The Scent of Death
The Scent of Death
Andrew Taylor
*WINNER of the Ellis Peters Historical Dagger Award 2013*‘Andrew Taylor wrote superb historical fiction long before Hilary Mantel was popular’ Daily TelegraphFrom the No.1 bestselling author of THE AMERICAN BOY comes a new historical thriller set during the American War of Independence.‘This is the story of a woman and a city. I saw the city first, shimmering from afar like the new Jerusalem in the setting sun. It was Sunday, 2nd August 1778.’Edward Savill, a London clerk from the American Department, is assigned to New York to investigate the claims of dispossessed loyalists caught on the wrong side of the American War of Independence.Surrounded by its enemies, British Manhattan is a melting pot of soldiers, profiteers, double agents and a swelling tide of refugees seeking justice from the Crown.Savill lodges with the respected Wintour family: the old Judge, his ailing wife and their enigmatic daughter-in-law Arabella. The family lives in limbo, praying for the safe return of Jack Wintour, Arabella's husband, who is missing behind rebel lines.The discovery of a body in the notorious slums of Canvas Town thrusts Savill into a murder inquiry. But in the escalating violence of a desperate city, why does one death matter? Because the secret this killing hides could be the key to power for whoever uncovers it…
Praise for The Scent of Death
‘Andrew Taylor has been quietly producing superb historical fiction since long before Hilary Mantel’s Man Booker wins bestowed literary respectability on the genre … He has the first-rate historian’s ability to channel the spirit of his period and let it speak for itself, combined with a masterly command of plotting and pace. His hair’s-breadth-escape set pieces are superb’
Daily Telegraph
‘Andrew Taylor’s epic historical detective novel is an absorbing and harrowing tale of the last part of America under British rule … The 18th century voice is beautifully achieved: Taylor is as good at this period as C J Sansom is at Tudor England, and like him pulls off novels that work both as literary fiction and detective stories … The mud, blood, corruption and cruelty of early Manhattan ratchet up the suspense’
Independent
‘The narrative unfolds with a leisurely confidence that allows unhurried opportunities for character and motivation to emerge. As the plot satisfyingly thickens to take in profiteering, and love and sex across the racial divide, Taylor once again shows how skilful a historical novelist he is’
Sunday Times
‘Andrew Taylor is an expert in the realm of murder and mystery fiction … The Scent of Death is a triumph of genre plotting: a detective story, and a piece of period writing that excites and surprises in equal measure … Taylor recognizes that successful page-turners come from the author removing himself from view and simply concentrating on telling a story that keeps readers interested to the end. In this respect, The Scent of Death undoubtedly and thrillingly succeeds’
Spectator
‘Andrew Taylor’s historical crime fiction is always an event. Ten years ago The American Boy, a gothic tale of the young Edgar Allan Poe in Regency England, deservedly won him a second CWA Historical Dagger. The Anatomy of Ghosts, from 2010, was both rambunctious and chilling, stripping away the demure veneer of Cambridge to reveal a wilder, and weirder, underside. Now he turns to Manhattan, although not as we know it’
Guardian
‘Taylor has emerged as an historical novelist with a rare gift for mood and atmosphere – especially the 18th century’
i
‘Andrew Taylor is one of the most imaginative historical mystery novelists writing today. Expect this to appear on a lot of “Best Of 2013” lists’
Globe and Mail
ANDREW TAYLOR
The Scent of Death
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street,
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2013
Copyright © Andrew Taylor 2013
Prelims map credit © Nicolette Caven 2013
Cover layout © HarperCollinsPublishers 2013
Cover photographs © Roy Bishop / Arcangel Images (iron gate); Jill Battaglia / Arcangel Images (figure); Shutterstock (house)
Designed by www.emma-rogers.com (http://www.emma-rogers.com)
Andrew Taylor asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007213535
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2014 ISBN: 9780007564644
Version: 2015-07-20
To Will with love
Table of Contents
Praise for The Scent of Death (#u239fbc82-e443-5d39-b077-193bdc2b8f26)
Title Page (#u8e72380e-ed02-5232-8ba6-c30b7b313c36)
Copyright (#u9d082709-8322-5b8a-8fb6-153fa11132b8)
Dedication (#u318db22a-b70a-5542-b128-e78e8bbff3f9)
Map (#ub9049d5f-8601-5697-acf1-85b9d496f3a8)
Chapter One (#u8eb07240-6ec6-5940-a572-59612bd4f0f9)
Chapter Two (#u4a106bb3-ae56-571f-b0f7-98226a811118)
Chapter Three (#ue7793f69-bfe7-5ce6-a7bd-b8715c09979f)
Chapter Four (#u074919e6-f067-5ad9-a930-fcebec594f83)
Chapter Five (#ub6b1fafb-b72e-5f03-83b3-fbec71b68836)
Chapter Six (#u49b6abb0-7284-50f3-a157-856ccaf10695)
Chapter Seven (#u35dab7ea-5c79-57d2-a5ef-09178da76120)
Chapter Eight (#u08de22b5-73f2-5d57-a207-2ca0d5a1dc54)
Chapter Nine (#u888bd366-37f4-52bd-ae62-e186bb92d8cc)
Chapter Ten (#ufb3d3c6f-8946-5598-bda1-085ce1f69d42)
Chapter Eleven (#u2f648820-031f-5c25-ad58-d49e144ae0e7)
Chapter Twelve (#u351dbbe2-b794-5bd9-a1f9-5f5f172e97ab)
Chapter Thirteen (#u7f555d36-5c2c-5162-8d6f-052927a969ac)
Chapter Fourteen (#u30f141b8-6cbe-5692-83b1-79c7a23ee3e9)
Chapter Fifteen (#ud0ef66bd-daaa-53fd-ab27-8c12e24c794e)
Chapter Sixteen (#u5c11525f-551c-5858-8c04-0eb457394baa)
Chapter Seventeen (#ue04508fe-574d-5f8d-a5c9-1dae467bf58c)
Chapter Eighteen (#ub3def388-beb8-542c-a480-2396c3b134f1)
Chapter Nineteen (#u08a91aa8-e8e4-538e-b845-16c396cc83ed)
Chapter Twenty (#u0b525398-ba15-53a3-96e3-5601abe243bf)
Chapter Twenty-One (#ue9c2132f-d159-5bc2-8caa-9e403a94286f)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#ub2385dde-5fb9-5a23-8da7-55d53aef5bfc)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Afterword (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the same author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One
This is the story of a woman and a city. I saw the city first, glimpsing it from afar as it shimmered like the new Jerusalem in the light of the setting sun. I smelled the sweetness of the land and sensed the nearness of green, growing things after the weeks on the barren ocean. We had just passed through the narrows between Long and Staten islands and come into Upper New York Bay. It was Sunday, 2 August 1778.
The following morning, Mr Noak and I came up on deck an hour or two after dawn. The city was now close at hand. In the hard light of day it lost its celestial qualities and was revealed as a paltry, provincial sort of place.
We had heard that a conflagration had broken out during the night. Nevertheless, it came as something of a shock to see the broad pall of smoke hanging over the southern end of the island, which was where the city was. The stink of burning wafted across the water. Fires smouldered among the stumps of blackened buildings. Men scurried along the wharves that lined the docks. A file of soldiers moved to the beat of an invisible drum.
‘It’s as if the town has been sacked,’ I said.
Noak leaned on the rail. ‘The Captain says it must have been set deliberately, Mr Savill. This is the second fire, you know. The other was two years ago. They blamed the rebels then, just as they do now.’
‘Surely New York is loyal?’
‘For some people, sir, loyalty is a commodity,’ Noak said. ‘And, like any other commodity, I suppose it can be bought and sold.’
Above the smoke the sky was already a hard clear blue. I borrowed a glass from a young officer who was taking the air on deck. Most of the surviving houses of the city were of brick and tile, four or five storeys and crowned with shingles painted in a variety of faded colours. Some had balconies on their roofs, and already I could make out the tiny figures of people moving about above the streets. Many buildings nearer the southern tip had steeply gabled Dutch façades, relics of the days when the town had been called New Amsterdam.
‘I confess I had expected a finer prospect,’ I said. ‘Something more like a city.’
‘It looked well enough before the war, sir. But looks deceive at the best of times. Believe me, there is great wealth here. The possibility of profit. And the possibility of so much more.’
I looked down at the grey-green water running with the tide along the line of the hull. The oily surface was spotted with soot carried on the south-westerly breeze. The fire had broken out in the very early hours of the morning.
A large, pale rag billowed just below the surface of the water. Seagulls fluttered above it, crying like the souls of the damned. The rag snagged on a rope trailing from the ship to a dinghy alongside. The current made the cloth twitch as if alive. A few yards away from us, the young officer who had lent me his glass was standing by the rail. He swore under his breath.
The rag had a long tail, barely visible beneath it and entangled with the rope. It made me think of a merman or some other strange creature of the sea. The officer said a few sharp words to a sailor who, a moment later, leaned over the side with a long boathook.
‘Distressing,’ Mr Noak said, and clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth.
I glanced at him. ‘What is?’
Noak nodded at the merman. The sailor had twisted the boathook into the rag. The water slapped and curled around it, growing cloudier and greyer.
Looks deceive at the best of times. Not a rag, I thought. A shirt.
The sailor heaved the boathook and its burden upwards. The shirt rose a few inches above the water. It twisted. The water around it was filthy now. There was a sucking sound as if the merman had smacked his lips. A waft of foul air rose up, forcing us to step back and cover our noses and mouths. Three seagulls swooped closer, sheering away at the last moment.
For an instant I saw the merman’s face – or, to be more exact, I saw where the face would have been, had it not been eaten almost entirely away by the creatures of the deep. Nor did the merman have a tail. Instead, two legs waved behind it. I glimpsed discoloured flesh flaking from swollen thighs and I smelled rotting meat.
The body fell back into the water. The current drew it swiftly away from the ship, and with it went the smell.
‘Can they not even bury the dead?’ I said.
The officer had heard me. ‘He was probably a prisoner from one of the hulks upstream, sir. Most of them are sailors from captured privateers. They tip them over the side.’
‘Do they not merit something better than this?’
His round, good-natured face split into a smile. ‘But there are so many of the knaves, sir, and he was only a rebel, after all.’
‘Cheaper, too,’ Noak pointed out. ‘Though as far as His Majesty’s Treasury is concerned it will come to the same thing. No doubt someone will claim the allowances due – for the shroud, the cost of committal and so on.’
I looked downstream. In the distance, the seagulls danced like blackened cinders against the blue sky. The body was no longer visible. The sea was greedy.
‘As I told you, sir,’ Noak went on, ‘there is the possibility of profit here, and that is true even in wartime. Indeed, perhaps more so than in peace.’
This was the first dead body that I saw in New York, and the first of the two dead men I saw that very day. As an individual, this one meant nothing to me, then or now. He and I had nothing in common apart from our shared humanity. I would never learn his name or how he died or who had thrown his corpse into the East River.
Chapter Two
I had met Samuel Noak on the voyage from England.
Mr Rampton, my patron, had arranged my passage on the Earl of Sandwich, a Post Office packet of which he was part-owner. The ship’s principal purpose was to carry the mails to and from North America and the West Indies. The owners supplemented the considerable income they derived from this by squeezing a handful of passengers into the cramped cabins. Most of them were, like myself, travelling on official business. But there were a few who made the voyage in a private capacity. Such a one was Mr Noak.
He and I were thrown into immediate intimacy for we were obliged to share a cabin little bigger than the commodious kennel that housed Mr Rampton’s mastiff at his house in the country. Noak was a small, spare man who wore his own sandy hair with only a modicum of powder for gentility’s sake and tied it with a brown ribbon. He scraped back the hair so tightly that the bones of his face seemed to poke through the skin. His figure was youthful but he might have been any age between twenty and forty. He spoke with a thin, nasal voice, and always with deliberation, in an accent that I later discovered was characteristic of his native Massachusetts. There was something of the puritan about him, a sourness of mien.
Even before we had weighed anchor, I resolved to keep a proper distance between Mr Noak and myself during the passage to New York. But I had not reckoned with the peculiar swaying motion of the ocean, let alone with the terrifying effects of rough weather.
Within a few hours of our leaving Falmouth, I descended into an abyss of spiritual and physical suffering. I was convinced that I was dying – that the ship was sinking; and my condition was so miserable that, for all I cared, the world might end in the next instant, which would at least put a period to my agonies.
It was then that I began to see Samuel Noak in a different light. For it was he who sponged my brow, who emptied my basin, who assisted me to the heads. It was he who forced me to undergo what he assured me was an old naval remedy for mal de mer: to wit, to swallow a lump of greasy pork again and again until the stomach no longer had strength to resist it.
Slowly, over the long days and longer nights, my symptoms subsided. Mr Noak brought me Souchong tea laced with rum and spooned it into my mouth, which eased my aching gut and at last encouraged me to fall into the first unbroken sleep I had enjoyed since leaving England.
Given Noak’s kindness, I could hardly hold the man at arm’s length, even if I had wished to do so. As I recovered, we slipped by degrees into a relationship that was something less than friendship but much more than mere acquaintance. It is difficult not to be civil to a man who has restored you to life.
‘Will you remain in New York, sir?’ I asked him one afternoon. The weather was calmer now, and we were strolling on deck after dinner. ‘Or do you travel on?’
‘No, sir – I have a position waiting for me in the city. A clerk’s desk in a contractor’s house. A friend of my uncle’s procured it for me.’
‘I’m surprised you should wish to leave London. The opportunities must be far greater there.’
‘True,’ he said. ‘But in New York I shall be a senior clerk, whereas in London I had no hope of advancement at all. Besides, I had a desire to see my native land again.’
‘Where were you employed?’
‘At Mr Yelland’s in the Middle Temple, sir. I had been there for three years.’
‘I believe I know the gentleman. That is to say, I have come across him once or twice.’
‘Indeed?’
‘I have a position at the American Department,’ I explained. ‘As you know, Mr Yelland acts as the British man of business for many Loyalists. He sometimes favours us with communications on their behalf.’
That was an understatement, as Noak must surely have known. Mr Yelland was one of several London attorneys who had reason to bless this unnecessary war, for it was proving very lucrative for them. He and his colleagues kept up a steady flow of letters to the Department. London was packed with displaced Loyalists who were convinced that the American Department owed them compensation for the losses they had sustained because of their attachment to the Crown.
‘Will you stay long in New York, sir?’ Mr Noak asked after a pause.
‘A month. Possibly two. Lord George has entrusted me with a commission and I do not know how long it will take.’
Mr Noak nodded, as if making a token obeisance to the august name of Lord George Germain, the Secretary of State for the American Department. The truth of my appointment was more prosaic: Mr Rampton, one of the two under secretaries, had decided that I should go to New York. Lord George had signed the necessary order, but I was not perfectly convinced that His Lordship knew who I was.
‘Perhaps we may encounter one another there,’ Noak said.
‘Perhaps, sir,’ I agreed, privately resolving that for my part I would not pursue the acquaintance once we reached America.
‘Where will you lodge?’
‘At Judge Wintour’s. He is an old friend of Mr Rampton, the under secretary.’
‘Ah yes,’ he said. ‘Of course.’
‘Are you acquainted with the Judge?’
‘Only by reputation, sir.’ Mr Noak paused. ‘They say his daughter-in-law is a great beauty.’
‘Indeed.’
‘And the heiress to Mount George, as well.’
‘I believe the air is growing chilly. I think I shall go below.’
‘Once seen,’ Mr Noak said quietly, ‘never forgotten. That’s what they say. Mrs Arabella Wintour, I mean.’
Chapter Three
At midday, a single cannon boomed from the battery commanding the entrance of the North and East rivers.
‘The noon gun, sir,’ the young officer told me with a knowing air as he took out his watch to adjust the time. ‘You’ll soon be ashore.’
Twenty minutes later, we were at last permitted to disembark. We were brought in at Beekman’s Slip upriver from the Brooklyn ferry to keep us at a distance from the still-smouldering fire.
The quayside was thronged with soldiers, seamen, officials and porters. It had grown even hotter, with a close, airless warmth. I threaded my way between boxes, barrels and ropes. Men barged into me. Once I tripped and nearly fell. After five weeks aboard a ship, dry land had become alien, even hostile.
Despite my official standing, I was obliged to wait my turn to show my papers and explain my business to three separate individuals. Meanwhile the baggage was brought ashore. A line of glistening negros carried it to the customs shed. The few passengers from the Earl of Sandwich joined the queue outside where new arrivals sweltered in the sun.
The south-westerly breeze had dispersed most of the smoke. Beyond the shed the buildings of the shabby little city stretched away to the west, sloping gently up towards the soot-stained tower of a ruined church. Mr Noak had told me that this was Trinity Church, damaged in the first fire two years earlier just after the rebels had evacuated New York, when so many houses and public buildings had been destroyed. He wondered why no one had troubled to repair it.
There was a stir at the guard-post by the entrance to the slip. A moment later a portly gentleman strode towards the customs house with the sergeant of the guard on one side and a harbour official on the other. The latter indicated me with a wave of his hand, and the gentleman surged forward, sweeping off his hat. He was a tall, finely dressed man with an upright carriage and florid face.
‘Mr Savill?’ he said, waving a crisp lawn handkerchief like a signal flag. ‘Your servant, sir. I’m Charles Townley, and so very much at your service. A thousand pardons – you should not have to stand about in this heat. I should have been here to greet you two hours ago but my clerk is ill and, to make matters ten times worse, this damned fire has thrown everything awry.’
Mr Townley’s arrival had an instant effect on my fortunes. A customs official hurried over with two negros carrying my boxes and valises. There was no need, the official said, for the formality of searching them and, at Mr Townley’s suggestion, he would have them instantly conveyed to Judge Wintour’s house. My pass was countersigned and I was free to go.
As I left, I bowed to Mr Noak, waiting silently in the queue, and said something civilly non-committal about our no doubt meeting again.
‘Who was that?’ Townley asked as we passed the barrier manned by two sweating sentries.
‘A shipboard acquaintance,’ I said. ‘No one in particular.’
‘You will not mind if we walk, I hope? We have not far to go and it will be quicker on a day like this.’
For the first few hundred yards, the solid ground felt unyielding and inhospitable beneath my feet. Nor was the city itself more welcoming – it was a veritable anthill, packed with hurrying, wild-eyed people, many of them carrying their belongings on their backs, and with wagons and carriages rumbling over the stones. The streets were paved and tree-lined but narrow. I felt the buildings were closing in on me and yet, after the confined ship, there was also an unsettling sense of limitless space. The air smelled strongly of burning.
‘It’s busy enough on any other day,’ Townley observed. ‘But the fire has made everything ten times worse. The world and his wife are abroad. If they haven’t lost their homes then they wish to gawp at those who have.’
‘Is the damage considerable, sir?’
‘Bad enough. Fifty or sixty houses are gone – perhaps more. It began in the middle of the night over there to your left, near Cruger’s Wharf and Dock Street. We have fire engines, of course, but our men were overwhelmed by the speed of it, and there were difficulties with the pumps.’
‘Has there been loss of life?’
‘No, we have been spared that, I believe. Through the mercy of God.’
‘The Captain told us that the fire may have been laid deliberately.’
Townley nodded. ‘It’s a strong possibility, in my opinion. The rebels care nothing for their fellow Americans. They endanger the lives of the innocent without a second thought. I believe the Commandant is to post a reward of a hundred and twenty guineas for information about the incendiaries.’
He took me first to Headquarters, a short step away, for all newcomers to the city were obliged to register with the authorities.
‘You should meet Major Marryot as soon as possible,’ Townley said. ‘I had hoped to make you known to him now, but his clerk says he has been called away. You will see a good deal of him, I’m sure, in the course of your duties. He deals with both the Provost Marshal and the city’s Superintendent of Police, as well as with the Deputy Adjutant General.’
‘In that case, sir, would you be good enough to direct me to Judge Wintour’s? I should pay my respects to my host.’
‘Ah.’ Townley tapped his nose, which reminded me of an axehead bent a few degrees out of true. ‘I am before you there, sir. I called on the Judge this morning with the news of your arrival. He asked me to convey his compliments to you, of course, and he begs you will do him the favour of calling on him after dinner, when they will have everything in readiness for you. But you must permit me to turn the delay to my own advantage. It would give me immense pleasure if you would dine with me.’
I accepted. Townley took my arm. We walked down Broadway to avoid the remains of the fire to the south. In this part of town, the buildings on either side of the road were mostly in a ruinous condition, casualties of the earlier fire in ’76. Further eastwards however, the street became pleasant and tree-lined, though a man had to watch where he walked, for it was very dirty.
‘I believe Mr Rampton was acquainted with the Wintours when he himself was in America?’ Townley said after a moment’s silence.
‘Yes, sir. Mr Rampton served for a time as Attorney-General of Georgia and he greatly valued the Judge’s advice on legal matters.’
Townley guided us round the corner into Wall Street. ‘I am afraid the Wintours are much altered since Mr Rampton knew them.’ His grip tightened momentarily on my arm. ‘And for the worse.’
Chapter Four
Mr Townley had arranged for a room to be set aside at the Merchants Coffee House. The place was on the corner with a fine view of the masts and rigging of ships in the harbour, which lay at the far end of Wall Street. It was a genteel establishment with a balcony running along the tall windows of the principal assembly rooms upstairs.
‘They know me pretty well here,’ Townley said as we went inside. ‘I think I can promise you a tolerable dinner.’
Ceiling fans turned slowly in the big room on the ground floor. It was packed with gentlemen, many of whom seemed acquainted with Mr Townley and anxious to exchange bows with him. But Townley refused to be diverted. He led me through the throng, past a row of booths whose privacy was guarded with green-baize curtains, and up the stairs. On the landing, a negro footman in livery was waiting to show us into a small parlour where a table was laid for three.
‘I had hoped that Major Marryot would join us,’ Townley explained. ‘No matter. We can talk more confidentially without him.’
There was a tap on the door and the servants brought in the dinner. While we ate, Mr Townley asked me for news from London. He was eager to hear what people were thinking and doing, and the more I told him, the more pleased he was.
‘You must pardon my appetite for information,’ he said. ‘We are starved for it. It’s bad enough in peacetime when the mails are better. But nowadays we fasten like leeches on every newcomer and suck him dry as fast as we can.’
When the cloth had been withdrawn, Townley pushed back his chair, crossed his legs and passed me the bottle. ‘And now we can be comfortable, sir. What are they saying about the war in the American Department? I know Lord George has no secrets from Mr Rampton, and Mr Rampton can have no secrets from you.’ His left eyelid drooped in a wink and he nudged my arm.
I inclined my head but said nothing.
‘There’s much to be said for keeping these things in the family,’ Townley went on. ‘It is a question of loyalty, quite aside from anything else. Whom can one trust but one’s own kin and their connections?’
‘Indeed,’ I said, though I rather doubted Mr Rampton trusted anybody at all.
‘And – apart from the domestic felicity that no doubt lies in store for you on your return to England – this must mean you are quite the coming man in the Department.’
Our conversation turned to the war. Earlier this year, the entry of France on the rebel side had come as a heavy blow. No longer could we take our control of the American seaboard for granted; and there was the constant threat that the French would compel us to divert our resources to the West Indies or even further afield.
‘Sir Henry Clinton keeps his own counsel,’ Townley said. ‘Between ourselves, sir, there are many Loyalists in this city who cannot understand the General’s inactivity.’
‘But you do not doubt our ability to win, sir?’
‘Of course not. Congress will lose this war in the end: it lacks the gold it needs to buy weapons and pay its men and feed its people. None of us can do without money, eh? It’s a bitter pill for those damned Whigs to swallow – their soldiers want guineas, for all they carry the King’s head on them. The dollar is a laughing stock, barely worth the paper it is printed on. If we Tories but hold our nerve, sir, and prosecute the war with determination, we cannot help but win.’
Townley hammered the table in his enthusiasm and proposed that we drink His Majesty’s health again. Afterwards, he turned the conversation to Major Marryot.
‘It is providential that he could not be here with us,’ he said. ‘A word in your private ear before you meet may not come amiss. You may find him – how shall I put it? – a little brusque. He may not be disposed to make your task less burdensome, even if it lies within his power.’
‘Why, sir? I have no quarrel with the Major.’
My host fanned himself with his handkerchief, now stained with wine. ‘You know what soldiers are. Marryot instinctively distrusts any man who doesn’t wear a red coat. He was wounded at White Plains, you know, and as a result is quite lame in the left leg, which has not improved a temper already inclined towards the choleric. Add to this the usual prejudices of a true-born Englishman …’
‘Forgive me, sir,’ I said, ‘but I do not understand how this would influence his behaviour towards me.’
Townley dabbed with his handkerchief at the moisture on his forehead, which ran in gleaming rivulets through the powder that had fallen from his wig. ‘He does not have much time for the American Department,’ he said. ‘Particularly when it bestirs itself to protect in some small way the interests of the Loyalists.’ He paused, and then added, ‘His father was killed at Minden. He served in the Twenty-third.’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Yes, I see.’
All of us in the Department knew the power of that one word, Minden. Lord George Germain had everything the world could offer – rank, wealth, position, the confidence of his sovereign – but the memory of the battle of Minden was a curse on him he had never contrived to exorcise. Nearly twenty years earlier, he had commanded the British cavalry against the French at the battle. He was widely believed to have disobeyed an order to attack, which had led to many casualties. He had been court-martialled and censured; some said he was lucky to have escaped execution, others that he had been cruelly misjudged. His wealth, connections and ability had enabled him to put the affair behind him. But the army remembered.
‘Putting that on one side for a moment, sir,’ I said quickly. ‘You implied on our way here that Judge Wintour has had his difficulties.’
‘Poor man. He has suffered a deal of sorrow in the last few years. He does not go much abroad now, either – so you may find he is not au courant with—’
There was a knock at the door. A footman entered with a letter. Murmuring an apology, Mr Townley broke the seal and unfolded the sheet of paper. Breathing heavily, he held it at arm’s length and read the contents with a frown deepening on his forehead.
He looked up. ‘I regret, sir, I’m called away.’ He tapped the letter. ‘Talk of the devil, eh? This comes from the Major himself. They have found a body in Canvas Town. So that was why he was not in the way at Headquarters.’
‘Perhaps I should accompany you, sir? After all …’
He nodded, taking my meaning, for his understanding was as quick as any man’s. ‘Indeed – if you are not too fatigued, of course. This is just the sort of affair for you. By the way, Marryot writes that, judging by his dress, the dead man was a gentleman. And I’m afraid there’s no doubt about it: the poor fellow met his end by violent means.’
Chapter Five
The eyes were open, though the orbs were now dull, dry and speckled with dust. The irises were a cloudy blue. The whites were fretted with networks of red veins as delicate as a spider’s thread.
‘Not much blood,’ Townley said. ‘I’d have expected more.’
It was very hot. The sweat was pouring off me. I stared at the sightless eyes. It was better than looking at the terrible wound on the neck.
Another dead body, I told myself, that is all. But this body was worse than the first of the day, the decaying merman floating in the harbour. Standing on the deck of the Earl of Sandwich, Noak and I had been safely removed from the corpse in the water; and then the kindly tide had borne it away into the ocean, out of sight and out of mind. But this body was so near that, if I had wished, I could have bent down and touched its stockinged feet. This body still looked like someone.
A fly landed on the corpse’s left eye but transferred itself almost at once to the dark, dried blood on the neck. My stomach heaved. Hand on mouth, I ducked away from the knot of men around the body and vomited up what I could of our long, luxurious dinner. One of the soldiers began to laugh but strangled the sound at birth.
‘For God’s sake,’ Marryot said, not troubling to lower his voice. ‘Sergeant, cover the face. It distresses Mr Savill.’
‘Who is the man?’ Townley said, perhaps in a charitable attempt to divert attention from me. ‘Do you know?’
‘No idea. Nothing in the pockets. No rings, though there’s the mark of one on his right hand.’
‘They’ve picked him clean.’
‘It would be strange if they hadn’t. If he’d been here an hour or two longer, he’d have been as naked as the day he was born. The people here are no better than jackals.’
The sergeant stepped back, having arranged a cloth over the corpse’s face.
‘I think I’ve seen him before,’ Townley said. ‘I’m not perfectly convinced of it, mind you, but I believe he was in church yesterday.’
‘Newly arrived?’
‘Probably. In which case the Commandant will have a note of him.’
I straightened up and wiped my mouth. Townley smiled at me. We were standing in a rectangular enclosure of soot-stained bricks, formerly the cellar of a house, one of those destroyed in the great fire of ’76. The only traces of it now were the blackened stumps of what had once been the joists supporting the floor above. A ragged canvas sheet, the remains of a patched sail, had been draped across one corner to make a primitive shelter. They had found the body there – not exactly concealed, but not in plain sight from above, either.
Marryot turned to the sergeant. ‘Have them bring the door. Look sharp.’
The body lay in an unnaturally contorted huddle of limbs, one shoulder against the wall. The man was short and thickset, with a yellowy, unhealthy complexion like old wax. He had been stabbed at least twice, once in the neck and once in the back. He wore a grey suit of clothes, the breeches much soiled. He had lost his wig along with his hat, but there were still traces of powder on his face and on the stubble on the scalp. I wondered what had happened to his shoes.
Two soldiers lowered a panelled door into the cellar. The sergeant and another soldier each took a leg of the corpse and dragged it on to the makeshift litter. The jaw of the dead man fell open, revealing the stumps of three blackened teeth. Townley covered his nose with his wine-stained handkerchief.
‘Christ,’ Marryot said. ‘I swear he’s beginning to smell already. This damned heat. The sooner we get him underground the better.’
The soldiers heaved the body on to the door. A white speck danced across the earth floor where the body had lain and came to rest against the wall. I bent down and picked it up.
‘Mr Savill?’ Townley said. ‘What have you found?’
I held out my hand, palm upwards.
Marryot turned towards us. ‘What’s this?’
‘A die,’ I said. ‘It was either under the body or lodged in the clothes.’
‘A gambler, and the game went awry?’ The Major addressed his words to Townley. ‘We’ll make enquiries, but I doubt we’ll ever know for certain.’
‘You do not think he might have had something to do with the fire?’ Townley asked.
‘I don’t think anything at all if I can help it,’ Marryot said. ‘Not in this goddam heat.’
He limped away, dragging his left leg behind him, and led the way up the steps at one end of the cellar into what had once been the yard at the back of the house. I dropped the little die in my pocket and followed with Townley.
The long afternoon had turned into evening. It was still light but the sun was now low in the sky. To the south-west were a few wisps of smoke, the remnants of the fire.
I looked about me. I had never seen a landscape of such utter desolation. According to Townley, this area had been the heart of the first fire, two years earlier, which had broken out near Whitehall Slip and, driven by changing winds, had spread a swathe of destruction through much of the city. The authorities had been ill-prepared for the conflagration and, to make matters worse, many of the buildings had been partly of wood, as dry as tinder from the long summer heat. Reconstruction had been postponed until after the war.
The ruins had long since been looted of anything of value that their owners had left behind. Now, Townley had told me, much of the area was known as Canvas Town, for it had become home to the worst elements in New York – deserters, vagrants, pickpockets, whores, murderers – in short, all the riff-raff of peace allied to the rogues and vagabonds of war. Temporary sailcloth shelters had sprung up, propped against chimneystacks and ruined walls. Respectable citizens rarely ventured into this piecemeal and provisional quarter of the city, particularly after nightfall.
Three more private soldiers, the rest of Marryot’s patrol, were waiting at ground level. One of them was standing on the roadway, holding the head of a broken-down nag that stood between the shafts of a small cart. They were not alone. A score or so of ragged men and women were watching the proceedings from a safe distance. Among them was a gaunt little boy, a tawny-skinned mulatto of ten or eleven years of age, leading a goat by a rope. A sign on the wall said that this was, or had been, Deyes Street.
‘Scarcely human, are they?’ Townley murmured in my ear. ‘But what can we do? If we had them thrown into gaol, the charge to the city would be intolerable. Besides, the gaols are full of rebels already. In my view, sir, these knaves should be rounded up and hanged – or be turned loose to fend for themselves in the Debatable Ground. It would be kindness to them and a relief to the respectable class of citizen.’
The watchers scattered as the rest of the party appeared from the cellar. The goat had a bell around its neck and it tinkled as it followed the boy. Only one man lingered – a tall negro wearing the faded red coat of a British soldier. He stared with strange hauteur at the men beside the cart, as though he were a person of consequence in this commonwealth of knaves and unfortunates. His dignity was marred by the pink scars that ran from his eyes to his mouth, one on either side of his nose. They twisted the face into the semblance of a smile.
The soldiers brought the body into the street and rolled it into the cart. The sergeant threw a tarpaulin over it. The negro sauntered into the empty doorway of a roofless house.
Marryot gave the slightest of bows and turned smartly away, gesturing to the sergeant to move off.
‘A moment, sir, if you please,’ I said.
The Major stopped and, for the first time, looked directly at me. He was below medium height but made up for his lack of inches in other ways, for he was broad in the chest and decisive in his movements.
‘What enquiries will you make in this matter?’ I asked.
‘That’s my business, sir. Mine and the City Commandant’s, unless Sir Henry Clinton decides otherwise.’
‘Mine too, sir. Under the terms of my commission I am obliged to report on the administration of justice in the city in all its aspects – and in particular upon the authority that the military power exercises over the civilian population.’
Marryot’s colour darkened. ‘Need I remind you that we are at war?’
‘The American Department is well aware of that, sir. And so am I.’
The Major glanced at Townley. ‘Sir, would you have the goodness to explain to Mr Savill that this is a city under martial law? Capital crimes are tried in courts martial, as Lord George Germain knows from personal experience.’
Townley smiled impartially and shrugged his shoulders.
‘I do not dispute that capital crimes come under military jurisdiction, sir.’ I spoke in an intentionally quiet voice, purged of emotion. ‘I do not wish to interfere. Merely to have an oversight.’
Marryot’s grip tightened around his cane. ‘If wishes were horses, sir, then beggars would ride.’
‘If you deny me in this, sir,’ I said quietly, ‘I shall complain formally both to Sir Henry here in New York and Lord George Germain in London. My orders are signed by Lord George, and his authority in this matter derives directly from His Majesty.’
‘I’m damned if—’
‘I repeat, sir. I do not wish to interfere with the discharge of your duties in any way. My orders are to observe, nothing more. I have my commission here, if you would like a sight of it.’
The Major’s forehead was scored with three vertical lines that sprang from the bridge of his nose. When he frowned, the lines deepened. He did not speak for a moment. Then he held out his hand.
‘You may show me your wretched scrap of paper.’
He read the commission slowly, while Townley paced up and down, fanning himself with his hat and whistling softly. The soldiers clustered around the cart in silence. They must have gathered something of what was going on, for Marryot’s voice was naturally loud and harsh, and he had made no attempt to moderate its volume.
He handed back the letter of authorization. ‘I warn you, sir, it will be a waste of your time and mine. But what can one expect when our affairs in America are at the mercy of a man who hides behind a desk three thousand miles away?’
I had no desire to fight other people’s battles. ‘And how will you proceed in this matter?’
‘We’ll find out who the man is, if we are lucky. Then at least he can be buried under his own name. As to his murderer: I do not hold out much hope there, sir, unless someone lays information. If a man looks for his pleasures in Canvas Town, he runs the risk of paying heavily for them.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ I said. ‘I’m much obliged.’
Townley smiled at us. ‘I’m rejoiced to see you such good friends, gentlemen.’ He pulled out his watch. ‘Mr Savill, I do not wish to hurry you, but we should be on our way. I fancy the Wintours keep early hours.’
‘Eh?’ Marryot said. ‘You are engaged at Judge Wintour’s?’
Townley bowed. ‘In a manner of speaking. Mr Savill will be lodging there during his stay in New York.’
Marryot coloured again. ‘Pray – ah – pray give my compliments to the Judge and his ladies. Tell them that I hope to do myself the honour of calling on them to see how they do.’
The three of us, followed by the soldiers and the cart, walked down to Broadway, where we separated. Townley and I turned left and made our way slowly eastwards in the direction of St Paul’s Chapel.
‘Well,’ Townley said, ‘you are quite the Daniel, I perceive, and have ventured into the lion’s den and emerged unscathed. I have seen Major Marryot make grown men quail.’ He smiled at me. ‘But have a care, sir. He is a man of some importance in this city and you should mind how you cross him.’
We strolled in silence the length of another block. Then Townley added: ‘Oh – and by the by – they say he has a certain tendresse for young Mrs Wintour.’
