The Dead Assassin

CHAPTER 18 INVITATION TO AN EXECUTION

“Oscar! Oscar! Awaken at once!” A strong hand gripped Wilde’s shoulder, shaking him awake. He reluctantly surfaced from sleep to find himself in his room in the Albemarle. Conan Doyle was standing over him, fully dressed in hat and coat, having just cabbed over from his own gentlemen’s club, the Athenaeum.

“Dash it all!” Wilde moaned. “Why did you awaken me? I had just discovered a secret closet within my house that I did not know existed. The closet was filled with shoes. Thousands of pairs of shoes. And when I tried them on, they all fit perfectly. It was the most profoundly moving experience. It was so vivid.” He sniffed the air. “I swear I still have the aroma of butter-soft leather in my nostrils. Have you ever in your life had such a dream?”

“We all have those dreams, Oscar. Now, I am sorry to awaken you so early, but I have shocking news.”

“News in any way related to footwear?”

“I’m afraid not.” Conan Doyle flourished the morning paper, opened it to the front page, and thrust it under Wilde’s nose. The banner headline read: “Murderer of Lord Howell to Hang!”

The Irish playwright’s mouth fell open. “How is that possible? Vicente was arrested but four nights ago!”

Conan Doyle was equally flummoxed. “Arrest, trial, and execution in a handful of days? The British judicial system has never in its history worked with such expediency.”

The Irishman’s eyes raced across lines of type, reading. “He’s to be hanged at Newgate on Wednesday.” Then realization stunned his eyes wide. “But… that’s today!”

“Precisely.”

“Tried and found guilty of treason by a special sitting,” Wilde read aloud, poring over the words. “In less than a week? Such an excess of haste seems impolitic, even in the case of treason.”

“I greatly suspect this execution has been rushed in order to silence Vicente before he can speak to anyone.” He snatched the paper back. “We must endeavor to see this man, Oscar. Talk to him. Learn the truth. Before his voice is forever extinguished.”

Wilde’s expression betrayed a lack of enthusiasm. “But, Arthur, you know how executions are. Newgate will be swarmed by every scamp, scallywag, ne’er-do-well, pimp, whore, prig, and pie monger, not to mention the bad, the mad, the insane, and the morbidly curious. We shan’t be able to even get within gawking distance.”

“Our fame may prove a key to unlock Newgate.” He tossed the paper aside. “Come, Oscar. Get dressed. We must leave without delay.”

Wilde stared up at him, flabbergasted. “Now? Just like that? I shall require at least an hour to select a suitable wardrobe. Come to think, what does one wear to an execution? Black? A tad cliché. And rather morbid given what is already likely to prove a morose occasion.”

Conan Doyle crossed to the armoire, snatched it open, grabbed a shirt at random and threw it at Wilde, who caught it and paused, struck by the color. “Burgundy? Really?” He laughed. “Rather a bold choice, don’t you think? Bravo, Arthur. Burgundy: a color that is rich and yet appropriately circumspect.” He held the shirt beneath his chin for Conan Doyle’s approval. “What do you think, Arthur? This shirt with an ivory cravat? Please, I want you to be brutally honest.”

“Being brutally honest, we need to leave now. Immediately. This instant. Newgate executes its prisoners on the stroke of nine and it is nearly eight o’clock.”

“B-but, Arthur,” Wilde sputtered. “Does a gentleman have time to wash? To shave? To break a crust? I am quite famished.”

Conan Doyle snatched the silver hip flask from the bedside table and pressed it into Wilde’s hands. “Here’s your breakfast. Now be a good chap and drink it down quickly. The game’s af—”

“Cease!” Wilde cried out, flinging up a restraining hand. “Please do not utter that phrase and I promise I shall hurry and never complain once.”

Wilde kept his promise and did not utter a single complaint during the carriage ride to Newgate Prison. Instead, he uttered many complaints — about the lingering fog, about the traffic, about the potholed road, about the noisome air — in an ongoing litany until the long, squat, ominous hulk of Newgate Prison finally hove into view through the carriage windows.

“Ugh,” he exclaimed upon seeing the stony shoulders of the prison (with the sepulchral dome of St. Paul’s hovering weightless above like a memento mori). “Newgate: a prime example of Architecture Terrible, a style so repulsive it proclaims its dread function to all who see it. Just looking upon its hideous proportions is like a slap of reprimand.”

