Marryot snorted. ‘Ha! I wager his loyalty has cost him a fortune. It is curious, is it not? All our refugees claim to have been as rich as Croesus before the war. It’s as if gold grew on the very trees here.’
I took a step into the room. ‘It should not be difficult to establish Mr Pickett’s situation, sir. Judge Wintour says he was acquainted with his daughter-in-law, Mrs Arabella.’
‘What?’ Marryot said. ‘What? No one told me that.’
Townley frowned. ‘Acquainted? How?’
‘Only slightly, I believe.’ I looked from one to the other. ‘It appears that Mrs Arabella’s late father met the man when he was in North Carolina before the war.’
‘Her father? Mr Froude?’ Townley rubbed his beak of a nose. ‘You are full of surprises, sir.’
‘Why did you not tell me earlier?’ Marryot said.
‘I’ve only just found you, sir,’ I pointed out. ‘And I did not hear of Mr Pickett’s visit to Warren Street until this morning – the Judge was with me when Mr Townley’s billet arrived. In any case, even if I had known about it yesterday evening, I could hardly have known its significance since the corpse had not been identified.’
Marryot coloured but did not apologize. ‘Why did Pickett call on them? And when, precisely?’
‘Last Thursday, sir – it was a morning call. He was but recently arrived and he called to renew his acquaintance with them, which I believe was very slight. He did not stay long for both the Judge and Mrs Arabella were obliged to go out.’
‘What did she say of him?’ Townley asked. ‘Mrs Arabella, I mean?’
‘I have not seen her this morning, sir. Indeed, I met her only for a moment last night.’
Townley shrugged. ‘It don’t signify – we shall probably find that Pickett called on everyone he had ever scraped an acquaintance with. All the refugees do that when they first come to New York. What else can the poor devils do? It is a form of genteel beggary.’
Marryot limped over to the table. ‘What have we here?’
‘I believe this to be a list of debts, sir.’ Townley handed him a sheet of paper. ‘Nearly two hundred guineas in all. But we cannot tell who his creditors are. There’s only a single initial beside each figure. Large sums. Guineas and pounds, not shillings and pence.’
‘A gambler,’ Marryot said. ‘What did I tell you?’
I slipped two fingers into my waistcoat pocket and took out the die I had found on Pickett’s body. It was made of ivory, not of bone or wood. A genteel die for a genteel beggar.
Townley smiled at me. ‘You have corroboration in the palm of your hand, I fancy. Faro? Backgammon? Fortunes change hands every night in this city at a throw of the dice.’
‘A man who gambles in Canvas Town is a fool,’ Marryot said.
‘Or desperate for money,’ Townley said. ‘Plenty of men go to Canvas Town after nightfall who would not be seen there in the day. Darkness covers a multitude of sins, does it not? And do you not think that if Pickett could not pay his debts …?’
‘Very likely – but I doubt we’ll ever know.’ Marryot took up another paper. ‘Depend upon it, if we find the murderer at all, we shall find him in Canvas Town.’
‘When did the people of the house last see Mr Pickett?’ I asked.
‘Sunday afternoon,’ Marryot said. ‘He dined at the tavern over the way and came back here to change his shirt. He didn’t stay long – he went out at about five o’clock. That was the last they saw of him. We must trace the next of kin.’
We did not linger in Pickett’s chamber. It was stiflingly hot and so small that the three of us made it unpleasantly crowded. Marryot leafed through the rest of the papers. In a satchel, he found an unfinished and undated letter written in a sprawling, untidy hand.
My dear sister, I am safely arrived in New York from Philadelphia. My design prospers, and I have great hopes that my fortunes will soon
‘His design?’ Townley said. ‘A gambler’s new and quite infallible system, no doubt. The next turn of the cards, the next throw of the dice, and all will be changed.’
‘No indication who the sister is, where she lives,’ Marryot said. ‘Perhaps Mrs Arabella knows.’ He pulled out his watch. ‘We’ve done all we can here. I’ll leave a guard at the door and have the room sealed up.’
‘What other enquiries will you make now, sir?’ I asked.
‘I shall make my report to the Commandant and he will order me to do as he thinks fit. Which may very well be nothing. That would certainly be my advice. We are in the middle of a war, sir, and young men are dying every day. I cannot waste my time on every fool who pays the price for his folly.’
‘Very true, sir,’ Townley put in. ‘In any case, what can one do unless a witness comes forward? And I’m afraid one does not find many public-spirited citizens in Canvas Town.’
‘But is this your usual policy with murder, sir?’ I said to Marryot. ‘You bury the dead and let the perpetrator go free?’
‘May I remind you again, sir? We are at war.’ He limped to the door. ‘The civil population cannot enjoy the same privileges and the same degree of comfort as it does in peacetime. New York looks to the army for its protection, and military objectives are of paramount importance.’
Townley stared at the sloping ceiling. ‘Still,’ he said, ‘I hope that the news of Mr Pickett’s death does not distress the Judge or Mrs Arabella.’
Once again, the blood rushed to Marryot’s face. ‘No, indeed. It is fortunate that the acquaintance was slight.’
There, I thought, my anger subsiding, there is the man’s weak spot: Mrs Arabella Wintour.
Chapter Nine
Shortly after one o’clock, there was an explosion.
It came without warning, an enormous, reverberating crash that swept over the city like an invisible tidal wave. For an instant, silence fell, an auditory equivalent to the trough following the wave.
Time seemed to elongate itself in defiance of the natural laws regulating the universe. I saw Townley’s face in profile beside me, the mouth open, the nose jutting outwards, his features as rigid as if turned to stone. The horses walking and trotting down Broadway stopped moving. Two oxen pulling a wagon not ten yards away might have fallen asleep where they stood. The trees on either side of the avenue were motionless. The leg of a dog lying in the shade of a shop doorway was as stiff as a ramrod now though an instant before it had been a blur as the animal scratched its ribcage.
All this dissolved into a flurry of movement. The nearer of the oxen collided with the trunk of a tree. A horse reared and a Hessian officer tumbled from its saddle. The dog scrambled into the darkness of the shop behind him, its tail between its legs. A plump middle-aged woman fainted. Her maid tried to support her but her mistress’s weight was too heavy for her, and they both fell to the ground.
The sounds were slower to return. They came in scraps and fragments, muffled at first, and accompanied by a ringing in my ears. Townley yelped, ‘Christ!’ A window shattered across the street. Shouts and screams filled the air. Horses neighed. Oxen bellowed.
Several soldiers stumbled down the road at a trot towards Fort George. The middle-aged woman woke up and went into violent hysterics, pummelling the poor maid without mercy. Townley touched my sleeve and pointed over the roofline of the houses on the other side of the street. A feathery column of black smoke was rising into the sky.
‘The