The Devil in Velvet

by John Dickson Carr

  Again Colonel Howard gave him a swift glance. Fenton’s eyes were shining, but not with enjoyment.

  “Pray let me tell you,” said Fenton, “what those Roundhead Commissioners had done. They would besmirch all that belonged to King Charles the First. His bedchamber they used for a kitchen, his dining room for a woodyard. They smashed the stained-glass windows, mutilated the statues, knifed the great paintings.” His voice deepened. “All that was of beauty, all that was of dignity and grace …”

  Fenton stopped abruptly. Colonel Howard’s long fingers tightened round the stem of a tobacco pipe and snapped the pipe in two pieces.

  “Good!” cried Fenton.

  “What! You call that sacrilege good?”

  “Nay, you mistake me. In all our discourse together, for the first time you have shown some heart or human feelings.”

  “Heart? Human feelings?” Colonel Howard was perplexed. “Upon my word, what have these to do with me? Indeed I have felt none for many years, since my wife died shrieking in the Great Fire.”

  “Is it so?” demanded Fenton. “You had a wife?”

  Rising up from the bed, he went to the table and clutched its edges on either side, looking down strangely on his companion.

  “I also had a wife,” he added. “She too is dead. She was poisoned.”

  “Poisoned?”

  It was plain, by the startled look on Colonel Howard’s face, that this secret had been well kept. None of authority knew it.

  “In this cell of yours,” said Fenton, breathing hard, “I have thought much and much. I can tell you who poisoned my wife. Nay, I can prove it! But I cannot do so unless I be permitted to write or communicate with my friends outside the Tower. I am allowed no visitors; not even pen and ink and paper. Why am I not allowed these?”

  “I can’t tell. It is not within my orders.”

  Fenton shook the table until books tumbled off and spattered face down on the floor.

  “You have heard, sir, that I guess the charges brought against me. Let me add to this Tam o’ Bedlam list. Come! Did I not speak, in Spring Gardens and to a false Frenchman called Duroc, with admiration of the French? Did I not cry out, before a clot of the mobile party who attacked my house, that I might well be a Catholic? ‘Have you knowledge to foretell the future?’ said their leader. And I must reply, ‘Yes.’”

  “Hum! Did you make mention,” inquired Colonel Howard, “of any pact with the devil?”

  “No. But I might have done so.”

  “That I can credit. But not to the least degree in anger.”

  “Colonel, put by this sorry stuff of treason! In our world I desire only justice for the person who poisoned my wife. May I not send a letter, even a spoken message, from here?”

  “It is not in my orders.”

  “May I have speech with the Governor of the Tower?”

  “Certes, Sir Nicholas, you may apply for it.”

  “Which must mean,” said Fenton, bending over him, “that I’ll not get it?”

  “I have no orders.”

  Though not in the least afraid of the prisoner, Colonel Howard pushed back his chair, stood up, and moved behind the chair.

  “I regret,” he said, “my time here is spent.” For the first time he raised his voice and called sharply. “Warder! Open me the door!”

  Outside the door to the sentry walk there was a scurry and a rattle of keys.

  “I have been much diverted,” remarked Colonel Howard, with a kind of maddening wistfulness, “by our discourses on history and poetry. I bear you no ill will. Remember what I have said; a woman will visit you late. Do as she shall bid.”

  A heavy door lock snapped after the bars were rung back. In the quarter-opening of the door appeared the sharp, polished blade of the partisan, with the red chest of Warder Brown behind it.

  “Remember!” Colonel Howard said for the second time. When he raised one finger, he was uncannily like Charles the First on the scaffold. “You have less time than you think.”

  The door closed, and was locked and barred once more, as the Deputy Governor left him. Fenton stood staring at the door, his hopes gone as though he had swallowed moat water. Throughout a fortnight, never speaking of himself, he had tried to gain the confidence of Colonel Howard.

  He went back to the improvised bed and sat down.

