The Devil in Velvet

by John Dickson Carr

  “Damme,” said George after deep pondering, “but you can’t have pot-walloped so much claret before you went from home. I saw you.”

  Fenton, motioning this aside with a fierce gesture, pointed his finger.

  “To the north,” he said. “Those are the Royal Mews, where the soldiers are quartered?”

  “Ay. As though you’d never heard the tattoo beat from there!”

  “To the northeast: the Church of St. Martin’s-in-the-field?”

  “What else? But …”

  “And southwards,” said Fenton, turning completely round to face a street there, “is King Street. On the left—”

  He swept his hand towards an old, dingy straggle of red-brick buildings, half-obscured by blowing smoke and grey sky and stretching half a mile between King Street and the riverside.

  “Whitehall Palace,” said Fenton. He moved his hand to the other side. “On the right, those iron railings and the hedges hide the King’s private garden, with all St. James’s Park beyond it.”

  “Nick, Nick, the back of your own house looks on the Park! ’Tis the Park. Where else is one?”

  Fenton was still staring straight down King Street, at a square tower of red and blue and yellow bricks, with a weathercock spinning at each corner. Though it stood exactly in the middle of the street, it had a large arch for a way-through to Westminster.

  “That is the Holbein Gate,” said Fenton, slowly turning. “And to the southwest: that must be a way into Spring Gardens.”

  Most of George’s worry lifted, and he began to chuckle. If Nick professed not to be acquainted with Spring Gardens, the scene of Mr. Wycherley’s Love in a Wood (and a brisk fellow always got love there, scratch him!), then Nick was not in any fit of moody-madness. Nick was but excellent well drunk. George’s chuckle deepened to a roar.

  Whereupon, unexpectedly …

  “Don’t mock at me, I beg,” said Fenton with a face so pale that George stopped short, mouth open. Fenton moistened his lips. Glancing eastwards towards Northumberland House, the New Exchange, and the mouth of the Strand, he turned back again. He stooped down beside the statue, and picked up a handful of dust and earth. He let it sift away through his fingers.

  “I am here,” Fenton said.

  But George had forgotten all this, as they struggled through the throng on the north side of the Strand. Happily he was about to describe his dream of all bawdyhouses when Fenton, still staring round, nearly slipped under the wheels of a funeral cart with mourners, and had to be hauled back.

  “Now hark’ee, Nick,” advised George, who was not angry but perturbed, “I care not a groat what any man may do in his cups. That’s but in the way of pleasantness. But …”

  “I ask your pardon,” said Fenton, trying to get the soot out of his eyes. “My head is cleared of fumes now.”

  “Good! Then ye’ll know better than to gape and gawk and stare, else—”

  “I tumble into the kennel?”

  “Not so much that. But here’s a rough crew, no less: these tatterdemalions, Abram-coves, street rogues, even the porters. They’ll …”

  Across George’s voice, drowning it, hooted the noise of a pig-killer’s horn. One of the many youthful shoeblacks, lurking in alleys with their mixture of soot and rancid oil, saw the state of George’s shoes and darted out at him. The heel of George’s hand sent him flying.

  “They’ll take ye for a country bumpkin newcome to town. Or for a mounseer (which is what they call a Frenchman); and that’s worse. They’ll put a trick on ye; they’ll pelt ye with ram’s horns or kennel stuff; they’ll come at ye like hornets. Then your face turns black; you lug out your sword; and the devil’s to pay.”

  “I shall take care, George.”

  “Admittedly,” Fenton was thinking, “these great goblin street signs were a matter of simple necessity. Since so many persons can’t read, especially the porters, names or numbers would be no good. But what an artistic pride the owners must take in them! The tavern with its red lattice, the coffeehouse with its lantern hanging outside …”

  Whap went a sword scabbard against the back of his knee. Half the throng seemed to be wearing swords; as they hurried, they kept on tangling or stinging you unless you carried yourself with care.

