CHAPTER XVII

AUDIENCE IN LOVE LANE

AND YET FENTON HIMSELF would not have thought this, or said so, in the darkness of the huge, velvet-stuffy coach which jolted him to his home.

He merely felt numb. Ordinarily, the coach would badly have hurt his body bruises, but there was nothing. He felt no pain in his heart; no tendency to rage or revile; nothing. But it was extraordinarily difficult to make his arms and legs move as they should.

“I must think this out,” he kept repeating to himself. “I must think this out from the very beginning.”

He remembered how, as he went out from Whitehall Palace into Pebble Court, with torches shining about and the great coach in attendance, he had taken out his watch. He was astonished to find the hour was not quite eight-thirty. All his audience with the King, all that went into it, had taken less than an hour.

How strange is time! Fenton felt his hand begin to shake badly; he knew, in horror, he might drop the watch. Gently Chiffinch had taken it from his hand, under the torchlight, and replaced it in his pocket. In his other hand, unseen, Fenton clutched Lydia’s crumpled letter. He managed to convey it to the pocket of his coat.

And now the great coach drew up before his door.

“I must think this out,” he doggedly repeated in his mind.

Though he was glad to be assisted down the steps, yet he smilingly pretended he needed no help. Afterwards he remembered preaching a mild, calm-voiced sermon to Sam, the door porter, that he need not remain there so late. It was deepening dusk, not yet dark. Sam bowed, opening the door for him, and then vanished.

But Giles, ever present, stood in the hall and held up a candle. When he saw Fenton’s face, Giles’s thin lips tightened.

“A good evening, sir.”

“And to you, good Giles. Ever a good evening to you!”

“May I take the liberty of an old servant, sir, in the asking of whether all befell as you desired at Whitehall Palace?”

“It did so. And wherefore not?”

“His Majesty was not—angry? If you would take but one look at your own face in the mirror, you would understand.”

“Angry, you say? God’s fish!” Fenton began in a roar, but controlled his voice to quietness. “Learn, malapert, how angry was the King. He offered me any reward, any preferment, I should name. For honour’s sake I could not take it, as you apprehend. Still!”

“Do you know what was offered, sir? Nay? Then I’ll tell you. His Majesty offered you a peerage.”

“Now, pox on’t, what should I do with a peerage? —Giles. Is … my lady well?”

“Ay, truly,” Giles answered in surprise. But there was a sour expression on his lips at his master’s contemptuous dismissal of a peerage. “The supper was abandoned near as soon as you had gone. Lord George, stupefied, was carried home in my Lord Danby’s coach. I confess, sir, I misliked the manner in which the elderly gentleman did sway in his saddle as he departed. Your lady, sir, hath gone to her room. She requested …”

Fenton seized the front of Giles’s coat.

“I don’t wish to speak to my—to her; that’s to say, not now. Not until a few minutes before midnight. Am I clear, Giles?”

“Questionless, sir!”

“Fetch me lights,” said Fenton. “I would go to my own bedchamber. I would sit there and reflect. Nor must I be disturbed for any cause. Is this clear too?”

Giles bowed. Quickly he kindled the tapers in a three-branched candelabrum.

“Nay, I’ll light my own way up, Giles! Give it to me.”

With a powerful effort Fenton kept his hand steady. His mind had always been clear, and he kept it clear. But, as the sense of shock slowly diminished, his bruises began to ache.

When he reached his own bedroom, he moved mechanically towards the two windows at the back, those windows looking out over his garden, the Mall below, and the Park. His long and heavy dressing table slanted out from the left-hand window, against the angle of the wall.

He set down the three-branched candelabrum on the dressing table near the mirror. Against ghostly darkness he caught a glimpse of his own reflection; it seemed (at least to his own eyes) a trifle pale, but not much.

“Why did Lydia do it?” he inaudibly asked the reflection, in his own mind. “Was this love of hers all a pretence?”

“You know it was.”

“I can’t face it.”

“You must face it.”