  His gaze travelled round the hot room, which was not overclean despite its size, past a pile of his clothes on the floor. In the wall opposite him there was a second door, also locked and heavily barred. Outside the door there was a winding stair in the wall; Fenton’s fancy followed it down to the room below, always full of warders and on its walls the heavy muskets of the military.

  As Fenton’s consciousness opened again, the noises from outside rolled over him. He could even hear from below—on the path under the arch which led to the other side of the Middle Tower—the trampling and merriment of visitors, who might see the sights if they were escorted by a warder.

  From the menagerie a hyena coughed and barked. The long afternoon light, smoke-darkened, drew towards evening amid grey stones. The crowds must go soon. Apparently the flute player had already gone. But three other mountebanks, with fiddles and fury, struck up a tune which made Fenton raise his head quickly. “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 …”

  It was no great coincidence, since everywhere in the City they now sang it. But the old Earl of Lowestoft was dead.

  Let him sleep well. For Lydia, who was always with Fenton in imagination, returned to soothe him now. As a rule he saw her as he had seen her on that last night at the dinner, amid silver and wax lights, while Mr. Reeve made the cittern tinkle softly to Ben Jonson’s old love song.

  He knew he saw Lydia only in fancy, else he would have come to madness. But Lydia sat in the chair lately occupied by Colonel Howard. Lydia’s blue eyes were open and eager, but sorrowful. A light was about her brown hair. Her half-parted lips made attempt to smile. Her hands were clasped together, arms a little raised towards him.

  And Fenton spoke to her aloud.

  “Wait for me; you’ll remember that?” he asked. “This day’s work was bitter, when I would persuade the Deputy Governor, but failed. No matter! I am not yet defeated. Since I know the name of the poisoner …”

  Fenton paused, regretting his words. Lydia, despite what seemed a frantic attempt to touch his hand, fled from him at that word “poisoner,” as she would have fled in life. His mind would not allow him to see her when he thought of poison.

  But the poisoner, of course, was Kitty Softcover, his former cook.

  Kitty, the Alsatian bawd, must be very much alive. Nevertheless Fenton pictured her as standing near him: small, grubbily clad, with her fine red hair and her fine white skin, but with bad teeth and greedy eyes. Her eyes darted everywhere for diamonds, for emeralds.

  “My good slut,” said Fenton, “it was you I suspected from the first, and spoke my mind to Giles. I found in the lock of the front door the soap traces of the mould you took for a key. Immediately I ordered a bar to be put up inside that door. But someone forgot it. As I saw myself, when Captain O’Callaghan took me in arrest, there was no bar inside that door.”

  It was as though Kitty lifted her upper lip, hating and yet writhing to cozen him.

  “But where, good slut, could you have found another great heap of arsenic to poison my lady? Only here in the Tower did I call to mind the shop of William Wynnel, the apothecary, in Dead Man’s Lane. And the occasion upon which I went there with Lord George Harwell.”

  In fancy the figure of Kitty laughed at him.

  “I gave you good character,” said Fenton. “I said naught was amiss. Even when George must fall a-ranting with talk of murder, I bade him be silent and confirmed my words by guineas in the apothecar
y’s hand. You sought him first (I vow?) since ’twas plain the old man doted on you? Had you returned, he would have given you as much more poison as you wished.

  “Upon that I lay my wager, little claw-hand. You hated me; you hated my wife. Did you not poison a bowl of sack posset before my eyes, with arsenic in sugar? On the night of June 10th you crept into my house. Didst come to steal? You remained to kill. My friends have but to seize Master Wynnel, choking truth from him; and we hold you fast for the law.”

  But Kitty had vanished, because Fenton’s thoughts faltered.

  He passed a hand over his damp forehead. The fiddlers were silent, their tune ended. Fenton, drawing himself back on the side of the bed, rested his back against the wall.

  The intense heat was fading, though there remained the ill odour of the western moat. Fenton let his head fall forwards, again attempting to think. …

  Almost immediately, or so it seemed, a voice in his brain seemed to cry out. “Take care, take care, take care!” it noiselessly keened.

