reading

CHAPTER I

THE MIST DOOR OPENS

SOMETHING WOKE HIM in the middle of the night. Perhaps it was the heavy, stifling air of closed bed curtains.

In his half-doze he could not remember drawing the curtains of the bed, which was three hundred years old. And it floated through his mind that he had swallowed rather a large dose of chloral hydrate, as a sleeping draught. Hence he might not have remembered.

Yet the drug still seemed to hold him. Memory, which he tried to summon up in the dark, gave back only images behind thick shifting gauze. When he essayed to remember words, they were as silent as puffs of smoke from cracks in a wasteground.

A drift of smoke showed him his own speech now.

“My name is Nicholas Fenton,” he said to himself, to restore clarity out of chloral. “I am a professor of history at Paracelsus College, Cambridge. In this modern year, which the calendar gives as 1925, I am fifty-eight years old.”

Now he realized that he had whispered the words faintly. Memory, briefly, awarded him a gauzy vision of last night. Yes, last night.

He had been sitting downstairs in the drawing room, and in the house which he had rented for the summer because “nobody” would be in London then. Across from him, on an oak settee with brocaded cushions, had sat Mary. Mary wore a cloche hat, to indicate a brief visit, and had a glass of whisky and soda in her hand. Mary was very much younger than himself, of course, and almost beautiful.

“Mary,” he had said, “I’ve sold my soul to the devil.”

Nicholas Fenton knew that she would not laugh, or even smile. She merely nodded gravely.

“Have you?” she asked. “And what did the devil look like, Professor Fenton?”

“Do you know,” he answered, “for the life of me I can’t remember? He seemed to change into all shapes. The light was dim; he was sitting in the chair over there; and my infernal eyesight …”

Mary leaned forward. Mary’s eyes possessed a quality which in his earlier days he would have called smoky: their colour a grey deepening almost to black, then again to a darker smoky-grey elusiveness as though they were shadowed in her young face.

“Did you really sell your soul, Professor Fenton?”

“Actually, no.” His dry chuckle was barely audible. “In the first place, I cannot quite credit the reality of the devil. He might have been only a hoaxing friend, with a talent for stage effect. I should not put it past Parkinson of Caius, for instance. In the second place …”

“In the second place?” prompted Mary.

“Except perhaps in the case of Dr. Faustus,” mused Fenton, “the devil’s bargains have always been too easy for him.”

“How so?”

“Contrary to popular saying, he is not a gentleman. His victims are always simpletons against whom he plays with cogged dice. He has never yet encountered a man of wit. If I have made a bargain with him, then the devil has fallen into a trap and I have beaten him hands down.”

He had intended to smile at her, indicating that she must not take him too seriously. Whereupon—or so it seemed to the half-drugged man now lying upstairs amid drawn bed curtains—whereupon that scene in the drawing room became even more dreamlike.

What Mary held in her hand was not an ordinary drinking glass. It appeared to be a silver goblet, highly polished. As she tilted the goblet to her lips, the light flashed and dazzled on its surface, sending the reflection straight into Fenton’s eyes. Light, they say, is cold. Yet this reflection shot across with a palpable heat, as of wrath.

And was there a short, sharp movement, as of a visitor, in one corner of the room?

No; it could only have been illusion. Mary held an ordinary drinking glass.

“What gift did you ask of the devil?” she inquired. “That you might be young again, like Faust?”

“No. That does not interest me.” This was only, say, one-fourth untrue, since Fenton had always firmly told himself he was as young as ever.

“Then was it … what stupid people have called your obsession?”

“In a sense, yes. I asked to be carried back through time to a specific date in the third quarter of the seventeenth century.”

“Oh, you can do it,” Mary whispered.

Often he wished that she would not sit there and look at him with such grave, attentive eyes. Often he could not understand what she found interesting in the conversation of an elderly stick like himself.

“You are the only historian,” said Mary, “with sufficient knowledge of minutiae to do it. Carry yourself cleverly, especially as regards phraseology, and none will suspect you.”

Now where on earth, he wondered, had she picked up that term “carry yourself cleverly”? It was common usage in the seventeenth century.

“And yet,” continued Mary suddenly, “I don’t understand this.”

“I don’t understand myself. But, if the devil keeps his bargain …”

“You mistake my meaning. In this way: you must many times have wished, before this, to be carried back into the past?”

“Oh, yes. ‘Wished’ is a mild word. God!” unexpectedly whispered Fenton, and felt a cold tremble. “How I longed for it! How I writhed on a bed of nettles, as men scarify themselves for money or women for social position! But it was only academic curiosity, I thought.”

“Then why do you wish for it now?”

“First, curiosity has reached a point past endurance. Second, I have a mission. Third, I never knew it was so easy to whistle up the devil.”

The expressionless Mary seemed interested in only one part of this.

“Mission, Professor Fenton? What mission?”

Fenton hesitated. He touched the pince-nez on the nose of his mild, donnish face. Automatically he ran a hand over his high, arched skull, where some strands of dark-red hair were still brushed back. In person he was a little over middle height, stoop-shouldered from bookishness, and very lean.

