The Bride of Newgate

by John Dickson Carr

  Nor was he left long alone with her. Mr. Hereford, the surgeon, swept his portly form through the doorway a minute later. Afterward Darwent could not remember that they exchanged four sentences during all the time that ached as it passed.

  Mr. Hereford uttered no word of reproach, nor did he waste time. Putting down his hat and case beside the bed, he began his examination of the patient.

  During that examination Darwent paced up and down, up and down. Dipping his hands in a silver bucket, he sluiced icy water down his face. His head felt dizzy when he straightened up. He was very tired. Briefly he wondered if he would have strength enough for the final, kill-or-be-killed fight tonight. But all such considerations were swept away when he hurried back to the bed.

  The surgeon, having removed Dolly’s gown by using a knife as Townsend had, put her under the silk coverlet and now drew it up to her chin with one bare arm outside. With one hand he touched the pulse; with the other he held open a large double-cased gold watch.

  Darwent’s eyes asked a question: “Is there any hope?”

  And the surgeon’s eyes replied: “None whatever.”

  Presently Mr. Hereford shut up his watch with a click. It was not all over. Both merely watched, the surgeon sitting on the edge of the bed and Darwent standing behind him.

  There she lay, scarce seeming to feel any pain now, as Darwent’s hand bent down to take hers. There, with appendix burst in the mysterious malady, she rested under the silken coverlet. There, twenty minutes later, she died.

  Darwent knew when she died, though he afterwards wished he had not. The surgeon stood up. Gently Mr. Hereford placed her arm under the coverlet, before drawing the coverlet up over her face.

  Picking up his case from the floor, putting his hat under his arm, he glanced at his companion with an unspoken question: “Shall I send someone upstairs?” He received a shake of the head in reply.

  “My carriage,” Mr. Hereford said aloud, with sudden strong noise, “arrived here at the same time as your lordship arrived. I remained downstairs to question certain persons.” He paused. “I regret …”

  “You need not.”

  Mr. Hereford bowed. Darwent extended his hand, and the surgeon clasped it; after which he went out and closed the door.

  For a little time Darwent stood staring at the floor. Then he moved over to the side of the ornate bed between the two windows. He was wondering whether to remove the coverlet from Dolly’s face, for a last look, when he heard a new noise.

  He heard it faintly from the square, drifting down the air well. Someone, who had been unable to sleep after that riot tonight, was abroad. It was only a common street organ, tinkling thinly, but he heard it.

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

  Which I gaze on so fondly today …

  Darwent swung round, and drove his clenched fist at one of the ornate bedposts. Fortunately, he missed. He needed a sound right hand for the last duel.

  Were to change by tomorrow, and flee from my arms,

  Like a fairy gift fading away …

  Since there was nobody there to see him, Darwent pressed his hands over his eyes. He took only one glance at the cold clay which was now Dolly.

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

  Let thy loveliness fade as it will …

  He tried to shut the imagined words of the melody out of his ears.

  Striding out into the center of the room, he knew that he could not evade them. Would Mr. Tom Moore, who wrote the song, ever know that the melody—sorry stuff though the words might be—could hurt like a deep wound and speak like his conscience? Doubtless, in his sentimental soul, Mr. Moore would have been pleased.

  And around the dear ruin each wish of my heart

  Would entwine itself verdantly still.

  There; for a moment the tune had stopped.

  For Darwent’s difficulty was not that his wits were muddled. They were too clear, or so he imagined. They saw too clearly, with terrifying outline, what was true and what was not true.

  Caroline was quite right. He had never been in love with Dolly. As Caroline’s grisly carefulness had pointed out, as he himself had agreed, he had transformed Dolly into a nymph for an Arcadia made of sooty-brown Covent Garden, and the Pantheon in Oxford Street, and the Chinese lanterns among trees at Vauxhall.

  That was the worst of it. That was the bitterest of it! For he should have been in love with Dolly.

  Instead he had elected to fall in love with blue-eyed Caroline, who looked at you past brown ringlets, who could become all Circe and soft words, all seductiveness and passion and a fleshly allure more than Dolly’s; yet who, at heart, was as cold as the spade guineas she worshiped. When the time came, she had dealt as ruthlessly with Dolly (why wouldn’t man learn?) as she had dealt with him at Newgate.

