The Scent of Death (46 page)

‘Indeed,’ I said. ‘But why should Miriam say she had shot you? Unless—’

Loyalty must be freely given
. I saw the truth in all its blindly obvious simplicity.

‘Of course,’ I said, answering my own question. ‘Because you and she were lovers. And so she told her mistress she had killed you. To protect you. In the confusion of the fire and their flight from Mount George, there was no one to gainsay her. And eventually you followed them to New York, where everyone but Miriam believed you were dead. But were you not afraid that someone would recognize you in the street?’

‘I am much altered from what I was, sir,’ Juvenal said. He touched his right cheek. ‘People see the scars, not the man, as you will discover yourself.’ He paused. ‘And I have undergone other changes.’

He meant his castration, I thought: I did not know how that would alter the appearance of an adult; or perhaps the alterations had as much to do with the mind as the body.

Juvenal opened the stove and threw some fragments of floorboard inside. I interpreted this to mean that he meant to heat the knife again. I shrank back against the line of puppets. The prospect of more pain spurred me to keep talking.

‘But then there came the Pickett business,’ I said in a rush. ‘Just as I arrived in New York. Miriam must have told you that Roger Pickett was here in New York, that he’d called at Warren Street. He’d been at Mount George on the night you killed Froude, so he knew you weren’t dead – or at least that Miriam hadn’t shot you. Is that why you killed him? Or was it—?’

I broke off. I had been about to say
Or was it because he knew about the gold?
But it came to me in a flash that Juvenal had not mentioned the gold.

‘Or was it revenge?’ I went on so quickly that my hesitation must have been barely perceptible. ‘But what had Pickett ever done to you?’

The only answer I had was that Juvenal hawked again and spat, this time at the stove. The spittle hissed as it evaporated.
It was so very quiet in this place. No sound reached us from
the outside world. The rubble of the merchant’s house above sealed us off from the rest of the city, the rest of the world.

‘You attacked me in the street, did you not? That time the two soldiers came to my rescue? Was that because Miriam told you that I had seen her with your little girl on Broadway? Or were you there too, and you feared I had seen you together with them? If I had, a word from me to Judge Wintour and—’

Juvenal spat a second time. The spittle hissed. He opened the stove again. Pale flames were licking the piece of board.

‘And then Captain Wintour came home,’ I said. ‘Your master.’

‘I have no master,’ Juvenal said softly, as he closed the stove door.

‘You attacked him on his own doorstep. That was after he threatened to sell Miriam to pay his debts, was it not? Did you hate him, too, for what he was and what he had been to you?’

For loyalty, I thought, is like milk: it may curdle and become something quite different in both taste and consistency.

‘The consequence of all this,’ I continued, ‘was to bring you to the notice of the authorities. You avoided Major Marryot and his patrol in Canvas Town. But your face could not easily be concealed, not in New York, even in Canvas Town.’

Loyalty is a sort of love, I thought: and the reverse of love is hate.

‘Where were you? In the Debatable Ground?’

Juvenal actually laughed. ‘I see I have no secrets from you, sir.’

‘Miriam must have told you that Captain Wintour and I were coming there,’ I said. ‘You were waiting at Mount George.’

He did not reply.

‘Was it you who killed poor Grantford and that boy, Abraham?’

‘If you kill a man,’ Juvenal said at last, speaking slowly as if testing each word beforehand to see whether it would bear the weight of his meaning, ‘you should do so for one of three reasons. For your own preservation, for loyalty, for revenge.’

Not for gain, I thought, not for gold?

‘It was a pity about your man and Wintour’s negro,’ he was saying. ‘But they were in the way.’

‘So was I, I apprehend.’

He shrugged.

‘You followed us through the lines,’ I said. ‘You killed Captain Wintour at King’s Bridge. You mutilated him most cruelly.’

‘I did as I was done by, sir.’

A silence fell between us. I was about to ask whether Juvenal was Townley’s ally, for that was still the great unanswered question. But he distracted me by opening the door of the stove again. The new fuel was ablaze now, the flames snapping and crackling like wild things. He patted his coat. I guessed he was looking for his knife.

