Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man's Smile

by Gyles Brandreth

  ‘I think that Edmond La Grange rather despised his mother,’ replied Oscar, who was devoted to his mother, also. ‘He owed her everything and that does not always bring out the best in a man. He accepted her place in his life, but her foibles irritated and her pretensions infuriated him. More than once I heard him say, “Maman, you are utterly absurd.”‘

  ‘A cold fish indeed,’ murmured Conan Doyle, sucking on his unlit pipe. ‘He was entertained by the idea of having a personal assassin at his disposal, even before he had specific victims in mind.’

  ‘He was.’ Oscar smiled at his friend. ‘And in Garstrang he sensed that he had picked a man well suited to his purpose. Garstrang killed the ghastly Marie Antoinette in style: burying her in earth in my book case. I imagine that La Grange was much amused by that. La Grange had a lively sense of humour.’ Oscar struck a match to light another cigarette. ‘Garstrang proved that he could kill a dog — but could he kill a man?’ He dropped the lighted match into the dregs of his tea. ‘It seems he could.’

  I looked at Conan Doyle. His eyes had taken on a mournful aspect. ‘Poor Traquair.’ He sighed.

  ‘Yes,’ echoed Oscar. ‘Poor Traquair. On that fateful day in La Grange’s dressing room on the boulevard du Temple, when Carlos Branco unleashed his secret upon the family La Grange, where was the hapless valet? Where was Washington Traquair? The poor wretch was in his cubiculo, of course, adjacent to the dressing room — alone and lonely. Had he heard Branco’s revelation? Had he heard the row that followed it? Most probably. But had he understood what he had heard? Almost certainly not; but La Grange could not be sure of that and dared not take the risk. Besides, he could rid himself of Traquair so easily. He had the man for the task to hand — and in his debt. La Grange instructed Garstrang to kill Traquair: “he’s a valet, he’s a blackamoor, he hardly counts”.

  ‘Garstrang did as he was bid and did it well. He was an artist in his way. And he served La Grange to perfection. La Grange valued him highly.’ Oscar looked at me. ‘I believe, Robert, that he came to intervene in that duel of yours, as much to ensure Garstrang’s safety as your own.’

  I lowered my head over my notebook and shaded my eyes. Even after so many years the absurdity of that duel — and of my infatuation with Gabrielle de la Tourbillon —was still a source of embarrassment to me. From behind my hand, I glanced towards the counter where the waitresses had been standing. They were gone: we were alone in the tea-room now.

  ‘La Grange needed Garstrang,’ Oscar continued. ‘There was business to be done. The twins must be disposed of. La Grange instructed Garstrang to kill them both. It was not difficult to achieve, even within the rules of the game. Agnès was easily drowned and Bernard was very simply set alight. Garstrang took a bottle of ether from La Grange’s “love-nest” — we saw him leaving the apartment with a box full of such bottles — and used it to douse the seat and floor of the cab which La Grange had ordered to send his so-called son on his way to Montmartre. He told us that the cab had been ordered to take us to Pharamond. It was not so. He had no plans to go out for supper. He knew that if he offered Bernard a carriage at his expense, the boy would take it. Garstrang saw Bernard into the cab and, as he closed the cab door on him, threw his lighted cigarette into the cab to ignite the furnace.’

  ‘Horrible,’ muttered Conan Doyle.

  ‘So it was Eddie Garstrang who killed Agnès and Bernard La Grange,’ I said, underscoring Garstrang’s name in my notebook.

  ‘Yes, on Edmond La Grange’s instructions.’

  ‘But who killed La Grange?’ asked Conan Doyle. ‘La Grange wasn’t bent on self-destruction.’

  ‘No,’ answered Oscar, ‘though death held few terrors for him. Epicurus had taught him that “death is nothing”: “for that which has been dissolved into its elements experiences no sensations, and that which has no sensation is nothing to us.”‘

  I was still staring down at my notebook. ‘With the twins dead,’ I said, ‘Garstrang was once more free.’

  ‘Indeed,’ replied Oscar. ‘When you saw Eddie Garstrang on the afternoon of La Grange’s death he told you that he had been a free man since midnight. He told you that he had been “contracted” to La Grange for six months and that, now, his time was up. But what he said made no sense: it was more than six months since the Compagnie La Grange had visited Leadville and less than six months since Garstrang set sail for France on board the SS Bothnia. No, Garstrang was free because he had fulfilled his side of the bargain.’

  Suddenly, quite softly, Arthur Conan Doyle began to growl. It was a low rumble, the noise a terrier might make on sniffing out a rathole. He narrowed his eyes and looked towards Oscar expectantly. ‘But Edmond La Grange decided that he did not want to let his murderer go?’

  Oscar grinned at the doctor. ‘You should be writing detective stories, Arthur. La Grange told Garstrang that he needed one more murder: the fifth element, what Epicurus called “the quintessence”. Just one more murder and then La Grange would repay him all the money he had lost at cards — and give him his freedom, too.’

