The Devil in Velvet

by John Dickson Carr

  Lydia had moved to the head of the bed. There, screened from the side by the looped-back bed curtain, she was drawing up the sleeves of her gown and adjusting the bodice. Meanwhile she made faces at him to show she loved him. And, since he had been speaking of the Green Ribbon Club’s little knives, a remark of Lydia’s still returned and twisted like a little knife in his heart,

  “‘As gentle as a minister of God, yet as bold as a Roundhead soldier!’”

  “O Thou,” he prayed to himself, “if only a dry old stick in a boy’s carcase could somehow be worthy of that, or live up to it!” But he knew it was hopeless.

  “When you have completed your dressing,” he said to Lydia, “I direct thus: return to your chamber. There is a bolt inside the door, you said?”

  “Yes; a stout wooden bolt. But …”

  “Lock your door, and open it to no one save you hear my voice. You are to have no food today; only such draughts as I shall order.”

  A little twitch of fear travelled round Giles’s face.

  “Nay, sir!” he scoffed, not convincingly. “You don’t think …”

  “But I do think, malapert. ’Tis my only virtue. There is a horror in this house,” said Fenton, “more nauseous or deadly than a cellar of sewage. I go to seek it out—now.”

  CHAPTER V

  KITTY IN GREY;

  AND A CAT-OF-NINE-TAILS

  THE PASSAGE OUTSIDE HAD ONLY TWO WINDOWS: one at the far end and one a little down on the right, over the staircase landing. As Giles bowed him out, Fenton remembered a new cause for trouble.

  “Er—Giles!”

  “At your command, master?” answered Giles, sticking round a wrinkled and more malapert face.

  “In that manusc … that is to say, I call to mind this morning,” Fenton corrected himself, “you made mention of a certain Mistress Kitty …?”

  “Kitty Softcover, the cook?”

  “Tush, that’s it! The very name!”

  “And upon whom, I also said,” added the remorseless Giles, “your own lewd eye hath so often been cast?”

  “My meaning, as touches Kitty, runs thus. Are we … have we …?”

  “Nay, now how should I know?” demanded Giles, pursing out his lips with a look of holiness. “If you are not yourself aware, then only God He knoweth. Yet it seems to me, master, you have acquired a singular delicacy of speech. I but said,” the wicked smile came round again, “you often cast your lecherous eye upon her: which fact, under favour, was as plain as a book with large print. Still, I will present them all to you in the study.”

  It did not strike Giles in the least odd that he should introduce the master of the house to his own servants. But that, as Fenton reflected, was only natural. A man of quality would not condescend to learn the names or faces of lower servants, unless he had special reason to do so.

  At the turn of the staircase they descended to the lower hall, and turned round so as to face the front door. And how that lower hall had changed, since he spoke to Mary Grenville in the front room on the left! It was now all black oak panelling and silver sconces, with one carved chest.

  And the big front door stood wide open.

  Though he had been prepared for it, yet Fenton was startled to find Pall Mall a little sylvan lane. There was a border of lime trees before his own front door. Sweet air stole into the hall. Fenton recalled that one of his neighbours was Madam Eleanor Gwynn, but he could not remember whether she had yet moved from the north side to the south side.

  “If you will be pleased, sir …” murmured Giles.

  “Stay a moment! Is Lord George yet come?”

  “Over an hour gone by, sir.”

  “Did he quiz you; did he make merry?”

  “Nay, sir. He is in the stable, and happy. He but said … if your hearing be not still too delicate?”

  “Now a pox on your sauciness!” roared Fenton, with so vivid an imitation of Sir Nick that Giles darted back as though from a blow. “What did he say? Speak plain!”

  “Well! ‘If Nick be having only one of them, instead of two,’ quoth His Lordship, ‘then why is he taking so plaguey long about the business?’”

  “But this morning—”

  “I replied,” softly said Giles, “that you, being a good trencherman, liked oft to partake several times of the same plate. ‘Ay,’ quoth he, ‘there’s reason in that. Don’t trouble him.’”

