The Demoniacs

by John Dickson Carr

  “We were befooled, as others would be,” Jeffrey said, “by thinking of Rebecca Bracegirdle as much older than she actually was. And because women’s gowns and hair-styles in portraits were the same sixty years ago as they were forty years ago. And also because …”

  He looked up at his companion.

  “Rebecca Bracegirdle, a dozen years younger than her sister Anne, was born about 1688. She became Mad Tom Wynne’s kept woman in the full dazzle of her beauty at twenty-two or twenty-three, say in 1711 or 1712. When her beauty had begun badly to fade, twenty years later, she became violently enamoured of a much younger man.”

  “I don’t deny—”

  “He deserted her, this younger man, some four years after that. She was become miserly and unpleasant. Or did her mental strangeness only begin then? For I hardly need tell you that this woman, as a circumstance most uncommon but far from unheard-of, was not past childbearing in her late forties. And Peg was born towards the end of ’36.”

  “Hush, for God’s sake! Hush!”

  “It shall be said once, and not again. But it must be said.”

  “How did you learn this if you did not even suspect it? When did you learn it?”

  “I learned only yesterday afternoon. In a wooden treasure-chest she kept two fresh parchments writ in fresh ink. One, as Peg may or may not have told you, was a will. With the other, as Peg can’t have told you because she does not know, an old and mad woman poured out her story. Rebecca Bracegirdle, now Grace Delight, had little reason to feel kindliness towards you or even towards the child you had fathered and taken from her—”

  “What could the cursed woman have done for the child? What could she ever have done for Peg?”

  “What did you do for Peg?”

  “I took her into my own home, that’s what. I passed her off as the child of my younger brother and his wife. My brother’s wife was no heiress, as we gave out; they agreed right readily for ready money, and so will all people for the rhino. But the money I settled on Peg was mine. If you doubt how fond I am of this wench …”

  “Oh, you are fond of her. It was the threat of exposure, wasn’t it, that Mrs. Cresswell used to make you cringe?”

  “Ecod, it was! What man of good family would have wed the child of a notorious drab? What man, still less, would have wed a daughter who commenced to behave like the mother?”

  “Except, of course, a suitor like myself?”

  “Not even you, though you love Peg and confess it, unless I had tricked you into it. Or, rot me, I thought you would not!”

  “But you know differently now, else you would not have felt so free at stating she was your daughter?”

  “I know it now. Peg told me—”

  “Of the jewels in the false compartment of the chest?”

  “Ay, and it don’t please me. You would have stole for her and might have killed for her, like the fool you are! Peg may think that’s mighty wonderful; I don’t. Still! At least it shows you’ve got heart.”

  “Then I might have been trusted with the whole truth, might I not?”

  “Ay, but who could be sure of that when you swore you’d not have her in any case? I could no more have told you I was her father than I could have told Justice Fielding when I schemed with him; he’d have been more shocked at my saying she was a by-blow than if I said she was unmanageable. Lad, why d’ye press this? Let be! Or is there something else?”

  Jeffrey sprang to his feet.

  “Yes. There is something else. With all this talk of ‘heart,’ you could have saved much heart-burning if you had spoken four words.”

  Sir Mortimer knew what he meant

  And yet, when he saw the look on the big man’s face and the sagging of the mouth as his companion backed away, Jeffrey controlled his own wrath.

  “No!” he said. “As you advise me, let be! You are not well. There is no need to speak of it now. But why did you come here tonight from a sickbed you should never have left? Was it only to say, ‘I am her father’? In part, perhaps it was. Or—?”

  “Lad, need Peg ever know?”

  “Not if I can prevent it. She has been called whore too often, and too unjustly, to be forever reminded her mother was one.”

  “Well can’t it be kept dark?”

  “I don’t know. Mrs. Cresswell is still at liberty. And there is the matter of Rebecca Bracegirdle’s death. And our affairs, yours and mine and everyone else’s, rest and resolve and have their origin with that old woman on London Bridge.”

  “Becky Bracegirdle, Peg says, was frightened to death?”

