“I’d not trouble you, Dick,” he growled. “Or your lady either. But there’s a council o’ war here, for your benefit.”
“Yes. Go!” urged Caroline breathlessly. She turned away, and then turned back again. “But might I,” she looked at Darwent, “might I be present?”
“My lady,” said Mr. Mulberry, with the corners of his mouth drawn down, “you’ve been uncommon kind to us. But there’s a time for women, and there’s a time for reasonable talk. They don’t mix.”
“If my wife does not accompany me,” Darwent replied mildly, “I am in no mood for your talk.”
Mr. Mulberry, about to burst, out, restrained himself with some mutter about women, and stepped aside. Caroline preceded Darwent into the dining room.
“And now, lad,” grunted Mr. Mulberry, “greet a second friend of yours.”
The large, lofty dining room, its front windows facing on the square like those of the green drawing room above, was paneled in a strong, light wood colored only by the tan of age. A very long table of polished mahogany gleamed against the Turkey carpet.
Mr. Mulberry, like other relicts of the eighteenth century, sneered with violence at the modern breakfast of 1815: “tea and toast, devil take me!” From the sideboard he had removed two large silver platters, one containing a cold ham and the other a cold joint of beef, which he had put on the table beside a delicate glass punch bowl filled with ale.
He sat at the head of the table, before a heaped plate. On the far side, at about the middle, sat the Rev. Horace Cotton, Ordinary of Newgate.
“Padre!” exclaimed Darwent.
The Rev. Horace, large and rosy-faced, surged up beaming from the other side of the table. Though he did not now wear gown and bands, and was clad in shabby gray clothes with a black waistcoat, still he was as obviously a clergyman as he was a gentleman.
“My lord,” said the Rev. Horace, hastening round the table as Darwent hurried forward with extended hand, “I rejoice to see you freed and happy.”
Abruptly the clergyman paused. His large blue eyes clouded.
“That is to say,” he amended, “I trust there is no … contretemps. Our friend Mulberry’s message was so urgent that I demanded leave of absence from my duties.”
“I have been free,” said Darwent, clenching his fists, “for less than twenty-four hours.” Visions of past horrors rose up. “They can’t drag me back, can they?” He looked at Mulberry. “What do you tell me of arrest and a return to Newgate?”
“Gently, lad! I said we’d spike his guns.”
“Whose guns?”
“Your enemy’s,” retorted Mr. Mulberry. “Your secret enemy’s.”
While he was speaking, the lawyer stood at the head of the table, cutting slices of ham and beef with a large bone-handled carving knife, and tipping them into an extra plate. He did not touch the large bowl of fruit near the ale bowl.
Caroline, with tact, had ordered that no servant should enter the room. Quietly, unnoticed, she slipped into a chair at the opposite end of the table from Mr. Mulberry. The Rev. Horace Cotton, after a still-dubious glance at Caroline, resumed his seat. Darwent sat down opposite the clergyman.
“Buckstone!” sneered Mr. Mulberry, puffing put his thick lips. “Buckstone’s not your secret enemy, and has no connection with the plot against you. Your lady there,”—he pointed at Caroline with the carving knife—“she’s not your secret enemy, and she’s got no connection with the plot either.”
Having filled the plate, Mr. Mulberry sent it spinning across the polished mahogany to Darwent. A knife and a two-pronged fork clattered after it. Dipping a deep glass into the punch bowl, and scooping it up full of ale, he sent that spinning wet and splashing into Darwent’s hand.
Any conscientious footman would have swooned away. But the fastidious, delicate Caroline only smiled and did not appear to notice.
Darwent—as the Rev. Horace Cotton observed—gave her a quick speculative glance.”
“But what’s the charge against me?” demanded Darwent. “What does it concern?”
“The murder of Lord Francis Orford.”
Every time that name was mentioned, the image of Frank’s long-nosed dead face seemed to leer among them like a satyr.
“But I’ve been tried and acquitted of that! Can I be tried again?”
Mr. Mulberry ignored this.
“Dick,” he said, meditatively tapping the carving knife on the cold beef, “about the real story of the murder. Did you ever tell the real story to anybody except this reverend gentleman and me?”
“No. Never.”
