Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
Franco: I think I know how to fix Eric and Nikolett.
Colum: You do?
Franco: Good dick.
Colum: …
Colum: What?
Franco: That’s what fixed Juliette and Devon.
Colum: Is this conversation a way for you to compliment your own dick?
X avier leaned back, tired and vaguely wondering if he needed glasses because his eyes hurt.
“Alright there?” Colum asked from his spot at the small dining table.
“Would you want to fuck me if I was wearing glasses?” Xavier asked.
Annie snorted, while Colum self-consciously fiddled with his own glasses.
“Yes?” Colum’s inflection made it a question.
“Good.” Xavier pushed up off the couch where he’d been combing through the research materials Annie and Colum assigned him.
He’d failed at finding a clue in the manuscript, so they’d resorted to logic to figure out their next steps.
After going over every inch of the plaster skull, even reassembling it using museum putty to stick pieces back together, Annie agreed that there was no clue on or in the skull to point them to the next piece. He’d gone over the manuscript again, analyzing every word. But if Wilde had left a clue in those pages, the way he had in the first bit of the manuscript, Xavier couldn’t find it.
They’d resorted to research—going over everything that was known publicly about Wilde’s life, and using information in the manuscripts about Wilde’s acquaintances, to track his movements and make logical guesses about where he’d have gone next.
Logic is not half as useful as imagination, for it does not prove anything.
Xavier was sure, down to the marrow of his bones, that the answer wouldn’t lie in knowing who he visited for two days in 1883. The answer lay in knowing Wilde. In understanding a man who’d been unapologetically complicated, clever, and witty.
“Okay.” Annie sat back. “Let’s go over it again. The most likely location for future chunks of the manuscript is with people Wilde trusted.”
“But he wasn’t just handing it over,” Colum said. “The people he gave it to hid it. Who decided to put this piece in the skull? Wilde or Marie Prescott?”
“Wilde himself must have commissioned the painting, making sure the clues that led to Marie were included. And he knew as he was writing where she would hide it, which is why he underlined the text that obliquely mentioned her and a head,” Annie replied.
Colum pursed his lips, thinking. “The painting might have been retroactive. Maybe once he gave the next piece to Marie, who hid it in the skull, he went back to Dublin and had the painting made.”
Xavier smirked. “That makes sense, if you assume that Wilde didn’t trust people to be clever enough to follow the clue he left in the manuscript. He thought two clues were needed.”
Annie nodded slowly. “So our lack of clue might be because when he wrote this section, and when the skull was made, Wilde didn’t know who he would give the next piece to or where the next person he trusted would hide it.”
“Maybe our timeline is off, and this all happened later than we think, meaning, the reason Wilde didn’t come back to leave a clue was he was in prison. That was 1895.” Colum grimaced, shaking his head. “No, I think based on what he mentions, our timeline is right, so the next chunk was most likely written years before the trial and prison.”
Xavier’s head started to hurt as he listened to them.
“Let’s go back to Robbie Ross,” Annie said.
Xavier agreed that both logically and emotionally, Wilde would have trusted a piece of the manuscript to Robbie Ross, his lover and friend.
Colum sighed. “But where would Ross have been hiding it? The Rosses had property and interests all over the world. Ross’s father’s family is from Canada and had powerful political ties there. His mother’s family was French.”
Xavier went to look out the window. The view wasn’t world class, but it wasn’t terrible. He liked standing in the quiet and looking down on the hustle and bustle of the city.
“We can’t run all over the world based on hunches,” Annie said. “Our security team would have kittens.”
“The logical option would be to go to France, since that’s where Wilde died. And he called Ross to come to him right before his death,” Xavier countered.
“Where in France?” Annie asked. “Correct me if I’m wrong, Xavier, but it’s a big place, right? There’s that seaside village where he lived with Ross, the place in Paris where he died. The Ross family’s various properties all over the country…”
Xavier heard her but kept staring out the window, a strange new melancholy filling him, though he couldn’t tell why.
“That’s grand, then,” Colum said. “What if we go to London instead? Maybe he sent a piece to his sons. His great-great-grandson lives in London.”
“His sons were teenagers when he died,” Annie said, checking her notes. “So probably anything he sent would have been sent to his wife. Did he love and trust Constance?”
“Yes,” Xavier said, without turning from the window. “Wilde loved many people, including the woman he married.”
“Well, married legally, since he was already married by Masters’ Admiralty law,” Colum added.
Xavier went still. The hotel was in shadow, enough that the glass window acted like a faint mirror. Xavier transferred his attention from what he was seeing on the street to Annie’s and Colum’s reflections.