If he stopped to think about it, Fenton knew, he was a frail man to throw himself like a swimmer into the dark waters of the past, full of cries and sounds unknown, a-rush with currents that might break his bones among rocks. But he resolved not to think about it.

“In this house,” he said, “on June 10th of the year 1675, a certain person at last died of poison. It was a slow, brutal murder.”

“Oh,” said Mary, putting down her glass on a side table. “Please forgive me, but have you authenticated evidence for all this?”

“Yes. I even have a folio-size portrait engraving of each person in the household. I could recognize any one of them who came into this room now.”

“Murder.” She repeated the word slowly. “And who were these people?”

“Three were women, all of them beautiful. Not,” Fenton added hastily, “that this has influenced my decision in any way.” Quite suddenly he sat up straight. “Did you hear an odd kind of laugh, then, very low-pitched, from the direction of those bookcases?”

“No.”

Under the sides of Mary’s cloche hat two edges of her black bobbed hair showed glossy wings against the milky-white complexion of her face. It seemed to Fenton that her eyes had hardened.

“Then, for another example,” he said quickly, “there was the owner of the house. Er—curiously enough, he bore the same name as my own. Nicholas Fenton.”

“Some ancestor of yours?”

“No. He was no relation whatever; I’ve traced it carefully. Sir Nicholas Fenton was a baronet. His line died out in the latter part of the next century. Mary, who committed that murder?”

“You mean you don’t know?” Mary asked incredulously.

“No! No! No!”

“Please, Professor Fenton! You mustn’t get excited. Your voice …”

“I beg your pardon.” Fenton controlled himself, though his insides were again cold and trembling. “The reason I don’t know,” he went on in his usual mild tone, “is that three sheets are missing from Giles Collins’s manuscript account. Someone was arrested, tried, and executed after a confession voluntarily given. But the pages containing this account have been lost or stolen. We can be certain only of two persons who were not guilty.”

“Oh?” said Mary. “Who were they?”

Her companion grimaced.

“One of them was Sir Nicholas himself. The other was a woman; her name not given, but from the details it is easy to guess her identity. I know it because there are notes at the end. We must accept this; otherwise we have no eyes to see through.”

“But surely,” Mary protested, “there must be some published account of this murder case besides that of Giles Collins?”

“So I had supposed. But it’s not in Howell’s State Trials, of course. It’s not in the first volume of the Complete Newgate Calendar, because Captain Johnson merely chose his cases and did not list them. For nine years—yes, nine years!—I have searched libraries and advertised to obtain some book, some pamphlet, even the broadsheet which was usually published at the time of a hanging. There is none.”

“Nine years,” whispered Mary. “You never told me.” In some fashion her face seemed to grow shadowy and smoky, like her hair and eyes. “There are three women in this, you said. I daresay your ‘Sir Nicholas’ was hard in love with one of them?”

“Well … yes.”

Now how had the child guessed that? For Mary, at twenty-five, he regarded merely as a child because she was the daughter of his old friend Dr. Grenville, of Paracelsus.

“You still don’t understand,” he insisted. “G—the devil help me, I have done everything! I have even taken up a headachy course of reading at criminology and medical jurisprudence, because this was an affair of poison. I think I can deduce the name of the murderer.” His voice rose. “But I don’t know.”

“And so,” Mary’s shapely shoulders moved, “you are now so desperate that you must go back into the past and find the truth?”

“I have a mission, remember. I may be able to prevent the murder.”

No clock ticked in the muffled silence.

“Prevent the murder?” Mary repeated.

“Yes.”

“But that’s impossible! This is a small thing, if you like, against the march of all the ages. But it’s already happened. It’s a part of the stream of history. You can’t change. …”

“So I was reminded,” he told her dryly. “Nevertheless, I wonder!”

“Did your satanic friend tell you this? What did he say to you?”

How difficult, how extraordinarily difficult, it had been to describe to Mary an interview which had seemed as normal and even casual as that of two men talking in the smoking room of a club! For the devil had paid him a quiet visit that night, not an hour before Mary arrived. His visitor, unattended by any of the lurid ceremonies usually described, had sat in a tapestry chair far across the drawing room.

What Fenton had told Mary was quite true. The light being dim—it was a small bulb in a table lamp darkened by several thicknesses of imperial-purple silk—Fenton saw only that unstable ever-varying outline, and heard soundless words.

“Yes, Professor Fenton,” his visitor had said amiably, in English of a faintly archaic flavour, like the gentleman he was not, “I think I can arrange this matter to your satisfaction. Others have requested it before you. The date you mentioned, I believe, was …?”

“It was May 10th, in the year 1675. Just a month before the murder.”

“Ah, yes. I will make a note of it.” The visitor mused. “Those were rough and bloody days, if memory serves me. But the ladies!” Here he revolted Fenton by smacking his lips audibly. “Dear sir, the ladies!”

Fenton did not reply.

