The Scent of Death (15 page)

The others were now talking about the increasing difficulty in obtaining fresh food, both meat and vegetables.

‘It is our one weakness,’ Mr Wintour said, ‘though not, I hope, a fatal one.’

His son looked up from his glass. ‘Surely our forays into the Debatable Ground should be able to fill that need, sir? And the smugglers, of course.’

‘Up to a point,’ Townley said. ‘But the supply is diminishing all the time, and the longer the war drags on …’

Captain Wintour turned to Marryot. ‘The army sends regular patrols into Westchester County, I believe?’

‘Naturally. And so do the rebels. And the irregulars, on both sides.’ The Major smiled, without humour. ‘Hence the name, of course: we debate the point all the time. But there’s not much livestock left up there now.’

‘I’ve a fancy to go there myself,’ Captain Wintour said.

There was a sudden silence.

‘When my wound is better, of course,’ he went on. ‘And when winter is over.’

‘I should not advise it, sir,’ Marryot said. ‘You know it is not safe to visit the Debatable Ground.’

‘Not by myself. I thought I might attach myself to a patrol. Or even a band of irregulars.’

‘Nonsense, John,’ Mr Wintour said. ‘There would be considerable danger and no possible benefit.’

‘I don’t agree, sir. If a man knows where to look, I am sure there are many benefits to be found. Besides, I find that I have a great yearning to see Mount George again.’

‘Mount George? Why?’

‘Because it’s mine now, sir, is it not? Mount George and all it contains. Is that not enough of a reason?’

A painting hung above the fireplace in the drawing room. It was a view of a shallow valley laid out as a gentleman’s park. The land sloped upwards to a long, white mansion on a low eminence. It had a porch or verandah running along its front and a pediment supported by eight columns. Further up the valley, cattle and sheep grazed under a blue sky adorned with fluffy white clouds.

In the foreground, to the left, was a group of figures: a gentleman with a plan or chart in his hand and a brass telescope protruding from his pocket; an elegant young lady clinging to his arm; a little girl, equally elegant, clinging to the young lady; and a small golden spaniel sitting at the girl’s feet. The gentleman was gesturing at the mansion with his other hand, as though pointing out its admirable features. The spaniel was looking the other way.

I had not paid the painting much attention before. But the conversation at dinner had aroused my curiosity. A couple of days later, after church on Sunday, I examined it more closely. Mr Wintour and his son were in the library. But I was not alone, for the ladies were in the drawing room too. We were drinking tea and trying to warm ourselves, for St Paul’s Chapel had been particularly cold that morning despite the size of the congregation.

‘Is this Mount George?’ I asked.

‘Yes, sir,’ Mrs Arabella said, without looking up from the tea tray.

‘And that is yourself, my dear,’ Mrs Wintour said. ‘As a little girl. It is truly charming.’

‘I never cared for that dress,’ Mrs Arabella said.

‘And the lady and gentleman are your parents, ma’am?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mr Froude was a fine-looking man, was he not?’ Mrs Wintour said. By and large, the old lady was more lucid in the mornings. ‘But he was never much of a sportsman, was he, my dear? His interests were scientific. Nothing delighted him more than dissecting a dead bird or tapping at a piece of rock with a hammer. Why, I once came upon him mounting a butterfly on a pin, and very pretty it looked.’

I turned to Mrs Arabella. ‘Mr Froude’s pursuits were scholarly?’

‘Yes, sir. Natural philosophy in the main. He corresponded with the Royal Society on a variety of subjects.’

‘Gentlemen entertain themselves in such curious ways,’ Mrs Wintour said in a tone of wonder. ‘Perhaps it’s as well your poor mother died young, Bella. I’m sure she cannot have liked it above half.’

‘It is a handsome property,’ I said, hoping to divert the conversation from a line that could only be increasingly uncomfortable to Mrs Arabella.

‘The artist exaggerated everything,’ she said. ‘As artists always do. In England, I am sure that gentlemen’s residences are much finer, and their demesnes more extensive.’

