The Bride of Newgate

by John Dickson Carr

  Since the heaviest drive of rain was against the front windows, the curtains had been drawn and the mantelpiece candles lighted in the green drawing room. On the striped sofa sat a frank-looking, clear-eyed young man, reading a copy of Leigh Hunt’s newspaper, The Examiner.

  The young man rose hastily to his feet. “Lord Darwent?”

  “Your servant, Mr. Lewis.”

  Tillotson Lewis, richly but very soberly dressed except for his white red-sprigged waistcoat, was about of Darwent’s height and figure. Like Darwent, he had gray eyes and brown hair. Otherwise, Darwent thought, there was no close resemblance between them except in a poor light or when someone was expecting to see it.

  And he liked young Lewis instantly; liked his evident straightforwardness and intelligence; liked the fact that he had no lisp, no sour temper, no deliberate eccentricity as cultivated by the dandy to be in fashion.

  But Lewis was nervous, twisting and untwisting the newspaper. Darwent waved him back to his seat on the sofa, and himself sat down beside the center table.

  “F-forgive my intrusion,” said Lewis, conquering his stutter with a ghost of a smile in the plainly friendly atmosphere. “I came here, Lord Darwent, mainly to thank you.”

  “To thank me? For what reason?”

  “I understand from my neighbor, Mrs. Captain Bang, that yesterday someone fired a bullet at you from a window of my lodgings. —One moment!” he added, though Darwent did not offer to interrupt.

  “On my oath,” declared Lewis, bending forward with the copy of The Examiner crushed against his knees, “I am not addicted to casual assassination. And at that time (if Mrs. Bang states it correctly) I was having my dinner, boiled fowl with oyster sauce, at White’s.”

  Darwent laughed.

  “You may be easy, Mr. Lewis. I am certain you did not fire the shot.”

  “Thank God for that! But why are you certain?”

  “Let’s say I have personal reasons.”

  “Most men,” said Lewis, “would have gone straight to a magistrate, or at least have summoned the watch …”

  “Now what good are the Charlies,” Darwent inquired dryly, “except to show a clean pair of heels when there’s trouble? For the most part they are old men who can be beaten senseless by fine sporting Corinthians such as, for instance, Jemmy Fletcher and Sir John Buckstone.”

  Lewis glanced at him quickly.

  “Don’t underestimate poor Jemmy,” he advised. “He has a willow-like look, I grant; but he’s as strong as a horse. As for Buckstone …”

  All of a sudden Lewis became conscious of Mr. Hunt’s newspaper, The Examiner, clutched against his knee. He folded up the newspaper, and put it into the tail pocket of his coat.

  “Does it surprise you,” he asked half-defiantly, “that a Tory and a member of White’s should be reading a paper of such … very advanced views?”

  “In the case of an intelligent man, no.”

  “You approve?” exclaimed Lewis. “When the editor was released, only last February, from a prison sentence for writing a so-called libel against the Prince Regent?”

  “I applaud Mr. Hunt’s good sense, if not his moderation. He called the Regent, I think, a ‘corpulent Adonis of fifty’?”

  “Something of the kind, yes.”

  “Better sense, or worse folly, would have written, ‘a fat hog who has outlived the great talents he once possessed.’“

  Tillotson Lewis opened his mouth to speak, and closed it again. His gray eyes contemplated Darwent with a pinched uneasiness: as though he would have huzzaed, but dared not eyen commend. Clearly, the candlelight illumined his thin face, with the twitching muscle beside the mouth. Behind closed curtains the rain sluiced down.

  “Lord Darwent,” he burst out, “you can’t do it!”

  “I can’t do what?”

  “Or let me say,” amended Lewis, “you must not do it.” His voice grew intense. “You mustn’t show contempt for society as it is; you mustn’t knock over idols; above all, you mustn’t touch Jack Buckstone.”

  All Darwent’s laughter, all his momentary happiness, seemed to dry up inside him and turn to a black mud which he could almost taste.

  “Buckstone again,” he said. “In the devil’s name, who is Buckstone? Is he too sacred to be touched?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I’m not to be free of him, even when the boasting swine collapses like a bag of wind?”