The soft candlelight bloomed on the glass, the dark-red of the claret decanter, which he had always kept in his room of late. Hastily he seized decanter and goblet, with a passionate wish to be dead drunk and away from all hurt. But he put them both down; now, if ever, he must be clear of head.

Unconsciously Fenton’s hand, tightly clutching Lydia’s crumpled letter, let it fall on the dressing table. Drawn up to the table was one of those padded Oriental chairs, much like those in the alcove at Whitehall, which were draped to the floor in crimson figured silk.

On a sudden impulse Fenton lifted the chair and set it down facing the darkness of the right-hand window.

But he made his preparations too. It was almost three hours and a half before midnight; Lydia’s true danger began on the stroke of midnight, the tenth. Not once did he think of striding down to her bedroom, bursting in, and flinging that letter at her as accusation.

He could not do it. His mind shrank back, as from a fire. If she were guilty, he wished to keep knowledge from him as long as possible. It did not matter … well, it did not matter too much … what she had done. He loved her. He would protect her, whatever happened.

Carefully he set down his watch on the table, within reach of his hand.

Then he sat down in the padded chair, facing a window dark except for the reflection of candle flames and the leaves of a tall beech outside. Curious! When he had first waked up in this room, he had thought them trees of the Park, whereas, of course, they were in his own garden.

“I don’t believe all this,” he told himself, with a stab at his heart now the shock had worn off. “It’s not Lydia! It’s not her character!”

The other side of his own mind, cool and assessing, seemed to answer in terms of the twentieth century.

“Stop this emotionalism,” it said. “You wished to think. Very well; think. What is Lydia’s background?”

“Her parents were Presbyterians. Her grandfather was a regicide: which must mean either Independent or Fifth Monarchy­ man.”

“And do you think nothing was stamped on her mind and heart before she married Sir Nick? Remember, she thinks herself married to Sir Nick. When I say ‘you,’ I refer to you in the semblance of Sir Nick. Did nothing hurt her, even when you cut her off from her old nurse, though she made a speech she knew would please you?”

“Be silent! What zeal would Lydia—of all persons—have for ‘the cause’? The Green Ribbon?”

“Have you forgotten the elementary facts of history?”

“No.”

“Then you remember that my Lord Shaftesbury, once himself a hot Presbyterian under Oliver, was the first forceful supporter at the Restoration that all Puritan sects might be permitted to take the Oath and Allegiance and Supremacy, so that they might not be outlaws? Don’t you know he welcomes old Presbyterians, old Independents, to the Green Ribbon? And their helpers?”

“But Lydia! She has no head for politics, or interest. She has said so a dozen times.”

“Rather too quickly, don’t you think? Remember how each time she has turned you quickly away from the subject?”

“Be silent, I say! On the very first night I met her, in Meg’s room,”—his mind paused a moment when he thought of Meg—“I tried to apologize for Sir Nick’s conduct, and asked forgiveness. And Lydia answered, ‘You ask my pardon? I ask yours, with all my heart.’”

“Well? And what else could she say?”

“I don’t follow that.”

“No one paints her character as cold and evilhearted. She was touched. Why do you suppose she defied her parents and married Sir Nick? It was a physical attraction; no more or less. When she found Sir Nick was a murderous and blackhearted dog, she hated him. Yet the ghost of attraction remained.”

“Yes, you can bet it did! When next day she hurried into this bedroom, with the poison rash on her forehead and arm, she was all tenderness and … and …”

“Certainly she pretended it. But do you recall what you said?”

“I have forgotten.”

“Only because you wish to forget. Sir Nick, half-mad, burst into a torrent of abuse; and called down God’s curse on Puritans and all their race. Because she seemed a gentle girl, you forgot she might be at heart as savage a Roundhead as you are Royalist.”

“Yet afterwards she was tender. Why, it was she who asked for—for me to seek her that night!”

“Mainly pretence. For the rest, you know her to be a fullblood girl of strong passions.”

“There was no pretence. You lie.”