Chapter Six
The high-ceilinged room was a place of shadows. Despite the heat, the windows were shut and the curtains closed – because, old Mrs Wintour said, the smell of the great fire was become intolerable and the street below so noisy.
Ten candles burned on brackets attached to the walls but they served mainly to accentuate the surrounding gloom. A heavy moth, drunk with desire, circled one of the flames. I could not drag my eyes away from it. The candle singed first one wing, then the other. At last, and with supernatural strength, the besotted insect reached the fatal flame again. There was a faint sizzling sound. The moth fell to the pier table immediately beneath the bracket and lay there, twitching.
‘More tea, sir?’ Mrs Wintour asked, pale and indistinct on a sofa.
‘Thank you, ma’am, but no.’
I rubbed sweating palms on my breeches. The Judge let slip a long, rumbling snore from the recesses of his high-backed armchair. Only his legs were visible.
Having discharged her duties as a hostess, Mrs Wintour sat back and did not speak. I could not tell whether her eyes were open or closed. From somewhere below came a clatter as though a pot had fallen on the floor. The moth gave up its unequal struggle with the world and expired. The air in the room seemed to condense into a dark, swaying liquid, trapping the humans like three curious natural specimens suspended in alcohol.
Would it always be like this, I wondered? Would I sit in silence, night after night, in this smothering subaqueous fog? The memory of the corpse in the harbour drifted into my mind, and I saw again the decaying face of the merman. Perhaps the poor fellow now lay in just such a stifling semi-darkness at the bottom of the ocean.
It was past ten o’clock. In a moment the grandfather clock in the hall must chime the quarter. It seemed as if days or even weeks had passed since it had last chimed the hour. A frugal supper had been served at nine by a manservant out of livery and a maid. I had been here since eight o’clock. Townley had introduced me to the Judge and had then slipped away, promising to call for me in the morning.
The drawing-room door opened. Mrs Wintour twitched in her chair and emitted a little cry as though someone had pinched her. A lady entered.
‘Ah, my dear,’ the Judge said, levering himself up with the help of the tea table. ‘There you are, Bella, bless my soul. Are you quite restored?’
I rose to my feet. The light was so poor that the woman’s face was barely visible. I was aware only that she was small and slim, and she brought with her the smell of otto of roses.
‘You startled me,’ Mrs Wintour said. ‘Why is everything so loud nowadays?’
‘Bella,’ the Judge went on, ‘allow me to name Mr Savill of the American Department. And, Mr Savill, here at last is my dear daughter, my son’s wife, Mrs Arabella.’
I bowed over the lady’s hand.
‘Mr Savill,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I am happy to meet you.’
‘Come and sit with us, my dear,’ the Judge said, stretching out his hand to her. ‘We shall send for fresh tea.’
‘Would you excuse me this once, sir?’ Mrs Arabella took the Judge’s hand in both of hers. ‘My head is still splitting – it is this terrible heat, I think.’ She stroked her father-in-law’s hand as though it were a small animal in need of reassurance. ‘I came down for a moment to welcome Mr Savill. I would not want him to think us unmannerly.’
‘Never that, madam,’ I said. ‘You are politeness itself. But I am sorry you are indisposed.’
‘You must take something,’ the Judge said. ‘Have Miriam mix you up a James’s Powder. I’m sure it will answer.’
‘Yes, sir, you may be sure I shall.’
Mrs Arabella kissed her parents-in-law. She curtsied to me and left the room.
‘The dear child should not overdo it,’ the Judge observed, sinking back into his chair.
The flurry of movement gave me the opportunity to withdraw. I had been up at dawn, I explained, and my first day ashore had been a tiring one.
‘Be so good as to ring the bell, sir,’ the Judge said. ‘Josiah will bring a candle and take you up to your chamber.’
The manservant conducted me up the stairs. My room was at the back of the house on the second floor. Square and low-ceilinged, it was dominated by a high bed with an enormous feather mattress. My bags and boxes had been brought up during the day.
I dismissed the man for the night. It struck me that it was only now, for the first time in over five weeks, that I was alone. Noak had always been there on the Earl of Sandwich, usually within arm’s reach. Even in the ship’s heads, someone else had generally been beside me or at least within sight and sound. Nor had I been alone today. Indeed, my overwhelming impression was that this was a city where it would be almost impossible to be solitary, for the streets and buildings were packed with people – townsfolk, refugees, British and Loyalist soldiers, and the crowds of followers that accumulate around an army.
I undressed, allowing my clothes to lie where they fell. For a moment I stood naked at the foot of the bed, hoping for a draught to cool my skin. But the air was warm and motionless.
I was too tired to read. Leaving the bed-curtains tied back, I climbed into bed. I laid myself on top of the bedclothes. The mattress enveloped me. I pinched out the candle.
The darkness was soft and caressing. I found myself thinking of Mrs Arabella. Because the drawing room had been so dimly lit, and because she had not come close to any of the candles, I had not seen her face clearly – it had been no more than a pale smudge floating above her body.
My impression of her derived from information provided by other senses. First, there had been the scent of otto of roses: but the smell of it had combined with the private odours of Mrs Arabella herself to form something richer and denser. Second, I remembered her voice, which had not been like any other I knew. This was partly because she spoke with an American accent, though it was not the broad twang used by so many people I had heard today. Also, of course, she was a woman, with the soft, insinuating tone that certain women possessed.
There had been no women aboard the Earl of Sandwich. To my surprise I felt my naked body responding even to this largely formless memory of Mrs Arabella with a rush of blood that both disconcerted and embarrassed me.
Hastily I directed my attention to my wife, Augusta. I imagined her walking in the park or reading or talking about the clothes and homes of other ladies, as she seemed interminably to do; and by degrees I grew calmer.
In the silence and the darkness, I thought about my daughter. Lizzie had wept when I left her. She was five now, and living with my sister in Shepperton, for her mother had remained in London. I prayed for my daughter’s happiness and for her preservation from all harm, as I did every night.
As I lay there, I became aware that the silence was no longer as absolute as it had been. Somewhere in the distance, a barely distinguishable sound rose and fell in volume in a series of irregular ululations.
The wind in the chimney? A bird of the night? An animal in pain? I did not recognize the sound but that was not strange in itself, for I was in a strange house in a strange city on the coast of a strange continent.
A minute or so slipped by. The sound grew fainter and then stopped altogether.
By that time I was sliding into sleep. My last conscious thought was that the sound might have been a weeping child. But, God be thanked, someone had dried her tears.
Chapter Seven
My Dear Daughter—
I put down the pen and stared out of the window. How did I find the words that would speak directly to a five-year-old child? How could I assure my Lizzie at a distance of three thousand miles of my paternal care and love for her?
After a voyage of five weeks I arrived here without any accident and in as good health as when I left you in Shepperton. The conviction that you will derive more benefit from where you are than if still with me has consoled me greatly on my parting from you.
Dull, I thought – dull, dull, dull. But I must write something to let her know I am safe and that she is in my thoughts. Anything was better than nothing.
Pray give my service to your aunt and ask her to write to me every week to tell me how you all do.
I reminded myself that a father should provide moral guidance to his children. In the rearing of the young, the tender emotions should be, by and large, the province of the tender sex.
If you love me, strive to be good under every situation and to all living creatures, and to acquire those accomplishments which I have put in your power, and which will go far towards ensuring you the warmest love of your affectionate father,
E. Savill
I threw down the pen more violently this time. Ink drops spattered across the table. A moment later, I picked up the pen again, dipped it in the inkpot and wrote in a swift scrawl:
Postscriptum: It feels strange to be on dry land. It does not wobble like the sea. New York is monstrous hot and busy. It is full of our soldiers, and very brave and gay they look in their fine uniforms. I saw many great ships in the harbour. Last night I slept in a featherbed that was as big as an elephant.
I folded the letter, addressed it, and put it to one side, ready to be sealed. It was still early in the morning and the sun was on the other side of the house. I took a fresh sheet and wrote:
My dear Augusta – We are safely arrived in New York, after a passage of some five weeks and two days. The—
I paused again. At this moment, I could think of nothing to write after The. Augusta would not wish to know that the weather was hot or that my mattress was as big as an elephant. Nor perhaps would she wish to hear that I was lodging in a house with a woman who smelled of otto of roses.
As I waited, three drops of ink fell from the pen and blotted the paper. I swore, crumpled up the sheet and tossed it into the empty fireplace. I set down the pen, propped my head on my hands and stared at the view.
The writing table was drawn up to the room’s single window, which looked out on a small garden laid out with bushes and gravelled walks in the old style. To the left was a service yard with a line of outbuildings. On the right, beyond a high wall, was another street, for Judge Wintour’s house stood at an intersection.
At the bottom of the garden, in the angle where the rear wall met the long side wall, was a square pavilion built of red bricks, with the quoins and architraves dressed with stone. Beside it was a narrow gate to the street. The little building was raised above the road. A flight of shallow steps led up to a glazed door on the side facing the house, and there was a tall window on at least two of the other sides. It was some sort of summerhouse, I thought, a species of gazebo or belvedere. Lizzie would love to play house there. I would describe it to her in my next letter.
I took up the pen again.
I have not yet seen much of the house where I am to lodge for I did not arrive here until yesterday evening. It is in Warren Street, not far from King’s College. Judge Wintour was most welcoming and he was gratified to have intelligence of your Uncle Rampton, for whom he entertains the most cordial regard. Pray believe me to be your most devoted servant in all things, ES.
I rang the bell. A young manservant named Abraham, little more than a boy, showed me down to the parlour where the table was set for breakfast. He said that Mrs Wintour rarely rose before midday, and that the Judge and Mrs Arabella were still in their rooms.
While I was eating, there was a double knock on the street door. Abraham returned to say that a gentleman had called to see me.
‘Me? Is it Mr Townley?’
‘No, your honour. A Mr Noak.’
‘Very well. You had better ask him to step in.’
Noak bowed from the doorway. ‘Your servant, sir. I apologize for calling on you so early. I fear necessity has no manners.’
I had a sudden, uncomfortable memory of vomiting over a pewter platter containing Mr Noak’s dinner, not a fortnight ago. ‘My dear sir, in that case necessity is a welcome guest. Pray join me – have you breakfasted?’
Noak perched on the edge of a chair. He said he had already had breakfast but would be glad of a cup of coffee.
‘I know you must be much engaged at present,’ he said. ‘But I did not know whom to turn to.’
I guessed that Noak wanted money. People always wanted money. Townley had been right, when he talked at dinner of Congress’s lack of gold, its fatal weakness: None of us can do without money, eh?
‘—so any form of employment commensurate with my skills and small talents, sir.’
‘What?’ I said. ‘I beg your pardon, I did not quite catch what you said before that.’
‘I said that unfortunately the position I had been invited to fill no longer exists, sir. The gentleman I was to work for has died, and his son has wound up the business. There it is – I have come all this way for nothing, and now I am in want of a situation.’
‘I am sorry to hear it. But I’m not sure what I can do to help – except offer you another cup of coffee.’
Noak shook his head. ‘May I hope for your good offices? You will soon, I’m sure, have an extensive acquaintance here. If you should come across a gentleman who is in want of a clerk – with, I may say, the very highest character from his previous employer in London, as well as considerable experience in the management of affairs both in America and in London – then I beg that you might mention my name.’
‘Nothing would give me greater pleasure,’ I said. ‘But …’
‘I know,’ Noak interrupted. ‘I am clutching at straws, sir. But a man in my position must clutch at something.’
‘Of course.’ I liked the man’s doggedness, his refusal to be cowed. ‘Leave me your direction, sir – I will send you a line if I hear of a place.’
The American took out a pocket book and pencil. ‘A line addressed to the Charing Cross Tavern will always find me.’
A moment later, he pushed back his chair and said abruptly that he would not trouble me any further. It was clear that asking the favour had not come easily to him, and I liked him the better for it.
After I had finished breakfast, I was passing through the hall when I heard another knock at the front door. Abraham opened it. A servant was on the step. I heard him mention my name. Abraham took a letter from him and presented it with a low bow to me. I tore it open.
Mr Savill
I have just this moment received intelligence that our body yesterday has acquired a name: a corporal on the Commandant’s staff says he is a Mr Roger Pickett, a gentleman newly arrived in New York, who was lodging at Widow Muller’s on Beekman Street (opposite St George’s Chapel). Major Marryot suggests we meet him there as soon as is convenient. The bearer of this will conduct you to the house if you are at leisure. If not, I shall do myself the honour of waiting on you later in the day.
Yours, etc. C. Townley
Judge Wintour came down the stairs, clinging to the rail.
‘Mr Savill, good morning. I hope you have passed a satisfactory night. You’ve breakfasted, I hear. Would you do me the kindness of sitting with me and taking another cup of coffee while I have mine? There is much I should like to ask you about the current state of affairs in London.’
‘Nothing would give me more pleasure, sir – but perhaps I might defer our conversation until later.’ I held up the letter. ‘I have to go out.’
The Judge’s eyes had strayed to the open door, where the messenger was waiting. ‘You there,’ he said, his voice suddenly sharp. ‘You’re Mr Townley’s man, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, your honour. He sent me for Mr Savill.’
‘Another dreadful crime, I suppose,’ the Judge said. ‘I have never known the city like this. We shall soon be murdered in our beds.’
‘Yes, sir. And murder it is. A gentleman, too – Mr Pickett.’
‘What?’ The Judge clung to the newel post at the foot of the stairs. Abraham moved instantly to his other side and took his arm. ‘Roger Pickett? But it can’t be.’ The old man turned his faded blue eyes from the servant’s face to mine. ‘Mr Pickett was in this very house, sir – not a week ago.’
Chapter Eight
‘Not a man of substance, as you see,’ Townley said. ‘Not now.’
The little room was at the back of the house in Beekman Street and on the third floor. The window overlooked a farrier’s yard. It was warm and close. I heard a roll of thunder in the distance.
Roger Pickett’s possessions were strewn over the bed, the table, the one chair, the chest and the floor. Mingled with them were unwashed glasses, plates, bottles, bowls and cups, many with scraps of rotting food still adhering to them. Widow Muller, the woman who kept the house, was a slattern. Besides, she had told Marryot that Pickett could not pay for the maid’s services.
I stood in the doorway, hat in hand. ‘Had he lived here long?’
‘A matter of ten days,’ the Major said. ‘Time enough to turn it into a pigsty.’
Townley was delving into the papers on the table. He raised his head and smiled at me. ‘I fancy he would have called on you, if his life had been spared.’
‘I suppose he desired compensation like the rest of them?’ Marryot said, opening the chest. ‘Dear God, you Americans are like hogs around a trough – not you, of course, sir; there must be exceptions to every rule – but I hold by the general principle.’
‘No doubt Mr Pickett suffered losses, sir,’ Townley said coldly. ‘Most of us have.’ He held up a sheet of paper. ‘It appears he came down from Philadelphia.’
‘After the evacuation?’
‘Yes. But he had only been there a matter of weeks. According to this he was originally from North Carolina.’
Marryot snorted. ‘Ha! I wager his loyalty has cost him a fortune. It is curious, is it not? All our refugees claim to have been as rich as Croesus before the war. It’s as if gold grew on the very trees here.’
I took a step into the room. ‘It should not be difficult to establish Mr Pickett’s situation, sir. Judge Wintour says he was acquainted with his daughter-in-law, Mrs Arabella.’
‘What?’ Marryot said. ‘What? No one told me that.’
Townley frowned. ‘Acquainted? How?’
‘Only slightly, I believe.’ I looked from one to the other. ‘It appears that Mrs Arabella’s late father met the man when he was in North Carolina before the war.’
‘Her father? Mr Froude?’ Townley rubbed his beak of a nose. ‘You are full of surprises, sir.’
‘Why did you not tell me earlier?’ Marryot said.
‘I’ve only just found you, sir,’ I pointed out. ‘And I did not hear of Mr Pickett’s visit to Warren Street until this morning – the Judge was with me when Mr Townley’s billet arrived. In any case, even if I had known about it yesterday evening, I could hardly have known its significance since the corpse had not been identified.’
Marryot coloured but did not apologize. ‘Why did Pickett call on them? And when, precisely?’
‘Last Thursday, sir – it was a morning call. He was but recently arrived and he called to renew his acquaintance with them, which I believe was very slight. He did not stay long for both the Judge and Mrs Arabella were obliged to go out.’
‘What did she say of him?’ Townley asked. ‘Mrs Arabella, I mean?’
‘I have not seen her this morning, sir. Indeed, I met her only for a moment last night.’
Townley shrugged. ‘It don’t signify – we shall probably find that Pickett called on everyone he had ever scraped an acquaintance with. All the refugees do that when they first come to New York. What else can the poor devils do? It is a form of genteel beggary.’
Marryot limped over to the table. ‘What have we here?’
‘I believe this to be a list of debts, sir.’ Townley handed him a sheet of paper. ‘Nearly two hundred guineas in all. But we cannot tell who his creditors are. There’s only a single initial beside each figure. Large sums. Guineas and pounds, not shillings and pence.’
‘A gambler,’ Marryot said. ‘What did I tell you?’
I slipped two fingers into my waistcoat pocket and took out the die I had found on Pickett’s body. It was made of ivory, not of bone or wood. A genteel die for a genteel beggar.
Townley smiled at me. ‘You have corroboration in the palm of your hand, I fancy. Faro? Backgammon? Fortunes change hands every night in this city at a throw of the dice.’
‘A man who gambles in Canvas Town is a fool,’ Marryot said.
‘Or desperate for money,’ Townley said. ‘Plenty of men go to Canvas Town after nightfall who would not be seen there in the day. Darkness covers a multitude of sins, does it not? And do you not think that if Pickett could not pay his debts …?’
‘Very likely – but I doubt we’ll ever know.’ Marryot took up another paper. ‘Depend upon it, if we find the murderer at all, we shall find him in Canvas Town.’
‘When did the people of the house last see Mr Pickett?’ I asked.
‘Sunday afternoon,’ Marryot said. ‘He dined at the tavern over the way and came back here to change his shirt. He didn’t stay long – he went out at about five o’clock. That was the last they saw of him. We must trace the next of kin.’
We did not linger in Pickett’s chamber. It was stiflingly hot and so small that the three of us made it unpleasantly crowded. Marryot leafed through the rest of the papers. In a satchel, he found an unfinished and undated letter written in a sprawling, untidy hand.
My dear sister, I am safely arrived in New York from Philadelphia. My design prospers, and I have great hopes that my fortunes will soon
‘His design?’ Townley said. ‘A gambler’s new and quite infallible system, no doubt. The next turn of the cards, the next throw of the dice, and all will be changed.’
‘No indication who the sister is, where she lives,’ Marryot said. ‘Perhaps Mrs Arabella knows.’ He pulled out his watch. ‘We’ve done all we can here. I’ll leave a guard at the door and have the room sealed up.’
‘What other enquiries will you make now, sir?’ I asked.
‘I shall make my report to the Commandant and he will order me to do as he thinks fit. Which may very well be nothing. That would certainly be my advice. We are in the middle of a war, sir, and young men are dying every day. I cannot waste my time on every fool who pays the price for his folly.’
‘Very true, sir,’ Townley put in. ‘In any case, what can one do unless a witness comes forward? And I’m afraid one does not find many public-spirited citizens in Canvas Town.’
‘But is this your usual policy with murder, sir?’ I said to Marryot. ‘You bury the dead and let the perpetrator go free?’
‘May I remind you again, sir? We are at war.’ He limped to the door. ‘The civil population cannot enjoy the same privileges and the same degree of comfort as it does in peacetime. New York looks to the army for its protection, and military objectives are of paramount importance.’
Townley stared at the sloping ceiling. ‘Still,’ he said, ‘I hope that the news of Mr Pickett’s death does not distress the Judge or Mrs Arabella.’
Once again, the blood rushed to Marryot’s face. ‘No, indeed. It is fortunate that the acquaintance was slight.’
There, I thought, my anger subsiding, there is the man’s weak spot: Mrs Arabella Wintour.
Chapter Nine
Shortly after one o’clock, there was an explosion.
It came without warning, an enormous, reverberating crash that swept over the city like an invisible tidal wave. For an instant, silence fell, an auditory equivalent to the trough following the wave.
Time seemed to elongate itself in defiance of the natural laws regulating the universe. I saw Townley’s face in profile beside me, the mouth open, the nose jutting outwards, his features as rigid as if turned to stone. The horses walking and trotting down Broadway stopped moving. Two oxen pulling a wagon not ten yards away might have fallen asleep where they stood. The trees on either side of the avenue were motionless. The leg of a dog lying in the shade of a shop doorway was as stiff as a ramrod now though an instant before it had been a blur as the animal scratched its ribcage.
All this dissolved into a flurry of movement. The nearer of the oxen collided with the trunk of a tree. A horse reared and a Hessian officer tumbled from its saddle. The dog scrambled into the darkness of the shop behind him, its tail between its legs. A plump middle-aged woman fainted. Her maid tried to support her but her mistress’s weight was too heavy for her, and they both fell to the ground.
The sounds were slower to return. They came in scraps and fragments, muffled at first, and accompanied by a ringing in my ears. Townley yelped, ‘Christ!’ A window shattered across the street. Shouts and screams filled the air. Horses neighed. Oxen bellowed.
Several soldiers stumbled down the road at a trot towards Fort George. The middle-aged woman woke up and went into violent hysterics, pummelling the poor maid without mercy. Townley touched my sleeve and pointed over the roofline of the houses on the other side of the street. A feathery column of black smoke was rising into the sky.
‘The French fleet?’ I said, and my voice sounded muffled and remote.
‘There would have been some warning if they were that close inshore. I think one of the ammunition ships must have blown up.’
‘By accident?’
‘God knows.’ Townley dabbed his face with a scented handkerchief. ‘First the fire, now this. Look at that damned smoke – it’s like a black plume at a funeral. Either it’s cursed ill luck or we have enemies within.’
‘My windows!’ cried the plump woman, suddenly emerging from her hysterics. ‘Quick, girl, what are you about? Help me up, we must go home.’
The Hessian officer scrambled to his feet and stumbled after his bolting horse, leaving a stream of German oaths behind him. The shopkeeper, a perruquier in apron and shirtsleeves with a face as pale as his own powder, appeared in his doorway with the dog cowering at his heels as though it had been given one whipping and feared another.
Townley and I walked quickly down Broadway toward Fort George. But there was nothing to be learned at Headquarters, either about the explosion or about the unfortunate Pickett.
I scribbled a note to Mr Rampton and enclosed with it the letters I had earlier written to Lizzie and Augusta. Townley showed me to the Post Room and introduced me to the head clerk who guarded the mails. The letters would go out in the lead-weighted Government mailbags by the first packet that sailed for home.
‘Though God knows when that will be,’ the official observed. ‘What with the rebels within and the French fleet without.’
‘We might as well have our dinner now,’ Townley said afterwards. ‘Nothing else can be done at present until this fuss and bother die down.’
As we were leaving, one of Mr Townley’s servants approached him with the news that the fever had claimed the life of his clerk in the early hours of the morning.
‘The poor fellow,’ Townley said. ‘Troubles never come singly, do they? It is this damned heat – it encourages every kind of pestilence. I must send something to his widow.’
We walked slowly towards the Common. Townley knew of a little inn in King George Street – nothing to look at from the outside, he told me, but the cook was from Milan and could do quite exceptional things with the meanest materials. I had already learned that Mr Townley thought a great deal about his meals and how they were prepared.
The excitement had ebbed away from the city. The broken glass had been swept up. The shops were as busy as ever.
‘It’s as if nothing had happened,’ I said.
‘That is the nature of war, sir,’ Townley said. ‘Terrors succeed terrors, but one cannot be apprehensive all the time. These exceptional alarms are much less of an inconvenience than something more mundane – like the death of my unfortunate clerk, for example. In life he was sadly imperfect, but in death he will be sorely missed. A mass of tedious business must inevitably fall on my own shoulders.’
‘I wonder.’ I hesitated, but only for a moment. ‘I think I told you, I met an American on the voyage. He worked as a lawyer’s clerk in London, and even knows something of the American Department. I believe he is in want of a position.’
A happy coincidence. Indeed I even congratulated myself on this turn of events – at a stroke, I thought, I might be able to oblige a new acquaintance while discharging a debt I owed to an older one.
‘Really?’ Mr Townley said. ‘How very interesting.’
Chapter Ten
After dinner, I returned to Warren Street. I found the ladies of the house in the drawing room. Mrs Arabella was at a table by the window with a copy of the Royal American Gazette spread out before her. Old Mrs Wintour was sitting in front of the empty fireplace.
I bowed in turn to them and wished them good afternoon. The old lady nodded graciously to me. But she said nothing and in a moment began to stare fixedly at the fireback as if trying to commit its sooty surface to memory.
Mrs Arabella beckoned me towards her. For the first time I saw her by daylight. Her face was oval, the complexion pale and unblemished, the lips full and the eyes brown. Her hair was partly concealed beneath her cap, but what I could see of it was lustrous and so dark as to be almost black.
‘Pray do not mention the explosion or yesterday’s fire, sir,’ she said in low voice. ‘Nor Mr Pickett’s death. Mrs Wintour finds subjects of that nature disagreeable.’
I nodded. Major Marryot was a bear in a red coat yet she clearly had him in thrall. Mr Townley spoke of her with a strange mixture of delicacy and wariness. Even Noak, as dry and dull as a ledger, knew her charms by reputation: ‘Once seen, never forgotten.’
Now, seeing Mrs Arabella in the glare of natural light from the window, I was frankly disappointed. She was well enough but her face lacked the classical proportions and high-bred refinement of Augusta’s; her figure would not have been considered à la mode in London, and her cotton dress seemed positively dowdy. The Americans, I thought, perhaps judged a lady’s personal attractions by lower standards than we did.
I had, on Mr Rampton’s advice, brought the Wintours some small presents from London – lace for the ladies, chosen by Augusta, a volume of sermons for the Judge and several pounds of tea for them all. When I presented the gifts, Mrs Wintour became quite animated.
‘I’m sure my son will enjoy the sermons too, when he comes home,’ she said in a voice like rustling paper. ‘His attention has always been turned towards spiritual matters – even as a little boy. I remember when we went to church: he listened so attentively to the sermons.’
Mrs Arabella wiped her fingers, inky from the fresh newsprint, on her handkerchief. She thanked me for the gifts but said she would not examine the lace until her hands were clean.
Mrs Wintour patted the sofa on which she sat. ‘Come and tell me how dear Mr Rampton does, Mr Savill. It must be nearly twenty years since we saw him. And you are married to his niece, Miss Augusta, I hear?’
‘Mr Rampton does very well, thank you, ma’am. Now he is under secretary of the American Department, Lord George Germain entrusts a great deal of business to him.’
‘And you, sir? My husband tells me that Mr Rampton speaks most highly of you.’
‘He is kindness itself, ma’am.’ This was not entirely true. Mr Rampton had opposed Augusta’s marriage to me, a mere junior clerk.
‘And do you have the consolation of children? You must pardon an old lady’s curiosity, Mr Savill.’
‘A daughter, ma’am – Elizabeth.’
‘How fortunate you are. I always wished for a daughter. When my son comes home, he and Bella will have one, possibly two. It will be as good as having them myself.’ She smiled at me. ‘It will be delightful, will it not? I dare say they will live at Mount George for much of the year – the air is healthier for children.’
The mention of Lizzie reminded me of the crying child I had heard – or thought I had heard – as I was going to sleep. I was about to ask whether there was a child in the house when the conversation shifted direction and the old lady began to ask me about which London clergymen were at present esteemed for their preaching.
‘Mama,’ Mrs Arabella said. ‘You should not plague Mr Savill with questions. I am sure he is weary.’
Mrs Wintour looked bewildered. ‘Ah – yes – do forgive me, Mr Savill, I run on, sometimes. My son tells me I must have been born chattering. Have you met my son John, sir?’
‘I’ve not had that pleasure, ma’am.’
‘You will meet him soon, I’m sure. He will make everything right when he comes home, and then I shall have my little granddaughters.’
‘You are tired, ma’am,’ said Mrs Arabella, rising from her chair. ‘Should you not rest for a while? I shall ring the bell for Miriam.’
Miriam came, and the old woman rose obediently and hobbled out of the room, clinging with two thin hands to the servant’s arm. The maid looked without hesitation to Mrs Arabella for her orders, though in this case few words passed between them, only a look of intelligence. This situation, I thought, had happened before, and more than once.
Mrs Arabella sat down again. ‘The Judge tells me that Mr Pickett has been found dead in Canvas Town. Was he murdered?’
That was plain-speaking indeed. ‘He is certainly dead, ma’am, and in all probability murdered.’ I tried not to think of the fly settling on the ragged wound in Pickett’s neck.
‘What was the motive?’
‘The affair is still a mystery. I apprehend that Major Marryot thinks Mr Pickett was a gambling man, and that may have had something to do with it. But I hope I do not distress you. I understand he was an acquaintance.’
‘I did not know him at all well, sir. Besides, we have grown used to hearing of horrors.’
‘I understand he has a sister. Do you know anything of her?’
‘No. I was not aware he had any family at all. I met him only once before and very briefly. I think he had had a few dealings with my father, but purely in the way of business.’
She said nothing further on the subject. A silence fell, and it was not altogether comfortable.
‘I – I understand your husband, madam, is expected home?’ I said. ‘Do you know when he will come?’
She stared at me with heavy-lidded eyes. ‘He has been missing since Saratoga. I thought you must know.’
‘Why yes – Mr Rampton said as much. But from what Mrs Wintour said, I inferred—’
‘Mrs Wintour desires his return so strongly that she believes he must come. I am not so sanguine, and nor is the Judge. But we do not contradict her.’
‘No, indeed.’
‘You would be doing us all a kindness if you would humour her in this as well.’
‘Of course.’
The Battle of Saratoga had been ten months ago. If there had been no news of Captain Wintour since then, the odds must be against his having survived.
‘You have heard nothing at all of him?’ I said after a moment.
‘No. We fear the worst. We hear so many reports of atrocities.’
Anger had brought colour to her face, and she looked almost beautiful. There was a fire about her when her passions were roused. I murmured a platitude about the horrors of war, particularly civil war.
‘Why does Lord George not advise the King to bring an end to this folly?’ she burst out.
‘Madam, I wish I knew, and then I should tell you. But Lord George does not open his mind to me.’
‘Of course not.’ Mrs Arabella’s eyelids closed, as though she wished to blot out the sight of me. ‘You are only a clerk.’
Chapter Eleven
The following day, Wednesday, Mr Townley arrived in Warren Street as I was in the act of leaving the house.
‘Mr Savill, sir,’ he cried from across the street. ‘This is well met. Have you heard the news?’
‘No, sir. What news?’
‘I thought the Major might have sent a man over to you. No matter – I am here instead. It appears that someone laid information late last night, and a man has been taken up for poor Mr Pickett’s murder.’
‘On what grounds?’
‘Oh, they have plenty of evidence – they have not charged the fellow yet, but I do not think there can be much doubt about it. We must not linger – he is to be interrogated at ten o’clock, and it wants but twenty minutes of that now. They are holding him at Van Cortlandt’s Sugar House at the corner of Trinity churchyard. And we are to meet your shipboard acquaintance there – what is his name? Note? Slope? Poke?’
‘Noak, sir.’ I had written to him yesterday afternoon and told him he might call on Mr Townley. ‘It is good of you to spare the time to see him.’
‘I have seen him already – he seems capable enough. And there’s something to be said for a man who knows a little of the wider world. I have decided to give him a trial for a day or two.’
‘That’s most obliging, sir – I hope he answers.’
‘We shall soon begin to discover whether he does or not. He can keep a record this morning.’
As we walked along, Townley asked if I was perfectly satisfied with my lodging; if not he would look about for somewhere else that might suit me.
I told him not to trouble himself for I liked it very well and added, ‘By the way, I had some conversation with the Wintour ladies yesterday evening.’
‘They are in good health, I hope? How did they strike you?’
‘I had not realized that Mrs Arabella’s husband is missing rather than dead.’
‘It is most unfortunate,’ Townley said. ‘No one has seen Captain Wintour since Saratoga, though there was a report of his being wounded. It leaves them all in a species of limbo – Mrs Arabella in particular. They do not know whether to mourn a son and husband or to pray for his happy return.’
‘Mrs Wintour seems in no doubt that it should be the latter.’
‘Alas, sir – as you may already have observed, Mrs Wintour’s sufferings have taken their toll on the poor lady’s rational faculties.’ Townley pointed with his stick. ‘We are nearly there – see? That is Van Cortlandt’s.’
The main sugar house was situated on a corner where two streets met. It was a big, brick-faced structure five storeys high and as ugly as a barn. An annex stood to one side. The establishment overlooked a yard enclosed by a wall. The building’s barred windows were deeply recessed and well above the height of a man. They accentuated rather than relieved the monolithic blankness of the façade.
‘This place is for prisoners of war,’ he murmured in my ear. ‘Marryot’s man shouldn’t be here at all, but the Provost is full.’
We stood aside to allow a file of soldiers to march down the road to the high wooden gates, which were guarded by two sentries. One leaf of the gates opened at the sentry’s double-knock and the file passed through to a yard. We followed them in.
Once inside, the sergeant of the guard told us to wait in the hall. Townley chafed at the delay.
‘At least it is cool and pleasant in here,’ I said.
‘The walls are immensely thick, sir. And there are few windows, as you see. The place was built to store sugar in good condition and safe from thieves. But it keeps people in as well as it keeps people out.’
A door at the back of the hall opened and Mr Noak came through.
Townley stared at him. ‘What? You? Here already?’
Noak bobbed his head to us, more like a bird pecking at a worm than a mark of respect. ‘Yes, sir. I made myself known to Major Marryot and showed him your letter. If you would care to step this way.’
As soon as we left the hall, the atmosphere changed. Sights and smells assaulted the senses. But I was first aware of the noise: a chaotic concerto of voices, groans, cries, and restless movements, all of them bouncing off the high, barrel-vaulted ceiling and setting off rolling echoes.
On the other side of the door to the hall was a table at which three soldiers were playing cards, apparently oblivious of what was going on around them. They glanced up incuriously and nodded us through.
Noak led us down a long, stone-flagged corridor lined with doors on either side. Along the centre of the passage was a drainage gulley apparently used as a sewer. Both Townley and I covered our noses with handkerchiefs.
A barred opening was set high in each door, and each opening framed a man’s face; his hands clung to the bars; and behind him was a multitude of other faces, packed together in one heaving, shouting, stinking mass of humanity.
‘For the love of Christ, your honours,’ a man called to us, ‘for the love of Christ, I can’t stop the bleeding.’
We walked faster and faster to a door at the far end. A guard let us into a lobby at the foot of a flight of stairs.
‘Dear God,’ I said. ‘It’s a perfect Bedlam in there. Worse than Bedlam – a foretaste of hell itself.’
‘They have only themselves to thank, sir,’ Townley said. ‘If they take up arms against their lawful government, they must expect to pay the price. The problem is that we have so many rebels to cope with. We are obliged to pack them in the best we can, wherever we find room.’
We mounted the stairs first to an anteroom guarded by a sentry and then to an inner apartment. A narrow window looked out across a neatly tended churchyard at the blackened ruins of Trinity Church.
Marryot was sitting at a long oak table, his lame leg resting on a footstool. He was leafing through a pile of papers. ‘Good morning, sirs,’ he said, looking up. ‘Pray sit down, now you are come at last. I was about to start without you.’ He nodded to Noak. ‘Tell the man outside to pass the word for the prisoner.’
We took chairs on either side of the Major. When he returned, Noak sat at the end nearer the window, with pen, ink and paper set out before him.
‘How fortunate that an informer came forward, sir,’ Townley said.
‘Fortunate?’ Marryot sniffed. ‘Fortune has nothing to do with it, sir. The army pays for its information. There are always men in want of gold.’
‘Can you be sure that the information is accurate, sir?’ I asked.
‘Little is certain in this world, sir, but the fellow we have in custody is certainly a rogue.’
We heard the stamp of marching feet outside. There was a knock on the door. At Marryot’s word, two soldiers entered with a small negro between them. He was cuffed at the wrists and swaying from side to side. When the soldiers came smartly to attention in front of the table, he collapsed on the floor in a huddle of limbs and filthy clothes.
‘Pull him up,’ Marryot ordered.
The soldiers hooked their arms under the prisoner’s shoulders and lifted him back to his feet.
‘Master, I didn’t do it, I swear on—’
‘Hold your tongue,’ Marryot roared. He turned to Noak. ‘You may write this down under today’s date, the fifth of August. And the place and time, of course. That this is the interrogation of a negro slave, a runaway, name of Virgil, property of the heirs of the late George Selden, esquire, of Queens County.’
