Most Secret

by John Dickson Carr

  “I honour it and I cherish it, sir, with all my heart.”

  “Would ever Alan Kinsmere have behaved as you desired to behave? Would Alan Kinsmere have stooped oafishly to assault a dragoon captain and knock his head against the wall?”

  “My father, rot me? He’d have measured the jackanapes with a sword blade.”

  “But not, I think, for an offence which may only have been of accident or heedlessness? Never, never without just cause?”

  “No, never without just cause.”

  “Upon your father’s memory, my boy, will you give me a pledge to walk warily?”

  “Upon my father’s memory,” cried Kinsmere, lifting his hand to take the oath, “upon my father’s memory, damn me, I swear I will.”

  And he meant this, too, when he said it.

  “Well!” observed Mr. Stainley, and fetched up a deep sigh. “The rest must be left to fortune and to your own native good sense. There are some safeguards which God Himself must provide. I can’t provide ’em. Until nine o’clock this evening, then! Mr. Kinsmere, I bid you good day.”

  My grandfather was not altogether sorry to see him go, the little man walking with great precision and stateliness up that series of terraces, to hire a sedan chair at the entrance of York House. Kinsmere remembered that he had money in his pouch, which was a good thing; and that he was free of observation now, which was a better. Whistling, he set out on foot for Charing Cross, followed the crowd, and came presently to Whitehall Palace.

  Round the Palace Gate rose a great dust of commotion. And to his ears floated the music of fifes in a quick-step march. From the Horse Guards down the road a company of foot soldiery, flintlocks on their shoulders, swung out through King Street to the lilting clear fife music and a rattlety-tap of drums at every tread.

  Kinsmere thought them very fine indeed. He liked listening to music; he liked watching well-drilled troops; he wondered if it would repay trouble to follow them. But, since the press of people had elbowed him, almost through the Palace Gate, he decided to go in. And so, amiably sauntering, he entered the Great Court.

  “Now hang me,” he said to himself, “hang me, but this is rather a curious sort of palace, if in fact it is the palace?”

  For the place steamed with dirt and offal, as I have indicated at another time, and this Abram-seeming crew had scarcely the appearance of courtiers. But it was dinginess and splendour all jumbled together. Under the arches of a brick gallery you could see several great gilded coaches, and a number of private sedan chairs with varicoloured silk curtains. Over the way from the kitchens the noble spire of the Chapel Royal rose up high above a glow of stained-glass windows in the sun.

  “Come!” says Rowdy Kinsmere, to nobody in particular, “is this the palace?”

  A loud, hoarse, wheedling voice spoke somewhere behind him.

  “Attend to me!” cried the voice. “Oh, good gentlemen, oh, brave gentlemen, oh, all sharp wits and steely hearts of the true breed, do pray for sport’s sake attend to me!”

  My grandfather turned round.

  Bright sunlight streamed through a rain of soot flakes from the smoke of so many chimneys. Near the arches of the brick gallery, where the sunshine lay warmest, a greasy man with a pitted face stood leering and ducking his head. Round his neck, on leather straps, he carried a wooden board like a pieman’s tray. Several greasy playing cards lay on it. The man with the pockmarked face spoke as though to a multitude, though he addressed Kinsmere alone.

  “Behold,” he continued in a kind of passion. “Here’s the do; here’s the game; here’s the challenge. I vouchsafe this, for sport’s sake, at great risk of loss or beggary to a poor man. Yet I offer it, though it ruin me! And what is’t I offer?”

  “Well, my bucko? Eh, yes, halloa? What is’t you offer?”

  “Find the lady!”

  “Find the lady?”

  “Ay, in all conscience,” cried out the other, fixing Kinsmere with a hypnotic eye. “I have here three right royal cards.” And he snatched them up. “You mark ’em, brave sir? Knave of clubs, king of diamonds, queen of hearts? Queen of hearts above all: that’s the lady. They are put face down: in this fashion. They move, they mingle, they alter their places: so. Now I would hazard a sixpence … a shilling … ay, even the half of a crown piece … you can’t say which is the lady. Would you hazard this wager, most noble gentleman?”

