The Revenge of Captain Paine

by Andrew Pepper

  At the junction with Regent Street, the shops became grander and the pavements wider still. A crowd had built up and it took Pyke a few moments to realise that everyone was looking at a procession of three giraffes, with their Nubian attendants, heading along Regent Street in the direction of the new zoological gardens in the park. Pausing to watch these strangely graceful creatures, he thought how excited Felix would have been, if he’d been there, and felt another wave of anguished sadness wash over him.

  When the procession had passed, Pyke crossed the road just in front of a brightly painted carriage and, startled from his thoughts, he looked at the window and saw Emily, her face pressed up against the glass.

  Running behind the carriage, waving his arms and shouting, Pyke caught up with it at the next junction, the driver and footman both looking at him as if he were an escaped Bedlamite.

  ‘That’s my wife in there,’ he said, panting, his lungs ready to burst.

  But it wasn’t Emily, of course. Nor did the delicate, effete woman in the carriage look anything like her, apart from having the same colour hair.

  Pyke sat down on the kerb and tried to catch his breath. Perhaps the laudanum had affected his vision. He was joined briefly by a young girl in a flimsy white dress. She shot him a wan smile and held up a bunch of wilting cress. ‘Ha’penny for some watercresses,’ she croaked. Her arms were skeletal and uncovered, her dress offering no protection from the elements. He got up and bought her a meat pie from a nearby stall, but when he came back she had gone.

  Darkness had begun to gnaw at the edges of the sky and the lamplighters were out on Oxford Street, moving from lamp to lamp with their ladders and tools. Pyke had nearly walked the entire length of the street. He was cold and his feet ached. There was one final tobacconist hemmed in between a grocer’s and a barber’s shop. He pushed open the door and heard a bell ring. The tobacconist wore wire-rimmed spectacles and a blue-and-white-striped apron. Pyke showed the man what little remained of the stub and asked whether he could identify the brand.

  The tobacconist pushed his spectacles back up his nose. ‘Not the exact brand but it looks like a well-rolled cigar. Something we might stock.’

  His assistant, a pretty young woman with blonde braids, hovered to one side of the counter.

  ‘I’m looking for the man who purchased it. His name’s Jimmy Trotter.’ Pyke gave them a description.

  The tobacconist shook his head and said he didn’t recognise the name or the description, but out of the corner of his eye Pyke saw the young assistant flinch. It was all he needed.

  It was another half-hour before the tobacconist pulled down the wooden shutters and locked up the shop. Wearing a shawl now, the young assistant bade him farewell and set off along Oxford Street. Pyke caught up with her at the corner of Duke Street. At first she didn’t seem to recognise him but when he mentioned Trotter’s name her face fell and her lips began to quiver. Pyke told her not to be scared, he just wanted some information, and if she told him what he needed to know, he would buy her a hot roast beef dinner and as much beer as she wanted. That seemed to do it, and she led him around the corner to a pub called the Three Geese.

  ‘He’s been a regular in the shop for a year. Always gives me these looks and tries to touch me when Mr Bent ain’t looking. He always buys the same thing, too: a box of Fuentes cigars, from the West Indies. Expensive, they are. He calls ’em his Prometheus sticks.’

  She was a slight, willowy girl with fine blonde hair and a freckled face, but she had already finished one mug of beer and ordered another.

  ‘Do you know where he lives?’

  ‘Not where he lives,’ she said, licking foam from her top lip.

  ‘Then where I can find him?’

  ‘Last month, Mr Bent made me deliver the cigars to him in person. I didn’t want to but he told me ’less I did, I’d lose my job. He said Mr Trotter was one of his very best customers. I didn’t tell him about the looks and the groping. And he said he’d pay me sixpence for it.’

  ‘Where did you deliver them to?’

  ‘That was the thing. When I left them for him, he weren’t there. But as soon as I stepped out of the pub, I felt something touch me and he was there, leering at me. I could tell he was in the gun, his eyes were crossed and I could smell the rum on his breath, but I could see he meant business. I’d say he’s a mean one. He tried to grab my wrist and pull me into the alley but I was too quick for him and then a gentl’man happened to walk past and I latched on to him.’

