The Devil in Velvet

by John Dickson Carr

  Thus Fenton, again fighting down a coffin lid with some horror inside, gained the mastery and held it. He saw through his own eyes, and with his own brain. Yet for the moment he must not loosen one muscle. The woman Meg (even if she were Mary, which he thought doubtful) must leave this house tomorrow, or her influence would smash all.

  “Your time is done,” he snapped. “Now go!” The scabbard rattled slightly. Meg, evidently deciding it was too dangerous for more words, rushed past him. Beyond the middle of the room she paused, swung the fur piece round her neck, again adjusted her hat with the golden-coloured plume, and drew herself up.

  Though about to speak, she thought better of it. With some dignity she swept out of the room, in a mighty rustling of petticoats. Only someone in the dim passage would have seen her face alter, or seen her secret smile.

  Fenton, swaying a little, kept himself steady on his feet.

  Twice he had defeated Sir Nick; but what if the other soul grew more powerful? Mechanically Fenton let the sword slide back into the scabbard. All over him he felt the sweat and exhaustion of the contest. Added to it was the strain of playing his part: the words came smoothly enough, from such long reading, but the affected accent drained him more.

  Putting a hand to his collar, he discovered only a neckband and a fall of lace. His fine black-velvet coat and breeches seemed heavy yet limp.

  “What,” he thought, “if we are all ghosts?”

  But the chair he touched was solid oak. The hearty prettiness of Lydia, wrapped in his bedgown and now kneeling on the bed facing him, was as real as her physical touch. He walked towards her as steadily as he could.

  “Lydia,” he said humbly, and put his hands on her cheeks, “you must pardon me for forgetting you while I dealt with … your cousin.”

  Lydia regarded him with eyes of worship, which was embarrassing.

  “Forget me?” she repeated. “Dear heart, that was when you remembered me!” Her broad moist lips trembled. “Will she go this time, that creature? Really and truly you are determined?”

  “She will go,” Fenton answered, with quiet conviction.

  Even Giles, who had lost his terror but remained sober and silent, seemed to feel that conviction in a man whose moods were beyond him.

  “Now we must study your illness …”

  “Now what a pother,” cried Lydia, “over so small a matter!”

  Well, but it was not a small matter. Unless he could change it, and shift the course of history, this girl would die of a heavy dosage of arsenic in the time of one month now less a day. His own wife—or was she his wife? Yes, of course she was! Else the whole tragicomedy had no sense or meaning. His fierce protectiveness went over her like a buckler.

  “Now bethink you, Lydia. When did these strong pains of the stomach, and the vomiting, begin to trouble you? Shall I say, at hazard, some three weeks ago?”

  Lydia counted back on her fingers, slowly.

  “True! But for one day, true!”

  “What are you accustomed to partake of, in the way of food or drink?”

  “When the first pain did come, after dinner, I made haste to my chamber and bolted the door. Afterwards I would not suffer even my chambermaid to be there when I was sick. No one must know,” whispered Lydia, trying (with those eyes) to look crafty. “I kept all things dark.”

  “But, after the first pains …?”

  “I did not go down to table. I could partake only of a bowl of sack posset, which the chambermaid carried up to me each day at noon precisely. Yet even the sack posset—not each day, but on occasion—did near to double me up: oh, most horrid!”

  For the first time Lydia grimaced with pain and loneliness.

  “Lydia, what did you think ailed you?”

  The girl looked vague.

  “Oh … I thought ’twas my death. People are always a-dying; and who can tell the reason?” Lydia hesitated, with an inner struggle. “Nay, the Lord forgive me, I’ll not deny it! I’ll tell all. Once or twice, ’tis true, I did think of poison. But I thought it must be you, dear heart; and thus, my husband, I could not speak.”

  Fenton turned away, clenching his fists.

  Lydia mistook his mood, which was only fondness for her and shame for the Sir Nick she had married. Nevertheless Lydia cried out.

