The Devil in Velvet

by John Dickson Carr

  “A good evening, sir.”

  “And to you, good Giles. Ever a good evening to you!”

  “May I take the liberty of an old servant, sir, in the asking of whether all befell as you desired at Whitehall Palace?”

  “It did so. And wherefore not?”

  “His Majesty was not—angry? If you would take but one look at your own face in the mirror, you would understand.”

  “Angry, you say? God’s fish!” Fenton began in a roar, but controlled his voice to quietness. “Learn, malapert, how angry was the King. He offered me any reward, any preferment, I should name. For honour’s sake I could not take it, as you apprehend. Still!”

  “Do you know what was offered, sir? Nay? Then I’ll tell you. His Majesty offered you a peerage.”

  “Now, pox on’t, what should I do with a peerage? —Giles. Is … my lady well?”

  “Ay, truly,” Giles answered in surprise. But there was a sour expression on his lips at his master’s contemptuous dismissal of a peerage. “The supper was abandoned near as soon as you had gone. Lord George, stupefied, was carried home in my Lord Danby’s coach. I confess, sir, I misliked the manner in which the elderly gentleman did sway in his saddle as he departed. Your lady, sir, hath gone to her room. She requested …”

  Fenton seized the front of Giles’s coat.

  “I don’t wish to speak to my—to her; that’s to say, not now. Not until a few minutes before midnight. Am I clear, Giles?”

  “Questionless, sir!”

  “Fetch me lights,” said Fenton. “I would go to my own bedchamber. I would sit there and reflect. Nor must I be disturbed for any cause. Is this clear too?”

  Giles bowed. Quickly he kindled the tapers in a three-branched candelabrum.

  “Nay, I’ll light my own way up, Giles! Give it to me.”

  With a powerful effort Fenton kept his hand steady. His mind had always been clear, and he kept it clear. But, as the sense of shock slowly diminished, his bruises began to ache.

  When he reached his own bedroom, he moved mechanically towards the two windows at the back, those windows looking out over his garden, the Mall below, and the Park. His long and heavy dressing table slanted out from the left-hand window, against the angle of the wall.

  He set down the three-branched candelabrum on the dressing table near the mirror. Against ghostly darkness he caught a glimpse of his own reflection; it seemed (at least to his own eyes) a trifle pale, but not much.

  “Why did Lydia do it?” he inaudibly asked the reflection, in his own mind. “Was this love of hers all a pretence?”

  “You know it was.”

  “I can’t face it.”

  “You must face it.”

  The soft candlelight bloomed on the glass, the dark-red of the claret decanter, which he had always kept in his room of late. Hastily he seized decanter and goblet, with a passionate wish to be dead drunk and away from all hurt. But he put them both down; now, if ever, he must be clear of head.

  Unconsciously Fenton’s hand, tightly clutching Lydia’s crumpled letter, let it fall on the dressing table. Drawn up to the table was one of those padded Oriental chairs, much like those in the alcove at Whitehall, which were draped to the floor in crimson figured silk.

  On a sudden impulse Fenton lifted the chair and set it down facing the darkness of the right-hand window.

  But he made his preparations too. It was almost three hours and a half before midnight; Lydia’s true danger began on the stroke of midnight, the tenth. Not once did he think of striding down to her bedroom, bursting in, and flinging that letter at her as accusation.

  He could not do it. His mind shrank back, as from a fire. If she were guilty, he wished to keep knowledge from him as long as possible. It did not matter … well, it did not matter too much … what she had done. He loved her. He would protect her, whatever happened.

  Carefully he set down his watch on the table, within reach of his hand.

  Then he sat down in the padded chair, facing a window dark except for the reflection of candle flames and the leaves of a tall beech outside. Curious! When he had first waked up in this room, he had thought them trees of the Park, whereas, of course, they were in his own garden.

  “I don’t believe all this,” he told himself, with a stab at his heart now the shock had worn off. “It’s not Lydia! It’s not her character!”

  The other side of his own mind, cool and assessing, seemed to answer in terms of the twentieth century.