  ‘You did well,’ Pyke said, waving at the pot-boy to bring her another beer.

  She gave him a toothy smile but he could see she was still shaken by the incident.

  ‘So you were told to deliver the cigars to a public house?’ When she nodded, Pyke added, ‘Do you remember which one?’

  She screwed up her face and tried to think. ‘I’d say it was on Tooley Street, across the river in Bermondsey.’

  Silently, Pyke kicked himself. ‘The Jolly Sailor.’ He should have thought about it without the girl’s prompt.

  ‘You know it?’ She looked at him, surprised. ‘It don’t seem like the kind of place a gentl’man would go.’

  But he didn’t want to make the long journey down to Bermondsey that night and, having met Townsend at the house in Berkeley Square and been told there were no new developments, he couldn’t face its silence and emptiness and caught a hackney carriage from a stand on the south side of the square all the way to his uncle’s apartment in Camden.

  Pyke had already told Godfrey the bad news about Emily and Felix in a note. His uncle ushered him into the parlour and put a glass of claret in his hand. ‘I haven’t heard a thing, either,’ Godfrey said, when Pyke told him there had been no word of them and no ransom letter. ‘We need to be careful, though, dear boy,’ he went on, peering through the curtains at the street. ‘I had a visit earlier from two very unfriendly peelers. They showed me a warrant for your arrest. I read it. It alleged you embezzled ten thousand pounds from your own bank.’

  So Blackwood had come good on his promise, Pyke noted with grim satisfaction. Again he wondered who was pulling his partner’s strings.

  Briefly Pyke explained what had happened while Godfrey listened, his lips rouged with claret. ‘And you think this might be related to what’s happened to Emily and Felix?’ he asked, when Pyke had finished.

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’

  ‘But you suspect who might have stolen the documents and set you up?’

  ‘Apart from Blackwood, there isn’t anyone else.’

  ‘Then that’s where you start.’

  Pyke explained he was paying Townsend to keep an eye on his partner but that his own priorities lay elsewhere.

  ‘Of course they do, dear boy, of course they do. And if there’s anything I can do to help, you know you just have to ask.’ Godfrey offered him a pained expression and shook his head. ‘A terrible, terrible business. I’ve been so worried. Emily, and that darling child of yours.’

  Pyke felt another wave of tiredness engulf him. He had hardly slept at all since the abduction. ‘Townsend made an interesting comment. That Emily may have been targeted for something she’d done, rather than to hurt me.’

  ‘But to involve a young child as well,’ Godfrey said, shaking his head.

  ‘I know, I know . . .’ Pyke thought about her reluctance to tell him what she had been involved in. Looking up, he noticed that a peculiar expression had taken over Godfrey’s face. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I heard some bad news today. A couple of the lads who help deliver the Scourge came to tell me.’

  ‘About?’

  ‘Apparently the Standard of Liberty beer shop on Brick Lane was raided earlier this morning and closed down. Everyone they could find was bundled into one of those secure carriages and taken away. There were similar raids on the Albion coffee house in Shoreditch, the Spotted Cow on Old Kent Road and the Barley Mow on Upper Thames Street.’

  Frowning, Pyke turned t
his new information over in his head and thought about something Tilling had told him. ‘Was Jackman’s brigade the main target?’

  Godfrey’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down while he finished what was in his glass. ‘From what I understand.’

  ‘Sir Henry Bellows was planning a crackdown against the radicals. I was told it might get nasty.’

  ‘You mean the windbag magistrate who wanted to lock me up and throw away the key?’

  Pyke nodded and asked Godfrey whether he’d had any joy chasing up information regarding the properties Bellows was alleged to have bought in Somers Town.

  ‘Not just yet, dear boy. But I have my feelers out there. Something will turn up. It always does.’