I blundered into speech. ‘Sir, I have a terrible thirst. Would you have the goodness to let me drink something?’

It was the first time I addressed him as ‘sir’ in the manner of an equal, though he had addressed me as ‘sir’ at several points; not in a servile way but as one gentleman to another.

With the toe of his boot, Juvenal pushed the jug within my reach. I stooped and picked it up. It was a quart-size earthen-ware vessel, a third full of beer.

‘Forgive me, but may I trespass on your good nature and ask for a pot to piss in before I drink? If I do not do it soon, I fear I may explode.’

He laughed and took up a bucket for ashes that stood near the stove. ‘Here – use this.’

It was, in its way, a kind action. I shall always remember that. He could have told me to piss against the wall or even in my breeches. For an instant, perhaps, he forgot that I was his prisoner. Such is the power of civility on a man of his breeding. For Juvenal was a sort of gentleman, albeit in a partial and vicarious way; he had acquired more than a little Latin when he shared the education of Jack Wintour.

He took a step forward with the bucket in his hand.

‘Thank you, sir,’ I said, swinging the jug against his skull with all the force I could muster.

It was the only chance I had. The blow was a lucky one. It caught Juvenal on the side of the head. The jug shattered, the base falling from it, the beer cascading over him. He gasped and staggered to one side, tripping over the wooden platter and dropping the candle.

I fell forward with all my weight on him. My right hand touched the candlestick. I seized it and dashed it against his head. He fought back feebly. The candlestick was made of metal and had a weighted base. I hit him again and again with it. At last he was still.

I felt in the pockets of his coat until I found the knife he had used on my cheek. I opened it and cut his throat. The blade was sharp but it was harder work than I imagined, to cut a man’s throat. The door of the stove was still open. The flames cast a shifting, twitching orange light over our little hell.

Juvenal cried out so I stabbed him in the neck and in the chest, in the region of the heart. His limbs thrashed. I returned to the neck and sawed to and fro until I had cut through the artery.

The blood splashed out of him. It made my hands so slippery the knife slid from my grasp. The blood spattered my fine evening coat and puddled on the floor with the beer.

I took up the knife once more, rolled away and cut the rope around my ankles. I was trembling. It was as if I was a child again and an angry parent had picked me up and was shaking me so hard that my teeth rattled.

I rested my head against the wall to steady myself. I unbuttoned my breeches and at last let out a stream of urine. It rustled in a broadening stream down the brick wall and pooled on the ground around the fallen, graceless figure of Mrs Punch. It spread a liquid shadow that mingled with the blood and the beer and came at last to rest against the barrier of Juvenal’s body.

By degrees I grew calmer.

If you kill a man, I thought, you should do it for one of three reasons. For your own preservation, for loyalty, for revenge. I suppose I killed Juvenal for all three.

But I wished I had not.

Murder.

Let us not beat about the bush. That is what it was. For a few seconds, I had a choice. I chose to cut Juvenal’s throat.

I tell myself no jury in its right mind would convict me of murdering him. That in another moment he might well have overcome me – he was far stronger than I – and that my life probably depended on his death.

Also, that he intended to castrate me, which might have proved fatal in itself quite apart from the fact that it would have caused me suffering beyond belief and destroyed my manhood.

Also, that he had shown himself to be capable of nursing his homicidal hatred for years until the right opportunity presented to him to take his vengeance.

Also, that he had killed at least five men to my certain knowledge – Froude, Pickett, Corporal Grantford, Abraham and Jack Wintour; he had shown them no pity and he therefore deserved none from me.

Also – well, all these arguments and more are valid. Nevertheless my heart tells me that what I did was murder. I had a choice. I chose to kill Juvenal and I did so with deliberation.

In the same moment, therefore, I chose also to make myself into a murderer for the rest of my natural life.

Of course these thoughts did not pass through my mind in the immediate aftermath of the deed. Moral philosophy had no interest for me whatsoever, for my terrors circled like wolves, ready to attack if I showed the slightest weakness.