“It is unfortunate,” continued the visitor, in a distressed voice, “that two gentlemen must discuss matters of business. But you know my conditions and my—er—price. Come! Can we not strike a bargain now?”

Fenton smiled. He had no very high opinion of his visitor’s intelligence. Of his power, yes. But not his intelligence.

“You go too fast, sir,” Fenton objected mildly, and ran his hand over the very thin hair on top of his head. “Before we strike any kind of bargain, I should prefer you to hear my conditions.”

“Your conditions?”

Towards Fenton, out of the dark tapestry chair, there seemed to flow a wave of such huge arrogance that it threatened the room and even the house. Fenton, who hitherto had felt no fear or even awe, was momentarily frightened. But the wave of feeling dwindled into a kind of bored politeness.

“Let us hear your conditions,” yawned the visitor.

“First, I wish to go back to the past in the character of Sir Nicholas Fenton.”

“Of course you do.” The visitor seemed surprised. “However! Granted.”

“Next, since I cannot discover a great deal about Sir Nicholas, there are further conditions. He was a baronet, yes. But baronetcies in those days, as you are aware, were sometimes worn by the oddest of bedlamites.”

“True, true! But. …”

“I must be a man of wealth and noble blood,” Fenton continued. “I must be young, I must at no time suffer any illness, bodily or mental affliction, or deformity of any kind whatever. Nor must you create any accident, or other circumstance, to deprive me of anything I have mentioned.”

For a second Fenton thought he had gone too far.

Out of the dark chair flowed a wave of pure childish annoyance, as though a small boy had stamped his feet on the floor.

“I ref—” There was a sulky pause. “Very well. Granted.”

“Thank you. Now I hear, sir, that one of your favourite jokes is to tamper with dates and clocks like an old-fashioned detective story. When I give you the date of May 10th, 1675, it is the time I mean. Nor shall there be any jugglery of fact. For example, you will not have me imprisoned and hanged for this murder. I shall live out my life, exactly as Sir Nicholas did. Granted?”

Though the childish heel-drumming had gone, anger remained.

“Granted, Professor Fenton. Surely there is nothing else?”

“Only one thing more,” said Fenton, who was sweating. “Though I shall be in the body of this Sir Nicholas, I must retain my own mind, my own knowledge, memory, and experience, just as they are in this year 1925.”

“One moment, if you please,” his visitor interrupted in a rich, soothing voice. “Now there, I am afraid, I cannot accommodate you completely. You observe that I deal plainly with you.”

“Be good enough to explain.”

“Essentially,” purred the visitor, “you are a kindly and good man. That is why I want your sou—your company. Now Sir Nicholas, I confess, was at heart much like you. He was good-natured, generous, and easily touched to sympathy. But, being of his age, he was cruder, of different temperament, and given to fits of violent rage.”

“I still fail to understand.”

“Anger,” the visitor explained, “is the strongest of all emotions. Now if you yourself—Professor Fenton, in the body of Sir Nicholas—were to lose your own temper violently, then Sir Nicholas would take over your mind as long as the anger fit lasted. You would become Sir Nicholas for that time. Yet, as part of the bargain, I solemnly tell you that his wrath fits never lasted for more than ten minutes. If you accept this, I grant your condition. What do you say?”

Again conscious of the sweat on his forehead, Fenton considered this to find a catch in it.

But there was none. In late middle age Fenton was a trifle inclined towards fussiness, and he fussed and fussed with the rack of pipes beside him. A man in a rage, admittedly, might do much damage in ten minutes. But Fenton’s other conditions, already granted, protected him from harm of any kind. They were like heavy nails, driven in after long thought, to seal up the door against the devil.

Besides, he become violently angry? He, Nicholas Fenton? Damn the visitor’s impudence! He never became angry. It was monstrous!

“Yes?” insinuated the visitor. “Agreed?”

“Agreed!” snapped Fenton.

“Admirable, my dear sir! Then we have only to seal the bargain.”

“Er—I was wondering,” Fenton began, but added hastily: “No, no! Not another condition! I merely wished to ask a question.”

“My dear friend!” cooed the visitor. “Ask, by all means.”

“I daresay it would violate the rules, and be outside even your power to grant, if I were to change history?”

The wave of feeling which flowed towards him was one of childish amusement.

“You could not change history,” the visitor said simply.

“Do you seriously mean,” insisted Fenton, “that with all the resources of the twentieth century, with infinitely detailed knowledge of what is going to happen, I could not alter even political events with a crash?”

“Oh, you might alter a small and trifling detail here and there,” said the other. “Especially in domestic matters. But, whatever you did, the ultimate result would be just the same. You are at perfect liberty,” he added politely, “to try it.”

“Thank you. I promise I shall try it!”

And then presently the devil had departed, with little less ceremony than he had come. Nicholas Fenton had a good space of time to sit down again, and calm his nerves with a soothing pipe of John Cotton, before Mary’s visit.

When he had finished telling Mary every detail of that conversation, she did not speak for some time.

“Then you did sell your soul,” she said at length. It was a statement rather than a question.

