12

16 October—5 November 1889

“Do you truly believe that the murderer may strike again?” I asked as I walked my friend home that evening, along the Chelsea Embankment towards his house in Tite Street.

“It is possible,” he said. “Indeed, I think it likely. Few of life’s occurrences turn out to be unique. For most of us, whatever we do, once is not enough. The poet does not pen the perfect sonnet and retire. The drinker is never satisfied by a single glass of wine. Having tasted the forbidden fruit, the sinner, inevitably, is hungry for more.”

“But if the murderer is a man like O’Donnell—” Oscar interrupted me. “The murderer is not a man like O’Donnell, Robert. If I had found Billy beaten to death in one of the backstreets of Broadstairs, I might have believed a brutish drunkard such as O’Donnell capable of the crime. But Billy’s murder was not a random act. It was not a momentary aberration. It was carefully planned and painstakingly executed. I found Billy in an upstairs room, surrounded by candles, lying, as on a catafalque, his arms folded across his chest…There was something formal about the manner of poor Billy’s murder, something ritualistic even.”

“Are you suggesting he was ‘sacrificed’ in some way?” I asked, incredulous.

“And if he was,” said Oscar, “how many other sacrificial lambs have been similarly slaughtered and laid to rest we know not where?”

He paused and stood for a moment looking onto the black surface of the river Thames. The tide was high, but the water was quite still. “Tomorrow,” he announced, “I shall begin a melancholy journey through all the morgues and mortuaries of the metropolis. There are thirty-seven of them in all, I understand. And in one of them, perhaps, among the unclaimed corpses, I shall find the body of Billy Wood. And—who knows?—I may find, too, the cadavers of other young men killed in a similar fashion.”

“Thirty-seven morgues and mortuaries…” I repeated.

“Yes, Robert, death is everywhere. This river alone throws up a hundred nameless bodies a year.”

“But it will take you months to visit every morgue and mortuary in London.”

He shook his head. “Weeks, not months,” he said. “I aim to visit three a day. It must be done. There is no alternative.”

“Can you not send your ‘spies’?” I asked.

“No,” he said, smiling. “I have to go myself. I know what Billy looked like. My ‘spies’ do not. I enquired of Mrs Wood and there are no photographs of Billy—even as a little boy. If he is to be identified at all, it can only be by someone who knew him personally.”

“I shall come with you, Oscar,” I said. “At which morgue do we start?”

He laughed and, turning away from the river, put a hand on my shoulder. “You are very kind, Robert, but, when visiting the dead, I prefer to go alone. It is melancholy work that suits one of my age and disposition. While I go in search of the body of Billy Wood, I suggest you lay siege to the heart of Miss Sutherland. I think you will find it more congenial employment.”

“But she is engaged to Fraser,” I protested.

“Indeed,” said Oscar, now putting his arm through mine as we resumed our walk along the embankment. “That will add a certain frisson to the enterprise. A romance without a dash of danger is hardly worthy of the name.”

“And I am in love with Kaitlyn,” I said, firmly and with a certain pride.

“Of course you are,” he answered, beaming at me broadly, “but Kaitlyn is in Vienna, Robert, and you are in London—”

“And am I incapable of fidelity?” I wailed.

“Fidelity fiddlesticks!” cried Oscar. “You are a man, Robert! You know my rule: the only way to behave with a woman is to make love to her if she is pretty and to someone else if she is plain. What a ridiculous fuss is made of fidelity! Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot. That’s all there is to it. Be grateful you are young, Robert. Seize every bit of happiness while you can.”

I did as Oscar counselled (I did not need much persuading!) and I confess that the weeks that followed were among the happiest of my life. On the morning after our first encounter, as Oscar set off for the morgue at Kennington Rise, I wrote a note to Miss Sutherland inviting her to join me for tea at the Cadogan Hotel. By return of post, she accepted my invitation. It was the beginning of what was, for me, a most magical experience.