  “Oh, no. If it were a matter of frightening to death, we might never prove murder under the law. She was killed by a human hand, with a human weapon as horribly simple to use as it is difficult to detect. And Lavinia Cresswell—”

  “Body o’ God!” said Sir Mortimer. “You’d not tell me it was Lavvy Cresswell who killed her?”

  He tried to continue, but could not or would not. Wind down the chimney-throat puffed at grey ash on the fire and set the candle-flame to flickering. A stir and a movement beyond shadows made Jeffrey look up. In the doorway of the taproom, bolt upright and stricken sober with a bottle in his hand, stood the Rev. Laurence Sterne.

  “Damme, now!” cried Sir Mortimer, suddenly wheeling round. “Damme, now!—”

  “Mr. Sterne,” Jeffrey interrupted, “your native wit will have told you that for three days you have walked at the fringes of a murder and of a gallows; and thus far, fortunately, you have observed neither. Don’t seek to discover more, I beg. Don’t walk further.”

  “I shall not,” Mr. Sterne replied. He was badly frightened; but he carried fright better than he carried liquor, and with some dignity. “Nor am I such a rattle as my nature sometimes makes me. That must be the gentleman with whose—with whose niece I was shut up for some minutes yesterday at Bow Street No, I shall not intrude. Pray excuse me.”

  “Stay a moment! There is a service you can render, if you will.”

  “Or if I am able? What service?”

  “This gentleman (Mr. Laurence Sterne, Sir Mortimer Ralston) has been very ill. He must go to his home at once. I can’t escort him, even so far as finding a chair or a coach. I am required elsewhere at once; this is vital; I can’t delay a minute longer. Will you give him your arm to the top of the hill, and see to the matter?”

  Sir Mortimer allowed no chance for a reply.

  “Go? Go, d’ye say? What foolery are you at? D’ye think I’d go before I had my questions answered and my mind set at rest?”

  “You shall go,” Jeffrey said, “or you may never have your questions answered and your mind set at rest.”

  “You’re daft! You’re moonstruck! I’ll not stir!”

  “Will you go, sir, while I still ask you as civilly as I can?”

  And then the atmosphere changed.

  “If I do go,” retorted Sir Mortimer, beginning in a mighty bluster and ending in a lesser one, “if I do go, I’ll go alone. I’ll not be escorted by a demnition parson as if I was a babe led by the earl I walk my own way and I always have.”

  “Very well.” Jeffrey picked up the cloak from the floor and draped it round the other man’s shoulders. “Good-night, sir. As a last warning, go nowhere except to your home.”

  Sir Mortimer, evidently fussed, went lumbering to the door and then turned round.

  “Ay, it’s well enough for you to talk,” he said. “But one day, hark’ee, when you’re past your best and fallen low, you’ll have more feeling than you have now.”

  “Good-night, sir.”

  Sir Mortimer banged the ferrule of his cane against the floor. They heard his footsteps, with surprising quickness for one of that bulk and weakness, go down the sanded passage. The outer door slammed.

  “And now, reverend sir,” Jeffrey said, “will you be good enough to follow him?”

  “Follow?”

  “Yes. Make sure he … he comes to no harm.”

  “Mr. Wynne, I had not meant to intrud
e here. I did so but to tell you that a second visitor, another visitor—”

  “Yes, yes; perhaps I understand. Will you make sure Sir Mortimer finds a chair or a coach?”

  “Mr. Wynne, I have ever been fascinated by the accounts of battles, sieges, fortifications, counterscarps, and what not. Yet I must confess myself a man of peace and not deeds. On the other hand …”

  “Mr. Sterne, no military strategy is required or indeed desirable. Time presses; for God’s sake make haste!”

  And then the clergyman’s long legs and inquisitive nose had gone.

  For one who had been urging so much haste, Jeffrey at first seemed to show a singular lack of it. He stood hesitating beside the table, glancing at the candle and the dead fire. He touched, inside the slip-pocket under the breast of his coat, the very thin steel object concealed there. Afterwards, as though making up his mind, he ran out into the passage, looked left and right, and then ran to the street-door.

