Most Secret
Authors: John Dickson Carr
“Very few detective stories baffle me, but Mr. Carr’s always do.” —
Agatha Christie
“No one is so consistently successful as Carr, who combines genuine understanding of and relish for the past with a comparable understanding and relish in matters of detectival trickery.” —
The New York Times Book Review
“An excellent novel of crime and puzzlement.” —
The New York Times
on
To Wake the Dead
“A superb story written by an expert.” —
The New Yorker
on
The Emperor’s Snuff-Box
“Mystery fiction at its finest—an enthralling story such as only Carr can conjure up.” —
Newsday
on
The Demoniacs
“One of the best … Read it for the story or puzzle or period color—but by all means read it.” —
The New York Times Book Review
on
Scandal at High Chimneys
John Dickson Carr
EDITOR’S NOTE
W
ELL, HOW MUCH TRUTH
is in it? Anyone who reads the ensuing narrative may wonder whether Colonel Kinsmere (rest his soul) was not glorifying his grandfather by building the sort of vague legend found among many families into a lyric edifice of lies. This is the verdict of one of his descendants, Mr. Herbert Darlington, who has assisted me in preparing the record, so that in suggesting it I am in no danger of getting myself sued for libelling somebody’s ancestor.
Primarily, the story was designed to amuse young people at Blackthorn during the troubled month of June, 1815. The bogy of Napoleon Bonaparte was abroad in Flanders, and three members of the Kinsmere family were shortly to face him in the army of Field-Marshal the Duke of Wellington. Boney’s drums could be heard even in that quiet library by the Avon. Whether the story was in part invented by an old gentleman of exuberant fancy (Colonel Kinsmere had celebrated his eighty-third birthday on the previous 11th of April), or whether every incident really occurred as he swore it did, is a question to which no answer can be supplied.
And yet, though certain details may be stretched or elaborated, we need not necessarily doubt everything. Today’s experience suggests that, in matters of diplomatic hocus-pocus behind the scenes, the melodramatic explanation is usually the true one. Besides, when Colonel Kinsmere told his tale in 1815, research into the records of the seventeenth century had attained only a rudimentary stage; even Pepys’s diary was not yet decoded.
The real-life people to whom Colonel Kinsmere introduces us behave so much in accordance with the discoveries of present-day scholars as to afford proof that he heard the details at first hand. The same may be said of topographical detail: the London background, the Devil tavern, the arrangement of rooms in Whitehall palace. Though it is impossible to discover whether a performance of
Julius Caesar
was given by the King’s Company on the date he assigns to it, those actors and actresses who appear with Dolly Landis in chapter IX were all authentically members of the King’s Company at that time, playing the parts that would have been given them.
Again, Colonel Kinsmere’s characters talk so entirely in the style of the seventeenth century that Mr. Darlington and I were somewhat tempted to woo readers by modernizing it. But this, as contemporary letters and diaries attest, is how people really did think and speak in the year 1670; it makes very easy reading when long sentences are punctuated into short ones and we have decided neither to alter nor to apologize.
Finally, it might be interesting to quote extracts from the diary of Mrs. Anne Kinsmere Darlington (1799-1868), who took down the narrative verbatim. She declares, in her diary, that she finds it a shocking story, though there is nothing in the least shocking about it. Whatever the lady’s views, it is to her interest and industry that we owe its preservation; certain marginal notes indicate she might surreptitiously have wished for herself the broad charms and amatory adventures of Dolly Landis. In any event, here is the tale as Richard Kinsmere told it; the reader may be left to determine how much probably happened, how much might have happened, and how much could never have happened in this world.
“Rares choses à voir! Rares choses à voir!”
Cry of the Puppet Show-Man
Seventeenth Century
H
E WAS A SIZZLER
, was my grandfather.
I am aware that this modern term “Sizzler” might seem to lack something of the veneration we are taught to accord grandfathers in general. The memories we retain of our own grandsire, as a rule, are few. To a child he occupies the awesome and unaccountable position of being father to our father, and therefore presumably capable of twice as hard a caning.
We regard him, in fact, as something between a saint and a bad dream. His white hair and beard confuse him in our minds with a mysterious personage out of the Bible, who is always stalking about very excitedly in a species of nightshirt, and preaching something to somebody. Though he seems a more sedentary sort of being than this, he has a shrewd taste for asking questions; besides, we are forever offending him. We somehow contrive to land a cricket ball in his cup as he sits down to tea, and all the aunts seem turned to stone when he swears. Then the aunts look sorrowfully at
us.
They convey the impression that it hurts them beyond words to hear a boy cursing so viciously at the tea table.
This, I gather, is the sort of cloudy memory most young people retain. I do not think, however, that you can regard
me
in such fashion. And if you think I am tolerably active for my age, and an unpardonable old rip of a grandfather into the bargain, then, Lord love us, you should have seen your great-great-grandsire as I saw him all those years ago.
Ah, yes. Yes, indeed!
