The Revenge of Captain Paine

by Andrew Pepper

  ‘Can’t you see, Maggie? You’re hurting him. You’re hurting the boy.’ Pyke took another step towards her.

  ‘That’s enough. Stay where you are, Pyke.’

  ‘Maggie, please. Think about Felix. Put him down and we can talk . . .’

  ‘I can’t be tricked that easily,’ she said, backing away, another step closer to the fire.

  ‘It’s not a trick. Put him down and we can talk. There’s nowhere left for you to go, Maggie.’

  Much later, Pyke would dwell on the moment when Marguerite had turned to the fire and wonder whether she had really thought about trying to harm his son. In the end, it didn’t matter because she turned back towards him and let Felix go, her cheeks stained with her tears. Felix rushed into his arms and Pyke gathered him up and walked out of the room without looking at, or saying another word to Marguerite, who had crumpled to the floor and was sobbing uncontrollably.

  That was the last time he saw her.

  As Pyke led Felix down the stone steps at the front of the house, holding his hand, he said, ‘I’ll never, ever let anyone take you or try and hurt you again.’

  ‘Mrs Maggie didn’t actually hurt me,’ Felix said, matter-of-factly.

  They walked on a little way in silence; ‘You know you’ve always wanted a dog,’ Pyke said, after a few hundred yards.

  Felix looked up at him and nodded. ‘Mummy said she’d ask you.’

  Pyke nodded, thinking about what Felix had just said. The boy didn’t know and he couldn’t bring himself to tell him. At least not yet. There was only so much the lad could take in a day.

  ‘Well, I might have found us a dog.’

  ‘A dog. We’ve got a dog.’ He trotted happily ahead. ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Copper.’

  ‘Copper,’ Felix said, excitedly. ‘What kind of a dog is he?’

  ‘A mastiff. But you have to be very careful around him. He’s been very ill. And he only has three good legs.’ Pyke took Felix’s hand and, together, they started across the fields towards Hambledon.

  Using the narrow staircase next to the old housekeeper’s room, Pyke descended into the cellar and, with only a lantern to guide him, followed the passageway as far as it would take him; at its end, just beyond the wine vault that he had steadily depleted in the six years since he’d been living at the hall, he unbolted a door and carefully negotiated his way down another flight of stairs, right into the belly of the building. Until a year ago, he had never been down there and didn’t even know it existed. He had stumbled upon it by accident, while looking for a casket belonging to Emily’s mother; in a rare lucid moment, just before her death, she’d told Emily about its existence, but neither Pyke nor Emily had been able to locate it. It was eerily quiet. This silence was reinforced by Pyke’s insistence that the four remaining servants take a week’s paid holiday and leave him alone in the old hall; but it didn’t really matter because down here no one would hear a man scream. It felt odd, knowing that it was just Felix, Copper and him in the building: Felix, who was asleep in his room, and Copper, who was stretched out by the fire in the drawing room. Just the three of them, if he didn’t count Sir Henry Bellows and Abraham Gore. Pyke followed a dark, winding corridor as far as it would take him and paused by the spot where he had left two pails of water and a tall stack of bricks earlier in the day. Unbolting another door, he pulled it open, the rusty hinges groaning as he did so. Putting the lantern down on the stone floor, he stepped into the room and saw the two of them, Gore and Bellows, tied up and gagged, on the other side of the wall that he had started to build and which already came up to his waist. Staring over the wall at the two men was like looking at hogs in a pen. The light had disturbed Gore and he squinted at Pyke, tugged at the bindings around his wrists and tried to speak through his gag. Bellows, who had been there almost a week, was slumped, unmoving, in the corner. The spartan room stank of the chief magistrate’s faeces, so much so that Pyke had nearly retched when he’d gone down there earlier in the day. Now, though, he had been expecting the stench and it didn’t affect him in the same way. It took him a while to climb through the narrow gap between the top of the wall and the ceiling and once he was inside the room, he removed Gore’s gag and prodded Bellows with his boot to see whether he was still alive. Returning to the other side of the wall, he started to mix some cement with water on a mason’s board. After a moment he heard Gore croak, ‘For God’s sake, man, can’t you see he’s dying? He needs food and water now.’

