2007 - Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders (14 page)

“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?”

16 October—5 November 1889

“D
o 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.

Veronica Sutherland liked Sir John, she said, because ‘he is what he is’, ‘a man without guile, without pretension’.

She enjoyed the way he puffed away at his briar pipe in her presence and, indoors, unselfconsciously sat at table with his deerstalker hat on his head. “He is honest, Robert, and of how many men can you say that nowadays? And he likes women, he
understands
women. Of how many men can you say
that?
”

Sir John liked Veronica Sutherland because, indeed, she did remind him of his late sister-in-law, Sophie Gray. “You have her wit and gaiety,” he told Veronica, “as well as her beauty and intelligence. Her life-force was extraordinary, but in the end it overwhelmed her. She became an hysteric, poor child. She died by her own hand. She flew too near the flame.”

It was late one Friday afternoon at the end of that October, following one of our lunches with Sir John, when Veronica and I were at Tite Street, taking tea with Oscar, and telling him about the picture of Sophie Gray, that Oscar told us he had nearly completed his new story for Stoddart and had decided on its title. “I shall call it
The Picture of Dorian Gray
,” he announced.

“Do you think Millais will mind?” I asked.

“Why should Millais mind?” answered Oscar, somewhat peevishly. “The artist in my story bears no resemblance to Millais, none whatsoever. And Dorian Gray, whose portrait is at the heart of my story—and who is perfection itself, who is perhaps what I would like to be in other ages!—knows no kinship to Sophie Gray.”