That autumn and winter, Veronica Sutherland had time to spare, and I had time to give, and we spent it together, hour upon hour, day after day—taking tea, taking lunch promenading, playing (we were in our twenties, still young enough for play), laughing (so much!), and talking (so much!).

We never talked of love; we talked of life —and the life of the mind. We spoke of art and drama and science (her interest in medicine was sincere); of Scotland (which she loathed); of Italy (which she loved; she had a passion for Venice); of Conan Doyle (whom she much admired); and, of course, of Oscar (she was fascinated by Oscar’s obsession with the death of Billy Wood). She rarely spoke of Fraser; and I never spoke of Kaitlyn or Marthe—or of my divorce. (Foxton, my estranged wife’s solicitor, continued to bombard me with communications; I put his existence out of my mind and his correspondence on the fire.)

At our first tete-a-tete—over tea and toasted teacakes at the Cadogan Hotel—Veronica told me her life story. She was the only offspring of elderly parents. By her own admission, she had been a wilful child, disrespectful of her betters, at all times determined to get her own way. Mr and Mrs Sutherland, according to Veronica, were devoted to God and to Dundee in equal measure, so inevitably when, aged twenty-one, she announced her intention to abandon both in order to study surgery in Edinburgh, there was much weeping among the Sutherlands, and even some gnashing of teeth. Her mother threatened to die of shame; her father threatened to cut her off without a penny. (Mr Sutherland did nicely in the jute-importing trade.) In the event a compromise was reached. Neither Edinburgh University nor the Royal Infirmary would entertain her as a student, but her father had a cousin—a married clergyman—who was loosely attached to the university. It was agreed that Veronica could live with him and his family for a year and follow a course of ‘reading’ under his instruction. This she did, and it was during her year in Edinburgh that she met Aidan Fraser. Almost as soon as she met him, she became engaged to him. Her family was delighted. The Fettes fortune counted for something; indeed, in Dundee it counted for a great deal. When Fraser moved to London to join the Metropolitan Police, Veronica was permitted to follow him. While he acquired his house in Lower Sloane Street, she moved into furnished lodgings with a widowed great-aunt in Bedford Square.

I rarely saw Veronica in the evenings (she was expected to dine with her great-aunt at least four times a week) and almost never at weekends (that was when she saw Fraser) but during the week, from Monday to Friday—when Fraser was about his duties at Scotland Yard and I was ‘available’, as authors and poets tend to be—Veronica and I spent some time together almost daily. She took a particular delight in our visits to the studios of the eminent artists of the day. Because they all knew Oscar, either personally or by reputation, we had an entree everywhere, and because Veronica was so beguiling and so full of vitality—which is the secret of glamour—wherever we went we were welcomed and, as often as not, invited back.

On virtually every Friday during the course of our friendship, Veronica and I found ourselves taking luncheon with Sir John Millais. He was a good and decent man, recently turned sixty, a fine painter (a great painter, in my view), and celebrated, of course, as one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood—though, by this time, he was scorned by younger critics (and most of Oscar’s other friends) for having ‘sold his genius for a mass of sovereigns’ as portrait-artist-in-waiting to the great and the grand of British society. Oscar was invited to these Friday luncheons, but seldom came. “I have morgues to visit, Robert,” he explained, “and a story to write. I have not yet found the body of Billy Wood, nor yet finished my portrait of Dorian Gray. Besides, while I admire Sir John, I feel less certain about his cook. No doubt the cod is a splendid swimmer—admirable for swimming purposes—but for eating…”

I understood Oscar’s reservation. While the Millais mansion was truly magnificent—a huge, square house, situated at Palace Gate, Kensington—lunch chez Millais was a modest affair. We ate in his vast drawing-room-cum-studio, at a covered card table set up by the fireplace. We dined, invariably, on cod and boiled potatoes, surrounded by life-sized portraits (Gladstone, Disraeli, Rosebery, Tennyson, Lillie Langtry in her prime; whom we got varied from week to week), some framed, some unfinished, all fixed on easels, positioned in a semicircle as though the subjects of the paintings were spectators at our feast. As I recall, the walls of the room were mostly covered with heavy eighteenth-century tapestries. There was only one painting on permanent display, hung on the wall to the left of the mantelpiece, above a Chinese lacquer chest: Millais’s last portrait of Sophie Gray.

