The Demoniacs Read online

  “Now how a pox should I know? I’ve not seen her. What concern have you with an old woman on London Bridge?”

  “None.” Mr. Wynne hesitated. “No true concern, when all’s said. But once, in some sense, she served my grandfather when our fortunes were good. Besides, it seems a most barbarous thing to turn these people from their homes.”

  “She’s an old servant, hey?”

  “In some sense, yes.”

  “Well, the feeling does you credit. I’m a man of tenderness too, split my bottom. The pin-and-needle makers are of some use, I grant; there are ladies who come from as far away as St. James’s to buy good wares cheap of the pin-and-needle makers. But the others—pah! If any suffer loss or hardship here, ’tis the Bridge House Estate; they’ll be out of pocket nine hundred pound a year in rents.”

  “That is all you have to tell me?”

  “It’s all I know to tell you,” Captain Beresford answered in a huff. “Now drive on if you must, or stay and crack a bottle if you will.”

  “I much regret, Tubby, that I may not linger. Coachman, drive on.”

  “Stay but a moment more, Jeff!”

  Captain Beresford moved his shoulders. Still holding mutton-chop and glass of wine, he glanced suddenly behind him, and then began slowly to turn round and round. The expression on his face was matched in the eyes of the guardsman with the lanthorn.

  “If you’ll not linger here, Jeff,” he said, “then you’ll not linger on the bridge either?”

  “Why not? Is it forbidden?”

  “Not by order, no. Still, I want no more of these odd noises by night; nor does the officer at the bridge-foot end. The men don’t like it. If I was a cursed imagining fellow like you, which thank fortune I ain’t, I could call this a cursed ghosty place and think things were walking. Hey?”

  “It is full of dead men’s bones, Tubby. You need feel no surprise if it be also full of ghosts. A sweet good-night to you. Coachman, drive on!”

  The long whip cracked. Hoofs and wheels thundered on thick-bolted planks beneath the arch of the gatehouse; and then, as they settled to a gallop, beneath so many arches of timber between houses that echoes reverberated as though in a tunnel.

  The young man sat down and brooded. Peg, immediately alert, assumed that fierce stateliness which so ill became her, and flounced to her own side of the post-chaise.

  “If ever I despised you ere this, Mr. Jeffrey Wynne, it is as nothing to what I feel now. Why, pray, must I hide my face from that officer?”

  “Tubby Beresford? Can you swear, Peg, you never met him? Or even saw him before?”

  “I—I—to speak a truth, I can’t recall. But I wondered.”

  “So did I. Tubby goes much into good society, and his tongue wags overfreely. Forget him now. More serious consideration must weigh with you when I deliver you to your uncle at the Golden Cross.”

  “At the Golden Cross?”

  “For sure you know the Golden Cross Inn? Hard by Northumberland House at Charing Cross?”

  “You said you were escorting me home!”

  “Yes; you shall go home presently. Before that, however, your uncle desires to question you at some place remote from servants and neighbours in St. James’s Square.”

  “Why does he desire to question me?—No, I insist upon knowing! I’ll not leave off until you answer.”

  “To speak plain, then, because you have become damaged goods. Despite the fortune you inherit, it will not be easy to arrange a good marriage after this last adventure.”

  “Was ever, ever a woman made so miserable as I have been?”

  “By whom, madam? You grow more fearful, to be sure, as we draw nearer the ogre; and I don’t blame you. Sir Mortimer Ralston is not a good-tempered man.”

  “He’ll forgive me; he always does.”

  “True. Take comfort In his own fashion he loves you, and he will only question you. He will not, as others might, summon a physician or a panel of matrons for a more intimate examination.”

  “Oh, filthy!” There were tears of unhappiness stinging Peg’s eyes again. “You are offensive. You are disgusting. I’ll hear no coarse language, rot your soul; I would remind you I am a gentlewoman.”

  The wild gallop across the bridge had gone only a few yards before the driver reined in hard. These crazy old houses were built so close together that from a distance they resembled blocks of buildings with only a few open spaces between them so that a man on foot could walk to the rail of the bridge. In some places the road was twenty feet wide; at others it narrowed to twelve. Jutting first floors above the street, with metal shop-signs all acreak in the wind, closed in so tightly that a high-loaded dray could get stuck between.

