Oscar Wilde and the Nest of Vipers

by Gyles Brandreth

‘Or is he about to flee?’ asked Oscar, peering down the drive towards the house.

  There, half obscured in the shadow of the building, in a corner of the forecourt, was a pony and trap and, standing by it, two figures, dressed in black. One was a young woman, heavily veiled, unrecognisable in full mourning; the other was the diminutive yet dapper figure of Lord Yarborough. With one hand he held the woman tightly by the arm; in his other hand he held a coachman’s whip.

  ‘Stop!’ cried Conan Doyle, jumping down from our moving four-wheeler as it drew up alongside the pony and trap. ‘In the name of the law, stop!’

  ‘What the devil do you mean, sir?’ answered Yarborough fiercely. ‘Explain yourself – and moderate your tone. This lady is not well.’

  ‘You may not leave,’ cried Conan Doyle, running up to Yarborough and his companion, and confronting them bodily, standing with his arms and legs akimbo to form a human barrier.

  ‘I may do as I please, sir,’ replied Yarborough coolly, lightly laying the tip of his whip on Doyle’s right shoulder. ‘I may have you thrown off my land as a trespasser if I so choose – and if I had not recognised you and your confederates, I’d do so without a second thought. What in God’s name is the meaning of this?’

  ‘You may not leave,’ repeated Conan Doyle, breathing heavily as he stood his ground. He glanced towards Oscar and me as we came up beside him.

  ‘I am not leaving, as it happens,’ said Lord Yarborough, nodding towards Oscar by way of greeting. ‘I am returning – with this young lady. She is not well. I had hoped she would be fit enough to accompany me to town – to pay her final respects to her late sister. But I drove her as far as St James’s church in the village and it’s clear that the journey to Grosvenor Square would be too great a strain for her.’

  Removing his whip from Conan Doyle’s shoulder, he turned to the woman at his side and, with both hands, carefully, lifted her veil from her face.

  ‘This is Louise Lascelles, younger sister to the late Duchess of Albemarle. You may recall that you met her when you were last here, Dr Doyle. You were in a calmer frame of mind that day.’

  Conan Doyle stepped back and lowered his eyes. The young woman – pale-faced and beautiful, with round brown eyes and auburn hair – gazed steadily at him. Her feathery white cheeks were stained with tears.

  ‘She has been weeping,’ said Oscar.

  ‘Yes,’ said Lord Yarborough. ‘Uncontrollably. That’s why I brought her back. I was wrong to think of taking her in the first place.’

  He looked at the girl dispassionately, as though he were inspecting a marble statue at the British Museum, then shook his head and pulled her black veil down over her face once more.

  ‘No,’ whispered Oscar. ‘Please. There’s no need.’

  ‘She does not see you,’ said Lord Yarborough, crisply. ‘Or, if she does, she is not aware of you. She is under hypnosis. She is in a trance.’

  ‘And yet she weeps,’ said Oscar.

  ‘Yes,’ answered Lord Yarborough.

  ‘And you cannot stop her.’

  ‘So it would seem. Hypnosis is an imperfect art. Would it were a science. We have so much to learn about the treatment of hysteria, Mr Wilde. At this clinic, we are experimenting with hypnosis. Others are experimenting with the use of hallucinogenic drugs. In America, I am told, they are looking to pass an electric current through the skull of the patient to clear the madness from the brain. Who knows what’s best? Who knows what lies at the root of the disease? We need to find out. That’s why the research must go on – whatever the hazards.’

  He turned to the young woman in black and took her by the arm.

  ‘Meanwhile, we must do what we can to safeguard the afflicted.’ He held out his whip to Conan Doyle, who took it from him. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I’ll return Louise to the house and then we can talk.’

  Clasping the young woman by the elbow, he steered her away from our group towards the main entrance of the building. There, standing in the portico, the door to the house half open behind them, were two other women. One was an elderly nun (a nursing sister, I presumed), ruddy-faced and bespectacled. The other was a younger woman dressed in mourning: a black-velvet bustle dress with a loose-falling skirt draped up at the back and a tight-fitting, waisted jacket. A sheaf of black swan’s feathers swept from her imposing hat, but she wore no veil. She carried herself erect and gripped a large, white envelope in her black-gloved hands. She looked so formal and so elegant that she seemed quite out of place.

