The Revenge of Captain Paine (55 page)

‘Of course.’ Godfrey nodded. ‘Is there anything at all I can do?’

‘I want you to go and visit a man called Fitzroy Tilling. I’ll give you the address. Tell him I need an audience with Peel and the prime minister, Viscount Melbourne, the day after tomorrow. Make it clear that if I don’t get what I’ve asked for, I’ll make public information that will threaten the orderly succession of Princess Victoria to the throne and raise the spectre of a Cumberland monarchy. Oh, and insist that Sir John Conroy is forced to attend the meeting, as well.’

Godfrey stared at him, seemingly not knowing what to say or even where to start. ‘You have the letters?’

‘One day I’ll tell you the whole story.’

His uncle nodded. It would have to be enough for the moment. Wet and dejected, he turned and began to trudge back towards the hall.

THIRTY-ONE

The venue chosen for the hastily arranged meeting was Lansdowne House, as coincidence would have it a Palladian mansion on the south side of Berkeley Square, just a few doors from the house that Pyke had rented. The third Marquess of Lansdowne was the Lord President of the Council in Melbourne’s cabinet, and Pyke had heard that the marquess sometimes hosted cabinet meetings in his stately home. Pyke viewed the arrivals from his window, and it was only when Peel and Conroy had been deposited at the front steps by their respective carriages that he made the short journey across the square and presented himself at the door. He was ushered into the entrance hall, an elegant room with a marble floor, a carved ceiling and columns leading to the stairs. Having left his coat with the butler, who he then followed into the drawing room, he was announced to Melbourne, Peel and Conroy, who sat in grim-faced silence. Fitzroy Tilling hovered unobtrusively by the door.

‘What in God’s name is this all about, Pyke ...’ Peel stood up to confront him, his eyes blazing with indignation.

Viscount Melbourne had a high forehead partly covered with curly greying hair that extended seamlessly down his long, angular face into bushy sideburns, a beak-like nose and a cleft chin. His demeanour seemed dour and melancholic, as though he wanted neither to be there in the room nor, indeed, to be prime minister, and contrasted with Peel’s brusque energy.

Conroy sat to one side and said nothing. His face didn’t move when he saw Pyke, nor did his expression give anything away.

‘Gentlemen,’ Pyke said, ignoring Peel’s question and choosing to stand rather than sit down in the armchair they had prepared for him, ‘I know you’re busy and I won’t keep you any longer than I have to.’

But they had all come. That was the most important thing. It showed they took his threat seriously.

Pyke took out both letters and held them up. Still Conroy’s expression remained opaque. ‘These are copies of letters written by the Duchess of Kent to Sir John Conroy.’ With a theatrical flourish he pointed at the comptroller. ‘I’ll read these, if I may.’ Pausing to clear his throat, Pyke presented the evidence that damned Conroy and, by association, the young princess.

After he had finished both letters and returned them to his pocket, Pyke looked up. Peel and the prime minister had gone very still. The two politicians exchanged a nervous look.

‘So?’ Conroy smoothed back his silver hair and coiled the end of his moustache. ‘It doesn’t prove anything. There’s not one scrap of hard evidence that says I’m the girl’s father.’

‘You don’t deny the letter was written by the duchess, then?’

The comptroller stared at the mantelpiece, not dignifying Pyke with a response.

Pyke glanced over at Tilling. ‘Two days ago my wife was assassinated by a man called Jake Bolter at Smithfield.’ He saw the shock register on Tilling’s face. ‘One of the assassin’s aims was to secure the safe return of the letters I just read out to you. The other was to kill my wife and me.’

The ransom demand Pyke had received apparently from the Duke of Cumberland had in fact been sent by Sir John Conroy, doubtless with the blessing of both Bellows and Gore. Conroy had waited for Cumberland to depart for Berlin before finally dispatching the note so that Pyke would have no way of finding out from the duke himself whether he really had kidnapped Emily or Felix. As someone with many contacts in royal circles, he had clearly been able to procure Cumberland’s seal, and by implicating the duke, Conroy had saved himself from Pyke’s wrath in the immediate aftermath of the kidnapping. If all had gone to plan, Conroy would have got his letters back and Pyke would now be dead. Unfortunately for the comptroller neither of these things had come to pass.

The prime minister’s frown deepened. ‘Why in God’s name would anyone want to kill your wife?’

