The Scent of Death (38 page)

But the real difference was that, in the eight weeks since I had seen her, she had aged as many years. There was a wariness about her expression. Her tiny breasts pushed against the thin material of her gown. She was still young but she had lost what had been childish about her.

Lost? Or had it snatched away?

‘What about her possessions?’ I asked.

‘Here, your honour,’ the matron said, holding up a frayed straw basket.

‘Give it to her.’

The matron obeyed. She and the turnkey moved away from the girl, who did not look at me and whose face had remained expressionless throughout.

‘You are to come with me,’ I said. ‘I’m standing surety for your good conduct.’

Mehitabel said nothing. But she followed a few paces behind, trailing behind me like a whipped dog. I led her out on to the green and then stopped. She stared around her at the crowds and buildings. I wondered whether this was the first city she had ever seen in her short life.

‘Mehitabel,’ I said.

She ran her tongue over chapped lips. She rubbed her hand down her hip in a gesture that belonged to an older woman in a different place. ‘What do you wish me to do, sir?’

As she spoke, her face lost what colour it had and she began to sway. I took her arm. I felt her recoil against my touch but she made no resistance to it. I supported her to a bench nearby. Her body was as light as a shuttlecock.

‘When did you last eat?’

Her thin shoulders twitched. ‘Yesterday, sir, I think.’

There was a coffee house on Broadway between Barclay and Robinson streets. It wasn’t crowded at this time of day. I took her to one of the booths near the back where there was more privacy. I sat at the table and gestured for her to sit opposite me. When the waiter came, I ordered bread and soup for her, with some porter for her to drink and sherry for myself.

It struck me as odd that she did not seem to think it strange I should allow her to sit at table with me. Was it because her miseries had rendered her impervious to surprise? Or because she, as the daughter of a tenant farmer, had known better things before the war? Or was it simply the American way to ignore the niceties and distinctions of rank?

When the food came I ordered her to take it slowly. But I might as well have thrown the words to the wind. Within less than a moment her bowl and her platter were empty. She dabbed at the crumbs with her moistened finger and asked for more.

‘No. Let that settle in your belly first. Then you shall have more.’

For a moment we drank in silence. Her head was bowed, with the black hair falling like a curtain to hide the face. Grey lice moved busily among the threads.

‘You had better tell me what happened.’

She did not look up. ‘Mr Varden came back after you left, sir.’

‘Varden?’ Jack had mentioned the name. ‘The Presbyterian deacon? The colonel of the local militia?’

‘Yes, sir. Someone must have played the spy and told him. He ordered Mother to be whipped until she told him where you’d gone, and why you were come into the Debatable Ground, and what you were about at Mount George.’

‘But she didn’t know.’

Mehitabel ignored me. ‘And she had a fit, sir, from the pain maybe, and she died under the lash. She used to have queer turns, sir, but not like that. And Mr Varden said it was God’s judgment on a sinner and a traitor.’

‘What happened to you?’ I asked.

‘Mr Varden took me into his family to work in the scullery, sir. He said it was an act of Christian charity to return good for evil, and heaven would bless him for it.’

Her voice was fluent but monotonous as if she was reading a tedious account concerning, and composed by, someone in whom she had no particular interest.

Shelter and food, I thought. At least she had been safe among people who knew her. Then why had she left? I said, ‘Have you news of your brother? Is he still with their army in South Carolina.’

‘He’s dead of the pox and I hope he’s in heaven.’

‘Is that why you left the Vardens?’

Her voice did not alter. ‘They made me sleep in the barn, sir. Mrs Varden told me that if I was hungry I should eat the scraps they fed the pigs with. And Mr Varden came by night and lay with me in the straw.’

‘What? Are you telling me—?’

At last she looked up and her expression stopped me in mid-sentence. ‘He said he was like Eliphaz the Temanite, Job’s friend, sir. He said he’d come to commune with me and assuage my pains and, if I complained or whispered a word of it to anyone, he’d have me whipped for thieving till I bled and then turn me out of doors in my naturalibus.’

