The Scent of Death (13 page)

‘True, sir.’ Wintour frowned. ‘Bankers are the worst of criminals. Greed blinds them to all morality as well as to common sense. I have often remarked upon it.’

‘It follows, sir, as a simple matter of logic, that it would be far more secure and indeed more convenient for me to accept your note of hand for the money instead. I know it will be safer with you than with the Bank of England itself.’

I held my breath, wondering if the absurdity of discussing the security of non-existent money would strike my host. But it did not.

Instead he sipped his wine and contemplated with evident enjoyment the idea that money, whether real or not, was safer with him than with the Bank of England.

He set down the empty glass. ‘I cannot bear to deny a
friend’s request,’ he said. His chin sank to his chest. After a
moment he stirred and his eyelids fluttered. ‘Besides, my dear sir, I shall soon have my box of curiosities and all our troubles will be over.’

His eyes closed. His breathing became heavy and regular. A log shifted in the grate. Miriam and Josiah stood waiting like dark statues in the shadows.

The following morning, I slept late. I awoke when Josiah drew back the bed-curtains and a current of cold air swirled over my face. My throat was dry and my head ached from the madeira.

I struggled up to a sitting position.

Something was different. Something had changed. The very air was charged with brightness.

The old man was standing by the window with his back to the room.

‘What is it?’ I said. ‘What are you looking at?’

‘The snow, your honour.’ Josiah turned. He was smiling broadly. ‘It came in the night. Just an inch or two. But everything is white.’

I breakfasted by myself in the parlour; I rarely saw any of the family before I left for the office. As Josiah was bringing me my hat and coat, however, Mrs Arabella came down the stairs with Miriam behind her. The women were dressed for going out.

‘You are going to your office, I collect?’ Mrs Arabella said, when we had wished each other good morning. For the first time that winter she was wearing furs, which brought out the extraordinary lustre of her dark eyes and the creamy pallor of her complexion.

‘Yes, ma’am. Unless I may have the honour of escorting you somewhere first?’

Mrs Arabella inclined her head. ‘Perhaps you would be good enough to give me your arm as far as Little Queen Street. I promised to meet a friend there this morning.’

‘With pleasure.’

I offered her my arm and we left the house with Miriam following five paces behind. Under the winter sun, we trudged towards Broadway. Icicles clung to window sills and gutters. Smoke rose in lazy spirals from the chimneys and smudged the hard blue sky. Warren Street had seen little traffic at this hour and the snow lay largely undisturbed.

Neither of us spoke. I was conscious of Mrs Arabella’s proximity, of the weight of her arm on mine, and the way her hand tightened its grip when the going was at all treacherous. Her touch gave me a disproportionate pleasure. I had not been so intimately close to a woman since I had said goodbye to Augusta.

We turned into Broadway. The street was already busy and here the snow was turning to slush. Prisoners of war, working in groups of two or three, were shovelling it into piles along the roadway.

‘It is always like this in New York,’ Mrs Arabella said.

‘What is, madam?’

‘The snow. Charming at first and then, as soon as people come along, ugly and inconvenient. People ruin everything, don’t they?’

She glanced up at me as she spoke. I glimpsed her profile framed in fur, her cheeks now tinged a delicate pink with the cold; and I marvelled that I had ever thought her anything less than beautiful.

‘I’m in your debt, sir,’ she said, in a lower voice.

I thought I had misheard. ‘I beg your pardon, ma’am?’

‘Miriam told me what you did last night.’

‘It is not worth mentioning, ma’am. A trifle.’

‘It was not a trifle to me, sir.’ She hesitated. ‘You cannot know how important it was.’

‘I beg you not to think of it again. It was nothing.’

‘Seventy guineas, Miriam said. That is not nothing.’

‘But I have no need of the money, ma’am.’ I felt myself colouring. ‘Not at present. Whereas I’m sure I should miss Miriam’s contribution to our domestic economy. Why, my shirts have never been as white as they have been here, nor my stockings so neatly darned. So you see my motives are entirely selfish and as such I deserve your censure, not your praise.’

She burst out laughing, turned her head and smiled up at me, exposing white, regular teeth. ‘That was a pretty speech, sir. And you argue like a Jesuit.’