Veronica Sutherland liked Sir John, she said, because ‘he is what he is’, ‘a man without guile, without pretension’.

She enjoyed the way he puffed away at his briar pipe in her presence and, indoors, unselfconsciously sat at table with his deerstalker hat on his head. “He is honest, Robert, and of how many men can you say that nowadays? And he likes women, he understands women. Of how many men can you say that?”

Sir John liked Veronica Sutherland because, indeed, she did remind him of his late sister-in-law, Sophie Gray. “You have her wit and gaiety,” he told Veronica, “as well as her beauty and intelligence. Her life-force was extraordinary, but in the end it overwhelmed her. She became an hysteric, poor child. She died by her own hand. She flew too near the flame.”

It was late one Friday afternoon at the end of that October, following one of our lunches with Sir John, when Veronica and I were at Tite Street, taking tea with Oscar, and telling him about the picture of Sophie Gray, that Oscar told us he had nearly completed his new story for Stoddart and had decided on its title. “I shall call it The Picture of Dorian Gray,” he announced.

“Do you think Millais will mind?” I asked.

“Why should Millais mind?” answered Oscar, somewhat peevishly. “The artist in my story bears no resemblance to Millais, none whatsoever. And Dorian Gray, whose portrait is at the heart of my story—and who is perfection itself, who is perhaps what I would like to be in other ages!—knows no kinship to Sophie Gray.”

“But is not suicide one of the elements in your story?” I persisted. “Does not Dorian Gray take his own life? I am only anxious for Millais’s sake because Sophie Gray took hers…”

Oscar waved me away airily. “If Dorian Gray is cousin to anyone,” he said, indicating the discussion was at an end, “it is to my young friend from the Foreign Office, John Gray. The surname is, of course, commonplace, but John, I assure you, is not.”

John Gray was Oscar’s new enthusiasm—the one distraction he allowed himself that autumn. I later learnt that though Oscar had told me, emphatically, that when ‘visiting the dead’ he preferred to go alone, in fact, on each of his investigative visits to what he called ‘the melancholy morgues and mortuaries of the metropolis’, he had been accompanied by John Gray.

Gray was twenty-three and worked at the Foreign Office. He was not a diplomatist; he was a clerk in the library, a young man of humble origins who had made his way in the world by dint of his own endeavours. “His father was a carpenter,” said Oscar; “we shall assume his mother was a virgin.” Obliged by his parents’ penury to leave school at thirteen, Gray had become a metal-worker by day while, by night, continuing his studies at his own expense. To his credit, aged sixteen, he had entered the examinations necessary to secure a clerkship at the Post Office—and passed with flying colours. “He is a complex, multiform creature,” said Oscar, “interested in art and music, poetry and languages, postage stamps and me!” Oscar met him for the first time that September—just a few weeks after the death of Billy Wood—at a literary gathering in Chelsea. “We became firm friends the moment we met,” said Oscar. “John has the appearance of a Greek god—and only shallow people do not judge by appearances.”

I first learnt of John Gray’s existence on that last Friday in October 1889. I met him for the first time a week later, on Bonfire Night, 5 November 1889. Veronica was dining in Bedford Square with her great-aunt, and Oscar and I had arranged to go together to the theatre. (The Irish-American actress, Ada Rehan, was making her debut at the Lyceum.) Oscar had told me he would come to collect me by cab and to be ready and waiting for him at my room in Gower Street at seven o’clock—no later.

