Oscar Wilde and the Nest of Vipers Read online

  Take your courage in your hands, dearest boy, and dine with me tonight. Let us feast like gods – or, at least, let us have oysters and champagne at Simpson’s. My carriage will collect you at nine o’clock.

  And, tomorrow, at midnight, let us go together to Mortlake cemetery. The Vampire Club gathers there, I’m told. You will be among friends – and chief among them will be, yours most sincerely,

  Oscar Wilde

  28

  Letter from Arthur Conan Doyle to his wife, Louisa ‘Touie’ Conan Doyle

  Langham Hotel,

  London, W.

  15.iii.90

  2 p.m.

  Dearest Touie, darling wife –

  Thank you for your lovely postcard. It arrived this morning and, in answer to your kind enquiry, yes, I am indeed eating properly. In truth, I am eating far too well. I am forgoing luncheon today, because Oscar treated me to a magnificent breakfast at the Savoy Hotel (porridge, kippers, the works!) and this afternoon I am summoned once again to the presence of HRH the Prince of Wales – where, apparently, a right royal ‘High Tea’ will be served. So, you see, Touie, I can tell you, in all honesty, that I am eating like a king.

  I am missing you most dreadfully, as you may imagine, and my lovely daughter, too, but there’s no denying this visit to the great metropolis is proving memorable. At every turn, there is a remarkable encounter. In the corridor, just now, I bumped into Antonin Dvorak, the composer. He is staying at the hotel with his daughter. He told me that, in the interest of economy, he had asked if he might share a double room with the young lady. The hotel manager was outraged and forbade it absolutely!

  At breakfast, I met Bram Stoker – a most congenial fellow. He is Irish, like Oscar, but, unlike Oscar, he has a wonderfully down-to-earth way with him. He is an older man and I felt oddly shy in his presence – possibly because he is business manager to Henry Irving at the Lyceum and, as you know, it is one of my abiding ambitions to write a play for Irving. I did not wish Stoker to think that I was interested in him solely because of his association with the great actor.

  I shall be seeing him again tomorrow night. He is taking me and Oscar, together with two of Oscar’s young friends, to Mortlake cemetery for a midnight gathering of ‘vampires’! I have no idea what it will involve. I am both wary and intrigued. Oscar is anxious to go – one of his young friends affects to be a vampire – and there may be something in it that I could use in one of my stories. We shall see. (And, fear not, I shall wrap up warm.)

  All being well, my postponed visit to the Charcot Clinic in Muswell Hill will take place on Monday and, on Tuesday, I will be back in Southsea where I belong. Now, I am going to do an hour of reading – Charcot on hypnosis in French! As you can tell, I am not idling – and I am eating – and, most of all, I am missing you, dearest girl.

  Ever your loving husband,

  ACD

  29

  Letter from Bram Stoker to his wife, Florence, delivered by messenger at 6 p.m. on Saturday, 15 March 1890

  Lyceum Theatre,

  Strand,

  London

  Saturday, three o’clock

  Florrie –

  Good news. I will be home by midnight. Much to report.

  Breakfast with Oscar was extraordinary. Our friend grows more eccentric by the minute. The talk was entirely of vampires! What is Oscar up to? Is he planning to write a comic opera about vampirism? It’s possible – though he hated Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Sorcerer, as I recall.

  Arthur Conan Doyle was with him and another fellow whose name I didn’t catch. Doyle is the young doctor who has created such a stir, first with his Highland adventure, Micah Clarke, and now with his stories of the oddly named detective, Sherlock Holmes. Doyle made copious notes, but said little. (Do you think he is writing a novel about vampires? If he is, it will outsell mine. I know it. He is the coming man, while I have still to reach the starting post.)

  I have said that I will take them to the Vampire Club tomorrow night and now I am regretting it! There is something about Oscar’s charm that is difficult to resist – though you succeeded. And how grateful I am that you did.

  Oscar said nothing of Constance or his boys. He spoke instead – with embarrassing effusiveness – of a young man who – according to Oscar – looks like the god Mars but is, in fact, a vampire from the Channel Islands!

  More of this anon. Banquo is about to be slain and I must check the afternoon’s takings.