  Fenton sat up straight, with a twist of pain in his cramped shoulders. Momentarily he thought he was in pitch-darkness. Then, as he blinked his eyes open, he saw that the stone room was deathly clear in all its outlines from the light of a full moon through barred windows.

  Admittedly he had been asleep, as though storing up energies for some combat. In all the rabbit warren of the Tower there seemed no sound, not even a whisper, except the faint lapping of water below.

  In that quiet there was the emptiness and even skin-crawl of a late hour, perhaps even in the morning. He had not heard the steady tramp-tramp-tramp along the path below, and the ceremony of the keys as the portcullis was lowered at the Byward Tower. He had heard no roll of drums from the parade ground. Nothing.

  With a quietness he could not explain even to himself, Fenton edged forward and stood up. He walked on tiptoe, moving round and round as though some enemy might lurk in a shadow.

  (“Take care! Take care! Take care!”)

  There were three windows: westwards, southwards over the river, and northeastwards near the sentry walk of the battlements. The air was chilly now. Moving soundlessly, Fenton stole over to the northeastwards window.

  The sentry walk was just beyond his line of vision however he tried to look, as it was meant to be. He could see the path below, but no firefly lanthorn bobbed in a sentry’s hand. He could see the Bell Tower at the angle of the inner ballium wall, then the inner battlements set in a line towards the Bloody Tower and the Wakefield Tower, where the Governor had his lodgings.

  Unearthly moonlight darkened the old stones to blackness, but set among them glimmers of white. Even the ravens must be asleep in the trees on Tower Green. Rearing above all was the square shape of Julius Caesar’s Tower, grey-white, dead, as though dead since a dust age when above its pinnacles flew the red-leopard banner of Normandy.

  Fenton shivered. Softly, again without noise, he stole back to the southern window above the river. Even the Thames seemed empty, except for a few craft moored against the Surrey shore across the river, some three hundred yards away. One larger ship, a square-rigger in shadow, carried two green-glowing lanthorns from her mainmast yard. Now Fenton could hear the hiss of white water under the wharf and against the wall. But nothing else.

  Stop! There was another sound.

  Someone, very softly, was moving along the sentry walk towards the door.

  CHAPTER XXII

  THE WOMAN AT MIDNIGHT:

  A NAME IS PUT TO THE POISONER

  ON FENTON’S TABLE there was a great trencher of food and a bottle of wine, evidently left for him while he slept; the food as cold as charity. He picked up the heavy chair, weighed it in his hands, and decided it would do as a weapon.

  Tiptoeing across to half-shadow beyond the western window, he held the chair at his side, and waited.

  Someone, with determination to make no noise, slowly eased back one bar with a grinding slur of iron. Then the second bar outside the door began to move.

  “Gently!” thought Fenton, and quivered with eagerness as he gripped the chair.

  His first notion had been secret assassination. And yet, though he had been shut irrevocably into the past, it was the reign of Charles the Second, not that of Richard the Third. No longer did the rack creak, with a snap of joints torn from their sockets, as some wretch screamed in the dungeons below Julius Caesar’s Tower. No black-clad men, faces dark except for teeth, crawled up the death-narrow stairs of the Bloody Tower.

  The bar on the door went back. A large key rattled in the lock; when it turned, even slowly, the lock snapped like the hammer of an empty musket.

  Briefly he saw a vertical line of moonlight shine and vanish as the door opened and closed. He could hear his visitor breathe. And the visitor was a woman, in a long black cloak with a round hood edged in fine lace.

  Fenton loosened his grip on the chair and set it down. He should have anticipated this, and guessed who she might have been.

  It was Meg York, yet a Meg in some subtle way altered: perhaps by moonlight. Putting down the key on the table, she threw back the hood of the cloak. Her hair, dressed in a new style, fell in long black curls about her shoulders. And her face, with no touch of hardness or irony, was the face of Mary Grenville.

  Fenton went cold, because this must be a mask. Meg kept one hand inside her cloak, as though holding a weapon. His hands moved again to the chair, watchfully. She at least was flesh and blood.

