The Devil in Velvet

by John Dickson Carr

  “There’s a horse outside for ye,” said Captain O’Callaghan, looking at the floor.

  “Then I am at your service, captain,” Fenton said.

  Late that night, long after Fenton had ridden away with the dragoons, many persons gathered together belowstairs. They made a circle, in the reek and red fire heat of the kitchen, for the trial of Judith Pamphlin. Few words were spoken. No flogging was done. The verdict was only a nod. Big Tom, gripping her by the hair, held her head and shoulders over a wooden tub, and slowly cut her throat while rats scampered unheeded. They buried her in the back garden, with such craft at turfing that no man has ever found even bones or dust.

  And elsewhere, at the Tower, the game of wits ran fast to its final, deadliest move.

  CHAPTER XXI

  OF LION ROAR AT THE TOWER

  THE ROAR OF A LION, not far away as distance goes, was answered by an even throatier roar from another cage. The squall of a catamountain pierced through both.

  The menagerie at the Tower of London, housed inside the Lion Gate but outside both the main gate under the Byward Tower and then the western moat, was open to the public on payment of a small fee. High rose the babble of Jack and Jill, with their friends, as they clamoured towards the long, low menagerie house under a sky darkened even here by chimney smoke and soot from the City.

  Colonel Howard heard the uproar as he strolled along the sentry walk of the battlements on the wall, southwards, beside the river. Colonel Howard, Deputy Governor of the Tower, should never have been of the military despite his good service. His face, delicate, with shiny cheekbones and a domed skull half-hidden by his grey periwig, was the face of a scholar or a dreamer. Colonel Howard was both.

  Though the late afternoon had become hot, he wrapped closer round him the long cloak from collar to boot ankle. Long ago he had caught an ague in the Low Countries, and was often cold. Colonel Howard’s short pointed beard and small moustaches, against the thin face, also suggested Spain and subtlety. After him tramped one of the warders, a fat fierce man as most tried to look, clad in the red doublet and hose, with the flat black-velvet cap, which had been the traditional dress of warders since the time of Henry the Eighth.

  “Colonel Howard, sir!” hissed the warder, with all mystery in his voice. Greatly daring, he touched the Deputy Governor’s arm and advanced a good carbuncle of a nose.

  “What’s amiss?” the warder whispered. “What cully’s work’s afoot for this night? Is it murder, or the like? Tip me the wink, sir!”

  Colonel Howard regarded him with a mild frown.

  “Latine loqui elegantissime,” he said in his soft voice, and shook his head sadly. “Or your English speech, I should have said.” The frown grew still more mild. “Have you heard report of murder, then? If so, you speak late.”

  The warder shrank back, protesting hastily. He lacked the words to explain that through this old fortress, among the warders and the redcoat military garrison as well, there ran a swift rumour, a word behind hand. It said that something of dire import, like the blazing star which heralded the plague, would strike here tonight.

  “Come,” invited Colonel Howard, patient but with narrowed eyes. “Speak your mind!”

  The warder, wildly at guess, pointed ahead. Along the sentry walk they were approaching the round, rough-stone squatness of the Middle Tower, with a heavy barred door opening on the sentry walk.

  “Sir Nick Fenton, the devil in velvet,” he said hoarsely, “is shut up in there since a fortnight. Ecod, sir! When they fetched him here, I thought him an old man.”

  “And so did I,” the other said thoughtfully.

  “Ah! But a fortnight’s good food and wine? Why, he’s fleshed out again, fighting-muscled, all a-prowl like the leopard at the menagerie. And with a look … a look …”

  Colonel Howard, who had almost forgotten his companion, nodded with the same thoughtfulness.

  “As though he had passed through some horror?” murmured the Deputy Governor. “And walked amid flame and foulness, like the Italian of Florence, and was his own man again, yet kept the memory of horror behind his eyes?”

  Again the warder was deeply perplexed, as were others, by this Englishman with the Spaniard’s face. As a weapon the warder carried only a short partisan, which the public always miscalled a halberd; and he stamped its shaft on the old stones.

