The Devil in Velvet

by John Dickson Carr

  As for Meg, she gave the impression of a fine lady after an exhausting forenoon without buying anything. Her fur cloak, muff, even hat were cast aside on the seat. The scarlet skirt with golden arabesques was spread out round her; the upper part of her gown, of vertical red-and-black with a very low corsage trimmed in black ruffles, had the same effect of weariness.

  Yet there was a smouldering quality about her, too. Fenton knew what it was; and, despite himself, it disturbed him. Her grey eyes, masked under long lashes, slid sideways towards him, and then away as though uninterested.

  “This New Exchange,” she said wearily, “is in higher repute than the goods it sells. I had desired to buy some simple gown, like this old thing, which some say none the less does become me.”

  And in weariness she lifted both arms above her head, all but emerging from her corsage when she lowered them, and apparently unaware of it. Fenton had tried to hide his bloodstained hands by putting them into his pockets. But Meg had seen them, as she saw all things concerning him. Suddenly she bent forward.

  “Foh, you have, been a-duelling again!” she said, shrinking back with a look of disgust and fright. Though the fright (for him) was real enough, anyone except George could have seen the fierce pride and pleasure underneath. “But lackaday! You won, which was most uncivil. One day you will be killed, and I shall be—oh, so horrid merry!”

  “Nay, now, scratch me!” protested George, who was scarlet in the face.

  “Sweetest George, would you know the difference ’twixt death and life?”

  Fenton sat up.

  “George,” he said, “she but feebly tries to mock at you. Should she try it again, set a barb in it and fire it back as you would fire a petronel. ’Twill do the doxy good.”

  Meg leaned swiftly towards Fenton.

  “Ay, and your own waspish tongue—!”

  “Would you dance at my funeral, Meg?”

  “Indeed I would. And sing too. Just as once …” Meg paused. She sank back into the corner, and her eyes wandered away. “Nick,” she said presently, “have you no remembrance at all?”

  “Of—of what?”

  “Of the time, not two years gone, when we had a house at Epsom? Your friends would be there: George (I am sorry for what I said, George!), and my Lord Rochester, and Sir Carr Scrope, and the old stout man who bade us call him ‘Mr. Reeve.’ And all of you fierce Royalists, sons and grandsons of those who were there since the royal standard was raised at Oxford.”

  Real tears shone on Meg’s eyelashes now.

  “Nick, Nick, I say no word against Lydia. But my sire and grandsire were no canting Puritans like hers. My father, the brother of Lydia’s father, was Captain Charles York. Even when they were beaten, and long afterwards, there were many who would neither flee to exile nor own Oliver as Lord Protector. They had no hope; but they would not yield. Whenever they saw an Ironside, they flew at him, backsword against backsword, until one or t’other was slain. Presently all were gone. Captain York among them.”

  Meg had sat up straight, shoulders quivering, eyes lost in a dream.

  Fenton began to speak, but checked himself.

  “And don’t you remember, as a boy, how the Sour-faces stood straight at every lane, with pike or sword? And Royalists, under their eyes, drank the toast? Crummle they lengthened to Crum-well. And they threw a crumb of bread into a pot of wine before they drank it. ‘God send this Crum-well down!’”

  “I—I well remember the custom.”

  “But not Epsom, Nick? You do, fie on you! The little dining room, with your friends there?” Meg had kept back her tears; she was proud. “I stood on a chair, with my other foot on the table; ay, and my petticoats thrown above my knee, and a cittern in my hands, thus. But I did not sing bawdry, Nick. I sang the old Cavalier songs, that set all your faces a-glow like a fire. I did it thus!”

  Meg sat bolt upright. She herself was all a-glow, from her own heart or spirit. Carelessly she threw back her head, its lustrous black hair dressed down the sides to little curls that almost touched the shoulders, and in a fringe across the forehead. True colour flamed in her cheeks. Her mouth and eyes, through the run of the verse, threw out every emotion from bitter contempt to triumph. Her right hand swept across imaginary strings.

