He was greeted with plain, if very respectful, derision.
Big Tom had carried back, over his shoulder, the senseless figure of Harry. Harry’s right arm and leg were broken, together with other injuries. Since Big Tom’s speech was all but unintelligible except to Nan Curtis, he did not mention that he had gone down for a minute or two of the fight because of a cracked leg on one side and a sword-thrust through the other thigh.
Nevertheless, he carried Harry home just the same.
“Brisk lad,” grunted Job, nodding towards Harry as the latter lay on the floor. “Only afeared o’ seeming afeared; there’s an end to’t; three deaders on top of him when he went down.”
Though all of them would admit to bruises, all denied broken bones: but Job had a broken collarbone and Whip several cracked ribs. Questioned closely by Fenton, they said they’d not have their bones plucked at by a double-damned chiurgien who knew nothing; best let be.
Whereupon Whip had an inspiration. If master had so much concern, let it be Mr. Milligrew. They’d trust him. Ecod, if the horse doctor knew so much about bonesetting with dogs and horses, wouldn’t he know much more about men?
The florid-faced Mr. Milligrew, who wore a neat black coat, a waistcoat with pewter buttons, and partly polished riding boots, regarded a corner of the ceiling. But plainly he was in accord with the sentiment.
“Then look well to it, Mr. Milligrew!” said Fenton, being rewarded by a grave nod from the other. “Cure them, and I warrant you’ll find me not ungenerous.” Slowly, with a gratitude he could not express, he looked round. “Is there no small service I can render you? Come! Not in the least measure?”
“Ugh!” Big Tom, who had propped himself seated against the wall to ease his legs, now made a pleading speech.
All looked at Nan Curtis for translation.
“Sir …” Nan stammered, now tearful.
“Speak, woman!” insisted Fenton. “What did he say?”
“S-sir, he did say the leech would now put them all a-bed, as leeches do. He asketh whether they might not all, for this night, become as drunk as ever men were. He asketh that each may have beside his bed a quart pot of strong ale, wine, or whatever he may choose; and that I shall refill these as often as they cry out.”
“By the body of Bacchus, yes!” returned Fenton. “Giles hath the key to the cellars; but tell him this is my command!”
From Big Tom, from Whip and Job rose such roars and howls of approval that they could be silenced only when Big Tom made another speech, now impassioned.
Again Fenton called for translation.
“Why, sir,” said Nan, her cap all awry and her tears flowing, “’tis much the same thing over and over. ’Tis: God bless you. And: Such a fighting leader as yourself he never saw; and, if they but made you commander in chief, two or three British regiments would pursue King Looey out of France and the Netherlands too, and not stop till they’d stuck him upside down in the Emperor of Chaney’s rice barrel.”
And now the cheers and whoops and yells redoubled. Though Whip and Job were scarcely able to stand up, yet they stamped on the floor and beat with wooden spoons on everything available.
Fenton was taken aback. In this age, when laughter or tears or savagery bubbled all so close to the surface, he did not know what to say.
“Nay, I did but little. Yet I … I thank you. I …”
And he hastened up the stairs.
When he mounted the next flight, to the bedroom floor, Fenton found himself feeling very guilty, and tried to walk on tiptoe (in spurred boots) without sound. For a long time he had been conscious of blood dripping on his shoulder from a damaged ear where some cudgel had caught the ear flap of his helmet; his stiffening body bruises ached; but he had not a broken bone.
So he tiptoed, expecting that Lydia would raise a fuss. But Lydia, fully dressed, waited for him at the top of the stairs. She merely threw her arms round him, despite his warnings as to his condition, and said she knew it would happen thus.
“Nay, dear heart, I did watch from the window upstairs. And when I saw you destroy above an hundred of them—”
“Lydia, dear! The whole of them numbered only …”
But she would not have it. It was Lydia and Bet, skirts and sleeves tucked up, who raced up and down the stairs with buckets of hot or cold water for a bath. When he had taken advantage of that, and was propped in Lydia’s bed with a silk bandage over his ear and a silk one across scratched ribs, he felt almost soothed except for an aching head.