A cavalry officer trotted past us. He glanced first at Mrs Arabella, and then at me. He touched his hat and smiled down at me with good-humoured envy.

Mrs Arabella did not notice, for she was still looking at me and her expression had grown serious. ‘It is not easy at present,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Captain Wintour has been away so long and endured so much that he does not find it easy to – to live as his circumstances now require.’

‘It is not to be wondered at, ma’am.’

‘But you must forgive me, sir – I chatter on about my own concerns, which can be of no interest to you – I’m afraid it’s a poor return to you for your kindness.’

She turned away and we walked on. I could not help pitying her – and the Captain too. When riches dwindle to a mere competence, then even a competence becomes a form of poverty.

The winter of 1778–79 was hard and bitter. In fact all the wartime winters were exceptionally long and cold. In some
quarters New Yorkers murmured that this was a sign of divine
displeasure. If so, Mr Townley remarked to me, God was displeased with the rebels as well, for the harsh weather fell on them and they too suffered from the shortages of food and fuel that made matters so much worse. But the rebels had a continent with all its resources at their backs. We had only the sea.

In the winter, during the cruel months of the year, we longed with an almost mystical hunger for the arrival of the Cork Fleet. It sailed across three thousand miles of ocean in a great convoy protected by our warships from the menace of the French navy and, near the end of the voyage, from the impudent attacks of American privateers. It brought flour and wine, tea and cloth, candles and crockery, furnishings and books – and, best of all, news from home. It was a marvellous sight to behold the Narrows choked with white sails that then burst like an exploding firework into the waters of New York Bay.

The fleet came much later than expected that year. The stock of flour held in the public stores was quite exhausted and there were rumours that the oatmeal used as a substitute for making bread would soon be gone. And what then? If the city and its soldiers starved, Washington could march in at the head of his men without firing a single shot.

Our household in Warren Street was better off than most. For this we had to thank Mr Townley and Major Marryot. Indeed, if it had not been for their influence, I doubt the Wintours would have been permitted to retain their house or at least to avoid the annoyance of having soldiers billeted on them.

Mr Townley was on cordial terms with many of the contractors. He seemed always to know when a shipment was due or when a consignment of vegetables arrived from Brooklyn. More mysteriously, he found ways of sending Mr Noak with small presents of meat, usually tough and salted. When I asked him once where it came from, Mr Townley tapped his great nose and murmured that heaven helps those who help themselves.

Hunger blunts moral niceties as well as the finer sensations of taste. I ate whatever food there was without troubling myself overmuch about where it came from; and everyone else did the same.

Major Marryot was peculiarly well placed to provide wood for the fires. As more and more trees were cut down beyond the city boundary and on Brooklyn, prices shot up as availability diminished. But the army never went short. The Major was conveniently based at Headquarters and was something of a favourite with the Commandant. It was due to his good offices that a wagon carrying a cord or two of firewood would sometimes rumble down Warren Street and stop outside our door.

During that winter, I often found Marryot or Townley at the
house, chatting with the ladies in the parlour or discussing the
state of the war with Judge Wintour or playing cards with his son. Townley was always affable, always obliging; he seemed drawn to Warren Street from simple good nature, perhaps mingled with decorous admiration for Mrs Arabella and a general respect for the family, for he himself came from humbler stock than the Wintours. It was only odd that such a busy, thrusting man could find the time to cultivate a family which at present had so little influence or wealth at its command.

As for the Major, his motive was easy enough to discern, though he tried to conceal it: he made calf’s eyes at Mrs Arabella when he thought no one was observing him and coloured when she talked to him.

Noak was often in the house too, making himself useful in the Judge’s library, which was in a sad state, or running errands that could not be entrusted to a servant.

‘I do believe you spend more time here than at Hanover Square with Mr Townley,’ I said one afternoon in January when I found him sharpening Mr Wintour’s pens.

‘Mr Townley offered my services, sir,’ Noak said without looking up, and the blade of his penknife continued to scrape to and fro at the tip of the pen. ‘And of course I am happy to oblige the old gentleman.’

