Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol: A Mystery (10 page)

From along the passageway, Warder Stokes shouted: ‘Silence!’ I waited, holding my breath. ‘Silence – on pain of punishment.’

I felt giddy with confusion and despair. I saw the Bible on the wooden chair beside my bed. I went to pick it up and it fell open at the Book of Psalms. I lay on the bed and turned my head to one side and, as I read the words, I spoke them out loud.

Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord.

Lord, hear my voice: let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications.

If thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand?

But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared.

I wait for the Lord, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope.

My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning: I say, more than they that watch for the morning.

I did not hear the surgeon as he entered the cell. I did not register his presence until I opened my eyes and found a bespectacled man with a bird’s-nest beard and mutton-chop whiskers leaning over me. He had a hand on my shoulder.

‘I have kept you waiting,’ he said. ‘I apologise. I had another prisoner to see.’

There was a Scottish burr to his accent. He spoke softly and I was startled by the power of his walnut-coloured eyes. They appeared like owls’ eyes behind the lenses of his spectacles.

‘You are a friend?’ I asked, confused.

‘I am the prison surgeon,’ he said. ‘Dr Maurice.’

‘You are a friend,’ I repeated. ‘I can tell.’

‘No,’ he said, standing up and looking down at me, ‘but I studied at Edinburgh with your friend, Conan Doyle. We were both students of the great Dr Bell.’

‘Arthur’s model for Sherlock Holmes.’

‘Indeed. Observation is everything – that’s what Dr Bell taught us.’ Dr Maurice looked down at me intently. He was a tall man, bony and angular. He stood at my bedside with his hands in his pockets, jangling keys and coins, contemplating me with a furrowed brow and what appeared to be kindly amusement. ‘And you, I’ve been led to believe, are Conan Doyle’s model for Holmes’s older brother – the brilliant but indolent Mycroft Holmes.’

‘So Arthur says – but I have not seen him for a time.’

‘I imagine not,’ said Dr Maurice, ‘under the circumstances.’ The surgeon stepped away from the bed – his legs were long, narrow and stiff, as though he walked on stilts. He bent over to open his medical bag and, from it, fetched a stethoscope. ‘You’d better rise from that semi-recumbent posture, C.3.3. I am here to examine you.’

‘You will be my friend,’ I said. ‘You must call me by my name, Dr Maurice.’

‘While you are here, you will be known by your number, sir. That is the rule – and it has its merits.’

‘Does it?’

‘It does. It reminds us that all men are equal in prison – all will be treated the same, regardless of who they are and where they come from. Now undress.’

‘What about the women and children?’ I asked, standing up to take off my jacket and shirt.

‘Men, women, children – once convicted and sentenced, they are all treated the same here. There can be no favourites.’ He pressed the cold listening bell of the stethoscope to my chest.

‘But Tom, I am told, is Warder Braddle’s favourite.’

‘Do not listen to idle gossip, sir. And do not spread it. The prison rule of absolute silence has its merits, also.’

‘How is poor Tom?’ I asked, turning my eyes towards the cell door.

‘If you’re referring to the prisoner across the way, the answer to your question is that it’s none of your business.’

‘But it is – surely? We have a Christian duty to love our neighbours, do we not? No man is an island.’

‘Except in prison – under the separate system.’ The surgeon gave a small laugh. I realised that if he had studied with Conan Doyle at Edinburgh he must be younger than he appeared – in his late thirties, at most. He hid his youth behind his heavy beard. ‘Turn around,’ he said. ‘Show me your back.’ I turned my back to him. I felt his hands on my shoulder blades. They soothed me. I felt the pressure of his fingers as he tapped them – hard – against my ribcage. ‘Cough for me,’ he said. I did as I was told. ‘Now take a deep breath and hold it . . . Now exhale.’

‘The poet John Donne went to prison,’ I said.

‘And his brother, Henry, died at Newgate – of the bubonic plague . . . Turn around . . . At least you’ve been spared that . . . Bend over now, as far as you can . . .’ The surgeon growled softly and pulled on his beard. ‘Stand up – slowly . . . You’re unfit – to say the least. You cannot touch your knees, never mind your toes. You have not treated your body as a temple, have you?’

It was my turn to laugh. ‘I have eaten, I have drunk, I have smoked – so much! I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease . . . And you see the result.’ I held out my naked arms, I gazed down at my loose and hideous flesh.

‘Take down your trousers,’ said Dr Maurice. ‘I must examine your private parts.’

I pulled down my ludicrous convict’s pantaloons with their obscene black arrows. ‘Once,’ I said, ‘I amused myself with being a
flâneur
, a dandy, a man of fashion . . .’

‘I know,’ said the surgeon, crouching down before me, ‘Conan Doyle told me – and I read the newspapers and the magazines.’

‘Look at me now, Doctor.’

‘I am,’ he said, examining me. He got to his feet. ‘I have seen worse,’ he added, smiling. ‘But I am a prison surgeon. I have seen the worst.’ He turned back to his bag to put away the stethoscope. ‘Where did it all go wrong, do you think?’

‘Did Arthur never tell you?’ I asked.

