The Demoniacs

by John Dickson Carr

  “The Parc aux Cerfs.”

  “Yes, Your Worship. At this place with the foreign name, which is the private brothel of the French King. It further states—”

  “That will do. Is it signed by Mr. Wynne?”

  “Yes, Your Worship. It is an angry letter.”

  “An angry letter, and a pretty affair.” The shuttered face turned towards Jeffrey. “Will you appear before me to challenge this evidence?”

  “No.”

  “No, I had thought not. And don’t tell me the offence occurred outside my jurisdiction. Since the complaint was lodged by her guardian, such offence may take place in China and still be within cognizance of our law.”

  “Yes. The law has mighty moral views.”

  “You would further say, no doubt, that you no longer believe what you wrote? That you were only a man distracted by rage or jealousy when you wrote it? You would say this too?”

  “No, I don’t say it. What in God’s name would be the good if I did? But it is true none the less.”

  “Hear me,” said Justice Fielding, picking up the switch and pointing with it. “You appear to think such offence a trifling one. It is not so. This girl, being a lady of quality, should have set a better example too. Here’s the very irresponsibility which tempts humbler folk, servants or the like; it leads them through gaming-house or brothel (ay, and even theatre) to the robbery that will hang them. All pains must be taken, all care employed and every farthing spent in charity at the limit of a man’s purse, to ensure that these people shall not go wrong. If they go wrong then, we can do no more. Hanging is hanging; a rogue’s a rogue, and there’s an end on’t.”

  “Is it so?”

  “It is so. But I will spare the feelings of this girl’s uncle as far as I can. She shall go to prison for a month—”

  “Do you conceive, sir, the effect on a gently nurtured girl who must pass a month in Bridewell?”

  “Who spoke of Bridewell? It’s the custom, true, to lodge prostitutes and vagrants at St. Bride’s Hospital. But the place of confinement is at the discretion of the magistrate. She shall go to Newgate.”

  “Newgate?”

  “Well, which is the worse? At Bridewell she would wear fetters. She would be put to beat hemp—to mill doll, as they call it—in company not the most savoury. She could be tied to the post and flogged if she proved refractory.”

  Again John Fielding pointed with the switch.

  “At Newgate, also granted, the company is none too savoury either. But it is different for a prisoner with funds in his (or her) pocket. She may buy private lodging. She may dine at the governor’s own table with others in funds. She may have liberty within the confines of the prison. Now this girl, as I understand, is supplied with money she stole from her uncle. Even if she were not, Sir Mortimer …”

  He hesitated slightly, with not quite a pause. And, just as he had caught an inflection in Jeffrey’s voice, so Jeffrey caught some uncertainty in his.

  “Sir, what game is being played here? What game are you playing at?”

  Brogden, the clerk, jumped as though he had been stung. There was a fight going on in Bow Street, evidently, between a ballad-singer and a milk-girl; its screeching rose up.

  “Game, sirrah? Do you question my honour?”

  “No, never that. But there are times when you seem to have confused yourself with God.”

  “Well, well, you have already consigned me to the devil. I must make shift to find my spiritual home as best I can. The girl goes to Newgate. And how, let’s ask ourselves, will you behave at this decision?”

  Once more the switch was extended.

  “Can I predict it? You will strike a great attitude, vowing to quit my service of your own accord, and bid me to the devil as you did before. Or you will run from here like a birched schoolboy from the master’s study, railing at monstrous injustice because you can’t abide the rules of the school.”

  “Under favour, you don’t truly believe I will do either of those things. And you are in the right of it; I will do neither.”

  “Which only means,” the magistrate said instantly, “you plot other mischief. I have a kindness for you, it may be, but take care how you yourself trifle with the law.”

  “I will take good care, believe me. Is there any means of procuring Peg’s release in less than a month’s time?”

  “She may be released, as you should know, at any time her uncle shall withdraw the complaint against her.”

  “Then I shall take still better care. May I see Peg?”

  “Not in the justice-room; it would not be pretty for either of you, and I mean to have the court cleared. At Newgate you must please yourself.”