  “Now the Lord forgive me!” and in her speech was a faint inherited twang of the Roundhead “Laard.” “The Lord forgive me, but what have I done? Nick, Nick!” She hammered her delicate hands on the bedclothes. “I swear I did but suspect it once or twice, when I had the vapours and was foolish. Now a thousand times I know! Oh, I have done you so much harm already!”

  He turned back to her, and smiled and reassured her.

  “You have done me harm?” he asked, again putting his hands on her cheeks and lightly kissing her lips. “You will do me harm only if you turn from my questions. Did you, in your illness, eat or drink anything save this sack posset you had each day? Anything else?”

  Lydia pondered.

  “No. Save for the barley water; but that is in a large glass bottle from which all drink.”

  “This sack posset: how is it prepared?”

  “A common sort. Four eggs, well whipped and beaten in a bowl. These poured into another bowl, of half a pint of milk and four pieces of sugar loaf. Then half a bottle of sack. No more.”

  Moodily Fenton bent down and picked up Meg’s dagger from the floor. For a time he weighed the dagger in his hand.

  “Giles!”

  “Ay, good sir?”

  “I believe you are acquainted with our ‘secret’?”

  “You were pleased to acquaint me, sir, when yesterday you made discovery that …”

  “Good!” said Fenton. “You, will now gather together the kitchen staff, any who might have prepared this sack posset, together with any who might have touched it by means of its being carried upstairs. Gather them together in—in my study.”

  Giles bowed, still sober and with no trace of impudence.

  “You will tell them,” continued Fenton, “that my lady hath been poisoned by arsenic; and that I will seek them presently. No doubt, Giles, there will be a great howling and skreeking …”

  “Howling and skreeking?” echoed Giles. “Ecod, sir! ’Twill be a worse din than at the playhouse, when they flourish for an entrance of witches. These cattle,” said the upper servant, “are in want of a roping, a good cat-of-nine-tails. But I’ll deal with them, sir; do you judge!”

  And he was gone, the door closed, before Fenton could protest.

  Lydia, who clearly distrusted Giles, still knelt facing Fenton on the side of the bed; but her blue eyes now laughed and her manner was gleeful.

  “I knew it!” she said. “Oh, I was assured of it! When we were married just,” she cast up her eyes, “three years, one month, and four days ago.”

  “Assured of what, my dear?”

  “Come here, and I’ll whisper a secret in your ear. Nay, closer! Come closer!”

  Obediently Fenton lifted the hair of the periwig and did as he was requested. Lydia immediately did such things to his ear as made him jump, albeit the attack was not too displeasing.

  “A whoreson trick!” he said, though he could not help grinning. Still weighing the dagger in his right hand, he mock-threatened her. “And where did you learn that?”

  “But you taught me,” replied Lydia, raising her eyebrows. “I know a hundred such; but now, please, I am in deep earnest.” She was; her eyes grew intent and her voice serious. “Nick, I tell you today because you are now different. Nick, I—I spoke of you to my father before we married. He hated you; I own it. Do you know what I said of you?”

  “No, Lydia! I had rather you …”

  Yet Lydia spoke out proudly, unconscious of how grotesque her words must sound.

  “‘As gentle as a minister of God,’
said I, ‘yet bold as an Ironside soldier.’”

  There was a pause.

  And once more the black soul struck hard at the coffin lid.

  There could have been no worse ill luck for these ill-starred lovers. For, in that civil war of Cavalier against Roundhead, now more than thirty years gone by, there had been no more fierce-fighting Royalist than the grandsire of Sir Nick, or his father too.

  And—in that purely academic way which can grow more bitter than any current politics—Professor Fenton was as fire-eating a Cavalier as his old namesakes. When he argued against the Roundhead views held by Parkinson of Caius, he really hated Parkinson.

  “I am deserving of no such compliments,” a too-polite voice observed to Lydia. “Still! Had you said, ‘as bold as a Cavalier …’”

  A sudden frightened look crept into Lydia’s eyes.

  “No, now, stay!” she begged, putting her hands over her face. “Oh, Lord forgive me! One more word, and again we shall ruin all!”

  “As—how, my lady?”

  Wearily Lydia let herself fall back on the pillows, her right arm extended and her head resting on it. It was as though she had half-died.