  Lewis spoke sympathetically and hesitantly, but with clear truth.

  “You will never be free of him, Lord Darwent, so long as he is a symbol of what a fine fellow ought to be. Face that.”

  There was a silence, broken by Lewis.

  “This morning, as everyone now knows, you scored a so-called victory over Buckstone …”

  “A ‘so-called’ victory?”

  “Yes. It is claimed you fought foul. Today you will be challenged to fight again.”

  “Challenged by whom?”

  When the wax lights faintly flickered, Lewis glanced round the shadowy room as though to make certain they were not overheard.

  “The truth is, between ourselves: you’re too dangerous a man with the pistol. It won’t be pistols. You will have to meet their best swordsman.”

  “I repeat, sir: who will challenge me?”

  “Major Anthony Sharpe. 7th Hussars.”

  “Major Sharpe?”

  “You don’t appear to credit me.”

  “But Sharpe is an honest and honorable man!”

  “True,” agreed Lewis, lifting his shoulders for emphasis, “as everyone knows! But both Jemmy Fletcher and Jack Buck-stone testify you fought foul: they say you swore you had never touched a pistol in your life, and did not even know how to fire one.”

  “When they say that,” Darwent told him agreeably, “they are both liars and damned liars.”

  Lewis rose in some agitation from the sofa, and paced round behind it.

  “My lord,” he said, “I make bold to believe you. First because I think you are honest. Second because of …” He touched the copy of The Examiner in the tail pocket of his gray waist-fitting coat with the black velvet collar.

  “But Fletcher and Buckstone,” Lewis added, turning abruptly, “have both given their words as gentlemen. Major Sharpe honestly believes them. As for Sir John Buckstone …”

  “Can’t we omit mention of Buckstone?”

  But, even as Darwent said this, the hateful words rang in his head like refrain he would now hear without end:

  You will never be free of him, Lord Darwent. You will never be free of him. You will never be free of him. …

  “Besides,” added Lewis, piercing his thoughts, “there is the question of military preferment.”

  “I fail to understand you.”

  “A near friend of Buckstone’s,” said Lewis, “is His Royal Highness the Duke of York. His Royal Highness of York is no longer head of the army, of course. But his influence is still of great power at the Horse Guards. Major Sharpe is a fine soldier; of good family, related to the Kinsmeres of Bucks; but poor, in debt, with no preferment.”

  “You intimate, sir, that again ‘influence’ will …?”

  “A colonelcy at the very least,” blurted Lewis, “will be his reward-of-merit for cutting you down. —My lord, his second may call here at any moment.”

  Darwent rose to his feet and went over to the mantelpiece. Just here, last night, he had given Jemmy Fletcher a reply for Buckstone. He turned round to face Lewis, stretching out his arms along the mantel ledge.

  And on Darwent’s face-there was a cold smile which (for some reason) brought out drops of sweat on Lewis’s forehead.

  “I won’t fight him,” Darwent said.

  “For your kind and mine,” the other retorted bitterly, “there is no choice. We accept a challenge, or we are horse whipped in public. Do you know Ned Firebrace, Major Sharpe’s nephew?””

  “No.”

  “Ned Firebrace,” returned Lewis, “was—was formerly a corne
t of the 10th Hussars, Prinny’s own regiment. He’s nearly as good a swordsman as his uncle; and he’s more malicious than Buckstone ever was. If you refuse his uncle’s challenge, he’ll take the horsewhip to you; and he’ll be justified!”

  “Let him try.”

  “But your reason for not meeting his uncle?”

  “Oh, I intend to state my reason in public.”

  “Good! That may be of help. What is it?”

  “That I mean to see one honest man, meaning Major Sharpe, uncorrupted by a set of swine who need a taste of the French Revolution.”

  Another gust of rain drove against the windows. Tillotson Lewis’s face went as white as his red-sprigged waistcoat.

  “For God’s sake, hush!” he implored in a low voice. “You’re a worse republican than Tom Paine ever was!”

  “I. Mr. Lewis? A republican? Come, now!”

  “Then what are you pleased to call it?”

