The Devil in Velvet

by John Dickson Carr

  He had several times seen Madam Gwynn, since they both lived in the same street. Madam Gwynn bade everyone call her Nelly, since, she said, she was as common as anybody. Fenton had caught a glimpse of her pretty face at an ivy-hung window, and again entering a monstrously bedecked sedan chair. It is regrettable to state that Nelly was not always sweet-tempered and not always sober.

  But tonight she was at her prettiest and most charming. Before a blazing fire stood a very large round table of polished oak, so that the two players were at some distance from each other. In that heat the candles drooped, sending a rippling glitter on the vast pile of gold coins at Nelly’s elbow.

  Nelly’s golden hair was piled up on her head, with crownlike effect in front, and sewn with pearls. In her violet-coloured gown, with many necklaces and rings, she was as slim as a nymph. Her oval face glowed with excitement and her brown eyes danced.

  “Nay, now,” she cried, “who deals?”

  “I believe, madam,” lightly replied her opponent, “that the deal is mine.”

  “Sweet Mr. Montagu!”

  Some half a dozen guests, gallants and their ladies, had lingered near the fire to watch. But Fenton, who had missed the name of Mr. Ralph Montagu when Chiffinch mentioned it, stood now sharply alert.

  Mr. Montagu, full of those airs and graces which women loved and De Grammont had admired, was an ugly-faced, medium-complexioned man in a flaxen periwig framed against red roses, with another great pile of gold at his elbow. Mr. Montagu was artful, ingratiating, avaricious, as coldhearted and treacherous as a tiger.

  Fenton, from old brown handwriting and old brown records, could see past that ingratiating look into the man’s very skull. If he were not prevented, Mr. Montagu would in future perform an act of treachery towards the King which …

  “But, Nelly,” softly twittered one of the attendant ladies, “this game of put: I understood it not, even when you played. Ombre or piquet I know; but this?”

  “’Tis a common game, and becomes me,” said Nelly, with a swift bright smile. “Ombre and piquet are but slow, slow, slow!” She flexed her white shoulders. “That fat fireship, the Duchess of Portsmouth, would shudder.”

  Delicately, Nelly spat over her shoulder.

  “But that monster,” she added, “is from London and indeed on the continent. The other mistress in chief, the Duchess of Cleveland, whom I mind not so much, hath long ago departed in a huff for the continent.”

  “And is there no other?” inquired Mr. Montagu, with his silkiest smile.

  Nelly’s beautiful voice, trained for the playhouse, could give her the most ladylike air when she chose.

  “I am the King’s whore,” she answered sweetly. “I have not yet heard I was another’s. Mr. Montagu, I would shew my friend the play of put. Pray deal to me.”

  The gaudily painted cards were already shuffled and cut. Montagu rose up gracefully and with just as much grace set three cards face down before Nelly, each with an audible flick.

  “This is my hand, sweetest Araminta,” explained Nelly, to the coy girl with the fan. “Mr. Montagu”—there were three more audible flicks across the table—“deals to himself, and sits down.

  “Now before we wager,” Nelly rattled on, “each may put by one card and take another. Then the winner is he (or, split me! she) who shall hold the lowest hand.”

  “The lowest hand?”

  “True, sweet bawd. But always in this manner! The winner must have two cards of the same number: as, two fives or two sixes. The third card must be different: as, four or trey. Ace is always lowest. Thus a hand of deuce-deuce-ace (oh, Lord!) could not be beaten save by ace-ace-deuce. But that’s a dream. Now stand back, my angel.”

  Both players picked up their hands. Nelly snatched up the cards eagerly, Montagu coolly, with a printed smile.

  Fenton had not crossed over to the group by the fireplace. He stood at the beginning of the open space, left hand lightly resting on his sword.

  “Your devoir, madam?” inquired Montagu, lifting his eyebrows.

  Nelly, her cheeks even more flushed, leaned forward. Taking one card from her hand, she sent it spinning across the table towards him.

  “Put!” she said.

  Montagu caught the card, setting it to one side. From the top of the pack, or apparently so, he took another card. Without troubling to rise, he sent it spinning face down to Nelly.

  Nelly, desperately attempting to look inscrutable, gave a deep sigh of excitement and dropped the cards into her lap.

