Death of a Wine Merchant by David Dickinson Page A

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 poureda 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 Così 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