The Devil in Velvet

by John Dickson Carr

  “Not you? Scratch me, but I was there! I heard you. Faces were all turned towards you, their mouths split; and all dark but for yellow firelight. Your temper was corked down like a miser woman’s bottle. ‘There he sits, my lords and gentlemen. “My Lord Shiftesbury,” some call him …’”

  “And—and what else did I say?”

  “Nay; don’t perplex me!” fussed George, with a heavy frown. “The beginning I recall, and the very end. Yet …” Suddenly his eyes narrowed with a look of deep cunning. “Was it truth, Nick, when you spoke of my Lord Shaftesbury’s past life?”

  “His past life? How?”

  Since Nick was bemused, it appeared, George sought to trap and test his madness.

  “That my Lord Shaftesbury, in youth and at the beginning of the Great Rebellion, was a most zealous Royalist, and fought well in the army of Charles the First, until …”

  Fenton sat up straight.

  “Until,” he retorted, “the man smelt in the air, smelt like a dog, that the King’s fortunes were changing and the King’s star would fall. Just before Naseby fight he deserted to the Roundheads. He became the most fervid, the most pious, the most zealous at psalms …”

  “And at Abbotsbury?” prompted a hoarse-voiced George.

  “At Abbotsbury,” said Fenton, “he was so zealous a Roundhead that he desired to burn alive a captured garrison in a Royalist house.”

  As the turnspit basted the fowl, drops of grease dropped into a coal bed now flaring. There was a vicious hiss and sputter, and low red light shot through the cookshop.

  “But his nose was ever a-sniff,” Fenton continued coldly and quietly. “At the Restoration there he was, in some fashion turned Royalist again, bowing and smiling (for he is sometimes a merry man) among the Commissioners who welcomed King Charles the Second.”

  Again the grease drops sizzled in the fire.

  “And do I need tell you,” inquired Fenton, “how his fortunes­ grew high? Until then he was but Anthony Ashley Cooper­, ‘the little man with three names.’ How his zeal for the new King pushed him up in titles and favours to being Earl of Shaftesbury? But he scented the wind again. This rising­ clamour of ‘No Popery,’ this determination to be rid of the Duke of York because the duke is a Catholic—or so my lord thought—would loose a tempest to blow away the King. He deserted again.”

  Hitherto Fenton had been quoting facts, coldly and without emotion. For the first time, now, he copied what he had seen that day. Turning his head aside, he spat on the floor.

  But George was bouncing with excitement.

  “You remember!” he kept repeating, and plucked at Fenton’s sleeve. “Nick, this is no madness. You’ll put no bubble on me! You were but drunk—faith, as I have seen ye guzzle for five weeks on end, with no memory left—when you spoke thus before Lords and Commons! And, now I think of it, you were drunk today; yet denied it.”

  Again it was the simplest way out. Fenton’s wry smile implied assent.

  “And ’gainst my lord and his Country party,” said George, shaking his head dubiously, “you made six points. Here was the matter of the body politic, and beyond my wits. But sure there were needles in the bundle, for some did yelp and cry out; and you silenced them with a great voice, or some cunning retort that made them appear foolish. But the very end of what you said! Nay, that I can recall to the word!”

  George rose to his feet. His hand, outstretched in red-shot gloom, might have been pointed at a ghostly Shaftesbury.

  “‘Four times turncoat, four times traitor. Three times husband, thrice advancement. Twice ennobled, twice ignobled. Once dead, soon damned. And here’s the sword would speed it on!’”

  George sat down, and stared with large eyes at the past.

  “Ecod, Nick! The shout that went up, from both sides, was like to crack the gilt off the roof. In all this my Lord Shaftesbury­ sat still in his chair by the fire, making play with a lace hand­kerchief. He is little, but wears an extravagant huge flaxen periwig­ greater than mine. Only once he turned his face to ye, as calm as a god’s. Only once he spoke (but this I heard later by report) to my Lord Essex. ‘I mislike this fellow,’ says my lord, as languid as a well-bounced wench: ‘let him have a lesson.’”

  “A lesson,” Fenton repeated slowly.

