2007 - Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders

by Gyles Brandreth

  “Is she?”

  “She is! Come, man, you must see that!” Fraser slapped the palms of his hands on his knees. “She is lying to protect the man she loves—and perhaps, also, to protect herself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that she herself may even be implicated in the murder.”

  “What?” cried Oscar, flinging his cigarette into the empty grate and rising to his feet. “You think she may have had a hand in killing her son?”

  “She would not be the first mother to have played a part in the murder of her own child.”

  “This is preposterous,” exclaimed Oscar. “This is outrageous.”

  “Outrageous, yes,” said Fraser calmly, “but not, I think, preposterous…Who was the housekeeper that day at number 23 Cowley Street? Whoever she was, she was also the murderer’s accomplice. Who was she? You saw her, Oscar—who was she?”

  “I did not see her,” Oscar protested.

  “But you did, Oscar. She opened the door to you. You told me so.”

  “I did not notice her. I paid her no attention.”

  “But you noticed something about her, Oscar, did you not? When you and Robert first came to see me, you described what happened when you arrived at Cowley Street. You said that you could not describe the housekeeper—except in one particular. You had a recollection of a flash of red about her person. Do you recall?”

  “Yes,” said Oscar, “I do—a red shawl or a scarf, a handkerchief or a brooch—”

  “Or a livid scarlet birthmark on her neck…”

  Oscar fell silent and turned towards the looking-glass above the fireplace. On the mantelpiece, resting next to each other, was a pair of Venetian carnival masks, souvenirs of one of Veronica’s expeditions to her favourite city. Oscar ran his finger along the rim of one of them as if checking it for dust. Fraser got to his feet and put his arm around Oscar’s shoulder. Oscar looked up. In the looking-glass, they made an unlikely couple: Sir Thomas Lawrence’s last portrait of the Prince Regent and Rossetti’s painting of Dante, side by side. As their eyes met, Fraser smiled.

  “Oscar,” he said, “let us be friends. Forget this business! Come to Paris! Bring Robert! We have Arthur’s tickets.” He turned to me. “You will come, will you not, Robert? It will please Veronica so much, I know. You will persuade Oscar—if he needs persuasion.” He turned back to Oscar who was still gazing fixedly into the glass. “Do you need persuading, Oscar? Come, a Scotsman is offering you a touch of Paris in the spring…”

  Oscar smiled. In that moment, his face to me seemed like a mask. I could not tell what he was thinking— about O’Donnell; about Susannah Wood and the possibility that she was implicated in the death of her own son; about Aidan Fraser and his extraordinary proposal that we should join him and his fiancée on a sudden expedition to Paris.

  “Tell me something, Aidan,” he said, in a matter-of-fact sort of way. “When last we met, you told us that you planned to ask Mrs Wood to identify the severed head of her son—but you did not do so, did you? Why was that?”

  “Because I thought better of it, Oscar,” he replied at once. “Because you and Conan Doyle were of the express opinion that the shock of it might kill her. And because I found that Bellotti—your friend Bellotti—was ready and willing to identify the boy.”

  Oscar’s eyes narrowed. “You have interviewed Bellotti?”

  “Oh yes,” said Fraser, “I have interviewed Bellotti. He has talked most freely, most informatively. I have learnt a good deal from Bellotti.”

  “And he is ready to give evidence?” Oscar asked, still addressing Fraser via the looking-glass.

  “He is, but have no fear. The privacy of the more innocent members of his curious luncheon club is assured. Bellotti hopes to return to business as soon as the court case is concluded—and I have told him that the Metropolitan Police will leave him and his clients to their own devices so long as they avoid causing a public nuisance or creating a public scandal.”

  “So Gerard Bellotti is your key witness?”

  “Yes,” said Fraser, “he is not as blind as he pretends to be. You interviewed him, too, I believe.”

  “Yes,” Oscar replied.

  “Did he, by any chance, reveal to you the identity of Drayton St Leonard?”

  “No,” said Oscar.

  “I thought not,” said Fraser. “Drayton St Leonard, according to Mr Bellotti, is the nom de guerre of Edward O’Donnell.”

  A silence fell.

