The Scent of Death (22 page)

‘No, sir.’ I was instantly sober again.

‘Of course, for selfish reasons, I’m rejoiced to hear it.’ He gestured around the room, at the gaily dressed figures that moved in and out, following the music. ‘You have a silver lining at least,’ he went on, smiling all the while. ‘You will be obliged to prolong your stay at Warren Street. You will continue to enjoy the society of your charming hostess. The younger of the two, that is.’

There was no mistaking his insinuation. After Mrs Wintour’s veiled warning, it alarmed me, though I hoped it was merely the sort of loose talk that Townley so often indulged in. I bowed coldly.

‘Talking of which,’ he went on, seemingly unabashed, ‘how is the gallant captain? I saw him the other evening at Governor Franklin’s but I was not able to enter into conversation with him. Does he still cherish his project of making an expedition to Mount George?’

The change of subject was smoothly done but I did not altogether like it. As so often with Townley, his manner was confiding but, under the surface, I sensed a restless, prying intelligence pursuing a subterranean course towards a hidden end.

‘I cannot say, sir,’ I said. ‘Captain Wintour has not mentioned it recently. Or not to me.’

‘It’s curious that he should want to go at all,’ Townley said, staring at the dancers. ‘He is not in the best of health. The expedition would be uncomfortable and dangerous. And to what end? I believe the house was burned down and the estate has been raided many times. I should have thought that there was nothing to be gained by going there until the war is over.’

‘You know as much as I do, sir.’

‘And of course the place must have unhappy memories for Mrs Arabella.’

‘Indeed?’ I looked sharply at him, wondering if the stillbirth at Mount George was public knowledge. ‘Why?’

‘Didn’t you know? Her father died there in late seventy-six. A sad business.’

‘Why – what happened?’

Townley lowered his voice. ‘It was a month or two after we’d recaptured New York and the Continental troops were retreating north. A party of their irregulars attacked the place and Mr Froude was killed.’

‘Was Mrs Arabella there?’ I said.

‘Yes – but by the grace of God she and some of the servants got away.’ He smiled at me. ‘So you understand my curiosity about the projected expedition, sir – Captain Wintour seems quite the man of mystery.’

‘If there’s a mystery, I’m afraid I cannot solve it.’ I glanced towards the door to the anteroom where the card tables had been set up. ‘Would you care for a rubber of whist? Shall we see if we can make up a four?’

Townley accepted the distraction and we whiled away an hour or two in the card room. It was after two in the morning by the time the party broke up. Mr Townley gave me a lift to Warren Street in his coach. He dropped me off at the door.

Usually at this hour the house was in darkness and the inhabitants were asleep. Abraham, the young footman, would be dozing on his chair in the hall, ready to unbar the door when a late-comer arrived. Tonight, though, even before the door opened, I knew something was different. There were cracks of light around the parlour shutters and a lantern still burned above the fanlight of the front door.

I was obliged to wait for longer than I liked. I listened to the sounds of Townley’s coach diminishing and the distant catcalls and shouts from merrymakers on Broadway. At length it was Josiah who opened the door, and without the habitual fumbling with bolts and bars. The old man looked dismayed to see me.

‘Has he come?’ Judge Wintour called from the parlour. ‘Show him in here at once.’

‘What is it?’ I said, thrusting my hat at Josiah.

He took it automatically and reached for my cloak.

‘Quickly!’ Mr Wintour cried, his voice cracking.

Josiah stood back, gesturing for me to enter the parlour.

A moment later, I saw Captain Wintour stretched out on the parlour sofa. One arm trailed to the ground. His coat and waistcoat lay on the floor.

Mrs Arabella knelt beside him. Mr Wintour paced up and down behind the sofa. He glanced at me and his features contorted with disappointment.

Still on her knees, Mrs Arabella turned her head. In the poor light the bruise on her face was like an eyepatch. Her wrapper had fallen open, revealing a linen shift beneath. Across its white bosom was a smear of blood.

The Judge rushed towards me and seized my arm. ‘John has been attacked, sir! And on our very doorstep! How will I tell his poor mother if he is murdered?’

Mrs Arabella rose to her feet and drew her wrapper tightly across her body. ‘By the mercy of God, Abraham heard him shouting and got the door open. It must have frightened the villain off.’

