2007 - Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders (7 page)

My friend William Yeats, the poet, had spent Christmas with Oscar at Tite Street the year before—I was in Paris at the time, in pursuit of Kaitlyn—and he wrote to me, describing the day, and Tite Street, and ‘the perfect harmony’ of Oscar’s life there, ‘with his beautiful wife and two young children’. Yeats said it suggested to him ‘some delicate artistic composition’. Yeats also told me that he had embarrassed himself that day by wearing yellow shoes. Undyed leather was then the fashion, but the moment that he set foot inside the house, Yeats realised that the livid ochre of his festive footwear—he had bought the shoes specially for the occasion—was completely out of keeping with the snowscape whiteness of Tite Street. When he saw the shoes, Oscar started visibly, and, throughout the day, he kept glancing at them surreptitiously, wincing on each occasion.

Yeats, I think, felt uncomfortable in Tite Street. I always felt easy and at home there. Perhaps that was because Constance made me feel so welcome.

That sunny September morning when Constance Wilde opened the door to me I had never seen her looking lovelier. She was dressed in white, with a violet ribbon in her hair and a matching ribbon around her waist. She held the door wide open and smiled at me. “Welcome, Robert,” she said. “It has been too long.” Her figure was fuller than I remembered; she seemed taller, too, and older, I suppose. She was thirty-one, but her face was not careworn; she looked happy, confident and gay. She shook my hand and then, with her knuckles, fleetingly caressed my cheek. “It is so good to see you,” she said. “I think of you often.” In the hallway, she pointed to the umbrella-stand and said, “Look, I have your swordstick still. It is here to protect me.”

I said, without thinking, “Constance, I will protect you always,” and, as I said it, I blushed.

She laughed, took both my hands in hers and squeezed them tightly. “You are such a romantic, Mr Sherard,” she said. “I am not surprised that Oscar is planning to take you on a great adventure. He tells me you are going to play Dr Watson to his Sherlock Holmes.”

“You have read
A Study in Scarlet?
” I asked.

“Indeed,” she replied. “Oscar insisted. And I enjoyed it. Oscar has become quite obsessed with ‘Mr Holmes’ and his powers of observation and perfect reasoning. To be truthful, I think Oscar may be a little jealous of Arthur Doyle and his creation. Let us go and find him.”

She took me by the hand and led me, like a playmate, through the house in search of Oscar. We found him in his Moorish smoking room, where nothing was white except for the narrow plume of smoke rising from his carefully held cigarette. He was lying back on a divan, with his eyes half closed. He must have heard us coming— he must have heard me arrive at the front door—but he did not stir. As we came into the room, languidly he lifted his cigarette into the air and, gazing on it, rolling it around deliberately between his thumb and forefinger, observed, “Cigarette smoking is the perfect type of perfect pleasure, is it not? It is exquisite and leaves one unsatisfied.”

Constance smiled; I laughed; Oscar sat up and turned towards us. “Constance has told you of the plan, I trust?” he said. “She is leaving us, Robert. She is taking the boys with her. She is going to North Yorkshire, to the moors, to stay with her little friend, Emily Thursfield.” Needless to say, Constance had told me none of this. Oscar turned to his wife and added, conspiratorially, “Do not introduce Robert to Emily, my dear. She is far too pretty. He will fall in love with her at once and be unable to sleep for a fortnight. I don’t believe he has slept at all since he first met you.”

I blushed once more. Oscar got to his feet, laughing, and placed his hands upon my shoulders.

“Constance is going on holiday, Robert, and we are going to work. We are going to unravel this mystery, Robert. We are going to solve this crime, with or without the assistance of Inspector Fraser.”

“Oscar has told me of the horrible murder he stumbled upon,” said Constance, seriously. “I feel for the poor boy—and for his family, whoever they may be.”

“We shall begin with his family, Robert,” said Oscar, extinguishing his cigarette. “That is where we shall start.”

I was puzzled. “But, Oscar,” I said, “I thought you said that the boy had no known relations. Isn’t that what you told Conan Doyle and the police?”

Oscar offered me a half-smile, but no answer.

“I cannot understand why the police will not help,” said Constance.

“Constance has seen Fraser’s outrageous telegram,” Oscar said. “I have given it to her—for her collection.” I looked at him, uncomprehending. “She has a special box in which she stores such items,” he explained. “She began the collection on our wedding day, with the telegram Whistler sent to us at the church:
FEAR I MAY NOT BE ABLE TO REACH YOU IN TIME FOR THE CEREMONY. DON’T WAIT.
Fraser’s missive is less amusing, I grant you, less well phrased, but I want it kept. I believe it may prove of interest in the fullness of time.”

