The Scent of Death

by Andrew Taylor

  ‘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 be no more 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?’r />
  ‘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.’

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  ‘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.

  In their haste to flee, the inhabitants of this place had abandoned their possessions – among them, a coarse blanket, a knife with a broken blade, a small fire whose embers had been made into a nest for a blackened pot containing brown, watery liquid and a selection of bones. I had seen a little of the slums of Whitefriars and St Giles in London, but the poverty of Canvas Town was of a different order. Here, in the heart of this crowded city, the poor lived like wild animals, without rights, without shelter and, worst of all, without hope.

  From the ruins to the right came the sounds of shouting and running footsteps. Marryot was now twenty or thirty yards in front, his head swinging from side to side. As well as his pistol, he carried a stick weighted with lead.

  Suddenly, with a great cry and clatter, Scarface leapt from a gap in the brickwork overlooking the lane. Marryot staggered and fell beneath the negro’s weight.

  I broke into a run. Afterwards I could not understand why I had not run in the other direction. It was as if someone else were controlling me. I had no more ability to choose which way to move than a horse does with an experienced rider tugging at his reins.

  I ran clumsily down the road, waving my stick and shouting. Marryot was on his front, pinned down by the negro’s body. He was heaving like a landed fish and bellowing with rage.

  Scarface wrenched the pistol away from him. He struck Marryot on the head with its butt, a powerful backhanded blow that elicited a howl of pain. The Major slumped into the ground and lay still. Scarface swung the pistol up and cocked it with the heel of his free hand.

  The muzzle was pointing at me. I was now no more than a couple of paces from the two men on the ground. For the first time I saw the negro at close quarters. His face was impassive. His features were European as much as African. The pink weals on his cheeks curved up from the lips like a gigantic, joyless smile.

  I hit out with the stick in a blind, sweeping arc. Scarface’s finger tightened on the trigger. The hammer cracked down. The pistol went off. All these things in the same instant.

  The shot came so close to me that I felt the wind of it on my cheek. But I saw nothing for – shamefully but with a child’s absurd logic – I had shut my eyes so that I would encounter Death in the dark, and perhaps he might not see me and therefore pass me by.

  A jolt ran up my arm. Someone cried out. I tripped and fell. I lost my hold on the stick. Someone groaned. There were more footsteps, more shouts.

  At last I opened my eyes. Marryot was beside me. He was on his hands and knees, swaying and moaning. His hat and wig had fallen off. Blood dripped from his face. The wig lay in a muddy puddle of water and ice with splashes of red dropping into it and dissolving.

  Scarface had gone.

  ‘How I loathe New York,’ Marryot said. ‘How I wish this abominable town was at the bottom of the sea.’

  We were sitting opposite one another in a booth at the Bunch of Grapes. We had the curtain drawn across to discourage intruders and a bottle of brandy on the table. Marryot had refused to have his wound dressed by an army surgeon: it was only a damned scratch, he said, and if that negro hadn’t run off he’d have made the cowardly fellow suffer for it.

  The butt of the pistol was ornamented with chased steel. It was this that had caught Marryot’s cheek, gouging out a graze along the cheekbone. The broken skin was already scabbing over. But the wound must be painful, judging by the swelling it had caused. The bruise was growing darker and angrier by the moment.

  He set down his glass and cleared his throat. ‘I have to thank you, sir,’ he said in a voice better suited to making an accusation.

  ‘It was nothing, sir.’

  ‘Indeed it was something. That scoundrel could have killed me. But now what are we to do?’

  He stared into the flame of the solitary candle on the table as if looking for the answer there. I leaned against the padded back of the booth. On the other side of the blue curtain, in the body of the room, men were talking and laughing, spitting and smoking, reading newspapers and playing games. The air was hazy with smoke from pipes, cigars, lamps and candles. But here in the booth we might have been alone on the surface of the moon. There was nothing to distract us from the difficulty we faced.

  ‘This is a damnable business, is it not?’ Marryot went on, splashing more brandy into the glasses and a few drops on the table between them. ‘Nothing for a man to get hold of. It’s like chasing … chasing clouds.’

  ‘At least a man can see a cloud,’ I said.

  ‘Eh?’ Marryot glared at me. Then the meaning hit him and he gave a harsh laugh. ‘Yes, very droll, I am sure. And what about this box of curiosities? What’s a man to make of that? What the devil has it to do with Scarface?’

  For a moment we drank in silence. I kept to myself the knowledge that Captain Wintour had mentioned a box of curiosities too, when we played backgammon two months ago. For him, as for Roger Pickett, a box of curiosities had promised some great reward.

  All our troubles will be over.

  But Wintour had been drunk at the
time and I myself had been a long way from sober. There was no possible link between him and Pickett’s murder – why, the Captain had been in Canada at the time, and his family had not known if he was alive or dead. It was a coincidence, nothing more, but I made a mental note to discover whether the two men had been acquainted.

  We knew one thing for certain: Lord George Germain was taking this matter seriously. He had not only ordered Mr Rampton to commission me to look into it, but he had also added a postscript on the subject in his letter to General Clinton, the Commander-in-Chief in North America himself. Clinton had sent down the word to General Jones, the Commandant of the city, who had naturally delegated the task to Marryot as the officer who had originally been charged with the investigation of Pickett’s murder.

  Did that imply that Germain knew something about Pickett’s claim? Or was he merely trying to oblige Lord North as a dog will do his best for his master, however unreasonable his demands?

  ‘Do you think you’ll find him, sir?’ I asked, breaking the long, despondent silence.

  ‘Scarface? Maybe.’ The Major dabbed his wound with the corner of his handkerchief soaked in a little brandy. He winced. ‘But New York has more leaks than a colander. Ten to one he’ll slip away to Long Island or the Debatable Ground. Still, perhaps it don’t matter one way or the other.’

  ‘It’s true that we don’t know that he can assist us,’ I said. ‘And we have nothing to tie him directly to Mr Pickett. But he’s put himself about too much in this matter for us to ignore him. We need to talk to him.’

  ‘That’s all very well, sir,’ Marryot said, ‘but I doubt he’ll grant us the opportunity.’

  ‘There are other lines of approach. Mr Pickett was in Philadelphia for a few weeks before coming here. He may have confided in someone there. We should also call at his lodging in Beekman Street. And of course we must ask the Wintours about him again.’