Andrew Pepper - The Revenge of Captain Paine

Just past the junction, their carriage came to a halt and Pyke pulled down the glass and poked his head through the window. Ahead, the street was blocked by a procession of long-horned Spanish cattle heading in the direction of Smithfield. Two young drove-boys, aided by a couple of sheepdogs, were trying to herd the beasts on to one side of the broad thoroughfare, so that traffic could pass on the other side, but their attempts to push and prod the frightened cattle seemed to have the opposite effect, because a breakaway group had split from the main herd and had fanned out across the entire road.

‘Where are the moo-cows going?’ Felix asked.

‘I don’t know. To the slaughterhouse, I suppose,’ Pyke said, not really thinking about his answer.

‘What’s a slaughterhouse?’

‘It’s a place where cows go before they go to heaven,’ Emily interrupted, giving him a sharp stare.

‘Oh.’ Felix continued to look at the cattle.

‘When they arrive, they’re knifed and flayed with a sharp cleaver. Their skins and hides are cut from their bodies and put to one side for the tanners and then the fleshy parts of their bodies, the rump, the loin, the legs and the hindquarters, are sliced up into chunks and finally the rest of the beast, the glands, bones, brains, bladder and hoofs, is scooped up and thrown into a big vat of boiling water.’

Emily stared at him aghast. ‘ Pyke.’ The sharpness of her tone frightened Felix, whose face had turned white. She would blame him if the boy started to weep, Pyke thought, angry at himself that he’d broken the harmony of the moment, even before they’d reached the new house.

Opening the door, he climbed down from the carriage and shouted at the drovers to do their job.

Someone moved behind him, on top of the carriage, but Pyke presumed it was the driver. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a metallic glint as the double-barrelled pistol swung towards him.

The first blast whistled past his head with a sudden whoosh of air, a giant sucking noise, the spent ball-shot peppering the cobblestones. The second blast came even closer, part of the shot ripping his frock-coat at the shoulder. If the masked man had aimed a little lower, Pyke thought grimly, he would now be dead.

Falling to the ground, he looked up at the roof; his would-be assassin had disappeared. Pyke was still on the ground when the vehicle started to roll forward. He realised that the masked man was at the helm, urging the horses to go faster.

Panic tore through Pyke’s stomach. He was on his feet in a matter of seconds and took off after the speeding carriage.

It had started to rain again, the darkening skies suddenly opening, and ahead of him the vehicle appeared as indistinct as the figures in a Turner painting. He tried to run harder. But now the procession of Spanish cattle had come to his rescue. The carriage had been forced to slow down, almost to a standstill, allowing Pyke the chance to close some ground. It was still moving too quickly for Emily and Felix to jump, though, and doing so into a herd of terrified long-horned cattle was all but suicidal. Now only a hundred yards away, Pyke could see that the masked man was attempting to steer a path directly through the stampeding animals. If he had been the target, Pyke thought to himself as he ran, then why didn’t the gunman abandon the vehicle and make his escape on foot? It would surely be easier to lose himself in the rabbit warren of alleyways and courts that criss-crossed the neighbourhood.

Ahead, some of the cattle broke away from the herd and swarmed around the stricken carriage, one of the horses rearing up on its hind legs and nearly toppling it in the process. His arms pumping like pistons on a steam engine, Pyke narrowed the gap to less than fifty yards and started to push his way through the scattered herd, ignoring the fact that one sudden turn of the head could impale him on a set of horns and kill him in a few seconds. The masked man had seen that Pyke was closing and lashed the backs of the two horses with the whip, spurring them on, in spite of the obstacles they faced. The carriage had almost cleared the herd and Pyke knew that if he didn’t make up the ground now, his chances of catching it up were slim. On an empty street, a well-oiled carriage pulled by a couple of powerful mares would be out of his range in a matter of seconds. He could not let this happen. Ignoring a sharp pain in his abdomen and realising too late that one of the cattle’s horns had sliced his stomach, he made a last, desperate lunge for the rear axle of the carriage as it cleared the last of the cows and bolted forward, just out of his reach.

Pyke saw Emily and Felix through the rear window of the vehicle as he fell to the ground.

Amid gusts of wind that nearly picked them up off their feet and rain that lashed the deserted farmyard, turning the already sodden ground into a filthy sponge of mud and faeces, Pyke climbed down from the carriage and waited for Townsend. The November air smelled of wet leaves and a sulphurous fug produced by gases that bubbled up through the mud. With Townsend’s help, Pyke pulled Sir Horsley Rockingham out of the carriage and together they dragged him, trussed and gagged, by his arms and dumped him next to a feeding trough. They had set upon Rockingham as he conducted one of his post-dinner tours of his stables and transported him, by carriage, to a farmyard less than a mile from the edge of his estate. The farmer’s acquiescence had already been bought. It was dark, with no moonlight to guide them, the sky thick with brooding clouds. The yard was quiet apart from some giant hogs that squealed and snorted in a nearby sty. To Pyke, the hogs resembled grotesque wild creatures rather than farm-reared animals.

Bending over the wizened landowner, Pyke removed his gag and waited for a few moments. Rockingham looked up at him, bewildered, as though he had no idea what had happened. His eyes were empty, the colour of dishwater, and a strand of saliva hung from his unshaven chin.

‘I’m only going to ask this question once,’ Pyke said, kneeling over the older man. ‘What have you done with my wife and child?’

Rockingham stared at him, uncomprehending.

‘I said, where are my wife and child?’ Pyke wiped the raindrops from his face and eyes. His greatcoat was already sodden.

‘Your wife and child?’ Rockingham repeated, as though the words made no sense to him.

Pyke hauled him up by the neck, as though he were a rag doll, and forced his head down into the gruel-like liquid in the trough. Counting to five, he pulled his head up and held it just above the slime, while he spat, ‘If I have to, old man, I’ll search every building on your estate and I’ll turn your nice Queen Anne mansion upside down, too.’

The hog’s gruel seemed to have brought Rockingham around because his eyes suddenly looked more focused, as though he understood what was happening to him and indeed who Pyke was. He strained his wrists, which had been bound behind his back by bailing wire, but couldn’t free them. The scum from the trough dripped from his face. ‘I don’t know a thing about your wife and child,’ he whispered, trying to catch his breath.

‘So why did you threaten them?’ Pyke said, close enough to the landowner’s face to lick it.

At the time Pyke interpreted Rockingham’s silence as an admission of culpability, but later he couldn’t help but think that his glazed face held little more than an expression of bewilderment. Even in his damp clothes, he could feel himself sweat. He could smell himself, too. Thrusting the older man’s acorn-like head under the viscous water, he held it there for a little longer.