‘As a young man, I passed several months there.’ Wintour clicked his fingers. ‘But let us have a game. What shall it be, sir? Cards? Backgammon? We can play by the fire – they will bring us up another bottle and we shall be famously snug.’
We were drinking an old madeira, pale and golden like watery sunlight. Mr Wintour had put aside a few bottles until the end of the war, so he would have a fitting wine with which to drink the King’s health when victory was declared. But his son argued that if they left the wine much longer, it would be spoiled; it would be better to drink it now.
‘Let us make this more interesting,’ he suggested as we were waiting for Josiah to bring up another bottle, and a second one too in case it should be needed. ‘Let us put a trifle on the outcome. I find that a stake concentrates the faculties wonderfully.’
Josiah brought the wine and Captain Wintour shouted at him for forgetting to bring the cards and the backgammon as well. The old man bowed low and said nothing, though I knew as well as he did that he could not have forgotten because he had not been ordered to bring them in the first place.
When the slave returned, Wintour had him set up a little table between us. It had flaps that drew out at either end, and we placed a candle on each of them. The Captain opened the backgammon board and laid out the ebony and ivory counters with trembling fingers. The arrows had been painted a delicate shade of green and they rested on a black ground. The board made a pretty sight in flickering light. It was a handsome set, as good as anything I had seen in London apart from the dice, which were clearly of colonial manufacture, being made of bone and crudely painted.
‘They say this is a game of chance, sir,’ Wintour said, taking up his glass. ‘But that is all stuff and nonsense, is it not? Chance may dictate the fall of the dice but, taken all in all, it’s skill that counts. When I waited for my ship in Quebec, I paid for my dinners with backgammon.’
A counter slipped from his hand. His wine glass tilted. Madeira splashed on to the board and formed a small, glistening puddle in one of its corners.
‘Goddamn it!’ He stared at the board and slowly shook his head.
‘It don’t signify, sir.’ I took out a handkerchief and dabbed at the wine. ‘It is only a drop or two. See – it is gone.’
Wintour stared at the handkerchief. ‘You’ve cut yourself.’
‘What? Where?’
‘Your hand, I apprehend – look at the handkerchief.’
I held the square of cloth to the light of the nearer candle. He was right: the cambric had a reddish tinge resembling blood in one corner. I examined my hand. The skin was unbroken.
‘It must be paint, sir, not blood,’ I said.
‘Very likely,’ Wintour said, losing interest in the matter as swiftly as he had gained it.
I frowned. The ground of the board looked black in the candlelight but it was possible that it was really a very dark red.
He reached for the bottle. ‘Shall we put a guinea on the first game, sir?’
‘Or there might have been blood,’ I said slowly. ‘A spot of blood on the board.’
As I spoke I imagined someone – Mrs Arabella, perhaps – pricking her finger by accident while she was sewing, with the board open before her. Or even suffering an unexpected nosebleed, such as one sometimes had as a result of a heavy cold. A few drops of blood might so easily have fallen on the board and lain there, drying in a moment, and invisible against the dark paint, particularly if the bloodletting had happened in poor light. The madeira had reliquefied the blood, bringing it back to a watery half-life.
‘Well, sir – guinea?’ said Wintour, sharply. ‘I find a little wager lends spice to a game, any game at all. Playing for love is so confoundedly dull.’
I had not played backgammon since my arrival in America. To begin with I found it difficult to concentrate. I lost the first game quite unnecessarily, allowing Wintour to gammon me.
‘We play according to Hoyle’s rules, do we not?’ he said, almost crowing with triumph. ‘If I remember rightly that means we double the stake. And therefore we triple it for a backgammon.’
I nodded, though I could not recall that the chapter on backgammon in Mr Hoyle’s book said anything about wagers at all, only a great deal on the mathematical probabilities of chance in relation to two six-sided dice.
Wintour paused to drink a toast to Dea Fortuna. He refilled his glass while I set the thirty men back on the board. By the time the first bottle of madeira was empty, he owed me eleven guineas.
‘Double or quits?’ he cried, as he set the pieces for the next game. ‘What do you say?’ He placed his bets with a sort of wild enthusiasm that rode roughshod over mere calculation.
There was a tap on the door and Miriam slipped into the room. She walked almost silently towards Wintour and stood by his chair, her head bowed and her hands clasped tightly together in front of her as if holding a secret.
‘Well, sir? Double or quits?’
‘If you wish, sir.’ I made up my mind that, if I lost, this must be the last game.
I smelled a hint of Mrs Arabella’s perfume in the air, clinging to the maid’s dress or her hands. I looked up at Miriam and saw the whites of her eyes flickering in the shadows behind her master’s chair. She was a comely young woman, in her way. She turned her head away from me.
Wintour set down the last of the counters and sat back. ‘What is it, girl?’
‘If it please your honour, mistress begs the favour of a word with you.’
‘Can’t you see I’m engaged? Tell her I’ll wait on her when I’m at leisure.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Her head still bowed, Miriam glided away.
My fingers slipped as if of their own accord into my waistcoat pocket. I touched the die I had found with Pickett’s body. The practice was on the verge of becoming habitual with me: like touching a rabbit’s foot for luck.
‘They pester me at all hours,’ Wintour complained as the door closed. His consonants were blurring now; the vowels slopped to and fro like water in a pail. ‘My father, my wife, my mother. Can they not understand that I need tranquillity above all if I am ever to recover my health? Your glass, sir – let us have a toast before we play: to the absence of women.’
He drank his glass in one and seemed not to notice that I did not do the same. We played the game, and he lost; so we played another, and another, and a fourth; and each time he lost.
I proposed that we call a halt, but Wintour demanded a chance to make good his losses.
‘I’m a little fatigued, sir. Besides, should we not cast our accounts?’
‘You sound like a damned clerk, man.’ He laughed. ‘But I suppose that’s what you are, sir – no offence, none in the world: I suppose a gentleman may hold a pen in an office, if he wishes, rather than a sword on a battlefield.’
He had kept a note of what he lost, scrawling the figures in pencil. He screwed up his face and blinked rapidly, holding the paper up to the candle. His lips moved silently as he totted up the figures.
‘Seventy guineas or thereabouts,’ he said at last. ‘Good God, how it creeps up on a man. Oblige me, sir – cast your eye over it. I never had much skill at reckoning.’
I glanced at the paper, reading the figures with difficulty. I already knew it must be nearer eighty guineas. ‘Let us call it seventy, sir,’ I said. ‘I prefer round numbers.’
‘Very well,’ he said with a gracious wave of his hand. ‘I’d give you the money this instant, if I could, sir, if it weren’t for those damned tight-purses. Damn them, eh?