Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol: A Mystery (7 page)

He called another warder in from the adjoining room. ‘We’re going to show our new prisoner his first flogging. If it makes his hair stand on end, so much the better. It’ll be all the easier for you to cut afterwards.’ He laughed. ‘We’ll get the best view from Landing B. A flogging’s not a pretty sight – except, of course, it might be to Mr Wilde. The lad’s only fourteen.’

The two men marched me from the guard-room, across a yard, along a series of stone-walled corridors and, eventually, up two steep and narrow flights of metal stairs. As we marched through the prison I heard nothing but the clang and echo of our steps and the rhythmic rattle of Warder Braddle’s heavy breathing. I saw no other prisoners. I looked neither to left nor right, and in my hideous prison cap could barely see the way ahead.

‘Stop,’ ordered Warder Braddle, at last. ‘Look over the rail – down there.’ It was like looking down from the deck into the hold of a ship. Two floors beneath us, in a patch of sunlight at the end of a long corridor of cells, stood a heavy wooden chair. Bent over the chair, face forward, secured to it by his arms and legs with leather straps, was the boy who was to be beaten. His buttocks and back were stripped bare. He was so thin that even I, in my hooded cap, standing thirty feet above him, could see each individual rib.

Standing in front of the youth, about a yard from his head, were two older men: the prison governor and the prison surgeon. Standing behind him were two warders: one held the instrument of torture.

‘It’s the cat-o’-nine-tails,’ said Warder Braddle, holding the back of my head so that I could not look away. ‘Have you seen one before? The prisoner is being flogged for insolence and insubordination, but because he’s a boy, aged between ten and sixteen, it’s the small cat he’s getting, not the large one. The handle is the same size, but each of the nine cords is just two feet in length. You’d not be let off so lightly, Wilde.’

Down below, the governor checked his timepiece. ‘Proceed,’ he said. ‘Twelve strokes.’

‘Sir!’ replied the warder, raising the flail high above his head. ‘One!’ The man brought it down onto the boy’s back with a terrible force. ‘Two . . . three . . .’ He counted out the strikes and the governor nodded his acquiescence to each one. I closed my eyes as the blows fell on the tethered child. The boy’s screams were horrible – and piteous – like the cries of a pig being unskilfully slaughtered.

‘. . . Ten . . . eleven . . . twelve.’

Warder Braddle at my side called down to the prison governor. ‘I think the last one went missing, sir, don’t you?’

I opened my eyes and saw the governor look up at Braddle and smile. ‘One more, then,’ he ordered. The warder with the cat thrashed the boy’s bloodied back once more.

While I was in Wandsworth prison I longed to die. It was my one desire.

On 26 August 1895 – after three months of incarceration – I was permitted my first visitor. Robert Sherard, the bravest and most chivalrous of all brilliant beings, came to see me. Twenty minutes was the time allotted for the visit. We stood five feet apart, in a vaulted room, divided by two rows of iron bars. In the narrow passageway between the rows, Thomas Braddle stood, keeping watch. As Robert talked – and smiled – and chided – and did his valiant best to lift me from my misery, the warder looked on contemptuously. When our time was up, and Robert went on his way, Braddle sneered, ‘Not really worth the bus fare, was it, Mr Wilde?’

On 21 September 1895, my wife, having travelled from Switzerland for the purpose, was my next visitor. In the gloom of the vaulted visitors’ room, we could barely see one another. In our mutual distress we scarcely spoke – and what poor Constance said I strained to hear above the hideous sound of Braddle’s breathing as he stood guarding the void between us. I told my gentle, unhappy wife of my sense of shame – and my regret. I told her that for the past few years I had been mad and begged her for her forgiveness. Through her tears, and through the iron bars, she gave it – freely. She told me that when I came out of prison, we would be reconciled. She put her hand between the bars and made to reach me. ‘No,’ cried Braddle, sharply, stepping forward and pushing back her outstretched arm. ‘No contact is permitted. And I am surprised, madam, that you should want to touch pitch.’

Braddle’s cruelty knew no bounds. It respected neither person nor place. When, faint with hunger, and weak from dysentery, in the prison chapel one morning, I fell to the ground, Braddle called out to the chaplain as he was coming to my aid. ‘Don’t, sir. The man’s a malingerer and a sodomite. The two often go together. Leave him be. I’ll get him to his feet.’ When I did not move, Braddle, with his boot, kicked me in the head, again and again, until I did. Once blood began to trickle from my ear, he said, ‘We seem to be getting through to him at last.’

Suffering is one very long moment. One cannot divide it by seasons. One can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. In prison, time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain. In prison, there is only one season: the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from one. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one’s cell, as it is always twilight in one’s heart.

Three sharp rays of sunshine pierced the pervading darkness of my months at Wandsworth Gaol.

The first was when my wife came and offered me forgiveness.

The second was in November, when I was taken by prison van from Wandsworth to the Court of Bankruptcy. I had debts and no means to pay them. Books, paintings, jewels – all that I had once had was gone. My humiliation was complete: my penury official. I was in the gutter and no longer looking at the stars. After the hearing, as I was escorted from the courtroom, handcuffed, between two policemen, I passed along a corridor lined with men who had come to witness my pathetic passage. Some had come to stare, and some to jeer. Alone among them was a friend. He had travelled from another country to be there, journeyed for days for this one moment in that dreary corridor. As I was led past him, my head bowed, slowly and gravely my friend raised his hat to me. It was an action so sweet and simple it hushed the whole crowd into silence. Men have gone to heaven for smaller things than that.