  “Your own devoir, Mr. Montagu?”

  “Nay, madam,” replied Montagu half-apologetically, and tapped his closed cards on the table. “I’ll not put to myself. Yet I’ll hold a thou—nay, two thousand guineas on the cards I have in my hand. Do you play, madam?”

  “God’s fish!” breathed Nelly, unconsciously using the favour­ite oath of the King, “but indeed I do play!”

  Using both hands, she shoved across the table the immense heap of gold; but sideways, towards Fenton, so that it should not interfere with the open space. Montagu did the same.

  It was observable, Fenton thought, that they did not trouble­ to count the money. They judged by size and weight and sheer glitter, as children will. As Nelly’s violet-coloured gown rustled, she ran one white arm through the heap, loving­ the gleam and hard smoothness of gold far more than the gold itself.

  “Your cards, Mr. Montagu?”

  “It grieves me,” said that gentleman, as though boyishly begging her forgiveness, “to triumph over a lady. Yet such are the gods of chance, being blind even to the most lovely face.”

  And he set out his hand. It was trey-trey-deuce.

  There was a murmur from the spectators. One heavily wigged and jewelled gallant cast a sidelong glance at a lady with too-red cheeks; she tapped her fan against cherry mouth, lips pursed out.

  “Stay but a moment,” Nelly said sweetly. “And look at these.”

  Card by card, delicately, she put down trey-trey-ace.

  Dead silence. Both hands were cheats, and such blatant cheats, that the spectators immediately began a rapid murmur of small talk. Yet Fenton could feel the wave of delight from them at the defeat of Montagu, who never played at cards unless he was sure to win. Montagu sprang to his feet.

  “Madam, I—” he began in a strangled voice; but controlled himself. Turning to his left, he moved round the table towards the aisle.

  And Fenton stepped directly in front of him.

  “Mr. Montagu,” he said, in so low a tone that no spectator­ could have heard it, “do you question the correctness of the play?”

  Montagu’s face showed a different look inside the flaxen periwig.

  “And who the devil are you, sir?” he demanded loudly.

  “My name is Fenton,” retorted the other, just as loudly. “In full, Sir Nick Fenton. Do you question the correctness of the play?”

  It was as though those spectators by the fire congealed into cake icing. Though they might be life-size, their heads and hearts were of cake with bright-coloured icing. But very much warm and alive was Nelly, who winked openly at Fenton. Alive was Montagu, from his ashy-coloured face to his brandy breath. He backed towards the edge of the table.

  “I question it not, sir,” he replied, in a light tone and with a smile.

  But he backed against the edge of the table, his fingers under its ledge. In the hush a gold coin fell and rang on the stone floor.

  “Sir Nicholas, for God’s sake!” a voice hissed close to his periwig, and a heavy hand was laid on his shoulder. And: “I cry your pardon,” the somewhat brusque voice of Chiffinch was raised, “Madam Gwynn, ladies and gentlemen, at the short fashion of our leave-taking. Yet Sir Nicholas has business of import.”

  Whereupon the hook-nosed Hercules led him back down the aisle, and through a variety of paths through flowers. Though Chif
finch remained deferential, it was as though he controlled a slight roar.

  “So-and-so!” he whispered. “May I not intrust you two minutes alone, without a near duel challenge in Whitehall itself? Your reputation, Sir Nicholas, is no whit underestimated.”

  “No!” protested Fenton. “These things,” he groped in his mind, “are all accidents. I know what is to happen,” here Chiffinch glanced sideways, “and I … I try to intervene. No more!”

  “Well, do you attend here!”

  At the southeastern corner of the hall, Chiffinch led him into a shut-off space with a fireplace built in the very angle of the wall. As many as four high folding screens, of heavy leather with brass nailheads, and thickened with three inches of padding, had been drawn round the alcove so that it became a very small room. The fire burned brightly. There were several chairs of the sort called Oriental, draped and padded for comfort, as well as two footstools. Since there was nobody in the little room, Fenton sat down.

  He had almost lost his anxiety as to time, as a quick look at his watch told him it was only half-past seven. He felt eager and alert. He had forgotten the ache of his bruises, even when someone jostled him. There was so much, so much, of which he must warn the King!