He could hear the rain still driving on the roof, splashing against windows and hissing in chimneys. Lydia, curling up beside him, pursued her curiosity at last.
“—And when the great store of rain began to fall,” she told him, “up rode a file of dragoons, with broad plumed hats instead of helmets. The leader held a light, and exchanged words with you.”
“Why, as to that,” Fenton laughed, “we must be respectful. They were the ‘First the Royal Dragoons,’ writ as I have spoken it, of the King’s new army. The leader of this group, an excellent fellow and by name Captain O’Callaghan, was as hot against the Green Ribbon as I could ever be. He told me: if I so desired, I could have every one of the wounded hung up in a halter. Yet he counselled caution.”
“As why?” murmured Lydia.
“Well! His Majesty and the Duke of York mislike these public brawls …”
“H’m,” said Lydia.
“In any event, my captain was persuasive. Let me not trouble my head in the matter. Let him have a word with the nearest justice. Meanwhile, he would cause to be brought two great wagons. Into one should be piled the dead, he telling his cornet the cornet ‘must be sensible of some public place where they could be buried.’ I knew not.”
“He did mean the plague pits, sweet heart.” And Lydia shivered.
“Is it so? Finally, into the second wagon should go the wounded who could move or speak or in injury not serious hurt, as also the badly wounded. The first parcel should be carried home, and warned that a rope awaited them for another show of riot. The second should be carried to Christ’s Hospital, with the same warning into the ear of the chiurgien in chief. Then are all things smoothed, hushed, kept dark.”
“What! And no credit or honour for you?”
“Lydia, what wish have I for these? And I would have no man hanged, could I prevent it.” Fenton brooded. “Of dead and wounded together, according to Giles’s accounting, there are thirty-one.”
“Then there’s the reason!” whispered Lydia, moving up beside him, and now with a shiver of different quality.
“Reason?”
“I saw it from the window. I saw Giles moving among the fallen, holding the officer’s lanthorn in the rain. I saw him return, delivering the lanthorn to the cornet and a bit of paper to the officer. I saw the officer look at the paper, and his great black hat and periwig lift as he looked at you. Then …
“The officer turned, and gave some order. Every one of their great long swords lugged out, and flashed up at salute. You returned the salute: hand to chin, blade straight up, and for a moment all rested motionless in the rain. Another command from the officer; they did execute as fine and pretty a file turn as could have any Roundheads!”
“As … who?” demanded Fenton. Even in this state, wrath stabbed through him like the slight wound across his ribs.
“As—as Prince Rupert’s Horse themselves,” Lydia answered gently, and put her head on his chest as he sank back. “Sleep, dearest one. Sleep now. Sleep.”
Thus on the following day, with black reaction on him and feeling pain, Fenton dozed all of the day and night under doses of laudanum. Nevertheless, on the day after that he awoke to briskness. Being one of those patients who will not stay in bed, he insisted on getting up and being dressed. Yet Giles, still white and shaken, he sent back to bed.
On that day, with Lydi
a beside him in the study while he marked his record in secret, he brooded. He felt that there was too little life, gaiety, music; that Lydia must be bored. So he wrote to my Lord Danby, the Lord Treasurer. He wrote to several friends in the country (at least, George had named them friends), asking them if they could appoint some future time to dine or sup with him.
Next day, as he scored down the 9th of June and felt its deadliness, he was well enough. Or, at least, he would have said so. His wounds of side and ear were trifling; besides, his periwig hid the latter. Only bruises made movement difficult.
After taking a long walk in the garden with Lydia, in weather again turned fine and sunny, he brooded again. Yet Lydia, as always, cheered him up. From below on the Mall, they could hear players at the game of pêle-mêle, and the thock of the big, heavy mallet as it swung hard against a heavy ball. The object of the game was to send the ball whizzing, “as though,” Fenton quoted, “as though from smoking culverin ’twere shot,” through a hoop at the other end.