  “Well,” said Oscar eventually, slowly turning away from the looking-glass and addressing us directly, “that seems to be that.”

  He smiled. One mask gave way to another. What he thought, in that moment, of Fraser’s revelation, I could not tell, but his immediate mood appeared to lighten. “Paris in the spring, you say?” He rubbed his hands together. “Why not? Thank you for inviting us, Aidan. If Robert is free for the next few days, I shall make myself free also.” He seemed, suddenly, inexplicably, exultant. “Are you planning to whisk us away on the night train, Aidan? Or is there time for that other bottle of Moselle before we depart?”

  We did not take the night train. In the event, we lingered at 75 Lower Sloane Street and enjoyed two further bottles of Fraser’s fine Moselle wine, before going on to Kettner’s for a light supper—lamb cutlets, roast potatoes and spinach: “En branches, not a la creme,” Oscar instructed the waiter. “I’m on the strictest diet—I’m off to Paris in the spring!”

  It was a little before midnight when we turned in. I walked home from the restaurant. Oscar took a cab.

  “Have no fear, Robert,” he said, as he clambered aboard, “I shall be making no detours tonight. I am going straight home to explain to my ever-patient wife why I am going to Paris for a week without her—and then I am going to bed. A demain, mon cher. Our train departs at eight-forty-five. Do not be late.”

  I was not. And nor was he. And nor was Miss Sutherland, who arrived at Victoria Station at eight-thirty in the morning, looking—to my eyes at least—like a fairy-tale princess: Perrault’s Cinderella crossed with Hans Andersen’s Snow Queen. She was dressed in a floor-length coat of black velvet, with cuffs and a collar of white ermine. Her hands were hidden in a silver-grey fur muff and her glorious red hair was piled high on her head beneath a matching fur bonnet. Tall and slender, she held herself proudly, but there was a playfulness in her pale green eyes, a look of merriment, or mischief. As we waited at the agreed rendezvous beneath the station clock and she came towards us, leading a trail of station porters bearing her bags and baggage, she appeared positively imperious. The bustling crowd parted instinctively to let her through. But when she reached us, greeting us each with a smile and a kiss (and, for me, a second kiss!), her manner was disarmingly natural, utterly unforced.

  “Where is Aidan?” she asked. “He is supposed to be our leader and he is nowhere to be seen!”

  “I thought I glimpsed him in the distance when we arrived,” said Oscar, “but I must have been mistaken.”

  We looked about the station concourse. A mass of humanity was surging to and fro. From the platforms steam was billowing towards us. Whistles were being blown, ever most insistently. Oscar glanced up at the clock. “We should board the train,” he said, “or we shall miss it. Do you have your ticket?”

  “I have,” said Veronica, producing it from her muff with a flourish. “Do you have yours?”

  “We do,” said Oscar. “Aidan kindly gave them to us last night. We are travelling in the names of Mr and Mrs Arthur Conan Doyle…”

  Veronica laughed. “Well, that will be something for you to declare when you reach Customs!” she said.

  As we followed her and her retinue of porters towards the platform, I realised how deeply I had fallen in love with her. This was not one of my passing fancies. This was a woman who had me wholly in her thrall. When we had found our compartment (and Oscar had tipped and charmed the porters and sent them on their way), she ensconced herself in the seat by the window, laying h
er muff and her bonnet on the seat beside her. “You must sit opposite me, Robert,” she said, “so that I can look into your eyes and, through them, discover the secrets of your soul.”

  “Do you believe that there is such a thing as the soul?” asked Oscar, removing his hat, coat and gloves, and placing them carefully in the rack above our seats. “I thought you surgeons were committed to the corporeal.”

  “We have a heart and a mind, Oscar. Who is to say that we do not have a soul? Were I allowed to be a surgeon, I might be the first to uncover its whereabouts!”

  “Indeed,” replied Oscar distractedly. He was now at the carriage window, scanning the platform for signs of Aidan Fraser.

  “Do not mock me, Oscar,” she continued. “Our mutual friend John Millais is convinced that the soul is not merely tangible but is located somewhere within the muscles and the membranes of the eye. When he paints a portrait, he claims to be satisfied only when he has captured ‘the soul within the eye’.”