The man whimpered. His cheeks glistened with tears. He wore filthy canvas breeches, loose at the knee, and a torn shirt. The feet were bare and the toes widely splayed. I wanted to look away but found I could not.
Townley took a silver toothpick from his waistcoat pocket and began to clean his teeth.
‘You are a vagabond, are you not?’ Marryot demanded. ‘Don’t speak unless I tell you – just nod.’
Virgil’s head drooped.
‘You absconded from your master when he was in Brooklyn the summer before last. And you’ve been living in Canvas Town with the rest of the rogues and knaves ever since.’ Marryot glanced down the table. ‘Have you noted that, Mr Noak?’
‘Master, for pity’s sake, I never saw—’
‘Hold your peace – I didn’t tell you to speak to me. You will have your chance later. And for God’s sake, stop snivelling or I’ll have you whipped.’
Noak scribbled.
‘Strike those last words out, Mr Noak,’ Marryot snapped. ‘They are not part of the record.’
Townley leaned back in his chair. ‘What evidence is against the man?’
‘All in good time, sir.’ Marryot put his elbows on the table and leaned towards the prisoner. ‘Tell me where you were last Sunday. Tell me what you did, what you saw.’
‘I was in Canvas Town, your honour. And I walked about the city looking for work. And then I went back to Canvas Town and fell asleep with nothing in my belly.’
‘Your belly looks plump enough to me,’ Townley observed, fanning himself with his handkerchief.
Marryot ignored the interruption. ‘That may be where you were but it’s not what you did. You’re a thief, a damned pickpocket. There were two empty purses in your bundle. And those shoes you had on your feet – well, they tell their own story, don’t they?’
‘Eh?’ Townley said. ‘What shoes? Nobody mentioned any shoes.’
‘Mr Noak,’ Marryot said. ‘Have the goodness to open the press and bring us what you find on the third shelf down.’
The press was a tall cupboard in an alcove by the empty fireplace. Noak took out a pair of black round-toed shoes with plain steel buckles on the flaps. He set them down on the table. The prisoner moaned softly at the sight of them. Marryot stretched out a hand and removed a small leather bag from one of the shoes.
‘So,’ he said. ‘When they brought you in last night, these shoes were on your feet.’
I picked up one of the shoes. The uppers were scuffed and creased. The sole needed reheeling. But the leather was good.
‘We had information that these shoes belonged to Mr Pickett,’ Marryot said. ‘I had them sent over to Beekman Street this morning. The kitchen boy who cleans the shoes is sure that these were Pickett’s.’
‘Information?’ I said. ‘From whom, sir?’
‘It don’t signify, sir. All that signifies is that the information is good. You’ll grant me that, I hope?’
Virgil lifted his head and, for the first time, looked directly at me.
‘You need not enter Mr Savill’s questions into the record either, Noak,’ Marryot said.
He untied the drawstring that fastened the bag and upended it. A heavy gold ring dropped on the palm of his hand.
‘It’s a seal ring,’ he said, holding it up between finger and thumb. ‘It has a stag incised on it. The woman at the house where he lodges, the Widow Muller, swears it’s Pickett’s. He wore it on his left hand and she noted it most particularly – he was behind with what he owed, and when he said he could not pay directly, she asked him why he did not turn his ring into guineas and be done with it.’
‘I never seen it, master, I swear, sir. Hope to die, God’s my—’
‘But the shoes?’ I interrupted. ‘You’ve seen those before?’
The prisoner glanced at me again. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Of course he had,’ Marryot put in. ‘They were on his damned feet when they arrested him.’
‘And where did you get them, Virgil?’ I said.
‘I – I found them, your honour.’
‘On Mr Pickett’s body?’
‘Yes, sir. Poor gentleman was lying there, all dead. I thought he didn’t need them, so what’s the harm? Look, sir.’ He pointed down at his feet. ‘I lost a toe to frostbite last winter.’
‘He was dead because you’d killed him,’ Marryot said. ‘That’s how you knew, eh? So you helped yourself to his shoes and took the ring off his finger as well.’
‘No, sir, weren’t no ring when I found him.’
‘Then why was the ring in your bundle?’
Virgil shook his head violently. ‘Didn’t put it there, master, swear by—’
‘Hold your tongue, damn you.’ Marryot looked at the soldiers, who were staring blankly at the wall behind the table. ‘Take him away. Keep him in irons.’
No one spoke until the guards had led out the prisoner. Marryot stood up and went to the window.
‘Well, gentlemen,’ he said, still with his back to the room. ‘This need not detain us much longer, I think? The evidence points to the knave’s guilt.’
‘No rational man could entertain a doubt about it,’ Townley said, yawning. ‘If someone else had killed him, he would not have left the ring on Pickett’s finger. Shall Noak write you out a fair copy of the proceedings?’
‘I’d be obliged.’
Mr Noak dipped his head.
‘When you write it up, you should mention that Mr Savill of the American Department was present as an observer,’ Marryot went on, turning to face us. ‘But anything he said may be omitted.’
‘Now what?’ I said.
‘Why, sir, what do you think?’ Marryot said. ‘We wait and let the law take its course. Martial law, that is.’
Chapter Twelve
On the night of Wednesday, I heard the child crying again. In the morning, I mentioned it to Josiah, the older of the two manservants. It must be one of the neighbour’s infants in the slave quarters, he said – he would investigate and have the nuisance abated. I said he should not trouble himself; it did not matter in the least.
The administration had found me an apartment to use as an office in a house it leased at the eastern end of Broad Street, not far from the City Hall. It was a pokey chamber up two pairs of stairs. My first caller was already waiting for me – a clergyman from Connecticut whom the rebels had turned out of his parsonage and parish. His crime had been to preach a sermon whose text had been Luke Chapter 20, verse 25. ‘And he said unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar’s, and unto God the things which be God’s.’ Caesar in this case was intended to be taken as George III rather than Congress. The poor man had lost all he owned, including a farm he had inherited from an uncle.
Shortly before dinnertime, Townley swept into the room. ‘Why, sir,’ he said without any preamble, ‘I have just this moment heard from the Major and I clapped on my hat at once and said to myself I should give myself the pleasure of bringing the news to you directly.’
I rose to my feet. ‘What news? A battle?’
‘Nothing of that nature. It’s the negro – Virgil. He came before the court this morning and they found him guilty of Pickett’s murder. Marryot says the fellow is to hang tomorrow morning. Sir Henry Clinton has confirmed the sentence. They say the Commander-in-Chief wishes to make an example of this man to deter other slaves.’
‘Is justice always so swift in New York?’
Townley shrugged. ‘Military courts have this to be said for them, at least: they do not drag their heels. Besides, at this time especially, when the city is awash with rumours about rebel incendiarists within our lines, it does no harm to show that we have the city firmly in our control. Will you come, sir?’
‘What? To the hanging?’
‘Of course – I am obliged to attend for the city and I thought it might interest you to accompany me. It’s as well to know how these things are done. Matters have arranged themselves very neatly. It’s at eight o’clock, and they will give us breakfast afterwards. They keep a good table.’ Townley took out his watch. ‘Talking of which, my dear sir, I believe it is time to dine.’
After dining with Townley, I had walked back towards my office, skirting the fringe of Canvas Town. It was very hot and I did not hurry. I was not yet sure of my way, and by chance I found myself passing Van Cortlandt’s Sugar House.
I turned into Trinity churchyard. The air seemed a little cooler here. Despite its proximity to the prison, the grassy enclosure was used as a place of resort, and at least a score of people were strolling among the gravestones. Indeed, it was more like a pleasure garden than a churchyard, with a broad, gravelled walk lined with benches, hooks for lanterns on the trees and even a platform for an orchestra amid the ruins. As I came up to the church, a familiar figure ambled round the corner of the tower at the west end.
‘Judge!’ I uncovered and bowed. ‘How do you do, sir? It is unconscionably hot, is it not?’
Wintour blinked up at me. ‘Ah – Mr Savill. Your servant, sir. You took me by surprise.’
‘Do you come here to take the air?’
‘No. In point of fact, I am looking for my goat.’
‘I beg your pardon, sir. I do not quite—’
‘My milch goat. It is the most charming animal imaginable. Mrs Wintour has a particular taste for its milk. Josiah tethered it here on Monday morning. Just there, sir, attached to those railings you see by the path. He swears he only turned his back for a moment, but in that moment it vanished.’
‘I am sorry to hear it, sir.’ I felt a memory shifting like shingle in the depths of my mind.
‘It is our own family burying ground, too. Which makes the theft somehow worse, as though the perpetrator had committed a sort of burglary. My poor brother is here, you see, and that is why Josiah brought the goat in the first place.’ Mr Wintour saw the lack of comprehension on my face and smiled at me. ‘I beg your pardon, sir – I have presented you with an unnecessary enigma.’
‘Your brother is buried here?’
‘Just so. He was as steadfast as any man in his attachment to the Crown.’ The old man’s face crumpled for a moment. ‘Alas, even as a boy, he was impetuous, and liable to speak his mind without counting the likely cost of it. That was his undoing. The rebels killed him, you know, whatever they say.’
‘Did he die in the fighting, sir?’ I asked.
‘No, sir, he did not.’
While the Judge was talking, he drifted closer to the railings and stared at the memorials they enclosed. I followed him. One of the inscriptions had been more recently cut than the others:
Erected in Memory
of
Francis de Lancey Wintour, D.D., M.A.
Fellow of King’s College, New York
Son of William Wintour, Esqre
Died 21 June 1776
Aged 57 years
‘When the rebels occupied this city at the start of the war,’ Wintour said, ‘they inflamed the Republican riff-raff and sought out all the prominent Tories they could find. Age and infirmity was no barrier to them. My poor brother Francis spoke his mind to the Whigs, just as he had done before the war. He urged them to lay down their arms and return to their natural allegiance.’ Wintour gripped one of the spikes of the railings and turned aside. ‘And then,’ he continued in a lower voice, ‘the mob came to his house, and broke down the door, and dragged him in his nightshirt into the street. He cried out, “God bless King George.” They placed him on a rail and paraded him through the streets with loud huzzas. Yes, and there were soldiers there too, and city militia men who had dined at my own table, though afterwards they denied it. They were laughing, sir – can you credit it? They were laughing while they persecuted an old, infirm scholar in the name of what they call liberty and the rights of man.’
I took Mr Wintour’s arm. ‘My dear sir – pray, you must not distress yourself any more. Let us walk home.’
‘No.’ He shook off my hand. ‘No, sir – it is better you should know all. They paraded my unhappy brother outside General Washington’s windows, and that gallant officer raised his hat to them and returned their huzzas. They had it in mind to plunge poor Francis in the Fresh Water Pond and then to run him out of the city. But God was merciful to my brother and permitted death to supervene. He suffered a rush of blood to the head and he died instantly of an apoplexy.’
‘Let us go home, sir,’ I said. ‘I am so sorry.’
‘But I wish I could find the goat.’ He released the railing and stood straight. ‘She was my brother’s, you see, and a particular favourite. And Josiah too – our father gave him to my brother when he was a boy. After my brother died, they both came to me with what was left of his estate. The man and the goat. And Josiah likes to bring the goat here sometimes to see her old master and his resting place. It is – it is a harmless practice, is it not? I could not find it in myself to forbid it. Perhaps the animal has simply strayed. Josiah is most upset. I shall place an advertisement in the newspaper.’
He allowed me to lead him away from the grave. Once we had left the churchyard, he released my arm and stepped out almost briskly in the direction of Warren Street.
‘I had some news today, sir,’ I said, hoping to steer the old man’s attention to safer subjects. ‘The court has tried the man accused of Mr Pickett’s killing. They found him guilty.’
Wintour stopped abruptly. ‘Really? So he will hang?’
‘Yes, sir. Tomorrow morning.’
‘God rest his soul. There is no doubt about his guilt, I suppose?’
‘I attended the preliminary hearing,’ I said. ‘He was wearing Mr Pickett’s shoes and had his ring.’
‘Did he confess?’
‘Only to theft, and only of the shoes. He claims that he stumbled across the body.’
Mr Wintour shrugged. ‘Well, the court must go by the evidence, not what an accused man says in his own defence. Though one can hardly call it a court in any proper sense, since the judges sit without a jury and none of them has more than a smattering of the law. Still – poor Pickett – an unhappy end to an unhappy life.’
‘I thought perhaps that, in view of the acquaintance, Mrs Wintour and Mrs Arabella should be told.’
‘You may leave that to me, Mr Savill. I take it kindly that you have given us a little warning. I should not have liked them to have come across it in a newspaper or from a friend’s gossip.’ He stopped and shook me warmly by the hand. ‘I shall trouble you no further, sir. I am quite restored now.’
We said goodbye. I resumed my walk back to my office. It was only as I was turning into Broadway that I remembered the goat.
On Monday morning, Josiah had lost his master’s goat in Trinity churchyard. In the early evening of the same day, I had seen another goat not far away in the remains of Deyes Street. A mulatto boy had been leading it over a pile of rubble.
The same goat?
Chapter Thirteen
That night I did not hear the crying child. I turned this way and that on the overstuffed feather mattress, drifting in and out of a doze. I woke to full consciousness before five o’clock and could not settle to sleep again.
I am going to see a man hanged.
When I rose, I stayed in my chamber. I took a little tea but did not eat anything, feeling that for some obscure but powerful reason one should not attend the death of another man with a full belly. I tried to pray but found that would not answer. I read a chapter or two from the First Epistle to the Corinthians. That was no use either. Next I took up The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which Augusta had given me when we parted. She believed it did a man’s career no harm if he was known to spend his leisure hours engaged in serious reading of an uplifting nature. But the book irritated me so much and so quickly that I tossed the volume into the empty grate before I had read a couple of sentences.
I contemplated writing to Augusta. But I discovered that I had nothing to write that would be fit for her to read. I would much rather have written a line or two to Lizzie. But how could one say words like these to a beloved child?
In a moment I shall step out to watch a man be strangled on a string, and I wish to God I could do anything else in the world instead, even being seasick for eternity or having all my teeth pulled.
Why did this agitate me so much? It was almost as if I myself were the condemned man, as if I, not Virgil, had taken the life of another and deserved to die.
By seven o’clock I could no longer stand the confinement of my chamber. I left the house and walked down to the North River, where the air was somewhat cooler. By a quarter to eight, I was in front of the Upper Barracks.
Despite the short notice of the hanging, a crowd had gathered on the level ground outside the wall of the barracks. People of all conditions were talking, laughing, eating, drinking, buying, selling, shuffling to and fro or simply standing in silence. There was nothing sombre or discontented about them. They were merely waiting and they were perfectly good-humoured about it.
As I pushed my way through the throng I glimpsed a familiar face: the negro with the scars on his cheeks, the man whom I had seen in Canvas Town. He was wearing the faded red coat he had worn on Monday when the soldiers had carried Pickett’s body away. He was playing a jig on a penny whistle with his hat on the ground before him. Beside him was a boy with a tray of raw meat at his feet. Flies buzzed above the meat.
‘Mr Savill! This way, sir.’
Major Marryot was standing by the wicket set in the main gate of the barrack yard, waving his cane to attract my attention.
‘Cutlets and fricassees, chops and casseroles,’ shrieked the boy, his high voice cutting through the noise of the crowd. ‘Fresh goat, tender and sweet.’
I glanced in the lad’s direction. He was a mulatto with skin the colour of dark honey. The crowd shifted and the boy vanished.
‘We are pressed for time, Mr Savill,’ Marryot called, and he rapped the gate with his cane.
The sergeant of the guard ticked off my name on a list pinned to the guardroom door. Marryot took me through to a little parlour with a view of the gallows behind the barracks. The noise of the crowd was still audible.
‘They won’t see anything, you know,’ Marryot said testily as we were walking along, slapping his boot with his cane. It was as if he took the crowd as a personal insult. ‘This is a military hanging – an entirely private affair. But still those damnable jackals gather outside the gates.’
The Provost Marshal, a red-faced Irishman, was already standing at the open window and calling instructions to his subordinates. The scaffold had been built out from the main building, to which it was linked at first-floor level by a wooden bridge. He acknowledged us with the most cursory of bows.
‘He won’t need that long a drop,’ he shouted to the sergeant who was arranging matters on the scaffold.
No one spoke after that. The Provost Marshal stayed by the window. Even at this hour there was a sour tang of brandy about him. Marryot sucked his teeth and scowled at the floor. I put my hands in my pockets and leaned against the wall, pretending an ease I did not feel.
My fingers felt the outlines of something small and hard-edged in the right-hand pocket. It was the ivory die I had found on Pickett’s body. A gentleman’s die on a gentleman’s corpse. I took it out and rolled it on my palm. A three.
Townley entered, with Noak like a terrier at his heels. ‘Good day to you all, gentlemen – we are not come too late, I hope?’
‘Damned incompetent fools,’ the Provost Marshal said to the world at large. ‘They cannot even manage to hang a rogue without assistance.’
Somewhere a bell chimed the hour. Townley pulled out his watch and compared it with the clock on the wall.
‘They’re late,’ Marryot said. ‘Devilish unkind to the prisoner.’
The miserable, waiting silence embraced us once again. Noak consulted his pocketbook, turning the pages rapidly. Townley massaged his nose, applying pressure to the left side as if trying to push it so it would stand at a right angle to the rest of his face rather than a few degrees out of true.
I stared out of the window at the gallows. It consisted of a crossbeam supported by an upright post at either end. Three black chains hung from the crossbeam.
At last, at eight minutes past eight, the door re-opened. One by one, half a dozen men emerged on to the scaffold. First came the Provost Marshal’s sergeant, strutting like a cock in his own barnyard. He was followed by two soldiers with the condemned man shuffling between them. Next came a youthful parson, whose limbs seemed too long for his body and not entirely under their owner’s control. Another soldier brought up the rear with a canvas bag swinging from his hand.
Marryot removed his hat. The other gentlemen followed suit.
‘It is quite a military affair, as you see,’ Townley observed to me in a low voice, fanning himself with his hat. ‘The army usually handles this unpleasant necessity for us – the Commandant prefers it so. Of course, the Provost Marshal has everything to hand here, so it is convenient for everyone. He is unhappily obliged to oversee a great many executions – he is responsible for our rebel prisoners of war, you apprehend.’
Virgil’s arms were bound together in front of him and his ankles were shackled with a chain. Once they reached the scaffold, his escort pushed him directly under the crossbeam. The soldiers released his arms, though they stayed close to him.
The little slave looked about him, his head turning this way and that. His eyes found the window of the room where the gentlemen were waiting for him to die so that they might have their breakfast. His head became still. He flexed his wrists. His hands flapped and twitched. His lips moved but no sound came from them.
‘Come along, come along,’ the Provost Marshal cried. ‘We don’t have all day.’
Virgil stared at the window.
No one else spoke. I prayed silently, wordlessly and surely meaninglessly: for how could God be here?
The soldier with the bag came forward. The men in the room became still, watching the soldier take out a nightcap from his bag, which he placed on Virgil’s head. With surprising gentleness he drew it down over the negro’s face and patted him on his shoulder as a man touches a nervous horse to reassure him.
No one spoke, either on the scaffold or in the room that overlooked it. The nightcap had transformed Virgil from a person into something not quite human. It stripped the individuality from him. All that was left was a bundle of rags trembling like a shrivelled leaf in a breeze.
The soldier took the rope from the same bag and looped it through the end of the chain. He tied a knot to secure it. He lifted the noose at the other end of the rope, glanced at the Provost Marshal, and then placed the noose on the shoulders of the condemned man. He tightened it and stood to one side.
As if the touch of the noose had been a signal, Virgil cried out ‘God, God, God.’ His voice was muffled and not loud but it scraped against the surface of my mind like a rusty nail. He would not stop. ‘God, God, God.’
The sergeant stepped forward and checked the knots. The clergyman opened his prayer book and began to speak, though his voice was too low to hear what he was saying through the open window. But I knew what the words must be: I am the resurrection and the life.
The slave’s legs gave way. He would have collapsed if the soldiers had not seized him under the arms. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. The parson stood back.
All this time, Virgil was crying, ‘God, God, God.’
The sergeant turned towards the window. The Provost Marshal raised his arm and let it fall. The sergeant stamped twice. An assistant beneath the scaffold released the trap.
‘God, God, God—’
The planks on which Virgil was standing gave way. He vanished into the darkness under the scaffold with a violent clatter. There was an instant of silence, broken by the beat of an invisible drum.
Virgil dangled in the air, his feet kicking. His hands fluttered and then the fingers clenched into fists. He was dancing and twisting on the rope. He tried to raise his hands towards his neck but his arms were bound to his sides at the elbows.
The Provost Marshal leaned on the windowsill. ‘Goddamn it. I told you to make this quick. I have not had my breakfast yet.’
Two hands appeared from the darkness under the scaffold. They gripped the ankles of the hanging man and pulled sharply downwards. A spasm of movement rippled through Virgil’s body. And then at last he was still.
Chapter Fourteen
‘The air is a little cooler, I find,’ Mrs Arabella said. ‘But we rarely sit here in the evening because Mrs Wintour finds it fatiguing to walk so far.’
‘I distinctly felt a draught on my cheek, madam,’ I said. ‘Indeed, it is very pleasant with all the windows open.’
I could hardly believe the banality of my own conversation. For a moment my remark seemed to have stunned the others into silence. Mrs Arabella must have thought me the most pompous fool in creation.
We were sitting in the summerhouse at the bottom of the Wintours’ garden. Mrs Wintour had been too tired to come down for supper. Afterwards, the Judge had suggested that the three of us take our tea in the belvedere.
‘There is a charming westerly prospect of Vauxhall Garden and the grounds of King’s College,’ Mr Wintour had said. ‘One can glimpse the North River beyond. Though of course it will be almost dark by the time we are settled. Still, it will be agreeable to know that the prospect is there, will it not?’
The twilight was already far advanced, though we had not had the candles lit because of the flying insects their flames would attract. The air smelled faintly of lemon juice and vinegar, an agreeable contrast to the stink that pervaded so much of the city.
I turned towards Mr Wintour. ‘I had meant to enquire sooner, sir: is there any news of the goat?’
‘No. I fear the worst. But I have placed an advertisement in the Gazette. Nil desperandum must be our motto in this matter, as well as in our larger concerns.’
I wondered whether to mention the boy who had been selling goat meat outside the barracks before the hanging. It was impossible to be sure, but he might have been the boy whom I had seen with a living goat and the scar-faced negro on the day we had inspected Roger Pickett’s body. But even if it had been—
‘Her milk is much missed, sir,’ Mrs Arabella said, picking up the teapot and breaking my train of thought. ‘If we have lost her, I fear it will be nigh impossible to find another milch goat.’
She was wearing a pale gown that in the fading light made her almost luminous. She refilled my cup. I rose to take it and, in doing so, I felt the warmth radiating from her body and smelled the perfume I remembered from that first evening: otto of roses, mingled with her own peculiar fragrance. As I took the cup and saucer, her finger brushed my hand.
‘No more tea for me, my dear,’ Mr Wintour said, struggling to his feet. ‘I must see how Mrs Wintour does and then I shall retire for the night.’
For a moment we watched the old man picking his way down the path towards the garden door of the house.
Mrs Arabella stirred in her chair, and the wicker creaked beneath her body. ‘Miriam tells me you went to see that man hanged this morning.’
‘Yes, ma’am, I did. A melancholy duty.’
‘Did he confess to the murder in the end?’
‘I believe not.’
‘You would think a man would speak the truth if he knew he was to go before his maker in a few moments.’
‘He may have desired to confess, ma’am. But he was not given an opportunity as far as I know. But forgive me – the subject must be painful to you.’
The wicker creaked again. ‘Yes, of course. Though I barely knew Mr Pickett – but his murder is a terrible thing. Tell me, sir – was it – was it a hard death?’
I stared at her in the gathering dusk. ‘Mr Pickett’s?’
‘No, no – I mean the man who was hanged for the murder.’
‘How can it not have been?’ I said, more sharply than I intended.
‘I spoke without thinking.’ She sounded upset, though there was not enough light for me to read her expression. ‘But – but there must be degrees in these matters, must there not?’
‘It cannot have been easy.’ I remembered Virgil’s clenched fists, the kicking feet and, most vividly of all, the hands that had risen from beneath the scaffold to give the sharp, fatal tug at the slave’s ankles. ‘But it did not take long.’
She sighed. ‘I am glad of that, at least. Of course they do not have feelings as we do.’
‘Who do not?’
‘Negros. They are made of coarser clay. Indeed, many of them are little better than beasts of the field. Most negros have no more idea of true religion or morality than the man in the moon.’
‘I cannot believe that to be true, madam,’ I said. ‘Their situation may be inferior to ours, their education neglected, but one cannot blame them for that. Indeed, if we blame anyone, surely we must blame ourselves for their shortcomings.’
She threw back her head and laughed with such spontaneous merriment that I found myself smiling in sympathy. ‘Oh, you would not say that if you knew them as I do, sir.’
‘But I have encountered many negros in London, freed men, who—’
‘I do not mean all negros, of course,’ she interrupted, ‘or even all slaves, for that matter – for example, I except those like Josiah and Miriam and Abraham – they have lived so long among us as almost to be like us, as far as God permits them to be and allowing for the difference between our station in life and theirs.’
‘They are slaves, then? I did not know.’
‘They are perfectly content in their condition and give us faithful service. Their loyalty is beyond question. Believe me, sir, Josiah would not have his freedom if Mr Wintour offered it him on a silver platter.’
A silence fell between us.
‘Let us talk to something more agreeable,’ she said at length. ‘Your family, perhaps – I’m sure Mrs Savill is counting the days towards your happy return.’ She spoke seriously but there was an edge of mockery to her words that irritated me. ‘And the other evening you told us that you have a daughter, I think?’
‘Yes, ma’am – Elizabeth; she is five years old.’
There was another silence. Then Mrs Arabella said, in a voice barely above a whisper, ‘It cannot have been easy to leave her and to come all this way. And even worse for her, of course, to lose her papa.’
The twilight had grown darker. I heard her breathing. How strange, I thought, that she talked of Lizzie missing me, but not Augusta; how strange, and how oddly near the mark.
A door slammed. Both of us sat up sharply. It was as if, I thought later, we had been on the verge of being discovered in some shameful assignation. Miriam was coming down the garden with a lantern in her hand.
‘Good girl,’ Mrs Arabella said. ‘I was about to ring for candles.’
Miriam made her obedience in the doorway. ‘No, ma’am, it’s master. He begs you to join him in the library.’
‘But I thought he had retired.’
‘He came down again, ma’am. Major Marryot’s called.’
‘So late? And why should they want me?’
‘I’m sure I don’t know.’
Mrs Arabella rose to her feet. ‘I suppose I must find out what they want. But do not disturb yourself, Mr Savill. Shall we play backgammon when I come back? I need diversion – I do not feel at all sleepy yet.’
I said that nothing would give me more pleasure.
‘Then that is settled. Miriam – light me into the house and then bring candles for Mr Savill directly. You will find the backgammon board under that seat in the corner, sir. Or Miriam will fetch it out for you.’
The two women set off for the house. After a moment I went over to the corner and put my hand into the darkness under the seat. The smell of lemon juice and vinegar was stronger here. The Wintour ladies were good housekeepers. I felt the outlines of the backgammon box and drew it out. I laid it on the table and opened it. It was too dark to see the counters clearly.
I did not have long to wait. Miriam came down the path with a candelabra, its candles unlit, a taper and the lantern. She put them on the table beside the backgammon board but made no move to light the candles. Her hands were shaking.
‘If it please your honour,’ she said, ‘I think mistress will stay in the house now.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I shall come in myself in that case.’ I rose to my feet and, as I did so, the woman clutched the edge of the table. ‘Is something wrong, Miriam?’
‘Oh, sir, it’s the Captain.’
‘But I thought you said Major Marryot had called.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Miriam said, stumbling over her words. ‘He brought the news. Mr John, sir. Captain Wintour.’
It took me a moment to realize what she meant. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. Such distressing—’
‘No, sir, it’s not that. Mr John ain’t dead. He’s alive.’
Chapter Fifteen
The first week in New York stretched into a month and then to another. I found myself imperceptibly adjusting to my situation until it appeared almost unremarkable.
The war coloured everything and nothing. Perhaps it had been like this in Troy for most of the ten years that city had been invested by the Greeks. Perhaps in Troy, as in New York, life had continued much as usual in the long intervals between battles. It almost made a man wonder whether the battles were necessary in the first place.
In October, Mr Rampton wrote with what he said was good news. Lord George Germain had been pleased to say with the kindest condescension imaginable that he had glanced over a memorandum I had composed before leaving for New York, and thought it a model of its kind. The Department would benefit greatly from a man of Mr Savill’s proven abilities as its eyes and ears in New York.
This being so, His Lordship desires me to communicate to you his wish that you should remain in New York for a few months more. Since a winter passage would not be at all agreeable for you, I took the liberty of suggesting that we should therefore extend your commission until the March or April. Who knows, by that time the rebels may have capitulated. We hear on every side that the Continental troops are deserting in droves because Congress cannot pay them except in their own worthless dollars.
My dear Savill, what a feather in your cap is this! Matters are turning out just as I had hoped. In haste, for the messenger is about to post to Falmouth to catch the packet before it sails with the August mail, believe me
Truly yours, HR.
At first I could not but be pleased that my abilities had earned such approval – not only from Mr Rampton but from Lord George himself. Then my mind swung to the other extreme. I had been sentenced to pass another five or six months in this uncomfortable provincial backwater. I should be obliged to deal, week in, week out, with ever-swelling numbers of unfortunate Loyalists, with the rudeness of Major Marryot and with an array of criminal cases.
And what of Augusta? My wife and I did not agree in many respects but she had never denied me a husband’s rights. Indeed, she showed a surprising enthusiasm for granting them to me when the candle was out and the curtains were drawn. To be absent from her was to have an itch one could not scratch. As a prudent and rational man, I should no doubt have told myself that the gratifications of marriage would prove all the sweeter if I continued longer in New York. But prudent and rational considerations seemed to have no noticeable effect on this particular itch.
In this reckoning of potential profit and probable loss, where did Lizzie figure on my balance sheet? For a child of five, a single month was an eternity, and I had already been separated from her for three. I knew she would be well looked after in Shepperton, and that my sister would ensure that she had no material wants. But she must miss her papa. Her mother had never cared much for Lizzie, perhaps because hers had been a difficult birth, and disliked having the child about her. But I had loved her from the first. I felt my daughter’s absence as a man must feel the lack of an amputated limb.
Still, there was no help for it. If I were to make a new home for the three of us and provide Augusta and Lizzie with the necessities of life and even a few luxuries, I must remain in New York for the time being.
I asked Mr Wintour whether I might extend my stay in Warren Street.
‘Nothing would give me greater pleasure,’ the Judge said, staring at me over the top of the glasses he wore for reading. ‘Before you came I was entirely surrounded by a monstrous regiment of women.’ He smiled to show that the words were intended as a pleasantry. ‘Besides, I do not find it agreeable to drink His Majesty’s health by myself. Toasts should be made in company, and another gentleman is indispensable for that. And of course it means I shall have the pleasure of making my son known to you when he returns. It may be any week now, you know – he writes that he is almost restored.’
‘I would not wish to inconvenience Captain Wintour, sir,’ I said. ‘If you would prefer me to remove—’
‘No, no, my dear sir. I would not hear of it. And nor would Mrs Wintour, and nor Bella. It is Bella who counts most particularly, you know, for this is her house. As for John, he will enjoy having a man his own age to talk to. Otherwise I fear he will find us very dull.’
Mrs Arabella came into the library, and he told her the news. She was looking remarkably handsome today, I thought – this fine autumn weather must suit her. Indeed, I could not understand how I had so readily dismissed her claims to beauty on our first acquaintance. ‘Once seen,’ Mr Noak had said of her, ‘never forgotten.’ Perhaps he had been right all along. I had not been a very good judge of anything after the discomforts of our passage from England and the horrors that had confronted me on my arrival in New York.
‘I hope your staying longer will not grieve Mrs Savill and your daughter, sir,’ she said. ‘Your daughter is called Elizabeth, is she not?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ I was touched that she had remembered the name. ‘It will certainly grieve me not to see her.’
‘And yet you stay?’
‘Bella, Bella,’ the Judge said. ‘A man must go where he is ordered. You know that, as a soldier’s wife.’
‘Yes, sir,’ she said. ‘Of course I know it. But a child cannot understand the bitterness of parting in the way a wife can.’
Mr Wintour patted her hand. ‘You are too tender-hearted, my dear.’
‘Five years old is very young.’
‘It cannot be helped,’ I said. ‘Though I wish with all my heart that it could.’
Chapter Sixteen
Mr Townley lived very comfortably with his family in a commodious and most respectable house in Hanover Square, next door to an admiral. Most of the ground floor was given over to business.
I had gradually learned that Townley was a man with his fingers in many pies. As well as superintending the city’s police, he sat on several boards, one to do with the execution of port regulations and another to do with the issuing of licences to the cartmen who transported goods about the city and its environs. He had a warehouse on Long Island and also leased Norman’s Slip, out on the Greenwich Road, which enabled him to trade on his own account.
‘My dear sir,’ he said, when I brought the news that my mission in New York had been extended, ‘how very agreeable – for us, at least. And for you too, I hope. Now pray sit down. Another five or six months, eh? Nothing could be better.’
We were in his private room, a back parlour. There was an autumnal chill in the air, and a fire burned brightly in the grate.
‘Will you look for an establishment of your own now?’ Townley asked, leaning forward in his chair. ‘You would be so much more comfortable. I believe I could find you most respectable lodgings in Queen Street if you liked: three chambers, a spacious parlour, a kitchen and wine cellar there. With use of the hall, of course, and the coachhouse and the stables. The widow who owns the house – a most delightful lady – is a friend of my wife’s. I’m sure I could obtain a six-month lease for – let me see – forty-five guineas.’ He raised a long, languid hand as if I had objected. ‘The American Department has a position in the world, after all. Mr Rampton would wish you to live in a style that befits it.’
‘I shall remain at Judge Wintour’s, sir, for the time being at any rate. It is very convenient in all respects.’
‘Ah.’ He looked up. ‘Well, no doubt Mrs Arabella is an excellent housekeeper. It is in fact her house, you know – it was her father’s residence in the city – though she has lent it to her parents-in-law for the duration of the war. But in any case, I am sure the family is happy to have you there.’
Neither of us mentioned money, but I knew my two guineas a week must be a welcome addition to the Wintours’ income. The Judge needed ready money. Everywhere in the house were signs of past affluence and present shortages, from Josiah’s livery with its frayed cuffs and stained armpits, to the carefully rationed tea leaves which were re-used at least once above stairs and probably two or three times more in the kitchen and the slave quarters.
‘Still,’ Townley continued, after a pause, ‘I wonder how you will find Warren Street when Captain Wintour returns.’
‘Equally convenient, I hope.’
‘That remains to be seen. Captain Wintour is not the easiest of men. Of course he has reason enough for that.’
‘Because of Saratoga?’
‘Yes, indeed.’ Townley glanced at me, his face bland but oddly attentive. ‘But there are other reasons, too. He had great expectations from his father-in-law, Mr Froude, but this war has put paid to those, at least until we have peace again.’ He paused. ‘When does he come home?’
‘In a few weeks. He is well enough to travel now, I apprehend, and is in Quebec. His father has sent money for his passage home.’
There was a tap on the door, and Mr Noak brought in a letter for Townley to sign.
‘Ah – the incomparable Noak,’ Townley said with a smile. ‘I cannot imagine how I managed without you.’
Mr Noak bowed but did not return the smile. He was now permanently employed by Mr Townley, who entrusted him with the management of more and more business. His unobtrusive efficiency was matched by his kindness of heart, as I had learned from his care of me at sea. So I was not altogether surprised when, one Sunday afternoon in September, I had found him in the drawing room at Warren Street reading the Bible to old Mrs Wintour, whose eyes were failing. These Sunday visits had settled into what was almost a routine; Mrs Wintour became quite agitated if Mr Noak happened not to be at leisure.
‘There was one other matter, sir,’ Noak said as he took back the letter from Townley. He hesitated, waving the letter to and fro to dry the ink.
‘You may speak, man – we need have no secrets from Mr Savill.’
‘Yes, sir. It is only the docket for Major Marryot.’
‘What of it?’
‘The list includes the boy found drowned by the Paulus Hook ferry. I believe he may be the Government informer who goes by the name of Benjamin Taggart.’
Townley straightened his long spine. ‘Oh yes – well, was he murdered?’
