The Bride of Newgate Read online

  “Begging your pardon, Dick.” Blazes was uncomfortable. “But it ain’t the same lady.”

  “Don’t lie to me! I tell you it’s Dolly!”

  “This lady,” Blazes said critically, “is a werry handsome piece. I grant you that.”

  “Then for God’s sake …!”

  “She ain’t too tall, though she looks as if she ought to be. She’s a-showing a lot of buzzim in her gown, and fanning herself fit to break the fan. She’s got brown hair in short ringlets. But ’er potato-trap … I begs your pardon, Reverence! … ’er mouth’s locked up like a moneylender’s cash-box.

  “Dick,” added Blazes simply, “she ain’t.”

  Darwent had managed to struggle to his feet. Now he sank down again, and said no more.

  “Are you acquainted with this lady” asked the Rev. Horace.

  Darwent shook his head.

  “Or the gentlemen?” The Ordinary looked at Blazes. “Who are the gentlemen?”

  “One of ’em is a carrion bird,” he meant a lawyer, “named Crockit. But the other! Sir, it’s Jack Buckstone!”

  “I fear that conveys little to me.”

  “Buckstone, sir! Sir John Buckstone, to speak him proper. By your leave, Reverence: walk wide o’ Jack Buckstone!”

  It seemed that Blazes’ hoarse pleading was not unmixed with reluctant admiration. His nose bloomed again.

  “Ask ’em in Covent Garden,” he pleaded. “That gen’leman’ll pull off his coat to fight any porter for a pot-of-ale wager. He’s been out nine times with the pistol, and never missed ’is man. He always gets wot he wants; and he don’t even notice ’ooever tries to stop him. I warns you, sir: you’d better see Buckstone. This business …”

  The Ordinary looked at the turnkey.

  “I am about God’s business of truth and justice. Who dares interfere with it?”

  “Sir, I only meant—!”

  “Present my compliments to the lady and the gentlemen.” the Rev. Horace added mildly. “Bid them wait until they are permitted to enter.”

  “But, sir—”

  “Did you hear me?”

  Blazes retreated hastily, slamming and locking the iron door. The Rev. Horace set his back against the door, and drew a deep breath as he studied Darwent.

  “Before you say one word more,” and his big voice sounded shaken, “I must ask you a question. Who are you?”

  “Eh?”

  “Who are you? No, don’t say, ‘It makes no matter,’ or some such rubbish! I won’t be put off! Is your name truly Darwent?”

  The felon almost laughed.

  “It’s Darwent now,” he replied. “I took the name—and there was mockery, if you like—from the title of my uncle’s peerage. He’s the Marquess of Darwent.”

  “The Marquess of Darwent!”

  “Deuce take it, Padre, don’t you fall into a swoon at mention of a few strawberry leaves on a coronet. You’re a man and a brother. As for the others … God rot the lot of them!”

  “I will hear no more blasphemy, sir! Especially about—” The Rev. Horace checked himself.

  “About great names?” inquired Darwent.

  The question darted uncomfortably near the truth. Like Mr. Elias Crockit, the Ordinary felt humility even toward the near-great. A moment ago he had spoken boldly to the turnkey about these visitors; now he wondered. Yet, like Mr. Crockit and most others, his views were quite sincere.

  “You told me, sir, you had no person to make interest at your trial.”

  “That was true, Padre. I should not have appealed to my uncle if I had risked far worse than hanging.”

  “And why not?”

  “A few years ago, as it happens, my uncle and I quarreled. The fault was entirely mine. But I hate the man yet. That’s human nature.”

  “May I ask the nature of this quarrel?”

  “I was for some years a fellow at Simon Magus, Oxford. The books, the beloved innumerable books! But I thought Oxford grew stale. I would try my luck in the new states of America. I have always felt a kindness towards them, Padre.”

  “Indeed.”

  “You are pleased to be superior, Padre, because you have read so little of temporal government. Well! I have read many manifestoes: thunders, vaporings, prolixities.” Darwent’s voice grew harsh. “But only their manifesto, through all history, has dared proclaim man’s right to the pursuit of happiness.”

  “Man’s duty should be his happiness! That is enough!”