“Ay; well. Do you recollect, at Newgate, a turnkey named Blazes? A man who’d sell his soul for money? Could he have overheard it while you were telling the parson in the condemned cell?”
“I was not—myself. I don’t recollect.”
“I recollect,” interposed the Rev. Horace firmly, and put down his knife and fork. “Come, my lord! When you were in the very middle of your story, the man Blazes came pounding and even kicking (kicking, mark it) at the cell door, as though to say, ‘I have just arrived.’ Could he not have heard you through the grill in the door?”
“Yes. He could have.”
“And think again, my lord! He came there pounding and kicking to announce visitors. But he was an unconscionably long time in fetching the visitors, merely from the Chief Turnkey’s lodgings. He could have overheard, my lord.”
“In fact,” said Mr. Mulberry, “he did. Can ye guess where I was last night?”
“Getting drunk, I have no doubt,” observed the clergyman.
Mr. Mulberry was not in the least disturbed.
“Ay; well; true enough. I was at Tom Cribb’s public house, as drunk as a Dutchman. But who should turn up there? Blazes. And who, damme, should be sitting in the next booth to mine? Sir John Buckstone.”
“Buckstone!” exclaimed Darwent, half getting up.
“Be silent, lad,” the slovenly lawyer said magniloquently, “and attend to your betters!”
Darwent sat down.
“Dick, in half a minute I was as sober as an ostler with his head under a pump. Blazes, d’ye see, wrote Buckstone a letter in the hope of a sovereign or a good deal more. From the half-dozen words Blazes does leer out … well, he knows the true story.
“And what does Sir High-and-Mighty John Buckstone say?” inquired Mr. Mulberry, scooping his own glass into the ale bowl and tipping off a bumper at a draught. “Why, I’ll tell you. ‘Not interested,’ says he; I propose to kill the swine in a duel tomorrow morning.’ And he calls for pen and ink. ‘However,’ says he, ‘in case I’m a bit out and only mangle him, here’s the name of a gentleman who will be interested.’ And he writes name and address on a piece of paper.”
“Did you see the name and address?”
“And betray meself? No?”
“Then—what?”
“Says Blazes to Sir High-and-Mighty, in a whispery voice, ‘Has he got the rhino?’ Well! ‘It’s a fashionable address, ain’t it?’ says Sir John Buckstone; ‘won’t he be bound to have money?’ And Blazes goes away. Mind, we don’t know he went to that address. Still, Dick: that’s the enemy.”
“But what can the enemy do to me?”
Again Mr. Mulberry ignored the question. His mouth was bitter.
“Yesterday, Dick, I told you I should have seen the evidence you were innocent and saved you at your first trial—if I hadn’t been as drunk as a fiddler’s bitch? Did you think I was maundering?”
“I didn’t know what to think!”
“Ay; well; shall I prove it now?”
“Yes! If you can.”
A stronger tension had invaded the light-paneled dining room; behind Mr. Mulberry, the two high windows, curtained in heavy russet velvet, grew darker with coming rain. Dipping again into the ale bowl, Mr. Mulberry drank the next bumper fairly slowly, and wiped his mouth with the end of his neckcloth.
Then he plumped down in his chair, pointing the carving knife at Darwent.
“Dick, cast your mind back to the morning of May the sixth. When you woke up (eh?) and found yourself flat on your back in Carter Lane near your fencing school. Your head nigh split, and against a pile of stones. And Orford dead as mutton in front of you.”
“I can remember,” Darwent said grimly.
“Dick, how was that lane paved?”
“It was not paved at all. It was mud only half dry, as I told you and the Padre! The mud stuck to the back of my clothes.”
“Ah!” said Mr. Mulberry, pouncing with the carving knife. “And d’ye recollect another circumstance you observed? About Frank Orford’s top boots?”
The Rev. Horace Cotton cleared his throat.
“I recollect,” he said, with a faint dawn of understanding in his eyes. “Lord Francis Orford, like Mr. George Brummell, blacked and polished even the soles of his boots. The soles were clean and shining.”
Darwent started to get up from the table, but sat down again.
“Ergo,” pounced Mr. Mulberry, “Frank Orford never fought a duel in that muddy lane. He never even walked the five yards from the door of your fencing school. No! He was carried there, no doubt in a coach, and flung down with a sword in his hand. —Stop!”