‘I cannot say for certain, sir, either way – he drowned, that is all; I saw no sign of violence on his body. They are keeping it at King’s Wharf for the time being. But what shall I say your recommendation is?’
‘To let sleeping dogs die. Or, rather, drowned dogs in this case.’ He chuckled in appreciation of his own wit. ‘Unless there are reasons why Major Marryot should enquire further into it?’
‘Not that I am aware of, sir. And, even if there were, the boy’s body can tell him nothing more than it already has.’
‘Well, then. I think we need waste no further time on a slave’s by-blow, do you? And I’m sure Major Marryot will agree.’
Noak bowed.
‘Mind you,’ Townley said, ‘Taggart did us one good service, did he not?’ He turned to me. ‘It was he who tipped us the wink about poor Pickett’s murderer. You remember? The runaway, Virgil. We’d not have been able to hang the rogue without Taggart.’
Chapter Seventeen
There could be no harm in it, surely?
On the other hand, a prudent man knew when to leave well alone. Especially a man with his way to make in the world.
As the day went on, I found myself thinking more and more about the Pickett affair. I could not avoid the fact that I felt not only curious about his murder but also in some strange way responsible for the runaway slave they had hanged for it.
It was as if I had failed him.
But was not the man a convicted murderer? Who was I to set my judgement against that of the officers who had made up the court martial? They were vastly experienced; they had been cognizant of all the facts – whereas I was but newly arrived in this city and a positive babe in arms in such matters. Most important of all, my duty was merely to observe the administration of justice: apart from that, I had no legal standing in the affair; nor was I under any moral obligation to go beyond the terms of my commission.
And yet – these were a civil servant’s arguments, perfectly adequate for a departmental inquiry or Mr Rampton or even a court of law. But they did not quite convince me as a man. Now Taggart, the informer, was dead too.
The decision hung in the balance for the rest of the morning, and later at the coffee house where I dined alone and frugally on an elderly mutton chop and a pint of sherry. At the end of the meal, I decided to let chance take a hand in the matter. I felt in my waistcoat pocket for the ivory die I had found under Pickett’s body. I pushed aside the plate and brushed the crumbs away with the napkin.
If it came up with an odd number, I should go back to the office and forget all about the drowned informer, the hanged slave and Pickett’s murder. If the number were even, I should refresh myself with a stroll to the river in the mild afternoon sunshine.
I rolled the die. It danced across the stained linen cloth, ricocheted off the base of the wine glass and came to rest beside the fork. It was a four.
There could be no harm in it, I repeated to myself again and again like a Papist with his rosary, as if repetition could somehow make it true. There could be no harm in it, none in the world.
The Paulus Hook ferry was at the north-west end of Cortland Street, by King’s Wharf. My choice of route proved to be a mistake, for Cortland Street took me through the desolate heart of Canvas Town, not far from the cellar where they had found the body of Roger Pickett.
The roadway itself was an illicit market place. As I passed along it, three whores solicited me, a negro offered me a Pembroke table with three legs and two unmatched chairs, a one-armed soldier tried to sell me a pair of boots, a variety of entertainers sought to distract me, and beggars haunted my every step. A woman showed me the baby at her breast. ‘For the love of God,’ she said, ‘for the love of God.’
This was the other New York, the shadow town, the dark simulacrum of the prosperous shops and stalls that lined Broadway.
At the end of the street, a breeze was coming off the water. Near the shore the river was dense with small craft bobbing on the swell. Further out lay a scattering of merchant ships with a line of men-of-war beyond them. The sea shifted and glittered in the sunshine. A mile or so away was the Jersey coast.
To the south, towards Fort George at the tip of the island, a party of prisoners of war were working with picks and shovels, strengthening the embankment along the shore. A small detachment of Hessians watched over them, though without much interest. There was nowhere for the prisoners to run to and, besides, most of them were in no condition to run anywhere.
At the wharf were more guards, part-time Provincials drunk with their petty authority. I showed the sergeant in charge my passes, one from Headquarters, the other from Townley, and his arrogance modulated swiftly to something approaching servility.
‘Where do you keep the bodies you take from the water?’ I asked. ‘I want to see one of them.’
He laughed. ‘A body, sir? We can show you a fair few of those. We keep them for a day or two, and if no one claims them they go with the others.’
‘What others?’
The sergeant pointed his staff at the prisoners at work on the embankment. ‘They pack the rebel dead into the foundations. Saves all of us a deal of work.’
‘You mean they put dead prisoners there? Under the new embankment?’
‘Yes, sir – and the ones from the water, like I said, assuming they’re not claimed. Might as well do something useful with them, eh?’
‘I wish to inspect the body of a boy,’ I said. ‘His name’s Taggart. Mr Townley’s man has already looked at him.’
‘Ah, yes – that little negro. Over here, sir.’ He led the way towards a warehouse built into the gently sloping ground away from the water. ‘We keep them down the end,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘It’s cooler.’
He unbolted a heavy door and stood aside to allow me to enter first. I found myself in a narrow chamber with a vaulted ceiling stretching across the width of the building. The room was lit by two arched openings, barred but unglazed, placed high in the walls. Below them was a bank of broad, slatted shelves.
The first thing I noticed was the smell – an unlovely compound of salt water, seaweed and decaying flesh. My gorge rose. I covered my mouth and nose with a handkerchief.
‘A man grows used to the stink,’ the sergeant said. ‘I hardly notice it now.’
I glanced about me at the shapes stacked on the shelves. The bodies had been hunched together to save space. Some were naked; others wore a ragged shirt or breeches. I knew that anything worth taking would have been plundered before they were brought here.
‘It’s that one.’ The sergeant poked a mottled arm with his staff. ‘Came in the day before yesterday.’
The small body lay on its side with its back to us.
‘I want to see the face,’ I said.
The sergeant seized the upper arm by the wrist. He tugged it. The body did not move. He grinned at me, spat on his hands and braced his leg against the brick support of the shelves.
‘He’s being a little contrary, sir. But not for long.’
He took the corpse’s arm with both hands and wrenched it violently towards him. There was a sucking, squelching sound. The upper part of the body twisted. The corpse was now on its back, though its legs were still angled away from us. The smell worsened.
The head faced upwards. The sergeant took hold of it by the nearer ear and pulled it closer to the edge of the shelf.
‘That suffice, sir? I can stretch him out if you want.’
‘No need, thank you.’ I forced myself to look at the face. The eyes had gone. I swallowed hard.
‘The one you’re looking for?’ the sergeant asked.
‘Yes.’
There was no doubt about it. It was the mulatto boy I had encountered twice before. He was smaller than I remembered, and perhaps younger – no more than nine or ten. He was very thin, the ribs as clearly defined as the ridges on a fluted column; and there were faded weals on his side where he had been beaten, probably with a rope’s end, but not recently.
‘How long had he been in the water?’
‘A day or two, sir, maybe less. Don’t take long for the fish to get the eyes. Minutes, sometimes.’
Here was the informer who, according to Noak, had brought about Virgil’s death on the gallows. I had seen him twice before, though I had not known his name. On the first occasion, the day of my arrival, the boy had been leading a goat close to the spot where they had found Pickett’s body. The second time, he had been selling goat meat outside the barracks on the morning when they hanged a man for Pickett’s murder.
I straightened up. ‘Have you had any other bodies lately?’
‘A rebel prisoner on Sunday. He’d been in the water for a week or two.’
‘What about a big negro with a long scar on either side of his nose?’
‘No one like that, sir, not to my recollection.’ The sergeant gestured at the boy on the shelf. ‘Seen enough?’
‘Yes. I’m obliged to you.’
‘Do you want me to hold him here for Major Marryot to see?’
I shook my head. What was the point, after all? Marryot would laugh at me.
The sergeant pushed the body back on to its side and rubbed his hands on his coat. ‘Runaway, was he?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Perhaps he was running from something.’
‘And then it caught up with him,’ the sergeant said.
Chapter Eighteen
Early in November, I saw the little girl for the first and last time.
I had just dined with the Commandant and a considerable company of gentlemen, most of them in uniform. There had been much food and many toasts. I was a little drunk, and therefore disposed to be emotional.
As I strolled along, Lizzie was in my mind, which was perhaps why I noticed the child in the first place. The thought of my daughter aroused a host of feelings in me – love, of course, and a sort of hunger for her company, and also anxiety: suppose she fell ill? Suppose her mother or her aunt treated her cruelly? Suppose I were to die, leaving her penniless and unprotected in this harsh and unforgiving world? Suppose the unthinkable, that Lizzie herself should die?
It was still early in the evening and Broadway was crowded. It was dark. There were a few streetlights, and the lighted windows and shop doorways. But these emphasized the gloom rather than dispelled it. That was when I saw the child.
The girl was younger than Lizzie and was in leading strings. She was with a woman. The two of them had emerged from a haberdasher’s shop about twenty or thirty yards in front of me. Both were muffled against the weather in long cloaks with hoods over their heads. The woman tugged the girl along, almost pulling her off her feet. The child had not yet learned how to walk quickly without falling over. She strained against the harness that held her as if bursting to escape.
In a moment they passed a pastry-cook’s shop – a large and brightly lit establishment with two big windows. The child was distracted by the smells and the warmth. She pulled her reins free from the woman’s hand and darted towards the open door.
The woman caught her in an instant. She hooked her arm around the girl’s waist and spun her, legs kicking, into the air. The movement dislodged the hoods from their heads.
The scene was as brightly lit as a stage. I saw the child in profile, her arms outstretched towards the pastry-cook’s, her mouth open in a howl of frustration. She was a negro, as was the woman who had charge of her.
In that same moment, alerted by my footsteps, the woman looked in my direction. To my surprise, I recognized Miriam, Mrs Arabella’s maid.
The scene dissolved. Miriam walked rapidly away, almost at a run, still with the kicking, wailing child in her arms. I called out. She did not turn round. A porter staggered out of the furniture shop next door with his arms wrapped around a large wing armchair, which stopped me dead in my tracks and blocked my view.
By the time I reached the pastry-cook’s, there was no sign of the woman and the girl. I could no longer hear the child’s cries. Either the two of them were obscured by the throng of passers-by or they had turned into another shop or down one of the narrow alleys that punctuated the line of buildings.
Why such apparently furtive behaviour? Was Miriam outside the house on some unlicensed errand? Was it possible that she was married? Could the child be hers? I began to doubt it had been Miriam – after all, I had barely glimpsed the young woman and the light had been poor.
I returned to Warren Street. Josiah answered my knock on the street door. The old man helped me remove my hat and greatcoat, murmuring gently that the ladies were in the drawing room and Judge Wintour was at work in his library. He turned aside to dispose of my coat.
‘Josiah?’
‘Sir?
‘I saw Miriam this evening. At least I believe I did.’
Josiah hung my coat without undue haste. He faced me and bowed, his face expressionless.
‘She was with a child – a negro girl, an infant. Has Miriam a daughter?’
‘No, sir.’
Josiah bowed again and retreated into the shadows at the back of the hall.
It cannot have been more than a week later that Captain John Wintour came home. I have a note of the date: it was on Thursday, 12 November. He had been badly wounded at Saratoga and, by his own account, had spent many months on the borders of life and death. An old and feeble-witted woman stumbled across him half dead in a wood when she was gathering kindling near her cottage. She had nursed him back to health.
Eventually he had reached Canada and found his way to Kingstown, where there were cousins of his mother who were able to shelter him; but his health had broken down again. Fortunately he had, in his own words, the constitution of a horse and had recovered sufficiently to be able to undertake the voyage home.
He arrived in Warren Street in the evening. It was the dead hour before supper. As chance would have it, when he knocked at the door I was descending the stairs on my way to the parlour.
The younger manservant, Abraham, let him in, trying to say a few words of welcome. Wintour pushed past him and stood in the middle of the hall, legs apart and hands in the pockets of his patched greatcoat, which had clearly been made for someone much smaller. He was a spare man of about thirty, with flushed, bony features and deep-set eyes, which were an unusually bright blue. He stared at me.
‘And who the devil are you?’ he demanded, swaying as he spoke.
‘My name is Savill, sir. Have I the honour of meeting Captain Wintour?’
‘Indeed, sir. The honour is entirely mine.’ Wintour attempted a bow, staggered forward and righted himself. ‘You must be the gentleman from the American Department. My father told me.’
‘Yes, sir. You have—’
The parlour door opened and Mrs Wintour almost ran to her son, an extraordinary exhibition of physical energy from the old lady. She embraced him. The Captain closed his eyes and patted her shoulder. With his other hand he scratched his nose.
Next came the Judge, more slowly. He looked his son up and down.
‘I am happy to see you home, John,’ he said.
‘Yes, sir. And – and I to be here.’
‘You are – you are fatigued?’
‘It has been a long day, sir, and my health is not yet quite restored.’
‘Then perhaps you should rest – after you have seen Bella, of course. Let Abraham take your coat.’
Mr Wintour took his wife’s arm and drew her from her son. The Captain held out his arms and let the slave ease the coat away from him.
No one looked in my direction. I thought they had forgotten me.
There were footsteps on the stairs. I turned. Mrs Arabella was rounding the bend at the half-landing. She paused at the top of the last flight down to the hall.
First she must have seen me. She let her eyes drift past me to the group in the hall below. I could not see her expression because the light was dim and the flame of the candle she held was below the level of her chin.
But the candlelight revealed two things about Mrs Arabella. It showed her slim white neck. It showed that she was swallowing repeatedly, as if trying to force down an unpalatable morsel. And the flame also picked out her hand holding the top of the newel post, and how the fingers gripped it so tightly that the skin wrinkled.
The Captain looked up. ‘Ah – there you are, madam. My pretty, witty wife.’
Chapter Nineteen
Townley was a hospitable man, who talked easily to anyone, and perhaps let his tongue wag more freely than a gentleman should. But I enjoyed his company because he was almost always cheerful and had a pleasant wit.
I would sometimes sup with him, either alone or with two or three of his friends. On those occasions I saw another side of New York, for the gentlemen around the table were Loyalists of course but, unlike those who came up to my office in Broad Street, they were on the whole content with their lives.
‘I bless the day,’ Townley confided to me in a fit of drunken confidence, ‘when those damned Yankees dumped the tea in Boston Harbour. Indeed, sir, it has been the making of us here.’
We were sitting at table in a small private room in the King’s Arms. The shutters were up and a fire of unseasoned wood crackled and spluttered in the grate. Two other men, a contractor and a commissioner for the harbour administration, made up the party. But they were oblivious to our conversation for they were engaged in an animated discussion about the need to bring in professional actresses at the John Street Theatre.
‘Surely it must be difficult for you,’ I said to Townley. ‘Since so many goods are in short supply, there must be a constant—’
‘Supply and demand, sir,’ Townley interrupted. ‘That’s what the students of political economy call it. It is a beautiful thing, for the supplier at least. If the available stock diminishes, you raise the price of what you have. Or, if demand remains keen when the supply is exhausted, you simply sell promises instead, which is like selling air. No, for a man with his wits about him, this war has been a blessing.’
He hesitated, frowning. I ran my finger round the rim of my glass and tried not to smile.
‘Of course, sir, I do not mean to suggest that the war is – well, in any way, even in the slightest, a desirable thing, but – taken, as a whole, you understand, considered in the round – there is no harm in a man looking to his own interests.’ Townley wagged his forefinger in front of my face. ‘Always with the proviso, my dear sir, that His Majesty’s interests must be served, first and foremost, without fear or favour, in any—’
‘Sir,’ I said gently, ‘I believe I understand you perfectly. Should we drink a toast to His Majesty?’
‘Indeed.’ Townley seized the bottle and burst out laughing from sheer animal spirits. ‘And damnation to his enemies. Good God, I had not realized it was so early. Shall we call for the punchbowl?’
By the time the party broke up it was nearly midnight. As we went outside, I almost recoiled from the cold. November was well advanced now, and so was winter.
Townley and one of the other men had servants to light them home. The third man took a waiting hackney chair. I decided to walk back to Warren Street. It was only a step away and the exercise would clear my head. Despite the lateness of the hour, the streets were still busy, for the city came alive at night with theatre parties, musical entertainments, suppers and dances. I knew my way perfectly and I believed, if a man was cautious, there could be no danger.
On the other side of the road, facing the fields, I saw the silhouettes of the prison and the poorhouse looming square and black against the sky. As I drew level with them, I turned up towards King’s College.
It was darker here and there were fewer people about. Someone ahead was whistling. A dog barked in the distance, somewhere near Freshwater Pond. The ferrule of my stick tapped against the paving stones. The change of direction brought me into the wind, which was blowing hard from the north. I felt its chilly bite on my neck above the collar of the greatcoat, and it cut through the thin silk of my stockings.
It was the wind that saved me. It was the wind that made me slacken my pace to adjust my muffler, which had worked loose.
Directly ahead, a man shot out from a dark entry between two buildings. But for my change of pace, he would have collided with me. Simultaneously, I heard footsteps behind me, whose presence I had already registered, footsteps that now were speeding up.
‘It’s him,’ said a man’s voice behind me.
I’m trapped.
I raised the stick above my head and turned sharply to the right, which brought my back to the blank wall of the building beside me.
The man in front leapt at me. I slashed the stick down in a diagonal arc. I heard a cry of pain. Metal chinked on stone.
I reversed the direction of the stick and swung it blindly backwards. I shouted, a wordless cry. The stick landed on something soft. It twisted like a live thing. I lost hold of it and swore at my assailant.
As suddenly as it had begun, it was over. There were more running footsteps. My two attackers darted into the alley. A couple of men gave chase, whooping and hallooing as if they were chasing hares.
‘Run, boyo, run,’ someone cried in great excitement, his voice bouncing against the walls of the alley.
I leaned back against the wall, hunched over and drawing breath in great shuddering gasps. As the danger subsided, my mind filled with all the stories I had heard of assault and robbery on the streets of New York, of the brutish attacks by drunken soldiers and vulgar criminals which the military authorities so rarely troubled to check.
‘Sir?’ It was an English voice, a gentleman’s. ‘Are you hurt?’
I looked up. ‘Thank you, no.’
‘Good God, this town is a perfect nursery of crime.’
Another man came running up to us, this one bearing a lantern. By its light I made out that my rescuer was a middle-aged naval lieutenant, with a footman to light his way.
‘Your arrival was providential, sir.’ I paused, for I still found it hard to breathe. ‘I cannot thank you enough.’
‘I can’t take the credit, sir – a pair of soldiers chased the villains away.’
His servant picked up my stick and handed it to me.
‘Footpads,’ my rescuer said, gripping the hilt of his dress sword. ‘Sprang on you like – like a pair of tigers on a goat. Saw that happen once, sir, in the East Indies. Not a pretty sight, believe me.’
‘Did you see the rogues, sir?’ I asked.
‘No, sir. Too dark to see more than the shape of them. Tell you what, though: I’d lay ten to one they were negros. You know that musty smell their clothes have, sir?’ The lieutenant sniffed, as if to illustrate his point. ‘I’ve often remarked it. Thieving magpies, the whole pack of them. They’d steal their grandmother’s teeth if they could.’
I shifted position and one of my shoes kicked against something that scraped on the pavement. I bent down and picked up the object, holding it so the light from the lantern fell upon it.
For a moment no one spoke. In my hand was a knife with a crude horn handle. The blade was about eight inches long and sharpened to a tapering point.
The lieutenant touched the blade with a fingertip. ‘After your purse and your rings, I suppose,’ he said. ‘But if need be, I dare say they would not have scrupled to murder you while they were at it.’
Chapter Twenty
Fear has a terrible habit of breeding fear; it spreads like maggots through rotting meat.
Once the danger was past I began to tremble. My rescuer kindly ignored my shameful weakness and escorted me to Warren Street. No one was about, except for servants. The lieutenant would not stay – his ship sailed at dawn tomorrow. I would have welcomed the company of anyone, even Captain Wintour, whose conversation, I had discovered, was not always agreeable. Instead I drank rum and water alone in the parlour, huddled over the banked-up fire, and the alcohol seemed to have no effect on me whatsoever.
My mind raced to and fro. It was as if it were under the influence of a powerful stimulant. When at last I retired to bed, I could not sleep.
Time and again, I ran over what had happened and what might have happened. The memory of my own unheroic conduct made me toss and turn in the smothering embrace of the featherbed.
Time and again, I returned to that terrible moment when the man had bounded out from the alley in front of me, and the footsteps behind had speeded up.
It’s him. That’s what the man behind me had said. It’s him.
After a sleepless night, I walked through the rain-slicked streets to Headquarters and asked to see Marryot. His servant ushered me into the Major’s private room. A masked white figure was sitting by the window. Two blue eyes, gleaming bright as if illuminated from within, stared out of the blank white face. For an instant I believed my mind had given way under the strain.
The moment dissolved and reformed itself: Marryot was swathed in a sheet, with his scalp and face lathered white. A regimental barber stood to one side, sharpening his razor on a strop. The blade slapped to and fro, glinting as it passed through a shaft of weak sunshine from the window.
I bowed.
‘Good morning to you, sir,’ the Major said, revealing the vivid pink of his mouth and an irregular palisade of blackened teeth. ‘You’ll forgive me if I don’t stand.’
‘Of course. I’m obliged to you for seeing me at such short notice.’
‘And how may I serve you?’
I glanced at the barber. ‘I wished to speak privately. Shall I wait until you are at leisure?’
‘You could wait all day for that and most of tomorrow as well. The General is to inspect the fortifications at King’s Bridge, and I am ordered to accompany him.’ Marryot looked up at the barber. ‘Wait outside. Send for more hot water.’
We waited in silence until the man had withdrawn, closing the door behind him.
Marryot did not ask me to sit. ‘Well, sir? What is it?’
‘I was set upon last night. It was about midnight – I was walking back to Warren Street after supping with Mr Townley at the King’s Arms.’
‘Were you robbed?’
‘No. Two soldiers came to my aid and chased the villains off.’
‘Were you hurt?’
‘No.’
‘All in all, a happy escape,’ he said. ‘I congratulate you, sir. And now, if that is—’
‘Sir, I am not altogether easy in my mind about this. There was something … something contrived about the attack. It was as if they had been lying in wait.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I felt as if I had walked into a trap, sir. There was a man in front and a man behind.’
‘But perhaps you had walked into a trap. Robbers work in pairs often enough.’
‘They had been waiting for me.’ I paused. ‘For me. Not for any passer-by that might have had a purse in his pocket. It’s him. That’s what one of them said.’
‘Well? All that means is that they had picked you out earlier as a likely mark.’
‘No, sir, I do not think so. Or they would not have made their attempt with so many witnesses about.’
Marryot sighed. ‘In my experience a robber can be as foolish as any man alive.’
‘Would you assist me in one thing at least? It would greatly set my mind at rest if I might talk to the two soldiers who chased them off. They may be able to tell me more about the men who attacked me. Besides, I should like to reward them. They may well have saved my life.’
‘Did you see their facings?’
‘No, sir. To all intents and purposes it was dark.’
‘So for all you know, they might have been from Provincial or militia—’
‘I heard them shouting, sir,’ I said, thinking, Run, boyo, run. ‘I believe I detected that one of them had a Welsh accent. Of course they may have come from a Loyalist regiment, but it is more probable that they did not.’
‘Very well.’ The lather on Marryot’s face was drying: cracks appeared, revealing the pink skin beneath. ‘I shall have enquiries made. And I suppose Mr Townley may learn something from his own informants.’
There was nothing to be gained by prolonging the meeting. I took my leave. But as I reached the door—
‘One other thing, sir,’ Marryot said. ‘How do they do in Warren Street?’
‘Very well, thank you, sir.’
‘And Captain Wintour? Pray, how is he?’
‘He improves every day, I believe,’ I said. ‘But his wound and the privations he endured have left their mark.’
‘His family must rejoice to have him restored to them. How are his parents? And – and Mrs Arabella, of course?’
‘Quite well, thank you.’
‘Pray pass on my compliments to them all, Mr Savill. I have not thought it proper to call in person to congratulate them on Captain Wintour’s happy return. In case his health still caused anxiety, you understand.’
‘I am sure that they are always happy to receive you, sir.’
‘You think so?’
I knew that when he spoke of the Wintours he meant Mrs Arabella and I pitied him for his doglike devotion. ‘I am perfectly convinced of it.’
‘Then I’m obliged to you, sir.’ The eyes blazed in the cracked white mask. ‘And I wish you good day.’
Chapter Twenty-One
Shortly before Christmas, I had occasion to become better acquainted with Captain Wintour. We found ourselves alone at supper one day; the ladies had not come down and the Judge was suffering from a head-cold and had kept to his room. It was chilly, and afterwards we drew up our chairs to the parlour fire.
‘It is so confoundedly dull here,’ he said, prodding the logs with a poker. ‘My father should entertain more. And we should be seen out and about in the world, where we belong. We are one of the first families of the province. Besides, a man cannot spend all his time at home with his wife, can he?’
I nodded, acknowledging the remark but not answering it.
‘Mark you, sir, Mrs Arabella is an adornment to any assembly or private party. She is wasted in Warren Street, shut up where nobody sees her. The Wintour diamonds are the best in New York, you know, and she looks charming in them. They were my grandmother’s. After the war is over I shall take Mrs Arabella to London and she shall wear them at court.’
‘You have visited London before, sir?’
‘As a young man, I passed several months there.’ Wintour clicked his fingers. ‘But let us have a game. What shall it be, sir? Cards? Backgammon? We can play by the fire – they will bring us up another bottle and we shall be famously snug.’
We were drinking an old madeira, pale and golden like watery sunlight. Mr Wintour had put aside a few bottles until the end of the war, so he would have a fitting wine with which to drink the King’s health when victory was declared. But his son argued that if they left the wine much longer, it would be spoiled; it would be better to drink it now.
‘Let us make this more interesting,’ he suggested as we were waiting for Josiah to bring up another bottle, and a second one too in case it should be needed. ‘Let us put a trifle on the outcome. I find that a stake concentrates the faculties wonderfully.’
Josiah brought the wine and Captain Wintour shouted at him for forgetting to bring the cards and the backgammon as well. The old man bowed low and said nothing, though I knew as well as he did that he could not have forgotten because he had not been ordered to bring them in the first place.
When the slave returned, Wintour had him set up a little table between us. It had flaps that drew out at either end, and we placed a candle on each of them. The Captain opened the backgammon board and laid out the ebony and ivory counters with trembling fingers. The arrows had been painted a delicate shade of green and they rested on a black ground. The board made a pretty sight in flickering light. It was a handsome set, as good as anything I had seen in London apart from the dice, which were clearly of colonial manufacture, being made of bone and crudely painted.
‘They say this is a game of chance, sir,’ Wintour said, taking up his glass. ‘But that is all stuff and nonsense, is it not? Chance may dictate the fall of the dice but, taken all in all, it’s skill that counts. When I waited for my ship in Quebec, I paid for my dinners with backgammon.’
A counter slipped from his hand. His wine glass tilted. Madeira splashed on to the board and formed a small, glistening puddle in one of its corners.
‘Goddamn it!’ He stared at the board and slowly shook his head.
‘It don’t signify, sir.’ I took out a handkerchief and dabbed at the wine. ‘It is only a drop or two. See – it is gone.’
Wintour stared at the handkerchief. ‘You’ve cut yourself.’
‘What? Where?’
‘Your hand, I apprehend – look at the handkerchief.’
I held the square of cloth to the light of the nearer candle. He was right: the cambric had a reddish tinge resembling blood in one corner. I examined my hand. The skin was unbroken.
‘It must be paint, sir, not blood,’ I said.
‘Very likely,’ Wintour said, losing interest in the matter as swiftly as he had gained it.
I frowned. The ground of the board looked black in the candlelight but it was possible that it was really a very dark red.
He reached for the bottle. ‘Shall we put a guinea on the first game, sir?’
‘Or there might have been blood,’ I said slowly. ‘A spot of blood on the board.’
As I spoke I imagined someone – Mrs Arabella, perhaps – pricking her finger by accident while she was sewing, with the board open before her. Or even suffering an unexpected nosebleed, such as one sometimes had as a result of a heavy cold. A few drops of blood might so easily have fallen on the board and lain there, drying in a moment, and invisible against the dark paint, particularly if the bloodletting had happened in poor light. The madeira had reliquefied the blood, bringing it back to a watery half-life.
‘Well, sir – guinea?’ said Wintour, sharply. ‘I find a little wager lends spice to a game, any game at all. Playing for love is so confoundedly dull.’
I had not played backgammon since my arrival in America. To begin with I found it difficult to concentrate. I lost the first game quite unnecessarily, allowing Wintour to gammon me.
‘We play according to Hoyle’s rules, do we not?’ he said, almost crowing with triumph. ‘If I remember rightly that means we double the stake. And therefore we triple it for a backgammon.’
I nodded, though I could not recall that the chapter on backgammon in Mr Hoyle’s book said anything about wagers at all, only a great deal on the mathematical probabilities of chance in relation to two six-sided dice.
Wintour paused to drink a toast to Dea Fortuna. He refilled his glass while I set the thirty men back on the board. By the time the first bottle of madeira was empty, he owed me eleven guineas.
‘Double or quits?’ he cried, as he set the pieces for the next game. ‘What do you say?’ He placed his bets with a sort of wild enthusiasm that rode roughshod over mere calculation.
There was a tap on the door and Miriam slipped into the room. She walked almost silently towards Wintour and stood by his chair, her head bowed and her hands clasped tightly together in front of her as if holding a secret.
‘Well, sir? Double or quits?’
‘If you wish, sir.’ I made up my mind that, if I lost, this must be the last game.
I smelled a hint of Mrs Arabella’s perfume in the air, clinging to the maid’s dress or her hands. I looked up at Miriam and saw the whites of her eyes flickering in the shadows behind her master’s chair. She was a comely young woman, in her way. She turned her head away from me.
Wintour set down the last of the counters and sat back. ‘What is it, girl?’
‘If it please your honour, mistress begs the favour of a word with you.’
‘Can’t you see I’m engaged? Tell her I’ll wait on her when I’m at leisure.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Her head still bowed, Miriam glided away.
My fingers slipped as if of their own accord into my waistcoat pocket. I touched the die I had found with Pickett’s body. The practice was on the verge of becoming habitual with me: like touching a rabbit’s foot for luck.
‘They pester me at all hours,’ Wintour complained as the door closed. His consonants were blurring now; the vowels slopped to and fro like water in a pail. ‘My father, my wife, my mother. Can they not understand that I need tranquillity above all if I am ever to recover my health? Your glass, sir – let us have a toast before we play: to the absence of women.’
He drank his glass in one and seemed not to notice that I did not do the same. We played the game, and he lost; so we played another, and another, and a fourth; and each time he lost.
I proposed that we call a halt, but Wintour demanded a chance to make good his losses.
‘I’m a little fatigued, sir. Besides, should we not cast our accounts?’
‘You sound like a damned clerk, man.’ He laughed. ‘But I suppose that’s what you are, sir – no offence, none in the world: I suppose a gentleman may hold a pen in an office, if he wishes, rather than a sword on a battlefield.’
He had kept a note of what he lost, scrawling the figures in pencil. He screwed up his face and blinked rapidly, holding the paper up to the candle. His lips moved silently as he totted up the figures.
‘Seventy guineas or thereabouts,’ he said at last. ‘Good God, how it creeps up on a man. Oblige me, sir – cast your eye over it. I never had much skill at reckoning.’
I glanced at the paper, reading the figures with difficulty. I already knew it must be nearer eighty guineas. ‘Let us call it seventy, sir,’ I said. ‘I prefer round numbers.’
‘Very well,’ he said with a gracious wave of his hand. ‘I’d give you the money this instant, if I could, sir, if it weren’t for those damned tight-purses. Damn them, eh? Let’s drink to their damnation.’
He lifted the bottle, but it was empty.
‘Who?’ I asked. ‘Whose damnation?’
Wintour set down the bottle and picked up the other, which was also empty. ‘Who? Eh? Oh yes – all of them – they’re all tight-purses in this city – you would not believe it, sir, these petty tradesmen, they would not have behaved like this before the war. Why should you wait for your money?’
‘It’s of no consequence to me in the least, sir—’
‘But it is. My dear – dear Savill, of course it is. I know you would take my note of hand. But when a debt of honour is involved, a gentleman feels it here.’ He laid his hand on his heart. ‘A tradesman’s bill can wait until the Last Trump for all I care, but a debt of honour is a very different thing. Besides, why should you wait? You’re my friend. And anyone in this city will tell you: Jack Wintour is a man of his word. Ask anyone, anyone at all. If any man says otherwise, I’ll blow out his brains, do you hear?’
‘Really, sir, you are too kind, but I am in no hurry for the money.’
He hammered his fist on the table, making the counters twitch on the board. ‘Nothing could be more absurd than the situation I’m in, sir. Is it not perfectly ludicrous that a man of my expectations should have to suffer from a shortage of ready money? Does Mount George mean nothing? God damn it, what’s credit for, sir, if not to ease a temporary embarrassment of this nature? And I insist – you shall not wait. There is no need, either. I have a scheme that will settle the matter at once. Pray have the goodness to ring the bell.’
I leaned across from my chair to the bell-pull to the left of the fireplace. ‘I believe I have had enough wine for this evening.’
‘No, no – it’s not for that; though come to think of it, we might as well have them bring up another bottle.’
Josiah came into the room and made his reverence.
‘Tell Miriam to step this way,’ Wintour said.
The old man looked up. ‘Miriam, sir?’
‘Yes, you old fool – Miriam. Are you going deaf? And then bring up another bottle.’
Josiah bowed again and withdrew. A moment later, the maidservant entered the room. She curtsied and waited for Wintour to speak.
‘Step forward, woman – there: stand in the light by the fire.’
She obeyed him. Her face was blank, like a house with the shutters up.
‘Turn round,’ he ordered, raising one of the candles so it shone more on her. ‘No, not like that – slowly. So we may study you at all points.’ He glanced at me. ‘What do you think, sir?’
‘I do not think it proper for me to have an opinion about another man’s servant.’
Wintour laughed. ‘But that’s the point, sir. Don’t you see? She’s not a servant. She’s a slave.’
‘Yes, but the principle—’
‘The principle is the same as if she was my horse. Or my dog. Or my house, for that matter. She’s mine. That is to say, she’s mine to sell.’
He turned back to Miriam, who was no longer revolving. Her face was averted from the light.
‘What would you say? Ninety guineas at auction? A hundred? Trained ladies’ maids don’t grow on trees. Prime of life, too, fine figure.’ His voice roughened. ‘Look at me, girl, and open your mouth.’
Miriam stared down at him. She opened her mouth. I glimpsed her pink, wet tongue.
‘There! I knew it!’ he cried. ‘See? She’s got her own teeth, or most of them. They like that in a house slave, you know. Damned if I know why, but they do. I’ll put her in for auction tomorrow. You won’t have to wait long, I assure you. She’ll be snapped up in a trice.’
‘But Miriam is Mrs Arabella’s maid, sir – wouldn’t the sale inconvenience her? I would not do that for the world.’
Wintour laughed. ‘You won’t do that, I assure you. My wife does not need a maid all the time – she can share my mother’s if she wants one – and anyway she shall have any number of maids when the war’s over.’
‘But Miriam serves Mrs Wintour, too, I believe.’
He sat up very straight in his chair. ‘This is a matter of honour with me, sir.’
At this moment there was a distraction in the form of Josiah and another bottle of madeira. The old man opened and poured the wine. I took a glass to be companionable. Josiah did not withdraw but stood back in the shadows near the door.
‘I wonder, sir, would you oblige me in this?’ I said, holding my wine up to the candle flame.
‘If I could, sir, I would oblige you in anything you care to name but a debt of honour is—’
‘You see,’ I interrupted, ‘it does not suit me to have so large a sum of ready money about me at present, with the city in such a lawless state. And these days one cannot trust a bank or a merchant to negotiate a bill without cheating a man, or defaulting, or going bankrupt.’
‘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.