  “My dear sir,” Darwent observed agreeably, and settled himself against the mantelpiece, “let us stop and reflect. All men are not created equal, if only by reason of their intellects. Shall we set-up pig-faced York, or Silly-Billy Clarence, or perverted Cumberland, or dough-witted Kent, against the genius of dead Mr. Fox or dying Mr. Sheridan?”

  “My lord, this is treason!”

  “Treason?” repeated Darwent. “When these dolts are of Hanoverian stock, with not one drop of English blood for four generations? Speak to me of treason, sir, when we serve a British king.”

  “Man, you are nothing more than—!”

  “A Jacobite, like my good friend Mr. Mulberry? I am not sure. But this I do say: that all men are, or should be, equal in their rights before the law.”

  “Ah, now you speak good sense! I am for truth and justice.”

  “If you are for truth and justice,” Darwent said quietly, “then you can aid me.”

  “Aid you? How?”

  Darwent felt a spell creep over his wits even as he uttered the words.

  “On the evening of May fifth, last, were you not engaged to meet the blue coach in Hyde Park? And go out to the moneylender’s house?”

  Again, as he finished speaking, Darwent half-twitched his head round toward the mantelpiece and the wall behind him. It might have been his imagination, in this shadow-draped room under the rain. But this was a front room, like the dining room below. Its west wall, this wall—with perhaps a three-foot thickness of solid brick between—was built against the wall of the house next door.

  Had there been a faint movement behind that wall?

  “Forgive me again, Mr. Lewis. Why didn’t you go in the coach?”

  “Frankly, because I distrusted this moneylender who called himself Mr. Caliban and offered too low a rate of interest. In fact, I wrote to him that I distrusted him; that I should keep the appointment, but investigate him first. I didn’t keep the appointment. But I saw the coachman.”

  “You saw the coachman?” Darwent demanded. “When?”

  “Why, on the night you speak of. In Hyde Park.”

  “Come, sir! Then you must have seen me knocked over the head and abducted, near the rails of the park on the Piccadilly side?”

  “Upon my soul, no! I was at the other end of the park. Behind bushes, with my horse tethered to a tree. I had decided not to go, yet it seemed unfair to send no word to the moneylender. I had elected to speak to the coachman; yet …”

  “Continue!”

  “I saw the coach, blue with yellow wheels, coming towards me. It was dusk, but I saw the coachman clearly. He wore a dirty brown muffler round his face, and a low-crowned hat. What turned my stomach was his cloak.”

  “His cloak?”

  “A dark cloak,” said Lewis, “stretching to his ankles, making him seem thinner and bigger; yet it was moldy. No, I am not fanciful! The cloak was spotted in places with green mold, as though from a graveyard.”

  “Ghost coach!” Darwent muttered grimly.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said, ‘ghost coach,’ Mr. Lewis, and never understood why I said it! It was that cloak, never noticed except at the back of the mind. Yes! And it explains why the coachman attacked me: intending to attack you. You were suspicious; you might be dangerous; they must treat you as a prisoner, until they found out what you knew. But the graveyard mold …”

  “It came from no graveyard,” cried Lewis. “You have seen such cloaks. They hang for years in a damp cupboard, gathering mildew, until some sporting buck takes them out for a jape or a masquerade.

  “The driver of that coach,” he went on in a high voice, “was a gentleman masquerading as a jarvey. And what of his partner, Mr. Caliban? I knew no more; I ran from there. King of Jermyn Street, an honest moneylender, has since supplied me with a loan. Besides,” and Lewis shuddered again, “it seemed to me I half-recognized the coachman …”

  “You recognized him? Who was he?”

  “Stop! I mean only a suggestion, trick of gesture, perhaps an illusion …”

  A rap at the door, heralding the appearance of Alfred with a letter on a salver, drew a curse from Darwent. But one glance at the letter made him pause.

  “It came by hand, my lord,” said the footman, “and it is marked ‘urgent.’”

  The letter, Tillotson Lewis noticed, was rather grubby; its address was squeezed uphill in a half-illiterate handwriting. As Darwent snatched it from the salver, Lewis (into whose thoughts we need not enter) saw that its red wax bore the Crown-and-Broad-Arrow, the seal of the Bow Street runners.

  “Forgive me,” Darwent muttered.

