The Revenge of Captain Paine

by Andrew Pepper

  Pyke willingly agreed and spent the final hour of the journey chatting with Milly. By the time they had started the slow, tortuous descent into the small port of Ramsgate, the afternoon light was starting to fade and it was almost dark when the weary horses trudged into the coaching yard. Pyke settled his debt with the driver and led Milly to an inn across the road, before any of the passengers realised their cases had been thrown from the roof of the carriage.

  Despite the pleasant setting between two chalk cliffs, Ramsgate was a dismal little town and Pyke was glad to be staying only for a night. Having left Milly in their room and assuring her he would return within an hour, he hailed a coachman from a stand in front of the inn and instructed the driver to take him to the Albion hotel. It was a clear, chilly evening and away from the smog of the city the air smelled fresh and the sky was filled with seagulls circling above the returning fishing boats. At the front desk, Pyke asked the hotel’s porters to pass a message to Helen Milner-Gibson and returned to the carriage. He had to wait only a few minutes before the bonneted figure of the princess’s lady-in-waiting emerged from the hotel.

  ‘Am I to believe you have word from my family, sir?’ she asked, peering into the carriage. This was the message Pyke had told the porter to pass to her.

  ‘Please, it’s such a chilly evening, why don’t you step in here out of the wind.’ He smiled disarmingly and moved across to the far side of the carriage.

  Reluctantly she hitched up her skirt and did as he’d suggested, but left the door ajar in case she needed to make a quick exit. She was an attractive woman with a pale, angular face dotted with freckles, doe-like eyes, dark brown hair gathered up in a comb and long, wispy eyelashes. Without having to ask, he could tell she came from a wealthy family: it was the way in which she carried herself, as though the world owed her something, rather than the other way around.

  ‘Please, sir, you said you had news from my family. Is it good news or bad news?’ She removed her straw bonnet and looked at him pleadingly.

  Pyke waited for a moment, staring out of the window at the masts bobbing up and down in the harbour. ‘I’m told you’re an acquaintance of Kate Sutton.’

  Before she could scramble to safety, he had grabbed hold of her wrist and reached across to shut the door. The driver had already been instructed, and indeed paid, to ignore what happened in the back of his cab, and took up the reins, the carriage rolling slowly forward.

  ‘I just want to know whether Kate is still alive or not,’ Pyke said, quietly, once the cab was moving.

  Helen looked at him, her expression revealing antipathy and fear.

  ‘I’m here to help but I can only do this if you’re honest with me. I’m sure I don’t need to underline the seriousness of the situation but, even so, you might not realise just how much danger you’re in as a friend of Kate’s. Her disappearance has left behind a trail of bodies, including her betrothed as well as her mother and father.’

  This revelation brought a gasp of astonishment. For a short while, she couldn’t even bring herself to look at him.

  ‘I’m not going to harm you, Helen. I just want to know whether Kate is still alive and if so where I can find her.’

  She stared down at the straw on the floor of the cab. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir.’

  Pyke nodded calmly. He’d expected to meet some resistance. ‘How long have you been the princess’s lady-in-waiting? ’

  ‘I’m not her lady-in-waiting. I’m her lady of the bedchamber. ’

  Pyke bowed his head, acknowledging the mistake. ‘How long have you been her lady of the bedchamber?’

  ‘About a year.’

  ‘And were you first appointed to this post by the duchess’s comptroller, Sir John Conroy?’

  A brief tilt of her head confirmed this.

  ‘So how would you describe your dealings with Sir John? Do you find him to be a trustworthy employer?’

  Gingerly she shook her head. They had travelled along the seafront and had come to a halt at the end of a track. Outside, the chalk cliff rose up from the sea like a vertical wall and the wind buffeted the side of the carriage.

  ‘In what way is he untrustworthy?’ When she didn’t answer, Pyke let out a heavy sigh and added, ‘Look, Helen, I can’t help either you or Kate unless you tell me something I don’t already know.’

  This time she turned to face him, her eyes blazing with indignation. ‘Why should I tell you anything?’

  ‘Because I can help you. At the very least, I can keep you both alive.’

  ‘And who are you?’ she asked, suddenly curious.

  ‘My name’s Pyke. Before he was killed, Freddie Sutton asked me to try and find his daughter.’

  ‘Kate’s father?’ This seemed to change things and Helen stared out of the window, biting her lip.

  ‘If it helps, I think Sir John Conroy is a morally repugnant coward. But that’s just my opinion.’

  She smiled at his apparent boldness before the frown returned to her expression. ‘Do you want to know something? The princess still believes I was planted by Conroy to spy on her.’

  ‘And were you?’

  ‘At first he wanted me to.’ She chuckled bitterly. ‘But he wanted me to do a lot of things for him.’

