Andrew Pepper - The Revenge of Captain Paine

Perspiring, his thoughts remained with the dead boy. Whose lad was it? From what Marguerite had told him, James, their son, had died ten years ago, and this boy had seemed only a few months older than Felix.

So who was he and why did he bear an uncanny resemblance to Felix? And why had Jake Bolter rather than Morris mourned in this very field alongside Marguerite?

It took Pyke almost two hours to walk back across the fields to Hambledon, and as he approached the old hall from the driveway, he looked up and saw someone scampering to meet him.

Jo was red faced and out of breath by the time she reached him and, not bothering to try to speak, she thrust an official-looking letter into his hand. ‘This was discovered about half an hour ago by Royce. It wasn’t delivered with the rest of the post.’ Pyke had instructed Royce, who usually dealt with the mail, to pass all correspondence unopened to Jo, who would then open it to see whether it carried any news of Emily and Felix.

Jo was staring at the bruises on his face but was too polite, or well trained, to make a comment about them.

Hands shaking, Pyke took the letter and inspected it. There was a red wax seal on the back. Tearing the envelope open, he removed the note and briefly studied its contents.

‘Well?’ Jo asked, unable to contain herself. ‘I was about to open it when I saw you coming up the driveway.’

Too stunned to speak, Pyke folded the letter up, put it in his pocket and started to walk towards the house.

‘What does it say?’ Jo said, persisting. When Pyke didn’t answer her, she added, ‘I don’t know how they know but the whole house is talking about it. Royce, Jennings, Mary, everyone.’

Pyke turned to her, his face suddenly pink with anger. ‘Fuck them. Fuck the lot of them. Fuck them. They’re just worried about their jobs. Fuck them. They’ve always hated me, the lot of ’em.’ He looked up at the old hall and thought about its funereal atmosphere, the creaking floors and draughty rooms. His hands were shaking uncontrollably and a solitary tear trickled down his cheek. If he had his way, he’d torch the building with all of them locked up inside.

‘What’s the matter, Pyke? Is it bad news?’

Jo had been with Emily for almost ten years and was the only one of the staff who addressed them in such a casual manner.

Still in shock, he turned to her. ‘I’d say that Emily and Felix are alive.’ His hands were shaking from the relief.

‘Alive?’

He tapped the letter in his pocket. ‘They’ve been ransomed.’

‘Ransomed? For what?’ She hitched up her skirt and followed Pyke up the drive. ‘By whom?’

‘Not a word of this to any of the servants. Let ’em gossip all they like,’ Pyke said, walking briskly now.

Of all the people who might have had a reason to kidnap Emily and Felix, Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, had been somewhere near the bottom of Pyke’s list. But the letter had been explicit. Pyke’s presence was demanded at Smithfield at dawn on Sunday, where he would give up certain correspondences in exchange for the safe return of his wife and child. Cumberland. Pyke thought about his recent visit to the hall and his ingratiating, unctuous manner. That left him just over two days to find the duke, the letters and perhaps Emily and Felix, too.

The Duke of Cumberland’s residence in Kew was a three-floor, red-brick Georgian mansion on the north side of the green, near the entrance to the botanical gardens. There was a shoulder-high wrought-iron fence running around the perimeter of the property but the gate was unlocked, and when Pyke presented himself at the front door, he was greeted by one of Cumberland’s servants and invited into the hall. Pyke didn’t have a plan beyond confronting the duke, by force if necessary, and wringing the truth out of him. Therefore he was taken aback when the servant informed him in a matter-of-fact voice that the duke had recently left for his family home on the Continent. The man explained that his master had caught an afternoon steamer from Deptford two days earlier and, if the sailing had been a smooth one, he would be docking in Hamburg some time later that evening. From there, the man added, it was a further two hundred miles across country to the duke’s home in Berlin. He gave Pyke this information freely and seemed bemused when Pyke asked him whether Cumberland had left the house in the company of an attractive woman and a small child. No, the servant assured him, the duke had left the house alone. Trying to hide his frustration, Pyke asked when Cumberland was due to return to London. The servant shrugged and said that his master was not expected back at the house until the New Year. Pyke didn’t say anything else to the man but wondered how the duke planned to oversee the exchange of Conroy’s letters for Emily and Felix from the Continent. If the letters had been important enough to kidnap Emily and Felix, why had Cumberland opted to travel to Berlin rather than remain in London for a few extra days?

Pyke was perturbed by this turn of events but didn’t believe the servant was lying. In the drawing room and billiards room, maids were covering the furniture with sheets, as though preparing for the duke’s lengthy absence. Fired up by his frustration, Pyke briefly thought about forcing his way into the rest of the house to check for signs of Emily and Felix, but he knew that if he did the servant would call for help, and instinct told him that he wouldn’t find anything.

What if Cumberland had told his servants he was leaving for the Continent but, in fact, was holed up somewhere in London waiting for the letters?

But when Pyke enquired after Cumberland at his apartments in St James’s Palace, he was told exactly the same thing: the duke had left two days earlier for Berlin and wasn’t expected back in England until the New Year. There, too, the housemaids appeared to be preparing the rooms for a lengthy hiatus, and while Pyke felt like ramming the barrel of his pistol down the footman’s throat, he knew it wouldn’t achieve anything. The man didn’t appear to be covering up for the duke or, indeed, seem to know anything about Emily and Felix and their possible whereabouts.

Pyke had reached another dead end and, as he trudged despondently back to his carriage, he turned over what he had found out in his mind, trying to figure out whether he had missed something important.

Perhaps Cumberland had entrusted someone else with the task of bringing Emily and Felix to Smithfield at dawn on Sunday. In which case Emily and Felix were being held somewhere in the capital and Cumberland’s apparent return to Berlin was some kind of diversionary tactic. A visit to the Admiralty in St James’s confirmed what Pyke already knew: that the journey from Dover to Calais and on to Berlin via Brussels and Cologne would take a minimum of three days. When Pyke had first heard that Cumberland had fled to the Continent, he had briefly considered pursuing him, but if he did so, he would miss the rendezvous at Smithfield on Sunday. Quickly he ruled out this option. He could always make the long journey to Berlin if, or when, nothing came of his encounter at Smithfield.

It was four in the afternoon on Thursday and the autumnal light was already fading. It hadn’t snowed but the temperature was hovering just above or below freezing, and men wearing warm coats and stovepipe hats hurried out of buildings to their waiting carriages. The once gleaming Portland stone of the Admiralty building had new turned a dirty, yellow colour, and farther along Whitehall the grand buildings of state — the Houses of Parliament, Downing Street, the King’s Palace and the new clubs of Pall Mall, where politicians and their peers socialised with their own — stood impervious against the shrill winds gusting off the river. But Pyke wasn’t concerned by the sudden cold snap. With his hands in his pockets, he wandered along Whitehall, turning over what he had learnt and wondering whether Cumberland really had kidnapped his wife and child. Certainly, if he believed, as he seemed to, that Pyke had come into possession of Conroy’s letters, he had a sufficient motive, and the letter delivered to Hambledon undoubtedly bore the duke’s private seal, which would have been impossible to forge and which therefore confirmed the duke’s culpability.