Andrew Pepper - Bloody Winter

Knox felt another spike of anger. ‘You prayed? You think God — if there is a God — is listening? Folk are dying out there in their thousands. If God cares so much, why doesn’t he do something about it? I don’t need your prayers.’ Disgusted, Knox looked across at his father. ‘You knew about this, didn’t you? That she’d given birth to Moore’s bastard. And yet you went ahead and married her.’

But Martin Knox didn’t say a word. Instead his mother rose and moved into the space between them. ‘Michael, I’m begging you, please go. I’ll meet you in a day or two, we can talk then, I’ll tell you everything…’

Knox stared at his father. The man’s lips were dry and flaky, and his eyes were empty. There was something else, something they knew, his mother and father, something they’d both wanted to keep from him.

Knox turned back to her, afraid now. ‘He was here, wasn’t he? John Johns. He came to see you.’ The reality of what he’d done — striking his mother — was starting to sink in and Knox knew he was capable of worse, knew it because it ran in his blood.

‘I told him he couldn’t stay.’

‘He’s your son; he came to you in his hour of need. And what did you do? You turned your back on him, just like you turned your back on me.’

‘ NOOOO.’

They stopped and stared at Peter, who had bellowed this, the loudest sound Knox had ever heard coming from the lad’s lips.

Sarah Knox gathered him up into her arms and held him. ‘Whether you can understand or not, Michael, I did what I did, I made the choices I made, to ensure this one would have a roof over his head.’

‘What did Johns want? Why did he come here? It has something to do with the man who died, doesn’t it? Did Johns kill him?’

‘I don’t know, Michael. Please, I can’t do this. Not now. Not like this.’

‘Well, does he look like me?’

That drew the first sound from his father’s lips. It came out like a strangled laugh. For the first time, Knox saw there were tears flowing down his cheeks too.

He had a terrible sense of foreboding.

‘What is it you’re not telling me?’ Knox looked first at his mother, and then at his father. ‘This is me you’re talking to, Mam. If you turn your back on me again, I’ll walk out of that door and never come back. Is that what you really want?’

‘I don’t know what I want any more.’ This time, she shouted, her face red and blotchy. ‘I want what’s best for everyone but I know I can’t have that.’

His father turned and withdrew into the bedroom. His mother went to follow him but Knox grabbed her wrist.

‘You don’t understand. I need to talk to him…’

Sarah Knox managed to free herself from his clutch. When Knox joined her in the bedroom his father was sitting on the edge of the bed, weeping. Knox tried to summon pity for the man but he couldn’t. He thought about all the times his father had beaten him, with a leather strap, with a cane, with his fists.

‘I’m not your real father,’ the man said listlessly. ‘Moore is.’

His mother had collapsed on the bed and was weeping. Somewhere in the other room, Peter was screaming. Numb, Knox looked between his mother and father, still trying to assimilate what his father had said. His father, who wasn’t his father. The truth of it was beginning to dawn: why his father had always hated him, the living embodiment of his wife’s infidelities.

His mother was still sobbing and was trying to catch hold of his father’s hand. ‘All this time you knew?’ she kept saying.

‘Is it true?’ Knox felt dizzy, the room spinning around him. ‘Is it true, Mam?’ he whispered.

She stared at him, her hands cradling Martin Knox’s almost unrecognisable face. Knox tried to digest what he’d been told, the fact that his mother had never told his father that Knox wasn’t his, that she’d kept this from him and believed — wrongly, as it turned out — that the man was unaware of Knox’s real parentage. That she’d continued the affair with the father of her first child after their marriage.

Sickened, bewildered, Knox lurched towards the door.

Outside, he felt a blast of cold air against his face. He stumbled down the steps, looked around him and started to run, with no idea of where he was going. He ran until his lungs gave up and he fell down on to the muddy ground.

THE EARLY HOURS OF MONDAY, 14 DECEMBER 1846

Merthyr Tydfil, Wales

Pyke had seen the men guarding the front gate before but he had thought nothing of it. Now, though, he knew why they were there. The Hancocks hadn’t decamped to Hampshire to mourn William’s death. They had never left their fortress, and if Pyke had pushed on into the Castle, after finding Cathy’s body, he would also have found father and son hiding away in their dusty rooms. As before, he approached the Castle from the mountain. There were no lights burning in any of the windows but this didn’t mean the Castle was deserted. The shutters and curtains were thick enough to block out the light from a few candles. Aided by the moonlight, Pyke moved down the slope, oblivious to the cold and the discomfort of his wound, and found the entrance that Cathy had shown him at the back of the building.

His thoughts turned to finding Cathy’s corpse in the dank passageway, a lump of waxy flesh. What had gone through her mind, he wondered, as she had drawn the razor across her wrists? The fact that her son had died? The guilt at the part she might have played in his death? And would he move her now that he knew the full story?

Now he was there, Pyke questioned again why he had come back. What good could he do? Except it wasn’t a question of righting wrongs, he told himself. He needed to know what had happened to Felix. It was as simple as that. Pyke had no illusions any more about the law or his role in trying to enforce it.

The interior of the Castle was cold and draughty: a fire would create smoke, would let people see that the building was occupied. He slipped quietly along the polished wooden floors from drawing to dining room. The rooms were all deserted. No sounds anywhere in the building, just the wind howling outside. He moved towards the staircase and ascended, one step at a time, careful not to make any noise. At the top of the stairs, he looked along the landing and decided to try Jonah Hancock’s room first.

The hinges groaned as he opened the door but Pyke needn’t have worried. Jonah Hancock was lying, fully clothed, face down on his bed, an empty bottle of gin next to him. Pyke prodded him and the ironmaster grunted once but didn’t come around.

Looking at him, Pyke felt a twinge of something, sympathy perhaps. Whatever else the man had done, he had lost his son, and Pyke knew well enough the utter desolation he must be feeling. To have something, someone, you loved snatched away from you — Jonah Hancock knew what that felt like, the hole it left.

At the far end of the passage, Pyke tried the door to Zephaniah Hancock’s bedroom. Despite the lateness of the hour he found the old man lying in bed reading a book, a pair of spectacles perched on the bridge of his nose. As soon as he saw who it was, Zephaniah let the book fall to his lap and fumbled for something under the sheets.

Before he could retrieve his pistol, Pyke hit the old man on the mouth, heard his jaw snap.

‘When did you find out that the child wasn’t Jonah’s?’ While he waited for Zephaniah to recover, he inspected the pistol. It was loaded and ready to fire.

The answer had come to Pyke almost as soon as he’d found out that Zephaniah had ordered the assassination of the Irishman up on the mountain. Everything had followed from this simple truth: the child wasn’t Jonah’s, so Zephaniah, who had never much cared for the boy and who had another heir waiting in the wings, had devised a scheme to turn Cathy’s kidnap plot to his own advantage.