The Scent of Death (30 page)

‘Thank you, sir, and bless you,’ she said. ‘But no. We must stay here so my son can find us when he comes home.’ She touched her narrow chest. ‘And I am not well. I do not think I should be able to travel.’

‘We shall see you before we go. You may change your mind. And when this war is over and the country returns to its senses, we shall see you back in Grove Farm. You have my word on it, ma’am.’

She shrugged almost imperceptibly as she thanked him. I think she believed there was no one this side of the grave who had it in his power to help her.

But we did share a simple meal of our biscuits and cheese with her, washed down with water from the nearby stream. The four of us sat around the table with the child and her mother perching together on the box that contained their remaining possessions. Wintour insisted that Mrs Tippet take a tot of rum afterwards, which brought a hectic colour to her cheeks.

‘Why are you and Mr Savill here, sir?’ she asked suddenly. ‘Is it not dangerous?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Which is why we shall not linger. We came because I desire to see Mount George. I must know what we shall face when Mrs Wintour and I return.’

‘Poor Miss Bella,’ Mrs Tippet said. ‘I remember when she was a girl and she would come and help us in the dairy. She would find this desolation so terrible, sir, indeed she would. And the memories too – would they not distress her? Seeing Mr Froude murdered before her eyes and the house going up in flames? Losing her baby, too.’ Her eyes filled with tears again. ‘Pray forgive me, sir. It was your child, too.’

Wintour looked away. For a moment no one spoke. Mehitabel darted glances at each of us and I realized from her expression the strain the girl was under, constantly on her guard, constantly watching for danger from those around her. I picked up the flask and offered Mrs Tippet another dram. She refused.

‘I suppose they took what they could from the house?’ Wintour said abruptly. ‘Whatever the fire had left.’

‘Yes. There’s only rubbish now, I fear.’

‘Is anyone still living there?’

She shook her head. ‘No one will go near the place.’ She licked thin, chapped lips. ‘They say it’s haunted, sir, that Mr Froude walks there, looking for that slave. The one that killed him. And some people say he’s there, too – that negro, I mean – he’s all covered in blood, and he’s still looking for Mr Froude.’

Wintour stood up and went to the doorway. He looked out over the waste ground in the direction of Mount George.

He glanced over his shoulder at Mrs Tippet. ‘That reminds me,’ he said. ‘Where’s the grave?’

‘He’s buried in the peach orchard, sir. Poor gentleman. My husband and son were among the ones who went back. They said a prayer over the squire but there was no clergyman, I’m afraid.’

‘No,’ Wintour said. ‘Not Mr Froude’s grave. I mean the baby’s.’

Before we rode away, I pressed three guineas into Mrs Tippet’s hand. The poor woman would have to be careful how she spent them to avoid arousing the suspicion or cupidity of her neighbours.

We also left her biscuits and cheese, as well as all our little
store of rum. It was the rum that gave me an indication of
the strength of the obligation that Jack Wintour felt towards the family’s former tenants. He was not a man who would lightly forgo the relief that spirits offered him; but in this case he did not hesitate.

We made for the ruins of Mount George itself. We reasoned that its reputation for being haunted would be some protection for us.

‘But it’s madness, Jack,’ I said quietly as we went along. ‘They’ll raise the country against us if we’re seen. Must we really go up to the house? You can see for yourself that there’s no point. We should leave now.’

‘Tomorrow. I promise you.’ He looked at me and nodded, as if he saw something he was expecting in my face. ‘It quickens the apprehension, does it not? The plight of those poor people – the war makes animals of us all.’

I nodded but said nothing. Mrs Tippet and her daughter had also quickened my apprehension of the danger we were in. I felt sick with fear, which formed a cold, hard knot in my bowels. I would have given everything I had to be back in the safety of New York.

We crossed the road and passed through a patch of dense woodland. After a mile or so we came to the other side. We had returned to the shallow valley which served as a sort of home park for the mansion itself, though we entered it at some distance beyond the pond where we had found Mehitabel Tippet.

