Free Oscar Wilde and the Nest of Vipers by Gyles Brandreth Page A

crise de nerfs that comes towards six o’clock unless a portion or two of pigeon pie and a plate of petits fours have been taken.’
    The prince laughed and smacked his thin lips. He drew slowly on his cigar – he smoked throughout our repast – and fixed Oscar with moist, bulbous eyes. ‘You are a funny man, Mr Wilde.’
    We ate at one end of a large dining table. Oscar and Arthur were seated to the right and left of the prince; Tyrwhitt Wilson, the equerry, and I, just beyond. The prince’s personal page – a boy with copper-coloured hair; Oscar says his name is Frank Watkins; he remembered him from the prince’s entourage at the reception in Grosvenor Square – waited exclusively upon His Royal Highness. The rest of us were looked after by a trio of straight-backed footmen who circled round and round the table with one dish after another, bobbing up and down before us, like wooden horses on a fairground carousel.
    ‘General Probyn is not here?’ enquired Conan Doyle.
    ‘He is at Sandringham,’ replied the prince. ‘I am allowed off the leash for a few weeks in March. I go to Paris and the French Riveria for a month or so while my wife visits her family in Denmark and our heroic comptroller stays in Norfolk. He is Capability Brown as well as Keeper of the Privy Purse. He is redesigning the gardens at Sandringham. Sir Dighton is an eager plantsman.’
    ‘Paris in the spring,’ murmured Oscar. ‘Nothing is more delightful.’
    ‘It’s my constitutional duty, Mr Wilde,’ said the prince sternly. ‘I merely do what Bagehot says I must.’
    ‘Ah!’ exclaimed Oscar. ‘The author of The English Constitution insists on Paris in the spring, does he, sir?’
    ‘Oh, yes,’ chuckled the prince, ‘followed by a few weeks en garçon along the coast between Nice and Monte Carlo.’
    Tyrwhitt Wilson piped up with a practised air: ‘Bagehot is very clear on the point: “The role of the heir apparent is to taste all the world and the glory of it, whatever is most attractive, whatever is most seductive.”’
    The prince beamed. ‘When Bagehot’s book appeared I gave the Queen a copy – specially bound.’
    ‘In fatted calf, I presume,’ said Oscar.
    The Prince of Wales banged the table with delight. ‘You are very funny, Mr Wilde,’ he wheezed, choking with laughter.
    As the feast was laid before us, and the page and footmen hovered close by, the conversation remained general – if dominated by Oscar and the heir apparent. They talked of motherhood and Balmoral deer pie, of Irving’s Macbeth and Mrs Langtry’s Rosalind, of Cannes in April and Cowes in August, of happiness and hysteria (the Prince of Wales acknowledges a strain of madness in his family), of the value of hypnosis and the place of history.
    ‘The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it,’ said Oscar.
    For an hour we ate and drank and made merry and then, at six o’clock, as clocks, both within the dining room and without, began to whirr and strike and chime,the waiting staff, taking their cue from the hour and a nod from Tyrwhitt Wilson, discreetly bowed themselves backwards out of the room. When they had gone, the prince’s equerry got to his feet and checked that the doors were securely closed. Once Wilson had resumed his place, silence fell.
    The Prince of Wales pushed his chair a little from the table and drew heavily on a newly lit cigar. ‘Well, gentlemen,’ he said, in a businesslike tone, ‘is it murder? Was my poor friend, Helen Albemarle, done to death?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Oscar, simply. ‘I believe so.’
    ‘Lord Yarborough thinks otherwise,’ said Conan Doyle.
    The prince raised an eyebrow. ‘The “psychiatrist”?’
    ‘He is also a physician – and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Lord Yarborough believes it was a heart attack.’
    ‘A heart attack?’
    ‘Myocardial infarction – a heart attack, possibly, but by no means certainly, provoked by sexual frenzy.’
    ‘Good God, man,’ cried the Prince of Wales,