  They were attracting some attention. Other ragtag figures had gathered round to stare. Up to the mountebank hurried a stout, blowsy girl with fixed smile and a leer of great would-be lewdness. Dirty, bepainted, in a battered straw hat and draggled finery, she edged between Kinsmere and the three-card man.

  “Oh, he would!” cried this newcomer. “He would, Tom, but you must not!”

  “I tell you, Chelsea Bess …”

  “Nay, Tom, you must not! ’Twould be no trick at all for him to find the lady. He’ll outwit you, Tom; you’ll starve!”

  And then another voice spoke.

  “Country bumpkins, it would seem, are come to town in great numbers.”

  My grandfather had never heard that voice before. Yet he almost guessed whose it was. He whipped round with greater quickness than he had turned the first time.

  Not far behind him, as though fated to be there from the first, stood the tall dragoon captain who had thumped him aside so unseeingly at York House.

  The captain still did not look at Kinsmere, or seem to look, though his eye may have strayed to the glitter of the big sapphire ring. On the coils of his periwig he wore a dragoon’s beaver hat with a flat plume round the brim. His nose was lifted above the thick upper lip, the narrow mouth, and the congealed sneer; he stared blankly, incuriously, above my grandfather’s head.

  An argument had burst out between the three-card man and the stout slut in the draggled finery.

  “What you say, Chelsea Bess, may be gospel truth …”

  “It is, Tom; I vow it is!”

  “Should he have a good eye, as no doubt he has, I venture much and rashly against a fine noble gentleman with a full purse. Still and all, Bess! ’Tis a short life, and what’s money? Then I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” declared this generous-minded mountebank, as though with sudden inspiration. “Shall it be a first wager of one shilling, now, to make a tack at finding the lady? What d’ye say, sir? Will you bet, sir?”

  “No,” replied Kinsmere, “I will not.”

  “You’ll not bet, by the Hilts?”

  “On all else, yes. On the lady, never again. At Pie Powder Court in Bristol, once, when half a dozen of us had spent fifty pounds in an endeavour to find that lady, we commenced to suspect something must be wrong. How we served the rogue who mulcted us, after he had been turned upside down and the coins shaken from his clothes, you will be spared the pain of hearing. Yet the lesson was a salutary one. By which I would intimate, good friend,” says my grandfather, “that the charitable offer on which you pride yourself can be little else save a bubble and a cheat.”

  The mountebank uttered a hoarse scream.

  “Bubble, is it? Cheat, is it? By the Hilts, Bess, here’s impudence! Tom o’ Bedlam am I, with my license under the hand and seal of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels to His Most Sacred Majesty. Tom o’ Bedlam am I, most honest of all the honest, who—”

  The dragoon captain spoke again, this time addressing the three-card man and the doxy.

  “Hold your clack, carrion,” he said in his harsh, bored voice. “Now be off, and no skreeking about it, lest I summon guards to take you in custody.”

  “Tom o’ Bedlam am I, by God’s death and Christ’s body, the most honest of all the honest …”

  “D’ye question my orders, fellow? Or you either, wench? Must I be at pains to repeat it? Go!”

  It completed their demoralization; both turned and fled.

  Now the captain faced towards my grandfather, but still would not look at him. In the sun-and-smoky courtyard, as antagonism flared, something sizzled between these two like a ma
tch to a powder train. The captain, nose higher still, kept his glazed little eye fixed at a point somewhere past Kinsmere’s shoulder. He spoke as though to an invisible third party.

  “Rogues and trulls of such kidney are not welcome at Whitehall Palace. But less welcome, it may be, are country bumpkins too grasping or cowardly to risk their poor shillings at a wager. Country bumpkins have no place in a world of fashion; they also had best begone too.”

  “Had they so? And who will compel this?”

  “They had best be off, I said. Country bumpkins must not threaten.”

  “Do you threaten, my bold dragoon?”

  “It is not needful”—still the captain addressed his invisible auditor—“to make threats against oafs and clods. Who threatens a poor blackbeetle in a kitchen? It is ignored, no more, until stamped upon and squashed. I have given myself the trouble to say: DEPART.”

  “And I am still here.”

  “If there be any poor clod who thinks himself jeered and insulted, who aches and burns to settle a score with his betters …”

  “Oh, come!” said Roderick Kinsmere, with a little pulse jigging in his arm. “You are the man desirous of trouble, my bucko. You will force a quarrel at any cost. Yet why should you wish this, against one you never saw before. Why?”

