The Scent of Death (21 page)

The sun was in my eyes. Dr Slype was reduced to a dark shadow overflowing from his chair.

‘If I remember right,’ he said, ‘Dr Wintour’s nephew married a lady named Miss Froude.’

‘Yes, sir – indeed he did.’

‘I’m almost sure – I cannot be quite certain, mind – that it must have been the young lady’s father who bought the Pickett estate in North Carolina. Mr Henry Froude. That was his name.’

When I returned to Warren Street after my visit to Dr Slype, I could not help overhearing Captain Wintour’s raised voice in the parlour as I passed through the hall.

‘Dinner was cold again,’ he was saying. ‘I swear that’s the third time they’ve served up that ham. It’s rotting on the bone. Are you trying to kill us all? And I could not even find a clean shirt this morning.’

Mrs Arabella said something I did not catch.

‘It won’t do, madam, I tell you – you spend too much time looking after those mewling negros and not enough on your duties, do you hear?’

I passed on. On the evening of the same day, after supper, in a tone that did not brook argument the Captain desired Mrs Arabella to read to us. When she asked what he would like her to read, he looked about the room and his eyes fell on a volume of
The Rambler
that lay on a side table.

‘There – that will do very well.’

She began to read aloud an essay on the evils of idleness. Within a moment or two her parents-in-law were asleep. I was turning over the pages of the
Royal Gazette
, for I had nothing to take me out of the house that evening. Captain Wintour twitched and fidgeted in his chair.

‘Let us take a turn in the garden,’ he said suddenly, interrupting his wife’s reading in mid-sentence.

‘What, now, sir?’

‘Yes, now. It is so close in here I cannot breathe. Put on your cloak, madam, you will not come to any harm.’

Mrs Arabella turned to me. ‘Will you join us, sir?’

The Captain scowled.

‘I think not,’ I said.

They were gone above twenty minutes. I sat yawning over the paper, while Mr and Mrs Wintour snored and snuffled in their armchairs on either side of the small fire. At one point I heard a noise – a distant cry or yelp, instantly extinguished. I read on.

I decided to go up to my room and write to Augusta and to Lizzie. As I went out of the drawing room, the garden door burst open. Mrs Arabella came into the house, kicking off her pattens. Her left hand obscured her face on the side nearer me. She must have seen me standing in the doorway but she did not falter or greet me in any way.

Then her husband appeared behind her, his arm raised. For a moment the three of us stood there as still as waxworks in an exhibition.

There are no third parties in a marriage. What a man and his wife say to each other is no concern of anyone else. What a man does to his wife is their business alone.

I knew all this. I knew what Captain Wintour must have done as surely as if I had seen it happen. And I knew that any court in America or England would say that, strictly speaking, he had the law on his side.

Despite that, I stepped forward. Mrs Arabella ran past me. Wintour lunged towards me. He was a big man, no taller than me but rather heavier; he was in that dangerous stage of drunkenness when caution is thrown to the wind but the body retains at least some of its ability to execute the mind’s concerns.

‘No, sir,’ I said.

I smelled his hot, liquorish breath. His face was contorted with passion. I heard the gentle snores of the Judge and the sound of Mrs Arabella’s feet pattering up the stairs.

‘You dare, sir?’ He raised his fist.

I did not move or speak.

‘Damnation, I—’

‘Johnny, dear?’ his mother called. ‘Is that you?’

Wintour wheeled about and marched down the hall into the garden.

I went back into the drawing room. ‘No, ma’am – it is I. Captain Wintour is taking a turn in the garden. I’m come to bid you goodnight.’

The old lady nodded, frowning slightly as if trying to reconcile my face with her son’s. ‘And my daughter?’

‘I believe I heard Mrs Arabella going upstairs.’

The Judge’s snoring changed in tempo. Mrs Wintour and I glanced at him. His head had rolled against the wing of his armchair. His wig was now askew and his mouth was open. He looked old and foolish.

‘Mr Savill?’ Mrs Wintour was staring at me again. ‘Take care.’

‘I beg your pardon, madam?’

‘Very great care. I am an old woman, sir, and you will permit me to speak frankly.’