  Automatically Fenton’s hand brushed up to go over the back of his head, as always when in reflection. Again he found the periwig and the hat. As he was about to remove the hat, he remembered that it must always be worn in public places, and stayed his hand.

  “A lesson,” agreed George, half-smiling. “It occurred but three nights later, you’ll recall. Here was you, riding home alone through the loneliest part of the fields, with only a paring of a moon to guide you, after a carouse at the White Horse by Chalk Farm. Out of ambush, three brisk rogues flew at you and pulled you from your saddle.”

  Fenton made no remark, but his fist slowly clenched on the table.

  “Come!” said George, half-apologetically. “Unless I much misread it, they had no intent to kill you. They did intend but to slit your nose and give you a heavy beating with cudgels, as a great lord customarily orders.”

  “Now how I admire my Lord Shaftesbury’s moderation!”

  George glanced at him, as though scenting some sarcasm here. But he forgot it in a chuckle.

  “Admire your own,” he advised dryly. “One rogue was found next morning in the ditch, half dead of a skull blow with his own cudgel. The second contrived to crawl back to the White Horse, with a sword-thrust through his middle. The third made escape.”

  “So I recall,” lied Fenton.

  “Now come, good hornet!” urged George, moving closer. “You can intrust me; I’ll not betray it. Many wondered why you took no vengeance for that. For months you have done little but brood and drink at home, going abroad only to ride in the Mall or … or pay respect to Meg York at her house in King Street, before you moved her to your own. Some said ’twas Meg ensnared you. Some might have thought you afeared—”

  “Did they so?” inquired Fenton, in a curious voice.

  Again George looked at him quickly, and with apprehension. But Fenton turned on him a smile of such politeness, white teeth showing under the narrow black line of moustache, that he was reassured. Fenton himself knew his mind to be quite clear, with no trace of Sir Nick.

  “Ah,” breathed George, and gave a belch of relief. “Here’s our dinner come!”

  Up marched the landlord, a fat outline against a heavier gush of heat, with a smaller man following him. They carried the smoking meat on big trenchers. Holding open the left side of his coat, George disclosed a single-edged dagger, for eating purposes, slung in a sheath under his left arm.

  “Nay, I’ll pay our shot!” he said firmly, as Fenton’s hand went to his pocket. “You sling away too much gold, hornet. Bear up, and here’s to you!”

  When you ordered a “pot” of wine, Fenton discovered, you received a good quart measure. If you had forgotten your own knife, the cook-shop could supply you with a knife in addition to a pronglike fork.

  Lifting the quart of canary, Fenton took a deep pull and all but gagged. The brownish-white wine was heavy, potent, and so oversweet that his nose and palate only just received it. But what fascinated him was George’s lightning-swift disposal of a capon, using only the dagger and dropping bones into a box on the floor. His manner of eating pigeons also interested Fenton, who had read of the practice.

  Skewering a fat pigeon to the trencher, George cut it into four quarters and devoured each quarter by itself, bones and all. “Why, then,” Fenton triumphantly cried in his mind, “here you are; here’s your century; dig in!” And his knife drove deep into a meat pie which, as he had anticipated, was almost as big round as the mouth of a salad bowl. His new, dog-strong teeth ripped away at pieces of meat which were lean but very tough.

  It was only the rich, soup
y gravy, containing heaven knows what, which told him he would vomit if he did not leave off. He put down knife and fork, considering the plan in his mind.

  “Er—George!”

  “Wh’?” or some such noise emerged from crunching sounds inside puffed cheeks. George’s face had grown red and shiny. His eyes beamed appreciation of the food.

  “I believe,” Fenton remarked carelessly, “my Lord Shaftesbury dwells at Thanet House in Aldersgate Street. Is ever a time appointed when he is always to be found at the King’s Head tavern?”

  Swallowing the last quarter of the last pigeon, George washed it down with a pint of canary.

  “Why, as to that,” he said, and reached up under the back of his coat to wipe greasy hands on his satin waistcoat, so as to have the stains out of sight, “my lord is there on most afternoons. Save when the Lords sit, or His Majesty’s council. Come, I had forgot! My lord is always at the King’s Head on Tuesdays,” added George, forgetting this was a Tuesday, “from one of the clock until midnight. He …”

  Fenton rose to his feet.