Even though all executions were now carried on within the walls of Newgate, out of sight of gawkers, a mob of hundreds swarmed beneath the prison’s grim façade: Fleet Street hacks, penny-a-line pamphleteers, firebrand priests sermonizing against sin, false beggars, shoeless urchins with filthy faces, reeling drunkards puking on their own shoes. And, of course, despite being literally in the shadow of the most feared symbol of the law’s displeasure, the criminal classes, to whom the event wielded an attraction the way a magnet draws iron. And so dipsmen worked the crowd, brazenly rifling pockets while streetwalkers with rouged faces and overspilling bodices buffed men’s eyes with their breasts, and sharp-dressed swells arm-in-arm with peach-cheeked courtesans and a faceless horde of thrill-seeking loiterers and ne’er-do-wells from all levels of society, each and every one summoned by the titillating spectacle of the suffering and death of a fellow human being.

The carriage trundled along Newgate Street until forced to a standstill by the press of bodies. Conan Doyle flung open the door and he and Wilde dropped from the carriage into the greasy jostle of the crowd. The two friends threaded a meandering path through the morbid carnival until they fetched up outside the prison’s infamous black gates. Set within the hulking outer gate was a smaller, human-sized door. Behind a sliding lattice grille lurked a uniformed prison officer with a face like a clenched fist, snarling at every supplicant who wheedled to gain entry. Conan Doyle shouldered past them all and handed in a note. “This is for your warden. Tell him it is from Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories.”

The guard snatched the paper and glared at it with a doubting scowl. He eyeballed Conan Doyle and Wilde up and down, and then banged the grille shut without speaking a word.

“That looked far from promising,” Wilde observed.

“I concur.”

“Although if I hired him to be my footman, I should seldom be bothered by creditors.”

After a short wait, they heard the clunk of a heavy iron bolt being shot and the door-within-the-door swung open. The same surly guard beckoned them with a get-yer-arses-in-here wave. Wilde and Conan Doyle stepped through Newgate’s infamous portal to a dread realm devoted to misery, suffering, and death. Without speaking a word, the grim-faced guard marched them along an echoing stone corridor to where a man in a gray suit with graying hair stood waiting. His face contained no glimmer of emotion, although the depth and severity of his frown lines suggested that he was a man with little practice in smiling.

“I am William Bland, warden of Newgate.”

Conan Doyle nodded a bow and presented a small, leather-bound book to the warden. “I hope you will accept this collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, with my compliments.”

The warden pointedly eyed the proffered book but made no move to take it.

The Scots author quickly added, “I have taken the liberty of signing it to you, sir.”

Still, the warden kept his arms resolutely folded behind his back. “Your offer is noted, Doctor Doyle, but I cannot accept. I do not sully my mind by indulging in the fripperies and distractions of the day. The Bible is the only book I read.”

To his mortification, Conan Doyle was forced to retract the snubbed offering, which he hastily secreted in a coat pocket. “Ah, I see,” he muttered, stunned by the naked surliness of the warden’s demeanor.

“The state is about to relieve a man of his life,” Wilde said in his “lecture hall” voice. He had captured the entire North American continent with it, and had no doubt it would impress a lowly prison governor. “As two of the nation’s leading scribes, we are here to interview the unfortunate party and draw a picture in words of his final hours upon the earth.”

Bland seemed unimpressed by Wilde’s grandiloquence. “And what will that accomplish?”

The Irish wit was lost for a comeback. “Why, it will…” He threw a glance at Conan Doyle. “Go on, Arthur, explain to the governor what our mission today will accomplish.”

Put on the spot, the Scottish author threw a cutting look at his friend, but then forced a smile and said, “We are here as witnesses to history. To record the laudable efforts of the British penal system in preventing our nation from a descent into anarchy and lawlessness.”

If the warden was any more impressed by Conan Doyle’s speech, he successfully concealed it. “Newgate has been visited many times by scribblers such as yourselves, gentlemen. Mister Dickens himself toured the facilities here many years ago and wrote a very dour report of conditions inside Newgate.”

“Really?” Conan Doyle blustered, although he had pored over Sketches by Boz many times and was well acquainted with the passages.