  ‘The American protested that he had already fulfilled his obligation.’

  ‘Naturally, but La Grange reckoned that he now had the upper hand. Since Garstrang had already committed four murders, he was deep in blood — and vulnerable. “Just one more, that’s all I ask. Kill Carlos Branco for me and then you’re free. Shoot him; use my gun. Here it is. A pistol shot combines the elements of earth and air, fire and water. Shoot Branco and then we’re done.”‘

  Oscar paused and, eagerly, Arthur took up the story:

  ‘But Eddie Garstrang knew that he’d never be “done”! Kill Branco and then who would be next? He had fulfilled his pledge. He was an honourable gambling man and he’d paid his dues. If La Grange was not ready to keep his side of the bargain, La Grange was the man to be killed— and, then, it would indeed all be “done”.’

  ‘How he did it we know,’ said Oscar, dropping the remains of his cigarette into his teacup. ‘He disguised himself as the Ghost of Hamlet’s father. He put on the cloak. He put on the helmet and visor. He went to La Grange’s dressing room. La Grange opened the dressing-room door; what we saw was La Grange himself, standing at the door, between the door and the mirror. Garstrang entered the room. I imagine he explained his curious disguise with a reference to Carlos Branco, indicating that he was now ready to kill Branco if that was indeed La Grange’s wish. He invited La Grange to give him his gun for the purpose. The old actor did as he was asked and the die was cast. Garstrang took the gun and, at once, without hesitation, turned it on La Grange and shot him. The moment the deed was done, he placed the gun on the dressing table, threw off the cloak, threw down the helmet and left the room, returning almost at once, arriving with Carlos Branco.’

  ‘Why did you not tell all this to the police at the time?’ I asked.

  ‘For the same reason that Carlos Branco did not simply tell the world that the twins were his. Who would have believed him? La Grange was dead. What evidence was there? Branco looked to be the guilty man. He had motive, opportunity and means — and you had seen him entering La Grange’s dressing room moments before the murder, Robert. You had seen him with your own eyes. You were very firm about that.’

  Arthur Conan Doyle was looking about the tea-room. ‘We are alone.’ He consulted his pocket watch. ‘It’s gone half-past five.’

  ‘We must be on our way or we’ll be locked in with the waxworks,’ said Oscar, pushing his chair away from the table and getting to his feet. ‘Where is our bill?’

  ‘We’re Tussaud’s guests, I’m happy to say.

  ‘Ah.’ Oscar smiled, pulling on his gloves. ‘It is Marie Antoinette who has let us eat cake.’

  I picked up the brown paper parcel containing our manuscript. ‘I’ve some work to do here,’ I remarked.

  ‘Don’t rush,’ said Oscar lightly. ‘It’s to be a posthumous publication, remember.’

  We walked through the deserted tea-room, back towards
the exhibition halls. ‘Oscar,’ I asked, a thought suddenly occurring to me. ‘How do you know for certain that Agnès and Bernard were, in truth, Carlos Branco’s children?’

  ‘Because,’ replied my friend, ‘like the act of suicide, the fact of being a twin can be an inherited characteristic.’

  ‘But Agnès and Bernard did not commit suicide,’ said Conan Doyle. ‘Alys Lenoir committed suicide, but she was not the twins’ mother.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Oscar. ‘Alys Lenoir committed suicide, but she was not their mother. But Carlos Branco was their father — and he was a twin.’

  ‘How do you know that Carlos Branco was a twin?’ I asked.

  ‘Because I have met his brother. I have met the twin of Carlos Branco. He was another of the remarkable people I encountered in the course of that memorable year. I met him through my friend George Palmer, the biscuit king. Branco’s twin was a clergyman — a convert, a zealot, an Anglican priest, of Portuguese descent. He came to England as a young man to join the Evangelical Alliance. When I first met him I sensed that his English accent was too perfect to be true. It was only when I met him for the second time that I realised who he might be. His eyes, his gestures, his way of speaking, all had seemed familiar, but whereas Carlos Branco at sixty was overweight and red-faced, Paul White was thin and pale. Branco is Portuguese for white, as you know. And Paul was the name he had chosen at the time of his conversion. Paul White was thin and pale — and ashamed. You recall how La Grange told us that, in France, actors count among the damned. Paul White was ashamed of his brother and of his brother’s calling — and ashamed of the favour that he had done his brother twenty years before.

  ‘Carlos had sent him an unfortunate Goan girl, a simple-minded family servant who had become a fallen woman. Carlos Branco had hoped that she could be his brother’s housekeeper. Paul White, the evangelical, would not have her in his house, but he found a place for her, working in the prison where he was chaplain. I met her on the day I went to Reading Gaol. I met her in the chapel there, a sad, brown-faced creature in an old black dress. Paul White called out to her in a language I half recognised. I thought that it was Spanish. I realised later that it was Portuguese.’

