The great man became animated; he sat higher in his chair. Dr. Tucker smiled in approval at his young protégée; this was exactly what he had hoped she would do—cheer up the patient by listening to him, encourage him, attend him with her eyes and ears.
“Now I remember! Yes, April Burke, she had dark eyes like Constance. Constance was my wife. Dark eyes like you. Yes, oh, I recall it all now.”
April Burke said, “Please tell me about her.”
I felt myself tremble; a sweat began cooling my hot neck. Her face seemed to be alight. Without yet knowing that I had done so, I had determined that this was the woman who would make me safe, who would make me aspire to—and reach—greatness.
Taking his hands back from the young woman's, Mr. Wilde spread them in an Italian gesture and began.
“When I met her, she had come down from Belfast, part of a troupe that played the cities and big towns for most of the year. I was barely twenty-one; I had been visiting my mother in Dublin and had gone to Jammet's Restaurant with two friends to eat snails. She came in—no, she entered; yes, “entered” is the word. She had the true gift of drama, which is knowing how to gain immediate and universal attention.
“Of the people with her, I recognized a fellow called Fallon, who introduced me to your grandmother and said, ‘This is Mrs. Burke. She is greater than Sarah Bernhardt.’ And, my dear child, she was enchanting. We spoke only for a moment, and yet for days I continued to think about her; and even though I do not wish to dwell upon this, she had something of Miss Bernhardt's background, or so it was said.”
Now more comfortable, he warmed up his story. It appears that he had continued to make inquiries about the beautiful actress for many years—and needed to, because her story had such strangeness in it.
April Burke the First (as Mr. Wilde now called her) had been born in County Limerick, along the river Shannon's banks in a place called Parteen. In those days, and indeed even in 1900, actresses often ranked no higher than courtesans. It seems that, with very considerable bravery, April Burke the First took her beauty to the stage, where she sang and danced in all manner of companies. Here, I shall try to replicate the richness of Mr. Wilde's narration as he told the grandmother's story to the unknowing but glowing granddaughter.
She had an elegance of movement; her walk was a glide. And being a gifted actress, she had the same elegance in her hands too, and her arms. She gestured much when she spoke, and her gestures added the commas and brackets to her physical conversation. I remember her eyes—so much like your eyes, child, that deep softness of brown velvet. She had a long nose, not so retroussé as yours, not so tip-tilted, and with not the same curve at the end of the nostrils. Her lips had some but not all of your voluptuousness. And she had your smile, a wonderful, curving slice of joy. Nothing pleases a man so much as a woman's smile, particularly if she wants something from him.
Next day, I wrote to this Mrs. Burke at the theater in which she was appearing. I had to leave for London, but my mail was being sent onward to me. For days, then weeks, I waited for the favor of a reply, but none came—an unthinkable matter in those days of good manners. My life naturally took me over, and even though I never forgot that luminescent encounter, I did not pursue her as actively as I wished I had done.
Some years later, I wrote a play in which she would have been perfectly suited—like you, child, she had the willowy height, the abundant hair, the force of presence. I made inquiries about this beautiful Mrs. Burke and found that, even though nobody could offer any proof of anything surrounding her, a tale had begun to grow up—a tale of passion and sorrow and lives interrupted and Life turned violently around.
It appears that her husband, Terence Burke, owned a large estate in Tipperary, a county with which, as with so many others, I am unfamiliar. Mr. Burke had fallen in love with his actress in a frightful village hall, where she performed extracts from Shakespeare. Smitten to his heart, Mr. Burke pursued her, taking his carriage across the country to see her every performance.
After many such journeys, over many months, she finally agreed to marry him—I am given to understand that the winning note was sounded when he promised to build a theater in his house for her. And he did—he built a fully equipped theater seating one hundred people. When the last nail had been hammered into place, Terence Burke made this beautiful woman his wife. Part of the marriage bargain was that she should return to the stage for some time.
