Bloody Winter: A Pyke Mystery

by Andrew Pepper

  Peter knew how to talk but he rarely, if ever, spoke. Instead he would coo and murmur and gargle and their mother would interpret for him. This time he was silent and, having let go of Knox’s midriff, he retreated back to his chair next to the fire. Knox thought about his other brother, Matthew, big as an ox, a labourer on the estate like their father, and wondered how they had all turned out so different. He tried to push from his mind thoughts about his brothers and the guilt he hadn’t made more of an effort to get to know them. He had his own family to worry about now.

  ‘So did his Lordship give you any reason for this unexpected turn of events?’ he asked.

  ‘He told me that it was a reward for loyalty.’ His mother looked approvingly around the room. ‘Your father did a little jig when he saw the bed next door. He’s never even slept on a mattress before.’

  Knox hadn’t seen his father in more than three months and he wondered whether his mother knew that he tried to time his visits to Dundrum to avoid having to converse with the man. He knew it was cowardly, simply avoiding his father, but he hadn’t been able to put memories of his youth out of his head, times when his father would return home drunk and full of rage and take it out on him with a leather strap. It had always been a surprise to him that the man treated Peter and Matthew with affection and Knox had never been able to reconcile this difference; the coldness of the man towards him with the warmth of his dealings with his younger children. It had bothered Knox for a long time – bothered him more than he had ever admitted to anyone, even his wife – but now too much water had passed under that particular bridge.

  ‘Is that all Cornwallis said?’

  His mother went over to join Peter by the fire. She patted the lad’s head and smiled as his neck and back arched towards her, like a cat wanting to be stroked. Finally she turned back towards Knox. ‘If truth be told, I got the feeling that it had something to do with you.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘The agent said something about his Lordship being … pleased with you. I didn’t ask what he meant.’

  ‘And he didn’t say anything else?’

  ‘I can’t remember. I was excited. He just said you were a good fellow. And loyal. He called you loyal.’

  Knox looked around the large, well-appointed room. It was dry, clean and warm – the kind of place in which his mother had always dreamt of living. And it would be a better home for Peter. ‘I’m pleased for you, Mam.’ Knox tried to smile. ‘You deserve something good for a change.’

  She gave him another hug and showed him around the rest of the cottage. Afterwards, she prepared a meal of corn, and while he ate, she told him what Matthew had been doing. Matthew was seventeen, only two years older than Peter. Knox had never asked why there had been such an age gap between him and his brothers but suspected it had something to do with their father’s drinking. He had never understood why his mother hadn’t walked out on his father; why she had remained loyal to him even when he vented his anger by striking her with his fists.

  Knox scooped out the last of the corn with his finger. ‘Cornwallis may be our friend today but what happens if he turns against us tomorrow?’

  His mother put her hands into her apron. ‘Why would he turn against us?’ A note of caution entered her voice.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  But Knox had never been able to hide anything from her. When she sat down on the bench next to him and pulled his face towards her, he tried to look away.

  ‘Why, son?’

  ‘Why do you think? He’s a vain, capricious man who does things arbitrarily to suit his whims.’

  ‘He’d have to have a reason to turn against us, Michael.’

  ‘He’s cruel, Mam. He likes to hurt people.’

  ‘Don’t talk nonsense. He’s been good to us, hasn’t he?’

  Knox thought about his investigation. ‘But for how long?’

  His mother stared at him and sighed. ‘I can see you’re thinking about this errand his Lordship has given you. You think all of this is an inducement not to rock the boat.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  Knox could see the confusion in her eyes but this time he waited for her to speak. ‘I always brought you up to do the right thing so I can hardly ask you to do any different now.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘Look.’ She pointed at Peter, curled up on the chair next to the fire. ‘What would happen to him if we were evicted from this place? If your father and brother lost their jobs on the estate? If I were dismissed from my position?’

  ‘I’ll be careful, Mam. You don’t have to worry about that.’

  This didn’t seem to settle her. ‘It’s not you I’m worried about.’ Her gaze drifted across to Peter.

  Knox didn’t really consider himself to be Protestant, even though his mother and especially his father had brought him up to fear God and Catholics; to fear Catholics more than God. It had always felt odd, and not a little false, to hate in such an indiscriminating way, for there were many more Catholics than Protestants in Tipperary, and Knox had always tried to judge people according to their merits. These days, he couldn’t say with any certainty that he hadn’t been attracted to Martha precisely because she was Catholic; because she stood for everything he had been warned against. It helped that Martha was as unkind about Rome as he was about the Church of Ireland. But even though they had been married for five years, it sometimes struck him that neither of them had fully escaped their childhood indoctrination. In arguments, he always saw himself as the rational one; felt that her positions were oblique and hard to fathom. Only when he thought about it did he realise that Protestant ministers had always said the same thing about Catholic doctrine. Sometimes he wondered how she saw him. He knew she found him too literal-minded at times. ‘Why is the wafer only ever just a wafer to you,’ she would say during arguments. With this attitude came a kind of dogmatism; Knox often had trouble seeing things from a different perspective. He lacked imagination, though Martha always said he retained the ability to empathise with others. But when you believed so ardently in the rightness of your views, it was hard to compromise, even if someone like his mother wanted him to look the other way. Perhaps, he decided, it was simply pig-headedness: the one thing he had inherited from his father.

