Philip Kerr - Dark Matter

“Will you play drafts, Miss Barton?”

“No, thank you, sir, I am reading.”

“Come, will you not play? I am much improved since our last encounter. I am learning much from the Doctor’s style of play.”

She turned her page, with eloquent silence.

“Miss Barton,” I said at last, “I rely upon what once passed between us to justify my asking you now if you think it possible that you will ever look upon me as your friend again.”

She said nothing, but kept on reading her book.

“If it seems at all likely that you will ever find it in your heart to forgive me.”

Now she looked at me over the top of her book and beat me with her eyelashes. “It is not I who needs to forgive you, Mister Ellis, as I think I have made plain to you, but almighty God.”

“But this is most unfair. Must we bring God into this?”

“Let me ask you a question, Mister Ellis. Are you still of an atheistic frame of mind?”

“I cannot, in all conscience, say that I am not.”

“You are under my uncle’s roof as a guest, Mister Ellis; as am I. We must try to get along as best we can. But I will tell you this, sir. I am a good Christian woman, Mister Ellis, and your views are repugnant to me. And your views being repugnant, it should be plain that you are also repugnant to me, so long as you shall hold them.”

“Then surely it is your Christian duty to help me back to Christ,” said I.

“It is not for me to show you the error of your thinking. That is not what is lacking in you, sir. Faith cannot be taught, Mister Ellis, like an alphabet. You must do that for yourself. I will not. I cannot.”

That same night, alone in my room at Newton’s house in Jermyn Street, my earlier conversation with Miss Barton, combined with a sense of apprehension that another attempt on Newton’s life might be made, made me restless, and finding it impossible to sleep, I resolved to go out and take the air of Hyde Park.

I had started down the stairs when I thought I heard a man’s voice in the kitchen. Newton was already abed, and Mister Woston had lodgings elsewhere. Returning to my room for a pistol, I went downstairs to investigate, and about halfway down I heard the man’s voice again. It was not a man saying anything that I heard, so much as a man groaning in his sleep.

Outside the parlour door I paused to cock my pistol, certain now that there was an intruder. And turning the handle, I advanced boldly into the room, with my pistol extended before me.

The sight I beheld was more terrible to me than any murderer could ever have been. In the candlelight which revealed her complete nakedness, Miss Barton knelt in front of Lord Halifax, who did serve her from behind like any common bawd. She stifled a scream as she saw me in the doorway. And seeing the pistol in my hand, Lord Halifax withdrew himself from inside her body, held his arms up in front of his head, and whimpered most piteously while Miss Barton tried to cover her naked parts with a tablecloth. And I stood there, saying nothing, but breathing like an angry bull. I almost put the pistol to my own head and pulled the trigger, such was the pain and disappointment that I felt. But after a moment or two I put up my gun and, begging their pardon for having put them in fear of their lives, explained that I thought I had heard an intruder, and then excused myself from their presence. Neither he nor she said a word; and yet by their situation all was suddenly plain to me. Newton had been right: his niece was in love; but not with me. It was Lord Halifax she loved.

I could not remain in that house. And not for the first time I walked from Jermyn Street to the Tower in a state of abject misery, hardly caring if anyone killed me. In truth, I would have welcomed death. For the injustice of it was only too painful to me. How could the she who had lectured me on a good Christian life give herself to another man within only a month or two of giving herself, more or less, to me? Of course the difference was plain; he was Lord Halifax and I was plain, poor Christopher Ellis. Better to be an earl’s mistress than a poor man’s wife.

After that terrible evening, Miss Barton was only infrequently at Jermyn Street when I called, and more often at milord Halifax’s house, in Bushey Park, so that she and I were almost never alone in each other’s company again.

Even now, thirty years later, it pains me to write about it. But this is small beer beside the main part of my story, which must yet be concluded; and I must relate how our spies and those of the Government kept close watch on Oates and the rest of the conspirators so that in early November, when it was given out that the King would return on November the fourteenth, the government was able to act in a most subtile way.

The very few copies of Mister Defoe’s pamphlet, with its supposed prophecy of Nostradamus, that had got into circulation had still managed to raise a great public stir among Londoners, and there was much talk of conspiracy against the King; and therefore it was plain that a move against any shade of Protestantism, no matter how extreme or malign, would have been a source of real provocation to the mob. And so the Government was obliged secretly to bring down a regiment of soldiers from out of the north of England that it could trust. This being done, one night close to the return of the King from Flanders, finally we did act against the conspirators.

One evening, early in November, Newton and I were playing drafts at his home in Jermyn Street, when he received an urgent letter from Lord Halifax. As soon as he read it, Newton was all purpose.

“Come on, Ellis, get your hat and cloak, the time has come to arrest these traitors. A search for Jacobites has been undertaken,” he explained. “Arrests are already being made. According to milord Halifax’s letter, the Tower has been put under a curfew, with many men arrested both inside and outside its walls. We have been detailed to arrest that vile creature Oates.”

“Sir,” I said, arming myself to the teeth, as they say, “will you not take a weapon yourself?”

“If I did, I think I would have more to fear from myself than any rogue we might meet tonight,” he said, declining my offer of a pistol.

We drove to Axe Yard, near St. James’s Park, and along the way we saw London given the aspect of a city in a state of siege. Trained bands of men marched up and down the streets. The guards had been changed at Whitehall and Somerset House, with cannon placed around the former. The Temple gates were shut, the great thoroughfares barricaded, so that I did begin to worry that Mister Oates, hearing and seeing the commotion, would escape us.

“Do not concern yourself about that,” said Newton. “He has been watched closely by Lord Halifax’s men these past few weeks, and it only remains for us to have the honour of bringing the principal conspirator into custody.”

“But will the mob permit the arrest of so many Protestants?” I asked.

“It has been put about that all those arrested are Papists,” explained Newton, “being either disaffected Englishmen or French spies, although the truth is that these are the same French Huguenots or Green Ribboners that have plotted to massacre London’s Roman Catholics.”

Which, I confess, did seem to me to be a most dishonest and Machiavellian way of governing a country.

Outside Mister Oates’s house, I removed one of my pistols from its holster and cocked it, before knocking loudly upon the door. By now I was an old hand at making an arrest, and had dispatched Halifax’s men to the back of the house, in case Oates still thought to give us the slip.

“In the name of the King, open up,” I called out, all the time pressing Newton back with my free hand in case any shots came forth. Finally, the door not being opened, Newton ordered the Treasury men to break in the door; and this being done, with a great deal of noise that did bring all the inhabitants of Axe Yard out of their houses, I entered the little house, followed, at a safe distance, by Newton and the rest. But the house was empty.