The Scent of Death (43 page)

On payment of a small fortune, three soldiers escorted me back to Warren Street. At the Wintours’ house, everyone was in bed apart from the porter dozing in the hall.

As I went upstairs, however, the closet door opened and Miriam came on to the landing. In her quilted dressing gown, she looked like a clumsy rag doll. She curtseyed awkwardly and whispered that her mistress begged the favour of a word.

I concealed my surprise – it was nearly two o’clock in the morning. The maid showed me into the small room where old Mrs Wintour lay. The bed-curtains were drawn around the bed. Mrs Arabella was sitting by the fire, swathed in a cloak. She looked up as I entered.

‘I know it’s late, sir, but could you spare me a moment?’

She indicated the chair on the other side of the fireplace. I put down my candle and sat. I heard the click of the door lock; Miriam had left the room. I was alone with Mrs Arabella, apart from the steady snores and gurgles from the bed where our invisible chaperone was lying.

I held out my hands to the fire. ‘How is Mrs Wintour?’

‘There’s no change. Not yet. Will you have tea? There is some in the pot.’

I accepted for I was very cold.

‘I was worried,’ she said almost petulantly as she busied herself with the teapot.

I was too tired to be polite. ‘Why?’

‘About you. Miriam told me where you had gone.’

‘Why should that worry you, ma’am?’

She handed me my cup. ‘Mrs Chawley’s has a certain notoriety. And since our conversation the other day, I do not quite know where we are with Mr Townley. Or Mr Noak.’ She drew her cloak more tightly about her. ‘Mr Noak was here again today and was most attentive.’

‘To Mr Wintour?’

‘And to me. Do you remember our conversation three months ago? When you gave me the – the items that had been my husband’s?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘As if it were yesterday.’

‘I believe I was harsh to you then,’ she said in a rush. ‘Unkind, even.’

‘Not at all.’

‘Come, let us not fence. I distrusted your motives, sir, and I think I was right to do so. I distrust Mr Noak’s and Mr Townley’s too.’ She hesitated, looking at the fire. ‘Indeed, I
trust no one completely now except perhaps my father-in-law.
But he is too feeble, too distracted, for me to rely on him.’ She turned her gaze on me. ‘But I must confide in somebody. So may I make the best of a bad job and trust you?’

I laughed softly. At first she looked shocked but then she smiled. But anger was stirring within me. She seemed not to realize that trust should be mutual if it was to be worth anything at all.

‘Madam,’ I said, ‘I shall take that as a compliment. Perhaps it will make it easier if I tell you that I was attacked tonight after I left Mrs Chawley’s.’

‘Good God!’ Her hand flew to her mouth. ‘Are you hurt?’

‘Not at all. I ran away, most ingloriously.’

‘Who attacked you?’

‘Three ruffians – chairmen, in fact. The point is, I believe Mr Townley must have had a hand in the matter or at least foreknowledge of it. If we’re right about a concealed understanding between them, that means Mr Noak probably knew as well.’

‘Does this have a connection with the gold?’ she asked.

‘I can’t see what else this could be about.’

‘Roger Pickett was looking for a box of curiosities. Does that indicate that he knew of the gold as well?’

‘I believe so.’ I could not see any reason not to tell her more. ‘He used to own the land in North Carolina where Mr Froude found the deposits. I think Mr Pickett considered that your father had cheated him. But you know all this, don’t you?’

She sat up in her chair. ‘What do you mean?’

The snores of Mrs Wintour stopped. The old woman made a rattling, gargling sound, as if clearing phlegm. For a few seconds there was silence. Her breathing became heavy and regular. The snores and gurgles began again.

I said in a voice not much above a whisper: ‘Mr Pickett must have reminded you about his claim on the gold when he called at this house.’

‘He did nothing of the sort,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Besides, we were not alone for a moment. I do not like your—’

‘Then why did you not tell Judge Wintour that you knew Pickett was, or had been, a rebel soldier? That he had quarrelled violently with your father and then burned down Mount George?’

‘Because it’s nonsense from start to finish. Has that foolish Tippet girl been talking to you? Don’t you realize that Mehitabel’s wits are addled? And no wonder, after what she’s endured.’