  Your Bram

  30

  From the notebooks of Robert Sherard

  I now understand why the Prince of Wales is the size that he is. I had expected ‘High Tea’ to include an omelette and cold meats alongside the cakes and scones and sandwiches. I had not for a moment expected the vast repast that was laid before us in the so-called Small Dining Room at Marlborough House.

  Egg dishes and cold cuts were indeed on offer – to whet our appetites. There were breads and pastries of every description too – muffins and crumpets, macaroons and dainties – and an array of desserts – gateaux, tarts, baskets of spun sugar filled with fresh fruit and ice cream. But between the initial savouries and the final sweets came salver after salver, groaning with culinary riches: a salmon mousse decorated with caviar, cold lobster with brandy mayonnaise, snipe with foie gras, grilled chicken with asparagus.

  ‘No turtle soup, Your Royal Highness?’ said Oscar plaintively.

  ‘This is merely High Tea, Oscar – a little something to sustain us until dinner.’ The Prince of Wales looked towards me and Conan Doyle, adding by way of explanation: ‘It was the late Duchess of Bedford’s idea – High Tea. She was a good woman.’

  ‘I shall remember her in my prayers,’ said Oscar.

  ‘Her Grace often felt a little low in the late afternoon,’ the prince continued.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ sighed Oscar, ‘that debilitating crise de nerfs that comes towards six o’clock unless a portion or two of pigeon pie and a plate of petits fours have been taken.’

  The prince laughed and smacked his thin lips. He drew slowly on his cigar – he smoked throughout our repast – and fixed Oscar with moist, bulbous eyes. ‘You are a funny man, Mr Wilde.’

  We ate at one end of a large dining table. Oscar and Arthur were seated to the right and left of the prince; Tyrwhitt Wilson, the equerry, and I, just beyond. The prince’s personal page – a boy with copper-coloured hair; Oscar says his name is Frank Watkins; he remembered him from the prince’s entourage at the reception in Grosvenor Square – waited exclusively upon His Royal Highness. The rest of us were looked after by a trio of straight-backed footmen who circled round and round the table with one dish after another, bobbing up and down before us, like wooden horses on a fairground carousel.

  ‘General Probyn is not here?’ enquired Conan Doyle.

  ‘He is at Sandringham,’ replied the prince. ‘I am allowed off the leash for a few weeks in March. I go to Paris and the French Riveria for a month or so while my wife visits her family in Denmark and our heroic comptroller stays in Norfolk. He is Capability Brown as well as Keeper of the Privy Purse. He is redesigning the gardens at Sandringham. Sir Dighton is an eager plantsman.’

  ‘Paris in the spring,’ murmured Oscar. ‘Nothing is more delightful.’

  ‘It’s my constitutional duty, Mr Wilde,’ said the prince sternly. ‘I merely do what Bagehot says I must.’

  ‘Ah!’ exclaimed Oscar. ‘The author of The English Constitution insists on Paris in the spring, does he, sir?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ chuckled the prince, ‘followed by a few weeks en garçon along the coast between Nice and Monte Carlo.’

  Tyrwhitt Wilson piped up with a practised air: ‘Bagehot is very clear on the point: “The role of the heir apparent is to taste all the world and the glory of it, whatever is most attractive, whatever is most seductive.”’

  The prince beamed. ‘When Bagehot’s book appeared I gave the Queen a copy – specially bound.’

  ‘In fatted calf, I presume,’ said
Oscar.

  The Prince of Wales banged the table with delight. ‘You are very funny, Mr Wilde,’ he wheezed, choking with laughter.

  As the feast was laid before us, and the page and footmen hovered close by, the conversation remained general – if dominated by Oscar and the heir apparent. They talked of motherhood and Balmoral deer pie, of Irving’s Macbeth and Mrs Langtry’s Rosalind, of Cannes in April and Cowes in August, of happiness and hysteria (the Prince of Wales acknowledges a strain of madness in his family), of the value of hypnosis and the place of history.

  ‘The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it,’ said Oscar.

  For an hour we ate and drank and made merry and then, at six o’clock, as clocks, both within the dining room and without, began to whirr and strike and chime, the waiting staff, taking their cue from the hour and a nod from Tyrwhitt Wilson, discreetly bowed themselves backwards out of the room. When they had gone, the prince’s equerry got to his feet and checked that the doors were securely closed. Once Wilson had resumed his place, silence fell.