I realized with surprise that she was perfectly lucid, which was unusual at this time of day and, increasingly, at any time.

‘It would be easy for a gentleman in your position to allow an attachment to develop – almost without his knowing. An attachment which was quite impossible and which could only bring pain to all concerned.’

‘I’m afraid I do not catch your—’

‘It would distress my husband inexpressibly,’ she went on, ‘– it would distress us all, I believe – if you were obliged to leave us before your visit to New York was finished. We consider you quite one of the family now.’

I bowed. ‘You are very kind.’

‘But it is growing late.’ She smiled graciously at me. ‘I must not keep you from your bed any longer.’

Bowing again, I left the drawing room, closing the door behind me.

I stood in the hall, attempting to digest what had just happened. The garden door was still ajar. It was dark outside. There was a half-moon veiled in clouds that streamed across a night sky the colour of slate. Captain Wintour was nowhere to be seen.

I heard the faintest sound above me. I looked up. The light was dim – an oil lamp burned on the landing and a single candle on the hall table below.

A person was leaning over the rail and looking down at me. I glimpsed, if that is not too definite a word, a shadow with flashes of white for eyes and teeth.

Slippered feet scampered across the landing. A door closed.

During the next ten days or so it was perhaps as well that I spent few of my waking hours in Warren Street. Mrs Wintour did not refer to our conversation again. She retreated across the borders of old age to a place where she seemed only partly aware of what was going on around her. A day or two later, she fell victim to a putrid sore throat and was confined to bed, which I confess came as a relief to me.

I could not ignore the fact that Mrs Wintour had, without saying as much, warned me of the danger of nursing adulterous desires for Mrs Arabella. If these desires, which I barely acknowledged even to myself, had been evident to Mrs Wintour, who else might have noticed the tell-tale signs?

The mood in the city at this time was buoyant, for our forces had had considerable success in Georgia, so much so that the province had been declared in the King’s Peace and civil government re-established. But the mood at the Wintours’ house was quite the reverse.

Our domestic economy was still at sixes and sevens because of the inoculations. On top of everything else, the necessity of nursing Mrs Wintour placed another strain on the straitened household.

I hardly saw Mrs Arabella. I encountered her in the stairs on the day after she had run in from the garden. The flesh around her left eye was a deep purple in colour, so dark it was almost black like the skin of a plum.

Later that day, at supper, in answer to Judge Wintour’s questions, she explained that she had collided with an open door when she went to her closet in the night. She spoke of it in a mechanical, uninterested way, as if the accident had happened to someone else, someone she did not care for very much. The Judge was concerned for her health – he believed the misfortune could be attributed to her overtaxing herself with her patients. He seemed to suspect nothing of the truth.

There were only the three of us at table that evening, for Mrs Wintour was upstairs and the Captain was out. As a general rule, he returned late, slept late and went out early. On the few occasions that he and I met during those ten days, he was perfectly amiable. We exchanged bows and the occasional commonplace as if nothing had happened between us. Had he been too drunk to remember the incident? Or did he simply believe that there was no profit in quarrelling with me?

As for Miriam, she avoided me. It supported my suspicion that it had been she who had witnessed my confrontation with Captain Wintour in the hall and who had scampered across the landing afterwards. Clearly she did not want to run the risk of my questioning her.

The bond between a woman and her maid can be almost as intimate as that between a man and his wife – in this case perhaps more so. I fancied that there was a sullenness in her demeanour when she met me, a disapproving look in her eye. Did she condemn me in her heart for failing either to protect or to avenge her mistress? Or did she condemn me merely for knowing of Mrs Arabella’s unhappiness?

But I did not blame her for that. Indeed, I condemned myself.

Duty pointed one way, inclination another.

Though I was much occupied with the routine business of the office, I could not forget the Pickett affair. I knew I must come to a decision. Put bluntly, should I share all that I knew with Marryot and Rampton, and therefore with our masters in the Government – or should I let Roger Pickett rest in his grave, and spare both myself and the Wintours, especially Mrs Arabella, the inconvenience and unpleasantness of an investigation into the family’s connections with a rebel?