‘I also have it upon the unimpeachable authority of a clergy-man in this city that Roger Pickett was a sergeant in the Continental Army in 1776. Moreover, a letter that Pickett wrote to his sister refers to a box of curiosities as a source of great wealth. So this does not rest on Mehitabel’s word alone. I regret, madam, that we cannot help each other at all unless you tell me the truth.’

She did not reply. I put down my cup. I waited a moment and then rose to my feet and bowed. Still she did not speak. I took up my candle and left the room without another word.

I did not sleep that night. In my bedchamber, I kicked off my shoes and threw off my coat, waistcoat and breeches. The cold made me whimper. I clapped on my nightcap, climbed into bed and burrowed under a mound of covers. Josiah had brought up a heated brick to take the chill off the bedclothes but the warmth had long since seeped away from it.

The darkness frightened me tonight. Like a child, I kept the candle burning and left the curtains open a crack so the light fell in a bar across the pillow. If I turned my head I saw part of the shadowy room beyond the bed.

My mind was in turmoil. For a moment I had allowed myself to speak frankly to Mrs Arabella about my suspicions before storming out. But it had gained me nothing beyond a temporary glow of righteous indignation succeeded by a terrible, gnawing sense of regret.

I had not known that it was possible to love a woman one did not trust. I wished I did not know it now. Was it conceivable that I had wronged Mrs Arabella? After all, this business of the gold and Pickett’s murder was as formless and impenetrable as a cloud. I could no more grasp it in my hand than I could a puff of steam from a kettle.

The night wore on. I had no way of measuring the hours except by the diminishing candle, for my watch was in a pocket of my waistcoat on the floor. Though I could not sleep, I drifted into that unhappy borderland on the edge of wakefulness where thoughts lose their hard edges and acquire a simulacrum of autonomous life quite separate from the consciousness that produces them.

Until I heard the scratching.

Suddenly I was fully awake again and my thoughts, for good or ill, were once more my own. The scratching was a
regular sound which came in groups of three, separated by a
short pause from the next group. At first I attributed the noise to a rat behind the panelling; there were far more rats in this crowded city than there were people.

But there was something too regular about the movements, too calculated.

I had only just come to that conclusion when the scratching became a tapping that followed the same rhythm as the scratching. As I listened, it grew louder.

Scratching and knocking …

Someone was at the door.

I pulled back the curtain, draped a blanket over my shoulders and left the shelter of the bed. Taking up the candle, I walked silently on stockinged feet across the floor. Draughts of freezing air played about my ankles. I stood by the door. The tapping had become faster, more frantic.

‘Who is it?’ I whispered.

The tapping stopped. A floorboard creaked on the other side of the door.

‘For God’s sake,’ I said in my normal voice. ‘Who is this?’

‘Hush – it’s I.’

I pulled back the bolt and opened the door, holding the candle high so that a wedge of light spilled on to the landing beyond. Mrs Arabella was waiting there. She wore a black hooded cloak that reduced her to a shadow, apart from the pale oval of her face. She was carrying a candle that trembled in her hand, making the shadows dance about the landing like mad things.

I stared at her in disbelief.

‘For God’s sake let me in,’ she said. ‘Mrs Wintour is dead.’

We talked in whispers.

‘Her breathing stopped. Then she gave a gasp, a long, long rattle. After that nothing.’

‘Are you sure she is dead?’

‘Of course I am. I went to the bed and saw her face. You do not mistake death when you see it.’ She pulled the cloak more tightly about her. ‘Dear God, this cold. I believe it will kill us all.’

I said, ‘Let me put this blanket around your shoulders. Sit on the bed.’

She obeyed me like a child. And, like a child, she tucked her legs under her when she sat down. ‘I did not wish to wake Mr Wintour,’ she whispered. ‘He’s exhausted. He will hear soon enough.’

‘What about Miriam?’

‘She’s in the same condition. She sat up with Mrs Wintour these last three nights. You – you do not object?’

‘Of course not. You’re shivering. Get under the covers.’

Again, she obeyed me. I was still standing by the bed, shaking with cold.

