The Scent of Death (29 page)

‘No doubt,’ I said. ‘And a man should also have a comfortable bed, food on his table and a complete absence of blood-sucking insects.’

He roared with laughter and said that I was as droll as Mr Goldsmith, and had I ever thought of writing plays? At the time, we were leading our horses through an evil-smelling swamp where plants wrapped themselves around our ankles and the mud tried to suck the boots from our feet.

That night, which was our third since we had left New York, we camped in a derelict cabin made of logs. Once night had fallen we risked a small fire, for the place was in a hollow and sheltered by rocks. We ate as heartily as our dwindling supplies would permit.

Afterwards we sat for a while over rum and water. We toasted the King, and then each other. There was almost an air of celebration for we were, Wintour thought, within ten miles of Mount George.

The only light in the hut came from a rushlight on the earth floor between us. We were quite alone – Grantford and Abraham were lying outside, near the horses. We were tired but neither of us was sleepy. We talked idly in spurts, as men do when they are comfortable with each other.

After a silence of several minutes, Wintour said, ‘I suppose we are friends?’

‘Indeed we are.’ I could make out his shape in the gloom but I could not see his face.

‘Then I wish you’d call me Jack,’ he said. ‘We Americans are freer in such matters. All my friends call me Jack.’

‘Then I shall do so with pleasure. And you must call me Edward.’

There was another silence. I suppose he and I had been friends of a sort hitherto. But shared danger turns men into comrades. Either that, or it makes them mortal enemies instead.

Then he surprised me. ‘Do you miss her?’ he said. ‘Your wife, I mean. It must be above a year since you saw her.’

‘Yes,’ I said without enthusiasm. ‘I suppose it is.’

‘You sound as though you don’t much care for her.’

It was as if we were a pair of Papists in the confessional. Rum and tiredness, danger and darkness, had combined to dissolve my habitual discretion.

‘She’s the mother of our daughter,’ I said. ‘That’s a great deal.’

‘Yes, but did you ever love her?’

‘Yes – well, in a manner of speaking. I wanted a wife. And she … she was suitable in every way.’

‘Suitable.’ Wintour passed me the rum. ‘Ah – old Rampton’s niece?’

‘Just so.’ I hesitated. ‘Mr Rampton has no children of his own.’ I drank. ‘But she married me without his permission. And afterwards I discovered that he never liked her above half. I cannot altogether blame him, either – my wife is a foolish woman and not easy to live with.’

There: the truth was out, a truth I had barely admitted even to myself. I had married Augusta because a man must have a wife and because I had believed the match would advance my career in the American Department. She had married me because she had thought me agreeable and ambitious, a man whom she could mould to the shape of her desires with the help of her family connections. She had seen a glittering future for me as an under secretary in the admini-stration and for herself as my wife. She had dreamed of a salon where she would entertain the rich and powerful who would flock to admire her. She had even dreamed of a knighthood for me and seen herself as Lady Savill.

They had been the worst of reasons for marriage and they had rebounded on our own heads. As a result, here I was in the Debatable Ground in the middle of a war on the other side of the world. I had a wife in name but not in fact and a daughter I had not seen for more than a year. And now, as my posting was extended again and again, I had become convinced that Mr Rampton had sent me to New York to get rid of me, and perhaps to punish me for my temerity. If anyone was a fool, it was I.

‘Forgive me,’ Wintour said. ‘I didn’t mean to pry. I wonder you haven’t found consolation. There are plenty of fine women in New York who—’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t wish for that. You must think me a sad prig.’

‘No. Merely mysterious. Like the Sphinx.’

The rushlight flickered and died. The warm darkness smothered us.

‘We all make mistakes,’ he went on in a rush, as if anxious to get the words out before he could change his mind. ‘I married Bella because she was Froude’s heir. But it hasn’t answered, has it, not for either of us. I didn’t realize that finally until I came back from Canada.’

I said nothing. I wondered what Wintour meant. Was it that he did not love his wife, or was it that he was disappointed in her fortune, because of the war? I remembered the violence he had offered her in March, just before the attack on him that had led to his fever: I believed he had hit her at least once in the garden; and he had been in such a drunken passion that he would have hit her again, had I not been on hand to prevent it.

