The Devil in Velvet

by John Dickson Carr

  At just this moment the orchestra, a trio composed of harpsichord, viol, and bass viola, arose in dreamy melody. The trio might not have been twenty-odd feet away, in a straight line; but where was a straight line here? Softly they played “I Pass All My Hours in a Shady Old Grove,” for which King Charles the Second had written the words.

  “Bitch!” screamed Lydia.

  A dim spark struck on the dagger as it whipped up. If the light had been better, there would have been murder done. Silver stripes tore and pink roses flew wide. Meg screamed, backing away. Lydia, herself somewhat appalled, threw away the dagger and flew at Meg with a hand to slap and a claw to tear hair.

  Though neither girl could in any sense be called tall, Lydia was the smaller. Meg, head down in butting style, ran at her with a violent shove of both hands. Lydia, staggering, caught her shoe in her own gown and fell. Meg instantly, and with sleek feline grace, ran out through the arch where Captain Duroc stood on one leg with his crutches.

  Lydia, bouncing to her feet and not forgetting the gold dagger, dashed at the arch after her. Captain Duroc, a crutch planted on each side but none too well balanced, barred her way.

  “Madame!” he pleaded with his liquid eyes wide, and all his comedian’s courtesy, “je vous implore! Two ladies: no, no! This is not the délicatesse!”

  Lydia looked him up and down.

  “May I be a punk,” she said almost sweetly, “if you are not the painted Nancy Ann with whom my husband dealt ere this?”

  And Lydia, lifting the front of her skirts, kicked him so viciously below the belt that Duroc, with a half-scream of pain, doubled up backwards with his crutches slipping away, and fell into the outer hedge.

  Fenton, still with nerves twitching badly from contact with Meg, had to find an outlet in some sort of action. He strode out of the glade through the same arch towards Captain Duroc.

  “Sir,” he began, voice still shaky, “though we be enemies, and must fight when your leg shall be healed, will you allow me the courtesy of lifting you up?”

  Duroc spat at him. Duroc, famous for his manners, lay back into the thick hedge, all twisted, his face upturned to the yellow-blue torch. The lean face, framed in gold-dusted periwig, was chalk-white except for spots which seemed dark instead of red.

  “Monsieur,” he said airily, “I cannot see you. Of me, me you ’ave made a fool; and thees is not done with impunity. I don’ know you. Go, fool, until I kill you.”

  “A word of advice, then,” snapped Fenton, whose hands quivered to be at the other’s throat. “I beg you won’t dishonour a noble nation by posing as a Frenchman. Your accent, sir, is abominable.”

  Swiftly he turned back towards the glade, and entered the arch again.

  “I believe,” he said, “Madam York left her cape, scarlet lined with dark blue, on the bank where …”

  Meg’s cape was a little way down the short and shallow slope which led to the centre of the circle. Some distance away, the mellowness of strings mingled into “I Pass All My Hours in a Shady Old Grove.”

  Then Fenton paused. He was not alone in the glade.

  There were four entrance arches, like the four points of a compass. He was near one. At the other three, straight ahead and at equal distance left and right, three men now stood motionless. All wore cloaks, but each had sword scabbard outside the cloak—blade about six inches drawn.

  They stood just inside the arches, watching him. Their broad hats concealed their faces, as the cloaks concealed what might have been good clothing. But in each hat was a large rosette of the Green Ribbon.

  Fenton’s joy, releasing all energy into this, sang through his veins in pure happiness.

  “Well met, gentlemen!” he said, trying to keep his voice low in accordance with the whispering of Spring Gardens. Instantly he unbuckled his cloak from the left shoulder, and threw the cloak aside. “But sure this ever repeated move of my Lord Shaftesbury lacks something in subtlety?”

  The man opposite him never spoke. He gave only a high, giggling laugh, a very unpleasant kind of laugh, as though he were too cunning to speak.

  “Sir,” retorted the man on the left, who seemed (to Fenton) to have a very short beard and moustache, “my Lord Shaftesbury is from London. Of this he knows nothing.”

  “No no!” mocked Fenton. “Never!”

