The Devil in Velvet

by John Dickson Carr

  “I … yes; I thank you.”

  Up they went, softly and slowly; Fenton stumbled only once on the stairs and not at all down the passage to the bedroom.

  Well, it was soon over.

  They had left Lydia alone in the dark. Giles, standing discreetly back in the doorway with his taper, allowed the room to lie in shadow. Fenton took two or three steps forward. Tears stung and burned into his eyes; he hastily wiped them away with his sleeve, but they filmed over his eyes and partly blinded him.

  In the shadow of the great bed, its curtains looped back, Lydia lay with her fleecy hair spread out round her head, her eyes closed, her arms crossed on her breast, and with one hand holding something he could not identify. To him she seemed just as in life. She did not look like that, but he was partly blind and it was better so.

  Haltingly he walked round to the other side of the bed, where sweet night air stirred at the open windows. He bent over and gently kissed her lips, which were still faintly warm. At last he saw what she held in her hand, pressed to her breast. Incongruously, it was the blue toothbrush he had caused to be made for her; a foolish thing, but the only memento she had of him.

  That broke him in pieces. Completely blind now, he stumbled back from the bed, turning round, groping his way, seeing nothing and feeling nothing until in some fashion he lurched against an open window. Then a firm hand held his elbow.

  “Enough, sir,” whispered Giles, in a firm voice. “Suffer me to lead you.”

  Fenton obeyed. He felt himself walking somewhere, a long distance it seemed, on boards, until the firm hand under his elbow stopped him.

  “She is not dead, Giles. Her lips were warm when I kissed her.”

  “’Tis even so, sir,” lied Giles gently. “You are spent and tired. You will be well in the morning.”

  Through blurred eyes Fenton discerned his own bedroom. Giles had already set lights on the dressing table, where he vaguely saw a crumpled grey letter, the claret decanter depleted by one glassful, his own red toothbru …

  Then he was blind again. With a last effort, as though seeking sanctuary, he threw himself forward, trying hard to land on the bed with his head towards its foot. But he was not strong enough. His body struck the top of the hard wooden bedstead, and he rolled back senseless on the floor.

  CHAPTER XIX

  OF EMERGENCE FROM DARK HOURS, YET—

  IT WAS A VALLEY OF PEACE. When Fenton half-opened his eyes, he lay there wrapped in contentment, with a mind untroubled and a sense that he had passed through evil days or nights, but emerged at last with a healed mind and heart.

  “Why, then,” he thought, “it was a dream after all. I made no bargain with the devil; he is a myth. I fought no bloody battles for what seemed a month in one night.”

  The name Lydia came into his mind. Pain touched him, but very slightly.

  “I loved a woman,” he thought, “who must now be dead for more than two hundred years. That is as well. It was very vivid. Having been the husband of Lydia, I could never care for another woman. And now the dream is over. I am glad, because it became towards the end a nightmare.

  “I took too much of that infernal chloral. It kept me asleep one night, and until dusk of the following day. I am back in the present again.”

  This occurred to him because he opened his eyes and found himself lying in the same big four-poster bed with the curtains looped back. The southern windows were darkening against a blue and white sky.

  “Though I swore I would never think so,” he told himself, “it will be pleasant to hear taxicabs honking in Pall Mall, and see solid men in top hats going to their solid clubs. My error lay in believing that, by travelling back into the seventeenth century, I should become for the most part a detached observer, all but a ghost. But no one can escape his emotions, his loves and hates and fears, especially when he is in the shape of Sir Nick Fenton. He …”

  Then came the shock.

  Trying to sit up in bed, Fenton found himself as weak as though he had suffered a long illness, and had to fall back. Running his hand over his head, he found his head still covered with heavy, fine-spun hair which could only be black in colour. His night habit, too …

  At the same moment, two lighted candles appeared at the left-hand side of the bed. One light was carried by Giles Collins, the other held high by Lord George Harwell.

  George’s large red face, framed in a gigantic periwig with a foretop, suddenly altered as he glanced inside the bed. His brown eyes bulged with astonishment, and the red face grew shiny with delight.