‘I know men desire her,’ he said in a voice so quiet I could hardly make out the words. ‘I see it in their eyes. Townley. Marryot.’ He paused, and I sensed he had turned his head towards me. I held my breath, waiting for him to add my name to the list. ‘They are like hounds with their tongues hanging out. But she’s my wife. She would never be unfaithful. And who knows? The game’s not over. It all depends what happens at Mount George.’

I waited but he did not explain his meaning. Was it something to do with the box of curiosities, whatever and wherever that was? Would it somehow mend his marriage? I opened my mouth to put the question direct. Before I could speak, I heard him yawn in the warm darkness and a rustling as though he were changing his position.

‘I believe I shall sleep now,’ he said. ‘Goodnight, Edward.’

‘Goodnight, Jack,’ I said.

Next morning, we left our refuge shortly before dawn. We followed the slope of the land down to a small river which, Wintour told me, eventually found its way into the Hudson. We journeyed upstream for several hours.

Most of the time we were on foot, leading the unwilling horses. It was difficult going, for the river ran through a ravine, a place of green shadows between steep, densely wooded slopes where a regiment of marksmen could have lain in ambush without any danger of our noticing them.

Suddenly the ravine bellied out into a broad bowl of land that had been cleared of most of its trees. The river swelled into a pond thick with reeds. On the far side of the water, the land stretched away to the north.

There, half a mile away, where the ground began to rise, was an irregular line of what looked like blackened stumps.

‘Mount George,’ Wintour said. And then he laughed.

The words were hardly out of his mouth when Grantford dropped his horse’s reins and plunged into the bushes. In a moment he was out of sight.

Wintour wheeled round, snatching his pistol from the saddle holster. There was a flurry of violent movement and snapping branches. Grantford swore. I heard a high shriek. The corporal reappeared, pushing in front of him a girl in a ragged brown gown. He had gripped her by the forearms and was holding her as far away from him as he could.

‘Little vixen, your honours,’ he said to us. ‘She bit me.’

The child was about twelve years of age and painfully thin. Her dark hair was loose and as ragged as her gown. She twisted violently in Grantford’s grasp. He lifted her an inch off the ground and shook her as if to shake the nonsense out of her.

‘Well?’ Wintour demanded. ‘What are you doing here?’

The girl said nothing.

‘Fishing, I reckon,’ Grantford said. ‘There’s a basket in the bushes and a couple of lines.’

‘Fishing? A girl?’

‘Why not?’ she said suddenly. ‘There’s no one else to do it.’

‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

She glanced with a frown in my direction, as if surprised by the sound of an English accent. ‘Mehitabel,’ she said. ‘Mehitabel Tippet.’

‘Tippet?’ Wintour said. ‘There was a tenant of that name at Grove Farm before the war.’

‘My father, sir.’

‘Where is he now?’

The child swallowed. ‘Dead, sir.’

‘How, child?’

‘The militia men shot him when he tried to leave for New York. One of the patrols fired on him.’

‘And your mother?’

‘Over there.’ She pointed into the bushes. ‘On the other side of the road from Squire Froude’s. There’s a bit of King’s land. Except they say it’s Congress’s now.’

‘So you’re not at Grove Farm?’

‘Oh no, sir, not for over a twelve-month. They turned us out of there.’

Wintour drew me aside. He wanted to see Mrs Tippet and asked whether I thought it would be prudent.

‘She may have information,’ I said. ‘But can you trust her?’

‘Of course I can,’ he said imperiously. ‘She’s one of our people.’

‘Not one of mine,’ Grantford muttered, the words hardly audible because he was sucking his wound to stop the bleeding.

‘Hold your tongue,’ Wintour said. ‘And put the girl up on your horse. Abraham, fetch her basket. We’ll go and see her mother.’

We led our horses through the scrubby copse to the road, which was scarcely more than a track of rutted, sun-dried mud. The wasteland stretched for a mile or so on the other side, a place of bushes, long, coarse grass, stones and brackish pools. The ground was lower here and poorly drained.

The Tippets’ cabin was even meaner than the hut where we had spent the previous night. It was windowless and built of untrimmed logs.

