‘Our crew’s been together for a year. Mary joined us at the start; she’d cook and clean and help out around the camp. Two nights ago, she was washing some pots yonder when this thing happened.’ His expression darkened and he spat the words out. ‘Whoever did it must’ a clamped his brutish hand around her mouth ’cos none of us heard a thing. Billygoat found her later, down by the river, all wet and dead, stripped naked and lying there like a piece of meat.’ Red’s hands were clenched so tight his knuckles had turned white.
‘And you think someone in the town was responsible for this?’ Pyke could barely bring himself to look at the body.
Red grabbed hold of his wrist. ‘Apparently some fellow in the Fountain inn has been boastin’ about it. We got a description. One of the lads saw someone matchin’ this description loiterin’ on the night it happened.’
‘Can you describe him for me?’
‘A hairy brute of a man. Whiskers all over his face. Close up, they reckon he has a glass eye, too.’
In the fading afternoon light, Pyke bent over to inspect the old woman’s corpse, and it was only then he saw the marks on her breasts. Burn marks, exactly like the ones he’d found on the headless body.
‘Have you seen these?’ Pyke pointed at the round burn marks, trying to play down his excitement.
Nodding, Red rummaged around in his pocket. ‘He might have used this. It was found next to the body.’ There in his open palm was a half-smoked cigar.
‘Can I have a look?’
Red hesitated and then thought better of it and handed the cigar to him. Pyke held it up to the light and inspected it. There wasn’t much to identify the brand but a tobacconist might be able to tell him more. He asked the navvy whether he could keep it. Red shrugged and said he didn’t see why not but added there were plenty of folk who liked to smoke cigars. But Pyke was already turning something else over in his mind. Now two bodies had come to light, within a few miles of each other, both with burns marks likely caused by the hot ash of a cigar.
What connected them?
Back inside the shanty, he sat down on a tree stump and looked over at Jackman. ‘Can I make an observation?’ Before either Red or Jackman could speak, he added, ‘You know that Jackman wants you to attack the town. It’s in his interest. If you march through the High Street looking for a brawl, there’ll be some townsmen waiting for you. So when a few of your men get hurt, perhaps badly hurt, Jackman here can exploit the situation for his own political ends.’
For the first time, Pyke noted with satisfaction, Jackman looked genuinely angry. Blood rose in his neck. ‘And if we do nothing, the company gets exactly what it wants. A nice, pliant workforce.’ He nodded contemptuously in Pyke’s direction. ‘By his own admission, he’s a company man. He just wants to smooth things over until the work has started.’
Red drummed his fingers on the makeshift table while he considered what to do. ‘The thing is, Pyke, if we don’t do a thing, then Mary’s death goes unpunished. You see what I mean?’ He waited for a moment, choosing his words. ‘I went to see the magistrate yesterday to report what had happened.’ His voice shook a little. ‘The man told me to my face not to waste his time. To my face. You reckon we can turn the other cheek, not do a thing?’
Pyke glanced across at the radical. ‘But it remains true that if the magistrate turns his militia and weapons on you, Jackman can exploit your likely injuries for propagandist purposes. He doesn’t care about your well-being any more than I do.’
This time Pyke had pushed the radical too far and, without warning, Jackman took a swing at him. But it was a wild punch and Pyke easily ducked under it, leaving himself with time to take aim and land a clean blow on the radical’s jaw. He put a little extra into the punch and felt a jolt of pleasure when Jackman went down.
Aroused by the disturbance, other men poured into the shanty and it took a blast of Red’s musket to restore some semblance of calm.
‘I’ve thought about what you said.’ Red looked at Pyke and rubbed his chin. His stare was empty of sentiment. ‘I’ve made my decision. We bury Mary and we march on the town.’
Cheers quickly spread through the camp. Gingerly climbing to his feet, Jackman nursed his cut lip. Only Red and Pyke seemed unmoved by what had happened, and when the furore abated the navvy turned to him and whispered, ‘You may well be right but we don’t have a choice.’
Later, when Pyke shut his eyes and pictured Mary’s battered corpse, it was hard to disagree with Red’s logic.
It was fully dark by the time they left the camp and the sky was still laden with black clouds. It started to rain as they approached the bridge, a fine spray at first and then larger droplets of water buffeted their faces. A squally wind blew gold leaves from the branches and, deprived of sunlight, Huntingdon once again became a drab market town, grey smoke billowing out of red-brick chimneys. There were thirty-seven of them, including Pyke and Jackman, and their makeshift weaponry was no match for what Pyke had seen outside the town’s watch-house.
They crossed the ancient bridge unopposed and marched three or four abreast up the deserted High Street, as anxious faces appeared and disappeared from behind drawn curtains. As they approached the Fountain inn, some of their number began to rattle their sticks and chant threats but, on closer inspection, both the inn itself and the adjoining taproom seemed deserted — certainly all the doors were locked and there were no signs of life anywhere inside the building.
It was raining harder and wet gusts of wind pummelled their unprotected faces. At the head of the mob, a breakaway group had decided to head for the square, and when they turned the corner into it, they were confronted by a row of well-armed men lined up to block their progress. The navvies were so obviously outnumbered it was a surprise that some chose to attack, but the whole crew was quickly forced back with brickbats and pick handles.
