The Devil in Velvet

by John Dickson Carr

  “I must not see her again!” he said aloud.

  In his pocket he had the paper on which Meg had written her two addresses. Fenton stretched out his hand to burn the folded paper in the candle flame, and then stopped.

  “How did Mary Grenville become Meg York?” he thought frantically. “Why is she here? All my dozens of questions she either evaded or said I should know the answer soon. And these answers I must have!”

  For this reason (or so he told himself) he got up quickly. He went to a bookcase, took down a volume of Tillotson’s sermons—what a windy hypocrite Tillotson was!—and put the paper between its leaves. Closing the book, he replaced it and had gone back to his chair when Giles entered.

  On a tray Giles carried a candle, a flat clear-glass decanter of Nantes brandy on which the light struck with brown-amber iridescence, and a clouded glass. You drank brandy neat. Everyone, from the Royal Society to the meanest man, knew that all water was undrinkable save for animals.

  Giles hovered for a moment, making ugly faces.

  “Now, then,” said Giles, “if you have a mind to—”

  “Much thanks; but I need no advice. I shall not be drunk for a night, much less a week.”

  When Giles had gone, Fenton poured the glass nearly full. After a few deep swallows, slowly, Nantes brandy began to deaden the ache that concerned Lydia.

  Tomorrow he would somehow reconcile matters with her. Never, by God, would he be unfaithful! And this nonsense of poisoning? This was what he feared, and feared horribly. But it could not happen. Round Lydia he had set too many guards.

  In front of him, as though in clear handwriting, he could see the record of his life as Sir Nicholas Fenton: Born 25th Dec’r, 1649; Dy’d 10th August, 1714. He and Lydia would see unroll the pageant of those times, in the main of treachery and turbulence, yet once or twice with a flame of grandeur; and, at least, he could die happy just before the first damned Hanoverian came forever to disgrace the British throne.

  Seeking such happy things, Fenton realized that the brandy had well fuddled his wits.

  But they must not remain fuddled, or he could not protect Lydia. Rising unsteadily to his feet, gripping the edge of the desk, he put a firm hand on the candle holder. Gritting his teeth, he lighted his own way up to his bedroom; he staggered only when he closed the door.

  Then, blowing out the candle, he fell into sleep across the bed.

  Next morning, though he had a throbbing head and a stomach of nausea, the hot strong sunlight dissipated doubts and made the preceding night’s quarrel seem foolish.

  After a good bath, after being shaved by Giles and permitting Giles to dress him more elaborately than usual (to Giles’s high approval), he felt in the best of spirits. His toothbrush, carefully whittled by Big Tom, set firm with such good bristles that Fenton dared not ask where they came from, lay on the dressing table with its handle painted bright red.

  A second one, painted blue, was on Lydia’s dressing table. Though he could get no toothpaste, a scented soap had to serve; and it at least made the mouth feel clean.

  “B—bl—b!” Lydia would say, looking reproachfully at him with the brush in her mouth.

  This morning, as usual, he hastened down to the kitchen and swallowed draughts of Lydia’s morning chocolate before it was sent up to her. Since a new cook had not been found, Nan Curtis was elevated to that position; she, utterly trustworthy, was so closely watched by Big Tom that more than once she burst into tears.

  Then Fenton accompanied Bet, the new maid, while she carried the chocolate service upstairs. He made certain that no person came near it. Though still scraped raw by Lydia’s outburst last night, he had prepared his apology when Bet knocked at the door.

  “Yes?” Lydia’s voice, rather eager. Then she stopped. There was a sort of hauteur in what she did not say.

  “It’s Bet, my lady. With the chocolate.”

  “Oh.” There was a long pause. Then the voice shook a little. “Is my husband by you?”

  “Yes, my lady.”

  “Then be good enough, sweet Bet, to tell him that his absence is more prized than his company.”

  Fenton closed his fists and drew the breath deep in his lungs.

  “Do as the damned woman bids you,” Fenton said loudly and clearly to Bet.

  And he walked away down the passage, stepping loudly on the boards. Out of the corner of his eye, in a darkish corner, he noticed Judith Pamphlin, arms folded, still watching. Much as he disliked her, still she was an added guard.

