The Revenge of Captain Paine

by Andrew Pepper

  ‘Trouble? Of course I’m not in trouble.’ Morris seemed unfazed by the question. ‘I merely need to borrow a small sum of money in the short term and according to all the usual practices and procedures.’

  ‘If you regard ten thousand to be a small sum then I truly take my hat off to you.’

  Morris regarded him with a grimace. ‘You don’t wear a hat.’

  ‘It was a figure of speech.’

  A moment passed between them. ‘So will your bank lend me the money or not?’

  ‘What will you put up as security?’

  ‘Cranborne Park. I own it free and clear.’

  Pyke nodded, still turning over the older man’s request in his mind. ‘I assume this isn’t something you’ve discussed with your wife?’

  ‘Since when did men like you and I ever allow our wives to dictate the decisions we make?’

  Pyke allowed himself a brief smile. ‘So how soon do you need this money?’

  ‘I’m afraid I’ll need a decision at once. I’ll need the money by tomorrow. In notes, if possible.’

  ‘All right,’ Pyke said, absent-mindedly fiddling with his two keys. ‘Bring the deeds to the estate with you to the meeting tomorrow and you have a deal.’

  They shook hands.

  Morris’s face brightened considerably but the strain was still evident. ‘I’d prefer it if no one else knew about this.’

  ‘We’ll need someone to witness our signatures on the loan contracts.’ Pyke waited and said, ‘What about Nash?’ He had first solicited Morris as a customer and they seemed to be on good terms.

  ‘As long as it goes no farther than young Jem.’ He looked across at Bledisloe who was beginning to stir. ‘Look, old boy, I do appreciate what you’ve done for me. I’d really like to invite you and your family to tea at Cranborne Park. You clearly made quite an impression on my wife. She insisted that I ask you: insisted that you bring your family, as well. Perhaps after we’ve concluded our business tomorrow? We could pick up your wife and child on the way.’

  Pyke assured him he would ask Emily and let him know at the meeting the next day. He asked, ‘Do you ever think it odd that we’ve become neighbours and business partners at the same time?’

  ‘Odd?’

  ‘Coincidental.’

  Morris shrugged. ‘Like I told you before, it wasn’t my idea to move to Cranborne Park.’

  Pyke stared out of the window, declining to respond. But it was exactly this point which worried him.

  NINE

  Even by ten o’clock the next morning, barely a shard of daylight had managed to penetrate the asphyxiating miasma of soot and dirt that hung over the warren of narrow alleys and courts around Spitalfields. The stench, too, made Pyke’s eyes water, a pungent odour of discarded, overripe fruit from the nearby market, human excrement and gobbets of putrid flesh from a nearby slaughterhouse where the walls were six inches thick with the blood and fat from slain animals. A long-tailed rat, as large as a small dog, scurried across the street, nimbly darting between ragged cobblestones to join others gnawing on the carcass of a dead cat. Pyke didn’t bother to shoo them away; nor would the rats have taken any notice of him if he’d tried. It had been some time since he had ventured into this territory, and with each passing year it became more alien to him - the sight of out-of-work men dressed in filthy rags, teeth black from chewing tobacco, openly copulating with blowsy women while their bow-legged children ran freely in cess trenches. All of it took him back to his own childhood, but he was no longer able to remember what it had been like to actually live in such conditions. Money had softened him to such an extent that he now felt uncomfortable if he didn’t bathe three or four times a week, eat fresh fish and vegetables off fine china, drink expensive French wines and sleep on good cotton sheets.

  Strangely this anxiety had not prevented him from becoming nostalgic about his own past. A few weeks earlier, he’d walked past the ginnery he had once owned around the corner from Smithfield Market and had been seized by a feeling of such intense desire to be back in his old room that he had tried to gain entrance to the building. Once inside, he had been set upon by a gang of thieves who used it as a flash house and who tried and failed to strip him of his possessions. Afterwards he had attended a charity ball organised by Emily to raise funds for another of her causes, and it had struck him that, as much as he despised the rookeries, despised their dirtiness, their stink of misery and despair and the smoke-blackened rooms where ten or more men and women slept head to toe on flimsy hessian sacks, despised the ubiquity of violence and the imminence of death, he felt more comfortable there than he did attending events alongside the great and the good of society.