  “Put by the notion,” cried the third man on the right, “that we were hired or sent. Sir, we are honest patriots and gentlemen, who think you traitor and better dead!”

  Each of them, at one time or the other, had flung the cloak back over his left shoulder. Each began to move forward out of his arch, slowly, down the slope towards a flat, good fighting circle fifteen feet across.

  “Honest men?” Fenton called softly. “I rejoice to hear it. Then you’ll come at me fairly, which is to say singly, and not three at once?”

  The man on the right had a young, shaky, nervous voice.

  “We would ensure the business, no more,” he said. “Only a simpleton goes singly against the devil in velvet!”

  “What?”

  “Well, so they call ye. Have you ever donned attire save velvet?” huskily demanded the bearded man on the left. “But you are Papist and conspirator and spy! Can you deny it?”

  “Yes!”

  “Yet you will die. Even if you be devil …”

  Fenton whipped out his sword. He jumped down to the flat surface of the fighting turf.

  “Why, then,” he said agreeably, “all three shall sup tonight in hell. Lug out!”

  At that moment he or somebody was thinking:

  “Come, here are easy odds. If I be quick enough, one bound—body turning left in the air—carries me off side of the right-hand man. Before he can bring round his guard, my point is through him. I use him, in left hand, to impede the second man’s arm: striking swift at the second man’s heart. ’Tis short; and the third man I dispatch at leisure.”

  Three opposing swords came out, all but colourless under moonlight and pale green. Fenton took a short leap to the right, nothing as yet to put them on guard. At the same time …

  Three swords, as they were drawn, stopped motionless. Three broad hats, with the Green Ribbon rosette, turned as though each man looked behind Fenton’s back.

  The thing was too spontaneous, too quick, to be any kind of prepared trick. Under the fourth arch, as Fenton glanced behind him, stood Big Tom.

  Big Tom’s heels were dug in, his immense shoulders extended. On a double lead, with a pair of mastiffs to each lead, he held back Greedy and Bare-behind in his left hand, and Thunder and Lion in his right. Their powerful haunches seemed to coil; their heads were set between heavy shoulders; a low bubbling growl went up and down as their hides shivered.

  The man opposite Fenton uttered his thin, giggling laugh. Slowly be began to move backwards, up the little slope for the arch. His unsteady fingers tried to put the blade back in its sheath. Fenton unobtrusively slid back the sword into his own scabbard. He did not like the Giggler.

  “Tom!” he said.

  “Aysir?”

  “If I give the signal to loose Thunder and Lion, can you hold back the other two?”

  “Aysir!”

  Fenton pointed his finger straight at the Giggler. “There!” he indicated.

  Then he brought his sword quickly up from the scabbard.

  “Thunder! Lion! Go!”

  Even though Big Tom had expected it, the lead ran harsh and blood-scraping through his hand. As the two mastiffs, haunches uncoiling, shot across the turf like brindled and tawny figures of nightmare, Thunder’s snarl ripped out against the sweet, tireless strains of “I Pass All My Hours in a Shady Old Grove.”

  “Tom,” said Fenton, quickly catching up his own cloak and Meg’s cape, “I think we’d best make haste from Spring Gardens, else there’ll be public riot and ourselves haled before a j
ustice. We—”

  He stopped. The Giggler had turned round and bolted into darkness just as Fenton pointed at him. The other two men had prudently vanished too. All that saved the Giggler from annihilation was the darkness which baffled the mastiffs’ sight, their sense of smell overcome by an overscent heavy with flowers, and trees.

  One of them snarled and stumbled on stones. Amid furious patterings, an artificial tree went down. Then came the noises that indicated their quarry was in sight. They were on the view halloa, and their victim screamed.

  “Tom,” said Fenton, “I much fear they make towards the trio of music. This music …”

  The music did not seem so much to stop as to explode. There was a crash as the harpsichord fell over backwards, all its strings leaping and jangling. The viol screamed like a pig, amid wild screams in the Italian language. The bass viola—much smaller than of later day, painted and with a scroll like a man’s face—the bass viola shot straight up in the air for a distance of fifteen feet.

  “Gotta heem!” a male voice cried ecstatically, as the viola descended and was caught.