  Punctually at noon, as always, he took a key and opened the locked cabinet in an under part of one bookcase in the study. With another very small key he unlocked the book of days, which he had never shown to another person.

  Dipping the pen carefully in the ink, he wrote the date June 6th, though he did not consider it was past until midnight.

  Four more days. …

  He could defeat it. He knew that. June 10th would finally be crossed off. Great as was his annoyance with Lydia, he loved her too much to neglect anything. In his mind he tested his safeguards, and decided to double them; but he could see no flaw.

  Nothing happened that hot day, Lydia refusing food and Fenton austerely doing the same. There arrived a courteous, almost humble note from the proprietors of Spring Gardens, countersigned by Thomas Killigrew, Esq., Master of the Revels to His Majesty. The note mentioned some slight damage, and begged to present its account. Though the bill was far too large, Fenton paid it by return messenger to be rid of the matter.

  By nightfall, when the candles were lighted, there was no change. Fenton sat in his study, first reading Montaigne, who is soothing, and then Ovid, who is not. Slapping shut the book, Fenton made his decision.

  Quietly he went down into the kitchen, from which he fetched a small axe with a short handle. Quietly he went upstairs, holding the axe behind his back. A few wall candles burned, and he could clearly see Lydia’s bedroom door.

  With two blows of the axe, which crashed and reverberated through the house, he smashed the bolt inside the door. One blow exploded the latch. Calmly, as though with artistic neatness, he broke off the hinges so that the door toppled into the room.

  “Now attend to me, woman—!” he began, and stopped as though a cavalry charge had met only cloud.

  Sitting up in bed, on the far side of it, Lydia was stretching out her arms to him. Tears ran down her cheeks, and her mouth trembled. He raced round to the other side of the bed, and their embrace grew chaotic.

  “’Twas all my fault!” both cried at once. Whereupon a listener could have heard no distinguishable word in the babble, since both talked at once, each pouring recriminations on himself or herself. Fenton called himself, and Lydia called herself, what amounted to lepers, pariahs, creatures so vile as to be unspeakable even in decent human sight.

  In the passage, Giles patiently and sardonically affixed a large piece of tapestry over the open doorway, tapping nails so lightly that even Judith Pamphlin did not hear him, and wondering how long it would take Big Tom to mend the door.

  From furious reconciliation, in all its aspects, they passed on to the tenderness which is the crown of all reconciliation, speaking together in low voices long after the last taper had burnt down to a blue spark and puffed out.

  They told themselves how foolish they had been, and Lydia sobbed. They swore eternal love so many times that it cannot be counted. They swore that never again, never under any circumstances, would they quarrel again; never, never. …

  Well, we all know it. Forever it is whispered in the ear of time. Yet its sincerity, for the time being at least, is just as poignant in any age.

  “With all your heart, Nick?”

  “With all my heart, Lydia.”

  Then, on the following morning, they lounged abed until past noon. Fenton had to go into the City on business in the afternoon. What he no
ted in his diary was the 7th of June.

  It was an oppressive day, overcast with grey cloud, too hot for the time of year. Several times he heard what sounded like a commotion in the stable yard, and he sent word to inquire about it. As a rule he kept away from the stables. Being in his old life only a tolerable horseman, he did not know horesflesh as Sir Nick would know it. He feared a bad blunder.

  Dick, the stableboy, reported that one of the coach horses was a-ailing, but nothing horse doctor couldn’t cure. Fenton ordered his black mare, Sweetquean, to be saddled and brought round to the front door.

  Since by some (to him) miracle, Big Tom had repaired the shattered bedroom door before noon, he hastened up for last instructions.

  “Fasten the bolt,” he said, “and open this door to no one. Should one knock without replying, cry out of the window to Whip, the coachman, or Job, the groom, bidding them come in haste with cudgels and faggot bats. Your promise?”

  “Oh, I will! I will!” said Lydia, in a passion of meekness. But she crept closer to him, head down. “Nick! As touches her.” Still she would not say Meg’s name, or raise her head. “Didst not truly desire to—”

  “No!” he assured her. By this time he believed it himself.