  “If there be any such lout, and he should have anything he would desire to say to me, let him walk quietly at my side and say it. Let him not raise hand like a stableboy; let him try to behave, though he can’t, as a gentleman might. Let him walk beside me, I repeat.” Then the bored voice grew louder and harsher. “This way. This way. This way!”

  IV

  FOR THE FIRST TIME the captain looked full at him, bending forward a little to do so. They measured each other. The glazed dark eye, the long nose, the thick upper lip to narrow mouth: all these, framed in the coils of a great periwig, were thrust almost into Kinsmere’s face.

  Then the captain, muscular and sneer-poised in his long red coat, baldric and rapier gleaming against it, lifted one shoulder and stalked carelessly towards the southeast part of the Great Court.

  At the southeast end of the courtyard an open passage—perhaps a dozen feet wide, with muddy cobblestones underfoot—stretched between blank walls towards the public water stairs above the Thames.

  On one side of this passage, your left as you entered it, ran the brick wall of the palace kitchens. On the other side rose up the stone wall of the Great Hall itself. It would be only an hour until midday-dinner time. Though no sound issued from the Great Hall, which they used as a playhouse, the whole length of the kitchens clanked and smoked at meal heat.

  After looking round sharply, as though to make sure they were unobserved, the captain led Kinsmere into this passage. It was gloomy here; gnats buzzed in their faces.

  And then:

  “Stop!” cries the captain, half wheeling.

  “With right good will,” says my grandfather. He halted with his back to the kitchen wall. “But how now, Bold Sir Captain and Cock of the Sneerers? Do you deign at length to mark the bumpkin’s existence? Hath it penetrated into your noodle that I am alive?”

  The other seemed almost convulsed.

  “Alive!” he repeated. “Alive! It breathes; it moves; it speaks almost intelligibly, as though the clod were a human being. Yes, poor bumpkin! You are in some sense alive, let’s allow, though for your insolence to me you are not like to remain alive. Now hearken well, good lout, while your betters shall put a question. You wear a sword, like so many who can’t use ’em. You wear a sword, but do you know swordplay?”

  “Yes. A little.”

  “‘A little,’ says he. A little!” Again the captain seemed almost convulsed. “Come, here’s a jest. Come, gods and omens of all this earth, here’s a jest most monstrous rich! Of swordplay, the lout saith, he knows a little. Ay, good bumpkin, I may guess how very little. And yet, if the thing can be managed discreetly or without noise, I may take pity. I may award you more honour than you deserve.”

  “More honour than I deserve? What honour?”

  “The honour,” retorted his companion, “to be spitted through the guts by my sword.”

  And he lunged forward, breathing hard in Kinsmere’s face. With his gloved left hand he pinned my grandfather’s right shoulder against the wall.

  “I address you, bumpkin,” he said loftily.

  “Remove your hand! Desist! Stand back!”

  “Have you ears, oaf? I said I address you!”

  “The words were heard. Will you remove that hand?”

  “I use my pleasure at all times.”

  “Do you so?”

  “Indeed I do,” said the captain, leering close.

  And that did it.

  “I have pledged myself to good deportment. I have sworn an oath to use civility towards all. And yet, by God, this goes something too far. For the last time, will you drop your hand?”

  “Ay, good zany. But I drop it, mark me, only the better to do this.”

  The captain’s left hand fell. His right hand, also gloved and its fingers open, he swung round savagely to whack Kinsmere across the side of the face.

  That blow never landed, being parried by an upflung left arm.

  Kinsmere’s left hand darted behind the captain’s back. His right hand shot out, fingers closing round the underside of his companion’s bony jaw. His hand cradled that jaw as a man nowadays might cradle a cricket ball. Bracing himself, settling a little with weight on his right foot, he opened both shoulders in a mighty throw.

  The captain, for all his muscular surefootedness, flew backwards across the passage as though caught beneath his jaw by the heaviest of all mallets they used at the game of pêle-mêle. The heels of his gambado boots made squashing noises on muddy cobblestones. His hat fell off. His back struck the wall of the Great Hall. His sword scabbard rattled as he sat down hard in mud.