  Could he stamp out this love; quieten the heart, still the fleshly allure? Perhaps not. But, as she loved money, so she could be dealt with.

  Darwent walked back to the bedside. Without lifting the coverlet he put the side of his cheek to Dolly’s.

  “Good-by, my dear,” he said, rising a little and holding both her cheeks in his hands. “I rather hope,” he added truthfully, “I join you before morning.”

  Near the door, there was a discreet cough.

  “Begging pardon, your lordship,” said the heavy voice of Alfred, his eyes fixed steadily sideways, “I took the liberty …”

  “You were quite right,” answered Darwent. He walked out from the bedside, and hesitated. “I shall probably be leaving London for a long time—er—if not for a very long time. I shall probably,” this had just occurred to him, though it seemed an excellent notion, “buy a commission in the army. I understand you’ve been in the army. Would you care to come along as my servant?”

  Large Alfred’s powdered head was lowered. He studied the floor as though he glared at it.

  “I expect you don’t know it, my lord. But there’s several of us ’ud follow you ’t’other side o’ hell.”

  Long silence.

  “No, I did not know it. But I am grateful,” said Darwent, “notwithstanding.”

  “My lord,” blurted Alfred. “Man to man … her ladyship …she didn’t …”

  Glancing up, he saw that Darwent’s face was as inhuman as some monstrosity out of Dean Swift.

  “Go downstairs,” requested Darwent, as though he had not heard. “I shall follow directly. I expect a visitor soon. Meanwhile, downstairs, I have certain business matters to arrange.”

  “Very good, my lord.”

  Darwent waited only long enough again to sluice water down his face and this time his head. The water poured gratefully through hair into head, slopping down his clothes. He had long lost hat and cloak. His collar and cravat being long torn away, he had folded over collar and lapels of the dark coat partly to hide this.

  When he went downstairs, the hands of the grandfather clock on the landing pointed to ten minutes past one. On the last flight of steps into the lower hall, where Alfred and Thomas stood guard at the dining room, voices could be heard from that brightly lighted dining room.

  Townsend and Jemmy Fletcher, at least, seemed in good spirits.

  “Damme, Caroline,” neighed Jemmy’s high voice, “you don’t mean you were in the carriage that overturned?”

  “Yes. I—I fear I was,” she replied. Her voice seemed uncertain, even terrified. Now what need, Darwent asked himself, was there for play-acting here?

  “Finest jape you ever heard!” giggled Jemmy. “I know the truth.”

  “Ah, sir?” prompted the fascinated Townsend.

  “Fact, my good fellow,” Jemmy said with gracious condescension. “It was Prinny, d’ye see?”

  “His Royal Highness,” said Townsend sternly. “’Cause, sir, if you knows the Prince as a friend …”

  “Oh, I flatter myself I do,” said Jemmy. “Prinny was giving a supper at Carlton House. Pure oversight they didn’t have me. Anyway, the
y were hard at iced punch in the Gold Room, when somebody brings the news that the Princess Charlotte’s been in danger from a riot at the King’s Theatre.”

  “Ah, but there was a riot!”

  “Quiet, my good man. Prinny really is rather fond of that daughter of his; dashed if he ain’t. Up he surges like a ghost with frog jowls. First, as usual, he goes and is sick into the hothouse flowers. Then he bawls: won’t some friend, some gentleman, save his daughter? Some new ’un, some green nincompoop, dashes out; when the Life Guards have brought the pore ugly gel back to Carlton House an hour and a half before. Damme, ain’t it a quiz? I never …”

  He stopped short. Darwent had come into the dining room.

  Caroline, with a look of deep love which Darwent might have sworn was genuine if he had not known better, hesitated and turned away. Townsend looked respectful. Jemmy, having removed his cloak, stood under the chandelier all spick-and-span from shirt frill to diamond knee buckles.

  “Ah, Mr. Townsend!” said Darwent, with a broad smile.

  Tension relaxed a trifle.

  “M’lord,” replied Townsend, with a deep bow.

  “I fear,” Darwent continued agreeably, “I made a grievous error when I tried to take our graveyard coachman alone, and did not call for the help of brisk lads from Bow Street.”