Mount George was visible on the far slope. From this angle, a huddle of smaller buildings could be seen in a dip in the ground to one side of the house. They seemed to have escaped the worst of the fire. Some of them retained at least part of their roofs.

We did not go there directly but rode along the fringe of the wood to make the most of what cover there was. Over a similar tract of ground in England we would have been observed; but in America, even in a vicinity that had been settled for several generations, the inhabitants were still scattered very thinly over the immensity of this wild land.

Wintour led us to a stream that ran down the slope beside the house. We followed its course toward the ruins, for much of it ran through a defile that offered a modicum of cover to our approach. I could not shake off the idea that invisible eyes were watching us from the surrounding country.

I was not the only one to wish himself elsewhere. Grantford muttered to himself as we rode along, a stream of mumbled oaths I judged it best to ignore. Abraham was silent. He had a sheen of perspiration on his black face and his eyes were never still.

The defile with the stream took us along what had been the garden front of the mansion. The land was terraced here, and a sunken fence rose up on our right, making a sort of ha-ha. On the other side was a level acre or so of wasteland which must once have been the pleasure ground immediately outside the principal apartments of the house.

The picture of Mount George that hung in the drawing room at Warren Street had given me a misleading impression of both the size and solidity of the mansion. In life it was smaller than art had made it seem; and it had been built mainly of wood rather than of stone, which was why the fire had wrought such terrible damage.

Wintour glanced at it as we rode past. ‘It doesn’t much matter,’ he said over his shoulder to me. ‘I never liked the house in any case. And it was too small as well. So this is a blessing in disguise, perhaps. God willing, we shall build it anew after the war. It shall be far more elegant and done up entirely in the modern taste.’

I remembered his ramblings while the fever had been upon him, how he had promised me a suite of splendid apartments at Mount George. But he did not mention my apartments on this occasion, or the box of curiosities which, at the time of his feverish ramblings, had somehow been necessary to the fulfilment of this scheme.

We continued to follow the course of the stream. The sunken fence diminished and at last vanished. We had reached a spot beyond the ruins where, higher up the slope and partly concealed in a shallow depression, the cluster of outbuildings lay.

This, I guessed, had been the farmstead of the original settlers. The yard formed an enclosure bounded by two roofless barns, an irregular line of byres, stables and pigsties and a sturdy building with crude stone walls, stained by fire. The latter had small square windows and a central chimney of brick. There was still a tiled roof over one end.

Wintour dismounted and hitched the reins of his horse to a gatepost. He looked up at me.

‘That’s the house the old patroon built,’ he said.

‘It’s in better condition than the mansion.’

‘They knew what they were about, those Dutchmen. They built to last.’

I dismounted and followed him into the building by the one central doorway, which was wide and low. The door itself lay abandoned on the ground, ripped from its hinges. It was made of oak, black with age and at least two inches thick.

On the ground floor there were two rooms, each with
a fireplace serve
d by the central chimney and each with a surround of old Delft tiles, the blues and whites still strangely vivid, though many were cracked and some were missing. Originally there had been windows and a doorway on the other side of the house, which faced the mansion itself; but the openings had been sealed with bricks, perhaps when the big house was built, so its occupants would have the comfort of not being overlooked by their farmworkers. Narrow wooden stairs, almost a ladder, led up from the kitchen to the attic where the bedchambers had been. Though the joists remained, the partitions and many of the floorboards had gone, either torn out or burned where they were.

But the most striking feature of the place was the litter of objects that covered almost every inch of the floor. It was as if a malicious angel had swept through the little house, destroying all that lay in his path with a great hammer. Wintour picked his way through the rooms, staring down at the mess beneath his feet.

Everything was broken. There was splintered glass, scraps of varnished wood and rags of cloth that might have been silk or velvet. Books lay here and there, their spines ripped apart and their yellowing pages rustling like dead leaves in the draught from the doorway. A small cast-iron furnace lay undamaged but on its side. The flue-pipe that once connected it to the chimney had been torn away and thrown to the other end of the kitchen. Fragments of brass gleamed among the debris. I saw the dial of a grandfather clock lying on the ruins of its case and its machinery. A smiling sun looked up at me.