  There was a broad sweep of earth before the front door, and a wide gap in the lime trees for the convenience of coaches. Fenton, mounting Sweetquean and taking the reins from Dick, went off by devious directions to spare the mare’s legs among Strand and City crushings.

  He would not have gone at all, except that he wanted a real cook, preferably a Frenchwoman. Though Nan Curtis did her best, Fenton longed for one who could prepare a meal and not murder it. Well he foresaw another domestic riot, but he must meet it.

  At Will’s coffeehouse, where he had once glanced in briefly to see Glorious John, red-faced, smoking his long pipe in the chair of honour, he had met one who evidently had been a friend, a youngish man of science named Mr. Isaac Newton. Mr. Newton had told him of an elderly Frenchwoman, once in bygone days cook to the Comte de Grammont himself, who might be found at an address in Fleet Street.

  So he galloped the long, semirural length of the Oxford Road, with Tyburn Gallows in the open field far behind. Sweetquean danced along Holborn, slowing now over a long run of vehicles, until Fenton’s ears, and especially nose, told him they were nearing Snow Hill.

  Then he turned right, southwards, down narrow little ways until he found Madam Taupin’s lodgings in a tolerably clean brick house in Fleet Street. Outside, when they talked, they could hear the roaring of Fleet Ditch as the refuse of many kennels poured into it down Snow Hill.

  It took Fenton a very long time to persuade Madam Taupin. She was a small woman, with so much air and grace of deportment that Fenton put forth his lordliest manners and won her heart. She shrank from the position, having been not very well treated (you understand, monsieur?).

  When he eventually persuaded her to take the position on June 12th, and rode back homewards, it was growing dark. Not only actual darkness, but the strange sky like a curdled sea, and puffs of air like puffs out of an oven. A storm hovered, but would not break.

  When he returned home, he found Lydia, still soft-eyed from a nap, dressing to sup. After dark, mysterious draughts and currents crept into the house.

  Fenton, going down to the study to glance at some accounts Giles had prepared, found the light so unsteady that he kindled eight tapers; yet their flames sputtered or widened and would not burn clear. That sense of oppressiveness hung over him, as over so many.

  Within ten minutes Giles came into the study. At the beginning Giles’s face was expressionless. He walked slowly up to the desk and delivered his news.

  “Sir,” he said bluntly, “the dogs are poisoned.”

  CHAPTER XIV

  THE BATTLE OF PALL MALL

  “DOGS?” FENTON REPEATED DULLY.

  In the draught a paper fluttered out of his hand and went a-sail into a candle flame. Giles’s bony fingers pinched it out amid sparks as it caught fire.

  “Since I must be precise of speech with so learned a man,” retorted Giles, always at his worst when he carried bad news, “I will be more plain. I had reference to the mastiffs.”

  Fenton started to his feet.

  “When? How? Why?”

  “Sir, ’twas done last night. —Nay, don’t fall a-cursing that we durst not tell you. There is yet hope.”

  “Hope? How?”

  “Job ran like mad to fetch Mr. Milligrew, best advised of all for knowledge of dogs and horses; ay, thrice better than your ignorant doctor of physick, who knoweth but how to kill. Well! Mr. Milligrew thinks, in eventual, he may save Thunder and Lion and perchance even Bare-behind, though all are in sore plight. Whiteboy, the terrier, is not permitted abroad at nightfall. But Greedy, as you may judge by his name, is dead.”

  Fenton sat down behind the desk, pressing his hands over forehead and periwig.

  “How was’t done?”

  “Poisoned meat,” replied Giles. “Thus!”

  From where he had been concealing it, behind his back, Giles brought a greasy piece of paper. On it lay a piece of good butcher’s meat, raw, bitten-off but untouched, and half-smothered in white powder.

  “Arsenic once more,” said Fenton, and stabbed at it with a quill pen. “Come: I could make you a crude test to prove it so. But observe! It is odourless and powdered. There are no (in chymist’s term) crystals of other white poisons: as antimony or strychnine. No! Here’s arsenic.”

