The Devil in Velvet

by John Dickson Carr

  And his puffy fingers moved on the strings of the cittern, plucking out a tune which in that babble could be heard not four feet away.

  “Here’s a health unto His Majesty

  With a tow-row-row, and a tow-row!

  Confusion to his en-e-mies,

  With a tow-row-row, and a tow-w-w-row! …”

  These words were heard only in Fenton’s mind. But again his heart rose for joy, of things never seen yet long held sacred. It was the song of the Restoration.

  “You’ll recall ‘Mr. Reeve,’” George said jovially to Fenton. “And how oft he came to your House at Epsom, when Meg was there? Mr. Reeve is another,” George added bitterly, “who melted his plate and sold his gold for the late King. Under Oliver his estate was sold, even his title filched away …”

  “And he that will not drink his health

  I wish him neither life nor wealth,

  Nor yet a rope to—”

  As George spoke, the tinkling music stopped. Mr. Reeve’s face grew expressionless. He spoke in a voice cracked and gruff, but still strong.

  “Nay, now!” he protested gently, as one who finds a matter long gone and distasteful.

  Fenton hesitated to put a question, because he knew and dreaded the answer. Yet he could not help himself.

  “Your estate and title, sir: were they not given back at the Restoration? Or some payment made to you?”

  “Boy, boy, that was fifteen years ago!”

  “But, sir: did you not speak to the new King, and present your petition as others did?”

  “We-ell!” said Mr. Reeve, moving one hand with a gesture of defensive apology. “I went to Whitehall, ’tis true. But so many flocked about him, so very many! And, no doubt, with better claim than mine. And there were all of those we then called the ‘confident young men,’ so gay of plumage that they made me ashamed.”

  Mr. Reeve shook his head, so that from his bald crown the white hair trembled on the shoulders of his unpardonable coat. Though Mr. Reeve was now clean-shaven, Fenton could imagine his former tuft of chin whisker, and the two tufts of moustache under each side of his nose.

  “To be open with you,” Mr. Reeve confessed, “I wore the same clothes as I wear at this moment. I have now eighty years upon me. Even then I was a rusty old Cavalier, in want of coin and cuffs. Had I approached His Majesty, they would have laughed at me and mocked me. And so I slunk away, as I have never done (I hope) from field of battle, with my petition still in my pocket.”

  “And have never again been to court?”

  The shrewd, penetrating look again appeared in Mr. Reeve’s eyes, with a faint chuckle added.

  “Come, I’ll pay you out!” he said. “You are, I hear, among the hottest of the Court party. Are you acquainted with His Majesty?”

  Two lines in Giles’s manuscript came to Fenton’s rescue.

  “I … I have passed by him in the Park, and bowed to him. He hath returned the greeting most civilly.”

  “But not spoken to him?”

  “I … think not.”

  “Only a few months gone, I hear, ye set all in amaze by a speech in Parliament that did much harm to my Lord Shaftesbury. Well! Did ye not go to Whitehall, next day (as would be but natural), to hear a word of commendation from His Majesty, or a friendly clap on the shoulder?”

  “No!” Fenton spoke instinctively. He did not know whether this was true. But he felt that Sir Nick would not have done this, and he was certain he would not himself have done it.

  “And wherefore not?”

  “Damn me, but I’d have done it!” blurted George.

  Mr. Reeve’s bloated face turned without expression to George, and back to Fenton.

  “Wherefore not?” he insisted.

  “I can’t tell,” Fenton answered honestly.

  “Why, then,” said Mr. Reeve, “I’ll tell! It was the black pride in your heart. Lest you suffer the King perhaps to think you had done this for favours, for preferments, for a rung up the greasy ladder all climb, you would turn your back on His Majesty’s own self! Do I say true?”

  Fenton, who had drawn up a short bench and sat sideways to the old Cavalier, shook his head.

  “I know not; I can’t tell.”

  “Well!” Mr. Reeve said grimly. “There are things a man can’t do, even if he should know himself in the right. Are you and I not much alike, then?”

  Fenton’s hand, surreptitiously creeping towards his money pocket, stopped.