  “Stop this emotionalism,” it said. “You wished to think. Very well; think. What is Lydia’s background?”

  “Her parents were Presbyterians. Her grandfather was a regicide: which must mean either Independent or Fifth Monarchy­ man.”

  “And do you think nothing was stamped on her mind and heart before she married Sir Nick? Remember, she thinks herself married to Sir Nick. When I say ‘you,’ I refer to you in the semblance of Sir Nick. Did nothing hurt her, even when you cut her off from her old nurse, though she made a speech she knew would please you?”

  “Be silent! What zeal would Lydia—of all persons—have for ‘the cause’? The Green Ribbon?”

  “Have you forgotten the elementary facts of history?”

  “No.”

  “Then you remember that my Lord Shaftesbury, once himself a hot Presbyterian under Oliver, was the first forceful supporter at the Restoration that all Puritan sects might be permitted to take the Oath and Allegiance and Supremacy, so that they might not be outlaws? Don’t you know he welcomes old Presbyterians, old Independents, to the Green Ribbon? And their helpers?”

  “But Lydia! She has no head for politics, or interest. She has said so a dozen times.”

  “Rather too quickly, don’t you think? Remember how each time she has turned you quickly away from the subject?”

  “Be silent, I say! On the very first night I met her, in Meg’s room,”—his mind paused a moment when he thought of Meg—“I tried to apologize for Sir Nick’s conduct, and asked forgiveness. And Lydia answered, ‘You ask my pardon? I ask yours, with all my heart.’”

  “Well? And what else could she say?”

  “I don’t follow that.”

  “No one paints her character as cold and evilhearted. She was touched. Why do you suppose she defied her parents and married Sir Nick? It was a physical attraction; no more or less. When she found Sir Nick was a murderous and blackhearted dog, she hated him. Yet the ghost of attraction remained.”

  “Yes, you can bet it did! When next day she hurried into this bedroom, with the poison rash on her forehead and arm, she was all tenderness and … and …”

  “Certainly she pretended it. But do you recall what you said?”

  “I have forgotten.”

  “Only because you wish to forget. Sir Nick, half-mad, burst into a torrent of abuse; and called down God’s curse on Puritans and all their race. Because she seemed a gentle girl, you forgot she might be at heart as savage a Roundhead as you are Royalist.”

  “Yet afterwards she was tender. Why, it was she who asked for—for me to seek her that night!”

  “Mainly pretence. For the rest, you know her to be a fullblood girl of strong passions.”

  “There was no pretence. You lie.”

  “Ah, is your vanity scratched?”

  “Do you tell me that, immediately after making that assignation, she wrote the letter telling my enemies where to find me?”

  “Of course. She does not love you. You are dangerous; you must be destroyed.”

  “Stop this nonsense!”

  “Yet you wished to think it out. How many times, when she wished to give you false praise, has her tongue slipped with that word, ‘Roundhead’? Why, think! ‘As gentle as a minister of God, yet as bold as a Roundhead soldier.’ Those words so inspired you that you struck dumb the whole Green Ribbon Club, and
not a man dared lay a hand on you!”

  “I did not think of them at the time. Yet surely …”

  “Who wheedled you into Spring Gardens that night? And, on the same day, slipped out secretly to send a note that brought down three swordsmen on you? To buy a new gown? Nonsense! Because the shop La Belle Poitrine is a new clearinghouse for letters.”

  “I tell you, stop this torture! If Lydia cared nothing at all, what do you make of her jealousy, and above all her jealousy towards Meg?”

  “That is more foolishness. Lydia is a woman. You are her possession. Do you think she would let any draw you from her? Least of all Meg; or, rather, Mary Grenville? Lydia knows that secretly Meg turns your brain; she can’t abide it; no woman’s vanity would.”

  “I keep telling you, I have turned all Puritan nonsense out of her mind!”

  “In a month? Come, now! When with six men against sixty, impossible odds, you went out to fight … well, did Lydia attempt to stop you, as most would? No; all she could think of was the dragoons; how they made a file turn as well as any Ironsides.”

  “She trusted me to win!”