  Giles folded his arms. “If that be so, what then?”

  “Why, it means I have been a fool!”

  “Oh, questionless,” murmured Giles, folding his arms. “But—as how?”

  “In this,” replied Fenton. He rose from his chair and began to stride up and down, amid the blowing candle flames and the thick heat. “My concern, all of it, is to protect my lady wife from poison. I have searched, studied, made scrutiny of all inside this house. Would any do her harm?”

  “Nay,” said Giles, looking down at his shoes. “My lady is much beloved.”

  “And therefore am I a fool. Mark it: I have stood on my guard against those inside the house. Not once have I thought to seek outside. To seek a friend—”

  “A friend?”

  “A pretended friend. Let that friend call out, so that the mastiffs may hear his—or her—voice; let them lick his—or her—hand; thus there will be no noise.”

  Giles altered his position. His eyes narrowed, and he stroked his long chin as though he wore a beard.

  “’Tis common practice,” he admitted, “among fuglemen or those now called burglars. Yet from this house no thing, nay, not as much as a spoon, hath been stolen away. Wherefore poison the dogs?”

  “As thus. Tonight, the mastiffs; they must not be there tonight. Last night they were poisoned. Last night someone was here to do a work as old as Rome; older, for aught I know. In fine: to take a wax or soap mould to the lock of some door, perhaps the front door. A locksmith can grind you the key in one day …”

  “And this night?”

  “Why, someone (it may be our good Kitty, who was cook and fed all the dogs) will be here for quiet plunder in jewel boxes, as well as to conceal some heavy dose of poison for my wife. Have I read it aright?”

  Giles, though for some reason he winced at the name of Kitty, looked back at Fenton and shook his head.

  “Nay, sir,” Giles answered quietly. “You are too much caught up with my Lady Fenton. You have not sounded the depth of this matter.”

  Fenton did not reply, but merely nodded with a gleam of anticipation in his eye. All the mysterious draughts, which blew the flames, had died away into heavy sluggish air. Fenton returned to his chair.

  “Sir Nick, this runs deeper than a matter of poison. ’Tis a matter politic; it may involve the throne itself! Here’s my Lord Shaftesbury, from
what I hear, building up from small starts a vast Opposition or Country party, their mark a green ribbon, and in especial with an eye to rousing the mobile party …”

  “Call it mob, Giles. Soon all will call it so.”

  “Well! And here you, you alone, who would shout ‘God for King Charles!’ amid a hundred of them! Each time they have struck at you, or you at them, you have held them up to mockery and ridicule. Such high-placed men of the Country party must not be so dealt with, lest their power diminish. They must make an end on’t.”

  Giles, rather white, backed away from the desk. Fenton raised his head. Giles, startled, saw that his master wore a strange smile, and that there was an anticipatory glitter in his eyes.

  “To deal plainly,” said Fenton, picking up a quill pen, “they must attack in force and crush me. To deal even more plainly, they must attack my house and draw me out.”

  “Sir, I do not say this will happen. Only that it may. But if so: ay, tonight!”

  “For my part,” said Fenton leisurely, “I pray they will make a tack at it. For I have devoted some thought to this business …”

  “What?”

  “And I have devised a small plan. Come; look across my shoulder while I sketch.”

  Giles moved round. Drawing a sheet of parchment towards him, Fenton dipped pen in ink and sketched rapidly what looked like a minor military campaign. As he sketched, his quick, terse words stabbed at every point in explanation. At the end he wrote down five names, including his own. He paused there, hesitantly, as Giles whistled.

  “And yet …” Fenton said in despondency.

  “Come, sir! What is’t?”

  “These men,” said Fenton, pointing towards the names, “are my servants. Can I, durst I, ask them to risk their lives?”

  Giles nimbly ran round to the other side of the desk and faced him in amazement.

  “Why, ’tis required by all masters,” he said, rather puzzled. “And here! Sir, have you once considered what your servants, men or women, think of you? Or have thought of you since a certain date,” and Giles’s eyes slid round. “To be exact, the 10th of May last?”