  Then he heard, outside the alcove, the “great voice,” now tuned to an amiable bass growl, of which so many had written, and the familiar long stride of Charles Stuart.

  “Not until I call you, Will!” said the voice.

  And into the alcove, past the side of a screen, stepped the living presence of the man of whom he had read so much. There was a catch to Fenton’s breath as he stood up.

  Charles was six feet tall, seeming taller by height of periwig and medium shoe heel. He was lean, and on the muscular side, in an almost shabby black suit rather roomy for him but with a dull red waistcoat and much laced.

  His very large black periwig, which was carefully parted in the middle and had many coils, stretched down on either side almost to his chest.

  His complexion was almost as brown as that of a red Indian; his nose long and straight, and under it, like Fenton, he wore a narrow line of black moustache. He had the Stuart cheekbones, the long Stuart mouth and chin. But his best feature lay in his eyes, of a red-brown colour, under high black brows.

  And he gave Fenton a warm, welcoming smile.

  “I fear, Sir Nicholas,” he said, holding out his hand, “that, since you will not come to me, I must needs send for you.”

  Fenton touched his forehead to the hand, which bore three rings, and made a leg. For a moment he was tongue-tied.

  “Come, man, be easy!” urged Charles, dropping into a comfortable chair and setting up one knee to put his foot on a gaudily embroidered footstool. “Or at least be comfortable. Be seated—so! Now I am easy too.”

  Yes, he had all the Stuarts’ charm. With word or look they could inspire blind loyalty and devotion. For that devotion, in past or future, how many swords would be drawn, how many toasts drunk, how many vivat’s heard even in the cries of the dying!

  “I had intended,” said Charles, trying to frown and not succeeding, “to be very severe with you. In my reign, Sir Nicholas, I have issued three royal edicts against duelling. At times you have been very troublesome to me. At other times—God’s fish, how it hath warmed the heart!”

  Charles leaned back. His face was often more sombre than it should have been, and with heavier lines than at first appeared.

  “Was it true, as I hear, that when you did smite home the last charge on the rioters, you set up the old battle cry, ‘God for King Charles’? Come! Was it for me, or for my father?”

  “Sire, I do not know. I can’t tell. ’Twas for both, I think.”

  “Either,” muttered Charles, “were honour enough.” His red-brown eyes lifted above the tops of the screens, and he toyed with a ring on his right hand. “I … you are aware, as I conceive, that from a far window of this room, then a door, my father stepped out on the scaffold to … to …”

  “Yes, Sire.”

  “Well!” Charles’s expression, which could change in a flash, now regarded him with an idle, indulgent smile. “This sooth­saying of yours. I warn you I …”

  “‘Have no truck with such kind of cattle,’” quoted Fenton, his hands tightly clasped, his gaze on the floor, “‘for, if they could tell you anything, ’tis inconvenient to know.’”

  Charles’s face was completely impassive.

  “And why do you use such words, Sir Nicholas?”

  “They were writ by yourself, Sire. They were writ long ago, in a letter to your young sister Henrietta, called ‘Minette,’ and then married to the very vile Duc d’Orléans of France. She is dead these five years, and her good soul at peace.”

  Charles rose abruptly to his feet. He walked over to the little corner-angled fireplace, putting his hands on the shelf above and tapping with his shoe at the small burning logs.

  Only two persons, Fenton knew, had ever deeply touched the heart of Charles Stuart. One was his fragile young sister, the other his father.

  Now he turned back to Fenton, his chin sunk into his neck lace.

  “I will not ask,” he said, “how you could quote from a private letter, carried by private messenger. A man of cunning might have contrived it.” Charles frowned. “Yet I confess you puzzle me, Sir Nicholas. I find in you a quiet-spoken gentleman of courtly bearing. I had thought to find a loud-voice braggart, such as your public appearances have shown me, even when you spoke in the Painted Chamber.”

  “Are we not both deceptive,” asked Fenton, “in our public appearance?”

  “How?”

  “Under favour, Sire! Do you think all men give credence to your deliberate pose as ‘unthinking Charles, ruled by unthinking thee’? Or, ‘a merry monarch, scandalous and poor’?” At these last words Charles pulled a wry face. “This may have been true in your hot-humoured youth. But it hath not been true for many years.”