  “Under favour, colonel, a black ugly look is a black ugly look; no more! But which of us ha’ heard,” and he pointed, “of a prisoner in the Middle Tower? Why not the Beauchamp Tower, as is usual? There you hold him safe and fast. But here’s the Middle Tower with a door opening straight to this sentry walk where we stand! And look you there, under favour!”

  The fat red-clad warder leaned through an opening between two of the battlements on the riverside. Below there was a heavy wharf, stretching the entire southern side. It was mounted with a long line of heavy ordnance, great cannon of iron or brass, against attack from the river.

  But, so that the river should serve as a natural moat, the wharf had been built out a little distance from the wall. Under its smoke pall the Thames ran dark and placid. Inside the piles of the wharf and this wall, the water yet boiled and hissed white.

  “There’s but one door,” said the warder, “between the devil in velvet and a leap from here. We could cross him with musket fire; ay. But …”

  Wheezing, he turned round the battlements, and stopped short.

  Colonel Howard was not even listening. He was looking back, musingly, over the inside premises of the fortress; harsh, yet touched with greenery; the Bell Tower at the angle of the inner ballium wall; and all dominated by the huge square bulk, grey-white stone with a lookout pinnacle at each corner, which was then called Julius Caesar’s Tower.

  “These stones are too old, and full of bones,” said Colonel Howard. “Too many men have died and then walked here. William Brown, are you never affrighted?”

  The warder gaped at him. “Me, sir?”

  “You are a fortunate man. I am oft affrighted.”

  More lions roared from the menagerie, their noise mingling with the laughter of children. Subtly the Deputy Governor’s face altered; and Warder Brown, who knew this cloudy-cove’s fame in battle, felt disquiet.

  “As to your warnings,” murmured Colonel Howard, “I fear you must address them to Sir Robert.” He meant the Governor of the Tower, a stern martinet. “Now unlock and unbar me this door to the Middle Tower. Stand your guard outside, while I speak with the prisoner.”

  It was done. Inside, as the bars again clanged behind him, the Deputy Governor stood in a circular room of stone blocks, very hot and oppressive, yet spacious and with windows. Prisoners at the Tower seldom suffered as they suffered at Newgate.

  “I am the bearer of news,” Colonel Howard said to Fenton.

  Fenton, his periwig discarded for his own black hair, stood in a cambric shirt, with old velvet breeches and gold buckles to his shoes, beside a table in the middle of the stone room.

  “I have long guessed your news,” he said without amusement. “On the night they took me, I was too shaken to think. But a friend—call him Mr. Reeve—had already warned me of exactly what might happen. Now I am charged with leading a Catholic conspiracy (God save such nonsense!) to rise against London with blood and fire. Mark how every stone falls into place, from a so-called Catholic mistress to a French Catholic cook named Madame Taupin. I was even advised to seek audience with the King. He sought audience with me. Well, I am here.”

  Colonel Howard, without replying, drew out a chair beside the table and sat down. His sword scabbard rattled against the floor, but he did not unfasten his cloak. On the table were several long clay pipes, an earthen bowl of tobacco, and piles of books.

  “No,” he replied, “that is not my news.” As though irrelevantly he added: “I believe I have visited you upon every day since your imprisonm
ent?”

  “For which I am deeply grateful.”

  “We have discoursed of history, literature, architecture, astronomy …” Colonel Howard all but sighed. A red-clad arm reached from inside his cloak and sought the books on the table. “Nay, the pleasure was mine! Yet we have never spoken of your—personal affairs?”

  “No. Never.”

  “Yet I venture to think,” said Colonel Howard, and lifted sharply penetrating eyes, “that you now mistrust all persons on this earth?”

  Fenton merely lifted his shoulders again, but did not reply. He was as tense, as watchful, as a hunting leopard.

  “Come, I would not pry!” protested Colonel Howard, and meant it. “But I dare suppose,” he added casually, “you have at least once met with the devil?”

  Fenton, staring back at him, felt the first qualm in many days. Involuntarily he put up his hand to his face, shading it. Though he was permitted no razor, not even a blunt knife to cut meat (which enraged him, because of his secret determination), each day he was shaved by the Governor’s own barber.