And the third shaft of sunlight came in November, also – later in the month, on the 18th, the feast of Saint Odo. That was the day when I learnt that I was to be moved from Wandsworth Gaol in London to Reading Gaol in Berkshire. Mr Haldane, Member of Parliament and ministering angel, had visited me again – and secured my books – and seen my wretchedness – and deemed another move advisable. Reading was his recommendation.

During my final weeks at Wandsworth, because of the damage done to my ear when I had fallen in the prison chapel and my continuing bouts of dysentery, despite the protestations of Warder Braddle, I was transferred from my cell on B Wing to the prison infirmary. The infirmary comprised eight separate cells set around a guard-room that also served as the prison doctor’s surgery. There I had a mattress to my bed and food that I could stomach. By day, I still picked oakum, hour after hour, in solitary silence, but, by night, at last, I slept.

I continued to have dreams, of course – fearful nightmares from which I would wake in a cold sweat, crying out in terror. It was one such that apparently woke me in the early hours of Monday, 18 November 1895. With what sounded like the clang of a mighty cathedral bell, the iron door of my cell burst wide open and there, silhouetted in the doorway, stood Thomas Braddle, his naked arms stretched out towards me, his face aflame.

‘I have returned, Wilde. You can’t escape me. I have been where it seems that you are going. I have been to Reading Gaol, by Reading town. It is a pit of shame. I’ve been there, Wilde. I have told them all about you. You’ll not escape me. I’ve made sure of that.’

He shambled through the door and came, haltingly, towards my bed. ‘Look!’ he cried. He had thrown off his coat. He thrust his naked arms towards me. ‘Look!’

I gazed on him in horror. He had the appearance of a man flayed alive. Over his whole body his skin glistened, raw and red. His flesh bubbled like a cauldron. I looked up at his pockmarked face: it was a mass of scarlet blisters. Mucus ran from his goblin’s nose. Bile, the colour of absinthe, spewed from his tiny mouth.

‘My lips burn,’ he cried. ‘My skin scalds me. My urine has turned to blood. You have done this to me, Wilde. You have infected me. You are diseased, Wilde. Curse you, man.’

He raised his right arm to strike me. I saw that he had a bottle in his fist. I covered my face with my hands, but the threatened blow did not fall. The effort of the assault overwhelmed him. He slumped, suddenly and hard, onto the stone floor at the foot of my bed, the bottle smashing onto the ground beside him.

This was not a dream. Within moments it was evident: Warder Thomas Braddle was dead.

4
20 November 1895
Clapham Junction

I
stood inside my locked cell and listened. I stood, hunched against the door, with my ear adjacent to the spyhole. I dared not look through it.

Rule 12. Every prisoner guilty of any of the following offences will subject himself to punishment: . . . Looking out, or attempting to look out, at window or door of a cell.

Braddle was definitely dead. I heard the chaplain read a prayer.

‘
Absolve, we beseech Thee, O Lord, the soul of Thy servant, Thomas Braddle, from every bond of sin, that being raised in the glory of the resurrection, he may be refreshed among the Saints and Elect.

Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
’

I heard a rattle of keys and a door open and close. There were footsteps and murmurings and then two other voices spoke. It was the prison governor and the prison surgeon.

‘Was he found here?’

‘No, in the cell, with the prisoner. We pulled him out, but it was too late.’

‘He died as he fell?’

‘Or moments after. There was nothing to be done.’

‘By God, he’s a hideous sight.’

‘He was never very pretty,’ said the doctor quietly.

The governor laughed. ‘Cause of death?’ he asked.

‘He had a weak heart.’

‘He looked so strong.’

‘Appearances can be deceptive. His heart was weak. His respiration was poor.’

‘But these foul eruptions on his skin – like boils . . . And the mucus . . . Revolting. His uniform’s covered in vomit.’

A fourth voice spoke. It was farther off. ‘He complained of the colic, sir.’

‘What?’

‘He said he had a pain in his abdomen, sir. As though his guts was on fire – that’s what he said. And his throat burnt – like a furnace.’

‘When was this?’ asked the surgeon.

‘Last night, sir – late.’

‘He wasn’t on duty yesterday?’ enquired the governor.

‘No, sir. It was his day off.’

‘But he’s in uniform.’

‘He’d been over to Reading, sir, for the day – to the gaol.’

‘A busman’s holiday.’ The governor appeared amused.

‘Gaoling was in his blood, sir.’

‘Yes.’

‘And he got back late?’ asked the doctor. ‘How late? After midnight?’

‘Yes, sir. More like two or three, sir.’

‘You were on duty?’ asked the governor.

‘Yes, sir. I was on the main gate. He came, asking for the doctor.’

‘Why didn’t you call me?’

‘It was the middle of the night. And I think he’d been drinking, sir. He brewed his own. A strong brew. He wasn’t in a fit state, if you know what I mean. I told him to come up here to wait till morning. I thought he’d sleep it off.’

‘Did he look like this then?’

‘It was the middle of the night, sir. I couldn’t rightly see. He was in a bad way, but I thought it was the drink.’

‘Why didn’t you send him home to his wife?’ asked the governor.

‘He didn’t have a wife, sir. He lived alone – in digs by the station. He was a bit of a loner.’

‘He was a good officer,’ said the governor. ‘He knew his duty – and did it.’