his chair to face Lord Tams. “The doctor claimed to have a method to rejuvenate a man’s lost vitality. He transfused his patients with youthful blood. Thus they regained youthful vigor. It is a not uncommon desire of men, as they get older, to recapture their youth. Papoli was preying on men who could afford to attempt it. Occasionally one of his patients died, because for some reason as yet unknown, some people’s blood will cause a fatal reaction when injected into another. Papoli claimed that he had devised a machine that would solve that problem-the strange apparatus that was between the two beds. But he was obviously mistaken.”
“How do you know that?” Lestrade asked.
“I went to talk to your prisoner this morning,” Moriarty said. He is extremely indignant that he is in jail. He considers himself a savior of man. He is quite mad.”
“So other men died besides my brother?” Lord Tams asked.
“Yes, several. But they were elderly men, and their natural vanity had kept them from telling anyone about the operation, so his secret remained safe. Occasionally one of his donors died, but they came from the poorest classes of the city and they were not missed.”
“But my brother was not that old.”
“True. It was his obsession with sexual vitality that made him seek the operation. It failed. Papoli and his assistant thought your brother had died on the table. They left him there, not wanting to carry a body through the hallway early in the evening. Later, when they came back to take him to his room, they found that he had briefly regained consciousness and partially removed his restraining straps. The upper half of his body fell off the table in his dying convulsions, and he was left hanging from a strap around his legs. That explains his hands, which had fallen toward the floor. When they lifted him, rigor had set in and his arms looked as though they were raised.”
Lord Tams sighed. “Poor Vincent.” He stood up. “Well, Professor Moriarty, you have saved my marriage, and possibly my life. I had the impression that Inspector Lestrade was preparing to clap me in irons at any second.”
“That’s as it may be,” Lestrade said. “No hard feelings, I trust?”
“None, Inspector. I invite you-all of you-to my wedding. I must be off now to see Miss Whitsome and tell her the happy news. Professor Moriarty, you will send me a bill, whatever you think is right, and I will pay it promptly, I assure you.”
Moriarty nodded, and Lord Tams clapped his bowler on his head and was out the door. A minute later Lestrade followed.
“Moriarty,” I said, refilling my coffee cup, “two last questions.”
Moriarty held out his own cup for a refill. “What?” he asked.
“Do you think the new Lord Tams will keep his brother’s rooms at the Paradol?”
“I never speculate,” Moriarty said, “it is bad for the deductive process.” He leaned back. “But if I were a betting man, I’d put a tenner on it. What else?”
“Miss Lestrelle told us that Vincent had made some reference to Shelley, and you said that that told all. Were you serious? I looked through my copy of Shelley this morning, and I could find nothing that applies.”
Moriarty smiled. “I fancy you were looking up the wrong Shelley,” he said.
“The wrong-“
Moriarty reached over to the bookshelf and tossed a book across to me. “Try this one.”
I looked down at the book. On the cover, in an ornate Gothic type, was the title: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.
Moriarty was out all this morning, and he came back with a painting by Lenore Lestrelle. It is all green and brown and blue blotches and seems to be some sort of pastoral scene. I am afraid that he intends to hang it in the dining room.
THE PICTURE OF OSCAR WILDE
I make no apologies for what follows, it begins. It is my intention that none shall read these words for the next-let us say-100 years. But that is not as much out of the well of modesty for which I am widely known and justly admired; but from a desire that I shall trouble no one with my peccadillos, and no one shall trouble me with their approbation. I am quite able to disapprove of myself without outside assistance. ”
There it breaks off. Below it on the page are a few random thoughts. Without the approbation of one’s friends where would one be?
And: One lives for joy and wit and friendship-but I can’t make out what one dies for.
These words are on the first page of an otherwise pristine notebook on the cover of which is printed “OFOW January 91.”
The playwright, poet, novelist and gadfly Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wilde left the notebook in my house sometime during the second week in, as it happens, January of 1891. He never called to reclaim it; perhaps in the flurry of that month’s events, he forgot its existence. Perhaps he began again in some other notebook, recounting the events to their sad conclusion, and put the narrative someplace where, in time, his version of the tale will be revealed.
Here is my version.
My name is Benjamin Barnett and I am the proprietor of the North Atlantic Cable News Service, bringing news of Britain and the Continent to North American readers. And I am a friend and erstwhile minion of Professor James Moriarty, who figures largely in this story. The professor rescued me from a Turkish prison some years ago, and in recompense for this service I stayed in his employ for a number of years upon my return to London before establishing the news service.
Oscar Wilde had been writing an irregular column for me on the London theatre scene for the past two years, under the pen name of Fingal Wills. When I asked him why he refused to use his own name, he had told me, “Writing for the American public is like appearing as the rear end of a musical hall horse. One does it only for the money, and one would as soon not be recognized.” I couldn’t argue with him.
It was around eight o’clock on a Tuesday night early in January, if memory serves, when our maid entered my study, where I was going over the accounts of some recent murder trials to see if any might interest a Boston newspaper whose readers seemed to relish British gore. “That’s all right, Tilda,” I told her. “You can go to bed. I’ll turn down the lamps and chivvy my own cup into the pantry.”
“There’s a gentleman,” she said. “At the door.”
“A gentleman?”
“He says he’s a gentleman,” she told me, holding out the small silver tray on which rested the gentleman’s card.
Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wells Wilde
“A gentleman indeed,” I agreed. “Although what…never mind. Show the gentleman in, Tilda, and then you may retire.”
A few moments later Wilde came through the door. His face was paler than usual and his hair was disarranged in an artless manner. “Thank you for seeing me with no notice,” he said, flopping onto a chair. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything. Thank God you’re home. Your wife-how is your wife?”
“Cecily is upstairs suffering from a headache. She finds both light and sound painful when these come on her, so I try to annoy her as little as possible.”
“Cecily,” he said. “Lovely name.” He sat bolt upright as though a sudden spasm had gripped his body and an expression of extreme pain-anguish? — flitted across his face. “Benjamin,” he said, “you must help me. It is a trick of the gods that I am acquainted with you and that you, I understand, are acquainted with a man named Professor Moriarty.”
“I am,” I said. I was, I confess, puzzled. I could not picture two men less alike than the intense, reserved man of science, Professor James Moriarty, and the mercurial, effervescent, witty aesthete, Oscar Wilde. They both possessed massive intelligence and keen intellects, but they directed these gifts in entirely different directions.
“I must meet him. I must speak with him,” Wilde said. He was tugging at his cravat as though it were the source of his troubles, but he did not seem to notice what he was doing. “And as soon as possible. The business is private, but urgent. Very urgent. Can you take me to him?”
