The Devil in Velvet

by John Dickson Carr

  A great hum of applause went up, mingled with the banging of knife handles on the table. George, who at first thought himself jeered, was soothed by Lydia.

  “Was it so?” she asked eagerly. Her elbows were on the table, her chin resting on clasped hands; and she tried to peer across at George through a maze of silver candelabra. “George! Dear George! Tell us of the house, and how ’twas furnished! Do, George!”

  “Ah!” said George. “Here’s a matter of true import. For you must not be surprised. This was none of your abodes in Whetstone Park.”

  Whetstone Park was not a park but a street. It was supposed to contain half the doxies in London.

  “Nay,” asserted George, and threw aside Whetstone Park in disgust. “This was, and is, a true Temple of Venus, for the convenience of a man of quality.” Suddenly he stopped. “Why, scratch me, Nick, I recall I spoke of it to you, on that day!”

  Fenton had been taking a sip from Lydia’s wine goblet. Of late he had grown accustomed to drinking a good deal of claret at supper, and even kept a decanter in his own room. But tonight, as host, he drank sparingly and had a cool head.

  “What day?” he asked.

  “Why, curse it, the famous day when you and I sought the apothecary’s in Dead Man’s Lane! And you skewered two bullyrocks at once? Nay; stop! I had but begun to tell you, when you were so preoccupied you all but fell into the kennel.”

  “Yes. I remember it.”

  “Come, come!” interposed Mr. Reeve at his stateliest. “As touches this bawdyhouse …?”

  “Well!” said George, turning a somewhat glazed eye round the table. “I chanced, one day, to dine at the Rainbow. After dinner I fell to musing, as men will, whether there might not somewhere exist some such temple as I conceived only in fancy. Thus idly I put the question to a friend who dined with me. I’ll not give his name, for he is an impudent jackanapes.

  “‘Why,’ says he, ‘are you dolt enough not to know of the veritable house itself, not two minutes from here?’ I replied as you imagine. ‘If you doubt me,’ says he, ‘I’ll tell you the very house, and instruct you what to say.’ Being pushed on by my desire for novelty, and other curiosity too: ‘Laus Veneris!’ says I. ‘A hit!’

  “And yet, when I came to the street, and saw the house, I verily thought my confidence abused by this jackanapes. It was a fine high house of brick, and a porter with tipstaff at the door. ‘However,’ thinks I, ‘I have a pocketful of guineas; a certain curiosity upon me; and well the jackanapes knows, if he should deceive me, I’ll pull his neck from his shoulders like a cork from a bottle.’

  “Wherefore I approached the porter with the tipstaff. ‘Fellow,’ says I, though with civility, ‘are there any lodgings to be let here?’ And I was not deceived. ‘Yes, sir,’ says the porter, ‘which you may view if you will give yourself the trouble of walking in.’”

  George paused.

  Observing that he had caught his audience, George refreshed himself with a long draught of canary from his silver goblet, which was immediately replenished. He beamed round with an eye unsteady but full of good will.

  “Hem!” George said suddenly, to conceal the fact that be belched. “Now where was I? Ah! I had no sooner entered the door, but I was met by a grave matron. This grave matron conducted me into her parlour, which was gallantly furnished, there to take a stricter view of me: as, to judge how well lined my pockets were.”

  George held out a beringed hand, from which flashed the hues of orange and sapphire and diamond. George himself was modestly attired in orange and silver.

  “The matron was well satisfied. And I have no doubt, my lord,” said George, turning a grave red face towards Danby, “she would have been well satisfied with your lordship’s self.”

  “I am much honoured, Lord George.”

  “Scratch me, my Lord, why don’t you seek the house yourself? Scratch me, I’ll take you there!”

  “Again I am much honoured,” replied the Lord Treasurer, who was almost as tipsy as George and took all this with deep seriousness. “But, if it be not too troublesome to you, another question. Was it upon this occasion that you met your divine Fanny?”

  “No, no, no!” intoned George, shuddering. “I met Fanny, that celestial creature, scarce a week ago. And when I saw her (’tis truth, my lord!), I was so overcome by her beauty, her divinity—curse me, I swooned away at her feet!”