‘Dear God,’ I murmured. ‘Is this the work of looters?’

Wintour glanced at me. ‘It wasn’t plunder they wanted, Edward. It was revenge.’

‘On whom?’

‘Mr Froude, of course. This place was his study and his laboratory. It was his passion. He doted on it like a child.’ Wintour gave a harsh bark of laughter. ‘No – it was something dearer to him than any child ever was.’

We could not find the baby’s grave.

The air was heavy with warmth and laden with the sweet, decaying stench of rotting fruit. We did not even know for certain whether we were in the right orchard – there had been three enclosures at Mount George, each for different kinds of fruit.

But Wintour thought it must have been this one, the smallest orchard, for he remembered that Arabella had loved the taste of peaches and apricots; sometimes she would order the slaves to set up an awning here against the south wall and bring out chairs, a table and even a carpet, so she might sit and read or dream with the smell of fruit in her nostrils.

We found Mr Froude easily enough. He lay in what had once been a herb bed at the base of one of the walls. Tendrils of rosemary had spread a vigorous grey web over the grave, feeding on his corruption. There was still a low mound, seven or eight feet long, to show precisely where his body lay. Someone had fashioned a crude cross from two planks nailed together and pushed it into the earth at the head of the grave. They had burned the initials HF at one end of the crosspiece and the date 1776 at the other. But over the years the nail had rusted, the wood had rotted and the planks now lay separately on the earth beneath the rosemary.

This land was so fertile that the trees were not espaliered but stood unsupported as standards. They were lank and ragged, overgrown and misshapen, for no one had troubled to prune them for two or three years. But still their branches bowed and sometimes snapped under the weight of the fruit they bore.

‘Why does no one pick the fruit?’ I said. ‘You could feed an army with it.’

‘Because of the ghosts, your honour,’ whispered Abraham, his eyelids twitching.

‘Hold your tongue.’

‘But Mistress Tippet—’

‘Superstition,’ I said. ‘Rank superstition.’

The young footman shook his head, as unshakeable in his fear as I was in mine. ‘They eat your soul, master. My mama told me.’

I took pity on him and told him to stand at the gateway to the orchard and keep watch. Corporal Grantford, unperturbed by the ghosts, was strolling among the trees and gathering fruit in his hat. Wintour was still looking for the baby’s grave. I joined him, and we walked methodically over the ground, examining every square foot of it.

‘November seventy-six,’ he said. ‘Damn it, that’s nearly three years ago now. And a baby’s body don’t take much more room than a cat’s, does it?’ He kicked savagely at a tussock of grass. ‘But you’d think they’d have left a marker, wouldn’t you?’

‘They might have done,’ I said. ‘It could have rotted away.’

We took another turn, examining the ground in silence. Mrs Tippet believed that they had buried the baby here a few days before its grandfather. But she hadn’t been there herself. She had no idea where the body might lie.

‘God’s death, why the orchard?’ Wintour burst out suddenly. ‘I can see why they put old Froude here after the place was sacked. But the baby died before that. So why not in the churchyard in the village? After all, my daughter was a Wintour. Half a Froude, too.’

‘Conditions were unsettled,’ I pointed out. ‘And the roads were probably bad at that time of year. No doubt they intended to re-inter the child later.’

I wondered whether the explanation had in fact been simpler and sadder, though I said nothing of this to Jack Wintour: perhaps poor Mrs Arabella had wished to keep her child as close to her as possible.

He said no more, but paced on. When we reached the far wall of the orchard, he stopped and rested his head on the brickwork. He rapped his forehead against it, three times.

‘Jack—’

He turned. I saw that tears were streaming down his cheeks.

‘Pray calm yourself, my friend,’ I said.

I looked behind us. Abraham was in the gateway at the other end of the orchard and he had his back to us. Grantford was nearer, though he appeared to be absorbed in gathering fruit.

Wintour wiped his face with the sleeve of his coat. ‘What else can a man do but weep?’ he said thickly. ‘I’m not like my father. Or even old Froude.’