The Scent of Death

‘What? To the hanging?’

‘Of course – I am obliged to attend for the city and I thought it might interest you to accompany me. It’s as well to know how these things are done. Matters have arranged themselves very neatly. It’s at eight o’clock, and they will give us breakfast afterwards. They keep a good table.’ Townley took out his watch. ‘Talking of which, my dear sir, I believe it is time to dine.’

After dining with Townley, I had walked back towards my office, skirting the fringe of Canvas Town. It was very hot and I did not hurry. I was not yet sure of my way, and by chance I found myself passing Van Cortlandt’s Sugar House.

I turned into Trinity churchyard. The air seemed a little cooler here. Despite its proximity to the prison, the grassy enclosure was used as a place of resort, and at least a score of people were strolling among the gravestones. Indeed, it was more like a pleasure garden than a churchyard, with a broad, gravelled walk lined with benches, hooks for lanterns on the trees and even a platform for an orchestra amid the ruins. As I came up to the church, a familiar figure ambled round the corner of the tower at the west end.

‘Judge!’ I uncovered and bowed. ‘How do you do, sir? It is unconscionably hot, is it not?’

Wintour blinked up at me. ‘Ah – Mr Savill. Your servant, sir. You took me by surprise.’

‘Do you come here to take the air?’

‘No. In point of fact, I am looking for my goat.’

‘I beg your pardon, sir. I do not quite—’

‘My milch goat. It is the most charming animal imaginable. Mrs Wintour has a particular taste for its milk. Josiah tethered it here on Monday morning. Just there, sir, attached to those railings you see by the path. He swears he only turned his back for a moment, but in that moment it vanished.’

‘I am sorry to hear it, sir.’ I felt a memory shifting like shingle in the depths of my mind.

‘It is our own family burying ground, too. Which makes the theft somehow worse, as though the perpetrator had committed a sort of burglary. My poor brother is here, you see, and that is why Josiah brought the goat in the first place.’ Mr Wintour saw the lack of comprehension on my face and smiled at me. ‘I beg your pardon, sir – I have presented you with an unnecessary enigma.’

‘Your brother is buried here?’

‘Just so. He was as steadfast as any man in his attachment to the Crown.’ The old man’s face crumpled for a moment. ‘Alas, even as a boy, he was impetuous, and liable to speak his mind without counting the likely cost of it. That was his undoing. The rebels killed him, you know, whatever they say.’

‘Did he die in the fighting, sir?’ I asked.

‘No, sir, he did not.’

While the Judge was talking, he drifted closer to the railings and stared at the memorials they enclosed. I followed him. One of the inscriptions had been more recently cut than the others:

Erected in Memory

of

Francis de Lancey Wintour, D.D., M.A.

Fellow of King’s College, New York

Son of William Wintour, Esqre

Died 21 June 1776

Aged 57 years

‘When the rebels occupied this city at the start of the war,’ Wintour said, ‘they inflamed the Republican riff-raff and sought out all the prominent Tories they could find. Age and infirmity was no barrier to them. My poor brother Francis spoke his mind to the Whigs, just as he had done before the war. He urged them to lay down their arms and return to their natural allegiance.’ Wintour gripped one of the spikes of the railings and turned aside. ‘And then,’ he continued in a lower voice, ‘the mob came to his house, and broke down the door, and dragged him in his nightshirt into the street. He cried out, “God bless King George.” They placed him on a rail and paraded him through the streets with loud huzzas. Yes, and there were soldiers there too, and city militia men who had dined at my own table, though afterwards they denied it. They were laughing, sir – can you credit it? They were laughing while they persecuted an old, infirm scholar in the name of what they call liberty and the rights of man.’

I took Mr Wintour’s arm. ‘My dear sir – pray, you must not distress yourself any more. Let us walk home.’

‘No.’ He shook off my hand. ‘No, sir – it is better you should know all. They paraded my unhappy brother outside General Washington’s windows, and that gallant officer raised his hat to them and returned their huzzas. They had it in mind to plunge poor Francis in the Fresh Water Pond and then to run him out of the city. But God was merciful to my brother and permitted death to supervene. He suffered a rush of blood to the head and he died instantly of an apoplexy.’

