The Bride of Newgate Read online

  “I knew it!” he said. “Dolly! Ill for two months … where is she?”

  “If you’ll be quiet, lad, I’ll try to be plain. She’s not been ill for two months. I had a runner after her: privately paid, in our service, yes. But I learned by accident this morning. Are you acquainted with Mr. Arnold, the stage manager at Drury Lane?”

  “Yes, of course!”

  “And with Mr. Raleigh, who paints the scenery, and Mrs. Raleigh?”

  “I’ve met them. Dolly …” Darwent stopped.

  “Ah!” grunted the lawyer, snapping shut the lid of the snuffbox and dropping it into his pocket. “Then you’ll understand. Once before, when your—your young lady disappeared for a matter of six weeks, she came back and threw herself on the Raleighs’ mercy. At least, so Arnold told me.

  “Two days ago, it appears, she fell over their doorstep in a raging fever with some illness the nearest doctor can’t understand. He can only let blood and look wise. I’ll tell you, Dick: there are pains in her side and she may need a surgeon: The Raleighs have given her their own room. They’re not rich people, Dick.”

  Darwent pressed his hands over his eyes, and then dropped his hands.

  “Who is the best surgeon in London?”

  “Well! Astley Cooper. Or so they say. If he’ll see her.”

  At Hoby the bootmaker’s there were two doors, one here in Piccadilly and one round the corner in St. James’s street. The former door opened and closed. Darwent heard a now all-too-familiar voice.

  “Ah, how do you do, my dear fellow!” called Mr. Jemmy Fletcher.

  Darwent, though exasperated, stopped in the act of giving an order to the driver.

  Jemmy Fletcher—“only a butterfly, my boy,” he would say of himself, though the occasional intelligence of his pale blue eye made this doubtful—strolled up to the carriage, himself agog with news. Jemmy, tallish and thin and with abundant fair hair, lived for the clubs, for the gossip he loved, for the green-baize card table at which he could not afford to play.

  He seemed well-meaning, good-natured, and helpful even as a parasite. Meeting Darwent on the State side at Newgate, he had cursed and condoled with the prisoner. Darwent, who thought cards the pastime of a fool when there were books in this world, played piquet with him and deliberately lost large sums—for a purpose.

  “Old boy,” continued Jemmy, with suppressed triumph, “this is positively providential! On my oath it is!” His slight lisp was the perfection of the dandy, though Jemmy was far from lacking virility. “Old boy,” he said in a low impressive voice, “you’ve been elected to White’s. How’s that?”

  For an instant Darwent wrenched away from his fears about Dolly Spencer.

  “I appreciate the honor,” he said.

  “Frankly, old boy, so you ought to. Nobody knew you. But there was your name. And, of course,” Jemmy added, modestly examining his fingernails, “my little efforts may have helped.”

  “Jemmy,” Darwent said abruptly, “do you know Sir John Buckstone?”

  “Old Jack? Gad, I should think, so!”

  “I want to meet him,” said Darwent. “I want to meet him, so to speak, on his own grounds.”

  “Now hark to me, Dick!” cut in Mr. Mulberry, with harshness. “If you take one word of advice—!”

  Darwent silenced him. Jemmy, who had many times met Hubert Mulberry, nevertheless half-lifted the quizzing glass, which hung on a cord round his neck, as though wondering who this fellow might be.

  “Jemmy,” said Darwent, “when can I meet Buckstone?”

  “But hang it, old boy,” Jemmy sounded puzzled, “he’s such a dull dog! You must meet Henry Pierrepoint; and Lord Alvanley, who seconded you. And Dan MacKinnon; he can crawl all the way round a room on the furniture, and never touch the floor once.”

  “A magnificent accomplishment. When can I meet Buckstone?”

  “Deuce take it, don’t press a fellow!” Jemmy, in dandy’s uniform except for buff-colored trousers in place of breeches and boots, brought his wits to bear. “Well! Everybody’s there between two and four, but it’s past four now.”

  “Can you give me an answer, Jemmy?”

  “He’ll ride in the park at five. Stop; of course! Jack’s always there at six to write letters, deuced if I know why, in the little back parlor.”

  “Will you meet me at White’s, Jemmy? Six o’clock?”

