The Revenge of Captain Paine

by Andrew Pepper

  As a much younger man Godfrey had published provocative essays by the likes of Paine and Spence, risking imprisonment to do so, but his political idealism had waned in his middle years and he had found that salacious tales of criminal wrongdoing, sold to the working poor for a penny, were more lucrative than tiresome political pieties. Now in his old age, and with nothing left to lose, Godfrey had again become a thorn in the side of the authorities. A weekly scandal sheet, printed on cheap paper and sold for a penny, exposed the illicit sexual liaisons and misdemeanours of the cream of society, and an unstamped newspaper called the Scourge spread a hotchpotch of radical sentiment, though in Pyke’s view it was often difficult to tell the two publications apart. It was also hard to determine which one enraged the authorities more.

  One piece in particular had resulted in the charges being brought against Godfrey. Floridly entitled ‘The Lady and the Scamp’, the article had alleged that Sir John Conroy, comptroller of the Duchess of Kent’s household, had been fucking the widowed duchess for some years. It also accused Conroy of procuring large sums of money from the public to line his own pocket and mismanaging the duchess’s affairs to such an extent she would soon have to be declared bankrupt. The piece had caused quite a stir, both because Conroy enjoyed some important political connections and because the allegations necessarily implicated Princess Victoria, the duchess’s sixteen-year-old daughter and heir to the British throne.

  It was highly unusual for the evidence at a hearing for a libel case to be presented by a barrister acting for the Crown but, in the light of Conroy’s elevated social status and fears that the claims might damage the young princess, palms had doubtless been greased and an exception had been made. Pyke suspected that the actual reason related not to the piece Godfrey had published about Conroy but rather to the fact that the authorities wanted to close down his publications once and for all.

  Libel didn’t carry a custodial sentence but if the damages awarded to Conroy were significant Godfrey could be bankrupted and sent to prison until he found sufficient funds to pay the debt.

  ‘Once the Crown’s barrister has presented the evidence against you, you’ll have a chance to ask some questions,’ Pyke whispered, across the rail. ‘Call on me and ask what I’ve unearthed about Conroy’s activities.’

  ‘Good God, my boy, what have you found?’ He grabbed Pyke’s sleeve and looked pleadingly into his face.

  ‘Just call me and follow my lead.’

  But there wasn’t time to explain. From the bench Bellows called the room to order and Pyke stepped back into the crowd.

  The chief magistrate was a peculiar-looking man, with a V-shaped streak of ink-black hair that extended almost as far down his forehead as his eyebrows, a pointed, beak-like nose, sunken hooded eyes and teeth that looked as if they’d been sharpened on a knife grinder’s stone. He sat back on the bench, rearranged his grey wig and glanced around the courtroom, not seeing Pyke in the faces amassed before him. This was a good thing as the surprise, when it came, would be far greater. Sir Henry Bellows had always disliked Pyke with a vehemence bordering on mania because he blamed him, rightly or wrongly, for the deaths of his two predecessors, Sir Richard Fox and Brownlow Vines.

  To the palpable disappointment of those packed into the courtroom expecting the exchanges to be laced with salacious details, the hearing lasted no more than five minutes. The Crown’s barrister, William Beresford, dismissed the article Godfrey had published as ‘total fabrication’ and called upon Godfrey to produce any evidence that could support his claims. Godfrey asserted that he did have a corroborating witness but that he had not been able to contact her for the hearing. This was lampooned by Beresford as another lie and in his summary Bellows ordered that Godfrey return to the courtroom in two weeks to stand trial for libel.

  ‘If, by that time, you cannot produce this witness, it seems likely you will be found guilty and face the most serious reparations that can be levied against you under the terms of the law.’ Bellows paused for breath. ‘In my opinion, you are a loathsome creature who publishes wilful lies about eminent members of society with the sole intention of causing them shame and embarrassment. The sooner you are locked up, the better it will be for all of us.’ Pushing his spectacles up his nose, he looked at Godfrey and added, ‘Do you have anything else to add?’

