CHAPTER XIII

FROM PLEASURE GROVE TO DANGER SIGN

MEG, TO BE MORE COMFORTABLE, writhed out of the cape and lay against its dark-blue inner side. Her thick, sleek, black hair had been disordered by the removal of the hood. He noted—curse these disloyal thoughts!—that her shoulders and breast were more full than Lydia’s, though her figure was more slender. Her hair lay dark against the whiteness of her skin.

Why, in sanity’s name, was he struck with a kind of madness whenever he met Meg?

“Nay,” she whispered, moving to draw farther under his arm and shoulder, “do you think my small gullery so very ingenious? For I tell you I was at a large shop, La Belle Poitrine, as was sweet Lydia this day. When I heard her cry in stage whisper, ‘No made gown; this must be done today; ’tis for Spring Gardens tonight,’ why, then, I had but to imitate gown and cloak. I had an even dice-throw to find you, if I covered my hair.”

Fenton cast a quick look round. The grove hedge, pale green in its gloom, might have been “a wood near Athens” in the play. Never in his life had he been so tempted. And, since he received nothing but encouragement, he bade temptation to the devil and yielded to it.

“‘Damn her,’” he quoted in his mind, “‘I’ll have her if she lie under a bed of thorns!’”

His lips pressed down on Meg’s moist mouth, and his arms tightened round her. Suddenly she seemed to recall something; she held his head back with both hands. Her long-fringed grey eyes looked straight into his.

“Nay,” she said, though he could sense the warmth (or call it what you like) rising from her, “This glade is too open; I’ll lead you to a bower I know. And first I have a question for you.” Hatred rose now. “Art satisfied with my sweet cousin Lydia?”

The old problem jumped into his mind.

“And I have a question for you,” he retorted. “Are you Mary Grenville?”

“Of course I am,” she answered, in ordinary modern speech and accent.

Propped on one elbow, Fenton stared at her.

“But, oh, dear!” said Meg, still in modern speech, “you gave me some awfully bad moments, once or twice. And why were you so beastly and awful to me, when I planned it just the opposite? You even kicked me out of the house; and I couldn’t do anything about it, except hint.”

To Fenton, very briefly, it was as though all material things—hedges, grass, Meg’s maddening, curving smile—all dissolved together. It was as though a vast eye had opened, in one comprehensive wink to show him a damp London street in 1925 and a grey-eyed quiet girl in a cloche hat.

“If I treated you badly,” he answered, in the speech of 1925, “it was because most of the time Sir Nick was in charge. My—oh, call it other soul. Why didn’t you speak out when I called you ‘Mary’ the first time we met?”

He heared her draw in her breath.

“I wish I had. Oh, God, I wish I had! But I was too unsure of myself. Don’t you recall how I helped you with your Dictionary of Seventeenth-Century Language, and your records? But I was uncertain. I hesitated too long.”

“I don’t understand anything,” cried the bewildered Fenton. “Look here: you didn’t even have those engravings of people I had to help me, or any evidence. How could you be fitted into all this? How did you know?”

Meg pressed her cheek close to his.

“Listen,” she whispered fiercely, “anything about how did I know is the one kind of question you mustn’t ask me. Not yet! Later you’ll learn and soon. You’ll learn that my character, my soul if you like, are exactly the same now as they were before; but I kept silent, and nobody knew. Now we’d better return to a sweeter age.”

The eyewink closed. The twentieth century vanished as it dwindled to remoteness. The only realities were soft-scented airs under the moon of Spring Gardens, and hedges or grass which could be touched as material things. Meg’s expression subtly altered, no longer with an evasive smile, but tender.

“Nay,” she said in those drawled tones, “we should do well to utter this speech, as fit as a pudding for a friar’s mouth. I did put this trick upon you, Nick, in the main to give you this.”

Partly raising herself, moving a little away from him, she threw her skirts above her right knee. Meg wore few if any petticoats. From the top of her garter, above the knee, she took out a small folded piece of paper.

Ever since their return to this age, Meg’s movements had become more quick, her eyes more bright. It was the same with Fenton.

“Here,” she said, “are my two houses, where you may find me.”