Pyke couldn’t see what was happening at the front of the melee but he could hear the grunts and screams as blunt objects rained down on their heads, bones cracking under the onslaught. A gleeful townsman split open one of the navvy’s heads with repeated swings of a brickbat, and just behind Pyke another navvy was pushed to the ground and kicked over and over in the stomach and head. On that occasion Pyke charged the lynch mob and managed to chase them off with a few lunges of his knife, long enough to pick up the stricken man and retreat with the rest of them towards the bridge. Some ran and others walked, turning only to check on the whereabouts of their pursuers. Pyke had lost sight of Jackman and Red but the man Pyke had rescued had recovered sufficiently to walk without help, even though he didn’t appear to know where he was or what had just happened.
Ahead of them the bridge was just about visible through the driving rain. Some of the townsmen were still pursuing them along the High Street, the sound of musket or rifle fire and the whiff of blast powder filling the damp air. From the size of their group, Pyke guessed that about half of the navvies had been left somewhere behind them, including perhaps Jackman, but he saw Red somewhere near the front, urging his wounded troops to retreat a little faster. It wasn’t until they were halfway across the bridge that Pyke saw the men lined up on the other side of the bridge, the Godmanchester side, where they’d hoped to find sanctuary: townsmen carrying torches and sticks and waiting to ambush them.
Others had seen them, too, and they came to a halt in the middle of the bridge, caught between two advancing groups of townsmen. What happened next would live for a long time in Pyke’s mind: the sounds of brickbats and pick handles raining down on their heads, cries of pain and anguish, blood splattered across his face, and splashes as terrified navvies jumped into the fast-moving river below to escape the onslaught. Later, he would be able to think back on what happened with greater clarity and determine what mistakes had been made and whether more could have been done to save those drowning men. But in the first moments on the bridge, he came as close to experiencing what a soldier might go through during an ambush as he would ever come, fighting to preserve
one’s life rather than win a victory.
One of the townsmen came at him swinging a pick handle. If he’d connected, the blow might have split Pyke’s head open. Instead, he swayed out of the way, punched the man in the face and disarmed him of the stick. Turning it on someone else, he drove it hard into his attacker’s stomach and watched as the man fell to his knees coughing up bile.
When they had finally broken through the ranks of the townsmen, who were tired of their victory, and made it back to the camp, Red embraced Pyke with both arms and whispered in his ear that he was a good man. Red’s clothes were torn and muddy and his face was bruised purple from the blows he’d received at the hands of the townsmen. Pyke’s injuries were slight in comparison. Others also offered their grateful thanks. From somewhere a horse was produced, its reins thrust into Pyke’s hands. ‘We need someone to tell folk what happened here tonight,’ Red said, his voice bristling with emotion. ‘We need someone to tell our story.’
Pyke checked his watch. It was barely seven o’clock. He still had time to make it to the rendezvous point with Morris by eight.
He looked out for the young radical but didn’t see Jackman among the walking wounded.
Pyke had ridden a few hundred yards along the muddy track from Godmanchester when he saw them, a row of men in tall-crowned top hats carrying torches and blockading the road. The lashing rain and squally wind made it hard to tell how many of them he was facing. A clap of thunder shook the ground and a fork of lightning lit up the sky. He saw them better in the afterglow of the lightning. At first he thought the men had been placed there in order to protect the town from recriminatory attacks by the navvies. But when he pulled on the reins, dug his heels into the horse’s midriff and tried to encourage the mare to turn around, this fallacy was exposed. A rifle shot exploded like the crack of a slaver’s whip, closely followed by a second and a third shot. They weren’t trying to stop or arrest the navvies. It was an assassination party and he was their target. Pressing his own horse into a gallop, Pyke lowered his head and held on to the beast as it clipped along the track. He didn’t see the other men, advancing from the direction of the camp, until it was almost too late. They, too, had fanned out across the track, their rifles aimed at him. Pyke jerked on the reins and brought the snorting mare to a standstill, looking in both directions as the armed men closed in on him.
For a moment, Pyke cursed his own stupidity. He had underestimated the threat posed by Yellowplush and Rockingham and had needlessly antagonised them for no gain other than to see them squirm. Worse still, he had become complacent, allowing himself to believe that his old skills would somehow carry him through, ignoring the fact that he hadn’t fired a pistol in anger or ridden a horse in five years.
Kicking the horse in the ribs, he felt the beast surge forward and directed it from the track, the animal clearing the first ditch with an effortless leap, spewing up chunks of turf as it landed and throwing Pyke forward in the saddle. Ahead, through the rain, he saw a deeper ditch followed by a wooden fence. He didn’t have any choice but to try to clear these two obstacles and had set about preparing the jittery animal for the jump when one of its hind legs seemed to give way, either because it had been hit by a bullet or because it had sunk too far into the mud. When he tried to make the jump, the mare toppled forward and threw him out of the saddle, catapulting him across the grass until he landed on his back with a thud.
