The Devil in Velvet

by John Dickson Carr

  Then both of them, panting, drew back and studied each other. The befooling tricks of moonlight did not aid their swordplay.

  Duroc, bleeding heavily from two bad wounds, still towered­ over Fenton. He swayed once, but he did not fall. No longer, Fenton knew, would he thrust for what seemed to be the eye: it was, in fact, to gash the eyebrow with his point so as to blind his opponent and finish Fenton with leisurely taunting. Duroc employed only an old trick of swordsmen, considered fair.

  But Duroc dared not do it now. His breath was going. He must thrust for the heart, as Fenton did. At the same time, Fenton remembered a trick which would not be invented until the eighteenth century. As a rule, it was impossible to disarm your man. Yet …

  “Now stab my belly,” bellowed a voice not far away, “but there’s Nick Fenton in fight on the sentry walk!”

  “Where?”

  “Look you there!”

  “Ecod, who’s the woman? Scant-clad, and a beauty!”

  Fenton’s insides seemed to contract. Musket fire at close range could …

  The light of lanthorns flooded part way into the very broad path between the inner and the outer walls. There were heavy footfalls on stone stairs in the narrow arch between the Bloody Tower and the Wakefield Tower.

  Fenton, his eyes on the quillons of Duroc’s sword, suddenly gave a great leap backwards. Duroc, gasping in triumph, pounced after him. And Duroc flung forwards, the moon white on his back, in full-length lunge at his adversary’s heart.

  Meg cried out. For Fenton stood wide open, both arms stretched out from his sides; and then he leaped sideways to the right, his sword banging the battlements. Duroc’s point and blade cleanly ripped open the left side of his shirt; Fenton felt against his side the fire-burn of what was only the cold flat of the blade.

  Then the deadfall snapped.

  Fenton’s left arm swept down. As the cup hilt of Duroc’s sword thudded between his left arm and side, Fenton held it clamped there for the instant’s time needed to bring his own blade up and over. Projecting from the left side of Duroc’s cup-hilt was one quillon with its steel curved backwards and close inwards like a narrow hook. Fenton’s blade shot vertically downwards inside the hook, locking and wedging the other sword. Duroc could not jerk it back.

  Too late the pseudo Frenchman saw it in horror. Suddenly whipping away his left hand, Fenton wrenched his right hand over and high to the right. No man’s grip, holding a blade forward as Duroc’s did, could stand against such sideways leverage. Duroc’s sword, torn from his fingers, sailed up and over the battlements in moon-silvered flight, and dropped whirling into the river.

  “There’s the devil in velvet, sir!” bawled a voice almost unnaturally close from below. “Ga! See what he’s done!”

  “Prisoner, stand and give yourself up!” called the curt voice of the military.

  Now the whole broad path hammered with running footsteps. Up sizzled and curled the bright, wicked light of torches.

  Fenton, sword poised for the last thrust, looked up into the dazed, terrified eyes of Duroc, bully of all Europe. And Fenton could not do this; his sword arm trembled. Duroc, misreading his look, stumbled round and ran. Fenton, with unsteady fingers sheathing the stained blade, himself turned to run towards Meg. But he found Meg not four feet behind him, motionless, her hand atop one battlement.

  “Up!” croaked Fenton, so winded he could hardly speak. “Jump!”

  Without hesitation, without assistance, Meg swung herself waist high and jumped over. He heard the splash in the seething water.

  There was a crash as the other door to Fenton’s prison cell, the door from the winding stair in the Middle Tower, was unbarred and burst open. Torches flared in the opening. Fenton raced back and shot the bars of the sentry-walk door, locking it from outside.

  But, as he turned back toward the path inside and below …

  “Muskets, sir? They’ve a-fetched ’em from the Middle Tower!”

  “Muskets! A file along the path. Here! Loose fire at will if he … Prisoner! Will you stand and yield!”

  “Come and take me!” croaked Fenton.

  The whole path seemed a maze of torches that dazzled his eyes. The light pinned him in view like an insect against a wall. Two Foot Guards officers, swords drawn and periwigs askew, were running up shallow steps to the battlements near St. Thomas’s Tower.

