There was a small rattle, as though Caroline had bumped against the desk. Beyond her smiled the great god Pan.
“I do not expect you to understand.” Darwent went on with polished courtesy. “Doubtless, in the strictly anatomical sense, you possess that organ known as the heart. In the happy event that you were to die and be dissected, they would probably find it. I have seen no other evidence of its existence.
“That is the fact: I love you. Everything I said in that opera box, or you wheedled out of me (God knows why), was strictly true. Even when I stood beside that girl’s deathbed, and cursed myself for I-don’t-know-what, I knew I had never cared for her.
“No: I must choose you. Very well. Accept my curses; but don’t ever fear harm or threat from me. That’s the trouble. Even knowing what you are, I couldn’t bear to see you hurt, humiliated, even touched; and make no wagers on the life of anyone who tries it. Such is my form of folly.”
He was so infuriated, a trifle light-headed, that he did not hear the tone of Caroline’s voice.
“Dick! Wait! You never said …”
“And now,” he concluded, “pray take your beloved money and go to the devil. Cram your pockets with it; eat it; may good digestion wait on appetite, and health on both! —Eh?”
Suddenly he discovered that Alfred, who had appeared at his elbow like a genie, was pressing on him a letter sealed in green wax with Caroline’s crest.
“From Mr. Hereford, my lord,” Alfred told him. “If you listen, you can hear Mr. Hereford’s carriage driving away. I believe it’s very urgent, my lord.”
“Urgent?” he repeated dully.
Alfred slipped away. Still holding the light in his right hand, Darwent broke the seal and clumsily spread open the letter. The neat, smart handwriting would persist in blurring, until words leaped out at him;
MY LORD:
If I venture to intrude into your lordship’s affairs, it is because long experience has taught me that my skill does far less good than those who surround the patient do harm.
Had you troubled to question Mrs. Demisham (housekeeper) and Meg Saunters (maid), you would have discovered the wonder that the late Miss Spencer remained so long on her feet. She was more than due for a collapse at any time. Her hearing and eyesight were already affected.
Had you further troubled to consult any sober-minded witness to the scene on the stairs …
Darwent’s eyes opened. The black letters were as clear as newsprint.
… you would have found that it was several seconds before Miss Spencer could see your wife (as her questions show) clearly enough to ask if something might be wrong. In my opinion, she scarcely heard what your wife said. Her collapse was long overdue, and it occurred.
Again Darwcnt paused. He glanced over toward the faint moonlight glow, where Caroline stood silhouetted against the statue.
As I think I reminded you, I myself arrived in my carriage just as you walked up the steps. If you will accredit me as a witness, I saw a great deal myself. If you can explain how a tear-blinded lady in a lighted hall can recognize a man dressed entirely in black, with even the shirt front covered, mounting a stairway against a pitch-black sky, I feel sure your theories would interest a student of optics.
As we grow older, my lord, we know that we are all fools. The solace of wisdom lies in learning, for the most part, how to avoid being a damned fool.
I beg to remain, my lord,
Yr. obdt. servt.,
SAMUEL HEREFORD
Darwent lowered the letter slowly. He lowered his head to look at the floor. To his surprise, Caroline—all changed, the blue eyes softened and frightened—came hurrying across the room.
“Dick! What is it?”
Silently he handed her the letter.
“If we take the term ‘damned fool,’” he said bitterly, “and build it up high with every strong adjective we know, how high could we make a man’s foolishness go? As high as Babel? As high as Mt. Blanc? It still would not reach me.”
He turned away from her as she glanced at the letter.
“Caroline, I …”
She looked at him only with fierce tenderness tinged with wonder.
“But what difference does it make,” she held up the letter, “if you really do care for me?”
“Difference! Caroline! It …”
“Why don’t you ask me what I think? What I want?”
“What do you think, then? What do you want?”
“Your love.”
“You have that already.”
“Then that’s all that’s necessary. —Oh! Wait! Except …”
“Yes?”
“‘An estate in Kent,’“ she said, “‘with shallow streams and soft brownish-green woods. If I could take you there, beyond sight of the world …’”
“You meant that too? You’d go?”
Her actions left him in no doubt of it. So long they remained there, locked together, that time did not exist. Presently, in their happiness, all things seemed new and fresh and full of discoveries. Someone noticed a glimmer outside the door, and he hurried her out into the hall.
“But … it’s dawn!” Caroline exclaimed, though it had been dawn for some time.
The front door stood wide open. Clear, white light, with a tinge of pink, flooded into the dusty hall. Darwent blew out the last candle, and set it on the stair post. A faint, warm breeze moved the trees in St. James’s Square.
“Your arm, Lord Darwent?” smiled Caroline, with mock formality.
He gave her his arm formally, and her hand, rested lightly on it. He smiled back at her.
“Your whole being, Lady Darwent?”
“That, of course,” murmured Caroline, “was always understood.”
And with her hand on his arm, their eyes raised and their faces smiling, they went down the front steps into the dawn.