  “Well … yes. But—”

  “One other thing,” Darwent interrupted, and consulted his watch. “Jemmy, you’re a tremendous fellow. You’re acquainted with everybody worth knowing. Don’t smirk; it’s true. Now if by chance you were acquainted with Mr. Astley Cooper, the surgeon … ah, I see you are.”

  “Only a dashed sawbones, old boy. What’s come over you?”

  “As a great favor, Jemmy, you must persuade him to come to … where do the Raleighs live?”

  “Lewknor Lane,” grunted Mr. Mulberry, regarding Jemmy with a curiously speculative eye. “Not far from the theater.”

  “To Lewknor Lane, off Drury Lane, and the home of a Mr. Augustus Horatio Raleigh. Offer the surgeon any fee he likes, and double it if he hesitates. Will you promise to do that, Jemmy?”

  “Yes, old boy, if you insist. But—”

  “Thank you. Our humblest apologies for leaving you so abruptly.” Darwent raised his hat, as the fashion was, and then made a gesture to the watchful driver on the box. “Lewknor Lane!”

  And off they clattered, leaving Jemmy Fletcher with his quizzing glass now fully at his eye, his good-natured face slack with astonishment, against clusters of boots in a shopwindow.

  Though they could make little headway in the throng of vehicles, the red berline presently increased its pace amid the stews and gaming houses of Leicester Square. Somebody of republican tendencies threw a mud ball at the carriage, and it whizzed past Mr. Mulberry’s white hat.

  He did not even notice. He sat there with his arms folded.

  “Well, lad,” he said grimly, and broke a long silence, “you’ve made a fine start.”

  “I hope so.”

  “At six o’clock,” grunted the lawyer, “you meet Buckstone, I can guess why, at White’s. A little later, for what reason I can’t guess, you meet your wife in St. James’s Square.” The bloated face turned sideways. “Rot me, did you engage to meet Frank Orford’s murderer too?”

  Darwent, his foreboding about Dolly increasing with each hoofbeat of the two black horses that drew the carriage, drummed his fingers on top of the carriage door.

  “I should have attended to that too,” he said, “if I had known who he was. But we have plenty of time to put him in the condemned cell.”

  “Let’s be open, Dick,” Mr. Mulberry spoke with sudden fierce bitterness. “You’ll never see him in the condemned cell; and that’s a fact.”

  Though Darwent glanced sideways, this did not seem to surprise him greatly.

  “Oh? And why not?”

  “Because, lad, you’ve committed perjury yourself! You’ve sworn a false oath, in two courts, about fighting a duel with Orford. We had to do it, to save you. But you can’t whistle for the magistrate with another story. Has that occurred to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Eh? It has occurred to you?”

  Darwent smiled. It altered not only the expression of the thin, fine-drawn face and the steady gray eyes; it seemed to alter the whole air and feelings of the man.

  “I have thought much,” he answered, “that I can’t tell even to you. But what defeats me, everywhere I turn, is this mystery of it!” Again he drummed his fingers on the carriage door. “Why was I taken to Kinsmere House in the blue coach? What cheat was employed overnight to transform a new-furnished room—and the same room, I tell you!—into an old ruin rotted with dust and cobwebs? Who can explain that?”

  “I can,” the lawyer retorted suddenly, and banged his fist against his chest. “Old Bert Mulberry can!” Then out poured the reason for a great deal that weighed on his mind. “The fact is, Dick: I b
etrayed you.”

  There was a silence, except for wheels and hoofs. Darwent looked at him, hesitated, and refused to believe.

  “You betrayed me? How?”

  “Oh, the bottle,” said Mr. Mulberry.

  “Lord, is that all?”

  “‘Is that all?’ he says!” Mr. Mulberry addressed the driver’s back. “I was foxed before I first set eyes on you in that room at Bow Street. When I came back from looking for the country house (d’ye recall?) I was blind-foxed and swaying on my feet.”

  “I remember, yes. What difference did it make?”

  Hubert Mulberry, in a passion of repentance, again hammered at his own chest.

  “All through the trial, with Mr. Serjeant Brutable defending you, I sat there with a grin on my face and a head full of grog. How did I instruct the Serjeant? With nothing at all. What do I deserve? Hanging! For it took me near a month (a month, Dick!) to see what I should have seen when you first told me your story.”

  Darwent’s heart seemed to stop beating.

  “My st … do you know who killed Frank Orford?”