  Again Fenton glanced ahead. He could see, motionless to the right outside the front door, the porter on guard. He was lofty of manner and carried a tipstaff. He admitted desirable people and turned away undesirables: all without constantly opening and shutting the door, or fussing the occupants inside.

  Fenton had always considered this an excellent old custom, which should have been kept up.

  “Sir, sir!” implored Giles, beginning to open a door at the back of the hall. “If you will but deign to enter?”

  Fenton entered.

  The study, though small, was well stocked with calf-bound books from folio to octavo. Against one window facing the door a flat desk-table in heavy, polished, dark wood stood sideways to the window. But the East India Company had again done its best in the carpet, and the rest of the furniture was oak.

  Even as he went in, Fenton sensed the atmosphere of tears and screams and huffings which must have beaten against these little walls. He thought of Lydia; his nature became harder, more ruthless than Sir Nick’s, because it was not wild or whirling; and Sir Nick’s anger lasted ten minutes at most.

  Four persons were drawn up in a kind of semicircle, each a little way apart, to face him. On a carved cabinet standing against the right-hand wall, the cabinet being about as high as a man, a silver candelabrum held three branches of wax lights.

  From a hook beside the door, Giles coolly took down a middle-­sized whip with nine leather thongs, each tipped with steel. This was the law, though the cat might be used only on suspicion of serious offence.

  “I will point them out to you, sir,” said Giles, indicating the semicircle of one man and three women. Letting the thongs of the whip fall, he pointed with the handle towards the man on the extreme left.

  “That is Big Tom, the sculleryman,” he said.

  Big Tom, who lived up to his name both in breadth as well as height, shifted from one foot to the other as though in this way he might get less dirt on the carpet. His face was begrimed out of a mop of hair, as were his flannel shirt, his buff-leather doublet, and his leather apron: he was evidently an odd-jobs man. Though contemptuous of Giles, he eyed Fenton in a worship of awe. He ducked his head, touched his forelock, and only made a gurgle in his throat.

  The whip moved to the right, towards the next person.

  “Nan Curtis, the kitchenmaid,” said Giles.

  Nan Curtis, overstout though less than thirty, had a round rosy face now drained of colour by fear, and a down-pulled lip like a baby. She wore a cap, and was tolerably clean save for a few oven stains. She sobbed audibly, and then was silent.

  Yet, each time that whip moved, a thicker spasm of repressed fear or anger seemed to beat against these topheavy walls of books, or send a quiver amid three candle flames shining down on silver and polished wood.

  “Next on the right,” said Giles, “we have Judith Pamphlin. Our lady’s chambermaid.”

  Fenton studied this chambermaid, remembering Lydia.

  Judith Pamphlin was a thin, tall, harsh-featured virgin in her late forties. Her sparse hair was done into tight curls close to her head. Hands folded, she stood bolt upright in a tight-laced frock of grey wool.

  No, Lydia would not like her. And yet …

  “Finally,” said Giles, moving the whip, “this is Kitty Softcover, the cook.”

  Fenton looked at her coldly and steadily, with hard appraisal.

  Kitty seemed the meekest of them all. She was small, plump,
and about nineteen years old. Though her loose blouse of coarse linen and her drab wool skirt had suffered from working over fire and turnspit, she had only a faint smut on the side of her nose. What Fenton first noticed was her hair.

  It was thick and heavy, of that very dark red colour which seems to ripple with lighter gleams. The candle flames set it a-glow. She raised her head and gave Fenton a brief glance out of eyes so dark blue that they seemed almost black. They were large eyes, too large eyes for the small bold face and overbold nose.

  Yet her glance was that of a woman who has been intimate with him: secret, knowledgeable, faintly defiant. Kitty was the only one who spoke.

  “Sir, sir, you’d not harm me?” she asked humbly, in a light voice but with so thick an accent that Fenton hardly understood her.

  “You all know,” he ignored her and turned to the rest, “that your lady mistress is being poisoned with slow poison named arsenic. She partook of it, we think, in a bowl of sack posset prepared in the kitchen and carried up each day. Slow poison does not occur by accident. Who prepared this sack posset?”

