The Scent of Death (39 page)

We retraced our steps up Broadway. I had no plan of action, no destination in view. I walked quickly with my head down. The girl trotted beside me. After a few hundred yards, she touched my arm.

‘Please, sir,’ she said. ‘May we go more slowly?’

By this time I had almost forgotten that Mehitabel was with me. I glanced down at her. She was breathing hard and her left hand was pressed to her side. It occurred to me belatedly that she must be weary and footsore, and that the heavy meal she had eaten must add to the discomfort that the exercise caused her.

We were passing the ruins of Trinity on our left. I led her through the gate into the churchyard. At that hour it was not crowded, apart from a group of workmen making ready for the evening festivities to mark the coronation.

I had not been there since the funeral. I crossed the grass to the railing that enclosed the square where the Wintours lay. The earth inside was dry and powdery from the heat of the summer. The stonemason had not yet fulfilled his commission so there was no marker to show that Jack’s body lay a few feet below us.

The girl knew nothing of this. I sat on a nearby bench and gestured that she might join me. For a while we listened to the whistling of the workmen and the blows of their hammers.

I am a cuckold, I thought. And soon Rampton will deprive me of my position as well. I am only a hindrance to him now.

‘Shall I go on, sir?’ Mehitabel said quietly.

‘What?’ I barked.

She shied away as though I had hit her. That brought me to my senses, or at least part-way towards them. The child had suffered enough already and would suffer more in the future. There was no need for me wantonly to increase her sorrows.

‘Go on with what?’ I asked in a gentler voice.

‘You were asking about Mount George, sir. In the coffee house, you remember – just before the soldier came.’

I wonder now whether Mehitabel spoke by design – whether, with a woman’s natural sympathy sharpened by the troubles she had herself endured, she divined that I needed distraction.

‘Do you remember?’ she repeated.

Indeed, I remembered: Sergeant Pickett.

The rebel soldier who had come to Mount George. My mind seized on the diversion. Here was Roger Pickett again – a sergeant, just as Dr Slype had told me that Pickett had been in the spring of 1776, when the rebels had garrisoned New York itself and Dr Slype had encountered him in the street.

But if Pickett had been at Mount George at the same time that Mrs Arabella had given birth, that must have been in November of the same year when General Washington and his beaten army had abandoned the city and were retreating from the British.

In this instant, a possible pattern emerged, as if it had been waiting only for this single hint to draw it out, for Mehitabel to say the words that linked Roger Pickett with the destruction of Mount George. Before the war, Froude had bought the Pickett estate, knowing that there was a vein of gold o
n the land. Had
Pickett heard, or guessed, something of that? Had he thought himself cheated? A lawyer would say he had no case worth arguing. But a moral philosopher might well argue that Pickett had a point.

Finding himself in the vicinity of Mount George among the rabble of a retreating army, it was natural enough that Pickett should pay Mr Froude a visit in the hope of extracting more from him – or merely to plunder the place for what he could find. But Froude, from what I knew of him, would not have been an easy man to browbeat.

Had he brought his murder on his own head?

Perhaps Froude had been foolish enough to boast of his discovery; for at that stage of the conflict it must have seemed that the war was all but over, and that the King’s authority would soon be restored throughout his North American colonies; and he must have felt himself safe, in his own house, surrounded by his own servants and slaves. In any case, I could safely infer that he had made some mention of his box of curiosities – something that had linked it with the gold in Pickett’s mind, which would explain the latter’s reference to it in the letter to his sister in England.

‘You said the first time the rebel soldier came,’ I said. ‘So this man Pickett came more than once. Was he alone?’

‘Yes, sir – that first time. I heard him and Squire shouting at each other. It was a terrible day – we’d just heard that the babe wasn’t likely to live.’

I looked at Mehitabel. She told this story without emotion in her voice, with no trace of remembered fear. Yet surely she had been terrified?

‘You heard them shouting? Pickett was in the house with you?’

‘No, sir – he was outside with squire. You see, he came when they were gelding Juvenal so he went to the yard. He followed the screams.’