But another part of her bargain with Mr. Burke said that after a number of years she would retire and have children. And she did retire, and I believe that a son was born—in the great house.
Now the story's thread begins to fray. As I have heard it, when Mrs. Burke concluded her confinement and when doctor and midwife pronounced her fit and well, her husband came to see her, to receive and admire his son and heir. She is said to have handed him the child in the confinement room, showed him also the nursery that had been prepared, and slipped quietly out of the room, never to return.
But I have also heard that before her husband came to see his son, Mrs. Burke had received, in conditions of great secrecy, another visitor. This person, a handsome lady, quite exotic, had bribed the midwife to permit her entry to the confinement room through the servants' quarters. And I have heard that, after exhibiting signs of great distress at this stranger's arrival, Mrs. Burke, the beautiful actress, crept away with this creature that night.
Mr. Burke, understandably distraught, arranged for a great hunt to be mounted. He called upon all his rich friends and they assembled militias of searchers, but the beautiful fugitive was never found. She had quite simply vanished.
Soon after, the unfortunate man, having lost his wife in the worst way of all—by which I mean, to circumstances that remained inexplicable— died of natural causes. He was found—I could not have written it better myself—on the stage of his own theater in his own castle; he had suffered an apoplexy. The child disappeared, and I have no knowledge of the estate's resolution; I heard that lawyers closed the house up after his death, and that it lies disused. I expect it has fallen into the hands of the probate courts. Which must be a shame—I recall hearing that the house may have been one of the most beautiful in Europe, and therefore in the world.
And that, child, is the story, as I know it, of the beautiful Mrs. Terence Burke. Indeed, I recalled the plight of her child when I was writing the character of Jack Worthing in The Importance of Being Earnest—Jack, you remember, was found in a handbag.
During this narrative the room had fallen still. Outside the window, the hooves of Paris clopped by; I could see a gaunt tree on which a few leaves continued to cling. My mind ricocheted between the young woman before me and the house whose enchanted turrets I had seen across the fields since my first awareness—a place that indeed lay disused and disputed. I longed to burst forward and tell how Tipperary Castle had been in my eyes since birth—but Mr. Wilde had grown tired. He sagged in his chair, and his hands dropped from the many operatic gestures which he had employed to tell the tale. His brain had not yet dulled, and he had one last—and, for me, consuming—thought to offer.
“Do you find it curious, child, that so much of you resembles the leading lady in this drama?”
Her eyes had never left Mr. Wilde's face. Of all the people there she had been the one most affected by what was narrated, and so had given Mr. Wilde the audience every man craves: a beautiful, attentive, and appreciative listener. She extracted herself from her reverie.
“Mr. Wilde, I am the only child of—” She paused, and her hands became a knot. “A man named Terence Burke. That is my father's name.”
“How old is your father?”
“I do not know.”
“How much do you know of his antecedents?”
“Very little.”
“Does not your mother know? I find women much more inquisitive about breeding.”
“She died when I was very young.”
“Then, dear child, might it not be the case that you are the sole hei
r to a great Irish estate? A mixed blessing, perhaps?”
Like the novels of the nineteenth century, Victorian Ireland abounded with spectacular tales of crazy inheritance. They were crazed by the law and its labyrinthine complications; crazed by the disputes of politics; crazed by estates left aslant and unused when their bachelor owners failed to return from a war or two; crazed by medieval practices such as “entail”—a law under which women had no right to inherit.
Tipperary Castle, as Oscar Wilde sensed, had all the potential for intrigue. He was a dramatist by profession, and therefore needed no proof that the girl sitting before him was the granddaughter of the vanished actress.
But who, if anyone, had inherited the place? Did those who reared or represented the infant Terence Burke ever attempt to recover the inheritance? Even if they knew of it, who would have taken on such a task, given the news in Ireland? Assassinations, cudgelings, fires, boycotts— every possible means had been tried to intimidate the English landlords.