‘Not at all, madam,’ I said. ‘Or rather, not all of them. But in any event, you must long for the day when this war is over and you will return to Mount George.’

‘But not in winter,’ Mrs Wintour said. ‘There’s no society then. We always winter in New York. Except the one year we went to London instead.’

Mrs Arabella looked up at the painting. ‘Mount George does not look like that now,’ she said in a low voice. ‘In any case, I would not want to see it.’

‘Perhaps, ma’am.’ I smiled at her. ‘But after this sad business has been concluded, we shall all return to our former lives. No doubt the effects of any damage or neglect will soon be made good—’

‘You misunderstand me, sir,’ she interrupted. ‘I never wish to see the place again in any condition.’

‘Indeed, the country is terribly cold in the winter,’ Mrs Wintour said, nodding vigorously as if agreeing with her daughter-in-law; and then she added a footnote: ‘Cold at heart.’

On 19 February, a few days after this conversation, the packet
Mercury
brought the December mail from Falmouth. My letters were waiting at Headquarters when I called there on my way to the office.

I did not open them until I had reached an apartment at the back of the building, a room rarely used so early in the day. I sat on a window-seat set in a deep embrasure, which gave me a view out to sea. The water was grey, flecked with restless streaks of white. A military transport was sailing across the bay in the direction of Staten Island. A ragged cloud of seagulls trailed in its wake.

Home
, I thought.
Pray God: let me go home
.

The letters had come under two covers. I broke the seal of the smaller first, the one with my sister’s handwriting on the outside; Mr Rampton had obligingly had it franked at the Department. Inside was a scrap of paper, folded once. As I opened it, a lock of fair hair slid out. It would have fallen to the floor if I had not clapped the palm of my hand on it and caught it against my breeches.

The hair curled like a tiny golden bow. It was secured with a
blue ribbon, frayed at one end. At the foot of the paper was a
pencil drawing of a ship with two masts floating on a jagged fragment of sea. A stick-like figure stood behind the larger mast. Below the drawing were two lines of blotchy, irregular writing:

Dearest Papa, Thank you for the doll. This is your boat comming home and you on it. I send you my best love and duty, Elizabeth

Most of the sheet was given over to my sister’s letter. She wrote that Lizzie was well, and that she adored the doll which at my request her aunt had presented to her in my name on her birthday. The child had been sickly but they had purged her and her uncle had bled her; she was much better now. She had fallen asleep during the sermon last Sunday and had been chastised for it.

After a moment, I folded the paper and its enclosure and slipped it into the waistcoat pocket that also contained the die I had found on Pickett’s body. My mouth was strangely dry. I felt a pulse throbbing at my temple. I looked out of the window. The transport was still wallowing on the water but the seagulls had gone.

Rampton’s letter lay on the seat beside me. I tore it open. His small and very regular script filled the page, crept around the margins and then passed vertically across the lines already written. Frugality, as Mr Rampton was fond of saying to the junior clerks of the American Department, must be our watchword; and neither he nor His Majesty possessed an inexhaustible supply of paper. In an instant, my eyes seized on the passage in the letter that affected me most.

Only last week, Lord George was good enough to intimate that having our own source of intelligence in New York itself was invaluable. That being so, he wishes you to remain there for a few more months, perhaps until the autumn, by which time this unhappy rebellion may well b
e no mo
re than a memory.

I swore. I kicked at the wall behind me with my heel.

You will recall the murder of the Loyalist gentleman, Mr Pickett, last August, which you reported to us in your very first letter from New York. I see that you made reference to a sister of the deceased, whom the authorities did not trouble to trace. It appears that this lady is in England, the wife of a Bristol merchant named Dornford, and that she received a letter from her brother, written shortly before his murder. In it, Mr Pickett wrote that he feared for his life as a result of some information he had about him concerning a
Box of Curiosities
whose contents, he added, would make him rich beyond the dreams of avarice and might change the course of the War.

I kicked the wall again.

This is very strange and we might well dismiss it as a mere freak or, more probably, as a ploy by a desperate man designed to cozen a loan from his sister. But there remains the possibility that Mr Pickett spoke no more than sober truth, and that he was murdered by rebels for possession of a large sum of money.