‘Because, Prime Minister, she was the radical figure otherwise known as Captain Paine, and her money was being used to try and unionise the navvies working to build the Birmingham railway.’

Peel swapped a brief glance with Tilling. It told Pyke that he had already been told about this development. But Melbourne seemed utterly flummoxed and said, ‘I’m sorry, sir, but you’ve lost me. How is any of this related to the letters you just read out?’

Pyke apologised for the confusion and said it would maybe be best if he explained everything in full. Melbourne nodded in agreement. Pyke walked over to the fireplace and tried to clear his mind. He still didn’t have the complete picture and he had to be careful about what he said about Peel’s involvement, how much he wanted to implicate the Tory leader. But he knew enough to be able to guess the rest. He waited until he had their full attention before he started.

‘About ten months ago, Abraham Gore, the chairman of the Birmingham railway, first came upon rumours that radicals planned to try and persuade the navvies employed to build his railway, and also the Grand Northern, to take their union oaths. Fearing that this would absolutely retard the progress of his railway, Gore decided to act and, in doing so, pursue measures that would both thwart the radicals’ plans and damage the prospects of the Grand Northern. But Gore had to tread very carefully. As someone who was well respected in the business world and a close friend of Edward James Morris, the chairman of the Grand Northern, he needed to shield himself from all repercussions that might arise from his actions. In other words, what he needed was someone to blame if things blew up in his face: someone who was violently opposed to the progress of the Grand Northern for his own reasons. This man was Sir Horsley Rockingham, a Huntingdon landowner who’d campaigned against the Grand Northern from the moment he had first heard that it would pass across his land. From the outset, it had been Gore’s intention to set up Rockingham to take the blame, if and when his action against the navvies in Huntingdon threatened to unravel out of control. To do this, Gore needed a go-between; someone he could rely on to cajole and prod Rockingham in the “right” direction. He selected someone by the name of Jake Bolter, an ex-soldier who had once served in the same regiment that Rockingham was affiliated to and who had been willing to trade his loyalty to his regiment for large sums of money. In the meantime, Bolter requisitioned the help of a ruffian called Jimmy Trotter, someone he’d met in his former lodging house and a man with even fewer moral scruples than himself.’

Pyke didn’t tell them about his own association with Abraham Gore and Gore’s attempts to implicate Rockingham in
his
eyes. The anonymous letter alerting him to the landowner’s presence in the capital was part of this strategy. That and having Bolter meet Rockingham and show him around. Pyke thought about Gore’s unswerving insistence that Morris would never have taken his own life and his suggestion that Bolter may have had something to do with Morris’s death, and wondered what he should make of these claims in the light of what he’d discovered about Gore.

‘About the same time, the letters I’ve just read to you were stolen from Conroy’s safe and the comptroller here went to see his good friend, Sir Henry Bellows, in a state of what I can only assume was blind panic. You’ve seen for yourselves the significance of what was taken. I’m sure Conroy was quick to impress this point upon Bellows. And I’m guessing he asked the chief magistrate to assign his best men to the task of recovering the letters. But Bellows would have known right away that he couldn’t assign any of his own officers to this task. The work was too dirty and he needed to use people who couldn’t be traced back to him. So he turned to his
good
friend Abraham Gore. I know for a fact that Gore and Bellows had already liaised about ways of stamping out radical activity, and the chief magistrate was about to spearhead a crackdown against Julian Jackman and the Wat Tyler Brigade here in London. Gore had already “bought” the chief magistrate’s favour by alerting him to plans to move the terminus of the Birmingham railway from Camden to Euston before anyone knew of it, thereby allowing Bellows to buy up properties in the area at a fraction of what they’d eventually be worth.’

Pyke paused for a moment and thought about the performance that Gore had put on for him at the coroner’s inquest. All to throw suspicion elsewhere and maintain Pyke’s trust, at least until Gore gained control of Blackwood’s bank. It was impressive in its own way.

