Andrew Pepper - The Revenge of Captain Paine

Their breakfast was interrupted again when Royce suddenly announced they had a visitor, and before Pyke could tell him they weren’t receiving visitors, Reverend Cole had shuffled into the dining room, apologising for his unannounced visit.

Even before the curate had opened his pinched mouth, Pyke knew why the man had come. With Emily’s blessing, Pyke had scrapped the practice of tithing on the estate. None of the farmers who rented their land was compelled to give anything to the church and, as a result, its income had plummeted and the church itself had fallen into disrepair. Pyke couldn’t have cared less whether the building and its congregation sank into a deep bog but the murmurings of discontent among parishioners had reached a new high and various figures had been dispatched to the hall to plead with him for the reintroduction of tithing.

Reverend Cole was an odious creature with sharp, twitching features and ferret-like eyes. His humpback was the most obvious sign of his deformity but rumour had it that his feet were webbed. He was a pompous, self-regarding little man and had made a nasty habit of intruding on them at inconvenient times — deliberately so, Pyke had often thought.

Standing up, Pyke strode across to greet the diminutive curate and put a friendly arm around his shoulder. ‘If you ever show your nasty, rat-like face at this hall without a prior invitation again,’ he whispered, ‘I’ll come down to your church with a blunderbuss and shoot every single one of the stained-glass windows you’re so proud of.’ He gave the terrified man a final squeeze before releasing him. ‘Is that understood?’

Ashen faced, the curate scurried from the room. Pyke looked across at Emily, who had raised her eyebrows.

‘What? I didn’t say anything.’

‘Really? It looked to me like the man had just soiled his undergarments.’

‘I just said I’d be happy to donate some money to the church’s poor fund.’

She gave him a hard look. ‘You’ve got to understand people are a little frightened of you.’

‘Frightened of me?’ Pyke tried to hide his delight at this prospect.

‘Yes.’

He came up behind her and threaded his arm around her neck. ‘I suppose I can be a very frightening person.’ He kissed the whiteness of her neck.

‘The servants, too. Jo tells me these things. ‘ Emily tried to push him away.

‘The servants hate me because I’m not your father.’ Surprised by her reticence, he put on a frown, adding, ‘Are you saying you don’t want to go back up the stairs and have me ravish you all over?’

‘Jo’s only just combed my hair,’ Emily said, laughing. But her arm was peppered with gooseflesh.

‘We could always fuck here on the table but I dread to think what Royce would do if he saw us.’

Emily giggled at this prospect and at Pyke’s crude impression of the elderly butler, and when he next tried to embrace her, she looked around to make certain they were alone before kissing him back. ‘Are you quite sure you’ve got enough powder left in your pistol?’

Pyke gave her a look of mock consternation. ‘Enough to see off an invading army, my dear.’

‘I told you, it’s my lady, not my dear,’ she said, as he carried up her the stairs in his arms.

As Pyke lay in her bed, the air thick with her perfume and his sweat, he closed his eyes and tried to remember when he had last been this happy. Then he recalled his brief conversation with Marguerite and the stranglehold Peel enjoyed over him and he felt his good mood begin to fade.

‘A few weeks ago, you mentioned a meeting you were hoping to attend, bringing together different radical and trade union figures in the capital.’

She looked over at him, surprised. It wasn’t often he asked about her work. ‘What of it?’

‘I was wondering when it was, that’s all.’

‘This Monday.’ Wrinkles furrowed her brow. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘I thought I’d come and support you.’

Emily sat up in the bed. ‘Why? You’ve not shown much interest in what I’ve been doing before.’

Pyke put on a hurt expression. ‘Don’t you want your capitalist husband there? Are you afraid I’ll embarrass you in front of the mysterious Captain Paine?’

‘Who said Captain Paine will be there?’ This time there was a note of suspicion in her voice.

‘So you think he actually exists?’

She gathered the sheet around her and stared out of the window. ‘Where has all this suddenly come from?’

‘I’m just trying to show an interest,’ he said, playing up the hurt.

That seemed to placate her a little. ‘Before the meeting, I have to visit the trustees of an orphanage in Hackney. Would you like to come with me?’

Pyke sank back into the mattress. ‘I was just wondering whether you’ve met him, that’s all.’

‘Have I met Captain Paine?’

‘Yes.’

She didn’t answer him and continued to stare out of the window as though something outside had gripped her attention.

Later that morning, Pyke took Felix for a walk in the grounds of the Hambledon estate. In order to reach the starting point, they took the carriage to the outer fringes of the estate and from there walked briskly across open fields. It was a crisp autumnal day and above them the sky was a vast uninterrupted expanse of blue. Beneath their feet the mud track was hard and the verges were choked with blackberries and nettles.

Pyke had expected his own progeny to be fearless and hardy, rather than the frail specimen scampering along beside him. This frailty did not make him love the little boy any less — he felt a fierce protectiveness towards his son that meant he would do anything in his power to see that the lad came to no harm — but Pyke sometimes wondered how it had happened; how he, of all people, had fathered a child whose arms and legs were as thin as pipe cleaners and who was so prone to illness.

They walked for a while in silence.

‘Nanny Jo read me a story last night but I fell asleep before the end,’ Felix started. ‘It was about a fox and a donkey and a lion.’

Pyke nodded his head. ‘One of Aesop’s fables.’ He racked his brains to remember the story.

‘Do you know what happens in the end?’

‘The one where the donkey, fox and lion go hunting together and the fox makes a pact with the lion to give up the donkey?’

Felix took his hand. ‘I think so.’

‘Well, so the fox persuades the donkey to follow him and arranges that he should fall into a deep pit.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the fox thinks, wrongly as it turns out, he can save himself from the lion by giving up the donkey.’

‘What happens next?’

‘When the donkey has been pushed into the pit, the lion turns on the fox and eats him. Then he eats the donkey.’

Pyke looked down and noticed his son’s terrified expression. ‘So the lion kills the donkey and the fox?’

‘Eats them, too.’ There was no point in sugar-coating the tale.

‘Why?’

‘To teach the fox a lesson.’

‘What lesson?’

‘Don’t trust anyone, especially not your natural enemies.’ Pyke considered this for a moment. ‘It’s a useful lesson for business, too.’

Felix screwed up his tiny face. ‘Is that what you do, Father? Business?’

‘Indeed it is.’ Pyke patted him gently on the head. ‘But if I had been the fox, I wouldn’t have turned my back on the lion.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because you always have to keep those stronger than you in full view.’

Felix thought about this. ‘What if you were the lion?’

‘If I was the lion, I’d make sure I was so fierce that the donkey and the fox would never dare to plot against me.’

‘Why would they try and plot against you?’ Felix seemed confused. ‘What if they were your friends?’