“Ah, is your vanity scratched?”

“Do you tell me that, immediately after making that assignation, she wrote the letter telling my enemies where to find me?”

“Of course. She does not love you. You are dangerous; you must be destroyed.”

“Stop this nonsense!”

“Yet you wished to think it out. How many times, when she wished to give you false praise, has her tongue slipped with that word, ‘Roundhead’? Why, think! ‘As gentle as a minister of God, yet as bold as a Roundhead soldier.’ Those words so inspired you that you struck dumb the whole Green Ribbon Club, and not a man dared lay a hand on you!”

“I did not think of them at the time. Yet surely …”

“Who wheedled you into Spring Gardens that night? And, on the same day, slipped out secretly to send a note that brought down three swordsmen on you? To buy a new gown? Nonsense! Because the shop La Belle Poitrine is a new clearinghouse for letters.”

“I tell you, stop this torture! If Lydia cared nothing at all, what do you make of her jealousy, and above all her jealousy towards Meg?”

“That is more foolishness. Lydia is a woman. You are her possession. Do you think she would let any draw you from her? Least of all Meg; or, rather, Mary Grenville? Lydia knows that secretly Meg turns your brain; she can’t abide it; no woman’s vanity would.”

“I keep telling you, I have turned all Puritan nonsense out of her mind!”

“In a month? Come, now! When with six men against sixty, impossible odds, you went out to fight … well, did Lydia attempt to stop you, as most would? No; all she could think of was the dragoons; how they made a file turn as well as any Ironsides.”

“She trusted me to win!”

“Remember,” cruelly the other side of his mind pointed out, “you are fifty-eight years old. Not in body. But in mind. Could not a pretty face, and pretty airs, and designing flesh, easily fool you? Might you not even become besotted?”

“Yes; I must understand the possibility.”

“Then take heed, when she warns you against the only woman who is really fond of you: Meg York. Lydia hates Sir Nick, and thinks you are Sir Nick; she is only using on another man the crafts of love she learned from Sir Nick.”

Fenton sprang to his feet, his arm across his eyes.

Wrath flared through him, but he knew he must control this. Quietly setting back each whisper at his ear, or hoping to do so, he sat down again in front of the black window and readjusted his thoughts. For a little time he looked out on blackness, and then the loud ticking of his watch on the dressing table reminded him.

It was ten minutes to nine. Already he had come to one resolve. He sprang up again, putting his watch back into his pocket. At the same time there was a light knock on the door.

Giles, very hesitant, peered in.

“Sir,” said Giles, clearing his throat, “I should not have troubled you. But the woman Pamphlin …”

Judith Pamphlin, as straight-backed and harsh-faced as ever, stood gripping her hands together.

“My lady,” she said, “would ask why you have not come to see her since your return.” Mrs. Pamphlin almost sneered. “She would also ask …”

Fenton’s right hand moved lovingly towards his sword grip. It was a very ill-chosen moment, as anyone could have seen in Giles’s face, for Judith to be here.

“You have disobeyed my order,” Fenton told her, “as to going near my lady. Later we will have discourse on this. Yet your one virtue, as I can perceive it, is that you are devoted and loyal to my lady. Is this so?”

“It is so.”

“Then keep good watch. Inform my lady that I must go from the house, on a matter of import, but that I shall return before midnight.”

Mrs. Pamphlin’s mouth opened to speak, but instead a wicked look came into her eyes, and she grudgingly remained silent. Giles, hastily thrusting one of the two candles into her hand, pushed her outside and closed the door.

“Is this truth, sir?” Giles asked quietly. “Do you indeed go from the house?”

“And why not?”

“Because of your mood, sir. You are ill.”

“Now what could you know of my mood?” Fenton asked dryly. His side smarted from a shallow sword-wound, and a feverishness came on him. “Giles! I would be habited with less of the showy or the conspicuous. Stay!” Vague memory stirred. “The black, Giles! The black velvet I first wore on that day, May 10th, you did so strangely mention to me …”

“Sir,” Giles cried in agony, “I am a bad servant. I have not cleaned the black, or so much as touched it. There were—there are bloodstains on the cuffs.”

