Andrew Pepper - The Revenge of Captain Paine

Money was the only thing that counted, Pyke told himself. Not honour, not morals, not tradition. Men like Cobb couldn’t feed their families because they had no money, not because they had no honour or morality. Money enabled people to live their lives as they wanted to, not according to the whims of others. Without money there could be no liberty or freedom.

Pyke closed his eyes and tried to clear his mind, but an image of Cobb’s hunched figure and pleading face remained with him for the rest of the day.

There were many different ways to steal from people and many layers to the city’s burgeoning criminal fraternity. At the bottom of the pile were the ferret-eyed pickpockets who trawled the markets, fairs, public houses and crowded pavements for easy marks, and the rampsmen who assaulted people at random with brickbats and cudgels and would kill or maim their victims without any compunction. Then came the mudlarks who scavenged the Thames near the wharves and docks in the East End for items deliberately discarded by their associates who loaded and unloaded the ships. Next were the rushers, who showed up en masse at someone’s front door and forced their way into the home, taking whatever they could and disappearing before the police could be alerted. A little higher up the chain were the receivers and trainers who oversaw gangs of pickpockets from their flash houses and brothels, and the skilled housebreakers who broke into the upper floors of respectable homes and stole cash and jewellery. Near the top of the pile were the so-called cracksmen whose guile and equipment enabled them to break into apparently impregnable safes and strongboxes, and the flash Toms who ran brothels with iron fists and took a cut of all the illegal enterprises on their turf. But right at the top were a handful of figures who presided over a complex network of illicit buyers and sellers and who offered a service that no one else could provide: a way of transforming the proceeds of theft into untraceable notes and coins.

Ned Villums was such a figure, and every Monday afternoon without fail he was ushered up to Pyke’s office, where he would deposit two sacks filled with stolen coins and notes. After they’d talked, Pyke would go downstairs to the vault, withdraw an equivalent sum of money, minus his commission, and return it to Villums.

Pyke had known Villums for a number of years and trusted the man unequivocally. It helped, too, that they both knew what the other was capable of and went out of their way to be fair minded. Pyke had once seen Villums feed a man he’d caught stealing from him to a bear tied up outside his tavern and used for sport.

‘Does anyone else apart from you know about our arrangement?’ Pyke asked him, as he prepared to leave.

That drew a sharp frown. ‘I know the rules as well as you do, Pyke.’ He shook his head, as though irritated he’d been asked the question. ‘Has someone been blabbering?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘But you suspect someone?’

Pyke shook his head. ‘Not at this end.’

‘But you suspect that someone knows? And you’re fishing to see if one of my lads might have talked?’

Pyke shrugged. ‘Is that a possibility?’

‘No.’›

They exchanged a cold stare. ‘Then there’s nothing to worry about.’

‘Good.’ Villums stood up and pulled his short, double-breasted jacket down over his belly. ‘I’ll show myself out.’

‘Ned?’

Villums turned around at the door. ‘Yeah?’

‘Let’s both try and be even more careful in the future.’

Villums left without saying a word. Pyke wondered whether he had unnecessarily antagonised a man with a history of and propensity for violence.

The magistrates’ court at Bow Street was located at the front of a tall, narrow, box-shaped building on the west side of the street, and by the time Pyke had pushed his way through the throng of law clerks, Bow Street Runners and lawyers assembled either on the steps at the front of the building or in the entrance hall and corridors, the hearing was about to start. Formerly the parlour in a private house, the room had long since abandoned any claims to respectability, and now the general air of dreariness, fostered by many years of neglect, had become institutionalised. Pyke knew it well, of course. As a Bow Street Runner, he had proffered testimony on many occasions from the witness stand, and it was the smell of the room, a musty odour of mildew, unwashed clothes, dried sweat and cheap tobacco, which carried him back to an earlier moment in his life. There were still one or two people he recognised from the old days but they either ignored him or refused to meet his stare: back then his reputation meant that few people had been willing to cross him and even fewer had sought him out as a friend or confidant.

Pyke’s uncle, Godfrey, stood alone in the dock, an elevated platform in front of a large mirror with a wooden rail running around it, while the chief magistrate, Sir Henry Bellows, conferred with the man who would be presenting the evidence against Godfrey. The point of the hearing was to determine whether the charges against the accused — in this case, criminal libel and possibly also sedition — merited a trial in a higher court. Once the evidence had been presented by the Crown’s barrister, Godfrey would be allowed to ask questions both about the evidence and the witness statements made against him in the hope of exposing contradictions and lies in the Crown’s case. On the Crown’s part, it was hoped that Godfrey’s testimony might be used against him if the case came to trial.

Wearing a blue, double-breasted Spencer coat with polished brass buttons over a cream embroidered waistcoat and frilly white shirt, his uncle did not look like a common criminal. He greeted Pyke with a hug and took a swig of gin from his flask before casting an eye across the crowded room. ‘A sniff of scandal and the jackals come running. They could have charged on the door and still packed the room three times over.’ He was a tall, broad-shouldered man approaching seventy years old, overweight, with a face as red as a beetroot and a shock of bone-white hair.

Pyke looked at the row of well-fed, smartly attired men sitting alongside Bellows on the bench. ‘Which one is Conroy?’

‘The silver fox with the coiled moustache. The bulldog next to him is his lawyer, Charles Frederick Williams, a King’s bencher no less.’ Godfrey took another swig from his flask and belched. ‘I know this poison will kill me in the end but who would want to live in an age of moral propriety?’ He shook his head with disgust. ‘That’s what I heard someone call it the other day.’

As a much younger man Godfrey had published provocative essays by the likes of Paine and Spence, risking imprisonment to do so, but his political idealism had waned in his middle years and he had found that salacious tales of criminal wrongdoing, sold to the working poor for a penny, were more lucrative than tiresome political pieties. Now in his old age, and with nothing left to lose, Godfrey had again become a thorn in the side of the authorities. A weekly scandal sheet, printed on cheap paper and sold for a penny, exposed the illicit sexual liaisons and misdemeanours of the cream of society, and an unstamped newspaper called the Scourge spread a hotchpotch of radical sentiment, though in Pyke’s view it was often difficult to tell the two publications apart. It was also hard to determine which one enraged the authorities more.

One piece in particular had resulted in the charges being brought against Godfrey. Floridly entitled ‘The Lady and the Scamp’, the article had alleged that Sir John Conroy, comptroller of the Duchess of Kent’s household, had been fucking the widowed duchess for some years. It also accused Conroy of procuring large sums of money from the public to line his own pocket and mismanaging the duchess’s affairs to such an extent she would soon have to be declared bankrupt. The piece had caused quite a stir, both because Conroy enjoyed some important political connections and because the allegations necessarily implicated Princess Victoria, the duchess’s sixteen-year-old daughter and heir to the British throne.