Even the shouts and curses of the court gentlemen who played it, together with another wooden whack as of small ordnance fired at sea, in time became soothing to the ear.
Late in the afternoon, still brooding, he decided on a stroll outside the grounds. Skewering a hat to his periwig, he had some trouble with the big key of the front door. Impatiently he drew out the key. After one close look at it, he put his finger tips gently (but himself in a cold sweat) inside the edges of the big lock.
Soap. Dirty and now almost churned away, but traces of soap. Some person of the mob, unquestionably, had poisoned the dogs. But someone else, perhaps under cover of this, had got a soap impression of the lock so as to have a locksmith cut a key.
Fenton said nothing, except that he went round to the stables and gave instructions to Job, who was now cheerfully at his work. Fenton told Job that an inside bar must be affixed to the front door in the shortest possible time. Then he resumed his stroll towards Charing Cross.
An outside poisoner? Very well; but what could the enemy do? Lydia’s danger point began only with the stroke of midnight tonight, which would become the 10th. And he first ate half her food and drank of her wine. She refused to touch anything when he was from home.
Fenton’s mood of cheerfulness, so odd yet natural of birth, had risen when he walked back from Charing Cross. Just before his own door stood a large, sombre coach painted dull brown with gilt trimmings. He hastened round to the other side, where Sam stood mute with respect, holding his tipstaff like a pike. “Nick, my boy!” said a voice inside the coach.
As he hurried to the other side, Fenton found that the coach door was open. Seated inside, but framed in the opening, was a tall, very thin man whose portrait Fenton knew he had seen, but whom he could not identify.
Ordinarily, you might think, the newcomer’s bearing would be stiff and austere. And, in the public eye, so it was. From under his hat and his immense brown periwig looked out the thin, sickly face of a man who was ill, whose nose seemed to droop like the tired lines across his forehead.
“I should hold it an ill thing, my boy,” he continued, being now not in public, “if Tom Osborne could not reply in his own person to a letter from Nick Fenton’s son.” For an instant he pressed long, thin fingers over his face. “It is the work, the unending work at the Treasury!”
(Thomas Osborne, of course! Earl of Danby, Lord Treasurer, the King’s minister in chief.)
“My lord,” said Fenton, “will you not step down? Better still, will you not stay and sup with us?”
My Lord Danby smiled, easing some of the weariness from his face.
“That,” he said wryly, “was the sorry intelligence I came to impart. I must speed home to more papers, as on any night you might name. Yet will it please you to sit for a moment in the coach?”
Fenton mounted the step, sat down opposite the minister in chief, and closed the door.
“I envy your youth,” said Danby. At first glance his smile appeared ghastly, then, at close range, only a look of friendliness. “No; I envy you nothing. Your lady is well?”
“Very well, thank God!”
“Also, in this matter of coming to sup, a doctor of physick has strange notions of health … such nonsense … yet I take but little.”
Fenton bent forward.
“My lord,” he insisted quietly, “it will do you a world’s good if you will remain and sup.”
My Lord Danby, his long body hunched back in the coach, regarded him out of dim, shrewd eyes.
“In some strange fashion you have changed.” He shook his head. “I cannot tell how. Yet—here’s a miracle! You really wish that I may stay!”
“Why, what else?” asked the astonished Fenton.
“Because all men hate me,” said Danby, looking at the floor. “The Opposition party, even my own party hate me. Why do they hate me?”
“I tell you, these are only hobgoblin fancies, begotten of too much work!”
Abruptly Danby leaned forward, fastening long thin fingers round Fenton’s arm.
“This keep to yourself,” he said in a low voice. “Near four years ago I entered upon a near-empty Treasury. Soon, in no great time, I will have put a million pounds sterling into that same Treasury. I will have added thirty new ships to the navy, mightier sail-of-the-line than any we now possess: holding, as I do, that we must remain masters of the sea and no Hollander or Frenchman dispute us. I will have paid the seamen, and the greatest part of the debt stopped in the Exchequer; to say nothing …”
His hand dropped, and he mopped his forehead with a lace handkerchief.
