The Demoniacs

by John Dickson Carr

“For the moment, no matter.”

  “Young sir, is this explanation?”

  “Doctor, I beg you to have patience. Peg was committed to Newgate for a month. This morning I asked Justice Fielding if he knew of a way I might secure her release before the month had passed. He said she might be released at any time her uncle should withdraw the complaint.”

  “Well, that is true, surely?”

  “Oh, yes. It is the best way and the shortest way, if it can be managed. But it is not the only way, as Justice Fielding must have known very well. If Peg and I become wife and. husband, from that moment the sole authority is mine. I can get her released out of Newgate by marrying her tomorrow.”

  Tobacco-smoke drifted up in the embrasure. Across the room somebody was reading aloud from one of the news-journals provided by every coffee-house and most taverns, and was cursing in admiration for Mr. Pitt. Dr. Abel, a slovenly man but not lacking in his own kind of dignity, took the pipe out of his mouth.

  “Is that what you propose? To wed the girl in prison?”

  “If need be, though I will avoid it if I can. It is not, let’s admit, a way to be preferred!—”

  “Preferred? It’s not to be thought of.”

  “And yet last night, Doctor, it was you who suggested it.”

  “I said this foolery of arrest could have been prevented if you had been wed long ago. The objections are to any marriage at all. I gave them at length, and imagined you agreed.”

  “Well, the only objection now is that a woman named Lavinia Cresswell may try in some fashion to strike back at Peg. She must be stopped for good. Do you recall I spoke much of Hamnet Tawnish and of this Mrs. Cresswell, who is his sister?”

  “You inveighed against them, yes.”

  “Now hear the true story,” Jeffrey said, “of Peg and my relations with her.”

  He began to tell it fully from the beginning. If he did not spare Peg, he did not spare his own thin-skinned pride and jealousy. He told of their quarrel and of Peg’s flight into France: which her maid, Kitty, had blurted out to her uncle after Peg’s departure. He told of his own pursuit at Sir Mortimer’s insistence, and of the latter’s instructions: that he must keep a worried man informed at all times; and, if he found Peg, he must send a smuggled letter to say when they would return so that they might be met at the Golden Cross Inn. He told of finding Peg, and where he had found her; he told of their flight from Versailles to Paris, and from Paris to London; and, finally, of their arrival at the Golden Cross.

  “I see,” observed Dr. Abel, putting down a pipe that had gone out. “Once already you had lain with the girl, then? Before ever she fled from home? And so the damage was done?”

  “Let’s say that Peg and I have been more than friends on more than one occasion. My greatest wish is to wed her. Or do you think me a low fellow for confessing as much?”

  “Yes, I think exactly that. But I also think you are not given to speaking scandal of ladies if you can avoid it. Why do you tell me this?”

  “Because, without it, the situation would appear to have no rhyme or reason. At the beginning I could scarce understand a word of it myself. And now I have, great need of your assistance.”

  Dr. Abel, under his stolidity as great a moralist as either of the Brothers Wesley, eyed Jeffrey up and down.

  “Indeed,” he said at length. “I assisted you last night, young sir, in a matter against my conscience. If you think I will aid you again, and this time in the Lord knows what, you suffer from a very rash optimism.”

  “Perhaps. If you refuse, I can’t blame you. I can only swear a great wrong may be done.”

  “Then it must be done. Are all the world’s woes to be piled upon my shoulders? And what makes you imagine I can help you?”

  “Last night, when you were speaking to Mr. Sterne at the Grapes, you mentioned a certain name. ‘I can’t claim to be Hunter of Jermyn Street,’ you said. Did you refer to Dr. William Hunter?”

  “I did.”

  “Have you any personal acquaintance with Dr. Hunter?”

  “Some slight acquaintance. William Hunter is a brilliant and eminent physician; justly so, from his talents; and I am—what I am. But I daresay he could recall my name.”

  “Would you be willing to pay a call on one of his patients, passing yourself off as Dr. Hunter’s colleague or assistant, and examine that patient to determine the extent of his illness?”

  “Now, really!” said Dr. Abel, and struck his fist on the table. “No, really, now. I have heard much in my time, but this goes beyond all bounds. What do you take me for? Have you yourself no conscience?”