Fenton was in too impatient a mood.

“No matter for that! These,” and he looked down over his sober grey clothes, with only a silver stripe to the waistcoat, “will serve the occasion well enough. Now go down to the stables, and bid them saddle my horse.”

After one look at him, Giles hurried from the room. From the dressing closet Fenton brought out a pair of light, soft riding boots which came well above his knees and had light spurs. He buckled on both sides of his neck a light cloak and crammed down hat on periwig.

Snatching up the three-branched candle holder, he attempted to creep softly downstairs. Even with the utmost caution, spurs would rattle on a board floor. What he feared was that Lydia might come hurrying out of her room.

Breathing more easily when he reached the ground floor, Fenton set down his lights on the desk. He opened the door of the bookcase and found the book of Tillotson’s sermons in which he had left the slip of paper with Meg York’s two addresses.

“One of them,” he thought, as he found the slip, “will be useless now. George said she had gone from Captain Duroc’s. But the other …”
He smoothed out the paper and read it.

“At the Golden Woman,”

Love Lane,

Cheapside.

Despite his bitterness, Fenton could have laughed.

A minute later he found Sweetquean before the door, her bridle held by Dick with a lanthorn. An ache, he could not tell whether mental or physical, went over him as he set his foot into the deep stirrup.

“A fine night, sir,” said Dick.

“Ay,” he said. “A fine night.”

Riding the mare on a slack rein, at most times letting Sweetquean have her head, Fenton rode for Charing Cross. Though chilly, the night showed a great throng of stars and a slender new moon.

Fenton passed Charing Cross, into the sweep of the Strand, under Temple Bar, and down the long slope of Fleet Street. All the world’s affront of the nostrils assailed him as the mare’s hoofs thundered on the heavy planks over Fleet Ditch, and Sweetquean went up Ludgate Hill at the gallop. There Fenton reined in to look round.

Except for stars and new moon, it was intensely dark. There were no street lamps. Behind him, sometimes in the distance ahead, would glow the warm red lattice of a tavern. But Bow bells, in Cheapside, must have struck nine some time ago.

That was the signal for the apprentices to unhitch their folded shutters and button up their shops for the night. In the street remained only a few revellers. Before Fenton lay a vast openness, cleared of burnt rubble, where once had stood Old St. Paul’s before the Fire, and the first brick of New St. Paul’s would be laid this very month.

“Old days,” thought Fenton, as he sent the mare clattering round to the left of St. Paul’s Churchyard and rode down Cheapside. But he was not thinking of London in this age.

He was remembering how he and Mary Grenville—or Meg York—had ridden in the Park together in their old life: not St. James’s Park, but the now-woodland Hyde Park, where stood grisly Tyburn. He remembered how they had swum in the river at Richmond. Mary, at eighteen, was a famous swimmer. But he, removing his pince-nez at over fifty, had gone all out and beaten her by three lengths.

No. He must not think of her as Mary Grenville. He must think of her as Meg York, a grown woman and a tigerish one.

Clack went his mare’s hoofs on the cobbles of curving deepest Cheapside, and he reined in to study where he was. Not far away a watchman’s lanthorn bobbed in the air like a dull luminous face.

It might be a pity that Sir Christopher Wren’s plan for a finer, greater London had never been used after the destruction of the Fire. But they built back the ancient streets, old since the Middle Ages, on exactly the same sites and with the same names.

Fenton’s memory could pick up, on his right and sloping down towards the river, Broad Street and Milk Street and Wood Street. They had bought these commodities in the streets before them, as they had bought the other commodity in Love Lane.

There were still gaps and scars from the Fire nine years ago. But most of the new buildings, high or low-and-trim, had been built of brick, with the plague burnt out of every hole. Fenton, as he guided the mare carefully down slippery cobbles, noted that Love Lane had become a district of the respectable poor.