  “’Twould much grieve me,” interposed Mr. Reeve, shaking his venerable head, “to mar this pure nosegay of poesy. But were ye sober?”

  “Oh, in moderation sober,” said George, huffed. “Can you name a time when but four pots of canary, even perhaps laced with brandy, have made me fall down in a swound?”

  Mr. Reeve said nothing. He had brought his cittern, as he sometimes did. At a short gesture, the porter behind his chair gave it to him. But he did not play; on occasion he plucked at a string or two, lost in old years.

  “Lord George,” intoned Danby, “pray continue your first visit.”

  “Hum! Well,” said George, “being satisfied, the grave matron shewed me the way up one pair of stairs into a very large and fair dining room. ’Twas hung with rich tapestry, and adorned round with excellent pictures, the effigies of divers ladies (as I took them to be) renowned in all ages for the fairest of that sex.

  “A servant brought us up immediately a bottle of sack, without any order given. Whereat the old gentlewoman drank to me, expressing her welcome. ‘Come,’ thinks I, ‘here’s civility itself; but whence do we proceed?’

  “No sooner had I thought this, but the old gentlewoman spoke. ‘Sir,’ says she, ‘as you are a gentleman, you may have some knowledge of that noble art of limning, or painting, for it is much studied by the gentry of this nation. Wherefore your judgment, sir: which in these pictures is the best drawn, or hath the best features?’”

  Here George, nearing his oratorical mood, rose unsteadily to his feet and clutched the wine goblet.

  “‘Madam,’ says I, ‘I will freely give you my judgment. Which, in my opinion (pointing to one, thus) is this. For she hath a full large front; her arched eyebrows are black, without any straggling hairs; her eyes are of the same colour, yet deeply tinged with grey …’”

  “George,” Lydia said softly, “is it not somewhat a likeness to Meg York?”

  “Now the devil fly away with Meg York!” shouted George. “I have learned she left the French captain; but where she hath gone I know not nor care! Besides, this was no picture of Meg!”

  “Nay, George, I but …”

  “Having made this judgment about the picture,” roared George, seizing the narrative and not letting go, “it seemed to me the grave matron but faded behind a curtained door. In her place, with a rustle of silks, out stepped the very likeness (’tis truth) of the picture, yet modest and a lady of quality.

  “While we drank the sack together, the lady with the full large front (by name Eliza) did acquaint me with the custom of the house. If you remained not all night, you were entitled to wine not exceeding four bottles, a taste of food, and a mistress besides, for the sum of but forty shillings.

  “But if you wished to remain all night,” continued George triumphantly, “the custom was thus. Under your pillow you placed ten golden guineas. On each occasion you did deal well and manfully with your mistress, you should take back one guinea for yourself. Scratch me, but wasn’t it a noble game?”

  Danby hemmed. “And if the question be not too intimate, Lord George, how many of the ten guineas remained beneath the pillow at morning?”

  “My lord!” protested George, shutting up one eye in rebuke and swaying on his feet. “There’s a question no man of quality durst ask another in this bawdyhouse. Yet I upheld my honour,” proclaimed George, “and with Fanny—curse me, now!” His face became one vast beam, and he addressed Mr. Reeve across the table. “What say you, good friend?”


  Mr. Reeve nodded thoughtfully. The strings of the cittern glistened against its polished wood.

  “Ay, you are in the right of it,” he muttered. “I am too old a rakehelly not to know my brethern. Yet ’twas not thus, I think, at the court of Charles the First.”

  “Come, ancient do-well! Come, Earl of Shadows and Mist!”

  “We sought not women in houses,” said Mr. Reeve. “We sought the women themselves.”

  His old yet very skilful fingers ran across the cittern strings. Softly, clearly, he began to play. Though he did not speak or sing, yet there was no person at the table who did not remember words older even than Charles the First.

  “Drink to me only with thine eyes,

  And I will pledge with mine …”

  Instinctively Lydia and Fenton, at the corner of the table, turned towards each other. She stretched out her hands across the table, and he gripped them. Her rounded chin was up, her face a little flushed, and in her eyes such love that it frightened him.