  “No. But the rest of it was easy to guess; ay, and I should have proved it at your first trial. They’d have acquitted you, Dick, if I’d had a sober head on my shoulders. That’s my confession. That’s why I worked to save you. But I couldn’t tell you until you were free.”

  Darwent looked at the floor of the carriage. He drew a deep breath. He touched the gray cape, thrown over his left shoulder, and made sure it was there.

  “Well!” he said, and his laugh was real. “Why should you blame yourself? We’ve done with it. You saved me; and I am free.”

  “Oh, you’re free!” roared Mulberry, his face congested. “But I know the truth about that enchanted room! I know why Orford was there! And yet we can never hang the murderer now!”

  The carriage, carefully driven through many dismal alleys after they had left Long Acre behind them, swerved to the right into Drury Lane.

  Chapter VII

  —and Love in Lewknor Lane

  “NO,” SIGHED MR. MULBERRY, losing a little of his haggard look, “you’re not thinking on murder now, Dick. But tonight, if you’re still alive …”

  He paused. Down Drury Lane, narrow and not very savory, they could see the big dull-faced theater, wonderfully rebuilt since the fire of ’09, with its doors now closed for the summer. Lewknor Lane, of ill repute since the time of Charles the Second, branched left as you faced south. As the red berline swung into Lewknor Lane, half-starved children poured out of doorways and screamed for joy or devilment

  “Pull up!” ordered Mr. Mulberry. “This is the house.”

  Darwent did not need to be told. He opened the carriage door and jumped down.

  “Mr. Raleigh!” he shouted. “Mrs. Raleigh!”

  One stone step led up to a door whose frame was somewhat rotted. To the right of it were two windows, giving on ground-floor lodgings of a narrow, scabrous, brick house. At one window—the curtains were painfully clean at both—sat Mrs. and Mrs. Augustus Raleigh, taking a sociable glass of gin-and-water as the heat of the day lessened.

  “Emma!” said Mr. Raleigh, in a voice extraordinarily deep for so lean a chest. “God bless my soul! See who’s here!”

  Every memory out of his old life, everything he had loved when he was a fencing master off Covent Garden, swept back over Darwent as though he had been away for twenty years.

  Actors and actresses, they said, were low people. Every respectable merchant knew it. They were still merely Their Majesties’ Servants, as they were the servants of every rowdy audience like that one years ago (let wrath try to forget it) which made David Garrick beg its pardon on his knees. It was not much changed now. Old Mr. John Kemble and Mrs. Siddons at Covent Garden Theatre, dimmed in their struggle against the glory of Edmund Kean at Drury Lane, could be honored but regarded as curiosities. No decent woman, of course, could enter the refreshment room at the latter playhouse.

  Darwent had never noticed this lowness. And Mr. and Mrs. Raleigh were not players. He wrenched open the front door, groped in darkness, and opened the door of the small, clean-scrubbed front room.

  “Dick!” began Mrs. Raleigh, but she could say no more.

  Alternately he embraced Mrs. Raleigh, who was a little plump woman in a muslin cap edged with lace; and shook hands with Mr. Raleigh, who was a middle-sized elderly man with a bald head and a cadaverous face.

  “Those clothes of yours!” gasped Mrs. Raleigh, in a state of fluster. “That carriage!”

  “There’s not time to explain now,” said Darwent, again wringing Mr. Raleigh’s hand. He attempted, and failed, to keep his voice steady. “Where is she?”

  Augustus Raleigh, who had the stately manner of a player rather than a scene painter, made a ceremonious gesture toward another door. There was only one other room.

  Darwent, his hand on the latch, hesitated because he wished to seem calm; but he could not manage it. Lifting the latch, he entered and closed the door behind him in half-darkness.

  The back room was so small that most of it was occupied by the wooden bedstead and a tiny chest of drawers. Its window, shut off by a brick house six inches away, showed only a gray soot-drizzled light through which sometimes drifted a gleam of sun. Darwent heard the straw mattress rustle as someone, under a clean and carefully mended sheet, tried to sit up.

  “I knew you’d be here,” whispered Dolly’s voice.

  Mrs. Raleigh had combed and curled Dolly’s yellow hair, cut shorter than it used to be. Her brown eyes were bright and yet glazed with fever; her face was flushed. Since Mrs. Raleigh’s wardrobe did not include a spare nightgown, Dolly wore her shift, or shoulderless undergarment; it was made of silk, but far from new.

