Читать книгу The Fatal Cup: Thomas Griffiths Wainewright and the strange deaths of his relations - John Price Williams - Страница 28

leave by the Commandant from February 11th, and should have returned by the 13th, but there was no sign of him.

By the 15th he was posted absent without leave, and ten days later Captain Galloway noted in his Return:2 “It is presumed some accident must have happened to him, as there has been no account whatsoever from him.” Captain Galloway was obviously taking a charitable view of the disappearance of his ensign.

But a month later Wainewright was still missing. The March Return pointed out that every effort had been made to trace him: “Ensign Wainewright was written to agreeable (sic) to the address he left, but no answer has been received; his friends were there written to, who stated they understood he was lying ill at Bath, but that as soon as certain information could be obtained I should be informed thereof.”

By the time Captain Galloway wrote this Wainewright had been missing for six weeks, and without a word of explanation. However grievous his illness, it seems that he had been able to let his friends know, but not his regiment. Was the illness a precursor of the “acute disease” as he called it, which was to attack him within a few months? It seems more likely, and more in character, that he had become so bored and restless that the idea of returning after leave to a soulless military life miles from his London haunts had become intolerable.

Oscar Wilde was to write much later that the “reckless dissipated life of his companions failed to

2. WO 17/291

THE FATAL CUP

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