I frowned, thinking I had misheard. ‘Whose screams? Was Mrs Arabella still in labour?’

‘No, sir – Juvenal’s.’

‘But
gelding
him? What do you mean by that?’ Surely the girl knew what the word meant? She was a farmer’s daughter, after all. ‘You geld a horse or a pig or a—’

‘Or a man, sir. It is all the same.’

I took a deep breath. ‘Tell me. As far as you can.’

‘Mr Froude was in a terrible passion that day because he’d hoped for an heir. Father said squire was the proudest man in America, sir, and he could never bear to be crossed. And when he flew into a rage he’d lash out at anyone. He’d have the slaves whipped for the slightest thing.’

‘But gelding—?’

‘He said Juvenal had stolen money and must be punished to make an example. So he had the men take him down to the yard … there was a building nearby they sometimes used for the animals.’

The old scullery, I thought, that must be it. I remembered the brick floor sloping down to the central drain, the ovens, the rings fixed low on the walls with the decaying ropes still attached to them. Near the drain there had been a dented iron plate, a hammer and a pair of pincers.

I remembered too how I had spat out a fly and how I had rubbed at a spot of spittle on the plate. I remembered the tint of rust-red on my fingertip. But had it been rust or the last trace of Juvenal’s emasculation?

‘What happened then? Did Pickett see all this?’

‘I don’t know, sir. I was at the window of the housekeeper’s room. I saw the sergeant going towards the yard. And after a while squire and his men came out with him and sent him packing. That’s when they were shouting at each other.’

‘When did Pickett come back?’ I asked.

‘A night or two later, sir, with a dozen men or more. Rebel soldiers. They stole what they could take and defiled some of the women and they set fire to the house. I hid behind a mattress in the slave quarters. That’s where they had taken Juvenal – he was lying there, crying out and groaning like a madman. They’d given him opium and rum for the pain but it wasn’t enough.’

A memory stirred: something did not quite agree with what I had heard previously. I tried to pin down the anomaly but it slipped away like a retreating fish in the dark waters of a pond.

Defiled?

The implications hit me at last. ‘Where was Mrs Arabella?’

‘I don’t know.’ The child’s brittle composure was cracking. The muscles of her face worked. ‘Then Mr Froude came running, sir,’ she went on. ‘He came into the slave quarters to hide. And Juvenal reared up and stabbed him.’

A great trouble has one advantage: it casts out a lesser one.

I had been considerably exercised in my mind about how to provide for Mehitabel in view of the possibility that Mrs Arabella might refuse to take her in. But the difficulty was trivial in comparison with the news that I was a cuckold and that I had lost the support of my patron at the American Department. So I simply ignored it.

When we reached Warren Street, I told Josiah to take the girl down to the kitchen and give her into the care of the cook. I sent up a few lines to Mrs Arabella, explaining that I had brought Mehitabel Tippet to the house at least for temporary refuge; I reminded her that Mehitabel and her mother had helped Captain Wintour and myself, and that her poor mother had paid for this with her life. In a quarter of an hour, Miriam brought me her mistress’s reply, a cold little note saying that this was quite in order.

Having settled the matter, I went out again and walked aimlessly to and fro – down to the harbour, round by the Battery and up towards Greenwich. By the time I returned home, it was growing dark. Mrs Arabella and the Judge were upstairs. I told Josiah to bring me something to eat in the parlour.

Though I was footsore and weary I knew I would not sleep for hours. I also knew that doing anything is generally preferable to doing nothing, so I fixed on the plan of writing letters to Lizzie, her aunt and Mr Rampton. I had pen and ink brought to me in the parlour, where the light was better than in my chamber, and ordered up a bottle of claret in case my sorrows needed drowning.

The immediate difficulty that faced me now was distance. Lizzie was three thousand miles away. Any letter I wrote would not reach her and her aunt for five or six weeks at the very least. In a way my problem was identical to that which, in another sphere, bedevilled Lord George Germain in London and General Clinton in New York. Communication between England and America was necessarily so slow that in many respects it was almost worse than no communication at all.

