The Scent of Death

by Andrew Taylor

  At that moment I recalled the garrulous Mr Ingham, Townley’s clerk to Long Island, exiled so that Noak might have his post in New York; I remembered how he had prattled of Mrs Townley’s father in his dotage; and how the old man had tried to conceal his accounts from prying eyes.

  I held the paper nearer the flame again.

  ‘Sir,’ Arabella cried. ‘It will burn, I tell you.’

  ‘No, ma’am.’ I watched the brown tangle expand towards the right-hand margin; I saw another appearing below it, dimly visible through the bar of printer’s flowers. ‘I believe I have solved your father’s riddle. And it is not so very difficult after all.’

  ‘Then tell me,’ she said.

  ‘They say salamanders are creatures of fire, do they not? The ancients certainly believed it – is it not in Pliny, and in Aristotle before him? Mr Froude was telling us that we should apply heat to the paper.’

  I turned the sheet over to its blank side. It was not blank any more. The brown tangle had grown to six lines. The words were run together and written in a narrow, confined scrawl. I could decipher only a few words here and there – to, entry, dead.

  ‘I can’t read it,’ I said.

  ‘Give it me,’ Arabella said. ‘My father’s hand was as crabbed as his heart.’

  I handed the paper to her. Frowning, she cast her eyes over it and then read aloud:

  ‘From brewhouse,

  NNE ¾ mile to second

  stream. Upstream abt. 300 paces.

  Two dead trees make cross.

  Creek. Entry cave

  concealed among rocks.’

  That night, as we lay in a warm muddle of limbs in the depths of the feather mattress, I broached a subject that had niggled at me like an insect bite for several days. At first it had been an almost impalpable irritation but it had grown steadily worse, as if the miniature wound had become infected by the events of the last few months.

  ‘Arabella?’ I called her that when we were alone; the Wintours called her Bella.

  She stirred in my arms.

  ‘I am a little puzzled in my mind about Miriam.’

  She muttered something I could not catch.

  ‘I think she may be spying on me,’ I said.

  ‘You imagine it.’

  ‘Someone searched my possessions the other day.’

  ‘What?’ Arabella’s voice was more distinct now. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘My papers were disturbed. Nothing that mattered, of course – I lock away anything of importance. But I think it may have been her.’

  ‘Servants always pry,’ Arabella said, as if stating a self-evident truth that a child would have grasped. ‘It’s nothing to be wondered at. It’s why God invented locks and keys.’

  ‘Tell me, has she ever had a child?’

  Arabella sat up with a jerk, dislodging the bedclothes and letting a current of cold air invade our warmth. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I saw her one evening on Broadway last winter. She was with a black child – a girl. But when I chanced to mention it later, she denied she had been there at all, let alone with a child. It was very young – two or three years old, no more.’

  She lay down again and pulled the covers over us. ‘Slaves breed all the time. But it can’t have been her child – it was probably a friend’s. No doubt Miriam was out of the house without leave, so of course she would deny it. Sometimes, my love, you are such a simpleton.’

  It was the first time she had called me ‘my love’.

  I said, ‘I chanced to pass the negro burial ground in the summer. There was a child’s grave there. The infant’s name was Henrietta Maria Barville. I understand that Barville is the surname that Miriam uses. The next of kin in the sexton’s register was one Miriam Barville. It must be the same person, surely?’

  ‘Perhaps she was kin,’ Arabella said with a shiver that rippled through her like the wind on water. She turned towards me. ‘Slaves are all related to each other, you know. Brothers lie with sisters, and mothers with their sons. You must not expect refinement of behaviour from them. The truth is, they have no morals, no restraint.’

  ‘How unlike us, my dear,’ I said; and I brushed my hand gently against her breasts.

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  We lived in a fool’s paradise. But it was a paradise nonetheless.

  The following Tuesday, 18 January, was the night of the great fête at Hicks Tavern. The army had subscribed above four hundred guineas towards it, which set up a considerable murmur in the town; for many said that the money would have been better spent of procuring fuel and food for the poor, who were suffering so terribly. Every day there were reports of people freezing to death in their sleep.