  Fenton turned his back to the path and swung up between two battlements. From below came what sounded less like a musket shot than a heavy explosion. Just as the heavy musket ball, erratic, smashed into the battlements a dozen feet away, he dived over.

  Dived …

  Too late he remembered that the wharf, with its battery of guns, was built too near the wall for any but a very close dive. It flashed through his brain as the gun wharf, the white-laced water, sprang up at him. He fell so close to the wharf that its edge tore off the back of one shoe, skinning the ankle. Then the shock of water, a cold hammer, drove him down into mud-swirling depths.

  His upcurved hands carried him up through blackness; and, as he reached the surface, the white rushing water banged his shoulder against a wharf pillar. He swam forwards, dodging obstructions and foul rubbish. The tide was not yet at flood; the current looked worse than it was.

  Writhing his ankles together and kicking off both shoes, Fenton emerged from under the wharf into moonlight. His crawl stroke clove water with the startling speed of his twenty-six years. Ahead of him he could catch a white flash of Meg swimming hard for the two green lanthorns of the dim ship; and how it stirred his heart again to exhilaration!

  The cold wind seemed to have shifted. He put on more speed, his head burrowing into water and sideways for breath. Then a musket ball smacked water beside him and skipped ahead, just as one part of the Tower wall exploded to the din of massed musketry.

  “Dive!” he shouted to Meg, or tried to shout. “Dive!”

  Down he went, deep underwater. The current softly pushed him, smoothed at him, but he swam forward for what seemed minutes, and rasped lungs nearly burst. When he reared his head, twitching back to clear hair from his eyes, he risked a backwards glance.

  The musket fire had stopped. But sputtering lighted matches, each a long cord wound several times round the bearer’s arm, moved amid the gun battery on the wharf.

  Then Fenton looked ahead.

  Kindled to full great shape out of the night, the line-of-battle ship Prince Rupert loomed up only a short distance away. The glow of the battle lanthorns, swung low against the rigging, illuminated the line of cannon on her upper gun deck. Then the high-built sterncastle was illuminated too. From the mainmast head flew the royal standard.

  A heavy-set man in a periwig, one hand on the balustrade of the sterncastle quarter-deck and the other holding a sea trumpet to his lips, shouted with a rolling voice across sound-carrying­ water.

  “Fire on a King’s ship, would ye?” rang the voice. “Master-gunner­! If ye see match move to gun over yonder, lay me a twelve-pounder on that battery!”

  The waist of the Prince Rupert was alive with the hard clack of bare feet running on boards and moving shadows against the battle lanthorns. A rope ladder with wooden treads clattered over the side and swung close to water.

  Far behind, a glimmering gun match stopped in mid-air as though at some order from the top of the Tower wall. A little space more, and Meg emerged from water. She climbed the rope ladder, swinging wildly with her drenched hair pressed close and also her drenched costume, until a staring tar nipped down to give her a hand.

  Over Fenton, too, loomed the curved side of the ship, and the grey canvas above. He steadied the rope ladder; then himself climbed. He knew, as he swung there, that his mind and soul were at peace. Despite those doubts, in this age he had found what he sought. Lydia, though loved, had been a romantic ideal which would soon have palled. Meg, for all her tempers, had be
en his own from the first.

  “We have beaten the devil,” he said, “and we have changed history!” And the Clemens Hornn sword still swung at his hip as he climbed the ladder to safety.

  NOTES FOR THE CURIOUS

  FOURTEEN YEARS AGO, when I wrote a factual study of political events between 1678 and 1681 to surround the murder of a London magistrate, and called it The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey, I did not think I should ever return to the bustling and brawling of the later Restoration. But, through all those years between, I had not ceased to read about it. The amount of factual material on which I have drawn for The Devil in Velvet—especially as regards the minutiae of speech, manners, customs, background, dress, eating, drinking, swordplay—has grown out of hand.

  To add an extended bibliography to a novel intended only for entertainment would overweigh the story and sound like frantic pedantry. The first duty of any novelist, a duty so often forgotten nowadays, is to tell a story. Yet these details of the story, as well as the characters of the genuine historical personages, are all true. The foreshadowing of the “Popish plot” is true. In case some of the curious might be tempted to probe further into this matter, I am happy to add some notes on matters colourful or picturesque.

