The butler recognized his face, and before Arthur had a chance to speak, the man issued a polite, “Right this way, Dr. Doyle.

“Mr. Stoker has been expecting you,” added the butler for effect.

“Yet I suspect he’ll be disappointed when he finds me,” said Arthur.

The house was both dark and ornate. It received little light from the street outside, despite the fact that it was buttressed to the south by the open parks of the Royal Hospital. The windows were too small, thought Arthur, and there were not enough of them. The drawing room seemed sodden with a princely and expensive gloom. The golds and silvers of the exposed tea set were transmuted into bronze by the pervasive dim. The lush reds of the oil paintings on the wall were darkened into bloody browns.

As Bram turned from his desk, Arthur saw that he was in the midst of lighting his cigar. The match burst orange light into the room and then was squashed out quickly with a blow from Bram’s lips. Cigar smoke trailed into the darkness above.

“I don’t care what you have to tell me,” Arthur began. “I haven’t the faintest interest in knowing who killed Emily Davison.”

Bram simply stared.

“Very well,” he said at last. “Thank you for making me aware. But that’s not why I asked you here.”

“Oh,” was all Arthur managed in reply. It had not occurred to him that Bram could have asked him over to discuss anything other than the murders.

“Oscar is dead.”

It took Arthur a long moment to understand what Bram was saying.

“… Wilde?” asked Arthur lamely.

Bram nodded. Who else would it have been?

Arthur sat down on a plush chair. He allowed his body to tumble into it as if he were diving bottom-first off a cliff.

“Where?” he asked. “When?”

“Paris. Did you even know that’s where he’s been? I didn’t. He’s been two years in the Hôtel d’Alsace. I never sent him a letter, or even a bloody note. Did you? Well, no. Of course you didn’t. He died sometime yesterday. Florence, of all people, got a telegram this morning, and she informed me.” Bram sighed. “Since he was released from prison, we didn’t offer him so much as a kind word, did we? We left the poor chap to drink and bugger himself to death on the Continent.”

Arthur didn’t take kindly to the implied accusation in Bram’s tone.

“And what were we to do?” he said. “Oscar had…proclivities. He was drawn inexorably to sin. It is a tragedy that such a great man was brought so low by vice. But the villain here is the vice, not you and I.”

“Vice?” said Bram. “Do you think that’s what killed him? No. A vice is a thing which may be applauded in moderation but becomes horrific in overuse. Morphine is splendid by the ounce, but it’s a vice by the gallon. A healthy desire for one’s wife, that’s a virtue. But a compulsive desire for another, however… well, that’s a vice that will do a man ill.”

Bram looked Arthur dead in the eyes. Arthur wondered if he was referring to Jean, if Bram was judging him. Well, so what if he was?

“No,” Bram continued. “It wasn’t the vice that killed Oscar. It was the loneliness.”

“Do you remember that night we met, he and I?” said Arthur. “At that dinner in the Langham Hotel? Wait, no, you weren’t there. It was hosted by Joseph Stoddart, of Lippincott’s. Oscar was so deliriously funny, and he was a towering figure. It was a golden evening for me. Oscar told me he admired my work. Stoddart commissioned novels from us both, did you know that? On the same evening. Oscar wrote his Dorian Gray, and I wrote The Sign of the Four”

“And then,” added Bram, “he went to prison. And you to an audience with the queen. Oh, say, I’ve simply forgotten to ask-has your knighthood come through yet?”

“Look here, it’s not so simple as you make it seem, all right? It’s not as if they locked him up in jail over Dorian Gray, and it’s not as if The Sign of the Four were the proximate cause of this knighthood everyone says I should be expecting. There was a series of intermediate steps. We took two different paths, do you see?”

“Yes, Arthur. I do.”

The men sat in silence for long minutes as Bram puffed on his cigar and Arthur let his mind recede into the fantasia of recollection. With Oscar it was the dinners one remembered most. With some men it was the afternoons at sport or late nights before the brandy bottle. But Arthur would always remember Oscar at dinner. At the head of a long table, six guests laid out before him on either side of the centerpiece like wings. Every head turned to face him hungrily, waiting for the next jest, the next outrageous and delicious proclamation. Arthur would remember the words that Oscar spoke, but he would also remember the way that Oscar fed off the attention and the laughter. Oscar was merely witty oneon-one, but he was uproarious in a group of twelve. It was as if, for Oscar, if there were no audience, then it was not worth the effort to try.

“It’s getting dark,” said Bram suddenly.

Arthur had to admit that it was. Little remained of the sun’s light outside the windows. Bram stood and approached a small switch near the door. He flicked it upward, and the room exploded.

Or so it felt to Arthur, until his eyes adjusted to the searing glare. When the blinding whiteness had subsided and Arthur’s eyes began to perceive color again, he noticed that on the sconces of the walls beside him, and on the arms of the miniature chandelier above, were electric bulbs. The six-inch tubes of glass burned a light of such whiteness as Arthur had never before seen.

“Oh, have you not seen my lights yet?” said Bram. “I had these put in over the summer. You’ve seen the public ones they’re putting out on the streets, but these are smaller. For private use. Dreadfully expensive, I don’t mind telling you, but look at them! I feel like I’m blowing cigar smoke into the clouds of heaven itself!” To illustrate his point, Bram puffed a hearty cloud of smoke at one of the wall sconces. The smoke seemed to be incinerated by radiance.

Arthur blinked his eyes, trying to stamp out the red and orange spots he hallucinated before him. When he had done so and his vision was fully restored, he surveyed Bram’s drawing room again.

The colors were those of medieval pageantry. All red was pure red, and all blue was pure blue. The shadows of the chairs cut sharp black lines on the golden Persian rugs. All was clean, visible, and still. Arthur thought that the room used to look like a Michelangelo and now it more resembled a medieval panel work. The luscious and spooky graybrowns of gaslight chiaroscuro had been stripped clean off by the sharp razor of electricity.

“They are a marvel,” said Arthur. A twinge of hesitation remained in his throat.

“Quite,” said Bram. “And yet I hear it in your voice. Something bothers you about them.”

Arthur looked around and felt adrift in the nova glare of progress.

“I can’t explain it, precisely,” he said. “But they make me sad, somehow.”

“You feel it, too, then?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“It’s the end of an age,” said Bram. “And the beginning of a new one. The twentieth century. It sounds odd on the tongue, doesn’t it? The calendars have already changed. And now we’ve lost Oscar. Not even Victoria can last forever, though she’s certainly of a mind to try.”

“Hush! Don’t speak that way.”

“Oh, come now. Edward won’t be so bad. You wait and see.”

“Perhaps,” said Arthur, “what saddens me is not the passing of time but the curious sensation of being aware of it as it happens. We’re used to demarcating our histories in hindsight-we draw the lines afterward. It’s the scholars who separate one period from another. Did Constantine know that he was presiding over something more than the natural tumult of empire? Did Newton know that he’d arrived upon a wave of revolution, like Aphrodite on her clamshell? And moreover, did anyone else perceive the change in the air around them? Were they ‘self-aware,’ as we are?