‘Bravo, Holmes. Bravo, Melmoth. Bravo, Wilde. Three cheers.’
‘You threw yourself into the fray – with nothing to lose and everything to gain. You cannot have been certain of the outcome, but you seized the moment – and you seized it well. When the warders flung you and Luck into the condemned cell, you knew at once what you had to do. You had to make your victim instantly unrecognisable. You took the poor eunuch by the head and scraped his face against the wall. You threw him to the ground and kicked in his windpipe. You robbed him of his features. You robbed him of his voice.’
Atitis-Snake laughed. ‘He put up a good fight.’
‘He was Private A. A. Luck, late of the Bombay Grenadiers. He’d been a soldier – but, poor man, he was a girl at heart and he was not your match. You overwhelmed him and when you had the unhappy wretch upon the ground, you took his number from his uniform and substituted your own. You took his cap from his head and hid your own face beneath it – and the moment the cell door opened you fled through it “like a scalded cat” and sped, “like greased lightning”, along the corridor and up the gantry to his cell.’
Atitis-Snake chuckled. ‘I knew the way.’
‘You must have held your breath that night – wondering whether your plan would work. When they came to take you from Luck’s cell to have you beaten for your part in the “insurrection” you knew that it had.’
‘I was ready for them.’
‘I imagine that you were. In your own cell, I assume that you hid your stash of poison in your bed – in the cracks between the wooden plank and the metal frame. That’s where Luck hid his face paints and his powders. You found them and you put them on.’
‘Yes, in case the cap fell off. But it didn’t. I was lucky there.’
‘You were lucky, too, that Governor Nelson did not postpone the hanging. You were lucky that Dr Maurice was away. He might have recognised Luck’s features, notwithstanding the damage you had done his face and the distortion wrought by the hangman’s rope.’
‘I took Luck’s punishment. And he took mine.’
‘His body is now decomposing in a pit of lime – in an unmarked grave.’
‘My back is still scarred from the beating. I was bent double for a week.’
‘And your face betrays some bruising, I see, now that you have wiped away the powder from your forehead. But you are alive, Sebastian Atitis-Snake. And Achindra Acala Luck is dead. You hobbled out of that accursed prison in Luck’s place – your face masked by Luck’s make-up, your head wrapped in one of Luck’s saris. You escaped Reading Gaol, Sebastian Atitis-Snake. A. A. Luck is forever buried there.’
The man blew his nose and wiped his mouth. ‘Dr Maurice said you were a clever man and so it seems. When did you have your first clue of this?’
‘Did Dr Maurice also tell you that I am a friend of Arthur Conan Doyle?’
‘He did.’
‘Are you familiar with a story called “Silver Blaze”?’
Atitis-Snake shook his head.
‘In the story Sherlock Holmes brings to the attention of the detective in the case “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time”. “The dog did nothing in the night-time,” said the detective. “That was the curious incident,” said Holmes.’
Atitis-Snake raised an eyebrow.
‘On the morning of the hanging,’ explained Melmoth, ‘Private Luck did not call out to me. He always spoke to me – every day, without fail, from his cell, at the same time, in the same way. But on the day he left the prison he did not. I thought of the dog that did not bark in the night and realised that the prisoner who did not speak in the morning could not be Private Luck.’
Atitis-Snake nodded appreciatively. He raised his wine glass to Melmoth one final time and drained it. ‘I see,’ he said. He was quite calm. ‘What do we do now?’ he asked, picking up his chequebook.
‘You go to bed – and I take my leave of you.’
‘You should be grateful to me, you know, Mr Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde. I killed the man who would have destroyed you. Luck was a blackmailer and a determined one. He would have come after you and told your wife all sorts of sordid stories.’
Melmoth shook his head. ‘I cannot be grateful to you, sir. You rid me of an enemy, that’s true, but last night you tried to murder me. You sent me to bed with a prostitute – and a dose of your beloved Spanish Fly.’