  “I am a thief-taker, Doctor. In the first twelvemonth at that trade a man will retch at much he is compelled to do. Afterwards he will have as little conscience as I have.”

  “Yes. So much is plain from your treatment of Miss Ralston. And you are grown old before your time. But you have small knowledge of the human heart, Mr. Wynne, if you fancy that young lady behaved from any motives except affection for your cursed unworthy self.”

  “I know that now; I don’t gainsay it. What I propose is for Peg’s help. However, since quite rightly you stand on your dignity and your own purity of motive—”

  “Well, go on.” Dr. Abel, who had started to get up, sat down again. “This is madness; this is stark mad; I’ll meddle no more in the affair. But I will hear you out. You and Miss Ralston, you say, arrived at the Golden Cross. Well? What occurred there to be of such prodigious import?”

  Involuntarily he had raised his voice. The reader of the newspaper, engrossed in an account of Mr. Clive’s victory at the battle of Plassey in India, glared across at them. Jeffrey looked at the table.

  “At the Golden Cross, while Peg scurried away apparently to tidy herself, I went up to a set of chambers called the Antelope, after our innkeepers’ taste for putting names to their rooms. And I looked in at the window of the private parlour.”

  “Well?”

  “Up to then I had not considered Lavinia Cresswell as any great menace, though clearly Peg did. If Mrs. Cresswell in a genteel kind of way had become Mortimer Ralston’s kept woman, what then? If he appeared to dote on her, what of that cither? It is not uncommon among men in their middle or late fifties. But I could not conceive of him as a man who would bear much in the way of nonsense. And I had not even met her brother.

  “Now, looking through the window, I commenced to wonder. Sir Mortimer sat eating and drinking at a table. Madam Cresswell paced by the fire and spoke to him. Though I could not hear what was said, this roaring fellow all but cringed. It was as though she held a whip.”

  “A whip?”

  “The term was figurative; but her taste for humiliating people is literal. When I entered the parlour, the situation became still more astonishing. Sir Mortimer’s first words were a heart-cry about his niece’s safety. Mrs. Cresswell would have none of this. She was possessed with the inclination to have Peg thrashed with a strap by Hamnet Tawnish before being jailed on the charge you know of.”

  And he related the incident.

  “I imagined, as no doubt Peg herself imagined, Mrs. Cresswell must have read that angry, ill-advised letter I sent Sir Mortimer from Paris. Yet she did not refer to the Pare aux Cerfs, which to her mind would have been unanswerable. She could talk only with a kind of wild malice of ‘louts,’ ‘bumpkins,’ ‘sluts,’ ‘cozening eyes,’ and suchlike terms. At that time, as I afterwards learned, she had not read the letter or even heard of its existence.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “You shall hear in a moment; it is the vital part of the explanation. For the true riddle here is not with Lavinia Cresswell or Hamnet Tawnish: it is with Mortimer Ralston. He shuffled and wavered before her, this man who should have puffed her away like a dandelion-clock, and agreed to what she proposed for Peg. Then, no sooner was she gone from the room to fetch Peg, his demeanour altered like a conspirator’s.

  “He begged me to save her from this pair of rogues. He knew Peg a
nd I had been more than friends; he knew how I felt towards her. To ‘prove my mettle,’ he said, he had sent me on this long pursuit into France when at any time he could have had Peg found by one of his banking agents at Paris. He urged me to wed her now, since she was in danger, and said he had designed such a marriage from the start.”

  “Upon your honour, young man, is this true?”

  “Upon my honour, in so far as I have any, it is sober truth.”

  “He asked you to marry her. With what response?”

  “I said I would cut my throat sooner. You will be greatly in error, Doctor, if you take Mortimer Ralston for the beef-fed country squire he affects to be. He is as cunning as any pawnbroker, and as devious as—as Justice Fielding. Though plainly Mrs. Cresswell held some threat above him, he denied it. By this time I was become as suspicious of his truthfulness as ever I had been of Peg’s.”

  “What should his truthfulness matter if you cared for the girl?”

