Oscar Wilde and the Vatican Murders (26 page)

‘I have
nothing to say about Agnes.’

‘Please
tell me what happened, Monsignor.’

Nicholas
Breakspear placed his hands carefully on the table in front of him, one hand
resting upon the other. Momentarily, he glanced towards me, as if looking for
support; I looked down at his hands; he turned to Oscar and composed himself.
He spoke quietly.

‘Mr
Wilde, the death of a pope is a public event. I have described what I remember
of the passing of Pio Nono to you to satisfy your curiosity. It was a moment in
history — a moment of significance. I was privileged to be a witness and your
interest is, in every way, legitimate. But the death of an unknown child is of
no significance … that is something else.’

‘She is
dead?’

Breakspear
hesitated. ‘Why do you ask? I do not know. I think so. I believe so.’

Oscar
pressed on. ‘You saw her that night, Monsignor. Tell me what happened.’

Breakspear
sat back, bemused, exasperated. ‘What’s this about, Mr Wilde? How do you know
anything about the girl? What’s she to you?’ Oscar stared at Breakspear with
ungiving eyes.
‘What’s she to you,
Mr Wilde?’

‘Nothing,’
said Oscar, eventually, ‘nothing at all.’ He held the glass of Madeira in his
right hand, cupped between his fingers. Slowly, he took a sip of the wine and
looked up once more to consider the painting on the wall. ‘But there she is —
the girl. She cannot be denied. Agnes … I see her beauty and I sense her
innocence.’

‘How do
you know her name?’

‘Tuminello
told me her name the other night.’

‘That
is not possible,’ snapped Breakspear. ‘I do not believe you, Mr Wilde.’

‘Tell
me what happened,’ Oscar repeated. ‘Tell me. Please.’

‘Tell
‘im, Monsignor.’ Cesare Verdi stood at the doorway to the dining room. His
black eyes shone in the candlelight. ‘My brother ‘as told me all about Mr
Wilde. You can trust ‘im, Monsignor. If ‘e wants to know, ‘e’ll have a reason.

‘Thank
you,’ murmured Oscar.

Breakspear
looked up at the sacristan. ‘Are you alone?’

‘Yes,
Dr Munthe is giving ‘em their injections, working ‘is magic.’

Breakspear
smiled. ‘Hastening their ends …’

Cesare
Verdi remained, silhouetted in the doorway. ‘Brother Matteo is with ‘em.’ He
ran his hands through his curly head of hair and wiped them on the sides of his
cassock. Apart from the absence of a clerical collar, he was dressed like a
priest, but you knew even at a glance that he was not one. He folded his arms
and nodded to Oscar.

Oscar
picked up his cue. ‘What happened, Monsignor? You did see Agnes that night,
after the death of Pio Nono?’

‘Yes. I
found her here in the sacristy at ten o’clock.’

‘She
was alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘Here?
In this room?’

‘No,
down there.’ He pointed beyond Cesare Verdi, to the first chamber, the room
with the red-damask walls. ‘I found her there. She was lying on the seat of
tears.’

‘Asleep?’

‘No.
She was dead.’ He paused and took a small breath. He moved his empty wineglass
towards the centre of the table. ‘At least, I think that she was dead. I
assumed she was dead. She was as white as a surplice, as cold as a chalice.’

‘You
touched her?’

‘I
touched her forehead. I held back her hair and searched for a pulse on her
neck. I found none. There were tear stains on her cheeks. Her eyes were
closed.’

‘She
had been dead for some time?’

‘I do
not know.’

Oscar
had finished his wine. He, too, placed his empty glass near the centre of the
table. He regarded Breakspear with kindly eyes. ‘She looked peaceful?’

‘Yes.
Her arms were folded across her chest. Her feet were resting on a pillow.’

‘Was
there a smile on her lips?’

‘Yes,
Mr Wilde, there was. How did you know?’

Oscar
made no reply. I leant forward. ‘What did you do?’

‘I did
nothing. I did not know what to do. I knelt at the poor, dead child’s side and
I did nothing.’

‘You
didn’t call for help?’

‘It was
ten o’clock. Those who were not still at the Holy Father’s deathbed were at
compline. I knelt by the seat of tears and I shed my own.’

‘You
wept,’ said Oscar, ‘and what did you think had happened? Why was she there?
Why
was she dead?’

Breakspear
answered without hesitation: ‘I thought she had died of a broken heart.’

‘Is
such a thing possible?’ I asked.

‘Oh,
yes,’ murmured Oscar. ‘It happens all the time.’

Nicholas
Breakspear looked at me and smiled. ‘Agnes loved Pio Nono as I did. As we all
did. But she loved him more. She had no father, no grandfather, no brothers, no
uncles — but she had Pio Nono. And she was just a child, so her love for him
was simple and selfless in a way that our love was not. And Pio Nono loved her
deeply. He was fond of children. He was always easy with babies. He would make
jokes with the altar boys, play little games with them, but Agnes was the only
child he ever really knew. She was more than a daughter to him. She was his
delight — the personification of innocence. She brought pure joy to his
declining years. She was his little lamb of God.’ Breakspear’s eyes turned back
to Oscar. ‘You ask me what I thought as I knelt by the seat of tears next to
the lifeless body of this beautiful child? I thought, Pio Nono is dead and
Agnes has gone with him to heaven. It is what they would both have wanted.’