Wilde hadn’t tried to hide his relationships, much to his own detriment. Except for one. He’d never said anything publicly about his trinity marriage—Florence Balcombe and Bram Stoker.
The world thought Oscar loved Florence, but Florence chose Bram. The truth was that the three were married, but that relationship couldn’t be made public. Instead, Florence and Bram were legally married.
Xavier knew the real story of Wilde—including who he was trinity married to. That was one of the privileges of being a member of the same secret society that had caused Wilde such pain.
He’d always assumed that Wilde was angry with Florence and Bram for forcing him to play the bachelor. That, combined with Wilde’s own restless nature and need to love and be loved, had led to him leaving them and spending the rest of his life thumbing his nose at the Masters’ Admiralty.
But what if it was more than anger or spite?
Looking at the ghostly images of Annie and Colum, Xavier imagined them fading away, until he had nothing left of them but memories.
What if Wilde had truly loved his trinity, and no matter how many other people he found to love, Florence’s and Bram’s ghosts haunted him.
Xavier spun from the window, heading for his tablet.
“Xavier?” Annie asked.
He flapped a hand at her, flipping through the pictures of the pages from the Dublin piece of the manuscript. The real manuscript was carefully in its case at Colum’s elbow, but he wanted to move fast and wouldn’t risk damaging pages in his haste.
It took him ten minutes to confirm he was remembering it right, and then he raced over to snatch up Annie’s tablet, flipping through the images she’d taken of the New York pages.
Satisfaction slid through him, and he felt an almost audible click of pieces snapping together as he put down the tablet.
Annie and Colum were looking at him, both quiet and expectant.
“Florence and Bram,” Xavier said.
“His trinity,” Colum responded immediately.
“Wilde was bisexual. Xavier perched on the arm of the couch and facing them where they sat at the table. “Marriage to a man and a woman would have been perfect.”
“So why didn’t he stay?” Annie asked slowly, though the way she stared into middle distance told him she wasn’t really asking him, so much as she was posing the question to all of them.
“The story, at least within the Masters’ Admiralty, is that Wilde was upset when Bram and Florence decided to get legally married and live together as spouses, meaning, he’d have to be the bachelor and not live with them,” Colum added.
“You don’t agree,” Xavier said, hearing the doubt in Colum’s words.
“Do you know how close together they lived?” Colum said. “Stoker was born in Clontarf, but he lived on Kildare Street. That’s as close to Wilde’s childhood home as the archive was to Annie’s hotel.”
“That’s a ten-minute walk, fifteen if you’re strolling,” Annie added.
“So why didn’t he stay?” Colum said, repeating Annie’s question. “He could have lived as a bachelor and spent every day with his husband and wife. He could have bought a house next door and been a confirmed bachelor but had the benefit of romantic and sexual relationships with his secret spouses. No one would have questioned him spending time with them.”
“No,” Xavier agreed. “Especially if Bram and Florence started hosting salons. Wilde’s parents’ salons were famous. Known as cultural and scientific hubs where people came and went from their home regularly.”
“He and Stoker were friends at university,” Colum said. “Were recruited into the society together. And he and Florence had known each other since they were children. It wouldn’t have been hard to explain the friendship.”
“Still, if it were me, I’d feel like the odd man out,” Annie said. “That would hurt. I mean, I know that’s what trinities have done historically until very recently, when nontraditional relationships have become less scandalous.”
“Hurt enough that you’d run off and rarely, if ever, return to the city where you were born? Hurt enough to marry someone else?” Xavier asked, brows raised.
“No, that seems…extreme.” Annie was frowning. “He would have known when he joined there was a possibility that, in the eyes of the world, he would never marry.”
“But don’t you see? We’re trying to apply logic to a situation that is rooted in the heart. The soul.” Xavier splayed a hand over his own chest.
There was silence before Colum met his gaze. “They broke his heart.”
Xavier nodded slowly. “I think Florence did or said something that broke Oscar’s heart, and the broken heart is what drove him away.”
“Florence and Bram?”
“Just Florence,” Xavier said.
Annie sat back in her chair, an odd expression on her face. “Okay, let’s say I’m Florence.”
Xavier nodded, watching her carefully.
“I’m the daughter of a lieutenant in the British army. I grew up wealthy and well connected. Practical. Disciplined. Rule-oriented—don’t forget, she sued when an unauthorized movie version of Dracula was made. Somehow, I get recruited into the Masters’ Admiralty, and when I get placed in my arranged marriage, it’s to Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker. I know Oscar. I’ve known him since I was young. He’s smart, witty, charming, and doesn’t care what the world thinks.