  Without sound she swept towards Fenton, and stopped close to him. In horrible grotesque, to his eyes, as a mask of flesh, her face seemed warm with pity and sympathy. She spoke in a voice just above a whisper.

  “You can have no fondness for me, I know,” she said. “Yet you must do as I bid, for I am here to aid you.”

  Fenton merely looked at her.

  “I tell you,” cried Meg in a whispery voice, and stamped her foot audibly on the floor, “you must make haste! You have not a night, not an hour, to lose; else you will die. I swear this!”

  “Come, I think not. They hold me on a charge of treason, I grant …”

  “But—!”

  “But, in consideration of Sir Nick’s high name and place, and also as sitting in Parliament, they cannot fling me into Newgate as a felon. They must bring against me a Bill of Attainder in the House of Commons. Parliament will not be convoked, my sweet, until the year ’77.”

  “If you make not your escape within this hour,” said Meg, “all hope is gone.” Meg yearned towards him. “Can you not intrust me?”

  Though Fenton did not laugh, his jaws and lips went through the movement of it.

  “Again?” he asked politely.

  Meg closed her eyes, pressing one hand over her face, as though with fierce effort she would draw to herself some mighty power.

  “Am I again fallen in love with my winding sheet,” said Fenton, “that I should intrust your warmth and your desire? What are you but a succubus of the underworld, whose true touch is as cold as ice? And where is your master?”

  “My …?”

  “I refer to the devil. Surely he must be near us. Stay, I have a new notion: summon him up, my pet! I would have audience with him for the third time, and defeat him as I did before!”

  Meg, now shaken by deadly terror, glanced everywhere about her and all but fell on her knees.

  “Stop!” she whispered. “You must not say those words! I beg it!”

  “Why, then,” and Fenton smiled like a death’s head, “is he so very near us?”

  “He is far and far away. He hath forgotten you. He thinks no more on you than on thousands of life in a drop of water. He did promise …”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise me,” said Meg, “that he would trouble you no more, since he knoweth history must run out its sands. But if you do call him, or say that you defeated him—”


  “Let him catch a pox in his own domain,” said Fenton, “for I did at least half-defeat him. True, his gibes and wrath drove me in fear from the house, while you sat half-naked on a couch and hated me that I did yield. But my fear was fear for Lydia. It was history won; not the devil. You heard your master own that I kept my soul, which so enraged him. That was the victory. ‘For what shall it profit …?’”

  “Stop! Stop! Stop!”

  But it was Meg herself who stifled her own muttering tone.

  “What was that noise?” she asked, turning her head from one side to the other.

  Fenton had heard it too, though only the moonlight seemed real.

  “I think,” he said, “that the lions out there, or it may be other beasts, are restless. I have heard them before. Or perhaps they scent your presence, great and small cats alike.”

  “Call me what you please,” said Meg. “Yet at heart I am Mary Grenville, as you are Nicholas Fenton of Cambridge. I, who followed you back into the past, cannot but love you. I’ll not see you die.” Again Meg pressed one hand to her face. “Nay, now are all my wits scattered! But, if I offer proof of good intent as well, will you hear me?”

  She moved closer. Unnervingly, Meg raised clear grey eyes (or so it seemed), untouched by craft or elusiveness.

  “I … I will hear you.”

  “Well! Is not the door of your prison cell unlocked?” Meg threw out her free left hand to point. “You are a far stronger swimmer than I, though I was accounted good when in dim days we swam together at Richmond. Jump from the battlements, swim beneath the wharf, and you are free!”

  “Free? To go … where?”

  “Have you glanced this night from the southern window of your cell?”

  “I have.”

  “Then did you mark a great ship against the opposite bank? With two green lanthorns at the … at the … nay, I cannot remember men’s names for these things!”

  “No matter; I marked the ship. What do you say of it?”

  “It is his Majesty’s line-of-battle ship Prince Rupert,” said Meg, “carrying forty, sixty: foh, I forget the number of guns. It was ordered there for your sake. You have but to swim three hundred yards and be safe. The ship will convey you to any port in France you shall choose.”