  “Nick,” the muffled voice spoke drearily, “why did you desire to marry me?”

  “Because I loved you.”

  “So I had thought and hoped. And yet, in this sick house, there can be only brief mention of someone I was brought up to love and honour and admire; and on the instant you fall a-ranting with jeers. Even great Oliver …”

  “‘Great Oliver,’” he whispered. His left hand tightened on the lower bedpost; his right hand gripped the haft of the dagger. “Do you refer to—Cromwell?”

  Even the pronunciation, Crummle, spat it out with such a crunch of viciousness that all hatred might have packed into one word. And, in fact, so it was.

  “I was born,” said Sir Nick, “in the year your holy Roundheads cut off the head of King Charles the First. It was a day in January, I have heard. There was a little snow in the air, but they had cleared the scaffold outside the Banqueting House window. He walked from St. James’s Palace, across the Park, up through the passage inside the Holbein Gate, and so turned down the long rooms of Whitehall Palace to the window of the scaffold. There they cut off his head.”

  Sir Nick, or it may have been Fenton himself, drew a deep breath.

  “Never a man died so bravely. Never a man walked so like a king. Never a king so proved that man himself might be noble, though they spat at him and blew tobacco smoke in his face as he passed.” Sir Nick, wheeling round, drove the dagger to its hilt through the bedpost, with such an eye that not a wood-chip cracked or shivered. “May God’s curse rest on them and all their race!”

  Lydia surged up, the bedgown falling back. In her heart she was not first of all interested in this.

  “Did you marry me,” she asked, “because you boasted, at the Greyhound tavern, that you would ‘tame the Roundhead maid’?”

  “No.”

  “I have heard as much, Nick.”

  “Then, God’s body, believe what you like!”

  “Well, you did not tame her,” Lydia said unsteadily. “My grandfather was a regicide, as your doxy Meg repeated last night. I was a young maid at the time of the Restoration; they did not take me to see him hanged and drawn and quartered, and his entrails thrown into the fire; but I have heard he died bravely too.”

  “Lydia, Lydia, do you know how few of the regicides were in truth executed?”

  “Pah! Do you?”

  “Across the council table King Charles the Second pushed a note to my Lord Clarendon. ‘I am weary of hanging; let it sleep.’”

  “And the Meg creature,” said Lydia, ignoring this, “told a foul lie when she said my father was a mad Independent. He was no Independent, but a Presbyterian moderate; and all such were horrified at killing the King, and did so vote as you may see in the record.”

  Again she pressed her hands over her eyes.

  “Nor was he mad, Nick. All knew it. He was gentle, but great and unafraid. They but shut him up because he would preach the gospel of the Lord as it came to him. From all this, Nick, I cut myself off for you. Oh, that is of small import! But why should I live, to what purpose, if your mind and heart are gone?”

  “This must stop,” Fenton thought desperately. “It must stop!”

  He had slid down on his knees beside the bed, hands grasping the sides of it. He knew that he could defeat Sir Nick, because he was still keyed up for the fight and because of his fondness for Lydia. It was the shortest contest, but the hardest. Once, it seemed, a fleshless arm writhed out of the coffin and laid hold in his very vitals.

  “Help me, Lydia,” he said, stretching out his hands, “help me!”

  Though she did not understand, she pressed his hands to her breast, and rejoiced to see the light come back into his eyes.

  “Lydia,” said the voice of Fenton, breathing hard, “there are things I cannot explain. If you were to imagine … nay; don’t imagine. But sometimes I am not myself, even when I have had no taste of wine or strong waters. Stay by me—”

  “Do I ask aught else?”

  “—and cry, ‘Go back; go back!’ if this senseless anger should move again. It will not, I swear, if you are there. And attend on this, dearest heart,” he added gently. “What have you and I to do with these old quarrels of our grandsires? They are blown away. Even their swords and pistols have changed. A Roundhead hath as much respect as he of our Church of England. And so I say, even of Oliver: may his staunch old soul rest in peace.”