“Yes, very drab indeed. I hope your reports will be equally dark. For the world needs to know that Newgate Prison is the last place any man or woman should wish to visit.”

As if to punctuate the remark, Bland turned his head and stared pointedly at Wilde, who visibly paled. And then the warden leaned forward, bringing his face uncomfortably close to Conan Doyle’s — a headmaster about to scold a naughty pupil. “Those who enter Newgate leave broken men,” he said, lavishing the Scottish author with breath that smelled as if a lead spoon had dissolved in his corrosive mouth. “And some do not leave at all, but are buried beneath the stones of the Bird Cage Walk, where they will remain prisoners of Newgate until the Resurrection. Bodies of the executed are taken there straight from the scaffold. A floor slab is pried up and the carcass dropped into the pit below. Final absolution is provided by a splash of water and a bucket of quicklime — to speed the dissolution of the skeleton.”

Conan Doyle dared not breathe until the Warden finally drew his face away.

“Unfortunately, we have quite run out of room,” Bland continued. “Nowadays, executed prisoners must be taken from the prison to be inhumed in a potter’s field along with the indigent, the insane, and all the other useless detritus of society.”

Conan Doyle swallowed a grimace and molded his features into an expression he hoped resembled affability. “I come purely in the interest of research, so that I may provide my readers with an accurate description of the rigors of prison to… to… provide a somber lesson for those who might be tempted to stray—”

“So, you wish us to leave?” Wilde interrupted. “It seems we have been invited inside Newgate simply to have the door slammed in our faces by you, personally.”

But instead of taking affront at Wilde’s remark, the warden shook his head mildly. Apparently, his countenance had only the one dour expression. “Quite the opposite, gentlemen. My prison is open for your inspection.”

It soon became obvious that the guard escorting them had been drilled to provide an intimate tour of all of the very worst of Newgate’s privations. First they visited the men’s cellblock, a place gaggingly odiferous with the stink of unemptied slop buckets, alkaline sweat, and the tangible reek of lives wearing to the bone. Next, they trod a dark maze of corridors, passing along the way a shuffling prisoner being prodded along by a guard’s wooden truncheon. The prisoner cut a nightmarish figure in his gray uniform, a cloth disk bearing the number 19 sewn onto the breast — the only identity permitted inside the prison walls. He wore the requisite cap with its large visor that projected straight down to hide the prisoner’s face and allowed only a restricted view of his confines through a pair of eye slits.

They passed an open door to an exercise yard where men in striped prison uniforms trudged in aimless circles around a narrow quadrangle. Next they entered a dinful gallery where convicts trudged upon the giant wheels of wooden treadmills, while others labored at The Crank, a wooden box fitted with a handle that turned in a box filled with sand to provide a resistance. In all cases, the one and only goal of such punishments was futility: a cruel reminder to every captive of the state that their energies were squandered meaninglessly and produced nothing but sore muscles, racked bodies, and broken spirits.

“The poor wretches toil like Sisyphus,” Wilde muttered sotto voce. “I could not survive a day in such a place.”

The extremities they witnessed cowed Conan Doyle. He had always been a staunch supporter of law and order, but the diabolical ingenuity of the punishments seemed out of proportion to any crime, perhaps short of murder.

Finally, they stepped into the condemned cell, a gloomy but comparatively large space created by knocking two cells together. The wan morning light filtered in through two barred windows. At one side of the cell, a pair of guards lounged at a pine table, playing cards. The only other stick of furniture was a low cot covered by a thin cotton pallet and a worn woolen blanket. The Italian valet, unshaven and wretched in his prison uniform, slouched on the end of the cot where he stared at the rectangle of sky caged by the barred window. He was not alone. A handsome man in his early thirties, with a noble mien and head of ash blond hair that had enjoyed the benefit of curling papers, sat at his side, a black Gladstone bag nestled on the floor at his feet. He was busy unwinding the dressings on the condemned man’s arm. Conan Doyle surmised that the handsome man must be the prison doctor. He rose from the cot when Conan Doyle and Wilde entered and addressed them in a challenging voice. “Who are you? Might this man not be allowed to compose himself unmolested in his final hour of life? What are you, newspaper reporters?”

At the comment, Wilde sucked in an audible gasp and pressed a hand to his breastbone, pantomiming umbrage.