‘So Gore employed Jake Bolter and by association Jimmy Trotter to hunt for the stolen letters and told them what he heard from Bellows and hence the comptroller here. That the chief suspect was a kitchen hand who’d worked at Kensington Palace called Kate Sutton and her betrothed, Johnny Evans. Bolter and Trotter found Johnny easily enough and exhaustive interrogation - Trotter burnt Johnny’s flesh with the end of a lighted cigar - revealed that Johnny had given the letters to Kate for safe keeping. But rightly fearing for her life, Kate went into hiding, and Bolter and Trotter were both unable to find where she had gone. Bolter even interrogated her parents in their Spitalfields home, to no avail. When he realised they couldn’t tell him what he wanted to know, he slit their throats and let them bleed to death.’ Pyke glanced up at the prime minister, who visibly winced at this particular detail.

‘Perhaps Johnny died as a result of the torture, perhaps they killed him because he was no longer of any use to them. I don’t know. But needing to dispose of his body, they stumbled on the idea of taking it with them to Huntingdon and dumping it there. After all, who would think of looking for a penniless London actor in the middle of the countryside? But just to make sure, they hacked off the man’s head and then, rather than bury the headless corpse in a field, they decided to throw it into a river near Huntingdon. Their aim was to further frighten and unsettle the men and women of the town. Remember, they also wanted these same men to violently defend their home against the navvies if and when the navvies could be provoked into attacking it. They did this very successfully. The navvies were routed in the ensuing violence and, in the process, the radicals were driven out of the town and the progress of the Grand Northern Railway arrested. More recently, it should be added, Gore has been using his influence to make sure that the Grand Northern terminates at Cambridge, thereby affording his own railway line a monopoly on all traffic between London and the industrial heartlands of the Midlands and the North. At its most basic, this whole thing was devised by Abraham Gore to break his railway’s closest competitor and destroy all attempts to unionise the railway’s workforce. A few days ago I saw the radical leader, Julian Jackman. He had been crucified, as a warning to others. My wife, who was also Captain Paine, was shot dead in Smithfield and died in my arms.’

For a while after Pyke had finished telling his story, the room was very quiet. No one was sure how to proceed. As befitted his rank, it was the prime minister who spoke first, sitting forward in his armchair, his hands pressed together. ‘I assume you have proof of these very grave accusations.’ He would know Abraham Gore very well, Pyke thought, and would perhaps be a little frightened of him, and frightened of any scandal involving a long-time supporter of the Liberals and someone who’d donated large sums of money to the party’s coffers.

‘Proof?’ Pyke wetted his lips.

‘Proof that my very good friend, Abraham Gore, was involved in these matters as you have described them.’ His eyes were cold and blue.

‘No.’

‘No?’ Melbourne frowned. ‘If the law cannot assist your case then I’m afraid you have no case.’

‘I’m not intending to plead my case before a court of law.’

‘That’s because there’s no case to answer.’ Melbourne clapped his hands together triumphantly. ‘My God, I should have you taken off to the Tower just for making such an impertinent accusation.’

‘In which case, the letters I read out earlier would be in Cumberland’s hands even before the cell door was bolted.’ Pyke stared at him. ‘In case of my death, my lawyer has been instructed to make the content of the letters public.’

Melbourne studied Pyke’s expression, trying to assess the threat he posed. It took Peel’s intervention to move the matter forward. ‘I’m afraid I can’t advise you what to do, Prime Minister, but I’d just like to say that it would be highly dangerous to underestimate this man’s resolve or indeed his ruthlessness.’

‘You know this man?’ Melbourne seemed appalled at this fact.

Peel bowed his head. ‘I’m afraid we’ve had dealings in the past.’

‘A man of principle such as yourself.’ Melbourne shook his head. ‘You disappoint me, Sir Robert. You disappoint me greatly.’

Despite the fact that they led different parties, neither man wanted to entertain the prospect of Cumberland seizing the throne.

Finally Melbourne’s morose stare returned wearily to Pyke. ‘What is it you want, sir?’

Pyke took out another letter, this time from a different pocket, and held it up. ‘This is a hastily scribed letter from Sir Henry Bellows to Gore that bears next Monday’s date. I want you to convince the comptroller here that it’s in his best interests to deliver it to Gore in person. Convince Conroy that if he does this, and gives Gore an inkling that something is amiss, his future will be no bleaker than it is already. Convince him that this represents his only chance to hold on to what he’s already pilfered from the state and avoid punishment for his role in the murders of Johnny Evans and Kate Sutton’s parents. Convince him that if he refuses or tries to tip Gore a wink he’ll be drummed out of his role at Kensington Palace quicker than you can say Jack Robinson.’