The Devil in Velvet Page 5

  At the very same moment, in a snap of sixth sense, he became conscious of Giles Collins.

  Now Giles would not stoop to clear away chocolate service or shaving service; such menial work must be done by a chambermaid. But Giles stood near the dressing table. His red eyebrows travelled up almost to the hairline, while his mouth sketched a delighted whistle.

  “Jackanapes and louse!” roared Fenton, looking about for something to throw. “I’ll have thee in the pillory for this! Begone, louse! Begone!”

  This time, since Giles had to fly past the bed, Fenton had another chance at a mighty kick. Again Giles dodged. And once more Fenton told himself to remember that these people—shrewd though they might be—were in many respects like children or adolescents.

  “Giles,” he growled, half in apology, to the wicked grin twisted outside the door.

  “Good master?”

  “Look to it that none disturbs us.”

  “Myself shall set watch, Sir Nick.”

  And Giles latched the door, which had no lock or bolt.

  Fenton turned back to the bed. Obediently Lydia had lain down beside the discarded silver chocolate service, though she trembled slightly. Fenton sat down beside her.

  “My lady …” he began gently.

  “Have you no tenderness at all?” she whispered, without opening her eyes. “Call me Lydia! Or,” she hesitated, hardly bold enough for a suggestion, “or even … dear heart?”

  Fenton felt a pang, not for her naïveté but for her intense devotion to the man she thought he was.

  “Dear heart,” he said, taking her hand and unobtrusively finding her pulse, “do you recall old days? When I took my degree, magister artium, at Paracelsus when I was seventeen? And desired to study physick, but that my father thought it beneath me?”

  She nodded at this information from Giles’s manuscript. Though Fenton had no watch, he needed none to find that her pulse beat was small, frequent, irregular. Gently touching her cheek, he found it cold and faintly clammy.

  “Well!” he said. “I would have you know that I did study thus in the way of secrecy. I can cure you. Am I one you intrust?”

  The blue eyes opened wide.

  “But what else?” she asked. “Are you not my husband? And do I not … have a fondness for you?”

  She spoke with such wonder that Fenton gritted his teeth.

  “Why, then,” he smiled, “but a few moments more!”

  He rose to his feet, the sword scabbard banging the side of the bed before his shoes struck the floor. Hurrying over to the dressing table, he found a clean towel and dipped one end of it into the now tepid water of the ewer. He returned with it, the towel bunched in his hand.

  “And now, Lydia,” he continued, gently passing the dampened cloth over her forehead where she had put the face powder, “we have only to …”

  “No! I won’t! Not ever!”

  The moment that cloth touched her forehead, Lydia shook her head violently and turned her head away. But Fenton saw just what he expected to see: the skin rash along the forehead, rather like eczema, but fainter. It was also under the powder patch on the cheek.

  At the same time, he gently touched the calf of her left leg; then the right. Both were a trifle swollen, and must have been painful. Only the stamina of this small twenty-one-year-old girl, her passionate longing for he knew not what, kept her even near to her belief that she was well.

  “Lydia!” he said sharply.

  She whirled round to face him, partly propped up by the pillow and the wall behind the bed. With swift fingers she flew at the bowknot of her bodice, so that in some fashion the whole gown seemed to fall apart at the top. Lithely she writhed her arms and shoulders out of it. Since a high silk smock impeded her, she ripped it down. Gown and slip lay about her, leaving her uncovered to the waist. Snatching the towel from Fenton, she began to daub at powder on her left shoulder, down the arm, and across the side.

  “Now see all my disgrace!” said Lydia. It was only the small eczema-like rash, but tears came into her eyes. “Can I go into a public place without being sensible I am jeered? Are you not disgusted?”

  “Not the least in the world,” he smiled, and held her glance by compulsion. “Lydia, what do you think is the matter­ with you?”

  But again she turned her face away and sobbed.

  “Last night,” she muttered, “when that creature—oh, horrid!—as much as said I had the French sickness, I could have died with shame. Oh, she has said it ere that! How could I have got it? God He knoweth, I have never … But fear will not go away.”

