Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini

by Rafael Sabatini

  There was a horrible sound like the crunching of an egg-shell, and the Citizen Representative dropped, fulminated by the blow, and lay in a shuddering, twitching heap, whilst the colour of this nightcap changed slowly from white to crimson under the murderer’s staring eyes.

  Gustave stood there, bending over the fallen man, motionless while you might count ten. His face was leaden and his mouth foolishly open between surprise and horror of the thing he had done.

  Not a sound disturbed the house; not a groan, not a movement from the fallen man. Nothing but the muffled ticking of the ormolu clock and the buzzing of a fly that had been disturbed. Still Gustave stood there in that half-crouching attitude, terror gaining upon him with every throb of his pulses. And then quite suddenly a voice cut sharply upon the stillness.

  ‘Well?’ it asked. ‘And what do you propose to do now?’

  Gustave came erect, stifling a scream, to confront the white face and beady eyes of Duroc, who stood considering him between the parted curtains.

  In a long silence he stared, his wits working briskly the while.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked at last, his voice a hoarse whisper. ‘How come you here? What are you? Ah! A thief — a housebreaker!’

  ‘At least,’ said Duroc drily, ‘I am not a murderer.’

  ‘My God!’ said Gustave, and his wild eyes turned again upon that tragically grotesque mass that lay at his feet. ‘Is he — is he dead?’

  ‘Unless his skull is made of iron,’ said Duroc. He came forward in that swift, noiseless fashion of his, and dropped on one knee beside the deputy. He made a brief examination. ‘The Citizen Representative represents a corpse,’ he said. ‘He is as dead as King Capet.’ He rose. ‘What are you going to do?’ he asked again.

  ‘To do?’ said Gustave. ‘Mon Dieu! What is there to do? If he is dead — —’ He checked. His knavish wits were racing now. He looked into the other’s round black eyes. ‘You’ll not betray me,’ he cried. ‘You dare not. You are in no better case than I. And there is no one else in the house. He lived all alone. He was a miserly dog, and the old woman who serves him will not be here until morning.’

  Duroc was watching him intently, almost without appearing to observe him. He saw the man’s fingers suddenly tighten upon the life-preserver with which already he had launched one man across the tide of the Styx that night.

  ‘Put that thing down,’ he commanded sharply, ‘put it down at once, or I’ll send you after your cousin.’ And Gustave found himself covered by a pistol.

  Instantly he loosed the grip of his murderous weapon. It fell with a crash beside the body of the man it had slain.

  ‘I meant you no harm,’ panted Gustave. ‘Do you know what wealth he hoards in these consoles, in that secretaire? You do, for that is what you came for. Well, take it, take it all. But let me go, let me get away from this. I — I — —’ He seemed to stifle in his terror.

  Duroc’s lipless mouth distended in a smile.

  ‘Am I detaining you?’ he asked. ‘Faith, you didn’t suppose I was going to drag you to the nearest /corps-de-garde/, did you? Go, man, if you want to go. In your place I should have gone already.’

  Gustave stared at him almost incredulously, as if doubting his own good fortune. Then suddenly perceiving the motives that swayed the other, and asking nothing better for himself than to be gone, he turned and without another word fled from the room and the house, his one anxiety to put as great a distance between himself and his crime as possible.

  Duroc watched that sudden scared flight, still smiling. Then he coolly crossed the room, took up the dead man’s candle and placed it upon the secretaire. He pulled up a chair — there was no longer any need to proceed with caution — sat down, and producing his keys and a chisel-like instrument he went diligently to work to get at the contents of this secretaire.

  Meanwhile Gustave had gone like a flash the length of the Rue de la Harpe, driven ever by his terror of the consequences of his deed. But as he neared the corner of the Cordeliers he was brought suddenly to a halt by the measured tread of approaching steps. He knew it at once for the march of a patrol, and his consciousness of what he had done made him fearful of meeting these servants of the law who might challenge him and demand to know whence he was and whither he went at such an hour — for the new reign of universal liberty had imposed stern limitations upon individual freedom.

