The Revenge of Captain Paine

by Andrew Pepper

  Emily punched him on the arm. ‘You’d better believe it, sir.’ But she still wasn’t mollified. Pyke could tell that he was a very long way from being let off by his wife.

  In the first room, once the drab, mildewed parlour of a private dwelling, he counted twenty children, all under ten years old, hunched over their work, either cutting out pieces of material for the lining or sole or stitching the lining and sole together. Each child sat on a wooden stool, a candle burning on the floor by their feet to guide their work. Emily and Pyke watched them from the doorway, noting their emaciated hands and dead stares, and listened for any signs of the master who lived upstairs and apparently ruled with an iron fist. Their guide, a mute, cadaverous man of fifty with a limp and two tufts of hair sprouting from an otherwise bald head, waved them into the next room, where the ceilings were so low Pyke could not stand straight. It was a smaller room but it housed the same number of children, all occupied with similarly numbing tasks. The first thing Pyke noticed was the near-total silence - no one uttered a word and the only sounds were the occasional coughing fit and shouting from the street outside. The second thing he noticed was the concentration fixed on their faces. There were other things he would remember later on - the icy temperature, the choking air, the eye-watering stench of overcooked food, and the dirt-encrusted walls and ceilings - but what stood out most of all was the atmosphere of fear, which assumed an almost tangible presence. The silence and the concentration were the undoubted products of the master’s reign of terror. Pyke had tried to talk to one of the youngest, a boy barely older than Felix, but his efforts to strike up a conversation had come to nothing. The boy had been too terrified to speak.

  Outside, Emily said, ‘There are ten houses on this side of the street, all owned by Groat. That’s ten houses with as many as twenty young children crammed into each of the rooms. Four hundred children. Upstairs belongs to the masters. They rule their houses with an iron fist. You saw how frightened the children were.’ She shook her head. ‘All of this means that Groat can sell his shoes for sixpence a pair and still make a tidy profit. People want cheap shoes, after all. Everyone suffers apart from Groat and his henchmen. Most of all the children, but also the shoe-and bootmakers who can’t compete with Groat’s prices. And the shoes people buy fall apart within a few months because the children who make them haven’t been properly apprenticed.’

  The odour of fried fish was pungent in the stiff breeze. ‘Where do all the children come from?’

  ‘Workhouses, the street, orphanages.’ Emily’s eyes were blazing. ‘It’s a profitable business, the trade in children. Groat might have paid a few pounds for each of those kids. That’s a few pounds multiplied by four hundred.’ She pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders. ‘Government legislation forces people into workhouses, workhouses then farm those same people off to middlemen because they can’t afford to feed and clothe them and the middlemen sell them on to private enterprises like Groat’s for profit. It’s all part of the same grubby system.’

  And banks like Blackwoods’ lent sweaters like Groat the money to start up their businesses in the first place, Pyke thought grimly.

  ‘So what is it you’re trying to do here?’

  Emily looked up at the terrace and said, ‘A year ago, when I was still a member of the Society of Women, I would have said lobby government to change the legislation and raise money for charities working to help the poor and dispossessed.’

  ‘And now?’

  At the end of the terrace, someone had daubed the words ‘Captain Paine’ in white paint on one of the gable-ends. Emily pointed to it and shrugged. ‘If a Liberal government has allied itself with the Malthusians who want to turn the country into a workhouse, what hope is there?’

  Pyke could hear the ire in her voice. For some reason, he hadn’t noticed it before, at least not to the extent he did now. ‘So what’s changed?’

  ‘I’ve woken up. Others, too. Paine said as much forty years ago and we thanked him by forcing him out of the country.’

  ‘Said what?’

  ‘Give a man or a band of men too much power, too much money, and the liberty of the nation is threatened.’

  ‘And that’s what you think has happened?’

  Emily stared at him through her long lashes. ‘Perhaps this isn’t a talk we should be having.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘As you indicated the other night, we might see that our respective positions aren’t as compatible as we might have once hoped.’

  ‘Perhaps they’re closer than we might have imagined, too.’

  ‘In what sense?’