  “Your pardon, Padre. It is not enough. However,” smiled Darwent, “I sailed at a most fitting time, of course, when we were at war with them in ’12. I sailed in an ammunition ship bound for Virginia; and hoped to swim ashore without being mistakenly hanged for a spy. But we never reached Virginia. At a place called Crosstree Island, where we were wrecked—” A shudder ran through him. “I hate firearms!” he said.

  But the Rev. Horace was paying no attention.

  “Sir, sir, attend to me! If you were to inherit the title, if you were to become my Lord Marquess of Darwent …!”

  And now his companion really laughed.

  “Padre,” he said whimsically, and scratched his hand manacles at the lice-infested hair, “my uncle is a hale gentleman, scarcely middle-aged, who grows roses in Kent. He has two strong sons to follow him. Even if an earthquake obliterated all three at once, which I consider unlikely, should I be any better off?”

  “No. Perhaps not.”

  “I am condemned, with my death warrant countersigned by the Regent himself. —Don’t ask me why! I don’t know! But do you see a loophole now?”

  The hours were dwindling, like the candles inside the lanterns.

  “And yet,” said the Ordinary, “perhaps I can be of help.”

  “You, Padre? And at this time? Come now!”

  “Put your trust in Him,” begged the other, with fierce intensity, “and tell me the rest of your story! I would not hold out false hope. No! But I credit what you say; and I do not think that He is ever mocked.”

  Here the clergyman held up a big hand.

  “You were in a room,” he went on, his voice soothing as though to induce sleep, “a room papered with dull red and gold. You faced a dead man, pinned to the back of a chair with a sword. Outside, on the lawn, there was a statue of a foolish pagan deity. Out of the air, or so it seemed to you, you heard a voice speaking. We deal, of course, with no such nonsense as ghosts. But the voice said, ‘He must not reach the windows.’”

  “Yes!” agreed Darwent, with a short and sharp breath.

  Memory, so dreamlike and yet so vivid in each detail, wrapped him round as though by some sleight of the late M. Mesmer at Paris.

  “I dislike to recall what happened then,” he said, “because from then onwards … Well! He took me unawares again.”

  “Who took you unawares?”

  “That coachman! The tall, thin, shabby man, with the scarf round his face up to the eyes: the man who drove me there in the blue coach. At least, I imagine it was the coachman. I never saw him face to face.

  “Remember, now, that I had not advanced more than three steps into that room, with the door at my back. When the voice spoke, I looked about me. There was a fireplace in the same wall as the door on my right; against it, upright and unstained, stood a rapier which was a companion sword to the one that killed Frank. I looked back again at the furniture, all buhl and ormolu ornament.

  “I had forgotten the door. Someone rushed at me, and struck again.

  “When the jarvey attacked me in Hyde Park, it was no love tap. It gave me an aching head. But it was no worse than we get three times a week, if we play at football; and think little of. I could have sworn, that first time, the jarvey murmured an apology, saying this was not customary.

  “But the second time! It was like to crack my skull, and it almost did. The awakening took a long time, since I had a touch of fever, and what a different awakening!

  “First I had a sense that I was in the open air, lying on my back in half-
dried mud, with my head against a pile of paving stones. After another long time, or so it seemed to me, I heard the noise of carts on cobbles and familiar street sounds. What I first saw, some distance away to the right and towering up over the houses, were the Greek pillars in front of Covent Garden Theatre.

  “It was a smoky pink-and-gray daylight, broadening to sunrise. When I tried to sit up, the sickness came.

  “My fencing school, as I told you, is off Covent Garden. On the north side, near the Piazza Tavern, there is a narrow cul-de-sac of an alley named Garter Lane. In our grandfathers’ time the place would have been in fashion. But in these days only City bankers and merchants, grave men whom the dandies jeer at, gather at the Piazza Tavern.

  “I was lying in Garter Lane, not five yards from my own fencing school: the back of my head caked with dried blood, like—like the bloodstained rapier in my right hand.