  And now not even the usual dim gleams showed from upper windows; the place, ill-smelling but not so bad as most London streets because of the river-breeze, was pitch black except where the light of a rising moon touched open spaces. It would have seemed dead without the clatter of their own passage, the unceasing current-roar; and, on the approach to Fish Street Hill, a thumping and jingling as great paddle-wheels supplied power for the water-works.

  But they did not hear these things. Peg Ralston, for once in her life desperately honest, wrung her hands and wept under the ruin of a straw hat.

  “And that you, you of all persons in this world, should tell me I am no maid! When it was you, and only you, who—”

  “Peg, be silent!”

  “Ah, does that stab your conscience?”

  “Yes; I confess I am not happy.”

  “Jeffrey, if only you had been less cruel to me!”

  “By this time, no doubt,” said Mr. Wynne, “it has all become my fault.”

  “I do not say as much, or even think so. It was stupid and s-silly of me to flee from home; I own that. But I was so extravagant vexed with you that I scarce knew what I did. You vowed I had been abed with a dozen men in London. And now, I dare swear, you think it was a dozen men in Paris. And you’ll tell my uncle so.”

  “Must it be repeated, madam, that your broad-minded views are no concern of mine? I could tell your uncle only where I found you. And he knows that already.”

  “He knows it? How?”

  “By the smuggled letter I sent him, as we were both smuggled across the Channel. Incredible as it may seem, your conduct has troubled him.”

  “I am sorry! I repent of it!”

  “Even if I wished, then, it could not be concealed that you spent some months in the school for King Louis’s Parcaux Cerfs.”

  “Some months?” echoed the astounded Peg, leaving off weeping to cry out at the injustice. “It was a matter of scarce two or three hours.”

  “Two or three hours? Come, madam!”

  “I swear—!”

  “When it required months to find you? Such enquiries, admittedly, are not rapid in a country where at any moment the enquirer may find himself jailed or hanged as a spy. Yet you had gone nowhere near any friend or acquaintance in France. How did you live during all that time? Was it by someone’s disinterested charity?”

  “I took no charity; none was needed. I’ll not deny that before leaving home I—I took a deal of money from my uncle’s strong-box.”

  “Gad’s life, this is still better! Sir Mortimer Ralston’s temper must be sweet past all understanding.”

  “It was not truly stealing; is he not my uncle? And I was in that place at Versailles, I swear, but a matter of hours! I grew affrighted, as you guessed. I had swore to punish you; I was resolved to punish you; but I grew affrighted. Jeffrey, Jeffrey, have you no tenderness for me at all?”

  “Well! I …”

  “Don’t you love me?”

  “No.”

  Peg swept up both arms and clenched her fist in a last extremity of woe.

  “So that now,” she said, “I am to be haled before Uncle Mortimer like any strumpet haled before a magistrate? Mrs. Cresswell will be there too; that odious woman will be there, who is nothing but my uncle’s doxy and yet will take on
the most righteous airs and preach at me. I don’t complain; no doubt I deserve it. But you! That you should desert me too.”

  “How, madam? Desert you?”

  “Yes, you will. Don’t gainsay it. When you have left me at the Golden Cross, it is in your mind straightway to take coach or chair and return here to London Bridge. For you are minded to visit an old woman who lodges above a print-seller’s shop called the Magic Pen. Is it not so?”

  Jeffrey Wynne whirled round. “Peg; how the devil did you know that?”

  Momentarily all speech was blotted out by the thudding and jingling of the great paddle-wheels, under the bridge against the City bank, which pumped water to all London east of Temple Bar. Then the post-chaise had crossed over it; it passed St. Magnus’s Church on the right, and went toiling up Fish Street Hill for a left-hand turn at Greater Eastcheap. No guard appeared. Nobody stirred in the street except an elderly watchman, one of the despised Charlies, skulking with pole and lanthorn, under the red lattice of a tavern near the Monument.

