The Scent of Death (50 page)

At that moment there were two gunshots, so close to each other that the second sounded like the echo of the first. All four of us looked towards New York.

‘We’ve been seen,’ Noak said. ‘It’s this confounded moon.’

There were more men on the ice now. A British patrol was making its way towards us, advancing in loose formation. The four of us were approximately the same distance from the rebels on one side and our own people on the other.

‘Come, Mrs Arabella,’ Noak said, ‘further delay would be foolish. Let us declare a truce. We have time to continue our journey if we go now.’ He looked at me. ‘You will not try to prevent us, sir. Not if you care for this lady’s happiness.’

The runaway, I thought, had been called Virgil. Why did they give slaves those ludicrous names? Was it simply a form of mockery?

‘Come, my love,’ I said. ‘Come back with me and we shall find a way to begin again.’

‘It’s too late,’ Arabella said. ‘I wish with all my heart it was not.’

She moved away from me. In the distance, someone shouted.

‘It’s not too late,’ I said. ‘Have faith in me.’

‘You don’t understand.’

‘I understand enough to—’

‘Mr Pickett came to Warren Street twice,’ she interrupted. ‘The second time was by my invitation – Juvenal took my note to Mr Pickett’s lodgings. I told him I would meet him privately at the belvedere and he should come to the garden gate, not the house, and we would discuss our business there. It was in the evening, quite late.’

‘Madam—’ Miriam broke off and turned her back on us.

‘I was playing at backgammon with Miriam when he came,’ Arabella went on. ‘He was an odious man, sir, puffed up with his power over me. He had seen me with Hetty at my breast at Mount George. He wanted the land and he wanted the gold. He even wanted me. And when he touched me and tried to kiss me, I took up my scissors from my sewing basket and I stabbed him in the neck.’

Blood on the backgammon board.

‘He fell to the ground, bringing the table with him. And then I stabbed him in the back to make sure he was dead. Juvenal took the body away in the night and left it in Canvas Town.’

I remembered my first visit to the belvedere, when I had sat there with Judge Wintour and Mrs Arabella. It had been the evening of the day they hanged Virgil for Pickett’s murder.

The air in the belvedere that night had smelled faintly of lemon juice and vinegar. The murder must have left stains and odours behind it, which Arabella and Miriam had done their best to remove.

But they had forgotten the dice.

I had carried the solution to this mystery on my person for months: one die had been caught up among Pickett’s clothing, the other in a crack in the floor; and now both dice were reunited in my waistcoat pocket.

Arabella cried out my name,
Edward
, and the wind snatched it away.

That was all she said. She turned and ran – but not towards the coast of New Jersey and not back to New York. She ran down the invisible stream, her heavy winter pattens tapping on the ice like hammers.

‘Stop, madam, for God’s sake, stop,’ Noak shouted. ‘It’s unsafe.’

Miriam watched her mistress. She did not move.

I ran after Arabella. Despite her pattens and the encumbrance of her clothes, she was already twenty yards ahead of me. I tripped over a jagged outcrop in the ice and fell. I pulled myself up. She had increased her lead. I heard Noak running behind me.

I heard and felt the ice cracking beneath my feet.

Arabella redoubled her efforts. I followed her. There was a burst of distant gunfire. Something hit my left leg just above the knee.

I fell forward. The ice gave way under the impact of my body. Freezing water enveloped my face and my chest. I let go of the axe and it glided into the darkness beneath. I slid inexorably after it.

Noak seized my legs. He tugged me backwards. It must have been him, though I did not see him. The wound in my leg made me shout in agony. But no sound emerged from my mouth, only freezing salt water.

Retching, I lay on my belly under the hard, metallic light of the moon. I remember the keening of the wind and the water that chilled my skin like liquid death. I remember the shots and then more shots.

I remember Arabella Wintour falling, floundering, her arms waving. She said nothing. She did not even scream. I remember thinking, I shall never know now if she cared for me.