The mother had clearly been watching for her daughter. She came out of the cabin when we were still fifty yards away. She gathered up her gown and ran towards us. I saw her anxious face and knew she feared the worse.

‘Madam,’ I said, raising my hat. ‘We mean you and your daughter no harm.’

‘Dear God.’ Wintour stared at her. ‘Mrs Tippet. I remember you now.’

She frowned at him. ‘Do I know you, sir?’ Her voice was cultivated, unlike her appearance.

‘Of course. Mr Froude brought me to Grove Farm on several occasions. I’m Miss Bella’s husband – Captain Wintour. Look here, ma’am, I’m truly sorry to hear about Mr Tippet.’

She burst into tears. Mehitabel clung to her mother, half comforting her and half desiring comfort herself. Mrs Tippet patted her and began to cough and sway on her feet.

‘Madam, pray take my arm,’ Wintour said. ‘I’m afraid we have startled you by coming upon you so suddenly. And allow me to name my friend, Mr Savill of the American Department in London.’

When she had recovered a little we walked slowly towards the hut. I told Grantford and Abraham to wait outside with the horses. Wintour and I took the mother and daughter into their home.

There was but a single room, no more than eight feet square. Wintour and I lingered in the doorway. The place was as clean as it was possible for it to be. Here the mother and daughter ate, sat, worked at their spinning wheels and slept together on the narrow straw mattress against one wall. They had a table, a pair of stools and a crudely made deal box of the sort that maidservants use for their possessions.

By and by, Mrs Tippet calmed herself and begged our pardon for her display of weakness. Wintour and I gradually drew out the family’s story. Mr Tippet, always a staunch Tory and a churchwarden as well, would not abjure his loyalty to the King. He was fined and otherwise persecuted for his refusal to take up arms for Congress. At last he could bear it no longer. He determined to go to New York and leave the farm in the possession of his wife and son. The local militia, who took a malign pleasure in hunting Tories, intercepted him as he set off by night and found some excuse to open fire.

‘They made a sport of it, sir,’ Mrs Tippet said. ‘Like boys that drown a cat to watch it squirm.’

Her dead husband was considered a traitor and his possessions were therefore declared forfeit to Congress. In practice, the local Committee found ways and means to help themselves and members of their families to whatever they fancied first, from the wines in their cellar and the clothes in their presses to the best of the negros and the contents of the barns. The farm itself was assessed by the Committee at less than a tenth of its value and sold on behalf of Congress to one of the Committee members.

The Tippets’ son had been forced to enlist in the army; it was either that or be imprisoned without a trial; and they had last heard of him with General Moultrie in South Carolina; but that was six months ago, and they did not know whether he was alive or dead. Since their eviction from the farm, mother and daughter had struggled to exist on their earnings from spinning and from the occasional gifts of friends, who were themselves subject to persecution if their generosity was discovered.

It was a common enough tale – I had heard variants of it from the Loyalists who came to my office with their sad histories and their impossible demands. This foolish conflict had so many victims and so few victors. Sometimes I think the Tippets and their kind, on both sides of the argument, were most to be pitied. They were the detritus of this war, perhaps of all wars.

Jack Wintour was moved to anger and almost to tears by this recital. I saw a side of him that day that I had never seen before. He had been bred to own land – the Wintours’ estate on Manhattan and, after his marriage, Mount George as well. The Tippets were, or would have been, his tenants. He had an old-fashioned and almost feudal notion of his responsibilities to them which would not have seemed out of place to a country squire in Queen Anne’s time.

‘I never dreamed,’ Mrs Tippet said, ‘I never thought I’d see the day.’

She fell to coughing again. Wintour glanced at me and bit his lip, his habit when he was perplexed. The girl stood in the shadows near the back of the hut and watched us all.

‘We shall not be here long, ma’am,’ Wintour said. ‘It’s of the utmost importance that neither you nor your daughter mention to anyone at all that you have seen us.’

Still coughing, Mrs Tippet nodded.

‘But when we leave we can take you and your daughter to New York with us, if you like.’

I said nothing. The offer was a credit to Wintour’s humanity if not to his common sense.