  There was a time in Pyke’s life when the Spitalfields weavers had been the blue-blood aristocrats of the artisan classes. The work had been secure and wage regulations had ensured that prices for their silk remained acceptable. More importantly the market for silk had been protected from foreign competition by government regulation. Indeed, as a child, Pyke could still remember visiting the homes of weavers and being astounded that they had gardens and summer houses. All that had changed when the government relaxed the ban on foreign imports, a move that flooded the market with cheap silk from France and Holland, and the combined effect of this and the influx of the sweaters who corralled women and children into slop shops and paid them pennies meant that the weavers had slipped from their position at the top of the working-class hierarchy to near the bottom.

  Pyke had to ask a toothless old man for directions to the Sutton house, and when he eventually found it, the dwelling turned out to be no more than two small, windowless rooms on the ground floor of a cottage shared by a number of other weaving families. It was an airless morning, damp without being cold, and Pyke had to cover his mouth and nose with a handkerchief, to try to ward off the oppressive stink that clung to the entire neighbourhood.

  The last thing he wanted to do was pick up a debilitating disease that he might pass on to his son.

  Pyke pushed open the front door and stared into the room at an old man hunched over a loom. ‘Are you Kate’s father?’

  Startled, the man looked up, two white eyes surrounded by skin that was so dirty it was hard to see him. Stepping into the room, Pyke saw it was lit by a solitary candle that three of them shared, the man and woman and a young girl. The man looked up from his loom and held up his hands to shield his eyes from the glare of the outside light. ‘Who wants to know?’

  As his eyes adjusted to the semi-darkness, Pyke realised the man wasn’t nearly as old as he had initially thought. It was just that his skeletal figure and wan, sunken cheeks gave the impression of a much older person. He returned the handkerchief to his pocket.

  ‘It’s a gemmen,’ the man croaked to his wife, springing to his feet and ushering Pyke into the spotlessly tidy room.

  ‘I’m looking for your daughter Kate.’ Pyke glanced over at the little girl, who gave him a toothy smile. She couldn’t have been much older than Felix, he thought grimly, and already she had been put to work on a loom.

  ‘Here, take a seat, sir,’ the man said, offering Pyke the only chair in the room. ‘That’s a very fine coat, if I may say so. A very nice coat. Very expensive. Must have cost you a pretty penny.’

  ‘Do you know where your daughter is? Has she been in contact recently?’

  ‘Not for a while. Me and Missus Sutton are tryin’ not to show our worry in front of the littl’un.’ He came a little closer and whispered, ‘But it’s been mighty hard for all of us. That gal’s always been my favourite. And between you and me, she always helped us with a few shillings from her wages.’

  ‘My name’s Pyke. I’m trying to find your daughter for my uncle. He visited you a week ago.’

  The man took hold of Pyke’s sleeve. ‘Is that your uncle, sir? The publishing man? A gemmen he was, too. Gave us a few coins.’

  ‘Do you have any idea where she might have gone?’

  ‘Hear that, Missus Sutton?’ he barked
at his wife. ‘This gemmen’s gonna find our gal.’

  ‘Don’t be getting your hopes up, Freddie. You know as well as I do she’s been gone nearly two weeks now.’

  ‘Hush, woman. May wolves tear out your throat for speaking that way.’ He turned back to Pyke. ‘What was it you was asking?’

  ‘Have you any idea where your daughter might have gone? She left her job at the palace last week without giving a forwarding address.’

  Freddie shook his head. ‘My gal wouldn’t have left that job, not if wild horses had been dragging her. Mrs Sutton’s cousin used to work in the palace, too, and she got our gal the job in the first place. Our Kate properly loved it. And it paid well, too. Enough to spare me a few groats at the end of the week.’

  ‘Was she in any kind of trouble, at least that you knew of?’

  ‘Our Kate?’ He shook his head vehemently. ‘Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.’ This didn’t match Godfrey’s description of her but Pyke let the opinion stand.

