The Scent of Death (49 page)

He gave a start but recovered himself instantly. ‘Good God, sir. But – but it’s Mr Savill, isn’t it? You took me quite—’

I let him hear me cocking the pistol and he fell silent. I jabbed the muzzle harder into his face. ‘Hold your tongue. Where are they?’

‘Who, sir?’

I drew him into the embrasure and placed the pistol under his chin, forcing his head back against the door. ‘Mrs Arabella. Noak.’

‘Why, at home with Mrs Townley, of course, and I hope fast asleep. Poor Mrs Arabella was quite—’

I pushed harder and he gave a cry.

‘Pray be careful with that, sir,’ he said in a strangled whisper. ‘The slightest touch might lead to an accident.’

I pushed harder still. ‘Pistols behave unpredictably sometimes, especially in this weather.’

Townley’s breathing became rapid and laboured. He tried to speak but could not.

‘Where are they?’ I said again. ‘On the ice already?’

‘Yes. Not long, though. If you hurry … But, sir, allow me to say one thing at least. When Noak was at his London attorney’s, he intercepted a letter from Pickett to his sister that revealed the existence of a great gold deposit. May we not come to an understanding? You and I will be as rich as—’

‘Hold your tongue.’ I eased the axe from my belt. ‘Is it just the three of them out there, the two women and Noak?’

‘Yes, sir. I swear it on my mother’s grave.’

I believed him. The more people in a party, the greater the risk of being either betrayed or observed.

‘Are they being met?’

‘A patrol’s coming from the other shore.’ Townley hesitated and then added in a rush, his voice soft and hoarse: ‘I never meant that any harm should come to you. It was merely necessary to keep you out of the way for a day or two. For your own safety as much as anything. I don’t know how you—’

‘Juvenal slashed my cheek,’ I said.

‘Juvenal? Who?’

‘Your gaoler – a runaway slave with a grudge.’ I realized suddenly that Townley knew no more of Juvenal and his significance than Juvenal had known of Townley, Noak and the gold. ‘He was going to emasculate me and leave me for dead. That is not safety, sir.’

‘I’m more distressed than I can say. It was Miriam’s idea that the man should keep you out of harm’s way until she and her mistress were safely away. She said he was entirely trustworthy and devoted to the interests of Mrs Arabella. On my honour, sir, I had no dealings with him myself—’

I brought up the axe and swung its blunt side against Townley’s exposed head. The blow caught his skull between the iron of the axe and the hard wood of the door. The haft twitched in my hand. Something cracked. He crumpled to the ground.

The slip was encrusted with icy snow. I stared down its frosted slope to the cold, grey world of the river, which stretched away towards that other America I knew so little about.

The night was full of noises. The tide was ebbing rapidly, causing the great sheets of ice to move restlessly against each other. The river creaked and groaned and grated like a living thing in pain. The wind hissed and howled, sweeping upstream towards the empty heart of the country. A bank of high clouds now occluded two-thirds of the sky and hid the moon completely.

I did not like the ice. When I was a child, I had seen a boy fall through the ice on the river near our village. None of us could swim. They did not find the body, what was left of it, until the spring.

So I had not ventured on the ice that year or during the previous winter. But many people did, walking and skating. They took sledges on the frozen river and even horses.

This winter, the worst of the war, the cold had been so intense that the army was able to move a twenty-four-pound cannon, which weighed three tons on its carriage, across the ice from the city to Paulus Hook. On another occasion, two hundred sleighs laden with provisions, each drawn by two horses, crossed from New York to Staten Island, with an escort of two hundred light horse to guard them.

But one could never be sure of the ice, even in that long, hard winter. The movements of the tide and the fluctuations of the water temperature subjected it to unpredictable stresses and varied its thickness from place to place. There were stories of refugees who had drowned as they fled from the rebels to the safety of New York. Cracks and holes sometimes allowed water to wash over the surface of the ice, where it would form new layers and freeze in its turn.

In the distance, on the further shore, a light flashed on and off some way to the north of Paulus Hook. After a pause of perhaps twenty seconds, it happened again. And then once again.

It must be a signal to the party on the ice, I thought, a marker to show them their direction. The discovery broke the spell that had held me. I scrambled down the slipway, holding on to the iron railing fixed to the side of the quay to prevent myself from falling.