  The Prince of Wales pushed his chair a little from the table and drew heavily on a newly lit cigar. ‘Well, gentlemen,’ he said, in a businesslike tone, ‘is it murder? Was my poor friend, Helen Albemarle, done to death?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Oscar, simply. ‘I believe so.’

  ‘Lord Yarborough thinks otherwise,’ said Conan Doyle.

  The prince raised an eyebrow. ‘The “psychiatrist”?’

  ‘He is also a physician – and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Lord Yarborough believes it was a heart attack.’

  ‘A heart attack?’

  ‘Myocardial infarction – a heart attack, possibly, but by no means certainly, provoked by sexual frenzy.’

  ‘Good God, man,’ cried the Prince of Wales, leaning forward, ‘what on earth are you suggesting?’

  ‘The duchess’s body was found in the telephone room at 40 Grosvenor Square,’ said Oscar calmly. ‘She was half naked. Her torso was exposed. She had wounds about her chest and neck. She may have been the victim of a violent physical assault – or, as Lord Yarborough suggests, the willing participant in gross carnal activity that proved too stimulating for her enfeebled heart.’

  ‘This is preposterous,’ hissed the prince. ‘Did she have an enfeebled heart?’

  ‘Lord Yarborough says so,’ said Conan Doyle.

  ‘And what do you say, Doctor?’ demanded the prince.

  ‘A heart attack is certainly a possibility, sir. The cuts and scratches on her body were mostly superficial. The wounds in her neck were deeper, much deeper, but whether they were inflicted before or immediately after death, it is impossible to say.’

  The prince was perspiring. He wiped his eyes and forehead with his napkin. ‘This is most distressing. Not at all what I expected. Poor Helen.’

  Oscar leant towards the prince. ‘What did you expect, Your Royal Highness? Might one ask?’

  ‘I didn’t know what to expect. I suppose I hoped that it would be death by natural causes …’

  ‘It may be,’ protested Conan Doyle. ‘Yarborough may be right.’

  The Prince of Wales looked at Oscar. Tears pricked his round, protruding eyes. ‘Or suicide.’

  There was a moment’s pause before Oscar asked, ‘Was the duchess very unhappy?’

  ‘No,’ said the prince, ‘but she was troubled.’ He hesitated, before repeating, ‘I did not know what to expect.’ He found a handkerchief and blew his nose, then settled himself back in his chair once more. ‘The telephone room? The duke said she’d been found in her bed.’

  ‘No, the duke actually found her in the telephone room,’ said Oscar.

  ‘Why on earth was she there?’

  ‘To make a call or to receive one,’ suggested Conan Doyle.

  ‘At midnight? At the climax of her party? At the very moment when His Royal Highness was about to take his leave?’ Oscar shook his head. ‘I think not.’

  ‘Was she there by assignation?’ I asked.

  Oscar looked at me, as if surprised to hear me speak. Contemplating his cigarette, he spoke as if wondering out loud. ‘Had she gone to meet someone by arrangement? A lover that she knew? A stranger who wished her harm? It is possible, I suppose, but the timing makes no sense. Why disappear at the very moment when your absence is most likely to be noticed? Midnight was the hour set for His Royal Highness’s departure.’

  ‘Now here’s a thought,’ said Conan Doyle, leaning into the table, his eyes suddenly glinting. ‘Midnight approaches. The duchess comes downstairs to be in the hall ready to attend His Royal Highness’s departure. When she arrives, the hall is empty. The duke and the servants are not yet there. The duchess waits, alone. And as she waits, her assailant appears and drags her into the telephone room.’

  ‘She would have cried out!’ exclaimed the prince. ‘She would have called for help.’

  ‘Her assailant could have silenced her,’ said Doyle, pressing his own hand against his mouth.

  The prince shuddered. Oscar stubbed out his cigarette on a small silver ashtray that featured the emblem of the Prince of Wales’s feathers.