  “Sir, ’twas me,” replied Kitty. Again she gave him that intimate, close-knit glance. “What I know!” it seemed to say.

  “You prepared it always?”

  “Always,” nodded Kitty. Slowly she turned her chin sideways. “But there’s many, passing in and out the kitchen, can swear I had no hand in it.”

  “Who carried the sack posset to my wife?”

  He looked at the rigid, harsh-featured Judith Pamphlin, who had now folded her arms tightly across her flat breast. Her lips had become a white, locked line. She seemed debating whether or not to trouble with answering him. When she spoke, her lip opened downwards.

  “I did carry it.”

  “Judith Pamphlin,” said Fenton, “how long have you been chambermaid to my wife?”

  “I was her servant long before she had the ill fortune to marry you,” replied Judith, with a through-the-nose twang but looking steadily into his eyes. “When you have taken a large cup overnight, and were out of your wits, I have heard you call her Roundhead bitch, scum of the Conventicle, spawn of a regicide.”

  Fenton looked at her.

  “Giles, give me the whip,” he said quietly.

  Giles handed it over.

  Fenton looked back at her with a gaze colder, steadier than Judith’s own. These were not Sir Nick’s tactics, all bull’s roar and have-at-you, which a strong-minded woman could have met. Fenton was beating down her mind and will, slowly, because his mind and will were superior to her own.

  Seconds appeared to stretch into minutes, while that cold look went on. Then he saw Judith Pamphlin’s eyelids begin to turn and lower. Not far to his right Fenton had noticed a high, heavy chair. As soon as he saw her eyelids flicker, he raised the cat-of-nine-tails high and brought it down with all the power of his arm at the meeting of the chair back with one chair arm. The thongs hissed and thudded, but with no more terrifying effect than the rattle-clack of steel tips.

  They bit; they gouged raw and ugly wounds into wood, as into flesh; and the heavy chair jumped and cracked.

  “Woman,” said Fenton, “you will never speak so to me again.”

  There was a pause. Giles Collins was as white as a ghost.

  “Nay,” muttered Judith, “I … I think I shall not.”

  “What do you call me?”

  “Master.”

  A shudder went round the group, except for stolid Big Tom.

  “Good,” said Fenton in the same expressionless voice, and handed back the whip to Giles. “When the sack posset was prepared in the kitchen, were ever you here to see it done?”

  “I never once failed to see it prepared,” returned Judith Pamphlin, bolt upright but conquered. Her harsh voice sounded shaken.

  “How? Did you suspect poison?”

  “Nay, not poison. But this slattern,” Judith shot out a long thin arm towards Kitty, “hath been lewd and thievish since her breasts grew: she casting eyes on all ’prentices or suchlike, and wheedling them to steal for her.” Judith’s voice rose. “The Laard’s justice condemneth her already to the lake of burning pitch, and the fire that …”

  “Forebear this Puritan cant. I will hear none of it.”

  Judith Pamphlin folded her arms tightly, and was again silent.

  But Kitty, he noticed out of the corner of his eye, no longer pretended meekness. Her small plump shoulders were crouched, and she turned too-large eyes of hatred on Judith. The small thick upper lip had risen, showing bad teeth.

  “This arsenic,” Fenton continued, “is a white powder, or,” he remembered what it was more likely to be in this age, “it may have been a small white bit from a larger cake. Judith, could the cook have put this into the sack posset without your notice?”

  Judith, hating Kitty, but in iron fairness, opened and shut her lips on one word.

  “No,” she said.

  “You are sure?”

  “’Twould not have escaped me.”

  “When you passed abovestairs, carrying the bowl to my wife’s room, did any person bid you pause, or try to trap your attention otherwise, so that poison might have been put there?”

  “There was none. Not ever.”

  “So!” said Fenton, after a pause. “You had best hear, then, that I intrust you and I think you faithful. A word aside with you.”

  Fenton backed towards the door of the study, setting the door halfway open. Judith Pamphlin, who had been standing with her back to the desk at the window—how much that same desk figured in Giles Collins’s account!—Judith darted a look of suspicion at him. But, when she marched across the room towards the door, she seemed a little less rigid.