  ‘Captain Paine is an advocate of direct action, isn’t he?’ Pyke looked at the words daubed on the gable-end in white paint. ‘It’s what I’ve always said. You want to make an impression, you don’t reason with someone. You take out a pistol and press it against the man’s head.’

  They had travelled a few hundred yards along the cobbled street in their carriage when Pyke banged on the roof and ordered the driver to stop.

  ‘Where are you going? What are you doing?’ Emily called out as he opened the door and took off back down the street. ‘Pyke.’

  He found one of the masters in an upstairs room, shaving with a razor over a pail of hot water.

  The man wore a black monkey coat with knee breeches, wool stockings and lace-up boots. Standing up, his whiskers lathered with soap, he held out the razor. ‘You want, I can walk the blue dog with you, cully.’

  Pyke went for his throat and the master managed only one wild swipe of the razor, catching Pyke’s forearm and slicing through his coat and jacket, before Pyke had landed a clean blow on his nose, breaking the bone, blood and sinew exploding from his nostrils. Clutching his nose, the man fell backwards, the razor clattering harmlessly to the floor, as Pyke scooped him up by the collar and dragged him over to the half-open window. ‘As of now, your employment here is terminated.’ Pyke rammed his head through the gap, forcing the rest of the man’s body out of the window but making sure he held on to the legs. Soon the master was dangling precariously from the upstairs window, people gathering in the street below to watch. ‘It takes a big man to keep children in line, doesn’t it?’ From somewhere out of the window he heard the master scream for help. But he was heavier than Pyke had realised and his boots were slippery, too, and soon Pyke knew he wouldn’t be able to hold him.

  Later, when the children Pyke had rescued from the first house gathered cautiously around the man’s motionless body, hardly daring to get any closer, Pyke suspected the fall might have killed him, but then he saw the man’s limbs twitch and heard him gasping for air and realised that he was just very badly injured. But the ensuing pandemonium had roused the masters from the other houses on the terrace and, when they saw what had happened, they tried to round up as many of the stray children as possible. Some of the children were still too dazed to take evasive action; others had seized the chance and had already made their escape. The masters were armed with pistols and sticks and there were too many of them for Pyke to take on without support. Retreating along the street, he came across one of the youngest boys he’d seen in the first room huddled in a fetid alley. Pyke hadn’t stopped to think what might become of the children, assuming that a life on the street was preferable to another minute in Horace Groat’s employment, but now it struck him that he’d rushed into something, more to appease his own conscience than to help the children, and created a whole new set of problems.

  Where would this child sleep tonight? What would he eat? How would he survive on his own?

  If Pyke didn’t do anything, the lad would be back stitching together Groat’s shoes before nightfall.

  ‘Do you have anywhere to go? Any family?’

  The boy stared up at him though large, liquid eyes.

  ‘Who brought you here?’

  The boy shrugged. ‘A man. Before, I went to a school in the country.’

  ‘What kind of a man?’

  ‘A man
with a dog.’

  ‘A big, fighting dog with copper-coloured fur?’

  ‘Aye, that’s the one.’

  Pyke tried to sound calm. ‘You went to Prosser’s school in Tooting?’

  The boy nodded. ‘My family all died last year.’

  A moment passed. ‘What are you going to do now?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Pyke thrust a few coins into his hand and said, ‘There’s this basement shop in St Paul’s Yard, number seventy-two, in the shadow of the cathedral. Present yourself there today and tell the white-haired man I sent you. My name’s Pyke. He’ll pay you to deliver a newspaper. It’s not much but it might keep you alive. Do you think you can remember all that?’

  The boy gave him a confused, bewildered stare and later, when Pyke was lying in his own bed unable to sleep, it struck him that the young lad might not have the necessary toughness and guile to make it through the night.

  ‘I want you to call in all of Horace Groat’s outstanding loans. Everything we’ve lent him.’

  William Blackwood flicked through an oversized ledger on the table in front of him and frowned. ‘He’s a very good customer. He hasn’t missed a single payment.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ Pyke said firmly. ‘In addition, I don’t want us to lend another penny to the slop trade in the East End.’