In my naturalibus
: suddenly Mehitabel had become a child again. I remembered my daughter, Lizzie, shrieking with joy when they stripped her for a bath by the kitchen fire and crying out that she was in her naturalibus at last like Adam and Eve in the Garden.

‘What did you do?’

‘I stole some food and ran away. I wanted to come to New York and ask Captain Wintour for help.’

‘You came here all by yoursel
f
?’

She shook her head. ‘I fell in with three men who said they were coming here. I went with them.’

Her eyes dropped again. The words were ambiguous, though perhaps she had not intended them to be. I guessed what had happened. War makes animals of us – and most especially of gangs of men freed from the restraints of morality and discipline. Mehitabel had paid for her protection in the only coin she had.

After a moment she stirred and took a long drink of porter. ‘At King’s Bridge, they told me Captain Wintour had been murdered,’ she went on. ‘So I tried to find you instead.’

‘You did right,’ I said. ‘You need have no concern for your future now. I shall talk to Judge Wintour and Mrs Arabella directly and see what can be arranged.’

‘But Miss Bella might not like it, sir.’

‘Why ever not? She would not blame you for the Captain’s death, child. You had nothing to do with it.’

‘No, sir, it’s not that. It’s because I’d remind her of the night the squire was killed.’ She looked at me with large brown eyes, as guileless as an animal’s. ‘I was there, you see.’

‘Please, sir,’ the child said. ‘I’m famished.’

I beckoned the waiter and asked what he had. We settled on salt beef, onions and beans for Mehitabel and another glass of sherry for me. In truth I was glad of the interruption.

I knew enough of Mrs Arabella and the Judge to be sure that they would not abandon this unfortunate child who had so large a claim on their charity. If necessary, I would help defray any expense they might incur on Mehitabel’s account.

But I was reluctant to march out of the coffee house and take the girl to Warren Street without preparing the ground beforehand. The household was in mourning for the dead and, perhaps, for the living. Mehitabel Tippet would serve as a reminder of a past that they were trying to forget.

There was another consideration. Providence had seen fit to supply me with an independent witness to what happened at Mount George nearly three years ago, to the series of events which had culminated in Mr Froude’s murder and Mrs Arabella’s flight to New York.

Those events had led, in the end, to Captain Wintour’s expedition to Mount George and possibly to his murder. I believed they might also have had other consequences, large and small, that might go some way towards explaining much that had puzzled and disturbed me ever since my arrival in New York.

The key to the mystery might lie in the memory of this frail girl. I needed to question her, to draw out every scrap of information she had, before taking her to Warren Street. There she would be drawn away from my control.

I sipped my sherry and watched her eat. She hunched over the plate like a cat over her prey and shovelled the food into her mouth. When she had done, she swallowed her wine in two long draughts. Her cheeks fired up with colour. She sat back and licked her lips. She yawned.

‘Were you often at Mount George?’ I said, keeping my tone casual as if nothing more than idle curiosity was behind the question. ‘Before it burned down, I mean.’

Mehitabel looked up. ‘Yes, sir. My father had a good deal of business with Mr Froude and sometimes for a treat I went over with him. And sometimes he’d leave me there for a day or two because the housekeeper had a kindness for me, and I’d help her in the still-room.’

‘Was your father’s business about the farm?’

‘I suppose so, sir.’

‘This was after the war began?’

She nodded. ‘But we hardly noticed it at first, sir. Wasn’t like later. I remember seeing Mr Jack riding off to war and Mr Froude said he’d be back before the summer was over because rebels couldn’t last long.’

‘That must have been in the spring of seventy-six.’ I paused. ‘When Mrs Arabella was with child.’

‘Oh yes, sir.’ She wiped her mouth with her sleeve. She seemed quite at her ease now, slumping back against the wall. ‘Poor lady. And Squire was cock-a-hoop – he was sure she’d give him an heir. Only it wasn’t a boy, as you know, sir, and it was born dead or dying. That was a terrible time – I was all alone in that house because Father had left me there, and that’s when the rebel soldier came, the very morning after the birth. He—’

‘What? It was the same day as they fired the mansion?’