  Pyke thought again about Bellows and his connections both to Huntingdon, where he seemed to know everything that had happened, and to Sir John Conroy, and wondered whether he had had anything to do with the kidnapping. The answer seemed to lie in front of him but just beyond his comprehension.

  ‘What is it, dear boy?’

  ‘Do you mind if I stay here tonight? I just can’t . . .’ Suddenly he felt overwhelmed by tiredness.

  His uncle held up the palms of his hands. ‘No need to explain. You know this has always been your home, too.’

  They sat in silence for a few minutes, both occupied with their own thoughts. ‘It’s hard to fathom, dear boy,’ Godfrey said, breaking the silence. ‘I do what I do because I no longer care. I like to rattle people’s cages. I can see the corruptness of government as well as anyone else but I don’t give a rat’s arse about the poor. Not really. Not like Emily. She wants to really change things and she thinks it’s still possible. A true believer. Always the most dangerous kind.’

  ‘Dangerous in what sense?’

  Godfrey wiped away a strand of dribble that had escaped from his mouth. ‘I don’t mean to further alarm you, my boy . . .’

  ‘But?’

  ‘How can I put this?’ He sat up in his chair, drumming the arms with his fingers. ‘I just don’t think you should underestimate the seriousness of the wider situation we’re facing here. There’s a small, dirty war going on out there and I suspect Emily might be caught right in the middle of it.’

  It had been more than three days since the kidnapping and still no one had heard or knew a thing about it. If it had, indeed, been a kidnapping.

  The following morning, more from a sense of desperation than realistic hope, Pyke found himself waiting for Gore at the head office of his bank on Leadenhall Street.

  As befitted the public face of London’s largest private bank, Gore’s banking hall was a cathedral to commerce and the power of money, a place that sought to display the wealth of its owner and customers. In architectural terms, the building was bettered in the Square Mile only by the head offices of the East India Company. The neoclassical façade, clad in brilliant white stucco, resembled an Italian palazzo, and inside, the ornate ceilings, the decorative pilasters and the giant silk damasks that hung on the walls, together with a glass chandelier that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Palace of Versailles, gave the impression of imperial majesty. In the hall itself, queues of well-fed customers were serviced by as many as twenty cashiers, and the whole room had an air of quiet efficiency and money that, at one time, Pyke might have found intoxicating.

  He arrived alone and was escorted up the marble staircase to the top floor, where he was told to wait. In fact, he’d barely had the chance to get comfortable in the armchair before Abraham Gore himself burst through one of the doors and strode over to greet him, concern etched on his face. ‘What is it, old friend?’ he asked, as he led Pyke towards his private office. ‘Have you discovered something about Morris’s death?’

  Pyke had expected Gore to occupy a large, palatial office more akin to something one might find at a gentleman’s club than a bank, and was therefore surprised to find himself in a room barely larger than his own, with just a medium-sized mahogany desk, two chairs, a half-empty bookshelf and a bureau as furniture. Gore invited Pyke to sit down on the other chair and said, ‘If you don’t mind me saying so, my friend, you look terrible. Is something the matter?’

  Somehow he found the utilitarian modesty of Gore’s office reassuring.

  Pyke took a deep breath and told Gore about the abduction. Gore’s jaw dropped as he did so, the colour draining from his ruddy cheeks. He listened patiently to Pyke’s brief precis of what had happened and wiped his forehead with a pocket handkerchief while muttering, ‘My God,’ and then, ‘A monstrous business.’ When Pyke had finished, he got up, walked around the desk and tried to embrace Pyke, a gesture that turned into a rather awkward fumble. Still, his intentions seemed genuine enough, and as far as Pyke had been able to tell the news had been as shocking to him as it was unexpected. Either that or Gore was a better actor than Pyke imagined.

  ‘You must be beside yourself with worry,’ Gore began, still shaking his head. ‘It’s truly monstrous. Who would do such a thing? And to involve your delightful boy, as well. If there’s anything I can do, anything at all ...’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s why I’m here.’ Pyke looked at Gore across the desk. ‘I might be clutching at straws but I’m worried my wife might have been targeted in a more general clampdown on radical activities here in the capital. I was hoping you might be able to call upon your various connections to determine whether this was the case or not.’