  There was a sudden burst of whistles, a whoosh of steam and a grinding and clanking of wheels as the train lurched forward. “It seems Aidan is not coming after all!” exclaimed Veronica.

  “But he is!” cried Oscar, abruptly pushing open the carriage door. There—wild-eyed, pale and perspiring—was Aidan Fraser, running as if his life depended on it. In his arms he was holding his portmanteau. He flung it into the compartment and then, as the train gathered momentum, with a mighty effort he jumped up into the carriage and fell forward onto the floor. He lay with his eyes closed and his mouth open, panting at his fiancée’s feet.

  “Not a pretty sight,” said Veronica, laughing.

  “But one of abject devotion,” said Oscar, slamming the carriage door shut and seating himself in the corner seat diagonally opposite her. “Did not Sir Edwin Landseer paint a canvas of a Labrador at his master’s feet in just such a pose?” Veronica clapped her hands together with delight. “Of course,” Oscar added, “Landseer considered the pad of the front paws to be the seat of the soul!”

  Fraser, still gasping for breath, opened his eyes and struggled to his feet. “You may well laugh at me,” he wheezed, as I helped him hoist his portmanteau up onto the luggage rack. “I overslept. I blame the Moselle. Please accept my profound apologies.” He stood for a moment before us, dusting down his coat and shaking his head as if at his own stupidity. His face was spangled with heavy beads of perspiration. He wiped them away with his handkerchief and then, with both hands, swept back his jet-black hair and slumped, exhausted, into the seat facing Oscar. “I am so sorry,” he murmured huskily, “so sorry.”

  “No time for lamentation now,” said Oscar, smiling, and patting him on the knee, “nor yet any cause. You’re here. You’re safe. We’re here. We’re happy. All’s well with the world.”

  All was indeed well with Oscar that day. He was at his most amused—and amusing. From London to Dover, from Dover to Calais, from Calais to Paris, to the very moment of our arrival at the newly opened Hotel Charing Cross, he was on song. For nine hours—virtually without respite—he entertained us. If our compartment was uncomfortable, or the Channel crossing was choppy (as it must have been!), I cannot tell you. All that I can recall, all that I noted in my journal, was the effulgence of Oscar’s discourse throughout that long day. What was most remarkable about his performance (for it was a performance) was the way in which, for so many hours, effortlessly, he commanded our attention.

  His secret—his trick—lay, I think, in the way in which he varied both the tone and the content of what he had to say. At one moment he was debating the locus of the soul with Veronica; the next he was describing in forensic detail the operation that his father had performed to save the sight of the king of Sweden. Then, of a sudden, he reduced us to tears of laughter with an outrageous story of one of his brother Willie’s drunken escapades. A moment later, he brought different tears to our eyes (and his own) with a whimsical and pathetic tale of the mermaid who lived in Dover Harbour and fell fatally in love with the harbour-master’s son.

  Apart from a passing reference to Bellotti and ‘the loucher members of his luncheon club’ (“Are not some of their practices against the law?” asked Veronica; “We are mid-Channel, dear lady,” Oscar replied, “I cannot tell you; in England, most probably they are; in France, according to the Code Napoleon, most certainly they are not; what a difference twenty-one miles makes!”), throughout the entire journey the case of the murder of Billy Wood was not raised once.

  At Veronica’s instigation, Oscar talked much about Paris, which he and I knew well, but which she and Aidan Fraser knew hardly at all. Fraser was eager for us, during our visit, to make a pilgrimage to the city’s new sensation: Gustave Eiffel’s recently completed tower.

  “Spare us Monsieur Eiffel’s Tower!” cried Oscar.

  “But it is extraordinary,” protested Fraser. “It rises nine hundred and eighty-five feet above the ground!”

  “And still gets you no closer to heaven!” said Oscar. “Turn your back to the Eiffel Tower and you have all Paris before you. Look at it—and all Paris disappears.”

  “The Tower is a phenomenon, Oscar,” I protested. “You can’t deny it.”

  “I don’t deny it,” he said, “and you should not be denied it either. Go to your tower. Enjoy! I’ll leave you to it. While you are scaling the heights, I shall take myself off to wander in the foothills of Mount Parnassus…”

  “And what do you mean by that, Oscar?” Veronica enquired, an eyebrow gently raised. “Do you have mischief in mind?”

