The Devil in Velvet

by John Dickson Carr

  “At length (forgive me) I could endure this clack no longer. I drew him out into the passage; I asked of him, in the name of the Saviour, could he aid or cure her? ‘Why,’ says Dr. Noddle, tapping his nose, ‘here’s inflammation of the bowel, or it may be poison; I can’t tell until the poor lady is dead. Meanwhile, fellow, I am mighty uneasy and I had best fetch a magistrate.’”

  Here the bitterness in Giles’s face would have surprised anyone who knew him. His red head darted across the side of the bed.

  “‘Master of Physick,’ says I, ‘you must do as you please. Yet, before you trouble a magistrate, let me relate to you the names of those who were at my lady’s supper party this night.’ And I named them. ‘My Lord Danby?’ cries out old Noddle. ‘Nay, I’ll not meddle with this; ’tis inflammation of the bowel, no poison; I’ll depose it; bury her when you like.’

  “Then, sir, we were helpless but for this booby. Job, having ridden hard to Christ’s Hospital for young Dr. Sloane, found him gone forth on another errand. Yet your lady bore all with patience. When she could talk, which was not often because I think she held the poison inside her of intent, she could speak only of you. We must fetch the foolish thing, for bruising the teeth or the like, and she pressed it to her breast like a cross. And so, loving you as few women have loved, she died.”

  Abruptly turning his head away, Giles rose to his feet.

  He went over to the dressing table. Here he picked up a small glass, nearly full of a darkish-brown liquid like a prepared medicine. Holding this up against the dim light, Giles studied it before he returned and set it down on the bedside table beside the candle.

  Fenton remained looking thoughtfully ahead at the coverlet.

  “You have spoken well,” he said, “and done well. I give you much thanks.”

  Giles bowed.

  “In your relation,” said Fenton, “there is but one mistake. I must tell you, as a secret, that my lady did not in truth love me. Would God she had!”

  And now, from Giles’s look, it was as though a noiseless clap of thunder exploded over the house.

  “Ah!” he said in a different voice. Though this was no sibilant, it seemed to hiss at Fenton. “And here’s more that I suspected!”

  “Suspected?”

  Giles, a-quiver, leaned part way towards him and over him.

  “It concerns,” Giles said, “a twisted grey letter, which I found there—on your dressing table—next morning, in your lady’s handwriting. It concerns your return from Whitehall palace the night before, you swearing to me that all went merry and hearty, yet I seeing with mine own eyes an ill and disheartened man.”

  Fenton turned his head away on the pillow.

  “You have good intent, jackanapes. But what can you know of this?”

  “Why, merely that I probed the matter. Ay, and found the truth of it.”

  “You?”

  “Stick a sword through your impertinence!” retorted the servant. “Truly, who but I? Did I not hear what your lady told me on her deathbed? Did I not read the grey letter? Did I not have the ear of Mr. Jonathan Reeve, your friend, and hath not he the whole whispering gallery of Whitehall, exchanging news for news? If I had need of gold to filch out secrets, was there not your money box? Say to me now: did I do wrong?”

  “No.”

  “Sir,” returned Giles, humble again, “you still think your lady’s love was all play acting, and that she desired your death. Well, perhaps you have reason to think so.” Suddenly Giles’s lean arm went up as though taking an oath. “Yet I swear by my immortal soul that never in her senses did she betray you to the Green Ribbon, and that her love was even as I have said! And this I can prove.”

  Fenton was propped up almost to a sitting position against the pillow, his head turned away. Giles saw his shoulders quiver slightly. Fenton, nevertheless, turned back slowly.

  “And yet,” he inquired, “Lydia wrote that letter?”

  “She did,” Giles agreed calmly. “She wrote it when she was confused, half-crazed, not knowing what she should do. Here was no idle jillflirt, all fondlings and sugar cake. Here was a woman, all joys and hates and griefs! Can you recollect—weeks gone now—what occurred on the morning of May 10th?”

  “I have forgot nothing.”

  “How you summoned your lady here, that you might seek the cause of her illness? Which, though we knew it not and only you made the discovery, was of poison by arsenic? How she did lie down where you are now?”

