Andrew Pepper - The Revenge of Captain Paine

They were very quiet in the carriage as it crossed over on to Fenchurch Street, the noise of horses’ hoofs clattering against cobblestones somehow amplified by the silence that grew between them.

Earlier in the day, Emily had made arrangements to show Pyke the row of terraced houses on Granby Street where Horace Groat employed up to a hundred children, some as young as six, to stitch together boots and shoes in near-darkness, working them for fifteen or sixteen hours and paying them as little as a shilling a day.

‘You lied to me,’ Emily said, eventually, in a menacing tone.

‘It didn’t seem important.’

Emily nodded, as though she’d expected him to say this. ‘If it wasn’t important, why go to the effort of lying?’

‘Because I didn’t want you to think what you’re no doubt already thinking.’

‘And what am I no doubt thinking?’ This time there was a trace of real anger in her voice.

Pyke stared out of the window, not wanting to answer her question.

‘We went to her house. All of us. Felix, too. And you didn’t think it necessary to let me know she was an old friend?’

‘She was an acquaintance, not a friend.’

‘I don’t care what she was,’ Emily shouted. ‘But you deliberately kept something from me.’ Before he had a chance to respond, she had thought of something else. ‘What am I? Stupid? Am I supposed to believe that her arrival in our neck of the woods is just a coincidence?’

‘I had nothing to do with that. I was as surprised as you were.’

‘But you went to see her without letting me know. After Morris had died.’

‘I had some pressing business, relating to a loan Morris has taken out, to discuss with her.’

‘ Business.’ Emily shook her head. ‘So how well were the two of you acquainted?’

‘We knew some of the same people.’

‘Did you fuck?’ The word sounded even more shocking coming from her mouth.

‘No.’ The lie was more instinctive than anything else.

‘Did you want to fuck her?’ Emily asked, not changing her tone. ‘After all, she’s a very beautiful woman.’

This time he looked directly at her. ‘I don’t expect you to tell me about all the men you find attractive. I just expect you not to act on your impulses.’

‘ My impulses? Why is this suddenly all about me? You were the one who lied to me, Pyke.’

He fell silent, knowing he was beaten.

But Emily hadn’t quite finished. ‘I take it you haven’t yet acted on your impulses.’

She waited for a moment. ‘Yet.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Now she’s a widow and doubtless a very rich one at that…’

‘You’re a very rich woman, too,’ Pyke said, gently. ‘And you’re the one I chose to marry.’

‘Except she’s more beautiful than me, isn’t she?’

‘She’s a peacock. All feathers and plumage.’

Emily’s scowl started to crack. ‘If she’s a peacock, what am I, then?’

‘You’re my very own bird of prey.’

‘And that’s supposed to make me feel better? Being compared to a buzzard?’

‘In a fight, who would you put your money on? A peacock or a buzzard?’

‘So now you expect the two of us to fight for you?’ A small smile appeared on her lips.

Pyke edged towards her and kissed her gently on the cheek. ‘Of course, if you did fight, you’d win by a mile.’

Emily punched him on the arm. ‘You’d better believe it, sir.’ But she still wasn’t mollified. Pyke could tell that he was a very long way from being let off by his wife.

In the first room, once the drab, mildewed parlour of a private dwelling, he counted twenty children, all under ten years old, hunched over their work, either cutting out pieces of material for the lining or sole or stitching the lining and sole together. Each child sat on a wooden stool, a candle burning on the floor by their feet to guide their work. Emily and Pyke watched them from the doorway, noting their emaciated hands and dead stares, and listened for any signs of the master who lived upstairs and apparently ruled with an iron fist. Their guide, a mute, cadaverous man of fifty with a limp and two tufts of hair sprouting from an otherwise bald head, waved them into the next room, where the ceilings were so low Pyke could not stand straight. It was a smaller room but it housed the same number of children, all occupied with similarly numbing tasks. The first thing Pyke noticed was the near-total silence — no one uttered a word and the only sounds were the occasional coughing fit and shouting from the street outside. The second thing he noticed was the concentration fixed on their faces. There were other things he would remember later on — the icy temperature, the choking air, the eye-watering stench of overcooked food, and the dirt-encrusted walls and ceilings — but what stood out most of all was the atmosphere of fear, which assumed an almost tangible presence. The silence and the concentration were the undoubted products of the master’s reign of terror. Pyke had tried to talk to one of the youngest, a boy barely older than Felix, but his efforts to strike up a conversation had come to nothing. The boy had been too terrified to speak.

Outside, Emily said, ‘There are ten houses on this side of the street, all owned by Groat. That’s ten houses with as many as twenty young children crammed into each of the rooms. Four hundred children. Upstairs belongs to the masters. They rule their houses with an iron fist. You saw how frightened the children were.’ She shook her head. ‘All of this means that Groat can sell his shoes for sixpence a pair and still make a tidy profit. People want cheap shoes, after all. Everyone suffers apart from Groat and his henchmen. Most of all the children, but also the shoe-and bootmakers who can’t compete with Groat’s prices. And the shoes people buy fall apart within a few months because the children who make them haven’t been properly apprenticed.’

The odour of fried fish was pungent in the stiff breeze. ‘Where do all the children come from?’

‘Workhouses, the street, orphanages.’ Emily’s eyes were blazing. ‘It’s a profitable business, the trade in children. Groat might have paid a few pounds for each of those kids. That’s a few pounds multiplied by four hundred.’ She pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders. ‘Government legislation forces people into workhouses, workhouses then farm those same people off to middlemen because they can’t afford to feed and clothe them and the middlemen sell them on to private enterprises like Groat’s for profit. It’s all part of the same grubby system.’

And banks like Blackwoods’ lent sweaters like Groat the money to start up their businesses in the first place, Pyke thought grimly.

‘So what is it you’re trying to do here?’

Emily looked up at the terrace and said, ‘A year ago, when I was still a member of the Society of Women, I would have said lobby government to change the legislation and raise money for charities working to help the poor and dispossessed.’

‘And now?’

At the end of the terrace, someone had daubed the words ‘Captain Paine’ in white paint on one of the gable-ends. Emily pointed to it and shrugged. ‘If a Liberal government has allied itself with the Malthusians who want to turn the country into a workhouse, what hope is there?’

Pyke could hear the ire in her voice. For some reason, he hadn’t noticed it before, at least not to the extent he did now. ‘So what’s changed?’

‘I’ve woken up. Others, too. Paine said as much forty years ago and we thanked him by forcing him out of the country.’

‘Said what?’

‘Give a man or a band of men too much power, too much money, and the liberty of the nation is threatened.’