The Scent of Death (36 page)

This put me in a difficult position. As a friend of the family, Marryot already knew of Captain Wintour’s private desire to visit Mount George, though he was not aware of the reason for it.

In the American Department we know about preserving official decencies. General Clinton had signed our passes on the grounds that Wintour and I were gathering intelligence. If he had troubled to ask questions, which he almost certainly did not, he would have learned that Governor Franklin was involved and that we intended to travel with Piercefield’s irregulars, which would have lent colour to this explanation for our journey.

So I emphasized what Wintour and I had ascertained of enemy troop movements, the state of the country and the condition of the remaining inhabitants. As a sop to Marryot’s conscience, I also mentioned that Jack had wished to assess the damage at Mount George. By ill luck, I told him, the enemy had caught wind of us. Grantford and Abraham had been killed, and Wintour and I had managed to escape. It was a straightforward story which had the merit of being the truth, if not the whole truth.

‘Is it possible that you were pursued through the lines?’ Marryot asked.

‘Why would anyone have done that?’

‘Because the killer wished to silence Captain Wintour at all costs?’

‘Once again – why?’

The Major put his elbows on the table and leant towards me. ‘If they feared you had seen something – evidence, maybe, that they were intending an attack on our positions.’

‘But we didn’t,’ I said.

‘As far as you know. But what if you did without realizing it? Concealed batteries? Naval preparations? The outworks of a new encampment? Think, sir, think.’

‘I have thought,’ I said, my voice rising. ‘I’ve done little else since I found him there except think. And I can think of nothing.’

‘I may tell you that Mr Carne is convinced that this must be the reason.’

‘I wish I could prove him right.’

‘But suppose for the sake of argument he is right, at least in part,’ Marryot persisted. ‘Suppose there was something you saw in the Debatable Ground but you do not yet realize the significance of it. Do you see what that means?’

‘Spare me the riddles, sir,’ I said. ‘I’m in no humour for them at present.’

‘Why – if they killed Wintour to silence him, will they not try to do the same to you?’

Captain Wintour was buried beside his Uncle Francis in Trinity churchyard. There was a considerable crowd in attendance. I was with the Judge. He clung to my arm and was silent throughout the funeral service and interment. He did not even weep.

As we turned away from the open grave, the crowd shifted its composition: for a moment a narrow avenue opened through its middle; and I glimpsed a thickset man smoking a clay pipe.

I saw him only for a few seconds. He was standing in the further fringes of the concourse, close to Van Cortlandt’s Sugar House. He had the look of a man enjoying the spectacle of a funeral. I was sure I had seen him before. His presence seemed to hint at something worse than itself, as does an omen or a bad smell.

Marryot passed along the path ahead of the Judge and myself. He was deep in conversation with Mr Townley and Mr Carne.
For a moment the three of them blocked my view. When they were gone, the crowd shifted. The pipe-smoker had disappeared.

The Judge and I walked slowly away. Some negro children were playing in the road that bordered the churchyard, oblivious to the solemnity of the occasion. The sight of them frolicking by a graveyard touched a spring in my mind that brought a memory to the surface.

I knew where I had seen the man. It was just before I had gone into the Debatable Ground with Jack Wintour. He had slipped in a pile of horse droppings outside the negro burial ground and some children had been taunting him in his misfortune. It was the man who had laid a posy on Henrietta Barville’s grave.

Jack Wintour’s murder seized the public’s interest for a week or two. But this soon evaporated when the inquiry failed to bring forth new information. It was wartime, after all, and New York had a surfeit of alarming news and violent deaths to feed on.

The days turned into weeks, and the weeks into months. I paid scant attention to Marryot’s warning that I might be in danger. I was too tired to fear for my own safety and also too unhappy. Instead I tried to drug myself with work. I slept too little and I drank too much. And I had bad dreams.

Soon after my return to New York from the Debatable Ground, I wrote to Mr Rampton in his official capacity and gave him an incomplete account of our expedition to Mount George and its brutal termination. I chose my words with care for I knew that he would also see the reports that the army sent to Lord George Germain; he made it his business to see everything that was laid before the American Secretary. I could not expect to hear Mr Rampton’s response until late September or even early October.