I did not know who or what awaited me on the other side of the door beside the stove.

Somehow I contrived to remain calm, though I was in considerable pain from the cut in my cheek. The trick was to think only of the immediate future: to deal with the next five minutes and let the rest take care of itself.

My actions were considered, even methodical. Sweating from exertion and from the heat of the stove, I relit the candle that had been extinguished in the course of the struggle, though I could not bring myself to replace it in the candlestick I had used with such violence. But I wiped the blade of Juvenal’s knife, closed it and put it in my pocket.

I still had my purse and my watch. The two dice were in my waistcoat. Like a superstitious fool I touched them in the hope they would bring me luck. The Departmental commission signed by Lord George Germain and my passes were safe in the concealed inner pocket of my coat.

The watch had stopped with its hands at ten past three. I had no idea of the time or even whether it was night or day. The cellar was as private as a tomb.

My shoes, hat and cloak were bundled up by the stove. I found beside them a small axe of the sort used for chopping kindling. On the floor by the wooden platter were fragments of the hard, gritty biscuit that forms part of sailors’ rations.

But I did not eat. My thirst was worse than ever.

I examined the door. It was stoutly made of dark, solid wood that had grown darker and harder with time; it was bound with iron; and a ring controlled the latch. On this side of the door there was no sign of a bolt or of a lock requiring a key.

Slowly I twisted the ring. I felt the weight of the latch and felt it move. I tugged gently. The door edged towards me. It scraped on the floor, but not loudly. It made no other sound.

It was dark outside. Cold air rushed into the cellar, chilling my bare hands and my naked scalp. I listened, counting the beats of my pulse until I had reached a hundred and twenty.

Someone was shouting in the distance. There was no sign of daylight. I heard a dull report, probably a musket shot but far away. Nearer, there were voices – men arguing loudly but without real heat. I could not distinguish their words. Elsewhere I heard laughter and a solitary scream, cut off suddenly as a knife lops off the end of a piece of string.

I opened the door a few inches further so the gap between the door and the jamb was wide enough for me to slip through. A narrow flight of steep brick steps climbed upwards between jagged walls of brick. The treads were coated with frost. The cold and the exertion made my wounded cheek throb to the beat of my pulse. Above me was a night sky. It was so clear one could have counted the stars. The air smelled of smoke and salt water.

Steadying myself on the wall, I crept up the steps, pausing at every one. I made some noise – it was impossible not to – but there was no sign that anyone had heard me.

The higher I climbed, the more sounds I heard. What worried
me most of all was the possibility that Juvenal’s confederates might be close by. I knew that he had worked with at least two people apart from Miriam – the one-legged man and his colleague with the puppet theatre. On the other hand, he would have been confident of his ability to restrain me single-handed and he might not have wished to have witnesses for what I might have said or what he intended to do to me.

The steps led into a heap of debris, coated with more frost and frozen snow. I kept in the lee of a broken chimney stack. On a night like this, any movement would be clearly visible against the skyline.

Axe in hand, I looked out on a scene that might have come from the last days of the world. The ruins of Canvas Town stretched before me. Fires glowed in the darkness. Other lights were visible from the inhabited buildings beyond. I heard snatches of songs, shouts, wild cries and a woman weeping in great gasping sobs.

At this moment, five or six men began to move among the campfires. They were clearly very drunk. They shouted, traded insults and sang. They blundered through the vagrants and heaps of rubbish. The racket they made gave me the opportunity I needed. I climbed over the rubble of the house and descended to a lower level, an area of pitted, frozen mud.

In the darkness I trod on something soft that might have been a man; but he did not respond and there was no way of knowing whether he was alive or dead. Thirty yards on, someone must have seen me, for they shouted ‘Ben, you old devil, come over here!’ I waved, and passed on. I swerved away from them and stumbled into a group of three or four people who appeared to be engaged in some form of copulation around a glowing brazier.

All at once – and this was typical of New York City where such extraordinary opposites lived side by side – I passed from the barbarous wilderness of Canvas Town into a paved street of prim, shuttered houses. A few minutes later I was on Broadway.