‘Let us go home, sir,’ I said. ‘I am so sorry.’

‘But I wish I could find the goat.’ He released the railing and stood straight. ‘She was my brother’s, you see, and a particular favourite. And Josiah too – our father gave him to my brother when he was a boy. After my brother died, they both came to me with what was left of his estate. The man and the goat. And Josiah likes to bring the goat here sometimes to see her old master and his resting place. It is – it is a harmless practice, is it not? I could not find it in myself to forbid it. Perhaps the animal has simply strayed. Josiah is most upset. I shall place an advertisement in the newspaper.’

He allowed me to lead him away from the grave. Once we had left the churchyard, he released my arm and stepped out almost briskly in the direction of Warren Street.

‘I had some news today, sir,’ I said, hoping to steer the old man’s attention to safer subjects. ‘The court has tried the man accused of Mr Pickett’s killing. They found him guilty.’

Wintour stopped abruptly. ‘Really? So he will hang?’

‘Yes, sir. Tomorrow morning.’

‘God rest his soul. There is no doubt about his guilt, I suppose?’

‘I attended the preliminary hearing,’ I said. ‘He was wearing Mr Pickett’s shoes and had his ring.’

‘Did he confess?’

‘Only to theft, and only of the shoes. He claims that he stumbled across the body.’

Mr Wintour shrugged. ‘Well, the court must go by the evidence, not what an accused man says in his own defence. Though one can hardly call it a court in any proper sense, since the judges sit without a jury and none of them has more than a smattering of the law. Still – poor Pickett – an unhappy end to an unhappy life.’

‘I thought perhaps that, in view of the acquaintance, Mrs Wintour and Mrs Arabella should be told.’

‘You may leave that to me, Mr Savill. I take it kindly that you have given us a little warning. I should not have liked them to have come across it in a newspaper or from a friend’s gossip.’ He stopped and shook me warmly by the hand. ‘I shall trouble you no further, sir. I am quite restored now.’

We said goodbye. I resumed my walk back to my office. It was only as I was turning into Broadway that I remembered the goat.

On Monday morning, Josiah had lost his master’s goat in Trinity churchyard. In the early evening of the same day, I had seen another goat not far away in the remains of Deyes Street. A mulatto boy had been leading it over a pile of rubble.

The same goat?

Chapter Thirteen

That night I did not hear the crying child. I turned this way and that on the overstuffed feather mattress, drifting in and out of a doze. I woke to full consciousness before five o’clock and could not settle to sleep again.

I am going to see a man hanged.

When I rose, I stayed in my chamber. I took a little tea but did not eat anything, feeling that for some obscure but powerful reason one should not attend the death of another man with a full belly. I tried to pray but found that would not answer. I read a chapter or two from the First Epistle to the Corinthians. That was no use either. Next I took up The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which Augusta had given me when we parted. She believed it did a man’s career no harm if he was known to spend his leisure hours engaged in serious reading of an uplifting nature. But the book irritated me so much and so quickly that I tossed the volume into the empty grate before I had read a couple of sentences.

I contemplated writing to Augusta. But I discovered that I had nothing to write that would be fit for her to read. I would much rather have written a line or two to Lizzie. But how could one say words like these to a beloved child?

In a moment I shall step out to watch a man be strangled on a string, and I wish to God I could do anything else in the world instead, even being seasick for eternity or having all my teeth pulled.

Why did this agitate me so much? It was almost as if I myself were the condemned man, as if I, not Virgil, had taken the life of another and deserved to die.

By seven o’clock I could no longer stand the confinement of my chamber. I left the house and walked down to the North River, where the air was somewhat cooler. By a quarter to eight, I was in front of the Upper Barracks.

Despite the short notice of the hanging, a crowd had gathered on the level ground outside the wall of the barracks. People of all conditions were talking, laughing, eating, drinking, buying, selling, shuffling to and fro or simply standing in silence. There was nothing sombre or discontented about them. They were merely waiting and they were perfectly good-humoured about it.

As I pushed my way through the throng I glimpsed a familiar face: the negro with the scars on his cheeks, the man whom I had seen in Canvas Town. He was wearing the faded red coat he had worn on Monday when the soldiers had carried Pickett’s body away. He was playing a jig on a penny whistle with his hat on the ground before him. Beside him was a boy with a tray of raw meat at his feet. Flies buzzed above the meat.