  George’s eyes, unexpectedly realizing, showed a look very like horror.

  “I have a mind,” said Fenton, “to visit the King’s Head now.”

  CHAPTER IX

  “HERE’S A HEALTH UNTO HIS MAJESTY!”

  THE DEAD MEN’S HEADS, stuck on poles above Temple Bar, were not those of traitors. They were merely heads of unknown men whose bodies had been fished out of the river or found dead in field and lane. If none knew who they were, their heads were cut off, pickled in a mixture of vinegar and cumminseed, and thrust high so that somebody might identify them.

  But, as the heads wagged in the wind, or looked down over stout grey-black-stone Temple Bar, their eyes and mouths were no warming welcome to the City.

  Temple Bar, with its great arched opening through which wheeled vehicles crashed with even greater din, had on each side of it a stone wall containing an opening for those who went on foot through to Fleet Street.

  Just beyond, at the corner of Fleet Street and the off-turning­ of Chancery Lane, stood the King’s Head, with its black timbers­ and its balustraded balcony on the floor well above the street.

  “Well, I’ll adventure it,” Lord George Harwell said stoutly. “But, Nick! As touches my Lord Shaftesbury …”

  Just inside the entrance in the wall to Fleet Street, Fenton paused and looked round to view the sights. But George’s insistence would not be denied.

  “No, now, curse it! What’s in your mind to do against him?”

  “Much!”

  “But in what fashion?”

  “My Lord Shaftesbury,” said Fenton, “has been good enough to say of me, ‘Let him have a lesson.’ Good! Let us see how my lord himself enjoys a lesson.”

  “Nick, you durst not challenge him! He is a noble lord—”

  “So is your own father.”

  “True, true; but the old hunks cometh seldom to London. He is nobody. Here’s another matter completely! My Lord Shaftesbury, apart from his vigour and extraordinary fire …”

  “Hath he vigour? Hath he fire?”

  “When he desires to show them: ay, for certain! Be warned, Nick! Apart from this (I say) he is elderly and full of poison from the hole in his side. He would laugh at a challenge. Now hear the best of the reasons why you cannot attack him now!”

  George stabbed his finger at the upper floor of the King’s Head.

  “There will be fifty swords about him, where he sits among his friends in the upstairs room. The house, I think, is already alive with daggers. They’ll not even suffer you to go near him.”

  “We shall go near him. Be sure of that!”

  The sun had come out in brilliance, and the wind was dead. Street signs rattled only to the shaking of Fleet Street itself. Chimneys against sloping roofs, so many chimneys that they were lost in haze, foamed black smoke straight upwards, letting fall a heavy rain of soot.

  “Over there on the south side,” thought Fenton, “is the entrance to the Temple, with the Rainbow coffeehouse hard by. On our side, beyond the King’s Head, there’s the Devil and also the Good King Wenceslas. With so many hospitable red lattices of taverns, it’s no wonder the crowd is thinned.”

  Past him, walking east, rolled a stocky youth whom Fenton identified as a seafaring man by his red breeches, broad belt, and tucked-up periwig. There was even a gunpowder spot on his hand. At the edge of Chancery Lane stretching up left at right angles to Fleet Street, the stocky young man hesitated.

  Just across the lane, as though shrinking from crossing the kennel, stood a demure young woman in a shabby gown, but with a broad flopping straw hat, the very lowest of low-cut corsages, and bright artificial colour in her face. She allowed one eyelid to droop, and the half-curl of a smile. The noble seafarer, galvanized, leaped across the lane—kennel and all—at one bound. Linking arms with each other, as in some rehearsed dance measure, they both swung to the right and strolled casually up Chancery Lane.

  “Now that was handsomely done!” cried George, in high approval, and craned to look after them. “Faith, that’s a credit to Mr. Pepys and the Navy!”

  Fenton also glanced after them. Chancery Lane contained many fine houses, mostly those of high-placed lawyers, with porter holding a tipstaff at the door. There were mean houses too. He wondered in which house Meg, under the protection of Captain Duroc …

  “Over the lane,” he said to George, “while ’tis still open. ’Ware the scissors-grinder’s wheel. Across it … so!”