  “No,” he answered, easily, “far from it. I simply mean that, while you are all busy inspecting Monsieur Eiffel’s monstrosity, I shall go to Montparnasse and take a stroll through the cemetery there. I have a grave that I am minded to visit. I shall pay my respects to an old friend. I have been thinking of her much of late—and I have news to share with her. For once the words of Mercury will be sweet after the songs of Apollo.”

  22

  Paris in the Spring

  That night, Oscar talked much of Marie Aguetant. We reached our hotel—the Hotel Charing Cross, in the huitième, in rue Pasquier—soon after seven o’clock. It was terrifically modern, wonderfully chic. There was a deal of marble on the walls, scarlet carpeting on the stairs and, in the public rooms, ornate electric chandeliers in the centre of every ceiling. Oscar was not impressed. He stood in the foyer, shaking the rain off his shoulders and sniffing the air suspiciously.

  “It is very new, Aidan, is it not?”

  “It is brand-new, Oscar.”

  “It is very shiny—like a new coin. I am always wary of things that are too shiny.”

  “Do you want us to look elsewhere?” Veronica asked. “We will be guided by you and Robert.”

  “No, no,” said Oscar. “We have journeyed far enough and I am sure the facilities here will prove excellent.” He smiled at the hovering bellboy. “Ignore my foolish prejudice. I’m one of those who warms to a man because his cuffs are frayed. It’s not rational, I know. Let us find our rooms and change for dinner. Where shall we eat?”

  “I thought we’d dine here,” said Fraser. “The restaurant is said to be first class.”

  “Now, there I do draw the line,” said Oscar. “It’s a rule of life that you must never dine in the hotel in which you are staying. When I dine at the Savoy, I sleep at the Langham. When I sleep at the Savoy, I dine at the Criterion. Between his digestif and his pillow, a gentleman should always glimpse the stars. May I propose dinner at the Grand Cafe? The soles soufflées à la mousse d’homard are the best in Paris, and Rigo and his gypsy orchestra never fail to find music to match your mood.”

  The facilities at the Hotel Charing Cross did indeed prove excellent. There was a bathroom attached to each bedroom (a great novelty in those days) and, at the mere turn of a dolphin-shaped tap, an abundance of flowing water, pale brown but piping hot. The food at the Grand Cafe when we reached it—almost two hours later; neither Oscar nor Miss Sutherland rushed their to
ilette—was exceptional. I was less certain about Rigo and his gypsy orchestra, however. As we arrived at the restaurant, bizarrely, they were playing a selection from Gounod’s Faust. As we were shown to our table, they struck up what sounded like a Hungarian funeral march. As we took our seats, I enquired of Oscar, “What is your mood now?”

  He cocked his ear and listened intently to the music. “Melancholy, it seems. I had not realised. But Rigo never gets it wrong. He has mystic powers.”

  We ordered—or, rather, we permitted Oscar to order on our behalf: soupe au cresson and truffes fraiches sous la cendre to lead into the soles soufftees, with carré d’agneau to follow (‘Let us proceed gently; we must do justice to the tartes and crêpes’). When the first of several fine wines had been served (a Perrier Joue’t, 1880, by way of aperitif—“I have simple tastes; I am content to settle for the best”), Oscar took his cue from Rigo. He spoke of death. And, in particular, the death of children. He talked of Billy Wood and of the boy’s natural sweetness and eagerness to please. He said, contemplating his saucer of champagne as he spoke, “I imagine poor Billy’s desire to please was his undoing. It is for many.” He invited us to raise our glasses and drink to the lad’s memory.

  He spoke, too, of his own younger sister, Isola, “taken from us when she was ten—how we loved her!” I knew how much he loved her; he carried a lock of her hair in an envelope in his pocket. “I can see her still,” he said, “dancing like a golden sunbeam about the house. She was everything to me…Heaven must be a very happy place if Isola and Billy Wood are there.”

  As Rigo’s mood-music lifted a little (the funeral march giving way to a gypsy aubade), Veronica asked him who was the friend that he proposed to visit in the cemetery at Montparnasse.