Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol: A Mystery (33 page)

‘Who can foretell what joys the day shall bring, Or why before the dawn the linnets sing?’

Sebastian Melmoth smiled as he spoke. And as he smiled he contemplated the bubbles that danced towards the brim of his newly filled glass of champagne. ‘I never lose count of the number of glasses I have drunk,’ he said, ‘because I never begin to count them in the first place.’ He laughed softly at his own joke and closed his eyes. The sun was less bright than before: the warmth of it was wonderful.

‘Are those lines from the poem that you are writing?’ enquired Dr Quilp, putting down his pen and pulling his chair closer to the table.

‘No, they are from a poem that I wrote a long time ago.’ Melmoth opened his eyes. ‘I am surprised you do not know it. You know so much about me.’

It was gone half past four in the afternoon. The two men had been sitting for more than two hours at the same corner table on the pavement outside the Café Suisse. They were alone. The café always seemed dead at this time of day. Where they sat was no longer in the shade, but the sun was not so high now and Melmoth, at least, was revelling in its rays. ‘When I was young,’ he murmured, ‘the moon was everything to me. I knew her. I could reach out my hand to touch her. She was my friend. Now I find her cold and distant. Now that I am old I need the comfort of the sun.’

‘You are not old,’ said Quilp. He shifted on his chair and pulled a linen handkerchief from his trouser pocket. He began to mop his brow.

‘And you are not well, Doctor,’ answered Melmoth, sitting up and setting his glass down on the table. ‘The sun is too much for you.’

‘I am quite well,’ said Quilp, smiling.

Melmoth took out his half-hunter to check the time. He turned and looked down the empty street, towards the docks. ‘The paddle steamer will be here quite soon and the foot passengers will all come trundling past. The English will notice us sitting here, but if they recognise me they will pretend that they don’t. That is what happens when fame turns to infamy.’

A seagull screeched overhead. ‘Perhaps they will not recognise you,’ said Dr Quilp. ‘It is your name that gives you your reputation, and your work, not your face.’

‘You are quite right, Doctor. Thank you. And it may be for the best. I am no longer the Adonis I once was.’ He grinned and showed off his ungainly yellow teeth. ‘I caught sight of myself in the looking glass this morning. I look
exactly
like an overblown Botticelli cherub run to seed.’

Quilp laughed. ‘And what do I look like?’ he asked.

‘An hour ago I would have said a vulpine Prussian officer on his way to fight a duel, but now I am not so sure. You are sweating, Doctor. You are
weeping
. You don’t look well.’ Melmoth picked up his glass. ‘You need to rest, Doctor. You need to lie down.’ Melmoth looked about the table with its litter of empty glasses and overflowing ashtrays. ‘We are done here, aren’t we? You must go to bed and I must go home.’ He pushed his chair a little from the table and nodded towards Quilp’s pen and notebook. ‘I take it that you have heard all that you came to hear? I hope that I have earned my entertainment – and more?’ He reached out his right hand and lightly touched Quilp’s chequebook, which was also lying on the table.

‘Almost,’ answered Quilp. He returned his handkerchief to his pocket and sat forward. He pushed his spectacles up his nose and looked directly at Sebastian Melmoth. ‘A few moments more. We must round off the story. I feel that you have not told me everything.’

‘I have given you the tale of Atitis-Snake, the poisoner. Isn’t that what you came for?’

‘In part, of course – yes.’ Quilp glanced down at his chequebook. ‘It is murder that excites the public. We both know that.’

‘And I have brought the tale to a fitting climax with the condemned man swinging from the rope.’

‘You have,’ said Quilp, ‘and I am grateful.’ He sat back and with his right hand lifted the last bottle of Perrier-Jouët from the ice-bucket beside the table. ‘There’s a glass more here for each of us. Let us finish the bottle – and finish the story.’

‘Very well,’ said Melmoth, easing himself to his feet. ‘If you will excuse me a moment. I must go and powder my nose – as American women like to say. Do you know the expression? It is one of my favourite euphemisms.’ He took up his cigarette and his glass of champagne and looked down at Dr Quilp. ‘I notice that you powder yours literally, Dr Quilp.’

Quilp laughed as Melmoth, lumbering like a sacred elephant, made his stately way into the darkness of the café.

He was not long gone and when he returned to the table he appeared lighter on his feet – less inebriate, more alert. Before he resumed his seat he cleared some space on the table, moving the ashtrays and empty glasses to another table. ‘
Finita la commedia
,’ he said, smiling at Dr Quilp. ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’

Quilp looked up, confused. ‘I do not quite follow you,’ he said.

Melmoth sat down. ‘You will, Doctor. You will.’ Melmoth’s energy had returned to him. He laid his hands flat upon the table and spread out his fingers. He looked at Quilp. ‘Where were we?’ he asked.

Quilp picked up his pen. ‘At the hanging of Atitis-Snake.’

‘Ah, yes,’ murmured Melmoth, reaching into his pockets for another cigarette. ‘In my end is my beginning.’

Quilp had moved his chair while Melmoth had been ‘powdering his nose’. He was no longer in the direct sunlight. He opened his notebook and stared down at it. ‘You had just given me Warder Stokes’s account of the execution,’ he said. ‘That was Tuesday the eleventh of May.’