  Pyke’s nod suggested he already knew about Conroy’s sleazy reputation. ‘I take it the princess isn’t exactly enamoured of her mother’s comptroller.’

  ‘That would be a gross understatement, sir. She hates him. Yes, hate would not be too strong a word.’

  ‘And this feeling is mutual?’

  ‘I should say so.’ Helen waited for a moment, to reflect on her answer. ‘But if he’s to be her private secretary when she becomes queen, I’d say he needs her more than she needs him.’

  Pyke allowed a short silence to settle between them. Finally he turned to face her and said, ‘I don’t mean to alarm you, Helen, but I have another reason for wanting to find the letters that I believe Kate stole from Conroy. My wife and child have been kidnapped and, in order to secure their safe return, I need to produce the letters this Sunday morning. I want you to understand that I’ll do anything to make this happen. Anything. Now, if that means dragging you up those steps over there to the top of the cliff and holding you over the edge until you tell me what you know, I’ll do it without batting an eyelid. Now nod your head once if you understand my predicament.’

  Dumbstruck, she nodded her head.

  ‘Good,’ he said, with a smile. ‘Now why don’t you take me to see Kate or tell me what happened to her?’

  Helen stared at him with her large, liquid eyes and nervously licked her lips. ‘But I promised . . .’

  ‘So Kate’s still alive?’

  Helen gave Pyke a forlorn nod. ‘But I swear, she’ll kill me, and maybe even shoot herself, if she thinks you’re there to harm her.’

  ‘What if I brought along her little sister?’

  That drew another gasp of surprise. ‘You mean, you have Milly here?’

  The girl before Pyke, wielding a pistol, in a sodden dress with pale, dirty skin, blue lips and dark, greasy hair, was more like a feral creature than the dutiful daughter Freddie Sutton had described.

  But her resistance crumbled as soon as she saw Milly and her pistol slipped from her fingers as her sister ran towards her, Kate gathering her up in her arms. Their combined sobs lasted for more than a minute. Pyke and Helen stepped back across the threshold of the disused labourer’s cottage to give them a little privacy. They had walked for a mile or two across the top of the windswept cliff, Pyke carrying a tired Milly for some of the way on his shoulders. Now at the abandoned cottage, little more than a pile of stones and some branches with an old canvas tarpaulin as a roof, Pyke and Helen waited outside, staring up at the starry sky.

  After about ten minutes, Kate appeared in the doorway and waved him and Helen back into the cottage. In place of her scowl, she now bore a smile and thanked him for what he’d done for Milly. Her cheeks were sta
ined with tears. Milly stood at her side trembling but trying to hold herself together. Pyke supposed Milly had told Kate about their parents and could only wonder at the bewilderment and sadness she must now be feeling.

  ‘Milly tells me you took her into your home and treated her like she was your own daughter, Mr Pyke. For that, I’ll always be grateful.’

  ‘Did she tell you how I first came upon her?’ Pyke looked first at Milly and then at her sister.

  Kate bit her lip and nodded, tears filling her eyes. ‘What were you doing there in the first place?’

  ‘My uncle’s Godfrey Bond. He asked me to try and find you.’

  Her expression darkened. ‘No disrespect, Mr Pyke, but I wish I’d never laid eyes on that man.’

  ‘None taken. And just Pyke will do.’ He coughed. ‘In my uncle’s defence, he only gave you what you and Johnny wanted.’

  Pyke’s mention of Johnny brought further discomfort to her face. ‘Have you seen or heard from him?’

  The way Pyke shook his head told her what she needed to know. She gasped, tears flowing down her cheeks now. ‘My God, what have I done? Ma and Pa and now Johnny ...’

  ‘You shouldn’t have to answer for Johnny. He saw a way of making some money and grabbed it with both hands.’

  ‘And my ma and pa?’

  Pyke glanced over at Helen. ‘You did what you thought you had to.’

  ‘No, I did what I did because I was a greedy little bitch.’ Kate’s laugh was devoid of humour. ‘It’s been funny. I’ve lived here, with Helen’s help, for three weeks now, and you know something? I haven’t missed the fine bedding and fancy foods in the slightest. I can see the stars at night through the holes in the roof and I’ve even grown used to the cold. I used to think that having money would be the greatest thing in the world. Now Ma and Pa are dead and so is Johnny and I don’t give a damn whether I ever see a gold coin again in my lifetime.’ She reached down and gave Milly a hug.

  ‘Perhaps you’d like to tell me what happened, Kate. How you came to be caught up in this mess ...’

  ‘Have you a few days to spare?’

  ‘I’d just like the truth.’ Pyke dug his hands into the pockets of his greatcoat. ‘You owe me that much.’

  Kate nodded solemnly. ‘I can’t offer you anything to eat or drink but maybe you’d like to take a seat.’ She motioned at the pile of hay.