Here Mr. Mulberry held up the carving knife and leered.
“Will they say, Dick,” he asked, “that you killed him nonetheless? That you carried him from your own door? I think not. Your own shoes were clean too, as you said. Ergo, both of you were carried there. I’ve got three witnesses, now, to testify to it. Damme, a jury would have seen the jape in five minutes.”
Darwent, throat constricted, swallowed down his glass of ale as though to attain clear speech.
“And all that time,” he said bitterly, “it never occurred to me that …”
“With a cracked skull and a half-rocked mind, lad? No.”
“And that’s the defense?”
“The defense?” scoffed Mr. Mulberry. “Why, Dick, that’s only the first step in the defense.”
“As—how?”
“Didn’t I say yesterday,” demanded Mr. Mulberry, “I could explain your cursed mystery? Except that I couldn’t put a name to the murderer, and I had to guess at one or two details. Ay; I did. But you were too concerned about a wench to heed me. Well! I needn’t guess at details now. I’ve got proof.”
“Proof? Who supplied it?”
“You did, Dick.”
For the first time Darwent became aware of what lay, soiled and drink-splashed, on the table near Mulberry’s left hand. He saw the three closely written sheets of the letter he himself had written to the lawyer, describing every event of yesterday’s late afternoon and evening, and sent off by hand from Stephen’s last night.
“Oh, it’s here,” said Mr. Mulberry, tapping the letter with his left hand while he pointed the carving knife with his right. “Cast your mind back to this mummer’s tale of the blue coach and Frank Orford skewered to a chair in the mysterious house. Now what’s the first question you’ve always asked me about that?”
“Speak up, lad, and shame the devil! What’s the first question?”
“Well, why was I abducted? Why did they take me there? What did they want of me?”
“Why, lad,” Mr. Mulberry replied coolly, “they didn’t want you. Have you forgotten a gentleman named Tillotson Lewis?”
“Tillotson Lewis?”
“Come, now! You walk into White’s Club; you see him; both of you feel you half ought to recognize each other. A minute later, Sir John Bloody Buckstone cries out with, ‘No, you’re not Lewis; for a second I thought you were.’ Dick, Dick! It’s because you look like each other.”
Mr. Mulberry, his upthrust gray hair a war crest against the gray window, waggled the carving knife.
“I doubt, mind you,” he added sharply, “if it’s more than a slight resemblance. ’Twouldn’t, if you ask Bert Mulberry, stand up against strong daylight or an eye that knew you both. But the driver of the blue coach, in dim light, wanted Tillotson Lewis. He got the wrong man.”
Darwent, with a fierce gesture, pushed back his chair from the table.
“You’ll serve nobody,” roared Mr. Mulberry, “if you rave like a Bedlamite now.” Scooping up two more glasses of ale from the bowl, he drank them quickly without troubling to wipe his mouth or the table. “It was plain to Bert Mulberry, as plain as the beak on Old Hookey’s face,”—this regrettable allusion to the Duke of Wellington caused the clergyman to quiver—“there’s been a mistake between two men. This letter accounts for it. What else d’ye know of Tillotson Lewis, Dick?”
Darwent, standing behind the chair and gripping its back, shook his head.
“Only the little I wrote you. Mrs. Bang said he was ‘a fine young gentleman,’ in somewhat indigent circumstances.”
“Indigent, eh?” chuckled Mr. Mulberry. Out darted the gleam of the carving knife. “What’s your next question about the mystery, Dick?”
“Well, what was the reason for all the mummery?”
“Gently, Dick! Bit by bit!”
“Why was Frank alone in a big closed-up house? Why was he sitting there, in a dressing gown, behind a tortoise-shell wood writing desk in the middle of the room—yes, and with a black silk mask in front of him!—as though he were waiting for someone?”
“Ah!” said Mr. Mulberry. “You shall answer for yourself, Dick.”
“But I can’t answer it!”
“Ye lie!” proclaimed Mr. Mulberry, who had taken half a gallon of strong ale for breakfast. “There’s the matter that caught my attention, as I daresay it did the Padre’s: viz.,” said Mr. Mulberry, “who puts a writing desk in the middle of a room?”
