The Devil in Velvet

by John Dickson Carr

  Nevertheless there was one black spot at the back of his mind. This was the dread date, June 10th, when they said … well, they said Lydia would die. Every time this remembrance wormed into his brain, he blotted it out, swore Lydia should not die because he would prevent it, and kept the question at bay.

  Also, amid the pleasant times of which we shall hear, a few ugly incidents struck into his life like a dagger. The first of the incidents occurred on the very night after he and George and Mr. Reeve left the King’s Head, following their meeting with the Green Ribbon Club.

  Fenton had wanted to go home, since late afternoon was drawing in. But George insisted they must take a cup of wine in sign of triumph.

  “What’s more, you must sprucify yourself,” he argued, not unreasonably. “What! Return with those hands and those sleeves? You’ll find a bowl of water at the Devil, for a surety!”

  “A cup of wine, judiciously swallowed,” declared Mr. Reeve with dignity, “improveth the digestion at all times.”

  So they had one or two at the Devil, where Fenton sprucified himself as well as possible. Then they moved on to the already long-famous Swan at Charing Cross. There, inside settles with high backs, facing each other across a table, George and Mr. Reeve fell to business with a will amid the roar and foulness of the tavern.

  Fenton, whose palate as yet could not put down the wine or even the ale, took a desperate try each time. Then, half-ill, he used a stratagem.

  Sitting on the floor beside his settle, legs outsprawled, was a hairy and drunk fiddler, whose eyes remained open but who could not move. Each time the tapster would arrive with fresh pints, Fenton would surreptitiously turn and pour his own down the throat of the fiddler, whose mouth opened automatically to receive it. As a result he drank himself almost sober; and, lifting the battered fiddle and bow from his lap, sawed away with much energy.

  Mr. Reeve, nearly as boozy but more dignified, accompanied him on the cittern. The whole company of the Swan joined in singing ballads remarkable for great bawdiness and minuteness of detail with regard to female anatomy.

  George swore (and six times he swore) that he would accompany Fenton to Pall Mall, and ask Meg to wed him, after but one more pint. You may guess the outcome. Both George and Mr. Reeve fell under the table, as was the convenient custom.

  With the assistance of two tapsters, Fenton paid the score and got them both wedged into different sedan chairs. Having ascertained that Mr. Reeve was well in the care of the “mine hostess of the Rising Sun, Red Lion Fields, being a kind willing dame of scarce sixty,” Fenton sent two heavily snoring chairs in different directions. Before each ran a linkboy, his torch flaming against powdery-blue dusk. Since it was not yet dark, there could be small danger of footpads.

  Afterwards Fenton hurried the short distance to his own home. The stately periwigged porter, with his tipstaff, stood very straight at the door.

  “There is one question … er …”

  “Sir,” replied the stately one, “I am called Sam.” Then rapidly he gave forth news. “Madam York hath departed, in a coach not her own, but with heavy boxes, not an hour agone. And I rejoice to tell, sir, that her ladyship, your wife, is well and mends in her health. A dozen times in the hour she sends Mrs. Pamphlin to seek you.”

  “Thank God,” Fenton said slowly, and felt his heart contract.

  The stately one bowed.

  “I—I desired,” Fenton said at length, “to learn how many letters were dispatched from here this day. But that’s a trifle, now I learn …”

  “Sir, there were four letters,” returned Sam, reckoning up how many times he must seek a street porter. “One from her ladyship, to Mrs. Wheebler the dressmaker’s, at La Belle France in Covent Garden. One from Madam York, to a Captain Duroc in Chancery Lane. One from Mr. Giles, to his brother by Aldgate Pump. One—hem!—from the cook-maid Kitty …”

  “Kitty! Can she read or write?”

  “One would not have thought so,” frowned the stately Sam. “’Twas so ill writ I could not discover the address myself, and gave it to a porter with sixpence, desiring him to be off.”

  “But this could not have happened in the afternoon! The wench (or so I think) was under guard in my study …”

  “Nay, sir, all letters were sent in early morning.”

  “Oh, no matter!” thought Fenton, and, as Sam gravely opened the door, he dashed through the malodorous lower hall, up the stairs, and along the passage to Lydia’s room.