  “Why, as to that …” Charles began, but stopped.

  With his most urbane air he moved back to the chair, sat down, cocked up his foot on the footstool. His restless, satiric brain must forever be a-probing.

  “Poor I am,” he conceded. “Parliament manage that.” He flexed his muscles. “The flesh still stings … oh, damnably! Who can resist a pretty woman? Or who trust her? Yet I have settled to a kind of domesticity among my small seraglio. I frolic no more, and I drink only for my thirst. I am grown gaunt, and long in the tooth.”

  “Naught else?”

  “God’s fish, yes!” said Charles, with something like a snarl. “My enemies must learn, soon or late, that I will not yield and I will not be bullied. The rightful succession shall go to my brother James, though they set up my bastard son Monmouth or another. And (you are in the right of it!) for years my hand hath guided this cockleshell boat; and I will bring her safe home ere I die.”

  “You will, Sire. And more. But the sea will rise high.”

  All Charles’s seriousness dropped away, as did the gleam behind his red-brown eyes.

  “Ah!” he murmured, with his usual careless, lazy air. “You refer, I take it, to your prophecy before the Green Ribbon Club?”

  “If my words have been twisted to Your Majesty …!”

  “Nay; have no fear for that. I pay more spies than my Lord Shaftesbury himself. But why must you carry the news to him? Why did you not come to me?”

  “First, Sire, I had a small grudge to settle with my lord. Again, I knew you would give no credence to this ‘plot,’ from the time you shall hear of it from a Mr. Kirkby. When first you meet their master-liar, a bloody rogue named Titus Oates, at the council board on September 28th, 1678, you will say flatly: ‘I call the fellow a lying knave.’

  “Oh, Your Majesty will outwit and destroy them. But there will be three years of terror and bloodshed. Meantime, whilst innocent Catholics are pers
ecuted as they have seldom been persecuted, you will not lift a hand to save them. Being Popishly affected, you will have sympathy; you will take hurt. But to pardon one Catholic will mean civil war; and as yet there can be no reckoning. You will even cry, as you sign death warrants: ‘Let the blood lie upon them that condemn them, for God knows I sign with tears in my eyes!’ So inflexible, Sire, you can be.”

  Fenton felt sweated, and knew he was trembling all over, from the force with which he tried to compel belief. Charles looked at him strangely.

  “All this,” Fenton added, “will come to pass. Unless, in some fashion, it might be prevented.”

  “How?”

  The deep voice, not loud, seemed to fill the alcove with the volume of a monosyllable.

  Fenton played his boldest stroke.

  “Your Majesty will not convoke Parliament until the year 1677—”

  “And wherefore not?”

  “Because the subsidies paid to you from the French King will not be exhausted until then. Shall I touch upon a matter of one hundred thousand pounds, as arranged in 1674?”

  Charles’s eyes shifted slightly. Since the now not-so-secret Treaty of Dover five years ago, he had at various times taken bribes from his cousin Louis, Charles being always cheerful to advance the interest of England against that of France. But mere rumour of it made the Commons howl.

  “Now here, Sire,” Fenton went on, “is the ironic jest. The present French Ambassador, M. Savarigny, will be replaced by another, M. Barrillon. I much fear that the French King mistrusts you almost as much as you mistrust him.”

  “Come, what a suspicious-minded fellow!”

  “M. Savarigny does a certain thing now. M. Barrillon will do it to far greater extent in the future. It is this. He will bribe the holy, pious Country party, the high-minded Green Ribboners, to cry out even more zealously and bloodily against you!”

  Charles pursed up his lips. “Now if I could but prove that … !”

  “Sire, all the correspondence between Barrillon and King Louis—which will be preserved—shall contain a list of almost all the bribe-takers. In the Commons, for instance, you shall find Harbord, Titus, Sacheverell, Armstrong, Littleton, and Powle. As for the lords: but why carry it further? My Lord Shaftesbury’s chief attendants will have their price at five hundred guineas a head; save for His Grace of Bucks, who receives a thousand. Could you but seize Barrillon’s papers, or in some fashion contrive to copy them …”