Chapter Twenty-Two
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.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/andrew-taylor/the-scent-of-death-39803169/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
Andrew Taylor
*WINNER of the Ellis Peters Historical Dagger Award 2013*‘Andrew Taylor wrote superb historical fiction long before Hilary Mantel was popular’ Daily TelegraphFrom the No.1 bestselling author of THE AMERICAN BOY comes a new historical thriller set during the American War of Independence.‘This is the story of a woman and a city. I saw the city first, shimmering from afar like the new Jerusalem in the setting sun. It was Sunday, 2nd August 1778.’Edward Savill, a London clerk from the American Department, is assigned to New York to investigate the claims of dispossessed loyalists caught on the wrong side of the American War of Independence.Surrounded by its enemies, British Manhattan is a melting pot of soldiers, profiteers, double agents and a swelling tide of refugees seeking justice from the Crown.Savill lodges with the respected Wintour family: the old Judge, his ailing wife and their enigmatic daughter-in-law Arabella. The family lives in limbo, praying for the safe return of Jack Wintour, Arabella's husband, who is missing behind rebel lines.The discovery of a body in the notorious slums of Canvas Town thrusts Savill into a murder inquiry. But in the escalating violence of a desperate city, why does one death matter? Because the secret this killing hides could be the key to power for whoever uncovers it…
Praise for The Scent of Death
‘Andrew Taylor has been quietly producing superb historical fiction since long before Hilary Mantel’s Man Booker wins bestowed literary respectability on the genre … He has the first-rate historian’s ability to channel the spirit of his period and let it speak for itself, combined with a masterly command of plotting and pace. His hair’s-breadth-escape set pieces are superb’
Daily Telegraph
‘Andrew Taylor’s epic historical detective novel is an absorbing and harrowing tale of the last part of America under British rule … The 18th century voice is beautifully achieved: Taylor is as good at this period as C J Sansom is at Tudor England, and like him pulls off novels that work both as literary fiction and detective stories … The mud, blood, corruption and cruelty of early Manhattan ratchet up the suspense’
Independent
‘The narrative unfolds with a leisurely confidence that allows unhurried opportunities for character and motivation to emerge. As the plot satisfyingly thickens to take in profiteering, and love and sex across the racial divide, Taylor once again shows how skilful a historical novelist he is’
Sunday Times
‘Andrew Taylor is an expert in the realm of murder and mystery fiction … The Scent of Death is a triumph of genre plotting: a detective story, and a piece of period writing that excites and surprises in equal measure … Taylor recognizes that successful page-turners come from the author removing himself from view and simply concentrating on telling a story that keeps readers interested to the end. In this respect, The Scent of Death undoubtedly and thrillingly succeeds’
Spectator
‘Andrew Taylor’s historical crime fiction is always an event. Ten years ago The American Boy, a gothic tale of the young Edgar Allan Poe in Regency England, deservedly won him a second CWA Historical Dagger. The Anatomy of Ghosts, from 2010, was both rambunctious and chilling, stripping away the demure veneer of Cambridge to reveal a wilder, and weirder, underside. Now he turns to Manhattan, although not as we know it’
Guardian
‘Taylor has emerged as an historical novelist with a rare gift for mood and atmosphere – especially the 18th century’
i
‘Andrew Taylor is one of the most imaginative historical mystery novelists writing today. Expect this to appear on a lot of “Best Of 2013” lists’
Globe and Mail
ANDREW TAYLOR
The Scent of Death
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street,
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2013
Copyright © Andrew Taylor 2013
Prelims map credit © Nicolette Caven 2013
Cover layout © HarperCollinsPublishers 2013
Cover photographs © Roy Bishop / Arcangel Images (iron gate); Jill Battaglia / Arcangel Images (figure); Shutterstock (house)
Designed by www.emma-rogers.com (http://www.emma-rogers.com)
Andrew Taylor asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007213535
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2014 ISBN: 9780007564644
Version: 2015-07-20
To Will with love
Table of Contents
Praise for The Scent of Death (#u239fbc82-e443-5d39-b077-193bdc2b8f26)
Title Page (#u8e72380e-ed02-5232-8ba6-c30b7b313c36)
Copyright (#u9d082709-8322-5b8a-8fb6-153fa11132b8)
Dedication (#u318db22a-b70a-5542-b128-e78e8bbff3f9)
Map (#ub9049d5f-8601-5697-acf1-85b9d496f3a8)
Chapter One (#u8eb07240-6ec6-5940-a572-59612bd4f0f9)
Chapter Two (#u4a106bb3-ae56-571f-b0f7-98226a811118)
Chapter Three (#ue7793f69-bfe7-5ce6-a7bd-b8715c09979f)
Chapter Four (#u074919e6-f067-5ad9-a930-fcebec594f83)
Chapter Five (#ub6b1fafb-b72e-5f03-83b3-fbec71b68836)
Chapter Six (#u49b6abb0-7284-50f3-a157-856ccaf10695)
Chapter Seven (#u35dab7ea-5c79-57d2-a5ef-09178da76120)
Chapter Eight (#u08de22b5-73f2-5d57-a207-2ca0d5a1dc54)
Chapter Nine (#u888bd366-37f4-52bd-ae62-e186bb92d8cc)
Chapter Ten (#ufb3d3c6f-8946-5598-bda1-085ce1f69d42)
Chapter Eleven (#u2f648820-031f-5c25-ad58-d49e144ae0e7)
Chapter Twelve (#u351dbbe2-b794-5bd9-a1f9-5f5f172e97ab)
Chapter Thirteen (#u7f555d36-5c2c-5162-8d6f-052927a969ac)
Chapter Fourteen (#u30f141b8-6cbe-5692-83b1-79c7a23ee3e9)
Chapter Fifteen (#ud0ef66bd-daaa-53fd-ab27-8c12e24c794e)
Chapter Sixteen (#u5c11525f-551c-5858-8c04-0eb457394baa)
Chapter Seventeen (#ue04508fe-574d-5f8d-a5c9-1dae467bf58c)
Chapter Eighteen (#ub3def388-beb8-542c-a480-2396c3b134f1)
Chapter Nineteen (#u08a91aa8-e8e4-538e-b845-16c396cc83ed)
Chapter Twenty (#u0b525398-ba15-53a3-96e3-5601abe243bf)
Chapter Twenty-One (#ue9c2132f-d159-5bc2-8caa-9e403a94286f)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#ub2385dde-5fb9-5a23-8da7-55d53aef5bfc)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Afterword (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the same author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One
This is the story of a woman and a city. I saw the city first, glimpsing it from afar as it shimmered like the new Jerusalem in the light of the setting sun. I smelled the sweetness of the land and sensed the nearness of green, growing things after the weeks on the barren ocean. We had just passed through the narrows between Long and Staten islands and come into Upper New York Bay. It was Sunday, 2 August 1778.
The following morning, Mr Noak and I came up on deck an hour or two after dawn. The city was now close at hand. In the hard light of day it lost its celestial qualities and was revealed as a paltry, provincial sort of place.
We had heard that a conflagration had broken out during the night. Nevertheless, it came as something of a shock to see the broad pall of smoke hanging over the southern end of the island, which was where the city was. The stink of burning wafted across the water. Fires smouldered among the stumps of blackened buildings. Men scurried along the wharves that lined the docks. A file of soldiers moved to the beat of an invisible drum.
‘It’s as if the town has been sacked,’ I said.
Noak leaned on the rail. ‘The Captain says it must have been set deliberately, Mr Savill. This is the second fire, you know. The other was two years ago. They blamed the rebels then, just as they do now.’
‘Surely New York is loyal?’
‘For some people, sir, loyalty is a commodity,’ Noak said. ‘And, like any other commodity, I suppose it can be bought and sold.’
Above the smoke the sky was already a hard clear blue. I borrowed a glass from a young officer who was taking the air on deck. Most of the surviving houses of the city were of brick and tile, four or five storeys and crowned with shingles painted in a variety of faded colours. Some had balconies on their roofs, and already I could make out the tiny figures of people moving about above the streets. Many buildings nearer the southern tip had steeply gabled Dutch façades, relics of the days when the town had been called New Amsterdam.
‘I confess I had expected a finer prospect,’ I said. ‘Something more like a city.’
‘It looked well enough before the war, sir. But looks deceive at the best of times. Believe me, there is great wealth here. The possibility of profit. And the possibility of so much more.’
I looked down at the grey-green water running with the tide along the line of the hull. The oily surface was spotted with soot carried on the south-westerly breeze. The fire had broken out in the very early hours of the morning.
A large, pale rag billowed just below the surface of the water. Seagulls fluttered above it, crying like the souls of the damned. The rag snagged on a rope trailing from the ship to a dinghy alongside. The current made the cloth twitch as if alive. A few yards away from us, the young officer who had lent me his glass was standing by the rail. He swore under his breath.
The rag had a long tail, barely visible beneath it and entangled with the rope. It made me think of a merman or some other strange creature of the sea. The officer said a few sharp words to a sailor who, a moment later, leaned over the side with a long boathook.
‘Distressing,’ Mr Noak said, and clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth.
I glanced at him. ‘What is?’
Noak nodded at the merman. The sailor had twisted the boathook into the rag. The water slapped and curled around it, growing cloudier and greyer.
Looks deceive at the best of times. Not a rag, I thought. A shirt.
The sailor heaved the boathook and its burden upwards. The shirt rose a few inches above the water. It twisted. The water around it was filthy now. There was a sucking sound as if the merman had smacked his lips. A waft of foul air rose up, forcing us to step back and cover our noses and mouths. Three seagulls swooped closer, sheering away at the last moment.
For an instant I saw the merman’s face – or, to be more exact, I saw where the face would have been, had it not been eaten almost entirely away by the creatures of the deep. Nor did the merman have a tail. Instead, two legs waved behind it. I glimpsed discoloured flesh flaking from swollen thighs and I smelled rotting meat.
The body fell back into the water. The current drew it swiftly away from the ship, and with it went the smell.
‘Can they not even bury the dead?’ I said.
The officer had heard me. ‘He was probably a prisoner from one of the hulks upstream, sir. Most of them are sailors from captured privateers. They tip them over the side.’
‘Do they not merit something better than this?’
His round, good-natured face split into a smile. ‘But there are so many of the knaves, sir, and he was only a rebel, after all.’
‘Cheaper, too,’ Noak pointed out. ‘Though as far as His Majesty’s Treasury is concerned it will come to the same thing. No doubt someone will claim the allowances due – for the shroud, the cost of committal and so on.’
I looked downstream. In the distance, the seagulls danced like blackened cinders against the blue sky. The body was no longer visible. The sea was greedy.
‘As I told you, sir,’ Noak went on, ‘there is the possibility of profit here, and that is true even in wartime. Indeed, perhaps more so than in peace.’
This was the first dead body that I saw in New York, and the first of the two dead men I saw that very day. As an individual, this one meant nothing to me, then or now. He and I had nothing in common apart from our shared humanity. I would never learn his name or how he died or who had thrown his corpse into the East River.
Chapter Two
I had met Samuel Noak on the voyage from England.
Mr Rampton, my patron, had arranged my passage on the Earl of Sandwich, a Post Office packet of which he was part-owner. The ship’s principal purpose was to carry the mails to and from North America and the West Indies. The owners supplemented the considerable income they derived from this by squeezing a handful of passengers into the cramped cabins. Most of them were, like myself, travelling on official business. But there were a few who made the voyage in a private capacity. Such a one was Mr Noak.
He and I were thrown into immediate intimacy for we were obliged to share a cabin little bigger than the commodious kennel that housed Mr Rampton’s mastiff at his house in the country. Noak was a small, spare man who wore his own sandy hair with only a modicum of powder for gentility’s sake and tied it with a brown ribbon. He scraped back the hair so tightly that the bones of his face seemed to poke through the skin. His figure was youthful but he might have been any age between twenty and forty. He spoke with a thin, nasal voice, and always with deliberation, in an accent that I later discovered was characteristic of his native Massachusetts. There was something of the puritan about him, a sourness of mien.
Even before we had weighed anchor, I resolved to keep a proper distance between Mr Noak and myself during the passage to New York. But I had not reckoned with the peculiar swaying motion of the ocean, let alone with the terrifying effects of rough weather.
Within a few hours of our leaving Falmouth, I descended into an abyss of spiritual and physical suffering. I was convinced that I was dying – that the ship was sinking; and my condition was so miserable that, for all I cared, the world might end in the next instant, which would at least put a period to my agonies.
It was then that I began to see Samuel Noak in a different light. For it was he who sponged my brow, who emptied my basin, who assisted me to the heads. It was he who forced me to undergo what he assured me was an old naval remedy for mal de mer: to wit, to swallow a lump of greasy pork again and again until the stomach no longer had strength to resist it.
Slowly, over the long days and longer nights, my symptoms subsided. Mr Noak brought me Souchong tea laced with rum and spooned it into my mouth, which eased my aching gut and at last encouraged me to fall into the first unbroken sleep I had enjoyed since leaving England.
Given Noak’s kindness, I could hardly hold the man at arm’s length, even if I had wished to do so. As I recovered, we slipped by degrees into a relationship that was something less than friendship but much more than mere acquaintance. It is difficult not to be civil to a man who has restored you to life.
‘Will you remain in New York, sir?’ I asked him one afternoon. The weather was calmer now, and we were strolling on deck after dinner. ‘Or do you travel on?’
‘No, sir – I have a position waiting for me in the city. A clerk’s desk in a contractor’s house. A friend of my uncle’s procured it for me.’
‘I’m surprised you should wish to leave London. The opportunities must be far greater there.’
‘True,’ he said. ‘But in New York I shall be a senior clerk, whereas in London I had no hope of advancement at all. Besides, I had a desire to see my native land again.’
‘Where were you employed?’
‘At Mr Yelland’s in the Middle Temple, sir. I had been there for three years.’
‘I believe I know the gentleman. That is to say, I have come across him once or twice.’
‘Indeed?’
‘I have a position at the American Department,’ I explained. ‘As you know, Mr Yelland acts as the British man of business for many Loyalists. He sometimes favours us with communications on their behalf.’
That was an understatement, as Noak must surely have known. Mr Yelland was one of several London attorneys who had reason to bless this unnecessary war, for it was proving very lucrative for them. He and his colleagues kept up a steady flow of letters to the Department. London was packed with displaced Loyalists who were convinced that the American Department owed them compensation for the losses they had sustained because of their attachment to the Crown.
‘Will you stay long in New York, sir?’ Mr Noak asked after a pause.
‘A month. Possibly two. Lord George has entrusted me with a commission and I do not know how long it will take.’
Mr Noak nodded, as if making a token obeisance to the august name of Lord George Germain, the Secretary of State for the American Department. The truth of my appointment was more prosaic: Mr Rampton, one of the two under secretaries, had decided that I should go to New York. Lord George had signed the necessary order, but I was not perfectly convinced that His Lordship knew who I was.
‘Perhaps we may encounter one another there,’ Noak said.
‘Perhaps, sir,’ I agreed, privately resolving that for my part I would not pursue the acquaintance once we reached America.
‘Where will you lodge?’
‘At Judge Wintour’s. He is an old friend of Mr Rampton, the under secretary.’
‘Ah yes,’ he said. ‘Of course.’
‘Are you acquainted with the Judge?’
‘Only by reputation, sir.’ Mr Noak paused. ‘They say his daughter-in-law is a great beauty.’
‘Indeed.’
‘And the heiress to Mount George, as well.’
‘I believe the air is growing chilly. I think I shall go below.’
‘Once seen,’ Mr Noak said quietly, ‘never forgotten. That’s what they say. Mrs Arabella Wintour, I mean.’
Chapter Three
At midday, a single cannon boomed from the battery commanding the entrance of the North and East rivers.
‘The noon gun, sir,’ the young officer told me with a knowing air as he took out his watch to adjust the time. ‘You’ll soon be ashore.’
Twenty minutes later, we were at last permitted to disembark. We were brought in at Beekman’s Slip upriver from the Brooklyn ferry to keep us at a distance from the still-smouldering fire.
The quayside was thronged with soldiers, seamen, officials and porters. It had grown even hotter, with a close, airless warmth. I threaded my way between boxes, barrels and ropes. Men barged into me. Once I tripped and nearly fell. After five weeks aboard a ship, dry land had become alien, even hostile.
Despite my official standing, I was obliged to wait my turn to show my papers and explain my business to three separate individuals. Meanwhile the baggage was brought ashore. A line of glistening negros carried it to the customs shed. The few passengers from the Earl of Sandwich joined the queue outside where new arrivals sweltered in the sun.
The south-westerly breeze had dispersed most of the smoke. Beyond the shed the buildings of the shabby little city stretched away to the west, sloping gently up towards the soot-stained tower of a ruined church. Mr Noak had told me that this was Trinity Church, damaged in the first fire two years earlier just after the rebels had evacuated New York, when so many houses and public buildings had been destroyed. He wondered why no one had troubled to repair it.
There was a stir at the guard-post by the entrance to the slip. A moment later a portly gentleman strode towards the customs house with the sergeant of the guard on one side and a harbour official on the other. The latter indicated me with a wave of his hand, and the gentleman surged forward, sweeping off his hat. He was a tall, finely dressed man with an upright carriage and florid face.
‘Mr Savill?’ he said, waving a crisp lawn handkerchief like a signal flag. ‘Your servant, sir. I’m Charles Townley, and so very much at your service. A thousand pardons – you should not have to stand about in this heat. I should have been here to greet you two hours ago but my clerk is ill and, to make matters ten times worse, this damned fire has thrown everything awry.’
Mr Townley’s arrival had an instant effect on my fortunes. A customs official hurried over with two negros carrying my boxes and valises. There was no need, the official said, for the formality of searching them and, at Mr Townley’s suggestion, he would have them instantly conveyed to Judge Wintour’s house. My pass was countersigned and I was free to go.
As I left, I bowed to Mr Noak, waiting silently in the queue, and said something civilly non-committal about our no doubt meeting again.
‘Who was that?’ Townley asked as we passed the barrier manned by two sweating sentries.
‘A shipboard acquaintance,’ I said. ‘No one in particular.’
‘You will not mind if we walk, I hope? We have not far to go and it will be quicker on a day like this.’
For the first few hundred yards, the solid ground felt unyielding and inhospitable beneath my feet. Nor was the city itself more welcoming – it was a veritable anthill, packed with hurrying, wild-eyed people, many of them carrying their belongings on their backs, and with wagons and carriages rumbling over the stones. The streets were paved and tree-lined but narrow. I felt the buildings were closing in on me and yet, after the confined ship, there was also an unsettling sense of limitless space. The air smelled strongly of burning.
‘It’s busy enough on any other day,’ Townley observed. ‘But the fire has made everything ten times worse. The world and his wife are abroad. If they haven’t lost their homes then they wish to gawp at those who have.’
‘Is the damage considerable, sir?’
‘Bad enough. Fifty or sixty houses are gone – perhaps more. It began in the middle of the night over there to your left, near Cruger’s Wharf and Dock Street. We have fire engines, of course, but our men were overwhelmed by the speed of it, and there were difficulties with the pumps.’
‘Has there been loss of life?’
‘No, we have been spared that, I believe. Through the mercy of God.’
‘The Captain told us that the fire may have been laid deliberately.’
Townley nodded. ‘It’s a strong possibility, in my opinion. The rebels care nothing for their fellow Americans. They endanger the lives of the innocent without a second thought. I believe the Commandant is to post a reward of a hundred and twenty guineas for information about the incendiaries.’
He took me first to Headquarters, a short step away, for all newcomers to the city were obliged to register with the authorities.
‘You should meet Major Marryot as soon as possible,’ Townley said. ‘I had hoped to make you known to him now, but his clerk says he has been called away. You will see a good deal of him, I’m sure, in the course of your duties. He deals with both the Provost Marshal and the city’s Superintendent of Police, as well as with the Deputy Adjutant General.’
‘In that case, sir, would you be good enough to direct me to Judge Wintour’s? I should pay my respects to my host.’
‘Ah.’ Townley tapped his nose, which reminded me of an axehead bent a few degrees out of true. ‘I am before you there, sir. I called on the Judge this morning with the news of your arrival. He asked me to convey his compliments to you, of course, and he begs you will do him the favour of calling on him after dinner, when they will have everything in readiness for you. But you must permit me to turn the delay to my own advantage. It would give me immense pleasure if you would dine with me.’
I accepted. Townley took my arm. We walked down Broadway to avoid the remains of the fire to the south. In this part of town, the buildings on either side of the road were mostly in a ruinous condition, casualties of the earlier fire in ’76. Further eastwards however, the street became pleasant and tree-lined, though a man had to watch where he walked, for it was very dirty.
‘I believe Mr Rampton was acquainted with the Wintours when he himself was in America?’ Townley said after a moment’s silence.
‘Yes, sir. Mr Rampton served for a time as Attorney-General of Georgia and he greatly valued the Judge’s advice on legal matters.’
Townley guided us round the corner into Wall Street. ‘I am afraid the Wintours are much altered since Mr Rampton knew them.’ His grip tightened momentarily on my arm. ‘And for the worse.’
Chapter Four
Mr Townley had arranged for a room to be set aside at the Merchants Coffee House. The place was on the corner with a fine view of the masts and rigging of ships in the harbour, which lay at the far end of Wall Street. It was a genteel establishment with a balcony running along the tall windows of the principal assembly rooms upstairs.
‘They know me pretty well here,’ Townley said as we went inside. ‘I think I can promise you a tolerable dinner.’
Ceiling fans turned slowly in the big room on the ground floor. It was packed with gentlemen, many of whom seemed acquainted with Mr Townley and anxious to exchange bows with him. But Townley refused to be diverted. He led me through the throng, past a row of booths whose privacy was guarded with green-baize curtains, and up the stairs. On the landing, a negro footman in livery was waiting to show us into a small parlour where a table was laid for three.
‘I had hoped that Major Marryot would join us,’ Townley explained. ‘No matter. We can talk more confidentially without him.’
There was a tap on the door and the servants brought in the dinner. While we ate, Mr Townley asked me for news from London. He was eager to hear what people were thinking and doing, and the more I told him, the more pleased he was.
‘You must pardon my appetite for information,’ he said. ‘We are starved for it. It’s bad enough in peacetime when the mails are better. But nowadays we fasten like leeches on every newcomer and suck him dry as fast as we can.’
When the cloth had been withdrawn, Townley pushed back his chair, crossed his legs and passed me the bottle. ‘And now we can be comfortable, sir. What are they saying about the war in the American Department? I know Lord George has no secrets from Mr Rampton, and Mr Rampton can have no secrets from you.’ His left eyelid drooped in a wink and he nudged my arm.
I inclined my head but said nothing.
‘There’s much to be said for keeping these things in the family,’ Townley went on. ‘It is a question of loyalty, quite aside from anything else. Whom can one trust but one’s own kin and their connections?’
‘Indeed,’ I said, though I rather doubted Mr Rampton trusted anybody at all.
‘And – apart from the domestic felicity that no doubt lies in store for you on your return to England – this must mean you are quite the coming man in the Department.’
Our conversation turned to the war. Earlier this year, the entry of France on the rebel side had come as a heavy blow. No longer could we take our control of the American seaboard for granted; and there was the constant threat that the French would compel us to divert our resources to the West Indies or even further afield.
‘Sir Henry Clinton keeps his own counsel,’ Townley said. ‘Between ourselves, sir, there are many Loyalists in this city who cannot understand the General’s inactivity.’
‘But you do not doubt our ability to win, sir?’
‘Of course not. Congress will lose this war in the end: it lacks the gold it needs to buy weapons and pay its men and feed its people. None of us can do without money, eh? It’s a bitter pill for those damned Whigs to swallow – their soldiers want guineas, for all they carry the King’s head on them. The dollar is a laughing stock, barely worth the paper it is printed on. If we Tories but hold our nerve, sir, and prosecute the war with determination, we cannot help but win.’
Townley hammered the table in his enthusiasm and proposed that we drink His Majesty’s health again. Afterwards, he turned the conversation to Major Marryot.
‘It is providential that he could not be here with us,’ he said. ‘A word in your private ear before you meet may not come amiss. You may find him – how shall I put it? – a little brusque. He may not be disposed to make your task less burdensome, even if it lies within his power.’
‘Why, sir? I have no quarrel with the Major.’
My host fanned himself with his handkerchief, now stained with wine. ‘You know what soldiers are. Marryot instinctively distrusts any man who doesn’t wear a red coat. He was wounded at White Plains, you know, and as a result is quite lame in the left leg, which has not improved a temper already inclined towards the choleric. Add to this the usual prejudices of a true-born Englishman …’
‘Forgive me, sir,’ I said, ‘but I do not understand how this would influence his behaviour towards me.’
Townley dabbed with his handkerchief at the moisture on his forehead, which ran in gleaming rivulets through the powder that had fallen from his wig. ‘He does not have much time for the American Department,’ he said. ‘Particularly when it bestirs itself to protect in some small way the interests of the Loyalists.’ He paused, and then added, ‘His father was killed at Minden. He served in the Twenty-third.’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Yes, I see.’
All of us in the Department knew the power of that one word, Minden. Lord George Germain had everything the world could offer – rank, wealth, position, the confidence of his sovereign – but the memory of the battle of Minden was a curse on him he had never contrived to exorcise. Nearly twenty years earlier, he had commanded the British cavalry against the French at the battle. He was widely believed to have disobeyed an order to attack, which had led to many casualties. He had been court-martialled and censured; some said he was lucky to have escaped execution, others that he had been cruelly misjudged. His wealth, connections and ability had enabled him to put the affair behind him. But the army remembered.
‘Putting that on one side for a moment, sir,’ I said quickly. ‘You implied on our way here that Judge Wintour has had his difficulties.’
‘Poor man. He has suffered a deal of sorrow in the last few years. He does not go much abroad now, either – so you may find he is not au courant with—’
There was a knock at the door. A footman entered with a letter. Murmuring an apology, Mr Townley broke the seal and unfolded the sheet of paper. Breathing heavily, he held it at arm’s length and read the contents with a frown deepening on his forehead.
He looked up. ‘I regret, sir, I’m called away.’ He tapped the letter. ‘Talk of the devil, eh? This comes from the Major himself. They have found a body in Canvas Town. So that was why he was not in the way at Headquarters.’
‘Perhaps I should accompany you, sir? After all …’
He nodded, taking my meaning, for his understanding was as quick as any man’s. ‘Indeed – if you are not too fatigued, of course. This is just the sort of affair for you. By the way, Marryot writes that, judging by his dress, the dead man was a gentleman. And I’m afraid there’s no doubt about it: the poor fellow met his end by violent means.’
Chapter Five
The eyes were open, though the orbs were now dull, dry and speckled with dust. The irises were a cloudy blue. The whites were fretted with networks of red veins as delicate as a spider’s thread.
‘Not much blood,’ Townley said. ‘I’d have expected more.’
It was very hot. The sweat was pouring off me. I stared at the sightless eyes. It was better than looking at the terrible wound on the neck.
Another dead body, I told myself, that is all. But this body was worse than the first of the day, the decaying merman floating in the harbour. Standing on the deck of the Earl of Sandwich, Noak and I had been safely removed from the corpse in the water; and then the kindly tide had borne it away into the ocean, out of sight and out of mind. But this body was so near that, if I had wished, I could have bent down and touched its stockinged feet. This body still looked like someone.
A fly landed on the corpse’s left eye but transferred itself almost at once to the dark, dried blood on the neck. My stomach heaved. Hand on mouth, I ducked away from the knot of men around the body and vomited up what I could of our long, luxurious dinner. One of the soldiers began to laugh but strangled the sound at birth.
‘For God’s sake,’ Marryot said, not troubling to lower his voice. ‘Sergeant, cover the face. It distresses Mr Savill.’
‘Who is the man?’ Townley said, perhaps in a charitable attempt to divert attention from me. ‘Do you know?’
‘No idea. Nothing in the pockets. No rings, though there’s the mark of one on his right hand.’
‘They’ve picked him clean.’
‘It would be strange if they hadn’t. If he’d been here an hour or two longer, he’d have been as naked as the day he was born. The people here are no better than jackals.’
The sergeant stepped back, having arranged a cloth over the corpse’s face.
‘I think I’ve seen him before,’ Townley said. ‘I’m not perfectly convinced of it, mind you, but I believe he was in church yesterday.’
‘Newly arrived?’
‘Probably. In which case the Commandant will have a note of him.’
I straightened up and wiped my mouth. Townley smiled at me. We were standing in a rectangular enclosure of soot-stained bricks, formerly the cellar of a house, one of those destroyed in the great fire of ’76. The only traces of it now were the blackened stumps of what had once been the joists supporting the floor above. A ragged canvas sheet, the remains of a patched sail, had been draped across one corner to make a primitive shelter. They had found the body there – not exactly concealed, but not in plain sight from above, either.
Marryot turned to the sergeant. ‘Have them bring the door. Look sharp.’
The body lay in an unnaturally contorted huddle of limbs, one shoulder against the wall. The man was short and thickset, with a yellowy, unhealthy complexion like old wax. He had been stabbed at least twice, once in the neck and once in the back. He wore a grey suit of clothes, the breeches much soiled. He had lost his wig along with his hat, but there were still traces of powder on his face and on the stubble on the scalp. I wondered what had happened to his shoes.
Two soldiers lowered a panelled door into the cellar. The sergeant and another soldier each took a leg of the corpse and dragged it on to the makeshift litter. The jaw of the dead man fell open, revealing the stumps of three blackened teeth. Townley covered his nose with his wine-stained handkerchief.
‘Christ,’ Marryot said. ‘I swear he’s beginning to smell already. This damned heat. The sooner we get him underground the better.’
The soldiers heaved the body on to the door. A white speck danced across the earth floor where the body had lain and came to rest against the wall. I bent down and picked it up.
‘Mr Savill?’ Townley said. ‘What have you found?’
I held out my hand, palm upwards.
Marryot turned towards us. ‘What’s this?’
‘A die,’ I said. ‘It was either under the body or lodged in the clothes.’
‘A gambler, and the game went awry?’ The Major addressed his words to Townley. ‘We’ll make enquiries, but I doubt we’ll ever know for certain.’
‘You do not think he might have had something to do with the fire?’ Townley asked.
‘I don’t think anything at all if I can help it,’ Marryot said. ‘Not in this goddam heat.’
He limped away, dragging his left leg behind him, and led the way up the steps at one end of the cellar into what had once been the yard at the back of the house. I dropped the little die in my pocket and followed with Townley.
The long afternoon had turned into evening. It was still light but the sun was now low in the sky. To the south-west were a few wisps of smoke, the remnants of the fire.
I looked about me. I had never seen a landscape of such utter desolation. According to Townley, this area had been the heart of the first fire, two years earlier, which had broken out near Whitehall Slip and, driven by changing winds, had spread a swathe of destruction through much of the city. The authorities had been ill-prepared for the conflagration and, to make matters worse, many of the buildings had been partly of wood, as dry as tinder from the long summer heat. Reconstruction had been postponed until after the war.
The ruins had long since been looted of anything of value that their owners had left behind. Now, Townley had told me, much of the area was known as Canvas Town, for it had become home to the worst elements in New York – deserters, vagrants, pickpockets, whores, murderers – in short, all the riff-raff of peace allied to the rogues and vagabonds of war. Temporary sailcloth shelters had sprung up, propped against chimneystacks and ruined walls. Respectable citizens rarely ventured into this piecemeal and provisional quarter of the city, particularly after nightfall.
Three more private soldiers, the rest of Marryot’s patrol, were waiting at ground level. One of them was standing on the roadway, holding the head of a broken-down nag that stood between the shafts of a small cart. They were not alone. A score or so of ragged men and women were watching the proceedings from a safe distance. Among them was a gaunt little boy, a tawny-skinned mulatto of ten or eleven years of age, leading a goat by a rope. A sign on the wall said that this was, or had been, Deyes Street.
‘Scarcely human, are they?’ Townley murmured in my ear. ‘But what can we do? If we had them thrown into gaol, the charge to the city would be intolerable. Besides, the gaols are full of rebels already. In my view, sir, these knaves should be rounded up and hanged – or be turned loose to fend for themselves in the Debatable Ground. It would be kindness to them and a relief to the respectable class of citizen.’
The watchers scattered as the rest of the party appeared from the cellar. The goat had a bell around its neck and it tinkled as it followed the boy. Only one man lingered – a tall negro wearing the faded red coat of a British soldier. He stared with strange hauteur at the men beside the cart, as though he were a person of consequence in this commonwealth of knaves and unfortunates. His dignity was marred by the pink scars that ran from his eyes to his mouth, one on either side of his nose. They twisted the face into the semblance of a smile.
The soldiers brought the body into the street and rolled it into the cart. The sergeant threw a tarpaulin over it. The negro sauntered into the empty doorway of a roofless house.
Marryot gave the slightest of bows and turned smartly away, gesturing to the sergeant to move off.
‘A moment, sir, if you please,’ I said.
The Major stopped and, for the first time, looked directly at me. He was below medium height but made up for his lack of inches in other ways, for he was broad in the chest and decisive in his movements.
‘What enquiries will you make in this matter?’ I asked.
‘That’s my business, sir. Mine and the City Commandant’s, unless Sir Henry Clinton decides otherwise.’
‘Mine too, sir. Under the terms of my commission I am obliged to report on the administration of justice in the city in all its aspects – and in particular upon the authority that the military power exercises over the civilian population.’
Marryot’s colour darkened. ‘Need I remind you that we are at war?’
‘The American Department is well aware of that, sir. And so am I.’
The Major glanced at Townley. ‘Sir, would you have the goodness to explain to Mr Savill that this is a city under martial law? Capital crimes are tried in courts martial, as Lord George Germain knows from personal experience.’
Townley smiled impartially and shrugged his shoulders.
‘I do not dispute that capital crimes come under military jurisdiction, sir.’ I spoke in an intentionally quiet voice, purged of emotion. ‘I do not wish to interfere. Merely to have an oversight.’
Marryot’s grip tightened around his cane. ‘If wishes were horses, sir, then beggars would ride.’
‘If you deny me in this, sir,’ I said quietly, ‘I shall complain formally both to Sir Henry here in New York and Lord George Germain in London. My orders are signed by Lord George, and his authority in this matter derives directly from His Majesty.’
‘I’m damned if—’
‘I repeat, sir. I do not wish to interfere with the discharge of your duties in any way. My orders are to observe, nothing more. I have my commission here, if you would like a sight of it.’
The Major’s forehead was scored with three vertical lines that sprang from the bridge of his nose. When he frowned, the lines deepened. He did not speak for a moment. Then he held out his hand.
‘You may show me your wretched scrap of paper.’
He read the commission slowly, while Townley paced up and down, fanning himself with his hat and whistling softly. The soldiers clustered around the cart in silence. They must have gathered something of what was going on, for Marryot’s voice was naturally loud and harsh, and he had made no attempt to moderate its volume.
He handed back the letter of authorization. ‘I warn you, sir, it will be a waste of your time and mine. But what can one expect when our affairs in America are at the mercy of a man who hides behind a desk three thousand miles away?’
I had no desire to fight other people’s battles. ‘And how will you proceed in this matter?’
‘We’ll find out who the man is, if we are lucky. Then at least he can be buried under his own name. As to his murderer: I do not hold out much hope there, sir, unless someone lays information. If a man looks for his pleasures in Canvas Town, he runs the risk of paying heavily for them.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ I said. ‘I’m much obliged.’
Townley smiled at us. ‘I’m rejoiced to see you such good friends, gentlemen.’ He pulled out his watch. ‘Mr Savill, I do not wish to hurry you, but we should be on our way. I fancy the Wintours keep early hours.’
‘Eh?’ Marryot said. ‘You are engaged at Judge Wintour’s?’
Townley bowed. ‘In a manner of speaking. Mr Savill will be lodging there during his stay in New York.’
Marryot coloured again. ‘Pray – ah – pray give my compliments to the Judge and his ladies. Tell them that I hope to do myself the honour of calling on them to see how they do.’
The three of us, followed by the soldiers and the cart, walked down to Broadway, where we separated. Townley and I turned left and made our way slowly eastwards in the direction of St Paul’s Chapel.
‘Well,’ Townley said, ‘you are quite the Daniel, I perceive, and have ventured into the lion’s den and emerged unscathed. I have seen Major Marryot make grown men quail.’ He smiled at me. ‘But have a care, sir. He is a man of some importance in this city and you should mind how you cross him.’
We strolled in silence the length of another block. Then Townley added: ‘Oh – and by the by – they say he has a certain tendresse for young Mrs Wintour.’
Chapter Six
The high-ceilinged room was a place of shadows. Despite the heat, the windows were shut and the curtains closed – because, old Mrs Wintour said, the smell of the great fire was become intolerable and the street below so noisy.
Ten candles burned on brackets attached to the walls but they served mainly to accentuate the surrounding gloom. A heavy moth, drunk with desire, circled one of the flames. I could not drag my eyes away from it. The candle singed first one wing, then the other. At last, and with supernatural strength, the besotted insect reached the fatal flame again. There was a faint sizzling sound. The moth fell to the pier table immediately beneath the bracket and lay there, twitching.
‘More tea, sir?’ Mrs Wintour asked, pale and indistinct on a sofa.
‘Thank you, ma’am, but no.’