  ‘There was another matter I wished to draw the court’s attention to, Your Honour.’ Imploringly Godfrey looked around the room for Pyke.

  ‘Yes?’ Bellows said, both curious and irritated.

  ‘It relates to the activities of the plaintiff, your honour.’

  That drew a stern frown. ‘I will not permit you to use this court to further slander an innocent man, sir. Now if there’s no ...’

  ‘Actually, Your Honour, I’ve employed an investigator to look into the plaintiff’s affairs,’ Godfrey said, thinking on his feet, ‘and his discoveries are, indeed, pertinent to this case.’

  ‘I’ve already ruled in this matter . . .’

  ‘But since these discoveries refer to your good self, Sir Henry, I think you should bear them in mind before reaching a decision,’ Pyke called out from the floor.

  Everyone turned to face him and an excited ripple of chatter spread throughout the room.

  ‘Who has the gross impertinence to speak to me from the floor? C’mon. Identify yourself.’ Bellows leaned forward on the bench and surveyed their faces.

  Pyke raised his hand and waited for a space to be cleared around him. ‘Last week I followed Sir John Conroy to the Travellers’ Club on Pall Mall where, I believe, he dined as your guest, Sir Henry.’

  The colour soared in Bellows’s neck as he struggled to contain his embarrassment. The chief magistrate had clearly recognised Pyke, but was too affected by the accusation to formulate a coherent response.

  ‘Since this lunch with the plaintiff, so close to the date of the hearing, effectively exposes your neutrality as a sham, it would be fair to reach the conclusion that your office has no jurisdiction in this matter.’ Pyke turned to his uncle. ‘Come on, Uncle. Let me take you for a drink.’ Holding out his hand, he helped his visibly shaken uncle down from the dock and whispered, ‘Just put your arm through mine, walk and don’t turn around.’

  ‘This is absolutely outrageous,’ Bellows yelled from the bench, finding his voice. ‘I will not be addressed in such an unpardonable manner by a guttersnipe.’ He was standing up, his arms gesticulating like those of a police constable trying to control an unruly mob. ‘You are both in contempt of this court and I order your immediate arrest. Officers, take them to the cells and let ’em think about their actions.’

  ‘Just keep walking,’ Pyke whispered to his uncle, as he strode confidently through the parting crowd.

  ‘I said, Officers, arrest those men and throw ’em in the cells,’ Bellows shouted, his face scarlet with rage.

  As they approached the door, a man called Pierce, a Bow Street Runner from the old days, blocked their path. Perhaps he hadn’t seen who it was and was just acting upon Bellows’s command, but the moment their stares met, Pyke saw the uncertainty creep into the other man’s eyes.

  ‘Stop that bloody man,’ Bellows spat from the bench, his neck swelling with rage.

  Pyke stepped towards Pierce and whispered, ‘We’re leaving now and I don’t want to cause a scene. I’ve nothing against you, Pierce, but if you try to prevent us from leaving this room, we’ll have a problem.’

  At first Pyke didn’t think he’d move out of the way but at the last moment Pierce’s resolve crumbled and seconds later they were gulping the air on the pavement outside the building, Bellows’s threats still ringing in their ears.

  As they wandered down Bow Street, Pyke could hear his heart hammering against his ribcage and realised his hands were trembling a little. It had been a long time since he had risked official sanction in this manner.

  ‘That was bloody marvellous,’ Godfrey said, before drinking his third straight gin in a row. ‘But why didn
’t someone arrest us as Bellows was demanding?’

  Pyke took a sip of beer. ‘Bellows can rant and rave but men like Pierce have long memories.’

  The glint in Godfrey’s eyes indicated he understood. ‘A warrant will be issued for our arrest, though.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Pyke said. ‘But my guess is that, when he’s calmed down, Bellows will realise he’s lost this one. He’ll absent himself from the case, citing personal reasons. It’ll go to another court and the same process will start all over again. We caught them out this time; next time they’ll be ready for us and if you can’t produce this witness, they’ll throw everything they’ve got at you.’

  Godfrey nodded, suddenly downcast. ‘Kate Sutton was a kitchen hand who worked at Kensington Palace.’