  “Thunder! Lion! Here!”

  Three times Fenton bellowed at the top of his lungs. There was a pause, as of dying excitement. All through the woodland, as though Spring Gardens had become sentient, rose low laughter, which swept over the walks and died away.

  The mastiffs padded slowly back to the glade. Though each had blood on his dewlaps, Fenton knew they had done no great damage. They were dispirited, almost slinking; Thunder raised one eye that looked almost as guilty as George Harwell’s. Both Thunder and Lion felt they had done something wrong; they had not killed; or had they disobeyed? Fenton cheered them up.

  “Quickly!” he said to Big Tom. “We must try, if it be in any way possible, to discover my wife!”

  Big Tom, who had been given a bad time by the madness of Greedy and Bare-behind, found all four mastiffs tractable. He whisked them out of the glade, sending them trotting at random to the right.

  Fenton, hurrying after them, came almost face to face with Captain Duroc. With the aid of the hedge and his one good foot, Duroc had propped himself upright on the crutches, his weight upheld by the hedge. The torch in its bracket burned like a corpse candle beside him.

  “I say a good night to you,” remarked Duroc, lifting his upper lip. “We ’ave more to settle between us than a broken leg. There is also a lady, Madam York. She—”

  “Prefers another?” Fenton asked softly. “How very foolish of her! A good night!”

  He raced along after Big Tom and the mastiffs, seeing that last look in Duroc’s eye and knowing it would be no easy fight when they met. Abruptly Fenton stopped and looked round, realizing where he was. The tall, thick hedge on his left was the outer hedge of the labyrinth.

  “Tom,” he said, “the mastiffs could rip us a hole in this. We should be out of it, though I can’t tell where. If only my wife …”

  That was the moment he saw Lydia, who also kept to the outer hedge, running towards them. She was flushed and breathing hard from running. As Fenton saw her, he suddenly felt far guiltier than any sentiments he had ever attributed to Thunder or George Harwell.

  Yet she seemed unconcerned, almost smiling. He had completely forgotten Meg’s cape, hanging over his left arm. If Lydia noted it, she gave no sign. At Fenton’s signal, Thunder, Lion, Greedy, and Bare-behind ripped such an opening in the hedge that their masters could step out rather than crawl out.

  “Why, curse it all,” exclaimed Fenton, “I’ve come back on my tracks. Here’s the begin step of Pall Mall. I had thought to emerge somewhere in the Park. Did not you think so, Lydia?”

  “Oh, we’re’t home shortly,” murmured Lydia.

  Giles, pale and sharp-featured, opened the street door with all the wall candles burning behind him.

  “I thank God to see you safe,” said Giles. “Sir, there did come a note from Mr. Reeve, who said he would always warn you of danger. Humbly I cry pardon; but I opened it. You were to be set on in Spring Gardens, Mr. Reeve did not know where or when, by three gentlemen.” Giles moistened dry lips. “I thought it well advised to send Big Tom with the mastiffs.”

  Lydia, without comment, had walked straight back and gone upstairs. Big Tom shepherded the dogs downstairs, preparatory to letting them out for the night.

  “Did the letter,” Fenton said harshly, “tell the names of these ‘gentlemen’?”

  “No, sir. Save it hinted …” Giles’s mouth drew together. “Sir, I have not the letter by me. ’Twill keep till morning.”

  Fenton agreed. Nothing could have been of less importance to him, and he flung it from his mind. Startled, he discovered Meg’s cloak over his arm. This was worse and worse.

  “You have done well, carrot-pate,” he said, and gave Giles a brief account of what happened. Afterwards he hurriedly told Giles to get rid of the cape; then, hesitantly, he went upstairs.

  Though he tried to frame words of apology, he found none. Lydia’s door was closed. He knocked on it, which he very seldom did, and was told to enter.

  Lydia, her gown rearranged and her hair all but in order, stood before the looking glass in the far corner of the room. A single candle burned.

  Again Fenton tried to gather words. Then, swallowing, he asked her whether she would like to have something to eat or drink.

  “Indeed?” said Lydia in a cool little voice, turning round to face him. “But sure we must tarry long at table before our guest shall arrive?”