  But the army was above such considerations. Besides, this was a patriotic affair that demanded the approval and support of every loyal citizen: for the entertainment was designed to celebrate the queen’s official birthday.

  By virtue of my position I was obliged to attend as the representative of the American Department. The Wintours could not go, even if they had wanted to, because they were in mourning for the deaths of Mrs Wintour and the Captain.

  The fête was an extravagant, splendid affair. Baroness von Riedesel, the wife of a Hessian general newly arrived in New York from captivity, represented Her Majesty, which annoyed many of the ladies there who felt they had a better claim to temporary royalty. The Baroness, vastly pregnant, was welcomed at the tavern with drums and trumpets. She opened the ball with the commandant, General Pattison, and afterwards at supper sat like a plump partridge on a great chair under a canopy. Outside the tavern, the city’s beggars gathered until the soldiers drove them away.

  I watched the dancing. I bowed low to the Baroness. I drank the loyal toast and those that followed. Most of my New York acquaintance was there – I even noticed Mr Carne, the American intelligence-gatherer, deep in conversation with General Pattison in a window embrasure. I myself had little conversation with anyone. Though there had still been no public announcement about my recall to London, disgrace clings invisibly to a man like an infection; it repels those around him.

  I contrived to leave shortly before midnight. I had arranged to share a hackney coach with a gentleman who lived near King’s College. I ordered the coachman to drop me not at the front door of the house but at the garden gate in the wall near the belvedere. The Judge was sleeping badly at present and my entering by the front door would have disturbed him, for the closet where he lay was immediately over the hall.

  At my request, the postillion jumped down with his lantern and waited while I unlocked the gate. I saw a light burning behind the shutters of the belvedere; one of the slaves would be waiting there to conduct me to the house.

  Once inside the garden, I closed, locked and bolted the gate. I heard the coach drive away. A lantern burned faintly in the fanlight above the garden door to the house. In the slave quarters, a man was singing softly in a very deep voice, one of those strange, sad melodies that the black people croon as they go about their lives.

  I mounted the short flight of steps to the belvedere, meaning to upbraid the slave for not coming out to assist me; he must have heard the sounds of my arrival.

  I pushed open the door. A lantern stood on the table. Miriam was sitting beside it, resting her head and arms on the table. She started up when I entered, her cloak and a blanket fluttering to the floor.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Beg pardon, your honour. Madam sent me.’

  ‘Why?’

  At that moment, a current of cold air touched my cheek. I heard movement. Pain sliced through me like sheet lightning in a night sky.

  The terrible brightness lasted only an instant. I tumbled into a black pit where nothing was.

  In the beginning was the pain. I became aware of it before I was aware of anything else. It was worse, far worse, in my head. But it stretched down the entire length of my body.

  The next item of information to force its way to the attentio
n was the fact that my bladder was bursting. This was followed by the realization that, although I was lying on an unpleasantly hard surface, I was at least tolerably warm. The air stank of urine and sweat, of stale spirits and ill-tanned hides.

  I forced my arm to move slowly up to my head. I could not feel a nightcap. Or a wig or a hat. I felt the bristle on my scalp and a very painful, swollen spot above and slightly behind my right ear. I was still dressed in the evening clothes I had worn at Hicks Tavern. My feet were cold. I flexed my toes. I discovered that I was not wearing shoes.

  I’m a man with no shoes – like poor Roger Pickett all those months ago on my first day in New York City.

  The memories returned. I remembered coming back to Warren Street after the fête. I remembered Miriam sitting in the belvedere, waiting to light me up to the house. But nothing more, not then.

  At last, and with a considerable effort, I opened my eyes. Not twelve inches away from me was a small malevolent face.

  I gave a cry and sat up in a rush. The sudden movement intensified the pain a hundredfold. The place where I lay was filled with a dirty-yellow radiance, a murky glow that was a near neighbour to fog. I saw beside me a line of small animals, the size of squirrels or even large rats, hanging like vermin on a board outside a gamekeeper’s cottage.