  “Peg, how the devil did you know that?”

  “Is it not true?”

  “True or false, how did you guess?”

  “But I knew it; simply I knew it. How should I not know it, since it concerns you?”

  “Hark’ee, Peg, I’ll not desert you tonight so long as there is need.”

  “Then you do love me, don’t you?”

  “No, woman, I do not. But you are in the right of it; I have every intent to return here as soon as possible. For I have come to a decision.”

  “About us?”

  “In the main, madam, it concerns the ghost of a woman long dead, and a portrait in the green-room at Covent Garden. What I plan is sheer folly, let’s allow. It will lead to law-breaking and may lead to murder.”

  “Murder?”

  “And yet I am determined on it Be silent, now, and try to entrust me! More lives than our own, I can assure you, will depend upon the occurrences of the next two hours.”

  II

  Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary

  “GOOD SIR AND YOUNG mistress,” the landlord said heartily, “give yourselves the trouble of stepping down. You are awaited and welcome.”

  He dodged past the horses’ heads as the post-chaise halted on the cobbles of the inn-yard, and opened the carriage-door. Jeffrey Wynne, adjusting his tricorne hat, swung out and jumped down to mud and straw on the cobbles.

  A thick smoke-reek eddied in the yard, which had a railed balcony round all four of its inner sides. There were lights in little latticed windows off the balcony; they shone on the young man’s sword-scabbard and the silver buckles of his shoes.

  “‘Awaited and welcome,’” he said in no easy tone. “Sir Mortimer Ralston—?”

  “Nay, sir, I can’t tell you his name. But a gentleman, doubtless the same, awaits you in my set of chambers called the Antelope, with the private parlour. He desires that you and the young mistress shall attend him immediately.”

  “In good time, landlord, in good time!”

  “Under favour, sir,” and the landlord made an agonized genuflexion, “he hath awaited you some hours. He said ‘immediately.’ There is a lady with him.”

  From inside the carriage came a noise of someone stamping her foot.

  “Did he so?” enquired Peg Ralston’s sweet voice. “And a lady, God’s death.”

  Flushed and lovely, as tall as her companion but soft of body and with no great physical strength, she appeared at the doorway. She hid thrown aside her cloak, to reveal a lilac-and-rose satin gown with skirt slightly widened by whalebone supports in an under-petticoat called a hoop; she was gulping back tears of fright which made her speak like this.

  “I am filthy,” she said dramatically. “That’s to say, I mean, I am much travel-stained. I have not shifted my clothes these four days. Mr. Wynne, I’ll not meet that odious woman until I am made ready.”

  “Landlord,” said Jeffrey, “be good enough to escort this lady to another room with a private parlour. Fetch her soap and water, if such be available.”

  “Sir, sir,” moaned the landlord, “I am not certain that—”

  “You have a pump, surely? Should all else fail, she can put her head under that. No, madam, I must not permit you to use more white-lead and rouge. You have too pretty a face to daub it like a juggler at Bart’s Fair.”

  “Sir, has the lady luggage?”

  “Now how should I have luggage,” asked Peg, “when I was catched away in my petticoat? Did you hear this gentleman?”

  “Sir, sir, but I must escort you and show you the way to the Antelope.”

  “I know the way. I can escort myself. Look to the lady.”

  A gold coin spun into the air, followed by another for the coachman and a third for the postilion astride the off-horse, causing Peg to protest against extravagance in terms that would have been strong if he had just dissipated a family fortune as a famous forebear had done. Then, as ostlers gathered round the carriage, he strode away across the inn-yard.

  The Golden Cross, presumably so called because the tavern-standard outside its arch bore the sign of a white cross on a green background, faced towards the statue of King Charles the First. You could not see that statue from the yard, or see anything except the loom of Northumberland House with weathervane and two stone lions. It was also the coaching-station for the west of England; a powerful smell of horses steamed in night air.

  Jeffrey, cloak across his arm, went up an outside staircase to the balcony. He did not touch the leather draw-string at the outside door he was seeking. Instead he peered in through the window beside it.

  The room appeared charged with emotion, yes. But it was not quite the emotion he had expected to find.