As January turned to February, there came by degrees a change in the household. Mrs Wintour was particularly susceptible to the cold. They took care to build up great fires in the parlour, and she would sit almost on top of it, swathed in elderly furs, holding mittened hands out to the flames. Her husband fussed over her, chafing her hands with his, sending Miriam for tea or broth or a rum toddy flavoured with nutmeg or indeed anything that might warm her. But she allowed the drinks to go cold and barely touched the food they brought.

Winter invaded the old lady’s mind as well as her body. It was as if her mental faculties had been gripped with an iron frost and her perceptions masked by an invisible blanket of snow. The surgeon came to bleed her, which merely made her weaker, whiter and colder than before.

Sometimes, the only parts of the poor lady that seemed to move for hours on end were her narrow chest, rising and falling almost imperceptibly, and her lips, which parted and closed as a stream of mumbled words emerged from some remote part of her brain that remained unfrozen. Her eyes watered chronically and the tears trickled through the crooked channels of her wrinkled cheeks. It was a miracle, I thought, that these salty rivulets did not turn to ice.

‘Oh, my dear,’ the Judge would say when he took her hands or stooped to salute her gently on the cheek, ‘you must not trouble yourself, indeed you must not. Hush, my dear, hush.’

If you listened to Mrs Wintour for long enough, there were fragments of sense, or not quite nonsense, among the words that tumbled out of her like fragments of nursery rhymes. As in a concerto, there were themes that came and went, sometimes in different guises. ‘Chilly willy chilly willy.’ Or ‘Dinner now, now.’ Or ‘Hetty-Petty. Hetty-Petty.’ I noticed that ‘Hetty-Petty’ was often accompanied with tears.

‘There was a daughter,’ Mrs Arabella explained in a low voice when I mentioned it to her. ‘Henrietta – she was their first child, before my husband was born.’

‘She died?’

‘On her first birthday. I fear that Mrs Wintour’s mind wanders in the past.’

‘But there is sense, of a sort, in what she says.’

‘Sense, sir?’ Mrs Arabella gave a short laugh. ‘Who knows what the sense of it is?’

‘If a child dies,’ I said, thinking of Lizzie as much as Hetty-Petty, ‘then …’

I hesitated, as that unbearable prospect opened before me:
if Lizzie were to die.

‘Then what, sir?’ she said, and her voice was as soft as the wood ash that spilled out beneath the grate.

‘Then I believe it would drive me to nonsense too.’

‘Or worse, I fancy.’ It was her turn to hesitate. She looked at me for a moment, her eyes wide and beautiful, her expression unreadable. I turned away, fearing that my staring at her would seem ill bred. She added in an even lower voice than before, ‘Much worse.’

There was a tap on the door, and Josiah came in with a letter on a salver. Bowing low, he held it out to me. He coughed gently.

‘By your leave, sir, Miriam said to say that she’s turned the cuffs and collar of your shirt and left it in your press.’

‘Thank you.’ I broke the seal on the letter.

Josiah coughed again. ‘And the boots are back from the cobbler’s.’

I looked up. ‘That’s quick work. I only gave them you this morning.’

‘I took them down myself, sir, and waited until they were done.’

‘I’m obliged.’

Josiah bowed again, including Mrs Arabella within the range of his reverence, and withdrew.

I glanced at her and smiled. ‘They treat me with a mother’s tender care, ma’am. It’s quite extraordinary.’

‘It’s because of Miriam.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

Mrs Arabella rose to her feet. She looked coldly on me, as if I had somehow presumed too far on our enforced intimacy in this house. These sudden reversals in her demeanour were not uncommon in her intercourse with me; they pained me; and yet they also exerted a strange fascination on me, which I attributed to the charm of the unpredictable.

‘Slaves are like dogs or horses, you see.’ She spoke slowly and deliberately. ‘They don’t forget a kindness. If you hadn’t chosen otherwise, Miriam would have been sold to a stranger by now.’

She curtseyed. I opened the door for her. When she had gone I went back to my chair, the letter still in my hand. I unfolded it, my mind still on Mrs Arabella and what she had said.

The letter contained only a few words scribbled in pencil.