The Bride of Newgate Page 7

“I was about to say: like an Oxford don.”

  Buckstone ignored this.

  “You wouldn’t have me,” he said, fixing his little black eyes on her. “How many times did I propose to you? Thanks; I forget. But you wouldn’t have me.”

  “You are a dear fellow, Jack, and it’s no wonder your friends love you. But I was obliged to decline the honor.”

  “Oh, obleeged to you, m’dear. You prefer—”

  Caroline’s face was scarlet.

  “Please don’t be utterly ridiculous. I said nothing of the sort.”

  Caroline’s wrath, to judge by her expression, was directed mostly at herself. It was evident that she could not even understand herself. She felt bewildered, distressed; in a sense betrayed. And, therefore, she must vent her feelings on someone else.

  “I fear you would not understand,” she remarked sweetly, and plied the fan until her brown curls trembled. “You came from Oatlands, yes. From your dear friend Frederick of York and his fat wife. How noble a commander in chief of the army, some years ago, was His Grace.

  ‘My name is York, I pull a cork

  Much better than I fight …’

  “And what, Jack, was the scandal which compelled him to resign? Was it not (or do I forget?) that swearing Frederick was too stingy? And his mistress sold commissions in the army, more cheaply than they could be bought at the Horse Guards, with Frederick’s full approval? And, with the scandal years blown over, he’s back at the Horse Guards again?”

  Buckstone stared at her.

  “If it comes to that,” he lifted his lip, “what about your pet poets?”

  “You make yourself ridiculous, Jack.”

  “Here’s George Byron,” said Buckstone, “almost new-married but almost ready to separate too, after goin’ to bed for years with his half-sister. Poetry! Gad’s life, I’ve written poetry in alburns myself!”

  “You are not quite as good a poet as my Lord Byron,” Caroline said gently. “You are not even as good a pistol shot.”

  But once again, if any person hoped to sting or even ruffle Jack Buckstone, that person suffered bitter disappointment.

  “Why, m’dear,” he said, with a mouth of sadness, “I can’t contradict you.”

  “Thank you, Jack.”

  “They’re all too afraid to challenge me,” said Buckstone, stating a simple truth. “You’d split with laughing,” and again, unexpectedly, Buckstone roared with mirth, “to see the poor devil on the field.”

  “My sense of humor, perhaps, is not well developed.”

  “No, dash it, I mean that! Poor devil’s hand is shaking already. Too anxious, d’ye see, to get in his fire first. Looses off blind, as soon as the word’s given, and misses by yards. And there he is sweating, as easy as a wafer at Joe Manton’s shooting gallery.”

  Arm extended and body sideways, Buckstone’s finger curled round the trigger of an imaginary pistol. His look of cunning would have delighted his friends. The flat brass buttons glistened against his blue coat, above the head of the snoring toper.

  Then Buckstone’s arm fell.

  “About this husband of yours, m’dear,” he began.

  “That man is not my husband!”

  “As you like, pretty. But if you’ve got into trouble, pretty, I say again it’s no affair of mine. You can’t expect …”

  He paused. Both of them had heard clattering footsteps up several pairs of narrow stairs. But both expected it was the tavernkeeper with the reckoning, until the face of Blazes the turnkey appeared in the doorway.

  “Ma’am. Sir.” Blazes, panting hard, tugged at his forelock. “There’s a reg’lar do over there,” he pointed, “and a ’ard job I ’ad to get out of the prison and tell you.”

  As a matter of fact, the Chief Turnkey had sent him. But Sir John Buckstone had given him half a crown on leaving Newgate; and Blazes, though almost in apoplexy from exertion, panted for more.

  “Yes?” asked Caroline, with rigid calmness. “What happened?”

  “They’re not a-going to hang Dick Darwent, ma’am,” answered Blazes, so short of breath that his head reeled. “Not now, they says, or ever.”

  Buckstone whistled. Caroline, without expression, her fan motionless, looked at the opposite wall.

  “Indeed?” she murmured. “And why not?”

  “It’d seem, ma’am, that Dick’s a nobleman. True as gospel! ’E killed another gen’leman in a duel; and now they can’t try him except afore the House o’ Lords!”

  The snores of the stupefied guest across the table rose loudly.