  ‘And she never talked about resigning her post and going elsewhere?’

  ‘Never once.’ Freddie folded his arms.

  Pyke studied his proud, leathery face. ‘What about lovers?’

  ‘Lovers? My gal ain’t no cockish dell but she ain’t a biter, neither. There might have been a gemmen. Not one like you, as well dressed and all, but a friend who liked her well enough.’

  ‘Do you know his name? Where he lives?’

  ‘I might do,’ Freddie said, a disconcerting glint in his eye. ‘But I might also need something to jog my memory.’

  ‘Freddie, may the Lord forgive you, trying to profit when this gemmen just wants to find our gal,’ his wife scolded.

  ‘The way I see it,’ the man replied, looking at Pyke rather than at her, ‘he wants to find our gal for himself. He ain’t doing it out of the goodness of his heart, is he?’

  Pyke took out his purse, picked out a sovereign and handed it to the man.

  ‘Gold. It’s gold, Missus Sutton. I ain’t see one of these in years. Gold.’ He seemed beside himself with excitement.

  ‘Kate’s friend?’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ His expression became serious. ‘Not a good sort. Johnny was his name. I always had him figgered as a bad apple. He wanted to be an actor and he expected our gal to keep him with her wages. I mean, that ain’t right, is it? Taking Darby from a gal.’

  ‘Do you know where I can find him?’

  ‘Not where he lives but I remember him talking about a penny gaff on New Cut. He tried to get me to go and see him act. I never did but he told me it was the farther one from the Waterloo Road.’

  Pyke looked down and saw that the young girl was standing next to him, hugging his leg. He bent down and patted her on the head. She seemed transfixed by the two keys on the chain and he let her play with them for a while.

  ‘That’s Milly, my youngest. Clever gal she is. A real magpie.’

  ‘Is there anyone else Kate mentioned? An old friend? Someone she talked to at the palace?’

  Freddie scratched his chin, straining to remember something. ‘There was someone else, come to think of it ... another gal who worked at the palace, a proper lady, though . . .’

  ‘But let me guess,’ Pyke said, retrieving his purse. ‘Your memory requires further lubrication?’

  ‘See, Missus Sutton?’ Freddie said, turning to his wife. ‘I said this was a gemmen, didn’t I? As soon as I saw him, I said to myself this is not just a gemmen but a cock of the walk.’

  Pyke wasn’t sure when he had first become superstitious or even why he allowed such things to unsettle him. He harboured no religious sentiments, choosing instead to put his faith in rational thought and scientific discovery. But still, if a black cat ran out across the street in front of him, he felt somehow reassured, and if he saw one magpie, he would immediately look for another. Mostly he saw his burgeoning superstition in benign terms, as a product of his material well-being. If this was all he had to worry about, then his life must be fine and rosy. Nonetheless Pyke could never quite shake the feeling that he had prospered undeservedly and that everything he’d achieved could just as easily be snatched from him. Within the last year, ravens had taken to nesting in the roof of his bank and he had found their presence oddly comforting. Rationally he knew such thinking was absurd: the presence of a few ugly birds had absolutely no bearing on the realities of his life. But each time he saw a raven out of his window, its black plumage set against the red tiles of the roof, it set his stomach at ease and he felt able to address his problems with renewed vigour.

  Having returned to his bank from the Grand Northern’s head offices and a lavish lunch of hot roast beef and plum pudding to officially mark the loan agreement between Blackwood’s and the railway company, he made his way up to his office on the top floor of the building and looked out of the narrow window. There were two ravens perched on the sill.

  While the evening newspapers had carried reports of the rioting in Huntingdon, none had mentioned the use of soldiers to quell the disturbances. No mention had been made of any loss of life suffered by the navvies, but one paper in particular had no doubt where the blame lay. It was just as Morris had predicted. ‘This peaceful market town was thrown into the utmost consternation in consequence of one of those disgraceful outrages taking place amongst the navvymen arising out of an apparent disagreement with the good men of Huntingdon,’ the report had claimed. ‘They then commenced a bloodthirsty, indiscriminate attack on the town and rioting of such magnitude ensued that special constables had to be sworn in to uphold the peace.’ The blatant untruthfulness of the piece made him want to find the journalist and ram the paper down his throat.

