Andrew Pepper - The Revenge of Captain Paine

It wasn’t difficult for Pyke to see why a struggling actor and a lowly kitchen hand might have been suitably tempted by Godfrey’s initial payment to take further risks, but he found her insistence that it was Johnny, rather than her, who had pushed the issue harder to swallow. But then Kate’s story took an unexpected twist, one that partly explained the show Pyke had seen at the penny gaff in Lambeth, and left him wondering why the royal comptroller hadn’t yet been dismissed from his position and arrested for high treason.

It had started earlier in the summer while the royal party had been living at ‘home’ in Kensington Palace. One of Kate’s tasks had been to deliver the princess’s lunch to her at midday and one day, early in July, a Monday or a Tuesday, she had witnessed something she wasn’t meant to, something she could not explain. Unbeknown to him, Kate had seen Sir John Conroy surreptitiously emptying a few drops of clear liquid from a bottle into the princess’s lunch. After this incident a pattern had developed. She would carry the princess’s food on a tray from the kitchen as far as the stairs, whereupon Conroy would intercept her and insist upon taking it up to the princess herself. This had lasted for at least a couple of weeks.

Pyke could only imagine how the notion that the comptroller was trying to poison the princess might have terrified the kitchen hand, especially as the princess’s health did start to deteriorate rapidly throughout the rest of the summer and at the start of the autumn. Motivated by a fear that Victoria might perish, and that she would be blamed for holding something back, Kate told her only friend in the palace what she’d seen. Helen Milner-Gibson initially treated Kate’s story with scepticism but took steps to warn the princess’s governess, the formidable Baroness Lehzen, who in turn made certain that Conroy never got his hands on her charge’s food again. But the princess’s illness, thought to be a bilious fever, had worsened throughout the autumn, to the point where their week-long stay in Ramsgate became a two-month sojourn, with the young princess too weak to travel back to London.

Despite her lowly status, Kate had travelled with the royal party to the south coast at Lehzen’s insistence, in order to work in the hotel’s kitchen and oversee the preparation of the princess’s food.

But Kate had also told her betrothed, Johnny Evans, about what she had seen and, apparently, the scent of fresh scandal and the possibility of using the information to make more money had sent the struggling actor into a frenzy. Pursuing his own agenda, he’d set to work trying to dig up some background information and had been told about a rumour, circulating a few years earlier, that the Duke of Cumberland had once tried to murder the young princess by introducing arsenic into her bread and milk. Unaware of the fact that Cumberland and Conroy despised each other, Johnny had concocted a scenario in which both men were conspiring to kill the princess. This had formed the basis of the show he’d put together and which Pyke had seen performed at the penny gaff. But Johnny still needed some hard evidence if he was going to sell this new story to Godfrey, and tried to pester Kate into snooping around Conroy’s private quarters. By her account, Kate had refused to do so, but before the royal party left for Ramsgate Johnny had badgered her to such an extent that she ended up providing him with enough information that he could plan his own raid on the empty palace.

According to her, Kate had played no further part in Johnny’s successful burglary of Conroy’s private quarters and she didn’t find out, until later, that he had taken a cracksman called Hayes along with him and that the two of them had found a way of breaking into Conroy’s safe. The first she knew that something was amiss was Conroy’s fury when he’d discovered his safe had been burgled, and his belief that the burglary had been assisted by someone from within the palace. During their stay at Ramsgate, he had begun a witch-hunt, trying to find out who’d helped the thieves break into the palace in the first place. About the same time, Johnny had shown up at the Albion hotel, apparently flush with his own success. The problem was that he couldn’t read and therefore left the letters he’d stolen from Conroy’s safe with Kate for her to peruse. But Johnny hadn’t been able to keep quiet about the burglary and word had quickly got back to Conroy that a certain ‘gentleman’ staying at an inn on the seafront had been boasting about his exploits. It was also reported that this same man had been seen in the company of one of the royal party. Once this rumour had begun to spread around the hotel, Kate fled, taking with her the letters, first to try to find Johnny and when she couldn’t find him, seeking refuge in an abandoned cottage she had previously noticed on her clifftop walks. Only Helen Milner-Gibson had been told of her whereabouts and she had been sworn to the strictest secrecy. Kate had sought sanctuary in the cottage, where she had spent the time reading and rereading the letters while trying to determine what to do, and how to extricate herself from the mess she had, partly, landed herself in.

‘You hoped it might all go away if you hid out here for long enough?’ Pyke asked, gently.

Kate gave him a desperate nod.

‘But it hasn’t gone away, has it? If anything it’s got worse.’ Pyke pulled his coat more tightly around his body and asked, ‘Do you think they found Johnny here in Ramsgate or followed him back to London?’

‘I don’t know. I never saw him again.’

‘And he had no idea what had actually been written in the letters?’

That drew a jaundiced laugh. ‘Johnny liked to think of himself as an actor but he couldn’t read or write.’ Pyke told her about the show he’d seen at the penny gaff and she shook her head, adding, ‘Doesn’t mean he actually wrote anything down: he probably just told folk what to say or do.’ Then, remembering something she’d meant to say earlier, she continued, ‘Of course, not knowing what he’d stumbled on didn’t stop him from passing word to the Duke of Cumberland, accusing him of trying to kill Victoria and saying that he had physical evidence — letters — to support his claim. Johnny told about me this, the last time we spoke here in Ramsgate. Apparently he’d demanded a thousand pounds from the duke in return for his silence.’

This got Pyke’s attention. His pulse quickened and his mouth dried up. ‘So what you’re saying is that Johnny’s disappearance, and his death, might have been the work of Cumberland or Conroy?’

Kate shrugged and said she had no idea. She didn’t even know whether he’d made it back to London, as he’d told her he was planning to.

Worried, Pyke turned this new information over in his mind. Up until then, he had assumed that Johnny’s murder and beheading had been carried out on Conroy’s behalf by Jimmy Trotter and the body dumped in the river near Huntingdon. But what if this wasn’t the case? What if Trotter had, indeed, committed this dastardly act, but on Cumberland’s orders? Cumberland, who’d subsequently orchestrated the kidnapping of Pyke’s pregnant wife and son…

At least Pyke now knew how Cumberland had first been alerted to the existence of the letters.

Another even more unpalatable thought crossed his mind. Indeed, it was something that had been bothering him ever since he had first received the ransom demand and then discovered that Cumberland had left for the Continent. What if the kidnapping had not, in fact, been planned and overseen by the duke? What if someone else had perpetrated it and tried to pass it off as Cumberland’s work in order to shield themselves from Pyke’s vengeance? Pyke had told Conroy about the duke’s interest in the letters. What if the comptroller had orchestrated the abduction and somehow managed to procure Cumberland’s seal in order to shift blame on to the duke? That might also explain why it had taken a full five days for the ransom note to reach Hambledon. Conroy had been waiting for the duke to leave the country; otherwise Pyke would have found a way of talking to him and would have found out that the duke had had nothing to do with the kidnapping. This was only conjecture, of course, but it made a certain amount of sense. And it raised the spectre of other, even more disturbing possibilities. For wasn’t Conroy an associate of Sir Henry Bellows and wasn’t Bellows in charge of a crackdown against leading London radicals, of which Emily was most definitely one?