The Bride of Newgate

by John Dickson Carr

  “You don’t love her,” said Caroline quietly. “You never have loved her. While you were brooding in that prison, you—you invented an Arcadian cloud cuckooland where there were never any cares; and you put her into it. It was never true.”

  “Caroline, I …”

  “What I say is true! You know it! And has ever a woman been forced to shame herself as I have?”

  Desperately her companion tried to speak in a light tone.

  “If you mean my uninvited visit to your bathroom …”

  “Oh, no,” said Caroline with an unsteady smile. “I give you leave to do that at any time it pleases you. And more! But …”

  Color reddened her cheeks, hardly visible in the darkened box; but, as though she felt the rush of blood to her face, she put up her hands against her cheeks.

  “But I!” she said, with self-loathing. “I was so hoity-toity, so sure my feelings were above other women’s. Men were odious, and I could not endure the touch of one. My will power was supreme! My will power would conquer all! Then I must meet you, and my will power was nothing.”

  Caroline’s voice faltered. They sat side by side in two plush chairs well back from the box ledge. Though Darwent tried to stifle her outburst, she rushed on.

  “In the ears of everyone—in public!—I acknowledged I loved you. I could have vowed, Dick, the pincers of hell would not make me say that. But I did; I’m glad I did; I’m proud of it. Because … haven’t you understood from the beginning you and I are two of a kind?”

  “Two of a kind?”

  “You’re a rebel. So am I. But I daren’t say so.”

  Then Caroline sat up straight, throwing back her curls.

  “What do you believe, Dick?” she asked with soft, fierce intensity.

  “In what particular respect?”

  “Oh, it’s not an absurd question! What does this world mean to you? What do you believe?”

  Their box faced directly across toward the drop curtain, at about the middle of the tier. Darwent was vaguely conscious of the orchestra playing the overture, that there had been a brief clamor over someone’s throwing orange peel into the pit; little more.

  “‘We hold these truths to be self-evident,’” he said, “‘That all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; and that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’”

  Darwent paused.

  The slow majesty of the words seemed to hang there like banners, visual images, before they faded away.

  “‘Created equal,’” repeated Caroline. “I hate that!”

  “Yes; I feared you would.”

  “But what matter does it make,” she cried, “if you and I believe in … in …”

  “The pursuit of happiness?”

  “In happiness!” said Caroline. “You would free men. I would free women from being bond slaves: yes, and give them rights equal to men! But this is only illusion.” She spoke in a detached, hopeless voice. “Dick, Dick, when will you learn that you can’t fight society?”

  “I have begun to learn it already.”

  “Then what will you do?”

  “When this affair is over …”

  “Unless you are dead, of course.”

  “Yes; unless I am dead. I now own an estate in Kent, with shallow streams and soft brownish-green woods. I spent my boyhood there; I loved it.” Darwent paused. His longing for Caroline had gone almost beyond control. “If I could take you there, beyond sight of the world …”

  “I could live there with you forever,” said Caroline. Very quietly she added: “Could Dolly Spencer?”

  He did not reply.

  “Please believe,” insisted Caroline, “I have nothing against her. I—I like her. This evening, when she asked if she could try on some of my gowns, I said she could have half a dozen for her own if she promised not to get out of bed until tomorrow. But could she spend a fortnight in the country, away from London and the playhouses, without screaming from boredom? Have you two anything in common, except—what I …”

  Again Darwent turned round.

  This time he did not realize that Caroline was so close to him. His cheek brushed hers. Then they were in each other’s arms, and the ensuing moments closely resembled madness or fury.

  “Damn you,” Darwent presently said in a choked voice. “I understand you now. I should have understood you long ago.”

  “Un—understand me?”

  “Cold and arrogant? Your trouble is that you’re too stimulating. You’re a wine that has three stages of headiness. You’re Madam Circe and Mother Eve. You’re never placid; you’re fierce-kiss-and-run-away; you’re angel and incubus, enough to—”

  “If this is your method of damning me,” whispered Caroline, “go on and on and on and on!”

