The Scent of Death (45 page)

In the beginning was the pain. I became aware of it before I was aware of anything else. It was worse, far worse, in my head. But it stretched down the entire length of my body.

The next item of information to force its way to the attention was the fact that my bladder was bursting. This was followed by the realization that, although I was lying on an unpleasantly hard surface, I was at least tolerably warm. The air stank of urine and sweat, of stale spirits and ill-tanned hides.

I forced my arm to move slowly up to my head. I could not feel a nightcap. Or a wig or a hat. I felt the bristle on my scalp and a very painful, swollen spot above and slightly behind my right ear. I was still dressed in the evening clothes I had worn at Hicks Tavern. My feet were cold. I flexed my toes. I discovered that I was not wearing shoes.

I’m a man with no shoes
– like poor Roger Pickett all those months ago on my first day in New York City.

The memories returned. I remembered coming back to Warren Street after the fête. I remembered Miriam sitting in the belvedere, waiting to light me up to the house. But nothing more, not then.

At last, and with a considerable effort, I opened my eyes. Not twelve inches away from me was a small malevolent face.

I gave a cry and sat up in a rush. The sudden movement intensified the pain a hundredfold. The place where I lay was filled with a dirty-yellow radiance, a murky glow that was a near neighbour to fog. I saw beside me a line of small animals, the size of squirrels or even large rats, hanging like vermin on a board outside a gamekeeper’s cottage.

Dead, I thought, and left to rot as a warning to others.

I stretched out my hand and felt a wall of cold, damp bricks. The mortar between them crumbled at my touch. I brushed the side of the nearest figure, which swayed and turned.

Alive?

I pulled back my hand sharply, fearing a bite or a scratch. The light shifted to the head of the moving figure. I glimpsed a wizened face with a nose like a blade. The nose reminded me of Mr Townley’s. A thought stirred in the depths of my mind, pushing its way through the pain.

A face with a great nose.

I was fully awake now. I remembered the puppet theatre at the Brooklyn races, with the one-legged barker and the squat fellow who carried the booth and managed the puppets. I realized suddenly that I had seen the latter again – more than once, indeed, and when he was unencumbered by his booth. He was the moon-faced man who had laid the flowers on the child’s grave in the negro burial ground. I had glimpsed him again in the depths of the crowd at Jack Wintour’s funeral, when he had been smoking a clay pipe.

A voice said, ‘Mr Punch at your service, sir.’

I turned my head sharply. What light there was came from two candles behind the man who had spoken. His face was in shadow. He was tall and broad-shouldered. He towered over me.

‘This is his town residence. Where he comes to rest after his labours. Along with Mrs Punch and their acquaintance.’

The man’s voice was American, not unlike Judge Wintour’s in intonation but deeper in pitch. He and I were alone in a chamber perhaps ten feet long by six feet wide. It appeared to be lined entirely with brick, even the barrel vault of the ceiling. I could not see a window or a door.

At the other end from the dangling marionettes and myself was an old stove of the Dutch pattern, the source of the warmth. To the right of it, I made out the shape of a low wide door.

‘If that’s Mr Punch,’ I said, ‘have I the pleasure of addressing the devil?’ I was so thirsty that it felt as if I were speaking through a mouthful of fine sand. ‘They usually appear together, I believe.’

He laughed. ‘You may call me whatever you like, sir.’

‘Who are you? What are you doing? Where are we?’

‘We are in Canvas Town, sir,’ he said. ‘This was once the strong-room of a merchant who traded in furs. The house above us is reduced to a heap of rubble. If you scream, no one will hear.’

I summoned up my strength and tried to scramble to my feet. I discovered that a rope attached to the wall had been tied to my ankles. I sprawled on the floor and the pain in my head made me cry out.

Once again, my captor laughed.

I struggled into a sitting position and then, with infinite care, stood up. The man did not move. When the pain had subsided, I asked if I might have a drink of water.

He considered the request for a few seconds. ‘No.’

My wits were still addled. ‘Those men with the puppet theatre on Long Island …’

‘How observant of you, sir. Yes, you have met Mr Punch and his friends before. My little deputies, in a manner of speaking.’

‘You speak in riddles.’

