Andrew Pepper - Kill-Devil and Water

Later that night, after Jo and Felix had cooked him a roast beef dinner, and Pyke had read Felix a chapter of Ivanhoe while Jo cleared the table, Pyke joined Jo in the kitchen and helped her wash the dishes.

‘That was a delicious meal,’ he said, taking a wet pan from her and drying it with a cloth. ‘Thank you.’ Godfrey employed a maid to clean the apartment but Jo hadn’t wanted to burden her with additional work.

‘I think Felix enjoyed himself.’

Pyke waited until Jo turned to hand him one of the pots and said, ‘And you?’

‘I had a good time, too.’ He had expected her to be flustered but she held his gaze and even smiled.

Pyke had once tried to kiss Jo, many years earlier, when she had been Emily’s servant and before he and Emily had married. Then his act had been foolish and impetuous, the product of his arrogance and loneliness, and she had rightly run away from him, though he suspected she had never told Emily.

‘For a while, after Emily died, and we still lived in the old hall, we were happy, weren’t we, just the three of us?’

‘And the servants.’

Pyke couldn’t help but smile. He had never liked the servants, the ones who’d revered Emily’s late father. He had never treated Jo as a servant, though. Not consciously, at least, and especially not after Emily’s death.

‘I thought about that time while I was in prison. It’s funny, you don’t realise something for what it is until it’s gone.’ He’d had a glass or two of wine with dinner and felt a little light headed.

Jo put down the glass she was washing and turned to face him. ‘I could see the problems you were getting yourself into, with the Chancery case and then some of the business ventures. You were reckless and you almost seemed to have given up. I didn’t say anything at the time, I didn’t speak my mind, and I’ve regretted it ever since. I still regret not being more of a support to you.’

For a moment Pyke was surprised by her boldness.

‘I don’t blame you for holding your tongue. In the mood I was in, if you’d tried to say anything to me, I would probably have dismissed you on the spot.’

He’d meant it as a joke but realised, too late, that he’d reminded her of the social gap that existed between them — and perhaps always would.

When she didn’t reply, he smiled and added, ‘I didn’t mean anything by that. I’m just a boy from the rookery.’

But whatever had been lingering in the air between them evaporated in that moment and Jo’s manner suddenly became more formal. ‘Please forgive me for speaking so bluntly to you,’ she said, stiffly.

‘Jo, I like it when you speak to me that way. I welcome it. Let’s go through to the front room and have another glass of wine.’

‘I’d like to,’ she said, not meeting his eyes, ‘but I have an early start tomorrow and I’ll need a clear head for it.’

It took Pyke almost two hours to travel down to Richmond by hackney coach and by the time he was dropped off on the green, the clouds had cleared and the sky was an unbroken vista of varnished blue. Now they were ten miles out of the city, the air felt clean and birds darted among the oak and birch trees that lined the green. A butcher’s boy carrying a tray of meat directed him towards the Alefounder residence, an impressive Palladian mansion on the east side of the green surrounded by an iron fence. By the front gate, a weeping willow had just blossomed and the air was perfumed with a scent that reminded him of a woman he’d once known.

Pyke found Harriet Alefounder tending to her flowers in a greenhouse at the back of the main house. She was a tall, distinguished woman, perhaps a couple of years older than her husband, her greying hair concealed under a straw bonnet. Her gaunt shoulders were covered by a woollen shawl and she was wearing gardening gloves. When Pyke explained why he was there — that he was investigating the ‘unexplained’ deaths of two women and needed to talk to her about her husband — he expected her to call out to her butler and have him removed from the property. But instead she took off her bonnet, rearranged her hair, which had been tied up in a knot, and said that in that case they had better retire inside where they would be more comfortable. As they made their way from the greenhouse to the doors at the rear of the house she added, ‘You have to understand my husband isn’t a bad man,’ as though such an explanation were necessary. And then, ‘Of course, you know that William and I no longer live under the same roof.’ Pyke hadn’t known this but nodded as though he did and followed her into the house.

Given what Pyke had already been told about Alefounder’s roving eye, his wife’s story was, in one sense, entirely without surprises. He’d had a string of affairs in their nineteen-year marriage and she, for the most part, had either turned a blind eye or allowed him to do what he needed to do, apparently secure in the belief that he loved her and would never leave her. This proved to be true until he met a woman called Elizabeth Malvern. The wife explained that she hadn’t known about the affair at the time and had only found out about it when William asked her for a divorce.

Until this point in her story, Alefounder’s wife hadn’t struck Pyke as a particularly bitter or spiteful person, but when she started to talk about the affair, and about the other woman — the harlot as she called her — her whole demeanour changed and the reason why she’d agreed to talk to him became apparent. She was angry and wanted the chance to vent her spleen. Pyke could well understand the source of this bitterness — her husband’s head suddenly being turned by a younger, prettier, flirtatious rival — and he was surprised to learn that Alefounder had, in the end, agreed to end the affair and return home. Their domestic life was good after that, she explained, for another year or so, and as far as she knew, he hadn’t tried to continue seeing ‘the Malvern harlot’. Everything was fine, until the most recent trip to Jamaica — apparently he undertook these annually to arrange the purchase and shipment of sugar directly from the plantations. When he returned, his whole manner had changed. He was cold, moody and distant, she explained, and refused to talk about the problem. This continued for a number of months and things had finally come to a head within the last month. Without explanation, he had moved out of the house, taking an apartment in the city, and then had demanded a divorce, which she’d refused to give him. That conversation, the last time they’d spoken, had taken place about three weeks earlier. But Harriet Alefounder’s story had one final twist.

Hurt, angry and bewildered, she had followed him in a carriage from his place of work to an apartment on The Strand. After waiting for a period of time, she followed him into the building. She’d found his apartment easily enough. All she had to do was ask one of the other residents. At the door she’d listened and heard a female voice laughing. It was the laughing which had cut her the deepest, she explained. She had paced up and down the pavement outside the apartment building for the rest of the evening. Eventually the front door opened, and that was when she saw them, arm in arm: her husband and a pretty mulatto girl. She’d fled The Strand without being spotted.

Outwardly Pyke tried to remain calm, but inwardly his heart was hammering against his ribcage. This was the confirmation he’d been looking for and it had come from the unlikeliest of sources. Of course, it didn’t prove anything more than that Alefounder had been sleeping with Mary Edgar, and perhaps had been since his last visit to Jamaica, but it gave Pyke enough to warrant another conversation with the trader.