The Devil in Velvet

by John Dickson Carr

  “Stay; there is still more! In three years will come a great and malodorous liar, with a false tale of a ‘Popish plot’; and you will use it to drive the town mad with terror. Blood will flow, flames rise, and there will be many murders by the hangman. And in the end …”

  It is a sober fact that my Lord Shaftesbury almost smirked. Gently he waved the lace handkerchief to and fro.

  “In the end?” he said, as though giving a slight push.

  Out went Fenton’s voice, like Sir Nick’s in the Painted Chamber.

  “You will fail,” he answered. “The King, having given you rope enough, will first outwit you and then crush you in his five fingers.”

  A raucous laugh, which went up from one table, was hushed by a slight gesture from my lord. He seemed—almost—unmoved.

  “Now here’s much cloudy stuff,” he complained, “as I could prophesy myself, or Orange Moll, or another. ‘A few years’! Why not fifty? Or an hundred? Can you foretell nothing of somewhat closer date?”

  “Truly, my lord, I can. What say you to … nine days?”

  “Come, that’s better! Well?”

  Again Fenton leaned his back to the stair rail.

  “At the moment, my lord, you are a member of His Majesty’s council, the highest and most secret in the land. You account yourself too powerful to be dismissed. But in exactly nine days—nine days, my lords and gentlemen!—you will be dismissed from the council as a dog is kicked from a chair, and ordered to depart from London!”

  Uproar broke loose at this; and eyes, a whole thirty pairs of eyes, slowly grew more menacing. Old Mr. Reeve slipped his right hand across to his sword grip. Still my lord’s slightest gesture kept them quiet.

  “Now would you make a wager as to this, Sir Nicholas?”

  “I will lay my life on it,” said Fenton. “If you be not dismissed on the 19th May, I vow to go alone, unarmed, into any lonely field outside London you may be pleased to name. Mark it well, my lord: the 19th May.”

  “See that it be writ down for him, good Bucks.”

  “And afterwards,” Fenton flung at him, “when the Exclusion Bill is defeated, when you have lost your battle against the King, you will in truth be old, and withered, and crazed in your wits. You will shake a skinny arm, crying, ‘I have ten thousand brisk boys at my command.’ There will be none. You will be alone, almost friendless, all power gone.”

  Dead silence. For they had glanced at my lord’s face.

  “All power gone.” None in that room, save Fenton and my Lord Shaftesbury, could guess what those words meant.

  My Lord Shaftesbury’s principles, as Fenton himself would have acknowledged, were very high. His hatred of the Catholic Church was quite genuine, near a mania. He cared little or nothing for money. He never took a bottle too many, or lost his head over a woman. All he desired was power, limitless power; and to get this, strictly on virtuous principles, he would commit any act from a small lie to wholesale murder.

  He stood up suddenly behind the table, dapping his lace handkerchief on the edge. Casually, as though to adjust the fit of his green coat, he turned his face away. And, beyond the window lattice, he saw the severed head staring at him on the pole over Temple Bar.

  All this time, swaying a little, it had been surveying the room. My Lord Shaftesbury turned back rather quickly, and sat down.

  “Why, Sir Nicholas,” said he, with a merry laugh, “you are in fact bold of your powers at soothsaying …”

  “Nay, my lord!” Fenton said quickly. “I am no soothsayer or fortuneteller. I but judge what will happen by natural means, in facts known to me.”

  “Now I should wish,” said my lord, “to make you acquainted with all my good friends here. That’s impossible, I fear. But there is surely one with whom I must acquaint you!”

  Instantly Bucks’s periwig moved towards Shaftesbury’s, while Bucks seemed to whisper and shake his head in objection. Other periwigs crept up to the high table, a garden of whispers among varicoloured hats with their flat plumes. Once Fenton caught a whisper, “No brawling.” Another voice (they could not identify it) hissed out its sibilants so loudly that the listeners caught what was said.

  “Pox on it, you play your ace of trumps too soon!”

  “Be wary,” muttered George, digging his left elbow into Fenton’s ribs.

  “Ay,” growled Mr. Reeve from beyond. “That old knave turned his face away but to hide a screaming-fit. There’ll be bloody work here, else I’m a Dutchman!”