  “I have forgot nothing!”

  “Is it so? To her at first (and so she told you) you seemed all altered, as though a good soul had come into you and did fight away an evil one. Then you must turn and out-Nick Sir Nick himself, calling down a curse on Roundheads and all their race. Look you there at the bedpost, sir! There’s the scar in the wood where you drove the dagger as you cursed them!”

  Fenton, his face a blank, did not reply.

  “Yet you did struggle back, as it might be to the good spirit. What could my lady think? What was here? And then, as thus she told me on her deathbed, when you two fell close-kissing and all but lying together here, where are you now, she knew you were not Sir Nick Fenton.”

  “What d’ye say, Giles?”

  Giles gave a curl of the lip, and shook his head.

  “Sir, sir! Did I not know, from the first hour on that morning, that you were not Sir Nick in the least? Many strange things, certes, Sir Nick might have done. But he would have been hanged at Tyburn ere he went from home in old flat-heeled house shoes, as you did.”

  Fenton looked back at him, impassive, from the pillow.

  “It is somewhat late, Giles, to call me impostor and cheat.”

  “Impostor?” cried the other. “Who said it? Not I! Nay, I all but told you, on the afternoon before the fight in the street, what was in my mind.”

  “As—what?”

  “Knowing naught of good or evil spirits,” said Giles, moistening his lips, “I’ll not discourse of them. Yet in some fashion I think this good soul came within the body of Sir Nick, and did change it. Else what I have beheld is Tam o’ Bedlam’s work.

  “Where got ‘Sir Nick’ the skill of physick and medicine, that he cured your lady from her first illness as though by magic? Sir Nick had the Latin and the French, though but stumblingly; yet I have seen you, in the study, read both as though they were English. How learned Sir Nick that wrist turn (thus!) of swordplay, and half a dozen bottes he never knew? Who gave you the tongue of true prophecy? What hand behind the stars taught you even the craft of war?”

  His voice rose up and stopped. The long silence was broken only by the flutter of the taperflame outside the bed curtain.

  “Giles.”

  “Master?”

  “Speak not of me. Speak of my lady! You own, you acknowledge, the letter to the Green Ribbon and their bullyrocks was writ by her hand?”

  “I do,” said Giles. “She hated Sir Nick, as she had reason. She was fast in her religious faith. Having no head for the body politic, she believed in this ‘good cause’ because she thought (wrongly!) it would have been her father’s. She was half-crazed; she wrote it. … Now mark, sir, what she wrote to the same Green Ribbon but a quarter of an hour later! Look upon it!”

  With an unsteady hand he reached inside his sober black coat and drew out two crumpled letters on grey paper. The first Fenton knew too well, and Giles flung it on the bed. Taking the candle holder in one hand, Giles flattened out the second letter and held it before Fenton’s eyes.

  Brightly the light brought out what was written there. It was Lydia’s handwriting, far more agitated than it had been in the first note. It scrawled upwards across the page; it was as though he could hear Lydia’s voice, or see her there beside him.

  “A quarter of an Houre gone, I did write to tell where you might fynde my husband. I cannot say now ’twas a Lye, else
I be not believed. But I say I was a poor Madwoman and a Fool. To your Countrey-Party I say, if you do him any Hurt (which I think you cannot, for you fear his swordeplay!!), I will denounce you to all Justices as Murtherers, and owne my part in’t. I send these secretly, by Job the groom, in hope to overtake the First. But I will write you no more, ever. God for King Charles! as he saith.

  “And I do disowne you in my title proper,

  “Lady (Lydia) Fenton.”

  Giles held the candle close until he saw Fenton had read it several times. Letting the note fall on the coverlet, he put the light back on the bedside table.

  “Was it not natural?” Giles asked softly.

  “Giles, whence came this letter?”

  “’Tis ill advised to ask,” returned Giles pertly. “You see it: enough! If it came from the strongbox of Sir Joseph Williamson or Mr. Henry Coventry, his Majesty’s Secretaries of State … why, ’twas your own money filched it out. Faugh! Their parcel of spies grow so confused or knavish they can’t separate innocence from guilt.”

  “Yet there were other letters, I think?”