“Then there’s Bram—also smart but quiet, thoughtful. Both men are clearly artists. They’re writers. Passionate about the theater.” Annie blew out a slow breath. “If it was me, in that time and place, with those men, I would have been worried. Very worried.”
“Worried about what?” Colum asked, but it was more of a prompt than a question.
“Worried someone would question the relationship,” Annie said. “That there would be rumors or whispers that would land the three of them in real trouble. Xavier mentioned Wilde’s parents’ salon, but Wilde’s father was a doctor and knighted for his work. His social standing protected the parents far more than Oscar’s or Bram’s as academics and writers would have protected them.”
Xavier nodded, glad to see Annie had followed his same train of thought. He clasped his hands, heart breaking for the man who’d been out of place in a world that couldn’t accept him. “Oscar didn’t leave because he was upset about not being the one to marry publicly. I think he left because Florence told him to. Told him he was too much—too radical, too outspoken. She told him to stay away.”
“Florence broke his heart and forced him to leave Dublin.” Colum sat back, eyes unfocused as he processed.
“She was trying to be logical and practical,” Annie said softly.
“In the first part of the manuscript, he’s vitriolic when speaking about her,” Xavier said. “But here, in this piece,” he motioned to the second part of the manuscript, currently weighed down to try to flatten the pages, “the tone is softer when he speaks about her.”
“He forgave her,” Annie said.
“Or he started to see she was right.” Colum pointed at the new chunk of manuscript. “Depending on when this was written, he may have already been getting in trouble with the British nobility.”
“If it was just her who told him to go, maybe Oscar sent a chunk of the manuscript to Bram.”
“We know Bram visited Oscar after he was released from prison,” Colum said. “But he never saw Florence again.”
“That we know of,” Xavier said. “But I think he loved them, always. I think, in the end, even with a broken heart, he would have trusted them. Trusted her .”
What Xavier didn’t tell them was he’d imagined it was them—that he, Annie, and Colum were in a trinity, and Annie told him to go away because it wasn’t safe. He would rage and fight, but he’d never be free of them. Xavier had known them only days—and Oscar had known Florence and Bram far longer than that before they were married—yet Xavier knew if he were in Oscar’s position, he would have come back to them in the end.
He would come home to them.
“Florence.” Colum started typing. “What happened to you and your people?”
Annie studied Xavier. “Was she afraid for herself, or was she afraid for Oscar?” Her gaze shifted to Colum. “She knew Oscar well enough to be scared that he was going to get in trouble for… What was it? Gross indecency?”
“Maybe she thought living too close to her and Bram would make it worse. That they’d get lazy and complacent within their trinity, and someone would catch the three of them together, or just Oscar and Bram together.”
Xavier tipped his head, considering. The revelation that he’d had at the window—Oscar’s change in tone regarding Florence, and that the Masters’ Admiralty’s explanation about why the trinity hadn’t stayed together didn’t fit—had hinged on Florence being practical and logical. But what Annie said felt right too. Maybe she’d looked at her husbands, seen that their minds and imaginations would change the world, and tried desperately to protect them.
Xavier came over, standing by Colum’s chair.
“Look up the Stokers’ movements,” he said softly.
It only took a few minutes before Colum made a sad little noise. “They followed him.” Colum pointed at the dates on the screen. After Wilde left Dublin for London, the Stokers had moved there too. Again and again, the Stokers’ movements mirrored Wilde’s. Not every one of them but enough it was clear they were trying to stay close to him.
“I wonder if she realized she’d broken his heart, when that was the last thing she wanted,” Annie murmured. “And I wonder where the Stokers’ things are…”
Colum rattled off the distressingly long list of Stoker descendants he’d researched.
“Guys, this might be it,” Annie said only minutes later. “Bram’s papers are all currently catalogued and held by museums, collectors, or descendants. But Bram and Florence’s great-niece on Florence’s side tried to auction off some of Florence Stoker’s personal effects and papers.” Annie kept typing and tapping even as she spoke. “According to this, all the major auction houses turned down the option to host an auction for Florence’s items, and she stated during the potential client interview that there was no one in the family who wanted Florence’s things either.”
“Did he forgive them?” Colum asked. “Enough to have sent or given them a piece of a manuscript that attacked the same society that married them?”
Xavier’s gut said yes, and right now, this felt like their best, their only, lead.
“Where?” Xavier demanded. “Where is the great-niece?”
“Dublin,” Annie said immediately. “She’s in Dublin.”
“Back to Dublin,” Colum said with satisfaction.
Xavier nodded but shared a look with Annie. Whoever was chasing the manuscript knew where the archive was and had attacked Colum there once already.
Suddenly, he sympathized with Florence. Because there wasn’t anything Xavier wouldn’t do to keep Colum and Annie safe.