  “A nobleman,” Caroline murmured. Her blue eyes began to rove round the room, and she breathed quickly. “His title?”

  (For the first time now, in anger, Buckstone’s fist clenched.)

  “Ma’am, I can’t tell you ’is title,” panted Blazes. “All I know is ’cos I was in the Sheriff’s lodgings when they sent me with a message for the Chief Turnkey.” He appealed to Buckstone. “What do you say, sir?”

  “Don’t believe it,” Buckstone replied briefly. “Get out.”

  “But, sir, it’s gospel truth!”

  “Don’t believe it,” repeated Buckstone, in the same bored voice. “Now get out.”

  “Please be quiet, Jack,” interposed Caroline. “The news this good man brings is very dreadful, of course. And yet in a way, Jack dear, I find it—well, not ill pleasing. For some extraordinary reason,” and she pressed her fingers against her temples, “our Richard Darwent fascinates me.”

  Buckstone made a short, sharp gesture. Blazes, watching him and raging, saw all hope of half a crown or any tip dwindle away. God’s truth, he had nearly killed himself for nothing!

  “Begging your pardon, ma’am,” said Blazes, “and considering as of wot we all knew happened last night, that ain’t wot Darwent thinks o’ you.”

  Caroline was startled. “I beg your pardon?”

  “And ’ow do I know that?” asked Blazes, in a passion. “’Cos I follered the Ordinary, that’s the Rev. Mr. Cotton, when he went back to Darwent’s cell less’n half an hour ago. Darwent’s carrion bird was a-talking to him.”

  “By carrion bird you mean lawyer? Well?”

  “‘Is there anyone who’s used you badly?’ says the carrion bird to Darwent. ‘Is there anyone you hate with heart and soul?’”

  Buckstone strolled over to a bench along one wall. From this he picked up his riding crop, turned round, and strolled forward.

  “Indeed?” said Caroline in a thin voice. “And what did he say in reply?”

  “He didn’t say nothing.” Then Blazes pounced. “But I’ve seen all of ’em, ma’am. The savage ’uns, the daft ’uns, the brutes as goes a-fighting to the rope! And I never saw a look on any of ’em like the look in Darwent’s eyes.”

  And the turnkey bolted down the stairs.

  Buckstone, thoroughly bored, tossed his riding crop among plates on the table. Mr. Jemmy Fletcher, whose fair hair trailed out into the dishes, gave a prodigious snore like a start of wakefulness, scrabbled with his hands, and rolled out of the chair to the floor like a dead man.

  Chapter VI

  Hears the Twittering of Fine Ladies—

  THAT WAS THE MORNING of June 22nd. On Thursday, July 21st, vengeance began to move swiftly.

  It moved, in one place, on a large scale. H.M.S. Bellerophon, seventy-four guns, lying off Rochefort in France, weighed anchor for England; and thence to a far place. H.M.S. Bellerophon carried a passenger, a little fat man in a green coat and white breeches. In a large flat book, under “Name,” Captain Maitland wrote, “Napoleon Bonaparte,” and under “Occupation” he wrote: “!!!!!,” as you may see in the Public Records Office to this day.

  It moved, in another place, on a rather smaller scale. The most Hon. the Marquess of Darwent, two hours after his acquittal before the bar of the House of Lords, sat in his own carriage in Piccadilly, at the top of St. James’s Street, just opposite Hoby the bootmaker’s.

  The carriage was a low, open, fast berline
, painted dark red, with no footman up behind but a driver in plain livery on the box. Darwent tried to look sedate, tried not to reveal that he was swallowing the air of freedom and trembling as he did so.

  After his thirty-day detention in a clean private room at Newgate, he was used to his new clothes, though the high cravat fretted him. All his wounds had healed. Food and rest filled the wiry figure with its old intense vitality.

  Clean-shaven, in new silken shirts, he had taken the air in the private exercise ground of the State side at Newgate. Purely for exercise, he explained, he resumed practice with the saber. Its straight, pointed, double-edged blade whipped such rapid patterns in the air that they seemed to remain, flashing, when the blade was still.

  And then the trial before Peers …

  Since justice had blundered at the sessions court, the whole matter had been hushed up (or so Darwent and the authorities thought) with expert discretion. No word of it publicly appeared. Even the report of the trial before the Lords was ordered to be suppressed. Darwent marveled that he could emerge, out of darkness and fully habited, as “my Lord Darwent.”