  They were now beside the lattice and a few paces from the door of the King’s Head.

  “For the last time,” George bawled, “you can’t come at him with a sword …”

  “Sword?” said Fenton, and swung round. “Who spoke of a sword? I mean to use none.”

  “Yet you said a … a ‘lesson’!”

  “True. Until he chokes on it! Stay; I had forgot the trophies!”

  “What trophies?”

  “The hat with the green rosette, and the set of ill-fitted false teeth. You told me you took them, and I see the hat in your pocket. Pray give them to me.”

  George handed them over, and his companion thrust both into his left-hand coat pocket. George asked no question, since again he was staggered. This man was not Nick in a temper, nor was he yet—quite—the grave, courteous scholar, though he might have been the latter.

  Though Fenton’s face was a trifle pale under its swarthiness, his eyes remained as passionless as those of a hanging judge.

  “Being myself a lecher and swaggerer,” he said, “can I judge my Lord Shaftesbury? Yes, I believe so. For I can pardon all things in all men, save one: an act of treachery. And this puffed-up fellow, as I remarked, has four times turned his coat.”

  “Nick, Nick, ’tis but the custom!”

  “Not mine, I thank you!”

  “Nick, for God’s sake!”

  Fenton threw open the door.

  George, following him with head down as though to butt a wall, closed the door after them. At first it was certain that nobody, in the babble which burst out at them, recognized the outward seeming of Sir Nick Fenton.

  It was a large room, with smoke-blackened plaster walls and, about the middle of the right-hand wall as you faced inwards, a balustraded staircase ascending the wall. Though these were only small fry among Green Ribboners, they made enough clatter and brawl to account for the rest. There were long black benches, long black tables, small tables, short benches, chairs, and joint stools, all a-scatter. The reek of ale and wine and strong waters seemed almost visible.

  Hats and periwigs wagged over leather drinking jacks, pewter pots and tankards, bottles, even cups. Some played at cards, half-rising and slapping down the card as though dagger-ready to fly at another’s throat. A dicebox rattled under the stairs. Many smoked long curved pipes made
of clay, with coarse tobacco whose smoke layers prevented Fenton from seeing much more than halfway down the room. Through this maze bustled the tapsters, or drawers of ale and wine.

  “Anon, sir!” would cry the tapsters, or, “By and by, sir,” while they seemed to scurry past, heads down; whereas, in fact, they did as little work as possible. Somebody was banging a tankard on a table, and shouting for a tapster who slid round an upright beam.

  Though Fenton both smoked and drank, this overpowering gush into his mouth and nostrils stifled him.

  “There’s nothing here,” he said. “Make straight for the stairs.”

  But George plucked at his sleeve.

  “Look!” George muttered, eyes wide in surprise. “There! Just to the left of the door!”

  At the left of the front door, behind a small table facing them sideways, sat an old and very fat man, with a stomach like Bacchus and gout-swollen legs ending in broad-buckled shoes. He was bald except for white hair, well kept and combed, which began about the crown of the head and fell down over his shoulders in the old Cavalier way.

  He might have been Falstaffian, a gusty tun of laughter, except that his rheumy eyes seemed too old and weary. His clothes, once of fine quality, were ancient and rusty though carefully mended. From his left hip, on three straps blackened by years—Fenton’s heart rose up for joy—hung the old cup-hilt rapier of the Cavalier.

  And in front of him on the table …

  “That’s a cittern,” George bent over to whisper in Fenton’s ear. “’Tis but a flattish box, much polished, and sharp cut on one side for longer or shorter lengths of string. Scratch me, Meg spoke of it today! The old gentleman is …”

  “Why,” Fenton was thinking, “that cittern is only an old-fashioned simple zither, and I remember it when I was a boy. I could play a tune on it now.”

  “Venerable sir,” he began aloud.

  The old gentleman quivered and shifted his bulk. All of a sudden his broad face, somewhat drink-mottled, seemed to come alive. The film lifted from his eyes. Across his face went a smile which (perhaps) might have warmed the heart of my Lord Shaftesbury himself.