Gyles Brandreth - Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders

Gyles Brandeth

Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders

aka Oscar Wilde and a Death of No Importance

The first book in the Oscar Wilde series

2007

Lovers of historical mystery will relish this chilling Victorian tale based on real events and cloaked in authenticity. Best of all, it casts British literatures most fascinating and controversial figure as the lead sleuth.

A young artists model has been murdered, and legendary wit Oscar Wilde enlists his friends Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Sherard to help him investigate. But when they arrive at the scene of the crime they find no sign of the gruesome killingsave one small spatter of blood, high on the wall. Set in London, Paris, Oxford, and Edinburgh at the height of Queen Victorias reign, here is a gripping eyewitness account of Wildes secret involvement in the curious case of Billy Wood, a young man whose brutal murder served as the inspiration for The Picture of Dorian Gray. Told by Wildes contemporarypoet Robert Sherardthis novel provides a fascinating and evocative portrait of the great playwright and his own consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes creator, Arthur Conan Doyle.

From the previously unpublished memoirs of Robert Sherard

France, 1939

My name is Robert Sherard, and I was a friend of Oscar Wilde. We met in Paris in 1883, when he was twenty-eight and already famous, and I was twenty-one and quite unknown. You must not call me Wilde, he said to me at that first encounter. If I am your friend, Robert, my name to you is Oscar. If we are only strangers, I am Mr Wilde. We were not strangers. Nor were we lovers. We were friends. And, after his death, I became his firstand his most faithfulbiographer.

I knew Oscar Wilde and I loved him. I was not by him in the poor room of the poor inn where he died. I had not the consolation of following to the nameless grave the lonely hearse that bore no flowers on its pall.

But, as many hundreds of miles away I read of his solitary death, and heard of the supreme abandonment of him by those to whom also he had always been good, I determined to say all the things that I knew of him, to tell people what he really was, so that my story might help a little to a better understanding of a man of rare heart and rarer genius.

I am writing this in the summer of 1939. The date is Thursday 31 August. War looms, but it means nothing to me. Who wins, who loses: I care not. I am an old man now, and sick, and I have a tale I need to tell before I die.

I want to complete the record, finish the portrait, as best I can. As in a forest of pine-trees in southern France there are great black, burnt-up patches, so too in my memory. There is much that I have forgotten, much that I have tried to forget, but what you will read in the pages that follow I know to be true. In the years of our friendship, I kept a journal of our times together. I promised Oscar that for fifty years I would keep his secret. I have kept my word. And now the time has come when I can break my silence. At last, I can reveal all that I know of Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders. I must do it, for I have the record. I was there. I am the witness.

The good die first,

And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust

Burn to the socket.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

31 August 1890

O n an afternoon ablaze with sunshine, at the very end of August 1889 a man in his mid-thirtiestall, a little overweight and certainly overdressedwas admitted to a small terraced house in Cowley Street, in the city of Westminster, close by the Houses of Parliament.

The man was in a hurry and he was unaccustomed to hurrying. His face was flushed and his high forehead was beaded with perspiration. As he entered the housenumber 23 Cowley Streethe brushed past the woman who opened the door to him, immediately crossed the shallow hallway and climbed the staircase to the first floor. There, facing him, across an uncarpeted landing, was a wooden door.

Momentarily, the man pausedto smile, to catch his breath, to adjust his waistcoat and, with both hands, to sweep back his wavy, chestnut-coloured hair. Then, lightly, almost delicately, he knocked at the door and, without waiting for an answer, let himself into the room. It was dark, heavily curtained, hot as a furnace and fragrant with incense. As the man adjusted his eyes to the gloom, he saw, by the light of half a dozen guttering candles, stretched out on the floor before him, the naked body of a boy of sixteen, his throat cut from ear to ear.

The man was Oscar Wilde, poet and playwright, and literary sensation of his age. The dead boy was Billy Wood, a male prostitute of no importance.

I was not there when Oscar discovered the butchered body of Billy Wood, but I saw him a few hours later and I was the first to whom he gave an account of what he had seen that sultry afternoon in the curtained room in Cowley Street.

That evening my celebrated friend was having dinner with his American publisher and I had arranged to meet up with him afterwards, at 10.30 p.m., at his club, the Albemarle, at 25 Albemarle Street, off Piccadilly. I call it his club when, in fact, it was mine as well. In those days, the Albemarle encouraged young membersyoung ladies over the age of eighteen, indeed!and gentlemen of twenty-one and more. Oscar put me up for membership and, with the generosity that was typical of him, paid the eight guineas joining fee on my behalf and then, year after year, until the very time of his imprisonment in 1895, the five guineas annual subscription. Whenever we met at the Albemarle, invariably, the cost of the drinks we drank and the food we ate was charged to his account. He called it our club. I thought of it as his.

Oscar was late for our rendezvous that night, which was unlike him. He affected a languorous manner, he posed as an idler, but, as a rule, if he made an appointment with you, he kept it. He rarely carried a timepiece, but he seemed always to know the hour. My friends should not be left wanting, he said, or be kept waiting. As all who knew him will testify, he was a model of consideration, a man of infinite courtesy. Even at moments of greatest stress, his manners remained impeccable.

It was past 11.15 when eventually he arrived. I was in the club smoking room, alone, lounging on the sofa by the fireplace. I had turned the pages of the evening paper at least four times, but not taken in a word. I was preoccupied. (This was the year that my first marriage ended; my wife Marthe had taken an exception to my friend Kaitlynand now Kaitlyn had run off to Vienna! As Oscar liked to say, Life is the nightmare that prevents one from sleeping.) When he swept into the room, I had almost forgotten that I was expecting him. And when I looked up and saw him gazing down at me, I was taken aback by his appearance. He looked exhausted; there were dark, ochre circles beneath his hooded eyes. Evidently, he had not shaved since morning and, most surprisingly, for one so fastidious, he had not changed for dinner. He was wearing his workaday clothes: a suit of his own design, cut from heavy blue serge, with a matching waistcoat buttoned right up to the large knot in his vermilion-coloured tie. By his standards, it was a comparatively conservative outfit, but it was striking because it was so inappropriate to the time of year.

This is unpardonable, Robert, he said, as he collapsed onto the sofa opposite mine. I am almost an hour late and your glass is empty. Hubbard! Champagne for Mr Sherard, if you please. Indeed, a bottle for us both. In life there are two types of people: those who catch the waiters eye and those who dont. Whenever I arrived at the Albemarle, the club servants seemed to scatter instantly. Whenever Oscar appeared, they hovered attentively. They honoured him. He tipped as a prince and treated them as allies.