  Pyke peered over the wall. Gore’s chubby face glowed in the half-light. ‘You want me to show him compassion?’

  Gore peered up at him, seemingly confused. ‘Yes.’

  ‘The same compassion you showed Mary, the old woman in Huntingdon that you had Trotter rape and murder, or the navvies who died in that river, or Freddie Sutton and his wife or Johnny Evans or Julian Jackman, who you had crucified, or my own Emily, who you had slaughtered just because her political views offended you.’

  ‘Views are one thing. Actions are quite another. I couldn’t just allow her to do as she was doing.’ Gore waited for a moment, to gather his breath. ‘She understood we were fighting a war. Every man and woman to the death. She fell on the battlefield so that good men like you and me might escape the ignominy of having our heads cut off and stuck on to poles.’

  In that moment, Pyke hated Gore as much as it was possible to hate any man, but rather than act on it immediately, he picked up the mason’s board and carefully spread a layer of mortar on top of the bricks. ‘Don’t ever think you can speak for me.’ If he shut his eyes, he could see Emily smiling at him. He felt another wave of grief swell up inside him.

  ‘You were entirely comfortable with her political beliefs and allegiances?’

  ‘I respected her right to express them,’ Pyke said, placing a brick on to the layer of mortar. He could even taste his animosity towards Gore at the back of his throat.

  ‘But they never brought you into conflict?’

  ‘I loved my wife. And now she’s dead.’ He took another brick and placed it next to the one he had just laid. With each brick, the wall became a little higher. It was slow, painstaking work.

  Pyke had added another three rows to the wall when Gore spoke again. Now Pyke couldn’t see him over the wall. ‘When I was young, I used to read about figures like Jack Sheppard and Dick Turpin. I used to scour the pages of the old Newgate calendars. They were my heroes. I loved their bravery, their wit, their boldness. When I was older, I learned that Sheppard was nothing but a housebreaker and Turpin a common horse thief. The rest of it, the derring-do, noble deeds and courage in the face of adversity, was just a fiction. I remember feeling cheated at first but it taught me a valuable lesson too. The idea that a solitary man can bring an order as civilised and magnificent as ours to its knees is a nonsense.’

  ‘Then why go after my wife? I’m guessing you knew she was Captain Paine, and not Jackman.’

  ‘Really?’ The surprise in Gore’s voice sounded genuine. ‘No, I didn’t know it, but Sir Henry here always took that whole thing more seriously than I did. I wasn’t worried about a few sporadic arson attacks. But it’s true to say your wife’s money, coupled with the Wat Tyler Brigade’s ruthlessness, concerned me greatly. Do you imagine I wanted my workers swearing oaths to a union and striking to demand higher wages? That would have hit me in the pocket and the bad publicity a strike might have generated would’ve sent our share price plummeting.’

  ‘You turn my stomach, Gore. That you could do what you did just to further line your own pocket.’ Pyke felt his bitterness and grief engulf him.

  ‘I couldn’t let everything I’d worked for slip away. You, of all people, should be able to understand that.’

  ‘The old woman you paid Trotter to beat and kill in Huntingdon. I saw her body. I’ll carry an image of it to my grave. She was nearly seventy and he beat her and tortured her and raped her, and for what? To try and provoke the navvies into a fight so you could cut them down.�
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  Pyke pasted another layer of mortar on top of the bricks: the gap between the ceiling and the top of the wall was now just a few feet. He wanted it to be finished; he could hardly bear to be in the same physical space as Gore.

  ‘What are you doing, Pyke? C’mon, man, we can still thrash out some sort of deal here, can’t we? I still have money. If you’ll stop building that damned wall for a moment and we can talk like gentlemen . . .’ Gore’s disembodied voice echoed around the chamber. ‘If not for me, do it for Sir Henry here. He’s in a terrible state. No man should have to go through what he’s had to go through.’

  ‘I liked you, Gore. I know you wanted me to like you. That was the whole point of the deception. But I did genuinely like you. And look where it’s got us.’ Pyke laid one of the bricks carefully on top of the fresh mortar. Aside from the hatred, he felt used and humiliated.

