Andrew Pepper - The Revenge of Captain Paine

Pyke wasn’t sure when he had first become superstitious or even why he allowed such things to unsettle him. He harboured no religious sentiments, choosing instead to put his faith in rational thought and scientific discovery. But still, if a black cat ran out across the street in front of him, he felt somehow reassured, and if he saw one magpie, he would immediately look for another. Mostly he saw his burgeoning superstition in benign terms, as a product of his material well-being. If this was all he had to worry about, then his life must be fine and rosy. Nonetheless Pyke could never quite shake the feeling that he had prospered undeservedly and that everything he’d achieved could just as easily be snatched from him. Within the last year, ravens had taken to nesting in the roof of his bank and he had found their presence oddly comforting. Rationally he knew such thinking was absurd: the presence of a few ugly birds had absolutely no bearing on the realities of his life. But each time he saw a raven out of his window, its black plumage set against the red tiles of the roof, it set his stomach at ease and he felt able to address his problems with renewed vigour.

Having returned to his bank from the Grand Northern’s head offices and a lavish lunch of hot roast beef and plum pudding to officially mark the loan agreement between Blackwood’s and the railway company, he made his way up to his office on the top floor of the building and looked out of the narrow window. There were two ravens perched on the sill.

While the evening newspapers had carried reports of the rioting in Huntingdon, none had mentioned the use of soldiers to quell the disturbances. No mention had been made of any loss of life suffered by the navvies, but one paper in particular had no doubt where the blame lay. It was just as Morris had predicted. ‘ This peaceful market town was thrown into the utmost consternation in consequence of one of those disgraceful outrages taking place amongst the navvymen arising out of an apparent disagreement with the good men of Huntingdon,’ the report had claimed. ‘ They then commenced a bloodthirsty, indiscriminate attack on the town and rioting of such magnitude ensued that special constables had to be sworn in to uphold the peace.’ The blatant untruthfulness of the piece made him want to find the journalist and ram the paper down his throat.

One of the clerks downstairs had told him that Jem Nash was processing bills in the main office, a large room at the back of the building on the floor below him where a hierarchy of rank and seniority determined who sat closest to the fire. But when he looked into the room, past the rows of clerks sitting at individual desks hunched over their ledger books copying invoices or fingering tall stacks of bills payable, he didn’t see his younger assistant. It was barely two in the afternoon and already it seemed dark, the only light in the room produced by individual candles that burned on each of their desks, alongside the inkwells and goose feathers. A year ago, Pyke had tried to introduce oil and gas lamps but the clerks had objected to the foul smell. Aside from the cashiers who manned the tills in the banking hall, the main business of the bank was undertaken in this room, and whereas his partner, William Blackwood, knew all the clerks by name, Pyke didn’t know a soul and found the room sombre and depressing. They hated him and loved Blackwood.

Nash was down a further flight of stairs in the banking hall and greeted Pyke with evident sheepishness. His boyish face was bruised and swollen, a purple welt the size of a grapefruit bulging from his cheek and making it hard for him to see out of one of his eyes. When he saw Pyke, he grinned as though it were of no consequence, and asked him what he wanted.

Pyke told him that Morris was coming in an hour and needed him to witness their signatures.

‘Signatures for what?’

‘A loan.’ Pyke waited, and added, ‘He wants to borrow some money but he wants it to go no farther than the two of us.’

Pyke started to walk away but turned around, anger rising within him like a gusty wind billowing into an unfurled sail.

Eighteen months earlier, Nash had visited Pyke in his office — he was then a lowly clerk at Lister’s, another private bank in the city — with news that his bank was preparing to pass on or rediscount to Blackwood’s some seemingly sound bills of exchange that would quickly become worthless. Needing to bolster their own cash reserves, Lister’s had bought a rediscounted bill that was due to expire in two months; whereupon a Lancashire spinner was due to pay the bill’s bearer twenty-five thousand pounds. Nash had informed him that his superiors were seeking to ‘sell’ on the bill to another bank because they had been told that the spinner was about to go out of business and wouldn’t be able to meet his debt. (In which case, the bank or institution that had last endorsed the bill would be liable for the full debt.) Even then Pyke had been able to smell Nash’s ambition and they struck a deal. If Nash could somehow gain access to the bank’s vault and find a way of smuggling Pyke into the building, he would reward him with a five per cent stake in Blackwood’s. Two months later, Nash had returned with a set of duplicate keys and the following night they had broken into the Lister’s vault. Though bold, sometimes foolhardily so, Nash had little sense of why Pyke had wanted to gain access to the bank’s safe. Certainly he had seemed confused when Pyke had spent much of the night counting money, rifling through bills of exchange and scribbling down information about outstanding loans.

‘You mean we’re not actually going to take a thing?’ Nash had asked, bewildered, doubtless wondering why he’d gone to so much effort to procure wax imprints of the keys they’d needed to gain entry to the vault. He had already started to pack his leather satchel with coins.

‘Why would I risk being caught with a few bags of stolen coins? I could be hung by the neck, and for what? The possibility of making a few hundred pounds.’

‘There must be thousands here, not just a few hundred.’

It had been like watching a starving man enter a patisserie, only to be told that he couldn’t touch a thing.

‘We’re going to put everything back exactly as we found it.’

‘Then why did you make me go to the effort of stealing all those keys?’ That had been further evidence of his petulance, though in fairness Pyke had already decided there was more he liked about Nash than disliked: even then it had felt as if he’d found a man whose ambition, determination, courage and flexible morality reminded Pyke of himself.

‘Because we’re not just going to steal a few coins and some notes,’ Pyke had said. ‘We’re going to steal the whole bank.’

He had enjoyed the younger man’s reaction: the delicious truth finally dawning on him.

Pyke’s inventory of the vault’s contents had confirmed what he had suspected ever since Nash’s initial revelations: Lister’s had borrowed short, lent long (where the money was tied up in speculative investments) and kept too little in reserve.

A month later, and with some help from Pyke, Lister’s closed its doors for the last time. Pyke had picked up the pieces, assimilating what remained of it into Blackwood’s. A week after that, and in spite of concerns about Nash’s inexperience, he’d come good on his promise and offered Nash a small stake in his business.

Still, it was Nash’s gambling, rather than his inexperience, which had caused Pyke most worry and, though he had quickly displayed an acute aptitude for business and had rapidly learnt the rudiments of banking, his recklessness at the roulette tables had earned him an altogether less favourable reputation.

‘So how much did you lose this time?’ Pyke’s booming voice echoed around the hall. They were closed for business but the cashiers were counting up inside their booths.