The Revenge of Captain Paine (61 page)

The famous Florentine philosopher, Niccolò Machiavelli, once wrote, ‘I believe it is probably true that fortune is the arbiter of half the things we do, leaving the other half to be controlled by ourselves.’ In the days and months following Emily’s bloody death and the wilful devastation that had ensued, Pyke thought often about Machiavelli’s claim and while it sometimes struck him as outrageous prevarication, more often than not he saw its truthfulness. Pyke had done what he had done, and while those actions may have led to the death of his wife, fortune, too, had played its hand, and fortune, as it always did with men who took risks and imposed themselves on the world, would shine on him again.

AFTERWORD

It would be misleading in the extreme to pretend that a novel founded upon the imposition of an essentially twentieth-century form - the hard-boiled detective novel - on to a much earlier historical period carries any real degree of historical accuracy. More particularly, the demands of the genre have necessitated some gross tampering with the so-called historical record. The Grand Northern is a wholly fictionalised railway; there were plans to build a line from London to York in the early 1830s but the fledgling company never received Parliamentary approval. The London and Birmingham railway
was
incorporated in 1833 and the railway would have been under construction at the time my novel is set, but while there were examples of skulduggery and sharp practices on the part of some less scrupulous railway proprietors across the sector, there is no evidence to suggest that the affairs of the London and Birmingham railway were anything less than carefully managed. Abraham Gore is a fictional creation and is in no way intended to resemble the real chairman of the London and Birmingham railway, George Carr Glynn. On the other hand, Ernest Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland, is very much a real figure and while there is little or no hard evidence to suggest that he ever actively plotted against his niece, Princess Victoria, the fears at the time that he might try and seize the throne for himself were pervasive and genuine. In fact, he was called upon to defend himself from these charges in front of a House of Commons select committee chaired by the radical MP Joseph Hume. Likewise, Sir John Conroy was, indeed, the comptroller of the Duchess of Kent’s household, and while there is no evidence to suggest that he deliberately exacerbated the princess’s illness during the autumn of 1835 by introducing substances into her food, he did try to exploit her illness during a prolonged stay in Ramsgate, by trying to persuade her to sign a document appointing him as her private secretary when she became queen. Victoria duly resisted his overtures and when she became queen in 1837, Conroy and her mother, the Duchess of Kent, were cast off into the wilderness.

In spite of the novel’s largely fictitious basis, it would be equally churlish to pretend that some degree of verisimilitude isn’t absolutely central to the project of historical fiction. In order to try and create a milieu that might have existed in the mid-1830s, I am indebted to the following (by no means exhaustive) list: Rick Allen,
The Moving Pageant
; Michael Alpert,
London 1849
; Arnold and McCartney,
George Hudson
; Felix Barker and Peter Jackson,
London
; Kellow Chesney,
The Victorian Underworld
; Mordaunt J. Crook,
The Rise of the Nouveaux Riches
; Giles Emerson,
Sin City
; James Epstein, ed.,
The Chartist Experience
; Michael Freeman,
Railways and the Victorian Imagination
; Norman Gash,
Reaction and Reconstruction in English Politics
; David Goodway,
London Chartism 1838-1848
; Francis Grose,
The Vulgar Tongue
; Tristram Hunt,
Building Jerusalem
; Peter Jackson,
George Scharf’s London 1820-1850
; Elizabeth Long-ford,
Victoria R.I
.; Michael Patterson,
Voices from Dickens’ London
; David Pearce,
The Great Houses of London
; Liza Picard,
Victorian London
; Robin Pringle,
A Guide to Banking in Britain
; Pamela Sambrook,
A Country House at Work
; Jack Simmons and Gordon Biddle,
The Oxford Companion to British Railway History
; John Wardroper,
Wicked Ernest
; Frederick S. Williams,
Our Iron Roads
and Cecil Woodham-Smith,
Queen Victoria: Her Life and Times Volume 1
. In addition the following websites have provided me with much useful background information:
www.oldbaileyonline.org
&
www.victorianlondon.org
.

I would also like to thank the following people at Weidenfeld & Nicolson for their hard work in helping to bring this, and the first book in the Pyke series, to fruition: Kelly Falconer, Emma Finnigan, Susan Lamb, Mark Rusher, Kate Shearman, the whole sales team and, most of all, Helen Garnons-Williams for her patience, creativity and diligence during the editing process. In addition, thanks to Dave Torrens at No Alibi’s book shop in Belfast, Luigi Bonomi, my agent, and Sean McCartney for his helpful pointers regarding the birth of the railways. Most of all, though, I would like to thank Debbie for her love, advice and tireless support during the writing of this book.