  It seemed to him a long time he stood there, watching the helpless shining of her eyes. Then he took the warmth of her in his arms, holding her tightly but gently; and her arms went up round his neck, hands pressing the back of his head.

  “You mustn’t kiss me,” Dolly whispered, her head tilting back. “I’m not well; I have fever; you might catch it.”

  Darwent smiled at her.

  “Then we’ll both have it together,” he said, and kissed the lips that were usually moist, but now fever-dry, while her arms pressed him closer and she seemed as always to wish for more intimate contact. When he lifted his head, she was between laughing and crying.

  Still he held her with fierce protectiveness; those months in Newgate, even the gallows, now seemed a trifle.

  “Put your head back on the bolster,” he told her. “Don’t try to sit up. —What is it, Dolly? What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know. ’Tisn’t much, I expect.”

  She paid no attention to this, dismissing it while her brown eyes searched his face, and she would not loosen her arms. Her soft voice, carefully and even frantically schooled to elocution as well as grammar by Mr. Raymond, the acting manager, slurred away.

  “Chills-and-fever,” Dolly said. “That’s what Mrs. Raleigh says, and she ought to know. Dick, I …”

  He smoothed her hair gently, his left arm under her shoulders to support her.

  “Dick, I heard they wasn’t—weren’t going to …” Dolly meant “hang you,” but she did not say it. He felt her shudder. “I couldn’t be near you. Oh, God, I was frightened!”

  “Gently, my dear. It doesn’t matter now.”

  “Then I heard someone say they’d shouted out from that place—you know, the prison—and said you were safe. I cried. I couldn’t be with you. No, you musn’t kiss me!” But she was pleased and smiled, and afterwards laughed, when he did.

  “What happened to me,” he insisted, “is past and done with. But where were you all this time, Dolly? Where have you been?”

  “I can’t tell you,” whispered Dolly. “I can’t tell the Raleighs, I can’t even tell you. Not yet!” Then she saw his eyes. “Oh! But ’twasn’t what you … Dick!”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve known men befor
e I met you. I told you all of that.”

  He nodded. To men, it is jealousy of the past which stabs; to women, of the present and future.

  “But since then there hasn’t been anyone else. There never will be.” Dolly laughed, not loudly and not for amusement, but at remembrance of things past. She was trembling. “Dick! Do you remember when I saw you the last time?”

  “Yes! My God, yes!”

  “I was all in costume with glass jewels to play Lady Macduff.”

  Glass jewels, did she say? It was in his mind to tell her that, if she mentioned Shakespeare, there really was a jeweler named Mr. Hamlet in Cranbourne Alley; and Mr. Hamlet should pour out his boxes for her. But there was a weight in his throat; he could not speak bombast.

  “I didn’t play it,” laughed Dolly, amused at herself as always.

  “Why not?”

  “They daresn’t let me. Mr. Raymond says my voice is ‘musical’: as though I could ever play a pianoforte or a harpsichord! But I’m no actress, Dick.”

  “Gently, Dolly!”

  Her eyes, with a glazed quality which suddenly alarmed him, wandered up the canopy of the curtainless bed.

  “It’s awful—awfully funny. When I’m myself I’m natural, like. On the stage I’m wooden.” Mirth touched her eyes and mouth again. “Dick! Do you remember the night I played Brutus’s wife (me!), and the Roman villa looked so real I leaned on one of the pillars and fell over?” Her memory moved away. “Or the nights we went to Vauxhall Gardens, Dick? And the fireworks? Oh, all the nights!”

  “Dolly, I’m going to lower your head. Lie down.”

  She moved obediently. But as she stretched out her knees, he saw a spasm of pain cross her face. He felt, too late, that before coming here he should have broken the bell wire on the door of every physician he passed.

  “Do you feel better, Dolly?”

  “’Tisn’t anything,” she said, and clearly believed it.

  “Before long,” he assured her, “the best sur—the best physician in London will be here. And we can’t impose ourselves on the Raleighs. Dolly. They’re as poor as Lazarus. I want to take you …”

  As though, vaguely remembering something she ought to have noticed before, Dolly half-lifted her head. She ceased to look at his face, and in a groping way she looked at his clothes.