The Devil in Velvet

by John Dickson Carr

  “You could not change history,” the visitor said simply.

  “Do you seriously mean,” insisted Fenton, “that with all the resources of the twentieth century, with infinitely detailed knowledge of what is going to happen, I could not alter even political events with a crash?”

  “Oh, you might alter a small and trifling detail here and there,” said the other. “Especially in domestic matters. But, whatever you did, the ultimate result would be just the same. You are at perfect liberty,” he added politely, “to try it.”

  “Thank you. I promise I shall try it!”

  And then presently the devil had departed, with little less ceremony than he had come. Nicholas Fenton had a good space of time to sit down again, and calm his nerves with a soothing pipe of John Cotton, before Mary’s visit.

  When he had finished telling Mary every detail of that conversation, she did not speak for some time.

  “Then you did sell your soul,” she said at length. It was a statement rather than a question.

  “My dear Mary, I hope not.”

  “But you did!”

  Here Fenton felt rather ashamed of himself. He felt that his tactics had been a little unsporting, even against the Father of Evil.

  “The fact is,” he said hesitantly, “I had up my sleeve, so to speak … er … an ace of trumps which will ultimately defeat him. No, don’t ask what it is. Perhaps I have talked great nonsense already.”

  Abruptly Mary rose to her feet.

  “I must be going,” she said. “It’s getting late, Professor Fenton.”

  Fenton was conscience-stricken. He must not keep the child up after ten o’clock, or her parents would worry. Nevertheless, even as he escorted her to the front door, he felt piqued that she made no comment.

  “What did you think of it?” he asked. “A while ago, you seemed to approve.”

  “I did,” whispered Mary. “I do!”

  “Well, then?”

  “You see the devil,” she said, “as your mind tells you to see him. All your interests are concentrated like a burning glass on history and literature alone. You see him as a combination of the clever, worldly man and the cruel, naïve small boy: I mean, just like a person of the later seventeenth century.”

  Then she ran down the few short steps to the southern side of Pall Mall. Fenton was left holding the door open to a damp if not rainy night. A twinge of his old rheumatism stirred with pain. Closing and locking the door, he returned to the dim drawing room.

  There was not a soul in the house, not even a dog to keep him company. A certain elderly and energetic woman, Mrs. Wishwell, had promised to come in each morning to get his breakfast and tidy up. Each week she and her daughter would give the house what she had enthusiastically called “a real good clean.”

  Go to bed now? Fenton knew he could not sleep. But he had anticipated that beforehand. His doctor had given him a medium-sized bottle of chloral hydrate, which he had hidden—rather furtively—in the carved-oak sideboard of the drawing room.

  Professor Fenton was an abstemious man. Carefully he poured out, as a nightcap, the one whisky and soda he allowed himself a day. Going over to the sideboard, he found the bottle of colourless liquid and added an overly generous dose to the whisky. Afterwards he sat down, leaned back in a comfortable chair, and sipped the mixture.

  Its effects, he reflected after about ten minutes, must be coming on too quickly. Outlines began to blur. He could scarcely …

  And that was all he could recall, until something waked him in the middle of the night, or it might have been early in the morning, with the bed curtains drawn and half stifling him. His heart was beating thickly, and he remembered a warning from his doctor. To drive what he supposed to be the chloral from his brain, he forced himself to lie back and reconstruct the events of last night.

  “Extraordinary!” he muttered, speaking aloud after the fashion of lonely men. “What a curious dream! No; perhaps not curious. But I must have drunk that infernal stuff much earlier in the evening than I can remember now.”

  Automatically he ran his hand up over his head. His hand reached the back of the neck, stopped suddenly, groped again, and then stopped altogether.

  Even the remaining strands of hair brushed across his skull were now gone. His head was shaved like that of an old-fashioned­ convict.

  Not quite closely shaved, however. There was a faint bristly stubble, which felt as though there might have been hair all over the head.

  Sitting up straight in bed, Fenton noticed that for the first time in very many years he had not put on his pyjamas, and that he wore nothing at all.

