Andrew Pepper - The Revenge of Captain Paine

The winter that year was the coldest anyone could remember since the Thames had frozen over and Pyke and Maggie Shaw still believed the world held out possibilities for them. Pyke didn’t see any more of her after walking away from her with Felix, and he heard later she had sold the estate and moved back to France, where she’d married into the aristocracy.

The furore unleashed by Pyke’s actions towards both the Grand Northern and the entire financial system started to abate only once the prime minister, Viscount Melbourne, announced a series of measures, including a substantial investment of government money, to bail out shareholders and prop up the ailing company while the damage was assessed. Surveyors reported that the devastation caused by the blasts would cost the best part of two hundred thousand pounds to rectify. The Grand Northern was eventually taken over by one of its competitors, the Northern and Eastern, but even with a new board in place and bolstered by new sources of capital, the first trains didn’t run on its tracks for another two years, and even then the fledgling railway terminated at Bishop’s Stortford rather than Cambridge. Morris’s railway, which was to have stretched one hundred and eight miles from London to York, had barely limped over the Middlesex border into Hertfordshire. To no one’s surprise, the Birmingham railway fared much better; the first section was completed by the end of the following year and at an official ceremony to mark the opening of the line between Camden Town and Boxmoor, a memorial was unveiled to commemorate the sudden demise of its founder and chairman, Abraham Gore, who, according to the plaque, had died from an unspecified illness some time in the previous winter. Nonetheless, the railway fever that had gripped the country for the middle years of the 1830s ran out of steam, perhaps as a result of the losses investors had incurred during what become known as the ‘Grand Northern debacle’, and as the economy slowed and then slipped into recession, only a handful of new railways were proposed and built in the final years of the decade.

Pyke’s war against the railway had resulted in many casualties but intervention on the part of Melbourne’s government had propped up the share price to the extent that the losses suffered by ordinary investors were, on the whole, small.

Once the navvies had been paid, Pyke and Red had parted on good terms and, just as Pyke had promised, no one was ever arrested or charged for the devastating attacks on the railway tracks and the subcontractor’s warehouses. The sudden, brief rise of Captain Paine lit the fuse for some radical activity in the capital and its outlying areas but he was quickly forgotten about, or rather passed into folklore. For a while afterwards, Pyke heard different versions of the ballad of Captain Paine being sung in the streets and in pubs, and he always found that its lilting melody and plaintive words brought a welcome lump to his throat. But radical activity didn’t peter out after Emily’s and Jackman’s deaths. Quite the opposite, in fact. In London, a plethora of Jacobin associations based on the Wat Tyler Brigade were established, particularly in the East End, trade unions saw their numbers leap, and agitation for political and workplace reform eventually resulted in the establishment of a set of demands put forward by a new movement whose advocates became known as Chartists. Pyke followed these developments with interest but played no part in furthering their cause; and no one ever found out that Captain Paine had been a woman. The Duke of Cumberland also never found out how close he had come to seizing the British throne and when, two years later, and just a few months after she had come of age, Victoria became queen, Cumberland was crowned King of Hanover, where, under Salic law, a female ruler was not permitted. Though Pyke had had no further contact with the princess, he had been interested to learn that one of her first acts as queen was to banish Conroy and her mother from the court for ever. Pyke saw Kate and Milly Sutton a few times after they’d returned to London. At Princess Victoria’s insistence, a good job was found for Kate in the King’s Palace and she was able to support herself and her sister from what she made. In the short time she’d stayed at Hambledon, Milly had developed a fierce attachment to Pyke, and it was only after he had promised to visit them regularly in their new quarters that Milly had agreed to go with her sister.

In order to smooth things over with Ned Villums, Pyke paid a visit to his associate Barnaby Hodges at his gaming house on Regent Street and told him about the money Jem Nash had blackmailed from Morris and which could be retrieved from beneath the floorboards of Nash’s lodgings in Fulham. Pyke’s former colleague and henchman, Townsend, died that winter, too. Pyke paid for his funeral and made sure that the grave was adorned with a headstone bearing his name and dates. He didn’t know anyone else at the funeral and left without introducing himself. On his way back to Hambledon, Pyke thought about his association with Townsend and wondered why, though they had known each other for fifteen years, they had never been friends.

During that first winter after Emily’s death, Pyke took long walks with Felix and Copper in the grounds of the estate and spent time in the field where she had been buried, a picturesque spot in the shadow of oak and sycamore trees. It was only during those months that Pyke felt he got to know his son for the first time, what he thought and felt about the world, and it relieved him to discover that a keen, unsentimental intelligence lay behind his frail appearance. One night, soon after the servants’ return to the hall, Felix had complained of hearing noises coming from somewhere below him and, though Pyke knew for a fact they couldn’t have been made by Gore, he paid one final visit to the tomb he had built deep under the cellar, only to be greeted by a long, sombre silence. That night he, too, had heard the voices, and for a while he truly believed that the banker’s ghost had returned to haunt him. After that, Pyke encouraged Copper to sleep on the floor beside Felix’s bed, and soon after that the lad and the slobbering mastiff were inseparable. It never ceased to amaze Felix how a dog as large as Copper could walk and even run using only three good legs.

Taking a rest from his business, Godfrey often stayed with them at the old hall and entertained them with gruesome stories of criminal wrongdoing. He would tell the stories in such a way that, by the end, even Felix and Jo were cheering for those who faced the scaffold. Though he knew that Emily wouldn’t have approved, Pyke felt it was somehow still appropriate. By the time spring finally came, the once plentiful wine cellar had been nearly depleted.

But those first few months after Emily’s death were also the worst of times. After Felix and the servants had retired to bed, Pyke would roam the dark passageways of the old hall with only his memories and laudanum to comfort him. Unable to sleep, he would pass silently through the house, trying to remember happier times: when he’d first met her, in the drawing room as she had played the piano, apparently unimpressed by his appearance; when she’d risked her own life to help him escape from the condemned block at Newgate; and the first time they had kissed, though now he couldn’t remember where it had been. He remembered their marriage, an intimate affair in which her desire to keep her family name had been matched by his desire not to reveal his first name to her. He also remembered their arguments, but even these brought him some comfort. Emily had always been as obstinate as him. It was what people loved about her. Her passion lit her up from the inside and made people want to know her. Her passion, her grace, her playfulness and her intelligence. Shortly after her death, Pyke had given up the house in Berkeley Square a full eleven and a half months before the lease was due to expire. Emily hadn’t known the house and he wouldn’t have felt right about moving there. In fact, spending time alone in the old hall finally taught Pyke to appreciate it and, in a cruel twist, it was only once he had started to feel at home there for the first time that a lawsuit was brought against him by a distant relative of Emily’s father, claiming that now Emily had died, the estate and its title should revert back to him. Pyke instructed the best solicitors in London and spent tens of thousands of pounds fighting the case, but even a year later the matter had still not been resolved.