“Two houses?”

“Faugh! You’ll not find me often in the first. They are the lodgings of a French captain, named Duroc, who is horrid and shuddersome. Only this day they brought him home, on crutches, with his leg in boards and bandages. And (oh, fie) this monster would be at amorous tricks! To see how I did elude him would ha’ made you burst a-laughing!”

“And the other?”

“That,” whispered Meg, her tone changing to rapture, “is my own little house. Nobody knows I am there. None can find me, or trouble me. ’Tis in no fine neighbourhood; but what better? None will seek me, except … will you come and wait upon me soon? Soon?”

“I will! I swear it!”

“The house is kept, on my one floor since all else is empty, by an old woman called Calpurnia. But speak your name to her; she will admit you.” Meg’s tone changed. “You’ll not be spiteful to me? Or harsh of word? Or use me ill?”

“The very reverse of all that, if you still desire!”

By this time Fenton would have said anything to any woman, yet even in his befuddlement he knew he spoke truth. Both voices spoke quickly.

“You spoke,” said Fenton, “of a bower …?”

“Yes, yes, yes!” Then Meg remembered. “Stay; you’ve not answered my question. Are you, completely and in all respects, satisfied by my cousin Lydia? One more kiss before you answer!”

She rolled towards him, and for the next few moments matters became somewhat chaotic. It was Fenton, periwig jostled to one side and part way near to calling the bower unnecessary, who glanced over his left shoulder. He saw the yellow-blue light blotted out by shadow, diagonally across in the arch to their left. He raised his head. Meg, also becoming sure it was too much trouble to go to the bower, raised her head too.

In the arch, so tall and gaunt that its top reached his flat hat and gold-dusted periwig, stood a corpse-faced man in white, with crutches under his arms and a swathed leg bent behind him. Just in front of him, still masked and cloaked but with lips deadly under the short nose, stood Lydia.

Meg sprang up, leaving behind her long-discarded cloak. Fenton, for certain self-conscious reasons, sat there but did not get to his feet—and later wished he had. Lydia moved with blinding swiftness in that blind, greenish light. Her hand slipped under the cloak, to the thin sheath with the double-edged gold dagger. She flew at Meg, holding the blade underhand, to rip up the middle.

“I can use a dagger,” whispered Lydia, “as well as you.”

At just this moment the orchestra, a trio composed of harpsichord, viol, and bass viola, arose in dreamy melody. The trio might not have been twenty-odd feet away, in a straight line; but where was a straight line here? Softly they played “I Pass All My Hours in a Shady Old Grove,” for which King Charles the Second had written the words.

“Bitch!” screamed Lydia.

A dim spark struck on the dagger as it whipped up. If the light had been better, there would have been murder done. Silver stripes tore and pink roses flew wide. Meg screamed, backing away. Lydia, herself somewhat appalled, threw away the dagger and flew at Meg with a hand to slap and a claw to tear hair.

Though neither girl could in any sense be called tall, Lydia was the smaller. Meg, head down in butting style, ran at her with a violent shove of both hands. Lydia, staggering, caught her shoe in her own gown and fell. Meg instantly, and with sleek feline grace, ran out through the arch where Captain Duroc stood on one leg with his crutches.

Lydia, bouncing to her feet and not forgetting the gold dagger, dashed at the arch after her. Captain Duroc, a crutch planted on each side but none too well balanced, barred her way.

“Madame!” he pleaded with his liquid eyes wide, and all his comedian’s courtesy, “je vous implore! Two ladies: no, no! This is not the délicatesse!”

Lydia looked him up and down.

“May I be a punk,” she said almost sweetly, “if you are not the painted Nancy Ann with whom my husband dealt ere this?”

And Lydia, lifting the front of her skirts, kicked him so viciously below the belt that Duroc, with a half-scream of pain, doubled up backwards with his crutches slipping away, and fell into the outer hedge.

Fenton, still with nerves twitching badly from contact with Meg, had to find an outlet in some sort of action. He strode out of the glade through the same arch towards Captain Duroc.

“Sir,” he began, voice still shaky, “though we be enemies, and must fight when your leg shall be healed, will you allow me the courtesy of lifting you up?”