  One of the clerks downstairs had told him that Jem Nash was processing bills in the main office, a large room at the back of the building on the floor below him where a hierarchy of rank and seniority determined who sat closest to the fire. But when he looked into the room, past the rows of clerks sitting at individual desks hunched over their ledger books copying invoices or fingering tall stacks of bills payable, he didn’t see his younger assistant. It was barely two in the afternoon and already it seemed dark, the only light in the room produced by individual candles that burned on each of their desks, alongside the inkwells and goose feathers. A year ago, Pyke had tried to introduce oil and gas lamps but the clerks had objected to the foul smell. Aside from the cashiers who manned the tills in the banking hall, the main business of the bank was undertaken in this room, and whereas his partner, William Blackwood, knew all the clerks by name, Pyke didn’t know a soul and found the room sombre and depressing. They hated him and loved Blackwood.

  Nash was down a further flight of stairs in the banking hall and greeted Pyke with evident sheepishness. His boyish face was bruised and swollen, a purple welt the size of a grapefruit bulging from his cheek and making it hard for him to see out of one of his eyes. When he saw Pyke, he grinned as though it were of no consequence, and asked him what he wanted.

  Pyke told him that Morris was coming in an hour and needed him to witness their signatures.

  ‘Signatures for what?’

  ‘A loan.’ Pyke waited, and added, ‘He wants to borrow some money but he wants it to go no farther than the two of us.’

  Pyke started to walk away but turned around, anger rising within him like a gusty wind billowing into an unfurled sail.

  Eighteen months earlier, Nash had visited Pyke in his office - he was then a lowly clerk at Lister’s, another private bank in the city - with news that his bank was preparing to pass on or rediscount to Blackwood’s some seemingly sound bills of exchange that would quickly become worthless. Needing to bolster their own cash reserves, Lister’s had bought a rediscounted bill that was due to expire in two months; whereupon a Lancashire spinner was due to pay the bill’s bearer twenty-five thousand pounds. Nash had informed him that his superiors were seeking to ‘sell’ on the bill to another bank because they had been told that the spinner was about to go out of business an
d wouldn’t be able to meet his debt. (In which case, the bank or institution that had last endorsed the bill would be liable for the full debt.) Even then Pyke had been able to smell Nash’s ambition and they struck a deal. If Nash could somehow gain access to the bank’s vault and find a way of smuggling Pyke into the building, he would reward him with a five per cent stake in Blackwood’s. Two months later, Nash had returned with a set of duplicate keys and the following night they had broken into the Lister’s vault. Though bold, sometimes foolhardily so, Nash had little sense of why Pyke had wanted to gain access to the bank’s safe. Certainly he had seemed confused when Pyke had spent much of the night counting money, rifling through bills of exchange and scribbling down information about outstanding loans.

  ‘You mean we’re not actually going to take a thing?’ Nash had asked, bewildered, doubtless wondering why he’d gone to so much effort to procure wax imprints of the keys they’d needed to gain entry to the vault. He had already started to pack his leather satchel with coins.

  ‘Why would I risk being caught with a few bags of stolen coins? I could be hung by the neck, and for what? The possibility of making a few hundred pounds.’

  ‘There must be thousands here, not just a few hundred.’

  It had been like watching a starving man enter a patisserie, only to be told that he couldn’t touch a thing.

  ‘We’re going to put everything back exactly as we found it.’

  ‘Then why did you make me go to the effort of stealing all those keys?’ That had been further evidence of his petulance, though in fairness Pyke had already decided there was more he liked about Nash than disliked: even then it had felt as if he’d found a man whose ambition, determination, courage and flexible morality reminded Pyke of himself.

  ‘Because we’re not just going to steal a few coins and some notes,’ Pyke had said. ‘We’re going to steal the whole bank.’

  He had enjoyed the younger man’s reaction: the delicious truth finally dawning on him.