  Dead, I thought, and left to rot as a warning to others.

  I stretched out my hand and felt a wall of cold, damp bricks. The mortar between them crumbled at my touch. I brushed the side of the nearest figure, which swayed and turned.

  Alive?

  I pulled back my hand sharply, fearing a bite or a scratch. The light shifted to the head of the moving figure. I glimpsed a wizened face with a nose like a blade. The nose reminded me of Mr Townley’s. A thought stirred in the depths of my mind, pushing its way through the pain.

  A face with a great nose.

  I was fully awake now. I remembered the puppet theatre at the Brooklyn races, with the one-legged barker and the squat fellow who carried the booth and managed the puppets. I realized suddenly that I had seen the latter again – more than once, indeed, and when he was unencumbered by his booth. He was the moon-faced man who had laid the flowers on the child’s grave in the negro burial ground. I had glimpsed him again in the depths of the crowd at Jack Wintour’s funeral, when he had been smoking a clay pipe.

  A voice said, ‘Mr Punch at your service, sir.’

  I turned my head sharply. What light there was came from two candles behind the man who had spoken. His face was in shadow. He was tall and broad-shouldered. He towered over me.

  ‘This is his town residence. Where he comes to rest after his labours. Along with Mrs Punch and their acquaintance.’

  The man’s voice was American, not unlike Judge Wintour’s in intonation but deeper in pitch. He and I were alone in a chamber perhaps ten feet long by six feet wide. It appeared to be lined entirely with brick, even the barrel vault of the ceiling. I could not see a window or a door.

  At the other end from the dangling marionettes and myself was an old stove of the Dutch pattern, the source of the warmth. To the right of it, I made out the shape of a low wide door.

  ‘If that’s Mr Punch,’ I said, ‘have I the pleasure of addressing the devil?’ I was so thirsty that it felt as if I were speaking through a mouthful of fine sand. ‘They usually appear together, I believe.’

  He laughed. ‘You may call me whatever you like, sir.’

  ‘Who are you? What are you doing? Where are we?’

  ‘We are in Canvas Town, sir,’ he said. ‘This was once the strong-room of a merchant who traded in furs. The house above us is reduced to a heap of rubble. If you scream, no one will hear.’

  I summoned up my strength and tried to scramble to my feet. I discovered that a rope attached to the wall had been tied to my ankles. I sprawled on the floor and the pain in my head made me cry out.

  Once again, my captor laughed.

  I struggled into a sitting position and then, with infinite care, stood up. The man did not move. When the pain had subsided, I asked if I might have a drink of water.

  He considered the request for a few seconds. ‘No.’

  My wits were still addled. ‘Those men with the puppet theatre on Long Island …’

  ‘How observant of you, sir. Yes, you have met Mr Punch and his friends before. My little deputies, in a manner of speaking.’

  ‘You speak in riddles.’

  ‘Few of us talk plainly, Mr Savill. Have you not noticed that? Allow me to gloss it for you: the men with the theatre were my eyes and ears in New York while I had business elsewhere. Hence my deputies, though sadly unintelligent ones.’

  ‘But who the devil are you? And why—’

  ‘Perhaps you would care to observe me more closely.’

  He turned, picked up one of the candles and came closer. For the first time I saw his face. To my surprise I discovered that he was a black man. But that surprise was instantly elbowed aside by a far greater one. The negro’s face was scarred from the outer corner of each eye to each corner of the mouth. The flesh had not healed properly and the scar tissue was raised and pink.

  ‘I see you recognize me now, sir, and you will understand why I have been obliged to act through intermediaries for the last few months – in New York City, at least.’

  ‘Listen to me,’ I said, ‘I have no animosity towards you and you can have none towards me. Restore my shoes, let me go and we shall say no more about it. You already have my purse, I’m sure, and you may keep it. I have nothing else of value on my person.’

  He laughed. ‘I don’t want your purse. I want you.’

  I peered through the gloom at him. ‘Do you hope for a ransom? I’m of no particular importance and I’m almost entirely without resources or friends. So I’m afraid you hope in vain.’