I was booted, suited, polished and brushed by 6.45 a.m. I was standing in the street at seven. By seven-fifteen I was anxious. By seven-thirty I was alarmed. Oscar was occasionally late for dinner, but never for the theatre. (Others insulted actors casually, treating them as servants; Oscar never did.) At 7.45 p.m., simply to reassure myself, I decided that I must have misunderstood him and that what he had in fact proposed was that we should go by separate cabs and meet at the theatre. I was reluctant to hire a hansom myself, of course, because what spare funds I had I’d all but spent on cream teas and iced champagne for Veronica, but if I was to have any chance of reaching the theatre by eight o’clock a cab was the only way. With my mind made up, and my forehead throbbing, I peered up and down the gloomy thoroughfare. By rights, Gower Street on Bonfire Night, when the fog is thick and the West End at its busiest, should not be the easiest place to hail a passing cab, but to my amazement, at the precise moment that I needed one, a four-wheeler appeared out of the yellow gloom and drew to an abrupt halt before me.

“The Lyceum Theatre,” I called out to the cabman.

“I don’t think so, guv,” he replied, “I’m going home.”

“Why have you stopped then?” I barked.

The cab door opened and I was answered. Onto the street stumbled two figures: a fair-haired boy in a sailor suit and Oscar Wilde, in dishevelled evening dress, his face blue-black with bruises, his hair matted with blood. “This is how I found him,” said the boy. “He told me to bring him here.”

I paid off the cabman and, between us, the boy and I helped Oscar up the stairs and into my room. “My name is John Gray,” said the boy, who looked fifteen at most. His hair was blond and longer than it should have been. His eyes were blue and watchful; his skin was golden; his lips were pale; his high cheekbones were dusted with freckles the colour of sand. John Gray was indeed a young Adonis in a sailor suit (a French sailor suit, I think)—just as poor crumpled Oscar, with his sagging flesh, his swollen mouth, his eyes half closed (they were too bruised to open), was an ageing Bacchus after a brawl.

We eased Oscar onto my bed. I loosened his collar and tie, and poured what brandy I had into a glass and held it to his lips. He whimpered. He was exhausted and in pain.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I don’t rightly know,” said the boy. (He spoke well. He had the manners of a young gentleman.) “I was crossing Soho Square, on my way to Kettner’s restaurant to meet a friend. I saw Oscar standing on the pavement, by the church, talking to a man. They were arguing.”

“What sort of man?”

“I don’t know—just a man, in a heavy coat.”

“What sort of man?” I repeated. “Was he young? Old? Bearded?”

“Not young, not bearded.”

“Was he tall?”

“Quite tall, and well built. He was dark—swarthy, that’s the word. He was carrying a stick. Because they were shouting at one another I didn’t go too close.”

“What were they shouting?”

“The man said something like, “Keep away! Keep away or I’ll kill you!”—and then he began to hit Oscar. He beat him with his stick and forced him to the ground. Oscar fell back onto the steps of the church and the man flung himself on top of him and hit him in the face. He punched him, again and again. That’s when I ran towards them, shouting, “Stop! Police!” The man got up and cursed me and ran away.”

“You say the man said, ‘Keep away or I’ll kill you!’”

“Yes, something like ‘Laisse-la ou je te tue!’”

“What?” I exclaimed. “He spoke in French?”

“Yes, it was French. I’m sure of that. But the accent was a strange one.”

“It was a man called O’Donnell,” I said. “He comes from Montreal. He is a brute.”

“He was certainly that,” said the boy.

Oscar said nothing. His head was turned to the wall. His breathing was deep and ragged, but steady. I sensed he was asleep. “I’ll keep him here,” I said. “Mrs Wilde is not expecting him home tonight in any event. Best not to worry her.”

“Are you sure?” said the boy, straightening the collar of his sailor suit and looking about him for a mirror in which to check his hair.

“I’m sure,” I said. “I’ll look after him. I’m his friend.”

“His ‘best friend’, according to Oscar,” said the boy.

“I’m glad of that,” I said.

“Well, I’ll be off then,” said the lad cheerily, offering me his hand. “I’m dining at Kettner’s. Did I say? We’ll meet again soon, I hope. And Oscar will be right as rain in a day or two, won’t he? I love him. We all do.”

And with a half-salute and the hint of a wink, John Gray was gone.