“Nobody,” Meg had whispered, “knows I am there. None can find me, or trouble me. ’Tis in no fine neighbourhood; but what better?”

Above the steep street showed a narrow path of stars. It was a trifle too close to Billingsgate Fish Market, Fenton decided. Suddenly a great red glare, over the houses, sprang up some distance away down the Thames, faded to pink, and died away. It was the immense soap vats and boileries, which he had forgotten; and, fortunately, the wind blew the other way.

But the glare showed him the house he sought. It was small, new, built of brick; and, like most others, it had a long staircase built up to the ground floor. Not a light showed. Tethering Sweetquean to a hitching post, Fenton ran up the stairs and banged at the door knocker until the little street echoed. Presently the door was opened by an ancient woman named Calpurnia, with one eye still open after a life of thievery and viciousness.

“Ay,” she wheezed out, narrowly inspecting him in the light of a floating wick in a grease lamp, “you’re the man. One pair of stairs up, then find ye a chamber overlooking the street. On Calpy’s oath, the lady’s not strayed from this house one minute, for fear she should not find you. Some hath one taste,” shrugged Calpy, “and some another.”

Fenton flicked a coin at her, and it mysteriously vanished in mid-air. He did not even see her catch it.

“Now begod!” she cried, holding the grease lamp higher and rolling her one eye. “Here’s a different thing! Here’s a gentleman; here’s a nobleman! I’ll stand and hold the lamp for ye, that I will and so help me!”

But the lamp was not necessary. Fenton hastened up the stairs, and back again along the upstairs passage towards the front. The front room had its door partly open, and faint candlelight shone out.

And then Fenton stopped abruptly.

Someone in the room, unquestionably Meg, was softly playing a tenor viol. Meg’s fine contralto voice, though low-pitched, rang out with a triumph of joy and pride.

“Here’s a cry to all ye goodmen,

Shout it joyous through the town—

Three swordsmen and three woodmen

Did bring the tyrant down!”

Fenton held hard to the stair rail, now half-sick at the stomach. Of all the things he did not want to hear, these were the worst. Each tawdry word somehow concerned Lydia, and brought Lydia into his mind. He stumbled down the passage while Meg still proudly sang of that cheap brash affair. …

“If all held firm and stood, men,

No Shaftesb’ry rules the Crown!

Three swordsmen and three woodmen

Shall bring THIS tyrant down!”

Fenton, his spurs rattling, threw open the door. The bow of the tenor viol slipped away from the strings. He and Meg looked at each other.

“You have been a mighty long time,” said Meg, tossing her head with a careless air, “in coming to wait upon me.” Then her tone changed. “Nick! What’s the matter?”

At the front of the room there were two windows, with a fireplace between them. At each window faced out into the room a huge carved chair, covered with coloured swan’s-down pillows. A single candle burned in a golden holder in the middle of the mantelpiece, above a light log fire in the chimney. Meg, fully dressed in a purple velvet gown with a heavy fall of Venice point lace round the low corsage, sat in the big carven chair to the right of the fireplace.

The tenor viol had fallen from her hand. That dim light shone on her dark hair.

Since Fenton knew her tastes, he was not surprised to find the small square room as richly furnished as any at Whitehall. There were padded chairs, and an ottoman. But most of all, because of the tapestries and the amorous pictures, it reminded him of George’s description. …

Meg sprang to her feet, letting fall the viol bow.

“Wait!” he said.

His face was as white as tallow, his legs unsteady. His right arm so ached with bruises that he could not have made a quick sword-draw to save his life. But he groped up for his hat, and found it gone. It must have blown off somewhere.

“First of all,” Fenton said hoarsely, in the speech of 1925, “let’s get rid, as we did once, of all this nonsense of word and pronunciation out of our own century. Let’s speak as we were taught to speak!”

The dim candlelight, the struggling fire, made a shadow-play across Meg’s white shoulders. But her eyes, lids drooping, began to gleam with understanding.