‘Few of us talk plainly, Mr Savill. Have you not noticed that? Allow me to gloss it for you: the men with the theatre were my eyes and ears in New York while I had business elsewhere. Hence my deputies, though sadly unintelligent ones.’

‘But who the devil are you? And why—’

‘Perhaps you would care to observe me more closely.’

He turned, picked up one of the candles and came closer. For the first time I saw his face. To my surprise I discovered that he was a black man. But that surprise was instantly elbowed aside by a far greater one. The negro’s face was scarred from the outer corner of each eye to each corner of the mouth. The flesh had not healed properly and the scar tissue was raised and pink.

‘I see you recognize me now, sir, and you will understand why I have been obliged to act through intermediaries for the last few months – in New York City, at least.’

‘Listen to me,’ I said, ‘I have no animosity towards you and you can have none towards me. Restore my shoes, let me go and we shall say no more about it. You already have my purse, I’m sure, and you may keep it. I have nothing else of value on my person.’

He laughed. ‘I don’t want your purse. I want you.’

I peered through the gloom at him. ‘Do you hope for a ransom? I’m of no particular importance and I’m almost entirely without resources or friends. So I’m afraid you hope in vain.’

‘I hope for very little nowadays,’ he said. ‘If anything.’

‘Then oblige me in this, at least,’ I snapped. ‘Tell me what you’re about. Was it not you the other night at Mrs Chawley’s with the sedan chair? Does that mean you are Mr Townley’s creature? And is Miriam Barville your ally, your lover?’

He hit me then – a punch with all his weight behind it, which landed full on my mouth. The force of it drove me back against the line of hanging puppets on the wall. The rope around my ankles trapped me like a rabbit in a snare. I fell heavily to the ground, bringing Mrs Punch with me. The pain made my vision blur. My mouth filled with blood. I touched the front teeth with the tip of my tongue. One of the incisors rocked in its socket.

‘Hetty-Petty,’ I said, the blood in my mouth distorting and thickening the sound of the words. The pain made me reckless. Despair made me angry. Fear made me talkative.

‘What did you say?’

‘Hetty-Petty. I saw one of your damned theatricals at the negro burial ground in the summer. A white man bringing a nosegay for a dead black child. Her name was Henrietta Maria Barville. Was she yours? If she was, I’m sorry for it. It’s a bad business, the death of a child.’

I tensed myself, expecting another blow or a kick or worse. But nothing came.

‘Was it her I heard crying in Warren Street?’ I said. ‘Of course – she was the child who died of the smallpox in the slave quarters, was she not? That was where Miriam hid her.’

‘You know nothing,’ he said, moving nearer the stove.

‘I thought Miriam was loyal to her mistress,’ I went on, probing further. ‘No doubt she is, in her way. But what’s a slave’s loyalty worth? Not very much, it seems. Because the pair of you laid a trap for me this evening. You and Miriam.’

Scarface crouched by the stove. He had his back to me. He opened the door. I thought he was warming himself. He did not speak.

I shifted as far as the rope would let me, my hands feeling for a weapon, any weapon. ‘Loyalty is a strange, immaterial thing, is it not? Perhaps Miriam finds that a greater loyalty outranks a lesser one. I should be obliged if you could explain this to me. Do slaves have loyalty as free people do? Or is it something that can be bought and sold just as they themselves can?’

He turned back to me. He had wrapped a cloth around his right hand and used it to grip a pocket knife with a dark wooden handle. The tip of the blade glowed a dull red colour in the gloom of the chamber.

I scrambled to my feet. As I did so, he seized my neck in his left hand and pushed me back against the wall. I flailed my arms towards him. But his arms were longer and stronger than mine.

Still gripping my neck, he pushed me down to the floor. The rope pinned my legs. He knelt heavily on my upper arms.

‘So,’ he said in his deep, melodious voice. ‘Loyalty. Let us see how loyal you are.’

He shifted his grip, wedging my head in the angle between floor and wall. I felt the heat of the knife before it touched me. He drew the tip down my right cheek from eye to mouth.

‘I could make you deny Christ himself if I had a mind to it, sir. Just like St Peter.’

The pain was exquisite. I screamed, my body bucking beneath his weight, trying to throw him off. He adjusted the position of his left hand, forcing me to rotate my head.