Nevertheless, none of this might have concerned us, had it not been that this lady’s husband has a brother who is Lord North’s man of business in Somerset and who has made interest to His Lordship about it, on Mrs Dornford’s behalf. His Lordship has now been pleased to raise the matter with Lord George. At his request I prepared a memorandum based on the information about the affair which you had given me.

To put it in plain language, Mr Rampton had taken care to distance himself as far as possible from the inquiry into the circumstances of Pickett’s death. Lord North, the premier himself, was behind the renewal of interest, and Mr Rampton would not wish to have himself associated with an investigation that might prove to have been incomplete or even, perhaps, fatally flawed. There was worse to come:

Their lordships have now considered this, and have decided that the matter merits further investigation; and Lord George believes that you are the man best suited for the commission. However, he commands me to urge you to employ the
utmost discretion
. For, if the murder was not after all the spontaneous act of a runaway slave, it may well have been part of a rebel plot; and we do not wish to alarm the perpetrators.

The rolling periods of Mr Rampton’s prose drew to a stately conclusion. He added a perfunctory postscript after his signature, saying that he understood his niece Augusta to be in the best of health. I realized that Augusta herself had not troubled to write to me; and I also realized that this omission did not cause me much distress.

I heard dragging footsteps enter the lobby from the anteroom beyond. I looked up. Marryot was limping towards me, his face flushed.

‘They told me I’d find you down here, Mr Savill. What are you doing – hiding away?’

‘I wished to be alone, sir.’ I lost my temper. ‘I still do.’

‘You won’t find solitude in this damned town. You should know that by now. Anyway, what the devil is all this about?’

‘Is what about?’

He came to a halt in front of me. ‘This nonsense about a box of curiosities.’

‘There he is!’ Marryot shouted, pushing me out of his way to obtain a better view. ‘There’s the black devil! Aim for the legs! In your own time, fire!’

There was a ragged volley of shots. None of them reached their target. The big negro in his faded red coat continued to duck and weave among the ruins. For all his bulk he was fast and agile.

‘You damned numskulls. After him.’

It was only mid-afternoon but the February day was already fading and it was growing very cold. The soldiers, weighed down by their equipment, ran deeper into Canvas Town. They had not had time to reload but they had been issued with naval cutlasses, which Marryot said were shorter and therefore better suited to close-quarters work than standard military swords. There were seven of them, six privates and a corporal from the Royal Americans, part of a company on detachment in the city that week.

‘He’s making for the road! Quick!’

The negro was now invisible, concealed from us by the gable wall of what had once been a stable. The corporal yelled at his men, trying to divide his party into two. His voice was cut off when he slipped and fell.

‘Idiots,’ Marryot muttered. ‘Blockheads.’

The ground was uneven and treacherous, puddled with icy water and a few drifts of muddy, frozen snow. The sky was a monotonous grey. There was no one else in sight. When the soldiers had come marching up the road, Canvas Town had been crawling with people; but already they had been moving away, for someone must have alerted them. They were still out there somewhere. I felt their eyes on me.

‘That devil’s making fools of them.’

Three days after the arrival of the December mail, Marryot had had a tip-off from an informer. In Canvas Town, the negro was known by the name of Scarface. It was almost as if he was proud of his disfigurement. I had picked him out at once among a knot of men clustered around a fire; he was easily recognizable even at a distance because of his coat and his height. The soldiers had gone after him like a pack of hounds.

‘They’ve botched it,’ Marryot said, drawing his pistol and limping down the muddy lane towards the intersection.

He must have calculated that the negro was hoping to reach Broadway, where the crowds and the maze of streets beyond would give a better chance of escape. At the junction the Major would have a clear line of sight in two directions.

I followed more slowly, picking my way between heaps of refuse and fragments of brick, glass and slate. My heart was beating faster than usual. I wished this unpleasant business was over. A manhunt was a dreary, dangerous affair and I had no stomach for it.