  “Never fear betrayal from me!” said Colonel Howard. His voice grew soft again. “Though, since with you all men’s credit is stabbed, you’ll not believe me.” He mused. “Now I have never met with the devil. But I am sensible he exists, and walks the earth, and might appear beside us at any moment.”

  Fenton merely smiled, as though at a modest pleasantry.

  “You said,” he answered politely, “that you brought news for me?”

  “True, true.” Colonel Howard glanced quickly round, and rose to his feet with an air of haste. “Let us go apart to the window.”

  The old arrow slits had been fashioned into windows in Tudor times. They were still small, and heavily barred. Colonel Howard beckoned Fenton towards a window facing west, above a moat stagnant and malodorous because it did not join the river. A causeway crossed the moat to the Byward Tower; and beyond rose the babble of the crowd round the menagerie house.

  “Now do you forget the devil,” said Colonel Howard in a very low tone. He snapped his fingers, as though flicking out the devil like a bird over the ill-smelling moat. “I bring you word, privately, from Sir Robert himself. Very late this night you will have a visitor.”

  “Indeed?” Fenton’s heart quickened. “What visitor?”

  “A lady. Or perhaps say only a woman. Her name or quality I know not.”

  “A woman?”

  “S-ss-t! There is a window close to the door giving on the sentry walk, and, outside, a warder fire-consumed with curiosity.”

  “Nay, but this visitor! Inside the Tower? After the drums beat the tattoo?”

  “I can but tell you what I was told,” said Colonel Howard. A breeze stirred his grey periwig. Lightly he touched his moustaches and pointed beard, more brown than grey; a thin amusement gleamed in his eyes and died. “Sir Robert knows little more, or so I think. Yet this piece of gullery (you espy?) could have been managed only by someone in high place and command.”

  Beyond the moat, not far away, a mountebank was amusing the crowd by playing two flutes at once, with a flute stuck in each corner of his mouth. Many persons hurried to him, away from a parson who had been preaching a sermon beside the gallows on Tower Hill. The parson was waving his arms and seemed to be calling down wrath.

  “But what is this woman’s errand?” demanded Fenton. “I can’t imagine,” he added dryly, “that mine host of this good inn will even provide a wench for my comfort.”

  “No. That goes too far.” Then Colonel Howard’s tone changed. “I am instructed to say only that she will bring you a message of great import. You will listen, and obey her. She is trustworthy—”

  “Indeed.”

  “—and in your interest. That is all.” Colonel Howard dropped his half-whisper and spoke in a normal tone. “Now would you hear news of a friend you but recently mentioned; and who, I hear, laboured mightily for you in a certain cause? Mr. Jonathan Reeve?”

  “Mr. Reeve!” said Fenton, gripping the bars of the window. His warmth of eagerness was apparent. “What news have you of him?”

  “He hath been rewarded, Sir Nicholas. Precisely as once you desired.”

  “Oh? And by whom?”

  “By His Majesty the King.”

  “Your pardon, Colonel Howard. But I beg leave to doubt that.”

  “Have a care, Sir Nicholas,” his companion said softly. “I can pardon much, conjecturing as I do that you have fought the devil and won your soul …”

  On the iron bars Fenton’s hands tightened and wrenched.

  “… yet still I hold the King’s commission; and I am Deputy Governor of the Tower.”

  Fenton spun round from the window.

  “Now how you terrify me!” he said pleasantly. “A fortnight gone, I was sick and much ashamed. In candour, I would now administer a dose of the same physick to someone else. Summon your guards, good sir. Let us see what a man may do against them with a table leg or a chair.”

  Colonel Howard was not even listening.

  “‘Hunc igitur terrorem animi, tenebrasque necessest—’” he muttered; then he paused suddenly and looked up. “Then you would not hear how your good and steadfast friend came at last to his reward?”

  Fenton hesitated, looked at the floor, and nodded. Colonel Howard went back to the chair by the table, where he sat down and took up a copy of Juvenal’s satires.

  “I was myself a witness,” he said, touching the book as though idly. “Though I go but seldom from the Tower, I was dispatched two days gone with a communication from Sir Robert to His Majesty’s self. The King, with some others, did play at pêle-méle in the Mall below the green terraces and in the Park. Mightily they smote the ball, shouting like schoolboys, amid the yellow dust.”