  Blackwood removed his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. ‘Can I ask what’s brought this on?’

  ‘No, you cannot. I’ve made my decision. I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘But those are some of our most reliable customers,’ Blackwood said, frowning. ‘And in the light of your questionable decision to loan such a large sum to the Grand Northern, we need to set our liabilities against more reliable forms of income.’

  They were sitting around a table in the boardroom, just the two of them. They had begun the meeting at nine o’clock as usual, without acknowledging what had happened to Nash or even mentioning the matter of the loan and the missing contracts. They had taken their usual places around the table, Pyke nearest to the fire, but their efforts to continue as normal quickly seemed misplaced.

  Someone - a good man, no less - had died and a proper reckoning of the situation was required.

  ‘Just do it. I want the notices served on him by the end of today.’

  There was a loud rap on the door, but it was William Blackwood, rather than Pyke, who called out, ‘Enter.’ Tiny beads of sweat had appeared around his temples.

  ‘And you are?’ Pyke asked, barely looking up from the table.

  A smartly dressed grey-haired man wearing a full-length velveteen coat and a white piqué waistcoat buttoned all the way to the top stood there, his top hat cradled in his hand.

  But Blackwood had clearly been expecting him and shook the man’s hand, before showing him to one of the empty chairs at the other end of the table.

  ‘Allow me to introduce Mr James Herries,’ he said for Pyke’s benefit. ‘Mr Herries is currently the solicitor to the committee of bankers for protection against forgers and fraud.’

  This time Pyke had a proper look as the man shuffled to his chair. Herries was a strange, elfin-looking individual with long, pointy ears, sharp canine teeth and an unctuous manner that immediately irritated him. Grinning, Herries assured Pyke that there was nothing to worry about and that the whole matter had doubtless been a terrible misunderstanding that could now be cleared up.

  There wasn’t too much difference between him and the eels they pulled out of the Thames.

  Clenching his fists until the knuckles had turned white, Pyke stared at his partner. ‘This is your doing, I presume.’

  ‘Let’s try and move beyond attributing blame.’ Herries smiled. ‘Suffice to say, an audit was conducted yesterday afternoon that I oversaw, and it’s come to light that a sum of ten thousand pounds of the bank’s money cannot be accounted in terms of the existing documentation.’

  Still ignoring the lawyer, Pyke said, to Blackwood, ‘I told you I lent that money to Morris according to the standard procedures of this bank.’

  ‘Ah, indeed, very good, sir,’ Herries said, interrupting. ‘Then perhaps you would be so good as to provide me with the attending documentation and this unfortunate matter can be resolved.’

  ‘You know me and what I’m capable of and yet you still decided to humiliate me in this way.’ Pyke waited for his partner to look up at him but his eyes remained rooted to the floor. ‘That either tells me you’re stupid or you know something I don’t. Which one is it?’

  But it was the lawyer who answered him. ‘If the documents aren’t forthcoming in, say, ten days - after all, we don’t mean to be unfair - it’s my unpleasant duty to inform you that a warrant for your arrest will be served and you will be sanctioned by the courts to repay the ten thousand pounds from your own pocket or face a lengthy sentence in one of His Majesty’s prisons.’

  Finally Pyke turned to him and licked his lips. ‘If you haven’t left this building by the time I’ve counted to thirty, I’ll tear you apart with my own hands and happily face the scaffold.’

  But Herries wasn’t cowed. ‘I was warned about your questionable reputation and I should just add that if something untoward was to happen either to Mr Blackwood here or myself the charges against you would still be pursued right the way to the highest court in the land.’ Gathering up his papers, he stood up and smiled. ‘Good day, gentlemen.’

  But when Pyke stood up at the same time, the lawyer’s composure finally cracked and he bolted for the door.

  As the dust settled, Pyke had to hold in the urge to stamp on his partner’s head, but the feeling passed quickly. This time he knew that a different approach was needed. For a start, there was no conceivable way Blackwood would have initiated such a bold move on his own, which meant that someone else was pulling his strings. Someone with sufficient status and power to afford Blackwood the protection he would undoubtedly need.

  ‘William?’

