The Scent of Death (44 page)

Five days had passed since Mrs Wintour’s death. Arabella and I sat a discreet distance apart with our feet on the fender. The Judge had retired for the night; he now slept in the closet where his wife had died, as if lying on the very spot where she had drawn her last living breath would bring him closer to her.

On the floor beside her chair, Arabella had a large sewing bag made of tapestry with wooden handles. She reached into it and brought out the oilskin pouch which Captain Wintour had found at Mount George. The stitching across the top had been cut. She glanced at me and saw me watching.

‘I must come to a decision,’ she said.

‘Must you? Not now, surely.’

‘Yes – now.’ She let the pouch fall to her lap. ‘We have so little time, you and I. You will be going back to England before we know it. And as for me – well, God knows what will happen.’

‘Come to England,’ I said. ‘Throw that pouch on the fire and come with me.’

‘I can’t leave my father-in-law. It would kill him.’

‘Bring him too.’

She smiled and shook her head. ‘He wouldn’t come. Anyway, how should we live?’

‘I don’t know. We’d find a way.’

‘I won’t live under the same roof as you, sir.’ She feigned horror at the very thought. ‘A married man.’

Neither of us spoke of love. Neither of us mentioned Roger Pickett.

She took several folded papers from the pouch. ‘Perhaps these will give us the answer,’ she went on. ‘After all, if I’m a lady of fortune, then anything is possible.’

‘Does it not depend which side wins? And on whether this vein of gold can be found? If it actually exists at all.’

She flared up at me. ‘I have no other ground for hope, sir. So this will have to do.’

I leaned over and took her hand, violating our pact that we would not touch except in my bedchamber. ‘Then I shall hope, too. May I examine the papers?’

She gave them to me willingly. ‘You were right about there being a puzzle. You will see.’

First there were the title deeds to the estate that Mr Pickett had sold to her father, Henry Froude. It comprised of a house, slave quarters, an overseer’s house, various outbuildings and messuages, and seven hundred acres of land. I looked over the deeds, which seemed quite in order, and returned them to Arabella.

There remained only a page torn from a printed book. It was headed ‘The Conclusion’ and contained about twenty lines of verse that began:

All of a sudden I had a picture of my father, dead these twenty years, sitting in the parlour and reading aloud to us children. In memory it had been one of those endless summer evenings of childhood, and the sound of the words in his deep, quiet voice had made me drowsy until at last I had slept.

As I walked through the Wilderness of this World, I lighted on a certain place …

‘Are the lines familiar to you?’ Mrs Arabella asked.

‘Yes,’ I said, surprised that she had not recognized them herself.

And as I slept, I dreamed a Dream.

‘They come from
The Pilgrim’s Progress
,’ I went on. ‘It must be the end of the first volume. Was Mr Froude a religious man?’

‘He followed the forms and observances of the Established Church,’ she said drily. ‘When he found it convenient or desirable to do so.’

‘So Bunyan was not a particular favourite of his?’

‘I never saw the book in his hands or anything like it. It might have been my mother’s, I suppose.’

I turned over the page. The other side of the sheet was blank apart from a pencilled list of dates, names and figures.
To R. Pickett, Esqre: 120 guineas.

‘The payments must relate to his purchase of the Pickett estate,’ Arabella said. ‘It’s as if he did not have his account book by him and he made these notes as a temporary record.’

The explanation made sense. But it did not quite satisfy me.

‘Then why include it with the deeds?’ I asked.

‘It must mean something. My father thought himself cleverer than the rest of humanity and he did nothing by chance. He enjoyed mystifying those around him. It confirmed his opinion of his own superior understanding.’

I turned the page over again. My eyes ran further down the lines of verse. The word ‘gold’ snagged my attention.

‘Listen,’ I said.

‘He’s toying with us,’ Arabella said. ‘How I disliked my father. Indeed, I still do.’

A memory surfaced in my mind. On our way back from Mount George, when Jack Wintour had told me of the box of curiosities, he had also mentioned something that Froude had said to him when he had shown his son-in-law the box.

That’s what he said, and he told me how.

‘Mr Froude suggested that your husband should ask a salamander for help. Does that mean anything to you?’

‘A salamander?’ She burst out laughing. ‘That’s droll if nothing else. We have enough of those wretched lizards in the Catskills. I detest them.’

‘Did he refer to something at Mount George? A painting of a salamander, perhaps? An exhibit in his laboratory?’

She thought for a moment. ‘I cannot bring anything to mind, sir.’

I held the paper up to the candle in case there were pinpricks or indentations in the paper that might reveal a hidden message. There was nothing, only the lines of the paper and, at the top, the watermark, an inverted fleur-de-lys.

‘Have a care,’ Arabella said. ‘It’ll burn.’

I jerked the paper away. She was right: at the top the paper was just beginning to darken with the heat.

‘You would not let my fortune go up in smoke, I hope.’

I did not reply. I held the paper up to the candle flame again, this time at a safer distance. My eyes had not misled me. At the head of the page was a decorative bar of printer’s flowers whose type consisted of a pattern of arabesque foliage. A little above this bar a tangle of fine lines, smudged and brown, had appeared to the right of the watermark. It was about an inch in length. I could have taken my oath that it had not been there earlier.

At that moment I recalled the garrulous Mr Ingham, Townley’s clerk to Long Island, exiled so that Noak might have his post in New York; I remembered how he had prattled of Mrs Townley’s father in his dotage; and how the old man had tried to conceal his accounts from prying eyes.

I held the paper nearer the flame again.

‘Sir,’ Arabella cried. ‘It will burn, I tell you.’

‘No, ma’am.’ I watched the brown tangle expand towards the right-hand margin; I saw another appearing below it, dimly visible through the bar of printer’s flowers. ‘I believe I have solved your father’s riddle. And it is not so very difficult after all.’