  And Kinsmere, feeling a lightness in the legs as well as a great hollow inside his chest, swerved sideways with left hand dropped to sword hilt.

  “Shall we try,” says he, “how devilish little I know of swordplay? Lug out, Cock of the Sneerers, and we’ll despatch our business now.”

  Yet he scored very little of triumph.

  The other man rose up instantly, hat on again, all poise and menace, no whit of assurance lost. From the direction of the Thames, into which all the town’s refuse was emptied, a foul smell arose and blew through to poison the good steam of cooking.

  But it was the captain who held attention in that dim passage. Towering, formidable, his every movement betraying the expert swordsman without pity or bowels, he circled catlike against what light entered from the river end.

  “Lug out, you say?” His utter and low-voiced contempt was like a blow in itself. “Lug out, eh? Is that what you’d do?”

  “I said it, yes! Why not?”

  “With three royal edicts to forbid duelling, with the king as fixed against it as a man may be in this world, you’d provoke a brawl in the very premises of Whitehall Palace? Dog! Spawn of the dung heap! Draw but half an inch of iron from that scabbard there, and I will not even stir myself to spit at you. I will summon guards, as I would have done for the other scum, and have you clapped into a gatehouse gaol where you belong. And yet you need not think to escape me, oaf. You have jeered me, which is not done with impunity; you have dared to lay hand on me, which is not done at all …”

  “Now, damme,” says Kinsmere, “but what mighty grandee have I so offended? Who are you, bold fellow at employing your mouth? How do you call yourself?”

  “My name, oaf, concerns you not. My deeds shall concern you much. Are you acquainted with Leicester Fields?”

  “I saw Leicester Fields today.”

  The captain moved forward, facing Kinsmere with one shoulder lifted high and the gnats round his wig.

  “Leicester Fields, the north side towards the Dead Wall,” he said, “and the clump of trees within the gate? Eh, lout? There will be a moon this night. Shall we
meet there, eleven of the clock as men of breeding do, to settle the differences between us?”

  “Yes!”

  “You’d dare venture this, poor fellow?”

  “I would not miss it.”

  “There need be no seconds to fight beside us.” Here the captain all but spat in his face. “Shall I call my friends to meet the cattle you would bring, and demean myself before all? But ’twill not take long, I warrant. A pass or two, and I run you through the guts. Or, in meantime, should heart and courage fail together …”

  “A truce to boasting, Corporal Ninnyhammer,” snapped my grandfather. “Go on much more in this strain and, royal edict or no, there shall be a whack across your chops to make you lug out HERE.”

  “And if I shout for the Yeoman Ushers?”

  “Then shout, God damn you!”

  The captain opened his mouth; had he uttered a sound, Kinsmere would have sprung for his throat. Again hatred flared between these two, another lighted match to a powder train. For all this cavalryman’s disinterested manner, he had an almost maniacal light in his eye. Then both controlled themselves.

  “Shall we set the seal on our bargain, then?” jeered the captain, lifting his right shoulder still higher. ‘Tonight? Leicester Fields? Eleven o’clock?”

  “Tonight! Leicester Fields! Eleven o’clock!”

  “Through the guts you shall be punctured, mark me again. Through the guts you shall be punctured, and die slowly. I can trouble myself with you no longer until then.”

  The captain turned round. Dismissing all, contemptuous of all despite the mudstains on his coat and breeches, he marched straight and high-shouldered towards the water stairs. You heard the noise of his boots on the steps; then he was gone.

  “Young sir,” interposed a new voice, “may I beg the favour of a word with you?”

  In from the Great Court end of the passage, attempting a complicated kind of bow as he did so, lounged a burly, middle-sized, middle-aged man of remarkable ugliness.

  He had a portentous air and a rumbling voice. He was dressed in rich if slovenly fashion: plum-coloured velvet coat above wine-stained waistcoat of canary yellow, silk stockings, silver-buckled shoes, and a finely carved hilt to his rapier. The coils of his brown peruke enclosed a countenance high-coloured with tippling, battle, and hard weather. And the newcomer’s presence brought reassurance. Even his ugliness was of the fetching and engaging sort; it compelled your liking even as you grinned.