Andrew Pepper - The Revenge of Captain Paine

Pyke looked at her, his mouth open. ‘You mean we’re going to have a baby?’ His voice shook with excitement.

Emily nodded, trembling. ‘The physician came to see me today. He confirmed it. But I’ve suspected it for a while.’

‘That’s wonderful.’ He embraced her with a hug. ‘I can’t believe it. After all these years. It’s really true?’

‘I know it’s time for me to slow down for a while…’ But there was discomfort in her tone.

‘Then why do you sound so unsure?’ Pyke pulled away and looked at her. ‘Come to think of it, why did you put yourself at such risk the other night?’

‘We both need to change, Pyke.’ Her voice turned harder. ‘Both of us, Pyke. That means you, as well as me.’

‘I know. And we can. God, I can’t believe it. We’re really going to have another child.’

Pyke got up, barely able to contain himself. But when he tried to pull Emily up on to her feet she resisted. Smiling, he asked her what the matter was. From beneath the sheets, she told him she was tired. Pyke sensed there was something else on her mind, but when he tried to find out what it was he was rebuffed.

‘We’ll talk tomorrow and over the weekend,’ Emily reassured him.

‘You’ll come and see the house?’

Emily feigned a pout. ‘It doesn’t look as if I have a choice, does it?’

For a while afterwards, Pyke held her in his arms, thinking that even if she hated it, he’d keep her there, if necessary by force, until any threat against her had blown over. Especially now she was expecting his child.

They had travelled from Hambledon — the three of them. The girl, Milly, had been sick in the night and was resting in bed. She still hadn’t uttered a word. If anything, the storm had worsened overnight: the easterly winds had picked up and the rain fell from an overcast sky like spears. It was only as they reached the city that the rain began to ease and the winds lighten, but when Pyke instructed the driver to pull over on Cornhill and told Emily and Felix he had to pick up something from the bank, he still had to run across the street to avoid getting soaked.

Five minutes later, he was crossing the road to rejoin Emily and Felix when he saw a carriage parked behind them. Through the open window the cadaverous face of Sir Horsley Rockingham was just about visible. Closer inspection confirmed this. Diverting his path, Pyke approached the stationary vehicle with caution. As he neared the window, he heard a dog barking and saw that Rockingham was accompanied by Jake Bolter. Pyke came alongside the carriage and peered inside. Rockingham and Bolter both smiled. Pyke was no longer concerned about the rain, which had petered out into a drizzle.

‘Have you been following me?’

Rockingham sat forward, his pale face slick with perspiration. ‘Not so pleasant, is it, eh, boy? When the shoe’s on the other foot.’

Pyke glanced over at Bolter who was patting his mastiff on the head. ‘Is that some kind of threat?’

‘You reckon you can slander me in my own neighbourhood and actually get away with it?’

Pyke met his stare. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ But it struck him that he didn’t even know what Godfrey had written on the handbills he’d dispatched up to Huntingdon and Newmarket.

‘Still, the embarrassment is inconsequential compared to what I’ve got planned for you and your family, boy.’

Pyke held his stare. ‘Did you just threaten my family?’

Rockingham receded a little but remained unapologetic. ‘No more than you did to me.’

‘You come anywhere near my wife or my son and I’ll beat you to death with my bare hands.’

‘See?’ Bolter said, to Rockingham. ‘You’ve rattled him. I told you.’

Rockingham just smirked.

Ignoring him, Pyke turned to Bolter. ‘I know you once roomed at a former crimping house near Cowgate with Jimmy Trotter. Trotter was spotted leaving the scene where an old woman was raped and murdered in Huntingdon: the incident that started the violence in the town. Trotter also killed and beheaded an actor called Johnny and dumped his body in a river outside Huntingdon. I believe you were involved,’ he said, turning his attention back to Rockingham, ‘and acting under this man’s instruction. I also believe you planned the murder of Edward James Morris between you, with the ultimate aim of curtailing the progress of the Grand Northern Railway across your land.’

Pyke didn’t know what kind of a reaction he might provoke. At best, he expected mild indifference and resolute silence. He certainly didn’t expect the older man to turn to Bolter and give him a hard stare. That was it. Afterwards, Bolter banged on the roof of the carriage and the driver took up the reins. The carriage rolled forward and, as it did so, he saw the two men exchange heated words: words that made him wonder about the veracity of the scenario he’d just painted.

Thankfully, when he returned to his own carriage, Emily didn’t ask him who he’d been talking to. He felt himself relax.

The rain had now stopped falling and the pavements had begun to fill up. From the cocoon of their carriage, they were protected from the filth and din of the street, but while, for Pyke, it represented a humdrum scene, the vast, stinking city going about its everyday business, to the uninitiated, like Felix, who had never seen so many people of every class and hue, let alone giant advertising boards, omnibuses creaking under the weight of their passengers, hurdy-gurdy men, organ-grinders with their pet monkeys and buildings so tall and imposing they cast the entire street into shadow, there was almost too much to take in. He sat there in awed silence, his face pressed up against the glass, devouring the sheer spectacle of it. Pyke pointed to a giant board advertising a show that featured giraffes and a dancing bear, and Felix rolled his eyes in fear and amazement. These were creatures that until now had come alive only in the pages of books. He wanted to go and see the animal show until another board proclaimed the wonders of a ten-foot man, and then Felix wanted to see that show instead. Promising to take him on another occasion, Pyke noticed a board advertising Groat’s ‘All-New Retail Emporium’ on the Strand, and wondered whether this had closed its doors. He thought, too, about his own action regarding one of the overseers and compared it with what had been achieved by Captain Paine — and without any loss of life. Groat wouldn’t trade again, Pyke mused, but there were plenty of men like him, just as there were bankers like Gore, and indeed himself, queuing up to lend them money. He wanted to say something to Emily but didn’t want to acknowledge that she had been right. The moment slipped by, unnoticed by her or Felix. Squeezing her hand, he thought about the house and whether she would hate it as much as he feared she might.

They had rattled along Cheapside and, passing St Paul’s on their left, crossed over on to Newgate Street. Pyke put his arm around Felix’s shoulder and wiped the steam from the glass so they could see more clearly. This was the part of the city he had grown up in and he wanted to point out some of its landmarks. But as they clattered past the buckling, squalid buildings and grubby alleyways, he couldn’t think of anything that might interest his son. They passed the place where he had once tended to a dying man, his belly carved open by a hunting knife, while on the other side of the street, in the Black Boar, through a morass of drinkers, he had shot dead a man wanted for killing his own wife. Farther along the street was the ancient prison where he had once been held, awaiting the noose, and from where he’d escaped with Emily’s help, and a few hundred yards along Giltspur Street was the ginnery he’d once owned, where his former mistress had been killed in her sleep. It was near there, too, that as a boy barely older than Felix he had watched helplessly as his own father had been trampled to death under the feet of a terrified mob. These were his landmarks, Pyke mused, and he wanted to share them with his son: he wanted to point to the spot where his father had fallen and say, ‘This is where my childhood ended, at the age of eight.’ But he held his tongue and thought instead about the very different life Felix now led, one where his every need was catered for and his every whim indulged. What kind of man would his son grow up to be?