The Scent of Death (47 page)

The shops had closed for the night but many taverns and coffee houses were still doing a brisk business. I concealed the axe beneath my cloak and walked rapidly back to Warren Street. Juvenal’s knife was in my hand, the blade already open.

On any other occasion I should have felt the danger of my being out alone at night. Now I did not give the matter a thought. If anyone had tried to stop me, I think I would have killed them too.

My head ached. But exercise stimulated still further my already agitated brain. The thoughts crowded into my mind at great speed, jostling feverishly against each other. By and by, however, they settled into groups and formed patterns, like dancers assembling to take up their places and tread a measure.

At last I thought I glimpsed the truth. Or rather, I glimpsed the two sets of truth that intersected, as it were, in the person of Mrs Arabella Wintour. I had stumbled into two mysteries, not one, though conjoined at the hip like those twins that emerge fused together from their mother’s womb.

The business began with Froude’s purchase of the Pickett estate in the knowledge that he was also buying a vein of gold. After the rebel army withdrew from New York late in 1776, Roger Pickett had visited Mount George in search of recompense or even vengeance. He had chanced upon Froude punishing Juvenal for his theft. Froude had bragged of his box of curiosities – and possibly even shown it – to Pickett. Pickett had returned with his men and destroyed Mount George. But he hadn’t found the box.

Nearly two years later, Pickett came back to New York, this time in the guise of a Loyalist refugee. When he called at Warren Street, Miriam had seen him. Servants know everything about the business of their betters. She would have known that he threatened the happiness of her mistress; and Miriam was nothing if not loyal. She had told Juvenal, her lover and the father of her daughter.

This was more than speculation: there was proof. When Marryot and I had revisited Pickett’s lodgings, the mulatto maid had told us that a negro in a red coat with a scarred face had left a letter for him on the day of his death. A summons to a rendezvous, perhaps, somewhere convenient to Canvas Town where we had found his body.

But – and this was the point on which the whole matter turned – Juvenal knew nothing of the gold or of the box of curiosities. Nor had Mrs Arabella until I had told her.

Unlike Noak and Townley.

The more I considered it, the more likely it seemed that the gold was the motive that had animated the pair of them from the start. There was no doubt whatsoever that there was an alliance between them and that it had begun before Noak and I had set sail from England. Nor could I doubt that they had plotted to use me as an innocent means of bringing them together in New York, in a way that would place their connection beyond suspicion. But they had selected me for another reason: I was to lodge at Warren Street. I gave them their
entrée
to the Wintours.

What else could draw Noak and Townley to Warren Street apart from the gold? Why else would Noak spend so much time there? Why else would he pry among the Judge’s papers and in Mrs Arabella’s sitting room?

Congress was desperate for gold. You cannot fund a revolution with paper money. That fact alone made almost any risk worth running, any chance worth taking, if it might bring the rebels a source of gold under their own control.

I turned into Warren Street and ran into the teeth of a crosswind that nearly knocked me over. It knocked some doubts into my mind as well. I could account for most of Juvenal’s actions but not quite all. Was it really possible that he had been in league with Townley? It beggared belief. But how else could I account for the timing of his attack on me as I left Mrs Chawley’s?

Juvenal was dead. I could not ask him anything now. But as soon as I reached the Wintours’ house I would rouse Arabella and together we would confront Miriam and at last wring the truth from her.

I mounted the steps and rapped violently on the door.

What of the dice? Were they another flaw in the pattern?

The door opened an inch or two, still on the chain. The porter’s face peered out at me. The light from within must have shown him my face. I saw his expression changing and the shock in his eyes.

‘For God’s sake, man, let me in,’ I said. ‘I’m freezing to death.’

In the hall there was a mirror in a tarnished gilt frame with a candle in a bracket on either side. I caught sight of my reflection as the porter was taking off my cloak. I would not have recognized myself in the street.

I had become a spectacle fit for a booth in a fair. In the absence of hat or wig, my bony skull gleamed like a death-head. My eyes were sunk deep in their sockets. Most striking of all was the angry stripe on my right cheek. I was like a Red Indian – or, worse, a wild man, one of those savage creatures reared by the light of nature alone that emerge from the depths of forests and both fascinate and appal the savants.