I stepped gingerly on to the sheet of ice at the bottom and walked out beyond the lee of the mole. A faint yellow glow made a puddle of light on the ice. Hanging on a hook at the end of the mole was a lantern. When I drew nearer, I discovered that the glass was shielded so the flame could only be seen from the ice and the opposite shore.

It was another navigation marker, I realized, the twin to the flashing light across the river.

The full force of the wind struck me as I moved away from the shelter of the mole. It came in gusts that made me stagger like a drunken man. I stumbled over the frozen corpse of a duck and pitched forward on my hands and knees.

The light flashed three more times on the Jersey side.

I scrambled to my feet. I must reach Arabella before the rebel patrol. That was all that mattered.

I did not think of what would happen next if I succeeded in reaching her or what would happen if I did not. I did not think of any of the unanswered and perhaps unanswerable questions. I plodded onward, my mind emptied of thought.

The ice was as solid as a marble floor. The wind was my enemy, cruel and insatiable in its malice. It pushed me off-course, it buffeted me, it set my eyes watering, and it found its way into the smallest crevice in my clothing.

But the snow was my ally: it offered better purchase for my boots than the ice and also, as my eyes adjusted to the conditions, it showed me where the others had gone before me.

Three sets of footsteps marched abreast in a wavering line towards New Jersey. Noak’s were in the centre, slightly ahead of the others. He had Miriam and Arabella close on either side, probably hanging on to his arms. Their travelling cloaks were longer than his and they trailed along the ground behind them, the marks they made partly obliterating the prints of their feet. The women would slow him down.

Following their footsteps lessened the fear that I might stumble on to one of the thinner patches of ice in the river or fall into one of the cracks between the sheets of ice. I began to run – slowly and awkwardly at first, like a child in leading strings discovering a new means of locomotion, but then with increasing confidence.

Again the flashes of light came from the Jersey shore.

The wind pushed the clouds away from the moon with the speed and transforming effect of a curtain rising to reveal a brightly lit scene on the stage.

Suddenly the North River was a sheet of silver and white under the night sky. Beyond it lay a long, grey blur, the coastline of New Jersey. Not a hundred yards away, outlined like the principal actors in the drama seen through the wrong end of a telescope, three linked figures were walking over the ice.

I shouted wordlessly. The wind whipped the sound from my lips. But they heard something for they stopped and looked back.

I ran on.

I drew closer. The little group had separated, the two women standing side by side. Though the women were shrouded in their hooded cloaks I knew the one on the right was Arabella because she was taller than Miriam.

Beside them was Noak. They must have recognized me now for he drew a pistol and levelled it at me. He did not shout that I should stop or he would fire. He didn’t say anything at all. He merely cocked the pistol.

I knew then that Noak meant to shoot me. He would kill me as efficiently as he had treated my sea-sickness when we shared a cabin on our passage to New York. There would be nothing personal about it when he pulled the trigger and, in a sense, nothing malicious, either. But he was always a practical man who looked for a practical solution to any difficulty he encountered. His purpose was patriotic; and as far as he was concerned his end justified any means he was obliged to employ to secure it.

But I ran on for I had nowhere else to go and nowhere to hide.

The moonlit figures dissolved into a flurry of movement. Arabella threw herself towards Noak. He sprawled sideways on the ice with her on top of him. The pistol went off but the shot was wide.

In a moment I had reached them.

Arabella scrambled to her feet. I held out a hand to her but she backed away. Noak was in the act of getting up. Miriam was standing to one side. She spat at me like a cat.

I took out my own pistol and cocked it with clumsy fingers. The barrel trembled and I was obliged to steady my wrist with my left hand. I was not at ease with firearms.

‘Madam,’ I said. ‘Pray stand aside from the other two.’ My words emerged jerkily, interspersed with gasps for air. ‘Miriam, move towards Mr Noak.’

The women obeyed me. Noak rose unhurriedly to his feet and brushed the snow from his cloak. All three of them had been encumbered with bundles and bags, some of which now lay abandoned on the ice.

‘Mr Noak and Miriam, you may continue to Jersey,’ I said. ‘For all I care the two of you may go to the devil as long as you do not come back. But Mrs Arabella stays with me.’