  “You did, m’lord,” Townsend assured him emphatically: “and I’d say it to King George hisself. God bless ’im!”

  “Still, since I already know who the coachman is …”

  Jemmy Fletcher’s eyes were agog. He hurried forward to stand in front of Darwent.

  “You know who he is?” Jemmy demanded.

  “Yes.”

  “Then, damme, tell a fellow! Who is the coachman?”

  Darwent looked at him steadily.

  “You are, Jemmy!” he replied. His right hand suddenly shot out and twined itself in Jemmy’s cravat. “And now, my lad, you’ll pay for it.”

  Chapter XXI

  The Wrong Murderer

  “ME?” BLURTED JEMMY. THERE was a horrible illusion that his blue eyes had turned liquid, and were spreading. “Me? A poor butterfly? The coachman?”

  “Yes, Jemmy. Shall I prove it?”

  As Darwent spoke those five words, a vision of two faces moved as pictures through his mind.

  He saw the face of Frank Orford, cold, haughty, long of nose—Frank, who would bite a coin to make sure it was genuine, and throw any poor devil into Newgate or the Fleet over a matter of five pounds—Frank, sitting behind a tortoise-shell wood desk in a lost room, with a rapier skewering him to the chair.

  And Darwent saw the face of Jemmy, sitting elegantly last night on the green-and-white striped sofa upstairs, while he gently, gently prodded Darwent into a pistol duel with Buckstone. He saw the sheer malice which momentarily curled round Jemmy’s mouth: melting inward, a bad sign. Against a misty sky at dawn, too, he saw Jemmy’s look when Jemmy realized Buckstone might lose the duel.

  But Jemmy was already babbling.

  “The feller’s mad,” he cried out to Caroline. And he began to quote. “‘Oh, ye who so lately were blythesome and gay, At the Butterfly’s Banquet carousing away …’ Damme, you can’t suspect me?”

  Darwent stopped him.

  “I never suspected you, Jemmy, until last night. Then I tried a sum in addition. My wife, Mr. Townsend, and these two servants shall be your jury now.”

  With a powerful heave Jemmy wrenched Darwent’s hand away. Blocking the doorway were the large figures of Alfred and Thomas, and their faces were not pleasant. Jemmy backed away toward the fireplace across the room from them.

  “First,” said Darwent, “I was an obscure fencing master, tried, under the name of Dick Darwent. Nobody, except Frank Orford’s relatives, paid much attention to that trial.

  “How did you learn so much about me afterwards, Jemmy? Until the last moment before the hanging, very few persons knew my name or the reasons for the reprieve. Afterwards everything was hushed up, and even rumors distorted,

  “But you knew the truth, Jemmy. How did you know where I was, and how to visit me on the State side of Newgate? Many fashionable ladies, I understand, were distracted with wondering how you knew it.

  “Of course, as my wife has told me in the interval,”—Darwent, glancing at Caroline, was disturbed by the sincerity of her eyes—“you were present, apparently dead drunk, at a champagne breakfast to celebrate my taking off. At the end, perhaps, you may not have been so dead drunk as you pretended.

  “You could have heard a turnkey, named Blazes, blurt out that I was a nobleman named Darwent. This meant an automatic change to the State side, before trial at the bar of the Lords. Burke’s Peerage, with hardly any study, would have given you my title.

  “But this is not the real mystery. Jemmy. The real mystery lies further back. It begins on the night of May 5th: when you drove me unconscious in the blue coach, and when you killed your partner, Frank Orford.”

  Jemmy’s voice went shrilling up.

  “I never killed Frank!” he screamed. Horribly, the ring of truth seemed in it. “Word of a gentleman, egad! I never did!”

  Darwent paid no attention. Townsend seemed wickedly amused, and rubbed his hands together.

  “You drove me in the blue coach out to Rinsmere House in Bucks,” Darwent continued steadily. “I could never swear, either to Mr. Mulberry or the Padre, that two persons lifted me out of the coach; I thought it was two, but I admitted it might have been one. It was you alone, Jemmy. You’re as strong as a horse. Tillotson Lewis told me so flatly; and I should have seen it before.