“I, sir, am Oscar Wilde, playwright and raconteur. My companion is the esteemed author Arthur Conan Doyle, and I can safely vouch that neither of us has ever been so insulted in our lives. Newspapermen, indeed! Do I look like a newspaperman? Do I dress like a newspaperman? Do I display the sunken posture of a man who spends his life on all fours, grubbing about in the unhappiness of human suffering?”

The prison doctor lowered his eyes. “I apologize. I am Doctor John Lamb, the only physician here in Newgate. It is my lot to attend to the poor souls walled up within this place. I do what little my meager skills permit to alleviate the suffering of the men and women here. Yes, even those who are condemned. For I believe that even the lowest in society deserve to sip from the cup of human dignity before the state strips away their soul.”

Conan Doyle stepped forward and gently took the Italian’s arm. The condemned man sat passive and silent — a man shaken from a dream only to awaken into a nightmare. The Scottish author inspected the physician’s work. A ten-inch incision, beautifully stitched, showed where the doctor had performed a miraculous repair of the arm.

“This is most artfully done, sir,” Conan Doyle observed. “The bone was shattered by a bullet, and yet he can raise and move his arm with little discomfort. I am a doctor myself and have stood in attendance at some of the best surgeons at my medical school in Edinburgh.” He carefully lowered the valet’s arm and reached out to shake the doctor’s hand. “I congratulate you, sir, and am curious to know how you performed this minor miracle.”

Doctor Lamb shook the proffered hand and acknowledged Conan Doyle’s praise with a nod and a modest smile that betrayed his satisfaction at the obvious pride he took in his work.

“As a prison doctor, the pecuniary advantages are scant,” he spoke in a cultured voice as mild as his demeanor. “My reward comes in the freedom to practice my technique. Including, what some would consider, experimental procedures.” He added somewhat ruefully, “I have an advantage over other doctors in that my patients do not complain much. And in the case of poor souls condemned to die, have not the means to do so. And so I am free to practice a form of healing whose orthodoxy might be questioned elsewhere. As you correctly noted, the bone was shattered into fragments. I straightened the ends using a bone saw and then held the ulna together using screws and metal straps.”

“Screws and metal straps?” Conan Doyle repeated. “I have never heard of such a thing! Surely, metal will corrode inside the body and cause infection?”

“Precisely why I used a special iron-free alloy that does not corrode. The strap is affixed to the bone with brass screws so that stabilizes the bone until it knits together naturally. In addition, I have concocted a salve that alleviates the swelling typical after surgery and promotes rapid healing. The incision was then sewn up in the usual manner.”

“Exemplary stitching, if I say so,” added Wilde. “I wish the woman who did my shirts had hands as skilled as yours.”

“Thank you, Mister Wilde.” The doctor paused to glance at his pocket watch. Reminded of the time, he hefted his Gladstone and stood up to go. “I must take my leave of you gentlemen. As always, I have an infirmary full of patients to attend to.”

Dr. Lamb bowed to them both and nodded to the two warders as he left the cell.

Throughout the conversation, the Italian valet remained placid and dazed. Wilde finally spoke his name, “Vicente,” and the man looked up with hollow, unfocused eyes dripping with mortality.

In fluent Italian, Wilde told the valet who they were and why they had come. “To hear your side of the story, which I believe has not been heard.” He perched on the edge of the cot beside the condemned man and laid a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Tell us,” he purred in Italian. “What really happened that night?”

Vicente took a deep breath and shuddered from the horror of casting his mind back to that dreadful evening. At first, he stumbled over his words, and then spoke in rapid bursts of Italian, which Wilde translated for Conan Doyle.

“It was late. My master dined at six thirty and then I dressed him. He had a meeting.”

“With who?” Conan Doyle interjected. “Ask him if he knows who Lord Howell was meeting?”

Wilde translated the question, but the handsome valet shook his head.

“I no know. I no know. Important man. Someone high up. Lord Howell was upset… agitated. After dinner he dismissed the cook and the maid-of-all-work. Gave them money and sent them away.”

“And you’ve no idea what he was worried about?”

The Italian shook his head. “Something serious. Something bad. I know because Lord Howell took money from the wall safe… and a loaded pistol.”

Conan Doyle and Wilde exchanged a look.

“He tell me to go away, too. He says there is much danger. But I would not leave. I said I would stay and face the danger standing at his side. And then a gentleman came to the door. He and my master had words.”