  The wax lights fluttered as he flung open the door. Lydia’s room, over the panelling, was hung with tapestries which all but covered every inch of the walls. The heavy, sedate bed yet had gilt Cupids at its corners. Lydia, fully dressed in a low-cut gown for evening, sat in an upright chair beyond a golden sconce of five candles, a book in her lap.

  Though she had undergone a bad time in recovery, as was plain from her pallor and the shadows under her blue eyes, still she was Lydia. She stretched out her arms. Fenton held her as tightly, cheek to cheek, as though he feared she might vanish.

  “Dear heart,” he said, when Lydia moved back to run her gaze searchingly over his face, “I hope I—I made you not too ill, so as to make you well?”

  “Fie!” Lydia told him, her pink lips trembling. One eyebrow lifted a little, as though she would smile. “’Twas nothing! Though troublesome at times, I’ll own, especially …” Here she paused, embarrassed; and also she saw the imperfect condition of his right sleeve. “Oh, Nick, you have …”

  “If I have, Lydia, you see me returned without hurt.”

  “Oh, I should have known that. I am not displeased. I—I am even proud. But I had not thought …” Her voice trailed away, as though horrified.

  Across the room, her lean stiff back uncompromisingly turned to them, stood Mrs. Judith Pamphlin, holding high a plate so as to polish it.

  Lydia’s shoulders trembled very slightly. After giving a covert glance towards Judith, she pressed her lips to Fenton’s cheek, moving back the periwig, and whispered.

  “I shall have your company this night, shall I not?”

  “And all nights!” he said aloud, and kissed her so that her lips moved under his.

  “Then,” he thought, “she is still frightened by her Puritan nurse?” This must be stamped on like an insect. He straightened up.

  “Woman Pamphlin,” he said, lashing her with the cold, even voice he had used before, “turn and face me.”

  Mrs. Pamphlin, putting down plate and cloth on a mirror-table, turned slowly. Her lips were a locked line.

  “I warned you,” said Fenton, “of ill consequences if you spoke one word of your Puritan cant to my wife. Have you done so?”

  “Nay, she hath not!” cried Lydia. “I much wondered at it. Underneath all, I think, she is kind.”

  “Then you have done well,” said Fenton to the rigid Mrs. Pamphlin. “Take care you say no word of it to her ever again. Now go!”

  Mrs. Pamphlin marched out of the room, closing the door.

  “My dear,” Fenton said gently, “you must not let these people affright you with their poisonous folly! I—I have an affair of moment, now, with the servants …”

  “Yes. I am sensible of it. Nick, dearest heart, I have wondered …”

  “But I will come back as soon as possible, and be with you at all times!”

  Nevertheless it was a minute or two before he left the room, with Lydia’s warmth tingling through him. He raced downstairs, round towards the study at the rear of the ground floor.

  If he had looked only at the three candles in their silver candelabrum, atop the dark carved cabinet of the satyrs’ heads, the room would have appeared just the same. But Big Tom, the sculleryman, lay sprawled on his back before an empty fireplace, his snores rising violently. Nan Curtis, the stoutening kitchenmaid in the cap, dozed in a chair with her head on one side. But, towards the carved cabinet wh
ere Kitty Softcover stood at one side and Giles at the other, he felt an atmosphere of hatred near murder.

  “I make you all apology,” Fenton told them, “for being longer than I had thought. Giles, was there no difficulty?”

  Giles, pale but with thin jaws hard-set, rattled the coils of the cat-of-nine-tails.

  “Sir,” he replied, “they did wish for food and drink, and I took it as my responsibility to command cold meat and ale.”

  “Good! Have you complaints?”

  He looked at the others. Nan Curtis, roused to wakefulness by his first words, kicked Big Tom to life with her felt slipper, and both sprang up.

  Kitty, her eyes narrowed, leaned against the black cabinet with her arms folded. Her breast slowly rose and fell, a core of spitefulness; the light burnished her red hair and threw shadows of eyelashes on her cheeks.

  “I ha’ complaint,” she snapped.

  Again Fenton looked her up and down, wondering why he felt such intense repulsion for her.