Duroc spat at him. Duroc, famous for his manners, lay back into the thick hedge, all twisted, his face upturned to the yellow-blue torch. The lean face, framed in gold-dusted periwig, was chalk-white except for spots which seemed dark instead of red.

“Monsieur,” he said airily, “I cannot see you. Of me, me you ’ave made a fool; and thees is not done with impunity. I don’ know you. Go, fool, until I kill you.”

“A word of advice, then,” snapped Fenton, whose hands quivered to be at the other’s throat. “I beg you won’t dishonour a noble nation by posing as a Frenchman. Your accent, sir, is abominable.”

Swiftly he turned back towards the glade, and entered the arch again.

“I believe,” he said, “Madam York left her cape, scarlet lined with dark blue, on the bank where …”

Meg’s cape was a little way down the short and shallow slope which led to the centre of the circle. Some distance away, the mellowness of strings mingled into “I Pass All My Hours in a Shady Old Grove.”

Then Fenton paused. He was not alone in the glade.

There were four entrance arches, like the four points of a compass. He was near one. At the other three, straight ahead and at equal distance left and right, three men now stood motionless. All wore cloaks, but each had sword scabbard outside the cloak—blade about six inches drawn.

They stood just inside the arches, watching him. Their broad hats concealed their faces, as the cloaks concealed what might have been good clothing. But in each hat was a large rosette of the Green Ribbon.

Fenton’s joy, releasing all energy into this, sang through his veins in pure happiness.

“Well met, gentlemen!” he said, trying to keep his voice low in accordance with the whispering of Spring Gardens. Instantly he unbuckled his cloak from the left shoulder, and threw the cloak aside. “But sure this ever repeated move of my Lord Shaftesbury lacks something in subtlety?”

The man opposite him never spoke. He gave only a high, giggling laugh, a very unpleasant kind of laugh, as though he were too cunning to speak.

“Sir,” retorted the man on the left, who seemed (to Fenton) to have a very short beard and moustache, “my Lord Shaftesbury is from London. Of this he knows nothing.”

“No no!” mocked Fenton. “Never!”

“Put by the notion,” cried the third man on the right, “that we were hired or sent. Sir, we are honest patriots and gentlemen, who think you traitor and better dead!”

Each of them, at one time or the other, had flung the cloak back over his left shoulder. Each began to move forward out of his arch, slowly, down the slope towards a flat, good fighting circle fifteen feet across.

“Honest men?” Fenton called softly. “I rejoice to hear it. Then you’ll come at me fairly, which is to say singly, and not three at once?”

The man on the right had a young, shaky, nervous voice.

“We would ensure the business, no more,” he said. “Only a simpleton goes singly against the devil in velvet!”

“What?”

“Well, so they call ye. Have you ever donned attire save velvet?” huskily demanded the bearded man on the left. “But you are Papist and conspirator and spy! Can you deny it?”

“Yes!”

“Yet you will die. Even if you be devil …”

Fenton whipped out his sword. He jumped down to the flat surface of the fighting turf.

“Why, then,” he said agreeably, “all three shall sup tonight in hell. Lug out!”

At that moment he or somebody was thinking:

“Come, here are easy odds. If I be quick enough, one bound—body turning left in the air—carries me off side of the right-hand man. Before he can bring round his guard, my point is through him. I use him, in left hand, to impede the second man’s arm: striking swift at the second man’s heart. ’Tis short; and the third man I dispatch at leisure.”

Three opposing swords came out, all but colourless under moonlight and pale green. Fenton took a short leap to the right, nothing as yet to put them on guard. At the same time …

Three swords, as they were drawn, stopped motionless. Three broad hats, with the Green Ribbon rosette, turned as though each man looked behind Fenton’s back.

The thing was too spontaneous, too quick, to be any kind of prepared trick. Under the fourth arch, as Fenton glanced behind him, stood Big Tom.

Big Tom’s heels were dug in, his immense shoulders extended. On a double lead, with a pair of mastiffs to each lead, he held back Greedy and Bare-behind in his left hand, and Thunder and Lion in his right. Their powerful haunches seemed to coil; their heads were set between heavy shoulders; a low bubbling growl went up and down as their hides shivered.