  In the village, he entered the taproom of the New Forge Inn and wiped his boots on the mat. The New Forge was the only place that offered accommodation and it had been closed on his previous visit. He approached the counter and asked the pot-boy to fetch the landlord. While he waited, Knox noted the clumps of sawdust on the wooden floor and the black tallow rings on the low ceiling. When the landlord finally appeared, he was a man of about forty with dark black hair, a stocky figure with a pockmarked face. He addressed Knox in English.

  Knox took out the copperplate and placed it on the counter. ‘D’you recognise him? I’m wondering if he took a room here some time last week.’

  The landlord peered down at the image.

  ‘This would have been on Saturday or Sunday night,’ Knox added.

  ‘Aye.’ The landlord shot him a wary look.

  ‘You recognise him?’

  ‘I think so.’ He had another look at the copperplate. ‘I was wondering when he’d be back or someone would come asking for him.’

  ‘You rented him a room?’ Knox felt his heart skip a beat. He hadn’t expected his intuition to be right.

  ‘He turned up on Saturday night and paid in coin for a week.’

  Knox tried to rein in his excitement. ‘Did he tell you his name? Where he was from?’

  ‘I couldn’t place his accent. But he wasn’t from here. At a guess, I’d say he was an Englishman.’

  Knox nodded, already wondering what he would do with this new information. ‘But did he give you a name?’

  ‘I’m sure he signed in. Wait just a minute.’ The landlord went to fetch the visitors’ book. Placing it on the counter, he opened it up and pointed to one of the entries. ‘Didn’t put down an address.’
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  The landlord swivelled the book around and pushed it towards Knox.

  Knox scrutinised the entry. There was just one word, penned in a style that lacked ornamentation.

  Pyke.

  Nothing more. ‘He didn’t say what had brought him to Dundrum?’

  ‘He didn’t say and I didn’t ask.’ The landlord gave Knox a hard look. ‘I’m assuming something’s happened to him.’

  ‘He’s dead.’ Knox waited a moment. ‘But I’d appreciate it if you kept this information to yourself.’

  The landlord nodded. Perhaps he’d been expecting this. ‘I put him in the room at the back. He wanted somewhere quiet. I haven’t checked the place since he took it. Maybe he left some possessions behind.’

  Knox followed the stocky man up the stairs and waited as he unlocked the door to the dead man’s room. There was a frock-coat and a plain, white shirt hanging in the wardrobe but no sign of a suitcase. The landlord opened one of the drawers and whistled. Knox joined him, staring down at the pistol and hunting knife that lay inside. He reached out and inspected them.

  ‘I’d like to hold on to these,’ Knox said, having ascertained that the pistol was loaded.

  The landlord didn’t raise any objections and they completed their search of the room without turning up anything else.

  ‘So how did he die?’ the landlord asked as they made their way down the rickety stairs.

  ‘Froze to death.’

  The landlord turned to face Knox. ‘Wouldn’t be the first to die that way, would he?’

  Knox turned the corner of the newspaper and looked over at Jeremy Brittas, who was snoozing in his armchair. He had stopped to see his neighbour on his way home and had been pressed into performing his usual duties. But as soon as he tried to put the newspaper down, the old man’s eyes opened. ‘I’m listening, dammit.’

  There was a letter in the paper entitled ‘Free Trade Run Mad’ and a longer piece – ‘Mr Smith O’Brien’s Concluding Letter to the Landed Proprietors of Ireland’ – which Brittas would not want him to read. Knox surveyed the opening lines and found himself nodding his head in agreement.

  ‘Read it out loud, man.’

  ‘If a foreign invader had subjugated your native land, and had imposed upon it the payment of an annual tribute amounting to four or five million sterling, in addition to …’

  ‘I don’t want to know what some hot-under-the-collar Repealer thinks. Read me something else.’

  ‘Very large arrivals of Indian corn and barrel flour are reported in Sligo.’ Knox felt his ire begin to rise. ‘There are large quantities in the hands of private speculators, many of whom never did business in the grain or flour trade before.’ As Knox put down the newspaper he noticed that his hands were shaking.

  ‘What is it now?’ Brittas peered at him through his wire-framed spectacles.

  ‘Does no one else see the sheer lunacy of it all: putting the relief effort in the hands of jackals?’

  Brittas sat forward, a puzzled look on his face. ‘You’re upset, boy. What is it?’

  Knox gestured to the newspaper lying crumpled at his feet. ‘It’s just words and stories to you, isn’t it? Opinions to be contested or corroborated.’

  ‘That’s what a newspaper is.’

  ‘This …’ Knox reached down and grabbed the newspaper. ‘This has been sanitised for the likes of your good self.’

  ‘Sanitised?’

  Knox could feel tears in his eyes but he fought to keep them at bay. ‘The other day I saw a pit full of bodies, fifteen or twenty of ’em, limbs intertwined. Today I passed a corpse lying in the hedge-row. I didn’t stop.’