  ‘Do you know them?’ asked Oscar.

  ‘Sister Agnes is in charge of the asylum,’ said Conan Doyle. ‘And the other lady is a patient, as I recall. I met her only briefly.’

  We watched as Lord Yarborough escorted Louise Lascelles to the doorway and gave the young woman into the nun’s charge. She went without protest, as if in a dream.

  ‘She walks as if she were a sleepwalker,’ said Oscar.

  The other patient, however, was anything but calm. The moment Lord Yarborough was within reach, she grabbed him by the arm. He tried to step aside, but she clung on. She pleaded with him. Her manner was pathetic – supplicatory, not irate. From what I could see, he spoke not a word to her, but shook his head repeatedly and, eventually, raising his arms, managed to break free.

  As he turned back towards us, the woman followed him and caught his arm once more, pulling him to her. This time he looked directly at her and, suddenly, appeared to acquiesce to her demand. She laughed and, gratefully, pressed the white envelope she was holding into his hands. Stepping back, she made a deep curtsy in front of him, before finally turning to make her way into the house with Sister Agnes and Miss Lascelles.

  Lord Yarborough watched the women go and then, briskly, walked back to us across the gravel courtyard where he reclaimed his whip from Arthur Conan Doyle.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  He threw the whip into the trap and slapped the pony on its flank, then looked at us enquiringly, one eyebrow raised, letting his beady eyes rest briefly on each of us in turn.

  ‘Dr Doyle, Mr Wilde, kinsman Sherard – what can I do for you, gentlemen?’

  ‘Answer some questions,’ said Conan Doyle, sharply.

  ‘If they are asked in a civil manner, I shall do so with pleasure.’

  ‘I sent you a telegram, Lord Yarborough,’ said Oscar. ‘You did not reply.’

  ‘I apologise. I am a very busy man. But you are here now and I am at your service. I’d invite you in, except that I am on my way to town and there has been a death at the asylum.’

  Conan Doyle looked up at the shuttered house. ‘A death?’ he repeated.

  ‘A natural death,’ said Lord Yarborough. ‘An elderly patient. A woman in her eighties. She had been here many years. It is a sadness, not a tragedy.’

  ‘Is that why the curtains are all drawn?’ asked Oscar.

  ‘We keep the house in darkness on such days.’

  ‘Out of respect for the dead?’

  ‘No – to calm the nerves of the living. Death can unsettle us all. It can have a terrifying effect on those with troubled minds. At such times as this, we keep the patients subdued and pacified as best we can. We keep the house in darkness and encourage them to sleep. We give them laudanum – in small doses.’

  Conan Doyle turned to Lord Yarborough. ‘How did the Duchess of Albemarle die?’ he asked.

  Lord Yarborough did not seem surprised by the question and answered it at once – and simply: ‘From a heart attack – provoked by the dangerous game she was playing or was about to play; provoked by it, but not caused by it, in my opinion.’

  ‘With whom do you think she was playing this “dangerous game”?’

  ‘I have no idea. None whatsoever. It could be any one of a dozen men – or more. The duchess was liberal in her favours.’

  ‘Could it have been the duke?’ asked Oscar.

  ‘No. The duke and duchess were no longer on intimate terms and had not been for two years at least. She told me so qui
te frankly – and the duke, when drunk, would admit as much.’

  ‘It would have been one of her regular lovers—’ Oscar began.

  ‘Or a complete stranger,’ said Lord Yarborough, smiling. ‘It could have been anyone, Mr Wilde – a gentleman or a servant, someone well known to her or someone quite unknown. Anyone. Nympholepsis is the term we give her condition. It amounts to a lunatic desire for carnal relations with men – a desire, in the duchess’s case, sweetened by danger and made more exhilarating by the infliction of pain.’

  ‘The man will have used his knife on her at her behest?’

  ‘The pain was part of the pleasure, Mr Wilde. It may even have been her knife.’

  ‘He used it to cut her breasts,’ said Conan Doyle.

  ‘To mark them – to cause a sensation – to draw blood … If you examined her breasts, Doctor, you will have noticed how much they had been scarred. That episode in the telephone room was very far from being the first.’

  ‘The man cut her throat,’ said Conan Doyle.

  ‘For the thrill of it – at her suggestion.’