  Fenton, still trying to keep the soot from his eyes and the kennel reek from his nostrils, woke up and really looked. He clutched at his hat, but it was safe. Both his hat and George’s were skewered to their periwigs with long golden pins, or they would have flown away long ago.

  Another gleam of sunshine pierced down through the haze. Fenton saw a fop being carried in a sedan chair, amid sneers of the tatterdemalions. He saw sober citizens in camlet cloaks, worsted stockings, and buckled shoes.

  There would be, he knew, no rich merchants with their gold chains and grave fur gowns. These belonged in the farthest City, where brick houses had been built after the Fire to replace the old wooden ones. Involuntarily he looked upwards, then across the street at the old houses with their gables of black timbers and once-white plaster, far overhanging the path underneath.

  A window lattice was pushed open there, then the other side of the lattice. A somewhat comely slattern of sixteen, yawning and with hair dishevelled because she was newly risen, had not troubled to don much attire. She surveyed the street without interest, scratching herself with one hand while she held a tankard of small beer in the other.

  “That’s it!” burst out George, who had been pondering deeply and now followed the direction of Fenton’s glance. “Now I call it to mind!”

  “What do you call to mind?”

  “Why, man, the Temple of Venus! I desired to tell you …”

  “Speaking of Venus, George,” interposed Fenton, with all his perplexities on him, “what if I told you I have decided to have done with all women save Lydia?”

  “Hey?”

  “What if I told you that? What would you say?”

  George’s brown eyes rolled sideways. He gave a huff of his stoutening chest. When he lifted a hand to his neckband, the glitter of his rings was reflected in the eyes of street rogues against the wall.

  “Why, then,” said George, “I should inquire politely after the health of Meg York.”

  “True; Meg. She will leave my house tomorrow.”

  There was a strange expression on George’s face.

  “Meg—will go? Whence?”

  “I cannot say. Oh! Except that she is to be kept by one Captain Duroc, of whom I know nothing.”

  “Is she so?” muttered George, and his left hand dropped to his sword hilt.

  “The question I … Hold! We are near to our destination.”

  Fenton stopped dead in the throng, and nearly had his head knocked off by a barrel of lard on the shoulder of a hurrying porter. The noise was still so great that he was compelled to shout, as he and George had been shouting at all times.

  “We must be near, else we have already passed it. Ahead there,” and Fenton pointed to a long line of grey gloomy pillars along the south, “is old Somerset House, with St. Clement’s facing us beyond.”

  “Old Somerset House?” retorted George, giving him once more a perplexed look. “D’ye know of a New Somerset House?”

  “Not yet. That’s to say,” Fenton deftly corrected himself in his yell, “the place is old and dank, you’ll confess. Now do you study the left-hand side of the road, and I’ll study the right. Dead Man’s Lane is beside the Savage’s Head, which I take to be a tavern.”

  “Tavern!” said George, and spat scornfully. “The place is a shop; they vend tobacco and make snuff. I have led you to it. Look up at the sign ahead.”

  The sign, not fifteen feet in front of them, swung and creaked and obediently whirled over to face them. On it was depicted a long, brown, horrible face, presumably the artist’s notion of a red Indian, showing two sets of ferociou
s-looking teeth with a long clay pipe gripped between them.

  Dead Man’s Lane, like so many lanes and courts and alleys winding back from the Strand, had for its entrance an arch about ten feet high and eight or nine feet across. Its tunnel was of smooth stone, stretching back some twenty feet to support the small house above.

  Towards the end, where the tunnel widened into a broader lane, there stood against the wall twelve red-leather fire buckets, in two lines of six each pressed together; grimed, weather-stained, and full of foul water.

  Both Fenton and George stumbled inside the tunnel, coughing to get the grit out of their lungs and brushing smuts from their waistcoats. The wind stood still; there was not a breath of it. Well inside this tunnel, the howl and babel sank to a low growl. You could speak in an ordinary tone. By mutual consent the two friends stopped for a breather.

  Again George seemed to be pondering.

  “Hey, those fire buckets!” he said carelessly, but with a crafty glance at his companion. “Now how did they come there, d’ye think?”