  Fenton, who had administered the lesson he promised, waited quietly.

  But my Lord Shaftesbury was deaf to protests. He whispered back something which appeared to satisfy them. Except for Buckingham, the coloured hats slid back to their tables with only a soft slither of shoes on a board floor.

  “Come, now!” invited my lord. Stretching out his hand towards a round table, where a number of Green Ribboners sat well back and towards Fenton’s left, my lord lifted his hand insistently for someone to rise.

  And up from among them rose the strangest figure Fenton had ever seen.

  The man was very tall and lean, more so than Long-legs in Dead Man’s Lane. But here all resemblance ceased. This man wore an enormous brown periwig, bigger and longer than any in the room, and powdered all over with gold: after the fashion of King Louis the Fourteenth.

  Framed in the periwig, the man’s liquid dark eyes were either mischievous or very sorrowful; it was hard to tell which. His long face was either very pale or else powdered; he wore an obvious spot of rouge on each cheekbone. His coat was white, with gold fleur-de-lis on it, in contrast to a dark-blue waistcoat with gold buttons; the tight-fitting breeches were white, above red stockings, and white shoes with high red heels.

  So the immense figure threaded its way among the tables, at a mincing walk with one shoulder slightly lifted and the rouge plain on its cheekbones.

  “That man,” Fenton reflected idly to himself, “came here either in a coach or a sedan chair, else he would have been hooted and pelted off the street.”

  Yet nobody in the room, including Fenton himself, was deceived.

  Many of the gallants, desperately trying to be in fashion, aped the effeminate airs of a few rich lordlings or of the playhouse. But, in that masculine age, it was nearly all pretence. Behind it lurked a deadly sword arm, and as much a man as King Charles himself.

  Tap-tap went the red heels, as the man in the gold-powdered peruke worked towards the stair rail at its far end, and then turned left to approach Fenton along the side of the rail.

  “Another led captain,” whispered George in disgust. “Another bully. But this time the best they can buy. Have a care, Nick!”

  My Lord Shaftesbury’s voice rose up pleasantly.

  “May I make you acquainted,” he said to Fenton, “with Captain Duroc, late of the French King’s personal attendance?”

  Behind him Fenton heard George draw a deep, whistling breath.

  “Now by God’s death and Christ’s body!” whispered George. His right hand darted from his sword hilt and slid under the left side of his coat, where the sheathed dagger hung below his arm.

  “Gently!” Fenton said over his shoulder.

  Then Fenton turned left, at the side of the stair rail, to face the Captain Duroc of whom he had heard so much.

  Duroc, in his white finery spotted with gold fleur-de-lis, approached slowly beside the stair rail. His hard, long-fingered left hand rested lightly on the gold pommel of a sword slung on a baldric, after the French fashion, under the coat from right shoulder to left hip.

  Still there was dead silence, while the ring of spectators looked on with watchful, amused eyes. Some kept their seats, some stood up, some peered past shoulders. Fenton heard the gurgle as my Lord Wharton, dark-faced and with black periwig, tossed down a pint of malmsey.

  Captain Duroc stopped about six fe
et from Fenton.

  “Monsieur!” he said almost tenderly.

  He smiled, showing bad teeth, in the same tender way; the smile lit up his dark, liquid, mournful eyes, which might be full of sorrow or mischief. He made a deep bow, arm across chest, so that a few motes of gold dust sifted from his peruke.

  Fenton gravely returned the bow without speaking.

  “Alas,” said Captain Duroc, straightening up like an actor, his hand on his heart, “eet ees most regrettable that you and I moost disagree, yes?”

  (“You’re no Frenchman,” thought Fenton. “Your accent is overdone. You’re probably some hybrid mixture from middle Europe.”)

  “But there must be no braw-ling,” said Captain Duroc, looking shocked. “No, no, no, no! There must be de small hinsult; de seconds chosen; de place chosen; de time … today, tomorrow? When you like! Tout à fait comme il faut, n’est-ce-pas?”

  Captain Duroc moved a trifle closer.