  “But here’s the crux! Here’s the riddle! You believed you were carrying Tillotson Lewis. But I discovered Frank’s body, and you smashed me over the head again. One good look at me in a good light, and of course you saw I wasn’t Lewis.”

  Darwent allowed the pause to lengthen.

  “Jemmy, how could you possibly have known I was obscure Dick Darwent, of Covent Garden? How could you have conceived that ingenious plan of carrying both bodies back to Garter Lane, and pitching them out of the coach without a footmark, very near my fencing school? How could you even have known of the fencing school?”

  Jemmy, with sweat running down his white face, seized at this as though Darwent had been joking all the time.

  “I couldn’t have known!” he crowed, in giggling gaiety. “It’s a dem absurdity, gad! I couldn’t have known!”

  “Oh, yes, you could,” said Darwent. “Townsend!”

  “Eh, m’lord?”

  “In your letter to me, I think, you said the graveyard coachman had been carousing merrily for a full twelvemonth through Covent Garden and St. Giles’s? Playing thief tricks, but chiefly from meanspiritedness or malice? Specifically, that he ‘knew everybody there’?”

  “Yes, m’lord. That’s true as gospel.”

  “You see, Jemmy? Assuredly you must have known Dick Darwent, though he wrote D’Arvent above his school. God help him, he was “a very well-known character in Covent Garden. You, and only you in all your circle, would have known where to throw those bodies! You agree?”

  From Alfred and Thomas, moving like tame tigers at the doorway, came a low growl. Caroline was against the curtains of one window, her eyes closed.

  But Darwent, though he felt the pain of weariness in his shoulder blades, still spoke agreeably.

  “Oh, Jemmy, that’s the least of the evidence against you! While I was on the State side at Newgate, I deliberately lost enormous sums to you at the card table: several thousand, to be exact. I wanted you for my bear leader in society. Particularly, I wanted to meet Sir John Buckstone.”

  Darwent’s expression darkened.

  “I had little control over my words or inflections then,” he said. “You’re no fool, Jemmy. You guessed I had no wish to shake Buckstone’s hand; a child of ten could have seen I wanted to fight him.

  “This was your opportunity, Jemmy. For all your frantic questioning of me, I had told you nothing what
ever. Yet I had seen the room with the red-and-gold wallpaper, and the bowl of oranges. I had seen the dead man. If I knew much of you, or even connected you with Frank Orford, you were a dead man. Was it not much better that I should fall by Buckstone’s pistol?”

  “No offense, old boy!” Jemmy blurted—and Townsend suddenly laughed.

  “No offense taken, I assure you,” Darwent answered blandly.

  For Darwent clearly saw, in Jemmy’s down-pulled mouth and hurt eyes, that Jemmy thought himself no hypocrite. He was a good fellow. He didn’t want to do it. If he must conceive the most murderous schemes, and shrink as he carried them out, it was only because poor old Jemmy, the butterfly, must have what he wanted.

  “When you presented Buckstone to me at White’s …”

  “I didn’t want to do it, Dick! Did I?”

  “I wish,” said Darwent, “we had a written record. Each bleat you uttered, apparently to make peace, was to goad and sting us further. Afterwards I walked to the front door of White’s, and you followed me. Remember?”

  “Well, I … damme, yes! Why not?”

  “We were all alone at that door. Granted?”

  “Granted; but a man can walk to the door of his own club!”

  “There I told you,” continued Darwent, “that for the next two hours I should be at my house, or my wife’s house, at number thirty-eight St. James’s Square.”

  “You look a scarecrow! Why don’t you have your clothes cleaned! —Well?”

  Darwent’s smile broadened.

  “About three quarters of an hour later,” he said, “a pistol ball was fired at me from Till Lewis’s window through a window here. Jemmy. In all London you were the only person who knew where I was.”

  Dead silence.

  Little fat Townsend, deeply interested, began to pick his teeth with a small blade of his knife. It contrasted with his fashionably curled white hair.

  “How you’ll chance your luck!” Darwent exclaimed, studying Jemmy with real curiosity. “Against nonsensical odds, as you will at macao! There wasn’t a hundred-to-one chance you would see me at a rear window. But on you came, dressed in shiny smooth evening clothes (forgive the state of mine), with a loaded pistol under your cloak. Your ugly luck-god smiled and then spat at you. You missed.”