  “Come, George! Your wits are surely fuddled.”

  “My wits, ecod!”

  “Why,” Fenton told him in a casual way, “since the Fire there have been I-don’t-know-how-many royal edicts that each merchant, however small of business, must keep a fire bucket on the premises. Don’t you remember, George?”

  “I … I …”

  “But truly, good fellow, these fire buckets are a devil in narrow huddlings. They will drench the goods; often, to his great wrath, they will drench the buyer too. Set them quietly away! What constable or even magistrate will trouble his head about them, save at a playhouse?”

  “Ecod, you are Nick Fenton!”

  The other pretended amazement. “And did you doubt that?”

  “Nay, not doubt; but …”

  George’s voice trailed. He waved his hands, ruffles flying. When he did not understand a thing, it seemed monstrous and un-English; he turned swiftly from it.

  “Now, Nick. As touches the matter of Meg York—”

  “I can tell you only she goes tomorrow. And, which I forgot a moment ago, she says this Captain Duroc hath lodgings for her in Chancery Lane. If you desire to keep her …”

  “Keep her?” roared George, with a huff of anger and deep injury. “Curse you, Nick, I desire to wed her!”

  “Wed—Meg?”

  “And wherefore not?” Again George puffed out his chest, in the purple coat and white-satin waistcoat with gold buttons. “Meg is a lady of quality, kin to your own wife. She needs no dowry; I have the rhino in plenty.” Here George grew embarrassed. “Certes, I know of her relations with you …”

  “Luckily or unluckily,” thought Fenton, “I don’t know.”

  “But give me the name of one high-born lady,” challenged George, “saving only Queen Catherine or Lady Temple or—or certes Lydia, who hath not been put on her back a dozen times by some brisk fellow! ’Tis but female frailty, betrayed to unlawful embraces. ’Tis the custom. And I am a man of my time.”

  Here George shifted his feet uneasily, looking at the dirt floor of the tunnel.

  “Nick,” he blurted out, “d’ye think she’ll have me?”

  “Oh, I make little doubt of it. If I hesitate, it is because I wonder whether you are well advised in this.” Fenton could not be sure of his own feelings. “God’s body!” he said. “Twice in the past twenty-four hours I have been at point of killing the damned woman: once with a chair, once with a sword.”

  George was vastly amused.

  “Bear up, good friend!” he chuckled. “’Tis but the sweet heart’s diverting humour.”

  “No doubt. Yet you may find it less diverting, George, should she drive a dagger through your ribs or … or prepare you hot mulled wine with arsenic.”

  Now remembrance lit up George’s bulging eyes.

  “Arsenic!” he said. His mind seemed to shy back. “Ecod, that’s why we’re here! I had forgot.” George cast a quick look at his right hand to see whether it had swelled up and turned black, which it had not.

  Whereupon he turned and strode forwards into Dead Man’s Lane.

  The lane itself was no more than twelve feet wide, having on its right a high dead wall of darkened bricks which at some places bulged with long cracks. It ended, thirty feet away, in a half-turn to another lane barred by a locked gate, iron-railed and -spiked, which made it all but a dead wall.

  On the left ran the long open front of a hay-and-grain dealer’s. Though the whole lane had a pleasant stable-like atmosphere, nobody showed face at the hay dealer’s. They saw only an empty cart and a long stone watering trough. There were a number of shops in the row, but the newcomers saw only one: a blue door, with a sign of the Blue Mortar.

  George swung round.

  “Where in all this is the reason?” he asked, a reddish bar of anger across his forehead under the flaxen peruke. “There’s none poisoned at your house, Nick, else he would have been took up by a magistrate! You durst not say (I’ll defy you!) that Meg—”

  His companion’s grave countenance stopped him.

  “I cannot tell,” Fenton said wretchedly. “For a long time I had thought so: I speak plain. Yet today I strongly doubted, and doubted again. Who am I, or any man, to say, ‘Such a person would do this,’ or ‘Such a person would do that’? George, I don’t know.”

  “I’ll discover—”

  “No! Leave all speech to me.”