I told nobody the full story of what had happened. I locked away the three pieces of ore and the oilskin packet in the brassbound writing box in which I kept my private papers. It seemed to me that there was nothing to be lost by postponing my decision in this matter and perhaps much to be gained.

It occurs to me now that I postponed many decisions in the weeks following my return to New York, and that this was itself one of the consequences of what had happened at Mount George and King’s Bridge. I was sick at heart. Nothing seemed to matter.

In the meantime, I tried to pick up the threads of my old life, which had become unfamiliar and curiously alien. It was as if our expedition had made me quite a different person. My previous existence hung awkwardly about me like a suit of clothes tailored for a wizened old man in the years of his maturity, when he was taller and plumper and happier.

The house in Warren Street was a sorrowful place now, though there were no outward signs that its inhabitants were in mourning. Mr Wintour had decided to fly in the face of convention for the sake of his wife’s peace of mind.

The old lady rarely came down from her chamber. Mrs Arabella and Miriam tended to her. The Judge visited her two or three times a day. He found little to console himself in her company.

‘She does not always know me now,’ he confided as we sat over our wine one evening in September. ‘She stares in my direction but looks straight through me. And she talks to the children.’

‘The children?’ I said, startled.

‘Yes. Jack and poor Baby Hetty. She sees them quite plainly. Sometimes it’s as if Jack is a boy again and his sister the age she was when she died. She sings to them. But that is better than when she is distressed. Oh yes, much better.’

‘What does the doctor say?’

‘What do they always say?’ Mr Wintour said. ‘They bleed her, they purge her, they prescribe this and that. But it makes no difference, except to make her weaker. You cannot cure time and sorrow.’

I had no words of comfort to say to him for he was so obviously correct in his diagnosis. Mrs Wintour’s wits became increasingly disordered. It made it no easier that she had days when her mind was clearer, if only for an hour or so at most. In her lucid moments, she remembered that we had told her Jack had gone to war.

‘When will he come home?’ she would ask Mrs Arabella and her husband.

‘Soon,’ they would say.

Mrs Wintour would weep and worry for his safety for a few seconds. Then her mind would flit away. Sometimes, a moment later, she would ask the same question. And they would give her the same answer.

In the latter half of September, I came home in the evening to find Mrs Arabella alone in the drawing room with the tea-tray beside her and a book in her hand. The candles were lit but, even in the gloom, I knew that something was different.

She laid aside the book and offered me tea. ‘The Judge will be down directly. He is with Mrs Wintour.’

I took the cup from her. The room seemed unexpectedly airier and clearer than usual. I looked about me and saw what had changed.

‘That painting’s gone,’ I said.

Mrs Arabella had been watching me. ‘I wondered how long it would take you.’ There was a hint of amusement in her voice. ‘I could not endure to see it there any longer. Josiah and the porter took it away this afternoon.’

The great painting of Mount George had dominated the room from its proud position over the fireplace. A solitary candle on the mantelpiece revealed its ghostly traces, a pale oblong outlined in the smoky stains on the wallpaper.

‘Will you have it hung somewhere else?’ I asked. ‘Or will you store it?’

‘I told Josiah to cut it up and burn it on the kitchen fire, sir. And the frame. At least we shall have some use from it then.’

‘You did not care for the house, I think? I remember you told me that once.’

She did not reply at first. Then, seemingly inconsequentially, she said: ‘It is better to go forward than to go backwards. Sometimes one must leave the past where it is – in the past. Do you not agree?’

‘Yes.’ I thought of Augusta and the mistakes that she and I had made. Perhaps Mrs Arabella was thinking of Jack. ‘But that is not always easy to do.’

We drank our tea in silence. Somehow we had slipped into the fragile intimacy we had shared in the past – though rarely, and never for long. I think candlelight made it easier for both of us, for shadows favour confidences. In that moment I made up my mind.

‘Madam,’ I said. ‘Before you leave it behind altogether entirely, there is something I must tell you about Mount George.’