Wilde leaned forward and asked in Italian, “Did your master and the gentleman argue?”

“Yes. No. Not an argument. But they spoke too loud. I think the visitor also knows of the danger. He left quickly.”

“What did the man look like?” Conan Doyle queried. “Can you describe him?”

Vicente covered his eyes with a hand, thinking. “A man of past middle years. Big whiskers.” He mimed sideburns with his hands. “A man of wealth, but I could tell he had no servants.”

“How could he tell that?” Conan Doyle asked.

A wan smile crossed the Italian’s face. “Because his clothes were rumpled. Not pressed. And he wore a very ugly hat.”

“What type of hat?” Wilde asked.

The Italian used both hands to mime a tall hat rising from his head.

“A top hat? The man wore a top hat?”

“Like a top hat, but taller. Too tall. Ridiculous.”

Conan Doyle felt an uneasy stirring. “Ask him how the gentleman arrived. Did he come by hansom, or carriage?”

Wilde put the question to the Italian, who responded by acting out a man seated behind a steering wheel and making a hissing noise that needed no translation.

“He arrived by steam car!” Conan Doyle said. “How many people in London wear a stovepipe and drive a steam car? Only one I know of: our Yorkshire friend, Ozymandius Arkwright.”

“And you think such a man is somehow involved in an assassination plot?”

The Scottish doctor’s face projected mystification. He shook his head. “I cannot say, but I am now convinced he is the blurred figure in the photograph of the Fog Committee.” He nodded at the valet. “Ask Vicente what happened next.”

Wilde relayed the question and the Italian grew visibly upset. “After the gentleman visitor left, the master had me order a carriage. He said we must both leave. But the carriage was late because of the fog. I went out into the street to look… and that’s when I saw him.”

“Saw who?”

“A man made of shadows, standing in the fog. When he does not move, I shout at him: ‘Who are you? What you want?’ The man steps forward. He walks like this…” Vicente got up from the cot and shambled up and down the confined cell, his face sweating and manic. “I shout again. ‘Who are you?’ And then he comes on through the fog until the streetlamp — whoosh — lights up his face and I see it is not a man. It is… the devil.” Vicente dropped heavily on the cot and buried his face in his hands, his breath squeezing out in an agonized wheeze.

“The devil?” Conan Doyle repeated. “What does he mean, the devil? Ask him what he means, Oscar.”

Wilde put the question to the valet, who finally peeled his large hands from his handsome face. “He was a man. But he was not. He moved. He walked. But his eyes were dead and a boneyard reek hung about him. I scream and run. My master comes out as I run past him, back to the house, the dead man chasing me. Lord Howell draws his pistol and shoots. BANG! BANG! BANG! Three times. The devil man flinches. Blood spurts. But still he keeps coming. We slam the door. Turn the key. Throw the bolts. Then BOOM! A sound like thunder as the dead man flings himself against it. We back away and then BOOM! The hinges break and the door crashes down. The dead man bellows like a bear and shambles into the house. Lord Howell raises his pistol and fires, but the bullet hits me in the arm. I scream. The pain so bad. I fall down. The devil comes on. Lord Howell runs into the parlor. Slams the door. Locks it. I think I am dead, but the devil steps over me. He smashes down the parlor door. Then, BANG! I hear a shot. And another, and then click, click, the gun has no more bullets. I stagger to the parlor in time to see the devil grab Lord Howell by the throat, lift him off his feet, and then… and then… he twist his neck all the way around. I hear bones snap and crack…”

The Italian’s words dissipated and a silence heavy as syrup poured into their ears.

Wilde nudged the Italian on by saying, “And what happened next?”

By now the Italian was sweating, shivering — a man in a fever. “I faint. I faint away. When I awaken, the devil is gone. My master… Lord Howell… is dead. He is dead. I crawl into a cupboard to hide — in case the devil comes back for me. I find a bottle and drink. I fall asleep and into this nightmare, from which Vicente cannot awaken.”

The Italian began to weep and smite his chest with his own hands. “I did not kill my master! I did not kill my master!”

Conan Doyle was listening intently and heard Vicente quickly mutter something that Wilde did not translate, but which made the Irishman visibly rock back.

“What did he say, Oscar? My Italian’s very limited. Something like: ‘I love my master’?”