‘Mr Savill! This way, sir.’

Major Marryot was standing by the wicket set in the main gate of the barrack yard, waving his cane to attract my attention.

‘Cutlets and fricassees, chops and casseroles,’ shrieked the boy, his high voice cutting through the noise of the crowd. ‘Fresh goat, tender and sweet.’

I glanced in the lad’s direction. He was a mulatto with skin the colour of dark honey. The crowd shifted and the boy vanished.

‘We are pressed for time, Mr Savill,’ Marryot called, and he rapped the gate with his cane.

The sergeant of the guard ticked off my name on a list pinned to the guardroom door. Marryot took me through to a little parlour with a view of the gallows behind the barracks. The noise of the crowd was still audible.

‘They won’t see anything, you know,’ Marryot said testily as we were walking along, slapping his boot with his cane. It was as if he took the crowd as a personal insult. ‘This is a military hanging – an entirely private affair. But still those damnable jackals gather outside the gates.’

The Provost Marshal, a red-faced Irishman, was already standing at the open window and calling instructions to his subordinates. The scaffold had been built out from the main building, to which it was linked at first-floor level by a wooden bridge. He acknowledged us with the most cursory of bows.

‘He won’t need that long a drop,’ he shouted to the sergeant who was arranging matters on the scaffold.

No one spoke after that. The Provost Marshal stayed by the window. Even at this hour there was a sour tang of brandy about him. Marryot sucked his teeth and scowled at the floor. I put my hands in my pockets and leaned against the wall, pretending an ease I did not feel.

My fingers felt the outlines of something small and hard-edged in the right-hand pocket. It was the ivory die I had found on Pickett’s body. A gentleman’s die on a gentleman’s corpse. I took it out and rolled it on my palm. A three.

Townley entered, with Noak like a terrier at his heels. ‘Good day to you all, gentlemen – we are not come too late, I hope?’

‘Damned incompetent fools,’ the Provost Marshal said to the world at large. ‘They cannot even manage to hang a rogue without assistance.’

Somewhere a bell chimed the hour. Townley pulled out his watch and compared it with the clock on the wall.

‘They’re late,’ Marryot said. ‘Devilish unkind to the prisoner.’

The miserable, waiting silence embraced us once again. Noak consulted his pocketbook, turning the pages rapidly. Townley massaged his nose, applying pressure to the left side as if trying to push it so it would stand at a right angle to the rest of his face rather than a few degrees out of true.

I stared out of the window at the gallows. It consisted of a crossbeam supported by an upright post at either end. Three black chains hung from the crossbeam.

At last, at eight minutes past eight, the door re-opened. One by one, half a dozen men emerged on to the scaffold. First came the Provost Marshal’s sergeant, strutting like a cock in his own barnyard. He was followed by two soldiers with the condemned man shuffling between them. Next came a youthful parson, whose limbs seemed too long for his body and not entirely under their owner’s control. Another soldier brought up the rear with a canvas bag swinging from his hand.

Marryot removed his hat. The other gentlemen followed suit.

‘It is quite a military affair, as you see,’ Townley observed to me in a low voice, fanning himself with his hat. ‘The army usually handles this unpleasant necessity for us – the Commandant prefers it so. Of course, the Provost Marshal has everything to hand here, so it is convenient for everyone. He is unhappily obliged to oversee a great many executions – he is responsible for our rebel prisoners of war, you apprehend.’

Virgil’s arms were bound together in front of him and his ankles were shackled with a chain. Once they reached the scaffold, his escort pushed him directly under the crossbeam. The soldiers released his arms, though they stayed close to him.

The little slave looked about him, his head turning this way and that. His eyes found the window of the room where the gentlemen were waiting for him to die so that they might have their breakfast. His head became still. He flexed his wrists. His hands flapped and twitched. His lips moved but no sound came from them.

‘Come along, come along,’ the Provost Marshal cried. ‘We don’t have all day.’

Virgil stared at the window.

No one else spoke. I prayed silently, wordlessly and surely meaninglessly: for how could God be here?