‘I don’t deny it, but much good did it do me. I appear to have got the dosage wrong – for here you are.’
‘I am here because I did not touch your devilish aphrodisiac. I kept the powder dry in fact – and, half an hour ago, when I went to “powder my nose”, I poured your twist of powder – all of it, no half-measures – into a glass of champagne. When I returned to our table I rearranged the glasses and set the poisoned yellow wine before you. I see that you have drunk it all.’
As tears filled his eyes, Atitis-Snake began to laugh. ‘I am going to die,’ he cried. He looked around the deserted café. ‘It cannot be.’ He gazed at Melmoth, pleadingly. ‘Is this true?’
‘It is.’
‘Why? Why must I die?’
‘So that the boy, Tom, can live,’ said Melmoth, simply.
‘This is all about the boy, Tom?’ cried Atitis-Snake, the tears now tumbling down his cheeks.
‘Yes, this is all about the boy, Tom,’ said Melmoth. ‘He and I, I realise, are the only ones left who know all your secrets. At Reading Gaol, you made Tom your friend – and your accomplice. Doubtless when he cleaned the cells, he made sure your stocks of poison were not discovered. Once you had murdered me, I think you would have waited for his release and then murdered him.’ Melmoth smiled and ran his forefinger lightly around the rim of his champagne glass. ‘On the day of my release, when I had done my shopping and before I caught the train to Newhaven, I took a cab to his mother’s address in Whitechapel and I promised her that I would do my best for her son. I have broken so many promises in my life, but this one, at least, I have kept.’
Atitis-Snake looked down at the empty glass that stood on the table before him. ‘What time did you give me this champagne?’
Melmoth took out his half-hunter. ‘Half an hour ago, at most.’
‘What time is it now?’
‘Five o’clock.’
‘I will be dead by seven, Oscar Wilde.’ He laughed and cried at the same time. ‘Killed – with a dose of my own poison.’
Melmoth smiled. ‘All men kill the thing they love,’ he said, gently. ‘Go to your room now, Sebastian Atitis-Snake. And if you have prayers to say, say them. You don’t want to die here, at this table. The foot passengers from the paddle steamer will be coming by in a moment. They are already late.’
Afterword
The body of ‘Dr Quilp’ was discovered in an upstairs bedroom at the Café Suisse on the morning of Saturday, 26 June 1897. According to the brief report that appeared ten days later in the Gazette des Bains, the man was ‘un inconnu’ – an unknown – who carried in his coat pocket a small packet of recently printed visiting cards bearing the name of ‘Dr Quilp’, but no other form of identification. His age, nationality and occupation could only be guessed at, said Dr Pierre Pollet, the police doctor, giving evidence at the inquest, but what was not in doubt was the cause of death. ‘This man had poisoned himself with an overdose of cantharides powder. His face was severely bloated, his skin a mass of blisters.’ According to the coroner, Monsieur Varangeville, it was a regrettable fact of life that strangers would come to Dieppe to avail themselves of prostitutes and take risks with so-called ‘aphrodisiacs’. Because, understandably, what little money the man had on him at the time of his death had been taken by the management of the Café Suisse as a contribution towards his unpaid bill, the coroner had no choice but to order the burial of the deceased in the municipal graveyard at public expense.
Within weeks of Quilp’s death, Oscar had finished writing The Ballad of Reading Gaol. When the poem was published in book form, in February 1898
, he arranged for one copy to be sent to R. B. Haldane, the Member of Parliament (and, later, Lord Chancellor) who had visited him at Pentonville prison at the beginning of his sentence, and another to Major Nelson, the governor of Reading Gaol. The copy that he sent to me was inscribed on the title page:
ROBERT HARBOROUGH SHERARD:
IN MEMORY OF AN OLD AND NOBLE FRIENDSHIP:
FROM THE AUTHOR OSCAR WILDE.
These words were written in ink, but below them Oscar had added, in pencil:
In my end is my beginning – from first to last.