  “But in the meanwhile?”

  The exchanges went like sword-thrusts. The clerk, on a wire of apprehension, turned from one to the other.

  “Brogden, what is the hour?”

  “Your Worship, it lacks ten minutes to ten.”

  “If you insist,” Mr. Fielding said to Jeffrey, “you may have the ten minutes before I go below-stairs. But I strongly advise you against seeing her at this time.”

  “Why?”

  “For one thing, she is not alone.”

  “I don’t count guards.”

  “Nor do I. There is also a drunk clergyman.”

  “A drunk clergyman?”

  “Another prisoner. If he had in fact continued assaulting and beating the watch outside the widow’s house, as he began to do, it would have gone ill with him. As it is, since we must respect the Church and all order established, I am prepared to be lenient with him too. But no matter. That is not the main reason I advise you against seeing this girl until later.”

  “Then what is the reason?”

  “Come, don’t you understand? She holds you responsible for her plight; you will not be well received. That is ever the way of women. In this case, however, I think she has reason on her side.”

  A whooping, whistling din arose from Bow Street If the magistrate seemed impervious to all this, Jeffrey was not. He pressed his hands to his forehead, and then dropped them.

  “None the less, I will see her if I may.”

  “As you choose. Brogden, go with him.— One moment!”

  The expression of the shuttered face, pompous and yet terrifying, followed Jeffrey as he crossed the room after Brogden.

  “I would draw your attention,” John Fielding said, “to a matter in your behaviour which was remarked as suspicious. Why, last night, did you desire to remain for some time alone in rooms that contained only a dead body?”

  Jeffrey, who had halted and was staring at the floor, swung round.

  “Did Peg tell you so?”

  “No. And pray don’t answer each question by asking another.”

  “Sir, I think you expected no answer to that. You gave a warning, for which I thank you.”

  “Whatever I expected, you will be good enough to answer another question put some while ago. There is work for you today: it concerns some thefts in Ranelagh Pleasure Gardens at Chelsea. Will you undertake this errand?”

  “If I must.”

  “You have other errands of your own in mind, perhaps?”

  “Only one,” Jeffrey lied. Then, still without speaking out, he spoke truth. “I was a great fool this morning. I fled from that bedchamber when I could have wrung a confession from Lavinia Cresswell. Then I lost my head and bolted. But all this may have been good fortune. It made other facts observable, and led to the errand.”

  “What errand, Mr. Wynne? Where?”

  “You will have guessed it. Mrs. Salmon’s Waxwork. Fleet Street. Four o’clock this afternoon.”

  *Thieves, burglars, highwaymen.

  VIII

  The Crossroads of Perplexity

  THE CLOCK AT THE Church of St. Dunstan-in-the-West, a short way within Temple Bar and not far opposite Mrs. Salmon’s Waxwork, began to hammer out three as Jeffrey approached from the east in Fleet Street.

  He was still too far awa
y to see the two metal figures, warlike in appearance though mysteriously and wrongly called Adam and Eve, which emerged from the clock whenever the hour struck. He was almost too far away to hear it under other noises. But he had still an hour’s time, as well as another appointment close by, before he met what was awaiting him at Mrs. Salmon’s.

  And he might not have cared. He was in too black and bitter a mood.

  His day, in one sense, had been more than successful. His visit to Ranelagh, less famous for its gardens than for the great rotunda which bloomed at night with concerts and routs and the masquerades so popular with illicit lovers, yielded little or nothing. He had not imagined it would; this was a device of Justice Fielding to keep him out of the way. It had been different with his quick, secret visit to the Magic Pen on London Bridge. It had required luck as well as planning to go there and escape unnoticed; he could only hope nobody had observed him.

  Still more successful was his call at a certain banker-goldsmith’s in Leadenhall Street. Being famished, he had eaten a heavy dinner and been careful to use coins only from Justice Fielding’s gift of five shillings, two silver crown-pieces, and half a dozen pennies. He should have felt better. But he could not drive away the bitter memory of a scene with Peg Ralston at Justice Fielding’s house that morning.