  He vanished into the darkness of a doorway, and crouched there to wait until those footsteps should have faded again into the distance. And it was in those moments as he leaned there panting that his fiendishly wicked notion first assailed him. He turned it over in his mind, and in the gloom you might have caught the gleam of his teeth as he smiled evilly to himself.

  He was his cousin’s heir. Could he but fasten the guilt of that murder upon the thief he had left so callously at work in the very room where the body lay, then never again need he know want. And the thief, being a thief, deserved no less. He had no doubt at all but that the fellow would never have hesitated to do the murder had it been forced upon him by circumstances. He reflected further, and realized how aptly set was the stage for such a comedy as he had in mind. Had not that fool compelled him to drop the very weapon with which the deputy’s skull had been smashed?

  No single link was missing in the chain of complete evidence against the thief. Gustave realized that here was a chance sent him by friendly fortune. Tomorrow it would be too late. In seeking his cousin’s murderer the authorities would ascertain that he was the one man who stood to profit by the Citizen Representative’s death, and having discovered that they would compel him to render an account of his movements that night. They would cross-question and confound him, seeing that he could give no such account as they would demand.

  He was resolved. He must act at once. Not three minutes had sped since he had left that house, and it was impossible that in the meantime the thief could have done his work and taken his departure.

  And so upon that fell resolve he flung out of his concealment, and ran on up the street towards the Cordeliers, to meet the advancing patrol, shouting as he went —

  ‘Au voleur! Au voleur!’

  He heard the patrol quickening their steps in response to his cry, and presently he found himself face to face with four men of the National Guard, who, as it chanced, were accompanied by an agent of the section in civilian dress and scarf of office.

  ‘Down there,’ he cried, pointing back down the street. ‘A thief has broken into the house of my cousin — my cousin the Citizen Representative Clairvaux.’ He gathered importance, he knew, from this proclamation of his relationship with one of the great ones of the Convention.

  But the agent of the section paused to question him.

  ‘Why did you not follow him, citizen?’

  ‘I am without weapons, and I bethought me he would probably be armed. Besides I heard you approaching in the distance, and I thought it best to run to summon you, that thus we may make sure of taking him.’

  The agent considered him, his white face — seen in the light of the lantern carried by the patrol — his shaking limbs and gasping speech, and concluded he had to deal with an arrant coward, nor troubled to dissemble his contempt.

  ‘Name of a name!’ he growled, ‘and meanwhile the Citizen Representative may have been murdered in his bed.’

  ‘I pray not! Oh, I pray not!’ panted Gustave. ‘Quickly, citizens, quickly! Terrible things may happen while we stand here.’

  They went down the street at a run to the house of Clairvaux, whose door they found open as Gustave had left it when he departed.

  ‘Where did he break in?’ asked one of the guards.

  ‘By the door,’ said Gustave. ‘He had keys, I think. Oh, quick!’

  In the passage he perceived a faint gleam of light to assure him that the thief was still at work. He swung round to them, and raised a hand. ‘Quietly!’ he whispered. ‘Quietly, so that we do not disturb him.’

  The patrol thrust forward,
and entered the house in his wake. He led them straight towards the half-open door of the study, from which the light was issuing as if to guide them. He flung wide the door, and entered, whilst the men crowding after him came to a sudden halt upon the threshold in sheer amazement at what they beheld.

  At their feet lay the body of the Citizen Representative Clairvaux in a raiment that in itself seemed to proclaim how hastily he had risen from his bed to come and deal with this midnight intruder; and there at the secretaire, now open, its drawers broken and their contents scattered all about the floor, sat Duroc, white-faced, his beady rat’s eyes considering them.

  Gustave broke into lamentations at sight of his cousin’s body.

  ‘We are too late! Mon Dieu! We are too late! He is dead — dead. And look! Here is the weapon with which he was slain. And there sits the murderer — caught in the very act — caught in the very act. Seize him! Ah, /scélérat/,’ he raged, shaking his fist in the thief’s white, startled face. ‘You shall be made to pay for this!’

  ‘Comedian!’ said Duroc shortly.

  ‘Seize him! Seize him!’ cried Gustave in a frenzy.