  Breaking the seal and opening out the letter, he glanced down it. His features hardened, perhaps with satisfaction or perhaps with surprise, and then the same cold smile drew back his lips.

  “Alfred,” he said quietly.

  “Yes, my lord?”

  “Are you any judge of a sword?”

  Alfred smiled a little. He did not mention that his wide shoulders and fine calves had been an asset in the Dragoons as well as here.

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “Good!” said Darwent, fishing a long key out of his waistcoat pocket. “In Garter Lane, off Covent Garden, you will find a fencing school, now shut, with the name ‘D’Arvent,’ over the door. Everyone knows that all good fencing masters must be French. This key opens the door.”

  “Yes, my lord?”

  Darwent’s look changed to one of unholy pleasure.

  “Pay no heed to foils or dummy weapons. Choose me a pair of sabers—if the blades be not sharp enough, have them set at a razor maker’s—and—yes! a pair of smallswords and a pair of rapiers as well. On your way back; take the carriage; you had better stop at Locke’s in Oxford Street and buy me a case of pistols.”

  Alfred’s eye lighted up. “Very good, my lord.”

  “And … Alfred. It will not be necessary to mention this matter to my wife. The weapons had better be hidden where she is unlikely to find them, preferably downstairs.”

  “Very good, my lord. Are there any other instructions?”

  “For the moment, no.”

  The door closed behind him. Tillotson Lewis felt his rigid shirt collar grow damp and soft with heat.

  “Do I understand,” demanded Lewis, “that you have changed your mind? That you will meet Major Sharpe after all?”

  “Oh, no. I won’t meet Sharpe.” Darwent’s gray eyes had become so intense, so hot with wrath, that the swelling pupils seemed to make them look black. “But there will be a meeting, my friend. There will be a meeting.”

  “Then what will you say to Alvanley? I told you a while ago that Sharpe’s second must be here at any minute! What will you say to Alvanley?”

  Darwent, turning toward the mantelpiece, whipped round again.

  “Alvanley?” he repeated. “Haven’t I heard that name before?”

  Lewis stared at him.

  “Gad, I should think so! Lord Alvanley seconded you for nomination to White’s. What’s more, he’s one of the few dandy-lions
with real ability and wit. And you must trust him a good deal.”

  “Trust him?”

  “Confound it!” muttered Lewis. “You permitted Will Alvanley to escort Lady Darwent to the opera last night, didn’t you?”

  This was the point at which the door opened, its latch being only partly caught, and Caroline came in. She was at her most stately, with a high color.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Lewis. —Were you discussing, my lord, the state of morals in the private boxes at the opera?”

  “To be quite frank, madam,” replied Darwent, with a low bow, “we were not. And shall the innocent flee where no man pursueth?”

  “Tonight, I think, you go with me to the opera?”

  “I go with you,” said Darwent, having a kind of rapture in his face, “because of your charm, and wit, and the beauty that turns my head; and also, I must confess it,” he looked at the letter, “in the hope of a very bloody meeting.”

  “Meeting!” exclaimed Caroline.

  In the open doorway behind Darwent towered the figure of Thomas, the second footman.

  “Forgive me, my lord,” said Thomas. “But Lord Alvanley is downstairs. He begs the favor of a word with you.”

  The master of the house drew himself up.

  “Ask Lord Alvanley,” he said politely, “whether he will be good enough to come upstairs.”

  Chapter XVI

  Riot at the Opera

  AS THE ORCHESTRA SOARED into the overture of Il Ratto di Proserpina, with its clangor of brass softened and without too much tyranny of violins, the Marquess and Marchioness of Darwent groped into the gloom of box number forty-five on the third tier.

  Outside the Italian opera in the Haymarket, more properly called the King’s Theatre, faint mist had long succeeded rain. Carriages, bright with armorial bearings, crushed together in thick mud to pile up before the doors.

  Link boys, who were usually middle-aged men, wove a pattern of torches as carriage steps were let down. In the Haymarket, as far up as the little shop where you might buy the Regent’s own snuff mixture, the crowd swayed and grew more restive.

  “But where is she?” shouted a voice, affectionate with the loving kindness of liquor. “Where’s the princess?”