The daylight faded. I tried to write to Lizzie, to assure her that I should soon be home and that we should be together again. Knowing Augusta as I did, I did not think it likely that she would have taken our daughter away with her, though the possibility lingered to haunt my nightmares.

I had barely reached the second sentence when I heard footsteps in the hall. The door opened and Mrs Arabella entered with a book under her arm. I rose and bowed. Josiah followed her, bringing candles.

I drew out a chair for her. Josiah lit the candles and withdrew. I waited for Mrs Arabella to open her book.

She looked up, raising her chin. ‘Are you at leisure for a moment, sir?’

‘Of course.’ I laid down my pen, wondering if she intended to continue our conversation about the gold.

‘I wished to thank you for bringing Mehitabel Tippet to us.’

‘Will it inconvenience you to have her here?’

Her eyebrows rose. ‘Not in the slightest. Why should it? Besides, we have a duty to care for her – she’s the daughter of one of our tenants. We shall let her find her feet with us and by and by I shall look about for a respectable situation for her.’

Neither of us spoke for a moment. My eyes drifted down to the letter in front of me – not the one to Lizzie but Mr Rampton’s to me.

It is a great pity you did not see fit to take the foolish woman with you to New York.

‘Forgive me, sir – and I do not wish to intrude – but you do not look at all well. Are you ill?’

‘No, madam. I am quite well. It is merely that I have had distressing news from home.’

‘Your daughter?’

‘No, thank God. As far as I know, she is in good health.’ I hesitated. Then, before I could put a brake on my tongue, I heard the terrible truth spilling out of my mouth. ‘It appears that my wife has eloped with a German gentleman. Though “gentleman” is too kind a word for him.’

I did not dare look at her face but I heard her sharp intake of breath. I did not mind her disgust. But I could not support it if she showed pity for me.

‘And your daughter?’ she said again.

‘She has been living with her aunt. I hope and pray she is there still.’

Mrs Arabella gestured towards my writing materials. ‘I’m afraid I am a distraction.’

‘That is an advantage at present, madam. I’m trying to write to Lizzie, but it may be days until the next mailbag goes.’

‘Then let us play a game to occupy ourselves.’

I stared at her. ‘A game?’

She stared back at me – directly, as a man does, with no pretence of modesty. ‘Why not? You want distraction and so do I. Backgammon?’

I agreed to this and rang the bell for the servant. In theory, Mrs Arabella was in mourning so it was scarcely decent for her to play at backgammon, even in private. But hers was a strange sort of mourning. Besides, I reminded myself, this was America, where they did things differently.

Josiah brought us the board and set the chairs so we faced each other across the table with the candles burning on either side of the board. Mrs Arabella told him to bring another wine glass.

I remembered the time I had played backgammon with Jack Wintour on the occasion that he had threatened to sell Miriam to pay his debts. I opened the board and spread the counters. The shaker was there, and the pair of bone dice.

When I was done, I sat back and pushed two fingers into the pocket of my waistcoat. I felt the outlines of the two ivory dice: one from Pickett’s body, the other from the belvedere at the bottom of the garden; discovered in different places and eleven months apart; yet alike as peas in a pod.

‘Well, sir,’ Mrs Arabella said. ‘Do we play for love or money?’

The words were capable of more than one interpretation. There was nothing flirtatious about her demeanour. On the contrary, she sat back in her chair as she spoke and her tone was unemotional, almost uninterested.

‘For love perhaps.’ I did not look at her as I spoke. I drew out the two ivory dice from my pocket and dropped them on the open board: a pair of sixes. ‘Will you indulge me, madam? These are my lucky dice.’

I raised my eyes. Did a flicker of emotion cross her face when she saw them? It might so easily have been merely the shifting of light and shadow on her cheeks, caused by the swaying candle flames.

‘Why not?’ She picked up the wooden dice and set them to one side. ‘But I had not put you down as a gambler, sir.’

‘Not from choice.’

I set the pieces in their places. Mrs Arabella sipped her wine. She rarely took wine, even with dinner. Like so many of the American ladies I met in New York, there was something of the puritan about her. I felt a contradictory surge of desire for her, as shameful as it was inconvenient.