Andrew Pepper - The Revenge of Captain Paine

‘You’ll catch a terrible chill out here, m’boy. Won’t you come inside with me and dry off, have a whisky?’

Pyke turned to his uncle and said, ‘I need to find my son.’

‘Of course.’ Godfrey nodded. ‘Is there anything at all I can do?’

‘I want you to go and visit a man called Fitzroy Tilling. I’ll give you the address. Tell him I need an audience with Peel and the prime minister, Viscount Melbourne, the day after tomorrow. Make it clear that if I don’t get what I’ve asked for, I’ll make public information that will threaten the orderly succession of Princess Victoria to the throne and raise the spectre of a Cumberland monarchy. Oh, and insist that Sir John Conroy is forced to attend the meeting, as well.’

Godfrey stared at him, seemingly not knowing what to say or even where to start. ‘You have the letters?’

‘One day I’ll tell you the whole story.’

His uncle nodded. It would have to be enough for the moment. Wet and dejected, he turned and began to trudge back towards the hall.

The venue chosen for the hastily arranged meeting was Lansdowne House, as coincidence would have it a Palladian mansion on the south side of Berkeley Square, just a few doors from the house that Pyke had rented. The third Marquess of Lansdowne was the Lord President of the Council in Melbourne’s cabinet, and Pyke had heard that the marquess sometimes hosted cabinet meetings in his stately home. Pyke viewed the arrivals from his window, and it was only when Peel and Conroy had been deposited at the front steps by their respective carriages that he made the short journey across the square and presented himself at the door. He was ushered into the entrance hall, an elegant room with a marble floor, a carved ceiling and columns leading to the stairs. Having left his coat with the butler, who he then followed into the drawing room, he was announced to Melbourne, Peel and Conroy, who sat in grim-faced silence. Fitzroy Tilling hovered unobtrusively by the door.

‘What in God’s name is this all about, Pyke…’ Peel stood up to confront him, his eyes blazing with indignation.

Viscount Melbourne had a high forehead partly covered with curly greying hair that extended seamlessly down his long, angular face into bushy sideburns, a beak-like nose and a cleft chin. His demeanour seemed dour and melancholic, as though he wanted neither to be there in the room nor, indeed, to be prime minister, and contrasted with Peel’s brusque energy.

Conroy sat to one side and said nothing. His face didn’t move when he saw Pyke, nor did his expression give anything away.

‘Gentlemen,’ Pyke said, ignoring Peel’s question and choosing to stand rather than sit down in the armchair they had prepared for him, ‘I know you’re busy and I won’t keep you any longer than I have to.’

But they had all come. That was the most important thing. It showed they took his threat seriously.

Pyke took out both letters and held them up. Still Conroy’s expression remained opaque. ‘These are copies of letters written by the Duchess of Kent to Sir John Conroy.’ With a theatrical flourish he pointed at the comptroller. ‘I’ll read these, if I may.’ Pausing to clear his throat, Pyke presented the evidence that damned Conroy and, by association, the young princess.

After he had finished both letters and returned them to his pocket, Pyke looked up. Peel and the prime minister had gone very still. The two politicians exchanged a nervous look.

‘So?’ Conroy smoothed back his silver hair and coiled the end of his moustache. ‘It doesn’t prove anything. There’s not one scrap of hard evidence that says I’m the girl’s father.’

‘You don’t deny the letter was written by the duchess, then?’

The comptroller stared at the mantelpiece, not dignifying Pyke with a response.

Pyke glanced over at Tilling. ‘Two days ago my wife was assassinated by a man called Jake Bolter at Smithfield.’ He saw the shock register on Tilling’s face. ‘One of the assassin’s aims was to secure the safe return of the letters I just read out to you. The other was to kill my wife and me.’

The ransom demand Pyke had received apparently from the Duke of Cumberland had in fact been sent by Sir John Conroy, doubtless with the blessing of both Bellows and Gore. Conroy had waited for Cumberland to depart for Berlin before finally dispatching the note so that Pyke would have no way of finding out from the duke himself whether he really had kidnapped Emily or Felix. As someone with many contacts in royal circles, he had clearly been able to procure Cumberland’s seal, and by implicating the duke, Conroy had saved himself from Pyke’s wrath in the immediate aftermath of the kidnapping. If all had gone to plan, Conroy would have got his letters back and Pyke would now be dead. Unfortunately for the comptroller neither of these things had come to pass.

The prime minister’s frown deepened. ‘Why in God’s name would anyone want to kill your wife?’

‘Because, Prime Minister, she was the radical figure otherwise known as Captain Paine, and her money was being used to try and unionise the navvies working to build the Birmingham railway.’

Peel swapped a brief glance with Tilling. It told Pyke that he had already been told about this development. But Melbourne seemed utterly flummoxed and said, ‘I’m sorry, sir, but you’ve lost me. How is any of this related to the letters you just read out?’

Pyke apologised for the confusion and said it would maybe be best if he explained everything in full. Melbourne nodded in agreement. Pyke walked over to the fireplace and tried to clear his mind. He still didn’t have the complete picture and he had to be careful about what he said about Peel’s involvement, how much he wanted to implicate the Tory leader. But he knew enough to be able to guess the rest. He waited until he had their full attention before he started.

‘About ten months ago, Abraham Gore, the chairman of the Birmingham railway, first came upon rumours that radicals planned to try and persuade the navvies employed to build his railway, and also the Grand Northern, to take their union oaths. Fearing that this would absolutely retard the progress of his railway, Gore decided to act and, in doing so, pursue measures that would both thwart the radicals’ plans and damage the prospects of the Grand Northern. But Gore had to tread very carefully. As someone who was well respected in the business world and a close friend of Edward James Morris, the chairman of the Grand Northern, he needed to shield himself from all repercussions that might arise from his actions. In other words, what he needed was someone to blame if things blew up in his face: someone who was violently opposed to the progress of the Grand Northern for his own reasons. This man was Sir Horsley Rockingham, a Huntingdon landowner who’d campaigned against the Grand Northern from the moment he had first heard that it would pass across his land. From the outset, it had been Gore’s intention to set up Rockingham to take the blame, if and when his action against the navvies in Huntingdon threatened to unravel out of control. To do this, Gore needed a go-between; someone he could rely on to cajole and prod Rockingham in the “right” direction. He selected someone by the name of Jake Bolter, an ex-soldier who had once served in the same regiment that Rockingham was affiliated to and who had been willing to trade his loyalty to his regiment for large sums of money. In the meantime, Bolter requisitioned the help of a ruffian called Jimmy Trotter, someone he’d met in his former lodging house and a man with even fewer moral scruples than himself.’

Pyke didn’t tell them about his own association with Abraham Gore and Gore’s attempts to implicate Rockingham in his eyes. The anonymous letter alerting him to the landowner’s presence in the capital was part of this strategy. That and having Bolter meet Rockingham and show him around. Pyke thought about Gore’s unswerving insistence that Morris would never have taken his own life and his suggestion that Bolter may have had something to do with Morris’s death, and wondered what he should make of these claims in the light of what he’d discovered about Gore.