  “Lydia!” he said sharply. He put his hands on her bare shoulders, and pulled her up almost to a seated position. “You said you did intrust me. Now look at me.”

  Then, though he dropped his hands, she did not fall back. But her face was still turned away.

  “You have no illness of the kind you think. Nor, in fact, any illness at all that is a part of nature. I can cure you in a day or less.” Fenton laughed, hut not too loudly to frighten her the more. “Now let me give proof I know. Do you not sometimes have a great thirst?”

  “I—I have drunk so much barley water I am like to burst. But how could you know?”

  “You often suffer,” he said, touching the calves of her legs, “from pain here?”

  Lydia looked at him. The blurred blue eyes, the short nose with nostrils now wide, the broad trembling lips, wore an expression almost of awe.

  “After you have partaken of food or drink, say a quarter of an hour, do you—not always, but on occasion—fell fierce pains of the stomach, and are violently sick?”

  “Oh, horridly! And, oh, in truth I think you know all man may know! But what …?”

  He dreaded to give her the reply, but he had no other choice.

  “Lydia, someone has been trying, very slowly, to poison you with arsenic.”

  CHAPTER IV

  MEG IN SCARLET; AND A DAGGER

  HE WAS RIGHT in dreading to tell her. Even the word “poison,” to Lydia as to nearly all other persons, was wrapped in dread and mystery; it struck out of nowhere, and could not be fended off. It was born of sorcery and witchcraft, howling like a wind in the chimney.

  Fenton needed a long time to soothe and reassure her.

  “Then I … shall not die?”

  “No! Do you feel like a dying woman?”

  “Truly, I don’t.” She mused on this. “Only a little indisposed; no more.”

  “That is because the poisoner gave you too few doses, and at too long intervals. If you but take the draughts I shall order, there is nothing to fear.”

  Lydia’s hand flew to her forehead. “These—these spots …?”

  “They will vanish altogether. They are only symptoms of poisoning by arsenic.”

  “But who would desire to …?” Lydia began on a shuddering breath. Fenton stopped her.

  “We will speak of that anon,” he said. “First we must cure you.”

  Lydia, so overjoyed and delighted and relieved that she could not trouble her head about a mere murderer, simply­ looked at him and continued to look. Her manner grew quieter­. Fenton tried to explain, in the simplest possible words, the nature of a poison and how it worked. But he knew she would not understand; the Royal Society itself would not understand. Last night he had observed that Lydia had a very comely figure. In the present state of her attire, this fact was much noticeable.

  “These legends,” he was saying, “of bat’s blood and toad’s entrails and other substances, nauseous yet quite without harm, become laughable in the light of … in the light of …” He paused. “I beg your pardon. What was I saying?”

  “Dearest heart,” Lydia assured him tenderly, though somewhat crimson of face, “you were but looking at …”

  “Ay; true! True, true, true! I had forgot.”

&nbs
p; Fenton slipped off the edge of the bed and stood on his feet.

  “It doth not displease me,” said Lydia.

  Fenton made one final effort to be paternal. Walking towards the head of the bed, he bent down and very lightly kissed her lips. Then the weights in the scalepans flew wide. Lydia’s arms went fiercely round him; or, rather, round that confounded periwig. He bent her head back and kissed her with what might be called some degree of intimacy.

  “Nick,” she presently muttered, close by the side of his mouth.

  “Y-yes?”

  “When you first bade me lie down, I thought what Giles thought. Then I bethought myself, ‘Here? … so publicly? … with so many people like to be about? …’”

  “I know.”

  “Shall our true rendezvous be for tonight?”

  This was folly. It was utter folly for a girl not yet free from poison, albeit a mild attack. But Fenton was rapidly losing his wits.

  “Tonight, Lydia, you may feel in no mood for such—”

  “I could love you,” she murmured fiercely, “if I were dying. Am I dying?”

  “No! A fiend’s name, no!”

  “Then I shall have your company this night?”

