The Scent of Death (12 page)

‘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.’

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 dea
f
? 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.’