And for those who chose not to live among such risks, it grew even worse. When absentees failed, year after year, to return for any length of residency, their hold on their properties became less and less secure. Soon their great houses stood hollow and all but abandoned. The law was supposed to help, as were the authorities. But when a neighbor allowed his goats or cattle to slip through unkept fences in order to graze bigger fields, no amount of law helped.
Estates fell down. Local merrymakers broke into the empty big houses. They danced in the hollow-sounding ballrooms. They disported themselves upon the furniture. They poked fun at the marble and bronze statues. They defaced the paintings that still hung on the walls. Therefore it could not be surprising if nobody had spoken up for the infant Terence Burke when he reached an age at which he could inherit.
Mr. O'Brien admits that he didn't intervene during Oscar Wilde's tale. He had enough on his plate. Perhaps he was still embarrassed over the spilled medicine. Also, he was being smitten by April Burke. And he surely knew or sensed that his distinguished patient was near to death and that he had failed to help him. Without question, however, the O'Brien family must have known a great deal about Tipperary Castle and must have spent years speculating upon its future; they were the estate's closest neighbors.
On Saturday morning, the first of December, I was sitting in the Café Beauregard, near the Pont-Saint-Michel, when the word came in that Mr. Wilde had died. This gave me the opportunity that I had so far been denied; I had gone back to the Hôtel d'Alsace, had not dared to go in, and had lurked about in the hope that I might meet April Burke again, but I never saw her.
When I announced in the café that I had known Mr. Wilde, and indeed had been one of the médecins attending him, I became the center of attention. Through this celebrity I gained much free coffee and cognac; more crucially, I gathered the details that, following a Requiem Mass in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, my beloved patient would be buried in the cemetery at Bagneux.
I attended both. The Mass was said by a fellow-Irishman, a priest from Dublin, a Father Dunne, but I saw no sign in the church of April Burke. Nor did I see Dr. Tucker. Four carriages followed the hearse; since the first appeared overcrowded, I assessed the second. It seemed to have been allocated to the clergy, which consisted of the priest and an altarboy. This left plenty of room for me, and my tragic expression easily got me on board.
I rode to Bagneux in a silence that Father Dunne must have taken for grief; and the priest, though he looked at me sharply, asked no question. Far from grief, however, I was obsessed with the prospect that I might meet April again, and consumed with anxiety as to what I must do should she not be there.
She was there! Much credit falls to her and Dr. Tucker that they did not take part in the unseemly wrestlings by the graveside. Several gentlemen attempted to gain the frontmost position at the prayers over the coffin—one dandy almost fell into the grave—and some time elapsed before order could be restored.
I watched April and her conduct. Standing a little way back from the main press of people, she wore a long black coat and had some white lace at her throat; her hat, small and shapely, served to heighten her beauty, especially as its veil did not quite cover her face. She behaved demurely, with downcast eyes and hands appropriately clasped.
When the funeral ended, the mourners dispersed loosely and moved along the narrow rows of graves to the gates. I walked too, watching for a chance to speak to Miss Burke.
The carriage in which she and Dr. Tucker had come to the funeral stood a little distance away from the others. Someone claimed Dr. Tucker's attention for a moment and April strode on. This gave me an opportunity; I walked briskly after her. When I drew level, she glanced at me and started.
“Oh, I thought you were Dr. Tucker.”
I said, “My pathway never formalized my medical skills. But you and I have been in the same sick-room.”
She stopped. “Have we?” She lifted her veil to look at me.
“Mr. Wilde was my patient—I am grieving for him.”
April then jumped back from me by two or three feet.
“But you're O'Brien? The quack?”
“Yes. No.”
The fact that she had stepped back enabled me to take a fully close view of her face. Tall and glorious, she seemed to me perfect—an improvement on Mr. Wilde's laudatory description of her grandmother the vanished actress.
“I have great skills as an herbalist.”
“I do not wish to associate with you.”
“Mr. Wilde liked me.”