  “This bowse,” she jerked her head towards Giles, the Alsatian thieves’ cant thickening her voice, “did ’proach me in the way of amorousness. Did take his hand, thus …” She reached down towards her skirt, but Giles cut her off sharply.

  “What the girl says,” he interrupted, “is true. However, sir, she made a remark touching yourself. This, under favour, I would repeat to you privily.”

  “Giles,” said Fenton, “should this happen again, and ’tis entirely a matter for your own conscience, be sure I hear nothing of it. Else I might be compelled to punish you, which would be a pity.”

  Kitty, in as much incredulity as wrath, screamed out at him.

  “Th’lt not punish him?”

  And Fenton realized, now, what his ear had not been keen enough to catch through Kitty’s pronunciation. Before all of them, she had been using the “thee” and “thou” of complete familiarity.

  “The matter of punishment, slut, we’ll discourse of.” Fenton drew the money pouch from his pocket and threw it to Giles, who caught it expertly. Briefly he took the packet of arsenic from the same pocket. “It was you bought this poison, one hundred and thirty-four grains of it. Nay,” he added wearily, “don’t addle your head to deny it. I have been to the Blue Mortar. Now: who sent you to buy it?”

  There was a long silence while Kitty, still with arms tightly folded, studied him from between narrowed eyes.

  “Th’ hastna discovered,” she decided. Up went her shoulders. “Then who can tell?”

  “I can tell,” answered Fenton with devilish quietness. “Giles! We do as I have ordered. Shepherd these people down to the kitchen. Kitty shall prepare a bowl of sack posset. The poison (of this I am certain) is in some ingredient already. Then it shall be drunk.”

  This time Kitty did not refuse. Her very small mouth, with its horizontal lower lip and Cupid’s bow upper lip, made some derisive movement.

  But Fenton, this morning raging with fear for Lydia, knew in his heart he had been too severe with those he believed to be faithful servants.

  “Be not afeared,” he said, looking at each of them in turn. “You will suffer no harm.”

  Reaching up on tiptoe, Giles fetched down the silver-branched sconce of three lights. Nan Curtis went out first, drying her tears, then Big Tom with his hand at his forelock, then Kitty expressionless of face. Giles’s light sent a golden shining before them.

  The stairs down to the kitchen, Fenton remembered, were across the hall and faced south so that it might lie beneath the dining room and be at the back.

  “Hold!” said Fenton, whom Giles was about to light downstairs.

  A hurrying of footsteps on the upper staircase stopped him. There was Lydia, in her evening gown of claret-coloured velvet outlined in white and gold, under the golden candle gleams.

  “Nick, I would go with you,” she pleaded. “I have a reason for this, truly!”

  Already Fenton’s nostrils had caught the heat and reek from below; he wondered whether he himself could manage it.

  “Lydia, you can’t go down there! Besides, you are in need of rest. Permit Giles to light you to your room!”

  Lydia’s blue eyes opened in wonder.

  “Down there? It is nothing!”

  “Nothing?”

  “My—my father, as you are aware,” Lydia lowered her eyelashes, “had no lack of coin or worldly goods. Yet many times he commanded me to scrub a kitchen worse than ours: so to chasten my pride and teach me humility. —Dear heart! Is aught wrong?”

  “I wish the old swine were still alive,” Fenton was thinking. “For I swear I would kick his behind from here to Ludgate Hill!”

  “Lydia,” he smiled at her, “I never command. But it will much please me if you do as I ask.”

  “Why, then—!” said Lydia, and did not pursue the matter.

  “Giles, take the light. Do you give me the whip. Escort my lady. When you return, bring with you a clock. Any nature of clock.”

  And then, as their heels rapped away, he picked his way down the stairs. Of the odour we need say nothing. Since wax candles were too costly for servants, he could see below a gleam of tallow lamps with floating wicks, and a low red light from a coal bed not yet gone out.

  Dull red light, and heavy dull heat. How many scenes, as he remembered them, had been played against a background suitable for his casual acquaintance, the devil! But the devil must be far away, busy amongst so many million other souls. On Fenton’s right hand was a brick wall, on his left a wall of very dirty plaster. …

  Then he gave a gasp, with that sense of the heart choking in the throat.