‘He told me that you had surrounded yourself with smaller natures and meaner minds, that you became a spendthrift of your own genius.’

‘He is quite correct.’

‘Conan Doyle is a keen observer – and a good man.’

‘The best of men,’ I said, thinking of him, of his firm grip and steady eye, his tweed coat and walrus moustache, his uncomplicated decency, and recollecting the adventures that we had shared.

‘He admires you still.’

‘I admire him.’

‘
Mens sana in corpore sano –
a healthy mind in a healthy body – that’s Conan Doyle’s motto. It’s not a bad one. It’s kept him on the straight and narrow.’

‘It’s kept him out of prison!’ I laughed. ‘But I chose a different path . . .’

‘You had everything,’ said the surgeon, now examining my ears, ‘but it was not enough?’

‘Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion.’

‘Desire, at the end, is a malady, or a madness, or both.’

‘I see that now, Doctor. I see the error of my ways. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I grew careless of the lives of others – my wife, my children, my true friends. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace – as you see. There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility.’

‘Your mind seems to be in perfect working order.’ I smiled. He nodded towards my prison clothes lying on the bed. ‘Get dressed now.’ I pulled on my shirt. He watched me as I did so. ‘Can I report to Conan Doyle that I have seen you?’ he asked. ‘When he last saw you he thought that you had gone mad.’

‘It was a temporary insanity.’

‘I have enjoyed our conversation, sir,’ said the surgeon, gravely, ‘but it must be our last. This is a prison. It is a world apart and you who are obliged to live here and we who choose to work here must abide by its rules. It is the only way.’ He picked up his bag and moved towards the cell door. ‘There is dry blood around your right ear. Wash the outer ear with care. Does the ear itself cause you much pain?’

‘Some.’

‘Endure it as best you can. I will prescribe an antidote for your dysentery. Take it. Keep yourself clean. Exercise. As you walk around the prison yard, think of Conan Doyle and walk as he would walk – with your shoulders back and your head held high. Eat the food that is provided. You’ll get accustomed to it in time. Do not drink anything but the water and tea and cocoa given to you with your meals. If you are offered illicit alcohol, do not touch it. Whoever offers it to you – prisoner or turnkey – refuse it. It is not safe. And take each day as it comes. Your time here will pass.’

He pulled open the cell door and called down the corridor: ‘Warder!’ He turned back and looked at me once more with his large owl’s eyes. ‘Goodbye.’

‘And Tom?’ I asked, lowering my voice and turning my head towards the cell that faced my own.

‘He is not well,’ murmured the surgeon. ‘He has a strong spirit, but a weak chest and . . .’ He hesitated. ‘And other difficulties.’ His voice trailed away.

‘But Warder Braddle will watch out for him,’ I said.

‘Beware of Warder Braddle,’ said Dr Maurice earnestly. ‘Mark what I say. Beware of him.’

7
21 November 1895
Warder Braddle

T
hat evening I was moved from the infirmary to my appointed cell: C.3.3. – the third cell on the third level of the third wing, C Ward.

The cell itself – narrow, dank and dark, with stone walls painted stone grey – was much like my cells at Wandsworth and at Pentonville, but the regime at Reading was different. Supper was served fifteen minutes earlier – from half past five o’clock. The fare, however, was the same: a pint of foul-tasting oatmeal gruel slopped into a tin bowl and delivered through a hatch the size of the mouth of a letterbox set into the cell door. With mine came what smelt like a saucer of poison: Dr Maurice’s antidote for my dysentery.

Between seven o’clock and seven-thirty a warder would call at each cell to collect any tools that the prisoner might have been using for his day’s labour. At 7.30 p.m. a bell was rung to indicate that it was time for bed. At 7.45 p.m., from a central point in the inspection hall, by means of a single lever, the gas jets in each of the prison’s two hundred and fifty cells were extinguished simultaneously.

I lay on my back in the darkness. My ear ached. I closed my eyes and thought of Conan Doyle – of his vigour – and of the unspoilt goodness of the man. I thought of Dr Maurice – no doubt at home by now, seated by the fireside with his pretty wife at his bony knee. Was he reading to her from
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
? I opened my eyes. Six feet above the head of my bed was my window: a hole in the thick wall, six inches deep and eighteen inches wide, barred and blocked with opaque glass. Beyond it shone the moon (the silver moon!), but through the glass I could discern no more than a pale yellow smudge. I closed my eyes. I could not sleep. I dared not dream. A dreamer, I once said, is one who can only find his way by moonlight – and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.

What stuff I had said! ‘A little sincerity is a dangerous thing and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.’ What nonsense I had talked! ‘An idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.’ Had I ever said anything of any worth? ‘A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.’ Was that true or merely clever? Was it even clever?

As I lay in my cell in Reading Gaol, I smiled as I thought of Arthur Conan Doyle. I had created the Selfish Giant and the man who sold his soul to retain his youth and beauty. Arthur had created Sherlock Holmes! ‘How often have I said to you, Watson, that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,
however improbable
, must be the truth?’ I spoke the words out loud – and as I did so I knew that I had solved the mystery of Warder Braddle. I fell into a deep sleep.