I rubbed sweating palms on my breeches. The Judge let slip a long, rumbling snore from the recesses of his high-backed armchair. Only his legs were visible.
Having discharged her duties as a hostess, Mrs Wintour sat back and did not speak. I could not tell whether her eyes were open or closed. From somewhere below came a clatter as though a pot had fallen on the floor. The moth gave up its unequal struggle with the world and expired. The air in the room seemed to condense into a dark, swaying liquid, trapping the humans like three curious natural specimens suspended in alcohol.
Would it always be like this, I wondered? Would I sit in silence, night after night, in this smothering subaqueous fog? The memory of the corpse in the harbour drifted into my mind, and I saw again the decaying face of the merman. Perhaps the poor fellow now lay in just such a stifling semi-darkness at the bottom of the ocean.
It was past ten o’clock. In a moment the grandfather clock in the hall must chime the quarter. It seemed as if days or even weeks had passed since it had last chimed the hour. A frugal supper had been served at nine by a manservant out of livery and a maid. I had been here since eight o’clock. Townley had introduced me to the Judge and had then slipped away, promising to call for me in the morning.
The drawing-room door opened. Mrs Wintour twitched in her chair and emitted a little cry as though someone had pinched her. A lady entered.
‘Ah, my dear,’ the Judge said, levering himself up with the help of the tea table. ‘There you are, Bella, bless my soul. Are you quite restored?’
I rose to my feet. The light was so poor that the woman’s face was barely visible. I was aware only that she was small and slim, and she brought with her the smell of otto of roses.
‘You startled me,’ Mrs Wintour said. ‘Why is everything so loud nowadays?’
‘Bella,’ the Judge went on, ‘allow me to name Mr Savill of the American Department. And, Mr Savill, here at last is my dear daughter, my son’s wife, Mrs Arabella.’
I bowed over the lady’s hand.
‘Mr Savill,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I am happy to meet you.’
‘Come and sit with us, my dear,’ the Judge said, stretching out his hand to her. ‘We shall send for fresh tea.’
‘Would you excuse me this once, sir?’ Mrs Arabella took the Judge’s hand in both of hers. ‘My head is still splitting – it is this terrible heat, I think.’ She stroked her father-in-law’s hand as though it were a small animal in need of reassurance. ‘I came down for a moment to welcome Mr Savill. I would not want him to think us unmannerly.’
‘Never that, madam,’ I said. ‘You are politeness itself. But I am sorry you are indisposed.’
‘You must take something,’ the Judge said. ‘Have Miriam mix you up a James’s Powder. I’m sure it will answer.’
‘Yes, sir, you may be sure I shall.’
Mrs Arabella kissed her parents-in-law. She curtsied to me and left the room.
‘The dear child should not overdo it,’ the Judge observed, sinking back into his chair.
The flurry of movement gave me the opportunity to withdraw. I had been up at dawn, I explained, and my first day ashore had been a tiring one.
‘Be so good as to ring the bell, sir,’ the Judge said. ‘Josiah will bring a candle and take you up to your chamber.’
The manservant conducted me up the stairs. My room was at the back of the house on the second floor. Square and low-ceilinged, it was dominated by a high bed with an enormous feather mattress. My bags and boxes had been brought up during the day.
I dismissed the man for the night. It struck me that it was only now, for the first time in over five weeks, that I was alone. Noak had always been there on the Earl of Sandwich, usually within arm’s reach. Even in the ship’s heads, someone else had generally been beside me or at least within sight and sound. Nor had I been alone today. Indeed, my overwhelming impression was that this was a city where it would be almost impossible to be solitary, for the streets and buildings were packed with people – townsfolk, refugees, British and Loyalist soldiers, and the crowds of followers that accumulate around an army.
I undressed, allowing my clothes to lie where they fell. For a moment I stood naked at the foot of the bed, hoping for a draught to cool my skin. But the air was warm and motionless.
I was too tired to read. Leaving the bed-curtains tied back, I climbed into bed. I laid myself on top of the bedclothes. The mattress enveloped me. I pinched out the candle.
The darkness was soft and caressing. I found myself thinking of Mrs Arabella. Because the drawing room had been so dimly lit, and because she had not come close to any of the candles, I had not seen her face clearly – it had been no more than a pale smudge floating above her body.
My impression of her derived from information provided by other senses. First, there had been the scent of otto of roses: but the smell of it had combined with the private odours of Mrs Arabella herself to form something richer and denser. Second, I remembered her voice, which had not been like any other I knew. This was partly because she spoke with an American accent, though it was not the broad twang used by so many people I had heard today. Also, of course, she was a woman, with the soft, insinuating tone that certain women possessed.
There had been no women aboard the Earl of Sandwich. To my surprise I felt my naked body responding even to this largely formless memory of Mrs Arabella with a rush of blood that both disconcerted and embarrassed me.
Hastily I directed my attention to my wife, Augusta. I imagined her walking in the park or reading or talking about the clothes and homes of other ladies, as she seemed interminably to do; and by degrees I grew calmer.
In the silence and the darkness, I thought about my daughter. Lizzie had wept when I left her. She was five now, and living with my sister in Shepperton, for her mother had remained in London. I prayed for my daughter’s happiness and for her preservation from all harm, as I did every night.
As I lay there, I became aware that the silence was no longer as absolute as it had been. Somewhere in the distance, a barely distinguishable sound rose and fell in volume in a series of irregular ululations.
The wind in the chimney? A bird of the night? An animal in pain? I did not recognize the sound but that was not strange in itself, for I was in a strange house in a strange city on the coast of a strange continent.
A minute or so slipped by. The sound grew fainter and then stopped altogether.
By that time I was sliding into sleep. My last conscious thought was that the sound might have been a weeping child. But, God be thanked, someone had dried her tears.
Chapter Seven
My Dear Daughter—
I put down the pen and stared out of the window. How did I find the words that would speak directly to a five-year-old child? How could I assure my Lizzie at a distance of three thousand miles of my paternal care and love for her?
After a voyage of five weeks I arrived here without any accident and in as good health as when I left you in Shepperton. The conviction that you will derive more benefit from where you are than if still with me has consoled me greatly on my parting from you.
Dull, I thought – dull, dull, dull. But I must write something to let her know I am safe and that she is in my thoughts. Anything was better than nothing.
Pray give my service to your aunt and ask her to write to me every week to tell me how you all do.
I reminded myself that a father should provide moral guidance to his children. In the rearing of the young, the tender emotions should be, by and large, the province of the tender sex.
If you love me, strive to be good under every situation and to all living creatures, and to acquire those accomplishments which I have put in your power, and which will go far towards ensuring you the warmest love of your affectionate father,
E. Savill
I threw down the pen more violently this time. Ink drops spattered across the table. A moment later, I picked up the pen again, dipped it in the inkpot and wrote in a swift scrawl:
Postscriptum: It feels strange to be on dry land. It does not wobble like the sea. New York is monstrous hot and busy. It is full of our soldiers, and very brave and gay they look in their fine uniforms. I saw many great ships in the harbour. Last night I slept in a featherbed that was as big as an elephant.
I folded the letter, addressed it, and put it to one side, ready to be sealed. It was still early in the morning and the sun was on the other side of the house. I took a fresh sheet and wrote:
My dear Augusta – We are safely arrived in New York, after a passage of some five weeks and two days. The—
I paused again. At this moment, I could think of nothing to write after The. Augusta would not wish to know that the weather was hot or that my mattress was as big as an elephant. Nor perhaps would she wish to hear that I was lodging in a house with a woman who smelled of otto of roses.
As I waited, three drops of ink fell from the pen and blotted the paper. I swore, crumpled up the sheet and tossed it into the empty fireplace. I set down the pen, propped my head on my hands and stared at the view.
The writing table was drawn up to the room’s single window, which looked out on a small garden laid out with bushes and gravelled walks in the old style. To the left was a service yard with a line of outbuildings. On the right, beyond a high wall, was another street, for Judge Wintour’s house stood at an intersection.
At the bottom of the garden, in the angle where the rear wall met the long side wall, was a square pavilion built of red bricks, with the quoins and architraves dressed with stone. Beside it was a narrow gate to the street. The little building was raised above the road. A flight of shallow steps led up to a glazed door on the side facing the house, and there was a tall window on at least two of the other sides. It was some sort of summerhouse, I thought, a species of gazebo or belvedere. Lizzie would love to play house there. I would describe it to her in my next letter.
I took up the pen again.
I have not yet seen much of the house where I am to lodge for I did not arrive here until yesterday evening. It is in Warren Street, not far from King’s College. Judge Wintour was most welcoming and he was gratified to have intelligence of your Uncle Rampton, for whom he entertains the most cordial regard. Pray believe me to be your most devoted servant in all things, ES.
I rang the bell. A young manservant named Abraham, little more than a boy, showed me down to the parlour where the table was set for breakfast. He said that Mrs Wintour rarely rose before midday, and that the Judge and Mrs Arabella were still in their rooms.
While I was eating, there was a double knock on the street door. Abraham returned to say that a gentleman had called to see me.
‘Me? Is it Mr Townley?’
‘No, your honour. A Mr Noak.’
‘Very well. You had better ask him to step in.’
Noak bowed from the doorway. ‘Your servant, sir. I apologize for calling on you so early. I fear necessity has no manners.’
I had a sudden, uncomfortable memory of vomiting over a pewter platter containing Mr Noak’s dinner, not a fortnight ago. ‘My dear sir, in that case necessity is a welcome guest. Pray join me – have you breakfasted?’
Noak perched on the edge of a chair. He said he had already had breakfast but would be glad of a cup of coffee.
‘I know you must be much engaged at present,’ he said. ‘But I did not know whom to turn to.’
I guessed that Noak wanted money. People always wanted money. Townley had been right, when he talked at dinner of Congress’s lack of gold, its fatal weakness: None of us can do without money, eh?
‘—so any form of employment commensurate with my skills and small talents, sir.’
‘What?’ I said. ‘I beg your pardon, I did not quite catch what you said before that.’
‘I said that unfortunately the position I had been invited to fill no longer exists, sir. The gentleman I was to work for has died, and his son has wound up the business. There it is – I have come all this way for nothing, and now I am in want of a situation.’
‘I am sorry to hear it. But I’m not sure what I can do to help – except offer you another cup of coffee.’
Noak shook his head. ‘May I hope for your good offices? You will soon, I’m sure, have an extensive acquaintance here. If you should come across a gentleman who is in want of a clerk – with, I may say, the very highest character from his previous employer in London, as well as considerable experience in the management of affairs both in America and in London – then I beg that you might mention my name.’
‘Nothing would give me greater pleasure,’ I said. ‘But …’
‘I know,’ Noak interrupted. ‘I am clutching at straws, sir. But a man in my position must clutch at something.’
‘Of course.’ I liked the man’s doggedness, his refusal to be cowed. ‘Leave me your direction, sir – I will send you a line if I hear of a place.’
The American took out a pocket book and pencil. ‘A line addressed to the Charing Cross Tavern will always find me.’
A moment later, he pushed back his chair and said abruptly that he would not trouble me any further. It was clear that asking the favour had not come easily to him, and I liked him the better for it.
After I had finished breakfast, I was passing through the hall when I heard another knock at the front door. Abraham opened it. A servant was on the step. I heard him mention my name. Abraham took a letter from him and presented it with a low bow to me. I tore it open.
Mr Savill
I have just this moment received intelligence that our body yesterday has acquired a name: a corporal on the Commandant’s staff says he is a Mr Roger Pickett, a gentleman newly arrived in New York, who was lodging at Widow Muller’s on Beekman Street (opposite St George’s Chapel). Major Marryot suggests we meet him there as soon as is convenient. The bearer of this will conduct you to the house if you are at leisure. If not, I shall do myself the honour of waiting on you later in the day.
Yours, etc. C. Townley
Judge Wintour came down the stairs, clinging to the rail.
‘Mr Savill, good morning. I hope you have passed a satisfactory night. You’ve breakfasted, I hear. Would you do me the kindness of sitting with me and taking another cup of coffee while I have mine? There is much I should like to ask you about the current state of affairs in London.’
‘Nothing would give me more pleasure, sir – but perhaps I might defer our conversation until later.’ I held up the letter. ‘I have to go out.’
The Judge’s eyes had strayed to the open door, where the messenger was waiting. ‘You there,’ he said, his voice suddenly sharp. ‘You’re Mr Townley’s man, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, your honour. He sent me for Mr Savill.’
‘Another dreadful crime, I suppose,’ the Judge said. ‘I have never known the city like this. We shall soon be murdered in our beds.’
‘Yes, sir. And murder it is. A gentleman, too – Mr Pickett.’
‘What?’ The Judge clung to the newel post at the foot of the stairs. Abraham moved instantly to his other side and took his arm. ‘Roger Pickett? But it can’t be.’ The old man turned his faded blue eyes from the servant’s face to mine. ‘Mr Pickett was in this very house, sir – not a week ago.’
Chapter Eight
‘Not a man of substance, as you see,’ Townley said. ‘Not now.’
The little room was at the back of the house in Beekman Street and on the third floor. The window overlooked a farrier’s yard. It was warm and close. I heard a roll of thunder in the distance.
Roger Pickett’s possessions were strewn over the bed, the table, the one chair, the chest and the floor. Mingled with them were unwashed glasses, plates, bottles, bowls and cups, many with scraps of rotting food still adhering to them. Widow Muller, the woman who kept the house, was a slattern. Besides, she had told Marryot that Pickett could not pay for the maid’s services.
I stood in the doorway, hat in hand. ‘Had he lived here long?’
‘A matter of ten days,’ the Major said. ‘Time enough to turn it into a pigsty.’
Townley was delving into the papers on the table. He raised his head and smiled at me. ‘I fancy he would have called on you, if his life had been spared.’
‘I suppose he desired compensation like the rest of them?’ Marryot said, opening the chest. ‘Dear God, you Americans are like hogs around a trough – not you, of course, sir; there must be exceptions to every rule – but I hold by the general principle.’
‘No doubt Mr Pickett suffered losses, sir,’ Townley said coldly. ‘Most of us have.’ He held up a sheet of paper. ‘It appears he came down from Philadelphia.’
‘After the evacuation?’
‘Yes. But he had only been there a matter of weeks. According to this he was originally from North Carolina.’
Marryot snorted. ‘Ha! I wager his loyalty has cost him a fortune. It is curious, is it not? All our refugees claim to have been as rich as Croesus before the war. It’s as if gold grew on the very trees here.’
I took a step into the room. ‘It should not be difficult to establish Mr Pickett’s situation, sir. Judge Wintour says he was acquainted with his daughter-in-law, Mrs Arabella.’
‘What?’ Marryot said. ‘What? No one told me that.’
Townley frowned. ‘Acquainted? How?’
‘Only slightly, I believe.’ I looked from one to the other. ‘It appears that Mrs Arabella’s late father met the man when he was in North Carolina before the war.’
‘Her father? Mr Froude?’ Townley rubbed his beak of a nose. ‘You are full of surprises, sir.’
‘Why did you not tell me earlier?’ Marryot said.
‘I’ve only just found you, sir,’ I pointed out. ‘And I did not hear of Mr Pickett’s visit to Warren Street until this morning – the Judge was with me when Mr Townley’s billet arrived. In any case, even if I had known about it yesterday evening, I could hardly have known its significance since the corpse had not been identified.’
Marryot coloured but did not apologize. ‘Why did Pickett call on them? And when, precisely?’
‘Last Thursday, sir – it was a morning call. He was but recently arrived and he called to renew his acquaintance with them, which I believe was very slight. He did not stay long for both the Judge and Mrs Arabella were obliged to go out.’
‘What did she say of him?’ Townley asked. ‘Mrs Arabella, I mean?’
‘I have not seen her this morning, sir. Indeed, I met her only for a moment last night.’
Townley shrugged. ‘It don’t signify – we shall probably find that Pickett called on everyone he had ever scraped an acquaintance with. All the refugees do that when they first come to New York. What else can the poor devils do? It is a form of genteel beggary.’
Marryot limped over to the table. ‘What have we here?’
‘I believe this to be a list of debts, sir.’ Townley handed him a sheet of paper. ‘Nearly two hundred guineas in all. But we cannot tell who his creditors are. There’s only a single initial beside each figure. Large sums. Guineas and pounds, not shillings and pence.’
‘A gambler,’ Marryot said. ‘What did I tell you?’
I slipped two fingers into my waistcoat pocket and took out the die I had found on Pickett’s body. It was made of ivory, not of bone or wood. A genteel die for a genteel beggar.
Townley smiled at me. ‘You have corroboration in the palm of your hand, I fancy. Faro? Backgammon? Fortunes change hands every night in this city at a throw of the dice.’
‘A man who gambles in Canvas Town is a fool,’ Marryot said.
‘Or desperate for money,’ Townley said. ‘Plenty of men go to Canvas Town after nightfall who would not be seen there in the day. Darkness covers a multitude of sins, does it not? And do you not think that if Pickett could not pay his debts …?’
‘Very likely – but I doubt we’ll ever know.’ Marryot took up another paper. ‘Depend upon it, if we find the murderer at all, we shall find him in Canvas Town.’
‘When did the people of the house last see Mr Pickett?’ I asked.
‘Sunday afternoon,’ Marryot said. ‘He dined at the tavern over the way and came back here to change his shirt. He didn’t stay long – he went out at about five o’clock. That was the last they saw of him. We must trace the next of kin.’
We did not linger in Pickett’s chamber. It was stiflingly hot and so small that the three of us made it unpleasantly crowded. Marryot leafed through the rest of the papers. In a satchel, he found an unfinished and undated letter written in a sprawling, untidy hand.
My dear sister, I am safely arrived in New York from Philadelphia. My design prospers, and I have great hopes that my fortunes will soon
‘His design?’ Townley said. ‘A gambler’s new and quite infallible system, no doubt. The next turn of the cards, the next throw of the dice, and all will be changed.’
‘No indication who the sister is, where she lives,’ Marryot said. ‘Perhaps Mrs Arabella knows.’ He pulled out his watch. ‘We’ve done all we can here. I’ll leave a guard at the door and have the room sealed up.’
‘What other enquiries will you make now, sir?’ I asked.
‘I shall make my report to the Commandant and he will order me to do as he thinks fit. Which may very well be nothing. That would certainly be my advice. We are in the middle of a war, sir, and young men are dying every day. I cannot waste my time on every fool who pays the price for his folly.’
‘Very true, sir,’ Townley put in. ‘In any case, what can one do unless a witness comes forward? And I’m afraid one does not find many public-spirited citizens in Canvas Town.’
‘But is this your usual policy with murder, sir?’ I said to Marryot. ‘You bury the dead and let the perpetrator go free?’
‘May I remind you again, sir? We are at war.’ He limped to the door. ‘The civil population cannot enjoy the same privileges and the same degree of comfort as it does in peacetime. New York looks to the army for its protection, and military objectives are of paramount importance.’
Townley stared at the sloping ceiling. ‘Still,’ he said, ‘I hope that the news of Mr Pickett’s death does not distress the Judge or Mrs Arabella.’
Once again, the blood rushed to Marryot’s face. ‘No, indeed. It is fortunate that the acquaintance was slight.’
There, I thought, my anger subsiding, there is the man’s weak spot: Mrs Arabella Wintour.
Chapter Nine
Shortly after one o’clock, there was an explosion.
It came without warning, an enormous, reverberating crash that swept over the city like an invisible tidal wave. For an instant, silence fell, an auditory equivalent to the trough following the wave.
Time seemed to elongate itself in defiance of the natural laws regulating the universe. I saw Townley’s face in profile beside me, the mouth open, the nose jutting outwards, his features as rigid as if turned to stone. The horses walking and trotting down Broadway stopped moving. Two oxen pulling a wagon not ten yards away might have fallen asleep where they stood. The trees on either side of the avenue were motionless. The leg of a dog lying in the shade of a shop doorway was as stiff as a ramrod now though an instant before it had been a blur as the animal scratched its ribcage.
All this dissolved into a flurry of movement. The nearer of the oxen collided with the trunk of a tree. A horse reared and a Hessian officer tumbled from its saddle. The dog scrambled into the darkness of the shop behind him, its tail between its legs. A plump middle-aged woman fainted. Her maid tried to support her but her mistress’s weight was too heavy for her, and they both fell to the ground.
The sounds were slower to return. They came in scraps and fragments, muffled at first, and accompanied by a ringing in my ears. Townley yelped, ‘Christ!’ A window shattered across the street. Shouts and screams filled the air. Horses neighed. Oxen bellowed.
Several soldiers stumbled down the road at a trot towards Fort George. The middle-aged woman woke up and went into violent hysterics, pummelling the poor maid without mercy. Townley touched my sleeve and pointed over the roofline of the houses on the other side of the street. A feathery column of black smoke was rising into the sky.
‘The French fleet?’ I said, and my voice sounded muffled and remote.
‘There would have been some warning if they were that close inshore. I think one of the ammunition ships must have blown up.’
‘By accident?’
‘God knows.’ Townley dabbed his face with a scented handkerchief. ‘First the fire, now this. Look at that damned smoke – it’s like a black plume at a funeral. Either it’s cursed ill luck or we have enemies within.’
‘My windows!’ cried the plump woman, suddenly emerging from her hysterics. ‘Quick, girl, what are you about? Help me up, we must go home.’
The Hessian officer scrambled to his feet and stumbled after his bolting horse, leaving a stream of German oaths behind him. The shopkeeper, a perruquier in apron and shirtsleeves with a face as pale as his own powder, appeared in his doorway with the dog cowering at his heels as though it had been given one whipping and feared another.
Townley and I walked quickly down Broadway toward Fort George. But there was nothing to be learned at Headquarters, either about the explosion or about the unfortunate Pickett.
I scribbled a note to Mr Rampton and enclosed with it the letters I had earlier written to Lizzie and Augusta. Townley showed me to the Post Room and introduced me to the head clerk who guarded the mails. The letters would go out in the lead-weighted Government mailbags by the first packet that sailed for home.
‘Though God knows when that will be,’ the official observed. ‘What with the rebels within and the French fleet without.’
‘We might as well have our dinner now,’ Townley said afterwards. ‘Nothing else can be done at present until this fuss and bother die down.’
As we were leaving, one of Mr Townley’s servants approached him with the news that the fever had claimed the life of his clerk in the early hours of the morning.
‘The poor fellow,’ Townley said. ‘Troubles never come singly, do they? It is this damned heat – it encourages every kind of pestilence. I must send something to his widow.’
We walked slowly towards the Common. Townley knew of a little inn in King George Street – nothing to look at from the outside, he told me, but the cook was from Milan and could do quite exceptional things with the meanest materials. I had already learned that Mr Townley thought a great deal about his meals and how they were prepared.
The excitement had ebbed away from the city. The broken glass had been swept up. The shops were as busy as ever.
‘It’s as if nothing had happened,’ I said.
‘That is the nature of war, sir,’ Townley said. ‘Terrors succeed terrors, but one cannot be apprehensive all the time. These exceptional alarms are much less of an inconvenience than something more mundane – like the death of my unfortunate clerk, for example. In life he was sadly imperfect, but in death he will be sorely missed. A mass of tedious business must inevitably fall on my own shoulders.’
‘I wonder.’ I hesitated, but only for a moment. ‘I think I told you, I met an American on the voyage. He worked as a lawyer’s clerk in London, and even knows something of the American Department. I believe he is in want of a position.’
A happy coincidence. Indeed I even congratulated myself on this turn of events – at a stroke, I thought, I might be able to oblige a new acquaintance while discharging a debt I owed to an older one.
‘Really?’ Mr Townley said. ‘How very interesting.’
Chapter Ten
After dinner, I returned to Warren Street. I found the ladies of the house in the drawing room. Mrs Arabella was at a table by the window with a copy of the Royal American Gazette spread out before her. Old Mrs Wintour was sitting in front of the empty fireplace.
I bowed in turn to them and wished them good afternoon. The old lady nodded graciously to me. But she said nothing and in a moment began to stare fixedly at the fireback as if trying to commit its sooty surface to memory.
Mrs Arabella beckoned me towards her. For the first time I saw her by daylight. Her face was oval, the complexion pale and unblemished, the lips full and the eyes brown. Her hair was partly concealed beneath her cap, but what I could see of it was lustrous and so dark as to be almost black.
‘Pray do not mention the explosion or yesterday’s fire, sir,’ she said in low voice. ‘Nor Mr Pickett’s death. Mrs Wintour finds subjects of that nature disagreeable.’
I nodded. Major Marryot was a bear in a red coat yet she clearly had him in thrall. Mr Townley spoke of her with a strange mixture of delicacy and wariness. Even Noak, as dry and dull as a ledger, knew her charms by reputation: ‘Once seen, never forgotten.’
Now, seeing Mrs Arabella in the glare of natural light from the window, I was frankly disappointed. She was well enough but her face lacked the classical proportions and high-bred refinement of Augusta’s; her figure would not have been considered à la mode in London, and her cotton dress seemed positively dowdy. The Americans, I thought, perhaps judged a lady’s personal attractions by lower standards than we did.
I had, on Mr Rampton’s advice, brought the Wintours some small presents from London – lace for the ladies, chosen by Augusta, a volume of sermons for the Judge and several pounds of tea for them all. When I presented the gifts, Mrs Wintour became quite animated.
‘I’m sure my son will enjoy the sermons too, when he comes home,’ she said in a voice like rustling paper. ‘His attention has always been turned towards spiritual matters – even as a little boy. I remember when we went to church: he listened so attentively to the sermons.’
Mrs Arabella wiped her fingers, inky from the fresh newsprint, on her handkerchief. She thanked me for the gifts but said she would not examine the lace until her hands were clean.
Mrs Wintour patted the sofa on which she sat. ‘Come and tell me how dear Mr Rampton does, Mr Savill. It must be nearly twenty years since we saw him. And you are married to his niece, Miss Augusta, I hear?’
‘Mr Rampton does very well, thank you, ma’am. Now he is under secretary of the American Department, Lord George Germain entrusts a great deal of business to him.’
‘And you, sir? My husband tells me that Mr Rampton speaks most highly of you.’
‘He is kindness itself, ma’am.’ This was not entirely true. Mr Rampton had opposed Augusta’s marriage to me, a mere junior clerk.
‘And do you have the consolation of children? You must pardon an old lady’s curiosity, Mr Savill.’
‘A daughter, ma’am – Elizabeth.’
‘How fortunate you are. I always wished for a daughter. When my son comes home, he and Bella will have one, possibly two. It will be as good as having them myself.’ She smiled at me. ‘It will be delightful, will it not? I dare say they will live at Mount George for much of the year – the air is healthier for children.’
The mention of Lizzie reminded me of the crying child I had heard – or thought I had heard – as I was going to sleep. I was about to ask whether there was a child in the house when the conversation shifted direction and the old lady began to ask me about which London clergymen were at present esteemed for their preaching.
‘Mama,’ Mrs Arabella said. ‘You should not plague Mr Savill with questions. I am sure he is weary.’
Mrs Wintour looked bewildered. ‘Ah – yes – do forgive me, Mr Savill, I run on, sometimes. My son tells me I must have been born chattering. Have you met my son John, sir?’
‘I’ve not had that pleasure, ma’am.’
‘You will meet him soon, I’m sure. He will make everything right when he comes home, and then I shall have my little granddaughters.’
‘You are tired, ma’am,’ said Mrs Arabella, rising from her chair. ‘Should you not rest for a while? I shall ring the bell for Miriam.’
Miriam came, and the old woman rose obediently and hobbled out of the room, clinging with two thin hands to the servant’s arm. The maid looked without hesitation to Mrs Arabella for her orders, though in this case few words passed between them, only a look of intelligence. This situation, I thought, had happened before, and more than once.
Mrs Arabella sat down again. ‘The Judge tells me that Mr Pickett has been found dead in Canvas Town. Was he murdered?’
That was plain-speaking indeed. ‘He is certainly dead, ma’am, and in all probability murdered.’ I tried not to think of the fly settling on the ragged wound in Pickett’s neck.
‘What was the motive?’
‘The affair is still a mystery. I apprehend that Major Marryot thinks Mr Pickett was a gambling man, and that may have had something to do with it. But I hope I do not distress you. I understand he was an acquaintance.’
‘I did not know him at all well, sir. Besides, we have grown used to hearing of horrors.’
‘I understand he has a sister. Do you know anything of her?’
‘No. I was not aware he had any family at all. I met him only once before and very briefly. I think he had had a few dealings with my father, but purely in the way of business.’
She said nothing further on the subject. A silence fell, and it was not altogether comfortable.
‘I – I understand your husband, madam, is expected home?’ I said. ‘Do you know when he will come?’
She stared at me with heavy-lidded eyes. ‘He has been missing since Saratoga. I thought you must know.’
‘Why yes – Mr Rampton said as much. But from what Mrs Wintour said, I inferred—’
‘Mrs Wintour desires his return so strongly that she believes he must come. I am not so sanguine, and nor is the Judge. But we do not contradict her.’
‘No, indeed.’
‘You would be doing us all a kindness if you would humour her in this as well.’
‘Of course.’
The Battle of Saratoga had been ten months ago. If there had been no news of Captain Wintour since then, the odds must be against his having survived.
‘You have heard nothing at all of him?’ I said after a moment.
‘No. We fear the worst. We hear so many reports of atrocities.’
Anger had brought colour to her face, and she looked almost beautiful. There was a fire about her when her passions were roused. I murmured a platitude about the horrors of war, particularly civil war.
‘Why does Lord George not advise the King to bring an end to this folly?’ she burst out.
‘Madam, I wish I knew, and then I should tell you. But Lord George does not open his mind to me.’
‘Of course not.’ Mrs Arabella’s eyelids closed, as though she wished to blot out the sight of me. ‘You are only a clerk.’
Chapter Eleven
The following day, Wednesday, Mr Townley arrived in Warren Street as I was in the act of leaving the house.
‘Mr Savill, sir,’ he cried from across the street. ‘This is well met. Have you heard the news?’
‘No, sir. What news?’
‘I thought the Major might have sent a man over to you. No matter – I am here instead. It appears that someone laid information late last night, and a man has been taken up for poor Mr Pickett’s murder.’
‘On what grounds?’
‘Oh, they have plenty of evidence – they have not charged the fellow yet, but I do not think there can be much doubt about it. We must not linger – he is to be interrogated at ten o’clock, and it wants but twenty minutes of that now. They are holding him at Van Cortlandt’s Sugar House at the corner of Trinity churchyard. And we are to meet your shipboard acquaintance there – what is his name? Note? Slope? Poke?’
‘Noak, sir.’ I had written to him yesterday afternoon and told him he might call on Mr Townley. ‘It is good of you to spare the time to see him.’
‘I have seen him already – he seems capable enough. And there’s something to be said for a man who knows a little of the wider world. I have decided to give him a trial for a day or two.’
‘That’s most obliging, sir – I hope he answers.’
‘We shall soon begin to discover whether he does or not. He can keep a record this morning.’
As we walked along, Townley asked if I was perfectly satisfied with my lodging; if not he would look about for somewhere else that might suit me.
I told him not to trouble himself for I liked it very well and added, ‘By the way, I had some conversation with the Wintour ladies yesterday evening.’
‘They are in good health, I hope? How did they strike you?’
‘I had not realized that Mrs Arabella’s husband is missing rather than dead.’
‘It is most unfortunate,’ Townley said. ‘No one has seen Captain Wintour since Saratoga, though there was a report of his being wounded. It leaves them all in a species of limbo – Mrs Arabella in particular. They do not know whether to mourn a son and husband or to pray for his happy return.’
‘Mrs Wintour seems in no doubt that it should be the latter.’
‘Alas, sir – as you may already have observed, Mrs Wintour’s sufferings have taken their toll on the poor lady’s rational faculties.’ Townley pointed with his stick. ‘We are nearly there – see? That is Van Cortlandt’s.’
The main sugar house was situated on a corner where two streets met. It was a big, brick-faced structure five storeys high and as ugly as a barn. An annex stood to one side. The establishment overlooked a yard enclosed by a wall. The building’s barred windows were deeply recessed and well above the height of a man. They accentuated rather than relieved the monolithic blankness of the façade.
‘This place is for prisoners of war,’ he murmured in my ear. ‘Marryot’s man shouldn’t be here at all, but the Provost is full.’
We stood aside to allow a file of soldiers to march down the road to the high wooden gates, which were guarded by two sentries. One leaf of the gates opened at the sentry’s double-knock and the file passed through to a yard. We followed them in.
Once inside, the sergeant of the guard told us to wait in the hall. Townley chafed at the delay.
‘At least it is cool and pleasant in here,’ I said.
‘The walls are immensely thick, sir. And there are few windows, as you see. The place was built to store sugar in good condition and safe from thieves. But it keeps people in as well as it keeps people out.’
A door at the back of the hall opened and Mr Noak came through.
Townley stared at him. ‘What? You? Here already?’
Noak bobbed his head to us, more like a bird pecking at a worm than a mark of respect. ‘Yes, sir. I made myself known to Major Marryot and showed him your letter. If you would care to step this way.’
As soon as we left the hall, the atmosphere changed. Sights and smells assaulted the senses. But I was first aware of the noise: a chaotic concerto of voices, groans, cries, and restless movements, all of them bouncing off the high, barrel-vaulted ceiling and setting off rolling echoes.
On the other side of the door to the hall was a table at which three soldiers were playing cards, apparently oblivious of what was going on around them. They glanced up incuriously and nodded us through.
Noak led us down a long, stone-flagged corridor lined with doors on either side. Along the centre of the passage was a drainage gulley apparently used as a sewer. Both Townley and I covered our noses with handkerchiefs.
A barred opening was set high in each door, and each opening framed a man’s face; his hands clung to the bars; and behind him was a multitude of other faces, packed together in one heaving, shouting, stinking mass of humanity.
‘For the love of Christ, your honours,’ a man called to us, ‘for the love of Christ, I can’t stop the bleeding.’
We walked faster and faster to a door at the far end. A guard let us into a lobby at the foot of a flight of stairs.
‘Dear God,’ I said. ‘It’s a perfect Bedlam in there. Worse than Bedlam – a foretaste of hell itself.’
‘They have only themselves to thank, sir,’ Townley said. ‘If they take up arms against their lawful government, they must expect to pay the price. The problem is that we have so many rebels to cope with. We are obliged to pack them in the best we can, wherever we find room.’
We mounted the stairs first to an anteroom guarded by a sentry and then to an inner apartment. A narrow window looked out across a neatly tended churchyard at the blackened ruins of Trinity Church.
Marryot was sitting at a long oak table, his lame leg resting on a footstool. He was leafing through a pile of papers. ‘Good morning, sirs,’ he said, looking up. ‘Pray sit down, now you are come at last. I was about to start without you.’ He nodded to Noak. ‘Tell the man outside to pass the word for the prisoner.’
We took chairs on either side of the Major. When he returned, Noak sat at the end nearer the window, with pen, ink and paper set out before him.
‘How fortunate that an informer came forward, sir,’ Townley said.
‘Fortunate?’ Marryot sniffed. ‘Fortune has nothing to do with it, sir. The army pays for its information. There are always men in want of gold.’
‘Can you be sure that the information is accurate, sir?’ I asked.
‘Little is certain in this world, sir, but the fellow we have in custody is certainly a rogue.’
We heard the stamp of marching feet outside. There was a knock on the door. At Marryot’s word, two soldiers entered with a small negro between them. He was cuffed at the wrists and swaying from side to side. When the soldiers came smartly to attention in front of the table, he collapsed on the floor in a huddle of limbs and filthy clothes.
‘Pull him up,’ Marryot ordered.
The soldiers hooked their arms under the prisoner’s shoulders and lifted him back to his feet.
‘Master, I didn’t do it, I swear on—’
‘Hold your tongue,’ Marryot roared. He turned to Noak. ‘You may write this down under today’s date, the fifth of August. And the place and time, of course. That this is the interrogation of a negro slave, a runaway, name of Virgil, property of the heirs of the late George Selden, esquire, of Queens County.’
The man whimpered. His cheeks glistened with tears. He wore filthy canvas breeches, loose at the knee, and a torn shirt. The feet were bare and the toes widely splayed. I wanted to look away but found I could not.
Townley took a silver toothpick from his waistcoat pocket and began to clean his teeth.
‘You are a vagabond, are you not?’ Marryot demanded. ‘Don’t speak unless I tell you – just nod.’
Virgil’s head drooped.
‘You absconded from your master when he was in Brooklyn the summer before last. And you’ve been living in Canvas Town with the rest of the rogues and knaves ever since.’ Marryot glanced down the table. ‘Have you noted that, Mr Noak?’
