The Scent of Death

‘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.’