  Two candles burned on the chimney-piece of a wainscotted parlour with a bare board floor. Behind a table in the middle, facing the window, sat a man who had been doing himself well at supper.

  He was a big man of past fifty, muscular as well as bulky from a big paunch and a heavy jowl. His rich clothes, flowered satin, were spattered with stains of food and snuff; and he had on a great draggled bag-wig. Sir Mortimer Ralston wore a sword only through custom; he would often say, smiting his fist on something, that he didn’t know how to use a sword and suspected few men could use one either. At the moment his red face did not seem so much ill-tempered as watchful and thoughtful, his eyes moving sideways while he drank from a dropsical glass goblet.

  The emotion in that parlour, such as it was, flowed from a graceful woman pacing back and forth at the fire-place with a closed fan in her hand. Mrs. Lavinia Cresswell, widow, could have passed for thirty anywhere except in the broad daylight most fashionable ladies avoided.

  Mrs. Cresswell was very handsome despite rather-too-pale fair hair and a rather-too-pale blue eye. She was not tall. Yet she had the true bearing, the true languid haughtiness, which Peg so passionately desired and could never imitate. Mrs. Cresswell spoke briefly to her companion; the onlooker could not hear the words; but it was almost as though Sir Mortimer cringed.

  ‘Now I wonder,’ Jeffrey Wynne was reflecting.

  It seemed to him that all his joints ached from the long jolting of the carriage, and his head ached from the anxiety of months. He watched them a moment more, thinking whatever thoughts you may attribute to him, before he went softly to the door. Also softly, so that the latch should not click, he lifted the leather draw-string. Then he threw the door open.

  The effect, on one person at least, was as though he had thrown a grenado.

  “How now?” said Sir Mortimer.

  The big man surged up, his paunch all but upsetting the table amid a clatter of pewter dishes. His mouth fell open. Much of the ruddy colour drained from his face as he looked first at Jeffrey and then past Jeffrey’s shoulder. He had a deep voice, a cellar-rumble and hoarse; but it cracked none the less.

  “How now?” he said. And then: “Hell’s death. You failed after all?”

  “Don’t fear, sir. I did not fail.” />
  “But the wench? Is she safe?”

  “Quite safe.”

  “Why, then!” said Sir Mortimer, controlling himself as though shamefaced. “Why, then!”

  Mrs. Cresswell had turned away and was tapping with her closed fan at the ledge of the chimney-piece. Sir Mortimer sank into the chair, gulping so hastily at the goblet that red wine ran down over his chins into the lace at his throat. It was some seconds before he finished or spoke. The veins of his forehead began to swell blue and choleric. He whacked the foot of the glass on the table, and rose up again.

  “Afeared?” he said. “Now who’s afeared, God damme? Very well: where’s my niece? Where is the strumpet? Where’s she hiding? Fetch her out, young man, and I’ll kill her. I’ll kill her, egad, and then I’ll disown her. Fetch her out!”

  “Sir,” said Jeffrey, “I ask you to hear me.”

  “You do, hey? Where is she?”

  “Sir, Peg is making ready in another room. For God’s sake, sir, deal gently with her. For all her mighty pretences, she has suffered much in her mind.”

  It was Mrs. Cresswell who answered, turning round coolly from the chimney-piece.

  “Indeed?” she smiled. “Before we have finished with her, I greatly fear, the dear girl will have suffered more in her body.”

  “If I may venture a suggestion, madam—”

  “You may not. Mr. Wynne, might I ask your age?”

  “I am twenty-five.”

  “Indeed. You are twenty-five.” Mrs. Cresswell raised pale eyebrows. “From your mien and your fashion of speech, I had thought you perhaps a trifle more. But you are twenty-five. Therefore be pleased to speak when you are spoken to; not before.”

  “Madam—”

  “There is another matter, Mr. Wynne. You have been of some service to us, or so I understand. Why did you perform that service?”

  “I did it for hire.”

  “Good. I am rejoiced you should apprehend as much. But your usefulness is over; and so, I must regretfully mention, is our interest in you.”