‘Can a slave feel loyalty?’ he murmured.

He stood up, leaving me whimpering on the ground. I covered my face with my hands.

‘Indeed they can,’ he went on. ‘A slave has sentiments just as a free man has. He feels love, he feels hate, he feels the desire for revenge. Do you think we learn these elevated sentiments from our white masters, sir? It is indeed a nice philosophical question.’

My cheek stung and was wet with blood.

‘Why did you kill Mr Pickett?’

That at least is what I meant to say. But the words emerged as a sort of muffled gasp. I swallowed some of the blood in my mouth and tried again.

‘Why did you kill Mr Pickett?’

By this time the black man had retreated as far as the stove. I felt my muscles tense in anticipation of pain: did he intend to heat the blade again as a preliminary to another attack on me?

But he shut the door of the stove and closed his knife.

‘Why do you think I killed him?’ he said.

‘Revenge?’ I hazarded. ‘Or to stop him talking?’

‘Talking? About what?’

I strained to see his face but I could not make out his expression. ‘Why, about the box of curiosities.’

He shrugged his massive shoulders. ‘Maybe it was revenge after all. After all, that’s why I was obliged to slash your cheek, Mr Savill. It is barely more than a scratch. In an hour or two, when the wound has begun to scab, I shall make a deeper cut because it will be more painful then. Then I shall oblige you to turn the other cheek, as Our Lord advises, and I shall do the same to that side of your face.’ He paused and slipped the knife into his pocket. ‘All of which you should consider merely as a preliminary. I shall do worse to you, by and by. Much worse.’

At that moment I knew precisely what he was about and what he meant to do to me. He intended to make me as himself.

To emasculate me. As he himself had been emasculated.

‘I have been no better than a blockhead.’ My voice sounded unnatural in my ears and, to my surprise, strangely calm. ‘I thought you were dead. That’s what everyone said. But you’re as alive as I am, Juvenal. Aren’t you?’

‘Indeed I am, sir,’ he said with that unsettling urbanity of address. ‘And I fear that I may soon outlive you.’

He blew out one of the candles. He took up the other and left me in the dark with the taste of blood in my mouth.

I drifted towards insensibility but did not quite succeed in getting there. My world was made of pain and darkness. I tried to count, both to measure the time and as a distraction, but somehow lost my way among the numbers.

What roused me was the sound of the door opening.

First an oblong of light spilled into the room. Juvenal followed, carrying a jug and a wooden platter, which he set on the floor just out of my reach. The tang of spruce beer joined the other smells in the chamber. I scrambled slowly to my feet.

Juvenal picked up the lighted candle he had left at the threshold, brought it over and used it to light the second candle. He shut the door. He held out his hands to the stove and looked at me for the first time since his return.

‘I believe you mentioned loyalty, sir,’ he said.

I bowed politely. My overburdened bladder made a savage pain in my guts.

‘I consider it the guiding principle of my life,’ he went on. ‘But the point I should have made to you earlier is that loyalty must be freely given. It is not an attribute or moral adornment that can be forced on a man. You cannot, as it were, make him wear it as you can a silver collar.’

I thought of the double portrait I had seen in Jack Wintour’s bedchamber: the boy in green, the boy in blue; the white master and the black slave.

‘Captain Wintour told me you did everything together when you were boys,’ I said. ‘You shared his lessons and his games. He said that you were a far better scholar than he was.’

‘That was not so difficult.’

‘He also told me you were dead.’ I swallowed with difficulty for my mouth was now very dry. ‘And the Judge said that Miriam shot you after you had stabbed Mr Froude.’

He gave a quick nod, as if my remarks were so much a matter of course they were hardly worth his notice. ‘The Tippet girl told you about Froude, no doubt. Mehitabel. She was there, you know.’

‘Why did he hate you so?’

‘Squire Froude was a brute. He didn’t need a reason to be cruel. But in this case he had a very good reason. I had stolen something from him.’

‘That’s no reason why you should have killed him.’

Juvenal hawked and spat at my feet, an action that was all the more shocking for the quietly genteel tone of his conversation. ‘After what he did to me, sir,’ he remarked in the level voice he had used before, ‘Froude deserved far worse than death.’