  ‘He cut her throat,’ repeated Conan Doyle. ‘Should he not be brought to justice?’

  ‘He did not kill the duchess,’ said Lord Yarborough calmly. ‘He was her lover and in all that he did I am certain the duchess acquiesced. She was the instigator, not the victim.’

  ‘Are you certain of this?’ asked Oscar.

  ‘Absolutely. I was her doctor. She told me of her desires – without shame. She showed me her wounded breasts – with pride.’

  ‘Were you her lover?’ asked Conan Doyle.

  ‘No, sir. I was her physician.’

  ‘Were you her lover, Lord Yarborough?’

  ‘Do not presume to repeat the question, Dr Doyle. We have both sworn the Hippocratic oath.’

  ‘Do you remember it, Lord Yarborough?’

  ‘How dare you, sir?’

  Lord Yarborough’s face was now whiter than ice. His small eyes narrowed; the veins in his neck and forehead began to pulse like the gorge of a toad. I saw his hands tremble, but they remained at his side – and his voice remained steady.

  ‘I have the oath by heart, from my student days, as I am sure you do. “Whatever houses I may visit, I will come for the benefit of the sick, remaining free of all intentional injustice, of all mischief and, in particular, of intimate relations with either female or male persons, be they free or slaves.”’

  ‘I repeat the question, Lord Yarborough. Were you her lover?’

  Lord Yarborough suddenly looked up to the sky and laughed. ‘I almost admire your impertinence, Dr Doyle. I shall take it as an excess of zeal and shall put it down to youthful arrogance. And God knows why, but since you press me, and since, I take it, these exchanges are confidential, I will tell you frankly: I am no woman’s lover – nor likely to be.’

  He looked at the three of us in turn and smiled. ‘But whoever her lover was is beside the point, gentlemen. The Duchess of Albemarle’s lover is not guilty of her murder.’

  ‘But he is responsible for her death,’ said Oscar gently.

  ‘Not so, Mr Wilde. Her weak heart is responsible for that.’

  The storm-cloud had burst. The tension of a moment earlier was gone. Lord Yarborough and Conan Doyle no longer confronted one another as raging bull and defiant matador.

  Oscar glanced over his shoulder to the four-wheeler that stood waiting for us at the far side of the courtyard and checked his watch. I checked mine. It was coming towards eleven o’clock.

  Oscar turned back to Lord Yarborough. ‘The duchess’s heart gave way, but her throat was also cut. How can you be so certain that her heart gave way before her throat was cut?’

  ‘Quite easily: because of the limited quantity of blood on her body and in the telephone room. There was much less than you would have expected to find, say, at the scene of a violent knife attack. If the jugular vein is cut during exertion, when the veins are engorged and blood is racing through the body, pumping wildly, then blood spurts and gushes everywhere. That was not the case in the telephone room at Grosvenor Square. It was the contained amount of blood there that led me to believe that the duchess had died at the outset of her sybaritic tryst, at the start, before the frenzy, before her blood pressure was raised. The heart attack killed her almost as she met her lover. She died in his arms, but at first he did not know it. In the darkness, and in his excitement, he was unaware of what had occurred. Merely sensing that he was not getting the response from his inamorata that he might have expected, he sought to intensify the pleasure by intensifying the pain. He cut into her more deeply. He slashed her breasts and he cut her throat until he reached her jugular vein – and only then, as the blood poured out of her, did he realise what he had done.’

  ‘And he fled the scene,’ said Oscar, with a heavy sigh.

  ‘We can take him for a coward,’ said Lord Yarborough, ‘but not a murderer.’

  ‘Why do you not wish to know who he is?’ I asked. ‘Are you not curious?’

  ‘I am curious, of course,’ he answered easily. ‘But I have thought the matter through and come to the conclusion that no useful purpose would be served by unmasking the man in question. Quite the reverse, in fact. If his secret is discovered, so is hers. How would that help the common good? If the truth were known about the private life of the Duchess of Albemarle, her reputation would be ruined. The duke would be humiliated. And the Prince of Wales would have been associated with yet another unsavoury affair.’

  ‘But the man may do it all again, may he not?’

  ‘Only if he encounters another woman anxious to play so dangerous a game with him – and I think that unlikely, don’t you? Whoever he is, he is not a threat to the public at large.’