  CHARACTER OF CHARLES THE SECOND

  “The King of England,” wrote the French Ambassador, Barrillon, to Louis the Fourteenth, “has a manner so well-concealed and so difficult to penetrate that the shrewdest are deceived by it.” (Barrillon to Louis, Sept. 9/19th, 1680, Dalrymple, ii, 204.) “The King,” privately declared that eminent jurist, Sir Franics North, “understands foreign affairs better than all his counsellors put together.” (Roger North, Life of Lord Guilford, 1816 ed., ii, 181.) “He is so shrewd,” commented Sir John Reresby in his Memoirs, “that you never know what he is about.” So speak a few of his contemporaries who knew him.

  The Letters, Speeches, and Declarations of Charles II (collected and edited by Mr. Arthur Bryant, 1935) show his wit as well as his common sense and his policy. To young Thomas Bruce, later Earl of Ailesbury, Charles really defined his aim: “God’s fish, they have put a set of men about me; but they shall know nothing!” (Ailesbury, Memoirs, 1890 ed., 112.)

  Charles’s whole intention was to keep the stability of the kingdom, ensure the rightful succession, and never again to go “on his travels.” After the work of such later historians as Sir John Pollock, Mr. Arthur Bryant, Mr. Cyril Hughes Hartmann, nobody takes seriously the grotesque parody of him which for long had comic place in the schoolbooks.

  The reason for this schoolbook notion is easy to find. In Charles’s own lifetime his Court party became known as Tories, and Shaftesbury’s Country party as Whigs. Now history, throughout the Victorian age, was for the most part written by Whigs. And Whigs, notably Macaulay, had no liking for a King who upheld the monarchial principle with such skill as did Charles the Second.

  Drawing on such sources as Anthony Hamilton’s Memoirs of Count Grammont, the Diary of John Evelyn, the Diary of Samuel Pepys (all obtainable in many editions), the Whigs drew on anecdotes which honest Pepys received at third or fourth hand as gossip from his hairdresser, and tried to picture the King as little more than wencher and fool. Wencher he assuredly was. The populace loved him for it. “God,” said Charles, “will not damn a man for taking a little irregular pleasure by the way”; and Dr. (later Bishop) Burnet noticed that few things touched him to the heart. (Gilbert Burnet, History of My Own Time, 1833 ed., i, 23.) But the Whig historians achieved something of a feat: for years they showed as Jack-fool a King who was the shrewdest man in Europe.

  By the way, it is a joy and delight to read the History of My Own Time in its edition of 1833, which of course was from a text published originally in 1724. But this one is reproduced as it was once edited by Dean Swift, Burnet’s bitter enemy. While the text moves ponderously on, gleaming-eyed Swift runs riot with such footnotes as “Liar!” or “Scotch dog!”

  CHARACTER OF LORD SHAFTESBURY

  The character and a great part of Shaftesbury’s career have been sketched out in this novel. One date in his life has been altered by a year; otherwise all dates and historical events stand as they are stated. Aside from contemporary reports of him by Bishop Burnet, John Dryden, Roger North, and Sir Roger L’Estrange (especially in L’Estrange’s The Mystery of the Death of Sir E. B. Godfrey Unfolded, 1688), he has had his official biography in W. D. Christie’s Life of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury (2 vols., 1871). And there is a fine analysis in H. D. Traill’s Shaftesbury, in the English Worthies series (1886).

  Tory and Whig united to condemn him when the fever of the age had gone, though Christie (Life, ii, 287-293) attempts to slur over some of his violence. But we must see him as he was. He was not a villain, except insofar as he was a fanatic. He would not take a bribe. But he would cheerfully have a man hanged on false evidence or privately murdered. That razorish face can be deciphered only if, to his fierce ambition, we add Traill’s suggestion of an honest blazing belief that Parliament must triumph over the King.

  OF GALLANTRY AND LOVE-MAKING

  Hazlitt, writing lectures in 1818, praised Wycherley’s comedy, The Country Wife. Long afterwards, the editor of a ‘new edition’ of these lectures in book form, On the English Poets and Comic Writers (Bell & Daldy, 1870), endorsed Hazlitt’s praise. But he endorsed it because “the drama is said to be the best picture extant of the dissolute manners of the court of Charles II.”