The End
Let us have all things but pedantry. The author respectfully requests that no critic, or reader, will mention the pages that follow.
Author’s Note
THOUGH MANY READERS WILL already know, it may interest some to learn how much of The Bride of Newgate is imagination, and how much true. The author, now relaxed and comfortable, is happy to supply such information.
Most of the main characters are fictitious. All but two incidents are fictitious.
But no house, club, theater, tavern, street, hotel even a shop or a place of amusement, or the windmill near which duels were fought, or the opera and its description, is in any way fictitious.
It will have been noticed that no famous historical character appears in the story at all. Many are talked about. But they are seen at a distance—on a balcony, or in an opera box—so that they never speak and never enter to clog up the action.
But a great many of the minor characters were very much real persons, as we shall discuss in a moment.
As one who has been browsing through the annals of the Regency for the past dozen years, the author need scarcely mention that its best contemporary historical backgrounds may be found in the Creevey Papers (notes and diaries of Thomas Creevey, 1768–1838, first edited by Sir Herbert Maxwell in 1838), and the Croker Papers (notes and diaries of John Wilson Croker, 1780-1857, first edited by Lewis J. Jennings in 1887). Creevey is Whig, Croker Tory, and Creevey almost modern in his outspokenness.
But for men and manners, for intimate social background by a man who knew these people well, we must seek out The Reminiscences and Recollections of Captain Gronow, 1810–1860 (2 vols., London: John C. Nimmo; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1900).
It is true that Gronow will sometimes stretch a point to make a good story, and you must often compare his account with another’s. For example, to take a very small point: it is Gronow who makes Scrope Davies tell the story about Lord Byron’s curl papers. But this is denied by Lord Lovelace, Byron’s grandson, in Astarte (new edition; London: Christophers, 1921). And anyone who sees the locks of hair in the famous room of Byron relics at the firm
of Messrs. John Murray, 50 Albemarle Street, can see that Lord Lovelace was right.
Next, regarding the bucks and dandies whose dress and manners Gronow has so accurately described:
It is curious that so many vivid accounts of them may be found in books centering round Beau Brummell. The author begs leave to consider Brummell a dull dog, to be thrown away in a couple of sentences. But other personalities appear round him, from William Jesse’s standard The Life of Beau Brummell (2 vols., 1844), to an excellent modern study in Willard Connely’s The Reign of Beau Brummel (Cassell & Co., London, Toronto, Sydney & Melbourne, 1940).
Lewis Melville’s Beau Brummell is chiefly notable for its careful tracing and plotting of house numbers and club numbers (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1924). And, though intended only for light popular entertainment, E. Beresford Chancellor’s The Regency Rakes (London: Philip Allan & Co., 1924) is admirably accurate.
As for Newgate, the “foul, heynouse jail” of the chronicle, there is enough material so that we can walk its corridors blindfolded in 1815.
To W. Eden Hooper, when Newgate Prison was demolished in 1903, fell the task of gathering and sorting the accumulated papers. Mr. Eden Hooper published his subscription volume, The Central Criminal Court (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1909, eight guineas). Later he condensed it into The History of Newgate and the Old Bailey (London: Underwood Press, 1935).
The pictures and sketch plans make several Newgates unroll as on a dark screen. See also Albert Crew’s The Old Bailey (London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson, 1933), and that grisly but pleasant volume, Horace Bleackley’s, The Hangmen of England (Chapman and Hall, 1929).
It has been stated that only two true historical events occur in the story. The account of how the news of Waterloo was brought to Lord Castlereagh (technically still “Foreign Secretary,” but referred to usually as the War Minister) comes from contemporary newspapers. The author would raise his hat to another and much fuller modern description in. Miss Carola Oman’s Britain against Napoleon (London: Faber and Faber, 1942).
For the second event: the O.P. riots at Covent Garden happened just as they are described here. See the monumental work first published in 1863, Dr. Doran’s, Their Majesties Servants, or Annals of the English Stage (London: John C. Nimmo, 1897).
A third historical event might have been permitted to occur if—regrettably—the author had not spoiled it by introducing a fight at the opera. Fortunately, however, on the previous night Lucia Elizabetta Vestris did score her first triumph in Il Ratio di Proserpina. You may read about her in Charles E. Peace’s Madame Vestris and Her Times (London: Stanley Paul, no date on title page or following page).
Excellent descriptions of the opera, too, have been left by both Hazlitt and De Quincey; and a line from the Opium-Eater has shamelessly been borrowed for the first paragraph of Chapter XVI. Should anyone wish a vivid and accurate picture of the purely literary or theatrical side of the age, he is heartily recommended to Miss Amy Cruse’s The Englishman and his Books in the Early Nineteenth Century (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, no date given).
But this last-named book concerns very genteel society; it does not deal with the boozing and the wenching which were the other side of the Regency. As an antidote, read about the prize fighters—“Gentleman” Jackson, Tom Cribb, Jem Belcher, Jack Randall were of course air real—in the often inaccurate but always stimulating works of Pierce Egan.