“My dear Mary, I hope not.”

“But you did!”

Here Fenton felt rather ashamed of himself. He felt that his tactics had been a little unsporting, even against the Father of Evil.

“The fact is,” he said hesitantly, “I had up my sleeve, so to speak … er … an ace of trumps which will ultimately defeat him. No, don’t ask what it is. Perhaps I have talked great nonsense already.”

Abruptly Mary rose to her feet.

“I must be going,” she said. “It’s getting late, Professor Fenton.”

Fenton was conscience-stricken. He must not keep the child up after ten o’clock, or her parents would worry. Nevertheless, even as he escorted her to the front door, he felt piqued that she made no comment.

“What did you think of it?” he asked. “A while ago, you seemed to approve.”

“I did,” whispered Mary. “I do!”

“Well, then?”

“You see the devil,” she said, “as your mind tells you to see him. All your interests are concentrated like a burning glass on history and literature alone. You see him as a combination of the clever, worldly man and the cruel, naïve small boy: I mean, just like a person of the later seventeenth century.”

Then she ran down the few short steps to the southern side of Pall Mall. Fenton was left holding the door open to a damp if not rainy night. A twinge of his old rheumatism stirred with pain. Closing and locking the door, he returned to the dim drawing room.

There was not a soul in the house, not even a dog to keep him company. A certain elderly and energetic woman, Mrs. Wishwell, had promised to come in each morning to get his breakfast and tidy up. Each week she and her daughter would give the house what she had enthusiastically called “a real good clean.”

Go to bed now? Fenton knew he could not sleep. But he had anticipated that beforehand. His doctor had given him a medium-sized bottle of chloral hydrate, which he had hidden—rather furtively—in the carved-oak sideboard of the drawing room.

Professor Fenton was an abstemious man. Carefully he poured out, as a nightcap, the one whisky and soda he allowed himself a day. Going over to the sideboard, he found the bottle of colourless liquid and added an overly generous dose to the whisky. Afterwards he sat down, leaned back in a comfortable chair, and sipped the mixture.

Its effects, he reflected after about ten minutes, must be coming on too quickly. Outlines began to blur. He could scarcely …

And that was all he could recall, until something waked him in the middle of the night, or it might have been early in the morning, with the bed curtains drawn and half stifling him. His heart was beating thickly, and he remembered a warning from his doctor. To drive what he supposed to be the chloral from his brain, he forced himself to lie back and reconstruct the events of last night.

“Extraordinary!” he muttered, speaking aloud after the fashion of lonely men. “What a curious dream! No; perhaps not curious. But I must have drunk that infernal stuff much earlier in the evening than I can remember now.”

Automatically he ran his hand up over his head. His hand reached the back of the neck, stopped suddenly, groped again, and then stopped altogether.

Even the remaining strands of hair brushed across his skull were now gone. His head was shaved like that of an old-fashioned convict.

Not quite closely shaved, however. There was a faint bristly stubble, which felt as though there might have been hair all over the head.

Sitting up straight in bed, Fenton noticed that for the first time in very many years he had not put on his pyjamas, and that he wore nothing at all.

“Look here, now!” he said to himself, but not aloud. Rolling to his left—the bed sheets seemed oddly coarse and raw—he touched the bed curtains. Despite pitch-darkness, he guessed this to be the bed and the room in which he had chosen to sleep. The bed curtains were thicknesses of unbleached linen, which would have on their outer sides a design woven in heavy red thread. He had seen the bed some days earlier, when he had rented the house, and had sat on the edge of that bed with his feet firmly planted on the ground.

Though still muddle-witted, he nodded gravely. He threw aside the bedclothes, flung back the curtains with a wooden rattle of rings, and swung himself round to sit on the edge of the bed. He must find his pince-nez on the bedside table; afterwards he must grope past the edge of the table and reach the electric switch beside the door.

But Fenton’s next gesture would have been really strange—if he had noticed it at the time.

Mechanically he reached along the side of the bed, and found what the undersurface of his brain knew would be there: a loose ankle-length garment of padded silk, with a small trim of fur round the collar and sleeves.

The bedgown, yes. Mechanically he put it round him, pushing his arms into the sleeves, and made a discovery which did rouse him. His whole figure, long and lank and lean, had now altered. He was thick of chest, with a flat stomach and heavily muscled arms. But, when he swung his feet over the side of the bed, his legs did not seem long enough to reach the floor.

From the throat of Nicholas Fenton, professor of history at the University of Cambridge, rose a purely animal snarl which seemed of heavier pitch than his usual light-baritone voice. He did not even know whether he had spoken, or another.

Sheer panic caught him. He was afraid of the darkness, afraid of himself, afraid of primeval forces unknown; and he sat there in a sweat of hot and cold, with his legs grotesquely dangling as though over a gulf.

“Jump!” a great voice seemed to be crying. “Wencher, rakehelly, gamester, jump!”

Fenton jumped, jolting his heels because it was not a long distance to the floor.

“Where am I?” he shouted back. And then: “Who am I?”