  ‘Your wife?’ Gore asked, sounding surprised. ‘Why on earth would she have been the target?’

  ‘You heard her last week at Morris’s house. She’s long been an ardent campaigner for political reform.’

  ‘Indeed, indeed,’ Gore said, rubbing his chin. ‘But do you really think a politician or a judge would sanction such an action? Your lad was involved, after all. I mean to say, would someone with their hands on the reins of power sink to such depths? I can’t think that your wife, delightful as she is, poses such a significant threat to the powers that be.’

  ‘Perhaps not, but in the week preceding the abduction I received two vague threats directed towards Emily.’

  ‘Threats from whom?’

  ‘A savage called Jimmy Trotter and Sir Henry Bellows.’

  ‘Bellows?’ Gore appeared upset by this news. ‘What’s that blithering idiot got to do with any of this?’

  Pyke explained that Bellows was orchestrating this clampdown on radical activity in the city and that a number of arrests had been made over the past couple of days.

  ‘Arrests, but not a kidnapping, not abducting a woman and a young child in broad daylight . . .’

  ‘Will you at least see what you can find out for me? Who knows? You might be quite right. Bellows might have had nothing at all to do with the abduction. But I’d like to hear this confirmed by one of your contacts. I’m not accusing him of anything just yet but he’s never liked me and my recent encounters with him have all been acrimonious.’

  ‘Of course, I’ll do whatever I can. I’ll get to work on it immediately. I’m just glad you felt you could confide in me.’

  Pyke nodded his gratitude. ‘It goes without saying that the fewer people who hear about the kidnapping the better. I don’t suddenly want to be inundated with false ransom demands.’

  ‘Quite, quite,’ Gore said, sitting forward in his chair, his face lined with concern. ‘In the light of this awful news, perhaps we should think about postponing our little piece of business ...’

  ‘Why?’ Pyke said, more sharply than he had intended. ‘Are you suddenly having second thoughts?’

  That seemed to wound Gore. ‘Not at all, my friend. Quite the opposite, in fact. I’m chomping at the bit to get going with it.’

  ‘Then we should proceed as planned. After all, business is business.’

  ‘Admirable sentiments,’ Gore said, seriously. ‘Even more so in the light of your ... difficulties.’ He paused for a moment. ‘And rest assured, I will do everything I can to help you. Everything in my power. I’m certain this dreadful business
will work out in the end. Even though I have no faith to speak of, at times like this I can see why people turn to the Church. I wish I could offer you more than I’ve been able to.’

  When the hack-chaise dropped him at the steps of Hambledon, he was met by Jo, the only servant Pyke had told about the kidnapping. Jo said that no ransom demand had been delivered to the hall and no new information had come to light She added that some of the servants were starting to question the story they’d been told - that Emily and Felix were visiting an old friend of hers on the south coast. Why hadn’t she told any of them about this trip? Royce had apparently been asking. Pyke dismissed these concerns with a shake of the hand. ‘So what,’ he said, bounding up the steps two at a time. He asked how Milly was. Jo explained that she was eating properly and looked quite well but that she still hadn’t spoken a word or ventured out of her room.

  Pyke found Milly sitting on her bed, humming to herself. Laid out in front of her were a series of pencil drawings; one of a horse, one of a tree, one of a flower and one of a dog.

  When she saw him, Milly tried to gather up and hide the drawings but he managed to retrieve the one of the flower from the bed before she could crumple it up. ‘This is very good, Milly,’ Pyke said, looking at the drawing from different angles. Clearly the girl had a talent for draughtsmanship.

  Blushing a little, she relinquished the other drawings from her grip and Pyke took them in his hands and admired them in passing. He told her the drawing of the flower was his favourite and without hesitation Milly thrust it into his hand.