‘Pio
Nono was eighty-five when he died,’ said Oscar quietly. ‘Agnes was twelve or
thirteen?’

‘Thirteen
or fourteen,’ said Breakspear, ‘something like that.’

‘A
difficult age,’ said Oscar.

‘So I
have heard,’ said Breakspear. ‘But I have no sisters.’

‘What
happened then?’ asked Oscar.

‘I left
her where I found her. I got to my feet. I made the sign of the cross. I left
the sacristy. I left the gas lamps high. I left the candles lit. I left the
door unlocked. The outer door is always unlocked. I went to compline. And
during the service I had darker thoughts. As I knelt, I began to think that
Agnes had taken her own life. As I prayed, I became convinced of it. In the
face of Pio Nono’s death, in her grief, in her despair, the poor child had gone
to the seat of tears and killed herself.’

‘How?’

‘I had
no idea, but I was certain of it.’

‘And
when the service ended …?’

‘And
when the service ended, all the others returned to the Holy Father’s deathbed
to watch over his body through the night.’

‘And
you?’                           

‘I did nothing.
I said nothing.’

‘Except
to me,’ said Cesare Verdi, standing in the doorway.

‘Yes,’
said Breakspear. ‘I found Verdi in the corridor that runs between the Sistine
Chapel and the papal apartments. He was returning to the sacristy, so I knew I
had no choice. I had to tell him. I swore him to secrecy and together, in
silence, we came here together.’

‘And
what did you find?’

‘Nothing,’
said Breakspear. ‘The seat of tears was empty. She’d gone. There was no sign of
her. None at all.’

‘If she
was ever there, she’d vanished,’ said Cesare Verdi, ‘— into thin air.’

16

Lobsters and lemon mayonnaise

I
have
heard it said, and seen it written, that the character of my creation
‘Sherlock Holmes’ is, in part, at least, modelled on the personality of my friend,
Oscar Wilde. Not so. I will concede this much — that both Holmes and Wilde were
men of peculiar genius and eccentricity: intellectually brilliant, intuitive
and observant, gifted as linguists, unique in their way of personal
expression. Neither was much taken with the frou-frou of skirts, but both were
true to themselves — and to their friends. They shared many qualities, and had
flaws in common, also. Each, at his worst, was self-regarding, self-indulgent,
selfish and self-absorbed, to a degree, I fear, that would be categorised in
the modern psychoanalytical parlance as ‘narcissistic’ and ‘egotistical’. And
each, too, had a strain in his nature that put him beyond the accepted
mores
of his times. In Holmes‘s case, this led to an unfortunate dependency on
the use of the drug cocaine. In Wilde’s case, it led to the gates of Reading
Gaol. But these two remarkable contemporaries, so similar in so many ways, were
nonetheless very different human beings. Holmes at heart was a man of science,
a man of action and a pragmatist. Oscar was a poet, a man of inaction and a
romantic. Besides, the one could not have been modelled on the other because I
conjured up Mr Sherlock Holmes some years before I met Mr Oscar Wilde.

The
character of
Mycroft
Holmes, on the other hand, is certainly indebted to
my close acquaintance with Oscar Wilde. It was during our stay in Rome in July
1892, and on this particular Saturday night, I recall, that I decided to endow
‘the great Sherlock Holmes’ with an older, taller, broader, stouter brother and
make him yet more brilliant than his sibling. The moment the notion came into
my head, I saw the figure fully formed. At once, without hesitation, I gave
Holmes’s brother Oscar’s genius, his appearance, his indolence — and his
appetite.

I have
also heard it said that I modelled Dr John H. Watson on one Dr Arthur Conan
Doyle. Again, I deny it absolutely but I will grant you this: that Holmes’s
friend and chronicler and I do have one characteristic in common.
We are
regular in our habits.
For example, I like to breakfast at eight, to take
luncheon at one and to dine no later than at half past eight in the evening.
Oscar, on the other hand, did not mind when he feasted, so long as it was
frequently and well.

That
evening we dined at midnight — in Axel Munthe’s rooms in Keats’s former
lodgings — on cold lobster and lemon mayonnaise, fresh strawberries and French
champagne. Oscar picked up these supplies from the kitchens of the Hôtel de
Russie at gone eleven o’clock, as we passed along the Via del Babuino on our
way from the Vatican to the Piazza di Spagna. He brought them to Munthe’s
apartment in a picnic basket and laid them out before us on a low table in
front of the fireplace. Having served the repast, he stood back to admire it.

‘Much
have I travelled in the realms of gold,’ he declared, with one hand resting
decorously on the mantelpiece and the other waving a lobster claw aloft, ‘and
many goodly states and kingdoms seen, but I don’t believe I have laid eyes upon
a midnight feast to rival this, gentlemen. Do you agree?’

I
mumbled my assent, while thinking my friend’s exuberance somewhat tiresome and
wondering how long it would be before I could slip once more between the Hôtel
de Russie’s crisp white sheets. (I like to be in bed by midnight.) Munthe was
more forthcoming. ‘This is indeed a treat, Oscar. Thank you. Our English tea
notwithstanding, I’m surprisingly peckish.’