  Opening this, he snatched at it and held it.

  Uneasy wind raked through alleys into Fish Street Hill, amid a dance of shop-signs all acreak. It had grown so dark, under black smoky-looking clouds swelling across the moon, that little was visible except by an occasional rift through cloud. When he looked up to the left, towards Gracechurch Street, he could see neither Sir Mortimer Ralston nor Mr. Laurence Sterne. When he looked down to the right, beyond the intersection of Upper Thames Street with Lower Thames Street, he could not even discern St. Magnus’s Church on the east side of the road. London Bridge’s towers would have been lost to shadows except for faint light from the guard-room.

  No City clock seemed to have been striking the hour, or watchman to shout it.

  And yet time was going on. Deering …

  Jeffrey closed the door and turned back to the passage.

  Its sanded floor stretched to a rear window giving on the stable yard. Coffee-room and tap-room at his left, passengers’ room and dining-room to the right. At the rear, where the little wick burned yellow-blue in a hanging bowl of fish-oil, that passage turned at right angles towards the kitchen.

  “Come out!” Jeffrey called. “If you’re here at all, come out They have gone, at least for a while. But I can’t search every room, and I can’t leave you here. Come out!”

  No reply. Jeffrey strode towards the back.

  “Did you hear me? I said …”

  And he stopped.

  Peg Ralston, in a grey-silk gown picked out with black and white, ran out from the turning of the passage and towards him. She faltered and stopped in shadow halfway along it, fists down rigidly at her sides. But the pallor of her face, as she ran under the little lamp-flame, had shone in contrast to red lips and wide fixed eyes.

  “There is no use to shout,” she said. “It needed no shouting before. And why should you shout now or speak to me at all? I heard.”

  XVII

  Needles and Pins, Needles and Pins

  HE COULD SEE HER only in silhouette: the small round hat tilted on piled hair, the elbow-length jacket above her gown, the hands clenched at her sides, against a faint flickering light from the end of the passage. But emotion flowed out as though he could see every look on her face.

  “Oh, I heard,” Peg said. She did not speak loudly. “You might have spared me this, don’t you think?”

  “How? I told you I would be at the Grapes at ten o’clock, and warned you not to come. If I guessed too late you might follow your uncle—”

  “It is most monstrous delicate,” cried Peg, “to hear him so gently called my uncle. I did not ‘follow’ him, except that I came after him. I am here because I would be with you. And you need not have dragged me out like a taken thief. You could at least have made believe you did not know I was here; you could have let me run away and hide my face; and I could have made believe I never knew.”

  “Made believe? Made believe again?”

  “Well, what else have you been doing?”

  “I thought to conceal the knowledge from you, yes. Now that you know, and have learned by eavesdropping what you had no cursed business to learn anyway, try to understand how little important this is. It matters not one Birmingham groat who your mother was or what she was.”

  “It does if you think so. And it matters how she looked.”

  “Looked?”

  “Yes, looked! We saw her dead in that room: old and gross and hideous, in a dirty smock and with the sores of snuff-taking on her nose and lip. And was there not a portrait?”

  “Portrait?”

  Peg ran forward a little.

  “You have not forgot what you told me last night? That there was a portrait, one I had not seen? That it showed Grace Delight in her youth and as she once looked, with diamonds round her neck?”

  “Yes; I believe I said so.”

  “But later, in the carriage to St. James’s Square when you were talking half to yourself, you said you ought not to have burned the painting that showed her resemblance to someone; but you stopped and would say no more. Was the resemblance to me? Don’t lie, Jeffrey: was the resemblance to me? Was it a picture of Grace Delight in her youth you kept from my eyes with such care in that bedchamber on Friday night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was the resemblance so very great?”

  “Yes. Yes, it was.”

  “Yes! And there is the answer for all. That bloated and hideous old woman is what I shall look like in my old age, or so you think and have always thought. You never look at me without thinking what the mother’s daughter may be like even a few years from now.”