  “Yes!”

  His arms went fully round her. And (such is nature’s way) Lydia’s skin seemed no longer in the least cold or clammy. The kiss had reached such an intimacy that both were considering it foolish and unnecessary to postpone the rendezvous, when …

  Giles, in the passage outside, put up a fine long defence. But this was the moment at which the door swept open, and in walked Meg.

  And, in that instant restirring of emotional currents, Sir Nick prowled after her like a black dog’s soul. Fenton, though shaken and startled, knew another emotion. It was the wrath which could slowly darken his eyesight.

  Meg, after one brief glance round the looped-back bed curtains, turned her head away. She walked slowly across the room towards the windows, giving herself time to think how she must meet this situation. Meg’s arms trembled a little. Lydia herself was not in the least embarrassed. Even before Meg’s glance, Lydia had contrived to writhe herself into the bedcovers so that she appeared to be wearing even less than was actually the case.

  “Then you honour us, madam?” Fenton asked, with a heavy snarl.

  “In faith I honour you,” Meg said coolly.

  At the windows, magnificently drawn up, she turned to face them.

  Meg’s black straw hat had a very wide brim, which forced her to hold her head up, but was a little curved up at the back. Flat along the curve of the hatbrim lay a single golden-coloured plume. Against her black glossy hair, done up in much the same style as Lydia’s, her white smoky complexion had never stood out more vividly.

  Round her neck, despite the warm weather, she wore a short pelisse of black fur reaching only to her elbows. It was unfastened, to show the top of a gown in vertical stripes of black and scarlet, with a very low bodice edged in small black ruffles. Her small purse, swung at her right hip, was gold-dusted and set with a circle of rubies. Both hands were thrust into a black fur muff, as the fashion was. Her skirt flared in vivid scarlet. Under it she wore so many satin petticoats that, when she moved, she sounded like a wandering rain shower.

  “Nick my dear,” Meg said airily, “I have ordered your coach for this morning. You’ll not deny me, I know.”

  “Indeed, madam?”

  Meg had decided, evidently, to ignore the whole matter and pretend Lydia was not there. Lydia, as though also uninterested, looked at nothingness with dreamy eyes and the suggestion of a smile. It was not in human nature for Meg to refrain from an eye-flick at her; and Meg gave only one gasp of fury.

  “I have a mind,” she continued carelessly, “to go to the New Exchange. I shall take a turn in the galleries, and perhaps buy a trifle or two. Sweetest, I am so wasteful. Yet twenty guineas, I think, will suffice for today.”

  “You are sure, madam?”

  Meg gave him a quick look of appraisal. He was approaching at a soft, murderous step. With an effort at carelessness, Meg moved out from the windows past the dressing table, and backed towards the left-hand wall. Slowly he wheeled round to face her, his forehead blackening with rage and his lips drawn back from his teeth.

  Helplessly Fenton felt the constriction tighten round his chest; he could hardly breathe. Something black, like a hangman’s hood, seemed to be settling over his head and addling his brain. He fought against it, but …

  “Oh, fie!” cried Meg, with a little shivering laugh. “Sure you would not be jealous of the foplings in the New Exchange, all flaxen periwigs and killing ogles, when they follow me. To one (thus) I give my manteau to hold; to another (thus) my muff; to still a third—”

  Meg broke off. She had not time to scream or even move.

  There was a soft hiss as the rapier whipped out of its sheath, and seemed to make a blur in dim grey light. Its point rested against Meg’s body exactly above the middle of her bodice. A hairline less, and it would not have touched her; a hairline more, and it would have drawn blood.

  “Before we speak of aught else,” a hoarse voice was saying, “you will let fall the dagger in your muff.”

  “Dagger?” whispered Meg, lifting long black eyelashes.

  “The haft projecting beyond your hand, your thumb on the blade: ’tis too plain to be missed.”

  “Oh, hideous! To think—”

  “You will let fall the dagger, or you will have this through your guts. Be easy, madam. The choice is your own.”