  “Nay, but stay a moment!” interposed George, who was rather red of face. “I am desirous to be civil, too. Yet why are you here? Sure you’re not a sp—” George swallowed and stopped.

  “Fie, now!” chuckled Mr. Reeve. “Where’s the wrong in an honest word like spy? I am so, in my modest way. (Have no fear; they can’t hear me.) I pick up a crumb or two here and there, for Mr. Chiffinch or even Sir Robert Southwell. For I loathe your Green Ribbon scum, even though they cry up the blessed Church Established like honest men. Eh, lad?”

  All this time, strangely or not, Fenton had been thinking of Lydia. Against the smoke reek he saw Lydia, the Puritan by training but not by instinct. He saw her face: the wide-spaced blue eyes, the short nose, the soft light-brown hair tumbled about her head. For nine years he had cherished a pictured engraving, and here was living reality. He thought how much Lydia loved the man she believed he was; and he was not that man at all. He remembered what he had been thinking this morning, a sincere prayer, when first he left Lydia.

  “O Thou,” he had prayed, “if only a dry old stick in a boy’s carcase could somehow be worthy of that, or live up to it!”

  Well, he would live up to it now.

  “I fear our talk must cease,” he said quietly. “But will you render me a service, Mr. Reeve? Lend me your cittern for a quarter-hour or so.”

  “The cittern? Right willingly!” grunted the other, and pushed it across the table. It was about three feet long, with gleaming strings. “But to what purpose?”

  “I go upstairs, to the council of the Green Ribbon.”

  The old gentleman showed no surprise as Fenton stood up, the cittern under his left arm.

  “Oh, you’ll do it,” he grunted, after one look into Fenton’s eyes and another at the dried, caked blood on Fenton’s hands. “And I think, for the good kidney of it, I’ll go with you.”

  “Nay, be still!” cried George. “To lose your place as … as …”

  “Faugh!” sneered the wheezy voice.

  With an intense effort Mr. Reeve hoisted himself up on swollen legs, tottered very slightly, and stood firm. His vast frame and belly made him seem round. His bloated face was a tippler’s, his white hair that of an archbishop, and lovingly he patted the cup-hilt rapier.

  “I am something weak in the legs for swordplay,” he chuckled. “Yet there’s a botte or two awaits the first lace-pantaloon who lets go,”—again he patted the cup-hilt—“against Dirty Bess. Where’s to, lad?”

  “Follow me, if you must,” said Fenton. “But don’t lug out, and don’t speak unless you see a sign from me.”

  They moved towards the stairs in single file: Fenton leading, then George, then Mr. Reeve. At the foot of the stairs a tapster, with black plant-growing hair like a wild man’s, skipped out to bar the way.

  “Regret, sir. Can’t go up.”

  Fenton looked at him in a mood more dangerous than any of Sir Nick’s.

  “I am Sir Nicholas Fenton,” he said, and saw the name jump up with fear in the tapster’s eyes. “Your health will remain good if you stand aside.”

  The tapster shrank back, but lifted his head as though to call upstairs. Fenton’s right hand, concealed by the cittern, flashed to his sword grip; the blade leaped partway out; and the tapster saw he meant murder.

  “I’ll-be-quiet-sir,” he muttered under his breath.

 
Back slipped the blade. A gold coin flicked over and landed at the tapster’s feet. It was the first gold of his own he had seen for eighteen months. Scooping it up, he decided that silence was the better part of discretion.

  Up the three went carelessly, save for Mr. Reeve’s wheezing and the drag of his swollen legs. The wall was on their right hand. Fenton, keeping his head partly turned away, displayed the cittern very conspicuously.

  The downstairs crowd, now roaring, wavered between intoxication partial and intoxication complete. More than eighty pairs of eyes rose up enviously towards the stairs. But they saw only a musical instrument to entertain the Great Ones, and they turned back to pipe or tankard or card without further interest.

  “Now I remember it,” said Mr. Reeve, absent-mindedly aloud, “’twas Dirty Bess (my sword, gentlemen) we used to call Monk’s wife: General Monk, if you please, before they made the big-behind Duke of Albemarle.”

  “Ss-s-t!”