  “Peg, stop! This is lunacy!”

  “You love me, Mr. Jeffrey Wynne? You even dare pretend to love me?”

  “For the last time, stop!”

  “Dear God, I could die of shame. You have made sport of me at all times; you have lain with me only when you could not avoid me; you—”

  She got no further. Jeffrey seized her by the throat with both hands.

  Before she could utter even half a cry, he had whirled her sideways and partly off her feet. He shifted his grip to her shoulders and drove her back hard against the wall. There, pinning her upright to face him, he closed his right hand again round her throat

  “That is better,” he said. “With your breath mercifully cut off, you will be in a better position to hear truth. And don’t struggle, madam. Pray don’t struggle, or I will knock that vain and empty head against the wall until you are able to think even less clearly than is your wont. Do you understand this?”

  And he looked into eyes grown glazed with terror.

  “Do you understand, Peg? If you do, nod once like the ghost I am tempted to make of you.”

  Now he could feel as well as hear her breathing. She shrank back with a neck-contortion that might have been a nod.

  “Then listen. A portrait of Anne Bracegirdle, Rebecca’s famous elder sister, hangs in the green-room at Covent Garden Theatre with the dates of her birth and death, 1676–1748, graved below it. You can’t have seen this; ladies are not permitted to enter green-rooms unless they become actresses and have ceased to be ladies. This particular portrait resembles Peg Ralston, but not so strongly as to amaze any except one who feels towards you as I do.

  “Again, Peg, pray don’t struggle!

  “I was never acquainted with my grandfather, Mad Tom Wynne; he cut his throat at the Hummums when I was a baby and four years before your birth, because this alluring Rebecca had deserted him for a much younger man. I came to learn her history pretty well. What I did not learn, because nobody could or would tell me, was the name of the younger man. What I did not learn was the woman’s age; and I imagined her to be only a year or two younger than her sister. There was rumour of a portrait, painted by Kneller, but nobody had seen it.”

  Jeffrey paused.

  Peg’s breathing had grown slower; the fright in her eyes became a look of fascination. He removed his hand from her throat.

  “On, Friday night, in that upper room, I stumbled on Rebecca Br
acegirdle’s portrait. It was also your portrait: to the eye, to the mouth, to the life. But to shock was now added utter confusion. The clothes were a court gown of King William’s time. This dead woman on the floor might have been your grandmother; she could not possibly have been your mother. Even if she were your grandmother, what in Satan’s name was the family connection? By whom? Through whom? In what manner, with overlapping generations? It was more than puzzling; it was nonsense. Do you see?”

  “Be silent and listen!”

  “And I do see,” breathed Peg. She did not move her back or shoulders from the wall, but her eyes searched his face. “Sure you were not deceived, I hope?”

  “It occurred to me that this woman might have been a dozen years younger than I had thought, and the gown of King William’s time might have been one from Queen Anne’s. In this event, it would be possible for the woman to have been your mother; and, as for the man concerned …”

  “Do you mean my true father? If that is what you mean, say so.”

  “Yes, that is what I mean. It was possible for your father to be Sir Mortimer Ralston. But I would not be persuaded of this, until yesterday I read the truth in the dead woman’s own statement Like a fool—”

  “—which you are—”

  “Very well!” Jeffrey’s hand hovered again above her throat “Until then I would not be persuaded. If Mrs. Cresswell held a threat of exposure above his head, I believed it must be of his concern in some Jacobite plot to oust the Hanoverian kings forever and restore Prince Charles Edward of the House of Stuart. There is much loose talk of Jacobitism, which is not serious and goes unheard. Yet Mortimer Ralston would have had the means and the substance and perhaps the will for a serious plot. Mrs. Cresswell, in my presence, had made sly reference to Jacobitism. It must be more than a hanging matter, I imagined, to make him so cringe before her.”

  “He is not truly involved in such a plot?” Peg cried out

  “No, he is not. I had underestimated his fondness for you. But then, which is the bitterness and the irony, I had underestimated my own.”

  “Your own?”