“Very well, if you wish. —Professor Fenton, why are you really here?”

“Because I’m beaten,” he answered flatly. “I can’t see what to do. I came here for … for …”

“For sympathy?” asked Meg, with poisoned sweetness. She crept a little way out, her breast rising and falling. Jealousy, hatred leaped at him. “You’ve had a tiff, I suppose, with that … that … the Lydia woman?”

“In a sense, yes.”

“And now you come crawling to me for sympathy? Well, you won’t get it!” Meg straightened up. “And you!”

Fenton contemplated the bright carpet.

“Probably you’re right,” he admitted.

“You!” Meg said bitterly. “Oh, I know Mr. Reeve too! Who doesn’t? And I have a copy of his verses! They call you the hero of the ‘battle’ of Pall Mall. I was proud of that. Yes! And, in our other lives, do you remember how you planned General, now Field Marshal, Fatwaller’s campaign that nearly broke the whole German defences? Yes! And led the opening attack yourself, with the First Battalion of Westshires?”

“Strangely enough, I dreamed of that the other night.”

“And now you come for sympathy to me. I can’t endure a man who crawls. Get out of here! Go!” she screamed at him. “Take your silly troubles and get out!”

“Good night, then; and good-by.”

He had not seen, even before he turned towards the door, how Meg’s expression suddenly altered. It altered even as she screamed at him. There was a heavy rustling of silks as she raced past him towards the door, closed it, and set her back to it.

“Nick! No! Wait!”

“Get out of my way, please,” he said dully. “What’s the use?”

“Oh, why must I always do this?” cried Meg, her grey-black eyes roving round the room as though she might find some answer there. “Almost every time we meet, I turn spiteful; I grow vixenish; I say things I don’t mean. And I didn’t mean what I said just now; I didn’t!”

To his dulled astonishment, real tears gleamed on her long black eyelashes as she looked at him. Meg clasped her hands together. More than her physical appeal, more than contrition, she seemed to exude a power of sympathy which almost burned.

“Don’t go,” she whispered. “Nick …”

Once-more he kissed her, and once more he lost his head.

“Now tell me!” said Meg, looking at him with her head held back. “What hath this woman done to you? Hath she cuckolded you?”

“Damn it, Mary, have you forgotten the speech of your own century?”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry! But did she—deceive you with another man?”

“No.”

“Then wherefore did you quarrel?”

Fenton was silent. He could not speak.

“Well, it makes no matter,” Meg said presently. “I do not care. Come here, Nick.”

A little way out from the closed door was a large padded chair, which faced towards the fireplace with its window on either side. A red glare sprang up behind the right-hand window; but he remembered, as it dimmed to pink and died, it was only the soap boileries down the Thames.

“It makes no matter!” Meg repeated in a shaky voice, though both knew she lied. Again she indicated the padded chair facing the windows. “Sit down, my dear. And must you wear a clumsy sword, a buckled cape, even here with me?”

Fenton loosed the sword and the cape, and threw them over on the ottoman. Then he sat down.

“I should ask you to remove that periwig too,” said Meg. “Yet (foh!) all men have their hair cropped beneath, or near-cropped, so that there may be no lice.”

Fenton did not know why he laughed.

“You need not fear the cropped skull or the lice either. I have let my hair grow,” he said. Taking off the periwig, he flung it over to the ottoman with a single bruise-twinge in his right arm.

His heavy black hair, parted on one side, had been pressed down by the periwig. As he threw the wig away, it was as though he came step by step closer, through the mists of the past, towards the future. But Meg, who had sat down sideways on his lap so that she might look at him and bend over him, for a moment would not allow him to think of this.

“Nay,” she whispered close to his cheek, “you must never think of me as Mary Grenville; only as Meg York. My true self is Meg York. This was so even when truly I was Mary Grenville, though I must needs conceal it because you all thought of me as a small girl.”

She bent over him. His intense mingling of desire, comfort, and sympathy again kept him silent. Meg persistently used the old speech; he knew he must do so too.