  ‘I hope for very little nowadays,’ he said. ‘If anything.’

  ‘Then oblige me in this, at least,’ I snapped. ‘Tell me what you’re about. Was it not you the other night at Mrs Chawley’s with the sedan chair? Does that mean you are Mr Townley’s creature? And is Miriam Barville your ally, your lover?’

  He hit me then – a punch with all his weight behind it, which landed full on my mouth. The force of it drove me back against the line of hanging puppets on the wall. The rope around my ankles trapped me like a rabbit in a snare. I fell heavily to the ground, bringing Mrs Punch with me. The pain made my vision blur. My mouth filled with blood. I touched the front teeth with the tip of my tongue. One of the incisors rocked in its socket.

  ‘Hetty-Petty,’ I said, the blood in my mouth distorting and thickening the sound of the words. The pain made me reckless. Despair made me angry. Fear made me talkative.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Hetty-Petty. I saw one of your damned theatricals at the negro burial ground in the summer. A white man bringing a nosegay for a dead black child. Her name was Henrietta Maria Barville. Was she yours? If she was, I’m sorry for it. It’s a bad business, the death of a child.’

  I tensed myself, expecting another blow or a kick or worse. But nothing came.

  ‘Was it her I heard crying in Warren Street?’ I said. ‘Of course – she was the child who died of the smallpox in the slave quarters, was she not? That was where Miriam hid her.’

  ‘You know nothing,’ he said, moving nearer the stove.

  ‘I thought Miriam was loyal to her mistress,’ I went on, probing further. ‘No doubt she is, in her way. But what’s a slave’s loyalty worth? Not very much, it seems. Because the pair of you laid a trap for me this evening. You and Miriam.’

  Scarface crouched by the stove. He had his back to me. He opened the door. I thought he was warming himself. He did not speak.

  I shifted as far as the rope would let me, my hands feeling for a weapon, any weapon. ‘Loyalty is a strange, immaterial thing, is it not? Perhaps Miriam finds that a greater loyalty outranks a lesser one. I should be obliged if you could explain this to me. Do slaves have lo
yalty as free people do? Or is it something that can be bought and sold just as they themselves can?’

  He turned back to me. He had wrapped a cloth around his right hand and used it to grip a pocket knife with a dark wooden handle. The tip of the blade glowed a dull red colour in the gloom of the chamber.

  I scrambled to my feet. As I did so, he seized my neck in his left hand and pushed me back against the wall. I flailed my arms towards him. But his arms were longer and stronger than mine.

  Still gripping my neck, he pushed me down to the floor. The rope pinned my legs. He knelt heavily on my upper arms.

  ‘So,’ he said in his deep, melodious voice. ‘Loyalty. Let us see how loyal you are.’

  He shifted his grip, wedging my head in the angle between floor and wall. I felt the heat of the knife before it touched me. He drew the tip down my right cheek from eye to mouth.

  ‘I could make you deny Christ himself if I had a mind to it, sir. Just like St Peter.’

  The pain was exquisite. I screamed, my body bucking beneath his weight, trying to throw him off. He adjusted the position of his left hand, forcing me to rotate my head.

  ‘Can a slave feel loyalty?’ he murmured.

  He stood up, leaving me whimpering on the ground. I covered my face with my hands.

  ‘Indeed they can,’ he went on. ‘A slave has sentiments just as a free man has. He feels love, he feels hate, he feels the desire for revenge. Do you think we learn these elevated sentiments from our white masters, sir? It is indeed a nice philosophical question.’

  My cheek stung and was wet with blood.

  ‘Why did you kill Mr Pickett?’

  That at least is what I meant to say. But the words emerged as a sort of muffled gasp. I swallowed some of the blood in my mouth and tried again.

  ‘Why did you kill Mr Pickett?’

  By this time the black man had retreated as far as the stove. I felt my muscles tense in anticipation of pain: did he intend to heat the blade again as a preliminary to another attack on me?

  But he shut the door of the stove and closed his knife.

  ‘Why do you think I killed him?’ he said.