  “Oh, God,” he thought, “what if I should lose her?” And the hours, the minutes, ticked towards what had been called the appointed time. He had sworn it before, and believed what he swore, yet now it was complete: he had never loved Lydia so much as at that time.

  Though the music had ceased, these two did not know it. They sat looking into each other’s eyes, scarcely hearing a word about them.

  “But, scratch me,” protested a puzzled George, “that song’s the very heart of poesy I’ve been endeavouring to tell you as concerns Fanny!”

  “Under favour, sir!” observed Danby, fixing his eyes somewhat­ blearily on Mr. Reeve. “Putting aside the small question­ of (hem) bawdyhouses, these times we live in are harsh and hasty. Would you have us ape our forebears in all things, and sing pride of it?”

  Mr. Reeve’s rheumy eyes blazed.

  Sweeping back his chair, which was carried away by the porter, Mr. Reeve arose on gouty legs. With his immense paunch, his hair and drunken face like a battered archbishop, he looked Danby straight in the eyes.

  “No, my lord,” he said in a rolling voice. “But I would tear to pieces the Green Ribbon ere it grew too strong. I would sing of a time but a few nights ago, June 7th, when above sixty rioters attacked this house. And six men—only six, my lord—routed them screaming amid thirty-one dead or wounded. And not one step hath been taken to punish the rioters.”

  Again Mr. Reeve’s fingers swept over the strings. The whole cittern began to dance with a lively air, and Mr. Reeve’s strong yet wheezy voice went out with them:

  “There’s a tyrant known as MOB, sir, in this town of soot and mud,

  Sitting green-faced by the hob, sir, with his hands imbrued in blood;

  And he howls, ‘Down with the Papists,’ at Lord Shaftesbury’s smiling will

  And the most, who are but apists, will howl with him! And yet still …”

  Once more, as inside the Green Ribbon Club, Mr. Reeve’s fingers ripped across the strings as the voice went out:

  “Here’s a cry for all ye goodmen,

  Shout it joyous through the town—

  Three swordsmen and three woodmen

  Did bring the tyrant down!”

  It could not be helped. Two porters, unable to restrain themselves, let out a yell of cheers. My Lord Danby, as though with cold shock, was stricken sober. George applauded wildly.

  At the same moment, the door to the hall opened. Lydia and Fenton, absorbed with each other, would not have turned even yet except for one thing. The door to the hall, where burned many larger and stronger candles, opened and closed swiftly. For half a second Giles, who had been mysteriously missing for a time, was silhouetted there; and his long shadow fell between Fenton and Lydia.

  Lydia, for some reason, shrank back as though in fear. Giles softly moved round the table, to whisper in Fenton’s left ear. All caught the whispered words:

  “Sir Robert Southwell, the clerk of the council, is come in a coach …”

  This blurred away. Mr. Reeve, who had yet another verse to his song, sat down and began to make the cittern tinkle softly towards Lydia, whose face was turned and who tried hard to listen to what Giles was saying. My Lord Danby, now straight-backed and more weary than before, turned to George with some murmured commonplace which George was too drunk to understand. Then Giles melted back into shadow, and Fenton stood up.

  “I think you are sensible,” he said, groping out with his right hand and finding Lydia’s, “that I would not leave this company for any reason save one. I have been promised that I may return in an hour; I have not even time to shift my clothes. Meanwhile, I beg of you, be merry!”

  With his left hand he took from his waistcoat pocket one of the huge, thick watches, and opened its case. The hands stood at five minutes to seven. Outside the windows lay clear daylight.

  “I am commanded to Whitehall Palace,” he added, “for a private audience with the King.”

  CHAPTER XVI

  AUDIENCE AT WHITEHALL PALACE

  “Phyllis, for shame, let us improve

  A thousand several ways

  These few short minutes stol’n by love

  From many tedious days. …”

  THE VOICE, clear and sexless, was that of a French boy: one of several imported at the pleadings of the French Duchess of Portsmouth. Louise, fat as a Turk, with a head like a golden-topped sofa cushion, had wept from night until dawn; the King finally cursed and consented.

