The Devil in Velvet

by John Dickson Carr

  Giles led him to a table, rather like Meg’s dressing table but in the angle of the left-hand window and the wall. On it Giles had placed a huge silver basin, a monstrous ewer of hot water, a very large straight-bladed razor on its oiled whetstone block (Fenton shied a little), several highly scented soaps in bowls, together with heated cloths and towels.

  For once there was a round-shaped chair, with a deep cushion. At Giles’s broad and curvetting gesture, he sat down facing the mirror. Neatly Giles unwound Fenton’s head covering, with all Giles’s airs becoming Frenchified. Very solemnly, without splashing a drop of water, he washed Fenton’s hands—each to a point about two inches above the wrist—and dried them with great care.

  If Giles had not triumphantly added, “Voilà!” it might not have stirred Fenton’s donnish sense of humour.

  “Now that is well done!” he said, lifting his right hand from the sleeve and inspecting it. “Indeed it is admirably done, as far as it goes. But doth it go, do you think, quite far enough? What if I had a mind to order a bath?”

  Giles’s red eyebrows shot up in two half-circles. “Good master?” he said.

  “I have it by report,” mused Fenton, “that Queen Catherine of Braganza, when she married our king well over a decade ago, had a large bath set into one of her apartments at Whitehall Palace, with a pump to bring up the water.”

  “Ay; true. But who bathes in Thames water,” Giles sneered, “would bathe also in Fleet Ditch.” He turned round and spat on the carpet. “A filthy lot, these foreigners!”

  “Then don’t try to be French, good carrot-pate. You are too much English.”

  Giles, in a huff, disdained this remark.

  “We have a bath,” he pointed out. “And a full half-dozen times a year, for aught I can tell, Big Tom must fetch it up from the cellar because my Lady Fenton or Madam York make such a great noise about the matter.”

  “Whereas you would be more moderate?”

  “I say nothing,” declared Giles.

  All this time the fingers of his right hand had been working in a soap bowl, almost magically foaming up a scented shaving lather. Then the speechless one continued.

  “But the ladies of our house,” he said, “can manage—ay, and do manage—to wash themselves without a monstrous great tub and buckets of sweet water from the pump. ’Tis but natural they should desire to wash neck and arms and shoulders, these being exposed in some public place such as ballroom or gaming house or the like. Yet on occasion (I apprehend) they even wash themselves all over.”

  Here Giles shut one eye in a wink so lecherous, yet so unaffectedly gleeful, that even his leer was not at all unpleasant.

  “Giles,” said his master, “you, are a whoreson old man.”

  “Old or young, pray who is not?” retorted Giles. “To pretend otherwise were hypocrisy, which we find many times condemned in Holy Writ.”

  At this point, by some prestidigitation of Giles’s left hand, a warm cloth slid smoothly round Fenton’s neck. His head was pushed very far back, so that his neck rested with steady cramping pain against the rounded top of the chair back. In this position, where he could see only two joinings of the wall panels and a part of a grimy white plaster ceiling, he felt Giles dexterously applying lather.

  “Now to continue my thesis—” observed Giles.

  “God’s body, will you never have done?”

  “Sir Nick, you swear too much. The head back, if it please you.” His head was pushed once more, his neck agonized. “Now woman in general, from the high degree of Madam Carwell (which French fireship somehow ensnares His Majesty) to the low degree of Mistress Kitty, our cook, on whom your own lewd eye hath so often been cast …”

  “Wha’?”

  “The mouth closed, good sir, or it will receive lather: thus. Woman, I say, must by nature and art be sweeter of flesh than ourselves, poor devils, whom they cozen and wheedle and tease, so that accordingly, by their behaviour, they are the more often undressed.”

  The lather felt cool and smooth, though its heavy perfume revolted Fenton. He opened one eye.

  “Have a care with that razor, Impudence! I had as lief be shaved with a two-handed broadsword!”

  “Mistrust me not,” murmured Giles. “’Twill be as light as a feather touch.”

  And in fact it was, Fenton being scarcely conscious of it even on the neck or at the angle of the jaw.

