The Revenge of Captain Paine (26 page)

‘Why are you telling me this?’ Pyke waited for a moment. ‘Is it something you just
guessed
I’d be interested to hear?’

Gore shrugged. ‘I told you because it’s the only morsel of information I’ve heard about the Tory leader in a while.’

‘From where I’m standing, it looks very much like you’re trying to smear him.’

‘Whatever you might think, Pyke, it’s the truth. I’m not the kind of man who tells lies about other people.’

‘Judicious editing of the truth can sometimes be more effective than blatant lies.’

‘Can I be more honest with you? I fear that Sir Robert suspects my involvement in inciting the navvies in Huntingdon to violence. Just as you did and, for all I know, maybe still do. I also fear that he’s trying to do what you just accused me of. Smear me with the taint of association.’

Pyke had wondered about Peel’s motivation all along and this finally made some kind of sense.

The fact that Gore, when pushed, had been honest with him in a way that Peel still hadn’t suggested the banker’s innocence. And Pyke knew that Peel wasn’t above stirring up rumours to besmirch those who threatened him.

‘And you had nothing to do with what happened in Huntingdon?’

Gore stared pleadingly into his eyes. ‘As I’ve said before, Eddy was my friend, my best and oldest friend, and I would never have done
anything
to harm him or his interests. If nothing else, you have to believe
that
, Pyke.’

 
Through the thinning crowd, Pyke saw Marguerite chatting to Emily. They were standing on the pavement next to his carriage, their heads nodding as they listened to one another talk. Briefly Pyke paused, more in horror than fascination, to look at both women and try to assess their mood.

Emily noticed him first. Her expression was unreadable but she didn’t break into a smile. ‘I was just passing on our condolences to Marguerite.’

‘Thank you so much, my dear.’ Marguerite trained her stare at Pyke. ‘I’m so glad that you and your husband could come. I can’t tell you what it means having a friendly face from the old days here.’

Just for a moment Pyke thought - hoped - that Emily had missed the implication of Marguerite’s deliberate attempt at sabotage. She looked between them, Marguerite and him, and frowned. ‘I’m sorry, but do the two of you know each other?’

Marguerite tried to appear contrite and muttered, ‘Oh? Didn’t he mention it? Well, we didn’t know each other well but we certainly knew each other.’ She didn’t look across at him. ‘Before a few weeks ago, we hadn’t laid eyes on one another for, perhaps, fifteen years.’

Pyke laughed, trying to make light of it. He wanted to wring Marguerite’s neck, of course, but that would draw further unwanted attention to their former attachment. ‘Yes, I almost didn’t recognise her.’

‘I suppose we’ve both come a long way since those days.’ Marguerite put on a sad smile and added, ‘If you’ll excuse me I have other people to greet.’ She looked across at the funeral cortège and shook her head. ‘When you called at the house the other day,’ she said, looking directly at Pyke, ‘I wasn’t doing very well, but perhaps once today is out of the way I’ll feel more like facing up to my responsibilities.’

Pyke said nothing as she disappeared into the crowd, but when he turned around to look for Emily she had already taken her place inside their carriage.

FIFTEEN

They were very quiet in the carriage as it crossed over on to Fenchurch Street, the noise of horses’ hoofs clattering against cobblestones somehow amplified by the silence that grew between them.

Earlier in the day, Emily had made arrangements to show Pyke the row of terraced houses on Granby Street where Horace Groat employed up to a hundred children, some as young as six, to stitch together boots and shoes in near-darkness, working them for fifteen or sixteen hours and paying them as little as a shilling a day.

‘You lied to me,’ Emily said, eventually, in a menacing tone.

‘It didn’t seem important.’

Emily nodded, as though she’d expected him to say this. ‘If it wasn’t important, why go to the effort of lying?’

‘Because I didn’t want you to think what you’re no doubt already thinking.’

‘And what am I no doubt thinking?’ This time there was a trace of real anger in her voice.

Pyke stared out of the window, not wanting to answer her question.

‘We went to her house.
All
of us. Felix, too. And you didn’t think it necessary to let me know she was an old friend?’

‘She was an acquaintance, not a friend.’

‘I don’t care
what
she was,’ Emily shouted. ‘But you deliberately kept something from me.’ Before he had a chance to respond, she had thought of something else. ‘What am I? Stupid? Am I supposed to believe that her arrival in our neck of the woods is just a coincidence?’

‘I had nothing to do with that. I was as surprised as you were.’

‘But you went to see her without letting me know.
After
Morris had died.’

‘I had some pressing business, relating to a loan Morris has taken out, to discuss with her.’

‘
Business
.’ Emily shook her head. ‘So how well were the two of you acquainted?’

‘We knew some of the same people.’

‘Did you fuck?’ The word sounded even more shocking coming from her mouth.

‘No.’ The lie was more instinctive than anything else.

‘Did you want to fuck her?’ Emily asked, not changing her tone. ‘After all, she’s a very beautiful woman.’

This time he looked directly at her. ‘I don’t expect you to tell me about all the men you find attractive. I just expect you not to act on your impulses.’

‘
My
impulses? Why is this suddenly all about me? You were the one who lied to me, Pyke.’

He fell silent, knowing he was beaten.

But Emily hadn’t quite finished. ‘I take it you haven’t yet acted on your impulses.’

She waited for a moment. ‘Yet.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Now she’s a widow and doubtless a very rich one at that . . .’

‘You’re a very rich woman, too,’ Pyke said, gently. ‘And you’re the one I chose to marry.’

‘Except she’s more beautiful than me, isn’t she?’

‘She’s a peacock. All feathers and plumage.’

Emily’s scowl started to crack. ‘If she’s a peacock, what am I, then?’

‘You’re my very own bird of prey.’

‘And that’s supposed to make me feel better? Being compared to a buzzard?’

‘In a fight, who would you put your money on? A peacock or a buzzard?’

‘So now you expect the two of us to fight for you?’ A small smile appeared on her lips.

Pyke edged towards her and kissed her gently on the cheek. ‘Of course, if you did fight, you’d win by a mile.’

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.