  “Come, fawn on disaster! Call Oliver master,

  And lickspittle, shiver, and crawl!

  The breast-plate, the back-plate, the gorget and tassets,

  The sword that did smite them, now hid in a wall?

  The lobster-tail helmet, the wine of the well-met,

  The red and the gold of the Crown?

  ’Tis a dead comrade’s ghost that shall give ye the toast—

  God send this Crum-well down!”

  There were other verses, but Meg could not finish them. Half the fever went out of her. She sank back, her hands over her eyes. George regarded her with hypnotized admiration and awe. “What a woman you are, sweetest madam! And what an actress you would have made!”

  “You forget,” Fenton said politely, “she is one already.”

  George turned a face whose redness was now wrath.

  “If any man but you had said that—!”

  “Oh, her Royalist feelings are true enough. Charles York was a good and valiant man; may the grass be green on his grave!” Coldly Fenton’s mind weighed the matter. “And do you think I don’t feel the allure of her? Don’t you think, even with the crowd round us now and eyeing us, I don’t burn to take her in my arms?” Here Meg’s fingers trembled a little. “But don’t you observe, George, how she watches through her fingers the effect she has made?”

  Meg dashed her hands away from her eyes and looked at him, through tears, with hatred.

  “I go,” she declared, keeping her lips straight, “to Mr. Plover’s great shop, The Jillflirt in Cheapside. Will you favour me by leaving this coach?”

  Fenton ignored the speech.

  “If you be only jillflirt—” he hesitated. “Well! You do but inflame and baffle men’s minds. George, for example, has a question he would put to you …”

  “Nick!” whispered George, in an agony of fear when he approached the brink. “Nay, ss-s-t! Not now!”

  “Question?” asked Meg in genuine surprise.

  “Nay, ss-s-t! Nick!”

  “Well, let be. It is a matter for consideration.” Fenton paused. “Meg, did you dispatch Kitty to the Blue Mortar, in Dead Man’s Lane, to buy arsenic?”

  Meg’s amazement was so great that Fenton could have sworn it was real.

  “Arsenic? Poison?” Meg said. “And that, one presumes, to kill you? Think all else of me. But not that. And this—this ‘Kitty’!” Her cheeks flamed again. “Must I be jealous of another too? What is her name? Kitty who?”

  “Kitty Softcover. She is the cook in our own house.”

  Meg’s shoulders lifted and writhed in disgust.

  “I? To make confidante of a cook-maid? I have never even seen the wench. And besides!” Across Meg’s lips curled that closed-mouthed smile he knew so well. “You think us conspirators?”

  “What else?”

  “I have many vices, as happily you know. But my interest lieth only in men.”

  “Now that,” he told her dryly, with mock admiration, “I confess I had not thought of. But pardon me for reminding you that you have many jewels. This girl …”

  “You are fond of her, I suppose?”

  “No. She shocks me,”—he used the term in its old sense of disgusts—“as much as she would seem to disgust you. Yet she is thievish, and fond of bright stones. Should you have given her a bright ring or bracelet …”

  “And put my neck in danger? Faugh!”

  “Yet the wench, unquestionably Kitty, gave to the apothecary a description of the lady who had sent her. ’Twas the true image of you.”

  Meg looked at
him curiously.

  “Nay, how much a dunce is the cunningest of men!” she said, shrinking into her most delicate manner. “Would any woman, sent to buy poison, give a true picture of the person who sent her, save that she wished to make suspect an innocent one? I hope this wench … nay, I will not speak her name! … is well and heavy flogged.”

  There was a pause.

  “George,” said Fenton, “Madam York is in the right of it. She makes zanies of us both. We had best go.”

  George opened the door of the coach, carried himself clumsily to the step, and jumped down. He was astonished to find this side surrounded by a silent group. Even the gaudiest coach was never stopped, nor had its windows broken by stones, if a pretty lady sat inside. The mob merely stood with lewd eyes and lewd expressions, seldom displeasing to the pretty lady herself.

  Again real tears touched Meg’s eyelashes.