  Something lurking against the right-hand wall, something as yet invisible, moved out against his side. Arms went round his waist. Small, rather chilly lips were pressed to the side of his neck.

  “I knew th’ didst but pretend,” whispered the voice of Kitty, very low, and in quiet glee.

  Fenton threw her away from him, flung her towards the left-hand, plaster wall. But it was hardly a foot away; her back made no noise as she landed there, except for a slight crackle of old plaster.

  “I likes to be struck; I likes to be flogged; eh,” whispered Kitty, her very large dark-blue and innocent-seeming eyes a-glitter­. She nodded towards the steel-tipped thongs of the whip in Fenton’s hand. “But not with that!”

  Fenton was about to roar out and order her downstairs, when her next whisper stopped him.

  “A comical gullery, was’t not, when th’ didst put Fire-Meg in a chamber opposite th’ wife? And each kepit strict watch on other one, and forgot us?”

  (Then here was the explanation of Sir Nick’s odd conduct! But, in the name of all sense or even lack of sense, what could Sir Nick find attractive in this … this …?)

  “See!” flashed Kitty’s whisper.

  Now Fenton dared not move, in case he heard more information. They were about halfway downstairs, with the faint yellow tallow lamps and red fiery coals showing at the foot. Again Kitty sidled towards him, but this time facing down.

  “See,” she went on, “how I keep close t’ gift th’ gav’st me?”

  Bending forward, holding open the front of her coarse blouse, she pointed. Round her neck, and slung down between her breasts on a grubby length of ribbon, hung a ring set with a triple tier of very fine diamonds. It curled round into a tiny snake’s head, stretching as far as any woman’s knuckle. The coils glittered wickedly.

  “Pretty!” cooed the red-headed girl.

  “I gave you that?”

  “Th’ didst. Who else?”

  Again she sidled round him like a cat, attempting to get in front. Fenton did not push her, though his arms had become tense to do so. Kitty’s own felt slipper dislodged itself from the wooden stair tread. She screamed out, fell backwards, and rolled heavily and all ways to the foot of the stairs, where she crouched unhurt
with eyes glaring up.

  A shout of laughter went up from the kitchen, dominated by the bass of Big Tom. Falling downstairs was considered an excellent jest. Also, from somewhere in the kitchen, there was a noise like the whack of light iron on a stone floor.

  The laughter stopped instantly as Fenton appeared. Kitty sprang up and bounced lightly away, a strange but triumphant look about her. Steadying his head and nostrils, Fenton looked round. This was not an underground room, as he had expected. Two heavily barred and dust-furred windows looked out towards a back garden and the edge of the stables.

  The immense fireplace was much the same as he had seen at the cookshop, though nothing was over or near the fire, and more pots and kettles hung close to it. There were rats, too; he heard them scuttle. A long table, its cover a frayed tapestry piece discarded from upstairs, showed where the domestic staff ate. There was a tall oak carry-all, later called a dresser, on whose shelf stood the dim tallow lamps. Its shelves held upright dishes and cups: mostly earthenware, but some glazed or even china.

  Big Tom, a heavy poker in his hand, suddenly leaped at one corner of the carry-all. There was a sound not quite to be described. In triumph, touching his forelock with it, Big Tom held up a dead or dying rat.

  “Well done!” Fenton gulped out the words gravely.

  Pleased, Big Tom went over to a heavy waist-high shelf, under which was heaped a pile of refuse. But in the board above was a large funnel-shaped depression, with underneath it a baked-clay funnel-shaped top and drainpipe as big as a chimney pot. About to throw the dead rat on the refuse heap, Big Tom hesitated and more delicately dropped it down the drain, emptying after it a little water from a large bucket. Nan Curtis nodded approval.

  “Now,” said Fenton, “let Kitty prepare the posset exactly as ’twas always prepared. Nan!”

  “Good s-sir?”

  “You shall watch her, close to her shoulder, and see nothing but what is usual shall be done.”

  Kitty, carrying her magnificent hair high, behaved with a contemptuous carelessness. She went to the carry-all, taking down a bowl of eggs and putting them on the dining table. She also took down a smaller earthen bowl, and a knife and fork from the drawer.