‘Then tell me,’ she said.

‘They say salamanders are creatures of fire, do they not? The ancients certainly believed it – is it not in Pliny, and in Aristotle before him? Mr Froude was telling us that we should apply heat to the paper.’

I turned the sheet over to its blank side. It was not blank any more. The brown tangle had grown to six lines. The words were run together and written in a narrow, confined scrawl. I could decipher only a few words here and there –
to, entry, dead
.

‘I can’t read it,’ I said.

‘Give it me,’ Arabella said. ‘My father’s hand was as crabbed as his heart.’

I handed the paper to her. Frowning, she cast her eyes over it and then read aloud:

That night, as we lay in a warm muddle of limbs in the depths of the feather mattress, I broached a subject that had niggled at me like an insect bite for several days. At first it had been an almost impalpable irritation but it had grown steadily worse, as if the miniature wound had become infected by the events of the last few months.

‘Arabella?’ I called her that when we were alone; the Wintours called her Bella.

She stirred in my arms.

‘I am a little puzzled in my mind about Miriam.’

She muttered something I could not catch.

‘I think she may be spying on me,’ I said.

‘You imagine it.’

‘Someone searched my possessions the other day.’

‘What?’ Arabella’s voice was more distinct now. ‘How do you know?’

‘My papers were disturbed. Nothing that mattered, of course – I lock away anything of importance. But I think it may have been her.’

‘Servants always pry,’ Arabella said, as if stating a self-evident truth that a child would have grasped. ‘It’s nothing to be wondered at. It’s why God invented locks and keys.’

‘Tell me, has she ever had a child?’

Arabella sat up with a jerk, dislodging the bedclothes and letting a current of cold air invade our warmth. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘I saw her one evening on Broadway last winter. She was with a black child – a girl. But when I chanced to mention it later, she denied she had been there at all, let alone with a child. It was very young – two or three years old, no more.’

She lay down again and pulled the covers over us. ‘Slaves breed all the time. But it can’t have been her child – it was probably a friend’s. No doubt Miriam was out of the house without leave, so of course she would deny it. Sometimes, my love, you are such a simpleton.’

It was the first time she had called me ‘my love’.

I said, ‘I chanced to pass the negro burial ground in the summer. There was a child’s grave there. The infant’s name was Henrietta Maria Barville. I understand that Barville is the surname that Miriam uses. The next of kin in the sexton’s register was one Miriam Barville. It must be the same person, surely?’

‘Perhaps she was kin,’ Arabella said with a shiver that rippled through her like the wind on water. She turned towards me. ‘Slaves are all related to each other, you know. Brothers lie with sisters, and mothers with their sons. You must not expect refinement of behaviour from them. The truth is, they have no morals, no restraint.’

‘How unlike us, my dear,’ I said; and I brushed my hand gently against her breasts.

We lived in a fool’s paradise. But it was a paradise nonetheless.

The following Tuesday, 18 January, was the night of the great fête at Hicks Tavern. The army had subscribed above four hundred guineas towards it, which set up a considerable murmur in the town; for many said that the money would have been better spent of procuring fuel and food for the poor, who were suffering so terribly. Every day there were reports of people freezing to death in their sleep.

But the army was above such considerations. Besides, this was a patriotic affair that demanded the approval and support of every loyal citizen: for the entertainment was designed to celebrate the queen’s official birthday.

By virtue of my position I was obliged to attend as the representative of the American Department. The Wintours could not go, even if they had wanted to, because they were in mourning for the deaths of Mrs Wintour and the Captain.

The fête was an extravagant, splendid affair. Baroness von Riedesel, the wife of a Hessian general newly arrived in New York from captivity, represented Her Majesty, which annoyed many of the ladies there who felt they had a better claim to temporary royalty. The Baroness, vastly pregnant, was welcomed at the tavern with drums and trumpets. She opened the ball with the commandant, General Pattison, and afterwards at supper sat like a plump partridge on a great chair under a canopy. Outside the tavern, the city’s beggars gathered until the soldiers drove them away.

I watched the dancing. I bowed low to the Baroness. I drank the loyal toast and those that followed. Most of my New York acquaintance was there – I even noticed Mr Carne, the American intelligence-gatherer, deep in conversation with General Pattison in a window embrasure. I myself had little conversation with anyone. Though there had still been no public announcement about my recall to London, disgrace clings invisibly to a man like an infection; it repels those around him.

I contrived to leave shortly before midnight. I had arranged to share a hackney coach with a gentleman who lived near King’s College. I ordered the coachman to drop me not at the front door of the house but at the garden gate in the wall near the belvedere. The Judge was sleeping badly at present and my entering by the front door would have disturbed him, for the closet where he lay was immediately over the hall.

At my request, the postillion jumped down with his lantern and waited while I unlocked the gate. I saw a light burning behind the shutters of the belvedere; one of the slaves would be waiting there to conduct me to the house.

Once inside the garden, I closed, locked and bolted the gate. I heard the coach drive away. A lantern burned faintly in the fanlight above the garden door to the house. In the slave quarters, a man was singing softly in a very deep voice, one of those strange, sad melodies that the black people croon as they go about their lives.

I mounted the short flight of steps to the belvedere, meaning to upbraid the slave for not coming out to assist me; he must have heard the sounds of my arrival.

I pushed open the door. A lantern stood on the table. Miriam was sitting beside it, resting her head and arms on the table. She started up when I entered, her cloak and a blanket fluttering to the floor.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Beg pardon, your honour. Madam sent me.’

‘Why?’

At that moment, a current of cold air touched my cheek. I heard movement. Pain sliced through me like sheet lightning in a night sky.

The terrible brightness lasted only an instant. I tumbled into a black pit where nothing was.