  “No! Let’s be fair.” He seized her arms, and made her sit upright. “This morning,” he added, “I told Dolly I was in love with her.”

  “But you didn’t mean it?” A pause. “Did you?”

  “I meant it when I said it, yes!” Darwent smote his fist against his knee. “What am, I, what is any man, but a weather vane sported at by his own folly? Yet all the time, Caroline, you were—there. If I told you the same thing now …”

  “But that’s all that matters, isn’t it?”

  “No. It is not.”

  “Why not?”

  Darwent braced himself.

  “I also said to her: if I win free from my present marriage,”—he felt Caroline shiver through their clasped hands—“will you honor me by becoming Marchioness of Darwent? Caroline dear, I don’t break promises.”

  Clang: smote the cymbal beat as the orchestra soared to the end of the overture. A spattering of applause, a vision of multitudinous hands clapping at innumerable box openings amid the fire-wink of jewels, animated the theater.

  “Quixotry again,” said Caroline.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  She did not snatch her hands away, as he had believed she would. Caroline sat motionless, her blue eyes fixed on him; and he could never penetrate to the depths of them.

  “How amusing!” she said, and choked back a sob. “One of the first things I l’liked about you was that absurd quixotry. Do you remember Newgate, Dick?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were chained to the wall and as weak as a cat; you had no chance whatever. Yet you insulted Jack Buckstone, in calm and measured language, though you knew he’d strike you senseless in an instant.”

  Caroline’s cheeks were flushed and her eyes sparkled with tear.

  “My liking for quixotry has returned to me, I fear,” she said. “‘I don’t break promises,’ you say. As though that were all in the world. Do you love her, Dick? That’s the only question? Do you?”

  “No. When you spoke of my brooding about an Arcadia … that was true.”

  “Then I won’t let you have her,” said Caroline. “Whatever I have to do, however low I have to sink, I won’t let you have her. I swear this before God.”

  “Caroline, you must …”

  Both of them, eerily caught by some subtle sense of wrongness, instinctively glanced toward the stage. Ahead of them. some distance away, was the huge apron with its oval ring of footlights. Well behind it, the green curtain trembled on its rise.

  The music crept out again, quivering with strings that breathed the melancholy of the Underworld and its dark life. The pit, a motionless blur, scarcely moved. Down the center of the pit benches, as far as the orchestra, lay Fops’ Alley.

  Yet an intimately sensitive place is the theater. Even thoughts seem to move and have ripples. And these thoughts were ugly and dangerous.

  As the curtain creaked up—revealing a moonlit glade which to Darwent in some way seemed familiar—the music quivered up with it.

  Two singers, a tenor and a soprano, glided out on the apron. Stage moonlight strengthened, glimmering on leaves. The soprano, in dark clothes like her companion, lifted her voice
to sing …

  A storm of hisses full-voiced and vicious, burst out of the pit and seethed up on the stage like tide on a beach. The woman, her hand at her throat, stopped in mid-flight.

  On the left-hand side of the pit, a bulky-bodied man with a thick neck jumped to his feet. On the right-hand side, another man jumped up; and a third followed.

  And the third man, with a voice like a bull, made himself heard above the determined rush of the orchestra.

  “Let’s have native nightingales, not foreign screech owls! Down with Vestris! Kill her!”

  Chapter XVII

  How Five of the Fancy Fought Two Men’s Steel

  DARWENT HAD SPRUNG TO his feet, his hand on the box ledge. His eyes moved, left and right, across the pit.

  He stood with his left side toward Caroline. Something in his pose, something of the way in which his right hand moved toward the trumpery court sword at his left hip, filled her with new terrors.

  “Dick!”

  “Eh?” He was not even listening; he was studying the pit.

  “Dick, what’s happening? Madame Vestris is not even on in that scene. What is it?”

  “Nothing that need trouble you, my dear.”