  “Sir, there were none.”

  Weakly Fenton raised himself from the pillow.

  “Is it so?” he demanded. “Not one which began, ‘If you kill him not the next time, I will abandon the Green Ribbon?”

  “Sir,” retorted Giles, showing his teeth and looking Fenton straight in the eyes, “no such letter was ever writ. Mr. Reeve hath proved it so. A certain knave who hates you, and deceiving even the King’s own self …”

  “What knave?”

  “I’ll not clap a name on him until you shall be stronger. This rogue pretended he had read a letter (which none other hath seen) and did swear ’twas from your lady. His tale? Faugh! We shewed ’twas a nosegay of lies. I can fetch ten witnesses, and the damned rogue himself, as my evidence!”

  Fenton sank back against the pillow, closing his eyes. For some time he remained motionless, while he could hear the creak of Giles’s shoes as the latter paced about. Evidently Giles could endure it no longer.

  “Eh, well?” he asked.

  To Fenton it was as though the sealed wound, far inside and quiet, had now broken and begun to bleed.

  “Your lady believed you to be some other soul in the very shape and flesh of her husband,” said Giles in a repressed voice; “and thus loved you. When she lay dying, and you not there, she thought that first letter a ‘judgment’ on her, and wished to die. Sir, do you not find this at all pitiful? Have I cleared her poor character, now that she is gone?”

  Fenton cried out in protest.

  “Giles, I have been the world’s fool. I have not considered; I did not dream …”

  “Nay, now,” said Giles, his voice softening. “I had expected too much from you. And I plagued you too hard. For this, sir, I beg forgiveness.”

  “Forgiveness? You, to whom I owe all deliverance?”

  “Well, well,” growled Giles, and stared at the floor. Suddenly he became all a-bustle. “And now,” he added severely, “I must look to my duties. I must go down and seek the wine I promised Lord George Harwell some time gone. There’s not even a whet of barley water since nine days; my lord will be raving.”

  “Stay, I would …!”

  But, leaving the light behind, Giles bustled out and closed the door behind him.

  Fenton half-smiled. He leaned back and, for a longer time than he knew, pondered the whole matter. In every corner of the dusky room he saw some image of Lydia.

  He thought of what absurdities his own mind had made him believe about her. He remembered how often she had suggested, almost in tears, that she had done him some “harm.” Yet most clearly he remembered that night, in her room, when he was roused from sleep to fight the mob. Would a descendant of Roundhead fighting men have held him back, if he wished to go? He remembered how Lydia had given him the padded war helmet.

  “If you die,” she had said, “then must I die too. And not …”

  In a strange way Fenton was happy. He had lived in the wind between the worlds. He knew that the devil existed; and, Master of all, the devil’s Opponent. Lydia was not dead. Fenton’s head turned sideways, as though he would look across the room towards the dressing closet where hung his swords and daggers. His hand sought the region of his own heart. He could join Lydia when he liked. He could—

  “Sir!”

  And Fenton was startled, forgetting his long thoughts, to find Giles again beside his bed. Fenton scented trouble as the mastiffs scented it.

  “Master,” said Giles, “you are your own self again. Now I seek your commands, as to how I must deal with two visitors who are newly come downstairs. They are separate; not upon the same business. The first, perhaps negligible, is Madam York …”

  “Meg York?”

  “Ay; and with a monstrous haunted look to her. Madam York I led into the withdrawing room, and bade her attend. But the other, a man whom we have—”

  “Yes?”

  “He comes, or so he says, on ‘a matter of state.’ He huffs as high as a City alderman, crying down my excuses of your illness and bereavement. This fellow would see you. How shall I deal with him?”

  “I will deal with him,” replied Fenton, with a happy but wicked smile. “Aid me to dress.”

  “Sir,” exclaimed Giles. “You’d not go downstairs? You lack the strength!”

  But this did not seem to matter. Fenton, forcing strength into himself by sheer damn-you determination, threw back the bedclothes and swung cramped legs over the side of the bed.

  “A matter of state, eh?” he said, breathing hard. “Call it a matter of the body politic, of the Green lords at their mischief. And … Giles! When I was put abed, did you mark the ring on my left hand? A cameo ring, the gift of His Majesty? I must wear that, as also my Clemens Hornn sword.”

