The Scent of Death (40 page)

We played the first game. I won, though the victory could have gone either way until the last throw.

‘Your dice have brought you good luck,’ Mrs Arabella said.

‘Then perhaps we should use the other pair for the next game.’

‘I think not. These may bring me luck this time.’

My attention wandered from the game and returned to Mr Rampton’s letter and its implications. Augusta had eloped with her German lover. By law, her adultery was grounds for divorce. But I knew that in practice a divorce decree required a private member’s bill in Parliament, which was both expensive and time-consuming; divorce was not a luxury that was open to a person in the middling rank of society. I could not allow myself to hope for Augusta’s death. Yet unless she died, I should never be free to marry again. My future seemed bleak indeed.

I looked up and found Mrs Arabella staring at me.

‘You are wool-gathering, sir,’ she said with an affectation of severity. ‘I’ve nearly gammoned you and you haven’t noticed. You see I was right about your lucky dice. They are as fickle as fate.’

With an effort, I smiled at her. ‘Shall we make it the best of three games?’

We set the board for the third time. This time I concentrated on the game. It was another close-run affair but fortune was unkind to Mrs Arabella in the closing stage of the game and I won comfortably.

‘It was not very gallant of you, sir,’ she said. ‘But I shall be forgiving and blame it on your dice. How glad I am that we were not playing for money.’

She rose to her feet as she was speaking. We said goodnight and I opened the door for her. I sat down again at the table. I noticed that she had barely touched her wine.

I slipped the ivory dice into my pocket, placed the backgammon counters on the board and closed the box.

As I took up my glass, her words recurred to me:
How glad I am that we were not playing for money
. But now I saw the possibility – the hope? – of a double entendre.

We had agreed not to play for money. We had agreed to play for love.

In the middle of war, New York slumbered in its own dreary peace.

We did not forget the dead. Jack Wintour’s absence left a wound in the Warren Street house that affected all of us. But in a week or two the wound began to scab over. It itched and ached but it no longer bled unless we could not resist the temptation to scratch it.

Early in October, I received another letter from Mr Rampton, as chilly in tone as its predecessor. He had received a report confirming that Augusta was now in Munich. He also eased my mind, perhaps unintentionally, by enclosing letters from my sister and my daughter, who were still in Shepperton.

I felt a sadness for my poor wife. Augusta could never be received in polite society again. Respectable people would close their doors to her. She was in all probability condemned to a half-life on the Continent. I knew I could not quite abandon her for she was still the mother of my child. I must discover whether she was in actual want and, if necessary, send her money.

Mr Rampton wrote that the elopement continued to delight the gossips in London and cause distress and inconvenience to himself. More to the point, Lord George had intimated that he did not at all like the notion that the American Department was connected with such a disagreeable scandal. Worse still, Mr Rampton hinted, news of my wife’s behaviour had reached the ear of the King himself, who was not pleased. The royal marriage was notably happy and His Majesty did not see why the marriages of his subjects should be any different.

That being so, Mr Rampton continued, it had been found necessary to review my employment at the Department. His Lordship had reluctantly concluded that it would not be in the Department’s best interests for me to remain in my clerkship. Though I was not of course directly to blame for Augusta’s behaviour, I must accept some of the responsibility for it for a man should direct his wife in all things. Another clerk would be sent out to replace me in the spring; I should return as soon as possible after his arrival.

Rampton made no mention of finding me a post in a different department, though I knew such a transfer would be a simple matter for a man of his influence. He had never liked his niece and had helped me only reluctantly into a place. Now her behaviour gave him all the reason he needed to sever connections with both of us.

He did not actually say that in so many words. He was too wily a man to commit to anything unless there was a clear advantage to himself in doing so. That was one reason why he was an under secretary.

The weeks passed and autumn slipped away. Mehitabel settled in the household, though I rarely saw her. Mrs Arabella told me that the girl was competent with her needle and was making herself useful.