“Much of your perplexity,” Meg said, “I caused by things I should have told you long ago, but durst not. Will you hear me now?”

“I hear you.”

“Do you recollect that night—in your withdrawing room, two hundred and fifty years from now—when you told me you had sold your soul to the devil?”

Fenton felt a small, inexplicable chill. But he nodded.

“I recollect it well,” he replied.

“And you discovered me not … surprised?”

“True! I felt so. Yet I can’t tell why.”

“It was of the heart, dearest, not the mind. You sought and found it ere you knew.”

“Yet …”

“Stay; hear me! I had heard no word of these people, or this matter of poisoning, though you had studied it for years. Still do you recollect?”

“Yes?”

“I was in a rage; I was sore jealous; I could have bit the blood from my arm.” Now Meg’s low voice hissed at him. “Yet I must not tarry. I loved you. I must learn, in haste and from a certain source, who these people might be. ‘Three beautiful women,’” Meg quoted, with hatred; “that was what you said. Well! As one of these women, I must travel into the past with you.”

“Travel into the …” Fenton stopped.

“Playing Meg York, but with my own self in her place, could I not indeed demonstrate I was no little girl?” Round Meg’s lips curled the elusive smile with which he was so familiar. “Faith, Nick, did you not mark it the first night you met me?”

The glow of the soap vats, rising up red behind the right-hand window and touching the left-hand window as well, showed Meg’s wicked little smile more clearly.

“By God’s body!” Fenton swore, and gripped her arms so that the smile became more provocative. “Did you, Mary Grenville, make any pact to sell your soul to … our friend?”

Meg’s voice was enigmatic.

“Of that,” she said, “we must discourse presently. In Spring Gardens, not long ago, you asked me why I did not tell you I was Mary Grenville when first we were met. I replied: that I was unsure of myself, unsure even of my speech.”

Abruptly Meg, despite her body heat, shivered. He put his arms round her and gripped her hard, feeling the pressure of her arms in return and her cheek against his. Both of them stammered in their speech.

“Y-yet,” said Meg, “’twas not all the truth. I must make you sure I could not be Mary Grenville. I must put by and delay. I must cause you to love me, or at least desire me, as Meg York.”

“Tell me! Have you made any pact with …”

“I’ll not say yes or no. Yet I travelled back in time in my own semblance, though I chose to be Meg York. Your lady mistress.”

“A pity,” said Fenton, “I have never been in a position to exercise my rights!”

“Why, as to that! ’Tis easily remedied. —Stay; touch me no more for the moment! I would have time to …”

“Unnecessary! Pray why defer?”

After a certain struggle, Meg rose to her feet. She settled her purple velvet gown, with the heavy fall of lace at the corsage­. Hurrying to the mantelpiece, she picked up the single taper holder to light her way into another room. As she turned from the mantelpiece and went back towards the door, she held up the taper flame when she passed Fenton, who was on his feet now.

“I shall return very quickly,” she murmured. “Do you much wish for my return?”

“Much!”

She glided past his hand, looking at him over her shoulder with her eyelids lowered. The door opened, and closed after her.

Fenton, his nerves twitching, sat down again.

Now the only light in the little room, with its tapestries and pictures, came from a fire which would not burn properly. Its small logs were burnt fiery red underneath, but with only a flick of flame over them.

Once this whole area (so the thoughts mumbled in Fenton’s head) had been swept by a Great Fire which began in a bakery in Pudding Lane. But surely there was something peculiar about the little log fire here in the grate now? Or else the direction of the wind had changed. This fire seemed to let smoke into the room, curling upwards in odd style. Then a deep glow from the soap boileries beyond the right-hand window, with its great chair facing outwards, rose up to show him the truth. There was no smoke from the chimney. There was no smoke at all. He had mistaken it for what seemed a vague, shifting outline of someone sitting in the great chair.

A suave, familiar voice spoke across at him.

“Good evening, my friend,” said the devil.