  “Now scratch me!” he cried, “but Nick’s awaked! Nick, good fellow, you have sore troubled us! Nick, give me your hand!”

  Fenton still felt that strange near-contentment and peace.

  “‘And gi’e us a hand o’ thine!’” he said, recklessly quoting a great poet who would not be born for nearly a century. “’Tis strangely weak, though.”

  “Well, curse ye, what else? Here’s you, falling into a swound like a dead man, and lying thus for eight days …”

  “Eight days!”

  “Ay; ask of Giles! They could give you no food, save by holding you up and putting liquids down your throat with a large spoon, and that’s no easy matter. But I’ll have a tack at it now!” swore George, puffing out his chest behind a wasp-striped waistcoat with diamond buttons. “Scratch me, I’ll look to your vittles! Hot smoking capons, stuffed with oysters! A steak-and-lark pudding, with fine gravy! What d’ye say to that?”

  “Not now, I thank you. Yet you warm the heart, George.”

  “Nay, curse it,” growled George, embarrassed and speaking from deep in his throat, “I am but a great lout.” He hesitated. “Hark’e, Nick. They bade me speak you no word as touches Lydia; but I’ll not be silent! When I heard of this, I was so cut down with grief that I … I …”

  Giles’s voice flowed so smoothly into the gap that George never noticed it.

  “My lord,” he said with deep deference, “may I beg leave to remind you, as I did before, that these eight days we have had a new cook, a French cook, a Madame Taupin?”

  “Hey?”

  “And, for your lordship’s pleasure, I did venture to bid her prepare a shoulder of mutton. With hot mushrooms, my lord, and mushroom sauce. It awaits you in the dining room.”

  George drew himself up indignantly.

  “Damme, man, am I come to this house for meat and drink?”

  “Alas!” said Giles, smiting his fist against his breast. “And now it is you, my lord, who remind me. I hold the keys of a noble wine cellar; I suffer no wine or any spirituous drink to be set out in the house, else shall I find some porter fallen snoring-drunk on the floor with the empty bottle in his hand.”

  “Ah!” murmured George, deeply impressed by this good husbandry.

  “Yet, my lord, I have forgot to set out for you our finest sack. If you will deign to go downstairs, and fall to, I will bring it you when I have had a word with my master. My lord: mutton and mushrooms!”

  “We-ell,” said George. He glanced at Fenton, evidently trying to display affection by looking sinister. “I don’t take leave of you, Nick! I am but in another room.”

  “That’s understood, George. Eat well!”

  When the door had closed behind the visitor, Giles looked sourly at a bedpost.

  “Lord George,” he said to the post, “is a rare good fellow. Yet a quarter of an hour more and he would have had you on horseback a-roystering to some tavern.”

  “It may be so. Set me up against a pillow, Giles.”

  Putting down the light on the bedside table, Giles quickly obeyed.

  Then, fists on his hips, he surveyed Fenton. It was clear that he too must have some outlet for relief. The lines deepened in his face, and his old impertinence returned.

  “Heyday!” he sighed, making a face. “Here are you aga
in in your senses to harry us. But for days it seemed to me we might fillip up, cross or pile, whether you lived or died. The Lord He knoweth why I gave myself the trouble to watch over you.”

  Fenton spoke softly and steadily.

  “Then my wife is in truth dead?”

  “She was buried,” said Giles, inclining his head, “four days gone, at St. Martin’s; and Dr. Lloyd himself preached at her funeral.”

  “Ah, yes. I see.”

  Giles darted him a quick look out of eyes red-rimmed for lack of sleep.

  “For your swound,” he sneered, “we have had doctors of physick by the parcel. And but one with a rattle of sense in his head.”

  “Oh?”

  “‘Why,’ saith he, ‘I have seen this before. It is of the brain, or so I think, and not of the body. As thus: we have seen a soldier in battle fight with lion’s ferocity, it may be day upon day. And yet, when he thinks the battle done, without any bodily hurt he may fall into a swound; and lie there two, eight, ten days, and recover with brain cool and healed.’ Thus said Dr. Sloane.”

  “He said true. —Stay!” said Fenton, frowning. “You refer to Sir Hans Sloane?”