  And the voice, accompanied by a tenor viola, rose up from a platform banked with flowers on the west side of the great Banqueting House. This hall, its wall supports painted brown with indentations of gilt, rose up to an immense, lofty ceiling painted with goddesses and Cupids by Rubens.

  You may see the Banqueting House today, since this alone escaped the fire which destroyed all of old Whitehall Palace in 1698. Yet, as you alone pace the stone floor on a gloomy afternoon, hearing your own footsteps ring and echo back, you will not see it as Fenton saw it on that lost enchanted night.

  Fully a thousand wax lights, in chandeliers or iron-gilt holders up from the floor, kindled it to a blaze. Its great arched windows, westwards, were curtained with heavy dark-red velvet, trimmed in gold, and slightly looped back by tasselled copes of gold. The brilliant light, in places soft and unsteady, mingled with the scent of banked red and white roses, carnations, the arum lilies, the heavy orange blossom, as though in a mist of heavy perfume.

  “We await Mr. William Chiffinch,” observed Sir Robert Southwell, a dark, bearded man. “Hold! I believe I see him.”

  Over all the light murmur of chatter, as he and Fenton watched from the great open doors, rose the pleading string notes of the viola, and the voice of the boy on the platform, as they begged Phyllis to consent.

  “False friends I have, as well as you,

  Who daily counsel me

  Vain frivolous pleasures to pursue

  And leave off loving thee. …”

  The words were by Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset, one of the early roysterers who yet remained at court when others had reformed, or, broken in health, faded into the country. Then Dorset displayed his dazzling wordplay for the final verse:

  “When I the least belief bestow

  On what such tools advise,

  May I be dull enough to grow

  Most miserably wise!”

  “Sir Robert!” intruded a heavy, rather hoarse voice. “Sir Nicholas! Your servant, gentlemen!”

  Mr. Chiffinch, unofficial Page of the Back Stairs, was a hook-nosed Hercules in a dark-brown periwig, plainly dressed except for lace, and with a plain sword. Having a head like a tun, he could outdrink any man he ever met, and so filch away secrets for the King. Many persons here would have been surprised to learn how much more was Will Chiffinch than a mere procurer, in the secret service of King Charles.
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br />   “If you will allow me …” murmured Sir Robert, and melted away.

  “Sir Nicholas,” said Mr. Chiffinch, as he bowed Fenton through the door, “having summoned you in such haste, it were uncivil to keep you waiting. Yet, God’s body, I cannot find the King!”

  His big hand indicated the throng among the flowers. There were many fireplaces in the room: and, since the June night had turned cold, they burned high with logs. This, in addition to candle heat and closed windows, made the Banqueting House uncomfortably hot.

  “’Tis no matter,” Fenton heard himself say. “I … I can wait.”

  “But you must be amused,” Chiffinch insisted. “Come!” he added, indicating the east wall of the hall. “A moment gone, there were several tables at cards by the fireplace. Do you wait there, and I vow to discover His Majesty in two minutes!”

  “I thank you.”

  “And—hem—a word in your ear, Sir Nicholas. Be not amazed at what you may see. ’Tis only the part of gallantry that we should permit the ladies to cheat.” Suddenly Mr. Chiffinch stood on his toes, looking down an aisle of chairs towards the eastern fireplace.

  “Nay,” he added, with a smile broadening his heavy face and the little blue veins round the root of his nose, “there’s but one table and one pair* of cards. Madam Gwynn plays alone against Mr. Ralph Montagu in the common people’s game of put. Two minutes, I vow!”

  And he hastened away.

  “I have stepped behind the mirror,” thought Fenton. “I see what none but dead men’s eyes have seen. I must look well!”

  For an instant the dazzle, the greasy heat, the too-thick scent of flowers in the lungs, even a babble of talk overpowered by music from a string trio, made his head swim as though he were really in a dream.

  But he straightened up, and slowly looked about for a face he might identify.

  There was none, at present. Peruked servants carried trays of sweetmeats among gallants of bright-hued attire and ladies, with George’s “double cherry” mouths and arched eyebrows, languishing behind landskip fans.

  Fenton, lifting his shoulders, went down the aisle of chairs towards the card table in front of the eastern fireplace.