  Sir Nick would do it, and Meg must have seen so. Meg’s grey eyes slid round. Sir Nick’s thumb and forefinger tightened on the sword grip, to drive it through her body, while Fenton struggled and fought to hold back the arm.

  Meg drew her right hand out of her muff. Her expression was cool and rather contemptuous. A small Venetian dagger, dull and unpolished, clattered on the floor boards beyond the carpet.

  “I am mightily obliged to you,” he said.

  The man in the periwig, whose every moment was as swift and lightfooted as a cat’s, lowered the sword point. He bent down, picked up the dagger, and sent it skimming across the room. Then, straightening up, he let the rapier slip back into its sheath.

  “And now,” he said, nodding towards Lydia in the bed, “which of us had you a mind to stab?”

  Meg’s astonishment was unfeigned.

  “Why, who but the Roundhead’s daughter?” she asked, gesturing towards the bed. “Did I not see her a-running in here? Could I not fancy what was a-doing? Some matters I account no crime.”

  “God’s body, you have the right of it there.” Then the voice grew soft. “But don’t try it against my wife, Meg, and don’t try it against me; or direly you will regret it. Last night, against my wife, you said a foul and untrue thing …”

  Meg lifted her shoulders and looked perplexed.

  “If it served my turn, wherefore not?” she asked. “I do as I please.”

  “Do you so? —Giles!”

  Giles, with a wizened face of terror which held no mischief, slipped into the room.

  “Ay, good sir?”

  “Let Madam York have the money she desires; look to it.” He swung back to Meg. “You may take the coach, but return it. —Stay but a moment, good slut; there is one matter more.” His fingers crept again to the sword grip. “George Harwell and I go into the Strand; rather, to Dead Man’s Lane; a coach would make snail’s walk. If I find you here when I return, if you are not gone forever with all you possess, I will not open my neck to the hangman by using this.” He shook the scabbard. “I will summon a magistrate, and have you committed to gaol.”

  Meg’s floppy hat went up and back. “And pray on what charge?”

  “That you will discover. But ’tis a hanging matter, you may depend on it. Now go.”

  “Go fo
r all time? You don’t mean it!”

  The sword started halfway out. The face before her was swollen and dark. Meg fell back against the wall, sending her hat askew. At the same time, she gave him a glance from under lowered lids.

  “I give you one minute,” he said, “to be gone.”

  As though too warm, Meg slipped the black-fur pelisse from her shoulders and draped it across the muff. Her gleaming white shoulders rose up from the black ruffles, above vertical scarlet-and-black, and vivid scarlet. As she adjusted her hat, her eyes grew narrow and again she smiled without opening her lips. The perfume she wore, to men as heady as strong waters, rose up round her. A slight movement could suggest, could remind …

  “Are you sensible,” Meg asked, “that Captain Duroc, of the French King’s personal attendance, hath already taken lodgings for me in Chancery Lane? The finest lodgings in London? And hath begged me, on his knees as a man of quality should, that I be kept by him?”

  “I wish Captain Duroc all joy of you.”

  “Nick!” she screamed, half-realizing he meant what he said.

  “Half a minute!”

  “If you would turn me away,” Meg said coldly, “I am not the woman to make protest. But—this very day!” Her voice softened. “Why, ’twould take me that time to gather up my poor stuffs and trifles. Sir, will you not suffer me to remain one night more?”

  “I … I … well! One night more, I dare swear, could do no harm.”

  (This was the point at which Lydia, now wrapped in his bedgown, sat up straight with a new look on her face.)

  “And this I tell you,” Meg added. Tears were running down her cheeks; you might even have thought them sincere. “Even though you turn me away, to Captain Duroc or another, we shall come together again. I am much perplexed; I see not why. I have apprehended this only since last night. Yet in some fashion we are bound together, you and I, to live or to die.”

  There was a silence, while a wind shook the windowpanes and whipped the trees outside in a dead world, yet a very living world. Unexpectedly Sir Nick’s voice altered.

  “Mary!” it said. “Can it be that—”