The man opposite Fenton uttered his thin, giggling laugh. Slowly be began to move backwards, up the little slope for the arch. His unsteady fingers tried to put the blade back in its sheath. Fenton unobtrusively slid back the sword into his own scabbard. He did not like the Giggler.

“Tom!” he said.

“Aysir?”

“If I give the signal to loose Thunder and Lion, can you hold back the other two?”

“Aysir!”

Fenton pointed his finger straight at the Giggler. “There!” he indicated.

Then he brought his sword quickly up from the scabbard.

“Thunder! Lion! Go!”

Even though Big Tom had expected it, the lead ran harsh and blood-scraping through his hand. As the two mastiffs, haunches uncoiling, shot across the turf like brindled and tawny figures of nightmare, Thunder’s snarl ripped out against the sweet, tireless strains of “I Pass All My Hours in a Shady Old Grove.”

“Tom,” said Fenton, quickly catching up his own cloak and Meg’s cape, “I think we’d best make haste from Spring Gardens, else there’ll be public riot and ourselves haled before a justice. We—”

He stopped. The Giggler had turned round and bolted into darkness just as Fenton pointed at him. The other two men had prudently vanished too. All that saved the Giggler from annihilation was the darkness which baffled the mastiffs’ sight, their sense of smell overcome by an overscent heavy with flowers, and trees.

One of them snarled and stumbled on stones. Amid furious patterings, an artificial tree went down. Then came the noises that indicated their quarry was in sight. They were on the view halloa, and their victim screamed.

“Tom,” said Fenton, “I much fear they make towards the trio of music. This music …”

The music did not seem so much to stop as to explode. There was a crash as the harpsichord fell over backwards, all its strings leaping and jangling. The viol screamed like a pig, amid wild screams in the Italian language. The bass viola—much smaller than of later day, painted and with a scroll like a man’s face—the bass viola shot straight up in the air for a distance of fifteen feet.

“Gotta heem!” a male voice cried ecstatically, as the viola descended and was caught.

“Thunder! Lion! Here!”

Three times Fenton bellowed at the top of his lungs. There was a pause, as of dying excitement. All through the woodland, as though Spring Gardens had become sentient, rose low laughter, which swept over the walks and died away.

The mastiffs padded slowly back to the glade. Though each had blood on his dewlaps, Fenton knew they had done no great damage. They were dispirited, almost slinking; Thunder raised one eye that looked almost as guilty as George Harwell’s. Both Thunder and Lion felt they had done something wrong; they had not killed; or had they disobeyed? Fenton cheered them up.

“Quickly!” he said to Big Tom. “We must try, if it be in any way possible, to discover my wife!”

Big Tom, who had been given a bad time by the madness of Greedy and Bare-behind, found all four mastiffs tractable. He whisked them out of the glade, sending them trotting at random to the right.

Fenton, hurrying after them, came almost face to face with Captain Duroc. With the aid of the hedge and his one good foot, Duroc had propped himself upright on the crutches, his weight upheld by the hedge. The torch in its bracket burned like a corpse candle beside him.

“I say a good night to you,” remarked Duroc, lifting his upper lip. “We ’ave more to settle between us than a broken leg. There is also a lady, Madam York. She—”

“Prefers another?” Fenton asked softly. “How very foolish of her! A good night!”

He raced along after Big Tom and the mastiffs, seeing that last look in Duroc’s eye and knowing it would be no easy fight when they met. Abruptly Fenton stopped and looked round, realizing where he was. The tall, thick hedge on his left was the outer hedge of the labyrinth.

“Tom,” he said, “the mastiffs could rip us a hole in this. We should be out of it, though I can’t tell where. If only my wife …”

That was the moment he saw Lydia, who also kept to the outer hedge, running towards them. She was flushed and breathing hard from running. As Fenton saw her, he suddenly felt far guiltier than any sentiments he had ever attributed to Thunder or George Harwell.