‘Is he badly hurt?’

‘He’s been stabbed. And there is a wound on his head, too. I sent Abraham for the doctor. You missed him by a moment or two.’

Mr Wintour resumed his pacing. He moaned softly as he walked. His nightcap was awry and he had lost one of his slippers.

The room was lit by three candles, one on the mantelshelf and the others on the tables at either end of the sofa. The fire was out and the air was very cold.

Abraham would be lucky to rouse a doctor at this hour, I thought, and even luckier to find one who was willing to venture into the streets at night without an armed guard. It was a thousand pities that Townley and I had not arrived in the coach a little earlier.

‘Pray bring me a light, madam,’ I said. ‘Would you hold it for me while I examine him?’

Mrs Arabella took up a candle. I bent over Captain Wintour. He lay on his back, propped against the arm of the sofa and breathing heavily. His mouth was open and his breath smelled powerfully of rumbo. For all the world he looked as if he were sleeping off a debauch.

The front of his shirt was saturated with blood on the left side. His neckcloth had been removed and used as a pad on the wound. I peeled back the bloodstained cloth to expose the skin beneath. There was a wound just below the collarbone. It was about half an inch wide and shaped like a narrowed eye. A blade then, probably, not a bullet. I judged by the tears in the skin that it had entered at an angle, driving upwards. The wound was still weeping blood but it was beginning to coagulate.

‘We must do something,’ Mrs Arabella said in my ear. ‘And we must do it quickly or he will die.’

‘Be quiet, ma’am,’ I said. ‘Hold the candle so I can see.’

The fingers of the Captain’s right hand were touching the ground. The fingertips rested in a puddle of blood. The surrounding carpet was spotted with more blood. I lifted the hand and turned it over. The palm and the lower parts of the fingers were a mass of blood. Wintour must have seized the blade and tried to wrest the knife from his assailant’s grasp. Otherwise, perhaps it would have found his heart, not his shoulder.

I released the hand. ‘Where’s the other wound?’

‘Here.’

Mrs Arabella set down the candle and gently turned her husband’s head, which was resting on the arm of the sofa. He had lost his wig and hat. The scalp was covered with coarse stubble which, I was surprised to see, was already turning grey.

There was an ugly graze on the left temple, which in places had broken the skin. I probed it gently with my fingertips. The bone beneath seemed firm and smooth: I could not detect a fracture.

I heard footsteps outside and Miriam came into the room with a candle. She too was in her night-clothing.

Arabella looked up. ‘How’s your mistress?’

‘I’ve settled her in bed again, ma’am, and given her some drops – I think she’ll sleep now.’ The maid saw me and bobbed a curtsey. ‘I didn’t tell her it was the Captain.’

‘Where in God’s name is the doctor?’ Mr Wintour said.

‘Pray do not distress yourself, sir.’ I straightened up and turned to Mrs Arabella. ‘We should not wait, ma’am. We should lay the Captain on a door and get him to his bed.’

‘Moving him upstairs might re-open the wound. And the disturbance would wake his mother.’

‘Then let us have a mattress brought down here and laid on the floor by the sofa. We can lift him on to that and do what we can to make him easy.’

‘Very well.’

For a moment, I had the strangest sense that her mind was elsewhere, that this scene in the parlour was merely a sideshow. But then she turned briskly and told Josiah to have the flockbed in her closet brought down.

‘Put water on to boil,’ I added. ‘And bring clean cloths and more candles. Light the fire, too – there’s a chill in the air. Have you a jar of basilicon in your store cupboard, ma’am? And some lint? We should dress the wounds.’

Within an hour, matters had a more cheerful aspect. Captain Wintour had been washed, bandaged and made comfortable. The room was much brighter, partly because there were more candles and partly because the fire was now well established, the flames climbing into the chimney and the damp logs cracking and popping as they burned.

Abraham returned but without the doctor. I was relieved to see him. I had feared for his safety in those lawless streets.

‘This is too bad,’ the Judge grumbled. ‘Does the Hippocratic Oath mean nothing to these men? Is venality their only guide?’

‘Perhaps it is for the best, sir,’ I said. I knew from Townley that few if any of the doctors left in the city were trained physicians, whatever they claimed. ‘I shall write a note for our friend Major Marryot and ask him to send one of the army surgeons. They know what they are about. Abraham shall take the note as soon as it is light.’