‘Master, for pity’s sake, I never saw—’
‘Hold your peace – I didn’t tell you to speak to me. You will have your chance later. And for God’s sake, stop snivelling or I’ll have you whipped.’
Noak scribbled.
‘Strike those last words out, Mr Noak,’ Marryot snapped. ‘They are not part of the record.’
Townley leaned back in his chair. ‘What evidence is against the man?’
‘All in good time, sir.’ Marryot put his elbows on the table and leaned towards the prisoner. ‘Tell me where you were last Sunday. Tell me what you did, what you saw.’
‘I was in Canvas Town, your honour. And I walked about the city looking for work. And then I went back to Canvas Town and fell asleep with nothing in my belly.’
‘Your belly looks plump enough to me,’ Townley observed, fanning himself with his handkerchief.
Marryot ignored the interruption. ‘That may be where you were but it’s not what you did. You’re a thief, a damned pickpocket. There were two empty purses in your bundle. And those shoes you had on your feet – well, they tell their own story, don’t they?’
‘Eh?’ Townley said. ‘What shoes? Nobody mentioned any shoes.’
‘Mr Noak,’ Marryot said. ‘Have the goodness to open the press and bring us what you find on the third shelf down.’
The press was a tall cupboard in an alcove by the empty fireplace. Noak took out a pair of black round-toed shoes with plain steel buckles on the flaps. He set them down on the table. The prisoner moaned softly at the sight of them. Marryot stretched out a hand and removed a small leather bag from one of the shoes.
‘So,’ he said. ‘When they brought you in last night, these shoes were on your feet.’
I picked up one of the shoes. The uppers were scuffed and creased. The sole needed reheeling. But the leather was good.
‘We had information that these shoes belonged to Mr Pickett,’ Marryot said. ‘I had them sent over to Beekman Street this morning. The kitchen boy who cleans the shoes is sure that these were Pickett’s.’
‘Information?’ I said. ‘From whom, sir?’
‘It don’t signify, sir. All that signifies is that the information is good. You’ll grant me that, I hope?’
Virgil lifted his head and, for the first time, looked directly at me.
‘You need not enter Mr Savill’s questions into the record either, Noak,’ Marryot said.
He untied the drawstring that fastened the bag and upended it. A heavy gold ring dropped on the palm of his hand.
‘It’s a seal ring,’ he said, holding it up between finger and thumb. ‘It has a stag incised on it. The woman at the house where he lodges, the Widow Muller, swears it’s Pickett’s. He wore it on his left hand and she noted it most particularly – he was behind with what he owed, and when he said he could not pay directly, she asked him why he did not turn his ring into guineas and be done with it.’
‘I never seen it, master, I swear, sir. Hope to die, God’s my—’
‘But the shoes?’ I interrupted. ‘You’ve seen those before?’
The prisoner glanced at me again. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Of course he had,’ Marryot put in. ‘They were on his damned feet when they arrested him.’
‘And where did you get them, Virgil?’ I said.
‘I – I found them, your honour.’
‘On Mr Pickett’s body?’
‘Yes, sir. Poor gentleman was lying there, all dead. I thought he didn’t need them, so what’s the harm? Look, sir.’ He pointed down at his feet. ‘I lost a toe to frostbite last winter.’
‘He was dead because you’d killed him,’ Marryot said. ‘That’s how you knew, eh? So you helped yourself to his shoes and took the ring off his finger as well.’
‘No, sir, weren’t no ring when I found him.’
‘Then why was the ring in your bundle?’
Virgil shook his head violently. ‘Didn’t put it there, master, swear by—’
‘Hold your tongue, damn you.’ Marryot looked at the soldiers, who were staring blankly at the wall behind the table. ‘Take him away. Keep him in irons.’
No one spoke until the guards had led out the prisoner. Marryot stood up and went to the window.
‘Well, gentlemen,’ he said, still with his back to the room. ‘This need not detain us much longer, I think? The evidence points to the knave’s guilt.’
‘No rational man could entertain a doubt about it,’ Townley said, yawning. ‘If someone else had killed him, he would not have left the ring on Pickett’s finger. Shall Noak write you out a fair copy of the proceedings?’
‘I’d be obliged.’
Mr Noak dipped his head.
‘When you write it up, you should mention that Mr Savill of the American Department was present as an observer,’ Marryot went on, turning to face us. ‘But anything he said may be omitted.’
‘Now what?’ I said.
‘Why, sir, what do you think?’ Marryot said. ‘We wait and let the law take its course. Martial law, that is.’
Chapter Twelve
On the night of Wednesday, I heard the child crying again. In the morning, I mentioned it to Josiah, the older of the two manservants. It must be one of the neighbour’s infants in the slave quarters, he said – he would investigate and have the nuisance abated. I said he should not trouble himself; it did not matter in the least.
The administration had found me an apartment to use as an office in a house it leased at the eastern end of Broad Street, not far from the City Hall. It was a pokey chamber up two pairs of stairs. My first caller was already waiting for me – a clergyman from Connecticut whom the rebels had turned out of his parsonage and parish. His crime had been to preach a sermon whose text had been Luke Chapter 20, verse 25. ‘And he said unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar’s, and unto God the things which be God’s.’ Caesar in this case was intended to be taken as George III rather than Congress. The poor man had lost all he owned, including a farm he had inherited from an uncle.
Shortly before dinnertime, Townley swept into the room. ‘Why, sir,’ he said without any preamble, ‘I have just this moment heard from the Major and I clapped on my hat at once and said to myself I should give myself the pleasure of bringing the news to you directly.’
I rose to my feet. ‘What news? A battle?’
‘Nothing of that nature. It’s the negro – Virgil. He came before the court this morning and they found him guilty of Pickett’s murder. Marryot says the fellow is to hang tomorrow morning. Sir Henry Clinton has confirmed the sentence. They say the Commander-in-Chief wishes to make an example of this man to deter other slaves.’
‘Is justice always so swift in New York?’
Townley shrugged. ‘Military courts have this to be said for them, at least: they do not drag their heels. Besides, at this time especially, when the city is awash with rumours about rebel incendiarists within our lines, it does no harm to show that we have the city firmly in our control. Will you come, sir?’
‘What? To the hanging?’
‘Of course – I am obliged to attend for the city and I thought it might interest you to accompany me. It’s as well to know how these things are done. Matters have arranged themselves very neatly. It’s at eight o’clock, and they will give us breakfast afterwards. They keep a good table.’ Townley took out his watch. ‘Talking of which, my dear sir, I believe it is time to dine.’
After dining with Townley, I had walked back towards my office, skirting the fringe of Canvas Town. It was very hot and I did not hurry. I was not yet sure of my way, and by chance I found myself passing Van Cortlandt’s Sugar House.
I turned into Trinity churchyard. The air seemed a little cooler here. Despite its proximity to the prison, the grassy enclosure was used as a place of resort, and at least a score of people were strolling among the gravestones. Indeed, it was more like a pleasure garden than a churchyard, with a broad, gravelled walk lined with benches, hooks for lanterns on the trees and even a platform for an orchestra amid the ruins. As I came up to the church, a familiar figure ambled round the corner of the tower at the west end.
‘Judge!’ I uncovered and bowed. ‘How do you do, sir? It is unconscionably hot, is it not?’
Wintour blinked up at me. ‘Ah – Mr Savill. Your servant, sir. You took me by surprise.’
‘Do you come here to take the air?’
‘No. In point of fact, I am looking for my goat.’
‘I beg your pardon, sir. I do not quite—’
‘My milch goat. It is the most charming animal imaginable. Mrs Wintour has a particular taste for its milk. Josiah tethered it here on Monday morning. Just there, sir, attached to those railings you see by the path. He swears he only turned his back for a moment, but in that moment it vanished.’
‘I am sorry to hear it, sir.’ I felt a memory shifting like shingle in the depths of my mind.
‘It is our own family burying ground, too. Which makes the theft somehow worse, as though the perpetrator had committed a sort of burglary. My poor brother is here, you see, and that is why Josiah brought the goat in the first place.’ Mr Wintour saw the lack of comprehension on my face and smiled at me. ‘I beg your pardon, sir – I have presented you with an unnecessary enigma.’
‘Your brother is buried here?’
‘Just so. He was as steadfast as any man in his attachment to the Crown.’ The old man’s face crumpled for a moment. ‘Alas, even as a boy, he was impetuous, and liable to speak his mind without counting the likely cost of it. That was his undoing. The rebels killed him, you know, whatever they say.’
‘Did he die in the fighting, sir?’ I asked.
‘No, sir, he did not.’
While the Judge was talking, he drifted closer to the railings and stared at the memorials they enclosed. I followed him. One of the inscriptions had been more recently cut than the others:
Erected in Memory
of
Francis de Lancey Wintour, D.D., M.A.
Fellow of King’s College, New York
Son of William Wintour, Esqre
Died 21 June 1776
Aged 57 years
‘When the rebels occupied this city at the start of the war,’ Wintour said, ‘they inflamed the Republican riff-raff and sought out all the prominent Tories they could find. Age and infirmity was no barrier to them. My poor brother Francis spoke his mind to the Whigs, just as he had done before the war. He urged them to lay down their arms and return to their natural allegiance.’ Wintour gripped one of the spikes of the railings and turned aside. ‘And then,’ he continued in a lower voice, ‘the mob came to his house, and broke down the door, and dragged him in his nightshirt into the street. He cried out, “God bless King George.” They placed him on a rail and paraded him through the streets with loud huzzas. Yes, and there were soldiers there too, and city militia men who had dined at my own table, though afterwards they denied it. They were laughing, sir – can you credit it? They were laughing while they persecuted an old, infirm scholar in the name of what they call liberty and the rights of man.’
I took Mr Wintour’s arm. ‘My dear sir – pray, you must not distress yourself any more. Let us walk home.’
‘No.’ He shook off my hand. ‘No, sir – it is better you should know all. They paraded my unhappy brother outside General Washington’s windows, and that gallant officer raised his hat to them and returned their huzzas. They had it in mind to plunge poor Francis in the Fresh Water Pond and then to run him out of the city. But God was merciful to my brother and permitted death to supervene. He suffered a rush of blood to the head and he died instantly of an apoplexy.’
‘Let us go home, sir,’ I said. ‘I am so sorry.’
‘But I wish I could find the goat.’ He released the railing and stood straight. ‘She was my brother’s, you see, and a particular favourite. And Josiah too – our father gave him to my brother when he was a boy. After my brother died, they both came to me with what was left of his estate. The man and the goat. And Josiah likes to bring the goat here sometimes to see her old master and his resting place. It is – it is a harmless practice, is it not? I could not find it in myself to forbid it. Perhaps the animal has simply strayed. Josiah is most upset. I shall place an advertisement in the newspaper.’
He allowed me to lead him away from the grave. Once we had left the churchyard, he released my arm and stepped out almost briskly in the direction of Warren Street.
‘I had some news today, sir,’ I said, hoping to steer the old man’s attention to safer subjects. ‘The court has tried the man accused of Mr Pickett’s killing. They found him guilty.’
Wintour stopped abruptly. ‘Really? So he will hang?’
‘Yes, sir. Tomorrow morning.’
‘God rest his soul. There is no doubt about his guilt, I suppose?’
‘I attended the preliminary hearing,’ I said. ‘He was wearing Mr Pickett’s shoes and had his ring.’
‘Did he confess?’
‘Only to theft, and only of the shoes. He claims that he stumbled across the body.’
Mr Wintour shrugged. ‘Well, the court must go by the evidence, not what an accused man says in his own defence. Though one can hardly call it a court in any proper sense, since the judges sit without a jury and none of them has more than a smattering of the law. Still – poor Pickett – an unhappy end to an unhappy life.’
‘I thought perhaps that, in view of the acquaintance, Mrs Wintour and Mrs Arabella should be told.’
‘You may leave that to me, Mr Savill. I take it kindly that you have given us a little warning. I should not have liked them to have come across it in a newspaper or from a friend’s gossip.’ He stopped and shook me warmly by the hand. ‘I shall trouble you no further, sir. I am quite restored now.’
We said goodbye. I resumed my walk back to my office. It was only as I was turning into Broadway that I remembered the goat.
On Monday morning, Josiah had lost his master’s goat in Trinity churchyard. In the early evening of the same day, I had seen another goat not far away in the remains of Deyes Street. A mulatto boy had been leading it over a pile of rubble.
The same goat?
Chapter Thirteen
That night I did not hear the crying child. I turned this way and that on the overstuffed feather mattress, drifting in and out of a doze. I woke to full consciousness before five o’clock and could not settle to sleep again.
I am going to see a man hanged.
When I rose, I stayed in my chamber. I took a little tea but did not eat anything, feeling that for some obscure but powerful reason one should not attend the death of another man with a full belly. I tried to pray but found that would not answer. I read a chapter or two from the First Epistle to the Corinthians. That was no use either. Next I took up The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which Augusta had given me when we parted. She believed it did a man’s career no harm if he was known to spend his leisure hours engaged in serious reading of an uplifting nature. But the book irritated me so much and so quickly that I tossed the volume into the empty grate before I had read a couple of sentences.
I contemplated writing to Augusta. But I discovered that I had nothing to write that would be fit for her to read. I would much rather have written a line or two to Lizzie. But how could one say words like these to a beloved child?
In a moment I shall step out to watch a man be strangled on a string, and I wish to God I could do anything else in the world instead, even being seasick for eternity or having all my teeth pulled.
Why did this agitate me so much? It was almost as if I myself were the condemned man, as if I, not Virgil, had taken the life of another and deserved to die.
By seven o’clock I could no longer stand the confinement of my chamber. I left the house and walked down to the North River, where the air was somewhat cooler. By a quarter to eight, I was in front of the Upper Barracks.
Despite the short notice of the hanging, a crowd had gathered on the level ground outside the wall of the barracks. People of all conditions were talking, laughing, eating, drinking, buying, selling, shuffling to and fro or simply standing in silence. There was nothing sombre or discontented about them. They were merely waiting and they were perfectly good-humoured about it.
As I pushed my way through the throng I glimpsed a familiar face: the negro with the scars on his cheeks, the man whom I had seen in Canvas Town. He was wearing the faded red coat he had worn on Monday when the soldiers had carried Pickett’s body away. He was playing a jig on a penny whistle with his hat on the ground before him. Beside him was a boy with a tray of raw meat at his feet. Flies buzzed above the meat.
‘Mr Savill! This way, sir.’
Major Marryot was standing by the wicket set in the main gate of the barrack yard, waving his cane to attract my attention.
‘Cutlets and fricassees, chops and casseroles,’ shrieked the boy, his high voice cutting through the noise of the crowd. ‘Fresh goat, tender and sweet.’
I glanced in the lad’s direction. He was a mulatto with skin the colour of dark honey. The crowd shifted and the boy vanished.
‘We are pressed for time, Mr Savill,’ Marryot called, and he rapped the gate with his cane.
The sergeant of the guard ticked off my name on a list pinned to the guardroom door. Marryot took me through to a little parlour with a view of the gallows behind the barracks. The noise of the crowd was still audible.
‘They won’t see anything, you know,’ Marryot said testily as we were walking along, slapping his boot with his cane. It was as if he took the crowd as a personal insult. ‘This is a military hanging – an entirely private affair. But still those damnable jackals gather outside the gates.’
The Provost Marshal, a red-faced Irishman, was already standing at the open window and calling instructions to his subordinates. The scaffold had been built out from the main building, to which it was linked at first-floor level by a wooden bridge. He acknowledged us with the most cursory of bows.
‘He won’t need that long a drop,’ he shouted to the sergeant who was arranging matters on the scaffold.
No one spoke after that. The Provost Marshal stayed by the window. Even at this hour there was a sour tang of brandy about him. Marryot sucked his teeth and scowled at the floor. I put my hands in my pockets and leaned against the wall, pretending an ease I did not feel.
My fingers felt the outlines of something small and hard-edged in the right-hand pocket. It was the ivory die I had found on Pickett’s body. A gentleman’s die on a gentleman’s corpse. I took it out and rolled it on my palm. A three.
Townley entered, with Noak like a terrier at his heels. ‘Good day to you all, gentlemen – we are not come too late, I hope?’
‘Damned incompetent fools,’ the Provost Marshal said to the world at large. ‘They cannot even manage to hang a rogue without assistance.’
Somewhere a bell chimed the hour. Townley pulled out his watch and compared it with the clock on the wall.
‘They’re late,’ Marryot said. ‘Devilish unkind to the prisoner.’
The miserable, waiting silence embraced us once again. Noak consulted his pocketbook, turning the pages rapidly. Townley massaged his nose, applying pressure to the left side as if trying to push it so it would stand at a right angle to the rest of his face rather than a few degrees out of true.
I stared out of the window at the gallows. It consisted of a crossbeam supported by an upright post at either end. Three black chains hung from the crossbeam.
At last, at eight minutes past eight, the door re-opened. One by one, half a dozen men emerged on to the scaffold. First came the Provost Marshal’s sergeant, strutting like a cock in his own barnyard. He was followed by two soldiers with the condemned man shuffling between them. Next came a youthful parson, whose limbs seemed too long for his body and not entirely under their owner’s control. Another soldier brought up the rear with a canvas bag swinging from his hand.
Marryot removed his hat. The other gentlemen followed suit.
‘It is quite a military affair, as you see,’ Townley observed to me in a low voice, fanning himself with his hat. ‘The army usually handles this unpleasant necessity for us – the Commandant prefers it so. Of course, the Provost Marshal has everything to hand here, so it is convenient for everyone. He is unhappily obliged to oversee a great many executions – he is responsible for our rebel prisoners of war, you apprehend.’
Virgil’s arms were bound together in front of him and his ankles were shackled with a chain. Once they reached the scaffold, his escort pushed him directly under the crossbeam. The soldiers released his arms, though they stayed close to him.
The little slave looked about him, his head turning this way and that. His eyes found the window of the room where the gentlemen were waiting for him to die so that they might have their breakfast. His head became still. He flexed his wrists. His hands flapped and twitched. His lips moved but no sound came from them.
‘Come along, come along,’ the Provost Marshal cried. ‘We don’t have all day.’
Virgil stared at the window.
No one else spoke. I prayed silently, wordlessly and surely meaninglessly: for how could God be here?
The soldier with the bag came forward. The men in the room became still, watching the soldier take out a nightcap from his bag, which he placed on Virgil’s head. With surprising gentleness he drew it down over the negro’s face and patted him on his shoulder as a man touches a nervous horse to reassure him.
No one spoke, either on the scaffold or in the room that overlooked it. The nightcap had transformed Virgil from a person into something not quite human. It stripped the individuality from him. All that was left was a bundle of rags trembling like a shrivelled leaf in a breeze.
The soldier took the rope from the same bag and looped it through the end of the chain. He tied a knot to secure it. He lifted the noose at the other end of the rope, glanced at the Provost Marshal, and then placed the noose on the shoulders of the condemned man. He tightened it and stood to one side.
As if the touch of the noose had been a signal, Virgil cried out ‘God, God, God.’ His voice was muffled and not loud but it scraped against the surface of my mind like a rusty nail. He would not stop. ‘God, God, God.’
The sergeant stepped forward and checked the knots. The clergyman opened his prayer book and began to speak, though his voice was too low to hear what he was saying through the open window. But I knew what the words must be: I am the resurrection and the life.
The slave’s legs gave way. He would have collapsed if the soldiers had not seized him under the arms. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. The parson stood back.
All this time, Virgil was crying, ‘God, God, God.’
The sergeant turned towards the window. The Provost Marshal raised his arm and let it fall. The sergeant stamped twice. An assistant beneath the scaffold released the trap.
‘God, God, God—’
The planks on which Virgil was standing gave way. He vanished into the darkness under the scaffold with a violent clatter. There was an instant of silence, broken by the beat of an invisible drum.
Virgil dangled in the air, his feet kicking. His hands fluttered and then the fingers clenched into fists. He was dancing and twisting on the rope. He tried to raise his hands towards his neck but his arms were bound to his sides at the elbows.
The Provost Marshal leaned on the windowsill. ‘Goddamn it. I told you to make this quick. I have not had my breakfast yet.’
Two hands appeared from the darkness under the scaffold. They gripped the ankles of the hanging man and pulled sharply downwards. A spasm of movement rippled through Virgil’s body. And then at last he was still.
Chapter Fourteen
‘The air is a little cooler, I find,’ Mrs Arabella said. ‘But we rarely sit here in the evening because Mrs Wintour finds it fatiguing to walk so far.’
‘I distinctly felt a draught on my cheek, madam,’ I said. ‘Indeed, it is very pleasant with all the windows open.’
I could hardly believe the banality of my own conversation. For a moment my remark seemed to have stunned the others into silence. Mrs Arabella must have thought me the most pompous fool in creation.
We were sitting in the summerhouse at the bottom of the Wintours’ garden. Mrs Wintour had been too tired to come down for supper. Afterwards, the Judge had suggested that the three of us take our tea in the belvedere.
‘There is a charming westerly prospect of Vauxhall Garden and the grounds of King’s College,’ Mr Wintour had said. ‘One can glimpse the North River beyond. Though of course it will be almost dark by the time we are settled. Still, it will be agreeable to know that the prospect is there, will it not?’
The twilight was already far advanced, though we had not had the candles lit because of the flying insects their flames would attract. The air smelled faintly of lemon juice and vinegar, an agreeable contrast to the stink that pervaded so much of the city.
I turned towards Mr Wintour. ‘I had meant to enquire sooner, sir: is there any news of the goat?’
‘No. I fear the worst. But I have placed an advertisement in the Gazette. Nil desperandum must be our motto in this matter, as well as in our larger concerns.’
I wondered whether to mention the boy who had been selling goat meat outside the barracks before the hanging. It was impossible to be sure, but he might have been the boy whom I had seen with a living goat and the scar-faced negro on the day we had inspected Roger Pickett’s body. But even if it had been—
‘Her milk is much missed, sir,’ Mrs Arabella said, picking up the teapot and breaking my train of thought. ‘If we have lost her, I fear it will be nigh impossible to find another milch goat.’
She was wearing a pale gown that in the fading light made her almost luminous. She refilled my cup. I rose to take it and, in doing so, I felt the warmth radiating from her body and smelled the perfume I remembered from that first evening: otto of roses, mingled with her own peculiar fragrance. As I took the cup and saucer, her finger brushed my hand.
‘No more tea for me, my dear,’ Mr Wintour said, struggling to his feet. ‘I must see how Mrs Wintour does and then I shall retire for the night.’
For a moment we watched the old man picking his way down the path towards the garden door of the house.
Mrs Arabella stirred in her chair, and the wicker creaked beneath her body. ‘Miriam tells me you went to see that man hanged this morning.’
‘Yes, ma’am, I did. A melancholy duty.’
‘Did he confess to the murder in the end?’
‘I believe not.’
‘You would think a man would speak the truth if he knew he was to go before his maker in a few moments.’
‘He may have desired to confess, ma’am. But he was not given an opportunity as far as I know. But forgive me – the subject must be painful to you.’
The wicker creaked again. ‘Yes, of course. Though I barely knew Mr Pickett – but his murder is a terrible thing. Tell me, sir – was it – was it a hard death?’
I stared at her in the gathering dusk. ‘Mr Pickett’s?’
‘No, no – I mean the man who was hanged for the murder.’
‘How can it not have been?’ I said, more sharply than I intended.
‘I spoke without thinking.’ She sounded upset, though there was not enough light for me to read her expression. ‘But – but there must be degrees in these matters, must there not?’
‘It cannot have been easy.’ I remembered Virgil’s clenched fists, the kicking feet and, most vividly of all, the hands that had risen from beneath the scaffold to give the sharp, fatal tug at the slave’s ankles. ‘But it did not take long.’
She sighed. ‘I am glad of that, at least. Of course they do not have feelings as we do.’
‘Who do not?’
‘Negros. They are made of coarser clay. Indeed, many of them are little better than beasts of the field. Most negros have no more idea of true religion or morality than the man in the moon.’
‘I cannot believe that to be true, madam,’ I said. ‘Their situation may be inferior to ours, their education neglected, but one cannot blame them for that. Indeed, if we blame anyone, surely we must blame ourselves for their shortcomings.’
She threw back her head and laughed with such spontaneous merriment that I found myself smiling in sympathy. ‘Oh, you would not say that if you knew them as I do, sir.’
‘But I have encountered many negros in London, freed men, who—’
‘I do not mean all negros, of course,’ she interrupted, ‘or even all slaves, for that matter – for example, I except those like Josiah and Miriam and Abraham – they have lived so long among us as almost to be like us, as far as God permits them to be and allowing for the difference between our station in life and theirs.’
‘They are slaves, then? I did not know.’
‘They are perfectly content in their condition and give us faithful service. Their loyalty is beyond question. Believe me, sir, Josiah would not have his freedom if Mr Wintour offered it him on a silver platter.’
A silence fell between us.
‘Let us talk to something more agreeable,’ she said at length. ‘Your family, perhaps – I’m sure Mrs Savill is counting the days towards your happy return.’ She spoke seriously but there was an edge of mockery to her words that irritated me. ‘And the other evening you told us that you have a daughter, I think?’
‘Yes, ma’am – Elizabeth; she is five years old.’
There was another silence. Then Mrs Arabella said, in a voice barely above a whisper, ‘It cannot have been easy to leave her and to come all this way. And even worse for her, of course, to lose her papa.’
The twilight had grown darker. I heard her breathing. How strange, I thought, that she talked of Lizzie missing me, but not Augusta; how strange, and how oddly near the mark.
A door slammed. Both of us sat up sharply. It was as if, I thought later, we had been on the verge of being discovered in some shameful assignation. Miriam was coming down the garden with a lantern in her hand.
‘Good girl,’ Mrs Arabella said. ‘I was about to ring for candles.’
Miriam made her obedience in the doorway. ‘No, ma’am, it’s master. He begs you to join him in the library.’
‘But I thought he had retired.’
‘He came down again, ma’am. Major Marryot’s called.’
‘So late? And why should they want me?’
‘I’m sure I don’t know.’
Mrs Arabella rose to her feet. ‘I suppose I must find out what they want. But do not disturb yourself, Mr Savill. Shall we play backgammon when I come back? I need diversion – I do not feel at all sleepy yet.’
I said that nothing would give me more pleasure.
‘Then that is settled. Miriam – light me into the house and then bring candles for Mr Savill directly. You will find the backgammon board under that seat in the corner, sir. Or Miriam will fetch it out for you.’
The two women set off for the house. After a moment I went over to the corner and put my hand into the darkness under the seat. The smell of lemon juice and vinegar was stronger here. The Wintour ladies were good housekeepers. I felt the outlines of the backgammon box and drew it out. I laid it on the table and opened it. It was too dark to see the counters clearly.
I did not have long to wait. Miriam came down the path with a candelabra, its candles unlit, a taper and the lantern. She put them on the table beside the backgammon board but made no move to light the candles. Her hands were shaking.
‘If it please your honour,’ she said, ‘I think mistress will stay in the house now.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I shall come in myself in that case.’ I rose to my feet and, as I did so, the woman clutched the edge of the table. ‘Is something wrong, Miriam?’
‘Oh, sir, it’s the Captain.’
‘But I thought you said Major Marryot had called.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Miriam said, stumbling over her words. ‘He brought the news. Mr John, sir. Captain Wintour.’
It took me a moment to realize what she meant. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. Such distressing—’
‘No, sir, it’s not that. Mr John ain’t dead. He’s alive.’
Chapter Fifteen
The first week in New York stretched into a month and then to another. I found myself imperceptibly adjusting to my situation until it appeared almost unremarkable.
The war coloured everything and nothing. Perhaps it had been like this in Troy for most of the ten years that city had been invested by the Greeks. Perhaps in Troy, as in New York, life had continued much as usual in the long intervals between battles. It almost made a man wonder whether the battles were necessary in the first place.
In October, Mr Rampton wrote with what he said was good news. Lord George Germain had been pleased to say with the kindest condescension imaginable that he had glanced over a memorandum I had composed before leaving for New York, and thought it a model of its kind. The Department would benefit greatly from a man of Mr Savill’s proven abilities as its eyes and ears in New York.
This being so, His Lordship desires me to communicate to you his wish that you should remain in New York for a few months more. Since a winter passage would not be at all agreeable for you, I took the liberty of suggesting that we should therefore extend your commission until the March or April. Who knows, by that time the rebels may have capitulated. We hear on every side that the Continental troops are deserting in droves because Congress cannot pay them except in their own worthless dollars.
My dear Savill, what a feather in your cap is this! Matters are turning out just as I had hoped. In haste, for the messenger is about to post to Falmouth to catch the packet before it sails with the August mail, believe me
Truly yours, HR.
At first I could not but be pleased that my abilities had earned such approval – not only from Mr Rampton but from Lord George himself. Then my mind swung to the other extreme. I had been sentenced to pass another five or six months in this uncomfortable provincial backwater. I should be obliged to deal, week in, week out, with ever-swelling numbers of unfortunate Loyalists, with the rudeness of Major Marryot and with an array of criminal cases.
And what of Augusta? My wife and I did not agree in many respects but she had never denied me a husband’s rights. Indeed, she showed a surprising enthusiasm for granting them to me when the candle was out and the curtains were drawn. To be absent from her was to have an itch one could not scratch. As a prudent and rational man, I should no doubt have told myself that the gratifications of marriage would prove all the sweeter if I continued longer in New York. But prudent and rational considerations seemed to have no noticeable effect on this particular itch.
In this reckoning of potential profit and probable loss, where did Lizzie figure on my balance sheet? For a child of five, a single month was an eternity, and I had already been separated from her for three. I knew she would be well looked after in Shepperton, and that my sister would ensure that she had no material wants. But she must miss her papa. Her mother had never cared much for Lizzie, perhaps because hers had been a difficult birth, and disliked having the child about her. But I had loved her from the first. I felt my daughter’s absence as a man must feel the lack of an amputated limb.
Still, there was no help for it. If I were to make a new home for the three of us and provide Augusta and Lizzie with the necessities of life and even a few luxuries, I must remain in New York for the time being.
I asked Mr Wintour whether I might extend my stay in Warren Street.
‘Nothing would give me greater pleasure,’ the Judge said, staring at me over the top of the glasses he wore for reading. ‘Before you came I was entirely surrounded by a monstrous regiment of women.’ He smiled to show that the words were intended as a pleasantry. ‘Besides, I do not find it agreeable to drink His Majesty’s health by myself. Toasts should be made in company, and another gentleman is indispensable for that. And of course it means I shall have the pleasure of making my son known to you when he returns. It may be any week now, you know – he writes that he is almost restored.’
‘I would not wish to inconvenience Captain Wintour, sir,’ I said. ‘If you would prefer me to remove—’
‘No, no, my dear sir. I would not hear of it. And nor would Mrs Wintour, and nor Bella. It is Bella who counts most particularly, you know, for this is her house. As for John, he will enjoy having a man his own age to talk to. Otherwise I fear he will find us very dull.’
Mrs Arabella came into the library, and he told her the news. She was looking remarkably handsome today, I thought – this fine autumn weather must suit her. Indeed, I could not understand how I had so readily dismissed her claims to beauty on our first acquaintance. ‘Once seen,’ Mr Noak had said of her, ‘never forgotten.’ Perhaps he had been right all along. I had not been a very good judge of anything after the discomforts of our passage from England and the horrors that had confronted me on my arrival in New York.
‘I hope your staying longer will not grieve Mrs Savill and your daughter, sir,’ she said. ‘Your daughter is called Elizabeth, is she not?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ I was touched that she had remembered the name. ‘It will certainly grieve me not to see her.’
‘And yet you stay?’
‘Bella, Bella,’ the Judge said. ‘A man must go where he is ordered. You know that, as a soldier’s wife.’
‘Yes, sir,’ she said. ‘Of course I know it. But a child cannot understand the bitterness of parting in the way a wife can.’
Mr Wintour patted her hand. ‘You are too tender-hearted, my dear.’
‘Five years old is very young.’
‘It cannot be helped,’ I said. ‘Though I wish with all my heart that it could.’
Chapter Sixteen
Mr Townley lived very comfortably with his family in a commodious and most respectable house in Hanover Square, next door to an admiral. Most of the ground floor was given over to business.
I had gradually learned that Townley was a man with his fingers in many pies. As well as superintending the city’s police, he sat on several boards, one to do with the execution of port regulations and another to do with the issuing of licences to the cartmen who transported goods about the city and its environs. He had a warehouse on Long Island and also leased Norman’s Slip, out on the Greenwich Road, which enabled him to trade on his own account.
‘My dear sir,’ he said, when I brought the news that my mission in New York had been extended, ‘how very agreeable – for us, at least. And for you too, I hope. Now pray sit down. Another five or six months, eh? Nothing could be better.’
We were in his private room, a back parlour. There was an autumnal chill in the air, and a fire burned brightly in the grate.
‘Will you look for an establishment of your own now?’ Townley asked, leaning forward in his chair. ‘You would be so much more comfortable. I believe I could find you most respectable lodgings in Queen Street if you liked: three chambers, a spacious parlour, a kitchen and wine cellar there. With use of the hall, of course, and the coachhouse and the stables. The widow who owns the house – a most delightful lady – is a friend of my wife’s. I’m sure I could obtain a six-month lease for – let me see – forty-five guineas.’ He raised a long, languid hand as if I had objected. ‘The American Department has a position in the world, after all. Mr Rampton would wish you to live in a style that befits it.’
‘I shall remain at Judge Wintour’s, sir, for the time being at any rate. It is very convenient in all respects.’
‘Ah.’ He looked up. ‘Well, no doubt Mrs Arabella is an excellent housekeeper. It is in fact her house, you know – it was her father’s residence in the city – though she has lent it to her parents-in-law for the duration of the war. But in any case, I am sure the family is happy to have you there.’
Neither of us mentioned money, but I knew my two guineas a week must be a welcome addition to the Wintours’ income. The Judge needed ready money. Everywhere in the house were signs of past affluence and present shortages, from Josiah’s livery with its frayed cuffs and stained armpits, to the carefully rationed tea leaves which were re-used at least once above stairs and probably two or three times more in the kitchen and the slave quarters.
‘Still,’ Townley continued, after a pause, ‘I wonder how you will find Warren Street when Captain Wintour returns.’
‘Equally convenient, I hope.’
‘That remains to be seen. Captain Wintour is not the easiest of men. Of course he has reason enough for that.’
‘Because of Saratoga?’
‘Yes, indeed.’ Townley glanced at me, his face bland but oddly attentive. ‘But there are other reasons, too. He had great expectations from his father-in-law, Mr Froude, but this war has put paid to those, at least until we have peace again.’ He paused. ‘When does he come home?’
‘In a few weeks. He is well enough to travel now, I apprehend, and is in Quebec. His father has sent money for his passage home.’
There was a tap on the door, and Mr Noak brought in a letter for Townley to sign.
‘Ah – the incomparable Noak,’ Townley said with a smile. ‘I cannot imagine how I managed without you.’
Mr Noak bowed but did not return the smile. He was now permanently employed by Mr Townley, who entrusted him with the management of more and more business. His unobtrusive efficiency was matched by his kindness of heart, as I had learned from his care of me at sea. So I was not altogether surprised when, one Sunday afternoon in September, I had found him in the drawing room at Warren Street reading the Bible to old Mrs Wintour, whose eyes were failing. These Sunday visits had settled into what was almost a routine; Mrs Wintour became quite agitated if Mr Noak happened not to be at leisure.
‘There was one other matter, sir,’ Noak said as he took back the letter from Townley. He hesitated, waving the letter to and fro to dry the ink.
‘You may speak, man – we need have no secrets from Mr Savill.’
‘Yes, sir. It is only the docket for Major Marryot.’
‘What of it?’
‘The list includes the boy found drowned by the Paulus Hook ferry. I believe he may be the Government informer who goes by the name of Benjamin Taggart.’
Townley straightened his long spine. ‘Oh yes – well, was he murdered?’
‘I cannot say for certain, sir, either way – he drowned, that is all; I saw no sign of violence on his body. They are keeping it at King’s Wharf for the time being. But what shall I say your recommendation is?’
‘To let sleeping dogs die. Or, rather, drowned dogs in this case.’ He chuckled in appreciation of his own wit. ‘Unless there are reasons why Major Marryot should enquire further into it?’
‘Not that I am aware of, sir. And, even if there were, the boy’s body can tell him nothing more than it already has.’
‘Well, then. I think we need waste no further time on a slave’s by-blow, do you? And I’m sure Major Marryot will agree.’
Noak bowed.