  Ordinarily, upstairs in a tavern, you found only private rooms. But the King’s Head, as Fenton saw when his eyes lifted above the line of the floor, had only one long room like the taproom downstairs, save for a few private rooms at the back.

  Its roof was supported by upright black beams, with gallows arms. Sunlight struggled in by latticed windows of sooty glass. Amid the same sort of furniture as could be found downstairs, about thirty gentlemen and a few noble lords—George had underestimated their number—sat and conferred gravely.

  There was no heavy reek, except for the smoke which coiled up the stair well. There were no cards or dice, and only one or two pipes. The rich-gleaming finery of coats, waistcoats, and gold knee bands, as well as the glossier and bigger and more ridged periwigs under broad hats, told that here were men of dignity; or at least wealth. Most of them, crimson-faced, were pretty fresh in liquor.

  There was dead silence. Though they could not have helped hearing footsteps on the stairs they made high-affected pretence of noticing nothing except their whispers to each other.

  Only their anger could be felt, in a kind of concentrated breathing. Most were thoroughly honest men, believing in my Lord Shaftesbury’s principles and dreading Popery.

  The stair rail here, protecting the stairs below, also ran parallel with the far or narrower side of the room. There, so that its occupants faced outwards towards the stair rail, ran a long table like a high table for council. Only two men sat behind it.

  “I know you,” thought Fenton. “Only too well I know you from your portraits. Let us see if you respond to prod or sting, as they say.”

  On the left, behind the high table, sat my Lord Shaftesbury. His immense flaxen periwig was lowered; you could not see his face, as he contemplated a very small glass of white wine. Some of the severed heads on poles above Temple Bar were turned towards Fleet Street, and one of them gaped sideways at the window beyond my lord’s left shoulder.

  On the right sat the large, stout, florid-faced George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham, growing towards his late forties and no longer so much fond of brawls or swordplay. He played with politics as he played with any other toy. He wore claret-coloured silk, with many waves and curls to his brown periwig, and a quart pot stood in front of him.

  Fenton moved a little way along the stair rail, leaning his back against it carelessly and swinging the cittern up to his chest. George and Mr. Reeve ranged themselves on his right.

  Still none moved, or looked up.

  Fenton’s fingers swept across the strings with a twang. He attempted to pluck out a tune, with each note loud and clear, a-jar against eardrums.

  “Here’s a health unto His Majesty,

  With a tow-row-row, and a tow-row!

  Confusion to his enemies,

  With a tow-row-row, and a tow-row! …”

  So clumsily did he play, and so long ill-practised, that it was a matter of many seconds before anyone realized what the tune was. The first to recognize it, suddenly, was my Lord Shaftesbury himself. In the act of raising the very small glass of wine, he paused, set down the glass delicately, and pushed it away from him.

  Afterwards all seemed to realize at once. His Grace of Bucks lifted the quart pot slightly, bumped it down on the time-smoothed table, and put it aside. There was a long squeak and scrape as my Lord Marquess of Winchester, near the high table but not of it, pushed a green glass as far away as possible. Scra-a-pe went two more. One stately Green Ribboner attempted to bring down his tankard with a crash, but he was whistle-drunk: it struck the edge of the table, letting fly a pint of claret, and clattered to the floor.

  His Grace of Bucks spoke first.

  “Sir Nicholas,” he began, in his rich and not unkindly voice, “if you are come here to join a company of good patriots—why, sit you merry, and be welcome! Yet …”

  Periwigs wagged together. Bucks now spoke in a stern tone.

  “My Lord Shaftesbury,” he said, “desires to know why you are here.”

  Fenton replied in the great voice which Sir Nick had used in the Painted Chamber.

  “Then let my lord put the question for himself.”

  Shaftesbury looked up. At first glance it seemed a merry face, despite its razorish kind of quality: of long nose, pointed chin, and great starved-looking eyes. Though old as men then reckoned time, he was only fifty-four. He had much charm. His fluent tongue and art had won him three wives: not for love, but for political advancement. Always he kept his face smoothed out, his thoughts concealed.

  At the moment he held a lace handkerchief, throwing it up and catching it. He did this two or three times, as though searching his memory for some elusive name.