  “Frank Orford’s body, stiff as a board now, lay on its back just in front of me. Damme, I’d heard Frank was so fastidious a dandy he blacked and polished even the soles of his top boots, like Brummell. It was true. I saw the shining soles, and the disarranged embroidered dressing gown with cravat crumpled now, and the unstained rapier in his right hand. My shoes were clean too.

  “I had only seen that, in daze, when my head split to the noise of a watchman’s rattle. There stood the Charlie, in his red waistcoat, and with big gloating eyes, springing his rattle to summon assistance.”

  Darwent lowered his head.

  The Rev. Horace Cotton, still with his back set against the iron cell door, breathed slowly and heavily. Yet he spoke with seeming irrelevance.

  “You are too fine-drawn,” he said. “Your imagination will not suffer you ever to rest.”

  “I deny that!” retorted the felon, as though he had been accused of the worst of crimes.

  “However!” The Rev. Horace swept this aside. “Undoubtedly you and the dead Lord Francis had been carried to that place?”

  Darwent brooded on that charge of being too sensitive. Though he would not have admitted it, Mr. Cotton was right. He was all sensitiveness and imagination; all loyalties and hatreds: a human being.

  “Carried there!” he repeated. “Yes!”

  “In the blue coach?”

  “I presume so. There were wheel tracks in the lane.”

  “And therefore,” said the clergyman, “it would be assumed that you and Lord Francis, on an evening of drunkenness, had gone out of your fencing school to fight by moonlight in Garter Lane? And that you afterwards fell and struck your head?”

  “Yes. Didn’t I tell you, Padre? A formal duel with the pistol: yes. With sabers: permissible. But rapiers? Never!”

  “This occurred to you, no doubt, when you were roused by the watchman’s rattle beside Lord Francis’s body?”

  “No I thought of nothing! Nothing at all save my own sickness and a head full of thunder. Do I need to tell you what is hard by Covent Garden? The Charlie, shouting for help as though I were a dozen men, marched me to the Magistrates’ Court in Bow Street.

  “I only dimly recall walking there. The Charlie would shake my shoulder and repeat, ‘You’re drunk, ain’t you?’ I denied it. But I immediately called for brandy, because I had need of it; and the voices of invisible people laughed all about me.

  “At the Bow Street Office there was a gentleman (Mr. Birnie, was it?) who spoke fairly and kindly. I attempted to tell my tale, the true tale, but I could not speak with clearness. Mr. Birnie said it would be some time before the arrival of the Chief Magistrate, Sir Nathaniel Conant; and bade me lie down.

  “Afterwards, at some time, I was lying on a board floor against the wall of a little room with hats in a row on pegs, and a loud-ticking clock. I think it was a room used by the Bow Street runners. Someone had washed and bound up my head. Squatting beside me was a man whom I later learned was a Mr. Hubert Mulberry. Are you acquainted with Mr. Mulberry, Padre?”

  The Ordinary shook his head.

  And again Darwent stared at the past.

  “He is not prepossessing, it may be. Mr. Mulberry is fat and slovenly, and most of the snuff he takes spills on himself. But he is a shrewd man of the law. And by—no; you don’t like oaths; I forbear—by the soul I may or may not have, he has been a good friend to me!

  “‘Drink this,’ says he, and propped me up. He put a bottle of raw spirit to my mouth. Afterwards he gave me a pannikin of water, and I gulped it down. My wits were enough cleared to tell him everything.

  “He said not a word, he asked not even a question, until I had done. He squatted there on his hams, and presently stood up.

  “‘I count myself a judge of men,’ says he, and went towards the door. I asked him where he was going.

  “‘Why, damme,’ says he, with violence in his bloated face, ‘to hire a gig or a curricle! If that country house is where you say it is, then I’ll engage to find it.’

  “When he had gone, Padre, I had one more visitor. The Theatre Royal in Drury Lane is not far from Bow Street, and news spreads. Dolly Spencer came over a-flying. Mr. Kean was in rehearsal for Macbeth. There was Dolly, all strange clothes and glass jewels, with the tears in her eyes, to throw her arms round my neck and put her cheek against mine and—” Darwent stopped.

  “Not a lady, of course,” he added in a voice of ironic politeness. “They removed her, as you may guess. I believe she bit one fellow in the hand. Not a lady. Merely the faithfullest creature alive.”

