It was only minutes later, as he sat in the bright, quiet reading room, that he remembered the car chase in London. The handgun. The Goateed Man. Was he still looking for Harold? For Sarah?
Harold knew then that a problem without a solution was not an annoyance, but the most maddening and horrible sensation in the world.
CHAPTER 37 A Death in the Family
“The things which we do wrong-although they may seem little
at the time, and though from the hardness of our hearts we pass
them lightly by-come back to us with bitterness, when danger
makes us think how little we have done to deserve help,
and how much to deserve punishment.”
– Bram Stoker,
Under the Sunset
December 1,1900
“Come at once,” read the telegram. “Please.” It was signed simply “B.S.”
Arthur was angry, but he went all the same. It was the sort of message that Holmes was always sending to Watson in his stories, and Bram knew it. What gall! To drag Arthur back into this horrible affair without even the courtesy of an explanation. It was conduct unbefitting a man of Bram’s stature, and especially a friend of Bram’s caliber. “Come at once.” For heaven’s sake. Arthur would have liked to think that Bram was a better man than to commit such skulduggery.
Arthur received the message a little after three in the afternoon and managed to make the 3:55 for Waterloo. From there it was but a twentyminute ride in a two-wheeler to get to Bram’s home along St. Leonard’s Terrace, Kensington.
He couldn’t imagine what Bram had found that was so urgent that Arthur had to drop his day’s cricket and head into the city. It was assuredly nothing, of course. Bram most likely just could not accept Arthur’s refusal to further engage in detective work. But to tantalize him like this… to tease him with the promise of clues! It was like holding cheap gin under the nose of a recovering dipsomaniac. Arthur would not forget this.
Nor, obviously, would he take the bait. He would go to St. Leonard’s Terrace, yes, and he would see what Bram was making such a fuss about. And then he would explain, calmly and resolutely, that he was of an age too advanced for such follies. If Bram wanted to continue his investigations, Arthur would not stand in his way. But for Arthur there would be no more interviewing of witnesses and no more sniffing of rancid bloodstains. The circus had left town, and Arthur would not travel with it.
Number 18, St. Leonard’s Terrace was rather larger than Arthur had remembered. Four years previously Bram had moved here from Number 19-he’d moved all of one house over in order to acquire an extra floor. The new house was re-created like the old one, almost down to the positioning of the vases in the drawing room. It was a move so very like Bram-expensive, a touch indulgent, and yet meticulous in its labors. There were rumors that Bram had been forced to borrow around town in order to pay for the new furnishings. Some said six hundred pounds from Hall Caine alone, while others said as much as seven hundred. But there were always rumors, and Arthur paid them little mind. And it was not as if it were Arthur’s place to ask. He and Bram knew enough about each other’s sins and shortcomings at this point. There was no cause for adding weight to the scales.
The butler recognized his face, and before Arthur had a chance to speak, the man issued a polite, “Right this way, Dr. Doyle.
“Mr. Stoker has been expecting you,” added the butler for effect.
“Yet I suspect he’ll be disappointed when he finds me,” said Arthur.
The house was both dark and ornate. It received little light from the street outside, despite the fact that it was buttressed to the south by the open parks of the Royal Hospital. The windows were too small, thought Arthur, and there were not enough of them. The drawing room seemed sodden with a princely and expensive gloom. The golds and silvers of the exposed tea set were transmuted into bronze by the pervasive dim. The lush reds of the oil paintings on the wall were darkened into bloody browns.
As Bram turned from his desk, Arthur saw that he was in the midst of lighting his cigar. The match burst orange light into the room and then was squashed out quickly with a blow from Bram’s lips. Cigar smoke trailed into the darkness above.
“I don’t care what you have to tell me,” Arthur began. “I haven’t the faintest interest in knowing who killed Emily Davison.”
Bram simply stared.
“Very well,” he said at last. “Thank you for making me aware. But that’s not why I asked you here.”
“Oh,” was all Arthur managed in reply. It had not occurred to him that Bram could have asked him over to discuss anything other than the murders.
“Oscar is dead.”
It took Arthur a long moment to understand what Bram was saying.
“… Wilde?” asked Arthur lamely.
Bram nodded. Who else would it have been?
Arthur sat down on a plush chair. He allowed his body to tumble into it as if he were diving bottom-first off a cliff.
“Where?” he asked. “When?”
“Paris. Did you even know that’s where he’s been? I didn’t. He’s been two years in the Hôtel d’Alsace. I never sent him a letter, or even a bloody note. Did you? Well, no. Of course you didn’t. He died sometime yesterday. Florence, of all people, got a telegram this morning, and she informed me.” Bram sighed. “Since he was released from prison, we didn’t offer him so much as a kind word, did we? We left the poor chap to drink and bugger himself to death on the Continent.”
Arthur didn’t take kindly to the implied accusation in Bram’s tone.
“And what were we to do?” he said. “Oscar had…proclivities. He was drawn inexorably to sin. It is a tragedy that such a great man was brought so low by vice. But the villain here is the vice, not you and I.”
“Vice?” said Bram. “Do you think that’s what killed him? No. A vice is a thing which may be applauded in moderation but becomes horrific in overuse. Morphine is splendid by the ounce, but it’s a vice by the gallon. A healthy desire for one’s wife, that’s a virtue. But a compulsive desire for another, however… well, that’s a vice that will do a man ill.”
Bram looked Arthur dead in the eyes. Arthur wondered if he was referring to Jean, if Bram was judging him. Well, so what if he was?
“No,” Bram continued. “It wasn’t the vice that killed Oscar. It was the loneliness.”
“Do you remember that night we met, he and I?” said Arthur. “At that dinner in the Langham Hotel? Wait, no, you weren’t there. It was hosted by Joseph Stoddart, of Lippincott’s. Oscar was so deliriously funny, and he was a towering figure. It was a golden evening for me. Oscar told me he admired my work. Stoddart commissioned novels from us both, did you know that? On the same evening. Oscar wrote his Dorian Gray, and I wrote The Sign of the Four”
“And then,” added Bram, “he went to prison. And you to an audience with the queen. Oh, say, I’ve simply forgotten to ask-has your knighthood come through yet?”
“Look here, it’s not so simple as you make it seem, all right? It’s not as if they locked him up in jail over Dorian Gray, and it’s not as if The Sign of the Four were the proximate cause of this knighthood everyone says I should be expecting. There was a series of intermediate steps. We took two different paths, do you see?”
“Yes, Arthur. I do.”
The men sat in silence for long minutes as Bram puffed on his cigar and Arthur let his mind recede into the fantasia of recollection. With Oscar it was the dinners one remembered most. With some men it was the afternoons at sport or late nights before the brandy bottle. But Arthur would always remember Oscar at dinner. At the head of a long table, six guests laid out before him on either side of the centerpiece like wings. Every head turned to face him hungrily, waiting for the next jest, the next outrageous and delicious proclamation. Arthur would remember the words that Oscar spoke, but he would also remember the way that Oscar fed off the attention and the laughter. Oscar was merely witty oneon-one, but he was uproarious in a group of twelve. It was as if, for Oscar, if there were no audience, then it was not worth the effort to try.