  ‘Why, damn her—No, that’s unjust.’

  Jeffrey, a man of books somewhat heavy in their contents, also read the romances that had such swooning influence on current taste. He would read these with an eye of levity, reflecting on the difference between the heroines you met in books and the women you met in life.

  The heroines in books were inclined towards the vapours; and so, admittedly, were many women in life. But the heroines in books remained verbosely lofty of virtue, a quality not quite so common in life. The heroines in books met all misfortune or adversity with a patience and long-suffering which was not common at all.

  Well, but what if that were so?

  Could you wish any girl you loved to resemble the crafty prudes so admired by women who read secretly as they drank secretly? Moralists condemned both habits. Would you like Pamela or Clarissa if you met either of them? Would you cherish a woman who rolled up her eyes and moved on her knees at all times when she was not denouncing your evil intentions? You would not; you knew you would not.

  Perhaps the trouble lay elsewhere.

  Life was a solemn-faced buffoon. It allowed no consistency, no reasonableness, not even a sense of the ridiculous to any persons (women, or men either) when they were caught up in strong emotion.

  You should be enabled to understand this. You should be enabled to smile at it as you smiled at it in the books of Henry Fielding, who had drawn people as they really were. But it seemed impossible. Faced with accusation or inconsistency, you could only feel guilt inside your wrath and try to avoid being swept away into words—or even acts!—of the same unreasoning kind.

  “’Tis a lie,” Peg had said, stamping her foot. “You’ll not call me a whore; I am virtuous entirely; I have lost it to none but you. And it was you procured my arrest; you desired me to be taken. And if you don’t carry me from here this instant …”

  “Bravely spoken, damn my eyes!” had said the Rev. Laurence Sterne. “Bravely spoken, my sweet chick. He’ll encompass it, I warrant you. Or, if he can’t or won’t, he is no man at all.”

  “Hold your tongue, Mr. Sterne,” said Peg. “Hold your tongue, you odious person. He can encompass whatever he has a mind to, and against any odds. Did he not carry me from that other dreadful place? Face down across his shoulder, with my modesty showing, and a whole company of French dragoons in pursuit? He could carry me from here too. But he won’t. He wrote to my uncle, and got me taken.”

  “Peg, will you hear reason?”

  “Did you not write to my uncle? You said so. And now I have seen the letter.”

  “I weep for you,” said Mr. Sterne. “And I weep for myself too. For I am falsely charged. I would no more have assaulted the watch than I would have struck that widow across her chops, being a Christian and a gentleman. If the bishop should hear of this, I am undone. But be of good cheer; I shall escape the stone jug; there’s one who’ll testify before the beak to my good character.”

  Peg looked at him.

  “And now,” Jeffrey had intervened, “will you entrust me?”

  “I entrusted you before. See where such foolishness has led me. And now it will be Bridewell.”

  “Peg, I will have you released sooner than you think. And it will not be Bridewell; it will be Newgate.”

  “Did you scheme this with my uncle too? Newgate? Oh, God, the man speaks as though he were sending me to take the waters at Bath!”

  “Are you supplied with money?”

  “I am so; I have a purse in the pocket of my petticoat. Why? Would you rob me of that too?”

  “Peg, don’t be a fool.”

  “Jeffrey, I can’t bear it,” the girl whispered. “There are rats; and there are body-louses too, and no servant to pinch ’em dead. I tell you I can’t bear it.”

  “Does—does a day or two mean so much to you?”

  “Mr. Wynne,” interrupted Brogden, touching Jeffrey’s arm, “the time is short. And anyway I think you had best go.”

  “Yes, go,” said Peg. “Go. Go. Go!”

  But her eyes melted as he reached the door; he would have turned back again if Brogden had not seized his arm.

  They had been in the magistrate’s ‘study,’ a rear room with the sun striking through its window. In the window-ledge were volumes belonging to the magistrate’s half-brother, whose family John Fielding supported after Harry died in Portugal. Brogden had drawn Jeffrey out into the passage and closed the door.