  But, as usual, he forgot that ear for scandal or unusual behavior which, among the ladies, missed nothing.

  Ever since that night of June 21st, a month ago, a buzz of whispering voices had been growing. Nobody knew the story accurately; but everyone knew, or professed to know, some scrap of it. It seemed a story so filled with swoons and romance, so darkling with emotion like Childe Harold, that teacups twittered from Hertford House to Northumberland House at dull, dirty Charing Cross.

  “My dear,” said Lady Jersey (not to be confused with the Regent’s former mistress), a dark beauty with an air like a theatrical tragedy queen, “Jemmy Fletcher visited him on the State side in the last week of June. My dear, it does vex me not to know how Jemmy learned he was there. Jemmy says he’s positively almost good looking.”

  “That will be novel,” thoughtfully murmured Lady Castlereagh, wife of the War Minister.

  “But Caroline?” urged the amiable Lady Sefton. “What of Caroline?”

  It was known that Caroline Ross, now the Marchioness of Darwent, had departed for Brighton, on the afternoon of June 22nd.

  “He is sick for love of her, they say,” observed Lady Jersey, posing above the teacups like a tragedy queen. “And I know Caroline is sick for love of him. But she won’t admit it, and throws brushes at poor Meg.”

  “He is sick for love of her?” murmured Lady Castlereagh, who had a wandering blue eye and did not like this. “How amusing! But don’t you mean ‘poor Caroline’? Caroline has always seemed … well!”

  “Fie, my dear! You must not speak so!”

  ”Something of a bluestocking, I was about to say.”

  “It is wonderfully romantic!” sighed Lady Sefton, and added: “Lord Darwent must have a card, of course?”

  All the ladies looked at each other.

  Lady Sefton referred to a card of invitation for Almack’s, that great bemirrored dancing room where they kept the orchestra hung in a kind of wicker basket. These three grandes dames, together with Lady Cowper and Mrs. Drummond Burrell and the Princess Esterhazy, were its patronesses and the arbiters of society. They ruled Almack’s with such haughtyness that even the Duke of Wellington, arriving one evening in trousers instead of formal black knee breeches and stockings, was turned away from its door.

  “God damme!” had said the Duke.

  Many persons would have cut their throats for a card to Almack’s and walked there afterwards to dance as corpses.

  “He must have a card,” Lady Jersey agreed firmly. “His name alone …”

  “Amid other things,” murmured Lady Castlereagh.

  Amiable Lady Sefton coughed delicately.

  “But if the dear man is still in gross confinement,” she cried, causing Lady Castlereagh to look at her with a start, “where does one send the card?”

  “My dear!” said Lady Jersey. “He has been put up for White’s Club by poor Jemmy Fletcher, and seconded by Will Alvanley. Stop! One thinks of a better place. A room has been bespoken for him at Stephen’s Hotel. That will do.”

  The card arrived. But Richard Darwent had not yet seen it.

  It was just as well that Darwent, sitting in the motionless red carriage on the afternoon of July 21st, in Piccadilly at the lop of St. James’s Street, had no notion these whispering voices were making him notorious.

  “Hup!” were the cries around him, and, “Mind your eye!”

  Past him flowed the rattle of carriages and carts, the clip-clop dance of a showy saddle horse. Against red-brick and dun-colored houses, the shopwindows—with their glass panes set in oblong white window joinings—gleamed amid sunshine and dust. Past the shop fronts moved ladies’ bonnets, usually with two or three upright plumes of red or green or blue.

  It was as though Darwent had never seen it before. He could hardly sit still in the carriage.

  In front of him, unnoticed, a hackney coach pulled up. Fat Mr. Mulberry, tolerably sober, struggled out and paid the fare. A moment later the lawyer muttered an exclamation.

  “Dick, Dick!” he protested in a troubled voice. “Look out for yourself!”

  “Mulberry!” said Darwent. “What’s the matter?”

  “All I did, lad, was touch your arm. You whipped round and showed your teeth like … no, no! Don’t do it.”

  “Did I?” asked Darwent, passing his hand across his forehead. “Forgive me. I was preoccupied. After all, they set me free only two hours ago.”