The soldier with the bag came forward. The men in the room became still, watching the soldier take out a nightcap from his bag, which he placed on Virgil’s head. With surprising gentleness he drew it down over the negro’s face and patted him on his shoulder as a man touches a nervous horse to reassure him.

No one spoke, either on the scaffold or in the room that overlooked it. The nightcap had transformed Virgil from a person into something not quite human. It stripped the individuality from him. All that was left was a bundle of rags trembling like a shrivelled leaf in a breeze.

The soldier took the rope from the same bag and looped it through the end of the chain. He tied a knot to secure it. He lifted the noose at the other end of the rope, glanced at the Provost Marshal, and then placed the noose on the shoulders of the condemned man. He tightened it and stood to one side.

As if the touch of the noose had been a signal, Virgil cried out ‘God, God, God.’ His voice was muffled and not loud but it scraped against the surface of my mind like a rusty nail. He would not stop. ‘God, God, God.’

The sergeant stepped forward and checked the knots. The clergyman opened his prayer book and began to speak, though his voice was too low to hear what he was saying through the open window. But I knew what the words must be: I am the resurrection and the life.

The slave’s legs gave way. He would have collapsed if the soldiers had not seized him under the arms. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. The parson stood back.

All this time, Virgil was crying, ‘God, God, God.’

The sergeant turned towards the window. The Provost Marshal raised his arm and let it fall. The sergeant stamped twice. An assistant beneath the scaffold released the trap.

‘God, God, God—’

The planks on which Virgil was standing gave way. He vanished into the darkness under the scaffold with a violent clatter. There was an instant of silence, broken by the beat of an invisible drum.

Virgil dangled in the air, his feet kicking. His hands fluttered and then the fingers clenched into fists. He was dancing and twisting on the rope. He tried to raise his hands towards his neck but his arms were bound to his sides at the elbows.

The Provost Marshal leaned on the windowsill. ‘Goddamn it. I told you to make this quick. I have not had my breakfast yet.’

Two hands appeared from the darkness under the scaffold. They gripped the ankles of the hanging man and pulled sharply downwards. A spasm of movement rippled through Virgil’s body. And then at last he was still.

Chapter Fourteen

‘The air is a little cooler, I find,’ Mrs Arabella said. ‘But we rarely sit here in the evening because Mrs Wintour finds it fatiguing to walk so far.’

‘I distinctly felt a draught on my cheek, madam,’ I said. ‘Indeed, it is very pleasant with all the windows open.’

I could hardly believe the banality of my own conversation. For a moment my remark seemed to have stunned the others into silence. Mrs Arabella must have thought me the most pompous fool in creation.

We were sitting in the summerhouse at the bottom of the Wintours’ garden. Mrs Wintour had been too tired to come down for supper. Afterwards, the Judge had suggested that the three of us take our tea in the belvedere.

‘There is a charming westerly prospect of Vauxhall Garden and the grounds of King’s College,’ Mr Wintour had said. ‘One can glimpse the North River beyond. Though of course it will be almost dark by the time we are settled. Still, it will be agreeable to know that the prospect is there, will it not?’

The twilight was already far advanced, though we had not had the candles lit because of the flying insects their flames would attract. The air smelled faintly of lemon juice and vinegar, an agreeable contrast to the stink that pervaded so much of the city.

I turned towards Mr Wintour. ‘I had meant to enquire sooner, sir: is there any news of the goat?’

‘No. I fear the worst. But I have placed an advertisement in the Gazette. Nil desperandum must be our motto in this matter, as well as in our larger concerns.’

I wondered whether to mention the boy who had been selling goat meat outside the barracks before the hanging. It was impossible to be sure, but he might have been the boy whom I had seen with a living goat and the scar-faced negro on the day we had inspected Roger Pickett’s body. But even if it had been—

‘Her milk is much missed, sir,’ Mrs Arabella said, picking up the teapot and breaking my train of thought. ‘If we have lost her, I fear it will be nigh impossible to find another milch goat.’

She was wearing a pale gown that in the fading light made her almost luminous. She refilled my cup. I rose to take it and, in doing so, I felt the warmth radiating from her body and smelled the perfume I remembered from that first evening: otto of roses, mingled with her own peculiar fragrance. As I took the cup and saucer, her finger brushed my hand.