  Giles lifted his shoulders almost to his ears.

  “Nay, I do recollect his Christian name was Hans. But he is not knighted.”

  “He will be. No matter. Now tell me what has happened in the eight days I have been here like a dead man.”

  “That I will do,” retorted Giles promptly, “else I shall have no peace. You are enough well fed; this day, all but awake, you did swallow good thick soup. Well!”

  Without asking leave, Giles went towards the windows and trundled back a padded chair. When he sat down, again without asking leave, only his red head and long face showed above the side of the bed. It was, Fenton thought, unpleasantly like the talking-head illusion of magic.

  “Sir,” said Giles, “do you well recollect the night of June 10th?”

  “Which,” Fenton said to himself, “I believed to be the 9th.” He nodded.

  “You returned from Whitehall Palace at about half-past eight of the clock, and thence to your chamber here. A few minutes before nine, I had occasion to come upstairs for an errand. At the stairhead, in the passage, I met the woman Pamphlin.”

  Giles illustrated each movement, like a goblin, with a stab of his finger.

  “’Tarry!’ says I, seeing her hotfoot for the door of this room. ‘Nay,’ says she, ‘I bear word of great import from my lady to Sir Nicholas.’ Whereat I wondered, recalling your command that none should trouble you. Nevertheless, I suffered her to enter. Do you recall what she said then?”

  “Much of it, yes.”

  Giles’s red head moved forward, upper lip lifting like fish’s mouth.

  “In exactness, the woman Pamphlin said to you: ‘My lady would ask why you have not come to see her since your return.’ Thus far, the woman Pamphlin said true. For your lady, having heard your footstep on the stair, and being faithful in love of you even to the death …”

  Fenton opened his mouth quietly to contradict him, but remained silent.

  “… did in truth say this. But recollect, now, Pamphlin in this room. Her next words, regarding your lady, were: ‘She would also ask—’ Here Pamphlin stopped, for you did lay hand on sword. Curtly you berated Pamphlin, as was just, for entering into my lady’s room, where you had forbidden her to go. Yet you intrusted Pamphlin.”

  Here Giles’s face grew bitter.

  “You bade her go back,” he continued, “and keep good watch. For, you said, you must go from the house, but would return ere midnight. Now recollect, sir! Saw you ever so ugly, wicked a look on Pamphlin’s face as then? Did remark it?”

  Fenton nodded. “I remarked it,” he said calmly.

  “And so did I. You made haste from the house more quickly than I had thought. I believed you ill, and would have prevented you; but who could have stayed you? Whereat I called to mind the hag’s stamp on Pamphlin’s face, and wondered, and went to your lady’s bedchamber.

  “Well, your lady lay on the bed, still in the blue-silk gown, with orange about it, and diamonds. She was sorely ill and vomiting, with Pamphlin by her side. ’Twas arsenic again, as plain as your nose. Now hear what was the other part of her word to you, which Pamphlin did not tell you! It was: ‘Ask him to come to me, for God’s sake, because I have eaten or drunk of poison at supper, and only he can save me.’”

  Giles paused, with another quick look as though he wondered whether his story might not be too distressing.

  But Fenton remained quiet. It was not that no pain or grief was inside him. Yet they seemed concealed, hidden away, so that only the hardest of blows could break the secret armour.

  “Poison at supper?” he muttered. “Yet,” he went on, only half to himself, “it was a very early supper. For sure the symptoms must have come on much sooner than that, unless … unless Lydia hid herself away while I was at Whitehall, and would not speak.”

  “That was what she did, master.”

  “Yet stay again! At supper I ate of her food, and drank of her wine.”

  “You have forgot. I was there; I heard; I saw.”

  “Saw?”

  “You ate of her food, true. But of your own wine you drank but sparingly, and her wine goblet you tasted but once. —Did you shiver, sir?”

  “No. No. Go on with your story, from … from the words, ‘Ask him to come to me, for God’s sake, because I have eaten or drunk of poison at s-supper, and only he c-can save me.’”