  ‘I liked you, too. I still do. I respect you. What you’ve been able to do. But all this nonsense can’t be allowed to continue for much longer. I know you don’t intend to leave us down here. That would be too monstrous. You’ve been waiting for my former friends to abandon me and now that’s happened. Please, Pyke. I can give you anything you want. Anything at all. Any amount of money you ask for.’ Pyke noted the first trace of panic in Gore’s voice with a certain grim satisfaction.

  ‘Can you give me my wife back?’ When Gore didn’t answer him, Pyke laid another brick and added, ‘How does it feel to know people you’ve supported and backed for years, men you’ve counted as your friends, have abandoned you in your last hours of life; have not just abandoned you but have conspired to hand you over to me on a silver platter? That can’t be a pleasant thought.’ He felt a sadistic pleasure in what he was doing and despised himself for it.

  A few minutes later he had added another layer of bricks to the wall. The gap was down to a few inches.

  ‘You may have bankrupted your old bank but that’s as far as they’ll allow this to go, Pyke. You’ll never bring down the system. Gore’s will endure and very soon men and women will be able to travel from London to Birmingham in less than eight hours for just a few shillings. Imagine that. Eight hours. The world will never be the same again.’ Gore was yelling now, his voice echoing around the enclosed chamber. ‘And when it’s finished that railway will be a monument ... to me.’

  Pyke added another row of bricks and then another until he had only one more row to build before the tomb was complete. He smeared a thick paste of mortar on top of the wall and took his time placing each brick, forcing some of the mortar into the gaps at the sides and between the top of the bricks and the stone ceiling. It was demanding work and he was sweating by the time he had just one final brick to slot into place. He was standing on tiptoe on the top rung of a wooden ladder and had to strain to get as close to the small hole as possible. ‘“What’s called the splendour of the throne is nothing more than the corruption of the state; it’s made up of a band of parasites living in luxurious indolence.” I found that written in Emily’s diary. It’s a quote from Paine’s The Rights of Man.’

  Gore tried to say something but once Pyke had forced the final brick into its place, he couldn’t tell what it was. He smeared the rest of the mortar across the join between the bricks and the ceiling, climbed down the ladder and wiped the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief. The candle in the lantern had almost burnt down and Pyke guessed he had only another five minutes at best before the light went out. Gore was screaming now but they were too far down in the belly of the old building for his cries to disturb Felix. Pyke gathered up his tools, picked up the lantern and started off along the narrow passageway, having to duck his head slightly because the ceiling was so low. By the time he had passed through the first door and bolted it, Gore’s screams had evaporated into the air, and just as Pyke made it to the top of the stairs, the flame in his lantern flickered and died.

  EPILOGUE

  The winter that year was the coldest anyone could remember since the Thames had frozen over and Pyke and Maggie Shaw still believed the world held out possibilities for them. Pyke didn’t see any more of her after walking away from her with Felix, and he heard later she had sold the estate and moved back to France, where she’d married into the aristocracy.

  The furore unleashed by Pyke’s actions towards both the Grand Northern and the entire financial system started to abate only once the prime minister, Viscount Melbourne, announced a series of measures, including a substantial investment of government money, to bail out shareholders and prop up the ailing company while the damage was assessed. Surveyors reported that the devastation caused by the blasts would cost the best part of two hundred thousand pounds to rectify. The Grand Northern was eventually taken over by one of its competitors, the Northern and Eastern, but even with a new board in place and bolstered by new sources of capital, the first trains didn’t run on its tracks for another two years, and even then the fledgling railway terminated at Bishop’s Stortford rather than Cambridge. Morris’s railway, which was to have stretched one hundred and eight miles from London to York, had barely limped over the Middlesex border into Hertfordshire. To no one’s surprise, the Birmingham railway fared much better; the first section was completed by the end of the following year and at an official ceremony to mark the opening of the line between Camden Town and Boxmoor, a memorial was unveiled to commemorate the sudden demise of its founder and chairman, Abraham Gore, who, according to the plaque, had died from an unspecified illness some time in the previous winter. Nonetheless, the railway fever that had gripped the country for the middle years of the 1830s ran out of steam, perhaps as a result of the losses investors had incurred during what become known as the ‘Grand Northern debacle’, and as the economy slowed and then slipped into recession, only a handful of new railways were proposed and built in the final years of the decade.