“Man, I don’t understand you!”
“It’s as simple as kiss-your-hand. Answer the question, and you have the key to all. Come! Think of it, now!”
Bending forward, he sighted along the carving knife.
“Who puts a writing desk,” he repeated, “in the middle of a room?”
Chapter XIII
Reveals a Secret of the Lost House
DARWENT LOOKED DOWN ACROSS the table into the eyes of The Rev. Horace Cotton. And the clergyman nodded, as though he knew this part of the story only too well; and Darwent recognized that he was deadly in earnest.
Glancing sideways at Caroline, whom the other two men had forgotten, he saw that her head was lowered. Her elbows were on the table, fingers pressed over her ears. A woman should not have been here at all.
But writing desks? All that would shape its image in Darwent’s mind was the picture of Sir John Buckstone, sitting at an inlaid gilt-and-mahogany desk against the wall in the back parlor at White’s. And this suddenly opened other thoughts.
“I can’t remember,” said Darwent, “that I ever saw a writing desk in the middle of a room. It’s always been against the wall. Except, of course …”
“Except?” prompted Mr. Mulberry, with ghoulish eagerness.
“Except in countinghouses or an office of business. A City merchant’s, for instance.”
Mr. Mulberry rose to his feet behind the table.
“Well!” he said. “Lord Francis Orford was a merchant.”
A stifled protest from Caroline, who was apparently scandalized at this suggestion, went unheeded.
“A merchant?” repeated Darwent, not in the least scandalized but much amazed. “Frank? What did he deal in?”
“Come!” sneered Mr. Mulberry, and snapped the fingers of his left hand. “Here’s a young man, by your own deposition, so stingy he can’t bear to part with a penny. He’s rich in his own right; but he loves money as Jove loved wenches or I love Blue Ruin. He has relations in England, ay; but his hoity-toity parents, who fear scandal as they fear the devil—”
“Caro … my wife told me that,” muttered Darwent.
“His parents, I say, have lived for more than two years abroad and can’t keep an eye on him. Damme, what would he do? What was he?”
“Well, what was he?”
; “He was a moneylender,” retorted Mr. Mulberry, and drove the carving knife so deeply into the joint of beef that the knife handle stood upright.
It was as though he had stabbed a living person, to judge by Caroline’s look.
“A most despised trade, eh?” grinned Mr. Mulberry. “That is, among the dandy-lions and nobs? Who borrow and borrow, men and women alike, fit for people in a lunatic hospital, but won’t ever own they’re in debt or to whom? Eh, Dick?”
“So I heard yesterday at White’s, yes. But Frank …!”
“What a scandal! Eh, Dick?”
“Mr. Mulberry,” interposed Caroline, softly but with authority.
Her fingers, spread out on the polished mahogany, looked white and delicate. But the old arrogance touched her features, chilling them, as she lifted her head.
“I fear sir, that what you suggest is so ridiculous you had best not repeat it elsewhere. Even now some corrective action may have to be taken.”
For the first time the Rev. Horace turned his eyes on her fully.
“And I fear, my lady,” said the clergyman, “that what Mr. Mulberry states is all too true.”
“You say this, Mr. Cotton?”
“I say it, my lady. Because I know it.”
Having finished his modest breakfast of beef and ham and ale, the big clergyman stood up.
“It is so difficult,” he continued in a repressed voice, which to Darwent was like an echo rolling down the Corridors of Newgate, “it is so difficult to find God’s will and one’s own duty. Lord Darwent: do you recall what I said to you, when first you told me your story?”
“I had forgotten, Padre, until now. But what you said seemed to have death in it; and doom. ‘Other men’ have seen your ghost coach,’ you said. ‘Yes, and ridden in it too.’”
A drop of rain stung one of the windows.
“Do you recall anything else I said, my lord?”
“You—let me think! You said you lived amid crime and sin, with even the poor debtor rattling his cup against the door for alms.” Darwent broke off. “Debtor!” he muttered.
“True. The debtors, well born or otherwise: Lord Francis Orford had them flung into Newgate or the Fleet. All were fish to his net.”
The Bride of Newgate Page 15