‘Oh no, sir – that was later. This was the first time Sergeant Pickett came, when Squire was busy with Juvenal in the—’

‘Stop a moment, child. Let me take this slowly. Can you recall when this happened? The day of the month?’

She screwed up her eyes in concentration while her fingers fiddled with the spoon on her plate. She seemed to remain in this state for minutes. I opened my mouth, intending to question her further. But there was an interruption, a sudden flurry of activity and oaths from the doorway.

Both of us looked in the direction of the noise. A soldier had bustled into the coffee house from Broadway. He was clearly in a hurry and had knocked into a waiter, sending a tray of empty tankards flying.

I recognized the soldier, an orderly who was often in attendance on Major Marryot. He marched smartly towards us, sweeping the protesting waiter aside with his arm.

‘Your honour.’ He came to attention. ‘Letter from Major Marryot, sir.’

He handed me an unsealed and roughly folded square of paper with my name in pencil on the outside, written in Marryot’s hurried and almost illegible hand.

‘Went to Hanover Square first, your honour, like the Major said, then they sent me to the Provost, and as luck would have it, the sentry had seen you and—’

‘Hold your tongue,’ I said.

The paper contained one of Marryot’s laconic communications:

Dear Savill, The fleet is arrived from Ireland under convoy of the
Roebuck
. An express for you. R.M.

An express? But this could not possibly be Rampton’s reply to my report concerning the fatal expedition to Mount George and Captain Wintour’s death. My letter to him had left New York barely six weeks earlier and he might not even have received it yet. Yet why else send an express?

We walked down Broadway to Fort George with the orderly several paces ahead, clearing our way through the afternoon crowd. When we reached Headquarters, I consigned Mehitabel into the orderly’s care, gave the man a few pence and told him to take her down to the buttery. Mehitabel was reluctant to leave me, for mine was the one familiar face in this incomprehensible and uncomprehending crowd.

I went directly to the Post Room. The head clerk saw me enter and abandoned the officer he was dealing with and came across to me at once with the express from the Department. The direction was in Rampton’s hand. I signed for the letter. Unable to wait, I tore it open and turned aside to read it.

Rampton’s handwriting was a blotchy scrawl, as if he had written in a hurry and in bad light, perhaps on his travelling
desk as he swayed and jolted in his coach. My eyes went to
the date: 7 August. That was the very day I had begun to write my carefully worded report on the Mount George journey.

I read the letter, but I did not take in the sense – partly because of the speed at which I skimmed it and partly because the news it contained was so unexpected, so unbelievable, that my mind simply could not grasp it at first reading.

My dear Savill, I have most distressing news and I shall not beat about the bush with it. Mrs Savill is no longer in London. I regret to inform you that she left for the Continent by the Rotterdam packet on the 5th inst. Worse still, she was not alone. She was travelling with a man who in London has been passing himself off as the Freiherr George von Streicher, a Bavarian gentleman attached to the Court of the Elector Charles Theodore. Before she embarked, she wrote most impertinently to me saying that she intends to convert to Catholicism, which will enable the Pope to annul your marriage to her and permit her to marry von Streicher. She seems unaware that neither the Pope nor her lover is likely to oblige her in this. Von Streicher is no more a Freiherr than I am and is quite possibly married already. I shall write at greater length by the next packet. Needless to say the scandal is all over London and is causing many difficulties. It is a great pity you did not see fit to take the foolish woman with you to New York. H.R.

Lizzie, I thought – does Lizzie know she has been abandoned by her mother? Another, much worse notion flew into my mind: surely her mother would not have taken her with her to Rotterdam or even Munich? I crumpled the letter into my fist and hammered it against the counter. A hush fell. Men looked up from their letters and stared at me. The clerk took a step towards me, his hand outstretched.

I ignored them all. I left the Post Room and collected Mehitabel from the buttery. She peered strangely at me as we walked away from Headquarters but said nothing.

‘What is it, sir?’ the girl asked me.

‘Nothing.’

‘You’re very pale, sir.’

I looked blankly at her. Then: ‘It need not concern you, child.’