  “Seeing this,” said Giles, “a certain madness came over me. Says I, to the woman Pamphlin: ‘Why did you not carry this word, before my master departed?’ Never before had I seen her smile. ‘Because,’ says she, ‘I would rather see my lady dead than in his hands.’ Nay, even then I held back! ‘Once he gave you remedies for this poison,’ says I; ‘and what are those remedies?’ And she replied: ‘I cannot call them to mind.’”

  At this point Giles changed colour.

  “Sir, I struck her to the floor, kicking her savagely. I upraised her, beating her head against the door. The woman Pamphlin’s face was as wood, like this bedpost; a fanatic’s; nor would she again speak, until I turned away to your lady, and the woman Pamphlin ran to hide herself.

  “Nor have I seen any lady so sweet, or so kindly, as your own lady, even in her pain. She would smile if she could. ‘I am dying, Giles,’ says she; ‘and ’tis a judgment on me.’ And other things she told me, though once (you recollect?) she mistrusted me. Stay! Long ere this I told her I would fetch a doctor of physick and also a Presbyterian minister, knowing,” Giles glanced at Fenton, “knowing this to be her faith.

  “Well! ‘No doctor of physick can help me,’ says your lady. ‘But if you would bring a clergyman, let it be one of the Church Established. For that is the faith of my husband, and now it is mine.’” Giles paused. “Did you speak, sir?”

  “No. I—No.”

  “The Lord He knoweth I will not harrow you with much more. Yet here’s one circumstance,” Giles said persuasively, “with which I must make you acquainted. When the woman Pamphlin could steal but an instant from her duties, she would keep watch on my lady’s door.”

  “True. I have often remarked it.”

  “Good! The woman Pamphlin hath since deposed thus: that, as she watched the door on the night of June 10th, she heard your lady crying and moaning in pain. She did then hasten to your lady’s door, which she discovered unbolted, and so found your lady to begin with. Could the tale be true?”

  “Yes. Of late,” said Fenton, “Lydia … my wife and I passed much in and out of the room. No longer did—did she lock the door when she was alone.”

  “And yet,” said Giles, “the woman Pamphlin could have given poison to your lady? Being her old nurse, she could have persuaded your lady to drink of some poisoned draught?”

>   Fenton attempted to weigh the scales coolly.

  “This is possible,” he replied. “Yet arsenic is a slow poison. Even taken at supper, there must have been far an overlarge amount.”

  “Ay, ’twas at supper!” muttered Giles through his teeth. “Though the way of it I can’t tell. Damn my eyes, I have been troubled as touches Pamphlin’s guilt. I hate the woman; therefore I would be just. There’s the reason for’t: why I persuaded you, when you returned half-crazed eight nights gone, not to kill her with your own sword. Yet you must know this:

  “The hag lies locked in a cupboard, with a chain round her wrist, belowstairs amid the servants. Mortal man, or I in least, cannot longer hold them back. They would have her dead, if only because she did not tell you your lady was dying, and let you go from the house without knowing it. And there’s reason in it, mark you. There’s reason!”

  Here Giles gasped, like one who has tried to rule but cannot do so.

  “Master,” he added quietly, “what Shall I do?”

  “As to the woman Pamphlin,” Fenton told him, “I care little. Nay; no writhings; I will make some guess at it, and myself inform the servants.”

  “Ah!” breathed Giles.

  “But, Giles, you have told me nothing!”

  Giles was taken aback. “Nothing, sir?”

  “Only of the night when my good and gracious lady … went to her rest. What occurred afterwards?”

  “Why, I retort upon you your own word,” said Giles, with his old pertness creeping back again in relief. “I say: nothing.”

  “But a doctor of physick here? A death from poison? Surely a magistrate …?”

  “I will end my small discourse,” and Giles grew grim again, “with relation of that. Still, mark you, the night of June 10th. First arrived the clergyman, a quiet good man. Then arrived the only doctor we could discover at that hour: Noddle his name, noddle his head. In he comes huffing and puffing behind a long beard, pompous and empty-pated, with a great long cane in his hand. Your good lady screamed when he did touch her. ‘Hem!’ says he, and ‘Haw!’ says he, and, shaking his head, ‘This is a mighty mysterious business!’