‘No more tea for me, my dear,’ Mr Wintour said, struggling to his feet. ‘I must see how Mrs Wintour does and then I shall retire for the night.’

For a moment we watched the old man picking his way down the path towards the garden door of the house.

Mrs Arabella stirred in her chair, and the wicker creaked beneath her body. ‘Miriam tells me you went to see that man hanged this morning.’

‘Yes, ma’am, I did. A melancholy duty.’

‘Did he confess to the murder in the end?’

‘I believe not.’

‘You would think a man would speak the truth if he knew he was to go before his maker in a few moments.’

‘He may have desired to confess, ma’am. But he was not given an opportunity as far as I know. But forgive me – the subject must be painful to you.’

The wicker creaked again. ‘Yes, of course. Though I barely knew Mr Pickett – but his murder is a terrible thing. Tell me, sir – was it – was it a hard death?’

I stared at her in the gathering dusk. ‘Mr Pickett’s?’

‘No, no – I mean the man who was hanged for the murder.’

‘How can it not have been?’ I said, more sharply than I intended.

‘I spoke without thinking.’ She sounded upset, though there was not enough light for me to read her expression. ‘But – but there must be degrees in these matters, must there not?’

‘It cannot have been easy.’ I remembered Virgil’s clenched fists, the kicking feet and, most vividly of all, the hands that had risen from beneath the scaffold to give the sharp, fatal tug at the slave’s ankles. ‘But it did not take long.’

She sighed. ‘I am glad of that, at least. Of course they do not have feelings as we do.’

‘Who do not?’

‘Negros. They are made of coarser clay. Indeed, many of them are little better than beasts of the field. Most negros have no more idea of true religion or morality than the man in the moon.’

‘I cannot believe that to be true, madam,’ I said. ‘Their situation may be inferior to ours, their education neglected, but one cannot blame them for that. Indeed, if we blame anyone, surely we must blame ourselves for their shortcomings.’

She threw back her head and laughed with such spontaneous merriment that I found myself smiling in sympathy. ‘Oh, you would not say that if you knew them as I do, sir.’

‘But I have encountered many negros in London, freed men, who—’

‘I do not mean all negros, of course,’ she interrupted, ‘or even all slaves, for that matter – for example, I except those like Josiah and Miriam and Abraham – they have lived so long among us as almost to be like us, as far as God permits them to be and allowing for the difference between our station in life and theirs.’

‘They are slaves, then? I did not know.’

‘They are perfectly content in their condition and give us faithful service. Their loyalty is beyond question. Believe me, sir, Josiah would not have his freedom if Mr Wintour offered it him on a silver platter.’

A silence fell between us.

‘Let us talk to something more agreeable,’ she said at length. ‘Your family, perhaps – I’m sure Mrs Savill is counting the days towards your happy return.’ She spoke seriously but there was an edge of mockery to her words that irritated me. ‘And the other evening you told us that you have a daughter, I think?’

‘Yes, ma’am – Elizabeth; she is five years old.’

There was another silence. Then Mrs Arabella said, in a voice barely above a whisper, ‘It cannot have been easy to leave her and to come all this way. And even worse for her, of course, to lose her papa.’

The twilight had grown darker. I heard her breathing. How strange, I thought, that she talked of Lizzie missing me, but not Augusta; how strange, and how oddly near the mark.

A door slammed. Both of us sat up sharply. It was as if, I thought later, we had been on the verge of being discovered in some shameful assignation. Miriam was coming down the garden with a lantern in her hand.

‘Good girl,’ Mrs Arabella said. ‘I was about to ring for candles.’

Miriam made her obedience in the doorway. ‘No, ma’am, it’s master. He begs you to join him in the library.’

‘But I thought he had retired.’

‘He came down again, ma’am. Major Marryot’s called.’

‘So late? And why should they want me?’

‘I’m sure I don’t know.’

Mrs Arabella rose to her feet. ‘I suppose I must find out what they want. But do not disturb yourself, Mr Savill. Shall we play backgammon when I come back? I need diversion – I do not feel at all sleepy yet.’