Free Most Secret by John Dickson Carr Page A

to breathe. But the woman’s FAT , damme, and there’s an end on’t.”
    “Pish!” roared Bygones Abraham. “Pish, tush, and what d’ you know o’ fine women? A fig, say I, for all your thin jillflirts with no more shape than a washboard. Give me a woman I can lay hold of.”
    “Oh, granted. At the same time …”
    “Stay, though!” interrupted Bygones, checking himself and shaking his head. “I must not forget Dulcinea. My passion for Dulcinea,” cries he, with a watery and sentimental light blurring his eye, “is spirituelle. Ah, Dulcinea! Sound of lutes and—er—lutes. It’s a deep secret, yet I confide in you.”
    “Dulcinea who? Not Dulcinea del Toboso, I suppose?” says Kinsmere, who knew and loved Don Quixote. “Which Dulcinea, then? What’s her name?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You don’t know?”
    “Nay, how should I? Having seen her but at a distance, and finding none acquainted with her to present me? But many times I have drunk her health in ink. And once in a mixture of barley water and soot.”
    “Come, friend, these are strange tipplings for an old soldier! Ink? Barley water and soot? Wherefore such japes as that?”
    “Because ’tis ah la mode,” returned Bygones. “I am a man of the mode; I have ever resolved to be one, though God He knoweth why.”
    “Well, then?”
    “Well!” said Bygones, huffing a little. “With a love spiritual or ennobling, hark’ee, it’s the new fashion to drink your Dulcinea’s health in some compound … not nauseous or too disgustful, it may be, but one no man o’ parts would think to quaff for his pleasure. And you must write her verses telling her how cruel she is and how much she won’t love you.
    “But my Lady Castlemaine,” he pursued, “needs no verses to fetch her down. Report saith they’re to give her a duchess’s coronet ere long. Yet she’s a damned fine woman; it’s a pity.”
    “Well, but,” protested my grandfather, “where’s the pity in it?” He still would not have admitted he was thinking of that yellow gown going past, of the eyes sweeping left and right, of a black patch near the small, heavy, duskily red mouth. “Where’s the pity,” says he, “in the awarding of a coronet for devoir well and truly done?”
    “Oh, as to that! Her enemies say this is no more than a pension, since she hath outlived her usefulness. ’Tis not as in old days, they say, when the king cared much and was tied to her shift strings. If she shows open fondness for Mr. Wycherley or for Charles Hart, the actor, they say it’s all one to our Charles of Whitehall Palace. We live in a maze o’ galleries, each one a whispering gallery. They say … always they say …”
    “Do they say true?”
    “Well!” retorted Bygones, and began a complicated oratorical gesture. “The king is but forty years old; he still knows hot humours; what would they have? Certes there are others. Here’s Nelly (the play-actress, d’ye see?) being this month brought to bed of a child. And Moll Davies as well.
    “But what’s that to my Lady Castlemaine, who can ever whistle him back when she’s a mind to? There’s none to compare with her, ecod, there’s not! She is still mistress-in-chief, strike me blind and don’t you forget it; of all amorous zhongloors she is still the woman.”
    Here he broke off, with some pride, to draw attention to his lodgings.
    Having negotiated many more passages, they had emerged into another gallery: a long, dusky gallery which ran east and west just above the private landing stairs to the river. The Shield Gallery, it was called, because of certain remaining shields and banners—from the ancient times of tournaments in King Harry the Eighth’s day—which were still hung up along the walls.
    Sunlight touched stained-glass windows at the eastern end, where a balcony had been built out over the water stairs; the maids of honour, on state occasions, stood en this balcony to throw flowers at the royal barges coming to