Yet she seemed unconcerned, almost smiling. He had completely forgotten Meg’s cape, hanging over his left arm. If Lydia noted it, she gave no sign. At Fenton’s signal, Thunder, Lion, Greedy, and Bare-behind ripped such an opening in the hedge that their masters could step out rather than crawl out.

“Why, curse it all,” exclaimed Fenton, “I’ve come back on my tracks. Here’s the begin step of Pall Mall. I had thought to emerge somewhere in the Park. Did not you think so, Lydia?”

“Oh, we’re’t home shortly,” murmured Lydia.

Giles, pale and sharp-featured, opened the street door with all the wall candles burning behind him.

“I thank God to see you safe,” said Giles. “Sir, there did come a note from Mr. Reeve, who said he would always warn you of danger. Humbly I cry pardon; but I opened it. You were to be set on in Spring Gardens, Mr. Reeve did not know where or when, by three gentlemen.” Giles moistened dry lips. “I thought it well advised to send Big Tom with the mastiffs.”

Lydia, without comment, had walked straight back and gone upstairs. Big Tom shepherded the dogs downstairs, preparatory to letting them out for the night.

“Did the letter,” Fenton said harshly, “tell the names of these ‘gentlemen’?”

“No, sir. Save it hinted …” Giles’s mouth drew together. “Sir, I have not the letter by me. ’Twill keep till morning.”

Fenton agreed. Nothing could have been of less importance to him, and he flung it from his mind. Startled, he discovered Meg’s cloak over his arm. This was worse and worse.

“You have done well, carrot-pate,” he said, and gave Giles a brief account of what happened. Afterwards he hurriedly told Giles to get rid of the cape; then, hesitantly, he went upstairs.

Though he tried to frame words of apology, he found none. Lydia’s door was closed. He knocked on it, which he very seldom did, and was told to enter.

Lydia, her gown rearranged and her hair all but in order, stood before the looking glass in the far corner of the room. A single candle burned.

Again Fenton tried to gather words. Then, swallowing, he asked her whether she would like to have something to eat or drink.

“Indeed?” said Lydia in a cool little voice, turning round to face him. “But sure we must tarry long at table before our guest shall arrive?”

“What guest?”

“Why,” said Lydia, lifting her eyebrows in surprise, “who but your sweet Meg? What! Not wait for Meg? How tenderly you did press her cape to your breast!” A wilder note crept into Lydia’s voice. “How cunningly you put the trick upon me, luring me to your filthy Spring Gardens, when I had no wish to go! I may not believe my own eyes, I suppose. Yet of a surety she was on her back, and you about to—”

“Lydia! You behave like a child.”

Lydia’s face slowly grew white, so that her eyes seemed enormous.

Then, as though at the loosing of every gun in a ship’s broadside, she began to talk.

Up to this time, if Fenton had noticed any sign of her fierce possessiveness and jealousy, he had been apt to be amused or even flattered. He had behaved like a husband in the fourth week of a honeymoon; which, in a sense, he was. Afterwards men learn better, as he did now.

It was a bad business, and it lasted half an hour. Carefully Lydia dissected Meg’s character, dissecting his own at the same time. Any fine lady had a long vocabulary of short words; and used them, even casually, in public. Her voice rose when she tore to pieces Kitty and Fenton, describing their conduct as she imagined it. When he protested in disgust, she demanded shiveringly to know whether he was not aware he had stolen her diamond ring to give to the slut?

As her voice grew wilder and wilder, so did her accusations against him. There was no contemptible act, from miserliness to murder, which she did not pour out. Lydia herself was horrified. She did not mean all this. But she could not stop. Being herself badly hurt, some impulse drove her to hurt and hurt and hurt in return. Once she flew at him with the gold dagger, stabbing blindly; and he had almost to break her wrist before she let go.

As for Fenton …

He had a worse task. As he tried to keep silent, still his own temper flamed; and with it, since this was so close and personal, came Sir Nick. The fleshless hand gripped at his vitals; fleshless arm, shoulder, side were rattling from that rotting wood.

For the most part pressing his hands over his eyes, he mentally put forth every ounce of strength. If Sir Nick were to gain possession now, he might run amok. As Fenton felt the black hood vanish from his eyes, he knew he had won again. He must leave; he must go away.