  “As regards men,” said Giles, “it is but fitting, especially as touches quality, that they should on occasion fully wash themselves. Also, that the windows of a house should often be set open, to take away the scent of the watches of the night.”

  “Well, then, damme,” exclaimed Fenton, sitting up so abruptly that only Giles’s deftness prevented a throat-cutting, “why is there such an offensive bad odour in this house?”

  Giles, wiping off lather on the neckcloth, gave a Frenchified shrug.

  “Why, sir, if that matter were my poor fault and not your own …”

  “Mine? How?”

  This time Giles’s shrug carried his shoulders almost up to his ears.

  “Here’s our cellar half full of sewage from the house, and what to do with it?” Giles looked sad. “Here are you, a Member of Parliament, a King’s man and the hottest of the Court party. Half a hundred times you have swore, and struck the table when you swore, you would employ your mouth and make interest with Sir John Gilead to have a pipe run not three dozen yards to a main sewer. But always you have forgot.”

  “Not this time, I’ll warrant you,” said Fenton, dropping his neck back to agony and a last touch of the razor.

  “’Tis true,” murmured Giles, “we have a third course open to us.”

  “Oh?”

  “Certes we could have it all pumped out into the street, as Sir Francis North did. But I fear this would sorely vex the neighbours.”

  Now Giles’s remark was not funny. “It’s a wonder,” thought Fenton, “that more of them didn’t die of typhoid, let alone the great or bubonic plague.” Nevertheless he roared with laughter.

  “Ay,” he mused, “Roger North tells the anecdote in his biography of—that is,” he corrected himself swiftly, “Mr. North tells it any night you please, when he has taken a pint or two at the Devil, within Temple Bar.”

  The razor stopped. Fenton sensed that all Giles’s sauciness and sermon talk had fallen away, and that the old man felt a shiver of fear. “Now of a surety,” Giles said quickly, “you would not take a cup of wine at the Devil tavern? So hard by the King’s Head, at the turning of Chancery Lane?”

  “And why not?”

  Here Fenton made his first large slip, though he did not know it and even Giles did not recognize it for what it was. Fenton’s mind, so alert not to betray itself over small points, had let a large one go past unnoticed. He had known of old that Sir Nick was a Member of Parliament and of the Court party; it overjoyed him, since these were his own politics of the era.

  But he did not, at the moment, connect these facts with the King’s Head tavern. The chilly grey sky seemed to press down on a chilly, ill-odoured room.

  “Now bend your head forward over the basin,” said Giles, “that I may wash your face.”

  Twenty minutes later, when he stood fully dressed before a full-length mirror, he looked at the reflection with incredulity. The glossy black peruke, with its curls falling down over the shoulder, would have seemed rather foolish on the head of Professor Fenton in his pince-nez. But, when it framed the broad swarthy face of Sir Nick, with moody grey eyes and narrow line of moustache, the countenance leaped out strong and even formidable.

  The black-velvet coat was rather long—halfway to the knee—but comfortable. Though it was loose and never meant to close or be buttoned, it had a short line of silver buttons down the right side. He was given no jewellery, for which he was thankful. His neckband carried only a short fall
of lace, down over a long black-satin waistcoat slashed with red. The black-velvet breeches, the black hose: at only one point had there been violent argument.

  “Now hark’ee, coxcomb,” said Fenton. He gave Giles what he intended to be only a very light push in the chest, to keep the man from fussing round him. But he forgot the power of his arm, and sent Giles flying and sprawling against the base of the opposite wall.

  There Giles sat up loftily, folded his arms, and proceeded to murmur a stream of vituperation.

  “I will wear all else,” pleaded Fenton, “but I will not wear these accursed high-heeled shoes with the bowknots on them.”

  Giles murmured something indistinguishable, flicking his fingers after it.

  “In four-inches heels,” said Fenton, “I could not take half a dozen steps without falling flat. As for your coloured ribbands at the knee garter and bowknots on the shoes, I well know these are worn by good brisk lusty men as well as fops and beaux. Yet my love for them is not yet developed.”