  ‘But he killed again last Tuesday,’ said Oscar.

  ‘Did he, Mr Wilde?’

  ‘He did – at the Empire Theatre of Varieties in Leicester Square. You were there.’

  ‘I was there and I saw the body of the poor dead girl.’ Lord Yarborough looked around the group. ‘We all did.’

  ‘And her wounds were the same wounds as those inflicted on Helen Albemarle,’ said Oscar.

  ‘They were similar.’

  ‘They were the same,’ said Conan Doyle.

  ‘That does not mean that they were perpetrated by the same person. The second death could have been caused by someone who wanted it to appear exactly like the first.’

  ‘But only four people saw the duchess’s body after her death: you and I, Lord Yarborough, the Duke of Albemarle and, possibly, his butler. One of us is not the girl’s murderer, surely?’

  Lord Yarborough looked at Conan Doyle with gimlet eyes. ‘A point well made, Doctor. But it could still be mere coincidence. The two women had little in common, after all.’

  ‘They had an association with the Prince of Wales in common,’ said Oscar casually, checking his timepiece once more.

  ‘And a history of hysteria,’ added Conan Doyle. ‘One was your patient, Lord Yarborough. The other might have been.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Did you know Louisa Lavallois?’ asked Oscar. ‘Or “Lulu”, as the prince called her?’

  ‘No. I had neither seen nor heard of the young lady before Tuesday night.’

  ‘Did you know that she had been a patient at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris – a “psychiatric” patient?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Louisa Lavallois had been a patient of the great Professor Charcot – one of his favourites, in fact – one of those poor mad girls who was a star attraction at les leçons du mardi, exhibiting her hysteria under hypnosis for the edification and entertainment of all who cared to come and watch. Except she wasn’t under hypnosis, of course. She was one of those who connived with the professor, who played the game, who acted her part and received her reward – until she rebelled and fell from favour and was thrown out.’

  ‘I know nothing of this woman – and nothing of this story.�
��

  Lord Yarborough tapped the edge of the white envelope he was holding against his chin and gazed steadily at Conan Doyle.

  ‘Be careful what you say, Dr Doyle. Your excess of zeal could be the ruin of you. Remember the laws of slander. Jean-Martin Charcot is one of the great men of European medicine. His name will be remembered long after yours has been forgotten. He has his faults, I am sure, but he has one exceptional quality – genius. He is a giant. He is not a charlatan.’

  ‘Is he a murderer?’ asked Oscar, lightly.

  Lord Yarborough’s small frame rocked with self-conscious merriment. ‘Very droll, Mr Wilde. Have you taken leave of your senses? Are you suggesting Jean-Martin Charcot murdered this girl to silence her?’

  ‘To safeguard his reputation, perhaps,’ said Oscar, smiling, his head tilted to one side.

  ‘You have taken leave of your senses,’ exclaimed Lord Yarborough. ‘Professor Charcot was not at the Empire Theatre on Tuesday night.’

  ‘No, Lord Yarborough, but you were. And Professor Charcot was at Grosvenor Square on the night that the Duchess of Albemarle died.’

  ‘Good God, man, are you quite mad? Why should Charcot murder Helen Albemarle?’

  ‘He doesn’t murder her. He makes love to her – and in so doing provokes the heart attack that kills her. You have told him of her emotional frailty – of her “nym-pholepsis”, is that the word? – and of her vulnerability to cardiac arrest. He takes advantage of both – to your advantage. Charcot triggers the death of the Duchess of Albemarle and, in doing so, Lord Yarborough, helps furnish you with the cadaver of a known hysteric – one of your own patients; a cadaver you need – to dissect, to study, to assist you in your all-important clinical researches. Charcot helps kill the duchess for your benefit and you repay the favour by killing the Lavallois girl for his.’

  Lord Yarborough threw back his head and roared with laughter. ‘The notion is risible, Mr Wilde.’

  Oscar grinned. ‘Far-fetched, I grant you – not risible.’

  ‘Risible,’ repeated Lord Yarborough. ‘It’s the stuff of one of Dr Doyle’s detective stories.’

  ‘Now who’s talking slander?’ asked Oscar, chuckling. ‘I believe Dr Doyle doesn’t find the notion even far-fetched. I believe he thinks it’s what may have happened.’