Fenton stalked to the door, somewhat marring the effect by slamming it after him. Immediately he heard Lydia leap at the door, to shut the latch and fasten the bolt.

Outside, upstairs and downstairs were all dark.

Fenton, staggering, fell against the wall. He felt his way along it, attempting to cool his head. Presently he shouted for Giles.

Giles, white face below red hair, materialized out of darkness and carried a candle in each hand.

“What is’t, sir? Some new—” Giles paused.

“Put a light in my study, old friend. Then fetch a decanter of our best canary. No, stay: of our best brandy.”

“Sir! If I might …”

Fenton merely looked at him, and Giles dematerialized down the stairs.

After a time, while Fenton mopped sweat from his forehead, he felt more steady. He groped his way to the stairs, and went down by holding the baluster rail. The door of his study was open. On the great polished desk, amid the walls of books, a taper in a silver holder burned unsteadily. He sat down in the desk chair.

“I love her,” Fenton said aloud to the candle flame. “The fault was mine. I own it. I must in some fashion mend her humour. Yet …”

Before him in imagination floated the face of Meg York. He could not resist Meg, and now he knew it. But why?

Her intense fleshly allure? Yes; but Lydia had that too. True, he had never known Meg in the sense he had known Lydia; but she must be maddening if she surpassed the Puritan girl. Or was it Meg’s fire, her elusiveness, her utter disregard for what she did—that touch of devil’s brush which many men have sought and some found?

But now there was a new quality straining them towards each other.

Meg was Mary Grenville. He had seen her face, heard her voice, which had been so much disguised by the pronunciation of this age as her appearance had been disguised by hair style and costume. Fenton in his old life had never seen Ma—no, call her Meg!—with her hair round her face, or ever particularly observed her figure.

Besides, she was a fellow-wanderer in another century. For all her swashbuckling, she must feel frightened and lonely. She was the daughter of his old friend. …

Fenton brought his fist down on the table.

“I must not see her again!” he said aloud.

In his pocket he had the paper on which Meg had written her two addresses. Fenton stretched out his hand to burn the folded paper in the candle flame, and then stopped.

“How did Mary Grenville become Meg York?” he thought frantically. “Why is she here? All my dozens of questions she either evaded or said I should know the answer soon. And these answers I must have!”

For this reason (or so he told himself) he got up quickly. He went to a bookcase, took down a volume of Tillotson’s sermons—what a windy hypocrite Tillotson was!—and put the paper between its leaves. Closing the book, he replaced it and had gone back to his chair when Giles entered.

On a tray Giles carried a candle, a flat clear-glass decanter of Nantes brandy on which the light struck with brown-amber iridescence, and a clouded glass. You drank brandy neat. Everyone, from the Royal Society to the meanest man, knew that all water was undrinkable save for animals.

Giles hovered for a moment, making ugly faces.

“Now, then,” said Giles, “if you have a mind to—”

“Much thanks; but I need no advice. I shall not be drunk for a night, much less a week.”

When Giles had gone, Fenton poured the glass nearly full. After a few deep swallows, slowly, Nantes brandy began to deaden the ache that concerned Lydia.

Tomorrow he would somehow reconcile matters with her. Never, by God, would he be unfaithful! And this nonsense of poisoning? This was what he feared, and feared horribly. But it could not happen. Round Lydia he had set too many guards.

In front of him, as though in clear handwriting, he could see the record of his life as Sir Nicholas Fenton: Born 25th Dec’r, 1649; Dy’d 10th August, 1714. He and Lydia would see unroll the pageant of those times, in the main of treachery and turbulence, yet once or twice with a flame of grandeur; and, at least, he could die happy just before the first damned Hanoverian came forever to disgrace the British throne.

Seeking such happy things, Fenton realized that the brandy had well fuddled his wits.

But they must not remain fuddled, or he could not protect Lydia. Rising unsteadily to his feet, gripping the edge of the desk, he put a firm hand on the candle holder. Gritting his teeth, he lighted his own way up to his bedroom; he staggered only when he closed the door.

Then, blowing out the candle, he fell into sleep across the bed.