  The guards sprang across the room, and laid hands upon Duroc to prevent him having recourse to any weapons.

  Duroc looked up at them, blinking. The his eyes shifted to Gustave, and suddenly he laughed.

  ‘Now see what a fool a man is who will not seize the chances that are offered him,’ he said. ‘After that scoundrel had bludgeoned his cousin to death I bade him go. He might have made good his escape, and I should have said no word to betray him. Instead he thinks to make me his scapegoat.’

  He shrugged, and rose under the hands of his captors. Then he pulled his coat open, and displayed a round leaden disc of the size of a five-franc piece bearing the arms of the republic.

  At sight of it the hands that had been holding him instantly fell away.

  The agent of the section stepped forward frowning.

  ‘What does this mean?’ he asked, but on a note that was almost of respect, realizing that he stood in the presence of an officer of the secret service of the republic, whom no man might detain save at his peril.

  ‘I am Duroc of the Committee of Public Safety,’ was the quiet answer. ‘The Executive had cause to doubt that the Citizen Representative Clairvaux was in correspondence with the enemies of France. I came secretly to examine his papers and to discover who are his correspondents. Here is what I sought.’ And he held up a little sheaf of documents which he had separated from the rest. ‘I will wish you good-night, citizens. I must report at once to the Citizen-Deputy Marat. Since that fellow has come back take him to the Luxembourg. Let the committee of the section deal with him tomorrow. I shall forward my report.’

  Gustave shook himself out of his sudden paralysis to make a dash for the door. But the guards closed with him, and held him fast, whilst Duroc of the Committee of Public Safety passed out, with dignity in spite of his torn breeches.

  KYNASTON’S RECKONING

  Under the date of the 18th August 1660, you will find the following entry in the diary of Mr Samuel Pepys: ‘Captain Ferrers took me to the Cockpitt play, the first that I have had time to see since my coming from sea, “The Loyall Subject,” where one Kinaston, a boy, acted the duke’s sister, but made the loveliest lady that ever I saw in my life.’

  Edward Kynaston was short of stature, and of a lithe and stripling grace, golden-headed, with a milk-and-rose complexion that any woman might have envied, and a countenance so delicately beautiful that it provoked from Mr Pepys the above ejaculation, and, further (on the 2nd of January following), this tribute: ‘. . . I and my wife to the theatre, and there saw “The Silent Woman.” Among other things there Kinaston, the boy, had the good turn to appear . . . in fine clothes, and in them was clearly the prettiest woman in the house.’

  This Kynaston had been discovered by Sir William Davenant — the same who boasted himself to be the son of Master William Shakespeare — and such were his histrionic gifts and personal beauty that even when women were admitted at last to the English stage he continued for some time thereafter to be entrusted with the principal female roles, since no woman could be found to compare with him in the performance of them.

  Some years later (on the 9th February, 1669) we find Mr Pepys writing as follows: ‘To the King’s Playhouse, and there saw “The Island Princesse,” which I like mighty well as an excellent play; and here we find Kinaston to be well enough to act again; which he did very well after his beating by Sir Charles Sedley’s appointment.’

  It is with this beating and its consequences that my story is concerned. Ned Kynaston was by now in his twenty-second year, and whilst he was still engaged in the main for female parts, yet upon occasion he would play the youthful gallant — and have every woman in the house enamoured of him.

  In what way Sedley offended him we do not know, nor does it greatly matter. We do know that Sedley was very prodigal of offence, and although at this time a man well advanced in the forties, yet age had not sobered him or given him dignity. He was still quite the most outrageous of all the rakes about the court of that prince of rakes, their sovereign. The audacity of his intrigues was second only to that of his royal master. It has been made the subject of a lampoon by his brother rake, my Lord Rochester. Once when, as a result of what Anthony Wood calls his ‘indecent and blasphemous behaviour’, he had raised a riot in the Cock Tavern in Covent Garden, and had been haled, together with my Lord Buckhurst and some others, before Sir Robert Hyde — Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, sitting in Westminster Hall — Sir Robert caustically commended to him the perusal of a book entitled /The Compleat Gentleman/ — a recommendation which galled him worse than the fine of £500 by which it was accompanied.