  “This is a true leave-taking, Nick,” she told him. “You noted, questionless, I lied when I said ’twould take another night to gather my stuffs. You will find me gone from your house by early evening.”

  “And I will never cease to think,” said Fenton, “that you are Mary Grenville.”

  He bent forward to kiss her hand, and found (unexpectedly) that he was kissing her lips instead. His knee slipped on the velvet-covered upholstery, and he fell against her. Before he could slip loose from her arms and get to his feet, his brain had become somewhat addled.

  But he slid down and out to the coach step, and thence to the ground.

  “Should you need me, as you will,” whispered Meg, leaning out, “you shall hear how to find me. For we are bound together, you and I!”

  Fenton gave a signal to the coachman, while George roared back loungers, who now seemed delighted. The coachman’s whip cracked, and cracked again; the huge vehicle quivered, but could not move. Fenton and George, both now wary of slapping sword scabbards, moved away into the crowd.

  “Nick,” growled George, with his gaze on the cobbles, “she loves you.”

  “No! Attend to me. First, I care for none but Lydia. Second, you do not know Meg. ’Ware her temper; give her money; load her with jewels and gowns and baubles; and she will love you too.”

  George turned a face in which hope struggled above incredulity.

  “Truly, d’ye think so?”

  “I … am sure. Besides, I mislike the sound of this Captain Duroc: who, as I now recall, is named as of ‘the French King’s personal attendance.’”

  Here George’s left hand, as once before, dropped softly to his sword hilt.

  “With you,” said Fenton, “she will be in good hands. But you must make haste, George! She goes from my house earlier than I had thought; she goes this evening. You must be there; you must huff up your courage; you must speak bold and not stammer, or you’ll lose her. Can you do it, man? Will you try?”

  George hesitated. Then, through set teeth, he swore he would.

  “Good! Now pray tell me what happened in Dead Man’s Lane, when I … lost my memory?”

  George told him, briefly but clearly.

  All this, more swiftly than it takes to relate, Fenton analysed and put each circumstance in its proper place. He saw that his worst danger was upon him.

  They had been in the apothecary’s shop: very well. The apothecary tells them Kitty’s description of Meg. George raves and threatens the apothecary wildly. Whereat he, Fenton—who an hour or so before has been coolheaded under greater difficulty with the servants—then flies out against poor George. Sir Nick grips him then, and has complete control by the time he looks out of the window and sees the green ribbon of my Lord Shaftesbury’s Country party.

  But the real explanation, he knew, lay deeper. He did not really fly out against George. Wrath gripped him, and Sir Nick slipped in, because of the accusation against Meg. Both of them must be more fond of Meg, even if you called it lust, than either realized.

  And there was worse, which made Fenton shiver. Each time Sir Nick was a-prowl, Fenton had heretofore sensed it; he had braced himself for that wrestling with the coffin lid and the remnants of the dead man inside.

  Yet this time he had not even been aware of it. At the apothecary’s he had felt only a mild surge of temper, a mere brush of it, not even as much as he had felt against Judith Pamphlin or Kitty Softcover. He could well remember looking out of the window and seeing the green ribbon … then nothing. He had never before lost his memory.

  True, it was not completely a loss. As a very drunken man will next day recall only one or two hazy memories, he vaguely recalled swords clashing, and somebody very thin, and someone else shouting, “’Ware the dog behind ye!” At the same time …

  What he had feared must be true. Sir Nick was growing more powerful.

  “No!” his brain cried out. To have that dead lunatic creep into his bones, perhaps for longer periods than the stated ten minutes, would make the devil laugh and perhaps had been the devil’s intent from the first. “Within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.” No!

  Weighing it coolly, he knew he could defeat Sir Nick if he remained always, always and forever, on his guard. This he determined to do. And he was almost cheerful again when he followed George into the smoky Fat Capon, where George ordered a chicken and four pigeons for himself, a meat pie for Fenton, and pots of canary for both.

  It was long past the hour for midday dinner. Very few patrons sat at the long tables, silhouetted like ghosts against the fiery red bed of coals. In the dimness Fenton’s hands went unnoticed despite their bloodstains.