Nobody answered him.

Every curtain must have been sealed against the windows, so dense was the dark. Fenton staggered a little. His bare right foot touched what felt like an old slipper of very hard leather; a pair of slippers, he discovered by exploration, and he put them on.

The whole room was pervaded by a faintly unpleasant smell, intensified by stuffiness. What was it he had wanted? Ah, yes. His pince-nez and the light switch. But suppose …

Clutching hard to the bed curtain as a guide, he edged his way towards the head. Yes, there was a table of some sort against the wall at the head of the bed. He stretched out his hand, and touched human hair.

This time he felt no impulse to cry out; no flinch to a crawling skin. He knew what he had touched, of course. It was the great peruke, or periwig, whose heavy curls fell down over the shoulders; it stood on its high wig block, ready for the morning.

Fenton nodded. If that were so, there must be something else. His fingers slid towards the right, encountering a large kerchief of silk folded several times. It was probably of bright vivid colours, like his bed gown.

On impulse he whipped it up, shook it out, and (with surprising dexterity, for such shaky hands) bound it round his head like a flattened turban. Even his reading, his intense study of small detail, told him that every man of quality concealed his shaven head in this fashion when he lounged at home en déshabille.

Though the breath whistled through his lungs—strong lungs, those of a young man, unbrushed by even the faintest whiff of poison gas from the second battle of Ypres—he imagined himself to be quite calm. Yet he made another test.

Though he groped carefully over the table, he could not find his pince-nez. Edging his way round the table, he attained the rather ill-fitting door. There was no light switch beside it. On the door he encountered not even a porcelain knob; only a wooden latch whose inner side curved outwards and downwards like a claw.

“Quite!” he said aloud. The utter banality of the word made him want to laugh.

On the table there had been a candle in its holder. But there was no match … that is to say, no tinderbox. He could not, literally and physically could not, remain here in darkness until morning. Nevertheless, if there had happened what he suspected yet still doubted, there must be someone else in the house.

Someone else. The imagined faces which swam before him …

Professor Fenton lifted the latch and threw open the door.

Again darkness. But he had chosen the large bedroom at the back of the house. He must be facing straight down the upstairs passage with the unexpectedly small bedrooms on either side. Some distance away, on the left, a thin line of yellow light shone under the sill of a door.

Fenton walked straight ahead, albeit on shaky legs. The same faintly unpleasant smell pervaded this passage as well as his room. Gaining the door of the room with the light, he did not trouble to knock. He lifted the latch and opened the door halfway.

It was as though veils were dropping away from his now-sharp eyesight, as though he had stumbled through a long tunnel in space to find this door.

Against the wall opposite the door stood some kind of table or perhaps dressing table. A single candle, in a painted china holder, cast (to him) only a dull little glimmer with blurred edges. It brushed the gold-leaf frame of an oblong mirror, propped against the wall with its narrow side on the dressing table.

Someone sat in an oak chair before the mirror, back towards him. But he could make out little, since the narrow back of the chair—of some yellow woven material pierced by lines of tiny round holes—cut off his view even from the mirror.

He knew only that it was a woman, since her long black hair was let down far over her shoulders, and pressed against the back of the chair. Stop! It was as though she had been expecting him. She did not start or even move at the wooden clunk of the latch, or the creak of the opening door.

For an instant, a finger-snap’s time, he dreaded to see her face. If he saw her face, he felt, it would close irrevocably the last barrier between his own life and a century two hundred and fifty years gone by.

But the woman gave him no time, even if he had wished it. She rose to her feet. Pushing the chair back and well to one side, she turned round fully to face him. And for seconds he could only look at her in stupefaction.

“Mary!” he said.

CHAPTER II

SCANDALOUS BEHAVIOUR OF TWO LADIES

“NICK,” THE WOMAN ANSWERED, with a strange intonation on that one word.

The sound of his own voice unnerved him. He could only stare. Mary Grenville had never in her life called him Nick. And yet, despite that inflection, it was her voice. Furthermore, despite differences from the subtle to the … well, to the shocking, he felt rather than knew it was Mary.

Since he had always towered over her, it was more than disturbing to find her only half a head shorter than himself. No, stop! His own height must now be about five feet six inches. And she was not a child. No, not in any sense! It startled Professor Fenton that he should ever notice the obvious reasons why she was not a child.

She stood there in an elaborate bedgown of yellow silk, somewhat soiled, but trimmed with white fur round the very loose sleeves and round a collar whose folds met about halfway to her waist. She had drawn it about her carelessly but tightly. By that dim candlelight her very white skin seemed to have that smoky, shadowy quality he had first remarked last night.

Mary held her head a little back and up. What unsettled him was her smile, especially when it broadened; that, and the expression in her grey eyes.

Then he thought he understood everything.

“Mary!” he said, with ordinary modern pronunciation. “You’ve been carried back too! I didn’t dream that conversation last night; you were not being polite when you sympathized! You’ve been carried back too!”

But it was the wrong approach.