  Again, deliberately to hurt himself, Darwent smashed the fetter of his right wrist against the wall behind him. The clergyman watched with grave, compassionate eyes.

  “Mulberry,” Darwent went on, “did not return until dusk. He was a trifle in liquor, and stood swaying above me.

  “‘Mr. Darwent,’ says he, ‘you may be an honest man or you may be the prince of liars. But this much I know: we can’t tell that story of yours before a judge and a jury. Stick to the drunken duel, my bully; stick to the drunken duel!’—And that, I think, is all.”

  The Rev. Horace Cotton was jarred with astonishment as though by a blow.

  “All?” he exclaimed.

  “Yes.”

  “You are mocking me! Unless … did this lawyer find the house?”

  “Oh, yes. Anyone thereabouts could tell him where to find it. It’s a Vanbrugh house: an E-shaped place with domes on pillars atop every corner, and a clock tower in the middle. I have passed it many times myself.”

  “Well!” said the Rev. Horace. “Did he find the pagan statue on the lawn?”

  “He did.”

  “And the room where you found Lord Francis dead?”

  “Yes. Padre. Exactly as I described it.”

  “This is madness!” groaned the Rev. Horace. His expression changed. “Yes, yes, drink your brandy if it comforts you!”

  “But,” continued Darwent, putting down the bottle after a long draught, “I neglected to tell you what else Mulberry saw.

  “The red-and-gold wall paper was now black with dust. That same dust, undisturbed, covered more thickly the floor and the fine Turkey carpet. Spiders had spun their webs between the writing desk of tortoise-shell wood and thc tall chair behind it. Spider webs muffled the dull luster prisms of the chandelier. There was no mark of a sword thrust in the fiber back of the chair.

  “Frank’s father and mother, the Earl and Countess of Kinsmere, have been abroad for a long time. They ordered the grounds to be kept in order, but the house to be locked up without an occupant. No man, it seems, has set foot in that room for more than two years.”

  Darwent, half-fuddled now but attempting to look agreeable, watched his companion with close-studying gray eyes.

  “Yes, Padre?” he prompted.

  “This is a jest in bad taste,” the Rev. Horace accused him, not loudly. “You play it, remember, only on yourself!”

  “The jest was not of my making. No.”

  “Some other house, perhaps? Some other room?”

  “There was no other hou
se, I fear. And no other room. Yet what I have told you is true. Do you believe me now?”

  The Rev. Horace hesitated, and moistened his lips.

  “My dear sir,” he said gently, “my heart knows that you believe it.”

  “Then you call me mad?”

  “No, no! I call you friend. But there are, to speak a truth, varying degrees of … of …”

  “That won’t do,” Darwent interrupted curtly. “Consider the evidence! We go into the sessions house with this lie of a defense: that Frank and I fought by moonlight in Garter Lane. They accept that. Now it was only natural, you grant, that Frank’s relatives should bribe the jury?”

  “Not natural!” the other insisted, swiftly and firmly. “But … but at least credible.”

  “Good! Then who made interest at Carlton House?”

  “I do not understand you.”

  “Frank’s father quarreled with the Regent four years ago. The same year as that famous falling out with the Beau. No Orford, except Frank himself, would dare approach the Regent: even through Ben Bloomfield. Yet here’s my death warrant countersigned, and the hanging set forward by at least four days!”

  The Rev. Horace’s rosy face turned a little away.

  “You conceive,” he asked, “that someone else is working against you? Someone in addition to the Orfords and this mysterious coachman?”

  “I know it!”

  “For a little while, sir, I had believed—”

  The Ordinary paused. He had seen too many men who thought themselves persecuted; and they went mad, alone, in a little room. Touching the prayer book gently, he moved over and sat down in the niche.

  “You have undergone much,” he said. “Now forget these worldly affairs in the peace that passeth all understanding!”

  “I thank you, no,” replied Darwent. “Where’s Dolly? Where’s Mulberry, even? He has been faithful, and come to see me.” The chains rattled and jangled. “You tell me I have a soul. I would barter that soul for ten pounds—yes, ten pounds—to leave them a little legacy of my gratitude!”