And on the final page of the book, again in pencil, he had lightly underlined the first and last letter of each line of the last three verses of the poem:
In Reading gaol by Reading town
There is a pit of shame,
And in it lies a wretched man
Eaten by teeth of flame,
In a burning winding-sheet he lies,
And his grave has got no name.
And there, till Christ call forth the dead,
In silence let him lie:
No need to waste the foolish tear,
Or heave the windy sigh:
The man had killed the thing he loved,
And so he had to die.
And all men kill the thing they love,
By all let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
Knowing my friend’s fondness for playing with words, I made a note of the thirty-six letters he had underscored and rearranged them to form a sentence that reads: ‘Sebastian Atitis-Snake done the dread deed.’
Within weeks of completing The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Oscar was reunited with Lord Alfred Douglas – the young man whose presence in his life had brought about his downfall. At the end of August, from his favourite table at the Café Suisse, Oscar, now forty-two, wrote to Lord Alfred, now twenty-six: ‘Everyone is furious with me for going back to you, but they don’t understand us. I feel it is only with you that I can do anything at all. Do remake my ruined life for me, and then our friendship and love will have a different meaning to the world.’
At the end of September, Constance wrote to her husband from Genoa: ‘I forbid you to see Lord Alfred Douglas. I forbid you to return to your filthy, insane life.’ But Oscar found he could not obey his wife’s command – and so lost her and his children and the small allowance of £3 a week that she had been paying to him. ‘Nemesis has caught me in her net,’ he wrote, ‘to struggle is foolish. Why is it that one runs to one’s ruin? Why has destruction such a fascination? Why, when one stands on a pinnacle, must one throw oneself down? No one knows, but things are so.’
In the spring of 1898, Constance, who had damaged her back in a fall, had an operation on her spine. The operation failed and she died on 7 April, aged thirty-nine. Oscar was distraught. ‘If only we had met once, and kissed each other,’ he wrote. ‘It is too late. How awful life is.’ The following year, he went to Genoa to visit her grave: ‘It is very pretty – a marble cross with dark ivy-leaves inlaid in a good pattern . . . I brought some flowers. I was deeply affected – with a sense, also, of the uselessness of all regrets. Nothing could have been otherwise, and Life is a very terrible thing.’
Constance’s death brought Oscar £150 a year from her estate, unconditionally. He continued to see Lord Alfred Douglas, but it was not as it had once been between them. After The Ballad of Reading Gaol he did no serious work: he travelled, he drank, he borrowed money from friends, he took each day as it came. He could not – or would not – concentrate to write, but when he and I met, over absinthe and cigarettes, he told me stories of his adventures which I wrote down – promising him faithfully that they would not be published during his lifetime. I asked him if he wanted the story of Atitis-Snake to be published at all.
‘Yes,’ he insisted. ‘Most definitely.’
‘But you murdered a man, Oscar,’ I reminded him.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and I used to play golf – rather well. There is so much more to Oscar Wilde than the public appreciates. In time, they must be allowed to know it all.’
‘Why did you kill him?’ I asked. ‘Was it part of your desire for experience? Because you wanted “to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world”?’
No,’ he answered emphatically. ‘For once in my life, I did the decent thing. If Atitis-Snake had lived,’ he said, ‘the boy, Tom, would never have been safe.’
Gradually, my friend’s health deteriorated. In particular, his ear worsened. Three and a half years after his release from prison, he died in Paris, of cerebral meningitis, on 30 November 1900. He was just forty-six years of age.
Oscar was given a pauper’s burial in a leased grave at Bagneux, a suburb seven miles to the south of central Paris. Nine years later his remains were removed to the French national cemetery at Père Lachaise, where they now rest beneath a fine monument created by the young sculptor Jacob Epstein.