All the woman’s coquetry and insinuation fell away. She shrank back from him, with fear in her eyes.

“Nick!” she cried out, as though begging him not to joke. “What black-more’s tongue d’ye speak? Pay your service to another, if you be struck stark mad!”

The last sentence sounded exactly like, “Pye your sarvis to anather, if ye be strook’t staark maad!” And suddenly Fenton remembered certain gramophone records he had made himself. With so many stage plays and letters of the age written or dictated phonetically, it was possible to reconstruct their speech as well as any man could. Often he had imitated it for the amusement of the high table at Paracelsus.

Drawing himself up, he made her a deeper and more courteous bow than Sir Nicholas Fenton would have made.

“If it be not too troublesome to you,” he intoned in her own speech, but gently, “may I beg to explain myself, madam?”

She understood well enough. But still it was the wrong approach. Breathing in hard gasps, the woman almost spat at him.

“Mad!” she said. “This frenzy for wine and the doxies has spilled the wits out of your head, as it hath done for my Lord Rochester!”

“I must be a devil of a fellow,” thought Professor Fenton, much disquieted. But he guessed the proper tactics at last.

“Hold your clack!” he suddenly roared at her. “God’s body! Must you skreek out like a carted dell if a man but use you with court civility?”

The woman’s right hand, raised as though to shield herself, dropped to her side. The tiny candle flame wavered, amid drifts and weights of shadow. The woman shook back her long hair, fleecy and yet cloudy black. She straightened up. Her whole expression became languishing, pleading, humble; and ever-ready tears started to her eyes.

“Nay, now, forgive me,” she pleaded in a soft voice, though he knew her white flesh held a tiger cat. “I was so distracted, that you did put me to lie in a chamber opposite your wife’s … sweetest, I scarce remember what I said!”

“D’ye heed me?” shouted Fenton, still acting his part and feeling rather pleased with himself. “Am I drunk? Durst you say I am? Or mad?”

“Sweetest, dearest; I owned I was wrong!”

“And I own, for my part, I have led no very admirable life. Well! We can mend that. But let’s pretend, for the comedy’s sake,” and he laughed loudly, “that we begin all anew. That we have never met, and do not know each other. —Who are you?”

Her long eyelashes lifted in brief wonder; then they drooped. Her expression became sweet and sly-lipped.

“If you don’t know me, sir,” she answered—with a slight emphasis on both you and know, while she smiled—“then in all faith no man on earth knows me!”

“A plague on’t, now! What is your name?”

“I am Magdalen York, whom it is your pleasure to call Meg. And who is ‘Mary’?”

Magdalen York.

In Giles Collins’s manuscript there had been considerable mention of “Madam Magdalen York.” The “Madam” did not necessarily mean she was married, but only a lady of quality; as the polite “Mrs.” of the playhouse dubbed the actress respectable. But this woman only slightly resembled the contemporary likeness of her, probably the fault of the engraver. She was …

“Sir Nick,” softly wheedled the woman called Meg. She hovered near him, clearly wondering whether to insinuate her arms round his neck or stand clear. Then, as she glided away from the dressing table, for the first time he saw his own face in the mirror.

Striding forward, he picked up the painted china candleholder and held the light close.

“God’s body!” he swore.

This time the engraver had done well. Out of the darkling glass, under a close-wound headdress of dull brown silk streaked with white, peered a swarthy but not unhandsome face, with a long nose and a very thin black line of moustache over a good-humoured mouth.

“Sir Nick. Fenton, born 25th Dec’r, 1649; dy’d—” Why, he could not be more than twenty-six years old! Only a year older than Mar … than this woman Meg. New, startling thoughts crept into the mind of Professor Fenton in the shape of Sir Nick. Under his bedgown, which was brown in colour and sewn with scarlet poppies outlined by silver thread, he flexed his arm muscles and sensed his flat belly.

“Come, now,” coaxed Meg from behind his shoulder. “You’d not feign madness again?”

“Why, no. I but wondered,” and he passed a hand over his jaw, “if I were badly shaved.”

“As though that mattered a Birmingham groat to me!” Her tone changed. “Sweetest. You’d not truly … mend your way of life?”

“Did you not wish it so?”

He turned round, setting down the candle on the table, so that he faced her and the dim light fell fully on Meg York.

“As touches other women, surely!” She was serious now; her face a little flushed, but her voice soft. “I have loved you—oh, most monstrously!—these two years past. You’d not leave me?”

“Could I leave you?”

“We-ell! For discourse’ sake …” murmured Meg.

Detached, as though considering the floor without curiosity, she carelessly allowed the front of her yellow bedgown to fall open. Under it she wore not even the seventeenth-century ladies’ nightgown or the short smock they sometimes preferred.

It is regrettable to state that desire gripped Fenton like a strangler. The intense sense of her physical nearness made his head swim. “This will never do,” thought the Cambridge don. The high-backed chair was near him. With as much dignity as he could, which was not great, he backed towards it and sat down. He had not allowed for his shorter stature, and the seat of the chair bumped him unexpectedly.