When the porter took my cloak, he saw the axe in my left hand and the knife in the right. His eyes widened and his mouth dropped open.

I handed the weapons to him. ‘Put them on the table there for now.’

There were footsteps on the landing above. I looked up and saw Josiah hobbling down the stairs. He was out of livery but still in his day-clothes. He wore a fur hat that had once belonged to his master and a muffler round his neck. He was carrying a weighted stick.

‘Thanks be to God, master,’ the old man cried when he saw me. But then he caught sight of my face and stopped, clinging to the rail.

‘I met with an accident,’ I said.

He came down the rest of the stairs. ‘Sir, we’ve searched everywhere – where have you been?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ I glanced at the clock. It was almost two o’clock. ‘Tell me – what day is it?’

The porter made a sound that might have turned into a laugh had he not strangled it at birth.

Josiah peered at me. ‘Wednesday night, sir. That’s to say, early on Thursday morning.’

So I had been unconscious for nearly four-and-twenty hours. ‘Have the Judge and Mrs Arabella retired?’

He shook his head, clearly bewildered and at his wits’ end. ‘I thought you might have come from there, sir.’

‘From where?’

‘Why, sir, from Mrs Arabella. From Mr Townley’s.’

I stared at him. ‘What the devil do you mean?’

‘Mrs Arabella went there this evening, sir. Mrs Townley collected her and Miriam in their coach. Sir, you are injured. What has happened? Were you robbed? And my poor, dear master—’

‘Josiah,’ I said. ‘Why did the Townleys call for Mrs Arabella? Why did she go?’

‘Because my master is dead, sir.’

The candlelight made large, liquid gleams in his eyes. I saw the tear tracks on his cheeks.

‘How?’ I said. ‘When?’

Josiah gestured upstairs. ‘Master was sleeping in the closet. In the bed where …’

I nodded, frowning, as his voice trailed away – I knew this already, of course, for that was the reason I had come to the garden gate and not the front door on Tuesday evening.

‘When I went to call his honour in the morning, he was dead. He was cold. Sir, he should not have died alone. Someone should have been there. I should have been there.’

I touched his arm. ‘Stop that, my friend. Tell me, how did he die?’

Josiah shrugged thin shoulders that curved inwards in a weary droop that spoke of decades of bowing and stooping. ‘What do I know of these things, sir, except that we must all go when God pleases?’

I gestured up the stairs. ‘His body has not been moved? I shall go up.’

‘They have not come to lay him out – he is scarcely decent, sir. This weather—’

‘I know. It doesn’t signify.’

Josiah lighted me upstairs. I slowed my pace to accommodate his. I had not realized how lame the old man had become of late and how his vigour had diminished. He showed me into the closet where his master lay.

The room was very cold and smelled of death; for in the moment of dying the body releases more than its soul. The curtains were drawn close about the small bed. At a sign from me, Josiah drew back the nearest of them and held up the candle so I might see.

The Judge lay on his back, his head raised by a single pillow. He wore a heavy gown and a thick flannel nightcap. His eyes were closed. His mouth was slightly open. His skin had a pale, waxy patina like ageing alabaster.

Sometimes death makes a man look foolish. It had been kinder to Mr Wintour. It smoothed away the wrinkles, stilled the tics and twitches of age and restored to his face something of what he had once been in the prime of life. His features were handsome, stern and regular, but not unkind or mean in any way. He looked like a judge.

I stooped and kissed his forehead.

I was desperate to find Mrs Arabella. I wanted to rush through the streets to Hanover Square and hammer on Mr Townley’s door until the people of the house let me in. But I am a clerk by training and experience, and clerks have this to be said for them: they think before they talk, and they talk before they act.

I made Josiah tell me what had happened. Yesterday morning, the boy who did the fires was the first to enter the closet but he had not realized his master was dead because the bed-curtains were still closed. It was Josiah who had made the melancholy discovery when he went to wake Mr Wintour at about nine in the morning.