  The roar of the pit, to Darwent’s cars at least, was almost equaled by the exclamations of outrage from the boxes. In the adjoining box, Lady Castlereagh screamed. The very old Marquess of Anglesea was heard to quaver out, “You down there, fellow—!” and an orange came sailing out of half-gloom to burst on the box wall behind him.

  “Send the foreign doxy back to Naples!”

  “Kill her!”

  But the snarlers of the pit were not ready, not yet in action. The general effect was that they were undressing. Greatcoats, fustian coats, wigs, and top hats flew wide. Darwent watched for each emergence of a cropped head.

  Every member of the Fancy had worn a cropped head since the day when “Gentleman” Jackson beat Dan Mendoza by gripping him by the hair while smashing his face. They ruled it no foul, though some of us still hold it was the dirtiest of fouls. In any case, the heads stood out white in dimness.

  “Her Royal Highness!” bawled a voice. “Make way for Her Royal Highness!”

  Four officers of the Life Guards, their red sleeves and steel breastplates agleam under gold braid, quickly whisked away Princess Charlotte and her escort. In the momentary pause after that crying of her name—the mob liked Princess Charlotte, poor girl—nobody noticed a figure which glided from the wings and out on the apron to the very footlights.

  The newcomer was not much more than eighteen. She wore heavy black, with black head veils. Tearing off the head veils, jerking open the costume at the throat, she displayed a pallid beauty of face against the stage moonlight and foliage far beyond her.

  “I am Elizabetta Vestris,” she cried.

  What arrested them was partly that dazzle of fascination which springs across a stage and fuses at once with an audience. It was partly the strength and yet softness of her voice: effortless, yet rising gently to every nook of the theater.

  “You think I am not English, then?” she asked. “Let me show you!”

  She spoke some inaudible words to the orchestra. Straightening up, throwing back her head and hair, she stretched her arms wide. In dead silence the violins wove their snare, the horns crept in beneath; as words soared aloft above the melody, it is a sober fact that not a soul moved. For you may impress men and women with opera. But you can touch their hearts only with a simple song.

  Oh, believe me, if all those endearing young charms,

  Which I gaze on so fondly today,

  Were to fade by tomorrow and flee from my arms

  Like a fairy gift fading away…….

  Six years later, when Elizabetta Vestris was the most famous singer-cum-courtesan in England, there were those who swore that never had she sung so well as she sang one brief verse on that night in ’15.

  Thou shouldst still be adored, as this moment thou art,

  Let thy loveliness fade as it will …

  Then silence splintered to bits.

  Across the song cut the raucous, strident note of a post horn. The man with the bull’s voice (he was Dan Sparkler, one of the heavies) roared again.

  “That’s the foreign screech owl! Why should she have our money?”

  The post horn blared again. Somebody threw another peeled orange.

  But this time it was a rotten orange. It struck Elizabetta Vestris between neck and breast, spattering wide, so that she faltered and stepped back. The spitefulness of it turned that act into an act of obscenity. From then on, it was war.

  In the pit a sober-sided young stationer’s assistant suddenly whirled round and landed a clinker of a right fist in Dan Sparkler’s face, drawing Dan’s claret and flinging him asprawl. The Sparkler smashed him down and jumped on him, of course; but another voice, from a second-tier box where Lord Yarmouth of the fiery hair stood with his fists on his hips, added to the din.

  “Did you ever,” shouted his lordship, “see such a set of damned rascals in your life?”

  “Like to get a wipe over the eye, ginger?” a crophead shouted back.

  “Ho! Would I?” demanded the Earl of Yarmouth, instantly tearing off his coat and turning to slide down the box pillars into the fight. On the other side of the theater Colonel Dan Mackinnon, being in a pit box, had only to tear off his own coat and hurl himself over the box ledge.

  Still Darwent, high above it in the third tier, did not move. Caroline ran round to the other side of him, seizing at his sleeve.

  “Dick! Listen to me!”

  “Well?” He did not look round.