Mrs Arabella looked up. ‘Ah. I wondered.’

‘About what?’

‘Whether there was something more. Something else.’

‘I needed time to consider what was best to be done,’ I said, aware that already she had placed me on the defensive.

‘You’re a man who knows how to keep secrets.’

I inclined my head – a token bow in thanks for a token compliment. ‘Besides, I thought you had other matters that were more pressing.’

‘Does it concern my husband’s death?’

‘No. Or rather, I do not see how it can do. But I cannot be certain of that. Indeed, I cannot be certain of anything.’

‘You are quite the philosopher this evening, sir.’

To my relief, there was a knock on the door at that moment, and Miriam entered with fresh candles.

‘If you please, ma’am,’ she said, curtseying, ‘Master says to tell you he’s gone to bed.’

‘It’s very early.’

‘Yes, ma’am, but he’s weary.’ A look of intelligence passed between the two women. ‘Terrible weary.’

Mrs Arabella dismissed the maid.

‘I’m afraid Mr Wintour is not well,’ I said.

‘Is it any wonder, sir? But you were saying?’

If the Judge had retired for the night, then we were unlikely to be disturbed. I excused myself and went up to my bedchamber to fetch the packet of papers and the three pieces of ore from my writing box.

I returned to the drawing room, carrying the canvas bag in which I had put them. Mrs Arabella watched in silence as I set a little table beside her chair. I undid the drawstring of the bag and, one by one, took out the three pieces of ore and the oilskin pouch. I placed them on the table.

‘This was why Captain Wintour was so desirous of going to Mount George.’

She extended her right hand and touched the nearest piece with her forefinger. She picked it up and felt the weight and the texture. ‘Is it metal?’

‘Permit me to show you.’ I took out my penknife, opened the blade and took up another piece of ore. I scored a scratch in the side of it. I gave her the piece. ‘Hold it to the candle flame, ma’am. Examine it.’

She did as I bid. ‘It has a glint to it underneath,’ she said. ‘Like gold.’

‘Captain Wintour believed it was gold. And so, I think, did your father. But I do not know for certain. I have not had it assayed.’

Mrs Arabella put down the ore on the table. ‘Where did it come from?’

‘It seems that there is a vein of gold on some land that your father owned.’

Her eyes widened. ‘But there is no gold in this part of America, surely? Where is this land? On the Mount George estate?’

‘No, ma’am. In North Carolina.’

Her head snapped up. She stared at me. ‘It’s in rebel hands?’

‘Yes.’

Mrs Arabella was silent for a few minutes. Her face was now averted from me. Her intelligence, it occurred to me, was hard and rational; one might almost say it had a masculine cast to it. She wanted time to think the matter through and she would not hurry for me or anyone.

‘What is in the bag?’ she said at last.

‘I have not opened it. Captain Wintour told me that it contains the deeds confirming your father’s title to the property and instructions about where the mine is on the estate. But your husband believed the instructions would not be straightforward. “Nothing obvious” – those were his words.’

‘My father liked puzzles and enigmas that challenged the mind. He worked at them for recreation.’ She spread her fingers. Her hand hovered, palm down, over the pouch and the three pieces of metal. ‘You found this at Mount George?’

‘Captain Wintour did.’

‘He knew where to look.’ It was a conclusion, not a question.

‘Mr Froude informed your husband of the discovery just before he went to join his regiment. He also showed the Captain where he had concealed the papers and the ore samples. In case he himself was prevented from going to New York.’

Her mouth twisted. ‘In his box of curiosities? Is that where he hid all this?’

I stared at her in surprise. ‘How did you know?’

‘There’s no mystery – my husband mentioned the box to you when the fever was upon him. Do you remember? He asked if you’d brought it to him.’

‘Of course – you were in the room.’

‘And I recall the box – my father had it made to his design a few years before the war to transport his specimens.’ Mrs Arabella sat in her chair. The whites of her eyes gleamed yellow in the candlelight. ‘But what really puzzles me, sir,’ she went on, ‘is how you knew of it beforehand.’