  Pepys, too, tells us of a ‘frolic and debauchery’ of Sedley’s and Buckhurst’s, ‘running up and down all the night, almost naked in the streets, and at last fighting and being beat by the watch and clapped up all night.’

  It is not difficult to conceive that so turbulent a rake may have got foul of the players at the King’s Theatre, and thus provoked Kynaston. Be that as it may, Kynaston chose to appear on the stage made up in so life-like a portrait of Sir Charles, and so naturally counterfeiting his accent and his posturings, that the whole house was convulsed with it when it had assured itself that it was not Sir Charles himself who strutted there upon the boards.

  You imagine, I hope, the fine passion into which Sedley was flung when he knew of it. Those who overheard his threats to have the actor’s life say that he foamed at the mouth in uttering them. But he did not take the direct way to achieve his purpose expected by those who were witnesses of his ravings. He did not send his friends and the length of his sword to Kynaston. How could he? Blackguard though he was by instinct and behaviour, it yet remained that by birth he was a gentleman; and it could not have become a gentleman to have so forgotten what was due to himself as to have condescended to cross swords with a rogue and a vagabond of an actor. Besides, Kynaston, for all his slight frame and almost womanish beauty, was of an extremely virile spirit, and of a singular address in all the exercises of his age. He played — as indeed you shall see — as pretty a rapier as any man in these islands.

  So Sir Charles took another way — the way of the gentleman with the plebeian. He sent a couple of hired bullies to waylay Kynaston in the park one morning. They fell upon him, broke his sword with their cudgels, and so belaboured him that he was left almost for dead when they made off before the advent of those who ran belatedly to the poor actor’s assistance.

  Such was the resentment of town and Court — for Kynaston was a universal favourite — that for once the King frowned upon one of those who modelled their conduct upon his own august pattern. But beyond a transient coolness, his Majesty did not see fit to visit any other punishment upon Sedley, and Kynaston, seeing that there was none to avenge him, considered, so soon as he was restored to health, how best he might avenge himself.

 
The cowardly assault had raised in him such a thirst for vengeance as naught but Sedley’s blood could assuage. He must take steps to make it impossible for the rake to do aught but set aside his gentleman’s estate and measure swords with him; that much accomplished, at whatever cost or consequences, Kynaston was resolved to kill him without mercy.

  He was about his murderous purpose on that sunny February morning on which Sir Lionel Faversham tells us that he met him outside the Dolphin in the Strand. He was dressed in a black camlet suit, very sober and simple, yet of an elegance that heighted his distinguished air. ‘Actor though he was,’ says Faversham, ‘I’ll swear that no courtlier figure might you see in Whitehall.’

  Faversham found him pacing there like a sentry, with a heavy riding-whip tucked under his arm.

  ‘Whither away, Ned?’ he greeted him.

  Kynaston tossed his golden curls, and with his whip he pointed across to the Dolphin.

  ‘I am staying for Sir Charles Sedley,’ he replied in that gentle and wonderfully musical voice of his. ‘If you’ll tarry here awhile, you’ll see a reckoning paid, and a rakehell carried home to bed. ‘Twill divert you, Sir Lionel.’

  ‘Odds my life, lad! Are ye clean mad?’ cried Faversham.

  Having a very real affection for the young man, and foreseeing for him the worst possible consequences from such an affair, he set himself urgently to turn him from his purpose. They wrangled there awhile, and in the end, Sir Lionel’s good sense prevailing, Kynaston suffered himself to be led away. Faversham carried him off to his own lodging in King Street, and kept him there out of mischief until the morrow. By then the actor’s rage had so far cooled that he lent an ear to the reasonable counsel of his host.

  ‘I’ll be advised by you, Sir Lionel,’ he said at parting, ‘and I abandon all thought of repaying him in his own coin. ’Tis stupid currency when all is said. Yet, sink me, it shall be the worse for him! For you are not to suppose that I shall forgo the reckoning. I’ll present it in another form, and, when I do, you shall see Sedley pilloried to the mock of the town.’