  “Then—God for King Charles!” Lydia breathed passionately, and threw her arms round his neck and sobbed.

  And thereafter, if not understanding, there was peace.

  “If I might put a question,” said Lydia. “Nay; ’tis none to anger you. Why do you embroil yourself today in this ‘body politic’ or ‘matter politic’ or whatever it is about men voting and shouting, which I do not understand?”

  Fenton stroked her soft, light-brown hair.

  “Do I so? I had forgot,” he said absently, and felt Lydia start. “Well, then!” he added, “if I do, it is because the same old tragedy is being enacted again.”

  “How?”

  “As thus. King Charles the First died. Cromwell, good Cromwell, rode high in the saddle for near a decade, boasting a strength he did not have. Then he died, as we do, leaving a near-empty Treasury. The brief rickety governments tumbled down after him, leaving a completely empty Treasury. And, in the blessed (or cursed) year of 1660, the old monarch’s son—King Charles the Second—returned from exile to rule over us.”

  “I remember the very night.”

  “For a time, dear heart, all went well. ’Twas as cheerful as an innkeeper’s crying, ‘Sit you merry, gentlemen!’ In a decade there were some snarls, though all patched up. By and by your Parliament did begin to shew its claws. ’Twas a matter of money and religion, just as under Charles the First. Their great cry was, ‘No Popery! No Popery!’”

  “Hush!” whispered Lydia, and cast a frightened look round her. “Who can tell what Papist might be listening? Hush!”

  Lydia was more terrified than she had been at any time before. She did not see Fenton smile above her head.

  “Then I will discourse softly; but speak my mind. Shall I mistrust these men—I had rather you called them Catholics—who poured out gold and life’s blood in defence of the King’s father? Who would cheerfully see their houses burn, if they could smite back once at a Roundhead helmet? Can I think they mean harm to the old King’s son? If I were not of our Established Church, I might myself be a Catholic.”

  “Now, Lord, you are o’ertaken again!” gabbled Lydia, and held him close. “Go back!” she cried, “Go back!”

  “Look into my eyes, sweet girl, and see whether or not I am myself.”

  �
�Truly, you—you do seem yourself. But may I speak?”

  “With all my heart!”

  “The King, poor fellow,” said Lydia, “is a weak man …”

  Again, over her head, she did not see Fenton’s broader smile.

  “And easily,” insisted Lydia, “to be led by lewd women. The Queen is a Papist. She who most ruleth the King, call her Louise de Kéroualle or Madam Carwell or Duchess of Portsmouth, is a French Papist and spy. The King’s brother, ’tis open rumour, is become a Papist. Is there no wicked design in this?”

  Fenton tilted up her chin.

  “Since you apprehend so much, do you know what the King’s supposed friends—the council at his own table—have done now?”

  “Nick, I have so poor a head for matters politic! ’Tis only you and I …”

  “They have ratted from him, Lydia, or are about to do so. My Lord Shaftesbury, the little man with the abscess in his side, deserted two years ago, though he still sits at the council board because he thinks himself too powerful to be dismissed. His Grace of Buckingham, a man of parts despite fat folly, deserted too. There are other peers of the realm, skreeking out ‘No Popery,’ but these are pygmies. Shaftesbury and Bucks have founded what they call the Green Ribbon Club, with its rosette a green ribbon, at the King’s Head tavern. Their party you are free to call the Opposition party or the Country party or the Treason party.

  “But they do not come at you fairly, as the old Roundheads did. No; not for a moment! Theirs is the method of tongues set a-whispering, to flood London with rumour in twenty-four hours. Theirs is the way of the pamphleteer, the elbow jogger, the little knife if you dissent: all an honest man would call small and vile.

  “One thing more I tell you, and have done. We are in a lull before the greatest politic battle of all. Three years more (mark it well!), and …”

  There was a soft rapping at the door, and Giles appeared.

  “The cattle are penned, sir,” Giles reported, with a wicked little twist of the mouth which showed he had tasted power and enjoyed it. “They await you in your study.”

  “Quiet, Giles?”

  “Most quiet now, sir.”