All this time Meg watched him furtively, through half-closed eyes, and uttered the ghost of a laugh which might have been a giggle if it had passed her closed lips.

“You a reformed rake?” she murmured. “Oh, fie!”

Women have a peculiar sense of humour.

Then her laugh vanished, through the flush remained on her face.

“I told you before,” she said. “I was so extravagant vexed at you, for putting me to lie in a chamber opposite your wife, and thereby causing a great noise of scandal should we be discovered, that I swear I could have killed you! But I have forgot that. I have forgot all. Why should we care what she thinks?”

“Why indeed?” he asked in a hoarse voice.

Fenton’s nerves were jumping like a hooked fish, his arms a-tremble. He got to his feet, and Meg stretched out her arms. But he never touched her … that is, at this time. Meg, her eyes seeming half-glazed, nevertheless flung a quick look over her shoulder.

“The door,” she whispered. “Oh, fool, you have forgot to shut the door! —Hark! Did you lend ear to that?”

“Some noise! … What matter? … I …”

“You’ve never heard the scratch of a tinderbox, then?” she inquired. Her tone was whispered fury, and she stamped her foot on the floor. “My sweetest cousin, your lady wife, will be across the passage before you may count ten on your fingers. Pray sit down; do!”

Afterwards Professor Fenton had a confused notion that he had uttered words, some late Restoration oaths he was not even aware he knew. For a moment he had imagined Sir Nick took possession of him, because his memory blurred.

But he sat down, and Sir Nick vanished.

He tried to concentrate on purely academic matters. When Meg drew her lips back, her teeth were even and as white as a hound’s, although only the most fastidious ever troubled with the teeth save for an occasional scrub with a soapy twig. Doubtless it was the harsh, gnawed food. All the same, Meg’s body was white and clean in an age when … stop! This only led his thoughts round in the old circle.

Snap went a door latch across the passage, and another. There was the moving gleam of a candle, and a rustle of taffeta, as someone else entered the room.

“Sweetest Lydia!” crooned Meg, with eyes of childlike innocence, and her bed gown wound round her.

“Then this will be the woman,” reflected Fenton, not daring to look over his shoulder, “whom I have—er—idealistically cherished for nine years.”

Bracing himself, he did look round.

Lydia, Lady Fenton, was fully dressed as though for a court ball. Her “sky-and-pink” taffeta gown was sleeveless, the low-corsage pushed outwards in heart shape and edged with Venice-point lace, the waist slender, and ankle-length skirt only a little flared. Lydia’s soft, light-brown hair was arranged round her head in a sort of very thick cap, down over the ears as well and wide at the sides with a few trailing curls: a fashion set by Louise de Kéroualle.

Her figure was comely, too. She was not as tall as Meg; even so, Fenton knew there would be high heels concealed by the blue-and-pink gown. Lydia Fenton would have been extraordinarily pretty if it had not been for one thing.

Her arms, shoulders, and breast were smeared with coarse white powder. Rough-and-ready cosmetics turned her face into a white-and-red mask, as though enamelled. Against a corpse-white face, the smears of red stood out against her cheekbones, and the mouth was heavy scarlet. She wore two “patches,” microscopic bits of black paper cut into the shape of hearts or diamonds or Cupids, one pasted beside the left eyelid and one at the corner of the mouth.

The effect was almost horrible. Enamel for a worn-out old woman of seventy had been raddled on the face of a twenty-one-year-old girl. It was as though an old waxwork had stepped down from its stand.

“Sweetest cousin!” intoned Meg, pronouncing the word cozen.

With a somewhat unsteady gait, Lydia moved towards the mantelpiece on her left. There, first tilting the candle, she set it upright on the mantelshelf. It must be remembered that Fenton could still not see her face well. But she had fine blue eyes, strained with tears, inside the mask.

Then Fenton did a strange thing. With one hand he picked up the high, heavy back of the chair, and brought its legs down on the floor with a crash.

“Our Gracious Liege, Charles the Second,” he intoned as though in a trance. “By the Grace of God King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith. And,”—the trance lifted—“he sleeps now at Whitehall Palace.”

“Or elsewhere,” tittered Meg, lifting one shoulder in astonishment. “What matter?”

Lydia ignored Meg altogether.

“Sir,” she addressed Fenton in a low, sweet voice, “you will confess I have endured much. But that you and this creature, within three yards of my door …”

Meg had backed against the dressing table. Her mouth was a pink O of shocked innocence and surprise.

“Oh, filthy! Hideous!” Meg shivered. “Fair cousin! Sure you would not think that Nick and I—”

Still Lydia did not look at her. Perhaps this was what made Meg pause in mid-flight, or perhaps it was the behaviour of Professor Fenton. Bowing low to Lydia, he lifted her hand and kissed it.

“My lady,” he said very gently, “I am not unaware of my weakness or cruelty towards you. May I ask your pardon on my knee, thus?” Then he rose up again. “I am not the boorish oaf, with indifferent learning and no wit, you must suppose me. May I have leave to alter my conduct?”