Pyke felt a sense of weary resignation as he lay unmoving on the damp turf, and an acknowledgement that he had overplayed his hand and lost more than he could afford to lose. They found him in a matter of seconds, three or four of them gathering around him like hunters. The smell of whisky on their breath was unmistakable. He thought of his son, who would now grow up without a father, and of Emily. One of them poked him with the barrel of his rifle, while another asked, ‘What do you want us to do with him?’ As a Bow Street Runner he had once enjoyed the full sanction of the law, but here he was less than a nuisance, a nonentity who was expendable precisely because no one knew who he was. Then he heard the same voice say, ‘Search and strip him.’ Another voice muttered, ‘Well, is it Cap’ain Paine or not?’ Pyke looked up and saw the glint of a shovel. ‘When you’ve done that, dig a deep hole, shoot him in the head and bury him.’ The voice belonged to Septimus Yellowplush.
The magistrate bent down to address him. This time he wasn’t wearing his wig and his bald head, as large as a pumpkin, glistened in the rain.
‘No one does what you did to me and gets away with it.’ He took aim and kicked Pyke on the side of his head with his boot.
When Pyke came to, he had been dragged deeper into the field and stripped of his clothes. Shaking violently, he felt the cold as he had never felt it before; it gnawed away at his toes and fingers and spread to the rest of the body. Trying not to panic, he looked up and saw two men, their backs turned to him, digging the hole that he would be buried in. If anything the rain was now falling harder than before. His wrists and legs had been bound with rope and he felt like a pig awaiting slaughter. There was nothing he could do except wait for the shot and hope it came quickly.
He had always hated the countryside.
When the first crack of a rifle sounded, he assumed it was one of the magistrate’s men. The first shot was closely followed by another and then another and very quickly it became clear that it was the men digging the hole who were under fire and scrambling for cover.
Pyke had only managed to crawl a few yards when someone poked him from above with their rifle.
Jackman stood over him and produced a knife from his belt. His whiskers dripped with water. ‘Here, hold out your hands.’ Pyke did as he was told and the radical cut them free with a single jerk of his knife.
Pyke sat up, still dazed. ‘What happened?’
‘The bald one’s dead. I shot him.’ Jackman threw Pyke his clothes. There was a rifle slung over his shoulders.
It took Pyke a few moments to realise what Jackman had told him. Yellowplush was dead. ‘And the others?’
‘Didn’t have the stomach for a fight.’ Jackman hesitated, apparently choosing his words. ‘Look, Pyke, I saw what you did on the bridge. It seems I was wrong about you.’
‘I was wrong about you too.’ Pyke stood up and put on his trousers. ‘Yellowplush seemed to think I was Captain Paine.’
That seemed to amuse him. ‘Must have seen you fight. It was an impressive sight, too.’
‘Why would they think Captain Paine was here tonight?’
Jackman gave him a curious stare and laughed. ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’
‘What’s so funny?’
But Jackman was already moving. ‘We should get going. They might return with more men.’
Pyke pulled up his boots and reached for his soaking frock-coat. He looked across the field. In the distance, he could see men on horseback silhouetted against the branches of the trees.
On the other side of the field he joined up with Jackman and crossed a fence using the stile, taking cover behind a hedgerow. ‘Follow this path. It’ll bring you out on to the Cambridge road.’ Jackman thrust the rifle into his hands. ‘Take it. You’ll need it. I have a feeling this isn’t over yet.’
But as Pyke went to thank him again, Jackman had turned around and was moving in the opposite direction.
EIGHT
It took Pyke half an hour to reach the rendezvous point where the carriage, and Morris, were thankfully waiting for him: his assistant, Bledisloe, too, though he didn’t get out of the carriage. When Morris tried to shake his hand, muttering about how relieved he was to see him, Pyke pushed him up against the side of the vehicle and shouted, ‘I was almost killed. But others weren’t so lucky. Navvies employed to build your railway were hounded into a quick-flowing river like they were rats.’ It was still raining and Pyke felt the humiliation of lying naked in the field wash over him again. Morris seemed terrified by Pyke’s outburst and listened like a beaten dog while Pyke tried to explain what had happen
ed, words tumbling out of his mouth in an unstoppable torrent.
‘What’s that noise?’ Something had interrupted his diatribe and Pyke stood there for a moment, looking back along the track he’d just run along.
Water dripped from Morris’s nose. He was soaking wet as well. ‘What noise?’
‘Maybe it was just another rumble of thunder.’ Pyke walked a little way along the track and stopped to listen.
The sound was more distinctive and it was getting louder. Sniffing the air, Pyke stared into the darkness and took the rifle in his hand. Inspecting the gun, he discovered it was loaded. This made him feel a little better, but without additional ammunition the rifle would be of only limited help. In the trees, he heard the twittering of an owl. With a jump, he started to run back towards the carriage, shouting at the driver to get going. When he caught up with it, the carriage was already moving, Bledisloe hauling them inside through the open door.
‘What is it, Pyke?’ Morris said, grabbing his arm. Bledisloe looked panicked as well.
‘Men on horseback,’ Pyke muttered, fighting for breath. ‘And they’re riding in our direction.’
The Revenge of Captain Paine pm-2 Page 10