  “It matters, believe me,” Jeffrey said. “They will talk with much complacence of an excellent marriage between a poor man and an heiress, saying he now controls her fortune. So he does, in law. But have you never seen Mr. Hogarth’s set of pictures called Marriage à la Mode? The woman knows this bondage is only by legal whim. Unless both husband and wife are as insensitive as clods, she-will be all too ready to resent it. From the time of the first quarrel she will begin to despise him.”

  “Even in a love-match?”

  “Especially in a love-match. Look at the world about us and deny it.”

  “Did you tell all this to Sir Mortimer?”

  “No. I could not believe Peg was in danger. I could not believe Lavinia Cresswell would dare carry out her scheme, or that Sir Mortimer would not balk her if she tried.”

  “But again you were vastly wrong?”

  “Until this morning it seemed so, yes. Straightway, at the Golden Cross, brother and sister marched in with the news Peg had bolted. They bore themselves like the lords of earth; or at least like the rulers of Mortimer Ralston. And still he did not oppose them. I learned where Peg must have gone, and I followed.”

  “Why did she go to those premises above the Magic Pen?”

  “She believed Rebecca Bracegirdle, or Grace Delight, to have been an old servant in my family. Had she met the living woman, she might not have been undeceived.”

  Jeffrey stared at the window behind Dr. Abel’s head.

  “Mrs. Anne Bracegirdle and Mrs. Rebecca Bracegirdle, to use the courtesy ‘Mrs.’ we still employ for actresses, were sisters of very different sort. Rebecca was a dozen years the younger. They trained her early for the stage, but she had no skill in it. At sixteen, to the disgust of her elder sister, she became an orange girl. At seventeen, to Anne’s still greater disgust, she, married a cabinet-maker in a humble way of life. She found her true talent at nineteen when she caught my Lord Morrmain’s eye. Two or three years later she was taken up entirely by Mad Tom Wynne. Yes, if Peg had met the living woman—”

  “All this is not to our purpose,” said Dr. Abel, and again smote his fist on wood. “I don’t question Miss Ralston’s conduct. But what of her uncle’s? If he is an honest man, how should he lay information against her and deliver her into these people’s hands?”

  “He did not do it to deliver Peg into their hands. He did it to save her.”

  “To save, her? By having her committed to prison?”

  “Yes. And it did not cross my dolt’s wits until I talked with Justice Fielding.”

  Both of them got to their feet, facing each other.

  “Early this morning, Doctor, I had another meeting with Lavinia Cresswell. It was at Sir Mortimer’s home in St. James’s Square, where I went to wait on him without being permitted to go near him.”

  “Mrs. Cresswell also paid a call there?”

  “It was not necessary. The lady lodges there now; she has lodged there for some time. The meeting need not be described in full. But overnight her whole demeanour had altered completely. At first it was as though I had met a different woman.”

  “More tricks and wheedles?”

  “No; all sugar and spice. And it was no trick; she was sincere, in so far as she can be sincere in anything. I looked so closely for tricks, I sought so hard to entrap her in another matter, that I failed to see a meaning as plain as any breakfast of beefsteak with oyster-sauce. She had misjudged me, she intimated. The night before, she declared, she had not yet learned how I really felt towards Peg.”

  Momentarily, in this tavern room with the boarded floor and the red-latticed window, an image of Lavinia Cresswell obtruded as vividly as though she were present in flesh and fur-trimmed robe.

  “She made fleeting reference to a letter of mine. Since surely she must long ago have seen that idiot’s note from Paris, I imagined it must be something new and I wondered what. She also threw out such impassioned remarks about Peg—‘Do you ask this, considering what we have both just learned concerning her? Would you yourself wed her now?’—that it might mean some secret of Peg’s birth or blood-line.”

  “Yes,” Dr. Abel agreed. “We are forgetting that aspect of the matter.”

  “We are not forgetting it, Doctor. Not for one minute. When I hurried to Justice Fielding in Bow Street I learned the truth. There was only one letter. But Peg must go to prison, and I had provided the evidence to send her there.

  “Mrs. Cresswell’s altered behaviour could be explained now. After reading that letter, she could not believe Peg would be married to me or to any other man Sir Mortimer might approve. Even as fortune-hunters, we were all ruled out. The good Lavinia was free to use her malice as she liked.