Mrs Arabella and I persuaded him to go to bed on the understanding that we would at once arouse him if Captain Wintour’s condition worsened. We sent Josiah away too, for the old man was clearly exhausted.

‘Abraham,’ I said to the footman. ‘Did you see Captain Wintour’s attacker?’

‘No, sir.’ The young man was swaying on his feet with weariness. ‘Heard him running away, though.’

‘Just the one?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Where was he going?’

‘Down past the college, your honour.’

Mrs Arabella told him to snatch a couple of hours’ sleep while he could.

‘And you, sir?’ she asked. ‘Will you retire now?’

‘I believe I shall stay in case I can be of service. If the Captain awakes, for example.’

‘Some refreshment then? Something to eat?’

‘Tea would be more than welcome, ma’am.’

She sent Miriam down to the kitchen to prepare it. For the first time Mrs Arabella and I were alone – apart from her husband, of course, an unconscious chaperone. She and I sat like an old married couple on either side of the fireplace. Captain Wintour’s mattress was in the shadows by the sofa. He lay on his back, snoring – a long, growling rumble as he took in air, followed by a profound silence pregnant with undesired anticipation before the next rumble began.

‘I cannot begin to thank you, sir,’ Mrs Arabella said in one of these silences. ‘You have done us a kindness this evening.’

‘It’s nothing of consequence, ma’am.’ I was obliged to raise my voice to be heard above the rumble of the next snore. ‘You and the servants would have managed it just as well if I had not been here.’

‘I think not. You were very prompt in our emergency.’ She hesitated. ‘The situation did not seem altogether strange to you, if I may say so. You knew at once what was needed.’

‘My brother-in-law is a surgeon and I accompanied him on his rounds for a month or two when I was a young man. Much of the craft seems little more than the application of common sense.’

The rhythm of Captain Wintour’s breathing changed. We turned to look at him. When the snore resumed, it had changed its character, becoming less of a rumble and more of a rustle like dead leaves shifting on a pavement.

‘Is that his purse over there?’ I asked suddenly. ‘On the sofa table – there, by the candle.’

‘Yes. And his pocketbook.’

‘So the robber ran off empty-handed?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Thanks to Abraham.’

There was a tap on the door and Miriam returned with the tea things. Mrs Arabella rose to her feet.

‘Would you excuse me, sir? I must pay a visit to my hospital. Some of my patients are wakeful tonight. Miriam will make the tea for you and I will return in a moment or two.’

She was gone for longer than that. Miriam gave me my tea and set a cup for her mistress. When that was done she made her reverence and begged permission to withdraw.

I threw another log on the fire. I was not at all easy in my mind. A man had attacked Captain Wintour on his own doorstep. There had been no robbery. I thought it probable that the assailant had knocked the Captain down with a blow to the head and then stabbed him. If robbery had been the sole motive, why not either stun him with the bludgeon or threaten him with the knife? The Captain had fought back; otherwise the knife wound might well have been fatal. The rogue had run off in the direction of Canvas Town as soon as his work was interrupted.

There was an uncomfortable familiarity to this. I remembered only too well the attack I had suffered in November. True, this was a lawless city, especially at night, and full of thieves with knives. On the face of it, there was no reason why this attack on Captain Wintour should have been the work of the negro Scarface. For a start, it would entail the enormous coincidence of his striking a random victim on the very doorstep of the house where I happened to lodge.

Unless – and here I wished for something stronger than the cup of tea in my hand – it was no coincidence.

Perhaps Wintour had not been the target at all. He and I were of much the same build and the light was poor. Had Scarface mistaken Wintour for me? Had he simply returned, knife in one hand and bludgeon in the other, to finish off what he had begun four months before?

The sound of the opening door woke me from a shallow sleep. Mrs Arabella had returned. Her candle shone full on her face. She looked tired and unwell, as if it were she who were ill and in need of the doctor.

She apologized for leaving me here on my own with her husband, who was still snoring away on the mattress. There was, she said, some crisis among her patients in the slave quarters that necessitated her presence and that of Miriam as her deputy. I asked what it was and whether there was anything in my power that might assist her.