‘Yes,’ said Melmoth, holding a lighted match to his cigarette. ‘Tuesday, eleventh May. And a week later to the day, I was released.’

‘How was that final week at Reading Gaol?’ asked Quilp.

‘Horrible,’ answered Melmoth, his brow suddenly furrowing at the recollection. ‘Ghastly. The men who had been involved in the fracas outside the condemned man’s cell on the eve of the execution – each one of them was given twelve strokes of the cat-o’-nine-tails, including the crippled half-witted soldier, Prince.’

‘A.2.11.?’ said Quilp.

‘You recall his number?’ said Melmoth, drawing on his cigarette. ‘I am impressed.’

‘I have it written down,’ said Quilp, holding up his notebook.

‘Prince was not a party to the so-called “insurrection”, but he was cruelly beaten all the same. I heard it happen and the next day I saw him as we took our daily exercise in the fool’s parade. The lashing he had been given had made him mad.’ Tears now filled Melmoth’s eyes. ‘Oh, the pity of it,’ he murmured. ‘But there was worse.’

‘Worse?’

‘Yes. On the Friday before my release, as I was making my way across the outer courtyard towards the garden shed to collect my tools for my day’s labour, I passed the wardress.’

‘The woman with the fine features whose name you never knew?’

Melmoth smiled. ‘You
have
been attentive, Dr Quilp. Yes, the same.’ He drew slowly on his cigarette, studying Quilp carefully as he spoke. ‘And as I looked at those fine features I believe, for the first time, I understood them. I had been looking for a mystery where there was none. Her beauty reflected her nature. Her open face reflected her spirit. We must remember that there is outright good in the world as well as outright evil.’

‘Did you speak with her?’

‘Only for a moment. She had three children with her.’

‘Her own children?’

‘No – young prisoners. They were in prison uniform.’

‘And was the boy, Tom, one of them?’ asked Quilp.

‘Oh no. These were younger than Tom. These were ten or eleven years of age at most – at most. They looked no bigger than my boys. I said to the wardress, “Why are they here?” She told me, “They have been convicted of snaring rabbits and cannot pay their fine.”’ With his right hand, Melmoth struck the café table angrily. Quilp steadied his glass of champagne. ‘Can you believe it? Children imprisoned for snaring rabbits! Later that day I told Warder Martin about the children. I asked him to seek them out. I asked him to find out their names and the amount of their fine. I told him I wanted to pay the fine to get them out. I could not bear the idea of those poor children in that vile place.’

‘And did Warder Martin do as you asked?’

‘He did – and more. He found the children for me and, to the smallest of them, he gave a biscuit.’

Quilp took a sip of his champagne. ‘That was an act of kindness,’ he said.

‘It was an act of folly,’ cried Melmoth. ‘As ill-chance would have it, a senior warder saw Martin give the child the biscuit and reported what he had seen to the governor. Warder Martin was instantly dismissed. I did not see him again. And when I saw Major Nelson on the day of my departure I was too cowed – too craven – too cowardly – to protest. I could not believe that the governor – so good a man – could have done so cruel a thing.’

‘He did it “by the book”,’ reflected Quilp, with a shrug. He drank more of his champagne. ‘Did you see the boy again before you left?’ he asked.

‘The boy Tom? No.’

‘And the dwarf?’

‘No, but Warder Stokes told me that he was certain that C.3.4. would be transferred to an asylum.’

‘That is something,’ said Quilp, taking out his handkerchief once more and mopping his brow. ‘And you?’

‘I left Reading Gaol on the evening of the eighteenth of May,’ answered Melmoth. ‘I was to be released “officially” from Pentonville, the prison in which my two-year sentence properly began. I was allowed to leave in my own clothes. I had my half-hunter and my cigarette case returned to me. I was not handcuffed. Major Nelson wanted to spare me what I had endured at Clapham Junction on my way to Reading, so two warders took me by cab from the prison gates to Twyford Station for the train journey to London. The sun was setting as we left and on the platform at Twyford there were bushes in bud. I walked towards them with open arms. “O beautiful world!” I cried. “O
beautiful
world!”’ Melmoth laughed at the recollection of it. ‘One of the warders begged me to stop. “Now, Mr Wilde, you mustn’t give yourself away like that. You’re the only man in England who would talk like that in a railway station.”’

Quilp smiled. Melmoth, still laughing, leant across the table towards him. ‘You do not look well, Dr Quilp, but since you insist on hearing out my story, will you raise your glass and drink to my freedom?’

‘I will, sir,’ said Quilp. The two men lifted their glasses and drank from them, deeply.

Melmoth lit up another cigarette. ‘On the nineteenth of May, early in the morning, I was released from Pentonville – a free man. By nightfall, I was here.’

‘You came to France at once?’

‘First, I had breakfast – with old friends. Then I went shopping.’

‘Shopping?’

‘I needed clothes. I bought a blue serge suit – and a fine brown hat, from Heath’s. I bought shirts in assorted colours of the rainbow, eighteen collars, two dozen white handkerchiefs and a dozen with coloured borders, some dark blue neckties with white spots on, eight pairs of socks – coloured summer things . . . and new gloves.’ Melmoth held up his hand and spread his fingers wide. ‘Size eight and three-quarters. My hand is notoriously broad.’

Quilp looked at Melmoth. He was no longer making notes. He had put down his pen. ‘This was extravagant,’ he said, smiling.