  “And yet, if she had come by that letter only since we met last night at the inn, how had she come by it? Who showed it to her, and why? The answer is that Sir Mortimer did. It had been sent to him in care of his bankers; he held it in reserve. Deliberately he showed it to Mrs. Cresswell before he took it to Justice Fielding at Bow Street.”

  “He protected his niece in this fashion? By sending her to Bridewell?—Stop, though!” Dr. Abel added suddenly.

  “Not to Bridewell, remember. At Bridewell she would meet indignities he could not bear to have her suffer. Even Justice Fielding hesitated and betrayed the game there.”

  Dr. Abel sat down slowly, spreading out his hands.

  “Mortimer Ralston,” Jeffrey said in some admiration, “will gain his ends by any means he must use. He knew I loved Peg; he knew I am not over-concerned with scandal or reputation; he knew I would fetch her out of prison by marriage, beyond reach of two unpleasant conspirators, if he compelled me to do so.”

  “And Justice Fielding?”

  “Justice Fielding, as well aware as I of the character held by Lavinia Cresswell and Hamnet Tawnish, is seldom averse to playing the part of the Almighty if he believes it will serve justice. I venture to think it pleased him when Sir Mortimer came there with the plan. I could not have expected this Roman pontiff of a magistrate to breathe a word to me of it. But Sir Mortimer might have told me! If he is devious, need he have been so devious as this? Could he not have dropped a hint?”

  “If memory serves,” retorted the doctor, “he more than dropped a hint. He begged you to save the girl. And you said you would cut your throat first.”

  “Now damme, Doctor, if you’ too join in the chorus of all the others—”

  “Well, what else is true? Whose fault is her plight, if not yours?”

  “And if you too refuse your help—”

  “Have I said I refuse to help? But how can I help?”

  “The old devil is ill and in care of Dr. Hunter. So they say; so I believe. Certainly he is surrounded by servants like jailers. I can’t get near him. None but a physician could get near him.”

  “What’s his complaint?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, there are ways round that. And of putting all to rights with Billy Hunter. Even supposing I gain his bedside, though, what am I to do?”<
br />
  “Was this his plan, Doctor? If he desires me to take all responsibility, I am ready. My worldly circumstances, as regards marrying Peg, will shortly have changed. But let him say as much! Then I am armed against the enemy. Then at least we can spare Peg the humiliation of being wed in prison.”

  Jeffrey pointed.

  “Furthermore,” he added, “you can satisfy your mind in the matter that troubles you most. If Peg and I were truly blood-kin, do you think he would not know it? Do you fancy he would have pressed this marriage? But ask him. Say frankly you have seen the portrait of Grace Delight, and ask him.”

  “Come, that is better. That is much better.” Untidily, wig riding forward, Dr. Abel again rose. “You have not told me all—”

  “No, I have not.”

  “But there are two questions. How have your circumstances changed since last night? What threat can Mrs. Cresswell hold over him? What threat can so much have frightened him that he chose a course like this?”

  “My worldly circumstances have not yet changed; but they will. As for the threat, I think I can tell you. It is there for any with the wits to see. The secret, Doctor, is—”

  Brisk footsteps rapped across the bare boards of the floor. A black gown billowed round. An eager voice rose up.

  “It must be a wicked secret, then. Pray let’s hear it.— Come, now,” exclaimed the Rev. Laurence Sterne, breaking off in alarm, “but don’t start so. Come, now, what’s the trouble? Come, now, what a pair of demoniacs you two are!”

  IX

  A Fiddle-Tune at the Waxwork

  “‘DEMONIACS,’” JEFFREY REPEATED. “‘DEMONIACS.’”

  In later years he was well to remember that moment: dead pipes and cold coffee on the table in a window-embrasure, the light thickening outside like the late afternoon roar that had begun along Fleet and under Temple Bar, the clergyman with protruding eyes and hand at breast.

  “‘Demoniacs!’” Jeffrey repeated.

  “Why, but what’s this?” demanded Mr. Sterne. “I spoke in jest, no more. My near friend Hall Stevenson, of Skelton Castle in Yorkshire, presides over a society he is merrily pleased to call the Demoniacs. It does not, I protest, at all resemble the infamous Twelve Monks of Medmenham, who are so given to impiety and devious ways. And don’t be misled: I am not truly a Demoniac!”