The Scent of Death

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.