“You must excuse me—”
“I have never seen a creature as beautiful as you,” I began, in a speech that I had prepared. “I have seen butterflies, I have seen kingfishers, I have seen hummingbirds—”
“Please go away from me,” she said.
“May I see you one day? May I walk with you in the Champs-Élysées?”
“No. Please—I must go.”
She had more maturity and firmness than I could have expected—a great deal more composure than I'd had at eighteen.
Walking after her, I declaimed, “My name is Charles O'Brien. I am a rounded Irishman in that, by virtue of my birth, I am welcome among the aristocracy and the peasantry, and I know not which I prefer. I delight in the Ascendancy's taste, and I thrill to the common people's wit. Surely I can be of use to you in your retrieval of your ancestral home—a place which I have known since I was born? My family, madam—we live beside it.”
She said, without turning around, “Shall I have truck with a fortune-hunter? No. And sir, your clothing—it is, it is—unclean.”
“I have been in mourning for Mr. Wilde and neglected to take care of my linen.”
“I must go.”
“I heard Mr. Wilde's story of your grandmother.” My foot caught the edge of a grave, and I almost fell.
“What makes you think I will try to recover that estate?”
“All beautiful women need property—they must have something other than themselves to decorate.”
“Sir, now you try to ape poor Mr. Wilde. You dismay me.”
She reached her carriage and climbed in; I stood by, not knowing what to do. Behind me I heard the patter of footsteps, and then Dr. Tucker walked past me, looking at me sidelong all the while but never raising his hat to me. When he too had clambered into the carriage, the coachman immediately drove away.
I was still in possession of considerable funds from a card game that I had lately entered in Pigalle, so I prevailed upon the carriage with Father Dunne and the altar-boy to go back into Paris by means of the same route. From time to time I glanced ahead out of the window and eventually, at the corner of the Rue Seminole, I saw Dr. Tucker's carriage turn and stop. The two occupants emerged and climbed the steps to one of the distinguished houses, where Dr. Tucker used a key—I had found where she lived!
That night at dinner, I pondered the events of the day and consequently drank too much wine. I had genuinely liked Mr. Wilde, and I also knew that
this young woman had captivated me—in the fullest sense of that word, she had taken me captive. My room on the Rue du Bac looked out on the street, and after dinner I sat at my window.
As the wine wore off I began to weep—at the puzzle of the thing, at the insult. I have never borne malice to another human, I have never willfully attempted to do anything but be helpful and considerate—and tell the truth. But I had somehow, it seems, gathered an offensive reputation in her eyes, and I knew not why.
When I had wiped away my tears and recovered from my loneliness, I found courage. I told myself that I would pursue April Burke diligently until she acquired the sense and understanding to soften toward me. And that night I wrote the tale to Lady Mollie, who understands and admires passion, and who would surely counsel me.
The Wilde funeral became notorious. As Mr. O'Brien describes, men wrestled for prominence in the cemetery at Bagneux. This was a less than prestigious burial—but better than it might have been. Oscar Wilde had committed an offense under French law by registering in a false name at the Hôtel d'Alsace. In fear of taunts and abuse he had been wandering Europe as “Sebastian Melmoth.”
He died of encephalitic meningitis (although some insist that he had syphilis). And he died as he had lived—beyond his means (as he said), much loved, and in conflict. He told a journalist friend that he and the wallpaper were “fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.”
Oscar's rooms in the Hôtel d'Alsace had become a combination of debtors' prison and shrine; he owed money everywhere. But, as ever, he also attracted unsought acts of kindness. The hotel's proprietor, Jean Dupoirier, without Oscar's knowledge, and aware that the writer was dying, gave substantial credit. In today's terms the bill ran into thousands, and Dupoirier personally ordered extra luxuries, and such medicines and liniments as Dr. Tucker wished to see be employed. Dupoirier's kitchen, as with so many small hotels in Paris, was not equipped for anything more substantial than breakfast, so the hotelier also paid for the meals that were brought in every day from nearby restaurants—they were ordered regardless of costs, and for all Oscar's friends too.