‘Mind you,’ Townley said, ‘Taggart did us one good service, did he not?’ He turned to me. ‘It was he who tipped us the wink about poor Pickett’s murderer. You remember? The runaway, Virgil. We’d not have been able to hang the rogue without Taggart.’
Chapter Seventeen
There could be no harm in it, surely?
On the other hand, a prudent man knew when to leave well alone. Especially a man with his way to make in the world.
As the day went on, I found myself thinking more and more about the Pickett affair. I could not avoid the fact that I felt not only curious about his murder but also in some strange way responsible for the runaway slave they had hanged for it.
It was as if I had failed him.
But was not the man a convicted murderer? Who was I to set my judgement against that of the officers who had made up the court martial? They were vastly experienced; they had been cognizant of all the facts – whereas I was but newly arrived in this city and a positive babe in arms in such matters. Most important of all, my duty was merely to observe the administration of justice: apart from that, I had no legal standing in the affair; nor was I under any moral obligation to go beyond the terms of my commission.
And yet – these were a civil servant’s arguments, perfectly adequate for a departmental inquiry or Mr Rampton or even a court of law. But they did not quite convince me as a man. Now Taggart, the informer, was dead too.
The decision hung in the balance for the rest of the morning, and later at the coffee house where I dined alone and frugally on an elderly mutton chop and a pint of sherry. At the end of the meal, I decided to let chance take a hand in the matter. I felt in my waistcoat pocket for the ivory die I had found under Pickett’s body. I pushed aside the plate and brushed the crumbs away with the napkin.
If it came up with an odd number, I should go back to the office and forget all about the drowned informer, the hanged slave and Pickett’s murder. If the number were even, I should refresh myself with a stroll to the river in the mild afternoon sunshine.
I rolled the die. It danced across the stained linen cloth, ricocheted off the base of the wine glass and came to rest beside the fork. It was a four.
There could be no harm in it, I repeated to myself again and again like a Papist with his rosary, as if repetition could somehow make it true. There could be no harm in it, none in the world.
The Paulus Hook ferry was at the north-west end of Cortland Street, by King’s Wharf. My choice of route proved to be a mistake, for Cortland Street took me through the desolate heart of Canvas Town, not far from the cellar where they had found the body of Roger Pickett.
The roadway itself was an illicit market place. As I passed along it, three whores solicited me, a negro offered me a Pembroke table with three legs and two unmatched chairs, a one-armed soldier tried to sell me a pair of boots, a variety of entertainers sought to distract me, and beggars haunted my every step. A woman showed me the baby at her breast. ‘For the love of God,’ she said, ‘for the love of God.’
This was the other New York, the shadow town, the dark simulacrum of the prosperous shops and stalls that lined Broadway.
At the end of the street, a breeze was coming off the water. Near the shore the river was dense with small craft bobbing on the swell. Further out lay a scattering of merchant ships with a line of men-of-war beyond them. The sea shifted and glittered in the sunshine. A mile or so away was the Jersey coast.
To the south, towards Fort George at the tip of the island, a party of prisoners of war were working with picks and shovels, strengthening the embankment along the shore. A small detachment of Hessians watched over them, though without much interest. There was nowhere for the prisoners to run to and, besides, most of them were in no condition to run anywhere.
At the wharf were more guards, part-time Provincials drunk with their petty authority. I showed the sergeant in charge my passes, one from Headquarters, the other from Townley, and his arrogance modulated swiftly to something approaching servility.
‘Where do you keep the bodies you take from the water?’ I asked. ‘I want to see one of them.’
He laughed. ‘A body, sir? We can show you a fair few of those. We keep them for a day or two, and if no one claims them they go with the others.’
‘What others?’
The sergeant pointed his staff at the prisoners at work on the embankment. ‘They pack the rebel dead into the foundations. Saves all of us a deal of work.’
‘You mean they put dead prisoners there? Under the new embankment?’
‘Yes, sir – and the ones from the water, like I said, assuming they’re not claimed. Might as well do something useful with them, eh?’
‘I wish to inspect the body of a boy,’ I said. ‘His name’s Taggart. Mr Townley’s man has already looked at him.’
‘Ah, yes – that little negro. Over here, sir.’ He led the way towards a warehouse built into the gently sloping ground away from the water. ‘We keep them down the end,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘It’s cooler.’
He unbolted a heavy door and stood aside to allow me to enter first. I found myself in a narrow chamber with a vaulted ceiling stretching across the width of the building. The room was lit by two arched openings, barred but unglazed, placed high in the walls. Below them was a bank of broad, slatted shelves.
The first thing I noticed was the smell – an unlovely compound of salt water, seaweed and decaying flesh. My gorge rose. I covered my mouth and nose with a handkerchief.
‘A man grows used to the stink,’ the sergeant said. ‘I hardly notice it now.’
I glanced about me at the shapes stacked on the shelves. The bodies had been hunched together to save space. Some were naked; others wore a ragged shirt or breeches. I knew that anything worth taking would have been plundered before they were brought here.
‘It’s that one.’ The sergeant poked a mottled arm with his staff. ‘Came in the day before yesterday.’
The small body lay on its side with its back to us.
‘I want to see the face,’ I said.
The sergeant seized the upper arm by the wrist. He tugged it. The body did not move. He grinned at me, spat on his hands and braced his leg against the brick support of the shelves.
‘He’s being a little contrary, sir. But not for long.’
He took the corpse’s arm with both hands and wrenched it violently towards him. There was a sucking, squelching sound. The upper part of the body twisted. The corpse was now on its back, though its legs were still angled away from us. The smell worsened.
The head faced upwards. The sergeant took hold of it by the nearer ear and pulled it closer to the edge of the shelf.
‘That suffice, sir? I can stretch him out if you want.’
‘No need, thank you.’ I forced myself to look at the face. The eyes had gone. I swallowed hard.
‘The one you’re looking for?’ the sergeant asked.
‘Yes.’
There was no doubt about it. It was the mulatto boy I had encountered twice before. He was smaller than I remembered, and perhaps younger – no more than nine or ten. He was very thin, the ribs as clearly defined as the ridges on a fluted column; and there were faded weals on his side where he had been beaten, probably with a rope’s end, but not recently.
‘How long had he been in the water?’
‘A day or two, sir, maybe less. Don’t take long for the fish to get the eyes. Minutes, sometimes.’
Here was the informer who, according to Noak, had brought about Virgil’s death on the gallows. I had seen him twice before, though I had not known his name. On the first occasion, the day of my arrival, the boy had been leading a goat close to the spot where they had found Pickett’s body. The second time, he had been selling goat meat outside the barracks on the morning when they hanged a man for Pickett’s murder.
I straightened up. ‘Have you had any other bodies lately?’
‘A rebel prisoner on Sunday. He’d been in the water for a week or two.’
‘What about a big negro with a long scar on either side of his nose?’
‘No one like that, sir, not to my recollection.’ The sergeant gestured at the boy on the shelf. ‘Seen enough?’
‘Yes. I’m obliged to you.’
‘Do you want me to hold him here for Major Marryot to see?’
I shook my head. What was the point, after all? Marryot would laugh at me.
The sergeant pushed the body back on to its side and rubbed his hands on his coat. ‘Runaway, was he?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Perhaps he was running from something.’
‘And then it caught up with him,’ the sergeant said.
Chapter Eighteen
Early in November, I saw the little girl for the first and last time.
I had just dined with the Commandant and a considerable company of gentlemen, most of them in uniform. There had been much food and many toasts. I was a little drunk, and therefore disposed to be emotional.
As I strolled along, Lizzie was in my mind, which was perhaps why I noticed the child in the first place. The thought of my daughter aroused a host of feelings in me – love, of course, and a sort of hunger for her company, and also anxiety: suppose she fell ill? Suppose her mother or her aunt treated her cruelly? Suppose I were to die, leaving her penniless and unprotected in this harsh and unforgiving world? Suppose the unthinkable, that Lizzie herself should die?
It was still early in the evening and Broadway was crowded. It was dark. There were a few streetlights, and the lighted windows and shop doorways. But these emphasized the gloom rather than dispelled it. That was when I saw the child.
The girl was younger than Lizzie and was in leading strings. She was with a woman. The two of them had emerged from a haberdasher’s shop about twenty or thirty yards in front of me. Both were muffled against the weather in long cloaks with hoods over their heads. The woman tugged the girl along, almost pulling her off her feet. The child had not yet learned how to walk quickly without falling over. She strained against the harness that held her as if bursting to escape.
In a moment they passed a pastry-cook’s shop – a large and brightly lit establishment with two big windows. The child was distracted by the smells and the warmth. She pulled her reins free from the woman’s hand and darted towards the open door.
The woman caught her in an instant. She hooked her arm around the girl’s waist and spun her, legs kicking, into the air. The movement dislodged the hoods from their heads.
The scene was as brightly lit as a stage. I saw the child in profile, her arms outstretched towards the pastry-cook’s, her mouth open in a howl of frustration. She was a negro, as was the woman who had charge of her.
In that same moment, alerted by my footsteps, the woman looked in my direction. To my surprise, I recognized Miriam, Mrs Arabella’s maid.
The scene dissolved. Miriam walked rapidly away, almost at a run, still with the kicking, wailing child in her arms. I called out. She did not turn round. A porter staggered out of the furniture shop next door with his arms wrapped around a large wing armchair, which stopped me dead in my tracks and blocked my view.
By the time I reached the pastry-cook’s, there was no sign of the woman and the girl. I could no longer hear the child’s cries. Either the two of them were obscured by the throng of passers-by or they had turned into another shop or down one of the narrow alleys that punctuated the line of buildings.
Why such apparently furtive behaviour? Was Miriam outside the house on some unlicensed errand? Was it possible that she was married? Could the child be hers? I began to doubt it had been Miriam – after all, I had barely glimpsed the young woman and the light had been poor.
I returned to Warren Street. Josiah answered my knock on the street door. The old man helped me remove my hat and greatcoat, murmuring gently that the ladies were in the drawing room and Judge Wintour was at work in his library. He turned aside to dispose of my coat.
‘Josiah?’
‘Sir?
‘I saw Miriam this evening. At least I believe I did.’
Josiah hung my coat without undue haste. He faced me and bowed, his face expressionless.
‘She was with a child – a negro girl, an infant. Has Miriam a daughter?’
‘No, sir.’
Josiah bowed again and retreated into the shadows at the back of the hall.
It cannot have been more than a week later that Captain John Wintour came home. I have a note of the date: it was on Thursday, 12 November. He had been badly wounded at Saratoga and, by his own account, had spent many months on the borders of life and death. An old and feeble-witted woman stumbled across him half dead in a wood when she was gathering kindling near her cottage. She had nursed him back to health.
Eventually he had reached Canada and found his way to Kingstown, where there were cousins of his mother who were able to shelter him; but his health had broken down again. Fortunately he had, in his own words, the constitution of a horse and had recovered sufficiently to be able to undertake the voyage home.
He arrived in Warren Street in the evening. It was the dead hour before supper. As chance would have it, when he knocked at the door I was descending the stairs on my way to the parlour.
The younger manservant, Abraham, let him in, trying to say a few words of welcome. Wintour pushed past him and stood in the middle of the hall, legs apart and hands in the pockets of his patched greatcoat, which had clearly been made for someone much smaller. He was a spare man of about thirty, with flushed, bony features and deep-set eyes, which were an unusually bright blue. He stared at me.
‘And who the devil are you?’ he demanded, swaying as he spoke.
‘My name is Savill, sir. Have I the honour of meeting Captain Wintour?’
‘Indeed, sir. The honour is entirely mine.’ Wintour attempted a bow, staggered forward and righted himself. ‘You must be the gentleman from the American Department. My father told me.’
‘Yes, sir. You have—’
The parlour door opened and Mrs Wintour almost ran to her son, an extraordinary exhibition of physical energy from the old lady. She embraced him. The Captain closed his eyes and patted her shoulder. With his other hand he scratched his nose.
Next came the Judge, more slowly. He looked his son up and down.
‘I am happy to see you home, John,’ he said.
‘Yes, sir. And – and I to be here.’
‘You are – you are fatigued?’
‘It has been a long day, sir, and my health is not yet quite restored.’
‘Then perhaps you should rest – after you have seen Bella, of course. Let Abraham take your coat.’
Mr Wintour took his wife’s arm and drew her from her son. The Captain held out his arms and let the slave ease the coat away from him.
No one looked in my direction. I thought they had forgotten me.
There were footsteps on the stairs. I turned. Mrs Arabella was rounding the bend at the half-landing. She paused at the top of the last flight down to the hall.
First she must have seen me. She let her eyes drift past me to the group in the hall below. I could not see her expression because the light was dim and the flame of the candle she held was below the level of her chin.
But the candlelight revealed two things about Mrs Arabella. It showed her slim white neck. It showed that she was swallowing repeatedly, as if trying to force down an unpalatable morsel. And the flame also picked out her hand holding the top of the newel post, and how the fingers gripped it so tightly that the skin wrinkled.
The Captain looked up. ‘Ah – there you are, madam. My pretty, witty wife.’
Chapter Nineteen
Townley was a hospitable man, who talked easily to anyone, and perhaps let his tongue wag more freely than a gentleman should. But I enjoyed his company because he was almost always cheerful and had a pleasant wit.
I would sometimes sup with him, either alone or with two or three of his friends. On those occasions I saw another side of New York, for the gentlemen around the table were Loyalists of course but, unlike those who came up to my office in Broad Street, they were on the whole content with their lives.
‘I bless the day,’ Townley confided to me in a fit of drunken confidence, ‘when those damned Yankees dumped the tea in Boston Harbour. Indeed, sir, it has been the making of us here.’
We were sitting at table in a small private room in the King’s Arms. The shutters were up and a fire of unseasoned wood crackled and spluttered in the grate. Two other men, a contractor and a commissioner for the harbour administration, made up the party. But they were oblivious to our conversation for they were engaged in an animated discussion about the need to bring in professional actresses at the John Street Theatre.
‘Surely it must be difficult for you,’ I said to Townley. ‘Since so many goods are in short supply, there must be a constant—’
‘Supply and demand, sir,’ Townley interrupted. ‘That’s what the students of political economy call it. It is a beautiful thing, for the supplier at least. If the available stock diminishes, you raise the price of what you have. Or, if demand remains keen when the supply is exhausted, you simply sell promises instead, which is like selling air. No, for a man with his wits about him, this war has been a blessing.’
He hesitated, frowning. I ran my finger round the rim of my glass and tried not to smile.
‘Of course, sir, I do not mean to suggest that the war is – well, in any way, even in the slightest, a desirable thing, but – taken, as a whole, you understand, considered in the round – there is no harm in a man looking to his own interests.’ Townley wagged his forefinger in front of my face. ‘Always with the proviso, my dear sir, that His Majesty’s interests must be served, first and foremost, without fear or favour, in any—’
‘Sir,’ I said gently, ‘I believe I understand you perfectly. Should we drink a toast to His Majesty?’
‘Indeed.’ Townley seized the bottle and burst out laughing from sheer animal spirits. ‘And damnation to his enemies. Good God, I had not realized it was so early. Shall we call for the punchbowl?’
By the time the party broke up it was nearly midnight. As we went outside, I almost recoiled from the cold. November was well advanced now, and so was winter.
Townley and one of the other men had servants to light them home. The third man took a waiting hackney chair. I decided to walk back to Warren Street. It was only a step away and the exercise would clear my head. Despite the lateness of the hour, the streets were still busy, for the city came alive at night with theatre parties, musical entertainments, suppers and dances. I knew my way perfectly and I believed, if a man was cautious, there could be no danger.
On the other side of the road, facing the fields, I saw the silhouettes of the prison and the poorhouse looming square and black against the sky. As I drew level with them, I turned up towards King’s College.
It was darker here and there were fewer people about. Someone ahead was whistling. A dog barked in the distance, somewhere near Freshwater Pond. The ferrule of my stick tapped against the paving stones. The change of direction brought me into the wind, which was blowing hard from the north. I felt its chilly bite on my neck above the collar of the greatcoat, and it cut through the thin silk of my stockings.
It was the wind that saved me. It was the wind that made me slacken my pace to adjust my muffler, which had worked loose.
Directly ahead, a man shot out from a dark entry between two buildings. But for my change of pace, he would have collided with me. Simultaneously, I heard footsteps behind me, whose presence I had already registered, footsteps that now were speeding up.
‘It’s him,’ said a man’s voice behind me.
I’m trapped.
I raised the stick above my head and turned sharply to the right, which brought my back to the blank wall of the building beside me.
The man in front leapt at me. I slashed the stick down in a diagonal arc. I heard a cry of pain. Metal chinked on stone.
I reversed the direction of the stick and swung it blindly backwards. I shouted, a wordless cry. The stick landed on something soft. It twisted like a live thing. I lost hold of it and swore at my assailant.
As suddenly as it had begun, it was over. There were more running footsteps. My two attackers darted into the alley. A couple of men gave chase, whooping and hallooing as if they were chasing hares.
‘Run, boyo, run,’ someone cried in great excitement, his voice bouncing against the walls of the alley.
I leaned back against the wall, hunched over and drawing breath in great shuddering gasps. As the danger subsided, my mind filled with all the stories I had heard of assault and robbery on the streets of New York, of the brutish attacks by drunken soldiers and vulgar criminals which the military authorities so rarely troubled to check.
‘Sir?’ It was an English voice, a gentleman’s. ‘Are you hurt?’
I looked up. ‘Thank you, no.’
‘Good God, this town is a perfect nursery of crime.’
Another man came running up to us, this one bearing a lantern. By its light I made out that my rescuer was a middle-aged naval lieutenant, with a footman to light his way.
‘Your arrival was providential, sir.’ I paused, for I still found it hard to breathe. ‘I cannot thank you enough.’
‘I can’t take the credit, sir – a pair of soldiers chased the villains away.’
His servant picked up my stick and handed it to me.
‘Footpads,’ my rescuer said, gripping the hilt of his dress sword. ‘Sprang on you like – like a pair of tigers on a goat. Saw that happen once, sir, in the East Indies. Not a pretty sight, believe me.’
‘Did you see the rogues, sir?’ I asked.
‘No, sir. Too dark to see more than the shape of them. Tell you what, though: I’d lay ten to one they were negros. You know that musty smell their clothes have, sir?’ The lieutenant sniffed, as if to illustrate his point. ‘I’ve often remarked it. Thieving magpies, the whole pack of them. They’d steal their grandmother’s teeth if they could.’
I shifted position and one of my shoes kicked against something that scraped on the pavement. I bent down and picked up the object, holding it so the light from the lantern fell upon it.
For a moment no one spoke. In my hand was a knife with a crude horn handle. The blade was about eight inches long and sharpened to a tapering point.
The lieutenant touched the blade with a fingertip. ‘After your purse and your rings, I suppose,’ he said. ‘But if need be, I dare say they would not have scrupled to murder you while they were at it.’
Chapter Twenty
Fear has a terrible habit of breeding fear; it spreads like maggots through rotting meat.
Once the danger was past I began to tremble. My rescuer kindly ignored my shameful weakness and escorted me to Warren Street. No one was about, except for servants. The lieutenant would not stay – his ship sailed at dawn tomorrow. I would have welcomed the company of anyone, even Captain Wintour, whose conversation, I had discovered, was not always agreeable. Instead I drank rum and water alone in the parlour, huddled over the banked-up fire, and the alcohol seemed to have no effect on me whatsoever.
My mind raced to and fro. It was as if it were under the influence of a powerful stimulant. When at last I retired to bed, I could not sleep.
Time and again, I ran over what had happened and what might have happened. The memory of my own unheroic conduct made me toss and turn in the smothering embrace of the featherbed.
Time and again, I returned to that terrible moment when the man had bounded out from the alley in front of me, and the footsteps behind had speeded up.
It’s him. That’s what the man behind me had said. It’s him.
After a sleepless night, I walked through the rain-slicked streets to Headquarters and asked to see Marryot. His servant ushered me into the Major’s private room. A masked white figure was sitting by the window. Two blue eyes, gleaming bright as if illuminated from within, stared out of the blank white face. For an instant I believed my mind had given way under the strain.
The moment dissolved and reformed itself: Marryot was swathed in a sheet, with his scalp and face lathered white. A regimental barber stood to one side, sharpening his razor on a strop. The blade slapped to and fro, glinting as it passed through a shaft of weak sunshine from the window.
I bowed.
‘Good morning to you, sir,’ the Major said, revealing the vivid pink of his mouth and an irregular palisade of blackened teeth. ‘You’ll forgive me if I don’t stand.’
‘Of course. I’m obliged to you for seeing me at such short notice.’
‘And how may I serve you?’
I glanced at the barber. ‘I wished to speak privately. Shall I wait until you are at leisure?’
‘You could wait all day for that and most of tomorrow as well. The General is to inspect the fortifications at King’s Bridge, and I am ordered to accompany him.’ Marryot looked up at the barber. ‘Wait outside. Send for more hot water.’
We waited in silence until the man had withdrawn, closing the door behind him.
Marryot did not ask me to sit. ‘Well, sir? What is it?’
‘I was set upon last night. It was about midnight – I was walking back to Warren Street after supping with Mr Townley at the King’s Arms.’
‘Were you robbed?’
‘No. Two soldiers came to my aid and chased the villains off.’
‘Were you hurt?’
‘No.’
‘All in all, a happy escape,’ he said. ‘I congratulate you, sir. And now, if that is—’
‘Sir, I am not altogether easy in my mind about this. There was something … something contrived about the attack. It was as if they had been lying in wait.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I felt as if I had walked into a trap, sir. There was a man in front and a man behind.’
‘But perhaps you had walked into a trap. Robbers work in pairs often enough.’
‘They had been waiting for me.’ I paused. ‘For me. Not for any passer-by that might have had a purse in his pocket. It’s him. That’s what one of them said.’
‘Well? All that means is that they had picked you out earlier as a likely mark.’
‘No, sir, I do not think so. Or they would not have made their attempt with so many witnesses about.’
Marryot sighed. ‘In my experience a robber can be as foolish as any man alive.’
‘Would you assist me in one thing at least? It would greatly set my mind at rest if I might talk to the two soldiers who chased them off. They may be able to tell me more about the men who attacked me. Besides, I should like to reward them. They may well have saved my life.’
‘Did you see their facings?’
‘No, sir. To all intents and purposes it was dark.’
‘So for all you know, they might have been from Provincial or militia—’
‘I heard them shouting, sir,’ I said, thinking, Run, boyo, run. ‘I believe I detected that one of them had a Welsh accent. Of course they may have come from a Loyalist regiment, but it is more probable that they did not.’
‘Very well.’ The lather on Marryot’s face was drying: cracks appeared, revealing the pink skin beneath. ‘I shall have enquiries made. And I suppose Mr Townley may learn something from his own informants.’
There was nothing to be gained by prolonging the meeting. I took my leave. But as I reached the door—
‘One other thing, sir,’ Marryot said. ‘How do they do in Warren Street?’
‘Very well, thank you, sir.’
‘And Captain Wintour? Pray, how is he?’
‘He improves every day, I believe,’ I said. ‘But his wound and the privations he endured have left their mark.’
‘His family must rejoice to have him restored to them. How are his parents? And – and Mrs Arabella, of course?’
‘Quite well, thank you.’
‘Pray pass on my compliments to them all, Mr Savill. I have not thought it proper to call in person to congratulate them on Captain Wintour’s happy return. In case his health still caused anxiety, you understand.’
‘I am sure that they are always happy to receive you, sir.’
‘You think so?’
I knew that when he spoke of the Wintours he meant Mrs Arabella and I pitied him for his doglike devotion. ‘I am perfectly convinced of it.’
‘Then I’m obliged to you, sir.’ The eyes blazed in the cracked white mask. ‘And I wish you good day.’
Chapter Twenty-One
Shortly before Christmas, I had occasion to become better acquainted with Captain Wintour. We found ourselves alone at supper one day; the ladies had not come down and the Judge was suffering from a head-cold and had kept to his room. It was chilly, and afterwards we drew up our chairs to the parlour fire.
‘It is so confoundedly dull here,’ he said, prodding the logs with a poker. ‘My father should entertain more. And we should be seen out and about in the world, where we belong. We are one of the first families of the province. Besides, a man cannot spend all his time at home with his wife, can he?’
I nodded, acknowledging the remark but not answering it.
‘Mark you, sir, Mrs Arabella is an adornment to any assembly or private party. She is wasted in Warren Street, shut up where nobody sees her. The Wintour diamonds are the best in New York, you know, and she looks charming in them. They were my grandmother’s. After the war is over I shall take Mrs Arabella to London and she shall wear them at court.’
‘You have visited London before, sir?’
‘As a young man, I passed several months there.’ Wintour clicked his fingers. ‘But let us have a game. What shall it be, sir? Cards? Backgammon? We can play by the fire – they will bring us up another bottle and we shall be famously snug.’
We were drinking an old madeira, pale and golden like watery sunlight. Mr Wintour had put aside a few bottles until the end of the war, so he would have a fitting wine with which to drink the King’s health when victory was declared. But his son argued that if they left the wine much longer, it would be spoiled; it would be better to drink it now.
‘Let us make this more interesting,’ he suggested as we were waiting for Josiah to bring up another bottle, and a second one too in case it should be needed. ‘Let us put a trifle on the outcome. I find that a stake concentrates the faculties wonderfully.’
Josiah brought the wine and Captain Wintour shouted at him for forgetting to bring the cards and the backgammon as well. The old man bowed low and said nothing, though I knew as well as he did that he could not have forgotten because he had not been ordered to bring them in the first place.
When the slave returned, Wintour had him set up a little table between us. It had flaps that drew out at either end, and we placed a candle on each of them. The Captain opened the backgammon board and laid out the ebony and ivory counters with trembling fingers. The arrows had been painted a delicate shade of green and they rested on a black ground. The board made a pretty sight in flickering light. It was a handsome set, as good as anything I had seen in London apart from the dice, which were clearly of colonial manufacture, being made of bone and crudely painted.
‘They say this is a game of chance, sir,’ Wintour said, taking up his glass. ‘But that is all stuff and nonsense, is it not? Chance may dictate the fall of the dice but, taken all in all, it’s skill that counts. When I waited for my ship in Quebec, I paid for my dinners with backgammon.’
A counter slipped from his hand. His wine glass tilted. Madeira splashed on to the board and formed a small, glistening puddle in one of its corners.
‘Goddamn it!’ He stared at the board and slowly shook his head.
‘It don’t signify, sir.’ I took out a handkerchief and dabbed at the wine. ‘It is only a drop or two. See – it is gone.’
Wintour stared at the handkerchief. ‘You’ve cut yourself.’
‘What? Where?’
‘Your hand, I apprehend – look at the handkerchief.’
I held the square of cloth to the light of the nearer candle. He was right: the cambric had a reddish tinge resembling blood in one corner. I examined my hand. The skin was unbroken.
‘It must be paint, sir, not blood,’ I said.
‘Very likely,’ Wintour said, losing interest in the matter as swiftly as he had gained it.
I frowned. The ground of the board looked black in the candlelight but it was possible that it was really a very dark red.
He reached for the bottle. ‘Shall we put a guinea on the first game, sir?’
‘Or there might have been blood,’ I said slowly. ‘A spot of blood on the board.’
As I spoke I imagined someone – Mrs Arabella, perhaps – pricking her finger by accident while she was sewing, with the board open before her. Or even suffering an unexpected nosebleed, such as one sometimes had as a result of a heavy cold. A few drops of blood might so easily have fallen on the board and lain there, drying in a moment, and invisible against the dark paint, particularly if the bloodletting had happened in poor light. The madeira had reliquefied the blood, bringing it back to a watery half-life.
‘Well, sir – guinea?’ said Wintour, sharply. ‘I find a little wager lends spice to a game, any game at all. Playing for love is so confoundedly dull.’
I had not played backgammon since my arrival in America. To begin with I found it difficult to concentrate. I lost the first game quite unnecessarily, allowing Wintour to gammon me.
‘We play according to Hoyle’s rules, do we not?’ he said, almost crowing with triumph. ‘If I remember rightly that means we double the stake. And therefore we triple it for a backgammon.’
I nodded, though I could not recall that the chapter on backgammon in Mr Hoyle’s book said anything about wagers at all, only a great deal on the mathematical probabilities of chance in relation to two six-sided dice.
Wintour paused to drink a toast to Dea Fortuna. He refilled his glass while I set the thirty men back on the board. By the time the first bottle of madeira was empty, he owed me eleven guineas.
‘Double or quits?’ he cried, as he set the pieces for the next game. ‘What do you say?’ He placed his bets with a sort of wild enthusiasm that rode roughshod over mere calculation.
There was a tap on the door and Miriam slipped into the room. She walked almost silently towards Wintour and stood by his chair, her head bowed and her hands clasped tightly together in front of her as if holding a secret.
‘Well, sir? Double or quits?’
‘If you wish, sir.’ I made up my mind that, if I lost, this must be the last game.
I smelled a hint of Mrs Arabella’s perfume in the air, clinging to the maid’s dress or her hands. I looked up at Miriam and saw the whites of her eyes flickering in the shadows behind her master’s chair. She was a comely young woman, in her way. She turned her head away from me.
Wintour set down the last of the counters and sat back. ‘What is it, girl?’
‘If it please your honour, mistress begs the favour of a word with you.’
‘Can’t you see I’m engaged? Tell her I’ll wait on her when I’m at leisure.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Her head still bowed, Miriam glided away.
My fingers slipped as if of their own accord into my waistcoat pocket. I touched the die I had found with Pickett’s body. The practice was on the verge of becoming habitual with me: like touching a rabbit’s foot for luck.
‘They pester me at all hours,’ Wintour complained as the door closed. His consonants were blurring now; the vowels slopped to and fro like water in a pail. ‘My father, my wife, my mother. Can they not understand that I need tranquillity above all if I am ever to recover my health? Your glass, sir – let us have a toast before we play: to the absence of women.’
He drank his glass in one and seemed not to notice that I did not do the same. We played the game, and he lost; so we played another, and another, and a fourth; and each time he lost.
I proposed that we call a halt, but Wintour demanded a chance to make good his losses.
‘I’m a little fatigued, sir. Besides, should we not cast our accounts?’
‘You sound like a damned clerk, man.’ He laughed. ‘But I suppose that’s what you are, sir – no offence, none in the world: I suppose a gentleman may hold a pen in an office, if he wishes, rather than a sword on a battlefield.’
He had kept a note of what he lost, scrawling the figures in pencil. He screwed up his face and blinked rapidly, holding the paper up to the candle. His lips moved silently as he totted up the figures.
‘Seventy guineas or thereabouts,’ he said at last. ‘Good God, how it creeps up on a man. Oblige me, sir – cast your eye over it. I never had much skill at reckoning.’
I glanced at the paper, reading the figures with difficulty. I already knew it must be nearer eighty guineas. ‘Let us call it seventy, sir,’ I said. ‘I prefer round numbers.’
‘Very well,’ he said with a gracious wave of his hand. ‘I’d give you the money this instant, if I could, sir, if it weren’t for those damned tight-purses. Damn them, eh? Let’s drink to their damnation.’
He lifted the bottle, but it was empty.
‘Who?’ I asked. ‘Whose damnation?’
Wintour set down the bottle and picked up the other, which was also empty. ‘Who? Eh? Oh yes – all of them – they’re all tight-purses in this city – you would not believe it, sir, these petty tradesmen, they would not have behaved like this before the war. Why should you wait for your money?’
‘It’s of no consequence to me in the least, sir—’
‘But it is. My dear – dear Savill, of course it is. I know you would take my note of hand. But when a debt of honour is involved, a gentleman feels it here.’ He laid his hand on his heart. ‘A tradesman’s bill can wait until the Last Trump for all I care, but a debt of honour is a very different thing. Besides, why should you wait? You’re my friend. And anyone in this city will tell you: Jack Wintour is a man of his word. Ask anyone, anyone at all. If any man says otherwise, I’ll blow out his brains, do you hear?’
‘Really, sir, you are too kind, but I am in no hurry for the money.’
He hammered his fist on the table, making the counters twitch on the board. ‘Nothing could be more absurd than the situation I’m in, sir. Is it not perfectly ludicrous that a man of my expectations should have to suffer from a shortage of ready money? Does Mount George mean nothing? God damn it, what’s credit for, sir, if not to ease a temporary embarrassment of this nature? And I insist – you shall not wait. There is no need, either. I have a scheme that will settle the matter at once. Pray have the goodness to ring the bell.’
I leaned across from my chair to the bell-pull to the left of the fireplace. ‘I believe I have had enough wine for this evening.’
‘No, no – it’s not for that; though come to think of it, we might as well have them bring up another bottle.’
Josiah came into the room and made his reverence.
‘Tell Miriam to step this way,’ Wintour said.
The old man looked up. ‘Miriam, sir?’
‘Yes, you old fool – Miriam. Are you going deaf? And then bring up another bottle.’
Josiah bowed again and withdrew. A moment later, the maidservant entered the room. She curtsied and waited for Wintour to speak.
‘Step forward, woman – there: stand in the light by the fire.’
She obeyed him. Her face was blank, like a house with the shutters up.
‘Turn round,’ he ordered, raising one of the candles so it shone more on her. ‘No, not like that – slowly. So we may study you at all points.’ He glanced at me. ‘What do you think, sir?’
‘I do not think it proper for me to have an opinion about another man’s servant.’
Wintour laughed. ‘But that’s the point, sir. Don’t you see? She’s not a servant. She’s a slave.’
‘Yes, but the principle—’
‘The principle is the same as if she was my horse. Or my dog. Or my house, for that matter. She’s mine. That is to say, she’s mine to sell.’
He turned back to Miriam, who was no longer revolving. Her face was averted from the light.
‘What would you say? Ninety guineas at auction? A hundred? Trained ladies’ maids don’t grow on trees. Prime of life, too, fine figure.’ His voice roughened. ‘Look at me, girl, and open your mouth.’
Miriam stared down at him. She opened her mouth. I glimpsed her pink, wet tongue.
‘There! I knew it!’ he cried. ‘See? She’s got her own teeth, or most of them. They like that in a house slave, you know. Damned if I know why, but they do. I’ll put her in for auction tomorrow. You won’t have to wait long, I assure you. She’ll be snapped up in a trice.’
‘But Miriam is Mrs Arabella’s maid, sir – wouldn’t the sale inconvenience her? I would not do that for the world.’
Wintour laughed. ‘You won’t do that, I assure you. My wife does not need a maid all the time – she can share my mother’s if she wants one – and anyway she shall have any number of maids when the war’s over.’
‘But Miriam serves Mrs Wintour, too, I believe.’
He sat up very straight in his chair. ‘This is a matter of honour with me, sir.’
At this moment there was a distraction in the form of Josiah and another bottle of madeira. The old man opened and poured the wine. I took a glass to be companionable. Josiah did not withdraw but stood back in the shadows near the door.
‘I wonder, sir, would you oblige me in this?’ I said, holding my wine up to the candle flame.
‘If I could, sir, I would oblige you in anything you care to name but a debt of honour is—’
‘You see,’ I interrupted, ‘it does not suit me to have so large a sum of ready money about me at present, with the city in such a lawless state. And these days one cannot trust a bank or a merchant to negotiate a bill without cheating a man, or defaulting, or going bankrupt.’
‘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.
Chapter Twenty-Two
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.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/andrew-taylor/the-scent-of-death-39803169/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
Andrew Taylor
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 17.04.2024
Отзывы: Пока нет Добавить отзыв
О книге: *WINNER of the Ellis Peters Historical Dagger Award 2013*‘Andrew Taylor wrote superb historical fiction long before Hilary Mantel was popular’ Daily TelegraphFrom the No.1 bestselling author of THE AMERICAN BOY comes a new historical thriller set during the American War of Independence.‘This is the story of a woman and a city. I saw the city first, shimmering from afar like the new Jerusalem in the setting sun. It was Sunday, 2nd August 1778.’Edward Savill, a London clerk from the American Department, is assigned to New York to investigate the claims of dispossessed loyalists caught on the wrong side of the American War of Independence.Surrounded by its enemies, British Manhattan is a melting pot of soldiers, profiteers, double agents and a swelling tide of refugees seeking justice from the Crown.Savill lodges with the respected Wintour family: the old Judge, his ailing wife and their enigmatic daughter-in-law Arabella. The family lives in limbo, praying for the safe return of Jack Wintour, Arabella′s husband, who is missing behind rebel lines.The discovery of a body in the notorious slums of Canvas Town thrusts Savill into a murder inquiry. But in the escalating violence of a desperate city, why does one death matter? Because the secret this killing hides could be the key to power for whoever uncovers it…