  ‘Was?’

  ‘I made discreet enquiries about her at the palace. I was told she’d left her post for personal reasons but she didn’t leave a forwarding address.’

  ‘You don’t know where she’s gone?’

  ‘No.’>

  Pyke sat forward and rested his elbows on the table. ‘Did she approach you or did you seek her out?’

  ‘The former, m’boy. She came to me, accompanied by a noxious, money-grabbing specimen called Johnny. I presumed they were copulating. They were both clear about the money they wanted. I’d say they were well suited to one another in that respect. We must have haggled for over an hour.’

  ‘And did you give them anything?’

  His uncle clenched his jaw. ‘Fifty pounds.’ He must have seen Pyke’s face but he added, in a defensive tone, ‘It was a good story. Apparently she walked in on Conroy and the duchess. He was fucking her in the arse.’

  Pyke couldn’t help but smile. ‘I didn’t read that in the piece I saw.’

  Godfrey broke into a mischievous grin. ‘Even I have standards, dear boy.’

  ‘And you don’t have any idea where she might be now?’

  Godfrey shook his head. ‘I paid a visit to her family’s home in Spitalfields. The father pestered me for money. The mother hardly said a word.’

  ‘But they didn’t know where their daughter was?’

  His uncle shook his head and stared down at his empty glass. ‘I’m not very good at this kind of thing. Perhaps you could visit her family and ask them some questions? If they don’t know where she is, they might know of someone who does.’

  Nodding, Pyke checked his watch again. ‘You could do something for me in return.’

  ‘Anything, dear boy.’ His uncle’s smile revealed his stained, mossy teeth. ‘Within reason, of course.’

  ‘I’d like you to come with me to a meeting of radicals in the east end. Emily has been involved in setting it up.’

  ‘If I must,’ Godfrey said, with a dismissive yawn. ‘I know I publish things for the poor to read, but actually spending time in their company is not my idea of an enjoyable evening.’

  In Emily’s position, it would have been easy to romanticise the working poor and turn them into exotic creatures waiting to be pitied and helped. In fact her view was much more complex, forged by a mixture of guilt, moral zeal and sympathy. Some middle-class charities sought to distance themselves from the people they were trying to help, finding the poor to be obnoxious, dirty, violent and blasphemous in a way they hadn’t expected or counted upon. Emily suffered no such illusions. A year earlier, while organising an event at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden in aid of the Spitalfield weavers, she’d travelled to the East End, where her carriage had been attacked. Two rampsmen robbed her of her rings and forced her to strip naked. No one had come to her rescue, doubtless enjoying the sight of a wealthy woman receiving her comeuppance at the hands of two ruffians. Later, after Pyke had tracked down the two rampsmen and retrieved the rings they’d stolen from her, he had asked whether the incident had shaken her commitment to her work. She had given him a puzzled look, as though the question were an irrelevant one, and told him she didn’t blame the men for what they had done.

  That was the thing about Emily.

  Just when Pyke thought he had her figured out, she’d act in a way that made him alter his opinion of her. She wasn’t a social chameleon, like Marguerite, a flibbertigibbet who changed her skin to suit her own desires. Rather, Emily was led by her convictions, and these changed according to circumstances over which she had no control. Two years earlier she had split from Elizabeth Fry’s society of women, middle-class do-gooders and busybodies concerned primarily with temperance and for whom prison visits constituted the limits of their horizons. As a free agent, she’d used her financial independence to fund individuals agitating for workplace reform and to promote communitarian ideas borrowed from Robert Owen, the socialist. Recently she had turned her attention to the burgeoning trade union movement and had helped to organise and broker a meeting to find common ground between moderates and radicals who were agitating for wider disruption.

  Pyke had expected that Emily’s commitment to her work would have waned after the birth of their son but, strangely, it had intensified. In fact, he often felt that her zeal for her work had increased in direct proportion to his success as a banker: the more money he drew from the bank, the less she seemed to need or even ask for. He sometimes wondered whether her apparent selflessness - wilfully ignoring her own needs - was in fact another form of selfishness, a way of validating her own difference. He’d put this to her once and received a scornful reply.