In November, I heard again from Mr Rampton. This time there was no mention of my unhappy wife for he had received my report of the Mount George expedition and of Captain Wintour’s as-yet unsolved murder. This would have set the seal on my disgrace if the seal had not been set on it already.

It was at about this time that I began to notice that I was no longer received so warmly at Headquarters as I had been. Even the provincial and city officials grew cool towards me.

Nobody said anything directly. Gradually, however, I realized that I had ceased to be considered the coming man whose friendship it might be useful to cultivate. The news that I was to be recalled in the spring had become widely known. To make matters worse, my wife’s elopement conferred a vicarious taint on me. The flow of invitations to concerts, supper-parties and dinners diminished to a trickle and then stopped altogether.

I still saw Noak, who continued occasionally to act as Judge Wintour’s secretary and sometimes came to Warren Street. But he avoided unnecessary conversation. As for his master, Townley confined our intercourse to the bare minimum required by his responsibilities and mine.

On the whole my unpopularity did not distress me unduly: I knew that my time in New York was coming to an end and that, in all probability, I should never meet my acquaintance here again. I consoled myself with the thought that at least I
should see Lizzie soon. As for the loss of my employment, I
hoped there would be an opening for an honest man in the prime of life who could cast accounts and write a fair hand. While I found my feet again in England, my sister would not allow Lizzie or me to starve.

It was the change in Major Marryot’s manner that surprised me most and, I own, made me a little unhappy. During the last twelve months, I had come to believe that he and I had put aside the coldness of our early relations in favour of something warmer that was, if not quite friendship, at least mutual esteem.

He and I were still obliged to work together but there was no longer any hint of our former intimacy. I encountered him once or twice in Mrs Arabella’s drawing room and was tempted to smile at the quandary that his emotions placed him in: he was drawn to her like an iron filing to the positive pole of a magnet; and yet I took the part of the negative pole and repelled him.

On one occasion at Headquarters, Marryot and I happened to pass in the crowded passage outside the Post Room. He jostled against me, pushing me at the wall. He paused and, for a moment, our eyes met.

He stared at me, daring me to make something of his rudeness, even hoping that I would, so it would give him an opportunity to vent his hostility against me more effectively. Duels were officially frowned upon in New York but they were not unknown.

Neither of us spoke. I held his gaze for a moment but refused to allow him to provoke me. I turned on my heel and walked away.

Towards the end of the month I had occasion to go across to Long Island, where a gang of irregulars from the mainland had murdered a Loyalist refugee from Connecticut in front of his family for the sake of a few guineas. I took depositions from witnesses and did what I could for the victim’s widow and children.

Afterwards, I had an hour or two in hand. The day was fine, though very cold. En route back to the Brooklyn ferry I made
a detour to the south that took me a mile or so out of my way.
The distillery was here beside its own jetty, with a stumpy mole poking out to sea in the direction of Nutten Island.

I enquired of a fisherman where I might find Mr Townley’s warehouse. He directed me to a large low building a couple of hundred yards back from the coast. Here I found Mr Ingham, the manager, in an office that overlooked the grey waters of the bay.

He was a stooped man a few years older than myself. His features were mobile and not without charm, though the vertical lines that scored his forehead hinted at habitual anxiety. The warmth of his welcome suggested that he seldom saw company in this place. He knew of me by reputation, but seemed unaware of my recent fall from grace.

I explained that the Townleys had mentioned him and I had called in as I happened to be in the neighbourhood on business. He immediately asked me to dine. I said I was pressed for time but we drank a glass or two of very tolerable sherry and chatted for half an hour.

‘I’m surprised we have not encountered each other before,’ I said as Mr Ingham poured the second glass.

‘I’m rarely in the city these days,’ he replied, with a twitch of his head as though the subject of himself embarrassed him. ‘I’m obliged to live here because there is constant danger of thieves and, besides, deliveries may come and go at any time. We are so dependent on the weather, are we not, sir?’ He darted a glance at me and ventured a pleasantry. ‘That and the caprice of our masters and the uncertainties of this war.’