Wilde hesitated before answering. Fidgeted. Shot his cuffs. Finally, he leaned close and spoke in a low whisper so the guards could not overhear. “Not precisely. He said he would not kill his master because… because he and Lord Howell were lovers.”

Conan Doyle sat in stunned silence, mouth agape. Finally, he swallowed and said, “Y-you’re quite sure, Oscar? You’re sure he meant—”

“I am quite sure, Arthur. I am quite sure he meant that he and Lord Howell were lovers in the manner of the ancient Greeks.”

Neither man spoke for a full minute. The only sound was the Italian’s soft weeping.

“Well,” Conan Doyle finally managed to say. “That explains why the wheels of British justice turned so quickly for once.”

“Yes,” Wilde agreed. “It simply wouldn’t do for it to become common knowledge that the war minister, a decorated hero of the Crimea, practiced the Uranian way of love. And, most unforgivably, with his valet, a man of the lower classes.”

Both looked up at the approaching tread of heavy feet. A group of sober-faced men crowded in through the cell door: Prison Warden Bland, a black frocked priest, Dr. Lamb, and two uniformed prison warders. It was a few minutes before nine. They had come for Vicente.

The hour of execution was nigh.

The young Italian saw them, too. Realizing that his death was but moments away, his face turned ghastly white. He pulled something from beneath the woolen blanket and stared at it for one last time: a square of folded paper and a small photograph. He kissed the photograph, muttering in Italian, and then looked up at Wilde with tears in his eyes and pressed them into his hands.

Wilde glanced at them: a photograph of a young woman, by resemblance a sister or cousin, along with a tightly folded letter damp with tears and tattered from many readings.

The valet muttered something to Wilde, and even though Conan Doyle could not completely understand the meaning, he fully understood the intent: the valet was pleading for Wilde to write to the woman in the photograph, informing her what had become of him.

“Gentlemen,” the prison warden announced. “The hour is at hand. Please go. We must make the prisoner ready to face his sentence.”

“I want to leave this wretched place at once,” Wilde said in a taut voice. “I do not wish to witness what is about to happen.”

“Nor I.”

But to their surprise, instead of returning to the front gate, the thuggish guard led them into an open quadrangle milling with newspaper men, civic officials, the idly curious, and, most shockingly, a few well-dressed society women, all attending on the pretense of fulfilling some form of civic duty in witnessing an execution, and not at all idle thrill seeking.

“You fail to understand,” Conan Doyle explained to the guard, “we wish only to leave.”

The guard did not attempt to conceal his amusement. “Too late to get squeamish now. The gates are locked. No one comes or goes until the execution is over.” He flashed them a Marquis de Sade grin. “Sorry, gents.”

Trapped.

“What in God’s name is that?” Wilde said, pointing at something.

The corner of the yard featured a strange construction with a steeply pitched roof complete with a glass skylight to allow daylight in. A low fence screened the lower half from view.

“The execution shed,” Conan Doyle answered. “It contains the gallows and the trap door.”

“Surely not?” Wilde said in a tone of utter revulsion. “It resembles a macabre Punch and Judy theater!”

The two friends were pinned against a wall, helpless to escape. The restive crowd fell silent as the condemned man, his arms pinioned at his sides, was led out onto the gallows platform. Dr. Lamb and a chaplain preceded the executioner, with Prison Warden Bland following at the rear. As the chaplain wobbled forward to give the prisoner last rites, he tripped and nearly sprawled full length.

“Wonderful,” Wilde said. “As at any good execution, the chaplain is drunk. Could this get any more delightful?”

The crowd of gentlemen began to push and jostle, subtly scrumming for a spot with the best view of the gallows.

An elderly man stepped to his right and Conan Doyle glimpsed the back of a head with long fiery red curls tumbling down about the shoulders. The redhead looked at something to his right and Conan Doyle instantly recognized the face. “That is the Marquess of Gravistock, Rufus DeVayne! He companioned the Prince of Wales to your play the other night.”

“Really? Are you sure?” Wilde said, squinting at the figure. “I doubt I would have forgotten meeting a youth so handsome.”

“You didn’t, Oscar. You were in your dressing room, sulking.”

“Ah, yes.” Wilde remembered, rather sourly.

A raffish young swell in a white silk topper also clapped eyes on the marquess and called out to him, “Rufus, you young fiend, is that you?”

