David Dickinson - Death of a wine merchant

Powerscourt wondered if Colville had lost his voice. There was no reply, no response, nothing at all. Cosmo might as well have been a statue. Powerscourt pulled a book out of his pocket and began to read:

‘“He did not wear his scarlet coat,

For blood and wine are red,

And blood and wine were on his hands

When they found him with the dead,

The poor dead woman whom he loved,

And murdered in her bed.”’

‘This is an account of the last days and hours of a man called Charles Thomas Wooldridge, sometime Trooper of the Royal Horse Guards, executed HM Prison, Reading, Berkshire, 7th July 1896.’

Not a muscle moved in Cosmo’s face. Powerscourt read on until he came to the morning of the execution. In the corridor outside a group of prisoners were being escorted to some unknown destination.

‘“At six o’clock we cleaned our cells,

At seven all was still,

But the sough and swing of a mighty wing

The prison seemed to fill,

For the Lord of Death with icy breath

Had entered in to kill.”’

Even the Lord of Death drew no reaction from Cosmo Colville. Powerscourt saw that the prison warder had tiptoed right up to the door and seemed to be listening to the words.

‘“And as one sees most fearful things

In the crystal of a dream,

We saw the greasy hempen rope

Hooked to the blackened beam,

And heard the prayer the hangman’s snare

Strangled into a scream.”’

Still there was no reaction from Cosmo. The man must have a heart like a stone. There was one last passage Powerscourt hoped might draw out some reaction.

‘“The Warders strutted up and down,

And kept their herd of brutes,

Their uniforms were spick and span,

And they wore their Sunday suits,

But we knew the work they had been at,

By the quicklime on their boots.”’

The warder had opened the door a fraction to catch the end of the poem. Powerscourt carried on reading. Far off, deep inside the prison, a man was screaming.

‘“For where a grave had opened wide,

There was no grave at all:

Only a stretch of mud and sand

By the hideous prison-wall,

And a little heap of burning lime,

That the man should have his pall.”’

Powerscourt looked up again into the face of Cosmo Colville. There was nothing there, only a flicker in the eyes that might have been contempt. Cosmo moved his chair back from the table.

‘“For he has a pall, this wretched man,

Such as few men can claim:

Deep down below a prison-yard,

Naked for greater shame, He lies, with

fetters on each foot,

Wrapt in a sheet of flame!”’

Still there was no reaction from Cosmo. Powerscourt could have been reading from the Book of Job for all the impact he was having.

‘“And all the while the burning lime

Eats flesh and bone away,

It eats the brittle bone by night,

And the soft flesh by day,

It eats the flesh and bones by turns,

But it eats the heart alway.”’

‘Do you fancy that, Cosmo?’ Powerscourt asked suddenly. ‘The burning lime? Your soft flesh? Fetters on each foot?’

At last Cosmo Colville spoke for the first and last time between his arrest and his appearance in the Old Bailey. ‘That’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol ,’ he said, ‘by Oscar Wilde. I never liked the bugger when he was alive. I like the bugger even less now he’s dead.’ He rose from his chair and opened the door. The last words Powerscourt heard him say were: ‘Can I go back to my cell now, please?’

In his warehouse by the Thames the Alchemist was having a further wine tasting. He slid his special corkscrew down the side of three bottles of red with strange labels. He poured a small amount of liquid into three separate glasses on his table by the window. He tried each one carefully, leaving an interval of a couple of minutes between each tasting. He was humming the Overture from Cosi Fan Tutte as he worked. The Alchemist had tickets for Mozart’s opera in a couple of days’ time. It had always been one of his favourites. He made notes in his black book. BX LG68 AG15 was the winner of this particular session. Now the Alchemist would have to go to France to supervise the blending of this particular bastard and see that the barrels and the labels were properly French. He would also organize the shipping of the final consignment of phoney claret to its ultimate destination in London. The Alchemist had done this many times before. He still had some more pre-phylloxera wines to create. He hoped he could be back in time for the opera. And, as he contemplated his own cut from this consignment, he thought he might be able to buy a better seat. Maybe he would watch Fiordiligi and Dorabella and their lovers from the luxury of his very own box.

Emily Nash, daughter of Georgina and Willoughby Nash of Brympton Hall, was not a bad person. Certainly in the months leading up to her wedding she had behaved very well. Perhaps it would have been fairer to say she had behaved well most of the time. She may have been too romantic for her own good, Emily. She may have dreamed more often about glittering futures than was good for her. Her imagination may have run on champagne when it would have run better on old-fashioned Indian tea. But her impulses didn’t often win her over completely. Consider the case of her sick grandfather. This elderly gentleman had come to stay in his son’s house and fallen ill. After a couple of days his condition deteriorated and his relatives wondered if he would ever leave Brympton alive. A full-time nurse was hired to help look after him. When she disappeared Emily volunteered to take her place until a replacement could be found. The grandfather’s mind was going. His memory might be sharp in the morning and disappear after lunch. He was losing control of his limbs and his faculties. For a while Emily told herself how brave, how considerate she was being, a junior version of Florence Nightingale in the Fens. Her parents were proud of her when they could drag their attention away from the old man who had come to their house to die. They found little time to praise their daughter who was helping him live through the last days.

The replacement nurse was slow to arrive. Days passed. Emily’s mother helped out when she could but she had other duties to fulfil. Anyway, Georgina Nash reckoned, Emily was doing such a good job she hardly needed any help at all. For some people the mantle of heroine and martyr sits happiest when they are being praised and thanked by all around them. The praise and the thanks seemed to Emily to decrease as time went by. Sometimes her parents didn’t bother to thank her at all. She began to grow resentful, not towards her grandfather but towards her parents. She longed for her nursing days to finish so she could do something dramatic to celebrate her freedom.

The replacement nurse finally arrived. Almost at the same time her friend Tristram called, fresh from his duties as Colville representative in East Anglia. Tristram happened to have brought a number of samples of the firm’s finest with him. Emily longed for her freedom, for a gesture of independence. It came as the sun was setting over the North Sea, lying in a grassy hollow behind the beach, the second bottle of champagne wedged in Tristram’s boot.

Some weeks later she told her mother the results of her gesture of independence. She showed little remorse. If that first nurse hadn’t walked out, and if they hadn’t taken so long to find a replacement, Emily reasoned, then nothing like this would have happened. Georgina Nash thought about the girl’s options. She was deeply shocked but found it hard to be very cross with her daughter. Looking back, they should have taken more trouble to find a replacement nurse for her father-in-law. Secretly she was thrilled at the prospect of a grandchild. It would roll away the years, having a little one in the Hall again, playing hide and seek as the child grew older, Willoughby and the grooms teaching him or her to ride, floating on the lake in a boat in high summer with the dragonflies dancing on the water.