  We stood in silence beneath the great glass dome in the entrance hall of Madame Tussaud’s. ‘And the American,’ asked Conan Doyle, sucking on his pipe. ‘What happened to Eddie Garstrang?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Oscar lightly. ‘He fulfilled his ambition. He became famous in his way. Or notorious, at least. It was what he wanted.’

  ‘I’ve not heard of him,’ said Conan Doyle.

  ‘He’s not famous for the way he lived. He’s famous for the way he died.’

  ‘Did he go back to Colorado?’

  ‘No, he stayed on in France. He returned to the life of a professional gambler. I sent a note to Brigadier Malthus advising him to keep an eye on him, and he did. And three years ago, Eddie Garstrang was arrested. He had shot a man in cold blood — over an unpaid gambling debt. Eddie Garstang was executed. It was a notable event. He was the last man to be beheaded by the original guillotine. That’s why Eddie Garstrang’s here, in the Chamber of Horrors.’ Oscar glanced up at the clock that hung on the wall above main doorway. ‘It’s ten to six, gentlemen. Let’s go and take a look at him before the exhibition closes. Robert can’t see the likeness, but I can. He has the look of a murderer. It’s in his smile. Never trust a man who shows you his lower teeth when he smiles.’

  Acknowledgements

  Readers of my series of Oscar Wilde murder mysteries frequently ask me the same question: ‘How much of this is true?’ My answer is, ‘All of it. Or almost all. Certainly, much more than you would think.’ Oscar’s friendships with Robert Sherard, Arthur Conan Doyle, George W. Palmer and Sarah Bernhardt are well-known. His encounters with Louisa May Alcott and P. T. Barnum and his interest in prison visiting and social reform are also well-documented, if less well-known. The places I have taken Oscar to in this story — Leadville, Colorado, New York, London, Paris, Reading — are all locations in which he was to be found on the dates on which I place him there. W. M. Traquair was indeed his valet on the American tour of 1882.

  In this book, as in the others in the series, I have tried to be as accurate as possible. (If you have noted any errors, I would be grateful if you would let me know.) In this endeavour I have been assisted over several years by conversations with an assortment of remarkable individuals, among them: my late father, Charles Brandreth, who knew Robert Sherard in the 1930s; John Badley (the founder of Bedales School, where I was a pupil in the 1960s), who was a friend and contemporary of Oscar Wilde; Sir Donald Sinden, who knew Lord Alfred Douglas in the 1940s; and Merlin Holland, Oscar Wilde’s only grandson.

  In the preparation of Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man’s Smile I have been particularly assisted by the following:

  Isobel Morrow, Independent Monitoring Board, HM Prison, Reading; Pauline Bryant, Governing Governor, HM Prison and Young Offender Institution, Reading; Anthony Stokes, Senior Prison Officer at HM Prison, Reading, and author of Pit of Shame: The Real Ballad of Reading Gaol (2007); Pamela Pilbeam, author of Madame Tussaud and the History of Waxworks (2003), who introduced me to The Theatre Industry in Nineteenth-Century France by F. W. J. Hemmings (1993); and His Excellency Osman Korutürk, the Turkish ambassador to Paris, who kindly showed me and my wife around his residence, L’Hôtel Lamballe in Passy, formerly the home of the Princesse de Lamballe where the Doctors Blanche ran their famous clinic.

  Among the special people I would like to acknowledge for their contribution to the making of the book are: Madame Gabrielle de la Tourbillon (who, in 1965, gave me her copy of Réflexions sur le Théâtre, dedicated to her by its author, Jean-Louis Barrault); the artist Anthony Palliser; the author Anne Perry; the writer and lecturer Paul Ibell; the composer and lyricist Susannah Pearse; Roger Johnson and Jean Upton of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London.

  As ever I am indebted to my literary agent, the incomparable Ed Victor, and to two members of his team in particular: Linda Van and Morag O’Brien. For their sustaining enthusiasm and detailed input I am equally indebted to three remarkable publishers: Kate Parkin in London; Trish Grader in New York; and Emmanuelle Heurtebize in Paris.

  The other question I am most frequently asked by readers is this: ‘Which biography of Oscar Wilde do you recommend?’ Of course I recommend Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellmann (1987), but, magisterial as it is, the book is riddled with inaccuracies and must be read in conjunction with Additions and Corrections to Richard Ellman’s Oscar Wilde by Horst Schroeder (2002). I also recommend, and without reservation, The Wilde Album by Merlin Holland (1997). The two books that, for me, take the reader closest to ‘the real Oscar Wilde’ are The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (2000) and Son of Oscar Wilde by Vyvyan Holland (1954).

  * * *

  [1] ‘Go away! Get out!’

  [2] ‘Without daring, nothing is achieved.’

  [3] ‘Let us return to our sheep’ = ‘Let us return to the subject in hand’.

  Table of Contents

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