  ‘But the Tip Free Press is a liberal paper,’ Brittas said, still not grasping what Knox was saying.

  Knox picked up the crumpled newspaper and threw it on to the fire. ‘I think I should stop coming here for a while.’

  ‘But I … how will I … I don’t understand what’s come over you.’

  Knox wanted to say something pithy that would reassure his neighbour – whom he had always liked and admired – but there were no words left to him.

  Knox often found himself staring down into the cot while James slept, amazed just by his existence, by his fingernails and little nose; amazed that, in some small way, he had been responsible for creating a life. Since the autumn, he had spent more and more time watching his son sleeping, either as a way to forget about the terrible things he been forced to witness or to remind himself that the goodness in the world hadn’t been entirely extinguished. Before Christmas, Knox had come across a mother and her baby lying by the road to Golden. It had been a beautiful morning – crisp, clear, the sky as blue as a painted plate. The mother and child were frozen as solid as bricks, the mother still clutching the infant tightly to her body in a pitiful attempt to keep it warm.

  It had taken until noon for the bodies to thaw enough for them to prise the baby from the mother’s grasp.

  James had been the same age as that child and for days afterwards, Knox had lain awake wondering what had driven the mother to take refuge in a hedgerow, what her final thoughts had been before passing into unconsciousness; whether she had still harboured hopes that her baby might live if she held him tight enough. It helped having James, of course – being able to pick him up, hold him, feel the child’s soft breath tickle his cheek – but it made him vulnerable too. The fear that something might happen to James would suddenly fill Knox’s head and sometimes make it hard for him to breathe.

  Knox left the cot and joined Martha in the front room. The dog was sleeping by the fire but it raised its head when Knox entered the room. He told her what he had said to Jeremy Brittas; that he didn’t understand where his anger was coming from.

  Martha kissed him once on the forehead. ‘These are terrible times, Michael. If you weren’t angry, I wouldn’t respect you.’

  ‘But you still think I’m risking too much, by not doing what Moore and Hastings want me to do?’

  Martha didn’t answer him at first. ‘I understand that you have to do what you have to do. But it doesn’t stop me from worrying about the consequences.’

  Neither of them spoke for a while. Outside it had started to rain, and they listened to it beating against the windowpanes.

  ‘I heard that Father Mackey’s planning to denounce Asenath Moore from the pulpit on Sunday,’ Martha said eventually.

  Father Mackey was the parish priest of Clonoulty, and over the past few months he had taken to seeking Martha’s opinion, even though she’d hadn’t been to confession for about two years. Knox worried about his presence, worried that any dalliance with the Catholic Church on her part would harm their marriage.

  He reached down and patted Tom on the head. ‘So what’s Mackey planning on saying?’

  ‘He’s livid that Moore is only offering relief to those folk who attend one of his Bible classes.’

  ‘But he’s not surprised, surely? Everyone knows that Moore has always tried to convert his workers.’

  Martha shrugged. These conversations about Father Mackey were always sensitive. ‘But Mackey’s willing to put his neck on the block. Surely that’s the point? I mean, who else has spoken up against Moore in public?’

  Knox didn’t have an answer but he couldn’t quite bring himself to commend Mackey as Martha wanted him to.

  ‘I think I know the name of the man who was murdered on Moore’s estate,’ he said, breaking the silence.

  ‘Oh?’

  Knox couldn’t tell from her tone what she thought about this development. ‘A man called Pyke.’

  Martha brushed a strand of hair behind her ear. ‘And what do you intend to do with this information?’ She stood up and went over to the fireplace, feeding a little more coal into the grate.

  ‘I don’t know. Sometimes I think I’m stupid to be doing what I’m doing. I think how many people have died and wonder why I’m so concerned about this one body.’

  Martha came over to where he was sitting and stroked his head. �
��Do you have an answer?’

  Briefly Knox thought about all the bodies he had seen since the start of the winter. ‘Moore asked specifically for me.’ He was trying to formulate in his mind what he wanted to say. ‘He asked for me either because he thinks I’m incompetent and I won’t find anything out or because he thinks he can bully me into holding my tongue.’

  ‘Do you think Moore is afraid that something damaging might come to light?’

  ‘I’m almost sure of it.’

  SEVEN

  WEDNESDAY, 18 NOVEMBER 1846

  Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales

  Pyke had woken early that morning, his dreams formless and unsettling, and since he had not been able to get back to sleep, he dressed quickly and slipped out of the Castle unnoticed. He had gone to bed thinking about Cathy, trying to make sense of the coldness of her greeting. The air was cold and damp and smelled of smog and wet leaves, and the mountains rising up on all sides of the town were just about visible through the mist. Following directions he had been given by Sir Clancy Smyth, it took Pyke half an hour to find the place where John Johns lived: a crofter’s cottage perched on the lower slopes of a hill. Farther up the hill Pyke could see another cabin, though it wasn’t in as good a state of repair. He didn’t try to conceal his presence and had travelled halfway along the track when a tall man wearing a black shooting jacket appeared from behind a tree and aimed a rifle at his chest. ‘Stop right there, sir, and raise your hands above your head.’

  Pyke did as he was told.

  ‘Identify yourself.’