  “Remember,” cruelly the other side of his mind pointed out, “you are fifty-eight years old. Not in body. But in mind. Could not a pretty face, and pretty airs, and designing flesh, easily fool you? Might you not even become besotted?”

  “Yes; I must understand the possibility.”

  “Then take heed, when she warns you against the only woman who is really fond of you: Meg York. Lydia hates Sir Nick, and thinks you are Sir Nick; she is only using on another man the crafts of love she learned from Sir Nick.”

  Fenton sprang to his feet, his arm across his eyes.

  Wrath flared through him, but he knew he must control this. Quietly setting back each whisper at his ear, or hoping to do so, he sat down again in front of the black window and readjusted his thoughts. For a little time he looked out on blackness, and then the loud ticking of his watch on the dressing table reminded him.

  It was ten minutes to nine. Already he had come to one resolve. He sprang up again, putting his watch back into his pocket. At the same time there was a light knock on the door.

  Giles, very hesitant, peered in.

  “Sir,” said Giles, clearing his throat, “I should not have troubled you. But the woman Pamphlin …”

  Judith Pamphlin, as straight-backed and harsh-faced as ever, stood gripping her hands together.

  “My lady,” she said, “would ask why you have not come to see her since your return.” Mrs. Pamphlin almost sneered. “She would also ask …”

  Fenton’s right hand moved lovingly towards his sword grip. It was a very ill-chosen moment, as anyone could have seen in Giles’s face, for Judith to be here.

  “You have disobeyed my order,” Fenton told her, “as to going near my lady. Later we will have discourse on this. Yet your one virtue, as I can perceive it, is that you are devoted and loyal to my lady. Is this so?”

  “It is so.”

  “Then keep good watch. Inform my lady that I must go from the house, on a matter of import, but that I shall return before midnight.”

  Mrs. Pamphlin’s mouth opened to speak, but instead a wicked look came into her eyes, and she grudgingly remained silent. Giles, hastily thrusting one of the two candles into her hand, pushed her outside and closed the door.

  “Is this truth, sir?” Giles asked quietly. “Do you indeed go from the house?”

  “And why not?”

  “Because of your mood, sir. You are ill.”

  “Now what could you know of my mood?” Fenton asked dryly. His side smarted from a shallow sword-wound, and a feverishness came on him. “Giles! I would be habited with less of the showy or the conspicuous. Stay!” Vague memory stirred. “The black, Giles! The black velvet I first wore on that day, May 10th, you did so strangely mention to me …”

  “Sir,” Giles cried in agony, “I am a bad servant. I have not cleaned the black, or so much as touched it. There were—there are bloodstains on the cuffs.”

  Fenton was in too impatient a mood.

  “No matter for that! These,” and he looked down over his sober grey clothes, with only a silver stripe to the waistcoat, “will serve the occasion well enough. Now go down to the stables, and bid them saddle my horse.”

  After one look at him, Giles hurried from the room. From the dressing closet Fenton brought out a pair of light, soft riding boots which came well above his knees and had light spurs. He buckled on both sides of his neck a light cloak and crammed down hat on periwig.

  Snatching up the three-branched candle holder, he attempted to creep softly downstairs. Even with the utmost caution, spurs would rattle on a board floor. What he feared was that Lydia might come hurrying out of her room.

  Breathing more easily when he reached the ground floor, Fenton set down his lights on the desk. He opened the door of the bookcase and found the book of Tillotson’s sermons in which he had left the slip of paper with Meg York’s two addresses.

  “One of them,” he thought, as he found the slip, “will be useless now. George said she had gone from Captain Duroc’s. But the other …” He smoothed out the paper and read it.

  “At the Golden Woman,”

  Love Lane,

  Cheapside.

  Despite his bitterness, Fenton could have laughed.

  A minute later he found Sweetquean before the door, her bridle held by Dick with a lanthorn. An ache, he could not tell whether mental or physical, went over him as he set his foot into the deep stirrup.

  “A fine night, sir,” said Dick.

  “Ay,” he said. “A fine night.”