I heard the sound of scratching and knocking. Ice speaks in its own language as it fractures and pulls apart. I thought of Arabella on the night that Judge Wintour died: how she came scratching and knocking at my chamber door; and how we lay together, warm and dry, in the featherbed that was as big as an elephant and smelled of otto of roses. Now she was scratching and knocking beneath the ice, begging me to join her.

How I hate memory.

I listened to the scratching and knocking of the ice. I wanted to take Arabella into my embrace and to lie with her, now and always.

Now and always.

Scratching and knocking.

When our soldiers came, I was quite alone.

‘I had hopes that we might remove the leg. But we must not despair. No doubt we shall have another opportunity.’

I did not recognize the man’s voice. His words did not surprise or even interest me. I heard a door open and close. Then there were footsteps receding in the distance. My mind floated like a leaf on the surface of a great darkness and an invisible current bore me away.

Later, perhaps much later, I opened my eyes. Pale light dazzled me. A drum was beating in the far distance.

I saw an old man stooping over me. He had the window behind him and I could not see his face.

‘Ah. You are awake at last.’ He had an Irish accent with a soothing cadence to it. It was the voice that had spoken in the middle of the darkness. ‘I thought it might be today.’

‘You were saying something about a leg, sir.’ My voice was rusty with disuse. ‘My leg?’

‘Indeed.’

‘You want to cut it of
f
?’

‘Yes, there was swelling, you see, and it looked ugly. Had the infection gathered strength, we should have had no alternative but to amputate above the knee.’

‘But – but you said you might have another opportunity.’

‘My dear sir, I did not mean your leg necessarily. I hope that we will not be obliged to take it off. Besides, I am not at all particular about these things. Any leg will do, so long as it conforms to the general pattern of a leg, if you take my meaning. You must not concern yourself about it in the slightest.’

His voice flowed softly. Some peculiarity of his mouth meant that every now and then a faint and not unmelodious whistle mingled with what he was saying. I grew more interested in the whistles than the words. What key were they in? Did the ghost of a fragmentary tune inform their apparently arbitrary nature? In a while I was asleep again, leaving these questions unresolved.

Later, it was dark. A candle burned on the table by the bed. Someone was washing my face in warm water, the cloth scraping over the bristle on my chin. My left foot was acutely painful. My nurse was a man who hissed like an ostler grooming a horse. He wore a long bloodstained apron over his clothes.

‘Where am I?’

He paused in his wiping and hissing. ‘So you’re talking now, eh? I’ll tell the doctor.’ He folded up his cloth and picked up the basin of water. ‘This is King’s College, sir. Though you won’t find much book-learning here apart from Dr Clossy’s lectures.’

Dr Samuel Clossy was the Irishman with the whistle in his voice. He was, I learned later, a distinguished physician who had served as the college’s Professor of Anatomy in happier days. He had returned to the city when the rebels were forced to abandon it. The army had converted the college buildings to a combination of military hospital and barracks. He put his knowledge to good use and served as a surgeon’s mate on the wards. He also found time to lecture to his younger colleagues on anatomy.

‘They are sadly deficient in their knowledge, sir,’ he told me in one of our first conversations when my mind was lucid once more. ‘I was in hopes of dissecting both your knee and your foot on their behalves. The foot, as I’m sure you know, is remarkably complex in its anatomical organization. Quite fascinating.’

Dr Clossy was an amiable old man who longed to return to his native Ireland. It was he who told me that it was now February. When they had brought me in, I had been suffering from cold and exhaustion, as well as from the wound in
my leg.
I had nearly lost a finger and two of my toes from frostbite.

He claimed to know nothing of the circumstances that had led to my admission. Indeed, for all his gossiping, he told me very little. But on the first day that I was allowed to leave my bed and sit by the fire for a few minutes, he mentioned with a casual air that I need not fear unwelcome visitors during my convalescence because there was a guard on my door.

By now I remembered almost everything until the moment on the ice when the soldiers had come.

The very next day Major Marryot called on me. I heard him talking to the sentry outside and I recognized his voice. He limped into the room with a scowl on his face. I was propped against the pillows of my bed and staring at the rectangle of grey sky beyond the window.