  “Hélas!” he breathed. “Now is de question of de quar-rel. But it must not be of the nature politic. No, no, no! Tiens, I have it!” Duroc’s liquid eyes grew bright. “We shall be like the knights of old, yes? Now I ask you!”

  Here he thrust his long face almost into Fenton’s. The rouge spots glared.

  “Who is de fairest lady in de land?” demanded Duroc. “Queek!” He gave no time to think. “Who ees she?”

  “My wife!” Fenton retorted hotly, and round him rose such a gale of laughter as nearly swept him off his feet.

  To the ears of this generation, he realized, he could have said no more foolish-sounding thing. The Green Ribboners whooped or doubled up with mirth. Clanking their pots on the tables, they cried, “Bravo!” or lifted a tankard in mock toast.

  Captain Duroc, who would have made a master playhouse comedian, turned slowly to his audience, lifted his shoulders to the neck in a shrug, and spread out his hands with his eyes a sorrowful blank.

  “Tiens,” he seemed to be saying, “what can I do with such a man?”

  Fenton’s cheeks burned. “Keep your head!” a voice said inside him. “Keep your head! Keep your head!” And he steadied himself.

  He had been a fool, of course. The strange look in Captain Duroc’s eyes had been only amusement mixed with contempt. This tall pseudo Frenchman, with his painted face and his mincing airs, believed he could dispose of an adversary with two or three passes. Coolly, with a tinge of the comic, he was arranging a duel which should not involve the precious Green Ribbon Club.

  Again Captain Duroc swung round dramatically, his hand at his heart.

  “Monsieur,” he said sadly, “I regret that ’ere is the place we dis-agree. For de fairest lady, vous comprenez, is the sweet Madam Meg York …”

  “Let me pass!” came George’s hoarse-panting voice. “One chance; enough!”

  For George, seeing before him only a contemptible French thus-and-so, would not have troubled his head with niceties of sword-drawing. George would have leaped straight for his throat with a dagger.

  Perhaps, in the long run, that might have been best. But Captain Duroc continued.

  “And now,” proclaimed the Captain, “I moost give you de insult. But I would not ’urt you; no, no, no!” Again he looked shocked, all his features moving. “Not such fine gentleman as yourself! I geeve you only de small insult … so!”

  He arched his lean body, lifting on the toes of his red-heeled shoes. At the same time he arched his right arm up and over, hand dangling with thumb and forefinger pressed together. Stretching out his arm, thumb over forefinger, he lightly flickered the forefinger against the tip of Fenton’s nose.

  “Voilà!” he said.

  The gesture was at once so grotesque, yet at the same time so ludicrous at Fenton’s expense, that the whole room roared again. Tears ran down from Green Ribbon eyes across Green Ribbon cheeks. Captain Duroc, well pleased, leaned his body negligently against the stair rail, and did not smile too much.

  “Then that is the insult?” Fenton asked loudly.

  “Mais naturellement, mon ami!”

  This time Fenton did not forget the power of his shoulder and arm. Already his weight was on his right foot. His body pivoted. His right hand, palm open, cracked against Duroc’s left cheek with a noise like a musket ball fired at heavy leather.

  It would be a mild understatement to say that Captain Duroc, after an openhanded blow like the flat of an axe, merely tumbled over the stair rail and fell downstairs. For half a second his gilt scabbard, his white breeches, his scarlet stockings, his white shoes and high red heels, seemed to stand in the air upside down.

  But this must have been an optical illusion. He fell at full length on the stairs, with a heavy and bony crash which set flying his periwig. He screamed once before he rolled to the foot of the stairs—all a whirl of sword, legs, lace, and ruffles—where he lay still.

  One member of the Green mutineers rushed to the stair rail, keeping wide of Fenton. Below, a tapster and several others were bending over Captain Duroc.

  “Well?” came the call from above.

  “Can’t tell, sir,” yelled back the tapster, audible to everyone upstairs. “Don’t like ut, though. Left leg’s a-broke, thinks I. There’s a barber-chiurgien three doors away, at the Healed Man. Like us to …?”

  The Green Ribbon man glanced back at Shaftesbury, who nodded. Assent was shouted down. And Fenton turned round.