  Colonel Howard turned the book over in his hands.

  “Presently,” he went on, “the King made a sign, as one who cries stop. The dust settled down. The mallets were put by. I saw this Jonathan Reeve approaching, on his swollen gouty legs, and on the arm of my Lord Danby.

  “He did not know what was in store for him. But you conceive how he looked? All in patched black, with his great belly and his old sword, and his countenance like a soiled archbishop’s in the long white hair? So he limped straight to the King, very proudly until he was there. Whereat, in a thing not seen in public these many years, he went down on one gouty knee, and bent his white head low.

  “One or two there were who would have smiled; but that the King looked at them, and they ceased. His Majesty’s self, with the dust on his coat and periwig, seemed embarrassed. Yet, when I did glance again, he seemed like unto his father.

  “‘Nay, I am not knighting you,’ said he. And then his great voice was like a drum. ‘But rise up, Earl of Lowestoft, Viscount Stowe, and take your rightful place among men. The return of your title and estates is but a poor repayment to one among many.’

  “And this Jonathan Reeve, Earl of Lowestoft, whispered but one word, which was, ‘Sire!’ All crowded about him, that they might set him upon his feet and speak civilly to him. And yet, scarce a quarter-hour after his great happiness, Jonathan Reeve was dead.”

  Colonel Howard paused. Juggling with the volume of Juvenal’s satires, he threw it on the table with a slap which roused the half-hypnotized Fenton.

  “Dead?” repeated Fenton, raising a hand to his eyes.

  “Truly.”

  “But how?”

  “Come, the man was eighty.” Colonel Howard spoke carelessly. “Such honours, after decades of poverty and jeers, overcame him. In the King’s own coach, on the way home to some blowsy tavern in Red Lion Fields, he seemed to drowse until the coachman heard a weak cry of, ‘God for King Charles!’ And so he died.”

  Fenton went slowly across to the improvised wooden bunk with the straw mattress. He sat down on the bed and put his head in his
hands.

  “It occurs to me too, though perhaps to no purpose,” mused Colonel Howard, “that you have another good friend. You name him Giles Collins. Nay; don’t start up! He is safe enough. But are you sensible of who he really is?”

  “Why,” said Fenton, pressing his hands to his temples, “I recollect Giles did once ask me the same question, when we were at swordplay practice. Did my father never tell me who he was? Or something of like meaning.”

  “Heard you ever,” asked Colonel Howard, “of Woodstock Palace?”

  Fenton sat up straight.

  “In October of the year ’49,” his companion continued slowly, “some eight or nine months after the murder of King Charles the First, a group of Roundhead Commissioners went down to Woodstock Palace. Their work was to dilapidate or destroy. And yet, by November 2nd, they were driven forth in terror by what seemed (I say seemed) the antics of evil spirits.”

  Fenton uttered an exclamation. He remembered the incident now.

  “Ah!” murmured Colonel Howard, giving him a sideways glance. “Then I need not recount the Roundhead Commissioners’ unhappy experiences, which they drew up in a solemn statement as comical as any play by Mr. Shadwell. There were in truth no enorm spectres to drench them with foul water, kick over their candles, fly away with their breeches, fire cannon, set great logs a-rolling in locked-up bedchambers.

  “The author of all the mischief was their pious scrivener-clerk­, a concealed Royalist. With two confederates, a trap door, some chymical salts and gunpowder, he had made a blue flame rise even from the pot-de-chambre. He called himself Giles Sharp. His true name was Joseph Collins, sometimes called Funny Joe, and all the countryside round Oxford still honours him.

  “He was also a gentleman,” said Colonel Howard, “first swordsman of Sir Thomas Draycott’s troop of horse at Worcester fight in ’50! Yet, being poor, he took menial service with the valiant. Can you put me together that man’s two names?”

  “Oh, without doubt,” answered Fenton, gripping the sides of the wooden bed. “Giles Collins, who in my hearing hath played both Puritan clerk and Funny Joe, can distinguish between good and evil spirits.”