  “Look here, now!” he said to himself, but not aloud. Rolling to his left—the bed sheets seemed oddly coarse and raw—he touched the bed curtains. Despite pitch-darkness, he guessed this to be the bed and the room in which he had chosen to sleep. The bed curtains were thicknesses of unbleached linen, which would have on their outer sides a design woven in heavy red thread. He had seen the bed some days earlier, when he had rented the house, and had sat on the edge of that bed with his feet firmly planted on the ground.

  Though still muddle-witted, he nodded gravely. He threw aside the bedclothes, flung back the curtains with a wooden rattle of rings, and swung himself round to sit on the edge of the bed. He must find his pince-nez on the bedside table; afterwards he must grope past the edge of the table and reach the electric switch beside the door.

  But Fenton’s next gesture would have been really strange—if he had noticed it at the time.

  Mechanically he reached along the side of the bed, and found what the undersurface of his brain knew would be there: a loose ankle-length garment of padded silk, with a small trim of fur round the collar and sleeves.

  The bedgown, yes. Mechanically he put it round him, pushing his arms into the sleeves, and made a discovery which did rouse him. His whole figure, long and lank and lean, had now altered. He was thick of chest, with a flat stomach and heavily muscled arms. But, when he swung his feet over the side of the bed, his legs did not seem long enough to reach the floor.

  From the throat of Nicholas Fenton, professor of history at the University of Cambridge, rose a purely animal snarl which seemed of heavier pitch than his usual light-baritone voice. He did not even know whether he had spoken, or another.

  Sheer panic caught him. He was afraid of the darkness, afraid of himself, afraid of primeval forces unknown; and he sat there in a sweat of hot and cold, with his legs grotesquely dangling as though over a gulf.

  “Jump!” a great voice seemed to be crying. “Wencher, rakehelly, gamester, jump!”

  Fenton jumped, jolting his heels because it was not a long distance to the floor.

  “Where am I?” he shouted back. And then: “Who am I?”

  Nobody answered him.

  Every curtain must have been sealed against the windows, so dense was the dark. Fenton staggered a little. His bare right foot touched what felt like an old slipper of very hard leather; a pair of slippers, he discovered by exploration, and he put them on.

  The whole room was pervaded by a faintly unpleasant smell, intensified by stuffiness. What was it he had wanted? Ah, yes. His pince-nez and the light switch. But suppose …

  Clutching hard to the bed curtain as a guide, he edged his way towards the head. Yes, there was a table of some sort against the wall at the head of the bed. He stretched out his hand, and touched human hair.

  This time he felt no impulse to cry out; no flinch to a crawling skin. He knew what he had touched, of course. It was the great peruke, or periwig, whose heavy curls fell down over the shoulders; it stood on its high wig block, ready for the morning.

  Fenton nodded. If that were so, there must be something else. His fingers slid towards the right, encountering a large kerchief of silk folded several times. It was probably of bright vivid colours, like his bed gown.
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  On impulse he whipped it up, shook it out, and (with surprising dexterity, for such shaky hands) bound it round his head like a flattened turban. Even his reading, his intense study of small detail, told him that every man of quality concealed his shaven head in this fashion when he lounged at home en déshabille.

  Though the breath whistled through his lungs—strong lungs, those of a young man, unbrushed by even the faintest whiff of poison gas from the second battle of Ypres—he imagined himself to be quite calm. Yet he made another test.

  Though he groped carefully over the table, he could not find his pince-nez. Edging his way round the table, he attained the rather ill-fitting door. There was no light switch beside it. On the door he encountered not even a porcelain knob; only a wooden latch whose inner side curved outwards and downwards like a claw.

  “Quite!” he said aloud. The utter banality of the word made him want to laugh.

  On the table there had been a candle in its holder. But there was no match … that is to say, no tinderbox. He could not, literally and physically could not, remain here in darkness until morning. Nevertheless, if there had happened what he suspected yet still doubted, there must be someone else in the house.

