Andrew Pepper - The Revenge of Captain Paine

‘What do you mean by handsome?’ Red said, his gappy teeth showing behind his lips.

‘Fifty guineas a man.’ With the money he’d made from the deal with Gore, Pyke could easily afford it. Not that Red knew it, but he’d be willing to pay up to ten times that figure.

‘Fifty guineas?’ Red hardly seemed to know what to do. It would take them two or three years to earn that kind of sum.

‘I’d need more than the nine of you, though,’ Pyke said, matter-of-factly. ‘At short notice, how many others do you think you could get?’

Red scratched the stubble on his chin and shrugged. ‘I reckon we could gather up, say, twenty more bodies by the end of tomorrow.’

‘As many as you can get.’

Red seemed surprised. ‘And you’ll pay ’em all fifty guineas? A man like you must have mighty deep pockets, if you don’t mind me sayin’ so.’

‘How I spend my money is my business,’ Pyke said, brusquely. ‘I’ll need you all down at my home near Enfield by Sunday night. I’ll arrange transportation. Two wagons ought to do it. The drivers will know where to go. Just have your men ready and waiting at the Stag in Peterborough by two on Sunday afternoon. Weather permitting, the journey shouldn’t take longer than five hours.’

‘You’re assuming we’ve already agreed to help you.’

Pyke held his gaze. ‘Are you saying you won’t?’

Red looked at the others. ‘There’ll be repercussions. We’ll be hunted down, won’t we?’

‘What if I could guarantee that no one will ever hold you responsible?’

‘An act like you’re planning? They’ll chase you and anyone involved to the ends of the earth.’

‘But as I just said, what if I could guarantee that this wouldn’t happen?’

Red stared at him. ‘And how could you do that?’

‘I’m a resourceful man.’ Pyke shrugged. ‘But I’m also a man of my word and as a man of my word, if I say there will be no repercussions, I’d expect you to believe me.’

Red put the white felt cap back on his head. ‘Reckon you’ve got all the answers, don’t you?’

‘In this instance, yes.’ Pyke saw something in his eyes and added, ‘But you’re still not convinced?’

‘You’re right. I’m torn.’

‘Between?’

‘I’d like to see this gen’leman get what’s coming to him, that’s for certain.’

‘But?’

Red took a slurp of his beer. ‘We like to build things,’ he said, simply. ‘It’s what we do.’

Pyke nodded. ‘Someone I knew who died recently also liked to build things. You’ve never seen anyone with more energy, more passion. He had a vision. He wanted to build a railway that ran from London all the way to York, a cheap, quick form of transportation that would change people’s lives for ever and would last for a hundred years.’ He waited for a few moments and looked into Red’s piercing green eyes. ‘His dream died with him. That railway isn’t going to be built. Greed and self-interest on the part of shareholders and committee members have won the day. You might think what I propose to do is nihilistic..’

Red was frowning. ‘Nihilistic?’

‘Pointless, barbaric even.’

‘And you don’t?’

Pyke thought about Emily and felt his anger return. ‘Sometimes all we’ve got left is the impulse to destroy.’

Red thought about this. ‘You talk about greed and self-interest like they’re wrong but you’re offering to pay us an enormous amount of money.’

‘So?’

‘So maybe there’s a virtue in greed, after all.’

Pyke looked at him and smiled. ‘You could be a philosopher yet.’

‘Does the job pay well?’ Red asked, playfully.

Pyke shrugged. ‘Fifty guineas for a morning’s work isn’t a bad start.’

At dawn on the following Monday morning, the first of a multitude of explosions could be heard in the vicinity of the town of Bishop’s Stortford in Hertfordshire. It was a loud blast that woke up many of the town’s residents and was quickly followed by further explosions detonated at intervals of approximately five hundred yards along the railway line. Similar blasts were heard in the vicinity of Hertford, Ware, Hoddesdon, Broxbourne, Waltham Cross, Edmonton, Ponders End, Angel Road, Tottenham Hale, Lea Bridge and Stratford. Initially, once the acrid plumes of black smoke had cleared, those who chose to investigate the blasts reached the same conclusion: that some kind of terrible accident had befallen the fledgling railway and that stores of black powder used by the navvies to blast their way through rocky impediments had spontaneously combusted. But it was only later, when the subcontractors responsible for overseeing the work at different points along the line inspected the terrible damage, that it dawned on people that the railway had been victim to a series of co-ordinated attacks: carefully planned explosions that had decimated much or all of the track already laid and created blast craters as deep as six feet along every part of the line.

At first light that same morning, thirty-six men, each one responsible for a mile of the thirty-six miles of track already completed or under construction, had moved along the railway line from Bishop’s Stortford in the north to Stratford in the south, lighting and setting off pre-prepared, carefully positioned charges along the way. In order to prepare for this, Pyke had broken into a storage warehouse belonging to a contractor working for the Birmingham railway — hoping Gore would later appreciate the irony — and loaded up his carriage with more than a ton of black powder. Having transported this material back to Hambledon, he had then set about assembling a hundred or so explosive devices. To do this, he had poured equal measures of the powder into already prepared parchment tubes and, employing a design associated with a Cornish-man, William Bickford, had made a safety fuse for each tube by carefully wrapping strands of jute around a core of powder and coating it with varnish. To detonate the powder all the navvies had to do was light the end of the fuse and move on to the next device.

Under Red’s command, it had taken the crew of navvies less than fifteen minutes to set off a total of one hundred and thirty-seven explosive devices: the sheer extent of the devastation caused would not become apparent until later. No lives were lost and none of the navvies was injured while trying to set off the parchment tubes. Bickford’s fuse had been an unqualified success.

On that morning, aided by Townsend, Pyke had ridden between the warehouses and storage barns utilised by the various subcontactors charged with the task of building different sections of the railway line and set light to them with rags doused in lamp oil. In all, they razed four large warehouses and eighteen smaller barns to the ground during the course of the morning.

At the same time in London, the crew of boys Godfrey employed to distribute his weekly unstamped newspaper, the Scourge, passed out more than ten thousand printed handbills announcing that Captain Paine had just declared war on the tyrants and devil-capitalists of the ruling class and stating that the action taken against the Grand Northern Railway, in retaliation for the deaths of three navvies in Huntingdon earlier in the autumn, would be just the start of a vicious campaign waged by the working poor up and down the country in support of a more equitable distribution of wealth. Pyke, who had overseen the contents of the handbill, signed off with the line: ‘The whole commercial system needs to be smashed and nothing short of revolution will produce a corrective’. Pyke had found it scribbled in one of Emily’s diaries.

Once the initial shock had subsided, representatives from Grand Northern ventured out to inspect the damage and discovered it to be even worse than they had feared. Whole sections of the completed or half-completed track lay in ruins, the iron rails torn apart and bent jagged by the blast and the wooden sleepers utterly obliterated; blast craters deep and wide enough to accommodate ten men punctuated the entire line at regular intervals of a few hundred yards; and in many cases the various embankments and cuttings, which had taken months if not years to forge, had been damaged beyond recognition. Surveyors and engineers who inspected the devastation informally told the subcontractors and representatives from the railway that the cost of repairing and replacing the damaged track might exceed half a million pounds.