  Mulberry, standing beside the carriage and watching him in that same troubled way, expressed congratulation.

  “I couldn’t be there myself, Dick, as you imagine. But I knew they’d do it.”

  “I didn’t,” said Darwent, and studied his polished top boots. “Each time a voice called, ‘Not guilty, upon my honor,’ I sweated for the next.” His voice rose. “But now, by God, I’m free!”

  “Easy, Dick!”

  “I beg your pardon. Will you get into the carriage?”

  “Are you sure you want to be seen with the likes of me?”

  “My dear friend, don’t be a fool. Climb into the carriage.”

  Mr. Mulberry climbed in. Yet his worry deepened. An observer, seeing him with his soiled white hat pressed down on gray-brown hair, would have decided that he knew or guessed far more than he would say.

  “I asked you to meet me here,” he went on, glancing round at Hoby the bootmaker’s, “because I’ve got two pieces of information that’ll set you off a-flying. Wait, now; don’t speak!”

  For a moment Mr. Mulberry was silent, groping after the snuffbox in the pocket of his long brown coat.

  “Dick,” he said, “I’m a daft jackanapes when I lose my temper. A month ago, in the condemned cell, I asked whether you had any enemies. ‘Hit back at ’em!’ says I; ‘have no mercy!’”

  “Do you see any reason to change those admirable sentiments?”

  “No, no! And yet …”

  “Well?”

  “You have an enemy—”

  “Only one?”

  “Dick,” the other persisted doggedly, “you have an enemy you don’t know and can’t see. If my thinking’s right (and it is!), he’s the same person who stabbed Lord Francis Orford. Your life’s in danger; and that’s a fact. Damme, would it please you to be clubbed to death in a dark lane?”

  “It will please me very much,” replied Darwent, “if someone tries it.”

  “Dick, you’re a different man!”

  “I am what they made me.” Presently his expression softened. “Bert, let’s speak of this at another time; don’t disturb yourself. What’s this news of yours?”

  “To begin with,” Mr. Mulberry said moodily, “your wife has returned to London.”

  Darwent showed his teeth in what might have been a smile.

  “I thank you, Bert. But I’ve already learned that.”

  “You’ve learned it?”

  “Yes. It’s tru
e,” Darwent conceded, “that I have been at liberty only two hours. But I have paid two visits. One was to Stephen’s Hotel, to make sure of my accommodation. The other was to number thirty-eight St. James’s Square, the home of my dear wife. I wished to make myself acquainted with the servants—if they happened to be there.

  “Well, they were there. They explained that ‘her ladyship’ (my wife, you see) would return today by ‘The Age,’” Darwent meant the famous stagecoach, “from Brighton. I propose to call on her this evening.”

  “Will she know you intend to call?”

  “No.” Darwent rounded the syllable, lightly touched a side pocket full of money, and said no more. Mr. Mulberry was even more worried.

  “Dick, why did she come back from Brighton?”

  “Explain to me,” suggested Darwin, “the habits of cobras or rattlesnakes.”

  “No, no, no! That won’t do. Damme,” said the lawyer, at length producing a snuffbox, “here’s a worse tangle than ever! For mark this: when you went to number thirty-eight, did you observe the house next door?”

  “The house next door?”

  “Ay; number thirty-six! Did you observe it?”

  “The shutters were closed; it seemed deserted. But not unusual for London in July.”

  “That,” replied Mr. Mulberry, and took snuff, “was the town house of Lord Francis Orford.”

  Darwent sat upright.

  Neither of them heard the clatter of wheels and hoofs about them, nor heeded the fine haze of dust in Piccadilly. Darwent found himself looking at a white signboard above a shopwindow; its black lettering ran, SUPERIOR PEN KNIVES RAZORS & PATENT NEEDLES, and next door was an apothecary’s.

  “This also we can consider afterwards,” he said. “What’s the rest of your news?”

  Mr. Mulberry, taking more snuff and spilling most of it, braced himself.

  “It concerns Dolly Spencer, I’ve found her. And again I say—gently, now!”

  “Where is she? Is she ill?”

  “Yes, Dick. She’s ill.”

  Darwent smote his fist on his knee. Over his left shoulder was slung a light-gray riding cape, an odd garment for so warm a day; but he drew it up when it threatened to fall.