  “Er—Sir Nicholas Fenton?”

  “My Lord … Shaftesbury?”

  Through the whole room went a sudden creak: as of chairs or benches pushed back the shaving of an inch, and a tensing of leg muscles. My lord had thrown the first dart, and had got it straight back in the face.

  But he appeared to notice nothing, merely tossing up the handkerchief.

  “Come, Sir Nicholas,” he said with an indulgent look, “you are a seeming hopeful young gentleman and, for aught I can see, a very ingenious one. Now how may I serve you?”

  “First, my lord, I would make report on your second lesson.”

  “I fail to understand.”

  “At your first lesson, when you had three rogues set on me in a lonely field, I fear two may be dead and the third escaped; also, I took no notes. But here …”

  Fenton handed the cittern to George, who in turn passed it on to Mr. Reeve. From his left-hand pocket Fenton pulled out a crushed hat with a green-ribbon. He straightened out the hat, even to its broken brim.

  “This—” he began again. With a jerk of his wrist he sent it skimming over other hats and periwigs, to land on the high table some distance from my Lord Shaftesbury. “—belonged to the first Alsatian bullyrock you set on me this morning. He now lies across some fire buckets, with a sword-thrust from throat to brain.”

  My lord merely tossed up his handkerchief and caught it.

  “These false teeth, too,” said Fenton. He drew the false teeth from his pocket, and they now had an even more repulsive look, reflected in the eyes that watched. Fenton threw them towards the high table, but they landed and smashed to pieces on the table in front of my Lord Wharton, who leaped to his feet.

  “They were worn,” said Fenton, “by the other bullyrock, who was dealt with by my friend here, Lord George Harwell. I but finished the bullyrock, with a thrust which I hope will prove mortal.” Then his tone changed. “My lord, your attentions begin to bore me.”

  Up went Shaftesbury’s eyebrows.

  “My attentions?” he asked softly. “Now there, I fear, you too much flatter yourself. And even were it so! Do you, a humble baronet, study revenge against me?”

  “No, my lord. I am here only to tell you something about th
e future.”

  A derisive stir ran round the tables; yet, strangely enough, it died away.

  “Sink me, can you tell my future?” demanded His Grace of Bucks, bending forward in deep fascination. Though Bucks in one season might be “chymist, statesman, fiddler, and buffoon,” as Mr. Dryden was afterwards to write, Fenton found it impossible to dislike the man because of his wit and talent.

  But Shaftesbury, himself faintly interested, silenced Bucks with a short gesture.

  “A soothsayer, then?” he mocked. “Pray speak!”

  “His Majesty, my lord, is the father of his people. Or at least, as his grace hath said,” Fenton nodded towards Bucks, “of a good many of them. His illegitimate children swarm. But he can have no legitimate children, because Queen Catherine can have none. Not a fiend’s tortures will make him divorce or put by the queen. His heir must be his brother, the Duke of York.

  “And the Duke of York, they say, is become a Catholic. Your first move will be to exclude His Grace of York from the throne, by bill of Parliament. Your second move will be to drive out King Charles himself, mainly by your cry of …”

  “No Popery!” shouted my Lord Wharton, and banged his tankard on the table.

  “No Popery!” screamed my Lord Marquess of Winchester.

  Others took it up. It penetrated to the downstairs taproom, where a thunder of “No Popery, No Popery!” blatted against the walls and all but burst them. Tapsters raced up and down stairs, with more drink for the Great Ones. Bucks swallowed well over a pint of claret at one try. My Lord Shaftesbury, complacent, waited until the noise had died away.

  Meanwhile Fenton lounged easily, his back to the rather low stair rail and a smile of serene confidence on his face. The Green leader spoke dryly.

  “You tell us, in effect, of Father Adam and Mother Eve.”

  “Stay; but there is more.” Fenton straightened up. “In a few years, my lord, you will rise mightily to power in this land. History shall know you,” here there was a pleased gleam under my lord’s drooping eyelids, “as the first great party leader, as father of ‘campaign’ oratory and of the ‘whispering campaign,’ turning the mobile party into the dread word mob.