  Pyke told her he was happy to stand.

  The tale that Kate Sutton told him was a depressingly familiar one in which none of the players, including herself and even Godfrey, came out looking good.

  Pyke had already been told the first part of it by his uncle but listened quietly while she described her unwitting discovery of Conroy’s sexual liaison with the duchess and the pressure brought to bear on her by Johnny, when she mentioned it to him, to try to trade her revelation for money.

  It wasn’t difficult for Pyke to see why a struggling actor and a lowly kitchen hand might have been suitably tempted by Godfrey’s initial payment to take further risks, but he found her insistence that it was Johnny, rather than her, who had pushed the issue harder to swallow. But then Kate’s story took an unexpected twist, one that partly explained the show Pyke had seen at the penny gaff in Lambeth, and left him wondering why the royal comptroller hadn’t yet been dismissed from his position and arrested for high treason.

  It had started earlier in the summer while the royal party had been living at ‘home’ in Kensington Palace. One of Kate’s tasks had been to deliver the princess’s lunch to her at midday and one day, early in July, a Monday or a Tuesday, she had witnessed something she wasn’t meant to, something she could not explain. Unbeknown to him, Kate had seen Sir John Conroy surreptitiously emptying a few drops of clear liquid from a bottle into the princess’s lunch. After this incident a pattern had developed. She would carry the princess’s food on a tray from the kitchen as far as the stairs, whereupon Conroy would intercept her and insist upon taking it up to the princess herself. This had lasted for at least a couple of weeks.

  Pyke could only imagine how the notion that the comptroller was trying to poison the princess might have terrified the kitchen hand, especially as the princess’s health did start to deteriorate rapidly throughout the rest of the summer and at the start of the autumn. Motivated by a fear that Victoria might perish, and that she would be blamed for holding something back, Kate told her only friend in the palace what she’d seen. Helen Milner-Gibson initially treated Kate’s story with scepticism but took steps to warn the princess’s governess, the formidable Baroness Lehzen, who in turn made certain that Conroy never got his hands on her charge’s food again. But the princess’s illness, thought to be a bilious fever, had worsened throughout the autumn, to the point where their week-long stay in Ramsgate became a two-month sojourn, with the young princess too weak to travel back to London.

  Despite her lowly status, Kate had travelled with the royal party to the south coast at Lehzen’s insistence, in order to work in the hotel’s kitchen and oversee the preparation of the princess’s food.

  But Kate had also told her betrothed, Johnny Evans, about what she had seen and, apparently, the scent of fresh scandal and the possibility of using the information to make more money had sent the struggling actor into a frenzy. Pursuing his own agenda, he’d set to work trying to dig up some background information and had been told about a rumour, circulating a few years earlier, that the Duke of Cumberland had once tried to murder the young princess by introducing arsenic into her bread and milk. Unaware of the fact that Cumberland and Conroy despised each other, Johnny had concocted a scenario in which both men were conspiring to kill the princess. This had formed the basis of the show he’d put together and which Pyke had seen performed at the penny gaff. But Johnny still needed some hard evidence if he was going to sell this new story to Godfrey, and tried to pester Kate into snooping around Conroy’s private quarters. By her account, Kate had refused to do so, but before the royal party left for Ramsgate Johnny had badgered her to such an extent that she ended up providing him with enough information that he could plan his own raid on the empty palace.

  According to her, Kate had played no further part in Johnny’s successful burglary of Conroy’s private quarters and she didn’t find out, until later, that he had taken a cracksman called Hayes along with him and that the two of them had found a way of breaking into Conroy’s safe. The first she knew that something was amiss was Conroy’s fury when he’d discovered his safe had been burgled, and his belief that the burglary had been assisted by someone from within the palace. During their stay at Ramsgate, he had begun a witch-hunt, trying to find out who’d helped the thieves break into the palace in the first place. About the same time, Johnny had shown up at the Albion hotel, apparently flush with his own success. The problem was that he couldn’t read and therefore left the letters he’d stolen from Conroy’s safe with Kate for her to peruse. But Johnny hadn’t been able to keep quiet about the burglary and word had quickly got back to Conroy that a certain ‘gentleman’ staying at an inn on the seafront had been boasting about his exploits. It was also reported that this same man had been seen in the company of one of the royal party. Once this rumour had begun to spread around the hotel, Kate fled, taking with her the letters, first to try to find Johnny and when she couldn’t find him, seeking refuge in an abandoned cottage she had previously noticed on her clifftop walks. Only Helen Milner-Gibson had been told of her whereabouts and she had been sworn to the strictest secrecy. Kate had sought sanctuary in the cottage, where she had spent the time reading and rereading the letters while trying to determine what to do, and how to extricate herself from the mess she had, partly, landed herself in.