Impressive as is Epstein’s monumental winged sphinx in Oscar’s memory, for me it does not rival the tomb built for Sir Richard Burton in the graveyard of St Mary Magdalen’s church in Mortlake, a village seven miles to the south of central London. The Burton tomb, thirteen feet in height, is an exact representation of a desert tent, its sandstone walls sculpted to depict the cloth of the tent rippling in the desert breeze. Oscar in Paris and Constance in Genoa are buried five hundred miles apart. At Mortlake, in their tent-like mausoleum, Richard and Isabel Burton are buried side by side – despite the best efforts of Private A. A. Luck, late of the Bombay Grenadiers.
In 1906, I published The Life of Oscar Wilde and included in the biography a chapter specially written by Warder Thomas Martin. When I had completed the book and delivered my manuscript to the publishers, I was sorting through the materials that I had used while writing it and came across a slip of paper that, at first, meant nothing to me. All that was on the paper was an address in Whitechapel – written clearly, but not in Oscar’s hand. I asked Warder Martin if the handwriting or the address meant anything to him. He recalled at once that the handwriting was that of Dr Maurice, the surgeon at Reading Gaol, and the address was that of the mother of Prisoner E.1.1. – the boy, Tom Lewis.
I remembered then that it was Oscar who had given me the piece of paper and had asked me, one day, when convenient, to visit the address to find out, if I could, what had become of the boy. I did so – in October 1906. I found the address without difficulty and there, in a tidy terraced house off the Whitechapel Road, I found the boy’s mother – living alone. She was a small, bird-like lady in her mid-fifties, with white hair, pink cheeks and a friendly disposition. She appeared happy to meet me and proud to talk about her son, who, she assured me, had not been in trouble of any kind since coming out of prison eight years before. She saw her boy very little nowadays, but he sent her money every week and she was grateful for that. He ran a restaurant, she told me, near King’s Cross railway station, which enjoyed what she called ‘a very high-class sort of clientele’. She had never been to visit it herself – her son discouraged her: ‘Home is home and business is business,’ he said – but she knew the address and she gave it to me. I went there that same afternoon. The restaurant turned out to be a café, with, above it, on the first floor, what was undoubtedly a male brothel. I think that Oscar would have been amused. When he had asked me to enquire after the boy he had said to me, ‘Remember, Tom Lewis is his name. As names go, it is not very promising. Do not expect too much of him. If only he had been called Oscar Wilde, think what a life he might have led!’
RHS
September 1939
Reading Gaol in the 1890s
Her Majesty’s Prison Reading was built in 1844 and designed by the great Victorian architect George Gilbert Scott, who went on to build London’s Albert Memorial and the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras station. The design for Readin
g Gaol was based on the 1842 ‘New Model Prison’ at Pentonville, which in its turn was based on the design of the 1829 Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. The design was to allow for the implementation of the favoured penal regime of the time, the ‘separate system’, whereby the inmates were kept in solitary confinement and prevented from seeing or speaking to one another. The aim of the system was to allow the prisoners within the ‘penitentiary’ the opportunity for quiet reflection and the true repentance of sins. As a county gaol, Reading also served as the site for executions: the first in 1845, in front of a crowd of 10,000; the last in 1913.
The full history of Reading Gaol is told in Pit of Shame: The Real Ballad of Reading Gaol (Waterside Press, 2007) by Anthony Stokes, for many years a senior prison officer at Reading Gaol.
Rules for Prisoners in the 1890s
The bell shall ring at the opening and locking up of the rooms and cells, which shall be, from Lady Day to Michaelmas Day, at six o’clock in the morning and eight o’clock in the evening; and in the winter months at day-light in the morning and eight in the evening; and at all times the prisoners shall be locked up in their day rooms before dusk in the evening.
No person shall be allowed admission into the prison during the hours of prayer, the time for public worship, or before unlocking or after locking up hours; and no person (except a barrister or solicitor), unless in the presence of the prison Governor or some person appointed by him, shall remain within the prison after hours or locking up, except in the case of sickness of a prisoner, or some other cause assigned to the satisfaction of the Governor.
Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol: A Mystery Page 24