  “I would not ’urt you; no, no, no!” he told them, with heavy mock accent. “Not such fine gentlemen as yourselves, ah quelle dommage!”

  “Lug out, both of ye!” snapped the gruff old tones of Mr. Reeve, in a low tone. “Deploy to the stairhead. These water-guts won’t stay you.”

  Both Fenton and George lugged out at the same time. Fenton almost missed it, since Sir Nick had failed to clean the blade after the fight in the lane, and drying blood all but fixed it to the thin wood; but out it came.

  Sooty sunlight ran along the blades as three men moved the short distance to the stairhead. Mr. Reeve raised his voice for all.

  “George, be you first down the stairs. Dagger in your left hand, man; and carve meat if any stand! I’ll go betwixt ye, with a song for the traitors and ninnyhammers! Nick, do you hold the rearguard. The first to come at Nick Fenton is a dead man, and they know it!”

  There was a thump of footsteps as George started down, sword in right hand and dagger in left. Mr. Reeve’s hand ripped across the strings, and his hoarse tones went into the song.

  “Here’s a health unto His Majesty …”

  My Lord Wharton, he of the dark complexion and black periwig, whipped out his sword. Fenton, at the head of the stairs, jumped round to meet him.

  A strange exultation ran hot in Fenton’s veins, because he was on his own. He had no Sir Nick to prop him up. He could use only his knowledge of the fencing foil, but carry it at them to the last thrust.

  “Co-o-n-fusion to his enemies …”

  At the high table, motionless, my Lord Shaftesbury sipped delicately at white wine.

  “Now can any man,” he asked with dry sarcasm, “in truth foretell the future?”

  “Nay; ’tis foolish,” grunted Bucks, his eyes on the stairs. “But were I ten years younger—”

  “At him, Wharton!” snarled a furious voice.

  My Lord Wharton danced out sideways, arm and blade extended—and then stopped dead, fully twelve feet from Fenton’s dark-stained sword. Slowly my lord lowered the point.

  “And he that will not drink his health …”

  “Such cloudly stuff, as I remarked,” murmured Shaftesbury, “could be mouthed by anyone. But this matter touching my dismissal from the council! Come: this Fenton is deeper in the King’s confidence than I had believed.”

  “I wish him neither life nor wealth …”

  By this time Fenton had backed downstairs, still at guard. They c
ould hear the clump of his swift footsteps.

  “Make way, there!” George was bellowing, at a distance. “Set open the door!”

  “Nor yet a rope to ha-a-ng himself …”

  Bang! went the front door, both leaves flying wide.

  “When I mislike a man,” murmured my Lord Shaftesbury, “he lives seldom long. I shall not fail a third time.”

  “With a tow-row-row, and a … tow-row!”

  And so, with heads and hearts high, three King’s men left the King’s Head tavern.

  CHAPTER X

  OF ARSENIC IN A SACK-POSSET—

  LOOKING BACK ON IT AFTERWARDS, Fenton thought that the next month—or nearly a month—was the happiest time of his life.

  Above all was his love for Lydia, his near-worship of Lydia. In those few weeks he had seen her change from a semi-invalid into a happy, laughing, sturdy girl, more beautiful of face and more healthily beautiful of body; and for some mysterious reason she adored him.

  He himself was contented as he had never been contented. Professor Fenton, of Paracelsus, grew as young in spirit as his present age. For he lacked nothing he wanted.

  “Why,” he would think, “all I need is a daily bath and a toothbrush: and these, in clumsy fashion, I now have. Otherwise, is my living much different from what I found in the bustling twentieth century, when I took a cottage in rural England, and much enjoyed it?”

  Or again:

  “How strange,” he reflected, “have been the minds of authors I have read, setting a character back hundreds of years in time! I think their learning is not wide enough. For they never allow the poor devil to have a good time. He must fret and fume because progress—accursed progress, and thrice-damned machinery—have not come to wreck men’s lives.

  “He is infuriated by the lack of telephones and motorcars. I felt no need of them when I studied, in rural Somerset, for some dreary degree or other. Our author, through his hero, is appalled at the sanitation, the harsh laws, the power of King or Parliament. Yet, in my heart, I confess these matters trouble me not at all.”