In Lydia’s blue eyes there was an expression which, for a moment, stabbed his heart with pity like a physical pain.

“You beg my pardon?” she whispered. “I beg yours, with all my heart.”

Then a touch of horror went past her eyes.

“You swear all this?” she begged. “You’d not put a trick upon me?”

“I swear it by what knightly honour is left to me.”

“Then rid yourself of her,” said Lydia, clasping his hand in both of hers. “Do not suffer her to stay here: not a night, not an hour! Sweet heart, I beseech you! She will destroy you; I know it! She will …”

Without hesitation Meg snatched up a hand mirror from the table and flung it at Lydia. The glass, missing both Lydia and Fenton, sailed across the room through the open door and crashed in the passage outside.

“Really,” thought Professor Fenton of Cambridge, “these people seem to have no inhibitions whatever.” Yet, despite himself, he found his own neck veins swelling with the blood of wrath.

“Bitch!” screamed Meg.

“Punk!” retorted Lydia, meaning harlot.

“Whey-face!”

“Fireship!”

“Fireship, eh?” repeated Meg, in a cool fury of perspiration at this deadliest insult of all. Whirling round, paying no attention to the set of her bedgown, she indicated on the dressing table the litter of used handkerchiefs, jars, and unguent bottles with whose aid she had removed her cosmetics.

“And is it I who have the French sickness, then,” she inquired, whirling round again, “that I dare not show my face save under thick enamel? Foh! Or is it the seeming innocent, the virtuous wife—daughter of a mad Independent, granddaughter of a hanged and damned regicide—who is truly a danger to men because she hath …”

Once more Meg paused.

Fenton could feel the furious congestion of his face, the blindness that was blackening his eyesight as well as his mind or soul. With both hands he whirled the heavy chair overhead as though it were made of plywood, to smash it down on Meg York’s head.

Meg, for the first time really terrified, screamed and backed away and fell on her hands and knees, with her long hair sweeping forwards to hide her face. Her clawed fingers sent up puffs of dust from the bright carpet.

What saved her life was partly that Sir Nick lusted for her too much, and hesitated to kill; and partly that Professor Fenton, as though fighting to shut down a coffin lid with some rolling horror inside, felt the struggle cease and the lid click shut.

Fenton’s arms and legs were shaking as he lowered the chair to the floor. Nausea crept up inside him. Catching sight of his own white face in the glass, with the curved black eyebrows and narrow line of moustache, he did not recognize himself and looked round wildly for someone else. Then he grew steadier.

“I hope I did not frighten you, madam?” he said hoarsely—to Lydia, not Meg.

“A little,” answered Lydia. “But not as much as you do think.” She lifted her eyes. “You will turn her away?”

From behind Fenton there was a faint, mocking titter.

Meg, still on all fours between the edge of the table and the edge of the bed, looked at him past the line of her long black hair. Her eyes were narrow and she laughed with her lips closed. He knew that, except for one black moment, this queenly slut had been enjoying it all.

Fenton strode towards the door. He felt, with justice, that he had experienced quite enough for one night.

“It shall be as you desire,” he said to Lydia, and pressed his hand on one bare shoulder. “But … not tonight. This night, dear wife, I lie alone. I must think how things are like to go. And above all,” he snapped, as he turned round in the doorway, “a sweet good night to both of you!”

Though he slammed the door behind him, he forgot that a wooden latch was unlikely to hold. The door banged, and then stood an inch open; pale vertical light slanted out into the dark passage. Fenton, shuffling a little way towards his own bedroom, resting his head against the wall panel and tried for a time to think.

Had any man, he wondered, ever faced so formidable a problem?

Twice that night Sir Nick had almost—almost, if not quite—gained control. And not alone by anger. Silkily, casually, the devil had mentioned anger. Now the devil (who must in the future not be underestimated) had not mentioned physical desire, which somehow seemed vaguely connected with anger and could be just as powerful. But physical desire was granted by implication, it became automatic, if you stipulated strong health and the age of twenty-six.

He was beginning to understand a little of Sir Nick’s character. Sir Nick lusted for Meg York, and would never turn her out or suffer her harm. But Sir Nick also loved his wife, and would never turn her out or suffer her harm either. Could a man at the mental age of fifty-eight control this? But fifty-eight was not really old; did he want to control it? Dimly Fenton realized (with horror) that in his heart he shared Sir Nick’s feelings too.

And he had promised to get rid of Meg next day.

But this was not his real problem. No, not by a jugful! His real problem, set down in the neat script of Giles Collins’s manuscript, was this:

Unless he could prevent it, Lydia would die of poison in exactly one month. She was the victim. And the person he had long suspected of being the murderess, from certain details in the manuscript, was Meg York.

Fenton, in creaky leather slippers, stumbled towards his bedroom door.

PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF
JOHN DICKSON CARR

The Devil in Velvet

John Dickson Carr

PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OFJOHN DICKSON CARR

The Devil in Velvet

John Dickson Carr

PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF
JOHN DICKSON CARR