  Fenton pushed open the blue door, into small and dingy premises which had nevertheless a rather large window of wavy glass set in round leaden circles. The wavy glass sent a faint greenish light on the little space before a dark-stained oak counter, with its dingy brass scales. The apothecary himself, a little wizened man who wore his own iron-grey hair under a black skullcap, was behind the counter poring over an open ledger. He looked up through oblong steel-rimmed spectacles as his visitors entered.

  “A good day to you, gentlemen,” he said, in a voice that creaked like a street sign. He bowed, but with no cringing. “And how may I serve you?”

  The apothecary, Master William Wynnel, was at heart a merry, bouncing, excitable little man, who decades ago might have done well as ropedancer or tumbler at Bart’s Fair. But long years had set a mask on him. He regarded them with lips pursed out and a look of sad severity, as though his learning were too much for him.

  “Master Apothecary, my name is Fenton.”

  “Have I the honour,” said the other, again bowing without obsequiousness, “of addressing Sir Nicholas Fenton?”

  “If you are pleased to call it honour, I am Nicholas Fenton.”

  It did in truth please the old apothecary, who found himself treated as he felt he ought to be treated.

  “You are too good, Sir Nicholas! And you are come here …?” The inquiry lifted.

  Fenton reached into his big right-hand pocket. Over the packet of arsenic was now the small but heavy purse, with a drawstring, he had taken from Giles before he left home.

  “I would buy knowledge,” he said.

  Opening the bag, he flung out part of its contents. Gold guineas, gold angels each worth ten shillings, broadpieces, silver rolled and rattled on the counter.

  Little William Wynnel drew himself up.

  “Sir,” he replied, “I am apothecary and chymist, this being (I must inform you) a skilled mystery, below only that of the chiurgien or the doctor of physick. Put by your money, I beg, until we discover whether I possess … the sort of knowledge you wish.”

  There was a silence. George, opening his mouth to roar, was stopped by a below-the-counter sign from Fenton. Fenton acted from a precise purpose.

  “Your words are just,” he said, sweeping the coins back into the bag, “and I am rightly rebuked. Master Apothecary, I ask your pardon.”

  Both George and the apothecary stared at him.
A handsome apology, from a nobleman whose line went back beyond the third Edward, seemed such condescension that it won over the apothecary and all his confidence. He would have told any secret.

  “First,” continued Fenton, replacing the bag in his pocket and carelessly drawing out the packet of arsenic, “I believe you sold this?”

  Master Wynnel took the packet and studied it.

  “Indeed I did,” he answered promptly. “Had I wished to hide the fact, Sir Nicholas, I would not have marked my shop design so plain. For (I must inform you) it is no offence against the law to sell arsenic. Near all our houses are infected with vermin, viz.: rats, mice, large and small insects or the like, which must be got rid of. ’Tis left to the apothecary, his judgment and cunning questions, to determine the buyer’s honesty.”

  This was true. Nevertheless the old man’s eyes shifted and struggled with dread.

  “Yet I hope,” he said, “there hath been no … ill fortune? No … no …?”

  “None at all,” Fenton reassured him, with a smile. “Observe how much arsenic remains! I explore the matter only to teach my household good rules of thrift.”

  He could just barely hear a stifled gasp of relief. All the apothecary’s portentous airs and pursed lips had gone. He was an eager, bouncing little man, eyes glittering behind the spectacles, anxious to help.

  “Can you call to mind,” suggested Fenton, “the date when this purchase was made?”

  “Call to mind? Nay, sir, I can tell you (as we say) instanter!”

  He flew at the open ledger in front of him, whipped over two pages, and set his finger on an entry.

  “The date,” said Master Wynnel, “was April 16th. A trifle more than three weeks gone.”

  “Yet could you know … though ’twould be a wondrous thing … how much arsenic is gone from the packet now?”

  “Wondrous? Nay, Sir Nicholas! Here!”

  The apothecary flew at the old brass pair of scales. Putting the packet into one scalepan, he placed a very light pebble on the other.