Next morning, though he had a throbbing head and a stomach of nausea, the hot strong sunlight dissipated doubts and made the preceding night’s quarrel seem foolish.

After a good bath, after being shaved by Giles and permitting Giles to dress him more elaborately than usual (to Giles’s high approval), he felt in the best of spirits. His toothbrush, carefully whittled by Big Tom, set firm with such good bristles that Fenton dared not ask where they came from, lay on the dressing table with its handle painted bright red.

A second one, painted blue, was on Lydia’s dressing table. Though he could get no toothpaste, a scented soap had to serve; and it at least made the mouth feel clean.

“B—bl—b!” Lydia would say, looking reproachfully at him with the brush in her mouth.

This morning, as usual, he hastened down to the kitchen and swallowed draughts of Lydia’s morning chocolate before it was sent up to her. Since a new cook had not been found, Nan Curtis was elevated to that position; she, utterly trustworthy, was so closely watched by Big Tom that more than once she burst into tears.

Then Fenton accompanied Bet, the new maid, while she carried the chocolate service upstairs. He made certain that no person came near it. Though still scraped raw by Lydia’s outburst last night, he had prepared his apology when Bet knocked at the door.

“Yes?” Lydia’s voice, rather eager. Then she stopped. There was a sort of hauteur in what she did not say.

“It’s Bet, my lady. With the chocolate.”

“Oh.” There was a long pause. Then the voice shook a little. “Is my husband by you?”

“Yes, my lady.”

“Then be good enough, sweet Bet, to tell him that his absence is more prized than his company.”

Fenton closed his fists and drew the breath deep in his lungs.

“Do as the damned woman bids you,” Fenton said loudly and clearly to Bet.

And he walked away down the passage, stepping loudly on the boards. Out of the corner of his eye, in a darkish corner, he noticed Judith Pamphlin, arms folded, still watching. Much as he disliked her, still she was an added guard.

Punctually at noon, as always, he took a key and opened the locked cabinet in an under part of one bookcase in the study. With another very small key he unlocked the book of days, which he had never shown to another person.

Dipping the pen carefully in the ink, he wrote the date June 6th, though he did not consider it was past until midnight.

Four more days. …

He could defeat it. He knew that. June 10th would finally be crossed off. Great as was his annoyance with Lydia, he loved her too much to neglect anything. In his mind he tested his safeguards, and decided to double them; but he could see no flaw.

Nothing happened that hot day, Lydia refusing food and Fenton austerely doing the same. There arrived a courteous, almost humble note from the proprietors of Spring Gardens, countersigned by Thomas Killigrew, Esq., Master of the Revels to His Majesty. The note mentioned some slight damage, and begged to present its account. Though the bill was far too large, Fenton paid it by return messenger to be rid of the matter.

By nightfall, when the candles were lighted, there was no change. Fenton sat in his study, first reading Montaigne, who is soothing, and then Ovid, who is not. Slapping shut the book, Fenton made his decision.

Quietly he went down into the kitchen, from which he fetched a small axe with a short handle. Quietly he went upstairs, holding the axe behind his back. A few wall candles burned, and he could clearly see Lydia’s bedroom door.

With two blows of the axe, which crashed and reverberated through the house, he smashed the bolt inside the door. One blow exploded the latch. Calmly, as though with artistic neatness, he broke off the hinges so that the door toppled into the room.

“Now attend to me, woman—!” he began, and stopped as though a cavalry charge had met only cloud.

Sitting up in bed, on the far side of it, Lydia was stretching out her arms to him. Tears ran down her cheeks, and her mouth trembled. He raced round to the other side of the bed, and their embrace grew chaotic.

“’Twas all my fault!” both cried at once. Whereupon a listener could have heard no distinguishable word in the babble, since both talked at once, each pouring recriminations on himself or herself. Fenton called himself, and Lydia called herself, what amounted to lepers, pariahs, creatures so vile as to be unspeakable even in decent human sight.

In the passage, Giles patiently and sardonically affixed a large piece of tapestry over the open doorway, tapping nails so lightly that even Judith Pamphlin did not hear him, and wondering how long it would take Big Tom to mend the door.