  ‘Perhaps Arthur is right,’ he said, slowly. ‘Not long before midnight, the duchess was in her drawing room entertaining her guests. As midnight approached, realising the time, she made her way down the stairs and into the hall. She was alone at this point – with no thought of going into the telephone room, either to use the telephone or to keep an assignation. But, waiting alone in the hallway, something drew her into the telephone room. What was it? Did she flee there suddenly to hide for some reason? To escape from someone – or something? Or did someone entice her into the room? Someone she knew?’

  ‘The duke was waiting for me as I came down the stairs at midnight,’ said the Prince of Wales.

  I spoke again. ‘That was when I saw the duke close the door to the telephone room. That was when I caught sight of the duchess’s body.’

  Oscar turned from me and looked directly at Conan Doyle. ‘You are the storyteller, Arthur. In a traditional murder mystery, isn’t the first person on the scene of the crime usually the chief suspect?’

  Doyle tugged at his moustache and grunted.

  Oscar went on: ‘Perhaps it was the Duke of Albemarle who murdered the duchess?’

  ‘Albemarle murder Helen?’ exclaimed the Prince of Wales, throwing down his cigar. ‘Impossible. I don’t believe it. I won’t believe it.’

  ‘You may have to, sir,’ said Oscar, calmly. ‘It happens all the time. Men kill their womenfolk. It’s the way of the world. Some do it with a single blow, others with a million cuts.’

  ‘The Duke of Albemarle is no murderer,’ protested the prince. ‘He loved Helen.’

  ‘Don’t all men kill the thing they love?’ asked Oscar softly.

  ‘Why would Albemarle kill his young wife? Why?’

  ‘Because he envied her her youth?’ said Oscar.

  ‘Jealousy, spite, revenge?’ suggested Conan Doyle.

  ‘Albemarle loved Helen,’ repeated the prince.

  ‘Well then,’ said Oscar, ‘if the duke adored his duchess, but the duchess was a wayward girl …’

  ‘She was not “a wayward girl”, Mr Wilde.’

  ‘Lord Yarborough suggests that she might have been.’

  ‘Lord Yarborough is wrong!’ barked the Prince of Wales. Coughing and spluttering, he pushed back his chair and got to his feet. Immediately, we all got to ours. ‘I knew Helen Albemarle. She was a lady, in every sense – I can assure you of that. Lord Yarborough’s suggestion is outrageous – slanderous. You need give it no further thought, gentlemen.’

  The prince, letting his napkin fall to the floor, walked away from the dining table, towards a large wooden globe that stood in the corner of the room and which showed the world as it was thought to be in Queen Elizabeth’s reign. The prince made the globe revolve slowly and spoke with his back turned towards us.

  ‘Lord Yarborough’s disgusting suggestion beggars belief,’ he
said. ‘Nor do I believe that the duchess’s heart was in any sense “enfeebled”. Had it been – had she had concerns of any kind about her health – she would have told me.’

  ‘Then it is murder,’ said Oscar.

  ‘I fear so. I feared the worst, but I had hoped it would not be this terrible. I thought that perhaps she’d been poisoned – or strangled. But this …’ He halted the gently spinning globe. ‘It is murder of the most brutal kind. Poor Helen.’ He turned and looked towards us as we stood at our places by the table. ‘You must continue your investigations, gentlemen.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Oscar.

  ‘I need to know the truth before I leave for France.’

  ‘Is it not time to involve the police, sir?’ asked Conan Doyle.

  ‘No, Doctor. No. I forbid it.’ The prince raised a hand to silence Conan Doyle. ‘What can the police do, except stir up trouble and inform the press?’

  ‘The press have not been generous to His Royal Highness,’ said Tyrwhitt Wilson, stepping away from the dining-room table and moving towards the door. ‘The Queen will be anxious to avoid a scandal. The Crown must be protected.’

  ‘But if a murder has been committed—’

  ‘Justice must be done,’ said the Prince of Wales. ‘I understand that. If you can establish, beyond peradven-ture, that it was the Duke of Albemarle who took his own wife’s life, I shall speak to him. He will do what’s necessary.’

  Conan Doyle straightened himself and looked directly at the heir apparent. ‘You mean, blow out his own brains?’

  His Royal Highness made no reply.

  Following Tyrwhitt Wilson’s lead, we bowed and, stepping backwards, left the room. Oscar murmured words of thanks as we retreated, but offered no parting sally.