  “George,” he said, when the meal had been ordered and both of them sat pondering for a time, “I had forgot to thank you for …”

  “Pah!” George said gruffly.

  “Not to know that in these days one does not trouble to parry a cut, but thrusts home with the point as he lifts his arm,” Fenton argued; “yet for three minutes to hold off a bully-Alsatia­—!”

  “Faugh!” growled George. “They cared not for me. You were their quarry.”

  “So I think. Yet let’s discourse upon it. These bullyrocks creep from sanctuary to kill for pay. One flaunts his green rosette. Who set them on me?”

  George looked at him in surprise.

  “Why, are you in any doubt? My Lord Shaftesbury himself.”

  Now there flowed back to Fenton all of Giles Collins’s forebodings and headshakings of this morning. “You would not take a cup of wine at the Devil, so hard by the King’s Head?” The latter tavern, of course, was the meeting place of the Green Ribbon Club. Most of all, Giles’s dark words: “There is like to be bloody work this day.”

  Giles, in fact, had all but dressed him for a duel: without any lace encumbrances, without even a ring on his sword hand. Yet Fenton gnawed at his lip, here in the cookshop, and would not be satisfied.

  “Granted,” he admitted, scowling, “I hate my Lord Shaftesbury and all his works. But here’s a man of high and mighty repute, a Lord Chancellor before he turned his coat against a King for the fourth time. Who am I to be his victim? Why?”

  The colour drained from George’s face. Slowly he turned towards his companion.

  “Now God help us!” George prayed; and then whacked his fist on the table. “I had thought your humours gone. Nick, Nick! A good doctor of physick, now …”

  “I need none, George. Why should this little old man bear me grudge?”

  George steadied himself, as though to speak to a child.

  “You have no remembrance, Nick?”

  “None.”

  “Parliament,” said George, “was prorogued …”

  “In November of last year,” agreed Fenton. “And hath not been convoked together even yet.”

  “Good! Good!” nodded George, eyes gleaming. “I’ll have thee cured yet, good friend. Now to prorogue Parliament,” he explained slowly, as to a chil
d, “means but to terminate its session for a time, not dissolve it. Lords and Commons, in November, were at such a high pitch of quarrel that both Houses sat together in the Painted Chamber, which is common ground for both …”

  “Devil take you, I know that! I desire to learn why my Lord Shaftesbury—”

  George, a little shaken and awed, stared at the past.

  “That night,” he said, “I was in the public gallery of the Painted Chamber, which contains five great tapestries representing the siege of Troy. I cannot tell why I was there, having no head for such stuff. Stop; I recall; I went because I heard there would be troublesome affairs, and hence merry sport.”

  “Yes?”

  “Jack Ravenscroft and I were a-laying wagers,” George said defensively, “whether the candles would go out before the speeches ended. Indeed, the candles burned blue and dim, on high pointed windows and November fog over the river; but both fires were very bright. My Lord Shaftesbury was accommodated with a chair by the nearer fire. His Majesty was there too.”

  “King Charles? Why?”

  “I can’t tell. But he lounged by the other fire. This day, Nick, when we saw the face of the red Indian on the tobacco sign—curse me, seeing the face all long and brown, I had all but said ‘Sire!’ Save that he showed no teeth like the brown long face, and the curls of his black periwig hung a little forward, and his eyes moved everywhere. Ye do remember?”

  “I—I—no.”

  “How you rose up from your seat,” cried George, “pointing your finger at my Lord Shaftesbury? How you made against him the most ingenious speech that ever flayed the hide from a man’s body?”

  This time a cold shudder went from Fenton’s head to his feet.

  At the back of the sooty cookshop the fire bed glowed; they had long put George’s capon and pigeons on the turnspit. A boy, himself called turnspit, basted the meat out of a ladle, hiding his face behind a damp cloth. Joints of meat, on iron arms and chains, were swung aside from the fire.

  “No!” said Fenton. “No! My Lord Halifax will do this, in years to come. But not I! Not I!”

  George had caught only the last words.