  Someone else. The imagined faces which swam before him …

  Professor Fenton lifted the latch and threw open the door.

  Again darkness. But he had chosen the large bedroom at the back of the house. He must be facing straight down the upstairs passage with the unexpectedly small bedrooms on either side. Some distance away, on the left, a thin line of yellow light shone under the sill of a door.

  Fenton walked straight ahead, albeit on shaky legs. The same faintly unpleasant smell pervaded this passage as well as his room. Gaining the door of the room with the light, he did not trouble to knock. He lifted the latch and opened the door halfway.

  It was as though veils were dropping away from his now-sharp eyesight, as though he had stumbled through a long tunnel in space to find this door.

  Against the wall opposite the door stood some kind of table or perhaps dressing table. A single candle, in a painted china holder, cast (to him) only a dull little glimmer with blurred edges. It brushed the gold-leaf frame of an oblong mirror, propped against the wall with its narrow side on the dressing table.

  Someone sat in an oak chair before the mirror, back towards him. But he could make out little, since the narrow back of the chair—of some yellow woven material pierced by lines of tiny round holes—cut off his view even from the mirror.

  He knew only that it was a woman, since her long black hair was let down far over her shoulders, and pressed against the back of the chair. Stop! It was as though she had been expecting him. She did not start or even move at the wooden clunk of the latch, or the creak of the opening door.

  For an instant, a finger-snap’s time, he dreaded to see her face. If he saw her face, he felt, it would close irrevocably the last barrier between his own life and a century two hundred and fifty years gone by.

  But the woman gave him no time, even if he had wished it. She rose to her feet. Pushing the chair back and well to one side, she turned round fully to face him. And for seconds he could only look at her in stupefaction.

  “Mary!” he said.

  CHAPTER II

  SCANDALOUS BEHAVIOUR OF TWO LADIES

  “NICK,” THE WOMAN ANSWERED, with a strange intonation on that one word.

  The sound of his own voice unnerved him. He could only stare. Mary Grenville had never in her life called him Nick. And yet, despite that inflection, it was her voice. Furthermore, despite differences from the subtle to the … well, to the shocking, he felt rather than knew it was Mary.

  Since he had always towered over her, it was more than disturbing to find her only half a head shorter than himself. No, stop! His own height must now be about five feet six inches. And she was not a child. No, not in any sense! It startled Professor Fenton that he should ever notice the obvious reasons why she was not a child.

  She stood there in an elaborate bedgown of yellow silk, somewhat soiled, but trimmed with white fur round the very loose sleeves and round a collar whose folds met about halfway to her waist. She had drawn it about her carelessly but tightly. By that dim candlelight her very white skin seemed to have that smoky, shadowy quality he had first remarked last night.

  Mary held her head a little back and up. What unsettled him was her smile, especially when it broadened; that, and the expression in her grey eyes.

  Then he thought he understood everything.

  “Mary!” he said, with ordinary modern pronunciation. “You’ve been carried back too! I didn’t dream that conversation last night; you were not being polite when you sympathized! You’ve been carried back too!”

  But it was the wrong approach.

  All the woman’s coquetry and insinuation fell away. She shrank back from him, with fear in her eyes.

  “Nick!” she cried out, as though begging him not to joke. “What black-more’s tongue d’ye speak? Pay your service to another, if you be struck stark mad!”

  The last sentence sounded exactly like, “Pye your sarvis to anather, if ye be strook’t staark maad!” And suddenly Fenton remembered certain gramophone records he had made himself. With so many stage plays and letters of the age written or dictated phonetically, it was possible to reconstruct their speech as well as any man could. Often he had imitated it for the amusement of the high table at Paracelsus.

  Drawing himself up, he made her a deeper and more courteous bow than Sir Nicholas Fenton would have made.

  “If it be not too troublesome to you,” he intoned in her own speech, but gently, “may I beg to explain myself, madam?”