  Giles was understood to murmur something about small popinjays.

  “Yet I am a good middle height for our time,” Fenton told him stoutly. “Giles, Giles! Have I no honest leathern shoes with flat heels?”

  Giles uttered a silent sarcastic laugh.

  “Questionless,” he said, “you have the old shoes you sometimes wear about the house.”

  “Good! Go and fetch them!”

  There was a long pause, while Giles’s red hair stood up like a goblin’s.

  “Sir Nick would dare the devil and the altar,” he said softly. “Sir Nick would fling wine into the face of my Lord Shaftesbury himself. But Sir Nick, the man à la mode, durst not venture into the street in those shoes.”

  “Go and fetch them!”

  Giles rose up, all meekness. He gave Fenton a quick glance in which wonder was somewhat blended with a subtle quality not quite to be identified.

  “I fly, sir,” he answered, and feathered out of the room with scarce a whisper from the closing door.

  Fenton turned round again to the full-length mirror. Automatically his hand fell on the sword hilt, which projected well out from under the coat at his left hip.

  Also automatically, his hands slipped under the rather long waist and shifted the belt a shading to the right. From that belt, at the left hip and behind it, two very thin lengths of chain supported and sloped the scabbard. And, since the scabbard was made only of the thinnest wood strips, glued together and covered with shagreen, it was so light that the duellist never even noticed it.

  “Clemens Hornn,” he said, unconscious that he had spoken aloud. “In past day the greatest swordmaker in England.”

  His right hand closed round the tight wire-woven grip. He backed away from the mirror. Then he whipped out the rapier.

  A low light glittered along the blade. It was not one of your fine old-style Cavalier rapiers, with cup hilt and long quillons but a blade too cumbersomely long. Nowadays men had discovered that an old-fashioned overarm cut was helpless against the lightning thrust of the point.

  Fenton’s sword was still a rapier, though in transition period to the smallsword. Its shallow guard gleamed like a closing flower carved in steel. Its short curving quillons were merely ornamental. It was shorter than the old blades—its edges blunt, half an inch wide down to the tapering, murderous point—but lighter and far more deadly. Thus the fine old blade now suited its day.

  Ever since touching the steel, he had been startled to find the sense of pride and pleasure which swept through him: the deep breath, the sense of steadiness and power. For certainly he was no swordsman.

  True, from youth to middle age he had been a very competent performer with the fencing foil in a gymnasium. But he could laugh at that now. The foil was a toy; it was too light, with all its complexities and too-easy parries. Such a performer could not stand for twenty seconds against a fighting sword in a crafty hand. At the same time …

  “In my little chat with the devil,” he thought to himself, “there was no mention of duelling. I cannot die before my time; true. I cannot be overtaken by physical illness; true. But a vicious sword-thrust?”

  “Your shoes, good sir,” interrupted the voice of Giles Collins, striking so like a rapier into Fenton’s thoughts that the latter all but dropped the sword in his hand.

  You could never tell in what mood you would find Giles. At the moment he was merely obedient. And merry.

  “If you will have the goodness to be seated,” he said, holding up the shoes like a pair of rare jewels, “I shall put them on. Heyday! I see you practice your secret botte.”

  Fenton’s eyes opened at his own image in the glass. His upper lip was lifted, exposing the white teeth in a snarl. The curls of his peruke had slipped a little forward. He stood sideways to the mirror, right foot straight forward with knee bent, left foot sideways and a little behind him, creeping to the right leg. The rapier, so balanced to his hand that it seemed to carry its own weight, gleamed at an unorthodox guard.

  Then Fenton woke up, and laughed rather too loudly.

  “’Tis no ‘secret’ botte,” Giles informed him dryly, “though all the rufflers think it so. Observe how your left foot crept towards your right. Your guard, deliberately, too close to your body. Heyday! I know it.”

  “Oh, I am no swordsman,” Fenton said carelessly, slipping the blade back into the scabbard and sitting down so that scabbard and coat could be accommodated.

  Again Giles gave him that curious, subtle glance. Giles was about to speak when Fenton withered him.