“Why did Mr Fraser say he had searched for evidence when he had not?” asked Constance.

“Why indeed?” asked Oscar.

I thought it was most likely that Inspector Fraser felt that the body of Billy Wood was a figment of Oscar’s imagination and that he was disinclined to use scarce police resources in the pursuit of a phantom murderer, but I kept my thought to myself and said instead, “If we are to find the family of Billy Wood, where do we begin?”

“At the roller-skating rink, if I’m not much mistaken,” said Oscar. The carriage clock on the mantelpiece—a trophy from his American lecture tour—struck the half-hour. “Come Robert, our carriage awaits.”

Oscar had ordered a two-wheeler. It was waiting for us in the street below. Oscar thought nothing of keeping carriages waiting for him at all hours. He was wantonly extravagant. On hansom cabs and amusements—flowers, champagne, luncheon, dinner, supper and the rest—he could spend in a day what I might earn in a month. Even with the income that Constance brought with her to the marriage, and even when he was at the height of his powers, with two plays running simultaneously in the West End, Oscar lived beyond his means—dangerously so. At the time, I had no idea that his financial position was as fragile as it turned out to be. From the moment of his marriage, I took him to be a moderately wealthy man. Had I known the truth, I trust that I would not have permitted him to be as generous towards me as invariably he was. The first inkling I got of the parlous state of his affairs was some three years after this, at the time of his brilliant success with
Lady’s Windermere’s Fan
. From that play alone, in one year, he earned more than seven thousand pounds in royalties. That was the year I recall being told by Gertrude Simmonds, the boys’ governess, that ‘things were not so prosperous’ in Tite Street, that the butcher had ‘refused to send a joint until the account was settled’ and that ‘Mr Wilde himself had to drive round in a hansom to settle up’.

However, there were no clouds apparent in the blue sky above Tite Street on the morning of 2 September 1889. Annie Marchant (bustling, busy Annie Marchant), the boys’ nursemaid, had brought her young charges out onto the pavement to bid their papa farewell. Oscar loved his boys. He kissed each of them fondly. To Cyril, who had turned four that summer, he said, “Take care of your mother, young man. The Yorkshire moors are perilous and a mother is a precious thing. You are granted only the one.”

“Hush, Oscar,” said Constance, anxiously. “You will frighten him.”

“No, my dear,” said Oscar, “these are wise children. Remember who their parents are.” He turned to Constance, who now had little Vyvyan in her arms, and kissed her gently on the forehead. He looked closely into Vyvyan’s round and smiling face and said solemnly, “
Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentetn mortalia tangunt
.”

Vyvyan, who was not yet three, gurgled appreciatively and pulled his father’s nose. Oscar turned to me proudly. “Their English is developing slowly, but when it comes to Virgil these boys don’t miss a trick.”

Laughing, we climbed aboard the two-wheeler. Constance, Annie Marchant and the two young children, all smiling, all so happy, waved us on our way.

“Take care, Oscar,” Constance called out, as our driver (a dour sort) cracked his whip. “I will see you in a month, my darling. I will be back for your birthday, have no fear.”

“With you as my wife, I have no fear,” said Oscar, blowing her a kiss.

As the cab turned right from Tite Street into Christchurch Street on its way towards the King’s Road, Oscar, adjusting the cuffs of his lemon-coloured linen jacket—he was now properly dressed for the season—sat back and said, “I have a good wife, do I not?”

“You do, Oscar,” I answered, with feeling.

“And darling children?” he added.

“Indeed,” I replied.

“And we,” he said, suddenly clapping his hands together, “have the excitement of a new venture in hand. Ennui is the enemy, Robert! Adventure is the answer. We shall find the murderer of Billy Wood. If Conan Doyle’s friend cannot help me, Conan Doyle’s example can. Oscar Wilde masquerading as Sherlock Holmes: why not? A mask tells us so much more than a face…”

It took us no more than ten minutes to reach our destination: the Dungannon Cottage Marble Rink at Knightsbridge. Yet another skating rink! London in the 1880
s
was awash with them. But the Dungannon was different. In the aftermath of Professor Gamgee’s success in transforming the floating swimming bath by Charing Cross Bridge into the ‘Floating Glaciarium’—an indoor rink that used ‘manufactured’ ice—another enterprising ‘professor of physical culture’, Colonel Henry Melville, had created a new marvel in Knightsbridge. His all-weather, all-year-round ice rink dispensed with ice altogether, offering skaters instead a ‘marble’ surface on which to skate—a surface, according to Colonel Melville, the smoothness of which was ‘unrivalled save by the clearest sheet of ice to be found within the Arctic circle’.