  “Mr. Wynne,” said the clerk, “you must promise me you’ll not try to see her until this evening when she is more restored. If you don’t promise, I know you’ll try. If you do promise, I will go myself with the constable who escorts her to Newgate, and make sure she is not put upon by the keeper. Will you do this?”

  “Mr. Brogden—”

  “Will you do this?”

  “Mr. Brogden, I am grateful.”

  And so now, tramping westwards along Fleet Street, Jeffrey’s mood grew the worse from all sorts of fancies. He kept recalling that scene as over and over a man will press the tip of his tongue against a sore tooth, knowing each time it will hurt.

  He was on the north side, within the line of stone posts which bounded the footway, and on the same side as St. Dunstan’s Church. The street could not be called crowded at this hour, though there was the usual crashing of wheels on cobbles and bad language from all the touchy. Jeffrey, going as far as the turning of Chancery Lane, looked across at Mrs. Salmon’s premises on the south side of Fleet Street.

  It was a very old wooden house. Propped up between a newer brick-built house at either side, it rose to four storeys of black beams and white plaster with tipsily slanted floor-lines and many old-fashioned windows. A wooden fish, presumably a salmon though painted pink, was affixed as its sign to the wall above the door. Also, since Mrs. Salmon aspired to the genteel trade, there was a sign for those who could read. Painted in large black letters on plaster, between the first and the second floor above the other sign, ran a simple legend of THE WAXWORK.

  This was a famous establishment, which six years from now would be visited by a Scots lawyer named Boswell. But Jeffrey, like so many London-dwellers, had never been inside.

  A smoke-pall obscured the fading sun and Mrs. Salmon’s windows too. For a moment Jeffrey stood staring at the house, as though to make sure it was there and couldn’t get away. Then he dodged across the kennel to the south side of the street, and entered the Rainbow tavern not far away. In the front room, as he had hoped, he found Dr. George Abel waiting for him.

  “Doctor,” he began, “it was good of you to come here in response to my letter. In a good cause, Doctor, would you be willing to violate what I take to be the ethic of your profession? Would you
even be willing to risk breaking the law?”

  “Mr. Wynne,” said Dr. Abel, lowering his head, “already I have had occasion to remark on your impetuousness—”

  “My impetuousness has gone now; it will not return. I swear this.”

  Dr. Abel, sitting on a bench behind a long table in the window-embrasure with his back to the street, looked up but did not comment. Jeffrey raised his hand.

  “And I forget civility. Will you take a dish of coffee and a pipe of tobacco with me? Last night, at the Grapes, I observed you smoked tobacco.”

  “You observe much, young sir.”

  “I must do so to earn my bread. Will you take coffee and tobacco, then? And reserve judgment until I have explained what I am at? This concerns Peg Ralston.”

  “How is the young lady after last night? How has she fared?”

  “Badly, Doctor. They have sent her to Newgate.”

  “Go on. I will hear you out”

  The Rainbow, originally a coffee-house, still made much of this soot-black delicacy. They were served with coffee, with two long clay pipes, and with the tavern’s tobacco in a tin canister. A tapster lit their pipes from a glowing coal held in tongs. There were a dozen other guests at tables and benches; Jeffrey kept his voice lowered.

  “Last night, when I showed you the portrait of Rebecca Bracegirdle or Grace Delight as she looked in the prime of her beauty, you told me I would not and could not marry Peg because we might be blood-kin. I affected to scoff at this.”

  “But did not in truth scoff at it? I thought as much.”

  “Then you are wrong. I scoffed at it and still do. Let’s be honest: at the back of each man’s mind must ever lurk the words ‘what if?’ That is all, and it’s of scant consequence. It was only one of the reasons which prevented me from wedding Peg long ago if she would have had me.”

  “Your other reasons, sir, must be uncommonly strong ones.”

  “Yes. My one other reason was a strong one; but you note I say was. It no longer exists. Since last night my circumstances in life have altered completely.”

  “Since last night, you say? How have they altered?”