Noak coughed. ‘Forgive me, sir, but does not that depend on the lady hersel
f
?’

Arabella’s face was in the shadow of her hood. She did not move.

‘Well, ma’am?’ said Noak.

‘You cannot go with them,’ I said.

‘I must,’ she said. ‘If you knew all, sir, you would not wish me to stay.’

I saw at once how Noak had forced her cooperation. ‘Is that how this spy made you come with him?’ I said. ‘Blackmail?’

She did not reply.

Keeping the pistol trained on Noak and Miriam, I moved closer to Arabella. I murmured two words in a voice that I hoped only she would be able to hear.

‘Henrietta Barville.’

Arabella moaned softly.

‘I believe I know who she was,’ I went on. ‘She was your daughter. But the poor girl does not matter now, I promise you.’

Arabella lifted her head and said very clearly, ‘She matters to me, sir. She will always matter.’

‘But what happened is over. It is all forgotten now. Besides, they can prove nothing.’

‘Would you say the same if it were your Lizzie lying in her grave? That she’s all forgotten?’

‘Where’s Juvenal?’ Miriam cried suddenly. ‘What have you done with him?’

‘He was about to castrate me,’ I said. ‘So I was obliged to kill him.’

The woman launched herself at me across the ice. I turned the
pistol on her and pulled the trigger.

The hammer fell but the gun misfired.

Miriam was upon me immediately, biting and scratching like a Fury. Her hand caught at the wound on my cheek and tore it open. I screamed and swung the pistol barrel at her with all my strength, sending her flying backwards on the ice.

There was a cracking sound. I heard it. I felt it beneath my feet.

‘Come away,’ Noak shouted. ‘The ice is weaker downstream. They were fishing there this morning.’

The new danger briefly united us. The four of us drew together and retreated about thirty yards up the river.

I still had the axe under my cloak. As we moved, I took Arabella’s arm and tried to coax her from the others. But she pulled herself away.

‘We must go back to New York,’ I whispered. ‘I beg you, madam.’

‘Ah,’ Noak said. ‘The Lord be praised.’

I turned. He was looking towards the Jersey shore. Dark figures moved against the silver and white of the river. There were five or six men. Two of them pulled a sledge over the ice behind them. They must have been downwind of us for they made no sound.

‘Come with me, ma’am,’ Noak said in his precise, nasal voice. ‘You know what will happen if you stay. And it’s not a pretty death, is it? To hang by your neck until you die.’

I took out the axe. The edge of the blade glinted in the moonlight.

The men with the sledge had drawn closer. But they were still some way off.

‘Why should she hang?’ I said to Noak.

‘For aiding and abetting His Majesty’s enemies,’ he said. ‘The evidence will admit of no other interpretation. It’s a capital offence.’

‘It was under duress. Besides, they would not hang a lady.’

‘Perhaps. But they would certainly hang an accessory to murder. Even if she is a lady.’

I came a step nearer to him. ‘You cannot mean that.’

‘I mean everything,’ Mr Noak said. ‘It’s quite simple. Mrs Arabella had a curious power over the negro, Juvenal. It would be indelicate of me to enquire too closely into its nature, but I have proof of it – I intercepted a letter he wrote to her which he had confided to his sister. When Mr Pickett threatened her, she bribed or coaxed the negro into acting as her agent in his murder. He did not do it for his sister, Miriam. He did it for her.’

‘You are quite wrong, sir,’ Mrs Arabella said.

‘Give me the papers relating to the Pickett gold deposit, madam,’ Noak said to her, ‘and you may do as you please and I shall be as silent as any grave.’

‘No,’ she said.

‘Madam,’ Miriam said. ‘Have a care, I beg you.’

Noak glanced at me. ‘And let us not forget, sir,’ he went on, ‘Mrs Arabella allowed an innocent man to hang for Pickett’s murder. We watched him die, Mr Savill. Do you remember? The runaway who stole Mr Pickett’s ring and shoes. The evidence against the runaway came from an informer, no more than a boy. Juvenal primed him with what to say. And then Juvenal killed the informer to stop his mouth. I believe you went to inspect the lad’s body when they pulled it out of the water near the Paulus Hook ferry. I knew you must have your suspicions.’