  The meeting was held in an upstairs room of the Standard of Liberty at one end of Brick Lane. As a Bow Street Runner, Pyke had once pursued a child rapist to the building across the street from the Standard. The man had made for the cellar, maybe hoping Pyke wouldn’t follow him, but had lost his footing on the stairs and had fallen into a cess pool. Pyke could still remember the scene: the rapist floundering in the dark, viscous liquid, his arms and head covered in thick soil. Pyke had neither come to his rescue nor precipitated his death. At the time he hadn’t known whether he had done the right thing, whether he’d robbed the mother of the injured child of the justice she and her child deserved, but when he had told her what had happened, she had thanked him and broken down in tears. The neighbourhood had not significantly changed in the intervening years: on the same side of the road as the Standard of Liberty, he counted a tavern, two ginneries, a brothel, a couple of pawnshops and a lodging house where donkeys and sheep roamed freely in and out of the door.

  The meeting had already begun by the time they arrived, and having persuaded two men on the door that they weren’t police spies, Pyke and his uncle took their seats at the back of the cramped room, just as the gathered men were applauding heartily. He saw Emily on the stage: she had clearly just addressed the meeting and had spoken well, for there was a jovial, enthusiastic atmosphere in the room. Some of the mob whistled their appreciation, at which Emily gave a mock curtsy. This drew further laughter. Pyke looked at his uncle and shrugged. He had no idea that Emily actually spoke at these meetings, and now that he had missed her speech he kicked himself for arriving late and wondered what she had said to the men. They seemed to have treated whatever it was with a degree of seriousness, or at least hadn’t barracked her with a deluge of sexual innuendos. Emily bowed again and climbed down from the stage. Her place was taken by a white-haired speaker who didn’t engage the audience in the same manner that Emily seemed to have done.

  ‘That’s James Munroe,’ Godfrey whispered. ‘He’s a moderate voice together with chaps like Lovett and Cleave. They’re part of the national trade union movement. On the whole, they’re a respectable but tiresome bunch; the type that wash their faces, clean their teeth and fuck their wives in the dark.’

  Pyke had once seen the renowned radical ‘Orator’ Hunt, who had died earlier in the year, whip up a crowd of working men into a frenzy with his plain-speaking approach. By comparison, Munroe’s speech carried all the charge of a gobbet of rotting meat.

  ‘We all know Peel and the Tories hate us but the present Liberal government has done nothi
ng for us, will do nothing for us in the future and never wanted to do anything for us in the first place.’ Pausing to receive the polite applause of the men packed into the room, Munroe nodded his head, seemingly pleased with his lacklustre performance.

  Pyke felt like asking him whether anyone in the room believed that a government elected only by propertied voters would ever act in the interests of the working man.

  ‘What we need, friends, is a wage that reflects the work we do. Today, more than ever, workmen do not receive a price for their labour that allows them to provide for their families. The devil-capitalist who has risen from our ranks and who lusts after money has become our enemy; he sits in his mansion revelling in his abundance while hard-working men are ground into the earth. These grubby money-mongers prey on our labour, require it to fill their pockets, exploit it and encourage others to exploit it, turn greed into a virtue, and in so doing make us not into slaves but machines, brethren of the very tools we use to do our work.’

  This time the applause was more muted. Munroe seemed puzzled, unable to work out why he was not receiving more wholehearted support from the rambunctious mob.

  From his vantage point at the back of the room, Pyke studied the gathered crowd, mostly shoemakers and tailors, he supposed, with a handful of labourers. The latter wore grubby shooting jackets and torn velveteen coats while the former were dressed in either smockfrocks or monkey jackets. He saw Emily right at the front of the room, having an animated talk with a young man sitting next to her. They looked to be sharing some kind of joke.

  ‘Do you see Emily there? Who’s she talking to?’

  Godfrey put on his spectacles. ‘Ah, that’s a chap called Julian Jackman.’

  ‘Why do you say it like that?’

  Up on the platform Munroe was trying to explain the merits of the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union.