On that note, let us take stock of those persons in the story who really lived and breathed in that gaudy, beginning-to-be-clean Regency.
The Rev. Horace Cotton, Ordinary of Newgate, was very much real. See the account of him, together with picture, in Bleackley’s, The Hangmen of England. Also he bobs up at intervals in a curious set of volumes, Celebrated Trials and Remarkable Cases, with Testimony, from the Earliest Records to the Year 1825 (6 vols., printed for Knight and Lacey, Paternoster Row, 1825).
All the dandies, bucks, and fine ladies, whether mentioned in the text or seen at the opera, were real persons—except Jemmy Fletcher, Tillotson Lewis, Major Sharpe, and Ned Firebrace.
Therefore it may not be necessary to add that Ladies Jersey, Castlereagh, and Sefton really were the patronesses of Almack’s, and have been described from contemporary observation. They may well have spoken in the way they are made to speak.
Lord Alvanley, too, was bouncingly real. All diarists and memoir writers unite in their praise of his good nature as well as his talents and his ram-you-damn-you spirits. He is one of the few persons who honestly would have assisted Darwent.
John Townsend, the old Bow Street runner, would fight his way out of the grave if you denied his reality, or the speech he uses in the story. For this see Gilbert Armitage’s The History of the Bow Street Runners (London: Wishart &Co.,1920) or George Dilnot’s The Story of Scotland Yard (London: Geoffrey Bles, no date in book). The latter book contains Townsend’s picture.
All names of contemporary magistrates and justices are real, up to and including Lord Ellenborough, the Lord Chief Justice. The device by which Darwent is saved from Newgate, of course, is legal to this day.
Nor is it at all necessary to point out that Edmund Kean, Mrs. Siddons, John Kemble—to say nothing of Mr. Arnold, the stage manager, or Mr. Raymond, the acting manager, at Drury Lane—bustlingly moved within their own world.
Enfin, we come to the speech of the year 1815.
It has been attempted here to reproduce the authentic speech of the time. Where do we find it?
For his own sanity’s sake, the reader is entreated not to read their novels. He is especially warned against the Minerva novels, from the Minerva Press, which poured into the circulating libraries—yes, they had such libraries then—and which talked on stilts as high as a house. Intelligent people, of course, knew these novels were funny. Macaulay, even as a boy, jotted down on the last page of Mrs. Kitty Cuthbertson’s Santo Sebasiano a sentence which particularly delighted him.
“One of the sweetest smiles that ever animated the face of mortal now diffused itself over the face of Lord St. Orville, as he fell at the feet of Julia in a deathlike swoon.”
Poor goop. Is this the language or behavior of the Regency? No. But—
We find it in letter writers and diarists, though often polished up to be what really was the language of good society. We find a larkier sort in the newspapers. Finally, we hear it very clearly in the testimony at trials.
This does not mean that writer or reader need shut himself up with The Newgate Calendar, the best version of which brings together the works of Captain Johnson, Captain Smith, George Borrow, Knapp and Baldwin, and Camden Pelham in The Complete Newgate Calendar (5 vols., London: privately printed for the Navarre Society Ltd., 1926). He will find little word-for-word testimony here.
But, in addition to Knight and Lacey (see above), he can accumulate dozens of pamphlets containing the testimony of crimes committed during this period. A man on trial, usually for his life, puts on no airs. Educated or uneducated, his language is real. So is that of judge, counsel, witnesses, and parson afterward, as Darwent found it.
Indeed, some of these musty pamphlets should be shaken out and filled with color. There is the murder case of Thomas Patch (1803), with the most curious alibi on record. There was Bedworth (1815), who was driven by a ghost to confess murder. There was Eliza Fenning (also 1815), and any man in his five wits could prove—pace Mr. Roughead’s fumbling—that this beautiful girl never poisoned the dumplings. But our friend the Rev. Horace Cotton escorted her to the gallows.
Stop! This note grows garrulous. The writer apologizes; it is only enthusiasm from one who, after dark, likes still to re-people the old streets with the old ghosts. Eyes may be wide open to the injustices, the brutality, the essential falseness. Yet those same may linger there, and ever rejoice, though all its arches be dust.
About the Author
John Dickson Carr (1906–1977) was one of the most popular authors of Golden Age British-style detective novels. Born in Pennsylvania
and the son of a US congressman, Carr graduated from Haverford College in 1929. Soon thereafter, he moved to England where he married an Englishwoman and began his mystery-writing career. In 1948, he returned to the US as an internationally known author. Carr received the Mystery Writers of America’s highest honor, the Grand Master Award, and was one of the few Americans ever admitted into the prestigious, but almost exclusively British, Detection Club.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1950 by John Dickson Carr
Copyright renewed 1958 by Clarice M. Carr
Cover design by Jason Gabbert
978-1-4804-7273-0
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The Bride of Newgate Page 30