  “What did Will Alvanley tell you on the stairs here tonight?” Caroline demanded. Her intuition flew even ahead of her wits. “What was in that letter you had this afternoon, with the Bow-Street-runner seal? Don’t deny you had it; Meg told me!”

  “Did she, by George!”

  “At first you wanted me to come here. Then, just before we entered, you said …” Caroline paused.

  “You’ll be quite safe, my dear, if you follow my orders. What is more, you can help me. Will you?”

  “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

  “I want you to watch the right-hand side of the pit, as divided by the central aisle. That’s where they’re struggling,”—a woman’s scream pierced up, shaking Caroline’s nerves—“to get into Fops’ Alley and up to the way out under these boxes. But you can see the division?”

  “Yes, of course!”

  “Watch the cropheads. If they begin to gather near the south door, the one leading up the stairs to the boxes—there—then tell me. I’ll watch the door on the north.”

  “No!” cried Caroline, her eyes inadvertently straying to the stage. “Not fire!”

  Under a weird whiteness of stage moonlight, with every lamp turned high, the pit was a fighting turmoil. One crophead, breaking through the orchestra, had hauled himself up on the apron.

  Elizabetta Vestris, who had retreated five steps, would not retreat a step further. The crophead’s foot crushed a lamp, splintering glass underneath and sending a zigzag streak of fire across tinder-dry boards. Three burly sceneshifters, each carrying the regulation red fire bucket, had already run out from the wings. The first of them, flinging the contents of the bucket in the crophead’s face, kicked him below the belt with a hobnailed shoe. The two others sluiced water across the blaze, dousing it in a spitefulness of oily black smoke. The crophead, though barely able to move, launched a roundarm at his adversary and deliberately kicked over another footlight.

  “Dick!” said Caroline in the third-tier box. “There’s Mr. Mulberry!”

  “Where?”

  Caroline was pointing downward.

  “The aisle end of the second bench from the back. He’s got some kind of wet cloth round his head to—to sober himself. He’s pointing …”

  Darwent saw where Hubert Mulberry was pointing. He followed the direction of that stabbing finger.

  And th
en, at long last, he saw the coachman.

  The coachman, directly underneath in the pit at the very edge of the way out from Fops’ Alley, was staring upward. Tall, lean-shouldered, he stood rocklike in that confusion. Against mad moonlight every detail of the nightmare was kindled or silhouetted: the long cape spotted with green mold, the low-crowned hat, the triumphant eyes above the brown shielding muffler.

  Bending over the box ledge, Darwent made a trumpet of his hands so that the coachman would be certain to hear him above the inferno of noise.

  “I am here,” he shouted, looking straight into the coachman’s eyes, “and here I stay. Come and get me!”

  In Darwent’s voice, for the first time since his meeting with Buckstone, there was again a murderous loving kindness.

  The coachman nodded. Already tall, he now seemed gigantic against the distortion of lights. Up went his right hand, high above the crowd, making cryptic signals.

  “Dick,” Caroline interposed quietly, “they’re beginning to move towards the south door to the stairs up to the boxes.”

  “Yes. I thought they would. And this is your time to go, my dear—don’t worry! Alvanley has arranged it all.”

  Caroline’s face was almost as white as her gown.

  “Dick, those … those prize fighters haven’t anything at all against Madame Vestris, have they? It’s all a demonstration, arranged by the coachman, to throw dust in people’s eyes?” Her voice rose. “Dick, what do they really want?”

  And again Caroline, being a woman and therefore sensible, felt maddened by the look of pleasure on her companion’s face.

  “To be quite frank with you, my dear: I’m afraid they want me.”

  “That coachman will be up here?”

  “Yes.”

  “And with—with his bruisers with him?”

  “Yes.”

  “You haven’t a chance! Any of those men … have you seen their arms? … could kill you with one hand!”

  “Quite probably, my dear.”

  “And what,” screamed Caroline, “have you got to defend yourself?” She saw his right hand dart across to his left side. “Only a little small-sword … it hasn’t even got edges, has it?”