  She understood well enough. But still it was the wrong approach. Breathing in hard gasps, the woman almost spat at him.

  “Mad!” she said. “This frenzy for wine and the doxies has spilled the wits out of your head, as it hath done for my Lord Rochester!”

  “I must be a devil of a fellow,” thought Professor Fenton, much disquieted. But he guessed the proper tactics at last.

  “Hold your clack!” he suddenly roared at her. “God’s body! Must you skreek out like a carted dell if a man but use you with court civility?”

  The woman’s right hand, raised as though to shield herself, dropped to her side. The tiny candle flame wavered, amid drifts and weights of shadow. The woman shook back her long hair, fleecy and yet cloudy black. She straightened up. Her whole expression became languishing, pleading, humble; and ever-ready tears started to her eyes.

  “Nay, now, forgive me,” she pleaded in a soft voice, though he knew her white flesh held a tiger cat. “I was so distracted, that you did put me to lie in a chamber opposite your wife’s … sweetest, I scarce remember what I said!”

  “D’ye heed me?” shouted Fenton, still acting his part and feeling rather pleased with himself. “Am I drunk? Durst you say I am? Or mad?”

  “Sweetest, dearest; I owned I was wrong!”

  “And I own, for my part, I have led no very admirable life. Well! We can mend that. But let’s pretend, for the comedy’s sake,” and he laughed loudly, “that we begin all anew. That we have never met, and do not know each other. —Who are you?”

  Her long eyelashes lifted in brief wonder; then they drooped. Her expression became sweet and sly-lipped.

  “If you don’t know me, sir,” she answered—with a slight emphasis on both you and know, while she smiled—“then in all faith no man on earth knows me!”

  “A plague on’t, now! What is your name?”

  “I am Magdalen York, whom it is your pleasure to call Meg. And who is ‘Mary’?”

  Magdalen York.

  In Giles Collins’s manuscript there had been considerable mention of “Madam Magdalen York.” The “Madam” did not necessarily mean she was married, but only a lady of quality; as the
polite “Mrs.” of the playhouse dubbed the actress respectable. But this woman only slightly resembled the contemporary likeness of her, probably the fault of the engraver. She was …

  “Sir Nick,” softly wheedled the woman called Meg. She hovered near him, clearly wondering whether to insinuate her arms round his neck or stand clear. Then, as she glided away from the dressing table, for the first time he saw his own face in the mirror.

  Striding forward, he picked up the painted china candleholder and held the light close.

  “God’s body!” he swore.

  This time the engraver had done well. Out of the darkling glass, under a close-wound headdress of dull brown silk streaked with white, peered a swarthy but not unhandsome face, with a long nose and a very thin black line of moustache over a good-humoured mouth.

  “Sir Nick. Fenton, born 25th Dec’r, 1649; dy’d—” Why, he could not be more than twenty-six years old! Only a year older than Mar … than this woman Meg. New, startling thoughts crept into the mind of Professor Fenton in the shape of Sir Nick. Under his bedgown, which was brown in colour and sewn with scarlet poppies outlined by silver thread, he flexed his arm muscles and sensed his flat belly.

  “Come, now,” coaxed Meg from behind his shoulder. “You’d not feign madness again?”

  “Why, no. I but wondered,” and he passed a hand over his jaw, “if I were badly shaved.”

  “As though that mattered a Birmingham groat to me!” Her tone changed. “Sweetest. You’d not truly … mend your way of life?”

  “Did you not wish it so?”

  He turned round, setting down the candle on the table, so that he faced her and the dim light fell fully on Meg York.

  “As touches other women, surely!” She was serious now; her face a little flushed, but her voice soft. “I have loved you—oh, most monstrously!—these two years past. You’d not leave me?”

  “Could I leave you?”

  “We-ell! For discourse’ sake …” murmured Meg.

  Detached, as though considering the floor without curiosity, she carelessly allowed the front of her yellow bedgown to fall open. Under it she wore not even the seventeenth-century ladies’ nightgown or the short smock they sometimes preferred.