From furious reconciliation, in all its aspects, they passed on to the tenderness which is the crown of all reconciliation, speaking together in low voices long after the last taper had burnt down to a blue spark and puffed out.

They told themselves how foolish they had been, and Lydia sobbed. They swore eternal love so many times that it cannot be counted. They swore that never again, never under any circumstances, would they quarrel again; never, never. …

Well, we all know it. Forever it is whispered in the ear of time. Yet its sincerity, for the time being at least, is just as poignant in any age.

“With all your heart, Nick?”

“With all my heart, Lydia.”

Then, on the following morning, they lounged abed until past noon. Fenton had to go into the City on business in the afternoon. What he noted in his diary was the 7th of June.

It was an oppressive day, overcast with grey cloud, too hot for the time of year. Several times he heard what sounded like a commotion in the stable yard, and he sent word to inquire about it. As a rule he kept away from the stables. Being in his old life only a tolerable horseman, he did not know horesflesh as Sir Nick would know it. He feared a bad blunder.

Dick, the stableboy, reported that one of the coach horses was a-ailing, but nothing horse doctor couldn’t cure. Fenton ordered his black mare, Sweetquean, to be saddled and brought round to the front door.

Since by some (to him) miracle, Big Tom had repaired the shattered bedroom door before noon, he hastened up for last instructions.

“Fasten the bolt,” he said, “and open this door to no one. Should one knock without replying, cry out of the window to Whip, the coachman, or Job, the groom, bidding them come in haste with cudgels and faggot bats. Your promise?”

“Oh, I will! I will!” said Lydia, in a passion of meekness. But she crept closer to him, head down. “Nick! As touches her.” Still she would not say Meg’s name, or raise her head. “Didst not truly desire to—”

“No!” he assured her. By this time he believed it himself.

There was a broad sweep of earth before the front door, and a wide gap in the lime trees for the convenience of coaches. Fenton, mounting Sweetquean and taking the reins from Dick, went off by devious directions to spare the mare’s legs among Strand and City crushings.

He would not have gone at all, except that he wanted a real cook, preferably a Frenchwoman. Though Nan Curtis did her best, Fenton longed for one who could prepare a meal and not murder it. Well he foresaw another domestic riot, but he must meet it.

At Will’s coffeehouse, where he had once glanced in briefly to see Glorious John, red-faced, smoking his long pipe in the chair of honour, he had met one who evidently had been a friend, a youngish man of science named Mr. Isaac Newton. Mr. Newton had told him of an elderly Frenchwoman, once in bygone days cook to the Comte de Grammont himself, who might be found at an address in Fleet Street.

So he galloped the long, semirural length of the Oxford Road, with Tyburn Gallows in the open field far behind. Sweetquean danced along Holborn, slowing now over a long run of vehicles, until Fenton’s ears, and especially nose, told him they were nearing Snow Hill.

Then he turned right, southwards, down narrow little ways until he found Madam Taupin’s lodgings in a tolerably clean brick house in Fleet Street. Outside, when they talked, they could hear the roaring of Fleet Ditch as the refuse of many kennels poured into it down Snow Hill.

It took Fenton a very long time to persuade Madam Taupin. She was a small woman, with so much air and grace of deportment that Fenton put forth his lordliest manners and won her heart. She shrank from the position, having been not very well treated (you understand, monsieur?).

When he eventually persuaded her to take the position on June 12th, and rode back homewards, it was growing dark. Not only actual darkness, but the strange sky like a curdled sea, and puffs of air like puffs out of an oven. A storm hovered, but would not break.

When he returned home, he found Lydia, still soft-eyed from a nap, dressing to sup. After dark, mysterious draughts and currents crept into the house.

Fenton, going down to the study to glance at some accounts Giles had prepared, found the light so unsteady that he kindled eight tapers; yet their flames sputtered or widened and would not burn clear. That sense of oppressiveness hung over him, as over so many.

Within ten minutes Giles came into the study. At the beginning Giles’s face was expressionless. He walked slowly up to the desk and delivered his news.

“Sir,” he said bluntly, “the dogs are poisoned.”