  Riding the mare on a slack rein, at most times letting Sweetquean have her head, Fenton rode for Charing Cross. Though chilly, the night showed a great throng of stars and a slender new moon.

  Fenton passed Charing Cross, into the sweep of the Strand, under Temple Bar, and down the long slope of Fleet Street. All the world’s affront of the nostrils assailed him as the mare’s hoofs thundered on the heavy planks over Fleet Ditch, and Sweetquean went up Ludgate Hill at the gallop. There Fenton reined in to look round.

  Except for stars and new moon, it was intensely dark. There were no street lamps. Behind him, sometimes in the distance ahead, would glow the warm red lattice of a tavern. But Bow bells, in Cheapside, must have struck nine some time ago.

  That was the signal for the apprentices to unhitch their folded shutters and button up their shops for the night. In the street remained only a few revellers. Before Fenton lay a vast openness, cleared of burnt rubble, where once had stood Old St. Paul’s before the Fire, and the first brick of New St. Paul’s would be laid this very month.

  “Old days,” thought Fenton, as he sent the mare clattering round to the left of St. Paul’s Churchyard and rode down Cheapside. But he was not thinking of London in this age.

  He was remembering how he and Mary Grenville—or Meg York—had ridden in the Park together in their old life: not St. James’s Park, but the now-woodland Hyde Park, where stood grisly Tyburn. He remembered how they had swum in the river at Richmond. Mary, at eighteen, was a famous swimmer. But he, removing his pince-nez at over fifty, had gone all out and beaten her by three lengths.

  No. He must not think of her as Mary Grenville. He must think of her as Meg York, a grown woman and a tigerish one.

  Clack went his mare’s hoofs on the cobbles of curving deepest Cheapside, and he reined in to study where he was. Not far away a watchman’s lanthorn bobbed in the air like a dull luminous face.

  It might be a pity that Sir Christopher Wren’s plan for a finer, greater London had never been used after the destruction of the Fire. But they built back the ancient streets, old since the Middle Ages, on exactly the same sites and with the same names.

  Fenton’s memory could pick up, on his right and sloping down towar
ds the river, Broad Street and Milk Street and Wood Street. They had bought these commodities in the streets before them, as they had bought the other commodity in Love Lane.

  There were still gaps and scars from the Fire nine years ago. But most of the new buildings, high or low-and-trim, had been built of brick, with the plague burnt out of every hole. Fenton, as he guided the mare carefully down slippery cobbles, noted that Love Lane had become a district of the respectable poor.

  “Nobody,” Meg had whispered, “knows I am there. None can find me, or trouble me. ’Tis in no fine neighbourhood; but what better?”

  Above the steep street showed a narrow path of stars. It was a trifle too close to Billingsgate Fish Market, Fenton decided. Suddenly a great red glare, over the houses, sprang up some distance away down the Thames, faded to pink, and died away. It was the immense soap vats and boileries, which he had forgotten; and, fortunately, the wind blew the other way.

  But the glare showed him the house he sought. It was small, new, built of brick; and, like most others, it had a long staircase built up to the ground floor. Not a light showed. Tethering Sweetquean to a hitching post, Fenton ran up the stairs and banged at the door knocker until the little street echoed. Presently the door was opened by an ancient woman named Calpurnia, with one eye still open after a life of thievery and viciousness.

  “Ay,” she wheezed out, narrowly inspecting him in the light of a floating wick in a grease lamp, “you’re the man. One pair of stairs up, then find ye a chamber overlooking the street. On Calpy’s oath, the lady’s not strayed from this house one minute, for fear she should not find you. Some hath one taste,” shrugged Calpy, “and some another.”

  Fenton flicked a coin at her, and it mysteriously vanished in mid-air. He did not even see her catch it.

  “Now begod!” she cried, holding the grease lamp higher and rolling her one eye. “Here’s a different thing! Here’s a gentleman; here’s a nobleman! I’ll stand and hold the lamp for ye, that I will and so help me!”

  But the lamp was not necessary. Fenton hastened up the stairs, and back again along the upstairs passage towards the front. The front room had its door partly open, and faint candlelight shone out.