The marquess turned to look and unleashed a wicked smile. “Hello, Bunky,” he replied. “It is I, manifested in the flesh.”

“What drags you from your rooms to this pest hole? Are you an enthusiast for executions?”

“Don’t be dull, Bunky. Everyone here is an enthusiast for executions, you included. I am here because a taste of death fires the blood. And in the hopes of gaining a trinket.” He flashed a pair of scissors. “I hope to snip a lock of hair, an earlobe, anything. Such talismans are imbued with great power.”

The young swell barked a laugh and said, “Just like at school. Still worshiping the devil, eh?”

“You’ve got it wrong, Bunky. It is he who worships me!”

The marquess seemed impervious to the scandalized stares launched at him by everyone within earshot of the remark. Conan Doyle harrumphed his disapproval and commented, “The young marquess seems rather a cad.”

But Oscar Wilde did not answer. He was staring fixedly at the young aristocrat in a pique of rapture.

On the gallows, the chaplain meandered to the end of his prayer and made a rather sloppy sign of absolution. Vicente was shuffled forward onto the trap by a warder gripping either arm. One dropped to his knees out of sight behind the wooden palisade as he bound the Italian’s ankles together.

“I refuse to witness this,” Wilde said, turning his face away.

The executioner stepped forward and drew a white hood over Vicente’s face, the fabric of which sucked in and out with each quickening breath. A warder handed the executioner the thick hawser with its heavy noose, and he slipped it over the young man’s head. Vicente’s knees visibly quivered as he took the weight of the rope.

The crowd’s subdued murmuring drained away. From somewhere, the execution bell began to toll the hour. Clong…

At the bell’s first strike, a flight of grubby pigeons burst up from the rooftops, wings creaking as they flapped around the courtyard, once, twice, three times, and then fled away.

… clong… clong…

The executioner gripped the long handle of the trap release.

… clong… clong…

Wilde’s head, against his volition, turned back to look.

… clong… clong… clong… clong. The bell tolled nine times and stilled. A resonating silence spread out in all directions.

The executioner yanked the handle, a catch released, and the double doors of the drop fell open with a guttural sound. Vicente seemed to hang suspended for a moment and then plummeted from view with a dreadful suddenness. The rope snapped taut and quivered with tension. All breath sucked from the crowd. Silence reigned. Some looked distraught. Some smiled. Others held a mystical look upon their faces, as if savoring the lingering taste of death.

A slow murmur began at the front of the crowd and swept back to where Conan Doyle and Wilde stood. For a moment they were puzzled, but then they understood why. The hanging rope was jerking from side to side and a sudden realization swept the crowd.

The executioner had botched the job.

The drop had not broken Vicente’s neck, and he was strangling to death. His muffled screams, though faint, rose from the drop pit. They continued for several long moments, the rope penduluming back and forth with its dread weight, until it shivered and stilled.

Conan Doyle’s mouth filmed with bile. The death had been neither clean nor instantaneous.

“Oh, badly done!” a voice chortled — unmistakably that of the marquess.

A chorus of boos went up, and suddenly apple cores, crumpled newspapers, and every missile that came to hand began to soar from the crowd, aimed at the bungling executioner. The chief warden, the executioner, and the prison guards cowered beneath the fusillade and looked from one to the other with dismay.

“I–I f-feel… r-rather… ill…” Wilde stammered out. His brow beaded with perspiration. His wan complexion had grown clammy and waxen.

“Take a deep breath. Fill your lungs. Breathe man, breathe!”

Wilde’s knees quivered. Conan Doyle gripped his friend by the arm and began to push him through the booing crowd toward an exit. The Scottish author was a large and strong man, but Wilde was over six foot and weighed several stone more. If the Irishman fainted in the press of the crowd, he would prove an immovable object.

“Come, Oscar. Keep walking. It’s just the shock. You’ll be all right. Breathe deep. Fill your lungs with—”

“Going dark… can’t see…”

“A few feet more,” Conan Doyle grunted through clenched teeth as he strained to hold his friend up. “Just a few feet more.”

“I f-fear…,” Wilde gasped, “… it. is… rather… too… laaaaaaaayyyte…”

Wilde’s knees buckled and he sagged to the ground, dragging Conan Doyle down with him.