“I did not know that you favoured roller skating as a sport, Oscar,” I said, laughing, as we entered the Dungannon’s crowded foyer.

“I do not,” said Oscar, coldly, “but Billy Wood did and Gerard Bellotti does. It is Bellotti we have come to find.” He glanced towards me. “Did I mention Bellotti to you?”

“You did, Oscar,” I said, “just the once. But you did not mention him to Conan Doyle or Inspector Fraser, I noticed.”

“I am glad you noticed, Robert. A good detective notices everything.” His eyes were now scanning the crowd.

“Might I ask,” I said, “
why
you didn’t mention his name to Fraser?”

“If Inspector Fraser deigns to take an interest in the case, he will come across Mr Bellotti soon enough. He may even be familiar with him already. I imagine Gerard Bellotti is not unknown to the police.” Oscar’s gaze had moved from the rink and its surround to the refreshment tables adjacent to the bandstand. “There he is,” he cried suddenly, pointing his cane.

Gerard Bellotti was not a prepossessing sight, nor did he have the appearance of a natural roller skater: he was grotesquely corpulent. Although he was seated a distance away, with his back to us, he was immediately remarkable, not only because of his fleshly bulk—he gave the impression of a toad that sits and blinks, yet never moves—but because of his gaudy apparel. He was wearing an orange checked suit that would have done credit to the first comedian at Collins’ Music Hall and on the top of his onion-shaped head of oily hair, which was tightly curled and dyed the colour of henna, he sported a battered straw boater.

“Who is Gerard Bellotti?” I asked.

“Not a man of refinement, I fear,” said Oscar, as we pushed our way through the crowd. It was midweek, but the Dungannon Cottage was packed. All human life was there (of a certain class, at least): courting couples, solitary loungers, mothers and grandmothers with children, servant-girls on holiday, young men bent on pleasure.

“How do you know him?” I called above the din. The noise was oppressive. Everyone was shouting to be heard above the music of the band and the relentless low roar of roller skates on marble.

“He works for Messrs O’Donovan & Brown of Ludgate Circus, London’s leading suppliers of domestic staff from the emerald isle,” Oscar called back. “Bellotti is one of their recruiting sergeants—he scouts for lads who might be suitable as bootblacks and page-boys. That’s what he does here.” Oscar paused and put his face close to my ear. “And, as a sideline, he runs an informal luncheon club for gentlemen.”

“‘For gentlemen’?”

Oscar laughed. “Well…Members of Parliament and the like. He offers cold cuts and companionship. He will supply an MP with a partner at cards—or an artist with a model. I know he has a marquess on his books—an amateur pugilist, who needs lads to wrestle with.”

“Mr Bellotti sounds interesting,” I said, amused.

“No,” replied Oscar, seriously, “Bellotti is complex, without being interesting.”

We had reached his table. Bellotti neither looked up nor even turned to look at us. As we sat down, with a pale plump hand he pushed away from him what appeared to be a cup of cold tea and spoke immediately. “Ah, Mr Wilde, how are you? I recognise your scent.” His voice was more melodious than I had expected, his accent more refined. “Canterbury Wood Violet, is it not? Always your favourite. Alsop & Quilter are still looking after you, I trust. And who is your friend? Is he in search of entertainment or employment?”

“Neither,” said Oscar. “Mr Sherard and I have come to you in search of information.”

“Indeed.”

Oscar leant his cane against the table’s edge and then, discreetly, pushed a sovereign beneath Bellotti’s saucer. “When did you last see Billy Wood?” he asked.

“Billy Wood? What a delightful boy. So bright, so breezy. One of your favourites, Mr Wilde—one of your enthusiasms.”

“When did you last see him?” Oscar repeated the question.

“Yesterday,” said Bellotti.

Oscar leant towards him urgently. “Are you sure?”

Bellotti pondered. “Perhaps the day before?” he said. “Yes, the day before. He came to one of the club lunches. We’re meeting in Little College Street now, you know. You must come, Mr Wilde. It is too long since we have had the pleasure of your company. He was in excellent form. Billy is always a delight. Why do you ask after him? Is he in trouble?”