  Blackwood was trying to slip out of the room without a confrontation and seemed to freeze as Pyke barked his name. ‘Yes?’ But he couldn’t bring himself to actually look at Pyke.

  ‘You do know you won’t get away with it.’ Pyke shook his head, feigning sadness rather than anger. ‘That’s to say, you do know I’ll do everything in my power to stop you ruining my name.’

  Blackwood licked his lips. He looked like an unarmed man trapped in front of a cavalry charge.

  ‘Ten thousand has effectively been stolen from under my nose.’ Pyke slammed his fist down on the table so hard that Blackwood jumped. ‘Ten thousand. I don’t even have that amount in my own account.’

  ‘I don’t know what you expect me to say,’ Blackwood mumbled.

  ‘I don’t expect you to say anything. But I want you to know I’ll strangle you with my bare hands before I give up a penny of my own money,’ Pyke added, calming down. ‘Nod, if you think I’m capable of it.’

  Dumbstruck, Blackwood scurried from the room, his face noticeably whiter than it had been at the start of the meeting.

  Pyke had thought that if he traced the missing ten thousand pounds, he would find Jem Nash’s killer; but equally, if he found out who had killed Jem Nash, he would surely be led to the stolen papers and the missing money. And what he discovered from Ned Villums later that afternoon, though not throwing any direct light on the issue of who may have killed Nash, certainly revealed Pyke’s assistant in a new light.

  Villums was waiting in his office. A coal fire had been burning in the grate since early morning and the room was comfortably warm. An oil lamp on his desk produced a greasy yellow flame.

  Pyke sat down behind his mahogany desk and poured them both a glass of whisky from a crystal decanter. ‘I wasn’t expecting you for another couple of days.’ He’d already seen that Villums hadn’t brought anything with him: no case, no money to deposit.

  Villums took a drink of the amber liquid. ‘The chat we had the other day made me nervous. Then I happened to read that you
r assistant at the bank had his head cut off.’

  ‘Are you saying you want to terminate our arrangement?’

  Villums shook his head. ‘I just want to give you a few weeks to get your house in order.’ He pulled up his chair closer to Pyke’s desk and added, ‘And I thought you’d like to know something about the lad.’

  ‘Nash?’ The skin tightened around Pyke’s eyes.

  Villums nodded. ‘He lost seven thousand on the roulette table at Barnaby Hodges’ gaming house in a single night.’ He must have seen Pyke’s expression because he added, without changing his tone, ‘Suffice to say, he couldn’t pay his debt.’

  ‘He told me he lost money on the tables. But I had no idea it was as much as that.’ Pyke finished his whisky and poured himself another. The fiery liquid tasted good against his throat. ‘It would have been the night before he died. The next day at work, it looked as if he’d been in a prize fight.’

  ‘Hodges told me that his men gave your lad a reminder of what might await him if he didn’t settle his debt.’

  ‘But you don’t think they killed him?’

  ‘Why would they? What good would Nash be to them dead? Hodges is still owed the seven thousand.’

  Pyke tried to turn this information over in his mind but he could see that Villums hadn’t quite finished. ‘There’s something else, isn’t there?’

  ‘Hodges also told me your lad liked to frequent a place called the Bluebell Club on Windmill Street in Soho. You know it?’

  Pyke shook his head.

  ‘It’s a club for mollies.’

  ‘Mollies?’

  ‘Mollies, mandrakes, she-shirts.’ Villums winced. ‘You know.’

  He must have stared at Villums for some time, unable to assimilate or make sense of this revelation, because the next thing he was aware of was Villums preparing to depart.

  ‘Does he know for a fact that Nash was . . .’

  ‘A molly?’ Villums put his coat on and shrugged. ‘Hodges told me he’d heard it on very good authority.’

  Later, Pyke tried to reconcile what Villums had told him with his own knowledge of his assistant. He had always imagined Nash to be a ladies’ man, someone who had shown no inclination to settle down because he was happy playing the field. In addition, Pyke had always thought himself a good judge of character and an exemplary reader of people’s thoughts, but armed with this new information, he felt foolish and short sighted, and wondered what else he might have missed about his young assistant.