I remember the night I heard him tell how he fought Captain Harker in the dark at the old Devil and St. Dunstan tavern in Fleet Street. He recounted the tale in ’forty-two, seventeen-forty-two; I am sure of it because they were sending me away from the Hall to school in the same week, and they had let me sit up at table with the gentlemen when the port went round after supper. The vicar was there that night, and Squire Redlands from Cyston Court down Gloucestershire way, and Major McCartney of the Life Guards; I remember Major McCartney’s red coat and fine gold epaulets.
“ ’Twas thus, mark you now!” says Rowdy Kinsmere.
For my grandfather not only told that rousing story of the fight in the dark; he borrowed Squire Redland’s sword and illustrated it all over the dining room, with the sword in one hand and a glass of port in the other, whooping out comments as he did so. When old Silver came in to suggest that it was bedtime, he was so excited that he fired the cut-glass decanter at Silver’s head, and very nearly hit it at that.
(Indeed, considering the length of our dining room here, I do not think I have ever seen a better shot: except perhaps when Scrope Wiley wagered two thousand pounds he could throw a toasting fork and spear the Lord Mayor of London exactly in the seat of the breeches at a distance of sixty feet; and did it, too, during the Procession of 1756. In Parliament it was called attempted assassination.)
Anyway, on this night I was telling you of, they sent me up to bed after I had drunk all a boy of nine years can conveniently carry. I went to bed, but I was awakened by some noise just as the stable clock was striking four, and I crept out and peeped over the banisters into the main hall.
In the main hall (which was paved with flagstones at that time) there stood my grandfather, and Squire Redlands, and Major McCartney, and the vicar, with their arms round each other’s shoulders, singing Macheath’s song from the
Beggar’s Opera.
Squire Redlands and the vicar, of course, were put to bed in the house, but Major McCartney had to ride to Bristol that night. So my grandfather propped him up on his horse, and saw that he was pointed in the right direction, and then stood out on the drive in the autumn mist and hallo’d him out of sight.
“Poor fellow, being obliged to leave us,” says Rowdy Kinsmere. “Ah, poor fellow!”
Upon my solemn oath, he was up drinking his ale at the breakfast table next morning, no whit the worse for it. And he had celebrated his ninety-second birthday on the previous 15th of May. Later he came to help them pack my box, which was to be put on the London coach for school. My mother had forbidden me any pocket money beyond the four shillings a term prescribed by the school; but he roared, “Hell alive, woman!” and crammed my pockets full of gold sovereigns, telling me to be sure not to spend ’em for anything sensible or he would birch me when I came back. He also made out a list, and showed it to me, of things at school for which I should receive a bonus. One, I remember, was for a prize in fencing and riding competitions; one for any completely new cheat or bubble I could devise to devil my housemaster; but the others I cannot call to mind.
Yet I can still see him in the room I occupied then: the little panelled room up under the eaves of the west wing, which Edward’s son has now. To the end of his life he would never wear anything except the clothes that were fashionable in his youth. So I see him standing by the window, in his great black periwig of Charles the Second’s time, his black camlet coat and the lace at his throat, reading that list through his spectacles, and the ilex tree throwing a shadow on the floor.
Now when I say to you that he was, in the language of 1815, a Sizzler, I do not refer to him in his old age. I would tell you of him as he went up to London in those distant days when the throne of England was graced or disgraced by a king whom some called Old Rowley. For you may be assured that, even in a family whose most conspicuous talent lies in its spontaneous ability to become embroiled in devilment, nobody ever had such a taste for it, or experienced so much of it, as your great-great-grandfather.
There are others, of course. You will perhaps have heard of my uncle Charles, his second son, who used to go to those private theatricals Queen Anne loved, and once hired a conjuror to find three gold watches and the Duchess of Marlborough’s garters in Dean Swift’s hat. But they didn’t know the man was a conjuror, you see, so that my uncle Charles was compelled to depart for the colonies in some haste.
And so I would tell you my grandfather’s story, young ladies and gentlemen, partly to beguile the time for you while your elder brothers are away in Belgium with Lord Wellington, and partly so that you may tell
your
grandchildren you have heard the true things out of a century and a half gone by: of what manner of men they really were who diced and jested, and fought and bussed wenches, at the court of Our Sovereign Liege Charles the Second.
It is very real to me. I heard it all, being Rowdy Kinsmere’s favourite. At my first duel he insisted on standing by with the surgeon, holding the cloths and the water basin. I had the good luck to run my man through the shoulder during the first minute of play. Afterwards my grandfather escaped from those who were supposed to keep an eye on the old reprobate; he was inviting the whole village to take beer at his expense in the taproom of the local tavern, and singing a duet with the blacksmith, when they found him.
His first name being Roderick, it was shortened to “Rod,” or “Roddy,” and became, almost inevitably, “Rowdy.” By my parents—a somewhat sanctimonious pair, though worthy people—he was regarded as a fierce old villain, past comprehension and damned as well. In actuality, a kinder-hearted or more muddle-headed person never lived. He made much of that little pinprick of a duel, and afterwards (I was fifteen) treated me as a man grown.