  “What guest?”

  “Why,” said Lydia, lifting her eyebrows in surprise, “who but your sweet Meg? What! Not wait for Meg? How tenderly you did press her cape to your breast!” A wilder note crept into Lydia’s voice. “How cunningly you put the trick upon me, luring me to your filthy Spring Gardens, when I had no wish to go! I may not believe my own eyes, I suppose. Yet of a surety she was on her back, and you about to—”

  “Lydia! You behave like a child.”

  Lydia’s face slowly grew white, so that her eyes seemed enormous.

  Then, as though at the loosing of every gun in a ship’s broadside, she began to talk.

  Up to this time, if Fenton had noticed any sign of her fierce possessiveness and jealousy, he had been apt to be amused or even flattered. He had behaved like a husband in the fourth week of a honeymoon; which, in a sense, he was. Afterwards men learn better, as he did now.

  It was a bad business, and it lasted half an hour. Carefully Lydia dissected Meg’s character, dissecting his own at the same time. Any fine lady had a long vocabulary of short words; and used them, even casually, in public. Her voice rose when she tore to pieces Kitty and Fenton, describing their conduct as she imagined it. When he protested in disgust, she demanded shiveringly to know whether he was not aware he had stolen her diamond ring to give to the slut?

  As her voice grew wilder and wilder, so did her accusations against him. There was no contemptible act, from miserliness to murder, which she did not pour out. Lydia herself was horrified. She did not mean all this. But she could not stop. Being herself badly hurt, some impulse drove her to hurt and hurt and hurt in return. Once she flew at him with the gold dagger, stabbing blindly; and he had almost to break her wrist before she let go.

  As for Fenton …

  He had a worse task. As he tried to keep silent, still his own temper flamed; and with it, since this was so close and personal, came Sir Nick. The fleshless hand gripped at his vitals; fleshless arm, shoulder, side were rattling from that rotting wood.

  For the most part pressing his hands over his eyes, he mentally put forth every ounce of strength. If Sir Nick were to gain possession now, he might run amok. As Fenton felt the black hood vanish from his eyes, he knew he had won again. He must leave; he must go away.

  Fenton stalked to the door, somewhat marring the effect by slamming it after him. Immediately he heard Lydia l
eap at the door, to shut the latch and fasten the bolt.

  Outside, upstairs and downstairs were all dark.

  Fenton, staggering, fell against the wall. He felt his way along it, attempting to cool his head. Presently he shouted for Giles.

  Giles, white face below red hair, materialized out of darkness and carried a candle in each hand.

  “What is’t, sir? Some new—” Giles paused.

  “Put a light in my study, old friend. Then fetch a decanter of our best canary. No, stay: of our best brandy.”

  “Sir! If I might …”

  Fenton merely looked at him, and Giles dematerialized down the stairs.

  After a time, while Fenton mopped sweat from his forehead, he felt more steady. He groped his way to the stairs, and went down by holding the baluster rail. The door of his study was open. On the great polished desk, amid the walls of books, a taper in a silver holder burned unsteadily. He sat down in the desk chair.

  “I love her,” Fenton said aloud to the candle flame. “The fault was mine. I own it. I must in some fashion mend her humour. Yet …”

  Before him in imagination floated the face of Meg York. He could not resist Meg, and now he knew it. But why?

  Her intense fleshly allure? Yes; but Lydia had that too. True, he had never known Meg in the sense he had known Lydia; but she must be maddening if she surpassed the Puritan girl. Or was it Meg’s fire, her elusiveness, her utter disregard for what she did—that touch of devil’s brush which many men have sought and some found?

  But now there was a new quality straining them towards each other.

  Meg was Mary Grenville. He had seen her face, heard her voice, which had been so much disguised by the pronunciation of this age as her appearance had been disguised by hair style and costume. Fenton in his old life had never seen Ma—no, call her Meg!—with her hair round her face, or ever particularly observed her figure.

  Besides, she was a fellow-wanderer in another century. For all her swashbuckling, she must feel frightened and lonely. She was the daughter of his old friend. …

  Fenton brought his fist down on the table.