‘For God’s sake, sir,’ she said. ‘Don’t be foolish. It’s not the weather for scruples.’

She shifted across the bed and lifted the edge of the covers. Her meaning was plain enough and I was too cold to care about decorum. I climbed into the bed.

We lay side by side with six inches or so of mattress between us. I listened to her ragged breathing and stared up at the shadowy canopy above our heads. Mrs Arabella’s candle, which I had placed on the mantelshelf, was burning steadily. But my own candle was guttering, its flame flickering through the gap in the curtains. The scent of otto of roses filled my nostrils.

Mrs Arabella was crying softly. Again, it was as a child cries, without fuss. ‘I do not like to be alone with the dead,’ she said in a while. ‘I fear they are watching me. But they say one should sit with the dead, don’t they? A soul is vulnerable just after death. The Devil may snatch it away as it leaves its earthly body.’

‘Mrs Wintour’s soul is in God’s care now,’ I said. ‘You must not distress yourself about that.’

Later, she stirred again. ‘I hardly remember my own mother.’

Time passed. I knew she was awake. As for me, I had never been more alert in my life.

The overstuffed feather mattress sank beneath our weight and curled around our two bodies. Imperceptibly it brought us closer together. I did not realize this until my right hand brushed her left hand under the covers. I did not move it away. She did not move hers.

I said, a little breathlessly, ‘When I first came here, I wrote to my daughter Lizzie and told her that in America I lay in a featherbed that was as big as an elephant.’

Arabella gave a snort of laughter.

Gradually the featherbed finished what it had begun. Our forearms touched, and then our shoulders. My breathing became fast and shallow. I heard her swallow.

I turned my head to look at her and saw that she had turned hers to look at me.

My candle guttered and slowly died.

She moved a little in the bed but she did not break the contact between us. I took her fingers in mine. She squeezed my hand gently.

‘Well?’ I whispered.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘Very well.’

The dreary business that follows death took its course.

The effects of the weather and the war mercifully limited the trappings of mourning. Two days after Mrs Wintour’s death, her corpse went to its rest in Trinity churchyard. The sexton told me that the ground was frozen so hard that it broke the diggers’ spades. But at least she had a grave. The dead lay unburied all over the city, waiting for a thaw. There were few mourners at the funeral. Mrs Wintour had lived a retired life for several years. Most of her friends had died or fled the city.

The Judge was now a mere husk of his former self. With his wife’s death following so soon upon his son’s, all the heart and vigour had been hammered out of him. The servants, particularly old Josiah and Miriam, seemed almost equally affected by grief as their master. Mrs Wintour might have diminished to insignificance in life but, absent in death, she coloured the existence of the entire household.

These melancholy surroundings made me feel guilty for my own secret happiness. They also lent a strange relish to it. So too, I think, did those unanswered questions about Mrs Arabella’s connection to Roger Pickett.

All I cared for was this: that Mrs Arabella came to my bed by night. I was like a starving child turned loose in a pastry-cook’s shop. Indeed, I believe she was in much the same condition.

We knew this could not last. We lived in constant fear of discovery, which perhaps added to our pleasure. It would not have been possible for us to conceal the liaison if the times had not been so topsy-turvy. But the household was smaller than before; the conditions of war had disrupted its routines beyond repair; and the cold kept people huddled wherever they could find warmth. We were not disturbed.

I believe that only one person suspected us: Miriam. Arabella said this did not matter for the girl was devoted to her and also had a great kindness for me since I had prevented Captain Wintour from selling her to pay his backgammon debts.

She may have been right about the maid’s devotion to her but I was not so sure about the girl’s feelings towards me. I was aware that Miriam sometimes watched me when she thought she was unobserved.

I told myself, what did it matter if the girl was loyal to her mistress? I forgot that a person may have more than one loyalty.

One evening, Arabella and I found ourselves alone before the fire in the Judge’s library. For once the room was almost warm, for an old friend of the family had sent Mr Wintour several hundredweight of coal, a considerable luxury during the war. Her proximity to me was both a pleasure and a torment – people were constantly coming and going; I dared not risk touching her.