  “I have much of moment to do,” he said. The strong, harsh tone struck the servant like a handblow. “Is Lord George Harwell yet come?”

  “Nay, sir, I believe not.” Giles fitted on the old, disreputable, comfortable shoes.

  “Ay; well; should he come, he must wait. I have an errand for you. Render my service to my lady wife—”

  Giles’s dark eyes bulged under the red eyebrows. “Your wife?”

  “Have you ears?” demanded Fenton.

  “Assuredly. I but thought …”

  “Ask of her,” Fenton continued, remembering the rules of civility for a mere wife, “if it be not too troublesome, whether she will wait upon me here as soon as convenient?”

  The husband must summon the wife; never go to her in public.

  “Again I fly,” murmured Giles, trying to subdue a leer. As he turned round, Fenton longed to deliver a mighty kick in the seat of his breeches; but Fenton had learned that Giles, though his age might be anything from fifty to seventy, was too agile to be caught.

  “Ah,” murmured this doubtful jewel of a manservant, “if I may make bold …?”

  “Well?”

  “Should I by mischance encounter Madam York—”

  “Bid her go to the devil!”

  The door closed.

  Fenton paced the floor. By summoning Lydia, he knew, he was turning loose emotional currents which last night had nearly swamped him. But every moment of this morning had made him bolder, because of his new age and his outward transformation. If for nine dim years he had cherished idealistically a bad engraving, wondering and picturing what the original must have been, he could not but feel a kindness towards her when both were young.

  But this (or so he told himself) was of no matter. Pressing his hands to his head, and being surprised to find the hair of the peruke he had forgotten, he brought back that old grind at medical jurisprudence. If last night he had not been so overwrought, he would have seen why Lydia wore so much paint and moved at an unsteady gait.

  Sir Nick would be prowling soon. Sir Nick either disliked Lydia or grudgingly tolerated her. Then, at all costs, Lydia and Meg must not be permitted to meet. They acted on each other like fire and loose gunpowder, a hissing flare at which you only scorched your hands, and looked to any powder kegs about you.

&n
bsp; Quick, rapping footsteps on small heels ran down the bare boards of the passage outside. About two yards from the door the footsteps stopped, as though their owner would draw herself up with dignity. There was a light knock on the door.

  “Enter!” said Fenton.

  It was Giles who opened the door, though so many emotional currents swirled into the room that Fenton did not even notice him. Lydia stepped hesitantly across the threshold.

  “Gad!” Fenton said involuntarily, and frankly stared at her for such a time that she grew discomforted and colour came into her face.

  Lydia wore today a gown for the house, of some light-brown material drawn in at the waist, with very tiny ruffles at the sleeves and at the fairly high neck. It had a white bodice, broad and triangular, so that its crisscross of points and laces began in a bow at the neck and ran down to her waist.

  But, above all, Lydia seemed to wear no cosmetics that disfigured her countenance. Her fresh-complexioned face, framed in the thick cap of light-brown hair which surrounded her head like a curve, ceased to seem ill or drawn because of the colour in it. Lydia’s blue eyes were set wide apart. Her nose was short, her mouth broad and full-lipped, her chin rounded. It was not a type of beauty, as Giles would say, à la mode; it would be considered to lack boldness, or a quality of stariness. But Fenton’s heart sailed like a paper dart out of a window. Since Lydia wore low heels, she appeared even smaller.

  “Do you,” she murmured, and lowered her eyes and seemed to search hard for some petty word, “do you find me pleasing?”

  “Pleasing?” repeated Fenton.

  He strode close to her, lifted her hand, kissed it, and pressed it against his cheek.

  “Last night,” faltered Lydia, “you did that. You have not done it since …” She paused.

  Now, when very close to her, he could see the faint powder she had applied. It was applied up high on the forehead, near the hairline, and at one side of her cheek. Probably it extended to the arms and shoulders. Even in this bad light, if he could persuade her to lie down, he could decide the matter.

  “My lady,” he said gently, “will you have the kindness to lie down on the bed?”