Mrs Arabella was informed at once, which was when it emerged that I had not returned home the previous evening after the fête. Miriam said she had waited up for me until three o’clock. As I had not come, the maid explained, she had assumed that I had drunk more deeply than usual and that I had stayed the night at the tavern or with friends.

The news of the Judge’s death had brought both Mr Townley and Major Marryot to the house during the day. Both men reported having seen me among the crowd at Hicks Tavern but neither of them could shed light on what had happened to me afterwards.

‘Mr Townley came just as Major Marryot was leaving,’ Josiah told me. ‘Mrs Arabella took him up to the closet – I heard him say he must pay his respects to his honour. He came back to the house at about three o’clock with Mrs Townley. They were with my mistress in the library for some time, and then she sent for me and told me to tell Miriam that they were going to stay with the Townleys and that she should pack what they would need for a few nights.’

‘Did you chance to hear anything of what Mr Townley said?’ I asked. ‘On either occasion?’

Josiah looked shocked. ‘No, sir.’

‘And how did your mistress seem?’

‘In great distress, sir.’ There was a hint of reproof in the old man’s voice.

‘Did she leave a message for me?’

‘No, sir.’

I could not understand it. I knew that Mrs Arabella distrusted the motives of Mr Townley and Mr Noak. It was inexplicable that she should agree to go to the Townleys’ at all; and to go without leaving a message for me was beyond belief.

I told Josiah to have the library fire made up and to bring me a tray of supper there, together with a bottle of wine and a pot of coffee. First, however, I wanted a bowl of warm water in my bedchamber. I think he was glad to be doing something he understood.

When the boy who looked after the fires brought up the water, I washed my face and hands and changed my clothes. I covered my head with my second-best wig and felt approximately myself again. Before I went downstairs, I studied myself in the mirror and was relieved to discover how unremarkable I appeared, if tired and careworn. Only the cut in my cheek placed a limit on my respectability. It had scabbed over but I was aware of it every time I moved a muscle in my face.

As I was crossing the hall towards the library door, there was a rustling in the shadows behind me. I spun round, my fists clenched. But it was only Mehitabel Tippet, the refugee child from Mount George.

‘Please, sir,’ she said in a whisper so the porter in his chair near the door would not hear. ‘Please, sir, begging your pardon, but may I speak a word in your private ear?’

In its way, nothing better illustrated the chaos of the household than Mehitabel Tippet’s presence in the hall in the early hours of the morning. The girl should not have been out of her bed. She should not have been in the hall without having been expressly commanded to go there. She should not have been so bold as to speak to me without having been spoken to first. Any of those offences would in normal circumstances have earned her a whipping.

As it was I told her that she might follow me into the library and speak to me while I ate. Josiah frowned when he saw her entering the room but he did not say anything. After he had served me my supper, I sent him away.

Despite the fire, it was cold in there. I sat in my usual chair. I made Mehitabel stand by the fender, for she was shivering. She was a little plumper than she had been four months earlier when I had taken her away from the Provost and brought her to Warren Street. But she was still a small, sad thing, liable to start at shadows.

I ate swiftly and in silence, shovelling the food into my mouth because I did not want to waste a moment more than was necessary. At the first taste, I realized that I was starving. It was poor fare – the usual gritty bread made from adulterated flour and a few slices of tough, salted pork garnished with a mound of currant jelly – but it tasted ambrosial to me.

After a moment or two, I laid down my fork and knife and took up the glass of wine. ‘Well, child? What is it?’

‘If you please, sir, it was when I was putting the mended sheets away in the cedarwood chest in the mistress’s bedchamber. That’s when I heard them.’

‘Heard whom? And when was this?’

Even the dim light could not conceal the fact that the girl had blushed. ‘The mistress, sir. And the tall gentleman with a big nose.’

‘Mr Townley?’

‘Yes, sir. This was the first time – when he came this morning to pay his respects. Not later when he came in the coach with his lady and took madam away. I heard them on the stairs almost directly. I couldn’t leave the room because I’m not meant to be seen in the family side of the house.’