  Pyke’s war against the railway had resulted in many casualties but intervention on the part of Melbourne’s government had propped up the share price to the extent that the losses suffered by ordinary investors were, on the whole, small.

  Once the navvies had been paid, Pyke and Red had parted on good terms and, just as Pyke had promised, no one was ever arrested or charged for the devastating attacks on the railway tracks and the subcontractor’s warehouses. The sudden, brief rise of Captain Paine lit the fuse for some radical activity in the capital and its outlying areas but he was quickly forgotten about, or rather passed into folklore. For a while afterwards, Pyke heard different versions of the ballad of Captain Paine being sung in the streets and in pubs, and he always found that its lilting melody and plaintive words brought a welcome lump to his throat. But radical activity didn’t peter out after Emily’s and Jackman’s deaths. Quite the opposite, in fact. In London, a plethora of Jacobin associations based on the Wat Tyler Brigade were established, particularly in the East End, trade unions saw their numbers leap, and agitation for political and workplace reform eventually resulted in the establishment of a set of demands put forward by a new movement whose advocates became known as Chartists. Pyke followed these developments with interest but played no part in furthering their cause; and no one ever found out that Captain Paine had been a woman. The Duke of Cumberland also never found out how close he had come to seizing the British throne and when, two years later, and just a few months after she had come of age, Victoria became queen, Cumberland was crowned King of Hanover, where, under Salic law, a female ruler was not permitted. Though Pyke had had no further contact with the princess, he had been interested to learn that one of her first acts as queen was to banish Conroy and her mother from the court for ever. Pyke saw Kate and Milly Sutton a few times after they’d returned to London. At Princess Victoria’s insistence, a good job was found for Kate in the King’s Palace and she was able to support herself and her sister from what she made. In the short time she’d stayed at Hambledon, Milly had developed a fierce attachment to Pyke, and it was only after he had promised to visit them regularly in their ne
w quarters that Milly had agreed to go with her sister.

  In order to smooth things over with Ned Villums, Pyke paid a visit to his associate Barnaby Hodges at his gaming house on Regent Street and told him about the money Jem Nash had blackmailed from Morris and which could be retrieved from beneath the floorboards of Nash’s lodgings in Fulham. Pyke’s former colleague and henchman, Townsend, died that winter, too. Pyke paid for his funeral and made sure that the grave was adorned with a headstone bearing his name and dates. He didn’t know anyone else at the funeral and left without introducing himself. On his way back to Hambledon, Pyke thought about his association with Townsend and wondered why, though they had known each other for fifteen years, they had never been friends.

  During that first winter after Emily’s death, Pyke took long walks with Felix and Copper in the grounds of the estate and spent time in the field where she had been buried, a picturesque spot in the shadow of oak and sycamore trees. It was only during those months that Pyke felt he got to know his son for the first time, what he thought and felt about the world, and it relieved him to discover that a keen, unsentimental intelligence lay behind his frail appearance. One night, soon after the servants’ return to the hall, Felix had complained of hearing noises coming from somewhere below him and, though Pyke knew for a fact they couldn’t have been made by Gore, he paid one final visit to the tomb he had built deep under the cellar, only to be greeted by a long, sombre silence. That night he, too, had heard the voices, and for a while he truly believed that the banker’s ghost had returned to haunt him. After that, Pyke encouraged Copper to sleep on the floor beside Felix’s bed, and soon after that the lad and the slobbering mastiff were inseparable. It never ceased to amaze Felix how a dog as large as Copper could walk and even run using only three good legs.

  Taking a rest from his business, Godfrey often stayed with them at the old hall and entertained them with gruesome stories of criminal wrongdoing. He would tell the stories in such a way that, by the end, even Felix and Jo were cheering for those who faced the scaffold. Though he knew that Emily wouldn’t have approved, Pyke felt it was somehow still appropriate. By the time spring finally came, the once plentiful wine cellar had been nearly depleted.