‘Good day, sir,’ he said with an awkward bow. ‘I’m glad to see you more yourself.’

I acknowledged his greeting but could not be troubled to speak to him. I was still very weak and my mind, though perfectly clear, wearied quickly with any exertion.

He walked about the room for a moment and then stopped abruptly with his back to the window, blocking the light. ‘This is a bad business, Mr Savill. General Clinton is most concerned. The Commandant has ordered an inquiry. You will have to appear before it in due course.’

‘I wish to go home,’ I said.

Marryot chewed his lip for a moment. Then he limped over to the bed and sat down heavily in the chair beside it. ‘I can tell you confidentially,’ he said in a low voice, ‘that it would save a good deal of time if you were to speak frankly to me now, in private – before you go to the board, I mean. We need not make this worse than it is.’

‘Make what worse?’

‘This Noak affair.’

I was too tired for this so I fell back on ignorance. ‘Noak? What about him?’

‘Surely you remember?’

‘I remember very little at present.’

He stared at me. He looked older than before and there was a sprinkling of grey among the stubble on his chin. ‘What do you remember then?’

‘The fête at Hicks Tavern. I believe I was attacked on my return to Warren Street. But I did not see my assailant.’

‘In the street or in the house?’

I remembered Miriam waiting for me in the belvedere. ‘I don’t remember. But I went in by the garden gate. I suppose they must have been waiting there.’

‘But the servants said you came back to the house the next night. And that you were distraught and had received that wound on your face.’

I put my hand up and touched my cheek. A long, hard scab ran from the eye to the corner of the mouth. It itched infernally because of my own stubble, which was now almost a beard.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was held in a cellar in Canvas Town. But they left me alone and I contrived to escape.’

‘Who was it?’

‘I never saw them. Not properly. It was dark.’

‘But surely you heard them?’ he prompted. ‘They must have said something.’

‘Nothing of any account. I took them for rogues. They stank, I know that.’

‘Where was this cellar?’

‘How should I know, sir? I told you, it was dark, and when I escaped I ran – I didn’t ask for directions from passers-by.’

Marryot scowled at me, his sickroom manners forgotten. ‘Very well. But tell me why you went out again almost as soon as you reached Warren Street.’

‘Because I found Judge Wintour was dead —’ I broke off, for tears had welled into my eyes. I realized I was weaker than I had thought. After a moment I went on: ‘I learned from the servants that Mrs Arabella and her maid had gone to stay with the Townleys.’

‘Why should she have done that?’

‘You must ask Mr Townley.’

‘I can’t,’ Marryot said. ‘He’s dead.’

As a clerk in government service I have learned that silence is almost always a better tactic than speech. I expressed shock and sorrow when I heard of Townley’s death but said nothing more. Marryot told me that he had been murdered at Norman’s Slip and that the circumstances were still under investigation.

Within a day or two I was able to walk with the aid of a stick across my room. I never discovered where the bullet that hit my left leg came from, their side or ours. Perhaps that was only to be expected. War is a foolish business at best.

If I had not been brought down by the bullet, could I have saved Arabella? And if I had, what then?

Dr Clossy had extracted the ball and the wound was at last healing. He told me that, in his opinion, it had not done much lasting damage. He recommended a regimen of gentle exercise as my health improved. I might not regain the full vigour of the limb but I would not be a cripple.

A soldier brought me a change of linen and a suit of clothes, which he had fetched from Warren Street. When I was dressed, I was permitted to leave my room under escort. I discovered that I was in a hospital ward on the second floor of the main block of the college. The ward had been allocated to patients who required, for one reason or another, the luxury of a room to themselves. Many of them were in great pain and I had often heard them crying out like the souls of the damned, particularly in the nighttime.

When Marryot returned, I told him that a servant at Warren Street had heard Mr Townley talking about Norman’s Slip to Mrs Arabella. I believed that she wished to cross the lines and join the rebels. She had let slip something to that effect as I was leaving to go to Hicks Tavern. But she was talking so wildly in her grief that I had not taken her seriously.