“I have served the Treasury faithfully, I think,” he added. “I do not know what these gentlemen would have.”
Golden light through the lime trees dappled one side of the dusty coach. Fenton, glancing out of the far window, saw a sight as heartening as the sound of an old song. Up towards his house rode George Harwell, a blaze of finery, and Mr. Reeve, in patched and mended black, on horses like their owners’ costumes. They seemed to be looking for bloodstains in the road, but rain had washed away such stains.
As they rode in, the noise of the hoofbeats turning left towards the stable yard, some fragment of conversation floated back even to a closed coach.
“Then you are possessed of a new wench,” came the wheezy tones of Mr. Reeve, with a grave, judicial air. “Good; that’s established. Now …”
“I told Nick Fenton I would find one,” George declared proudly, “and scratch me, if I haven’t! Ah, what a woman! Her lips like two cherries, one above the other! Her …”
More intimate detail floated away.
“See, my Lord!” said Fenton, nodding towards the sun. He was really troubled about Danby’s state of mind. “’Tis not yet evening. We sup very early. Your need is for diverting discourse which shall not deal with the body politic. Could you take hurt from (say) a capon and a glass of wine?”
It was as though Danby, weighed down by many coats or capes, threw them back from his shoulders.
“We-ell!” he said. “I dare swear, my boy, they would do me no harm.”
The impromptu supper, like most impromptu things, was first pleasant and then hilarious. Lydia, managing all behind the scenes, placed her reliance on capons, hot and cold, more of them than even George could eat; on baked potatoes, and a great drum of cheese.
All this Lydia contrived so rapidly that Fenton stood in amaze. He was even more amazed at the quickness with which she dressed and swept into the room: in blue silk, with orange colour about it, a-sparkle with diamonds. All set off her glowing colour, and her eyes and hair.
My Lord Danby gave her so courtly a bow that George was envious of it, and Danby kissed her hand with a compliment of such nimble wit that Fenton himself grew envious.
Fenton sat at the head of the table, with Danby at his left and Lydia at his right. Mr. Reeve, at the beginning
as stately as a battered archbishop in the presence of the Lord Treasurer, sat at Lydia’s right. George, facing Mr. Reeve beside Danby, was nervous and inclined to make gravy fly when he bolted his food. But the wine did its good work on all.
No hats, of course, were worn at a friend’s table. The coils of the great periwigs glimmered behind many wax lights on the table. Nan Curtis had burned every potato save one, but all cooks did this and no one observed it. A porter stood behind every chair; and Giles, bolt upright at the back of Fenton, directed the porters with severe eye flicks.
Nevertheless, whenever George or Mr. Reeve gave a serious hem and tried to ask questions about recent events, Fenton deftly turned them away with a pungent anecdote translated back into their own terms. This set the table in a roar. All others joined in, including Lydia and Danby, with anecdotes—as a rule concerning the apprentice and his master’s wife—as the wine ran faster at the end of the meal.
But everything in the talk centred round George’s new love affair. Lydia finally triumphed.
“George!” she pleaded, allowing her silver wine goblet to be refilled for the sixth time, “tell us of her! Else I vow I will not sleep for curiousness, truly I won’t.”
George, now stuffed to repletion, gave a royal wave of his hand.
“Then, imprimis,” said Mr. Reeve, who had again assumed his air of a judge on the bench, “let us hear her name. Let us hear her name.”
“Her name,” said George, with pride and pleasure, “is Fanny.”
“Come now!” said the judge, tapping one finger craftily on the table. “Here’s mere evasion! What’s her full name? Or doth she refuse to give it?”
“Why a fiend’s name should she? She is Mistress Fanny Brisket.”
“And may I ask, Lord George,” inquired Danby, very courteously, but with a somewhat owlish look of too much wine, “how you were made acquainted with the young lady?”
George’s large face, already red and polished, could have grown no more red.
“Why, as to that,” he answered, with a little cough. “To say true: ’twas in a bawdyhouse.”
The Devil in Velvet Page 26
