”
“Thirty-seven morgues and mortuaries…” I repeated.
“Yes, Robert, death is everywhere. This river alone throws up a hundred nameless bodies a year.”
“But it will take you months to visit every morgue and mortuary in London.”
He shook his head. “Weeks, not months,” he said. “I aim to visit three a day. It must be done. There is no alternative.”
“Can you not send your ‘spies’?” I asked.
“No,” he said, smiling. “I have to go myself. I know what Billy looked like. My ‘spies’ do not. I enquired of Mrs Wood and there are no photographs of Billy—even as a little boy. If he is to be identified at all, it can only be by someone who knew him personally.”
“I shall come with you, Oscar,” I said. “At which morgue do we start?”
He laughed and, turning away from the river, put a hand on my shoulder. “You are very kind, Robert, but, when visiting the dead, I prefer to go alone. It is melancholy work that suits one of my age and disposition. While I go in search of the body of Billy Wood, I suggest you lay siege to the heart of Miss Sutherland. I think you will find it more congenial employment.”
“But she is engaged to Fraser,” I protested.
“Indeed,” said Oscar, now putting his arm through mine as we resumed our walk along the embankment. “That will add a certain frisson to the enterprise. A romance without a dash of danger is hardly worthy of the name.”
“And I am in love with Kaitlyn,” I said, firmly and with a certain pride.
“Of course you are,” he answered, beaming at me broadly, “but Kaitlyn is in Vienna, Robert, and you are in London—”
“And am I incapable of fidelity?” I wailed.
“Fidelity fiddlesticks!” cried Oscar. “You are a man, Robert! You know my rule: the only way to behave with a woman is to make love to her if she is pretty and to someone else if she is plain. What a ridiculous fuss is made of fidelity! Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot. That’s all there is to it. Be grateful you are young, Robert. Seize every bit of happiness while you can.”
I did as Oscar counselled (I did not need much persuading!) and I confess that the weeks that followed were among the happiest of my life. On the morning after our first encounter, as Oscar set off for the morgue at Kennington Rise, I wrote a note to Miss Sutherland inviting her to join me for tea at the Cadogan Hotel. By return of post, she accepted my invitation. It was the beginning of what was, for me, a most magical experience.
That autumn and winter, Veronica Sutherland had time to spare, and I had time to give, and we spent it together, hour upon hour, day after day—taking tea, taking lunch promenading, playing (we were in our twenties, still young enough for play), laughing (so much!), and talking (so much!).
We never talked of love; we talked of life —and the life of the mind. We spoke of art and drama and science (her interest in medicine was sincere); of Scotland (which she loathed); of Italy (which she loved; she had a passion for Venice); of Conan Doyle (whom she much admired); and, of course, of Oscar (she was fascinated by Oscar’s obsession with the death of Billy Wood). She rarely spoke of Fraser; and I never spoke of Kaitlyn or Marthe—or of my divorce. (Foxton, my estranged wife’s solicitor, continued to bombard me with communications; I put his existence out of my mind and his correspondence on the fire.)
At our first tete-a-tete—over tea and toasted teacakes at the Cadogan Hotel—Veronica told me her life story. She was the only offspring of elderly parents. By her own admission, she had been a wilful child, disrespectful of her betters, at all times determined to get her own way. Mr and Mrs Sutherland, according to Veronica, were devoted to God and to Dundee in equal measure, so inevitably when, aged twenty-one, she announced her intention to abandon both in order to study surgery in Edinburgh, there was much weeping among the Sutherlands, and even some gnashing of teeth. Her mother threatened to die of shame; her father threatened to cut her off without a penny. (Mr Sutherland did nicely in the jute-importing trade.) In the event a compromise was reached. Neither Edinburgh University nor the Royal Infirmary would entertain her as a student, but her father had a cousin—a married clergyman—who was loosely attached to the university. It was agreed that Veronica could live with him and his family for a year and follow a course of ‘reading’ under his instruction. This she did, and it was during her year in Edinburgh that she met Aidan Fraser. Almost as soon as she met him, she became engaged to him. Her family was delighted. The Fettes fortune counted for something; indeed, in Dundee it counted for a great deal. When Fraser moved to London to join the Metropolitan Police, Veronica was permitted to follow him. While he acquired his house in Lower Sloane Street, she moved into furnished lodgings with a widowed great-aunt in Bedford
Square.
I rarely saw Veronica in the evenings (she was expected to dine with her great-aunt at least four times a week) and almost never at weekends (that was when she saw Fraser) but during the week, from Monday to Friday—when Fraser was about his duties at Scotland Yard and I was ‘available’, as authors and poets tend to be—Veronica and I spent some time together almost daily. She took a particular delight in our visits to the studios of the eminent artists of the day. Because they all knew Oscar, either personally or by reputation, we had an entree everywhere, and because Veronica was so beguiling and so full of vitality—which is the secret of glamour—wherever we went we were welcomed and, as often as not, invited back.
On virtually every Friday during the course of our friendship, Veronica and I found ourselves taking luncheon with Sir John Millais. He was a good and decent man, recently turned sixty, a fine painter (a great painter, in my view), and celebrated, of course, as one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood—though, by this time, he was scorned by younger critics (and most of Oscar’s other friends) for having ‘sold his genius for a mass of sovereigns’ as portrait-artist-in-waiting to the great and the grand of British society. Oscar was invited to these Friday luncheons, but seldom came. “I have morgues to visit, Robert,” he explained, “and a story to write. I have not yet found the body of Billy Wood, nor yet finished my portrait of Dorian Gray. Besides, while I admire Sir John, I feel less certain about his cook. No doubt the cod is a splendid swimmer—admirable for swimming purposes—but for eating…”
I understood Oscar’s reservation. While the Millais mansion was truly magnificent—a huge, square house, situated at Palace Gate, Kensington—lunch chez Millais was a modest affair. We ate in his vast drawing-room-cum-studio, at a covered card table set up by the fireplace. We dined, invariably, on cod and boiled potatoes, surrounded by life-sized portraits (Gladstone, Disraeli, Rosebery, Tennyson, Lillie Langtry in her prime; whom we got varied from week to week), some framed, some unfinished, all fixed on easels, positioned in a semicircle as though the subjects of the paintings were spectators at our feast. As I recall, the walls of the room were mostly covered with heavy eighteenth-century tapestries. There was only one painting on permanent display, hung on the wall to the left of the mantelpiece, above a Chinese lacquer chest: Millais’s last portrait of Sophie Gray.
2007 - Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders Page 11