Towards the end of March, the
Romulus
man-of-war brought in a fleet of twenty storeships and merchantmen which had sailed from Torbay at the beginning of January. At this time of year the weather made communication between New York and England even slower and riskier than usual.

Mr Rampton had forwarded a bag of mail. His letter to me, written a fortnight after his last, concerned itself solely with the business of the Department; there was not the slightest hint of the private connection between us. I was beginning to suspect that he had selected me for the New York mission not to advance my career but to condemn me to a form of exile.

I found one small compensation: Mr Rampton made no mention of Mr Pickett and his supposed box of curiosities. I interpreted this omission to signify that he believed he had done all he might reasonably be expected to do: therefore he did not propose to exert himself any further in the matter.

If I was right, then it followed that neither Lord George nor Lord North had wished to do more than appear obliging – the former to his prime minister, the latter to his agent, Mr Pickett’s brother-in-law. I had not yet composed my memorandum on the renewed investigation, but nothing it would contain was likely materially to affect Mr Rampton’s opinion.

A day or two later, I was at Fort George for a meeting with the Deputy Adjutant General, the Provost and Major Marryot. Afterwards, Marryot caught my eye and gave me an almost imperceptible nod. We strolled out as if by chance to the parade ground. In this crowded city, a public space offered the most privacy.

‘Well?’ he said, coming to a halt and wheeling round to face me. ‘This Pickett affair.’

I said nothing.

He frowned. ‘Have you fresh intelligence?’

I shrugged and blew out a sigh. ‘What do you suppose, sir?’

‘I suppose it’s a damned wild-goose chase.’ The Major rubbed his left leg, the lame one. He often massaged it without, I think, knowing that he did so. ‘I’ve had no reports of Scarface in the city.’

‘Could he be within the lines somewhere? Long Island, perhaps?’

‘Of course he could if he had someone to shelter him. He could be here in the city for all we know.’

‘If so, I cannot think he goes abroad very much,’ I said. ‘Or only at night. He stands out in a crowd.’

Marryot nodded. ‘Ten to one he slipped through the lines and he’s somewhere in the Debatable Ground.’

‘Nothing from Philadelphia, either,’ I said, ‘nor from Pickett’s lodgings here. Not a whisper of this box of curiosities or of a design against Pickett’s life.’

‘It’s like wrestling with shadows,’ Marryot said.

I looked sharply at him. For a plain soldier, Marryot had a strange tendency to produce these queer, poetical metaphors. He had once described the Pickett affair as ‘chasing clouds’. Now he was ‘wrestling shadows’. But I wasn’t tempted to smile at them. His metaphorical fancies fitted this strange investigation as much as any words could.

His colour rose. ‘That’s to say, it’s a devil of business. Nothing for a man to get hold of. And I hate running other men’s errands to no purpose.’

‘Then perhaps we shouldn’t try.’

‘Eh? But I thought Lord George—’

‘We have done as much as we can, sir,’ I said. ‘After all, what man can do more? This is what I propose: that I write a digest of what we have discovered – and in some detail too – and that we both fix our signatures to it. We send it to the Department and, God willing, we shall hear no more about it.’

‘You really think it would answer?’

‘I believe so. If they want more, they will tell us. Of course, if we stumble on anything pertinent in the meantime, we shall report it to them.’

Marryot looked from side to side, as if fearing eavesdroppers. ‘Are you sure this is wise, sir? It will not harm our prospects?’

‘Why should it?’ I spoke with some confidence, for this was my world not the Major’s: I knew the workings of Mr Rampton’s mind; I understood the words he employed and the words he did not. ‘We have nothing to lose except a deal of tedious distraction.’

He rubbed the stubble on his chin. ‘Very well, sir. It shall be as you say. And – and, well, I’m obliged to you.’

That night I met Townley by arrangement at the assembly that was held every fortnight or so in the big upper room at Roubalet’s Tavern. He and I were subscribers at two guineas apiece.

‘I’m happy to see you in such good spirits, sir,’ he said when I laughed immoderately at a foolish joke told by an elderly naval lieutenant. ‘Did the
Romulus
bring news of your recall?’