  “You are yet in no way of health for swordplay! You need it not! Already I have given certain small commands …”

  Giles’s voice trailed away. His eyes narrowed in speculation.

  “And yet peradventure you do well,” he said. “For I think you now meet your greatest danger of all!”

  CHAPTER XX

  THE FIRST THE ROYAL DRAGOONS

  THE CLEMENS HORNN SWORD swung at his hip. He wore a coat of blue velvet, a buff waistcoat with gold buttons, and buff-coloured stockings between the blue breeches and the medium-heeled shoes. Out of his periwig looked a face of sickbed pallor, yet freshly shaven as every day Giles had shaved him, and the face was smiling.

  Thus Fenton, on unsteady legs, went down to meet his visitor. Giles, who carried a seven-branched candelabrum to light him, either could not or would not speak the name of the visitor.

  And yet, to Fenton’s sensitivity, it seemed that the whole house was alive with stealthy movement. As he went first out into the upstairs passage, he could have sworn he saw Harry—the porter-swordsman who had been badly hurt in the mob fight—go limping up another pair of stairs towards the lumber room.

  Furthermore, no sooner had he stepped out of his room than there was a scurrying and padding and whining; and the three great mastiffs were about him, with brindled Thunder hurrying first. They sensed he had been ill. Not even Thunder reared up to put paws on his shoulders. But they crowded close, frantically licking his hand as he patted them; they whined, their puzzled eyes upraised.

  “Gently!” said Fenton, steadying himself. “Gently, now!”

  He walked down the stairs after Giles, the dogs slithering at his heels. While Giles set the candelabrum on the newel post, Fenton turned from the stairs, took a few steps towards the front of the large lower hall, and stopped in astonishment.

  The floor was swept and shining. All the wall tapers were glowing in their sconces with very bright but soft light. The hall was empty except for a man standing in the open doorway, the front door being thrown
wide.

  This was a rather tall, heavy man, whose scarlet uniform coat (with black frogs) stretched well below his boot tops and was half undone. He wore a heavy backsword, and lace sprouted at his throat. On his black oiled periwig was jammed rakishly the broad-brimmed black hat with the curled scarlet plume. At the moment his big nutmeg-grated face was red with wrath behind so large a curled black moustache that the moustache seemed to mingle with the sides of the periwig. In contrast, his blue eyes bulged under dark, tangled eyebrows.

  Fenton looked at Giles, who had put aside the candelabrum and followed him.

  “Giles,” he said, “here is some other grievous mistake.” He smiled at the newcomer. “Sir, are you not Captain O’Callaghan, of the First the Royal Dragoons?”

  “I have that honour,” said Captain O’Callaghan, drawing himself up stiffly.

  “Giles, observe!” requested Fenton, and nodded towards the open.

  Outside, where the air was sweet to Fenton’s oppressed lungs, path and lime trees were illuminated by a brilliant half-moon. Beyond the trees, motionless on their horses, sat a file of dragoons, facing the house. They wore the long sword at the left side; over the left shoulder to the right hip, on a leather baldric, was slung the flintlock musketoon, or light musket.

  “Have you forgot, Giles?” demanded Fenton. “Why, ’twas Captain O’Callaghan who bade his men salute us, that night we fought the Green Ribbon!”

  And Fenton stepped forward, holding out his hand. Thunder, biggest of the mastiffs, padded at his side.

  “Captain,” Fenton went on with deep sincerity, “I give you all a hearty welcome, if a poor one. I have been, you apprehend, the merest trifle unwell. My household is in confusion, since my … my wife … my—”

  His voice trailed off. There was more here than something wrong. O’Callaghan, fiery with embarrassment, still remained stiffly and did not extend his hand.

  “What is the meaning of this?” Fenton asked in a low voice.

  “Sir Nicholas,” burst out the captain, “I hold ye high in esteem; strike me dumb if I don’t! I have little stomach for my errand here; nay, I’ll confess that too. But ’tis me juty, don’t ye see?” His voice was almost pleading. “And a word to ye first!”