  “Precede me,” Fenton said curtly, as she stopped at the door.

  The woman hesitated long, then ducked her head in obedience and marched out. Fenton, following her out into the dim hall, all but closed the door and set only his fingers inside it.

  “Go quickly to the kitchen,” he said in a low voice, “and prepare this. One large spoonful, of the sort I have seen in a museu—of the sort to eat soup at table, of powdered mustard. You have powdered mustard?”

  Judith did not reply; she merely nodded.

  “This in a glass or cup of warm water. To follow it if necessary, salt water or greasy water. Have you,” here his immense memory for minutiae faltered, “have you oil of olives?”

  Judith nodded.

  “This in equal parts with the juice of China oranges,” he pronounced it chaney, “and give it often. Barley water in plenty. Hot stones or bricks at the feet. All this should serve. Should my lady wife afterwards be weak, hot cloths to the abdomen and …” (No, of course there would be no morphine!) “Stop: have you laudanum?”

  Another nod.

  “A strong dose of laudanum, powdered and in water, to keep her drowsy for a few hours. By late afternoon, we shall see a different person. Quickly, now! Put on a salver such things as you immediately need; then return here, and tap at the door.”

  Judith nodded, and turned away.

  “Stay now! One moment more!” Fenton added.

  “At your command, master.”

  “I think you faithful. No guilty woman would dare speak as you did. Then why, tell me, does my wife mislike you, and run away, and bolt the door against you when she is ill?”

  Unexpectedly, an odd kind of emotion half-stirred behind that emotionless face. Judith Pamphlin touched her cheek.

  “Because I am hard-favoured, which is but the Laard’s will. Because I would help her, and well she knows I hate you. Because, as in childhood, I would teach her what is the will of the Laard …”

  “Again, woman: forbear your Puritan cant!”

  “I know the will of the Laard!”

  “What humility! How wiser than the wisest of men!”

&nbs
p; “Nay,” said Judith, all but shrinking up, “I am humble, the humblest of creatures …”

  “Yet you know His will. Attend to me: say but one word of your gibberish to my wife, and I will not have you flogged. You don’t fear a flogging.” (He knew her, and she sensed that; her eyes moved sideways.) “But I will have you turned into the street, and she will die.”

  “In some ways,” said Judith Pamphlin, again defeated, “you do well.” In a queer croak of something like respect she added: “Master.”

  Then, bolt upright, she marched towards a very small stairway leading down under the main stairs.

  For a long time Fenton stood motionless, his fingers inside the door, looking towards the front door and the border of lime trees.

  Towards anything that endangered Lydia, he was not angry: he was only merciless. Though he fought against history and the devil together, he swore she should not die. Then who was the author of the mischief?

  Plainest of all was Kitty Softcover, despite Judith’s statement. There could be no doubt that Kitty was Sir Nick’s latest conquest. Fenton did not like her in the least. For all her bodily charm, for all her insinuating large eyes and her magnificent red hair, he sensed that Kitty was as cold as a fish and had the instincts of a magpie. What a fool Sir Nick was!

  Compare Kitty, for instance, with Meg York. Compare the redhead dullard against Meg’s wit and Meg’s physical presence! (Now why was he making such comparisons?)

  True, he himself had been the first to suspect Meg. But that estimate had come entirely from reading Giles Collins’s narrative. Now that he had seen most of these persons, and weighed them up in judgment, his conclusions about Meg were different.

  Meg, of course, might easily commit murder. He had almost seen her do it. But Meg would kill only in one sudden flare of violence, with dagger or pistol; swiftly, before the fit died. Slow, laborious poisoning would not be quick enough for her. She would administer enough arsenic to kill ten persons, or none at all. And in this she was exactly like Sir Nick.

  Yet someone …

  Fenton hesitated. There was another possibility, beside the plain course in Giles’s account. He could apply a certain test. Settling his periwig, still butting against history and the devil, Fenton went into the study and closed the door behind him.