  Let us omit the word “dissolute” and proceed. The Country Wife really did cause a sensation on the stage, but not because it was found dissolute. In this play Horner (the hero) seduces Mrs. Marjory Pinchwife (the heroine), luring her into his bedchamber with a promise to show her his fine set of china. Mrs. Marjory, enraptured, calls for so much more china that presently Horner must protest he has no china left. As a real-life result of the play, it was months before any respectable woman in London dared venture into a shop and say she wanted china.

  Now this was the sort of joke which made playgoers truly whoop: just as, on the other hand, they loved firework displays of wit. It was a combination of the adolescent and the sophisticated, which to a great degree sums up the Restoration.

  The best comic dramatists of the time, Wycherley and Etherege and Shadwell—together with Congreve and Vanbrugh, who appeared much later but demonstrated that the spirit of the Merry Monarch was still alive—gave playgoers their best crazy situations and their best wit. Congreve, especially in Love for Love and The Way of the World, is almost too witty. He flashes in your eyes like Tinker Bell; sometimes you wish he would stop coruscating and sit down.

  What we must understand is that the fine ladies and “men of quality,” in real life, were not really like these glittering stage figures. They wished to be. They tried hard to be. They had the same blunt speech, the same frank amorousness. But they were not one-tenth as clever, or one-half as cold-hearted.

  “In our sins, too,” cries Brass to Dick Amlet, in Vanbrugh’s The Confederacy, “I must own you still kept me under. You soared up to adultery with the mistress, while I was at humble fornication with the maid. Nay, in our punishments too: when I was sentenced but to be whipped, I cannot deny you were condemned to be hanged. In all things your inclinations have been greater and nobler than mine.” This is a compressed but not expurgated version of the speech.

  Even true-life wits at the beginning of the Restoration, Buckingham or Sedley or Rochester or the King himself, could not have fired off such a string of bons mots as does Manly in Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer, or made love with such splendour as does Valentine in Congreve’s Love for Love.

  OF MANNERS, CUSTOMS, BACKGROUNDS

  The Spring Gardens (or plain Spring Garden, if you prefer) were the old and original Spring Gardens. You may mark a part of the site to this day in Spring Garden Street, behind Cockspur Street as you go down to Trafalgar Square. The place must not be confused with what
Evelyn calls “the new Spring Garden at Lambeth,” (Diary, 2nd July, 1661). This refers to Vauxhall Gardens (Pepys’s “Fox-Hall”) on the other side of the river. Through the years Vauxhall gradually outshone and destroyed the old gardens, because of much greater space, more arbors, quaint illumination, and music. It had nearly two centuries of gay existence. See John Timbs, The Romance of London or Walks and Talks about London, both in many editions.

  The Tower of London has a bibliography in itself. The Lion Gate has long been destroyed; and “Julius Caesar’s Tower” is of course the White Tower. As for the Royal Menagerie, which is described in this story, it was removed in 1834. Yet you may still have a drink, not far from its site, at a pub called The Tiger. Nine years after the removal of the menagerie, the stagnant moats on the land side were drained. A map as early as Tudor times shows the gun wharf built out from the wall on the river side. Ned Ward, writing of a visit to the Tower in 1698, tells how they stuffed the fierce lion called King Charles the Second, and preserved him after death (The London Spy, 1929, Arthur L. Hayward, ed., 225-236).

  The plan of London in 1678, published by the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, consists of so many sheets that they fill the whole wall of a room when you fit them together. On this map, with its thick guide, you will find marked the position of every building, house, or place down to those of the very smallest importance: the home of a minor nobleman, a tolerable tavern. To the student of minutiae it is invaluable, as is the plan of Whitehall Palace in the Guildhall Library. In passing, it may be remarked that a plaque still marks the position of the “new” Duke’s Theatre, and of the King’s Head tavern.

  As for the ordinary speech of these people, see their own letters and books. For example: compare the few authentic letters of Nell Gwynn published in Peter Cunningham’s The Story of Nell Gwyn and the Sayings of Charles II. (H. B. Wheatley­, ed., 1892) to the dazzling speech of Millament in the play. Nelly merely prattles, as rapidly as she is said to have spoken, in dictating the letters; and her name may be spelled in three different ways.