‘Have you been here long?’

‘Nearly fifteen months now. Not that I grumble, you understand – the position is a most responsible one. I was Mr Townley’s confidential clerk before that, as you may know, but he wished to assist an American gentleman from England into the place. But that was only part of his reason – he told me that I was wasted as his clerk. He was kind enough to say that I should have more scope for my talents here.’

I bowed my head in acknowledgment of Mr Townley’s acumen. ‘The American gentleman must be Mr Noak,’ I said. ‘I’ve come across him a good deal.’

‘I’m sure he is a most competent man of business,’ Mr Ingham said with an air of uncertainty, as if he would have been delighted to hear the opposite.

‘No doubt, sir. But he strikes me as a man who works best under orders, under close supervision. Whereas yourself …’

I left the flattery unsaid, secure in the knowledge that my host would fill in the blanks more effectively than I could ever do.

Mr Ingham’s face was pinker than it had been, perhaps because of the sherry. ‘I – ah – I like to think that Mr Townley realized that I would be equal to the added responsibility. And indeed Mrs Townley too.’

I raised my eyebrows in polite surprise.

‘Oh yes,’ he went on. ‘I have known her for much longer than Mr Townley because her father was my old master. She has a surprisingly good head for business – like her father before her, of course, in his prime.’ He gestured out of the window, at the looming bulk of the warehouse. ‘All this was his, you know, and came to her on his death. That’s why Mr Townley needed to install a manager. Mark you, I have not found it easy.’

‘The war?’

‘That has caused us many problems, sir, but it has also brought many opportunities in its wake. No, I’m afraid the profits had suffered in the last year of the old gentleman’s life because he’d become foolish and absurdly secretive. He saw rebels behind every bush. He was so terrified of spies that he would not do his accounts in ink; he insisted on using lemon juice to render the figures invisible. He slept with an armed servant lying across his doorway and with pistols under his pillow. Why, sir, the stories I could tell you.’

I could not prevent my host from telling me some of his stories about Mrs Townley’s father in his dotage. When at last I rose to leave, declining yet another invitation to stay to dinner, Mr Ingham saw me to my horse, talking all the way.

‘Pray give my compliments to Mr Townley,’ he said as I prepared to ride off into the gathering gloom of the afternoon. ‘And to Mrs Townley.’

‘A charming lady,’ I said by way of a venture.

Mr Ingham nodded vigorously and his face flushed an even darker shade of pink. ‘Yes, sir, indeed she is.’

The winter besieged New York more effectively than the Continental Army was ever able to do. The weather forced inactivity on both sides. Little of note, in the military sense, took place after our forces repelled a rebel attack on Savannah in October. Washington set up his quarters in Morristown in New Jersey, where he remained for many months.

The snow began to fall in November. It fell heavily and continuously throughout the winter. Great drifts clogged the gutters and banked up against the buildings. The traffic crawled through the streets and often stopped altogether. Soldiers and prisoners of war, organized into gangs, tried to keep the main roads clear, fighting a losing battle with the snow and ice. Even the whores were driven off the streets.

The rivers, creeks, harbours, ports and bays around Manhattan Island were choked with ice. Judge Wintour told me that he had never seen the like of it in all his years. As the ice thickened and spread, this led to another difficulty for the city: it hindered the passage of victuals from eastern Long Island and, worse still, from England.

General Clinton managed to sail for Charleston in late December with as much of the army as could be spared. After that, the cold steadily worsened and the ice extended its grip. By the middle of January, ice formed a broad if irregular bridge across the Hudson to the shores of New Jersey. Manhattan was no longer an island. Deserters from Long Island crossed over the ice from Lloyds Neck to Connecticut.

It was an anxious time for we lived in fear that the rebels would take advantage of our weakness and simply walk across the Hudson and into the city, whose garrison was now seriously reduced thanks to General Clinton’s expedition to South Carolina.